What I find interesting is that Wittgenstein seemed to view his students not as &quot;students&quot; per se, but as foils for his ongoing inquisition into his own understanding of philology, ontology, and philosophy.<p>He wasn&#x27;t teaching just for the sake of doing something good; he was using grade school students as test subjects (in a very benign way) for his own exploration of paradigms of human consciousness.
I find this to be an interesting twist -- one might expect that a prominent philosopher hanging up the gloves to teach grade schoolers constituted an instance of the old &quot;rapid burnout disguised as a moral epiphany&quot;. But no -- in fact, Wittgenstein realized that he could only learn what he wanted to learn by teaching grade school, and set about doing that without fully explaining his thought process to the rest of the world, who probably would not have understood anyway.