The Outside Perspective

One challenge, as a beginning writer, is learning to crawl outside of your societal box. I have been thinking about this a bit recently, and ran across a remark from papersky over at a Making Light discussion about the proposed law in Arizona that would allow students to opt out of any assignment that offended them. Jo's comment:

Jo Walton ::: (view all by) ::: February 26, 2006, 09:12 AM:

Oh, and anyone who wants to study one thing and one thing only with no breadth requirements should go to university in Britain. When I first read about the American Liberal Arts education, in Doorways in the Sand I thought "What an imagination Roger Zelazny has got! What an astonishing SFnal idea." When I discovered it again, in The Number of the Beast, I thought "Heinlein got this idea from Zelazny! And he didn't acknowlege it anywhere!" It took coming across it again in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin to make me actually believe it existed. I've been sulking ever since.

Jo grew up in Wales but now lives in Montreal. There is, I would say, absolutely nothing like moving (even temporarily) to another country to shake up your perspective.

When I was thirteen, my father went on sabbatical, and my family spent a year in England, living in London. My parents both did research (my father for a book, my mother for her dissertation) and my brother, sister and I went to school. I have since been told that 1986-87 was something of a nadir for state education (what Americans call public education -- "public schools" in England are private schools, I'm not sure why) in London. Things started improving not long after I left, but academically the school I attended was dismal, and my formal education that year was kind of a wash.

My informal education, on the other hand, was unparalleled.

For example, let's take lunchtime.

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England is one of the easier foreign countries to live in, as an American, because you speak the language (more or less). Yet there are a million ways in which it is foreign. Having this experience as a thirteen-year-old was both terrifying and exhilerating. The most fundamental thing I learned was that Other People Have a Different Normal -- this is a very basic lesson, but I learned it in a bone-deep way that year.

I love that when Jo first read about the American liberal arts education, she thought it was this wildly creative science fictional idea. That is such a good illustration of what I'm talking about. The idea of distribution requirements is almost inherent to the American concept of an undergraduate education; there are schools that have no such requirements, but they're the rare exception. Yet this was so foreign to Jo's experience that she considered it science fictional.

She notes later in the thread that her bitterness is because this would have been so perfect for her, and she didn't find out about it until it was too late to take advantage of it.