I've had these quotes sitting around for several days now, and been convinced that I was going to turn them into a nice tidy post. It's finally dawned on me that it's not going to happen, since I'm snowed under with projects at the moment and have no hope of relief in the next week and a half. So I'm posting these puppies up anyway in the interest of preservation and filing them in the "Meta-blogging" category. I'm sure most of you will see why they belong there.

All of this is from Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind," which is in my "Cross-talk in Comp Theory" text.

"We are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. … Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance."

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, quoted by Bruffee

"The range, complexity, and subtlety of our thought, its power, the practical and conceptual uses we can put it to, and the very issues we can address result in large measure directly from the degree to which we have been initiated into what Oakeshott calls the potential “skill and partnership” of human conversation in its public and social form" (Bruffee, 399)

"The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value" (399).