by Egon Lass

Created on: May 08, 2009

THOUGHTS ON EDUCATION

My formal education leaves so much to be desired, it renders me breathless. In a German grade school run by Nazis I was told that I was too stupid to learn beyond the eighth grade and that I could not partake of the English lessons because I had no linguistic abilities. Before they could actualize these criticisms, I immigrated to the United States, finished high school and learned English. My opinion of teachers was so low that I became arrogant about learning, thinking that I needed no professor to teach me what I could learn on my own in any library. Up to a point, my arrogance may have been justified. Nevertheless, at age forty I entered an American university and stayed until I had finished my master's degree. In that process I was an undergraduate hot shot, taking the honors program with thesis, joining Phi Beta Kappa, and graduating summa cum laude. By this time I had already had quite an array of vocations, been in positions in which others trusted me with their lives, lived in more cities and states than I could remember, and considered sites around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean my stomping ground. On a normal resume I would have been considered a qualified applicant.

Since I was twice as old as most students, I knew what I wanted from my university and went straight for it. I studied anthropology in order to apply it to archaeology, a discipline in which I had already worked for nearly a decade. Archaeology is about excavation and discovery of ancient civilizations. There are a few universities in the world that actually teach archaeology. If you excavate, then you have to know more or less what you are finding, so you have to know the shape of structures in different periods, and the nature of change in material culture through time. This is a good basing for any archaeologist, and it is the main focus of teaching the discipline. Unfortunately, if you dig a hole in the ground without publishing a report about what you have found, you may as well use dynamite. Archaeologists who excavate sites without publishing them are nothing more than educated robbers of antiquities. The reason why most archaeologists do not write reports is, because they don't know how.

I was very impressed by the honors program seminars in my university. You are assigned to read a number of books on the subject that you are studying, and you are asked to do research on a certain aspect of that subject, and then to write a paper on your research. Every student has to read your paper and critique it, after you have presented it to the class. Whether you are studying a science or literary criticism, by the time you graduate you should be able to write a publishable paper. How many universities are there who have this goal in mind, and why aren't there more?

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