in passing/the grouch reads

the grouch reads and comments in passing on....
Naomi Reshotko's Socratic Virtue....(Cambridge UP)

On page 50, Naomi quotes Penner and Rowe:

"In general people are well aware their conceptions and descriptions of the people they are referring to are inadquate."

(quoting their 1994, "The Desire for the Good; is the Meno inconsistent with the Gorgias?", p. 6, in Phronesis 39 (1), 1-25)

Now here's my in-passing remark (which I make with some trepidation, as these things can be complicated)....

One might want to emphasize that the remark concerns referring to people. But my first thought goes something like this:

That sort of openness to correction--though it is certainly the wise policy--did not characterize my work experiences from 1996 to 2009. My employers didn't want to hear any sort of corrections of their mistaken views--unless that happened to be asked in an extremely restricted, technical context. (E.g. one pompous and arrogant woman decided that a school "needed" a dress code, and left the teachers to decide exactly which length of skirt was acceptable for proper young ladies...)

When I speak above of "their mistaken views", you may think that I am dogmatic or
arrogant; you could equally say: they just didn't want to discuss or consider alternative views once they had decided--and it wasn't necessarily the case that I was allowed to participate in the decision-making process.

And, when it comes to it, when I worked in high schools, the discussion of particular people, i.e., students, was omnipresent and largely unfair. I always felt as though we were acting as judges and juries and there was too little space for someone to speak in defense of a particular student. So, again, the idea of openness to correction seems to have been squashed...

I do feel some trepidation in airing this remark, but I offer the following as a partial resolution....

Maybe openness to correction is, in a sense, pefectly natural (not merely the metaphysical truth), and maybe our institutional structures (economic and political) war against it.

Or, the people I've had the displeasure of meeting in the past were simply foolish.....(though, in many cases, they were able to decide that my employment contract should not be renewed...)

Or, maybe in the case of individual students, I was too tired, cowardly, and depressed to argue that they had been condemned unfairly.... maybe my former colleagues would have had to listen... Or, maybe they would have become annoyed at me and accused me of not being a team player.