Great Courses

I don’t know about many other PAW’s out there, but, you’ve either not had the finances to attend college out of high school (like me), didn’t have the encouragement to do so (like me), were outright discouraged in some ways (like me), attempted to attend college in your adult years (like me), and either failed out of life getting in the way or financial issues. Like me.

With the debt crisis, general economic instability, social decay, and all the horrible events occurring in the world today, it seems like arguing over the value of an education is going to take a back-burner to the more pressing issues we have right now.

Should it? Maybe. Shouldn’t it? Should education always stay in the forefront of conversations as the only way to combat hate, ignorance, and xenophobia? Yeah. But I don’t feel right telling families in mourning what their priorities should be when I don’t live their lives.

However, we will get around to education again. Either as a talking point for class divide, or financial stability.

What we need to decide, as a society, is the value of education. Is it going to be an elitist marker that is just another divide between classes? Or is it something that should be accessible to everyone, no matter their goal, career, or ambition?
Of course, I favor education for all. Housewife? What mother and home caregiver cannot benefit from education on chemistry and psychology. Simple chemistry helps so much with baking and cooking, I’m surprised Alton Brown hasn’t done Great Course lectures, because that’s basically what Good Eats was, the science of food.

Jump right to my PAW Brethren and Sistren. You Poor, Angry, Writers who have no recourse for a higher MFA that seems to be the only requirement for some people to put out their manifesto of crap fiction that gets recanted later by its own author.

But I digress.

So, for those of us who value education for its enriching of life in general, Great Courses and it’s lesser known companion on the shelf, The Modern Scholar, are invaluable.

For writers, there really isn’t any one direction I can point you. Go everywhere. There isn’t a subject that can’t be explored.

The problem being, these are expensive. However, the public library offers most of these.

I’m obsessed with music courses. Composers in many eras (I have one or two I fan-freak-out over), fundamentals, biographies, operas, symphonies, I can’t get enough. It’s chocolate cake.

For all the pressing of The Teaching Company and Modern Scholar I’m doing right now, it culminates to this. You can get knowledge, inspiration, doors to technique can be revealed, you can identify with brooding and eccentric famous people, enjoy the work and never look at it the same again. You can’t help but transfer that to every part of your life, especially your writing.

But there are three things that get me through tough times that I got directly from these studies.

The composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, teacher to Igor Stravinsky, said “Inspiration is the reward of persistence, not a haphazard dependence.”

Liszt only gave a shit what his cats thought.

And finally, Berlioz. Berlioz came from a family of non-musicians. He dropped out of school and did whatever he could to be in the music world. And only as he could afford them. He even got kicked out of the Library of Paris Conservatory while studying because he wasn’t a student (yet), even though he was there during public hours.

I haven’t even covered all the courses there are on literature…

By the way, is that book done yet?