The Long Apprenticeship of Listening

Speaking is taught everywhere: rhetoric, presentation, persuasion. Listening is assumed to arrive on its own, requiring nothing but functioning ears and reasonable politeness.

The traditions that treat listening as a formal discipline, and several do, describe it instead as a long apprenticeship with identifiable stages: hearing the words, hearing the intention beneath them, hearing what the speaker cannot yet say, and finally hearing without the constant interference of one's own preparing reply.