1890: The Cult of Education
Jeanne d’Anatis
It seems—if one is to believe the latest learned pronouncements—that a cult begins with a charismatic leader, a narcissist of rare vigour, who founds a hierarchy of acolytes, and binds them through warmth, deception, and the studious art of appearing to care. How marvellous, then, that this diagnosis could as easily describe the directors of our nation’s schools as it might the robed prophet of Surrey who insists he speaks with the moon. The only difference is that the prophet’s followers eventually escape him; pupils, by contrast, become his replacements.
The Cult of Education, my dears, is the only cult that can send letters of recommendation. It parades under the noble banner of “self-improvement,” as though humanity were an exercise in carpentry and one might sand down the inconvenient corners of one’s soul. What do they teach, these apostles of the alphabet? They instruct us in obedience disguised as logic, and in convention passed off as truth. In the genteel cult of the classroom, one is told what to believe, how the world must work, and that one’s own doubts are the first sign of depravity. The chalk is their incense; the curriculum, their catechism.
One must admire the efficiency of their recruitment. The desperate and the uncertain, the aspiring and the introspective—these are the preferred sacrifices at the altar of Education. “Come,” they say, “be improved—be civilised.” Civilisation, we learn, is simply the art of agreeing with your examiner. Their so-called love bombing takes the form of praise for docility—gold stars pinned to the brow of conformity.
Mr. Ruskin tells us, with all the pomp of a man in possession of both beard and publisher, that “Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.” I can only reply that I have attended enough sermons and drawing-room lectures to conclude that such “behaviour” means sitting prettily while men parade their certainties like performing seals. And so we women are trained to know our letters, provided we never write anything that was not already approved by our husbands or headmasters.
It is, of course, deucedly clever of them to make knowledge itself seem a form of piety. Only the initiated may hold degrees; the rest of us must kneel at the altar rail of Ignorance, where we are told that the light of understanding would only hurt our delicate eyes. “Too much knowledge is unbecoming,” they say, as though intellect were an indecent ankle. The male fantasy of scholarship is not the pursuit of truth—it is the management of it. They lock up wisdom in mahogany cabinets, keep the keys in their waistcoats, then boast that we women have no talent for the thing.
If one were to draw up a chart of the Educational Hierarchy, what a fine cultic pyramid it would make! At its apex, the High Priest: a Bachelor of Arts who speaks only in Latin and sometimes forgets what century he is in. Beneath him, his disciples, who quote him faithfully without comprehension. Below them, the students, shivering initiates, taught that self-doubt is virtue and curiosity a sin. And at the base—the parents—who pay handsomely for their children’s unlearning, convinced that the nearer one approaches pomposity, the nearer one comes to salvation.
I propose, therefore, a reformation—not the Reformation of Book or Church, but of Mind. Let us learn as though no man were watching. Let us prefer inquiry to indoctrination, spark to syllabus. The purpose of learning, after all, is not to be well-behaved; it is to be awake. But the mistresses of the Education Temple fear an awakened pupil—it is precisely she who might rise from the pew and ask the unthinkable question: Why?
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