Friday, October 29, 2004
Reverse Culture Shock
Reverse Culture Shock
"Abroad, students commonly find a more independent curriculum and study style. When they return, a regime of assignments and quizzes can feel insulting." I recall feeling insulted when I encountered ridiculous freshman hazing in 1966 at Emporia College in Kansas. I lasted there two weeks. The following year, English 101 & Music "Appreciation" classes at Bloomfield College insulted my intelligence. By the time I got to Ramapo College in 1974, extra-curricular exposure to a wide range of art, music, literature, political & religious ideas, plus my girlfriend's accounts of her year studying in Oxford England had made the whole standard American classroom thing pretty unappealing. So one doesn't have to study in Europe to feel isolated among "provincial" minds. But I also began to stop associating provincialism with living outside a metropolis. You won't find a more peculiar form of provincialism than New York cultural snobbery - which most afflicts those who didn't grow up in or around the city. If one has the imagination to have an aerial view, then as one stands on the shore looking east over the Atlantic, one understands that someone with a different perspective is standing on the far shore looking west.
***
In today's New York Times (10/29, registration required), commentator STEPHEN J. MARMON goes through the complex scenario (& arithmetic) that would result in a Bush/Edwards administration with the further possibility of an acting-president John Edwards. Such an election might seem like a terrible thing, & it probably would be, but it also could bring about something this country hasn't had in a long time: a bi-partisan foreign policy administered by the State Dept. rather than by a secretive group of presidential advisors.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
"Abroad, students commonly find a more independent curriculum and study style. When they return, a regime of assignments and quizzes can feel insulting." I recall feeling insulted when I encountered ridiculous freshman hazing in 1966 at Emporia College in Kansas. I lasted there two weeks. The following year, English 101 & Music "Appreciation" classes at Bloomfield College insulted my intelligence. By the time I got to Ramapo College in 1974, extra-curricular exposure to a wide range of art, music, literature, political & religious ideas, plus my girlfriend's accounts of her year studying in Oxford England had made the whole standard American classroom thing pretty unappealing. So one doesn't have to study in Europe to feel isolated among "provincial" minds. But I also began to stop associating provincialism with living outside a metropolis. You won't find a more peculiar form of provincialism than New York cultural snobbery - which most afflicts those who didn't grow up in or around the city. If one has the imagination to have an aerial view, then as one stands on the shore looking east over the Atlantic, one understands that someone with a different perspective is standing on the far shore looking west.
***
In today's New York Times (10/29, registration required), commentator STEPHEN J. MARMON goes through the complex scenario (& arithmetic) that would result in a Bush/Edwards administration with the further possibility of an acting-president John Edwards. Such an election might seem like a terrible thing, & it probably would be, but it also could bring about something this country hasn't had in a long time: a bi-partisan foreign policy administered by the State Dept. rather than by a secretive group of presidential advisors.
