30 July, 2009, comment to Times Higher Education (THE, UK), on the article Love me, love my work, by Dale Salwak.
Dale Salwak writes "To strip someone of his or her work is to strip away part of the soul." There would be a lot of very soulless people in the world during these difficult times, if this were so. Salwak uses the anecdote of the husband who didn’t want his wife to work as a means of emphasizing the apparently incredible value of work, to the individual, and supposedly, to the wider world (if it something as important as academic work, ie).
Work is valuable because society has made it so, largely because the people who write the books tell us it is. Work is essential to a person’ identity, but this kind of writing, by Salwak, does nothing to help people outside of academia to understand their sometimes miserable lot in life, or to help them feel better about it. Academics are indeed privileged to be able to live the lives they do, including the women who are now (thanks to feminism) able to take their places alongside men on campuses around the world.
In this world of ours, it is not just husbands who have the capacity to "strip away" part of what so many human beings have within them, in the form of abilities, life experience, and knowledge. If you cannot apply what you have discovered, or reasoned through, to those outside the ‘inner circle,’ to individuals who have been excluded from academia for one reason or another (and not due to lack of ability or knowledge), then the result of the literary labour simply appears as a kind of inbred narrowness of thought, a narcissistic sense of grandiosity, or along with like others, a closing of the ranks against the rest of the world.
Love me, love my work
Dale Salwak
THE
July 30, 2009
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407554
0 comments:
Post a Comment