Episode 325 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk with the poet Abraham Smith about his latest release, the book-length work, Destruction of Man.
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Episode 325 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
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This is what you might call ‘the unannoying autobiographical pause’, if you’re the sort of person who’d use ‘unannoying’ in any context whatsoever.
I was also interested in the idea that universities might change your identity, and the consequent (and to my mind justified) worry that some students might have about that. It’s all very well to impart knowledge and teach better thinking, but will that change your identity? And if it does, is the university justified in having a curriculum, environment and philosophy that might do that?
I’d be keen to hear a round table discussion on that from the usual suspects. Assuming, of course, that I’m still the same person as I was when I typed this comment.
Well, the idea of a liberal arts education is that a student should grow when encountering all of the great ideas that have emerged in the history of civilization. The assumption is that an open-ended education is a good thing; a student makes what he or she will of the educational experience. Many liberal arts educators don’t acknowledge that this can be stressful for students and potentially alienate themselves from their families and communities.
Many conservatives hate the very idea of a liberal arts educational altogether, and think education should be nothing more than vocational training. They see the mind-opening possibilities of a liberal education as a form of brainwashing. The film “God is Not Dead” is a conservative’s idea of what college is really like, as if liberal college professors wake up bursting with animosity towards a benevolent god.