“The Humanities will break down the class barriers, State control will wrest it away from religious rigidity, and a forced disinterest of its teachers will rescue humanity from the machine-thinking anarchy which has set upon it. . . .”

 Arnold’s defense for the preservation of 19th century culture is now antiquated in both its application to local issues of his day and in its understanding of social forces, ethical behaviorism, and functions of language. It is difficult today to read him without resisting what now seems quite conservative arguments for lifting up what he imagines is a disinterested “sweetness and light” of perfection and then wondering where or where in England might it be found?

Like Nietzsche’s Anti-Education which I read alongside this, Arnold laments the loss of high culture, the best of thought and the highest moral achievements of humankind. Nietzsche’s artistic-psychological approach champions the rise of “geniuses;” Arnold’s social-historical argument calls his ultimate human thinkers “Aliens,” in that they are apart from the social norms. Nietzsche argues for a synthesis of spirit in his Apollonian and Dionysian ways of thinking (in his book The Birth of Tragedy), and Arnold calls for a happy union of Hebraic (disciplined) and Hellenistic (creative) thought: all this to point out what arguments were springing up through Europe at the beginning of the machine age.

For Arnold, none of the social classes were in a position to desire or find the culture he calls upon: the wealthy (“barbarians”) were too obsessed with image and material splendor to turn inward; the middle-class (“philistines”) too obsessed with becoming wealthy; and the poor (“populace”) too marginalized to have access or desire to ask.  Liberals in government, full of barbarians and philistines, was too swept up in reforms to desire philosophy. The Church, too Hebraic in its rigid dogma, is uninterested in the creative reason that “sees things as they are.” The public press, too, is incapable as it purveys little but “stock notions” of thought to the populace. This leaves, of course, the schools.

But Arnold, again like Nietzsche, is in despair over their conditions, largely for the same reasons that were true of German schools and of all our schooling today: it is bent to a machine-like model of education designed to teach students to aspire to wealth through workplace skills, thus assigning them to their unimaginative places in society. Knowledge in England’s school is never pursued for its own sake (the “disinterest” which is essential to the high cultural ethic), but always for a motivated acquisition which only serves to cement social classes into place.

Surprisingly, for all their laments about schools, both Arnold and Nietzsche consider education to be the key to civilization’s survival–and I have to say, I agree. For Nietzsche, it’s largely about getting the curriculum out of the way for geniuses to learn as they will; for Arnold, it’s about State commitment and regulation of schools (ironically) to re-invigorate curriculum with the humanities. The Humanities will break down the class barriers, State control will wrest it away from religious rigidity (dominant in Arnold’s time), and a forced disinterest of its teachers will rescue humanity from the machine-thinking anarchy which has set upon it.

As I said with Nietzsche’s book, even 160-odd years later, we could be making many of these same arguments–and do–though we seem to have acted in no great ways towards reform. The problem is not the diagnosis, especially: it’s the curative, the prescription which will not be administered, and to our eyes now appears fairly myopic itself, resting as it does on a proverbial Western Golden Age of classical thought for an enlightened homogeneous tribe or one who can be led to homogeneity, its alien geniuses themselves penned within its walls of tradition.