Cultural Olympians: Rugby School's Cultural Leaders

Education.

Introduction

Patrick Derham and John Taylor

The liberal tradition is one which values openness to a plurality of viewpoints and is committed to the use of reasoned enquiry and dialogue in the context of disagreement. Liberalism stems from a recognition of the difficulty of establishing certainty when addressing the questions of history, philosophy and ethics. Consequently, the tradition places emphasis on the importance of what Keats called negative capability: the ability to live, creatively and confidently, in the face of uncertainty, and to utilize this uncertainty as a spur to fresh thinking and engagement with the deepest questions of all.

The educational importance of liberalism should be self-evident, though, in an age when education has come increasingly to be valued for instrumental or utilitarian reasons, it is in constant need of being re-stated and defended. In recent years, we have aimed to mount a two-pronged attack: to argue vigorously in defence of the liberal approach, and to demonstrate, by engagement in curriculum reform, that its ideals can be implemented in ways which are practical and functional.1 We have sought, both in theory and practice, to advocate a philosophical approach to education.

Education, on this view of things, is the project of enabling young people to consider, and answer in their own lives, the great question of Socrates: how, then, should we live? It is, through and through, an ethical enterprise. It is also an enterprise premised on the application of critical, reflective enquiry (the unconsidered life is not worth living, as Socrates remarked, in partial answer to his own question) and on the task of humbly attending to the best that has been said and thought on the question, as Matthew Arnold would have it.

Liberal education is a response to a fact about the human condition: the fact that when we engage in the project of reflection on life itself, we find that questions mount up more quickly than answers. Nowhere is this truer than in the sphere of the humanities. About matters of history, ethics, theology and metaphysics, we find the desire for certainty thwarted by the limitations of our human faculties, by the confusion of our language and by the fact that even our best thinking is bound to find itself conditioned by presupposition, tradition and context. The desire for absolute certainty, which Descartes made central to the tradition of modern Western thought, is one which is destined necessarily to be frustrated.

Knowledge of how to live with uncertainty is one of the best lessons that liberal education affords. An acknowledgement that, in the pursuit of religious, ethical, philosophical or historical truth, our best thinking falls short of achieving finality engenders the virtues of humility, tolerance and empathy. But, crucially, the fact that we consider ourselves to be fallible in the pursuit of truth presupposes the idea that truth remains as our goal. The sceptics of antiquity saw themselves as those who seek; they aimed not to create a climate of crippling doubt, but to engender an ongoing quest for truth. Moreover, if objective truth, by its nature, will never be attainable with finality, the quest will be one which is always open to a new generation. We may climb high, and perceive new horizons, but beyond these, yet further horizons remain undiscovered.

It was with these thoughts in mind that we decided to turn for inspiration to some of those former members of our School whose lives and thought embodied greatness in the sphere of cultural endeavour. In focussing on pioneers who were all pupils or teachers at Rugby School, there is a danger of succumbing to a certain parochialism; to imply that, so to speak, something rather special in the waters of East Warwickshire caused a flowering of talent and an influence which extended across the globe. It is not our intention to advance any such thesis. Instead, our intention is simply to bring together, in illuminating juxtaposition, accounts of the lives and thought of some of those Rugbeians who gained a reputation for cultural, intellectual and spiritual leadership: the cultural olympians of their day. The lives of those whose stories are recounted here have much that is interesting and, perhaps, instructive to say.

These stories are, we believe, of more than purely historical interest. They promise to shed light on some of the complexities of the ongoing process of grappling with such matters as the relationship between faith and knowledge, the foundation of ethics within a largely secular, pluralist society, the nature of historical understanding, the challenge of social inequality, the priority of religious practice over doctrine – and, summing these up, at the most simple and profound level – the way in which we should go about answering Socrates’ great question of how should we live.

Aside from their connection to Rugby School, is there a common thread which runs through the lives of our cultural olympians? It would be mistaken to characterize them all as holders of a set of shared philosophical doctrines. But perhaps they can fruitfully be seen as sharing a way of addressing the great questions of their day. Imaginative, creative engagement with uncertainty – Keat’s negative capability – is recognizable as an element in the mindset of our cultural olympians. We offer this thought, not as a thesis, but as an hypothesis to be held in mind when reading the chapters which follow.

We can perhaps also discern a shared outlook amongst Rugby’s cultural olympians. Their liberal mindset is one which respected the need for critical, reflective, informed enquiry, but also allowed for openness to the insights which can be gained from traditional outlooks, and respect for the religious sensibility. It was an approach which connected creative thought about the transcendent with humility about the limitations of knowledge.

If not informed by an appropriate philosophical understanding, discussion of these topics is apt to degenerate into an intemperate exchange between dogmatically opposed positions, or, conversely, to wither away under the influence of the relativistic assumption that there is no objective truth to be pursued. By contrast, the form of reflective questioning described in the chapters that follow offers a paradigm for liberal, philosophicallyoriented enquiry into matters of ultimate significance, about which there remains deep-seated disagreement.

________________

1 See Derham and Worton (2010) Liberating Learning, Widening Participation (University of Buckingham Press) and Taylor (2011) Think Again: A Philosophical Approach to Teaching (Continuum)

Thomas Arnold: Legend, Tradition and History

John Witheridge

Awitty school novel entitled The Lanchester Tradition was published a few months before the outbreak of the First World War. Its author was G.F. Bradby, son of Dr E.H. Bradby, a pupil under Arnold who returned after Balliol to teach at Rugby, before becoming Master of Haileybury. He sent his three sons to Rugby, two of whom also became masters. In 1900, the younger, A.C. Bradby, wrote about Rugby for the Handbooks to the Great Public Schools series, and described Arnold as perhaps the most famous of schoolmasters; everyone has heard of him; at Rugby his name is still on all lips. 1 The Bradby brothers were steeped in the Arnold tradition which G.F. satirises in The Lanchester Tradition. It is about the staff of Chiltern School, and the trials and tribulations which beset a new, reforming headmaster. Despite his protestations that the masters and boys who figure in the following pages have never existed outside the author’s brain, 2 Chiltern is evidently Rugby, and Abraham Lanchester is Thomas Arnold. In the minds of at least some of the masters, his writ (or at least their version of it) still runs:

In spite of its ancient school-rooms, noble grounds, and salubrious climate, Chiltern would probably never have become one of the public schools of England if it had not been for Dr. Lanchester . . . Chiltern has lived ever since on (his) memory . . . The Lanchester tradition permeates the place like an atmosphere, invisible but stimulating . . . Any change in the hour of a lesson or the colour of a ribbon is regarded as an outrage on the Lanchester tradition, and is popularly supposed to make the dead hero turn in his grave.3

The Chiltern masters revere Lanchester as their second and greater founder,4 but much of what they admire is a caricature. Some matters, like the detail of uniform or the structure of the timetable, which they regard as important, had either been of little interest to Lanchester, or were later innovations which he would not even have recognised, let alone preserved.

All this is also entirely true of Arnold at Rugby. Like his counterpart, Arnold had been a restless reformer who had fought hard to change and improve a school he found ossified by custom and neglect. He has also, like Lanchester, acquired a posthumous reputation which mingles fact and fiction, history and legend, and in which, furthermore, the legendary, fictional aspects have come to dominate the tradition and the popular image. To understand why and how this has occurred we need to consider and compare three influential sources for Arnold’s life. The first is Arthur Stanley’s two volume Life and Correspondence (1844); the second, Thomas Hughes’s schoolboy classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857); and the third, Lytton Strachey’s essay in Eminent Victorians (1918). Stanley’s is a serious Victorian biography of nearly 800 pages; the other two are light and readable, and hugely popular in their time. They also depict an Arnold whose characteristics became the stuff of legend.

Stanley’s biography is the most historically authentic and reliable source. As a boy at Rugby, Stanley had idolised Arnold, and Arnold regarded him as the almost perfect example of the kind of boy he hoped the school would produce.5 He was precociously intelligent and bookish, and was taught by Arnold for three years in the sixth form, putting him in daily touch with Arnold’s thoughts and ideals. His biography is sympathetic, certainly, but objective and detached, and deliberately not a panegyric. The Arnold Stanley represents is, first and foremost, a prophetic figure, deeply and earnestly Christian, and it is this religious and moral influence above all that he brings to Rugby. His great object, wrote Stanley, was the hope of making the school a place of really Christian education.6 Arnold’s methods, according to Stanley, were his own heroic example of a man always trying to act as in the presence of God; his weekly, spellbinding sermons, more often than not on the struggle with evil and wickedness; teaching, especially of history, which sought to draw moral lessons from the past; stern, but by the standards of the time, humane discipline; and the prefect (praepostor) system, which recruited all thirty members of the sixth to be actually fellow-workers with him for the highest good of the school.7 As for the rest of school life, Arnold left it much as he found it. Stanley explains that he really only tinkered with the curriculum, leaving classics to dominate, and refusing to include science. Arnold never took much interest in games, except for an occasional glance out of his study window or stroll around the Close. Besides, organised sport (namely cricket and Rugby’s version of football) was still in its infancy, and many of the boys’ leisure hours were spent (or wasted) as they had always been, in rambling across the countryside – trespassing, poaching and rat-catching.

Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, published thirteen years after Stanley’s Life, gives a different picture, though in many respects a complementary one. It is an entertaining adventure story, but written with an evangelical purpose, namely to win admiration for the great Christian headmaster and, through him, to Christ, who is the King and Lord of heroes.8 Although Hughes had also been a pupil under Arnold, his novel is in places anachronistic, in that he reads back into Arnold’s time some later public school developments, especially the new cult of games, and what became known as ‘muscular Christianity’. It is this aspect of the Arnold legend that Hughes bequeaths to the tradition. He was predisposed to do so because, as a boy at Rugby, he had been much like Tom Brown – unintellectual, mischievous and keen on sports. He was not clever enough to join the sixth so never knew Arnold except from afar. It is instructive that when Stanley first read the book he said he was amazed to have discovered aspects of the school of which he had been entirely ignorant.9 What Stanley did recognise as authentic though was the story’s depiction of how supremely important Arnold was to his pupils, and especially how they thought and felt when they heard of his death.10

The Arnold of Eminent Victorians is the product of the fashionable antipublic school prejudice which followed the First World War. Arnold and Arnold’s Rugby were easy targets for the anti-Victorian sniper, wrote Basil Willey, and Stanley’s Arnold is a high-minded but blundering and conventional prig.11 Strachey’s essay represents a cynical reworking of the Arnold of Hughes’s fiction, supported by selective treatment of Stanley’s facts. In so doing, Strachey adds two more dimensions to the Arnold legend – that he was a typical Victorian, eminent or otherwise, and that he had ruled Rugby by fear, as Keate ruled Eton by flogging.12 As the Israelite of old knew that his almighty Lawgiver might at any moment thunder to him from the whirlwind, or appear before his very eyes, the visible embodiment of power or wrath, so the Rugby schoolboy walked in a holy dread of some sudden manifestation of the sweeping gown, the majestic tone, the piercing glance, of Dr Arnold.13

These are also fictions not facts. First, Arnold was not a Victorian. He was born in 1795 when George III was King, and was in his teens and twenties during the Regency. Only his last five years were lived during the reign of Queen Victoria, and he died twenty years before Prince Albert. He taught Victorians, and his ideals and methods laid Victorian foundations, but he was not himself a Victorian. Second, though Arnold may have been by nature serious, and though he lived in a time when a great gulf was fixed between schoolmasters and their charges, Stanley and Hughes both depict Arnold as a fond father who was essentially compassionate and kind to his pupils. Stanley says that the recollections of the head-master of Rugby are inseparable from the recollections of the personal guide and friend of his scholars.14 He speaks too of a deep undercurrent of sympathy which extended to almost all, and which from time to time broke through the reserve of his outward manner.15 In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Arnold arranges for Tom to share a study with George Arthur, a new boy who was likely to find life at Rugby a trial.16 Tom rises to the challenge, encourages the boy, and protects him from the bullies. On his last day, a master explains to Tom what the Doctor had intended, and describes ’the care with which he has watched over every step in your school lives.’17 Would so many of Arnold’s pupils have loved and revered him as they did if this had not been true?

So much for the legends; what now of history?

Arnold’s religion was a curious mixture of simple, unquestioning, almost Evangelical convictions about sin and salvation, and an independent-minded and critical approach to truth, which exposed almost everything else to the light of history and reason. The former derived as much from his temperament as his upbringing, and the latter from four years as a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and the company he kept there with a group of clever, liberal dons nicknamed the Noetics. Oriel also introduced Arnold to the theological writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to which the Noetics turned for inspiration, and whose son, Hartley, was also