The summer holiday means I am absolutely immersed in my PhD. I mean from 7am to 7pm, reading, writing, reading, writing, coffee and regular two-and-a-half hour trips to London to visit the fantastic Educational Settlements Association archives (quite close to Kings Cross = only one bacon sandwich, hot drink combo from Greggs) and the Workers' Educational Association archives (quite far from Kings Cross = two bacon/hot drink combo from Greggs). At the latter, I discovered this fantastic piece of writing from my favourite education man crush, R. H. Tawney. I think I am going to have to crowbar a chapter about him into the PhD, which means more trips to London and the archives, ah all day in a library during a nice summer day. What can be better?
Anyway, enough of my ramblings. Get your pedagogical brains around these beauties, taken from a speech given by Tawney to the Co-operative Movement ...
Education has always meant not simply the accumulation of knowledge, or the perfecting of the individual through intellectual discipline - both great ends - but the uplifting of society through the inspiration of a common ideal.
and this:
Education is not a varnish upon life, but an expression of man's profoundest thought as to what is a right way of living.
oh did I mention that this educational trendsetter was writing in ... 1912 ... (perhaps not, my supervisor keeps telling me I need to add dates in for a History PhD 🤭) read this and tell me why we aren't reaching this lofty height 110 years later ...
To-day we are realising that the object of education is the development of a child's personality; that personality can be developed only by personality; and therefore that if we want to have an educational system worthy of the name, we must give the teacher a fair chance by seeing that the number of children in a class is sufficiently small to allow of every child being treated as an individual.
and another:
Psychology has taught us that there are many avenues into a child's mind besides books and that in the future we must adapt our curriculum far more closely to the needs of individual children than we have done hitherto.
I mean, I'm not one of those people who think there are no original ideas left but give the man some credit, he is systematically expressing the same pedagogical thought that we are exposed to as "new thinking" in our PGCEs.
"Why do I need to learn this?" we've all had that question slurred at us, right? Tawney has the answer ...
I am sometimes asked by critics: "What is the use of humane education to miners, and engineers, and weavers?" One retort to a person who asks such a question is to ask another: "If this is the way in which you think about education, what use has your education been to you?" But this is a retort which I am usually too polite to make, and the real answer is this. We do not want education for the workers, in order to make them better machines. We want it in order that they become better human beings, free men and free women.
Today, Matthew Goodwin is selling a fair few books talking about the role the elites play ...
Co-operators must stand for the kind of education which is needed in order to make free men and women. And in the second place they must stand for the abolition of privilege in education as the best guarantee of the abolition of privilege in social life. I should like to put it to you as strongly as I can that one of the main causes which in all countries impedes the advance towards democratic goverment - by which I mean a goverment in which all types of experience are represented, and from which all classes receive intelligent consideration--is the virtual monopoly of higher education by an extremely small class. The monopoly of higher education is, in fact, the buttress by which all other monopolies are protected. Men are really governed by ideas, and those who possess power are those who manufacture ideas and put them in circulation.
You have to search out the information yourself ...
The fact that such a narrow circle of experience is represented in the Universities means that their teaching tends to be based on certain assumptions which are accepted as true without any searching examination into their validity. These assumptions are reproduced in the press, are reproduced again in speeches in Parliament. The result is that an intellectual atmosphere is created in which it is difficult for any alien idea or any uncongenial point of view to struggle into life.
Finally
What is the remedy for this state of things? ... It is to see that all types of experience are represented in your educational institutions, and thus to create a body of opinion which does justice to the sufferings and interests of all classes in the community. It is to ensure that those who are capable of expressing points of view which have hitherto been neglected shall have a fair chance of the education which is needed in order that they may do so. It is, in short, to democratise the institutions by which knowledge is created, ideas are diffused, and the tone which public opinion will follow is set. It has been said that "no class is good enough to govern another," and I would add that no class is wise enough to do its thinking for another.
Okay, one more ...
Once a year it is my duty to leave Manchester to spend two or three months in Oxford, and as one walks among the lilacs and laburnums of that beautiful city, where the chief industries are the printing of books which few people read, and the manufacture of clothes too elegant for even an undergraduate to wear, one's mind naturally travels North, from Oxford to the furnaces of the Black Country, and beyond the Black Country to the pot banks of Staffordshire, and beyond Staffordshire to the humming cotton mills of Lancashire, and beyond Lancashire to where men hew coal in the pits of Northumberland, and beyond Northumberland to where they hammer riverts on the Clyde; and one wonders what is the ultimate value of an industrial system in which those who toil receive little joy from their labour, and of a culture from which the majority of one's countrymen are excluded.
Yep, I'm heading to his archives, let's see if I can find any more hidden gems.
R.H. Tawney's address was delivered at the Educational Meeting, held on Tuesday, May 28th, 1912, in connection with the Co-operative Congress held at Portsmouth. The address was entitled "Education and Social Progress". The full address is available at the WEA archives, in the London Metropolitan University's special collections, box reference number WEA CENTRAL/4/1/2/1.
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