MY JOURNEY THROUGH SOCIOLOGY:

[RonPrice]

My experience these days of sociology, as a formal discipline, as just about entirely on the Internet. Occasionally I dabble(for I am retired now and I have made of dabbling an art-form) in this rich and variegated field which forty years ago I had just entered. I remember well that first year of the formal study of sociology, which ended in early May of 1964, just before I got a job checking telephone poles for internal decay. In about February or, perhaps, March, a tutor joined the sociology staff. He was able to explain the mysteries of Parsons better than anyone. And at the time, Parsons occupied a position in the emperean of sociological godheads. Everyone admired this tutor as if he was some brilliant theologian who had just arrived from the Vatican with authoritative pronouncements for us all to write down on our A-4 note paper to be regurgitated on the April examination. He was an Englishman, if I remember, rather slim and a good talker. And Parsons, for all of us, was about as intricate as you could get and still stay in the same language and on the same earthly plane.

For a year I had no contact with sociology, except for a short period of time toward the end of my second year at university. I got to know a young woman of 27 who had one son and who studied sociology. I took her ice-skating in about February of 1965. I can’t quite remember how I met her but for two or three months I went to the occasional lecture with her in sociology. She had a passion for helping Africans and I had a passion for her. Our mutual passions interlocked nicely and it was this reciprocity that led us to join together in third year sociology.

I took six courses in sociology that year, enough to bring the dead to life, or is it the living to death or, perhaps more accurately, I should say enough to kill any enthusiasms for sociology. In retrospect it was fortuitous that Canadian universities begin in mid-September with exams starting in mid-April. With the Christmas break, the week off for Easter and exam study the student is left with six months of lectures-reading-tutorials. That is about all one can stand of reading sociology. The cold Canadian wnters keep it all on chill: nothing like a brisk walk to class in sociology 3A6 to examine the essence of Marxism, if there is an essence, or the intricacies of functionalism and it has many intricacies especially the Parsonian brand. From Comte to the 1960s in a quick hit. Part of me always wanted to take it seriously and part of me found it such a burden of words that my already incipient depression just got another kick-start on its way.

Anyway, I got through my third year and found myself with a BA bracket sociology end-of-bracket. I did not get my degree until November because when the transcript came out in June I was four or five marks short of a passing grade, 60%. I had to pay a visit to the Head of the Department, a gentle spirit who frequently imbibed a white wine, a beer or was it a claret? He taught me sociological statistics. This was the most mysterious of all arts in this youthful discipline which by 1963 was about 100 years of age with roots going back into the dawns of time. I remember, yes, as if it was yesterday, sitting in his class writing down as much as I could in the hope of unravelling it leisurely at home in a quiet evening where I lived over a restaurant in the small town of Dundas, 15 minutes away on a good hitch-hike. Of course I never did, unravel it I mean; night after night I’d ponder these mathematical symbols in the hope that sincerity and effort would pay off. In this case they did not and here I was eight weeks after the end of the year asking him for a few marks. He came to the party, probably because it was late afternoon and by then he’d already had a few and he was one of those drinkers who gets friendlier after knocking back a few.

I had periodic dalliances with sociology after that graduating year of 1966. At teachers’ college we had a sociology unit. I had to go to a teachers' college to get some practical qualification because sociology was good for absolutely nothing insofar as a career was concerned. I could have tied it to social work as well as teaching, but untied to anything about the only use it had was at a bar in the evening, with your girfriend discussing your(and her) inner life, driving a taxi and sitting around filling in time reading books. However useful sociology may be in this private domain, you can’t take it far as the cornerstone of a career.

I came to teach sociology in 1974 to trainee teachers in Launceston, in 1975 to library technician trainees in Melbourne, in 1976-78 in Ballarat to engineers and social science majors. When I lived in Katherine I taught it occasionally in adult education to evening classes and in Port Hedland to students in management courses. In the early 1990s in Perth I taught sociology in Certificate courses and again in 1997-8 teaching sociology for human service workers. Now after more than forty years I find myself finally finished combing library shelves through books which I first saw over forty years ago and the hundreds of additions. Some of the material is highly stimulating and some as dry and coagulating as a sewer after a long period of no rain. The books are still as fat and I find I can not spend more than an hour hunting them down. An immense fatigue sets in toward the end of my first hour in the library and I must scoop up my allotment of seven or eight books to read in the leisurely quiet of my home with a cold or a hot drink in my hand depending on the time of year.

I look forward in my dotage to a long and happy life with this strange field I chanced upon more than forty years ago when I was trying to avoid the world of work and its deadening and so often predictable stamp of boredom. The labyrinthine channels of sociology one can travel in forever; the library shelves are getting more extensive; it is a burgeoning field as are all fields now. The river of sociology, now in its middle age, perhaps, will flow on into its third century while I get old. And when my days are long and I am freed from the work-a-day world and its routines I will play among its waters, bathing myself in its endless streams, having learned how to avoid drowning in its heady froth. I will only sample its choicest and its freshest glasses of refreshment. For by then I will be an accomplished connoisseur of its mysteries. I will be old and ready for my final hour.

Ron Price

* Two years and two weeks after writing this essay I retired from the teaching profession and from teaching sociology. By March 2000, three years after the pleasure of writing the above 'summary of experience,' I had seven arch lever files of notes, the residue from those many years of dabbling in sociology in my study in a house in George Town, the oldest town in Australia. By then I had begun to sample only the choice bits of the field that I enjoyed the most: sociological theory. I continued what I had done since my first contact with sociology in 1963, enlarge my understanding of the Cause through the insights of this useful discipline. I also found myself teaching sociology in a School for Seniors (19/8/2000). My final hour had begun.