George Orwell and Education

Learning, Commitment and Human Dependency

Christopher Hanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815352822
• eBook ISBN: 9781351138062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

George Orwell and Education uses Orwell's life and works to address current educational questions. His early life, political awakening and artistic development are key elements in the book's presentation of Orwell himself as a learner, and as someone whose ideas continue to speak to contemporary debates about human interdependency.

The focus of the book is on critical issues in education, including the idea of universality, the status of young people and the nature of learning. Orwell's efforts to conceptualise, and artistically realise his own experience, create a platform for exploring current educational issues in their philosophical and political contexts. This book will encourage a reimagining of, and stimulate debate about an idea of education that is less individualistic, pays greater attention to human mutuality, is politically engaged and ultimately more sustainable.

The book will appeal to researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of literature in education, pedagogy, educational philosophy, literary theory, citizenship and youth and community.

Chapter 1
Universality

This chapter is concerned with the nature of our social bonds: Who are we, the sentient human animals who, understood as a collective, ought and must be able to live together?

Orwell depicted the individual and the social as interdependent but the connections are troublesome and fragile. This tension is particularly evident after the mid-1930s and the transformation of his political outlook that brought about a new purposefulness of artistic expression. Orwell’s treatment of two very different protagonists in novels between 1936 (Gordon Comstock) and 1939 (George Bowling), demonstrates a growing desire to understand other people, while his prose is interesting in its own right for its suggestiveness about inter-human perception.

Current educational literature mirrors Orwell’s concern with fragile human attachments, manifested in two senses of loss. Firstly, the sense of lost community symptomatised by social atomisation; secondly, the sense of lost economic security, manifested in widespread inequality and material precariousness. To think clearly about the nature of learning, theory, truth, childhood and practice, first we need to understand what is presupposed by the statement ‘all of these are important to us’. The word ‘us’ can refer to people connected by competition, but also to a collective ideal that transcends the particular.

Orwell often viewed life through the lens of the former, but the latter galvanised him artistically and yielded his most significant political actions. The chapter examines Orwell’s brief moment of radical idealism in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), in which he employs populist tactics increasingly used in current political debate. There is a brief review of the ‘Brexit’ phenomenon, which is located in the chapter’s discussion of economic precariousness. It is suggested that Orwell’s work reveals much to us about social and psychological precariousness, but more significant were the connections he made between political discourse and the uses and abuses of truth.

Beginnings

When I thought of poverty, I thought of it in terms of brute starvation. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. . . . What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether.

(RWP, pp. 139–140)

Orwell had been an imperial policeman in Burma from 1922 to 1927. ‘For five years I had been part of an oppressive system. . . . I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate’ (RWP, p. 138). During a period of leave from Burma in 1927, Orwell returned to his family in England and told his astonished parents not only would he not be going back, but he was determined to be a writer (Bowker, 2003, pp. 98–99). At the end of 1927 or beginning of 1928, he embarked on a period of ‘tramping’ and living in near destitution, in London, Paris, and then London again and its adjoining regions. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell said at the time of these forays into destitution, he was full of hatred for oppression but possessed little political knowledge. He says ‘I had at that time no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory’, and ‘I knew nothing about working-class conditions’ (p. 139). Crick (1980, p. 183) treats Orwell’s claims with scepticism, arguing that he must have acted from a mixture of motives. ‘Obviously he knew that somehow he would use these experiences for his writing’, but we ought not to assume this was the only or main reason. Crick (p. 182) suggests that already in 1929, Orwell was forming important political commitments that only later would achieve their fuller expression in avowedly political works like The Road to Wigan Pier. Bowker makes a related point about Orwell’s early development in Paris, where his writing consisted of both unsuccessful forays into fiction and some political pieces for French journals Monde and Le Progrès civique. These pieces reveal the ‘emerging consciousness of “George Orwell”, a man at this stage mapping a new mental landscape, forming a new creative identity, speaking with a new authorial voice’ (Bowker, 2003, p. 109).

Orwell’s characteristic motifs are clearly discernible in the earlier works, but were realised more skilfully and in greater conceptual depth as the 1930s progressed. A particularly Orwellian image appears in his first published book-length work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Orwell worked as a plongeur at a Paris hotel, where his duties included washing crockery for thirteen hours at a stretch, madly dashing around to prepare impatient guests’ breakfasts, and serving dinner to surly waiters at table. Orwell recalls,

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door was between us and the dining room. There sat the customers in all their splendour – spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce leaves, torn paper and trampled food.

(Orwell, 1933, p. 67)

Most characteristic of Orwell’s later writings is the sense of civilised illusion – the signs and rituals of bourgeois life are in some essential sense premised on their inverse reality. There is gilt-edged splendour in one place, precisely because squalor exists in another, but the squalor is hidden, and the gilded mind does not know it exists, or does not want to know. This sense of material interdependency, premised on a constitutive denial, is a key motif that I embroider throughout this book. In Chapter 6, which concentrates on Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, this denial is seen to be intrinsic in one of Orwell’s most famous fictional devices, doublethink.

At this stage however, I want only to re-emphasise the importance for Orwell of the missing signs of human mutuality. The quotation deliberately sets up an antithesis between how the humans on either side of the divide perceive and relate to one another. The idea that rich and poor, young and old cannot live together has long been an anxious topic of debate in the UK. I will briefly review some of this history in the next section, beginning in the late nineteenth century, before moving more explicitly to current debates around atomisation in public life and the discourse of precariousness. This historical context is useful for understanding what may have been Orwell’s formative influences, and for speculating about the causes of current fragmentation. The key ideas are, firstly, that economic inequality creates social fragmentation; secondly, there is a defensive reaction, whereby society protects itself from destructive economic effects.

Atomisation in public life

Industrialisation in Britain created great wealth but also great poverty. In the late nineteenth century, there was a reaction against the unequal society produced by the economic system. One commentator, C. F. G. Masterman, argued that mere competitive economic individualism was insufficient for a society that wanted to be both cohesive and durable:

The old astonishing creed that if each man assiduously minds his own business and pursues his own individual advancement and the welfare of his family, somehow by some divinely ordered interconnections and adjustments the success and progress of the whole body politic will be assured, may at least perhaps be relegated to the limbo of forgotten illusions.

(Masterman, 1973 [orig. pub. 1901], p. 50)

In the last decades of the nineteenth century preceding the appearance of Masterman’s The Heart of Empire, a ‘good deal of interventionist legislation had been passed… which could not be squared very easily with… laissez-faire principles’ (Vincent & Plant, 1984, p. 36). These principles had dominated political thinking throughout the nineteenth century, but by the 1890s, ‘periodic depressions, industrial and imperial competition from other states, and most importantly a growing knowledge of the magnitude of urban poverty’ (Den Otter, 1996, p. 149), had shaken belief in laissez-faire capitalism. Rather than viewing the state as a simple ‘night watchman’ of economic arrangements, there was a shift towards viewing the state as an active instrument for creating the right conditions to regenerate the lost social bonds and attachments.

This was accompanied by a new idealism that in various ways envisioned, theorised and practised the changes needed to restore the lost wholeness of British society. The most prominent figure in the movement of British Idealists is probably T. H. Green, whose work drew substantially on Hegel’s in attempting to ‘fashion Christian belief into a metaphysical system’ (Vincent & Plant, 1984, p. 8). Here, the ‘common good’ was conceived as consisting of, and being fulfilled by, the already existing beliefs, practices and activities of the population. The key point for this discussion is that the ‘common good’ is viewed as really existing, but dependent for its realisation on the actions of people. Conversely, people participate in and fulfil the ‘common good’ through their civic participation.

These ideas may have influenced the young Orwell (who was born in 1903) and shaped his later political thinking. As we have already seen, economic injustice was one of his great preoccupations as a writer. In The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Orwell makes a revolutionary appeal to ‘ordinary people’ that in some respects sounds like idealism – it is not typical of his outlook as a whole, but the mature fiction and political commentary are in various ways concerned with the political implications of lost collective meaning. Later in the chapter, these ideas are linked with contemporary political populism in northern post-industrial economies.

The defensive gesture against atomisation

The section draws on Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (2001). First published in 1944, Polanyi’s work analyses the

great transformation of European civilization from the preindustrial world to the era of industrialization, and the shifts in ideas, ideologies, and social and economic policies accompanying it.

(Polanyi, 2001 [1944], foreword by J. E. Stiglitz, p. vii)

One of Polanyi’s key arguments is that the early champions of free-market liberalism believed that markets should be decoupled from society and become self-regulating. This means that markets should not be controlled to limit their destructive effects on humans and nature. Polanyi’s analysis charts efforts in the late eighteenth century to liberalise labour markets. Against these changes, legislative and political defences were quickly erected (see The Great Transformation Chapters 6 and 7). This dynamic of market liberalisation and social defence continued into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remains an essential dynamic in current debates about the effects of neo-liberalism (intro. By F. Block, p. xxxiii). At this stage I want to emphasise Polanyi’s general contention that,

the dynamics of modern society was governed by a double movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself.

(p. 136)

I am particularly interested, then, in the idea that relationships of exchange, organised by markets, continuously assert themselves at the expense of social relationships. In reaction, social relationships reconfigure themselves to protect against the worst excesses of market exploitation. Orwell was obviously driven by a dynamic like this when he wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), a novel about the deadening through poverty of creative impulses. Gordon Comstock is the protagonist and an unsympathetic failed poet. Desperate for companionship, he nevertheless sabotages scenes of friendship and love, which seem to count for so little compared with the shame of poverty. In a typically agitated state with his girlfriend Rosemary, Gordon insists,

“Don’t you see that if I had more money I’d be more worth loving? Look at me now! Look at my face, look at the clothes I’m wearing. Look at everything else about me. Do you suppose I’d be like that if I had two thousand a year? If I had more money I should be a different person.”

“If you were a different person, I shouldn’t love you.”

(KAF, p. 125)

Gordon goes on like this, always with the same motive – to dismiss the pretexts of civilised life and assert the brute fact of money as their sole determinant.

Later in the story, Comstock has a change of heart. He seems suddenly to desire the respectable family life he has been rejecting. We, the readers have sensed these muted desires at play in the text, but they are not detected by the character himself. The key point is that these shifts in the character’s desire are psychological and social defences in the sense being explained here – as counter-moves against an exploitative, meaningless structure. The other, more general point here is that the defensive gesture is essentially structural and temporary. It is premised on a willingness to occupy a position rather than on the positive articulation of an ideological point of view. Gordon Comstock’s change of heart is essentially personal, not political. In time, Orwell’s political insights deepened and his characterisations became more substantial. This point will be later developed when Comstock’s narrative voice is compared with that of George Bowling, the protagonist in Coming Up for Air (1939).

We, the people

The main points so far are firstly, at the time of Orwell’s birth at the turn of the twentieth century, fears about social and cultural atomisation helped create a counter-movement, stimulated by an ideal of soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Universality
• 2 Young Orwell and the nation
• 3 Young people
• 4 Learning
• 5 Practice
• 6 Truth
• 7 Theory
• Conclusion
• Index