Monday Morning Musings - Old and Young

Some of my writing in recent years has focused on characters who are much older than the ones I usually write about. While I was taking my morning walk today, I started wondering why that might be and I realized that it is probably because I am closer to those ages than I am to younger protagonists. I can relate to the issues of aging and being on the downside of life. Plus, now that I am of a certain age, I realize that I look at those other older people differently than I did when I was young. Those older people are no longer the grandmother and grandfather I loved dearly but had nothing in  common with except my mother or father.

They are my peers, and I now see that we have lives rich with more than rocking chairs and knitting needles. That is what I have tried to capture in my short story collection, The Wisdom of Ages, and also what I addressed in a short story that is featured on The Story Shack, "To Love Again." It has a lovely illustration done by Monique Lafitte.

The story is about finding love after the death of a spouse. I remember when I was young, when older people lost a husband or wife, they stayed single the rest of their lives. That doesn't happen so much any more, and that is a good thing for those who don't want to spend their later years alone. I wrote about this once before in a short story that was published in the anthology, One Touch, One Glance Anthology of sweet romance stories. That story, New Love, was based loosely on the experience my father had with new love when he was 80, and it proves that there is no age limit on love.

On the other end of the age spectrum are all the young people graduating from college and looking ahead to jobs or graduate school or both. One of our grandsons just graduated, and it was fun to listen to the young people who came to his party as they talked about their dreams and goals for the future.

What are your thoughts on love later in life? Are you celebrating graduations in your families?

Monday Morning Musings

As many students are starting college classes this week, I thought it would be good to share an interesting article that was written by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, authors of the book, Higher Education? The article was in a recent edition of The Dallas Morning News and focused on the importance of reclaiming liberal arts in colleges.

In doing the research for the book the authors discovered that liberal arts courses have been downsized in most universitites and colleges or they have been altered, "both in format and in function." While the course titles may be the same as they have been for years, what the course entails "Is no longer attuned to undergraduates looking for a broader and deeper understanding of the world."

Hacker and Dreifus cited the course description from the Yale catalog for a class that deals with how disabilities are depicted in fiction: "We will examine how characters serve as figures of otherness, transcendence, physicality or abjection. Late may come examination questions on regulative discourse, performativity and frameworks of intelligibility."

Huh?

The authors believe that classes like that "suggest that professors are using the curriculum as their personal playground." Some professors are structuring classes around topics of their current research, and that approach seems to benefit the professor more than the students.

When I studied psychology, sociology and history, which are all classes in liberal arts, we focused on broader aspects of human behavior such as good and evil, morality, ethics, and social justice. Those are the areas that we needed an understanding of as we prepared to step out of the classrooms and into the big bad world as adults. How could we act ethically if we didn't know what ethics entails? How could we work toward social justice and equality if we didn't have a clue what the problems are? And, gosh, we did have a sense of good and evil and right and wrong, and tried to stay on the right side of both.

What do you think? Is it time that colleges brought back a stronger liberal arts program?