"The design of buildings and landscape is thought to have little or nothing to do with the process of learning or the quality of scholarship that occurs in a particular place. But in fact, buildings and landscape reflect a hidden curriculum that powerfully influences the learning process."
This immediately reminded me of an incident that occurred just a few weeks ago in my Theology class. It was a beautiful Thursday here in Northfield: unseasonably warm, bright and sunny, and the leaves had already begun turning. It was just beautiful outside, and no one wanted to be in a classroom for an hour and twenty minutes on a day like that. One of the more favored students (perhaps because he had been coaxed by some of the less favored students) proposed at the beginning of the class that we move the class out of the stuffy classroom and into the fresh outside air. The idea was shut down by my professor because she finds class outside "distracting." This bothered me a little. For one, it meant I would be spending the next 80 minutes inside, but it also bothered be for another reason. See, I'm not an overly religious guy and I don't claim to be either, but on beautiful days like that I just have to say to myself, "Whoever or whatever made this happen did something right." Now the point of the class I'm enrolled in isn't to convert you to a specific religion or even make you believe in a higher power; it's to understand the Bible from a more literary criticism-centered standpoint. But to really understand a collection of books like the Bible, it's important to not necessarily believe what the authors believed, but to understand it. I honestly think that going outside on a beautiful day like that Thursday would have helped me come a little closer to understanding what the people that authored the Bible risked their lives for. My professor was afraid of her students getting distracted, but by what? The very things that inspired many of the authors of the texts we were studying.
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