It's My Life

Life is settling into routine and patterns. I'm at Borders the majority of my time, and the rest of the time all I really want to do is read and learn how to think again. No, really. Journalism really does that to you -- it robs you of any semblance of intelligence, and makes you a drone so that you may repeat the journalism mantras "truth." "equality." "unbiased reporting." Do you see intelligent diction, research in there? No. So, if you try to use even a relatively complex word, even something like gregarious or gauche, they must be changed to talkative and awkward. No, awkward might even be too complicated for our fifth-grade reading-level audience members -- clumsy.

As I go through and re-read some of my journal entries from high school, I don't remember what some of the words mean. These are words I used on a regular basis in my high school. HIGH SCHOOL. Is this what college does to you? It forces you to speed read literature and text books, so that you memorize fractures of information for quizzes and essays, yet understand nothing. Sure, I was able to read some of the classics in college, and now I can say I read them. But I wasn't able to enjoy hardly any of them, because I was expected to read Jamaica Kincaid in two days; Herman Melville in three. Gee. This must be why children and adults alike no longer quite enjoy reading like they used to. We simply aren't given the chance. Rather than force Shakespeare and Dickens down our throats, why not give students a list of dozens of works to choose from? Let them go out and explore literature, explore the classics and any genre they might be interested in. Maybe then our literacy rates wouldn't be so appalling. Maybe then you wouldn't see I HATE READING in Facebook profiles, or vacant shrugs when asking what someone's favorite novel is.

But, that would be giving us too much freedom, wouldn't it? However would our poor governors rank our schools if not by number crunching and data? If we can't ingest 10 books a year as we choke on them and scrape by on spark notes rather than our minds, what would happen to our fantastic technological advancements? What would happen?

You tell me.


Song: Title, Billy Joel