Assignment One – “Economy“

What a difference 150 years make! If Thoreau and Robinson lived in the same period of time and they sat down to discuss intellectual freedom they would probably agree with one another. But due to the time span they have between them, their ideas on how to achieve it are not compatible. Allthough they both in their foundations support intellectual freedom, the society in which they are operating has immensely changed from Thoreau‘s to Robinson’s time. And this is why—as similar their basic ideas may be—their perspectives do in fact contradict each other.

This chronological distance has several effects on the way they adopted their opinions. When Thoreau is writing in the middle of the 19th century, western society has gone only the first step of several, which will lead to the early 21st century society, in which Robinson is writing. Just a few decades before Thoreau a self-sufficient livestyle was a common model in society, he allready describes the possibility for his contemporaries, to hire a specialist for almost every task. Instead of building his own house, a student—but this is true for everyone of course—could just rent an appartement. Instead of hunting game or growing vegetables, he could just buy food at a grocery store. Thoreau’s point here is that a considerable amount of education could be learned “by doing“ instead of taking classes in which the same knowledge is presented theoretically.

Here he sees an opportunity to save the money of the students as well as society. And in addition this saves the students time, which can then be invested in studying what they prefer. This leads to Thoreau’s idea of intellectual freedom.

But life has grown more complicated nowadays. When Robinson is expressing her opinion, people have specialized in almost every aspect there is in human life. Because they had to. You cannot expect anyone to build their house, hunt their dinner, fix their car, do their taxes and all other forms of modern bureaucracy. And you can hardly learn these things by doing but you have to learn them theoretically first. If students were to master every single field of modern life they would have to stay in school for so long, that they would neither be able to bring to use what they learned nor to learn what they fancy.

With intellectual freedom in mind a situation like this is not desirable, thus Robinson does conclude that there has to be something like the social safety net to enable students—and not only students again—to pursue the education and philosophy of their preference, doing this being supported by the society, and at some point ideally become part of the supporting society themselves. This is Robinsons approach to intellectual freedom.

So it becomes apparent that Thoreau’s and Robinson’s understanding of intellectual freedom is very similar but leads to very different execution-models, which are, among others, allready contradictory from the chronological point of view.