Wendell Berry ‘A Remarkable Man’ [from What are People For?]

Wendell Berry ‘A Remarkable Man’ [from What are People For?]

Discussion questions:

page 23: ‘If Shaw’s language is never far from experience, it is also never far from judgment, another of his qualities that will make him useless to propagandists’

Could it be argued that Berry is himself using Shaw as propaganda for his own agenda?

What is Berry’s agenda?

Are we given enough of Shaw’s dialogue to accept Berry’s interpretations of Shaw at face value?

If Shaw’s words are so powerful, why does Berry feel a need to interpret them for us?

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page 19: ‘When he speaks of “correspondin” a girl or says that his son “got stout enough to accomplish a place,” we have no trouble understanding what he says, and we are also aware that his words convey insight beyond the reach of conventional usage’

Do you agree that we have ‘no trouble understanding’? Whom do you think Berry is talking to when he uses the word we? (the top of page 26 gives ‘college bred’ as a possible answer, do we belong to this category?)

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page 19: Berry mentions the importance of differences between blacks and whites in America. He uses the phrase ‘an etiquette of ignoring differences’. Do you think there is such etiquette here in Korea, between Korean culture(s) and English culture(s)? What cultural differences would you be willing to list? In what way might some differences be useful or necessary for each other?

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page 22: Do you think it possible that science can save humanity from its self destruction? Do you think humanity is self destructing? If humanity is self destructing, is it worth saving?

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page 24: ‘A powerful superstition of modern life is that people and conditions are improved inevitably by education’

Can we assert that well educated people are better than uneducated people?

Have you ever met someone like Shaw?

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page 25: ‘The purpose of education has been to prepare people to “take their places” in an industrial society, the assumption being that small economic units are obsolete. And the superstition of education assumes that this “place in society” is “up.” “Up” is the direction from small to big. Education is the way up. The popular aim of education is to put everybody “on top” ’

Wendell Berry quotes his friend West Jackson in a commencement speech:

‘Our system of education until now, has had, in effect, only one major, upward mobility, now, West says, a second major needs to be added, and the name of this major, will be homecoming’

What is ‘home’ (or perhaps ‘local’) to you? Can you share some of your reasons for taking this master’s tesol course? What other reasons apart from job training?

Do you feel as though you are experiencing or expect to experience ‘expert servitude to the corporations?’

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page 26: ‘Of course, it is preposterous to suppose that character could be cultivated by any sort of public program. Persons of character are not public products. They are made by local cultures, local responsibilities’ What is character?

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‘We have tried, or tried again, the experiment of building urban prosperity by the impoverishment of the countryside and its people, and inevitably we have failed, the result has been impoverishment that is both rural and urban’

How true might this statement be for your own country?