If I understand rightly – it can be difficult to disentangle the multitudinous dissatisfactions of the world – there are two current complaints about the educational system of our day that make any claim to novelty. Education has always been considered a great bore, and generally quite fruitless; it has always appealed to a minority, and been applied to another minority that does not want it. These are old grievances, and for reasons I cannot pretend to fully understand, they have not weakened our insistence that children pay this terrible penalty for that last relic of original sin, illiteracy. Beyond these, though, there are two new grievances; and because they are new, the proposed solution is not liberation from the past, but rather a return to ‘the good old days’. For while it is an age-old tradition to decry the useless knowledge school fills our children’s head with, the fashion of our day is to complain that school fails to fill our children’s heads with any knowledge at all. It used to be a mark of the severest cultivation to declaim prettily on the vanity of school-learning: now it is considered far finer to dismiss the very idea of school-learning. People seem to lend credence to the idea that the gruelling slog our students go through really produces no result at all.
The second complaint or quarrel that can really claim to be new, is that there is a peculiar kind of bureaucracy, that apparently forces the bulk of the population into unemployment by preventing anyone without a degree from working. And if a job does not require a piece of paper, I am told, it requires several. Forests, apparently, have been levelled like this; and the cogs of society are completely jammed by this deluge of certificates. The idea seems to bee that while there is too little learning at the schools, there is too much schooling required; books are in decline and certificates are on the rise – the paper is simply reallocated. The premise of the system seems to be that each certificate means so little, that it takes a lot of them together to mean anything.
I do not know how much justice there is in these claims. It is hard to find which way is up in such matters. The ideal modern education is too elusive, since no one is quite clear what education is any more. It seems to be almost the nature of modernity to be too smart for education: education being the attempt to instil a few narrow ideals, and modernity being too tolerant or circumspect to have any narrow ideals. In the West, for instance, they used to teach wretched minors Classical Latin and Greek, because they were learned languages, though admittedly they were both dead; but that is antithetical to the modern attitude. Why learn Latin and Greek instead of Japanese? Why learn even Japanese instead of Arabic? Why not learn Spanish? Why not learn Chinese or Indonesian? We have, after so many centuries of darkness, rediscovered the great childish secret that schooling has always striven to drive from our ductile minds: the invincible question, ‘but why?’ No language, or subject, or tract of space or time has learnt to cope with that kind of examination. Ideally, one would learn Japanese and Arabic and Spanish and Chinese and Indonesian, with Greek and Latin to boot, and every other language on earth; but as young children seem to find such feats of comprehension difficult, the only solution is to sigh and teach them something at random. Let them learn Occitan. For good or for ill that is what modernity means: ambitions beyond huge, and results that are simply random. For example, our ancestors used to carve up rocks and call them gods, so that every nation had its own rock and claimed its rock had created all the other rocks; we have dispensed with all such rocks and replaced them with, not a boulder, but comparative biology. The same thing has happened in education. Once upon a time, education was purely practical, narrow, and in a sense cynical. It had one end in view, and that was to allow a man to keep up with the thoughts and ideas of other educated men. You learnt the whatever language your people held learned and plumbed the principles of their religion, so that you were on the same page as everyone else, and could get on with the practicalities of the learned life. By contrast a modern education is the most avowedly impractical of educations, the most vague and mysterious. It will not teach you to communicate with the community of the learned, who will all speak different languages and have learnt different subjects. It will teach you a number of disparate scraps of knowledge so that you have a finger in every pie and a tooth in none. Its only justification is the notion that, for some strange and spiritual reason that no one can clearly explain, so long as something is learnt about each subject, it doesn’t matter what.
Is this a good system, or is the old arbitrary dogmatism better? This, I believe, is the real matter at stake in the discussion of education – and I am really unfit to pronounce upon it. My own education, if it can be called that at all, was unorthodox enough that I cannot speak for others. The new system has a real, modern logic behind it, though like all good logic its results are at best paradoxical and at worst wearisome. The old system was too down to earth to be logical, and its results were comfortable but inadequate. Which is worse is hard to say.
On another matter I feel myself fitter to pronounce, as the most amateur of Egyptologists, and a student of the Arts. The matter is the silly old slander of the pyramid scheme. I believe the idea is that a certain amount of discomfort can be aroused by telling a BA who projects a PhD that their degree is ‘simply a pyramid scheme’, because the idea of a degree that ideally produces teachers of the same is ridiculous. The injustice done to Arts students by this attempt on their comfort can be easily passed over. To that I can turn the other cheek, and the sneering tone can be ignored and forgiven; it does not hit home at its intended mark anyway. Far greater is the insult to pyramids, and that I cannot ignore.
An insulting comparison always hits two targets. When a duellist calls his opponent a dog he insults both his opponent and dogs. He assumes one would not want to be a dog. When a farmer calls his assistant a clod he does wrong by the assistant and the earth. He assumes one would not want to be a clod. And when someone calls Arts degrees a pyramid scheme, they insult pyramids as well as Arts degrees. This might have been fair enough, if we were talking in purely abstract terms: simplicity, even of the geometrical variety, is not widely considered desirable. But we are not talking in purely abstract terms. Like any other geometrical solid found in a textbook, pyramids may be found in the real world too. As a matter of fact, they may be found all over the world, on just about every continent, like clods, and dogs. Only, clods and dogs are not meant to be grand, but pyramids are.
For example: the Great Pyramids of Giza are not generally referred to as ‘simply pyramids’. Wherever the idea came from – their size may have a little to do with it – they are even considered somewhat impressive, in their own way. Tourists are expected to be at least a little amazed, and if there is something more than mere politeness there, so much the better. It was not entirely a matter of form that they are considered a wonder of the world. And oddly enough, no one has yet attempted to divest them of their triangularity in order to increase their appeal. It could be done. A flourish could be added to Khufu without incongruity: an Egyptian headdress, say, or a giant ibis. Khafra could be embedded in a sphere like an enormous illustration of Euclid. But no one has; it seems at least respectable to be a pyramid. Indeed, it is a notable fact that there are no Great Cubes of Cuba or Great Cylinders of Kuwait: the closest rival, so far as geometrical chutzpa goes, is the more prosaic Pentagon. Even the Parthenon is not quite a prism, though it is plain enough, and the Kaaba, though it is indeed a cube, is admired as something other than architecture. Every other great monument is complex, only the pyramids pull off simplicity. And there is a general feeling that the pyramids by their very ponderous plainness can speak, while the buttresses and balustrades of a cathedral can only stare down in grand silence. At any rate, even cathedrals have to make concessions to the pyramid to preach their sermons, for a spire is but an appended pyramid. Only pyramids convey plainly the only clear and frank message any building ever conveyed: that all human constructions point to heaven.
Henceforth, out of respect for the pyramid, I shall insult arts degrees by calling them triangle schemes. I shall explain that what a molehill is to a pyramid, a triangle is to an orchestra. My new metaphor will lay stress on the pettiness of the arts, while sparing the good name of pyramids. I shall declare that pyramids point to the stars, but the arts, like triangles, point nowhere. Perhaps I shall carry a brass triangle in my pocket for the occasion, and when met by some such honourable bachelor as may have studied arts, I shall tinkle it at his nose, to symbolise the puerility of a degree so far from attaining the distinction of a pyramid. If one day I teach the arts, I shall be sure to discover to my pupils my scorn by bestowing upon each of them a little silver triangle, and explaining them that it will remind them each day that they have entered upon a triangle scheme.
But if, in a less flippant mood, someone tells me that Arts degrees are a mere pyramid scheme, I will answer him so. ‘With all due respect for your dubious intent and for learning of any kind,’ I will say, ‘it is for the other sciences to envy that they are not pyramid schemes. As Yorkminster’s biggest boast is that for all its elaboration it too contains something of the pyramid, so the sciences’ greatest boast is that they contain something of the pyramid. The honour we pay to the Professor of IT testifies to this: we honour him because he has contrived a pyramid scheme from a degree that was not originally meant to be one. And while every other science tries to dignify itself by decking itself out with career opportunities, only the Arts has the colossal self-assurance to dispense with these trinkets. The arts are so idealisitic as to aim primarily at the creation of students so good that they can teach; the practical degrees, supposedly all the finer for the non-triangular figure they cut, confess that their highest hope, in the majority of cases, is to produce workers. Which is more necessary is not open to dispute. Society is built and buoyed by workers, it is merely decorated by teachers. But which is more ambitious should not be doubtful either. To talk of the arts as “a mere pyramid scheme” is a contradiction in terms. It is like saying Alexander merely tried to conquer the world, on the grounds that he was not so articulate as to set aside certain portions for conquest and leave the rest aside. If it is a fault for the arts to be a pyramid scheme, the fault is not futility but rather hubris. Young historians should not be blamed for their idleness but for their ambition. Philosophers should be compared, not to vain theorisers and indolent dreamers, but rather to the most cutthroat political schemers.
‘In point of fact, though, I do think this kind of aspiration is so damaging. Because of its uncompromising idealism, the Arts degree leaves its traces all over the world; for thousands of students never reach the pinnacle of the pyramid, and follow some other path with their learning. They do not find other paths closed to them. They have wasted time roughly in the same sense that a tourist wastes time, and have probably not lost half so much money in proportion to time, and doubtless learnt much more. So they pick up their bags and head of into the “real world,” wherever their fancy takes them. The average person who has done a medical degree or an engineering degree has no such luxury. They are expected to continue to the top, be it lower or higher, and told that a failure to do so is equivalent to so much wasted time and money. They are never turned out on “the real world” to find a new profession. If they are not studious, they content themselves with some form of drudgery in their field; if they are studious, they may land themselves precisely where they want – in their field. I have no objections to this system; I even consent that it is an ideal system. But if it is taken to shed bad light on our “pyramid scheme” degrees, then we can easily return fire. It is these “practical” degrees that close off employment opportunities, since while propping open one door they close all others. The pyramid scheme may open nothing more than one very high and narrow door, but at least it does not shut the others.
‘All this is basically besides the point, since no one nowadays is so patient of their life as to sweat a degree without immediate renumeration in the way of employment (which our pyramid schemes do not generally offer.) An exception is generally made for what may be described as Burj Khalifa schemes, because they are considered vital to society. I am not picky on the point of professional opportunities. If the Arts really were a proper pyramid scheme, and once committed to a Bachelor you were committed to a Doctorate and a fellowship, they would be not less, but more significant. For being more essentially and emphatically a pyramid, they would have a finer point. All who pursued it would pursue it for its own sake; to undertake a Bachelor of Arts would be as bold a declaration as becoming a monk. For anything pursued for its own sake is a moral trumpet. The fact that professors, people who have done this, are not without honour in the world – although they are without leisure, money, or any of the usual equipage of honour – gives a very clear indication of what we as a society value. If that value is bad, there is nothing better than that the pyramid be demolished as quickly as possibly convenient. If it is good, it must be supported by every means we can spare. Either way, it is shortsighted to jeer at it for being a pyramid and not a dodecahedron. We are either sending out seven youths and maidens a year as fodder for a minotaur, or we are sending out as many to be servants of Athena. A little leaven leavens the whole lump: if the pyramid points to wisdom, the mere presence of professors in society does it good: if the pyramid symbolises pedantry, the honour accorded to it is a mark of our naïveté or decadence. Whichever way, the proposition that the Arts are nothing more than a pyramid scheme is mere blather: for even to the notably limited extent that they are a pyramid scheme, they are something greater than other sciences and studies. We might teach medicine for no other reason than that we have a basic desire for health, we might teach engineering because it is a necessity, and IT because we depend on it: but we teach Arts because we want to. A pyramid is a monolith. It is precisely because academia is a pyramid that it cannot be ignored. Let it stand for superstition or scepticism, for fastidiousness or generalisation, or for knowledge, or for gnosticism, or for bookish withdrawal and monkery – whatever the case, if it is a pyramid scheme, it can’t stand for nothing.’
theparsnipoftime 