News from Nowhere

I suppose it's because the BBC are promoting a bodice-ripper costume drama about the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood that I've been thinking about William Morris. He of the obsession with handicrafts and the poetry as flowery as his wallpaper. But this was the man who in 1890 created "News from Nowhere", a socialist utopia that's unusual because, more than a century on, it doesn't read like a vision of mechanistic hell. I've always had a soft spot for this book: of course it's naive and idealizes pre-industrial life but, hey, when you compare it to almost every other utopian vision, it's incredibly human.

In Morris's visionary society, children don't go to school - learning's far more organic. I was browsing the web for the relevant section of the book and fell instead on an article from a couple of years earlier. Dated 1888. It made me smile. Sometimes those of us who reject school are written off as casualties of 1960s idealism (I'm sure a certain Mr Badman believes this), yet there were people who could identify the underlying paradoxes of schooling almost as soon as it became universal.

Morris, Thoughts on Education Under Capitalism

Here's a telling excerpt that neatly anticipates the ideas of John Holt and especially John Taylor Gatto:-

"Though even our mechanical school system cannot crush out a natural bent towards literature (with all the pleasures of thought and imagination which that word means) yet certainly its dull round will hardly implant such a taste in anyone's mind; and as for the caput mortuum, the dead mass of mere information which the worker comes away with when his 'education' is over, he will and must soon forget this when he finds out that it is of little use to him and gives him no pleasure.

I must say in passing that on the few occasions that I have been inside a Boardschool, I have been much depressed by the mechanical drill that was too obviously being applied there to all the varying capacities and moods. My heart sank before Mr M'Choakumchild and his method, and I thought how much luckier I was to have been born well enough off to be sent to a school where I was taught - nothing; but learned archaeology and romance on the Wiltshire downs."

Of course, the reference to M'Choakumchild derives from the schoolmaster in Dickens' "Hard Times". Dickens described his hellish fact factory in 1854. These concerns that schooling can squeeze the life out of the imagination go back a long way. Of course, approaches to schooling have come a long way since children were drilled with facts, haven't they? But replace 'facts' with 'targets' and 'drill' with 'literacy/numeracy hour', and I'm not so sure how much has really changed.