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The Challenge of Universal Education: An Essay on 'The Conflict Between Aims'
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10449 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
5,039 Words |
| Author
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Alan Charles Kors
Alan Charles Kors is professor of history at the University of
Pennsylvania. |
There is a tendency in the academic world to demonize T.S. Eliot these days. Many of the so-called postmoderns present the iconoclastic Eliot as the very embodiment of the "traditions" and "hegemonies" against which the postmodern age stands, a relic of an unregretted past.
In a January 1991 McLaughlin Report broadcast on NBC, for example, Stanley Fish, Professor of English at Duke University and the Tartuffe of political correctness, ridiculed complaints about coercive ideologies on contemporary campuses by informing viewers of an age when he and his friends were tyrannized by the specter of T.S. Eliot. Graduate students and young professors, Fish complained, not only had to write, criticize, and sound like Eliot (a phase many of us somehow missed when taught by that intellectually diverse generation), but even had to imitate the way he lived his life.
In Fish's words: "The ruling set of ideas in literary studies was put forward by T.S. Eliot, indeed, embodied not only in his writings and in his person that was an Anglo-Catholic mentality in relation to which everybody knew that he or she could only read a certain set of texts, dress and talk in a certain way, drink in certain ways, visit certain countries, have certain implements in one's house. What I'm talking about is not so much a mandated code, but a code of behavior which grows up naturally in relation to some set of ideas that gets into the atmosphere."
When McLaughlin asked if it was only Eliot's poetry that became normative, Fish replied that "his religious and political attitudes dominated the academic scene in literacy studies." When McLaughlin asked if this domination had been limited to literacy studies, Fish explained that it was a much broader phenomenon that he was describing, one that crossed into the social, the moral, and the political, a veritable Eliot hegemony: "The kind of ideas that were embodied in T.S. Eliot and the T.S. Eliot regime led people either to be promoted or not to be promoted, to be given certain courses to teach or to be told that certain courses weren't worth teaching, et cetera."
It is more than ironic, in light of this, that Eliot, in his first three lectures on "The Aims of Education," raises, in fact, so many of the same questions that New Age critics present as original to themselves. Like them, Eliot is concerned with the unconscious purposes assumed by those who claim to educate solely from rational and conscious choice. Like them, he worries that without understanding just how problematic and equivocal the use of the term
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