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(LifeSiteNews) – I'm thinking about the education of two women.

One of them was born to wealth and privilege, and continued in both. She's now a member of a cultural archonate, a super-legislature whose decrees are binding upon 300 million people. She's never been married, she has no children, and, like almost all women of our time and most men, she's never been near to hard daily manual labor, or war, or the imminent threats of famine, pestilence, violence, and the wild caprice of nature. It would take more than a prolonged storm, or an attack of hungry bears – it would take a colossal global breakdown to cause her, and almost all of the rest of us who live in the western world, weary in our riches, to wonder where to find meat for the table tonight.

The other woman was also born to wealth and privilege, and also continued in both. She married, twice, and she wanted children, though none came. When she was 32 she and her first husband bought an orange grove in northern Florida, near the swamplands and live-oak forests called the Big Scrub. Her husband hated the place and left her, but she remained, and spoke endlessly with the old men who had lived thereabouts and along the even wilder banks of the Saint John's River. From close observation she learned about the wild things that teemed there; such edibles as gallberries, red mayhaws, persimmon, wild plum, and scuppernong grapes; but also wolves, foxes, lynx, panthers, possums, squirrels, raccoons, deer, black bears, and, in the water, alligators and the deadly cottonmouth. Her second and richer education began in Florida, listening to the stories told by those old men. They were half wild themselves, hunting, trapping, farming, fishing, trading, drinking, marrying and begetting children and burying some of them and raising the rest to adulthood.

I know a good deal about the education the first woman had. I had it myself. She is Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, graduate of Princeton, class of 1981; my class.

It's hard for me to disentangle the good from the bad, when I think about Princeton. At that time, classes in the humanities were held for four hours a week, three for lectures and one for a “precept,” when the class was divided into small groups, ostensibly for more personal discussion of the text at hand. Only professors lectured, and many of them were masters of the art, beloved and admired for their eloquence. Thomas Roche, John Fleming, and Robert Hollander will be an influence upon my “style,” until the sad day when I bid farewell to teaching forever. In most departments (mathematics was a notorious exception) professors seemed to pride themselves on winning the hearts and minds of their students. Graduate students were permitted to lead some of the precepts, but that was it.  

There were brilliant minds, no doubt. My professors included scholars of world renown: Hollander (Dante and Italian literature), Saul Kripke (analytical philosophy), Goru Shimura (mathematics), Fouad Ajami (middle eastern politics). There was also the arrogance that comes with the Ivy brand – arrogance, avarice, and ambition. These evils were not counterbalanced by anything that would lift one's gaze to the heavens, in gratitude or humility. Among my close friends, only two or three regularly attended religious services. The impressive Gothic chapel was dark and cavernous and usually empty.  

There was also no curriculum. Could you leave Princeton without having read Augustine? Probably most people left Princeton without having heard of Augustine, or, at most, knowing of him only as a name out of the dark backward and abysm of time. In the old days, Princeton's entrance exam was Latin, but none of that classical education survived the sixties. All you had to do was to take two courses in each of four large areas – a requirement you might easily fulfill by accident, taking what you pleased. You also had to be proficient in one foreign language. That was it. Many Princetonians did read great works on their own; at any moment of the day you could walk past a conversation about Dostoyevsky or modern classical music. But there was no coherence to it all.  

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Nor did Princetonians have to worry about money. At that time, tuition amounted to about a third of the median household income. If you didn't have it, Princeton made up the difference. Many students came from wealth: country clubs, elite boarding schools, vacations in Europe. We did no physical labor to maintain the campus. The rooms in the older dormitories were handsome, and even we freshmen had a separate living room and bedroom. The meal plan allowed you to eat all you wanted. Drink and debauchery – managed well, so as not to interfere with ambition – were matters of moral indifference.

It had the failings of the parochial, without the virtues. It was narrow, but not bound by piety to any place or people, or duty to God. It could bring forth some phenomenally learned people, but not by design, and not, I think, with great frequency. It confirmed students in their high opinion of themselves and their right to visit their schemes upon their less advantaged countrymen.

And now, one of my own classmates can rule “unconstitutional” millennia of human history and culture. That anybody should do so is appalling under any circumstances; utterly baffling in what used to be a democratic republic. Perhaps only a hothouse orchid from a place like Princeton would consider it.

Then there is the other woman, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling. You may think that it is a sweet novel about a child and a pet, a deer named Flag. It is not sweet. It is an utterly unsentimental story about a boy who loses his boyhood and learns the sadness of being a man. Rawlings wove all the tales she heard from the old men into one many-colored tapestry of risk and responsibility, danger, destruction, beauty, human vice from “frolicsome” irresponsibility to vengeance and violence, and human virtues – manly integrity and womanly perseverance.  

It isn't simply that the work to be done in a place like the Big Scrub could break your health, as it does to the boy Jody's father, who is the hero of The Yearling. It could break your will too, if you did not set your face like flint – for who would want to go on a two-day-long hunt in the dead of winter, through swamps and across cold streams, for the most thieving bear in the county? Or, with Jody's longsuffering mother, knife off the rotten ends of unripe sweet potatoes, one after another, hundreds and hundreds of them, after the crop was ruined in a week-long storm? You had to do a hundred things requiring skill and judgment and muscle. But you had to be a man, you had to be a woman; and those were not the same things, and they required more than having the body of an adult.

At the end of the novel, Jody has to shoot his yearling deer, because it has been ruining the crops. He does it, and runs away from home in a rage, returning a week later, sadder and wiser. His father speaks to him.

“You figgered I went back on you,” he says. “Now there's a thing ever' man has got to know. Mebbe you now it a'ready.  'Twa'n't only me. 'Twa'n't only your yearlin' deer havin' to be destroyed. Boy, life goes back on you.”  

Jody looks at his father and nods.

“You've seed how things goes in the world o' men. You've knowed men to be low-down and mean. You've seed ol' Death at his tricks. You've messed around with ol' Starvation. Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'tain't easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I've been uneasy all my life.

“I've wanted life to be easy for you. Easier'n' 'twas for me. A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to git their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever' man's lonesome. What's he to do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.”

If I had to have somebody rule over me as a Cultural Goddess, it would be someone who listened to the men who with their trusty wives braved a land of predators and fever and teeming life and danger ever near. It would be somebody like Marjorie Rawlings. But she would be too wise to take the job. With what choice words, heard among old men with whisky, vinegar, and tobacco spit in their veins, would she reduce to shame anyone so base as to make the offer!

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Anthony Esolen is a Fellow at the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts, in Merrimack, NH.  He is the translator and editor of Dante's Divine Comedy (Random House), and is the author of more than a dozen other works, including Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery) and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Press).  He regularly writes for The Catholic Thing, Crisis Magazine, Touchstone, and Magnificat.