The answer for many people, including myself would be:  Not Soon Enough!

The usual regrets aside, my descent into critical thinking, strangely enough, started after University as it was only then that I had enough time to really start powering through the books that I had been accumulating while working on my degree.  All that stuff that I was ‘responsible’ for learning was still there, but my curiosity led me down the path toward a greater understanding of the mechanics of how our society works.  I owe a great deal to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ronald Wright for fuelling my intellectual growth and move toward a more nuanced understanding of how history and society works and access to a larger context background that helped(s) make sense of world events as they unfolded.

The difference in taking courses before and after my degree was quite startling as learning because you ‘have to’ versus because you ‘want to’.

The challenge now is to continue the journey and start reading again seriously. With the rise of the siren song of social media and video games maintaining an intellectual focus is quite challenging.  Getting back into the reading for comprehension and understanding groove is quite difficult.  I’m thinking that hitting the University for some courses may be the tonic to this particular problem.

We’ll have to see what’s in the cards and hope to heck there is something interesting to take this upcoming spring/summer. :)