RDB: Jude I

"Everything seemed turning to satire"(135)

Oh my dear lord in heaven, if not for Great Expectations I would have thought this to be the most miserable narrative in existence. As it is, I'm beginning to think that victorian novels were designed to be the soap operas of their times. How in heaven's name could the story of a single person contain so many miserable people!? The crappyiness of the people in this story ceases to affect the reader by the very absense of anyone NOT crappy with whom to compare them, its ridiculous! Raised by a hag who wishes him dead, entrapped by a harlott who lacks any clear motive at all, enamored of a city that cares nothing for him, enamored of a woman who enjoys toying with any man within her reach, Jude lives a life so horrendously pointless that I find it difficult to connect with him in any way, even when dredging through the worst memories of my life.

As it is, I can in fact identify with how Jude would have felt during his extremely brief attempt to actually get into a college. "...he found himself clinging to the hope of some reply as to his one last chance of redemption."(93) is in fact an excellent example of how it felt to wait for an acceptance letter from UT, especially given how late in the year they send theirs out. In fact, if I recall correctly, I had my housing secured well before I had any such assurances of my education, as idiotic as that is. Even more so I can identify with his...well...lostness throughout the entire thing. Even if he had succeeded in gaing acceptance, what then? Jude spent twelve years trying to get into college for college's sake, with no plans of what he would do with his education, in fact no real interest in what he would do with it whatsoever. I cannot deny that I did exactly the same thing. All of middleschool and highschool was this mad dash to prove myself worthy of college admittance, without a thought to why I wanted to go, or what I would do with what I learned.

I fear that all my life so far has been learning for learning's sake, a sentiment that Newman obviously glorifies, but there is no great mother church to provide me with food and lodging for the rest of my life, simply as a reward for being intelligent. I'll be twenty-five and dead broke when I finish "learning", and I doubt that any of that learning will lend itself to any particularly practical pursuits, such as obtaining lodging or sustenance. Jude has found himself in much the same predicament, hell his only practical skills are those he picked up purely as a means to achieve is much vaunted "education". Ironically enough, his dreams of college have gotten him nothing, while the masonry is at least keeping his fool self fed and housed. When he doesn't throw away his wages on women who bring him only misery that is.

But I digress, in terms of the fear, the not knowing that accompanies the pursuit of entrance into a school of higher learning, I can indeed connect with the story being told. And Jude reveals for us all the heartbreaking tale of failure in the pursuit, a side which, by dint of our being in college at the moment, none of us is familiar with. I watch Jude drift now, from ambition to ambition, never settling long enough to achieve any, and know all too well that I could be him. I see qualities in him I know I possess myself, I see him make choices that I too would make, even when, as an observor of his life, I scream at him not to. It is indeed a revealing glimpse at my own life, my own soul, to watch Jude flounder in waters I swam myself, when we both started out swimming in much the same fashion.

Liberal Arts RDB

I find myself beginning to pity whomever suggested that vocational schools possess greater social utility and worth than liberal education, for they obviously did not take into account that all the great literary minds of the world would rise up against them with such terrible wrath. Perhaps it is their own fault for not realized that they criticized the source of all great argument and literature, neh?

And that is how I feel about liberal arts, there is no question in my mind that a liberal education is deeply necessary in creating a well-rounded member of any society and culture. Human beings who learn how to do specific tasks, and spend their life doing said tasks, without ever wondering why, or what for, are no longer human beings at all, they have become something altogether different;

robots.

To clarify, I'll use myself and my ambitions as an example. I hope to become a lawyer, hopefully a successful and well-paid one. But imagine I went about this without concern for a liberal education. I could skip straight to law school, learn the dry intricacies of our judicial system, and spend the next thirty years of my life going to a court, arguing a soulless point of law, achieving my goal, or my client's, going home with my check, and never know why!! What is the point of a career where you accomplish a goal, but don't know why you accomplish it? What will you do with money if you have never wondered at the true value of everything around you?! To live a life accomplishing set goals again and again with no depth to my thoughts would be nightmare eternal, of that I have no doubt. Liberal teaching gives depth, it gives meaning, and and yet leaves you wanting more of both. What you learn about communication and the world around you enables you to have conversations worth having. Speaking to pass along what you know, there is no joy in that, there is no life. But speaking to pass along what you feel, to share what matters to you, what confounds you, what terrifies you, that is what creates dialogue that has value in and of itself.

And oh the joy of having worthwhile dialogue with others, to share in their lives, in their thoughts, that joy is what gives worth to life, not green felt paper. Yet perhaps that is not enough for some, some concrete worth must be assigned to all things, and if it cannot be, then that thing is inherently worthless. Very well then, liberal training provides the concrete foundation of morality, it provides the ability to understand what is right and wrong, most especially in terms of our interactions with other human beings.

Smith is absolutely correct in his assertion that "it is by imagination only that we place ourselves in [another's] situation"(339). And of course, it is in the school of liberal arts that such dilly-dally skills as "imagination" are cultivated, and trained, for what self-respecting "Proffesional" would ever waste his time with such childish pursuits? Bate's asserts that "moral judgement...involves sympathetic participation with those, other than the agent himself" (339). It is in the schools of liberal arts that one is taught how to think like a person other than themself, it is in the halls of literature and rhetoric that students are shown how to become another person, to feel another's pain or joy or confusion. Nowhere in learning to build a car does one encounter a narrative of the horror of living in slavery. At no point in a dentist's training is he taught the sadness of falling in love and having it denied. It is through a liberal education that we are taught to understand narratives that are not our own, and shown how to extend our imagination into these narratives, in so doing making them part of ourselves.



So a final time I assert, as much as on the surface it seems that vocational and proffesional training are the more necessary lines of learning, if you create in yourself or another a human being incapable of understanding the value of the life they lead,

RDB: Newman "Universities"

My immediate response to Newman's discourse was skepticism mixed with disdain. This is borne out of my dislike for men of the cloth meddling in the world of education, as faith and knowledge rarely go easily hand in hand. I feared my own preconceptions confirmed upon reading the line "But education is a higher word;...and commonly spoken of in connexion with religion..." (310). His further distinction between education and instruction didn't sit well with me at all, but I believe that can be attributed to changing times and technology. The fact is, there cannot be education in this day and age without instruction. How can one find a book in a library without being told how the complicated Dewey decimal system works? How can they do research online when they cannot operate a computer? To glorify education while at the same time disdaining instruction is to worship an ivory tower while disdaining the ground upon which it rests, it's elitism and folly. The fact that he later goes on to contradict himself by stating "Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers...is necessarily a matter of training" (311) makes it even more contradictory. Training is instruction. While each individual has their own unique method of storing knowledge, one cannot truly learn if one has never been taught how to, so again I state, there is no education without instruction.
Now, when it comes to Newman's assertation that learning is best facilitated by a university setting, his comparison of a lawyer teaching law to a law professor teaching law, I find myself in total agreement. Nowhere on earth that I know of is there an atmosphere of learning and growth such as there is on a university campus. And I wholeheartedly agree with his belief that a student benefits from being in the vicinity of many different schools of learning, whether or not he partakes of them himself. Being at a university has taught me that there are indeed advantages, even joys, to be had from learning things you don't and or won't ever really need to know. There is a fullness of character, and a greater joy in the world and its interactions, that is opened up by knowledge, any knowledge, irregardless of whether it serves a direct end.
This is not to say that I totally agree with Newman's arguments for Universities not being pressured to produce research for the common good. A public university is supported by taxes levied on every man and woman within the range of its supporting government, whether or not said man or woman has ever attended or will ever attend the university for their own ends. Because of this, it is a moral imperative that the university fulfill some sort of role in the community as a whole. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is a beautiful concept, but in practice it would be senseless and impractical, what is the point in knowing something if you do nothing with that knowledge? It is not imperative that knowledge serve some other purpose, that is true, but that does not mean that it shouldn't, that it is not morally justifiable that it be asked to do so. What greater end can knowledge aspire to than the betterment of man (speaking in terms of man's knowledge that is, if dogs had a university it would only be fair they strive towards the betterment of dogkind)? To disdain a university using its considerable resources, up to and including the vast sums of knowledge concentrated within its halls, to directly better mankind in any way it can is arrogance and elitism in the extreme.
A college student and a high school drop out eat the same bread, share the same fears. To say that the former is justified in disregarding the latter simply because of a difference in vocation is folly in the extreme. Aside from even that is the foolishness of begrudging a seat of learning to do research, and to use that research for real-world applicational ends. The cure to a disease, a new mathematical theory, an insight into the human mind, these are all pieces of priceless knowledge in and of themselves, but they most certainly are not devalued by being applied, rather than recorded and shelved for others to read and shelve again. To use knowledge is to share knowledge, just the same as teaching it, Newman quibbles over a difference in teaching method, nothing more.