A few weeks back, I was in Belgium for a conference. On Sunday, I leave for Annapolis for another conference. In between, I have been dutifully chipping away at the reading I need to do for the conference next week as well as the end-of-year-administrative work as well as slogging through the book of the moment by Piketty (review to come when I finally force my way through the whole thing (the Alert Reader will guess that the tenor of the forthcoming review is something less than enthusiastic). One thing I haven’t done (as the Alert Reader will also notice) is write for this here space. Why? Tedium mostly—I’ve allocated the better part of my mental energy to the tasks of the day and by the time I was tired of such things, I had no mental energy left to compose.
I just finished a book which made me terribly concerned that
if I didn’t write a blog post soon, I would end up floating face down in a
river somewhere. That was the argument
of the book I just read. Really. A rather sobering thought, that.
A month or so ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that I
was determined to read Hesse this summer.
He enthusiastically told me that I simply must read Beneath the Wheel, that it was by far his favorite book by what
turns out to be one of his favorite authors.
I had no idea that Hesse was among
anyone’s favorite authors, let alone someone I knew, let alone someone I knew
who didn’t dress in all black with black earrings and black fingernail
polish. (Truth be told, I have no idea
why I associated Hesse with that particular type of person. Really no idea at all.)
You don’t have to hunt hard for the thesis of this book.
“Nor did it occur to any of them that a fragile creature had
been reduced to this state by virtue of school and the barbaric ambition of his
father and his grammar-school teacher.
Why was he forced to work until late at night during the most sensitive
and precarious period of his life? Why
purposely alienated from his friends in grammar school? Why deprived of needed rest and forbidden to
go fishing? Why instilled with a shabby
ambition? What had they not even granted
him his well-deserved vacation after the examination?
Now the overworked little horse lay by the wayside, no
longer of any use.”
Yep, overworking young school children, turning the academic
enterprise into drudgery and endless hours will destroy them. By about a third of the way into this book,
you know it won’t end well.
My first thought: I wish some of my students would read this
book. I have far too few students who
know anything at all about the joy of
learning. Too many college students treat
school work as nothing other than tedious, arduous tasks. Why shouldn’t school be fun?
My second thought: my first thought is wrong. I wish some of my students would not read
this book and actually learn that not all of life is having fun, but sometimes
you have to, you know, work. Sometimes,
you have to spend some long hours (yes, hours, not minutes) studying.
My third thought: one
thought does not fit all.
My fourth thought: one thought does not fit any. As I ponder the book, I realize that I have a
hard time connecting the details of our protagonist’s life with the modern
age. I have students who are too
obsessed with grades, far too obsessed with grades, students who take no joy in
school, who in one sense feel just like our protagonist in the way they see
school work as something which chains you to a desk to learn ever more, but who
seem to miss out on the rest of life because they are so obsessed with learning
exactly what needs to be learned for a class and nothing else. But, it is rare that those are also the
students who work the hardest in a class. (This may be a product of the place
where I work; it may be different at other schools. Indeed, there is reason to think that it may
be different elsewhere.) I have other students
who are a bit to obsessed with recreational activities, who take their school
work lightly, and who could benefit from, you know, working. But those are rarely the students who are
actually most enjoying their leisure; 14 hours of social media per day is not
as enjoyable as it might sound.
The longer I ponder this, the more I realize: the idea of work is dead in educational institutions.
What is the proper end of work?
I suspect very few students could offer an answer, even a bad answer, to
that question.
And what about those of us who are no longer students? We work to earn a wage. For some of my friends, it is obvious what
constitutes the end of their work. For
college professors? Ah, therein lies the
rub: what is the end to which the work of a college professor should strive?
I honestly don’t know whether Beneath the Wheel has lessons I should be taking to heart or
not. I do know it made me write this
blog post after sorely neglecting this blog for weeks. But, is blogging the proper end of work?
Even more to the point, is the discovery that there is a song entitled Beneath the Wheel which
was obviously written by someone who had read this book something which constitutes
a proper use of working hours or a frivolous distraction from work?
Back to The Federalist
Papers.
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