1880: Bishop James Mallard
Address to the tutors of Ducksin College
I am told one must not begin a lecture without a prayer—but as prayer presumes an addressee, and I am notoriously without one, I propose instead a toast: To the Department of Education, England’s newest experiment in the restrained mismanagement of innocence.
Now, one hears much of late on “educating the young,” as though they were a species of decorative poultry to be fattened with ink and grammar, to strut obediently through the nation’s examinations before being plucked clean by commerce. I confess a kind of admiration for this fantasy—it is pleasant, as all decorative absurdities are, and, like ecclesiastical architecture, perfectly useless.
Observe, if you will, that the stated purpose of education oscillates between two noble lies. First, that children must be furnished with “tools to navigate life.” Second, that learning ennobles them. Neither has any relation to the facts, which are dismal but oddly consoling.
Most Englishmen, I assure you, will never “navigate” much beyond their vicarage, factory, or farm gate—any more than a tea kettle navigates the hearth. And as for ennoblement—experience proves that reading a tract on the Punic Wars or the death of Socrates rarely prevents one from beating a horse or cheating a tailor. The human spirit is not improved by grammar any more than a cake is improved by Scripture.
I dare say, gentlemen, that the true function of the schoolroom is half sentimental, half strategic. Sentimental, because the public can now afford its conscience to bleat in public—“Let the poor learn, for we cannot quite bear the sight of six-year-olds in soot.” Strategic, because a literate labourer can be more efficiently deceived; he reads his own wage deductions and may even sign against them, lending the affair a papery dignity it would otherwise lack.
It was Dr. Cattermole, that moral economist of some obscurity, who remarked in his Treatise on Useful Children (1858) that “a well-spoken beggar terrifies no one but the illiterate.” The Government, ever vigilant in its pursuit of efficiency disguised as benevolence, took him at his word.
But there is also the question—what do we teach? One imagines a little boy in Durham poring over the conquest of Bengal. What use to him the intrigues of Clive or the cartography of Empire? He will never command a regiment, never divine the ethics of taxation by opium, yet daily he recites how the English conquer and “civilise.” Perhaps he is meant to feel, by proxy, that civilisation nestles within him also—an illusion most comforting to those destined to remain uncivilised.
Meanwhile, our Sovereign, God bless Her Majesty and spare her arithmetic, requires not to add nor subtract, only to sign and seal. The ordinary man, however, must count, if only to verify that the government has counted against him fairly. Reading, writing, reckoning—these are his trifles of liberty. Beyond them lies mere ornament.
Permit me an observation drawn from ecclesiastical experience. The Church—that industrious phantom which I continue, out of habit, to serve—has long taught that knowledge should lead the soul upward. Yet in my youth, when I confessed to the Archbishop that I had found no evidence of such a soul, he replied, “Then you must acquire a substitute—a sense of purpose will suffice.” Education, gentlemen, now serves the same role in our secular theology: it is the soul’s prosthesis, a diverting contrivance that spares us the discomfort of vacancy.
We are, I believe, engaged in teaching the child not what to know, but where to stay. Every diagram and declension whispers of boundaries. You may rise, little one, but only to your ordained ceiling; you may shine, but not too brightly. It is, in a sense, a marvel of social engineering. The aristocracy is secure precisely because the ladders are so beautifully polished—to climb them is to admire them.
Lady Hesketh of Marlborough once lamented to me (in the cruelest silk, I assure you) that “education makes the lower sort restless.” On the contrary, it makes them graceful; they learn to articulate obedience. I have seen a boy recite Cowper before returning to the docks, his diction as pure as his fingernails were black. One almost applauded—had not the scene been so heart-breaking or so inevitable.
If education were truly about enlightenment, the curriculum would be subversive. We should begin with the history of hypocrisy, proceed to the geography of falsehood, and finish with a practical course in self-deception. Alas, these are not examinable subjects. The Board prefers “Useful Knowledge,” by which it means the art of remaining useful to others.
I sometimes wonder—though I do not, as a rule, sympathise with pastoral melancholy—whether we mistake our affections for our motives. We love the image of a child bent dutifully over his book; it flatters our adult vanity that learning leads to virtue. But the greater likelihood is that we admire him because he is silent, abstracted, and harmless. A child working resembles a saint’s statue: tender, disciplined, and, above all, still.
Our philosophers have not been idle in defending this arrangement. There was the late Mr. Hewitt of Jesus College, who declared in 1874 that “education prepares the mind for grace, which is to say, it makes it aesthetically obedient.” A bold line—and truer than its author intended. Obedience is, after all, the only transferable virtue. Teach it early, and society runs like a well-oiled confessional.
Gentlemen, I am not—despite my reputation for blasphemous excess—opposed to instruction. I rather enjoy the spectacle of it. The classroom is the theatre of our national aspiration. Its props—slates, chalk, sloping desks—are sufficient for the performance. What concerns me is merely the script. Britain, the great improvisor, prefers to act a morality play while rehearsing a ledger. Were I less amused, I might call it tragic.
But just as the soul’s absence did not trouble the Archbishop, so the absence of educational sincerity need not trouble us. One must remember that hypocrisy, like beauty, is a moral lubricant. The child imagines himself a scholar; the parent imagines himself benevolent; the State imagines itself just. Only the teacher knows the fatigue of pretending that this is progress.
Should education, then, teach children “their place”? Inevitably—and perhaps mercifully. A society without hierarchical self-awareness is like an orchestra of soloists: intolerable chaos in the name of feeling. It is kinder, therefore, to instruct a child that he is born to serve—or to rule—or, more typically, to consent to both fictions in alternation. He will thank us later, if only for the predictability of it.
Do not mistake me for a cynic (I am merely an enthusiast for candour). To place a child among the basest of humans, as one might place a bloom in compost, is not cruelty but cultivation. From such soil, some rare and fragrant intellect may rise—and the remainder will feed it. This, too, is a kind of grace. England excels in it.
In my garden, there grows a rose of impossible decadence, the Rosa nihilica. It flourishes only because I prune it to the point of injury. I imagine our education system much the same. Each generation is lopped and wired into presentable shapes; the result is a national bouquet of docile beauty, faintly perfumed with despair.
Yet one must admire the arrangement. For every child forced to learn the wars of kings, one master gains a quiet pupil; for every virgin intellect unspoiled by thought, a state gains a faithful servant. And for every Bishop who dares remark upon it, a hundred newspapers gain their morning scandal. The machine turns, and we, its ornamented cogs, purr contentedly within.
And so, gentlemen, when next you hear Parliament debate the merits of compulsory schooling, remember: it is not the child who is being taught, but the adult who is being excused. We prefer to imagine the young as vessels of promise, because the alternative—that they are replicas of ourselves—is too dreadful to contemplate. It is the parent’s conscience, not the pupil’s ignorance, that is daily instructed.
But this confession is unfit for the pulpit, and only just forgivable in a lecture. Permit me, then, to conclude not with exhortation, but with an indulgence: continue your charitable subscriptions, your endowments, your faith in Progress. Let the little ones read, if only to preserve the illusion that someone, somewhere, is being improved. It keeps the Empire tidy.
The age is sentimental. One must humour it—as one humours the dying.
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