[Elizabeth Haran]

After reading Stanton’s perspective, I got a clear feeling that she agreed with Transcendental ways of thinking. She was writing in a time when it was very uncommon for women to get any sort of college education, and talked about nature as a sort of equalizer. When things got serious and a professional education didn’t apply to a situation, it could be seen that men and women were equal in their ingenuity. To quote Stanton, “In times like this humanity rises above all college curriculums and recognizes Nature as the greatest of all teachers in the hour of danger and death.” This very nicely coincides with Thoreau’s ideas about learning from nature instead of from a classroom. Stanton used these ideas to promote equality between the genders.

I was a little confused about Alcott’s message regarding Transcendentalism, though. Maybe someone else in the class could help me out with it. The male characters in her story very clearly follow Thoreau’s ideas by building their own homes and having only what they needed. They often were thinking so much about the big picture that they forgot about the little things that needed to get done around the house, so those things got left to the women. Throughout the story, Alcott seems to be mocking their way of life and sort of passing it off as a fad. She wrote, “self denial was the fashion.” However, at the end when Abel was so heartbroken by the failure of the Transcendental ideal, his wife was sympathetic to this. Alcott implied that the failure of an ideal seems more serious/punishable to society than bank robbery. This last message seemed to conflict the mocking tone that she had toward those ideas earlier in the story and I’m wondering if anyone else has any ideas about what her take-home message could have been.

[Elizabeth Haran]

When reading Thoreau’s section on the economics of attending college, one of the same passages that stood out to Kaitlyn stood out to me. That is, “I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.” It reminded me of our discussion of the study of humanities in the beginning of the semester. While I do think that every individual could benefit from having the same sort of experience that Thoreau did, but within today’s society that would be nearly impossible to do. Similar to the way that the study of humanities, which is important in broadening one’s intellectual horizons, is deemed “impractical” by modern society. Our culture places so much emphasis on getting a mainstream education and getting on a career track (preferably in fields involving math and science).

Within that same quotation, Thoreau remarks that the rest of the citizens are paying for college kids to get their education, which he implies is not really worthy of community support. Because Geneseo is a state school and is partially financially supported by the community, I felt that this directly related to our experience here. I believe that those individuals concerned about the costs of social welfare programs would prefer to contribute to someone’s education and then have them  be able to provide for themselves as an adult than to pay for these individuals throughout their lives if they can’t find a job in our economy. I think there can be a happy medium between Thoreau’s sort of extreme ideology and our current system, though. When reading this section, I kept thinking about how many European students take a “gap year” between high school and college. While most of them aren’t building their own houses in the woods, they are living in the real world and learning from experience rather than a classroom. This allows them to get to know the world around them before they get their education, and be more sure of what they want to do so they are less likely to waste the community’s money in the process.

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