Week Four: Making Connections

No doubt, by this time in the semester, you’ve already heard a lot about “making connections.” We’ve mentioned this activity a number of times already in these tutorials; our emphasis on this activity is reflected in the grading criteria discussed in the gradatorium; and your teacher has certainly discussed this in class. Why bother with “making connections”?

It could be argued—indeed, it has been argued in our own classes—that making connections between the essays in The New Humanities Reader is an arbitrary activity. There is no explicit connection between Susan Faludi’s essay on the Citadel’s transition to co-education in the 1990s and Jasper Becker’s essay exploring the causes of famine in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so why devote the time and energy to creating a connection? Why practice a skill that could just as well be called “making things up” or “hallucinating” or “indulging your imagination”?

When we hear objections of this kind, we feel that what were hearing is the sound of an educational system that has failed to train its students to take their own thoughts seriously. And this is the central project of The New Humanities Reader: to provide you with the opportunity to explore what you think about the issues and cultural forces that will shape the world you will graduate into. Anyone can be trained to accurately summarize what they’ve read: the creative aspect of thinking emerges when connections are made between the texts you’ve read, between what you’ve read and your own experience, and between what you’ve read and thought in the past and what you’re coming to think now. By learning how to make connections, you will learn how to make ideas mobile and active and this is the habit of mind that is most highly rewarded both inside and outside the academy.

So, what’s to gain from creating a “virtual connection” between Faludi’s essay on the Citadel and Becker’s essay on the Great Famine? Although the events discussed by these two essays are separated by several decades and thousands of miles, both essays can be seen to be implicitly concerned with the same issue: how authoritarian regimes are created and maintained. By making a virtual connection of this kind (there are many more that could be made between these two essays), you create an opportunity to think further about an issue that is not fully covered in either essay: that is, you shift the attention in your writing away from being primarily concerned with repeating what you’ve read to focusing on your own thoughts about what you’ve read. This is why learning how to make virtual connections is so important—it puts the activity of developing and advancing your own thoughts at the center of your education.

In a very real sense, your brain has been hardwired to make connections: it is the ability to make connections that permits you to navigate the unfamiliar situations that emerge everyday. In fact, this activity is so routine, you don’t even notice it: when a road is blocked on the way to school, you find another route to get you to your destination; when you get to class and no one’s there, you check the door to see if the class has been moved; when a hand is raised in class, you know, by recollecting all your previous experiences in class, that this is a standard way of requesting an opportunity to speak. Your mind is always at work saying: X is like Y or X isn’t like Y or X is and isn’t like Y.

So, when we ask you to make connections within a given reading or between the readings, we’re asking you to do the kind of mental work you do everyday—we’re just asking you to do this mental work on the ideas and issues raised by The New Humanities Reader. It’s that simple, really: we want you to make connections between ideas, experiences, and events and then we want you to evaluate the significance of the connections you’ve made.

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