Down with seriousness!
Divine frivolity and the writing of finals
April 2, 2008
Benjamin Linkewich
“You are not taking things seriously enough!” A chill: this is the last thing any student wants to hear in the final month of classes. Rather than feel ashamed, however, I raise the question: what does it mean to be serious about education, and is that what you want to be?
It’s a fact: it is only through levity in this strange process we call Undergraduate Studies that we hit upon the soul of education. Does respect for the institution and the process of accreditation require any seriousness about education? I have a friend nearing such degrees as Philosophy and Engineering, and when I, cruel soul, inadvertently asked him that horrible, horrible question all students dread – what he would do when he finally received his degree – his only reply was, “fan myself with it.”
Think about this: life can only be lived with levity, and levelling this at goal-orientation and the whole process of getting odd letters after your name proves resoundingly refreshing and hope-inspiring. To take things “seriously” in education is to get caught up in minutiae and material concerns that are a secondary reality to the real process of education. It’s all right to be in it for the GPA and the job, but your intellectual vision must be on something higher or things begin to break down in the last month of classes.
These final few weeks are when your professors conspire in jamming you in the vice-grip of assignments, responses, journals, term-papers, and the poorly-titled “second midterms,” all in a short period of time. Viewed in terms of GPA, job-preparation and other material concerns, your professors seem like evil forces out to get you, hell-bent on sundering your sanity. But around here you know that they’re inherently angels of light in professorial garb: viewed in higher terms, they’re helping you to develop as a person, materially and spiritually. The work-load makes you hardier in body and mental discipline. The bulk of ideas forced upon you gets you to grapple with great thoughts, developing your moral imagination.
Humour makes sense of the educational process itself, and the other area at which I challenge you to level humour is a specific facet of this: fitting in with the academic culture around your academic discipline. There is a serious style that must be achieved for you to be taken seriously, quite apart from the quality of your learning and thinking on your subject. You must have something to say, of course: a living idea housed in your mind. However, writing it in ‘academic’ form can be a painful thing. To me, it feels like the process of taking this beautiful butterfly of thought, choking it with chloroform and sticking a whacking great huge pin through it and mounting it on a wall. Sure, it’s still the butterfly, but it inspires tears of sorrow rather than rapture.
In the sciences, social sciences, and business, everyone has given up even attempting to be interesting, unless they’re quirky geniuses or dimly-viewed “popularizers.” But I still have great hope for the Humanities! I can live with the emphasis on linear argument, even if it makes essays bulkier and less elegant. The elimination of the first-person begins to make one feel a bit stilted. The destruction of the colloquial can be a good thing, but begins to restrict real-world expression, yo. Soft, but at the other extreme the line is verily more painful: the elimination of the older styles. Yea though it be necessary, I find myself wont to writing in archaic language. Sounding Shakespearean or Wagnerian ought not to obscure meaning, as long as healthy irreverence is achieved and the effort is for the cause of lingual beauty. So subvert the system! There is hope that you can tiptoe on the boundaries effectively, just as the great writers you study once did.
Thus, in both cases, humour makes the journey more interesting, more hopeful, and more human. As Chesterton said, “The life of man is a story; an adventure story.” Rather than be “miserable moderns and rationalists [who] do not merely love ourselves more than we love duty [but] actually love ourselves more than we love joy,” we must learn to find the joy and hilarity in these crazy times of education.
Now you go...
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