Scholarship in Arnold Wesker's 'The Friends'

... n'just t'lethee know that's, scholrship up int North ...

'MANFRED. Our trouble, Crispin, us lot, the once-upon-a-time bright lads from up north, is that we've no scholarship. Bits and pieces of information, a charming earthiness intelligence and cheek, but-not scholarship. Look at these books here. (He picks up a pile and throws them round him.) Renan, Taine, Kirkegaarde, Wittgenstein, Spengler, Plato, Jung, Homer, Vico, Adorno, Lukacs, Heine, Bloch-you've not heard of half of them, have you? And half of them, two-thirds, I'll never read. Do you know, new knowledge disrupts me. Because there's no solid rock of learning in this thin, undernourished brain of mine, so each fresh discovery of a fact or an idea doesn't replace, it undermines the last; it's got no measurement by which to judge itself, no perspective by which to evaluate its truth or its worth; it can take no proper place in that lovely long view of history scalloped out by bloody scholarship, because each new concern renders the last one unimportant. No bloody scholarship, us. And when I sometimes get a feeling that two people in love or one man afraid of death might be a supreme consideration, along comes this man with his 'we are moving into phases of creative disorder' and his 'everywhere the lines are blurred' and I've no defence. He sounds so right, I think, and besides-he's got scholarship. What's 'silly loving' and 'banal dying' in all that? Evil? You want me to confess to the knowledge of evil? I confess it. I say it-evil! So? And what  shall I do with that bit of knowledge?' p.18.

 WESKER, Arnold. The Friends. London: Jonathan Cape, (1970). Hardcover. First edition.