On Education

The "shadow of lost knowledge"

At school we learn many things (if we’re lucky) that we subsequently forget. I often quote the Victorian schoolmaster William Johnson Cory who touches on this when he speaks about what a good school education should provide. Cory consoles us that whatever we learn can provide a valuable mental framework even when the details are forgotten: he uses the memorable phrase ‘the shadow of lost knowledge’.

Cory was writing about Eton in the 1860s, and his comments seem more applicable to tutorial teaching - say in a college or university - than to schoolroom instruction:

At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.

To this might be added the words of the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, writing around 1950 about the ‘gift’ of a university education. In today’s universities with their politically vocal student radicals it’s harder to find evidence for the suspension of final judgment that he espouses:

The characteristic gift of a university is the gift of an interval. Here is the opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of at once acquiring new loyalties to take their place...a moment in which to taste the mystery without the necessity of at once seeking a solution.

Popular films like Dead Poets’ Society, The History Boys, and most recently The Holdovers present the experiences of schoolteacher and students, emphasising the effect of instructors (inspiring or otherwise) on young minds. As a teacher for more than quarter of a century, I’ve found that the best students succeed with minimal input. The other day one student wrote to thank me for my ‘guidance’ in helping him achieve a triumphantly successful exam grade. I had done little other than praise his regularly excellent work, and was reminded of the words of the historian Edward Gibbon:

The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.