Education in Manliness

The Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham

Malcolm Tozer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367487720
• eBook ISBN: 9781351065924
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education in Manliness explores the central educational ideal of the Victorian and Edwardian public school. The book traces the formulation of what Edward Thring, the most celebrated headmaster of the era, termed 'true manliness', noting the debt to the Platonic concept of the whole man and to Christian example, before examining the ideal's best holistic practice at Uppingham and other mid-Victorian schools.

The central chapters follow the tilting of manliness to the physical by the muscular Christians in the 1860s, its distortion to Spartanism by the games masters and sporting dons from the 1870s, and its hijacking by the advocates of esprit de corps during the remainder of the century. The book lays bare the total perversion of the ideal by the military imperialists in the years up to the Great War, and traces the lifeline of holistic education through the progressive school movement from the 1880s to the 1970s. It then brings this up to date by comparing true manliness with the 'wholeness' ideal of schools of the new millennium.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the fields of history of education and the theory and practice of teaching, as well as school and university teachers, teacher trainers and trainee teachers.

Chapter 1

The making of true manliness

I Plato: ‘Truth, courage and self-control’

John Stuart Mill once remarked that the Greeks were the initiators of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of importance in the world, and no history of nineteenth-century English education can ignore them.^[1] Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras the two classical languages dominated the curriculum of the public schools, generally taking more than half the classroom time. Most schoolmasters and clergymen had read the classics at the universities and, as late as 1914, ninety-two of the 114 public-school headmasters were classicists.^[2] Much earlier, Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1842, had brought in two innovations to the teaching of classics that had increased their popularity: first, he shifted the balance away from Latin towards Greek; and secondly, he used a mix of classics and history to explain contemporary social and political problems.^[3] Arnold’s reforms soon extended to most public schools and after 1840 the classical pendulum stayed firmly in the Greek sector. Thus the ideas of ancient Greeks, suitably filtered for adolescent consumption, came to provide the philosophical grounding and mystical support for all shades of Victorian opinion. Although only a tiny minority of the nation might learn Greek, and a smaller fraction took their studies seriously, the influence of the reading men was soon most persuasive.

The Greeks, however, did not have just one school of thought on education; in Athens and Sparta, for example, we have two highly contrasted ideals, though both drew support from the same epics of Homeric times. The beauty of Greece is that every subsequent philosophy can find at least one Greek original to serve as a platform on which its own developments can be built. Thus, in the sixty-five years of Victoria’s reign, Athens, Sparta and then Homeric Greece can each be shown to have its own Golden Age. The rise of the public schools and the emergence of athleticism from the 1860s owed much to Sparta, whilst the age of imperialism at the end of the century is decidedly Homeric; but both are distortions of the ever-pervading influence of Platonic Athens. It is a curiosity that as nineteenth-century public-school practice evolved, so it sought support from more primitive Greek models.^[4]

Platonic influence on all our thinking about the conduct of life is incalculable. If we sometimes underestimate our debt in these matters to Plato, it is only because his ideas have become so completely part of our best traditions. Platonic impact often goes undetected for we are never really free from it. Platonism is a perennial philosophy but in the first half of the nineteenth century it dominated English thought. Early Victorians felt a kinship with the Athens of the last years of the fifth century BC and they looked to this past for the key to the problems of the present. There was great interest in classical history, and the era saw renewed attentions paid to excavations of the sites of antiquity.^[5]

There are many similarities between the Athenian democracy and early Victorian England. Both were maritime nations and both had gained security after triumph in war: Trafalgar and Waterloo were to the Victorians as Salamis and Marathon were to the Athenians. Both had growing empires on which their commercial success was built. In name both societies were democracies, though in each case the democratic rights were shared by few: the slaves of Athens bear some similarity to the lower classes in pre-Reform Bill England. In both societies social unbalance was partly redressed by the political, educational and social service given to the state by the ruling aristocratic families. Both ruling classes were civilised and cultured, and paid considerable attention to the arts. Victorian England gleaned much support from Plato; he maintained that government should be by educated gentlemen rather than by technical experts. This inexpert intelligent ruler became the archetypal all-round, amateur administrator of world-wide fame. Plato was the gospel for most shades of Victorian opinion: Utilitarians and Radicals, Evangelicals and Tractarians, all drew on his educational thought as expounded in the Republic.^[6]

The Platonic ideal of ‘the beautiful and the good’, though it was realised for less than eighty years, left behind it an imperishable memory. The well-born Charmides was the exemplar of this ideal: he combined modesty with pertness, and pride with sensitivity. He possessed all the desirable physical, intellectual, aesthetic and moral capacities and they were tuned in perfect harmony: he was the ‘whole man’.^[7] The revival of this philosophy as the basis of Hellenism occurred in Rome in Christian times under Plotinus. Platonism passed into the Western Church from Plotinus through Augustine, Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Plato’s social concern matched that of Christianity and his philosophy was easily absorbed by the Church.^[8] Plato became the intellectual source for all Anglican theology from Richard Hooker onwards, through the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century – Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith and Ralph Cudworth – and right through Victorian times.^[9] This influence only underwent an eclipse under the Puritans but the interval was brief.^[10]

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Platonism, or rather the neo-Platonic philosophy of Plotinus, became the ‘lifeblood of Romanticism’.^[11]Platonism and Romanticism were the dominant creeds at Cambridge in this period, whilst Oxford had Aristotelian and Tractarian leanings. To S. T. Coleridge:

Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it is possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of men, besides which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.

(1830)^[12]

These men, the subject of David Newsome’s Two Classes of Men, dominated English thought throughout the century. F. D. Maurice, in doubting whether John Henry Newman was a Platonist, noted that ‘the great evil of everything at Oxford (is) that there is nothing but Aristotelianism’. Maurice disagreed with Coleridge as to whether a Platonist could become an Aristotelian: ‘all little children are Platonists, and it is their education which makes men Aristotelians’ (1836).^[13] A. E. Taylor took a step further: ‘Aristotelianism itself, on close study, is steadily found to be only a rather half-hearted Platonism’ (1925).^[14] In concert with the Romantic sentiments of the period, Platonism was seen as the natural philosophy: only the sophistication of an Oxford education could deflect a man from the true path. R. M. Ogilvie, in his study Latin and Greek, noted the re-orientation of classics from Latin to Greek in this period, and especially towards Plato and Thucydides. At the universities the changeover occurred in the 1830s when William Sewell began to lecture at Cambridge on the Republic; Oxford followed suit in 1847 when Benjamin Jowett lectured on Plato. Thomas Arnold was responsible for much of the change in the schools. At Rugby, Arthur Stanley studied Plato and Thucydides above all others and the same picture emerges from Shrewsbury School under Samuel Butler and Benjamin Kennedy, and from James Prince Lee’s King Edward’s School, Birmingham.^[15] Greek, and in particular Plato, became the staple diet in early Victorian public schools.

As the century progressed, so the Platonists came into dominance.^[16] The poets William Wordsworth and Robert Browning were Platonists and Thomas Carlyle derived his Platonism second-hand from Christianity.^[17] S. T. Coleridge was probably the greatest of the Platonic philosophers and he in turn inspired Frederick Maurice, Alfred Tennyson and Julius Hare, who at Cambridge formed a Platonist Club, the Apostles.^[18] The Republic matched Maurice’s dream of a universal Church.^[19] For Charles Kingsley, Plato was the ‘king’ of philosophers, and John Ruskin would read something from the Bible and something from Plato each morning.^[20] Of the later poets, William Cory and Matthew Arnold are two who glorified Platonism in their work.^[21]

Plato was born in 428/7 BC and died at the age of eighty or eighty-one in 348/7. His whole thought was directed towards how society could be reshaped so that man might realise his full potential. This forms the theme of the Republic. Plato was appalled by the sophistication of life in contemporary Athens and he sought to bring it back to a stricter Hellenic style: the Republic is a recall to simplicity. Plato’s ideal city, the Republic, is but one manifestation of man’s search for the ideal state, be it the City of the Perfect, Utopia, Civitas Dei or Heaven. His ideal citizen, or exemplar, combines the best of the legends of the past and all the hopes for the future. Each Republic has its own hero.^[22]

Virtually all idealistic theories of education can be traced back to Plato: the aim is to produce ideal citizens to play their part in the ideal civic community. Service was the corner-stone: within an ordered society each citizen would disinterestedly concede his own preferment and loyally serve others.^[23] Plato was convinced that happiness was the reward of virtue and that the virtuous life was the only pleasant one. It was not the having of strength, long life, health or wealth but the right use of them that made men happy.^[24] In this aim the state’s supreme function was education. Most importance was attached to the early years when the soul was plastic, and there was no distinction between the sexes. As Plato believed that the soul assimilated its environment, it was vital to surround the body with objects worthy of imitation. This was the basis of Plato’s educational practice.^[25]

The Greeks believed that the greatest work they had to create was Man and that the training of a noble personality was the prime aim. Before prescribing an education, Plato analysed the principles governing human life. There were three elements to a man’s soul: appetitive, spirited, and philosophic. The appetitive was concerned with the pursuit of bodily desires – food, warmth and so on – and was not involved in education. The spirited was the source of courage and self-confidence, and was realised in ambition and self-assertion. The rational or philosophic element embraced the pursuit of intellect and all learning. The balance of the three elements was essential and this harmony Plato termed arête.

The term is hard to define exactly but Harold Nicolson’s ‘balanced achievement’ is a fitting interpretation.^[26] The soul was to aspire to three virtues: truth, courage and self-control.^[27] It is from these virtues that the Victorian ideal of manliness stems so let us use contemporary sources to analyse their meaning. Truth – aletheia – implied all honest action, truth to oneself and truth to one’s loyalties. Courage – andreia – had animal bravery as its base but rose to fortitude under affliction and in adversity; it was also the courage of men who are loyal to the principles which have been inculcated during their upbringing. Self-control – enkrateia – was obedience to authority, whether the authority of a ruler or to one’s higher inner-self. Truth, courage and self-control are thus three aspects of the one Victorian ideal of manliness or, rather, they are the axes of a three-dimensional moral continuum: thus ‘endurance’ – of sorrow, pain, or illness – is the meeting point of courage and self-control.

The Greek conception of the education of the whole man is summed up in the term paideia. Plato defines this as ‘the education in arête from youth onwards, which makes men passionately desire to become perfect citizens, knowing both how to rule and how to be ruled on a basis of justice’.^[28] The word is derived from pais – a child – and originally referred to education of children, but in Hellenistic times the word came to signify ‘culture’; thus the means became the end to be achieved. A man’s paideia is his personal culture, the sum of his intellectual, physical, moral and aesthetic attributes that make him a whole man. Plato’s educational practice to produce the whole man was based on music – mousikē´ – and gymnastic – gymnastikē´. Music included literature, singing and playing instruments, and the plastic arts; it was central to Plato’s philosophy that beauty in nature and art were but an outward sign of goodness. Gymnastic aimed at simplicity of life and diet, and the maintenance of good health. Music and gymnastic did not separately educate the philosophic and the spirited elements of the soul: a good body would not by itself make the soul excellent, but a good soul would render the body as perfect as possible. Music and gymnastic were thus finely tuned to produce the perfect harmony of the whole man.^[29]

II Coleridge and Wordsworth: ‘Let Nature be your Teacher’

Whenever society feels that its roots are undermined by the modern world, there is a tendency for it to become introspective. Lessons and legends of the past are reassessed, enriched by dreams of perfection, and refashioned yet again in the search for the ideal society. To S. T. Coleridge at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the age of mechanical improvement and empirical science was being undermined by ‘talent without genius’ and ‘understanding without reason’. ‘We have purchased a few brilliant inventions at the loss of all communion with life and the spirit of nature’.^[1] Coleridge’s aim, and the creed of all Romanticism, was to recover this communion and regain this spirit. He thus gave meaning to all who followed for whom Utilitarianism was the antithesis of life, and he became the spiritual source for all nineteenth-century moralists.

Thomas Arnold had a great reverence for Coleridge and many of his ideals gained support from the poet’s Aids to Reflection. Through Frederick Maurice his influence was felt at Cambridge, Oxford and London: both Christian Socialism and the Broad Church Movement owed much to Coleridge’s union of religion and morality. Arnold and Maurice in turn inspired others. At Cambridge, Frederic Farrar developed a ‘boundless admiration’ for Coleridge’s work; at Oxford, Frederick Temple read him widely – ‘I have been reading Coleridge a good deal lately’, Temple wrote from Balliol, ‘and I can hardly tell how much I admire him’.^[2] Tennyson’s In Memoriam is seen by some as one of the fullest expressions of Coleridge’s religious thought.^[3]

In effect there were two Coleridges. The early poet and critic was the fount of Romanticism; the later Highgate philosopher was best captured in Table Talk. The former was closely associated with William Wordsworth, for it was in their momentous partnership of the decade...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 The making of true manliness
• 2 True manliness in practice
• 3 Athletic manliness
• 4 Imperial manliness
• 5 The survival of true manliness
• Epilogue
• Publications
• Index