"The Canon and the World" (Originally posted May 18th on The Library of Oddities)

Link to my original post: https://thelibraryofoddities.wordpress.com/2022/05/18/the-canon-and-the-world/

It's less than a week until graduation. Years of my life are about to be reaped in the form of a little scroll and a photograph. The next day, I will be flying home.

What exactly have I been doing, you might wonder, thinking in the usual terms of majors and other such things. However, as a secular homeschooler with a brain that worked differently, I didn't choose a regular old college, but the 'most contrarian' one, and as such I have learned about the history of music, math, literature, philosophy, science, and other odds and ends. In other words, while the rest of you were getting clear cut grades, I studied the Canon.

Sorry.?

Personally, I do not regret this decision and feel that tracing the Liberal Arts through time gave me insight into art, politics, religion, language, science, humans bumbling around, and so on. Truthfully, the discussion based format was the most beneficial of all, taking me from sounding like a fool 90% of the time to 30% of the time. All joking aside, I feel like I have been enriched in profound and practical ways.

Meanwhile, there's the world - more specifically, all the things that have been happening while I was studying the canon. Corruption, sedition, pandemic, legislation that endangers me and those I care about, the slow crumbling of nature at our hands. While me and my cohorts looked at the past, time fulfilled its purpose and marched relentlessly into a bleak future.

At this point, I am imagining two objections. One party is clamoring (in response to an accusation I haven't made) that art and thought are still important and we should not just throw culture away to learn engineering and climate science, and the other is saying that this is proof that I wasted my time, for what is the canon but a bunch of old privileged white men??

With all due respect, while each point has some truth, one of you is wrong because you forget we can do multiple things and progress does not have to be the enemy of the worthy past, and the other of you is wrong because you forget that like it or not, flawed things can still have good points and we have the foundations we have. I would like more of us to get down to the nuts and bolts of making a better world, but the softer arts have a place in that, and we cannot choose the right path forward without knowing where we've been. Unfortunately, we have indeed been on the wrong path on many topics and have had to scramble on to the right one many times. As to the other, the past is flawed and the people who decide the boundaries of the canon have bias, so yes, there are far too many old white men. But how are we to change this without critically examining the canon, seeing what has value and what doesn't, to know what to invite in and what to throw out, as well as nourish the best students of all kinds to one day be part of the canon?

That being said, I do have a critique - not of my school, not of the concepts that underly it, but certain of my classmates. It can be easy to forget the world while you are at a rigorous institution (indeed that is one of their pleasures), but the amount of ignorance about the current goings on, social shifts, the work that needs to be done, and a thoughtful application of our hard won drop of wisdom to the rest of life can be a be staggering. I would argue that if you do not see a way to improve the world or have a new idea or simply stay aware, your knowledge of history has been tragically wasted.

I am not saying that all students are like this, or that the majority are - this is simply a warning to my peers about to depart and the youths about to go on this journey. What have you learned? How does it fit with the world? What can your skills and open eyes offer to the present moment?

Personally, I am continuing my work furthering the cause of making this a saner and safer world for all, now armed with better critical reasoning and a lot more context. I write - what else I do I haven't yet figured out, but I have pinpointed where to look. I have gained a faith that fits with who I am while challenging me each moment to think about my day to day life. I have gained people that I care about, and guides for my next step. I came into myself more, and thus I am less willing to lie and capitulate to the unjust.

I became more human, as the humanities like to argue they do, but it wasn't enough to be stuffed with texts - it took an active eye and mind and spirit, it took hard work,?and it will take a commitment to continue after the Latin script and our nice collage president declares us done.