Willard McCarty, a London-based computing humanist and one of the best all-around people I’ve ever known, posted this quote by Northrop Frye to the Humanist list:
“It takes a good deal of maturity to see that every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn’t matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures.”
-“The Beginning of the Word”. Ontario Council of Teachers Keynote Address, 30 October 1980. Indirections 6 (Winter 1981). Reprinted in Northrop Frye, On Education. Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988, pp. 9-21.
I should remember this, in about half a year when I’m really on edge about finishing the dissertation and having an argument or anything at all to contribute to the field. Oh, generally this sort of thoughts doesn’t plague me, but it happens to everyone, right? Well, it helps at times like that to think of your discipline as the absolute caput mundi (okay, I just really wanted to use this phrase). The arrogance of such thoughts, I assure you, is always mitigated by the awareness of all that other knowledge out there, knowledge I will never experience first-hand. I’d very much like to have some sort of common language with others, any single other and all of them, who hold knowledge that is inaccessible to me.
Sometimes it bothers me that anything I do, including my chosen profession, is so closely tied to self-expression. It seems… well, arrogant. On the other hand, it’s also an indicator of high-level personal involvement which, for me, is easier to maintain than a constant state of keeping everything at arm’s length.
Hm. That’s an interesting quote. It brings to mind this idea I’ve been mulling over (and which Sam and I have discussed in passing from time to time) about whether it’s better to have a “well-rounded” education, as is provided by most decent US universities, or something with a very precise focus, as with Sam’s education at Cambridge in the UK. There are benefits to both, I think, and I’m still undecided as to which is better. I love the idea of completely and totally embracing one subject, but I got that as a graduate student and adored the ability to really branch out as an undergrad and study all the things that interested me. I suppose, for this reason, I think it’s best to have that focus, but perhaps not until later in your education.
Okay, I’m done rambling now.
I agree, Jacq – with the caveat that what Americans perceive as “well-rounded” is really not. :)
To explain: I find that, here, I’ve taken classes that have given me the same information that my peers back in the Old Country got through self-education. The workings of political systems would be one example: sure, there’re courses on that in Russia, but the basic level of knowledge is also much higher. Same goes for mathematics, chemistry, physics, foreign languages, literature. All of that is studied much more in depth in secondary school, during one’s formation as a person, and teenagers tend to pursue their subjects of interest outside school as well. In some crowds, it becomes kind of gauche if you don’t know certain things that people here only learn in college, if that.