Old Schools

Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress

Ramsey McGlazer

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780823286584
  9780823286591
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823286607
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: Literature

Winner: AAIS First Book Prize

Old Schools marks out a modernist countertradition. The book makes sense of an apparent anachronism in twentieth-century literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in progressive pedagogical theories.

Advocates of progressive education turned against Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested means including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint.

Yet McGlazer's remarkable book reminds us that progressive education was championed not only by political progressives, but also by Fascists in Italy, where it was an object of Gramsci's critique. Building on Gramsci's pages on the Latin class, McGlazer shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, returned to and reimagined the old school.

Strikingly, the works that McGlazer considers valorize this school's outmoded techniques even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away.

Registering the past's persistence even while they respond to the mounting pressures of modernization, writers and filmmakers from Pater to Joyce to Pasolini retain what might look like retrograde attachments—to tradition, transmission, scholastic rites, and repetitive forms. But the counter-progressive pedagogies that they devise repeat the past to increasingly radical effect. Old Schools teaches us that this kind of repetition can enable the change that it might seem to impede.

1. Surviving Marius

Pater’s Mechanical Exercise

The sacraments were instituted for the sake of exercise.

—Hugh of St. Victor, De Sacramentis

Every school exercise … is like a sacrament.

—Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School
Studies with a View to the Love of God”

The Idol of Their School

To posterity, Walter Pater has handed down phrases. Today’s readers tend to remember only one or two of these: “to burn always with a hard, gemlike flame”; “She is older than the rocks among which she sits”; “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music”; “Failure is to form habits”; “art for art’s sake.”¹ Pater lifted the last of these phrases from Théophile Gautier and Algernon Charles Swinburne and coined the rest himself. All but one of them appeared in the first edition of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873.² Indeed, with this text Pater made his name, and he continues to be associated with the sound bites that The Renaissance contains.

These were effectively sound bites from the start, already verging on cliché when they were first circulated. This, at least, is what W. B. Yeats startlingly suggests in the Introduction to his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse.³ Here Yeats recalls that among Pater’s earliest readers, habits were, despite Pater’s own warnings against them, very quick to form; that the author’s aphorisms were right away repeated ad nauseam; and that the flame imagined in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance had no sooner been ignited than it had burned out, or at least led to collective burnout among Pater’s many disciples and devotees.

In light of Yeats’s claims, Pater’s late reflections on lines learned by heart, phrases worshipped, and “short rememberable sayings” put into practice are especially striking.⁴ These recur in the fiction, essays, and lectures—later texts that also return repeatedly to schools—that Pater wrote after The Renaissance and the controversy that it caused. Consider, to begin with, one such return, staged in an exemplary passage from the story “Emerald Uthwart” (1892):

Horace —he was, had been always, the idol of their school; to know him by heart, to translate him into effective English idiom, have an apt phrase of his instinctively on one’s lips for every occasion. That boys should be made to spout him under penalties, would have seemed doubtless to that sensitive, vain, winsome poet, even more than to grim Juvenal, quite the sorriest of fates; might have seemed not so bad however, could he, from the “ashes” so persistently in his thoughts, have peeped on these English boys, row upon row, with black or golden heads, repeating him in the fresh morning, and observed how well for once the thing was done; how well he was understood by English James Stokes, feeling the old “fire” really “quick” still, under the influence which now in truth quickened, enlivened, everything around him.⁵

This is vintage Pater. From the opening self-correction—“was, had been always”—to the convergence of old and new in the scene of schoolboys reciting Horace “in the fresh morning”; from the single words in arch quotation marks to the archaizing epithets (“grim Juvenal,” “English James Stokes”); from the repeated words and phrases (“row upon row”; “how well … how well”) to the thoughts that circle back to qualify previous thoughts (so that Horace’s turning over in his grave becomes his finding “quite the sorriest of fates” “not so bad”), the passage collects some of the author’s most distinctive tics and tendencies.

These constitute Pater’s own “effective English idiom,” a language that might at first seem to rule out the reception that it here describes. Who, after all, even “under penalties,” could learn such sinuous sentences by heart? Under what conditions could these sentences ever quicken or enliven readers, rather than trip them up or weigh them down? There is a heaviness to Pater’s prose and a laboriousness to the reading of it, as the ode to Horace that I have quoted attests. At the same time, though, at every turn the passage on Horace aspires to the condition of the “apt phrase” it celebrates. By means of the hedges and hesitations that the passage features, Pater’s sentences decompose themselves even while they compose scenes of schoolwide study and recitation. This was one charge leveled against Pater’s prose during his lifetime: “The unity of the book,” one critic complained, “is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, … the page is decomposed to give place to the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word.”⁶ Such a privileging of parts over wholes leads, by this account, to incoherence. But from another perspective the “independence” of the phrase makes it “rememberable,” repeatable (PP 198). The sentence’s decomposition makes it possible, in other words, “to know him by heart,” if only partially and never quite as well as the gifted James Stokes knows Horace.

Pater’s style thus “blends, or contrasts itself”—both blends and contrasts itself—with the scenes it renders in “Emerald Uthwart” (MS 215). And the content of these schoolroom scenes is as distinctive as Pater’s style in rendering them. Most significantly, the repetition of Horace’s verses is, for Pater’s schoolboys, first a thing to be “done”; only secondarily is the Roman poet “understood.” Learning by heart forms habits, and Pater delights in poetry’s outward performance more than in its inward significance:

One’s day, then, began with [Horace], for all alike, Sundays of course excepted,—with an Ode, learned over-night by the prudent, who, observing how readily the words which send us to sleep cling to the brain and seem an inherent part of it next morning, kept him under their pillows. Prefects, without a book, heard the repetition of the Juniors, must be able to correct their blunders. Odes and Epodes, thus acquired, were a score of days and weeks; alcaic and sapphic verses like a bead-roll for counting off the time that intervened before the holidays. (MS 215–16)

“Odes and Epodes” saturate everyday scholastic life. And the “bead-roll” or rosary that measures passing time becomes the sign of a continuity between “Roman bricks” and “Gothic stones”; “pagan” and Christian worlds; “uninstructed” and instructed times; Horace himself and the “English James Stokes” (MS 215). But the shading of “alcaic and sapphic verses” into “a bead-roll for counting off the time” suggests something else as well: namely, that in Pater instruction is ritual, aligned with what The Renaissance already calls “the unprogressive, ritual element” in religious observance (R 100).

For Pater, then, as for Simone Weil, “every school exercise,” in the old school of “Emerald Uthwart,” “is like a sacrament.” And “exercise” in Pater’s later works names a crucial function of the sacraments themselves. These are not primarily, then, institutions that secure belief; they represent “something to be done, rather than something to be thought, or believed.”⁷ Doing can, of course, lead to thought and belief, just as James Stokes can truly understand the Horatian verses he repeats. But doing comes first, and its primacy matters. Indeed, it gives a critical—and a counter-progressive—edge to what might at first appear to be a merely nostalgic or reactionary project.

This chapter undertakes to show that Pater’s prioritization of ritual over belief and of practice over understanding in education follows from his refusal of the liberal ideology of progress. Like their Enlightenment antecedents, Victorian versions of this ideology defined modernity as a liberating exit from convention and constraint, a means of achieving freedom from traditional bonds, outward forms, and various kinds of historical baggage. The weight of the past, of religion and superstition, of “illegitimate rulers, rigid traditions, and unreal fetishes,” could be shed.⁸

So liberal reformers claimed, and in his “Conclusion” Pater concurred. A break with convention is what the youthful—the famous, the familiar, and, I am suggesting, the naïve—Pater sought to achieve. To be sure, the essays collected in The Renaissance had everywhere stressed the value of tradition, and some had even extolled “limitation” as a virtue (R 106). But the singularly influential “Conclusion” sounded another note altogether. In prose whose programmatic fetteredness escaped most readers’ notice, eclipsed as it was by an epoch-making energy, Pater sided with the new: “What we have to do is be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy” (R 120). Nor should we be bound by convention, for “what is only conventional,” Pater wrote, “has no real claim upon us” (R 120).

Proclamations like these contrast starkly with “Emerald Uthwart.” Here “what is only conventional” is shown to be worthy of loving attention, even veneration: “The well-worn, perhaps conventional, beauties of their ‘dead’ Greek and Latin books … really shine … with their pristine freshness; seem more than to fulfill their claim upon the patience, the attention, of modern youth” (MS 213). The language of conventions and claims from the “Conclusion” returns here, but with a difference: “Emerald Uthwart” affirms what the “Conclusion” denies. The late text calls on “modern youth” to attend to—and, as the etymology of “patience” suggests, even to suffer from—the old, “well-worn” things and even the orthodoxies that the early Pater urged readers to outgrow. At the same time, the late “Emerald Uthwart” returns to the old school that had long been the target of progressive educators’ polemics. Pater’s late text thus not only revises his own earlier position; it also counters liberalism’s tendency to devalue the traditions that it relegates to the past.

Pedagogy occupied a central place in the project of liberalism, and the old school’s well-worn conventions were chief among the past practices that liberal reformers sought to leave behind.⁹ In his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill lamented that most students “have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by” the “knowledge drilled into them” at school.¹⁰ Such students learn merely to repeat “the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own.”¹¹ But here Mill himself repeated an opinion of Rousseau’s: that children should be protected from exposure to facts and phrases they are not equipped to understand. Such phrases, for Rousseau, stunted students’ growth and stood in the way of collective flourishing. The education that centered on such phrases—which was all traditional education, according to Émile—thus led to the creation of dependent subjects, rather than self-reliant citizens. Hence the founding stipulation that Émile should “never learn anything by heart.”¹²

Pater never explicitly seconded this stipulation, of course. Still, the distance that separates his “Conclusion” from “Emerald Uthwart,” and the early from late Pater, in this respect is remarkable. With its Émile-like emphasis on “Present interest,”¹³ the “Conclusion” echoes liberal and progressive discourses—and this even if The Renaissance as a whole everywhere engages with the past. By the time of “Emerald Uthwart,” though, things had changed: at the cost of any semblance of narrative momentum, Pater’s late text refutes progressive educational theories in a series of asides that find “value” in the very “classical education” that Rousseau and Mill opposed (MS 218). For the late Pater, the techniques of this education—learning by heart, the use of “penalties,” and even the inculcation of “Submissiveness”—teach first and foremost “the preponderating value of the manner of the doing it in the thing done”: “Just at those points, scholarship attains something of a religious colour. And in that place”—in that school—“religion, religious system, its claim to overpower one, presented itself in a way of which even the least serious by nature could not be unaware” (MS 218). Here again, religion marks the place where “the manner of the doing” trumps “the thing done,” and Pater affirms even what is apparently least liberating about “religious system.” This passage makes critical characterizations of the late Pater as reactionary seem perfectly understandable. Indeed, we might well wonder who but a reactionary could write such an apology for “authority” (MS 218). I have already begun to argue, however, that moments like these in Pater’s late works should be read otherwise in light of both Pater’s own “Conclusion” and the educational discourses to which, late in his career, the author responds.

Pater’s defenses of the old school, which abound in Marius the Epicurean and the texts written after it, represent retractions of his own youthful views and refutations of educational reformers’ projects. These projects culminate in the widespread effort to liberate “the school from mechanism” that I considered in my Introduction.¹⁴ Pater’s late work, by contrast, affirms the mechanical methods of the old school precisely: unenlightened methods based on what Mill calls “the phrases of other people,” on what Rousseau decries as mere imitation. For Pater, such practices become means by which to acknowledge the claims and the systems from which we are not free. These claims and systems are social, and they are old. The new school—in both Rousseau and Mill, a home school—centers, in theory if not always in practice, on the individual student and his “present interest.” What Pater recognized in the old school, by contrast, was its ability to sustain another interest, one not perfectly aligned with but rather at a “diagonal” to the present (MS 205).

This becomes clear early in “Emerald Uthwart,” when Pater’s narrator makes the all but explicitly anti-Rousseauist case for teaching “modern boys the Classics” “amid the haunts, the traditions, and with something of the discipline, of monasticism”:

The French and others have swept their scholastic houses empty of it, with pedantic fidelity to their theories. English pedants may succeed in doing the like. But the result of our older method has had its value so far, at least, say! for the careful aesthetic observer. It is of such diagonal influences, through complication of influence, that expression comes, in life, in our culture, in the very faces of men and boys—of these boys. (MS 205)

The breathl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: On Counter-Progressive Pedagogy
• 1. Surviving Marius: Pater’s Mechanical Exercise
• 2. Among Fanciulli: Poetry, Pedantry, and Pascoli’s Paedagogium
• 3. “Copied Out Big”: Instruction in Joyce’s Ulysses
• 4. Salò and the School of Abuse
• 5. Schooling in Ruins: Glauber Rocha’s Rome
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index