A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things III: The Schoolroom

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

VII.      The Smallholding

Now we have imagined the sorts of homes we ought to build and the “Shadow Society” needed to protect the Permanent Things au milieu de le deluge, the very serious topic of education arises. Indeed, I had wanted to address it at the beginning of the last essay in this series, but there was an order of priority to observe.

No-one disputes “education” is absolutely vital to the maintenance and furtherance of society as a whole, yet it seems to me the whole concept is very ill-defined. What does it mean to receive “an education”? Is there any meaning attached to the word other than the vague or subliminal?

Chesterton comes to our aid, in What’s Wrong With The World:

But education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views, or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. . . Mr Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something – perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

Education is a method, the handing on of tradition. No matter what you are teaching, it is education, and it is, therefore, tradition. The most modern and progressive education in the world is a tradition, and therefore a demand upon the recipient. That might sound unpleasant to our modern ears – isn’t education about cultivating the natural genius of the child? – though perhaps it is less surprising now, as the Deconstructivist educational project parades its forces in the streets like so many Soviet tanks. Chesterton addresses this point too, of our fears that an “education into tradition” is forcing something upon the child:

The educator drawing out [natural qualities] is just as arbitrary and coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses. He decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be developed. . . The only result of all this pompous and precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes. Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we must accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is human.

So we know what education is. We know it is necessarily forceful – to use a present example, it is quite as forceful to teach children that racism is evil as it is to teach them that God is real. No-one expects “religion and ethics” classes to go into detail on fringe cannibal cults, or to give a deeply sympathetic hearing to white supremacist terrorism. Of course, as the Deconstructivists are clear-headed enough to acknowledge, this applies in every field. The books you teach in literature – the canon you thereby set up – pass on a tradition, an idea of value and beauty. The argument goes, after all, that we have too many dead white men on our syllabi.

So if we have concluded that all education is forceful, and no area of the syllabus can be “neutral” in the way we might sometimes pretend – though of course we may be fairly generally settled around mathematical operations and the findings of experimental science – we must decide what tradition we wish passed down in juvenile education, and why. That may sound a strange way to frame the discussion – surely we should pass down “good things”, and that’s that?

But of course as education is a method, different educations have different purposes. The education of a joiner ought to involve geometry and certain structural physics and physical hardening and precision tool use; that is a tradition, and a noble one, to carry on. But that is not what our 7-year-olds should be learning, and no-one claims it. What is the point of the education of a 7-year-old?

Prior to that age, usually and traditionally (there’s that word again), the focus prior to that is on the three Rs – reading, riting, rithmetic. These are very basic tools for engagement with the world. They provide a surprising degree of independence on their own – particularly reading, which in a sense offers the whole world to every man and woman.

Even in those first few years of directed education, there will be a “bias” in the types of material presented to the child – even concrete examples in mathematics will have a bent, with the familiar chosen rather than unfamiliar. Very few maths problems for six-year-olds ask anything like: “The Cardinal sends eleven men to capture the Musketeers. The Musketeers defeat four of the men before escaping. How many of the Cardinal’s men are left?” accompanied by a visual depiction of the battle. The questions are usually about portions of fruit. (More’s the pity.)

But undoubtedly the selection of materials for the humanities and arts becomes wider, more formal, and more directed as schooling goes on. It may be that there is an attempt at reading classic books to the children during carpet time, or perhaps something newer and glossier; they may learn “Frère Jacques” as a sort of introduction to French, or they may learn world geography via different dishes. Different instruments and musical styles will be listened to or even tried out.

The point is this: children at about seven or eight begin to be much more receptive to directive education, and can more consciously begin to engage with the tradition you are (necessarily) handing down to them in their schooling. This why the ancients often saw the age of seven as the a time to begin teaching; it is why Elyot and other Renaissance Humanists said the same; it is why in many Western countries now formal schooling doesn’t start till six or seven.

So, I repeat, what is the point of the education of a 7-year-old? Well, our great project is the construction of a Citadel of the Permanent Things, and no-one doubts juvenile education is of vital importance in the formation of wisdom, ability, and character in the child. Our educational project must aim to cultivate a love for the Permanent Things in the child, and an understanding of the true nature of the world. It must inculcate good aesthetics, a moral sensibility about events, a coherent understanding of the interaction between individual moral action, politics, and history, and so forth. Every education is training the child for one cause or another (even the “drawing out” of the natural genius of a child, on its own, is training the child for something – egotism). As this is a civilisational project, Western civilisational canons – in art, literature, and so forth – are central. Morality must match the wellspring of Western civilisation – “Judaeo-Christian values”. Given my own convictions, I would naturally add God Himself to the list, both as to His reality and His plain importance in Western thought and history. (Naturally, some of my fellow travellers may aver on the former quality!)

Before I offer our “imaginative objective”, we must assess, briefly, the current state of affairs. If – for some reason – our juvenile education already does the job described, then we need not tinker, and we may have great hope, because in the decades to come a great number of recruits will be joining our side in the fight.

Yet, of course, we know it does not. Even the fevered imaginations of the most demented Deconstructivists cannot quite pretend that what we teach now is the same – as evil, as wicked, as racist, as sexist – as what was contained in the education of Shakespeare, or Newman, or Arnold, or Lewis. There was a substantial identity in what they were taught, in mode, in subject, and in specific content; there is virtually no similarity between their education and ours. The only objection of the Revolutionaries is that the Revolution is not finished, and so their substantive grievance – over the very existence of the previous culture – is still unsatisfied.

The great canons are now to be finally dissolved – I saw a pressure group complain just the other day that the prominence in English Literature syllabi of Shakespeare, undoubtedly by far the greatest dramatist in the English language, destroyed racial and sexual balance in that area of the curriculum – and the growing demand from every quacking meat duck on the Internet is that history must be solely taught as a litany of the villainies of our ancestors. At the very fringe of the discussion, for now – but such is the speed of ingress we may quickly see even this insanity elevated to sober importance – is the suggestion that basic arithmetic and our concept of number is Western intellectual imperialism.

A new world is to be created through the means of education; it is mandatory in Britain that our 7-year-olds learn about the beauty and validity of all manner of family unit – not merely so that they are kind and accepting of their fellows from all background, but so that they know the changed public morality, even if their parents disagree. The British State, in its present response to coronavirus, is happy for young friends to play with each other if they go to state-approved nurseries, but not if they go to each other’s houses; childcare may be provided by state agents, but not by your brother and sister-in-law. This latter policy, of course, is only incidental to the present crisis, but it is perfectly exemplary of the Tradition being handed down. The State is mother. The State is father. The State provides; the State decides.

Now, remember that juvenile education only exists to provide a worldview – to create, in a collaborative but managed way, the future person. No education does anything else. If it seeks not to do so, it merely does so badly – like offering medicines at random to a sick person, without even describing their benefits. The education on offer from virtually every school in the United Kingdom – including most private schools – does not seek to inculcate a love for the Permanent Things into the seven year old, nor the seventeen year old. It is servile and not liberal, insomuch as it seeks as a matter of first importance to render the child practically employable, or at least move them on to University on the conveyor belt; it is moral, as all educations must be, but in a largely and increasingly immoral manner, not in any wholesome way; and, perhaps most contemptibly, it is barely thought through, being an almost random agglomeration over 60 or 70 years of every new idea, of a carousel of quickly forgotten new books, or the rising and falling in importance of subjects.

Of course, many teachers fight the good fight in the face of this; some few schools may take a much more morally, culturally serious view of the matter; there are noble projects afoot to provide better education for future generations (I know of one nascent Classical School in the West Midlands). But the fact of the matter is that the parent looks out upon a darkling plain, and chaos, and dark intellectual violence. For the one who avows allegiance to the Permanent Things, it is virtually inconceivable to send a precious child – one’s own Tradition transmitted to posterity, in double-helix – into the jaws of Leviathan, faintly hoping that the few hours they have at home each evening are enough to buttress an utterly decrepit, nigh-collapsing cultural edifice, or counteract the poison of the snakes in the grass who now rule the whole field. For most of us, home education is the only escape (so, naturally, three-quarters of the political class are now calling for that to be onerously regulated out of prospect).

Yet I shall still spin the imaginative alternative – not that it can be quickly accomplished, though I hope it might provide inspiration for parents building domestic monasteries, complete with a homeschool, as arks amidst the floodwaters – but because we must know at that which we aim. We must know what body of learning to attain and conserve and propagate, what human scale to aim at, and what moral purpose to attain. If those of us who are young now are to hope to build schools in our senescence – or to see our grandchildren do so, victorious at last – we must dream now.

I have defined three decisions to make: the BODY OF LEARNING, the SCALE, and the MORAL PURPOSE. Let us begin with the second of those.

The scale must be a HUMAN SCALE. A class of 30 may seem inefficiently small to Mr Gradgrind, but it is a creation of his type. It may just about do for a class of clever and motivated children, but nobody else. It is industrial in scale, packing in the meat until harvest, sending it out to the consumers pale and drained of real value. It is a subversion of the family, inverting the social priorities proper to all children. It is justified by every false economy possible – as if a child in 1700 wasn’t “socialised” because they didn’t attend an air-conditioned warehouse daily! We have, thank God, vastly improved the prospects of their physical health in that time, whilst making every effort to degrade their moral health.

No – the scale must be proper to the task, which is to render our children ever more human, ever more connected to real things, ever more alert to transcendence. Now, of course, homeschooling or small private schools answer this in part; but let us cast our thought forward. We must provide for small-scale, bespoke education. Children must be able to follow their natural bent, and have plenty of free time in which to explore the world. Their specific strengths and weaknesses must be addressed not as “one of thirty”, but in their own right. They must not be to the teacher a paperwork burden; they must be an object of craft.

All societies have social gradation, and our imagined future will own the fact – therefore we must imagine two contexts, for the richer and for the poorer parent. Both must be healthy and good; a social design which neglects the education of the poor (as ours does, and has since the evisceration of Grammar Schools) deserves to die a death.

Naturally the richer man’s children can enjoy the benefit of household tutors and governors. That “school” can be operated on the scale of the household with every benefit attaching. The structure of the school day can be thoroughly flexible in such a case – with ratios of 1:1-1:4, each child can comfortably attend to their own personalised studies, seeking help where needed, without requiring the whole group to be corralled.

Wider social mixture can be found with other households, in church, and elsewhere; shared learning is certainly possible, with joint trips. But the richer man can afford the violin and violin teacher off his own back – his house-school can be fundamentally self-contained.

What of the less rich mother or father who desires to teach at home, to emphasize the natural unit of the household, to enjoy that time with their children, to direct the flow of their education? A network of home-school co-operatives – like those that already exist – is vital to this. Formal, state-supported networks of parents committed to this project would allow the pooling of resources beyond the individual household – so that every child can have access to musical and artistic opportunities gratis, and be able to lounge in a comfortable library surrounded by good books (which never get expelled for never being read), and gain quality teaching in those areas on which their parents demur. If I am not a confident physicist, that does not disqualify me from managing my child’s education, as the State-adoring pigeons would claim; it means I must seek specialist help. In a healthy society, why should this process not be state-supported?

Finally, we must reckon with the need for schools. There will be parents who, for one legitimate reason or another, are simply unable to directly manage their children’s education; there will be orphans; there will be the children of derelicts. Indeed, we must assume that a small majority or very large minority of children will still require at least partial schooling outside of the home. The great challenge here is how to retain a human scale. The great difference between our time and that of Shakespeare is the sheer quantity of people to be educated. Yet of course the solution lies in the statement of the problem; we must simply embark upon a dramatically ambitious teacher training programme, centred on a transcendent and beautiful canon and morality, to provide many more teachers than today, each fit to both pour much more in to their students, and with much more relative independence. Now we have a diffuse and garbled curriculum, with endless flexibility, but where it comes to management, the control maintained by leadership is crushing; we need the precise opposite.

We need teachers for the Village School and the Grammar School. Even in an urban context, categorically no great moral value can be assigned to the agglomeration of children from a wide area into the industrial process; why not rather build many smaller schools, constructed from fine materials, with airy, high rooms? A Village School for every urban neighbourhood! We have all seen the merging of schools, the aim for the economy of scale (again, children-as-units-of-production); we must reverse this. Now it will be argued that this will surely only multiply the paperwork, and our new corps of teachers will be sucked under by each needing to act as a Head or Deputy Head – but of course most of the paperwork of the Late Nanny State will be consigned to oblivion. Given it has not conduced to the teaching of better moral character or aesthetic judgement, and even improving results are a mere fata morgana operating on our reduced ambitions and requirements, we will lose very little by binning 90% of the bureaucratic superstructure.

No. Let there be thousands of little schools built, each with at most a half dozen staff. Set aside a lovely garden for each building. Let the teacher once again truly rise in social estimation – not as an object of state-ordained reverence, but as a stakeholder and necessary leader of the local community. The Inspectorate for such schools would need much less expansion than the teaching staff, unless we judged that we wanted to render much more “roaming help” to those schools (and well we might).

What about the BODY OF LEARNING? There are three requirements: that it be uniform, that each element be proven, and that the whole cultivates the mind and soul.

It must be uniform because the whole point of education is to transmit a world. A shared body of learning offered a shared world; that shared intellectual world, drawn largely from the past, becomes the shared lens by which we consider the present world we physically share. We accept the importance of shared experiences, bafflingly, when it comes to popular culture consumption, but not when it comes to education. No – for the first several years of formal education, we should teach our children a smaller, narrower curriculum, the contents determined by the two remaining requirements. We can excel at training teachers in teaching this smaller body of learning; there can be a much higher quality of discussion upon it; children will in due time be able to discuss these very topics with their parents and grandparents, who learned them aforetimes. We will discover that the less learned the better, if it be better learned.

The body of learning must be proven. “Canon” means “rule, measure”; what we pass on must have proven itself in fair and open battle, over many decades and centuries, to be worthwhile. Let discerning adults read and analyse the latest novels. The vast majority of the body of learning must be made up of cultural classics. What is longest proven, of course, is the learning of Greek and Latin – mentally disciplinary subjects which then provide the ability to read many of the greatest works on politics and philosophy, a great share of the greatest literature, and some fine histories. Why shouldn’t every bright child begin to pick up some of these old languages from the very earliest time? Why not at 7, or 9? Even a smattering is elevating.

Similarly, there will be no shame about affirming a canon largely made up of “dead white men”. Indeed, I should say that – in literature, history, and other arts and humanities – the first of those qualities is virtually a requirement. Only the very greatest and longest-lived writers become benchmarks in their own lifetime. The moss must grow on their graves before most writers can be judged. Today’s artistic darling is very often forgotten tomorrow, if not tonight. This does not prevent us from including a small selection of cultural classics from elsewhere, especially from integrated migrant cultures; the Bhagavad Gita is old and noble and strange enough for a British child to relish. Only an obsession with novelty, a chronological snobbery, leads us to eschew the classics and constantly update the curriculum. Of course we will need some new textbooks, and a rotation of reading for younger children including some newer books, but when we read in Elyot that the 7-year-old should begin with the Iliad, we must ask ourselves the question: do we believe our children thicker than hose-wearing smallpox-ridden medievals? If we are to be true chronological snobs, we really ought to read even more highly than they did; if we are to be humble in the face of eternity, we ought to bow to their proven judgement. They produced Shakespeare, we produced Rupi Kaur.

It must also be a cultivating body of learning. We do not simply want a body that is uniform and contains good writing. We want to structure learning to inculcate virtue; remember, the Deconstructivists want this too, only they want anti-virtue instilled. We want our children to read of bravery and know how to be brave, and to read of decency so as to learn decency. The order and manner in which we teach the canon must encourage courtesy, social order, courage, kindness, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, home-building, child-raising, God-fearing. We must therefore order our teaching to accomplish this. This is also a secondary way of demonstrating the provenness of a book; Ovid and Byron are obviously great, but their more adult works are not what must be presented to the 9-year-old. The same applies even more clearly to visual arts. As an aesthetic sensibility must be cultivated, but cultivated carefully and morally, trained like a delicate flowering plant up the manse wall, we must be sure not to overstrain the plant too early; we must not gorge the child with a surfeit of rich aesthetic nourishment, or demand stern moral insight from those still forming their analytic capacity.

Under the head of cultivation it is worth briefly commenting on the ways in which the body of learning is to “connect” – within itself, and to the world around the student. If the whole purpose of education is to gift over a world to the child – and, for the Christian, specifically order them in relation to God – then each subject must connect. Each subject is not some separate box of papers replete with knowledge, but essentially its own empire; there is only one subject, and that is Wisdom. Every topic must connect. It is useful, then, to look to topic-based rather than subject-based learning in as many instances as possible (once basic literacy and numeracy are established), teaching meaningful geography alongside history, for instance. Why has the Walloon plain been vital in wars since before the Renaissance through to the Second World War? Why was there a Rush for Africa, and why is China assaying the same now – and does it have anything to do with the continent’s vast mineral reserves? Geometry can be taught alongside architectural theory; for the warlike younger boy, much mathematics can be brought in by way of military exemplars. Why not study Marlborough’s campaigns by way of not just narrative but statistics, geometry, and so forth? Why not teach probability via a simple wargame of Blenheim? Why not turn formal logic to the analysis of the public declarations of the Sun King and his opponents? All this, of course, becomes vastly easier when teaching on a non-industrial scale, as teaching can be catered to the child in this respect.

Our last great requirement was a MORAL PURPOSE. Education always has some moral aim and purpose, we have established. Part of the purpose is the inculcation of the standard: honour God, protect the weak, preserve order, love beauty, and so forth. But there is a practical purpose, too. The man or woman of a rich, connective, classical education is a free person; they are fit to be freemen in the Kingdom. They can manage or own property in a trustworthy manner. They share with each other a worldview which allows effective collective action. They have not been trained on passing fads, and so may take a long view of matters; they know that there is a time rising and falling, joy and sorrow, sowing and reaping. They are secured to the anchor of their ancestors – they can turn to Lewis, Newman, Burke, or Shakespeare, and know that they have sat in the same classrooms and imbibed the same air. They can even look to old Augustine and remark, as they read the Confessions (perhaps in Latin!), about how much knowledge they share, how many joint delights they have had, and how similar their moral imagination is.

If education now produces half-conceited half-despairing units of economic production, intellectually unarmed for the fight, lacking analytic skills but having been provided a surfeit of half-baked analysis – well then, let us provide an education which morally orders the child, which accepts the need for trade skills but categorically defines them as secondary to the cultivation of the spirit, which renders every man and woman as capable of freedom as they can be, and which moreover enables them to pass on the same to their children and grandchildren in turn.

Let us, then, imagine the scene: we see the tiny urban school in front of us. The Khans and the Johnsons each send their little brood there each morning, limited as they are by health and employment concerns. A few other children gather. Their two teachers do the headcount and bring the children to the carpet. The day begins in prayer, and turns to studying the Anarchy. We hear of Empress Maud’s determination and King Stephen’s overkindness to her; we learn about the battles; we consider how a monastery at the time would have worked (perhaps with mention of a certain clerical detective); we look at how Stephen’s father went off on a Crusade.  Some of the children wish to put on helmets and shields and pick up swords and pretend to refight Lincoln – so one teacher takes them out to the garden, an excellent excuse for what used to be called P.E. Other children wish to colour in or annotate maps of the monastery they learned about – in fact, one of them takes to a writing desk to write a story. One of the children really struggles with reading, and so – with the other children temporarily occupied, at least when they’re not skirmishing over crayons – the other teacher reads from the Children’s English History they use.

In the afternoon, after a hearty lunch, other topics are brought in – though on the day’s theme. Latin drills might centre around words to do with God or worship; what did those old monks say in their prayers? Sturdy wooden blocks and plastic bricks are brought out to build castles and monasteries, according to set plans, with counting and geometry necessary – indeed, the older children are called to design their own and ensure the thing can stand after building.  The day finishes by listening to some troubadour music, and then making their own (finally, an acceptable excuse for a teacher to bring a guitar in to school!).

Meanwhile, at thousands of other tiny schools in the city, something similar is happening. The Kings and Queens are memorized, the tale of our folk learned by heart. The more curious children – of whatever age, sharing as they do a classroom with many a mixed age group – begin to ask questions of the constitution. Why ought a King or Queen inherit, and when? The most alert and mature might be directed to Fortescue, or at least a little primer. As these children grow, they will have a shared body of learning with nearly all of their neighbours, allowing a cultural idiom to arise which is hearty and healthy; it will value and validate the Permanent Things, teaching reverence for home, aspiration for wisdom, and moral virtue. They will be men and women fit to secure their nation's place in the world, to deserve the ordered liberty that they will contribute in building, capable of joy and restraint. They will be Permanent People.

Of course, that is the future; we are led there by dreams. How may we begin today? What writing or teaching or campaigning or building can you contribute to the cause today?