"You could maybe soften your stance a little on the humanities (perhaps instead of learning about them on the Internet, repeating your thought that you can learn them independently?)" - My college counselor regarding an essay.
I think you can. Actually, I know you can. If you want to read a book, you can find and download it as a free pdf in under 10 minutes. Quite fittingly, this is exactly what I did to get my copy of the Singularity is near.
If you want to discuss it or read analyses, you can easily travel from wikipedia, to sparknotes, to online forums, etc. I often go to amazon.com and read the reviews. Online comments are an ENORMOUS resource of compelling ideas. This is why I think the online WSJ is far greater than the print edition. The comments alone can be better than the original article. Furthermore, you will almost definitely here an articulation of all sides of an argument. I know my knowledge of history has some terrible deficiencies courtesy of our liberal Exeter history department. Reading a wikipedia page tends to give a less biased rundown of what actually happened, and lets you focus on what you personally find interesting.
I have a private blog and on this blog I just copy and paste every phrase or link that I think I may want to recall later. (To do this, just create a blog on blogspot and go to permissions and set it up so you are the only one who can view it). [Evan and Philip, I think we were talking awhile ago about how frustrating it is to forget where you read something because we read so many sources nowadays. Well, here's your solution.]
Anyway, nuff said,
- Jimmy
I think your argument is totally valid. But I think what your college counselor said makes sense too - if you wanna get into college, you have to suck the readers' dicks. I know that's not your style, but you're insinuating that everything you can learn at a liberal arts college you could just as easily learn with access to the internet (which is 100% true). And they probably don't want to hear that because they're delusional.
ReplyDelete