Earlier this month, I wrote about how Dartmouth students were forced to do too much reading in certain courses ("Learning To Read," Oct. 2). Now I'm going to write about how we're not doing enough of it.
There was a time when a man could be judged by the number and quality of books in his personal library. It was a time when all great intellectuals knew each other and would bounce literary references and obscure trivia among themselves in conversation as easily as we do pingpong balls.
The time I'm speaking of is the 18th and 19th centuries, when serfdom was the rage (literally) in imperial Russia, and women didn't have libraries because most of them weren't even literate. I dare not suggest that we return to either of the those two standards, but what has happened to the days of the learned gentlemen whose vast knowledge was something to be respected? Why has reading for pleasure become some sort of unattainable paragon not worth pursuing?
In theory, the ideal of a well-read Enlightenment man isn't gone, because it's the academic motivation for our attendance at this institution. We enroll in classes to study under professors who are the leading minds in their respective fields, and after four years, we receive a fancy piece of parchment as a testament to our training.
To pretend like thorough education is the actual result of our stay at Dartmouth is foolishness at best and madness at worst. Intellectual heroes like Benjamin Franklin spent the entirety of their lives learning in order to achieve the sagely status that allowed them to invent inane proverbs such as, "Genius without education is like silver in the mine." A sizeable proportion of modern college students, on the other hand, undergo the strange social and academic dynamic we call the "college experience" but then abandon any semblance of an ongoing education after they start earning comfortable salaries on Wall Street. Today's proverb is "educations and careers cannot coexist."
So why don't our class readings represent an adequate education? Undoubtedly, anybody with even a remote interest in learning has found out that a four-year stay at Dartmouth is not enough to take every class that sounds interesting. The narrow focus of classes and the broad range of disciplines make this simply impossible. Sometimes, if your interests are specific enough, there isn't even a good class on that particular subject. If you want to take a class on medieval history more detailed than a 1000-year general survey, Dartmouth is not the place to look.
But that's OK, because we're not supposed to know everything we're ever going to know by age 22. That's why we're taught to think critically time and time again. If you want to discover something about the Norman conquests of Sicily, you don't have to take a class on it. There are plenty of good books out there to read. Besides, when you're out of college and your job requires you to pick up some more biology for whatever reason, there won't be any professors to assign homework and give lectures.
In defense of their poor leisure-reading habits, students often say that there is simply not enough time to read with all of the reading classes require. I agree. But how many of us can claim that we would do more independent reading if classes became less burdensome? It's easy to play the academic and blather on about all the books you wish you had time to read, but few people I know would consistently choose to spend their time with the Aeneid instead of with their friends.
There's also the atrocious argument that reading blogs and online newspaper articles is just as good as reading books. This may be valid from the standpoint that reading YouTube comments may help maintain the mere ability to read, but to pretend that snazzlebazzle487's inane comment about a montage of lolcatz is the intellectual equivalent of Goethe is nothing more than a joke. Reading is not supposed to be something you work to maintain so that you can read new items off a McDonald's menu -- it's supposed to be an avenue toward intellectual development.
College is the pivotal time in our educational careers, a time when we start to take responsibility for how we learn. If we don't teach ourselves how to teach ourselves now, then it will be incredibly difficult to do so in the future. Go to the library, and find a book to finish before the end of the term. I recommend Milton.
