Training

[From an old text file.]

“Training” is an element in a rhetoric of academic professionalization: “our training prepares students to,” “our graduate students are trained to,” and so on. In humanities study, I’d suggest, there’s no such thing as training. Training is systematic, rigorous. Reading and learning are haphazard and unpredictable matters, with courses taken for all sorts of reasons, and works read (and resonating) in no uniform sequence.

Speaking of the haphazard: in The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton tells a story of walking into the wrong classroom and ending up in a great class with Mark Van Doren:

It was when I had taken off my coat and put down my load of books that I found out that this was not the class I was supposed to be taking, but Van Doren’s course on Shakespeare.

So I got up to go out. But when I got to the door I turned around again and went back and sat down where I had been, and stayed there. Later I went and changed everything with the registrar, so I remained in that class for the rest of the year.

It was the best course I ever had at college.

*

As I remembered only when I asked Elaine to read this post, she wrote in 2008 about cringing when she hears the words “classically trained.” My text file dates from 2012.

[I’ll grant that graduate students are trained in the forms of hierarchy and deference that operate in academic life, but that’s hardly what’s meant by “our graduate students are trained to.”]