Elizabeth Stice is an Associate Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she's not teaching class, she enjoys reading, running, and spending time with her dog.
2020 has certainly had real trials and tribulations, but our approach to it is also reflective of a culture in which everything disliked has long been “the worst.”
If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts.
In television and movies, heroes often push away the ones they love, because relationships can be obstacles or endangering for one or both parties. But what if love is not a liability, but a force greater than gravity?
Students may return to universities that post a philosophy statement but have no philosophy department. Yet as we look at our country, divided over history and by economics, home to scientific innovation and scientific ignorance, education is both more needed and more endangered than ever.
Being wealthy doesn’t make Chouinard a better representative of the values that he shares with Berry, but recognizing that Berry is not alone and that these values can be brought into the wider world, if imperfectly, makes their embrace of limits and simplicity more compelling and their approach to life seem more possible for others.
As difficult as some content is to teach, we have a responsibility to educate our students about the past, good and bad. A curriculum which leaves out the bad would gaslight our students.
There is certainly a place for online learning in undergraduate education, but we should not undercut traditional higher education for the sake of innovation or profit margin.
If we learn about ourselves and our homes through travel, we don’t just become better “citizens of the world”—we can become more conscious and thoughtful citizens of our own places.
