At no point do you ever have to believe that your teacher's way is the proper way. You must always suspect that it's just an okay way that's better than what you know now.

The article's key premise is false I'm afraid.

If you don't play guitar at all, someone who can show you a few chords is better than no teacher at all. You know that person is no professional, but you set that aside and get out of them what you can.

When I started programming my teacher so to speak was the BASIC interpreter on an 8 bit micro. Within a week I knew that BASIC was a piece of shit. I persisted in it anyway because I knew it would be a gateway to better things. It was in the machine's ROM so you can count on it to be there when you power up the thing without having to load anything from a disc.

If you're a kid who reads voraciously, especially nonfiction, you will soon notice discrepancies and contradictions among different sources, including your schoolteachers. You realize that authority is fallible, and the responsibility lies with you to work out what is right.

> Polanyi says you need a prior act of affiliation to kick start the kind of apprenticeship through which culture comes to be transmitted. But such acts of affiliation, or “granting of one’s personal allegiance” to an authoritative figure, no longer seem routine. When a student shops for a professor, he may consult Rate My Professor Dot Com, that sophomore panopticon by which teachers are held to norms established by students: easiness, availability outside class, hotness, etc.

Is the issue here that students choose professors with RateMyProfessor.com, or is that students are able to choose at all?

> It is worth thinking about the significance of ressentiment. (In using the French word, I follow Nietzsche and all who are instructed by his account.)

Nietzsche used the French word, because German doesn't have a word with the same latin root. English does. When you speak of ressentiment in english, you imply some difference between ressentiment (some intellectualized malady that affects only your opponents) and resentment (a commen emotion that affects everyone).

> To indulge in ressentiment is to deny that something is good.

What if it actually isn't good? Is it then not denial and ressentiment to say so?

To resent someone's status (or the status of some classic work), means to feel that it's undeserved. It's resentment regardless of whether it really is deserved.

Just the beginning is demoralizing. There are many kinds of trust, and quite all are to be gained. True learning require interest and passion, and the teacher has to discover and suggest this in Students. this kind of reasoning seems by the point of view an (educated?)adult, so full of 'intellect', way different from a joung mind (sadly). I think students, even very young, can feel and understand very well the difference between an iconic autority placed on the highest seat, and someone that can be trust. Is not a surprise the fact that experiencing this kind of education someone become individualist. Trust is a -consequence-, not the cause.