Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
is a pleasing sense of being around 20,000 young people who are having the best years of
their lives.
In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting
and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available,
but at least you did it. Nowadays, American students' principal concerns seem to be sex
and keeping their clothes looking nice. I don't think learning comes into it very much. At
the time of my trip there was an outcry in America over the contagion of ignorance that
appeared to be sweeping through the nation's young people. The principal focus of this na-
tionwidewrist-wringingwasastudybytheNationalEndowmentfortheHumanities.Ithad
recently tested S,000 high-school seniors and found that they were as stupid as pig dribble.
More than two-thirds of them did not know when the US Civil War took place, couldn't
identifyStalinorChurchill,anddidn'tknowwhowroteTheCanterburyTales.Almosthalf
thoughtWorldWarIstartedbefore1900.AthirdthoughtthatRooseveltwaspresidentdur-
ing the Vietnam War and that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Forty-two percent-
this is my favorite-couldn't name a single country in Asia. I would scarcely have believed
all this myself except that the summer before I had taken two American high-school girls
foradrivearoundDorset-brightgirls,bothofthemnowenrolledincollegesofhighrepute-
and neither of them had ever heard of Thomas Hardy. How can you live to be eighteen
years old and never have at least heard of Thomas Hardy?
I don't know the answer to that, but I suspect you could spend a week in Auburn kissing
the ass of every person who had ever heard of Thomas Hardy and not get chapped lips.
Perhaps that is a grossly unjustified comment. For all I know, Auburn may be a hotbed
of Hardy scholarship. But what I do know, from having spent only a short while there, is
that it hasn't got a single decent bookstore. How can a university town not have a decent
bookstore? There was a bookstore, but all it sold was textbooks and a decidedly unliter-
ary assortment of sweatshirts, stuffed animals and other paraphernalia bearing the Auburn
Universityseal.MostAmericanuniversitieslikeAuburnhave20,000studentsormore,and
upwardsof800ori,000professorsandlecturers.HowCarlanycommunitywiththatmany
educated people not support a single decent bookstore? If I were the National Endowment
for the Humanities, I would find that at least as compelling a question as why high-school
seniors do so poorly on general knowledge tests.
Incidentally, I'll tell you why they do so poorly. They answer the questions as fast as they
can, at random, and then sleep. We used to do it all the time. Once a year in high school,
our princi
