I’m Going Back to College

For the past few years I have been taking courses at North Carolina State University—first, a few undergraduate courses in French and history, then graduate-level classes in history alone. In April, I was accepted as a genuine, formal graduate student seeking a master’s degree. My primary concentration will be European history.

I’m retired. I’ve been retired since 2015. My husband, Rick, is an economist who says that education is an investment and, given my age, I won’t have much time to earn a return on it. So why do I want to do this? My reply is that this education is a consumption good, not an investment. Some people have “bucket lists” of things they want to do before they die—usually places they want to see. My bucket has two things in it: studying history and speaking French.

I’m writing this blog because I wish to deepen my educational experience and see if my observations resonate with others.’ I want to comment about it all—mostly history and historiography, but also other academic disciplines and maybe even pedagogy and college administration (not personalities, though, except possibly my own). I hope my questions and comments will elicit further observations, including corrections, from colleagues and friends, practiced historians, and fellow  students.

Why am I studying history? I’ve read a lot of history over the years—ambitious, triumphal books about the Industrial Revolution and the worldwide increase in prosperity that it launched. In the 1970s, while browsing in the Chicago Public Library, I discovered North and Thomas’s Rise of the Western World and I have been curious about the forces leading to prosperity ever since. I’ve even directed Liberty Fund conferences on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence. I love  books such as  Stan Evans’ The Theme is Freedom, Joel Mokyr’s Industrial Revolution, and Joyce Appleby’s The Relentless Revolution. For years I wrote about such books for the libertarian Liberty Magazine.

But intellectually, my reading has always been a scattershot affair—just doing what I wanted without a clear goal or guidance. Most of the books I like have been economic history, but I’m not an economist and not a historian (an historian, my husband says sternly), really, just a dilettante.  I want to get my teeth into something worth munching on. And thanks to the five courses I already have taken, I have done so. But they are just the beginning.

If I like history so much, why didn’t I study it in college? Ah, Wellesley. I was sixteen years old when I entered Wellesley. My mother had died three years earlier. Superficially, I was all right, but underneath I was depressed. I couldn’t do all the reading that would be required to learn history. I took two history courses, “world” history and Central European history. One professor wrote on an exam, “You have the main themes right but are weak on the details.” Students need to read a lot to get the details. I shifted to poetry.

Over the next few months, I’ll discuss some of the things I’ve been learning, not just in books, but by being at school. The tone will be a personal mixture of naïveté about academic pursuits and understanding based on age. I hope that I illuminate for myself some corners of life. Perhaps I will view the present more generously once I have a better grasp of what has gone before. And perhaps I will help others learn more, too.

While I will keep my posts short (around the size of this one, or less) I will also link to interesting posts or articles about history, academe, or related topics.  Please look in the righthand column to see links to news that intrigues me and to a few websites I like. Again, please join me in this adventure.