These utopian societies just do not want their people to know the truth. Suspicious. Just like the censorship of art, education seems to be on the chopping block as well. This is not about the quality of education, because that's a tangent I do not wish to pursue, but rather about the specificity of education.
In Plato's Republic, only the education of the guardians is worth mentioning.
In More's Utopia, people are educated in their craft(s) and can spend their free time studying language and literature.
Bellamy's Looking Backward mentions education through apprenticeship, and "The schools... of higher liberal learning are always open to
aspirants without condition." Each person must learn a trade through an apprenticeship and rise up in the ranks. If people want to pursue higher education, they are able to.
The host in Morris' News from Nowhere is initially confused by the term "school." As the dialogue continues, he says, "I understand you to be speaking of book-learning" and addresses the ways children learn to read, write, and study languages. That's not really the narrator's point either; he wants to know about how these people educate the mind. The people discourage bookishness and find it childish, because work is more important: "so I don’t think we need fear having too many book-learned men." And this was the sentence that struck me.
Why would a society not want its people to be learned? It's fine to learn a trade because that leads to employment and a manner in which you aid the community. But you're not allowed to learn anything else, or at least, it's frowned upon to pursue any other education. Stay in your little box of the craft/profession you've chosen to learn, young one, and don't pursue anything more because it's not good for you to know too much. Because if the people become educated about their ways of life, they might realize what's actually going on. It goes back to control. If a society controls what the people, especially children, learn, then society controls the people and the people become docile, complacent, and, most importantly, malleable. Then the machine of society is in control rather than the people who make up that society. It reeks of 1984 and 2+2=5, or the "fake news" of today. What are these utopias hiding that they don't want their citizens to learn?
I think implying some vast conspiracy is reading beyond the text. Most of this makes more sense when you consider the exact way these things are phrased. The only one that is specifically against "bookishness" is News from Nowhere, and it seems geared toward prevent a class of pure academics, rather than being "anti-education". The others place more emphasis on the crafts because they have a greater focus on practical pursuits. The Utopians, for example, are hardly limited in what other things they can study, and as I pointed out last class, there is a limitation on the number of people "who can be excused from labor", people given a free pass from crafting or farming pursuits to become full-on academics. Our suspisons about the motives are justifiable, considering our own government's tendencies, but as has been said before, we need to put that cynicism aside in this discussion.
ReplyDeleteDespite reading more into Winstanley and the Diggers, I agree with both your positions - we must peer beyond the veil of our own cynicisms and expectations, but we must also question what settles for intellectual freedom. Are these Utopias focused on schooling for all the way America's public schooling system today does? Are the Utopians malicious in intent? When were these fictions written, and how does this affect not only the interests of education, but its power? And, keeping in mind my personal motto - education is life, and life is an education - how can all we have to learn be simplified to books and authors and censorship when the vastness of knowledge itself is hard to grasp without the limitations of writing and space on a page? People will always be sentient enough to think, so what are the Utopias saying about the requirements for intellect (is it the arts? Books? Structure? Philosophy?)?
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