As we know, the reason I always felt so at sea with that issue was, I had no idea what our goals or standards were: it was only clear to me that whatever they were, they were unfamiliar and unknown to me.
But the reason they were so threatened by our asking what the goals and standards were was perhaps that they did not actually have any or know how to think about them, beyond certain conceptions of things that had been handed to them and that they had absorbed by rote.
That was another of the reasons our question, although entirely innocent, seemed murderous.
Axé.