THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: Schools and Schooling
Scruton, Roger
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE Schools and Schooling " • H E SCHOOL WHERE I WAS EDUCATED from my l l t h t o my 17th year was an English "grammar" school-one of those old Tudor foundations that...
...My teachers had the opposite belief...
...Child-centered education proceeds by awakening eliciting, encouraging: the child should be exploring the world, and the teacher must therefore present him with things that are relevant to his interests and stimulating to a mind like his...
...Just down the road from us in rural Virginia is an old deserted cabin with a classroom, a tiny kitchen, and a toilet...
...Not that the situation is better in France, Germany, or America...
...But the principles on which it was run were not exceptional at all...
...A "post-graduate certificate of education" was invented, to provide a compulsory hurdle in the path of all who had made the mistake of learning something...
...Any other way of treating it, my teachers thought, would lead to its disappearance...
...She doesn't ask about the relevance or use of what she is teaching...
...And it is true that information, as currenflyconceived, is the enemy of knowledge-a mass of unsorted facts and factoids, pouring from the screen with the incoherence of a madman's monologue...
...Henceforth graduates with genuine competence in a subject could no longer teach in the public sector, It is true that information, as currently conceived, is the enemy of knowledge--a mass of unsorted facts and factoids, pouring from the screen with the incoherence of a madman's monologue...
...It is therefore right to allow them into the classroom, so long as nothing "relevant" occurs there, the mark of true knowledge being its total irrelevance to the world of a child...
...Those teachers were distinguished from their successors by two all-important characteristics...
...For them, if children are permitted in school it is in order to benefit knowledge...
...And that assumption was, by and large, correct...
...Our physics master had worked with Rutherford on the splitting of the atom...
...People had made the mistake, he thought, of focusing on the teacher, when the true object of education is the child...
...All that it needs is a child or two, an adult or two, and the thing that they spontaneously generate when brought together, which is the pursuit of knowledge...
...The question what to teach the young occupies many pages of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian...
...In Britain this battle took on a new form in the 1960s...
...A"professor of education" would have been, in their eyes, a creature as risible as a professor of television, of hairdressing, or of underwater basketball...
...Education, as an academic discipline, was itself shaped by subversives...
...The socialist government of Harold Wilson therefore devised a cunning strategy designed to give "education" an insuperable advantage over knowledge...
...And the mark of this triumph is the unchallenged belief that, if knowledge is to be permitted in school, it is in order to benefit the child...
...That is why Americans are right to turn to the home schooling movement, the first ray of hope for education since the state got its hands on it...
...None of those appear on the home schooling curriculum since it is devoted, by its very nature, to passing on the knowledge that the parent values, whether or not the child perceives its relevance...
...But that is not all there is to it...
...Examinations have been reshaped to endorse the new "relevant" curriculum, and when it is pointed out that 30 percent of British children now leave school unable to read or write, the educationists cheerfully point to the "irrelevance" of reading and writing in the "information culture...
...First, they knew nothing about "education...
...For Dewey education should be purged of all residues of authority, so as to proceed through the child's self-expression...
...Eliot, who had taught in the school in his Prufrock days...
...The graduate in education, competing with the pupil of Lord Rutherford for a job teaching physics, can say: sure he knows some physics...
...The teachers were graduates of the old universities...
...But it is worth asking why...
...Each school, whether in the private or the public sector, recruited teachers with knowledge, on the quite reasonable assumption that knowledge was its business...
...they can carry knowledge into the future and keep it from decay-they might JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE even add to it...
...Admirers of this preposterous book somehow fail to notice that education, as Rousseau conceives it, requires day-by-day one-to-one coaching from an expensive private tutor, whose devotion to the cause of knowledge has left him no time whatsoever to acquire it...
...and the music master was an amateur composer, friend of our local celebrity, the symphonist Edmund Rubbra...
...INCE THEN GOOD TEACHERS have been gradually driven from the system, often accused of"insensitivity" towards the needs of children, and castigated for the irrelevance of what they presume to know...
...T HAT PUBLIC-SECTOR SCHOOLS are not like that today, either in Europe or in America, goes without saying...
...some had returned from active service in the colonies...
...unless they had undergone another year of studywhich was not a year of study at all, but a period of mind-numbing indoctrination in official nonsense...
...almost all had wished to pursue an academic career, reluctantly accepting the role of schoolmaster as an honorable second-best...
...All attempts by the state to rectify the disaster are doomed, since they will be administered by the educationists...
...My hope is that, as more and more parents take up the challenge, they will gradually learn to pool their resources, to divide the labor, to share their expertise, and to produce that precious thing which has all but disappeared from the world of ordinary people--the school...
...one or two had held fellowships in Oxbridge colleges...
...Leavis, and the school library contained all of English literature, organized according to the system of T.S...
...The idea that there was such a subject--that there could be experts in education, theories of education, and recipes for putting those theories into practice--such an idea had never crossed their minds...
...No educationist has ever set foot in it, and no bureaucrat knows of its existence...
...The idea of education as a , field of expertise thereby gives the ignorant an insuperable advantage over the learned, whom they out-number in any case by ten to one...
...And they were right, since it did...
...But the idea that you could be an expert in education, while knowing next to nothing about anything else, is a peculiarly modern fallacy, and one whose appeal rests entirely on its subversive effect...
...Sixth-form English was taught by a pupil of ER...
...THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE Schools and Schooling " • H E SCHOOL WHERE I WAS EDUCATED from my l l t h t o my 17th year was an English "grammar" school-one of those old Tudor foundations that had become incorporated into the state educational system but which still retained, in those post-war - decades, the ethos of public service...
...Our Latin master, whose infectious love of Virgil made many converts among the boys, also wrote poetry in Latin and English, and was something of an expert on both Catullus and Yeats...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006...
...Of course, the school would do its best to ascertain that its recruits were competent in the classroom...
...Children have their lives ahead of them...
...Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum...
...The other great influence on schools of education has been John Dewey, a figure with an equally preposterous and equally apriori approach...
...Those who attended teacher-training colleges, however, who were by and large those who had failed to get to university, had encounteredvirtually nothing except "education...
...From the windows you see the Blue Ridge Mountains, surmounted by Old Rag, and in the foreground a horse or two...
...The most important has been the rise of"education" as an academic subject...
...The best of them shrugged their shoulders and went to work in the city...
...Sure, it was an exceptional school...
...To a child few beliefs are more useful than that the earth is fiat, that all children are victims, that mine and thine are indistinguishable, or that 2+2 = 5; few things are more relevant than pop stars, sitcoms, and advertising jingles...
...It takes its inspiration from Rousseau, whose novel Emile outlines a new form of teaching, in which knowledge is not authoritatively displayed but gently elicited, in a mind already poised on the brink of it...
...Thus there entered into schooling the two ideas that have destroyed it: child-centered education, and relevance...
...Competing for jobs with learned graduates they made it transparently obvious that they had nothing to offer save fashionable nonsense...
...The classroom has a blackboard, a bookshelf, and a few battered desks...
...But it would act on the assumption that, failing some accident like vampire teeth or a crippling stutter, knowledge would tend to pass of its own accord from the one who displayed it to the one who saw it on display...
...our chemistry master had published a textbook on hydrocarbons...
...It is from such costless resources that civilizations begin...
...Everywhere we encounter the triumph of "education" over knowledge...
...Like harmony and counterpoint, like Latin and poetry, like the laws of quantum mechanics or the theory of transfinite cardinals, knowledge, for them, was its own justification, and never needed to stoop to a use...
...Every place has its own gorry stow to tell, but in each countrywe can trace the decline to a few common fac48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 ROGER SCRUTON tors...
...but I know how to teach it...
...Add them to the campaigning zeal of the egalitarians, who have always hated learning since real learning discriminates, and the result is a deadly weapon in the battle against knowledge...
...When a mother sits down to teach her child, she is instinctively aware that her role is not to flatter ignorance but to pass on knowledge...
...Secondly, although they knew nothing about education, they knew an awful lot about something else: namely, the subject they had been appointed to teach...
...My schoolmasters had never encountered "education," since the only qualification required of them was knowledge...
...My teachers valued knowledge for its pristine uselessness...
Vol. 39 • June 2006 • No. 5
