5.10.2005
education
A thought occurred to me at breakfast today over conversation with Stefan, a philosophy student I can't stand and who just sat down across from me, and Tony, a perfectly agreeable MCR member. For more on why I dislike Stefan, click here. Anyway, Tony and I had been talking about memory and the idea of linguistic ability when Stefan sat down and promptly hijacked the conversation. He also turned a passing statement which Tony made regarding the differences between European and American archaeological trends (Tony is an archaeologist), including Britain in with the Americans and then dismissing the entire American and British archaeological field as being rubbish. Nevermind the fact that the Americans and Brits have very different models of archaeological study: neither was rigorously European, and therefore none passed muster.
Sitting down over a meal with your friends from Oxford tends to be a very one-dimensional affair. I played in an orchestra concert last night (filling in for a friend) in St. Hugh's college. We went down to the college bar afterward for a drink, and I sat there with a bunch of music students who couldn't talk about anything other than music. And Blackadder. When I dine with politics students conversation is invariably about politics. And heaven forbid I'm in the midst of a bunch of engineers... To be fair, I'm talking about academic conversation: there are plenty of non-academic conversations regarding rowing or the recent British elections or who Tom Cruise is with now (Katie Holmes). But if I'm eating with Americans, academic conversation will have no tendency to do anything: everything is fair game, and the facility with which we talk about a variety of subjects is astonishing.
I realized this morning that this has to do with the two educational systems at work in this environment. Those brought up in the English system took A-levels as their last year of high school, which focused their energies and studies into three strictly regimented subjects. They apply to Oxford with the pre-determined intention to study a particular subject, which they do for their three years of undergraduate training. They are extraordinarily competent in their respective subjects, but completely lost in most others. Americans, unless they go to places like MIT, are exposed to a wide variety of topics and classes before being asked to major or specialize in any particular field. For example, during my first two years of Princeton, I took classes in Chinese, Ancient Greek, Ancient Philosophy, Music Theory, Economics, Psychology, Florentine Cultural History, and Religion & Law. It's an odd combination that led to my senior thesis having something to do with legal linguistics, philosophy, statistics, and law, in addition to classics. So when Americans get together over lunch, they can chat intelligently about anything.
I was emailling back with a former colleague at the P. school back in November, and I said something that piqued his interest, I think. The mealtime conversations at Oxford are nowhere near as interesting as they were at the P. school cafeteria. I think it's honestly because, by and large, the Brits can't talk about anything outside of their academic field, which is a bit sad, really.
Sitting down over a meal with your friends from Oxford tends to be a very one-dimensional affair. I played in an orchestra concert last night (filling in for a friend) in St. Hugh's college. We went down to the college bar afterward for a drink, and I sat there with a bunch of music students who couldn't talk about anything other than music. And Blackadder. When I dine with politics students conversation is invariably about politics. And heaven forbid I'm in the midst of a bunch of engineers... To be fair, I'm talking about academic conversation: there are plenty of non-academic conversations regarding rowing or the recent British elections or who Tom Cruise is with now (Katie Holmes). But if I'm eating with Americans, academic conversation will have no tendency to do anything: everything is fair game, and the facility with which we talk about a variety of subjects is astonishing.
I realized this morning that this has to do with the two educational systems at work in this environment. Those brought up in the English system took A-levels as their last year of high school, which focused their energies and studies into three strictly regimented subjects. They apply to Oxford with the pre-determined intention to study a particular subject, which they do for their three years of undergraduate training. They are extraordinarily competent in their respective subjects, but completely lost in most others. Americans, unless they go to places like MIT, are exposed to a wide variety of topics and classes before being asked to major or specialize in any particular field. For example, during my first two years of Princeton, I took classes in Chinese, Ancient Greek, Ancient Philosophy, Music Theory, Economics, Psychology, Florentine Cultural History, and Religion & Law. It's an odd combination that led to my senior thesis having something to do with legal linguistics, philosophy, statistics, and law, in addition to classics. So when Americans get together over lunch, they can chat intelligently about anything.
I was emailling back with a former colleague at the P. school back in November, and I said something that piqued his interest, I think. The mealtime conversations at Oxford are nowhere near as interesting as they were at the P. school cafeteria. I think it's honestly because, by and large, the Brits can't talk about anything outside of their academic field, which is a bit sad, really.
