Go Ahead College, Crush my Initiative

This Calvin and Hobbes strip accurately describes my feelings toward my World Civilizations II class. Today at 2:00, I have to hand in a paper that deals at least in some way with the topic of "Freedom and Domination" and it has to deal with pre-industrial Europe. All in all, not that bad of a topic. The prof made it deliberately vague on purpose, allowing me to choose my own topic, but then ruined a perfectly good paper assignment with a couple of ridiculous limitations.

• The paper can be no longer than five pages
• No outside research material can be used other than the two textbooks required for class

To make matters worse, our two textbooks are filled with the obligatory politically correct crap that you can expect from a class taught by a postmodern (just because a four paragraph summary of the scientific revolution doesn't mention any women doesn't mean the author was exercising some prejudice! It means that just about every major scientific discovery during the Renaissance happened to be by a man, and four paragraphs isn't enough to do justice to them, let alone force in women inventors of little consequence to satisfy politically correct pressures. Descontructing text like that is stupid! It's academically irresponsible!) prof who went to college in the first co-ed class at a fairly radical (formerly) women's college. So instead of fairly objective cohesive historical fact, we get articles on "A Dutch Massacre of the Algonquian", "The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico", Olaudah Equiano's memoirs of being a slave, and fluffy intellectualism like "Women and Marriage in Europe and China"- which would be interesting (I agree that the European model of allowing women to work outside the home played a key role in economic expansionism by offering cheap, exploitable labor) if it wasn't constantly reframed as the male exploitation of women. (On a side note, am I the only person who thinks reframing five thousand years of history because of changes in gender relations during the last forty years is ridiculous?)

Originally, I wanted to write a kick-ass paper on Mercantilism and how a worldview that forces nation states to compete for what is believed to be a finite amount of resources leads policy away from mutually beneficial trade agreements and places added emphasis on war and subjugation, making colonialism and the exploitation of native peoples the logical conclusion. However, I can't because a) a paper of this sort would need no small amount of substantiation and b) I'm pretty sure I can't do it in less than five pages without being overly reductionist and leaving huge gaps. So, instead I'm turning in a half-ass generic paper barely over three pages that is neither interesting to read and was much worse to write. From time to time I entertain the thought continuing my education because topics such as the above interest me, before my daydream is squashed by the nature of modern academia. Thankfully I only have to write a couple of these a semester or I'm pretty sure my desire to learn anything ever again would be thoroughly crushed.