Beyond School

(or, The Marlene Dietrich School of Human Relations)

Artifact: Ear Plugs
Date: Early 1990’s-Present
Elements of Culture: Kinesics and Interpersonal Relationships; Proxemics; Values

Commentary:

I thought, therefore I smoked. (Not me in photo.)

During my final years in college I went into study overdrive. The printed page accompanied me everywhere. I usually studied at a coffee-house near my university that was always packed with other students, often friends or acquaintances, who would usually sit around a table in loudly talkative groups. I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t want to join them. I didn’t want them to join me and interrupt my reading. So I took to wearing earplugs so I could study. They were my salvation.

People would see me in the courtyard and approach to say hello, and rather than say, “Sorry, I’d rather read,” I could simply point to my earplugs to give them the message. I could obliterate social invitations from other groups sitting at nearby tables who addressed me by simply pretending that my earplugs prevented me from hearing them. Within a month or so, my earplugs had succeeded in communicating to one and all that I preferred my books to their company. People no longer approached, groups no longer tried to include me. I was happy.

I was happy. I know this sounds sick and truly could be argued so. They were my generation, my fellow human beings, and I rejected them all for the sake of the printed page. How could I be happy?

It mostly had to do with a radical disconnect with the culture of my generation. I had roamed the centuries of thought and music, explored the decades of film for so many years that I was no longer interested in the popular culture of my generation. I had become, in other words, an incredibly elitist snob inadvertently—I hadn’t intentionally set out to find my generation’s tastes distasteful and lose all cultural connection with them. That was just the centrifugal effect of a life of study: extensive exploration of art and print across time and space had simply flung me from the dominant aesthetic culture of this year’s hits.

Of course there were other students similarly orbiting far from the solar system of alternative rock, tattoos and piercings (we’re talking the grunge ’90s in the Pacific Northwest here), living writers and artists, and newly released films. But their centrifugal paths had taken them in other directions: even though they may have drifted the same distances as I had from today’s tastes and values, every mile from the center they and I traveled only increased our mutual separation. Picture individual sunbeams shooting off from the sun: the farther they travel, the more separate they are from each other and their common origin.

I was an extreme case of what print literacy and knowledge-based values can do to an individual. Physically I could join individual friends and family, but not culturally. I couldn’t go home again. I was an atom.

Pedagogically, I had reached this state in part due to an education that valued knowledge and rational thought over emotion and human relations. At the university level, the career track for future Ph.D.s promotes this centrifugality and its resultant cultural atomism: scholars are encouraged to find an uninhabited niche in the ivory tower, and to furnish it by themselves.

The competitive nature of university success also encourages academic personalities that are scripted to define success as knowing more than the rest. This is to me in sadly ironic contrast to the expectation I think most novice scholars have of the fruits of their intellectual labors. I know I, as a freshman, pictured the friendly and passionate exchange of ideas in an intellectual community, which was the norm in that early stage of survey courses, as only becoming richer and more communal as I rose up the ranks. But hitting graduate level was like reaching Oz: behind that august curtain of rich expectation, I discovered people who as a rule seemed isolated and fearful of being exposed as less than omniscient. Would more group-work and constructivist team projects in the academy have produced these results? (And of course, there are exceptions to this stereotype, bless them.)

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Photos: Smoker by RO-BOT.  Iranian statue by salehoffline.

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*The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1

If you like this post, please spread it:

1. Legacy 4: In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males (the College Years)
2. Legacy 6: From Soldier to Peacemaker: Learning the Language of the “Enemy”
3. Legacy 7: Teaching Killing

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