Here’s the image: A kid with a conical hat sitting on a stool in the schoolroom’s corner. He’s a dunce. He just doesn’t prepare, or he just doesn’t get it. His lack of understanding gets him labeled as stupid, and the place for stupid people is the corner.
Right. This wouldn’t happen in today’s schools. Most educators know not to label a child who might have difficulty with a particular lesson or subject. But the practice seems to have taken place in the past. And we all know the irony, that the label “dunce” is supposedly (Samuel Johnson’s disagreement notwithstanding) derived from the name of John (Joannes) Duns, A.K.A. Duns Scotus, the medieval Scottish philosopher, theologian, and logician whose painted picture depicts a guy wearing what appears to be a rounded fez, the model for the dunce’s cone hat. It’s really ironic. Duns Scotus was one of the brilliant minds of his time.
Scotus, the “Subtle Doctor” as he was called by the Pope, lived at the beginning of a new wave of thinking. His intellectual enemies sought to undermine his followers’ thought with ad hominem attacks and name-calling. Thus, “dunces.”
One might think that anyone who takes a position on something today is a dunce. The labeling is free and easy. Disagree with someone? Call him or her a dunce. Yes, it blocks the kind of logical debate for which Duns Scotus was known, but, hey, it makes those who do the labeling feel good about themselves and helps them to “win,” at least in their minds, the argument du jour.
It doesn’t matter which side of an issue you support, you’ll always find yourself wearing the dunce cap and sitting in the corner of your intellectual enemies’ schoolroom. You might have flawless logic on your side. You might just have an honest disagreement about how some aspect of society should work. You might, of course, even be wrong, but not maliciously wrong. Somebody is going to give you that conical hat.
But don’t wear it. Don’t go into the corner. And don’t try to put it on the person who tries to place it on your head. You have other choices, one of which is to continue making, like the Subtle Doctor, your logical point. Another is to recognize that those who would put you on that stool in the corner can only rarely be convinced that you are correct. It is their emotional attachment to their side that prevents them from seeing your side, and it’s that attachment that grabs the conical fez to stick on your head.
Watch almost every human circumstance that involves opposing sides on topics that range from politics to religion. Who puts whom in that corner, in that place for the dunce?
Right. This wouldn’t happen in today’s schools. Most educators know not to label a child who might have difficulty with a particular lesson or subject. But the practice seems to have taken place in the past. And we all know the irony, that the label “dunce” is supposedly (Samuel Johnson’s disagreement notwithstanding) derived from the name of John (Joannes) Duns, A.K.A. Duns Scotus, the medieval Scottish philosopher, theologian, and logician whose painted picture depicts a guy wearing what appears to be a rounded fez, the model for the dunce’s cone hat. It’s really ironic. Duns Scotus was one of the brilliant minds of his time.
Scotus, the “Subtle Doctor” as he was called by the Pope, lived at the beginning of a new wave of thinking. His intellectual enemies sought to undermine his followers’ thought with ad hominem attacks and name-calling. Thus, “dunces.”
One might think that anyone who takes a position on something today is a dunce. The labeling is free and easy. Disagree with someone? Call him or her a dunce. Yes, it blocks the kind of logical debate for which Duns Scotus was known, but, hey, it makes those who do the labeling feel good about themselves and helps them to “win,” at least in their minds, the argument du jour.
It doesn’t matter which side of an issue you support, you’ll always find yourself wearing the dunce cap and sitting in the corner of your intellectual enemies’ schoolroom. You might have flawless logic on your side. You might just have an honest disagreement about how some aspect of society should work. You might, of course, even be wrong, but not maliciously wrong. Somebody is going to give you that conical hat.
But don’t wear it. Don’t go into the corner. And don’t try to put it on the person who tries to place it on your head. You have other choices, one of which is to continue making, like the Subtle Doctor, your logical point. Another is to recognize that those who would put you on that stool in the corner can only rarely be convinced that you are correct. It is their emotional attachment to their side that prevents them from seeing your side, and it’s that attachment that grabs the conical fez to stick on your head.
Watch almost every human circumstance that involves opposing sides on topics that range from politics to religion. Who puts whom in that corner, in that place for the dunce?
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