A Very Victorian Debate,
Still Unfinished
Culture & Eductation:
Unified or Unrelated?
William Ayers:
The ‘Weather Underground’
William Ayers:
‘Educate to Enculturate’



In Teaching toward Freedom, William
Ayers illuminates the hope as well as the
conflict that characterizes the craft of
education….as a way for students to
become more fully human, more
engaged, more participatory, more
free….
For Ayers, noted educator and activist,
“the allure of teaching, that ineffable
magic that draws me and many others
back to the classroom again and again,
comes from the particularly precious
ideal that lies directly at its heart:
Teaching, at its best, is an enterprise
geared toward helping every human
being reach the full measure of his or
her humanity.”
“…society needs to understand what it
means to teach toward freedom. . .
Ayers's asks that students imagine
different future worlds where justice is
better served and where we create a
vision needed for a better world."
Anthony Burgess:
the Cultural Fallacy








Novelist
Scholar
Playwright
Composer
Poet
Broadcaster
Theologian
Etc. etc.
Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange

“There was music playing, a very nice
malenky string quartet, my brothers, by
Claudius Birdman, one that I knew well. I
had to have a smeck, though, thinking of
what I'd viddied once in one of these like
articles on Modern Youth, about how
Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively
Appreciation Of The Arts could be like
encouraged.
“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry
would like quieten Modern Youth down and
make Modern Youth more Civilized.
Civilized my syphilised yarbles. Music
always sort of sharpened me up, O my
brothers, and made me like feel like old Bog
himself, ready to make with the old donner
and blitzen and have vecks and ptitsas
creeching away in my ha ha power.”
“Sweetness & Light”….

“Educate an idiot and get an Educated idiot.”

Clockwork Orange: Alex the Droog:

•
•
•
•
Culture makes cultured hooligans
Smarter at being violent
Heightens the intensity of violent experience
Makes violence a cultured æsthetic experience
Conclusion: culture and education is neutral
on moral behavior.
Matthew Arnold: “Culture”


More oppositional—or
binary—analysis
Why not state it plainly?
Matthew Arnold is an
impossible prig.
•

Gave the “Victorian
stuffed-shirt” stereotype
its embodiment.
“Inspector of Schools”
Thomas Arnold: Rugby

Matthew Arnold’s father,
Thomas Arnold, was the
head of Rugby School
and a important
proponent of ‘Muscular
Christianity’
•

The sport of Rugby (&
thus American football)
was invented during
Thomas Arnold’s tenure
there: an expression of
‘clean masculinity.’
Immortalised in Tom
Brown’s Schooldays.
Matthew Arnold: “Culture & Anarchy”




Without “Culture”—defined by Matthew Arnold as “the
best that has been thought & known in the world”—
society becomes anarchic.
In our terms, free-market capitalism makes
individualism the primary virtue—the individual becomes
the primary arbiter of virtue and action—and thus society
takes selfishness as its dominant value.
With no predominant concern for the ‘public good’,
society becomes an anarchy of consumption.
Why was there no shared values? Why did free-market
capitalism gain ascendancy in the Victorian Age?
The Arnold Problematic

Unspoken in Matthew Arnold:
•
•
•
•
Christianity was a shared system of belief for England,
which asserted higher values than individualism.
Arnold did not personally believe in the dogmas of
Christianity: helped propagate the idea that Faith was no
longer viable (“Dover Beach” e.g.)
Christianity replaced by Education—i.e. cultural education.
•
Culture replaces Religion.
The Pedagogical Fallacy:
• Education—teaching culture—effects moral
behavior
• Paradox: a Utilitarian view of Culture & Education
“The Woman”
A Victorian Triptych
Fiction & Life under Victoria’s
matriarchal Regnancy

A Victorian dialectical position: still uncomprehended

Chance to see what was—through the mind of
literature—not what our contemporaries think there
was or want there to have been.
Examine what is being stated here about Life &
Literature—Culture & Fiction.

• P1: Domestic power is primary power
• P2: Women control domestic power
• C: Women control Victorian power.
•
A matter of the function of Art in Society.
The Reality of Fiction
Sherlock Holmes:
the Power of Woman



Three Victorian short stories on or about ‘the woman question.’
Chance to see what was—through the mind of literature—not
what our contemporaries think there was or want there to have
been.
A triptych of aspects on woman as a subject of direct attention.
Male-Female Cultural Dichotomy


Dionysus
•
•
•
•
•
Chthonic (Earthly)
Enclosing, nurturing
Emotional, Expressive
Changeable
Female
Apollo
•
•
•
•
•
Ætherial (heavenly)
Penetrating, dominant
Rational, controlled/ing
Rigid & Fixed
Male
Sherlock Holmes:
the Power of Woman

The female-male to Dr. Watson’s stolid Victorian masculinity.
•
•
•
•
•


(Watson’s dullness sharpens the portrait of Holmes’ intelligence, & gives the
reader an identity-point in the narrative)
Neurotic (p.1557)
Domestic (22 Baker St. & his name)
External appearance controlled and altered to suit desire of mind (i.e. of power.)
(This matches a female quality: in the text, of Irene Adler.
•
p.1567 “his expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he
assumed.”
Succeeds by reasoning and observing: or rather, by observing then
reasoning.
•
•
p.1558: “you see, but you do not observe.
P.1559: “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”
•
p.1558: “You would certainly have been burned [as a witch] had you lived a few
centuries ago.”
Woman’s domestic power is the power of observation, then
manipulative action.
“The woman”
Power of Social Perception


Holmes in turn sees through the social appearances
of others: i.e. the disguise of the King of Bohemia.
Irene Adler has power of disguise—ability to control
dress for social (i.e. real power) effect—and to see
through disguise (Holmes’): by power of domestic
perception:
•

p. 1571 “….when I found how I had betrayed myself, I
began to think.”
Irene, like Holmes, is man-woman combination:
•
p.1562: “face of the most beautiful of women, and mind of
the most resolute of men.”