ellauri078.html on line 141: By Emily Dickinson’s own account, she delighted in all aspects of the school—the curriculum, the teachers, the students. The school prided itself on its connection with Amherst College, offering students regular attendance at college lectures in all the principal subjects— astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, natural history, natural philosophy, and zoology. As this list suggests, the curriculum reflected the 19th-century emphasis on science. That emphasis reappeared in Dickinson’s poems and letters through her fascination with naming, her skilled observation and cultivation of flowers, her carefully wrought descriptions of plants, and her interest in “chemic force.” Those interests, however, rarely celebrated science in the same spirit as the teachers advocated.
ellauri078.html on line 151: Dickinson left the academy at the age of 15 in order to pursue a higher, and for women, final, level of education. In the fall of 1847 Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Under the guidance of Mary Lyon, the school was known for its religious predilection. Part and parcel of the curriculum were weekly sessions with Lyon in which religious questions were examined and the state of the students’ faith assessed. The young women were divided into three categories: those who were “established Christians,” those who “expressed hope,” and those who were “without hope.” Much has been made of Emily’s place in this latter category and of the widely circulated story that she was the only member of that group. Years later fellow student Clara Newman Turner remembered the moment when Mary Lyon “asked all those who wanted to be Christians to rise.” Emily remained seated. No one else did. Turner reports Emily’s comment to her: “‘They thought it queer I didn’t rise’—adding with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I thought a lie would be queerer.’“
ellauri117.html on line 610: John Locke (1632-1704) was a close friend of the First Earl and an advisor to the family for years to come after the First Earl’s death. Locke was the personal physician and general advisor to the First Earl. He supervised the childhood medical care of Shaftesbury’s father, the degenerate Second Earl (1652-1699). He also helped find a wife for the Second Earl and he cared for her during her pregnancy with the Third Earl. Most significantly for our purposes, Locke supervised the Third Earl’s education. He personally chose Shaftesbury’s governess Elizabeth Birch and designed a curriculum for her to follow in her instruction of the child. This experience was, presumably, the basis for Locke’s later work Thoughts Concerning Education. Under Birch’s tutelage, Shaftesbury received a strong education in the Classics and became fluent in Greek and Latin by the age of eleven. Locke continued to check on Shaftesbury’s progress over the years. Locke served as a primary advisor to the young Shaftesbury, though Shaftesbury did not always follow Locke’s advice. Shaftesbury had many "philosophical" conversations with Locke, some of which are preserved in correspondence. "Mautonta!" huusi 3. Shaftersburyn Jaarli vähän väliä.
xxx/ellauri121.html on line 291: Her early years of winter school had taught her that it's possible to go through the entire year's curriculum in a month. As a result, she advanced quickly, and there was an awkward period when she was in a class of much older children: "They shouldn't have done that. I was 12 in the first year of high school and there were people in my class who were 15-and-a-half." That surely taught her a lot, a likely model of The Red House in Handmaid's Tale. She was tired a lot and developed a heart condition, inherited from her father, in which the heart beat is irregular, almost syncopated. Her verbal rendition of the rhythms is hard to transcribe, but these lines from one of her early poems, "Faulty Heart", capture it:
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 347: In the 1960s, the New Criticism, which since has taken hold at most American universities, came into vogue, insisting that literature be reexamined through multiple lenses so that new interpretations and voices would flourish. Elaborate curriculums looked at literature through different prisms: gay, feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist and others. Bloom was enraged. He spent decades lambasting the New Criticism, refusing to have anything to do with these critics and labeling them derisively as “the school of resentment.” Many resented his elitism.
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