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I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class neighborhood who had “gone to college,” as the common phrase had it. In my experience, that status was confined to doctors and teachers. My father was a high-school dropout. Higher education seemed like a gift reserved for the anointed, whether by wealth or genius. Naturally this inspired a strain of suspicion and resentment. After high school, I applied, without assistance, to two universities – Harvard and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. My naiveté was stunning. The state school accepted me and after three years I dropped out. It was probably my generation that first came to believe everyone should go to college. I no longer think that’s the case, especially because a university degree no longer signifies a true education. I’ve known too many degree-holding alliterates and even border-line illiterates. Robert Conquest chooses his words carefully in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999): “Not all young, or old, people are susceptible to education.” Conquest’s analysis of education is interesting. His formal education at Oxford was excellent and he became a gifted historian, poet, novelist and all-around man of letters – a rare breed today. He bolsters his argument with allusions to Edward Gibbon and Marcus Aurelius. Some young people are, Conquest writes, “more or less uneducable. Others have had a good education by the time they are eighteen, or even younger, but have neither the desire nor the bent for ‘higher’ education.” This confirms my observation that some of the brightest, most well-read people I’ve known are degreeless. “For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all," Conquest writes, "as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds -- except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.” It’s always a pleasure to meet and talk with an autodidact, a self-directed learner, as opposed to a formally educated pedant or drone. Often the former is motivated by love of learning; the latter by status, money, fashion, indifference. Of the amateur class, Conquest writes: “No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.”

How contemporary art reflects our waning belief in progress.

vaguely impressionistic reflections about what I've been up to + links to stuff I've enjoyed recently

Jonathan Swift often stayed at Quilca, the country home of his friend the Rev. Thomas Sheridan (1687-1738) in County Cavan, Ireland. There he wrote portions of Gulliver’s Travels. Not surprisingly, Swift was an inspired kvetcher. There’s a long tradition of English writers complaining about accommodations. Think of Smollett, Carlyle and Waugh. Three-hundred years ago today, Swift wrote a letter to Sheridan containing three poems inspired by his stays at Quilca. Here is “The Plagues of a Country Life”:  “A companion with news, A great want of shoes; Eat lean meat, or choose; A church without pews. Our horses astray, No straw, oats or hay; December in May, Our boys run away, All servants at play.”   By Swiftian standards, pretty mild. No scatological substrate. In the body of the letter he writes: “The ladies room smokes; the rain drops from the skies into the kitchen; our servants eat and drink like the devil, and pray for rain, which entertains them at cards and sleep; which are much lighter than spades, sledges and crows.” Another traditional complaint -- the laziness and unreliability of servants. He might also be describing the poverty typical of rural Ireland in the eighteenth century. Swift says the “maxim” of the servants is:   “Eat like a Turk, Sleep like a dormouse; Be last at work, At victuals foremost.”   Swift worked hard to feel gratitude for rural, in “The Blessings of a Country Life”:   “Far from our debtors, No Dublin letters, Not seen by our betters.”   One year earlier, Swift has written a brief prose piece titled “The Blunders, Deficiencies, Distresses,and Misfortunes of Quilca.” It’s a list of complaints. I especially like this one: “The kitchen perpetually crowded with savages.”