Hearing this took his mind off the hats. He imagined asking the young man how he had gotten so smart at 18 that he could listen to professors and read books for four years and not learn anything new. He wanted to puncture the braggart's arrogance, and scold him for wasting the time of those who had tried to teach him. Other college professors might have felt the same way.
His anger faded as he realized that the boaster could not have meant what he said. Surely, the braggart had learned something in college. So what was the arrogant guy saying? Perhaps the cocky braggart belittled his education because he was angry that it had not gotten him a better job, or perhaps he was trying to say to his buddy, "I'm no better than you for having gone to college. common sense is what matters.." If this is what he meant, it was not such a bad message.
Still, he was sad the braggart spoke of his education as a waste. Even if he had learned more than he realized, he had also missed a lot. He had not learned how to look back on himself, how to see who he was, what he was becoming, and how he was connected to others. If he had, perhaps he could have explained, without making his buddy feel bad.
He did not suppose that courses in writing (or other technical subjects) are likely to foster much self-awareness. That is not their purpose. But other kinds of courses, and whole fields of study, claim this purpose as their reason for being. His own field of study, sociology, is often justified on the grounds that it helps people gain insight into themselves and into society, so they can live more satisfying, self-determined, and responsible lives. If sociology (or any discipline) can do this for people, then he thinks it has good reason for being.
Sociology courses sometimes foster less self-awareness and insight into society than sociology promises to deliver. This failure is most likely to occur it seems to him, when courses aim primarily to teach about sociology as a discipline. "See how scientific we are? See all these theories, and concepts, and findings? You had better be impressed by all this!" No teacher says these things in quite this way, of course, but sometimes this is the message that comes through. He had heard it himself.
When sociology is taught as a body of work, created by strangers, it can seem like an exotic and fanciful thing - something that one can take or leave, depending on how interesting it is to listen in on the sayings of sociologists. If this is how sociology comes across, most people will tune it out before long. After all, what sociologists say among themselves is less interesting than social life itself. Most people, sensibly enough, would rather pay attention to social life than to the academic study of social life.
And so, it often happens that an encounter with sociology leaves only a faint impression. A few scattered facts and concepts are remembered. But there are no changed habits of mind, no well-learned ways of making a different kind of sense of the social world. It is as if, after so much telling about the pictures that others have made, we have forgotten that the point is to teach people how to make pictures for themselves.
If you would like a written portrait of the disciple of sociology, you can find one in many places - but not here. This book is not about the concepts, theories, and findings of sociology. Although, it makes implicit use of these, It is about how to think sociologically, and about why this is worth doing. It tells (and shows) how to pay attention to, and make sense of, the social world in a sociological way. He calls this the practice of being sociologically mindful. Once you master this practice, you can make the pictures for yourself.
*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND ED., MICHAEL SCHWALBE, 2001, PGS. 1-3*
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