![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 8th, 2014 05:11 pmWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
You should take my opinion of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life with a couple of handfuls of salt, because he was very much preaching to the choir here. It was a library book, so I didn't actually draw sparkly little hearts around the section where he talks about how research has supplanted teaching as the central duty of professors (with predictably awful results for undergraduates, and perhaps not quite as predictably awful results for the general quality of published research), but that was definitely my feeling about a lot of what he wrote.
I particularly liked this quote: "The problem is that students are incessantly encouraged to believe that academic excellence is excellence, full stop, that better at school means simply better - better morally, better metaphysically, higher on some absolute scale of human virtue." (214)
I know people who believe this, or an even stronger form: higher not just on a scale of virtue, but on a scale of absolute worth. It's a catastrophic belief, both in terms of social consequences - as Deresiewicz notes, the downside of the meritocracy is that the people at the top believe they deserve it (the very definition of meritocracy being, after all, rule by the most meritorious) and can't see that in many cases, the game was rigged in their favor: something like 75% of Ivy League students come from the top 25% of wage-earners.
But also because if you fail at anything, well then. You've just proved you're one of the worthless.
What I’m Reading Now
Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, which is basically dragons in Regency England, if England were called Scirland and London were named Falchester. I have the impression that Brennan threw up her hands and said “Screw it, I don’t want to do a bunch of research about the Napoleonic Wars, I want to focus on DRAGONS.”
Which seems legit. I feel like many authors would benefit from this approach. If you don’t care at all about the actual history, invent an alternate universe with period flavor! It would warn off serious history buffs and entice in the readers who are interested in the period tropes.
(And not just authors. If the producers of Reign had just admitted to themselves that they had no interest in history and set it in an alternate universe vaguely inspired by Mary Queen of Scots, all my qualms about watching it would disappear.)
What I Plan to Read Next
Maureen Johnson’s The Madness Underneath, the sequel to The Name of the Star.
Oh oh! And I have Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Season of Ponies! Multi-colored horses, here I come!
You should take my opinion of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life with a couple of handfuls of salt, because he was very much preaching to the choir here. It was a library book, so I didn't actually draw sparkly little hearts around the section where he talks about how research has supplanted teaching as the central duty of professors (with predictably awful results for undergraduates, and perhaps not quite as predictably awful results for the general quality of published research), but that was definitely my feeling about a lot of what he wrote.
I particularly liked this quote: "The problem is that students are incessantly encouraged to believe that academic excellence is excellence, full stop, that better at school means simply better - better morally, better metaphysically, higher on some absolute scale of human virtue." (214)
I know people who believe this, or an even stronger form: higher not just on a scale of virtue, but on a scale of absolute worth. It's a catastrophic belief, both in terms of social consequences - as Deresiewicz notes, the downside of the meritocracy is that the people at the top believe they deserve it (the very definition of meritocracy being, after all, rule by the most meritorious) and can't see that in many cases, the game was rigged in their favor: something like 75% of Ivy League students come from the top 25% of wage-earners.
But also because if you fail at anything, well then. You've just proved you're one of the worthless.
What I’m Reading Now
Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, which is basically dragons in Regency England, if England were called Scirland and London were named Falchester. I have the impression that Brennan threw up her hands and said “Screw it, I don’t want to do a bunch of research about the Napoleonic Wars, I want to focus on DRAGONS.”
Which seems legit. I feel like many authors would benefit from this approach. If you don’t care at all about the actual history, invent an alternate universe with period flavor! It would warn off serious history buffs and entice in the readers who are interested in the period tropes.
(And not just authors. If the producers of Reign had just admitted to themselves that they had no interest in history and set it in an alternate universe vaguely inspired by Mary Queen of Scots, all my qualms about watching it would disappear.)
What I Plan to Read Next
Maureen Johnson’s The Madness Underneath, the sequel to The Name of the Star.
Oh oh! And I have Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Season of Ponies! Multi-colored horses, here I come!
