Every Saturday and Sunday morning conversation is the same. What happened? Who was where? What house went the hardest? What happened between who? And of course, how do the answers to these questions affect the askers? This information travels instantly and constantly. It trades hands six or ten or twenty-five times a day, in person or through social networks. We talk about it until we've said it all, then wait a few minutes to talk about the updates. We always rationalize the reason for our social overload as: We live in Greencastle, what else are we going to do?
Yes, we live in a small corner of the world between snowy cornfields and cow crap. But the fact remains that we're all students at a liberal arts school, and our addiction to useless information is a dead weight for our education.
We attend classes taught by accomplished professors, study the subjects we want to devote our careers to for hours and sit in lectures by world-class speakers. The next day, we drink hard, compete for high attendance at parties and cite sources that said one fraternity is better than the other.
DePauw wants "to provide the intellectual setting for those who enter its community to become wise and humane persons; and to prepare them for a lifetime of service to the wider human community." Basically, we're here to be molded into critical thinkers. But this does not only apply to the time we're in class. It applies to the time we're on Facebook, Erodr or talking who's hot-who's not in real-time, too.
We should be thinking critically about ourselves. After all, we are the product of what we repeatedly do. If we repeatedly fill our time discussing things that only happen within the DePauw bubble, we become experts on the DePauw bubble. That's the problem. That rejects the liberal arts mindset altogether.
Though DePauw may teach us critical thinking in the classroom, we fail to apply critical thinking in our everyday. As a result, our school cannot give us the development it's designed to. If we want to take our $50k tuition seriously, we should waste less breath on the goings-on of the DePauw social scene.
-Pitts is a sophomore English writing major from Indianapolis.