On her book “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College
Cover Interview of September 03, 2017
A close-up
I have to confess that I like this book. I poured my heart
and soul into each page. I lived with the ideas and the sentences and the
chunks for years. But some of my children are more beloved than others. (And
yes, like all writers, I’ve learned to “kill my darlings.” There
is a lot that has been excised.) But if you want to poke around, here are a few
places to amble:
The Introduction, especially pages 1-6, 15-16.
The strangeness of higher education, pages 86-88 and 113.
Chapter 5 on grades, which is something I’ve become entirely
obsessed about.
Pages 181-189 on the nature of the human animal.
About riding a bicycle, pages 209-210, because I remember
writing this passage in one burst.
Chapter 9 on motivation, especially Table 9.1 on page 222.
The Conclusion, especially pages 270-274.
I tried to tell the story of my journey: I had been one kind
of person and teacher, had a crisis of understanding, did research, changed my
mind, and became a different kind of person and teacher. If you flip through
those pages, you’ll get the gist of the story.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
I have to confess that I like this book. I poured my heart and soul into each page. I lived with the ideas and the sentences and the chunks for years. But some of my children are more beloved than others. (And yes, like all writers, I’ve learned to “kill my darlings.” There is a lot that has been excised.) But if you want to poke around, here are a few places to amble:
The Introduction, especially pages 1-6, 15-16.
The strangeness of higher education, pages 86-88 and 113.
Chapter 5 on grades, which is something I’ve become entirely obsessed about.
Pages 181-189 on the nature of the human animal.
About riding a bicycle, pages 209-210, because I remember writing this passage in one burst.
Chapter 9 on motivation, especially Table 9.1 on page 222.
The Conclusion, especially pages 270-274.
I tried to tell the story of my journey: I had been one kind of person and teacher, had a crisis of understanding, did research, changed my mind, and became a different kind of person and teacher. If you flip through those pages, you’ll get the gist of the story.