�This Book is Not Required� is so powerful that hundreds of professors have actually required it. According to its author, Inge Bell, it is an undergraduate’s guide for intellectual and emotional survival.
Not merely about undergraduates though, it also touches upon professors� and graduates� experiences. On this firm foundation Bell branches into politics, sociology, romance, family life, and religion. She brilliantly wires all of these topics coherently into the college experience.
By Joel Brown,
Contributor
�This Book is Not Required� is so powerful that hundreds of professors have actually required it. According to its author, Inge Bell, it is an undergraduate’s guide for intellectual and emotional survival.
Not merely about undergraduates though, it also touches upon professors� and graduates� experiences. On this firm foundation Bell branches into politics, sociology, romance, family life, and religion. She brilliantly wires all of these topics coherently into the college experience.
Undoubtedly she is critical toward many methods of the academy but without dismissing it. Her critiques do not encourage refusals to attend college, but rather wish to assure that its opportunities are lived out to the fullest.
For example, Bell suggests selecting classes not by subject, but by the professor’s reputation, to find professors who are not afraid to say, �I don’tknow,� and even to learn under anyone with an unusual perspective or radical slant as they inevitably are highly motivated to teaching well.
She is also a master at challenging well-ingrained social assumptions. Can an ambitious person really love? Ambition grows out of �consuming vanity and anxiety,� not to mention �a fierce dissatisfaction with oneself.�
Is grade competition dehumanizing? How is its anxiety conducive to learning? Why would we give even seven year olds failing grades?
Also, she shows an impressive familiarity with the many sides of familial and romantic relationships during college years. She puts forth a very level-headed view of sexuality, avoiding extremes: the idea of sex as sin is a destructive human invention, but you need self-acceptance more than you need sexual partners. And in the end, this book is about such wholeness.
After exposing the academy’s flaws in format and standards of measuring knowledge, Bell writes, �It would not have surprised your grandparents, but it may surprise you, that wisdom is essentially to be found in the great religious traditions of the human race.�
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