Coming home!

Dec 20th (late) to Jan 12th or whenever I decide I really should start revising (studying). Really looking forward to seeing everyone, including the sun, who I believe is scheduled to be out more than 2 hours every day in California. And Lisa, yes please! Can you come up--can we come down? I have no idea what is going on, but we'll figure something out.

Got Bleakhouse from the library (which I'm excited about) and still haven't gotten past page 50 of the Silmarillion, so I've got flight reading sorted. Dreading it, really am...and I've gotten to the stage where I'm nervous using regular old tickets-what does that say? :)

I also wanted to provide my own commentary on Casnocha's bit in 'The Diatribe Continuith', since I left it as an afterthought and didn't say anything about it myself. It's interesting that the reaction has been so uniformly negative. He is a bit of an idiot, but he has a certain point that gets muddled up in the way he frames his argument. Starting with college is the mistake here, because I don't think he's actually complaining about universities at all, but rather about the schooling leading up to them that means that students come to university and only then have any sort of freedom. People talk about figuring out what they are really interested in in university, and it is the peculiar mixture of rigor, breadth, and specialization that does that. My issue, and I think Casnocha's as well, is that there is no reason that this should not always be going on. Through primary and secondary school you are set, by and large, down a set number of broad paths and then pushed along by a railroad of pre-prepared material. My favorite, and most memorable, moments of my schooling were research projects where I got to pursue my own agenda: sloths, slavery...actually, those are the only two I can think of. Ben's idea of specialization I don't think is a rigid enforcement of sticking to a subject field, but rather a freedom to explore within fields outside of usual boundaries. Of course the context is important, as is a well rounded education, but if at any point in my education I had the opportunity to study Aztec or Viking history, ecosystems and super-species, the psychology of mass action, or the interplay of technology and culture, I would jump at the opportunity. Maybe it's the fault of a UK system, but even here at Uni these are footnotes and footnotes to footnotes. One thing I'm seeing closely studying Greek philosophy/ethics/science this semester is how choosing a single point of view and looking at everything else from that perspective can be really broadening. Casnocha's remedy isn't that universities or schools should allow people to do only what they are interested in and nothing more, it's that deeper explanation and the ability to set questions are powerful tools that we are given no incentive to pursue.

On the issue of setting questions, I have a 'UK perspective'. In the States, I get the sense that professors tend to give quite general topics or encourage students to come up with something original or creative in everything they do as part of that "critical thinking" thing that seems to be so big at the moment. Here there's usually just the opposite, with verbose and specific questions posed so that essays are strictly the answer to a question rather than the exploration of a topic. This makes them a lot more focused and helps me tremendously in cutting my ability to waffle, but I do feel less attached to and enthusiastic about the work. The SD "choose your own topic and do a presentation on it" got me really excited, though I suspect most viewed it as more of a chore, and the idea of a dissertation makes me very happy.