The Educational Experience (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Donald Barthelme
- First Published: 1973
- Type of Work: Short story
- Genres: Short fiction
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, Twentieth century, Education or educators, Students or student life
“The Educational Experience” offers Barthelme's view not only of what current education consists—random facts with no coherence—but perhaps also of the worth of the entire sum of humankind's history: nothing. Barthelme's theory of history is contained in a fractured quotation from Wittgenstein that is offered by the “group leader” toward the end of the story: “The world is everything that was formerly the case.” People are nothing but the bodies of their predecessors, which do not form into a coherent whole, as the chunks of citation and reference remain undigested....
[The entire page is 608 words long]
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