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

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 8 text:

We come here raw material in a way. We have the brains, we have the educational background, we have the inclination. We come here ready to take, to consume, to exploit anything which they—which the school we come to regard as an entity called Mt. Holyoke— cares to give us. And if at first, because we are rather callow, and haven’t really defined for ourselves what it is we expect to be given—if at first we don’t seem to be getting very much, we become skeptical. We say a lot of clever things about education versus regurgitation. We are very naive, and we walk around secure in the knowledge that we are very sophisticated.

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.