Espionage at I-House

JBStillFlying
Mon, 04 Nov 2019 01:48:34 +0000

“”[Students] commonly talked about what they were reading at meals and in other spare time during the day - and late, late into the night" (p. 141). Is that how it is in today’s College, I wonder?"

In all fairness, even if my own kids were at another school they would still be the types to discuss what they were reading with others. In general, the question of whether UChicago manages to find these kids or create them might be a chicken and egg thing.

I quoted the above statement (separately) to each of my two and asked if that described them and/or the people they knew. My D replied yes, and that this was pretty normal. My son informed me that academic and intellectual topics are a normal and frequent part of their conversations, but so is other stuff. No one he knows is having late night philosophical discussions. Knowing each as I do, I pretty much would have predicted these responses. If anything, it demonstrates that each was well placed in his/her respective house.

“The world tends to divide between those with a penchant for argument (truly understood, as dialectical discourse) and those who know it only as mere assertion and invective and therefore avoid or stigmatize it. A proper experience of the culture of the University of Chicago will infect you forever with a taste for it.”

I wonder about the current generation of young people. Was just reading an article about the increase in "ghosting" among younger Millennials and Gen Z'ers - not just in personal relationships, but with employers and prospective employers as well! Has the desire for conflict avoidance gone to an extreme among this age group? How does such a tendency impact the college classroom today?