Philosophers as Educational Reformers (International Library of the Philosophy of Education Volume 10)

The Influence of Idealism on British Educational Thought

Peter Gordon, John White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415564748
• eBook ISBN: 9781135170950
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume assesses how far the ideas and achievements of the 19th century British Idealist philosophical reformers are still important for us today when considering fundamental questions about the structure and objectives of the education system in England and Wales. Part 1 examines those ideas of the Idealists, especially T. H. Green, which had most bearing on the educational reforms carried out between 1870 and the 1920s and traces their connection with the philosophy and educational theory of Hegel and other post-Kantians. Part 2 is an historical survey, concentrating on the innovations in the organization and contents of education in England and Wales brought about by the administrators and educationists educated in philosophical idealism. Part 3 considers what relevance the philosophical and practical ideas of this interconnected group of reformers have to education today.

part 1
Philosophical idealism and education

1
Introduction

British philosophical idealism of the late nineteenth century was founded on the philosophy of Hegel and drew its inspiration also from the thought of Kant and Fichte, and, more anciently, from Plato and Aristotle, all four of which writers had contributed much to Hegel’s thought. Between Hegel and the British idealist whose work will figure prominently in this volume, T.H.Green, there are, of course, considerable differences, both in conclusions and in arguments. But they both hold certain beliefs in common. For both of them reality is not to be identified with the physical world or even with a dualist combination of a physical with a mental world: reality is essentially mental or spiritual. What we call the realms of matter and mind—the everyday world of physical objects on the one hand and the everyday world of our thoughts and feelings on the other—are not the ultimate, irreducible constituents of reality. To understand the physical world, we have to look behind it to the foundation on which it rests, that in virtue of which it is what it is. This foundation is thought, not the thought of individual human beings, but an eternal consciousness (or God, or Absolute, or Spirit), existing outside time and space. Man, as well as the world he lives in, is also linked to the eternal. His link is more intimate. For man, unique among animals, is capable of reason. Qua thinker he becomes a part of or a reproduction of the eternal thought which underlines all things. But man is essentially a social creature. His being is inseparable from that of the state, the political community within which he lives and which includes smaller-scale social groups, such as the family, to which he belongs also. Man is, therefore, connected to reality as a whole not as an independent individual, but as a participant in a shared social and political life, that is, as a citizen of a state. His education, which is the means whereby he becomes a citizen, is thus one of the state’s foremost concerns. For at least the spiritual and political leaders of the state —and, as we shall see, in Green’s case, for others too—it is at the same time an intellectual education, developing their powers of thought so that they come to partake of eternal thought: in this way the state will be able to realize its proper fuction, of mediating between the human and the divine.

This conception of the links between nature, man, the state, and God will have to be filled out, with reference to the British idealists in particular, in later sections. But even this sparse account of the connexions is enough to show us how very different from the prevailing metaphysical and social ideas of mid-nineteenth-century Britain the new idealism was. The dominant thought of the time, deriving from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, was empiricist, individualistic, utilitarian. While the idealist saw reality as an organic, interconnected whole, no part of which was independent of the rest, the empiricist saw it as an aggregation of atomic entities, the physical atoms of Newton and Locke and/or the sensations, or ideas which were the atoms of the mind. Each atom could be understood, and could only be understood, in isolation from the rest. Science, physical or mental, was to begin from these irreducibly simple entities and show how they are associated together to form more complex phenomena. Man was one example of such complexity. While the idealists saw him as essentially a part of a community, the empiricists held him to be essentially an independent, a-social individual, complex in relation to the physical and mental atoms of which he was constituted and in terms of which he was to be understood, but atomic in relation to the other individuals with whom he was associated in a society. On this view the state was not a community of citizens sharing a common good, but a kind of machinery of government instituted to preserve the liberty of the individual. The ethical principle of utilitarianism—that man should aim at bringing about his own and others’ happiness—was not derived from reflection on man’s social and spiritual nature, but from his innate tendency, in common with other animals, to seek pleasure and shun pain. In educating children, consequently, one’s master-aim was the promotion of the general happiness. There was no theoretical reason why the state should do anything to promote this education.

Nothing could be further from this prevailing orthodoxy of the mid-nineteenth century than the idealism which was to challenge it and for a time upstage it between 1870 and 1920. But idealism did not burst upon the old order quite unheralded with the publication of the first British neo-Hegelian philosophy around 1870. The previous half century had already witnessed a growing dissatisfaction, both among literary men and among theologians, with the old Enlightenment order. Carlyle’s was the most powerful voice, declaiming in tones which tend to jar on our modern ears, but which deeply affected his contemporaries, against the absence of spiritual values in the new industrial society. Though too unsystematic a thinker to be called a philosopher, Carlyle’s leading ideas were philosophical none the less, being inspired directly by German idealism, especially that of Fichte. This metaphysics— Kant’s and Schelling’s, perhaps, more than Fichte’s—was also the source of Coleridge’s religious and political thought. It is via Coleridge that Wordsworth came to incorporate in his poems the idealist conception of the spirituality of nature and hence its educative influence. Coleridge’s Church and State (1830) took over from the idealists the thesis that the state is a spiritual entity, mediating between man and God. Just as Fichte argued for a class of scholars to devote themselves to raising the spiritual level of the state, not least by their educative influence on the rest of the population, so Coleridge, for similar reasons, advocated a ‘Clerisy’, that is, a large body of clergymen, scholars and teachers who were to form part of a ‘National Church’, engaging in scholarship, advanced teaching and more general parochial work of an educative kind, thus leaving no corner of the country ‘without a resident guide, guardian and instructor’ (Willey, 1949, p. 46, quoting from Coleridge, op. cit.). State funds were to be provided to support the work of this National Church.

Coleridge’s belief that the Anglican church, though imperfect, could, through its network of parochial influences, as well as through its dominance in educational, especially university circles, provide a foundation for a Clerisy, was taken up by two leading religious thinkers of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Arnold and F.D.Maurice. Arnold is known to us today as the prig lampooned by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians. But Strachey’s perception was cruel and one-sided, doing less than justice to Arnold’s creative role in nineteenth-century social reform. Like Coleridge before him and like the Rugbeian R.H.Tawney in our own times, he deplored the separation of secular affairs from spiritual, opposing the divorce which evangelicals and puritans made between them and advocating a ‘Broad Church’, that is a liberal Anglicanism which could embrace other forms of Protestantism within it. Church and state were an indissoluble unity. Like Coleridge, and again like Tawney, Arnold wanted part of the national wealth ‘saved out of the scramble of individual selfishness and set apart for ever for public purposes’ (Willey, p. 57, quoting from Arnold’s Principles of Church Reform). In Tawney’s age such funds would be used for what would then be considered the purely secular activities of a welfare state. To many of us today Arnold’s view that more public money should be spent on the Establishment, in the shape of the Anglican church, may seem reactionary. But his end—the spiritual enlightenment of the nation—was the same as Tawney’s. Like Coleridge, he saw the educational possibilities of having a Christian scholar in every parish. In his work as headmaster of Rugby, imbuing his pupils with the gospel of hard work, not for purely intellectual but for the higher moral and spiritual ends to which these were subordinate, he helped to give the idea of ‘Clerisy’ a practical embodiment.

F.D.Maurice was another disciple of Coleridge, important as the co-founder, with Kingsley, of ‘Christian Socialism’ in 1848. Maurice shared many of Arnold’s ideas: latitudinarianism, a belief in the spirituality of the state as expressed through a national church, a passion for education. His ‘socialism’, inspired by the revolutionary fervour of 1848, led him to advocate co-operative rather than private ownership of capital and to work with co-operative associations and trades unions. It also led to his founding of a working men’s college in London in 1854.

Carlyle, Thomas Arnold and Maurice were still influential figures, either in their own person or via their disciples, in the intellectual world of the 1870s with which our story begins. This is perhaps especially so for Oxford. Carlyle’s most famous follower was John Ruskin, who was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford (1870–9) and who united Carlyle’s denunciations of laissez-faire and Fichtean belief in a new class of spiritual leaders with a passion for the history of art. Matthew Arnold, the son of Thomas, had been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, a post which he held concurrently with the school inspectorship which remained his main career. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy appeared in 1869. The influence of his father, and through him of Coleridge and the Germans, is evident in his criticism of the narrow ‘Hebraism’ of the dissenters, or Philistines, and in his reliance on the state to educate men of ‘culture’, that is ‘Hellenists’ committed to the values of spirituality and rationality, whether expressed in literary, religious or political activity. We shall see later and in more detail how Arnold’s general social theory led him to press for a national system of secondary education, on Continental lines, to raise the ‘intelligence’, as. he put it, of the largely dissenting middle classes. For the moment it is enough to note that there was nothing of exclusive élitism in this call for middle-class education. Arnold, like Coleridge and Thomas Arnold, wanted educated values to permeate the whole nation. ‘The men of culture’, he claimed, ‘are the true apostles of equality.’ By its attachment to critical reason, its opposition to stock notions and narrow prejudices, culture ‘seeks to do away with classes’ altogether (Arnold, 1869, p. 44).

In his attachment to the state as a spiritual organism, Arnold, according to his biographer, Lionel Trilling, generally passed for a disciple of Hegel ‘probably without ever having read him’ (Trilling, 1939, p. 90 fn.). The genealogy of his ideas which we have sketched in part (the Greeks and Wordsworth were among other major influences) may help to explain why this was so. German idealism came to England first not as a worked-out philosophical system but embedded in the literary, religious and socio-political works of writers like those whom we have mentioned. In the 1870s and later it became systematized. The ease with which this occurred, and the rapidity with which its ideas, in their systematized form, were able to permeate the intellectual world, were due not a little to the already widespread influence of idealist ways of thinking which we owe to these men.

It was at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1860s and 1870s that this systematization took place. A leading figure here was T.H.Green (1836–82), who was a Fellow of Balliol from 1860 until his death. It was he, pre-eminently, who wove together the various idealist strands of thought of an unsystematic nature and reconnected them with the Greek and German philosophy which inspired them. But the creation of a British school of idealism was not all due to Green. More must be said about the role which Balliol College had in this process, and more particularly, about the influence of Green’s tutor, Benjamin Jowett.

Jowett (1817–93) is important in several ways. First, it was he who introduced Hegel’s philosophical system into England. In 1844, some ten years before Green went up to Oxford, Jowett, then a young tutor at Balliol, visited Germany to make a study of current philosophical writings; he quickly became absorbed in Hegel, whose influence in his own country was then beginning to decline. According to his official biographers, Jowett remained for several years after this an ardent, though an independent, student of Hegel. It added a new dimension to his thinking, which was manifested through his teaching and informal associations with students, rather than in his writings. Jowett had no interest in constructing philosophical systems; and when Green came to develop his own system out of Hegel and other idealist influences Jowett was less than lukewarm. For all his later distrust of Hegelian systems, however, he acknowledged as late as the 1880s that he had received a greater stimulus from Hegel than from anyone else.¹

Jowett’s interest in Hegel was only one aspect of his idealist cast of mind, which permits us to classify him with Coleridge, Carlyle, Maurice and the two Arnolds as one of the pre-systematic progenitors of British idealism. Plato was an abiding influence. Jowett’s translations of the dialogues, especially of the Republic, are now classics. He saw his Balliol undergraduates rather as Plato saw his Guardians, urging them to work hard not only in the pursuit of academic excellence alone, but also in order to devote themselves, having left Oxford, to public service of one sort or another. How far he was influenced here by Hegel in particular is unclear. Certainly Hegel’s insistence in his Philosophy of Right on a rigorously educated ‘universal class’ of civil servants and teachers who were to maintain the spiritual unity of the state against individualistic pressures from below has affinities with both Jowett’s thought and practice. But then, as we have seen, this kind of Platonic solution to the problem of social disintegration was a commonplace among the other idealist-inclined thinkers we have mentioned, from Fichte, through Coleridge and Carlyle, to both Thomas and Matthew Arnold.

Between Jowett and the Arnolds there were also more particular connexions. It was under Jowett’s regime at Balliol, first as tutor, then, after 1870, as Master, that the famous link between the college and Rugby School became firmly welded. Jowett’s gospel of hard work and public service was little different from Thomas Arnold’s. Another link with Matthew Arnold is that he was an undergraduate at Balliol in the early years of Jowett’s fellowship.

Jowett’s Platonic conception of the links between the university and public life made him an enthusiastic supporter of the campaign for university reform. He helped to turn Oxford away from medievalism and bring it into closer touch with the leading social, intellectual and political movements of the day. One of his ‘pet crotchets’, which, as we shall see, was shared by T.H.Green, was to raise the value of scholarships, so as to ‘provide the means for many more persons of the middling class to find their way through the University into professions’ (Faber, 1957, p. 197).

T.H.Green’s idealism owed not a little to the work of his teacher and colleague Jowett and the other pre-systematic idealists we have been describing. In broad outline Hegelian, with a strong Kantian emphasis, it also, especially in its ethical and political doctrines, brought to bear these other, native, lines of thought, fusing them with German-inspired philosophy in a new synthesis.

Green, the son of an evangelical clergyman, was a pupil of Rugby and Balliol. Melvin Richter mentions the ‘faith he constructed, like so many others in his age, out of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dr Arnold, Carlyle, F.D.Maurice and Kingsley’ (1964, p. 47). Of these, Maurice’s influence on him is of particular interest, since one of Maurice’s best-known disciples, D.J. Vaughan (1825–1905), vicar of St Martin’s, Leicester, and the founder of what became the Vaughan Working Men’s College in the same city, was Green’s uncle. Green never lost hold of his uncle’s Christian Socialist principles. He used to visit him regularly throughout his life (op. cit., p. 42).

Through his critiques of empiricism in his posthumous Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), in which he outlined his positive metaphysical views and the ethics he built on them, and his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1895), Green built up a wide-ranging and eclectic idealist philosophy, Hegelian in its broadest outlines, as we have said, but argued through without the head-breaking abstractions of Hegelian logic. It rapidly became enormously influential, both in the development of British philosophy and, more generally, as an inspiration for social reformers.

Speaking of the new idealist philosophy as a whole, Anthony Quinton stated in a recent lecture: ‘In less than ten years (from 1865) a series of works came out, bearing a strong Hegelian imprint, from those who were to be the leaders and inspirers of a whole generation of British philosophers. For the next thirty years absolute idealism maintained an unchallenged primacy, both in volume of publications and in its hold over the loyalties of university students’ (1971, p. 14). Among Green’s disciples and fellow idealists in the 1870s were A.C.Bradley at Balliol, his brother F.H.Bradley at Merton, Bernard Bosanquet at University College and William Wallace at Merton. The best known of these in philosophical circles today is F.H.Bradley (1846–1924), w...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Plates
• General editor’s note
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• part 1 Philosophical idealism and education
• part 2 The work of the educational reformers
• part 3 The idealist legacy today
• Biographical notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index