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Excellent Sheep Analysis

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In the text, Excellent Sheep, the author William Deresiewicz states that college is a time and space set up to help you to think. I agree with Deresiewicz’s statement that college should help us in “developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice.” However, this is not always easy because college is a period in which students face multiple challenges where they form their own individual sense of self. Students often find “the soul torn apart in a painful condition, as long as it prefers the eternal because of its truth, but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.” (Augustine, Confessions). Students tend to remain in positions where they are comfortable and do not want to participate in challenging tasks; they are inscribed with ways of thinking and feeling based on prior teachings at home and in school. This leads them to converse with people that have a similar thinking style and approach to life due to familiarity. Deresiewicz talks about Edmundson and how one of his teachers used the same method as Socrates, the teacher of Plato, and echoed his opinions back to him, which forced him to deconstruct and reconstruct his own words. This created an unfamiliar and uncomfortable environment where he was taught “not what to think, but how.” Deresiewicz encourages the same approach to be used for college students to provide the basics of how to think. Although this seems like a simplistic approach, one thing Deresiewicz fails to point

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