Scholar Gipsy : Matthew Arnold

I've been reading up on Matthew Arnold's work as a school inspector, and came across some of his poetic works. Having only thought of Arnold as a cultural critic, I was surprised to find his poetry to be so highly regarded as well. Stefan Collini has praised Arnold as ranking amongst Browing and Tennyson as being "one of the three pinnacles of Victorian Verse" (Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait 2).  His poems centre mainly around reflective thought, doubts and intellect.

The following extract is Arnold's most lucid poetic interpretation of Victorian Higher Education. From the towers of an Oxford University Arnold demonstrates a disregard for logic in favour of free spirited knowledge. The Scholar Gipsy (1853) is a poem that tells the story of a Scholar who leaves the Oxford and formal education to live out in the wild and learn instead from gypsies. The poem tells how the gypsies "had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others."

F.R Leavis has argued "what the poem actually offers is a charm of relaxation, a holiday from serious aims and exacting business. And what the Scholar-Gipsy symbolizes is Victorian poetry, vehicle (so often) of explicit intellectual and moral intentions, but unable to be in essence anything but relaxed, relaxing and anodyne" (100).

I am unsure whether Leavis has given enough credit to Arnold's poem, which rather than being relaxing is melancholy and essentially disturbed. The Scholar Gipsy may have a pastoral and gentle wrapping, but is nonetheless a clear cut criticism of regimented learning.

You can read the poem in its entirety here. 
G Wilson Knight gives a typically New Critical reading of the poem on JSTOR here

I was most struck however with lines 201 - 210 which bitterly talks of modern life as "sick hurry" (204). 

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,

And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;

Before this strange disease of modern life,

With its sick hurry, its divided aims,

Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife—

Fly hence, our contact fear!

Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!

Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern

From her false friend's approach in Hades turn,

Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.

The poem is set whole action of the poem is within sight of "Oxford's towers," therefore Arnold leaves little doubt that the narrator's first-person plural refers to the scholarly community of the university. Arnold attended Balliol College at Oxford himself from 1841 - 1853, graduating with a 2nd Class Honours degree in "Greats." The poem was published ten years after this date and perhaps reflects a mature retrospective view of the university. 

Here are some images of Oxford University relating to 1853.

University College, 1853 from the Highstreet. From the Oxford Almanack 

Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby was the Chancellor of the University in 1853

Drawing, "George James Drummond's Room at Oxford, 1853" by George Pyne - depiction of an undergraduate room at Oxford College (probably Christ Church). A Partial view of another building can be seen in the rightmost window.

References:

Arnold, Matthew, The Scholar Gipsy 

Collini, Stefan, Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait. Oxford; Clarendon. 1994. Print. 

Leavis, F. R., The Common Pursuit, cited in Harold Bloom (ed.) The Art of the Critic: Literary Theory and Criticism from the Greeks to the Present (New York: Chelsea House, 1985-1990) vol. 9, p. 100.

Nussbaum's remarks at Colgate University

Thanks to Andy Daddio for this brilliant photo. Truly the Daddio of Scholarly Photography!

When it comes to a defence of the liberal arts in Higher Education, Martha Nussbaum is a matriarch. While some have criticised her universalism, and tendency towards vague aspiration, she nonetheless retains a dominant position in the field of debate. Dr Nussbaum hold a BA from NYU, a PhD from Harvard, also teaching at Brown and Oxford. She has long defended the intrinsic rather than the instrumental value of the humanities. (see Cultivating Humanity or more recently Not for Profit)

I came across a great wordpress blog - GlobalHigherEd edited by Kris Olds (Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Susan Robertson (Professor, University of Bristol).

I was particularly taken with this post which featured an awesome word cloud of Nussbaum's Commencement speech at private liberal arts school Colgate in New York 2010

There is access to the entire speech here in the Colgate archive. The speech is similar to the argument in Not for Profit, but has some moving passages which articulate the current educational climate most effectively. I have chosen a few here.

The type of liberal education you have 
received, however, is under assault all over
the world in our time of economic anxiety, as
all nations compete to keep or increase their
share in the global market...

Critical argument gives people a way of being responsible: when politicians bring simplistic rhetoric their way, they won’t just accept it or reject it on the basis of a prior ideological commitment, they will investigate and argue, thinking for themselves, and learning to understand themselves. And when argument, not mere partisan feeling, takes the lead, people will also be able to interact with one another in a more reasonable way...

In twenty years, the world may remember the sort of education you have received as a distant memory. If that is the way the future unfolds, the world will be a scary place to live in. What will we have, if these trends continue? Nations of technically trained people who don’t know how to criticize authority, useful profit-makers with obtuse imaginations...

Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself, and that certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture. 

Fighting talk. 

 

Above is the Wordle graphics that the aforementioned Kris Olds has formulated from Nussbaums speech - I think it is a great visualisation of her rationalised and universal argument.  

Rousseau's Emile: on Infancy

I made this quote bank of the first chapter of Rousseau's Emile : "Infancy". Feel free to use this wherever and whenever you want. 

The first drafts of Emile did not include infancy, but as William Boyd observes in Emile for Today (Heineman 1975) that the inclusion of the chapter in the revised edition reveals Rousseau's general ideas about education.
Rousseau strongly contrasts "the goodness of man and the badness of man-made institutions" (9) and "the natural man, man in himself, and the man who lives in society, the citizen of some state" (9).

Victorian Schools Bibliography

I'm looking into the Victorian Education system, and am particularly interested in the idea of using popular fiction, newspapers, TV, and film in order to understand the state of universities in the Nineteenth Century.

I'm reading Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood Education in Nineteenth Century Fiction by Elizabeth Gargano as an example of the methodological application of novels into social matters such as education policy. 

The collection of books below are the novels that Gargano makes reference to in the opening of her book. Although they discuss schools rather than universities, they nonetheless describe some of the more general changes into education in the Nineteenth Century. These themes emerge to be the inspective gaze of the teacher, the complex relationship between school / home life. The processes of standardizing education, and the urge towards efficiency.

Interestingly, the only wholly positive fictional portrayal of schooling on this list is Evelyn Sharp's The Making of a Schoolgirl  - an account of female education in a domestic environment.