A University College Student Association Magazine
CULTURE
9
The Art of Frolicking by Giulia Martinez-Brenner I don’t remember precisely when I stopped playing with my sisters. There must have been a last time, which of course you don’t know then and there. Like how there was an instant when your parents put you down and never picked you up again. There is a distinct point in time that could mark these moments, but in memory changes become hazy and gradual. My younger sisters continued without me. At the beginning they still pleaded with me to join their games, learned to not waste their breath, and I was left alone, without regret. I had more important things on my mind than silly distractions. The world was turning sober, and things needed to be treated accordingly. I suddenly wanted everything to be serious; people had to be serious for me to respect them, for something to be of importance it had to be heavy. We would wrap ourselves in my mother’s scarves to create ball gowns. One of my personal favourites was to put a rope across the top of my head - fashionably secured in place with a bright blue swimming cap - because I was convinced it looked like two long braids. We would run,
this attitude trickled down, as it always does. My youngest sister was left to play on her own or with friends, until the day came she stopped too. As a new member in the stage of solemnity, I was realizing how meaningful everything was. I learnt about responsibility and accountability, how all actions matter. Things were so thickly ings engrained in the ways of our world could do justice to the weight of our troubles, I had to respond to humourlessness with the same. Now, this path can then lead to many places. I may have ended up a bit of a cynic. Once you see how serious and important things are from up close, you need to take a step back for a breather. And if you take enough of those steps, you also ingful and intense, but it’s also just a ridiculous little dance if you look at it from far enough away. I’m not entirely sure how to hold both of these thoughts in my mind.
and ships, round and around the apartment I now know was actually so small.
friends. We skipped, frolicked, danced in the dunes, with or without music. We gathered and the forest, because for some reason, throwing sticks really hit the spot. Or we just ran, not for exercise, or urgency, just because it felt good. It felt great. It wasn’t like playing board games, or kind of playing didn’t necessarily have an intention, or a structure. It was being playful. It was seeing immensity in the smallest things, like in a dead branch, but an immensity that could be joyfully laughed at. It was understanding that this may all be just a game, but this game is still all we have. And it had been so long since I’d felt playful. A habit abandoned, replaced with ways I presumed to be better, and fuelled by the fear of seeming immature or thoughtless if this wasn’t maintained. Maybe frolicking is the way of balancing another way to respond to humourlessness is with humour. Or maybe once in a while you really just need a good scamper across sand.
Daniel’s Delectable Discussions by Daniel Kamenkovitch Is UCU a Liberal Arts (LA) college? What does “liberal” even mean? The name of this educational style as we know it today has its origin in the septem artes liberales, which included the Trivium (Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric) and – as commonly established by A. M. S. Boethius (7th century A.D.) and later further advocated in court by Charlemagne (8/9th century A.D.) – the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy). These “liberal” disciplines have their origin in Ancient Greece (within the history of Europe, at least), where sciences and humanities would be practiced to “educate citizens” (only males, sadly). Education did not play the primary role of equipping an individual with knowledge, but ultimately it was to provide wisdom – i.e. a body of knowledge and experiassembly. Education’s ultimate goal or target was the collective, the polis. The English word for “liberal” education use it was, in fact, Cicero (4th century B.C.). Throughout this semester, I have come to under“liberal” education: (a) free of worries about interacting with the “polis” or city life, (b) freeing the mind by engaging in worldly as well
as personal knowledge, i.e. personal growth and echoing the Greek Know Thyself, and (c) the elective course system. Thinking about this led me to ask myself whether UCU follows a traditional liberal arts history, or whether it is part of a more new movement. Well, what do we have? We do follow a Platonic tradition in being a gated campus away from the hustle and bustle of the main city centre, just like his Academy; although we do not necessarily require students to stay here for 50 years! We have many extracurriculars, and a highly But the latter never was within a liberal arts tradition, at least not until Harvard President C. W. Eliot introduced some reforms in 1869. It is since then that we have this elective system for students, which we now take for granted. In the classical LA tradition, the focus was more on (a) the breadth, needed for the attainment of as well as (b) oneself; and (c) certain subjects paramount to the curriculum as a result of the previous two. At UCU, the latter one is, of course, not the case. UCU is a college for interdisciplinarity; although it does not truly require much breadth (in disciplines) from its students, it also does not prescribe a strict content-oriented syllabus. Content-related requirements
do arise at UCU; but most only from within the necessity to “major” in a particular department or subject to begin with seems to clash with the tradition of liberal education. Irving Babbitt, too, argued that specialization should not be rather, it is the building of a “gentleman’s” (or lady’s) attitude, having in mind a “positive focusing on building one’s own character. He refers to this approach as humane education. After engaging with this topic this past semester, for me, a “liberal education” thus came to mean a span of three or even four years (original LA Harvard curriculums) where the about one’s academics, oneself and the world around oneself. Being forced to specialize early onward at our age I deem not all being “liberal”. But tradition is one thing, and modernity has its spice. I came to UCU because I could do Psychology, Cog Neuro, Philosophy, Linguistics and Literature. What do you think? Within its arts, what is UCU’s “liberal”? What, to you, is “liberal arts”?
