Woolf.

This is coolbert:

Here begins a series of blog entries, topics of which are relevant to the Great War [WW1]. All posts done without regard to any sort of chronological order or importance.

Extracts with my commentary from the original articles as seen at the excellent Internet web site isegoria.net .

Stanford! Honors seminar! 

From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Our First View of the End of the World"

"In Our First View of the End of the World, Stanford professor Terry Castle explains the frustrations of teaching:"

"What does it mean to remember the First World War? Over the past few years I have been trying to get my students — mostly 19- or 20-year-old Stanford English majors — to learn about, think about, reckon with, remember the Great War. I have been spectacularly unsuccessful. My latest failure came just this spring, in an honors seminar on Virginia Woolf. We were reading Jacob’s Room, the hero of which dies on the Western Front, and I suspected — correctly — that my students knew little about the war or its repercussions. (Make of it what you will, but all of the students except one were female.)"

DAMNED AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENTS AT THE MOST ELITE INSTITUTIONS THEIR MINDS STUPEFIED AND FULL OF MUSH! SCHOLARS [?] OF THE HIGHEST CALIBER TOTALLY IGNORANT OF MAJOR HISTORICAL EVENTS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WHICH SEEMS TO  ESCAPE THEM ABSOLUTELY ALMOST IRREDEEMABLY SO!!

Perhaps some current Stanford undergraduate will read this blog entry and be ashamed of themselves? For some reason I doubt it.

coolbert.