Possibility Junkies

Mark Edmundson talks about no more laptops in his class. Students can check them at the door or leave them at home. Just because we are able to connect a telegraph wire between any two points in the world now does not mean that, say California and Mississippi have anything to say to each other. There's more, like seeing all the pleated skirts in the world at one time.

This is what Immanuel Kant, were he around to see it, might have called the computer sublime (he called something like it mathematical sublimity). The moment when you make the purchase, close the deal, pick a girlfriend, set a date: All those things, the students around the Thoreau table concurred, were a letdown, consummations not really to be wished for. The students were a little surprised by the conclusions they came to about themselves. "It's when I can see it all in front of me," one young woman said, "that's when I'm the happiest."

And I liked thinking on this:

It's not a luxury, this Socratic education whose goal is self-knowledge. Constantly I see my students leaving the university, determined to do not what they want and need to do, but what their parents and their friends believe that they ought to do. And in this they can in some measure succeed. Society has a great span of resources to assist someone in doing what he's not cut out for yet still must be done. Alcohol, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don't need will all help you jam your round peg of a self into this or that square-holed profession.

But those students who, through whatever form of struggle, really have come to an independent sense of who they are and what they want genuinely seem to thrive in the world. Thoreau says that if you advance in the direction of your dreams, you'll find uncommon success, and teaching a few generations of students has persuaded me that he is right. The ones who do what they love without a lot of regard for conventional success tend to turn out happy and strong. As to those willing to advance in the direction of other people's dreams — well, prime the credit cards, crank the porn channel!

There's lots more>>>