For the second time, I'm starting not just my week, but my *semester* with an 8 am lecture on Monday. At least it was sorta interesting.

SC3101, Social Thought and Social Theory. Where we more or less proceeded to not just debunk our society, but horror of all horrors, we proceeded to debunk our discipline itself. Headache.

"Sociology is Euro-centric and andro-centric and we have inherited this bias of the classical sociologists, in the sense that we still read mainly discourse which is written by Europeans and Americans, and many of the classical sociologists whose work we read are male."

I know no discpline is perfect, but after three sems, you come along and tell me that *everything* I've learned is problematic in some way?? *facepalm* Distrubing. But intriguing food for thought.

3101 seems promising. Especially when my lecturer proceeded to expound upon the saying of how "we create demand for things that we don't need."

"Most of you are probably are probably third-year students-- No? Well, at least second-year, then. Most of you are probably thinking that you'll graduate soon and go out into the 'real world'; let me tell you, that world is 'fake', for lack of a better word."

Yes, I realise now that a lot of writings in sociology have a strong undercurrent of the theme of "freedom". Whatever that is, and how each of us chooses to define it.

Is there a "real world" out there which is as "real" as we think it is? Is school (or University, really) really such an insulating place from the outside world?

In the "real world", to paraphrase my lecturer, we'll be buying things that we don't really need, but make everything get done faster, and all for what? In the "real world", we'll be slaves to the system; you won't be able to do what you want, because it's your duty as a member of society to ensure the continuation and perpetuation of the system. How "real" can a world be when it won't allow us to be the people that we really are?

Enter Anomie theory and Durkheim's writings on suicide, and everything else I learnt in Sociology of Deviance.

So, according to my lecturer, "The 'real world' is in here." Within the compounds of the Universities of the world, within the walls of lecture theatres and tutorial rooms and the minds of teachers and students, where we can say what we want, and with sound reasoning, be unafraid to say it.

So then, I suppose his main point was to say that academia *is* freedom. :D

I understand where he's coming from, I guess; we have a kind of freedom, those of us schooled in the social sciences. A freedom to challenge the "System"; a friend once told me in my first year, "Law students look for loopholes, while Arts students have fun making them," just to give you an example. And now more than ever, I see how that freedom is constrained by the System and how everyone else in it helps to stifle all our freedoms. (Matrix, anyone? :D)

My Literature lecturer in my first semester put it to us that the social sciences are held in low regard because no one wants to take notice of the problems that we can point out, especially when there can be no definite solutions to them. If we apply the concept of "freedom" here, could we see the rest of the world as downplaying our importance because the freedom that social science students have threatens the System and it's their duty to protect it?

But, as my American Law lecturer would say, "to play the devil's advocate", is not academia also constrained by rules? Without the System, what *would* we have to question at all? :D

It seems then, that the only thing for certain is that we torture ourselves with the questions with no answers and try to make sense of things that we cannot comprehend.