Due to over-structured education, many college students are unable to read a book naively.

17

The history we learn is vertical, intellectual and clear; hence unreal. Can we study history horizontally, affectively and chaotically?

18

Most people find it impossible not to begin a book on the first page. Many feel guilty if they do not finish it.

19

Traditionally, one is assigned primary sources as illustrations . There is the unconscious assumption that the source has a meaning which the clever student divines if he knows how to pose the right questions . In one intellectual history program, for example, a course is given entitled "explication of text." The idea of reading primary sources naively, without previous formulation of questions, and with sloppy randomness, evokes horror in the typical academic mind.

20

The same assumption casts a miasma over all education. It reinforces the view that what is real are our models, of which experience is only illustrative; as opposed to the view that was is real is experience, of which our models are feeble, segmented attempts at mimesis.

21

Why is it today that students tend to believe that everything is relative, all standpoints are arbitrary, "truth" is an illusion, we are all helplessly conditioned, and the world will one day be run by computers and manipulative social scientists? Who taught them these fairy tales? Why do they cling to them so tenaciously?

22

Discipline as a tool, versus discipline as a straight jacket. Today, when you meet another graduate student, or professor, you ask him what is his field .

23

Presented in an anthology, with a selection from a famous work by Thomas Dc Quincy, the student might find it of little interest. Presented with a set of his complete works in 44 volumes, he might discover, for example, an essay on Judas Iscariot that fascinated him. In the present system of education, it is rare that a student will discover anything.

24

If the medium is the message, then what is the message of an education in which one begins with general textbooks (to get the whole picture), proceeds to more specific ones, and concludes by a carefully supervised examination of primary sources? Answer: control, hierarchy, no surprises. That life is governed by general principles, which are already well understood and need only to be applied. That contemporary knowledge is superior to past knowledge.

25

According to Otto Fenichel, obsessive-compulsive neurosis is characterized by "the isolation of ideational content from its emotional cathexis," "inhibition in the experiencing of gestalten," "belief in the omnipotence of thought." ( The Psychoanalytic Thcory of Nettroses ).

26

What moreover is the message of a national educational system in which everyone studies

the same subjects in the same way? That there is only one correct way to think?

27

Marshall McLuhan says that "the essence of education is civil defense against media fall-out." College students might acquire defense against text books by spending a few months re-examining their own high school texts while reading the high school text books of ten, twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago, as well as the high school text books of French, East German, Egyptian, Indian and other school systems. They might also read ads and brochures of text book publishers. More than any explicit lesson. this would enable them to understand what textbooks are really about.

28

Is translation possible? A businesslike approach to thought considers the study of foreign language as a waste of time for the average student. What is important can be translated for them by specialists, the other 99 percent to be ignored. This view is satisfactory as long as one is willing to accept the consequences:

That truth is translatable: that it lies in content rather than form and nuance.