Quote:
Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger
Yesterday, one of my students happened to walk past my door, looking rather obviously distressed. So I asked him what was wrong.
He explained that the instructor for the class he'd just left had asked him a question in class, and he'd gotten it wrong. Okay, that happens. All too often, in fact.
Her response was to pull out a dunce cap, place it upon his head, and tell him that he had to wear it for the rest of the class.
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A little history might take the sting out of some of that cruel humiliation. The original dunce cap is named after its most illustrious wearer, the Franciscan theologian, mathematician, philosopher and University of Paris professor John Duns Scotus. For hundreds of years he was considered the epitome of the intellectual, a man so respected for the nuance and intricacy of his arguments that he was monickered
Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor). He wore a conical hat because to him it symbolized the acquisition of knowledge, the point representing knowledge and the widening cone driving it down into the brain.
The Scholastic approach went out of fashion with the rise of Renaissance humanism and his followers, known as Dunces, were derided as dense hair-splitters. Eventually, John Duns Scotus was forgotten and the dunce lost his connection to the theologian and became just a simple idiot. They kept the hat, though.