John's Recommended Articles

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6716477a-4861-49c9-88ae-c62d3da78f49&k=59188

In early February, I watched 16 men receive degrees in an extraordinary college commencement ceremony. Although there were caps and gowns and processional music, these degrees were given deep inside a maximum-security prison…

Still, what really moved me and my Bard colleagues to tears as we listened to the words of the four representatives of the Class of 2009 was the recognition of how weak the love of learning is among those for whom the privilege of moving seamlessly from high school into college is taken for granted. Why can we not engender the same motivation and attachment to a life of the mind when there are few real constraints on our students? In these times of economic distress, there is ever more skepticism about the utility of fields of study in the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences, which appear to have no immediate practical benefits. But, in the prisoners in Bard's program, we saw something we rarely see on our own campuses: recognition of the deep value of the pursuit of inquiry for its own sake.