joanna bujes wrote:
>
>
> I don't know to what extent the burning desire to learn remains in the
> working class. It seems to be the hallmark of a corrupt, moribund
> culture that this desire is lost.
Both Greenblatt's argument and Joanna's argument here are grounded in a kneejerk (and incorrect) conception of what "working-class" means. My great uncle, born in the 1870s, was kicked out of the house without a highschool education because he was no longer xtian. I met him just once back in the spring of 1947. He had about 50 of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books (including Candide), a two-volume edition of the essays of Emerson, the Communist Manifesto, and Stalin's _Foundations of Leninism_ in his library. Back early in the century he had organized sheepherders in Montana for the IWW. (Due to circumstances beyond my control I no longer own the books he gave me at that time. And unfortunately he died about 6 months before I began to consider myself a marxist, so I could never give the pleasure of knowing that he had a red great-nephew.)
Now where would an Alf Piggott be today had he been born in (say) 1985. He would be sitting in some college classroom == and he would _still_, goddamn it all, be working class by any rational assessment, and he would still be just as learned as those workers described in this essay. (Incidentally, about a month ago I fwd this essay to the Milton List -- and got a wonderful reception for it. One poster said he was going to add it to his syllabus.) There were two advantages, as I argued sometime already in the last year, that those well-read workers of the 1800s had that most workers (including workers with college degrees or ph.d.s) don't have today:
1) Much of the reading they did they did collectively, even out loud in study groups. (Twenty years ago I read _Wages, Price and Profit_ onto tape, since there were several people in the study group who had only a high school education and did not read very well. They did very well indeed when they could read and listen at the same time.)
2) They had not been convinced by an education that emphasized writing and grammar that they were illiterate and it wasn't worth trying to read. As Joanna herself has noted before, she is in the working class. And she seems quite literate! Skill in writing (as taught, and perhaps fundamentally) is a special skill, not necessarily (or at all) related to either intelligence or ability to read complex texts.
Carrol