CREATIVE
You are the scholar gypsy. Explain to your friends why you have decided to run away from conventional education.
My Dearest Ronald,
Education has become an intellectual activity, something we use to stimulate our senses and tickle our ears. We esteem education in such a high regard, but are we actually embodying it? We supposedly cherish and value education here at oxford, but in all matters of practicality, I believe we are far from it. We have turned education into an idolised principle that we claim to love yet fail to uphold. Superficially, we are about education, but fundamentally, conformity and obedience. Education without practical experience or actual physical engagement is nothing more then a chore to me. To read all of the books, to write all of the essays and storys, to study all of the cultures, but to not actually experience them, is that truly appropriate? I am fed up with viewing the beauty of this world through ink and paper or from the mouth of another. I want to experience it for myself. I want to be free. Free from the constraints of university life. Free from the mental shackles of conformity and appropriate behaviour. I want to see, touch, feel, hear and be in the very thick of life. No longer do I feel satisfaction in being a third party to the joys of life. No longer do I get enjoyment in the structure and properness of the life I am living – no longer do I find solace in these intellectual games. I am off, where to, I know not. All I know is that I seek to live a life of adventure, of fulfillments, of wonder. Perhaps I will join the gypsy’s..
Jesse's Blog 
Hey Jesse mate thought Id give yours’ a read this week. I’d say you’ve nailed down the general persona of the scholar gypsy, his motivations for leaving the conventional intellectual sphere of oxford and venturing out into the romantic world of nature’s beauty. Good use of the rhetorical question “but are we actually embodying it (education)?”, since it works not only to create a personal sense of real social investment in his peers’ views but to create a sense of doubt and a need for questioning in them. Which would help them live up their professed ideals I reckon. On a more critical note you repeated yourself far too many times buddy, when you could’ve consolidated the first 4 lines into 2, so that we could move on to the next bit quicker while still getting the message in a poetic manner. Anyways that’s all for now have a good one mate.
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bro you haven’t accepted the comment yet
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Hey Jesse,
I love this blog, I did the same topic this week, and I really like how you talk about the hypocrisy of education and how we always say how much we value it but don’t actually pay all that much attention to it. I also like how you say that the intellectual, bookish side of education isn’t all there is and that there is so much more to education, like life experiences and that they teach us so much, maybe even more than what books teach us. I think you’ve done a very good job at encapsulating the frustration we all feel as university students sometimes and how we all get really bored of just studying when all we want is to be out in the world, living life as we want to.
What a great job you’ve done! 😀 Just two things: “Oxford” should be spelt with a capital “O”, as it’s the name of a place, and “gypsy’s” should be “gypsies”.
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Jesse, I absolutely loved your blog post! I’ve chosen the same topic as you for this week 🙂 and I loved reading another version of the response to the topic. I can surely learn something useful from your blogs: you are able to express your ideas perfectly in such a concise way, there’s no waste of words and this is thanks to your ability in choosing great words and expressions. You can tell so much in such short paragraphs and it is so true that the quality doesn’t depend on the length of our writings!
I liked the way you embodied rhetorical questions in your text; it made me understand that you really reflected in depth on what education means for you. I agree with you when you say that we don’t experience education but we only learn it “theoretically” through books and essays. You really gave me the idea of what freedom is for you and how it is important for us to be out of constraints in order to learn what education is. And I personally think that what we should learn first, before grammar, rules, and formulas, we need to learn so much from human relations, how to behave and how to approach to the world. And we don’t find this written in books, but we should rather just go out and get into the game to experience life in first person, without filters.
I love at the end of your blog, the use you made of anaphora, to reinforce the idea of how far and distant you feel from these “intellectual games”. Your language is so expressive, very concrete and enriched by an intelligent lexical choice!
Great job ! 🙂
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Dear Jesse,
You have written a wonderful creative piece which beautifully captures the inner feelings of the scholar gypsy. I really like how you began your letter with the use of rhetorical questions. It provokes intricate ideas about our education system and how much of it actually has any meaning to us on a deeper level. I also like how you discussed how education without experience can only be seen in limited terms. After all, how much do we really know if we do not have the experience to support it?
Please remember to check some of your spelling, oxford = Oxford, storys* = stories, gypsy’s = gypsies (plural). Also, it would be nice to elaborate on some of your ideas using more imagery to enhance it further!
Overall, I really enjoyed your blog. You have captured the essence of how the scholar gypsy felt about living in the modern world and his desire to escape it! Thank you.
Sibel.
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Hi Jesse,
I really enjoyed your blog this week. The way in which you captured how the joys of life shouldn’t be read about in the ink of an old book but should be actually lived and experienced really resonates with me. As university students who are constantly under pressure to excel in their units, who write so many academic essays I think in some ways we have lost the fun and the essence of education. Similarly, as literature students who have to read classic novels it really makes you question how we live our lives and I think in some ways makes you change your life in order to find a balance.
When writing other blogs try using commas instead of full stop in appropriate sentences to help make the paragraph flow a little better. Other than that, you should be really proud of this creative blog! Keep up the good work 🙂
https://jesseshakespeare.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/sixth-19th-century-literature-blog-post-week-9-monday-1st-of-may/
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