Mount Holyoke College - Llamarada Yearbook (South Hadley, MA)

Page 10 text:

If education is essentially a self-contained process, it must often be a solitary one. Perhaps it is because of our intellectual loneliness that we turn, sometimes almost desperately, to others for a sort of solace, for an assurance that we are not dry and dog-eared like the primary sources we use so assiduously. Yet this sort of diversion becomes terribly disappointing, for each man has his limits of communication, and somehow, nobody’s boundaries seem to go far enough. And so we turn inside, contorting our mind and our emotion into a variety of shapes, and attitudes, and postures.

Page 9 text:

It is not, perhaps until we have had four years of consideration that we come to know that this institution—that any institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowing—can supply us with only one accommodation: the tools of learning. Our education is contingent most fundamentally upon our own motivation. It is this motivation which brought us (some of us rather naively) to this place. It is this same motivation which will make us devoted to the acquisition of knowledge all our lives. What this particular place can give us, then, is not Education with a capital E, but all the facilities for educating ourselves.

Page 11 text:

But keeping company only with oneself can become stifling, oppressive. We find we must rub the minds of the living scholars of our classrooms and the preserved ones on the library shelves to be able to hone our own. We turn ourselves out again, hoping with a sort of happysad disillusionment that we will overcome the futility of trying to communicate with others. We entrench ourselves in the more significant, the heavier, concepts of living. The balance is tipped too far, and often we fall. We have spent too much time testing the old question of “What am I?”