Aug 21, 1995

At Hampshire College we have this thing called the "3rd world
expectation". Intersting! Vague -- integrate a new perspective into
our work. It's been around a bit, but not forever. At the Johnston
Center, there's the "Cross-Cultural experience" which seems to be
relatively equivalent. Most often, students there take a term or year
abroad, whereas most often at Hampshire the experience is more
academic, less experiential. 

Of course, at both institutions a student can manage to slack some on
this or to do a great job -- I, for example, at Hampshire, really
slacked on the "official" bit, claiming that a class I took dealt
substantively with issues of this 3rd world -- not a complete lie, but
really it was to please the rules, not myself. The same thing is
somewhat possible at Johnston, though less so -- slacking there might
mean a trip to nearby Mexico, which seems like slacking compared to a
semester of traveling through southeast asia (as would have been
typical years ago) or a year abroad in Austria (as would bee typical
now). 

I've been thinking lately about the world, about myself, about my
education... This summer, I've been travelling. I've been to
Minneapolis, then through Des Moines, to Durango, Colorado, spending
just over a week visiting some of our famous "natural wonders" in the
Southwest, a week in LA, a week in Mexico, then driving north along
the California Coast, a month in Port Townsend, WA, with excursions
nearby into the Olympic Mountains, Oregon, into Seattle -- even to
_Microsoft_, which was nearly as foreign as Mexico. Is this traveling
important to the way I look at my country now? Tremendously. "My
country" used to mean New England, and I assumed other places were
similar. But now I really feel like the possibilities for my future
are so much greater -- I could never have imagined living in, say San
Fransisco, before -- but now that is in a way a possibility. I almost
never imagined spending time in Mexico, but now that, too, is a real
possibility.

The variety of people I've encountered -- the great people who live in
this country (mixed of course with the old men who get very angry at
me for being an Easterner, or whatever--) seeing the Mountains, how
they're different and how they're the same. It's comparable, in a way,
to the variety of people I can find in my own neighborhood -- think
how much I've learned from simply getting to know the farmer who lives
next door, Tim Edson, whose great-grandfather settled here a hundred
years ago. The variety of ways of thinking. 

The whole point of all this is to say how valueable it has been for me
to include all thes other things in my own view of what my education
is. Some folks do classes, job, classes, job. My claim is always that
I learn at least as much as those folks, but also have the
flexibility to work in so many directions -- that I am certainly
more ready to be a productive, caring person and parent than I would
have if I'd taken the more traditional approach. Maybe the same for
you?

Someday I should finish this.