The progymnasmata were a sequence of rhetorical exercises, graduated in difficulty, designed to build a student’s capacity for argument, the way a training program builds a runner’s endurance: incrementally, with each exercise preparing the ground for the next. The goal was not a finished piece of writing but a strengthened mind.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker

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For years, the architecture of higher education quietly encouraged students to believe that the point of a class, and indeed of the entire college experience, was the credential—that the teacher-student relationship was a transactional one that ended with a grade. But if the grade is the goal, and a machine can get you the grade, the machine is not a shortcut; it’s just efficiency.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker

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