The audacity of questioning

I have always been a questioning sort. Not in the "how does this work?" sort of way. I'm like Mindy from Anamaniacs, I just keep asking "Why?" My whole life I've run into people who were willing to question why things were, what they were, why they existed. As I look back, I realize that most of these people were outside mainstream academia, something that should explain why I sit where I sit now in grad school. It doesn't.

I have a class, Research Methods, which is very heavily grounded in ideology. And no, I don't mean that there's a background idea that weaves its way through the course. I mean ideology as in the dangerous kind, as in an idea that grabs hold of people to the point that their world view is entirely determined by the ideology. You know, the scary kind. In this case, its Italian socialism mixed with bits of Marx mixed with good old fashioned American know how and pushing things to the nth degree. It's certainly interesting, and outside my normal purview. For the sake of my grade, I haven't questioned this within the confines of the class. I have, however, spent the entire semester questioning the why and wherefore. It's a personal growth thing.

Perhaps that's why I was so shocked when the undercurrent I had detected in the comments flared out in the most awkward of ways. One of the students decided to hold forth on the fact that questioning isn't natural, that all of us are preconditioned to NOT question, and that we must learn how. This came from a student who has been nothing but dogmatic on many many issues, not the least of which was a debate with me over the usage of the word "hegemony." It gets me thinking again of how lucky I am, and how screwed we as a society are.

I'm lucky because I have been left to my natural inclination, ie, questioning. Aristotle says that man is, by nature, a political animal. That may be, but I think man is, by nature, a curious animal as well. How much do we prize inovation and invention? What marks a small child as annoying but their insatiable curiousity? Curiousity begats questioning which generally begats thinking. And man is marked by his thought-- what else distinguishes him from the other animals?

And this preconditioning thing-- my colleagues act as though it is nature, when it is the opposite. It's unnatural, it's not good, and its everywhere. It's also how ideologies take hold-- if there is but one school of thought that promises everything you ever wanted and an answer to the evils in the world wouldn't you take it? No difficulty, no pain, just an answer to the questions that you keep trying to supress. How wonderful. And so people stop questioning, and start being lemmings.

I'm sure you all know where that leads to. It's more than just different schools of thought. It's why people of radical political persuations can truly not understand someone with a different view point; it's outside the system so its outside the world.It just frightens me that so many people agreed with her assesment: that people think we are naturally sheep, uninquiring beings who simply live because we are waiting to die. If an entire society has entered that mind set that isn't it too simply living because it is waiting to die? Scary thought.

I've been silent for many weeks now, mainly because I had three rather large projects all due the same day (this past Friday). It was a good thing I did. Prior to those projects, I had felt very discouraged about library school. I felt that I was left to my own devices overmuch, that the lectures were less helpful and more about professorial idiosyncrasies. It took me a few weeks, but I realized that they have finally shown me enough resources that I can do this stuff myself. One can decide to learn, be eager to learn, but without tools that desire often becomes frustrated.

For example, I can now expound the difference between Dublin Core metadata encoding, and MARC encoding. I can tell you how Dublin Core fits into METS, sort of the updated version of MARC with many many fewer fields. I have actively found and developed an outline for the collection development policy for a special collection of web documents. And I remember all the stats stuff I once knew.

All this to say? Academia got me so down I forgot what my purpose was. This is utilitarian knowledge, but not in the bad, decried sense. This is knowledge that leads to reasoning that hopefully leads to showing people where and how to find the knowledge and truth they seek. And that means something.

Hopefully it means I've turned a corner, that from here on I will salvage an education meant strictly to be utilitarian. I've got some time to do it. On Wednesday, I return to NH for a brief engagment (ha ha, if ONLY). Hopefully I'll get some pictures up on here to share with all five of you who check in every once in a while