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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
Disparate reactions indeed, but then, that's fairly normal for the Club!
I read this book as being about a particular place and a particular way of life. Rebanks doesn't talk much about Oxford because that's not what the book is about. That is, he is writing about life as a shepherd, not life as a student in Oxford. So yes, of course he touches on various aspects of his life, such as school, going to Oxford at a later stage, mentions UNESCO, and so on. But these parts of his life aren't what the book is about.
I don't think it is reasonable to berate him or call him blindly ignorant to other ways of life because he doesn't write about them. They aren't a part of his life as a shepherd. [...]
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Had he stuck to life as a shepherd I would not have been inclined to berate, but he does write about other ways of life, mostly with indirect or implied scorn, but sometimes directly:
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He asked what I made of the other students, so I told him. They were OK, but they were all very similar; they struggled to have different opinions because they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn’t most people’s experience of life. He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken-processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. He laughed and thought this tremendously witty. It wasn’t meant to be funny.
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This observation stood out because it seemed to me that there was no evidence he actually knew these people he was criticising. He earlier spoke of people coming to his land and learning nothing of the reality of life there, and yet he can come out with this? What's the bet that if you drop one of these students in the middle of the Lake District they will see the shepherds as "all very similar"? We always see those foreign to us in this way, it takes time and familiarity to change this view. And how does he know these people have never failed or been nobodies? And what is it with this "nobodies" thing anyway? Doesn't he see that he is belittling his own existence with such a statement? (He is effectively saying, about himself, and many others besides, exactly the sort of thing he complains about hearing from others.)
I do have some sympathy with the idea that people should spend some with the "other", it can help us to learn that difference is often not where we expected it to be. But we only learn this if we open ourselves to the experience, if we let the foreign become familiar, and the author's writing of Oxford suggests this didn't happen.