Paradox of undergraduate education

Jotted in the margins of the reference page of one of my first undergraduate essays was the comment, "Excellent grasp of the theoretical material and original ideas of your own, but the whole paper could have been deeper if you had read and considered the entirety of the major works you use".

I remember that comment giving me pause. Deeper thought. It stuck with me and since that day, I've strived to do that in my academic works; be deeper, write deeper, display more nuance.
Yet, this afternoon, while reading the lyrical introduction to Marshall Berman's excellent and compelling book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, I came face to face with that concept again. This time, though, it was presented as an issue of 20th century modernity. The problem with this third phase of modernity, Berman argues, is that thought and analysis have flattened into dualisms and polarities. He seems to suggest we've lost the colour and nuance to our thinking and, in doing so, have become passive in our cultural participation. As a consequence, too few 20th century modern thinkers dare to think big thoughts, to create grand narratives, or to delve deeply into the messy contradictions of life.

While I could go on about how he develops this and show how much I agree with it, the point here is rather to talk about how the originating idea of modernity, the call from Kant to have the courage to think, has been so compartmentalized by the acceleration of time and thought that it becomes difficult to be original, to demonstrate a largesse of vision or an incisive depth of thought.

Case in point - my undergraduate education. As an emerging sociologist and cultural theorist, it is to be my job to contemplate the questions of human social life. I am expected to have read all the greats from all the tiers and to understand how they link to one another in a rich and strong web of understanding and argumentation on what it means to be human. The tacit expectation is that I will have read each of these great thinkers deeply, and that I will have a strong and almost didactic grasp of who said what about what and whom.

Sounds right? Of course.

Yet, the reality of my education falls far short of this expectation. Rather than take courses that deal with the entirely of thought that is a single thinker (e.g. Marx, Weber, Habermas, Foucault), all of my courses have been survey courses. They have been about tracing a large field of thought, be it classical social theory, theories of self and society or, as of now, contemporary cultural theory. In all cases, my exposure to various big-T theorists and thinkers has often consisted of a 20-30 page excerpt of their work.

So, when it comes time for me to sit down and write a 10 or 20 page paper on some aspect of someone's theory, I stumble in the gloaming of their work, the short brief evening of their thought to which I've been exposed that semester. As I do this, time and again, I'm reminded of how little of their overall body of work and argument I can claim to know.

The remedy for this may seem obvious -- read more. Take all the books for those theorists out of the library, sit down and read them. Doing so would allow me to answer Berman's call.

But the structure of my undergraduate education is not built for that. Often, I am given a set of essay topics and must produce a compelling and original paper within two week. Fourteen short days. And while working on that paper, let us not forget that I am juggling four to five other courses, each demanding a minimum of 40-60 pages of dense theoretical reading weekly.

A quick mathematical calculation tells me that I am reading somewhere in the vicinity of 250-300 pages a week. On top of attending 15-20 hours of class lectures. And, of course, commuting to school, staying in touch with my social circle, exercising, doing household chores and grocery shopping and, by necessity, eating and sleeping and bathing.

Add onto that the assignments that pile up each week in each class, the seminars I have to lead, the papers and critiques and replies I have to create, exams I have to study for and things I have to just plain know and the overall picture of a sociology undergraduate falls far short of the ideal to which Berman would have me aspire.

How can I have broad knowledge of theory, have read anyone extensively and deeply enough to be able to redress the issue noted in that first of my undergraduate essays, given the realities of my undergraduate life? When all of the enormity of a theory or theorist is instructed in confetti-like bits and drags and drops, what one is left with is a murky Andy Warhol-meets-Jackson Pollock-like collage of an understanding, rather than a cohesive, all-dots-connected flowing knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can lead to wisdom.

Like today. I would dearly love to rush out to the library or bookstore, buy Berman's book, whose introduction I enjoyed thoroughly, and sit down with a few cups of tea and read it, cover to cover, spending the weekend wallowing in it and engaging with Berman's take on modernity. But, if I do that, I will not be able to read the Baumann reading for this week for that class, nor will I read chapters 3 through 5 in my Cities and Urban Life textbook (all 100 pages) for my Urban Regions course. Nor would I get to reading Friedan, Trebilcot and Jones for my Feminist Theory course, rending me unable to participate as expected in Tuesday's seminar. Nor would I read the four chapters for my Comm course, or the two chapters for my development course or do the literature review for my field research course...along with the reading for the week in that textbook too.

And so it goes. Be thorough, be broad, be deep, dig and sift and think, think, think. Yet each of the readings for each of my classes jumps me around each week from topic to topic, from writer to theorist, never pausing anywhere long enough to get more than a glossed-over white bread understanding of an incomplete microcosm of some important person or thought or book. Demands of each course being what they are, where am I supposed to get the time to read broadly and deeply enough of any single theorist to be able to make any knowledge claims about their work? Let alone be able to think deep thoughts about any one topic, or write deep and nuanced analytical paragraphs into a coherence of brilliance that will show that I've heeded those comments on that first paper.

Do as we say, not as we demand of you. This is the message I'm taking away from my undergraduate education. This, it seems, is the paradox of my undergraduate education.