The resulting confusion is indescribable. What is the leitbild, as the Germans say, the guiding image, in accordance with which young people could try to form and educate themselves? There is none, or rather there is such a muddle and mess of images that no sensible guidance issues from them. The intellectuals, whose function it would be to get these things sorted out, spend their time proclaiming that everything is relative – or something to the same effect, Or they deal with ethical matters in terms of the most unabashed cynicism.
— Professor David Orr, 25th anniversary book, Hartley Marks, 1998.
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.— Lord Byron, quoted by Schumacher in chapter 6.
To read it would be to condone it.
— F. R. Leavis, literary critic, in reply to a colleague accusing him of not having read ‘The Two Cultures’ lecture.
Section II is all about how Schumacher applies the ideas in Section I to the modern world. He has called it simply ‘Resources’. This one (No 6) is also one of the only chapters in the book which was written especially for it. It isn’t based on anything Schumacher had written before.
It covers more about education than it’s about economics directly. Perhaps because he knew a great deal more about the latter rather than the former, it is also highly readable, compelling and simple.
Schumacher diagnoses the problem as related to the decline as one of metaphysics in UK schools and he is also impatient to try different methods of education in Washington.
What the chapter says.
As a European liberal, Schumacher believed that education is the underlying solution to the problems he has identified. But what kind of education? His starting point is a critique of the famous 1959 lecture by the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow in which he talked about the gulf between the ‘Two Cultures’ – literary and scientific.
Snow urged that the gap should be healed, which in practice mean a great deal more scientific education for nearly everyone.
Snow gave his lecture in 1959 and it was based on an article he had written on the same subject in 1956. It led to a huge furore, which Schumacher reflects in his own attack on the two cultures. It was published as a book on the two cultures in 1961. It got another boost the following year when the great literary critic F. R. Leavis published his attack on the lecture and on Snow personally in The Spectator.
Originally delivered as the Downing Lecture at Cambridge, ‘Two Cultures? The significance of C. P. Snow’ is pretty devastating. Leavis wrote about “the preposterous and menacing absurdity of C. P. Snow’s consecrated public standing,” his “embarrassing vulgarity of style,” his “panoptic pseudo-categories,” his “complete ignorance” of history, literature, the history of civilization, and the human significance of the Industrial Revolution. “Not only is he not a genius,” said Leavis, “he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.”
Schumacher was much more polite than that, denying there was any parallel at all between the First Law of Thermodynamics and Shakespeare’s plays – which was Snow’s contention. He also echoes some of the themes of Matthew Arnold nearly a century before, in 1882:
“There must be something more to education than Lord Snow suggests. Science and engineering produce ‘know-how’; but ‘know-how’ is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. ‘Know-how’ is no more a culture than a piano is music. Can education help us to finish the sentence, to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man?” writes Schumacher.
“At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.”
Schumacher suggested two elements to his argument against the two cultures:
- Language
“First of all, there is language. Each word is an idea. If the language which seeps into us during our Dark Ages is English, our mind is thereby furnished by a set of ideas which is significantly different from the set represented by Chinese, Russian, German, or even American. - Grammar
“Next to words, there are the rules of putting them together: grammar, another bundle of ideas, the study of which has fascinated some modem philosophers to such an extent that they thought they could reduce the whole of philosophy to a study of grammar.”
He was quite right about English philosophy, which takes dryness to whole new, almost Saharan levels.
When you have no idea how to interpret the world around you, then you are truly lost, he says. Then he quotes the great 20th century Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset:
“We cannot live on the human level without ideas. Upon them depends what we do. Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.’ What, then, is education? It is the transmission of ideas which enable man to choose between one thing and another, or, to quote Ortega again, ‘to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace…’
Yet the key ideas we imbibe at school are mainly a handful of Victorian ones:
- There is the idea of evolution – that higher forms continually develop out of lower forms, as a kind of natural and automatic process. The last hundred years or so have seen the systematic application of this idea to all aspects of reality without exception
- There is the idea of competition, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, which purports to explain the natural and automatic process of evolution and development.
- There is the idea that all the higher manifestations of human life. such as religion, philosophy, art, etc. – what Marx calls ‘the phantasmagorias in the brains of men’ – are nothing but ‘necessary supplements of the material life process’, a superstructure erected to disguise and promote economic interests, the whole of human history being the history of class struggles.
- In competition, one might think, with the Marxist interpretation of all higher manifestations of human life, there is, fourthly, the Freudian interpretation which reduces them to the dark stirrings of a subconscious mind and explains them mainly as the results of unfulfilled incest-wishes during child- hood and early adolescence.
- There is the general idea of relativism, denying all absolutes, dissolving all norms and standards, leading to the total undermining of the idea of truth in pragmatism, and affecting even mathematics, which has been defined by Bertrand Russell as ‘the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, or whether what we say is true’.
- Finally there is the triumphant idea of positivism, that valid knowledge can be attained only through the methods of the natural sciences and hence that no knowledge is genuine unless it is based on generally observable facts. Positivism, in other words, is solely interested in ‘know-how’ and denies the possibility of objective knowledge about meaning and purpose of any kind.”
Interestingly, none of those ideas – the bad metaphysics we are actually taught – involves any traditional English empiricism, says Schumacher.
“No amount of factual inquiry could have verified any one of them. They represent tremendous leaps of the imagination into the unknown and unknowable. Of course, the leap is taken from a small platform of observed fact… What do these six ‘large’ ideas have in common, besides their non-empirical, metaphysical nature? They all assert that what had previously been taken to be something of a higher order is really ‘nothing but’ a more subtle manifestation of the ‘lower’ – unless, indeed, the very distinction between higher and lower is denied. Thus man, like the rest of the universe, is really nothing but an accidental collocation of atom…”
Schumacher then argues that a purely scientific education can’t do this for us because it deals only with ideas of know-how, “whereas we need to understand why things are as they are and what we are to do with our lives.”
“What we learn by studying a particular science is in any case too specific and specialized for our wider purposes. So we turn to the humanities to obtain a clear view of the large and vital ideas of our age. Even in the humanities we may get bogged down in a mass of specialized scholarship furnishing our minds with lots of small ideas just as unsuitable as the ideas which we might pick up from the natural sciences. But we may also be more fortunate (if fortunate it is) and find a teacher who will ‘clear our minds’, clarify the ideas – the ‘large’ and universal ideas already existent in our minds – and thus make the world intelligible for us.”
Nor is it true that the metaphysics and ethics would be eliminated altogether. On the contrary, all we got was “bad metaphysics and appalling ethics,” he says.
Next, Schumacher looks at how that bad metaphysics can destroy civilizations, quoting the great classical historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood:
“The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilization ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease …. It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world …. The cause was a metaphysical cause. The ‘pagan’ world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patriotic writers) said, because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were …. If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered.”
How might change come about, when those bad metaphorical ideas are so much implied by teachers. On the other hand:
“How could there be a rational teaching of politics without pressing all questions back to their metaphysical roots? Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in ‘double-talk’ if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the metaphysical and ethical problems involved. The confusion is already so great that it is legitimate to doubt the educational value of studying many of the so-called humanistic subjects…”
This is the poor teacher, who Schumacher refers to as ‘he’:
“I do not think, however, that this can be successfully done unless he quite consciously accepts – even if only provisionally – a number of metaphysical ideas which are almost directly opposite to the ideas (stemming from the nineteenth century) that have lodged in his mind…”
He then mentions three examples:
- Hierarchy
“Without the recognition of ‘Levels of Being’ or ‘Grades of Significance’ we cannot make the world intelligible to ourselves nor have we the slightest possibility to define our own position, the position of man, in the scheme of the universe.” - Insoluble problems.
“All through our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled. The typical problems of life are insoluble on the level of being on which we normally find ourselves…”The British mathematician and parapsychologist, George Tyrell, invented the terms ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ to distinguish problems which can’t be solved by logical reasoning from those that can. As Schumacher explained:“Life is being kept going by divergent problems which have to be ‘lived’ and are solved only in death.” - Ethics
Those who originally came up with the ideas behind the ‘bad metaphysics’ still retained the ethical assumptions they had been brought up with, he says – yet after three or four generations, they have nothing:
“In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and willfully abandoned our great classical-Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like virtue, love, temperance. As a result, we are totally ignorant, totally uneducated in the subject that of all conceivable subjects, is the most important, We have no idea- to think with and therefore are only too ready to believe that ethics is a held where thinking does no good. Who knows anything today of the Seven Deadly Sins or of the Four Cardinal Virtues? Who could even name them? And if these venerable. old ideas are thought not to be worth bothering about, what new ideas have taken their place?”
Finally, he sets out his hopes for the future:
“What is to take the place of the soul- and life-destroying metaphysics inherited from the nineteenth century? The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction. It is not as if we had to invent anything new: at the same time, it is not good enough merely to revert to the old formulations. Our task – and the task of all education – is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.”
What happened next?
There is nothing in this chapter that implies how education should be managed instead, and nothing in the rest of the book either. But in a book called Small is Beautiful, you sort of expect there might be something to do with scale.
It is true that, in C. P. Snow’s mind, the Soviet Union was way ahead of the West in dealing with these vast imponderables. This is, he said, partly because the Russians have a “passionate belief in education.” But it is also because they have a “deeper insight into the scientific revolution than we have, or than the Americans have.”
It so happened that Snow’s lecture took place in the late 1950s, just when observers on both sides of the Atlantic were looking at the Soviet lead in the space race, and assuming that it must have something to do with their education system – massive schools.
Policymakers persuaded themselves that somehow only huge schools could produce enough scientists to compete with the USSR. It is one of the peculiar ways that Soviet thinking filtered into the West.
The first challenge to it came from Roger Barker, who described himself as an environmental psychologist, who set up a statistical research centre in a small town in Kansas after the Second World War and researched small schools wherever he could find them.
It was his 1964 book Big School, Small School, written with his colleague Paul Bump, which revealed that – counter to what you might expect – there were more activities outside the classroom in the smaller schools than there were in the bigger schools. There were more pupils involved in them in the smaller schools – between three and twenty times more in fact. He also found children were more tolerant of each other in small schools.
This was precisely the opposite of what the big school advocates had suggested: big schools were supposed to mean more choice and opportunity. It wasn’t so.
Nor was this a research anomaly. Most of the research has taken place in the United States, but it consistently shows that small schools (300–800 pupils at secondary level) have better results, better behaviour, less truancy and vandalism and better relationships than bigger schools. They show better achievement by pupils from ethnic minorities and from very poor families. If you take away the funding anomalies which privilege bigger institutions, they don’t cost any more to run.
Unfortunately, those kind of assumptions were still widely believed when Small is Beautiful was being written. And now – when some of the evidence has finally got through the thick skulls of policymakers – there is no spare money left to save or protect those smaller schools we have left.
Among the successes of small schools has been Finland, where the average number of pupils per school is 50. The Scandinavian country is held up as a model for educational success and regularly tops international school league tables for basic skills.
But why should smaller schools work better? There is some consensus among researchers about this. The answer is that small schools make transformational human relationships possible. Teachers can know pupils and vice versa. “Those of us who were researchers saw the damage caused by facelessness and namelessness,” said the Brown University educationalist Ted Sizer, who ran a five-year investigation into factory schooling in the 1970s. “You cannot teach a child well unless you know that child well.”
Frightening evidence of this came in June 2008, when the Times Educational Supplement reported that 21 per cent of Year 8 pupils in the UK said they had never spoken to a teacher. “Talk to the children, if you can,” one school volunteer I know was told by the head teacher on their first day. “Nobody talks to them these days.”
Since then, the various sides in this debate have barely listened to each other, and especially for some reason in the USA. On one side, the protagonists of GERM (the Global Educational Reform Movement), including rigid testing, league tables and core competencies, see themselves fighting a long-term war against those who believe that education is primarily about ‘lighting a fire’.
On the other side, the parallel movement to new economics – those education fire-lighters – have been reduced to supplicants, without a big idea or any schools, most of which have now closed or been taken over by the state or nation.
Worse, schools are actually getting bigger. There is nothing like the 5,000-pupil factories that have had such a disastrous effect on education in the USA, but a new school in Nottingham was designed for as many as 3,000 pupils.
I don’t know how much Schumacher was aware of these educational issues, but the idea of small-scale schools that were capable of lighting that fire were to become important among his followers.
By coincidence, the same year when Schumacher was beginning to think through this book, there was another book published from a younger contemporary, who has often been compared with him. The Austrian catholic priest Ivan Illich, then in New York City, had written a book called Deschooling Society.
Illich began thinking about public education when he ran into the radical educationalist, Everett Reimer, in Puerto Rico in 1958.
He later saw that, between 1965 and 1968, over three billion dollars were spent in US schools to offset the disadvantages of about six million children. The programme was called ‘Title One’.
“It is the most expensive compensatory programme ever attempted anywhere in education,” wrote Illich, “yet no significant improvement can be detected in the learning of these ‘disadvantaged’ children. Compared with their classmates from middle income homes, they have fallen further behind.”
How do you explain that?
Illich argued that this total failure to improve the education of the poor despite more costly treatment can be explained in three ways:
- Three billion dollars are insufficient to improve the performance of six million children by a measurable amount, or
- The money was incompetently spent: different curricula, better administration, further concentration of the funds on the poor child, and more research are needed and would do the trick, or
- Educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the school.”
Illich argued that No 3 was the most important – and Deschooling Society became the best-known element of Illich’s critique of public institutions – that schools were keeping people stupid, and hospitals were making people sick, and so on.
That goes some way beyond Schumacher’s intention in writing this chapter, which was more to do with the assumptions behind what they are taught. Unfortunately, technocratic thinking from the six Victorian ideas, that Schumacher identified, still dominates educational policy.
“We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be metaphysical,” wrote Schumacher. “Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists. the disorder will grow worse.”
Questions for discussion…
- Is Schumacher right that the only way to truly understand the world is via a metaphysical education?
- Why has the experimental education so run out of steam – when even Ted Sizer’s ‘Coalition of Essential Schools’ closed in 2017?
- What kind of schools does his theory imply? How should we bring up our children?
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