Online Education Degree

This book has been at the top of many lists of books and frequently made reference to in other great books that are also on great book lists. Finally, my book group decided to read it and I had an excuse. It turns out the book is much more of an effort than we thought but well worth it none the less. I like to use these reviews as a convenient place to keep my notes on the book and usually that would include great quotes. But with this book the number of keepers would be almost as large as the book itself. What a wry wit HA must have had! He was also sly to present himself as constantly failing in finding education except where it was a surprise and stressing the Harvard type as he does in the chapter by that name. It sets the character type that he plays as his and represents that as the ideal Harvard man but in some of the wriest terms. It is hilarious. This ideal type turns out to be a main focus of the autobiography. But very interesting is the way this is written from the point of view of the educated older man looking back and accounting for a life that still reflects the perspective of the child, adolescent, and adult, which was full of meetings with folks like the British Earl Russell and J.S. Mill, Americans like Secretary Seward, not to mention his own father and the Presidents – such that he assumed as a child that everyone would eventually be president, Italians like Garibaldi, such a life – jam packed with the important folks of the day. If HA had taken the tack of stressing the importance of his endeavors and experiences he would have come across as an unabashed egotist. But by decrying his abilities, education, and experience, the book becomes endearing and heartwarming. A joy to read. But some of the great quotes I noted were these: p. 55 “The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, the teachers and the taught.” On Harvard but education in general? “…he, like the rest of mankind that accepted a material universe, remained always an insect or something much lower — a man.” P. 63 and p. 78 “The German government did not encourage reasoning.” p. 192 “Everyone had heard of Mrs. Grote as “the origin of the word grotesque.”. or p. 193 “The young American who should adopt English thought was lost. From the facts, the conclusion was correct, yet, as usual, the conclusion was wrong.” Many more are worth noting but passed while I was nowhere near a computer.
Rating: 5 / 5