Education! Education! Education 

Martyn Crucefix climbs the shivering mountain of Mam Tor with John Milton on his back

 

When I read John Milton's essay, Of Education, with its urgent concern for the right way to teach the young - a matter which, Milton remarks, 'this Nation hath extream need should be done sooner than spoken' - I am reminded of a mountain.

This is no metaphorical hill. It's not even the one he imagines in the essay. He describes there 'a hill side where I will point ye out the right path of a vertuous and noble Education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect [and with] melodious sounds on every side'.

No - this is a real mountain in the English Peak District. In fact, this is Mam Tor - the shivering mountain they call it - a slowly tumbling hummock of a hill, unstable as a result of hidden geological faults, continually shedding itself into the road beneath, a slow-motion avalanche of a mountain.

When I climbed Mam Tor at the end of the 1970s, I was between the end of my education and the beginning of the world of work and, as I walked I wondered what it was I had been fitted for. Earlier, I'd been sitting in the car, an old Renault Five, a newspaper propped up on the dashboard gear change, waiting for the rain to stop.

 At that time, there was much being written about 'education for leisure'. It was widely believed that with the advent of new technologies, and the decline of the old industrial base, the problem facing Britain would be an over-supply of leisure. We would be required to work two or three days a week, and so education, while fitting us for the requirements of a job, would have as its secondary - even primary - function the preparing of citizens for the free time that would stretch before us.

We would be confident, curious, open-minded, self-motivating citizens who would at last understand that education is an end in itself, not a means to an end. It seemed the old world of education was tumbling before the light of progress.

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Milton's essay also records a moment of transition, but this time a rather more successful one. Written in 1644 to the Puritan reformer, Samuel Hartlib, Milton was at the time engaged in an urgent debate about how the Church should be organised, and how the State should be governed. Education, education, education - as more recent governors have also declared - needed to lie at the heart of this project. To be more precise - educational reform - for the new world created by the revival of learning - humanistic theory, the burgeoning hostility to all things medieval - was demanding serious change. Milton tells Hartlib that the essay will convey his idea of 'a better Education, in extent and comprehension far more large, and yet of time far shorter, and of attainment far more certain, then hath been yet in practice'.

Milton is here tilting at the scholastic methods of education that he had suffered in Cambridge and which, in his view, challenged students too early, and with the wrong material. Scholasticism had managed only to create an 'unpleasing and unsuccessful' form of schooling, full of 'much miserable Latine and Greek', forcing students to the composition of 'Theams, Verses and Orations' that bore no relation to the real world, focussed as they were on grammar and mellifluous expression.

Those who retain an image of Milton as a gloomy Puritan poet will be surprised by the sting in his satire. And in our world of endless paper assessment, and teaching to the test, there is something eerily familiar as he conjures up these poor students who, 'having but newly left those Grammatick flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, now on the sudden [are] . . . mockt and deluded all this while with ragged Notions and Babblements while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge'.

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Seeing how much has altered and yet so little has changed in the world of education, is one of the pleasures of this essay. Like an early Jamie Oliver, Milton considers the importance of diet, recommending it should be 'plain, healthful, and moderate'. He enthuses about the need for exercise: weapons training followed by wrestling in the mornings; and, in the afternoons, military activities - the youngsters on foot, the upper years on horseback. Milton's anti-scholastic agenda surfaces once more in the modern-sounding recommendation to invite speakers to the school or, as he says, to 'procure, as oft as shal be needful, the helpful experiences of Hunters, Fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries'. 

And in a seventeenth-century world yet to confront the discouragement of the detailed risk assessment, school trips are recommended, specifically the riding out 'in Companies with prudent and staid Guides'. Even visits abroad are given the thumbs up, and these would have the advantageous spin-off of removing the need to employ foreign tutors or, as Milton scathingly characterises them, 'the Monsieurs of Paris [who] take our hopefull Youth into their slight and prodigal custodies and send them over back again transform'd into Mimicks, Apes, and Kicshoes'.

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As for the curriculum, Milton has been mocked for the sheer scale and ambition of what he proposed students study between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. After some basic language work, students would be launched into Arithmetic, Geometry, Religion, Scripture, Agriculture, Geography, Greek, Astronomy, Fortification, Architecture, Engineering, Navigation, Natural Philosophy, Anatomy and Physick. More through a form of osmotic absorption than direct tuition, Milton insists students will simultaneously be acquiring what he calls the ability of 'deliberate choice', which means the ability to judge between good and evil. This reinforces his claim that one of the purposes of education is 'to repair the ruines of our first parents', and the essay's relevance to, and yet remoteness from, our own time is brought home when you realise that much of this moral instruction derives - rather quaintly - from another of Milton's anti-scholastic enthusiasms, the study of classical authors.

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Of course, Milton is himself now one of these forbidding classics, and in our schools he is not much studied. As we peer back into his world, it's clear that so many of those points of contact failed two hundred years ago. It is still Romanticism, with its autobiographical bent, its love of the rebel, and its celebration of personal witness, individualism, aspiration and extremism that we feel closest to. Ironically, the Romantics read Milton as their true father, and one of the clearest moments where you can see this process occurring is in a novel published in 1818.

We read there of a creature, composed of human body parts, wandering through a forest in Switzerland. It discovers a copy of Paradise Lost. The poem turns out to be a key component in the creature's education and - apart from speaking ever after in a slightly archaic idiom - he learns key elements of Milton's teaching: good and evil, social and parental responsibility, free will, love, discipline, pride.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is more than anything a book about education. Her creature is a blank but sensitive slate, a sponge, an ugly but quite brilliant student, and through him she teaches - as did Milton - the need for human development to be managed responsibly by those empowered to do so.

But in the novel, the lesson is ill-learned. Shelley's creature grows ever more monstrous as a result of his abandonment by his creator and his mistreatment by society. He declares 'I am malicious because I am miserable'. The creature is the working class, but he is also any young person eager to learn. Milton's essay imagines successful education in which students are 'enflam'd with the study of Learning, and the admiration of Vertue; stirr'd up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy Patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages'. In contrast, a poor education is a poison in society. The young are 'tost and turmoil'd with their unballasted wits in fadomless and unquiet deeps of controversie . . . [they] do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of Learning'.

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In one of those chilling moments when we catch sight of our own society in the mirror of this essay, Milton describes such ill-educated individuals thrust out into the world, 'not with virtue and clarity but with mistaken ambition, a mercenary outlook, an ignorant zeal'.

If you google the phrase 'education for leisure' these days, there is little or nothing reflecting my thoughts climbing Mam Tor all those years ago. What you will find are links to the Carol Ann Duffy poem that bears that title - the poem recently withdrawn by an exam board because of 'social issues and public concerns'. The storm that blew through the staff room at this news was of such withering contempt for bureaucratic stupidity that it would have restored anyone's flagging faith in the sincerity and seriousness of the teaching profession.

In Duffy's poem, a bored, unemployed man roams edgily around his house, squashing a fly, flushing a goldfish down the toilet, threatening the cat. He is not one of Milton's young men, 'stirr'd up with high hopes of living'. He is something of a monster. Duffy is explicit: education has failed to prepare him for life. He remembers, 'We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in / another language and now the fly is in another language'. Having declared to a radio phone-in that he is some sort of Romantic 'genius', he takes a bread knife and goes out to commit violence. Rather than the glorification which the cloth-eared exam board claimed to see in this poem, Duffy's intention is obviously satirical. This too is a cry for educational reform, in the same vein as Milton's, though with a far more piercing and contemporary edge.

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We teach, Milton argues, to create good citizens. And as a poet, he raises the profile of his own art in his proposed curriculum. He sees poetry - the whole of literature - as one of the high points of composition for students who have completed their studies, as well as one of the key resources for learning. Even he will have realised that this is too modest. Poetry shares with education the purpose of leading us out of ourselves into encounters with the other. Without this we grow ever more alienated from our environment, from other people, ultimately from ourselves, since it is only in relation to others that we find our identity. Without it we grow a little more monstrous each day, more likely to inflict damage on others and not be able to imagine the impact. Without it, we are less prepared to be citizens of our own century; we become, more and more, atomised individuals at the mercy of any passing whim or any noisy political bandwagon.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge understood Satan in Paradise Lost to be just such an atomised individual, representing, he said, the 'intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven'. For Milton, this risk of falling through the cracks of civil society is something his essay on education is intended to avert. For us there is an even greater responsibility - because it must be a democratic responsibility - to devise ways of achieving his aim of 'a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man' - or a woman - 'to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick'.