Read this article about liberal education from Slate magazine. It's by a professor who teaches in my Fundamentals program (to which he gives a shout out at the end), and who is teaching the hard-core 3 hour class on St. Augustine next quarter.

As for my liberal education? It's sort of idleing right now as I proceed to become dumber as the quarter goes on. I've made so many stupid points and thoughtless remarks in all my classes this year that I'm embarrassed to add them up. My ascent into the high realms of idiocy peaked yesterday when I met with my Fundamentals advisor to talk about my junior paper. Now, my advisor is the most popular professor of Classics on campus. Tittering students and faculty literally gather around and encircle him as soon as he steps outside his office. To you of the Milton diaspora, he's like Chase, if Chase fulfilled all our greatest hopes and became a professor of Latin and shaved his head. So, you know, when you get to have a meeting with him, you know you're getting some precious time that some students would skip their mother's funeral for. But yesterday, I wasted nearly every minute of his time talking--or rather, not talking about my future paper. Instead, I choked out a few choice words: fiction, virtue, Shakespeare, ham & cheese (the last was a conversation we had about food, the most vibrant talk in the session). It's not that I'm having trouble jumpstarting my brain; on the contrary, I'm not even trying, opting instead to let it enjoy its warm, cozy coma in my head for a few more weeks. The trouble is I can't untie my tongue for just a few minutes to fabricate a fraction of an original idea for the benefit of those around me.

I need a class that's going to put a hot poker in my ear.

It almost happened today in Art History, where we've started the section on modern abstract art. I got hopping mad at a few other students who were lashing out at modern art with all the usual complaints people lob at modern art. But they were all complaints that were phrased in ways that said, "Yes, my comment is bull-headed and unthoughtful, but perhaps by that very virtue it is not that I am refusing to understand the problem, but actually cutting to the very core of its truth!" when actually all they were saying is, "I don't understand what a picture of a bunch of squares means." I'm no champion of modern art, but I do consider myself an enemy, or a frequent dissenter, of refusing to understand something just because it's not immediately digestible.

By that logic, though, I should be complaining way less in English 101 and apologizing a lot more to my indecipherable photocopied readings from Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, who, as we know from Rita, is writing the most cutting-edge poststructuralist theory about vampires.