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Women in Shakespeare

Many critics say that Shakespeare was a feminist. For instance Shapiro claims that Shakespeare was ‘the noblest feminist of them all”. I partly agree with McLuskie that Shakespeare mostly wrote for entertaining males, but I don’t think it is historically true to think of him as a feminist. To my mind, Shakespeare was an extraordinary talent in portraying human behavior, necessarily depicted the condition of women within a patriarchal system and created women characters, which in their richness transcend the limitations of his time.

In this essay I would like to point your attention to Shakespeare’s description of two women Portia and Rosalind and the way he depicted them is the most important part of his work.

When William Shakespeare wrote, The Merchant of Venice, he included a female character that influences the play dramatically. In most of Shakespeare’s plays, the women have little power and intelligence. In The Merchant of Venice, however, Portia is a woman that saves the life of a man with her wit and intelligence.

Another woman created by Shakespeare that posses qualities similar to Portia is Rosalind, from Much Ado about Nothing. Both women add to the main themes of the play because of their ability to use their intelligence and witty remarks as well as having a loving heart. The women share many similarities as well as many differences, which seem to be inevitable because Portia seems to be put on a pedestal that very few can reach.

Portia is one of Shakespeare’s great heroines, whose beauty, lively intelligence, quick wit, and high moral seriousness have blossomed in a society of wealth and freedom. She is known throughout the world for her beauty and virtue, and she is able to handle any situation with her sharp wit. In many of Shakespeare’s plays, he creates female characters that are presented to be clearly inferior to men. The one female, Shakespearean character that is most like Portia would be Rosalind, from Much Ado about Nothing. Both of the women are known for their wit and intelligence. Rosalind is able to defend her views in any situation, as does Portia.

Shakespeare gives each of them a sense of power by giving their minds the ability to change words around, use multiple meanings and answer wisely to the men surrounding them. By adding a loving heart to both of these women, Shakespeare makes their intelligence more appealing.

Even though Rosalind hides the loving side of her character for most of the play, she still expresses her kindness and love in other ways. Like Portia, she is a dear friend and an obedient daughter. In the fourth act, after Portia has saved the life of Antonio, she uses her wit, just as Rosalind does to test Benedict’s love, to convince Bassanio to surrender the ring that he vowed he would never part with.

After simply asking for it and being unsuccessful, she decides to use her intelligence and says, “I see sir, you are liberal in offers. / You taught me first to beg, and now methinks / You teach me how a beggar should be answered.” The only main difference between the two women is the way they are perceived by the other characters.

Portia is thought of as a perfect angel possessing no flaws, which is shown when Bassanio describes her to Antonio and says, “In Belmont is a lady richly left, / And she is fair and, fairer than that word, / Of wondrous virtues. Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth, / for the four winds blow in from every coast / Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks / Hang on her temples like a golden fleece, / Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchis’ strong, / And many Jasons come in quest of her”.

Portia displays all the graces of the perfect Renaissance lady. She is not ambitious, she is quiet rather than restrictive. She is modest in her self-estimation. Her generous spirit makes her wish she had more virtue, wealth, and friends so that she can better help those she loves. Rosalind, on the other hand, is not described as beautiful and even though she is well liked in her society, she is not thought of in the same godly way as Portia is.

Besides saving the life of Antonio, Portia is also used to convey the theme of deceptive appearances. Throughout the play, Shakespeare uses his characters to show the audience that a person cannot be judged by how they appear to the eye and that a person can truly be identified by their inner soul. Bassanio chooses the lead casket and proves that even though the other caskets appeared to be beautiful and trustworthy, the treasure was found in the casket of lead.

Shakespeare foreshadows the theme of appearances when Portia says to her new husband, “You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, / Such as I am┘ But the full sum of me / Is an unlesson’d girl, unschool’d, unpractic’d, / Happy in this, she is not yet so old / But she may learn; happier than this, / She is not bred so dull but she can learn”. After saying this to her husband, she later dresses up as a man and finds a way to release Antonio from his bond with Shylock, when no one else is able to. She proves to the audience and to her friends that even though she might have been perceived as an unschooled, unpracticed girl, her inner self, posses the strength, intelligence and experience that enables her to do what she did. When Shakespeare created Portia’s character, he contributed the likeness of Rosalind and added the elements of a perfect Renaissance woman. Even though Portia is a woman, she still posses the intelligence to use and manipulate words, the beauty to woo men, and the soul that stands above many others. Her appearance adds to her angelic reputation and her wisdom allows the audience of the play to acknowledge the theme of deceptive appearances.

Portia is one of Shakespeare’s best parts for an actress as, apart from being one of the central characters within the main plot of the play; she displays great wit and intelligence. These are assets which none of Shakespeare’s other female roles ever had as women who lived around the same time as Shakespeare, were not considered to have such honorable traits.

Bibliography:

Lodge, Thomas. Play Rosalynde (1590). Oxford protege; Euphuist style

Munday, Anthony. The Merchant of Venice (1580). Oxford protege/secretary

Josephus Flavius, Antiquitates Judaicae in Greek (ed. B. Niese) and English

Gilbert, Sandra M.; Gubar, Susan. Shakespeare’s sisters, feminist essays on women poets.
Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1979

Looser, Devoney. British women writers and the writing of history, 1670-1820. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000

William Richardson, Essays on Some of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters to which is added an Essay on the Faults of Shakespeare (London : J. Murray and S. Highley, 1797), 5th edition, pp. 338-363

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The nature of Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical question “What ought a man to do?” Its answer is that he ought to act so as to produce the best consequences possible.

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Victorian Lessons: Education and Utilitarianism in Bentham, Mill, and Dickens

Formulated by Jeremy Bentham and his followers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, utilitarianism was one of the first rational and systematic attempts to address the vast social, economic, and cultural problems caused by the impact of the Industrial Revolution on British society. Bentham’s philosophy was based on the belief that human institutions should serve all elements of society, and that such institutions should be useful by providing for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”1 In defining this greatest happiness or good, Bentham adopted what he called a “moral arithmetic,” evaluating each human action according to an actual formula, which balanced units of pleasure with units of pain. For Bentham, good resulted when pleasure, defined by each individual’s enlightened self-interest, predominated.2 However, Bentham’s belief that self-interest determined what is good was soon seized on by Victorian industrialists of laissez-faire persuasion to justify their disregard for anything except social usefulness and economic gain. The damaging effects of the practice of these principles, especially in the field of education, became evident to the second-generation utilitarians, like John Stuart Mill; indeed, Mill considered himself to have been personally victimized by a misguided application of Benthamite educational ideas, which he believed alienated human beings from art and emotion. It is this narrow, factual, “useful” education, and its complicity with the factory system, that Charles Dickens satirically attacks in Hard Times, a novel which is based on actual historical circumstances and dramatizes a major cultural controversy of the age. Not only does Coketown, the setting of the novel, represent the actual industrial city of Hanley,3 but, I would argue, the action and characters of the novel represent the conflict between Benthamite education and its collusion with industrialism, and Mill’s more enlightened resistance to such a limited conception of human motives and aspirations.

Published in 1854, Dickens’s Hard Times deals with the enormous changes in British society caused by the Industrial Revolution. During this time, society was like wax, constantly being shaped and reshaped by the profound changes the revolution brought. Among such changes, one of the most fundamental was the exodus of workers from rural communities to the cities, which were centralized around factories. Of course, the lives of these displaced people were completely altered; men, women, and children toiled for up to twenty-hour days, earning only subsistence wages, while they lived in poorly ventilated housing, hastily constructed around the factories and mines. By the mid-1800s, intellectuals, politicians, reformers, and authors realized that they needed to mitigate the negative effects of this revolution on the exploited working classes, especially on the children.

Before the Industrial Revolution, rural children of the lower classes had been educated by their parents. Typically, young boys and girls would learn traditional crafts and skills from their parents in order to prepare for the future; they would work with the rest of the family as a unit that provided for itself through the farm. An education outside the home was rarely affordable or necessary. However, the mechanization of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution changed all that. Traditional rural occupations were made redundant, and a large part of the rural population was drawn into the factories of the cities and the mines that produced the coal and iron which drove the Industrial Revolution. Where children had worked alongside their parents, now they were separated from them and made to do particularly dangerous work. Risking their lives down coal mines, up chimneys, and in close proximity to hazardous machinery, the children were forced to work hours even longer than their adult counterparts. Education would have offered some hope to overcome this miserable situation, but it was beyond the realm of possibility until reforms were gradually legislated and implemented.

It was several decades before such legislation and reform began to ameliorate some of these conditions, and it took a long series of reforms, stretching into the 1880s, before some of the worst abuses of child labor were finally curbed. In 1832, the year of Bentham’s death, a new Whig government came to power in Parliament and passed the first of a series of Reform Acts. A parliamentary committee subsequently investigated the conditions under which children worked; based on what they uncovered, Parliament passed the Factory Act in 1833, which limited the hours children and young people could work in factories, and required that children under thirteen be schooled for at least two hours per day during the time they were at the factory. However, the educational requirement often went unfulfilled: “compliance in many factories was limited to setting up a classroom in the boiler room and appointing the stoker, a crippled former mill hand, or some other illiterate to do the teaching. In other mills, forged certificates of attendance concealed wholesale violations of the law.”4 Legislation prohibiting children under ten from working in the mines had to wait until 1842, with the passing of Lord Ashley’s Mines Act.5 However, as these reform measures prevented children from working quite as much, they also reduced the meager family income, making it even more difficult for a family to exist, let alone educate their children.

Although charity schools existed throughout the 19th century, the first system to guarantee education for all students did not appear until 1870, as a consequence of Forster’s Education Act. (Compulsory schooling came even later, in 1880, and free education not until 1892.) Under Forster’s “equal-education” law, the state did not simply have to fund schools, but also to provide buildings and teachers when necessary.6 However, the standardized curriculum that this Education Act brought into being did not always really help the children. At best, it allowed them to become clerks or bookkeepers, and while this was indeed more desirable than becoming a coal miner, it still limited children to menial jobs which would be useful to the employers of the time. While the earliest standard, “Standard I,” seemed innocuous enough, requiring children to be able to read monosyllables, write letters, and add and subtract numbers up to 10, by “Standard VI” the evidence of utilitarianism was painfully clear: at this standard, students should be able to “read a short ordinary paragraph in a newspaper, or other modern narrative,” write down “another short ordinary paragraph in a newspaper, or other modern narrative, slowly dictated once by a few words at a time,” and perform “a sum in practice bills of parcels.”7 All of these standards carry industrialist and utilitarian undertones; one need only note the requirement that a student find the sum of a “practice bill of parcels” in order to see how this “useful” curriculum was shaped by commerce and business.

Even the schoolrooms themselves were reminiscent of factories. Large numbers of students were seated in long, orderly rows in a large, single room, with monitors and teachers inspecting their work.8 There was a firm emphasis on the sequential and factual, yet because it was not required by the state, school administrators did not usually promote teaching practical studies or the sciences, let alone the humanities or the arts. In addition, the school and the factory were often connected: employers from the town usually came to schools to find “dependable workers” to fill gaps in assembly lines or other job openings.9 Was such a school really the vision of the utilitarians? To answer this question, we must go back to the roots of the utilitarian philosophy.

Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher who lived from 1748 to 1832, was mainly interested in the field of law, political theory, and ethics. He was educated at Oxford and began his career as a lawyer; however, though he received his degree in 1769, he never was to practice law, but instead applied his enormous energy to writing “about how the law ought to be.”10 His early philosophy, as stated in “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” posited that all actions should be justified by their usefulness, where usefulness was defined as the ability to bring the most pleasure to the most people.11 This emphasis on the pleasure of each individual seems very hedonistic, possibly even anarchic, and certainly raises questions about the subjective nature of pleasure. In fact, Bentham was quoted as saying “Pushpin is as good as poetry,” provided that the increase in pleasure caused by both activities was the same.12 However, since poetry brings pleasure to many readers, not only to one or two as in the game of pushpin (disproving his assumption that the net increases in pleasure are the same for both), one could say that poetry should be more important by Bentham’s own standards than pushpin. Moreover, it could be argued that there is a difference between the kind of pleasure afforded by reading and writing poetry and that afforded by playing a simple game.

Bentham applied his philosophy, based on the principles of utility and pleasure, to an elaborate system of education which he called “Chrestomathia,” from the Greek words meaning “conducive to useful learning.”13 The two main goals of his Chrestomathic school were to eliminate “ennui” and the “pain of mental vacuity,” and to ensure that students were adequately prepared for a fruitful future in a career “most suitable to… every individual case.”14 He also listed what he termed other “advantages” of his system, such as keeping younger students out of trouble.15 Bentham proposed filling such mental vacuums with useful subjects, and devoted entire chapters of his work Chrestomathia to technology, algebra, and geometry. He excluded the fine arts from his “branches of instruction,” but only after offering specific pragmatic grounds for omitting each subject; for instance, music was “excluded as a subject on the grounds of noise” and insufficient space in the schools. 16 Bentham did acknowledge the fine arts as valuable on the basis of the pleasure they afford certain individuals, but he thought they should be extracurricular pursuits. In addition, he warned school administrators against limiting the applicability of the curriculum to “particular ranks or professions”a rule many schoolmasters of Dickens’s time obviously did not follow. 17 Despite the rigidity of his system, Bentham was indeed a reformer in the field of education: under his system, corporal punishment would be abolished, religion would be excluded from the rigorously academic curriculum, and equal education for women would be instituted, since Bentham believed “the whole of the proposed field of instruction…is useful to both sexes.”18

Unfortunately, as most historians are aware, there is always a difference between an idea in the mind of a philosopher and its realization in society. It would seem that industrialists, like those who founded and ran Dickens’s Coketown, seized upon the aspects of Bentham’s educational philosophy that furthered their self-interest; they advocated “useful learning,” but ignored the rest of his ideas. After all, the industrialists simply needed factory workers, not well-rounded human beings, and considered the pleasure and happiness of the workers largely irrelevant to their profits. Thus, the system condemned by Dickens, while not genuinely utilitarian or Chrestomathic, was certainly an overwhelming social reality in industrial England.

What the practice of utilitarianism in Victorian education became can be seen in very graphic terms in Dickens’s Hard Times. In the northern industrial city of Coketown, the schoolchildren are systematically denied any expression of emotion and creativity, reduced to reciting monotonous facts, such as defining horses as “Quadrupeds. Graminivorous. Forty teeth….”19 This philosophy of education is heartily approved by the satirically named schoolteacher, M’Choakumchild, the also aptly named owner of the school, Gradgrind, and by a visiting government official, here referred to as the “gentleman”:

“Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy.”

“You are not, Cecilia Jupe,” Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, “to do anything of that kind.”

“Fact, fact, fact!” said the gentleman. And “Fact, fact, fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

“You are to be in all things regulated and governed,” said the gentleman, “by fact…You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets…You must use,” said the gentleman, “for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration.”20

M’Choakumchild’s and Gradgrind’s school stresses regulation and control; it is interested in manufacturing the obedient and compliant workers the industrialists needed, and thus brings to light a crucial problem with utilitarianism. The industrialists, of course, endorsed the schoolmasters’ intent to guide children to jobs in Coketown, and to make them effective drones, because such an “education” would increase their own happiness and profits. Furthermore, they assumed that the clerks and factory workers the system produced would also be happy, provided that their existence had been limited to facts from the start; certainly Bitzer, Gradgrind’s model student, seems to feel no need for fancy, or creativity. But Dickens emphasizes the disastrous implications of such an educational philosophy for individuals of intelligence and sensitivity, and argues against such narrow self-interest by making his admirable characters selfless, generous, and kind. Indeed, Dickens seems to ally himself with John Stuart Mill’s specific objections to Bentham’s educational philosophy by creating the character of Louisa Gradgrind, whose unhappy and repressed childhood and disastrous marriage can be directly traced to the inadequacies of her Benthamite education. Both the fictional adventures of Louisa and the actual events in the life of Mill demonstrate the destructive consequences of an education that damages emotional and creative growth

Born in 1806, Mill was raised by his father, a friend and devoted follower of Bentham, according to strict utilitarian principles; Mill was a precocious child, learning to read Greek at the age of three and Latin by the age of eight. By the time he was fourteen, he had read widely in classical literature and history, had finished his studies in economics, arithmetic, algebra, and science, and was ready to start on his career. However, Mill soon came to feel that his early education was too stifling of the imagination and spirit, and indeed, had robbed him of his childhood and stunted his emotional development. In his early twenties, he suffered a nervous breakdown, attributing his “dry, heavy dejection” to his intense and narrow Benthamite education.21 The road to recovery for Mill was his discovery of Wordsworth’s poetry, which would certainly have surprised Bentham.22 In the year after Bentham’s death, Mill anonymously published a refutation of his old mentor, and five years later, in 1838, published an essay under his own name entitled Bentham, arguing that “morality consists of two parts. One of these is self-education, the training by the human being of his affections and will. That department is a blank in Bentham’s system.”23 Also, by the mid-19th century, the devastatingly negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution on the great masses of working men, women, and children, were clearly evident. Thus, Mill’s revisions of utilitarian philosophy came both from a profoundly personal need and from a need to rectify the obvious ill effects of the Industrial Revolution.

Mill revised Bentham’s philosophy by emphasizing and redefining happiness rather than pleasure as a more universal and morally acceptable goal. As Amy Gutmann says, in her essay entitled “What’s the use of going to school?”:

Even critics of utilitarianism recognise that happiness, broadly interpreted, is a minimally controversial good in that it accommodates almost all conceptions of the good life. Very few people want to lead an unhappy or unsatisfying life. Utilitarianism maintains a neutral position among conceptions of the good life, asking people only to recognise the equal claims of all others to lead a happy life as they define it.24

Thus “happiness” can be as subjective a term as “pleasure,” and its meaning depends on who defines it. Mill himself later attempted to clarify the ambiguity by stipulating that there should be two standards of happiness, making an ethical distinction between “the comparatively humble sense of pleasure and freedom from pain” and “the way of life which human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have.”25 While Mill’s description understands that happiness is defined differently by different people, it is Dickens who unambiguously dramatizes in Hard Times the fact that the happiness of one group of people is often achieved at the expense of another.

Although Hard Times is Dickens’s only novel devoted completely to representing the ills of industrial England, many of his novels are concerned with the impact of utilitarianism on education and schools. At least part of this concern rises from Dickens’s personal experiences in industrial England and at school as a young boy. One of the most powerful and well known of these experiences occurred when Dickens was twelve years old. He was taken out of school to work in a blacking factory, as his family was in debt and his father had been incarcerated in the Marshalsea, a debtor’s prison.26 As a young man, Dickens thought he might become a journalist so that he could expose the abuses which he saw in the factories, mines, and slums of England; however, after his first success with The Pickwick Papers (an entertaining and mildly satirical picaresque novel), he realized that he could make powerful arguments and influence society through novel-writing, which better suited his creative genius. As a writer, Dickens enjoyed a vast audience, who read most of his novels in serial form in popular weekly magazines. Hard Times was serialized in Household Words, and was so popular that it “more than doubled the circulation of [this] journal.”27

Schools of all types appear in Dickens’s works, and reflect the different types of schools in Victorian England. There is the Squeers’s boarding school in Nicholas Nickleby, where the students are essentially treated as slaves, their education consisting of learning to misspell the word “window” (as “winder”), and then performing the very “useful” task of having to clean all the windows in the school; Biddy’s school in Great Expectations, where Pip learns to read and write, is a more humane country school unaffected by educational theories; and, in the same novel is Mr. Pocket’s school, which educates Pip just enough to behave like a gentleman and fit into upper-class society. However, in Hard Times, Dickens is primarily concerned with the industrialization of education, as seen in the philosophy of Thomas Gradgrind, the school’s owner; M’Choakumchild, the teacher; and Bounderby, the unscrupulous industrialist.

Hard Times clearly satirizes the Benthamite philosophy of “usefulness” in Gradgrind’s relentless emphasis on the “facts” over all else. Furthermore, Gradgrind’s (and Bentham’s) connection with the ideas of laissez-faire economists and theorists is underlined by the names of Gradgrind’s children: Adam Smith Gradgrind, and Malthus Gradgrind. Less evident, but I believe more important, is the parallel between Dickens’s character Louisa, Gradgrind’s daughter, and the philosopher John Stuart Mill, Bentham’s godson. Both are brought up almost as test cases for their father’s philosophies: Mill is educated at home according to his father’s Benthamite beliefs, and Louisa is tutored in Gradgrind’s utilitarian school. Similarly, both react violently against their parents’ philosophies, suffering psychological crises for the same reason: their educations have stifled emotion and imagination. Although the circumstances are slightly different, both Louisa and Mill experience their profound change of heart in their early twenties, and their rejection of utilitarianism is directly associated with its inability to help them comprehend strong emotions and feelings, especially in their closest personal relations. Louisa would certainly agree with Mill’s assessment of Bentham’s philosophy; as Mill says in his essay Bentham, Bentham estimated “personal affection…as the very weakest and most unsteady of all feelings,” and never understood “sympathetic connexions of an intimate kind.”28 Mill’s analysis of Bentham is echoed by Louisa’s desperate rhetorical question to her father about her own emotional shortcomings: “What are my heart’s experiences?”29 While Dickens reveals the problems caused by Benthamite education in the personal lives of his characters, the novel also exposes the way this utilitarian education serves the whole system of industrial production in Victorian England. Dickens specifically satirizes the smug confidence of Gradgrind and Bounderby that the type of education provided in Coketown affords pleasure for all. Coketown, Dickens’s archetypal industrialist city, actually shows, as George Bernard Shaw succinctly states in his 1912 essay on Hard Times, a very different and grim reality:

Coketown, which you can see to-day for yourself in all its grime in the Potteries (the real name of it is Hanley…), is not…a patch of slum in a fine city….Coketown is the whole place; and its rich manufacturers are proud of its dirt, and declare that they like to see the sun blacked out with smoke, because it means that the furnaces are busy and money is being made; whilst its poor factory hands have never known any other sort of town, and are as content with it as a rat is with a hole.30

The perversion of utilitarianism is clearly evident here in Shaw’s description of the ignorant happiness of the deprived workers, and the dominance and pride of the “rich manufacturers” in what they have accomplished. The factory hands and clerks could never hope to surmount their conditions, since their education, imposed upon them by men like Gradgrind, gives them no other choice than to work as laborers in Coketown. M’Choakumchild, the schoolteacher, is dedicated to replicating the education that has recently been inflicted on him through the government-approved syllabus required in teacher training colleges: “He and some one hundred and forty schoolmasters had been lately turned out at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.”31 Like Gradgrind, M’Choakumchild misinterprets and perverts the principles of utilitarianism and Chrestomathia, and is determined to separate each student from his/her imagination, or fancy, by filling them to the brim with facts and statistics. M’Choakumchild pictures the students as pitchers waiting to be filled; as he looks at the rows of children, the schoolteacher sees his pupils as “little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were filled to the brim…”32 The wording of this metaphor is strikingly similar to Bentham’s proposal to fill the “mental vacuity” of the children attending his school. Moreover, Gradgrind’s school feeds directly into Bounderby’s bank, factory, and even into his home: Dickens portrays this process of moving students along the assembly line of education into manufacturing as inexorable, unyielding, and inevitable as time.

Time went on in Coketown like its own machinery: so much material wrought up, so much fuel consumed, so many powers worn out, so much money made…

Time passed Thomas on in the mill…Time, sticking to him, passed him on into Bounderby’s Bank, made him an inmate of Bounderby’s house…and exercised him diligently in his calculations relative to number one.

The same great manufacturer…passed Sissy onward in his mill, and worked her up into a very pretty article indeed.33

Eventually, Gradgrind encourages Louisa to marry Bounderby by looking at the “facts,” which seem to favor such a loveless union. Louisa assents, because, as she admits herself, “What do I know, father, of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things might have been nourished?”34 In Dickens’s novel, however, it is the reality of human emotion that throws a monkey wrench into this clockwork system.

Josiah Bounderby, Coketown’s banker, manufacturer, and entrepreneur, like the students Gradgrind educates, is devoid of morality, able only to see the advantages of self-interest, business, and profit. Through the disastrous breakdown of Bounderby’s marriage with the unhappy Louisa Gradgrind, Dickens appears to be saying that such a marriage of fact and profit can only lead to unhappiness and ruin. Ironically, it is Bitzer, Gradgrind’s star pupil, who demonstrates the worst consequences of the amorality and lack of feeling and emotion which Gradgrind’s education has inculcated. In the climactic scene of the novel, Gradgrind attempts to send his miscreant son Tom abroad. Tom, who according to Dickens’s description, is dishonest because his education has made him “incapable at last of governing himself,” has stolen from Bounderby’s bank.35 However, Bitzer also seeks to locate Gradgrind’s son, so that he can “turn him in” to Mr. Bounderby and thus receive a promotion:

“Bitzer,” said Mr. Gradgrind, broken down, and miserably submissive to him, “have you a heart?”

“The circulation, Sir,” returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the question, “couldn’t be carried on without one…”

“Is it accessible,” cried Mr. Gradgrind, “to any compassionate influence?”

“It is accessible to Reason, Sir,” returned the excellent young man. “And to nothing else.”

“If this is solely a question of self-interest with you”Mr. Gradgrind began.

“I beg your pardon for interrupting you, Sir,” returned Bitzer; “but I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest…We are so constituted. I was brought up in that catechism when I was very young, Sir, as you are aware.”36

The character of Bitzer here parodies the faulty premise of the educational and philosophical system which Gradgrind has been inculcating, namely that everything is justifiable solely by monetary worth and self-interest, and that rationalism and materialism can account fully for human nature.

Dickens’s alternative to utilitarianism in Hard Times is best expressed by the circus clown, Mr. Sleary. Along with Louisa, it is, ironically, the clown who has the greatest impact on Gradgrind, for it is he who explains to Gradgrind that there is something else in the world besides self-interest and mere fact. After he generously helps Gradgrind’s son to safety, as a gratuitous act of kindness devoid of self-interest, profit, or benefit for himself, Sleary says to Gradgrind with his distinctive lisp (read ‘s’ for ‘th’):

“Thquire, shake handth, firtht and lath! Don’t be croth with uth poor vagabondth. People mutht be amuthed. They can’t be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t made for it. You mutht have uth, Thquire.”37

Here, Dickens insists through Sleary that amusement and entertainment are necessary aspects of human happiness and pleasure, whether in the humbler form of the circus, or in the higher, aesthetic form of literature and poetry. Playfulness, fancy, creativity, and imagination are essential human needs that are not addressed by the utilitarian emphasis on profit, advantage, regimentation, and control. This statement clearly explains Gradgrind’s failure: by seeking to destroy his pupils’ and his own children’s emotion and sentiment, he has discounted the most important aspects of human experience. One should also note how Dickens, through Sleary, equates learning and working in Coketown. This brings to mind again the images of the factory-like classrooms of Gradgrind’s school, and the connections between the classroom and the workplace that are characteristic of Gradgrind’s and much of Victorian England’s version of utilitarianism.

It seems clear to me that Dickens had both Bentham and John Stuart Mill in mind when writing Hard Times, as we can see in his harshly ironic portrayal of utilitarianism and its connection to laissez-faire industrialism. Of course, it would be unfair to judge Bentham’s educational philosophy solely by the way Victorian society instituted it, or by the way this is reflected in Dickens’s novel. Bentham was dedicated to solving the problems the Industrial Revolution had caused in British society, and his encyclopedic mind dealt with areas as diverse as education and prison reforms: for instance, he invented a device called the panopticon, which was a point of total surveillance in both prisons and schools, designed to exercise constant visual control over prisoners and pupils as a way of curbing bad behavior and thus reducing the use of corporal punishment.38 His ideas also laid the foundation for more liberal reformers, like Mill, to improve and build on. Bentham believed, of course, that his own ideas would bring about “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” by allowing people to follow their own self-interest, and by establishing enlightened and rational government policies towards education, industrialism, the law, and even prisons. Dickens, however, was more concerned with the human reality as he saw it, and the abuses that Bentham’s philosophy fostered in society, when there was a constant emphasis on controlling those aspects of the human character whose immediate usefulness or profit to the industrial world was not obvious. If Bentham’s way of thinking led to more and better factories, prisons, and schools, Dickens saw only the soul-destroying characteristics of these institutions, and their essential similarity.

The crisis in educational philosophy and practice that concerned Bentham, Mill, and Dickens did not die with them; in fact, the questions that preoccupied them about whether education should be defined as the learning of certain facts and areas of knowledge, or as the inculcation of a broader humanism aimed at making the student a cultured and thoughtful person, still persist today. On one side, there are the prescriptive educational systems that list what children should learn in school to be considered educated, technology companies that tell schools what they should teach in order to provide them with future employees, and standardized tests that measure ability through precise, numerical, and supposedly neutral terms. On the other side, there are those systems that want education to be a process which liberates the individual’s potential, cultivates the feelings and intellects of the student, and values music and art as much as chemistry and calculus. Today, as in Dickens’s time, schools are constantly rethinking educational philosophies and instituting new programs, and there often seems to be a difference between theory and practice, as there was between the reformist intentions of utilitarianism and the more sobering reality. The outcome of the battle between a strictly “useful” education and a more humanist approach may still be undecided, but the writings of Bentham, Mill, and Dickens can help us to reevaluate the issue in our own time.

Endnotes

1 Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1988) p. 3
2 Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973) pp. 117-118
3 George Bernard Shaw, “Hard Times,” Hard Times: The Norton Critical Edition, eds. George Ford and Sylvere Monod (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966) p. 333
4 Altick, p. 47
5 Ibid., p. 46
6 Ibid., p. 133
7 Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996) pp. 168-169
8 Altick, p. 249
9 Mitchell, p. 170
10 Ross Harrison, “Introduction,” in Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government p. x
11 J. J. C. Smart, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1973) pp. 12-13
12 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843) vol. 2, pp. 253-254, cited in Utilitarianism: For and Against, p. 12
13 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) p. 19
14 Chrestomathia, p. 20, pp. 25-26
15 Ibid., p. 29
16 Ibid., p. 440
17 Ibid., p. 18
18 Ibid., p. 122
19 Hard Times, p. 3
20 Ibid., pp. 5-6
21 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Longmans Press, 1873) pp. 138-139
22 Ibid., p. 148
23 John Stuart Mill, Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967) p. 197
24 Amy Gutmann, “What’s the use of going to school?” Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1982) p. 262
25 J. S. Mill, cited in Gutmann, p. 263
26 Michael and Mollie Hardwick, The Charles Dickens Companion (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968) pp. 233-234
27 Ford and Monod, “Introduction” in Hard Times, p. vii
28 Literary Essays, pp. 196, 198
29 Hard Times, p. 77
30 G. B. Shaw, “Hard Times” in Hard Times, p. 333
31 Hard Times, p. 6
32 Ibid., p. 1
33 Ibid., pp. 69-70
34 Ibid., p. 77
35 Ibid., p. 101
36 Ibid., pp. 217-218
37 Ibid., p. 222
38 Chrestomathia, p. 106

Bibliography

Altick, Richard D., Victorian People and Ideas New York: W. W. Norton, 1973

Bentham, Jeremy, A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988

Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996

Bentham, Jeremy, Chrestomathia, ed. M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983

Davidson, William Leslie, Political Thought in England: the Utilitarians, From Bentham to J. S. Mill New York: H. Holt, 1916

Dickens, Charles, Hard Times: the Norton Critical Edition, eds. George Ford and Sylvere Monod, New York: W. W. Norton, 1966

Hardwick, Michael and Mollie, The Charles Dickens Companion New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968

Houghton, Walter E., The Victorian Frame of Mind New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957

Mitchell, Sally, Daily Life in Victorian England Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996

Mill, John Stuart, Autobiography 2nd ed., London: Longmans Press, 1873

Mill, John Stuart, Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967

Sen, Amartya and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982

Smart, J. J. C., Utilitarianism: For and Against Cambridge: University Press, 1973

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argumentative essay example

MANAGEMENT MODEL OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT BASED ON CLUSTER PARTNERSHIP

The article explores approaches to modeling business development management based on cluster partnerships. Four basic approaches are distinguished: structural modeling, game approach, neural network approach and statistical approach. It is emphasized that the activation of business development based on cluster partnership increases the competitiveness of all economic agents of the network. Since it is practically impossible to make optimal decisions due to the diversity of partner participants, a partnership method is proposed as an alternative, which allows reaching local compromises and making “quasi-optimal management decisions”. It is emphasized that in the process of making optimal decisions on business management based on cluster partnership, it is advisable to use holistic management based on the perception of cluster partnership as a whole. It is noted that in order to holistically, holistically consider business management based on cluster partnership, it is necessary to take into account intercorrelated aspects such as four sectors (individual internal, individual external, collective internal and collective external), development lines (vertical and horizontal, growth and decline, internal and external ); levels of business development based on cluster partnerships that meet the previous aspects; choice of management activities depending on the situation, experience and knowledge; definition of management for each of the participants in the cluster partnership.

Keywords: management decisions, interacting business entities, structural modeling, models of competitive and cooperative interactions of business structures, neural network approach, holistic management concept, network management, cluster partnership.

Formulation of the problem. Today, the government, business and all citizens of Ukraine face an urgent need to increase the level of competitiveness of the national economy as the main factor in ensuring an adequate standard of living for the population. The problem of raising the national economy to an appropriate level can be solved through the introduction of a cluster approach. Clustering processes can activate the development of the state economy, especially if they are consistent with a strategy developed with the role of state, local authorities and scientific institutions and society. Therefore, the scientific community continues to search for new theoretical and methodological aspects of the formation of business development models on a cluster basis, which will solve problems on the path to reforming and effectively developing the national economy in the current turbulent conditions.

Analysis of recent research and publications. Scientific approaches to the study of effective business development management models on a cluster basis indicate a growing relationship between clusters, where the resources and competencies of clusters are combined, access to target markets and know-how becomes open, information and experience are exchanged between clusters, networks are created using special technology it becomes possible to use sources of knowledge from all over the world, as well as the development of a new branch of knowledge. According to M. Porter, the founder of cluster theory, business management on a cluster basis contributes to the establishment and expansion of business contacts, the use of common infrastructure elements, and the lobbying of professional and commercial interests [7]. The increase in the importance of the knowledge economy has led to a change in approaches to the formation of the composition of the cluster members since the importance of the system of interactions between industrial enterprises and innovation infrastructure enterprises has significantly increased. It should be noted that the “triple helix” model proposed by Professor of Stanford University G. Itkowitz and Professor of the University of Amsterdam L. Leidesdorff assumes active involvement of state structures in business management on a cluster basis [9]. The relevance of business development in this way is determined by the fact that a new method is proposed to achieve the coordination of interests and goals of elements of complex network socio-economic systems, which is especially important for the functioning of business on a cluster basis in the context of a transition to a full-fledged partnership between interacting participants in the processes of production and commercialization of innovations. Among the scientists who proposed the statement that business management on a cluster basis should develop global connections or global partnerships, one should single out professors of business economics H. Batelt, P. Maskel and A. Malmberg [1] and the scientific works of scientists from Cornell University (USA) by M. Gertler and J. Levitt [3]. In these studies, scientists note that these partnerships can provide businesses with significant benefits, but they are not without problems, especially in the formation, development, and management. Therefore, to date, the business development management model based on cluster partnership has not been fully studied by scientists, there are debatable questions regarding approaches to modeling and making optimal decisions on business development based on cluster partnership.

The purpose of the article to management model of business development based on cluster partnership.

Statement of the main material.  The analysis of the works of domestic authors devoted to the issues of modeling business development based on cluster partnerships made it possible to identify four basic approaches.

Firstly, structural modeling, when, consisting of some structural elements, a certain pattern is superimposed on the proposed integrated structure to determine the direction of its development. So, for example, in [4], the authors proposed a universal structural model, using which it is possible to build an information model of cluster partnership through a certain database structure with information about the partner cluster, their relationships with external partners.

Secondly, a game approach that allows obtaining models of competitive and cooperative interactions of business structures in a cluster partnership, as well as evaluating the advantages of the strategies of individual partner clusters. Lobova S.V. et al. [5] proposes a multi-agent model in which the cluster members seek to maximize their interests, and the connections between them are represented as a game M(NK(t)) + 1 person:

The analysis of the works of domestic authors devoted to the issues of modeling business development based on cluster partnerships made it possible to identify four basic approaches.

Firstly, structural modeling, when, consisting of some structural elements, a certain pattern is superimposed on the proposed integrated structure to determine the direction of its development. So, for example, in [4], the authors proposed a universal structural model, using which it is possible to build an information model of cluster partnership through a certain database structure with information about the partner cluster, their relationships with external partners.

The analysis of the works of domestic authors devoted to the issues of modeling business development based on cluster partnerships made it possible to identify four basic approaches.

Firstly, structural modeling, when, consisting of some structural elements, a certain pattern is superimposed on the proposed integrated structure to determine the direction of its development. So, for example, in [4], the authors proposed a universal structural model, using which it is possible to build an information model of cluster partnership through a certain database structure with information about the partner cluster, their relationships with external partners.

At the same time, 0() is the goal of company n ( ∈ ()) included in the cluster structure that characterizes the efficiency of its operation at time t (for example, the goal can be profit maximization):

where () is the vector of managerial actions of company n included in the cluster structure,

() is the intensity matrix of using internal cluster links of company n,

() is the vector of environmental factors affecting the performance of company n,

( − 1) is the result of the company’s operation at the previous time,

( − 1) is a vector that reflects the totality of advantages received by the company due to joining the cluster structure and its development,

() is the set of companies included in the cluster partnership.

In addition, in the conditions of the company entering the cluster structure through changes in managerial influences aimed at developing the cluster as a whole, some properties of the cluster 1 () are subject to optimization:

1() = 1((), (), (), ( − 1)) → ⏟

()∈Π∈() ()  (2)

where () is the vector of performance results of enterprises included in the cluster () = (1(), … , (())()).

However, the application of game theory in modeling business management on a cluster basis is hampered by a significant number of interacting participants, which entails difficulties in finding solutions numerically. Accordingly, the basic premise of simulation models built on the basis of game theory is, as a rule, the interaction of only two firms, which undoubtedly limits the practical application of such models.

And, thirdly, a neural network approach that allows solving complex and difficult to formalize tasks that arise while managing business development on a cluster basis [42]. The use of neural networks for modeling cluster structures is convenient because they do not need to build a model but build it only based on the information provided. Artificial neural networks will turn incoming data into the optimal vector of management decisions and are capable of self-learning. Thus, in [6], neural network predictive models were built that take into account the impact of clustering processes on the state of meso- and micro-objects: at the meso-level in the short term, it allows calculating the expected GDP per capita; at the micro level, the neural network model makes it possible to determine the dependence of the profits of the enterprises of the cluster core on the indicator of the cluster development of the region.

However, the use of neural networks in modeling cluster structures is not easy. Complex models quite often fail on the set as well and setting up learning algorithms on a specific data set requires laborious experiments and therefore a lot of time. Contradictions between learning algorithms and the objective function of the cluster reduce the reliability of artificial neural networks. The main mechanisms of operation of several neural network methods of neuro-control and the distinctive features of their implementation are presented in [8, 11].

Algorithms of artificial neural networks solve the problems of developing algorithms for finding an analytical description of the patterns of functioning of economic objects (enterprises, industries, regions). These methods are used to predict some “initial” characteristics of objects. The use of neural network control makes it possible to solve the problems of economic and statistical modeling of the development of cluster partnership systems, to increase the adequacy of mathematical models, to bring them closer to economic reality [3]. Since the economic, financial and social systems in a cluster partnership are very complex, creating a complete mathematical model, taking into account all possible actions and reactions, is a very difficult task. In systems of such complexity, it is natural and most effective to use models that directly imitate the behavior of society and the economy. Specifically, this is what the methodology of neural networks can offer.

Fourthly, the statistical data is the most informative from our point of view. As a result of this stagnation, significant links between factorial changes are revealed, indicators of successful business activity in cluster ambush are identified, and structurization of all structures is carried out to enter a partnership. In [2], using statistical methods of data analysis, the authors managed to identify the key factors for the “success” of business structures operating on a cluster basis and to determine stable statistical indicators that determine them, to identify the relationship between the participation of an enterprise in a cluster and its innovative activity.

However, statistical data – is, first for everything, a tool for the primary processing of information about the cluster, and structurization and revealed already significant interrelationships.

It is necessary to indicate that the activation of business development at the ambush of cluster partnerships promotes the competitiveness of all economic agents in the region. Irrespective of those that are still not affected by management from the center, pro-regional entities with their actions influence the development of cluster partnerships. Management decisions that are accepted in their minds are often dysfunctional, that they do not push the system to reach the set goals, the shards do not protect the interests of all participants-partners. Some dysfunctions, revealed at this stage of regulation, may require a negligible leveling for the identification of potential important traces. Since accepted optimal decisions due to the difference between the participants-partners is practically impossible, as an alternative, the method of partnership is promoted, which allows reaching local compromises and accepting “quasi-optimal managerial decisions”. In the process of adopting optimal solutions, there is a need for holistic management, which is based on the adoption of cluster partnership as a single whole.

Diffusion of holism into the theory of management should be brought to the point about those that will be directly included in the development of the current paradigm of management to the warehouse of the conceptual positions of the upcoming priority positions (Table 1).

Table 1

Fundamentals of the old, new world and holistic

business development management concepts based on cluster partnership

Traditional concept New world concept Holistic management concept
1. Cluster partnership is a “closed” system.

2. The main factor of success and competitiveness is the growth in the scale of production of products and services.

3. The main task of management is the rational organization of production, the efficient use of all types of resources and the increase in labor productivity.

4. The main source of surplus value is labor productivity.

5. A management system built on the control of all types of activities, the functional distribution of work, norms, standards, and rules for implementation.

1. Cluster partnership is a “closed” system.

2. The main factor of success and competitiveness is the growth in the scale of production of products and services.

3. The main task of management is the rational organization of production, the efficient use of all types of resources and the increase in labor productivity.

4. The main source of surplus value is labor productivity.

5. A management system built on the control of all types of activities, the functional distribution of work, norms, standards and rules for implementation.

1. A cluster partnership is a living organism, relatively isolated (having its own experience, history, resources), but having close ties with the external environment.

2. An important task of management is a vision of the future based on the existing relationships of phenomena and processes.

3. An important factor for success and competitiveness

integration and synergy

4. An important source of surplus value is people who integrate

new knowledge based on understanding the relationship between phenomena and processes in the economy.

5. The management system is built on the interaction and mutual understanding of people, multilateral and interacting communications.

It should be noted that the holistic paradigm is closely related to the systematic approach to business development based on cluster partnerships. Consequently, a new organizational and managerial, “cluster-network” paradigm of business development based on cluster partnerships is emerging, within which sectoral regional economic systems are moving to a cluster organization and a network method of partnership interactions. Networks allow economic partner-participants to integrate into the economic space (Fig. 1).

M
M
SCIENCE
GOVERNMENT
BUSINESS
EDUCATION
X
X, Y
X, Y, Z
X, Y, Z, K

Fig. 1. Network business management model based on cluster partnership

Source: author’s development

 

Conclusions. Therefore, we can conclude that, according to the “all-sector” model, to holistically, holistically consider business management based on cluster partnerships, it is necessary to take into account the following mutually correlated aspects:

– 4 quadrants (or sectors) – individual internal, individual external, collective internal and collective external;

– lines of development (vertical and horizontal, growth and decline, internal and external);

– levels of business development based on cluster partnerships that meet the previous aspects;

– choice of management activities depending on the situation, experience and knowledge;

– definition of management for each of the participants in the cluster partnership.

 

References:

  1. Bathelt H., Malmberg A., Maskell P. Clusters and knowledge: local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation. Progress in Human Geography. 2004. 28(1). 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph469oa.
  2. Da Rocha A., Kury B., Monteiro J. The diffusion of exporting in Brazilian industrial clusters. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 2009.
  3. Gertler M. S. and Levitte Y. M. Local Nodes in Global Networks: The Geography of Knowledge Flows in Biotechnology Innovation. Industry and Innovation. 2005. 12(4). 487–507. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13662710500361981.
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argumentative essay example

Productivity and How a Good Pen for Taking Notes Can Make a Difference

Hera are the 5 BEST PENS FOR TAKING NOTES IN YOUR COLLEGE CLASSES

A good pen makes a huge difference when it comes to taking notes. It is the primary instrument for recording your thoughts and observations, so you want to make sure that you are working with an instrument that’s comfortable in your hand, provides the right amount of resistance on the page, and flows smoothly across the page.

If you’re a student who likes to take notes by hand, you’re going to love the variety of pens for taking notes on ThinkTank.com. We have ballpoint pens with fine-line points, gel pens with bold points, and even erasable markers. No matter what your preferred writing style is, we’ve got a pen that’s right for you.

Think about it. The best pens facilitate creativity, organization, and productivity. Smooth ink encourages neat writing and attention to detail, both of which mean good study material. You can pen notes in used textbooks, too. Nothing beats the relief you feel when you flip to a tricky chapter and find some former owner’s notes clarifying the hardest concepts. The physical act of taking notes by hand helps you more effectively absorb info and make connections, and you’ll take better notes if you have the best pens in hand. Better notes = better grades.

These pens work great for me. I use them to take notes in class and they don’t bleed through the paper. I love that they come in so many colors and add a little bit of extra fun while taking notes.

1. uni-ball Jetstream Stick Roller Ball Pen
The uni-ball Jetstream is a 0.7 mm roller tip pen that will produce a highly pigmented ribbon of ink that dries so fast even lefties can end the day with smear-free fingers. They’re ideal for long lectures because they require minimal pressure from your hand to dispense ink in a precise, steady stream.

2. Pilot G2 Retractable Premium Gel Ink Roller Ball Pen
Though we admit to being a fan of a thicker, richer ink line, we also love the delicate point on these Pilot gel rollers. In our opinion, they’re the best pens for writing in a tight space, like when you need to label a detailed diagram or squeeze notes into tiny margins. The padded barrel is comfortable to hold and, like all good retractable pens, they make a satisfying click when opening and closing.

3. Zebra F-301 Retractable Ballpoint Pen
At just 0.7mm, this Zebra ballpoint is another excellent fine point option on our list of best pens for note-taking in your favorite notebook. The non-smudging, quick-drying ink is critical in situations when you’re cranking out notes from a fast-talking professor. Also, this pen is unique in that it has a smooth plastic (instead of rubber) grip, so it can slip in and out of pockets and pen sleeves without getting snagged.

4. Pentel EnerGel Deluxe RTX Gel Ink Pen
If you’re the type who utilizes colored ink to differentiate within your notes, these are the best pens for you. The vibrant colors dry quickly, and the tapered metal tip regulates ink flow regardless of whether you tend to press hard or apply pen to paper with a lighter touch. The saturated green and purple hues are will help some notes stand out without distracting too much from the whole.

5. BIC Round Stic Ball Pen
These made it to our list of best pens because they’re a staple in the Textbooks.com office. We’ve been out of college for a while, it’s true, but we’re big on creative meetings that require lots of manual note-taking. In addition to writing smoothly and drying quickly, another perk to these pens is that they’re ridiculously cheap considering the quality – so no friendships will end over any pen thievery.

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The House on Mango Street-Term paper

Term paper: Understanding Women`s Stories

Per Instructor must read paperback book “The House on Mango Street”, Cisneros, Sandra (1991); New York: Vintage Book.

Must Follow these instructions per instructor: This paper requires that you prepare an analysis of a female character (or characters) from the novel. The character analysis should demanstrate an applied knwoledge of a range of psychosocial issues impacting women. THE PAPER should address all the following areas. Please to address and include topical headings for each section 1 thru 8:

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Euthanasia Debate from Con-side

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Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan”

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Understanding of Cultural Differences in USA

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Patriot Act in terms of Airport Security

In the recent years and even months, the war with terrorism and homeland security, especially airport security, have been on the top of the list of priorities of our government. Many security propositions and initiatives have been passed in Congress. This is done to make the community of our country safer and strengthen our military force. Since 9/11, all levels and branches of government have cooperated to strengthen aviation and border security, stockpile more medicines to defend against bio-terrorism, improve information sharing among our intelligence agencies and deploy more resources and personnel to protect our critical infrastructure.

However the changing nature of the threats for our country creates a need for a new and government structure that would be capable of protecting our country from attacks using any type of weapons. President Bush has proposed the most significant transformation of the U.S. government in over a half-century by consolidating the current confusing patchwork of government activities into a single department called the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security will have in one place all the resources needed to do what it takes to protect our country. The reorganization of America’s homeland security infrastructure is crucial to overcoming the enormous threat we face today. Currently, the Senate is working to follow the House’s lead and establish a Department of Homeland Security.

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OJ Simpson Murder Trial

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US National Identity Card |Argumentative essay example

Ten days after the terrible day September 11, after attacks on Pentagon and the World Trade Center Larry Ellison, who at the time was chief executive officer at Oracle Corporation, started a political and technological debate. He stated that none of the airline traveling would never be safe again until all the citizens of the United States and also foreigners were required to show national ID card before entering a plane.

We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card,” Ellison said in an interview with San Francisco’s KPIX-TV.

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argumentative essay example

Animal Test Pros and Cons

Animals are often used as objects for various experiments and test. Any new human disease medicines are first used on animals, the new types of make has to pass the test on the animals first and surgeons practice their skills on pigs and dogs. I don’t think animal test is fair to put through the risky experiments to ensure that the medicine or other products are safe for humans to endure. Who measures the importance of life? We kill animals to avoid risk ourselves; I think there are no legitimate reasons for that. Animals have to have rights just as we people do, because they feel pain and emotions and if they look different from us, that does not mean they do not suffer or are ready to die.

It is obvious that scientists have to test the new products, but they would definitely come up with more accurate results if they tested medicine and other products of humans, since they are intended for human use. For instance, when trying to look for a cure for a stroke, scientist mainly used rats for test purposes. Out of nearly a thousand tests only 30 have worked on rats and eventually only three worked on humans. In my opinion we could find the right cures much faster and easier if we test them on humans. By testing the cures on our own species we would have more information on our body reaction to different medicines, rather than make thousands of experiments on species that have bodies and DNA very different from ours.

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Jervey Tervalon’s Novel “Understand This”

After writing his first and probably the most famous novel “Understand This”, Jervey Tervalon once said at the interview: “I’m trying to create a body of work focused on black life in south Los Angeles and the United States.” The main focus of his books is on the black life in south Los Angeles area. He writes in a documentary style leaving behind the entertainment hype. Jervey uses his talent and understanding of unfortunate truth of life today to express it in all its unpleasantness and brutality.

Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans, LA on October 23, 1958. His family soon afterwards moved toLos Angeles, California. This way he spent most of his childhood in Los Angeles. His father Hillary was a postman and his mother, Lolita used to work as a keypunch operator. Both of his parents supported Jervey in his striving for education and encouraged him to read and attend college when he reached the age.

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“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austin |Book review essay

“Pride and Prejudice” book by Jane Austin — review

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”(pg.1). This first sentence of book “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austin, is probably one of the most famous phrases in all British comedies concerning social issues. The story line goes about the matters surrounding marriage in 19th century.

Elizabeth Bennet is the main character of the book “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austin. She is twenty-one years old, has a quick mind, sharp wit and keen sense of justice. Her father, Mr. Bennet, spends most of his time in his library hiding from the rest of his family.