Can't see the forest for the trees...

So the first full week of Master's work is done. I'm about halfway through the syllabus with a week and half, two weeks to go. I feel pretty good about the odds of getting everything done, but I can't say that I enjoy it.

I like to have things challenge me. Even in my first semester at TMC, the America semester, I was challenged. I had read almost everything on the syllabus before, so that wasn't it. It was the works themselves, the professors, the environment. It made me rethink what I had and hadn't picked up before. My current reading material? Some of it is interesting, certainly, and some of it seems to be historically inaccurate. Some of the authors could benefit from a review of vocabulary and semantics-- I find myself too often thinking "I don't think that word means what you think it means." While I appreciate that the work I'm doing is far more technical and practically oriented, that's not to say that it should be inane.

Library Science is also the last place I expected to find ideology, mainly because of my own naiveté I will own, but there it is. There is more ideology in this course then I encountered in most of my courses at Thomas More. There is an overarching "Librarian power" message that somehow we should be open to everyone but to always know that we could, in fact, take over the world. There's truth to it, I suppose: if all the libraries and archives ceased to stock certain authors or certain books, they would likely disappear from the consciousness of the people. Let that terrifying thought sink in for a moment. There's an underlying advocacy of openness to certain viewpoints more then others: that because someone has suffered censorship in the past we must overcompensate, allowing them total freedom and punishing those who censored with... something like censorship. Again, I can't say this definitively because the whole thing is so poorly written as to send my brain into caterwamps. So, where do I go from here? I don't want to be the pompous ass in class that sits there and says "I once read in (insert famous or pretentious author here)..." At the same time, I can't just sit there while they say that the Catholic Church is a giant censorship organ that doesn't like education except for the secularized Dominicans and Franciscans. For starters, no, and for second secular? Really? And they left out the Jesuits. Say what you will about present day Jesuits, when the order was founded Ignatius was very much concerned with the education of his monks, and not just in the works of the Church Fathers.

It's all rather confusing. And everything is on e-reserves, and say what you will about the wonders of technology, sometimes I'd like to read it in an actual book.