This thinker's guide for students is focused on making intellectual work and deep learningmore manageable, practical, and intuitive. Its goal is to foster lifelong learning and the traditional ideal of a liberally educated mind: a mind that questions, probes, and masters a variety of forms of knowledge, through command of itself, intellectual perseverance, and the tools of learning. In this guide the authors suggest a variety of strategies for becoming not just a better student but a master student. This guide emphasizes that all bona fide fields of study share common intellectual structures and standards of reasonability. It emphasizes thatfoundational intellectual structures and standards of reasonability are worth learning explicitly and in themselves, since they help us more deeply interconnect and understand all that we learn. The guide also emphasizes foundational intellectual dispositions and values that define the traits of the disciplined thinker in all fields: intellectual autonomy, intellectual humility, intellectual integrity, intellectual perseverance, intellectual empathy, confidence in reason, and fair-mindedness. On every page, it honors the idea and power of intellectual work. It serves as a resource to which student can return again and again to garner new depth of meaning and understanding.
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