The fourth ‘R’ is rooted belief: Rex Warner and the politics of revisionist classicism

Introduction: Latin, revisited

In the 1920s, a new Latin textbook appeared in the British market entitled Latin for Today, which was to become ‘probably the best-selling book in its field in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s.’ ¹ This textbook was markedly different from other textbooks at the time, including Latin Premier and Macmillan Latin Course. What made Latin for Today unique was its primary aim: increasing the relevance of the classics, specifically by supplementing the grammatical elements of Latin with historical and cultural lessons. The book clearly de-emphasised Latin grammar, arguing that ‘it taught as a means to an end and never as an end itself.’ ² In contrast to the 1902 Macmillan Latin Course, which included only a string of linguistic exercises, Latin for Today featured legends, classical mythology and frequent pictures, asking students to focus on the value of Rome to ‘our modern civilization’ and ‘the English language.’ ³ Latin for Today accompanied contemporaneous proposals to revise the role of the classics in education in a pre-war period when the role of education in a democracy was becoming increasingly centralised. And while scholars often focus on the way cultural figures have responded to the ideological crises of the era, only recently have critics begun to explore how writers with both political and pedagogical investments, particularly those included in what Hynes called the ‘Auden Generation,’ have addressed such interwar debates. ⁴ In the 1930s, there were fervent demands to increase educational access across class lines and decentralise the role of public schools, notably by The Hadow Report (1931) and The Spens Report (1938), proposals which sought to diversify the offerings of secondary schools and usurp the dominance of classically invested public schools. Though conservative fiscal policies and war interrupted many of these efforts, the vociferous defence of universal secondary education amplified extant skepticism about the cultural value of traditional classical education. ⁵

When the end of the war enabled the institutionalisation of new policies in the form of the Education Act of 1944, the resulting tripartite system of education reduced the emphasis on classical education across the board, and Oxbridge removed compulsory classical language requirements by the end of the 1950s. ⁶ But in the decades before the Education Act, some wondered what Latin or Greek could possibly offer students to cure the plague of right-wing politics ailing the continent and using classical imagery to fuel its worst impulses. Even more argued that the preference for students who had mastered Latin and Greek was a sign of academia’s worst bourgeois tendencies. This classical crisis led novelists and poets, particularly those whose roles as educators involved them in these debates, to reframe the value of the field and theorise how best to remodel classical education in defence of democratic liberalism. The aforementioned Board of Education proposals recognised the economical detriment caused by mass unemployment, reinforced by the exclusivity of the traditional public school system. As educational policy eventually took these suggestions on board, debates over the role of Latin and Greek would similarly lead to their devaluation within secondary and higher education, a trend exemplified by Latin for Today.

One figure perfectly suited to deal with the classical crisis of the 1930s was novelist and classicist Rex Warner. Though well-known by the circle surrounding Auden, now Warner is an overlooked figure, perhaps only recognised for his 1941 dystopian novel The Aerodrome. But his other interwar dystopias, including The Wild Goose Chase (1937) and The Professor (1938), demonstrate a deep preoccupation with the relationship between classicism, pedagogy and political crises. The increasingly virulent debate over politics and education impacted Warner and other classicists disproportionately, as the field – bolstered as it was by the prominence of the elitist public school system – was increasingly seen as an antiquated pedagogical relic that, as Natasha Periyan notes, ‘seemed antithetical to democratic social and educational forms.’ ⁷ This debate led Warner’s friend Auden to make a shocking claim about public schools: ‘the best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist State.’ ⁸ Just as Auden was concerned about the relationship between politics and traditional education, his friend Warner was interested in how, or if, classical teaching might resist the rise of fascism. Throughout his fiction Warner, a teacher of Latin and Greek, pairs frequent references to pedagogy in his fiction with dystopian plots that dramatise the threat of authoritarianism. As pedagogical theorists and administrators would begin to conceptualise the political aims of education anew, Warner’s fiction sought to pave a fresh path for classical education informed by his leftist politics. In his essays, Warner wrote fluently and frequently in defence of a revisionist classicism that he argued could aid in the continued defence of the left. His novels and essays, as I will argue, endorse a revision of traditional classicist education, additionally espousing a concept of teaching mirrored in the institutional debates about pedagogical reform which sought to democratise educational access and decentralise the classicist monopoly of public schools. Warner’s 1930s classicism, like Latin grammars and educational policies, shifted away from linguistic and grammatical concerns, and embraced a more holistic approach to classicism – one more coincident with the allegorical aesthetic modes of his interwar writing. In doing so, Warner also cautioned against the aloofness typically associated with traditional classicist pedagogy, seeking to find synergy between classical study and political activism.

This essay will trace Warner’s revisionist classicism throughout his fiction and prose while mapping the parallel debates about classical education taking place within institutional academic circles, particularly as related to the public debates about secondary education in the interwar period. Though challenges to classicism at legislative and institutional levels had been waged intermittently for decades, the rise of what I call ‘revisionist classicism’ during the interwar period finally consecrated the long-standing decline of both the public school tradition and the concomitant influence of Latin and Greek as fields of traditional grammatical study. For reformers like Frederick Clarke, educational policy needed to reject any classical education that only ‘[served] the vocational needs of a ruling class of cultivated amateurs’ and failed English working-class students who sought to climb the economic ladder. ⁹ A practical, politicised classicism, like that espoused by Warner, was the best way to preserve the field he loved within the newly conceptualised system of nationally funded secondary education while also addressing the incipient tide of fascist thought and preserving democratic norms.

‘Discipline for What?’: The fall of classical discipline in the 1930s

The Auden circle of the 1930s has often been associated with the academy and, for the most part, this association has been quite unflattering. One of the most cited stereotypes of these writers comes from George Orwell, who described Auden as evolving out of a ‘public-school-university-Bloomsbury pattern,’ a critique challenged later by Samuel Hynes. ¹⁰ And as Janet Montefiore reminds us, the ‘Auden Generation’ often mistakenly understood their public school experience ‘as the normal apprenticeship for writers of their generation,’ forgetting that women and working-class writers had no such privileges. ¹¹ All the same, the perceived educational privilege of many interwar writers was critical to 1930s literary production; Benjamin Kohlmann argued that ‘the notion of the Ivory Tower was important’ because ‘it exerted an anxiety of influence that affected a wide spectrum of left-wing writers,’ even those without public school experience. ¹² Writers like W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, Cecil Day Lewis and Rex Warner were depicted as Ivory Tower schoolboys due, at least in part, to their classical training in public schools, but the importance of teaching and pedagogy to these writers later in life is equally notable. Most of those in Warner’s circle were, as Valentine Cunningham describes it, ‘in and out of the scholastic agencies like yo-yoes.’ ¹³ W. H. Auden taught children at Larchfield Academy and the Downs School, focusing primarily on English and French. ¹⁴ Cecil Day Lewis also taught at Larchfield, and Edward Upward would be an educator for the whole of his career at Alleyn’s School. ¹⁵ Warner attended Wadham College, Oxford, where he connected with close friend Cecil Day Lewis and met W. H. Auden, who would dedicate part of The Orators to Warner’s son Jonathan. ¹⁶ From 1929 to the end of the war, Rex Warner taught at no fewer than six schools, including a mixture of public and grammar schools both in England and Egypt, including the Reynes Park School, for which Auden wrote a school song. ¹⁷ At times, Warner’s radical politics led to tension at his posts, as when he brought students to a Conservative meeting where the students jeered, much to the dismay of conservative parents. ¹⁸ For teachers like Warner, working in a culture made tenser by the possibility of war, both the traditional methods of the past and the legacy of public schools were quickly becoming obsolete. There is a definitively elegiac quality to discussions of British public schooling in these interwar years, examples of which lie in Graham Greene’s The Old School (1934), a collection of essays from writers on their time as students, including W. H. Auden’s essay on public schools, ‘Honour’. Characterising the current system of education as ‘doomed,’ Greene’s preface characterises the book as a ‘family album,’ ‘more funny than tragic,’ depicting an education system ‘so odd … [it] does not demand a pompous memorial.’ ¹⁹ Writing at the end of the war in English Public Schools, Warner mirrors this vision of the public school as antiquated, wondering ‘how they are to take their part in a democratic system of education.’ ²⁰

Aside from the characterisation of traditional education by these writers as passé, public schools were ‘coming under fire from radical critics’ in the 1930s; such critics specifically targeted the fetish for classical language training as a contributor to the obsolescence of public schools. ²¹ Warner was aware of these arguments, even quoting public school critic and prominent socialist educational reformer R. H. Tawney in English Public Schools (1945):

Warner’s closest friend, Cecil Day Lewis, also saw retaining classical education as evidence of ‘the rising bourgeois class’ and a clear usurpation of the ‘means of intellectual production.’ ²³ In ‘An Expensive Education,’ Day Lewis decried the ubiquitous traditional approach to classical language study as maintaining capitalist exploitation. Furthermore, dedication to classicism reinforced an apolitical approach to culture, which Day Lewis saw as fundamentally opposed to the aims of contemporary art:

But even if we granted that Latin provided the best mental discipline, the question remains – discipline for what? … The clientele of the average preparatory school (and public school) is more or less saturated with the capitalist mentality; it is inevitable, therefore, that the training of such schools should be fundamentally directed towards the maintenance of the capitalist system. For this, Latin – with its emphasis on syntax, its constant appeal to the past, its abstraction from contemporary issues, its combination of intellectual snobbery and imagination-deadening drudgery – may well be the most effective ‘mental discipline’. ²⁴

It was no secret that classical public education had come to stand for class privilege, and the class divisions classicism reinforced were readily apparent; in the 1920s, renowned Greek scholar J. W. Mackail saw the entry into Greek as a ‘prize for the aptest and most forward’ student, but also recognised that privileging the classics led to ‘the artificial growth of class-consciousness,’ which was ‘the antithesis of democracy.’ ²⁶ In this same period, massive efforts by the Labour Party to democratise secondary education were underway, with Tawney (the man Warner cites in English Public Schools) penning his cornerstone Labour treatise Secondary Education For All (1922), which advocated for universal secondary education to the age of fifteen (the leave age was fourteen) with ‘the widest possible variety of type among secondary schools.’ ²⁷ A highly compromised Conservative version of this proposal was meant to go into effect on 1 September 1939, but was interrupted by the war. ²⁸ Only after the war were similar policies, including both an unconditional raising the leaving age and the introduction of a more inclusive secondary school structure, more fully realised in the form of the Educational Reform Act of 1944. These post-war changes, providing alternative pathways for working-class students to enter university, made it clear that the traditional public school had sickened English culture with elitism, and its trademark focus on classical languages was a symptom of this cultural illness.

Describing the role of Latin historically, Frederick Clarke wrote in 1940 that Latin was ‘very little more’ than a ‘medium of learning,’ further suggesting that classical training helped the upper classes, who were ‘concerned with the specific attainments necessary for effective living at their own social level and in their own milieu.’ ²⁹ Clarke helped transform the 1938 Spens Report into the Educational Reform Act of 1944, and similarly sought to decentralise the role of classical languages in order to make education more relevant to working-class pupils, partially by encouraging adaptation of new classicist pedagogical methods; this approach eventually led to the dissolution of the Latin entrance exams by Oxford and Cambridge in the post-war period. ³⁰ But in the 1930s, while public schools sought to maintain their cultural relevance and defend themselves against the leftist ‘barbarians at the gates’ like Day Lewis, Warner wanted to welcome those so-called barbarians with open arms, hoping to refurbish classical education in a way that bolstered the anti-fascist left. ³¹

Along these lines, Warner’s novel The Professor acts as an allegorical manifesto against traditional classicism. Warner’s first three novels, published in the 1930s and 1940s, follow innocent protagonists unexpectedly cast into the morass of dystopian totalitarian nightmares and tasked with the challenge of restoring democratic norms by the novel’s end, with mixed success. But as these novels established Warner as an allegorist of the fascist tide, they also acted as fictional manifestoes against traditional classical pedagogy. In a plot which follows the last days of a classics professor turned Chancellor amidst a fascist uprising, Warner’s The Professor pits traditional classical pedagogy against toxic fascist ideology, suggesting that an unrevised version of the former is no match for the political savvy and violence of the latter. Warner presented this criticism by using the Professor – named only Professor A – as a negative example; throughout the novel, the protagonist’s inability to adjust his pedagogy to the times yields catastrophic results, both personally and politically. He is a caricature of the isolated public school-university product; in 1931, 76 per cent of those holding high offices in Church, state and industry in England were, like the Professor-turned-Chancellor, educated in public schools. ³² Looking at the crowds after he is newly announced Chancellor, Professor A thinks, ‘hardly one person in a thousand could possess any knowledge of classical literature.’ ³³ The Professor rightly identifies that the public would fail to understand his classically inflected motivations for governance. But Warner takes the argument a step further, connecting the Professor’s bookishness to his dissociation from working-class struggle – a direct reflection of Day Lewis’ criticism in ‘An Expensive Education’:

And he himself, what knowledge had he of the way of life of those whom he represented? He had inspected but never worked in factories; he had bought goods in shops, but never sold them … he was a teetotaler and a non-smoker. ³⁴

There is additional support tying the Professor’s aloof approach to education to his toothless politics. His economic plan is guided by academic perspicacity, not the cultivation of public opinion. Even in his efforts to gather the views of the public, the Professor outs himself as an anachronistic technocrat, specifically requesting that a ‘plebiscite’ be planned and executed, both a Greek reference and a clear allusion to the contemporaneous cancellation of an Austrian poll by Hitler. ³⁵ Despite his efforts, the erudite pedagogue seems doomed to failure as a democratic leader precisely because he holds tightly to a bookish, unapplied classicism. This is further emphasised when he returns home to his lover, Clara, after being named Chancellor; she ‘[does] not rise’ when he enters, and her only request is for help with some translation of Alcman’s fragments. Having no propensity for human connection, translation ends up being all he is good for. It comes as no surprise when we find that she has adopted a fascist lover and betrayed him. His relationship with his son is also damaged by this aloof classicism. After being raped by the fascist National Legionnaires, his son’s girlfriend commits suicide. After the son tells this tale, all the Professor can think of is Andromache’s lament in the 22nd Book of the Iliad. In a rare moment of self-questioning, the Professor begins to challenge the relevance of his studies, wondering if ‘such dignified expressions of grief’ were ‘merely the make-believe of a poet;’ it is the first time he challenges the political relevance of his classical training. ³⁶ But the moment is lost. Seeking to stop the tyranny of the rapist Legionnaires, his Communist son suggests his father arm himself and other Communists as a practical means of defending the threatened state, but the father balks, continuing to believe that ‘even at this hour persuasion may be proved more powerful than violence.’ ³⁷ To fix the problem, he hopes to present an address over wireless, ‘chiefly to the workers’ – the very same workers with whom he cannot identify. ³⁸ Of course, the broadcast is sabotaged, and the failure to arm the Communists ends up being the Professor’s most hubristic mistake yet. Warner is clear that it was the son who had the right approach to defending the nation against a fascist scourge, not the erudite Professor.

While The Professor shares the skepticism of public schools shared by Cecil Day Lewis, R. H. Tawney, and Frederick Clarke, Warner’s essays outlined new pedagogical stratagems to transform the role of classics and avoid the negative model put forward by the Professor. Warner begins his essay ‘The Study of the Classics’ (1947) by ironically suggesting himself yet another defender of tradition. ‘The study of classics,’ Warner writes,

has been defended so often and on so many grounds that it may seem both unnecessary and impertinent to attempt another defence which is bound to be, in great part a reiteration of what has often been said before. ³⁹

In analysing the dissolution of classical Greek and Latin training, Christopher Stray cites a satirical couplet in a Guinness advertisement, titling itself ‘Lines on a Guinness advertisement by a claffical scholar,’ the typography of which ‘[belonged] to the departed world of old-fashioned lettering.’ ⁴³ These shifts in popular attitude towards the classics were also reflected in teaching pamphlets, where ‘the embedding of Latin in the curriculum as a formal training of mind … was fast becoming a ritualized process detached from the investigation of literature and history.’ ⁴⁴ Similarly, Rex Warner saw the value of classical education lying somewhere outside the realm of a purely linguistic study. He cites ‘a common background of thought,’ ‘breaking down conventional barriers of time and place,’ and ‘a positive guidance for the future’ as features that give classicism value. ⁴⁵ At no point in his defence of the classics does he defend classical languages as such, or the practice of learning them. Instead, Warner endorses the narrative structure and content of Greek and Latin prose as constitutive of classicism’s value. Beyond this, he hints at the political import of classical structures by suggesting classical texts might provide guidance for future actions.

More than any other of Warner’s novels, The Professor cautions that a failure to correct such academic aloofness necessarily bolsters the claims of fascist foes. It was known that Warner modelled the Professor on famed classicist Gilbert Murray, who fought against Conservative proposals to restrict free state-run secondary education in the 1930s. ⁴⁶ And while some readers, recognising the reference to Murray, countered that the real-life classicist would have effectively countered the fascists, Warner stages a debate between the fascist National Legionnaires and the Professor which suggests otherwise, emphasising the impotence of traditional classical modes amidst the rise of fascism. As Chancellor, the Professor is confronted by one of the fascists, Julius Vander, a former public school classmate. Vander, citing his mastery of rote classical education, notes the shock this evokes in the Professor: ‘You were thinking that it was strange that a man who was at one time good at examinations of Greek and Latin should be wearing this uniform.’ ⁴⁷ Through Vander’s mastery of the classics exam, and his concomitant fascism, Warner suggests a necessary revision of the cultural approach to classicism by linking fascism to the values of classicist public education, an allegorical mirroring of Auden’s decrying public schools as fascist institutions. The Professor laments that Vander does not,

[believe] in the ideals of European civilization which we have inherited from the Greeks almost in their entirety … I am afraid that I meant that you were either a liberal or, at all events, not unsympathetic to the ideals of liberalism. ⁴⁸

In his diatribe explaining the ideological motivations that led him towards fascism, Vander cites an educational policy fetishising recitation of the classics and oppressing the working class. Vander’s rebuke of the Professor points to the problematic marriage of liberal ideology and traditional classicist pedagogy. While the fascist damns both, Warner also seems to be drawing attention to the problematic ties between recitative classicism and cultural elitism:

[E]veryone could have enough food and drink, there would be just the right amount of educated women to go around, and all the world could read Plato in the original Greek. Everyone could work for everyone else; there would be no more war; and the whole world would be turned into one big jolly factory without an owner … This is the kind of ideal which at the present time has resulted from your faked generalized morality. You say you want to make men brothers. What you really want is to make them ants. ⁵⁰

A final dramatic reference to fascism indicates the importance of a classicism informed by a polemical pedagogy. Ousted from his position as Chancellor, the disguised Professor finds a mob of his former students holding copies of the Illiad and the Odyssey near an open bonfire as they rail against him. The books, one protestor claims, ‘are not only in a foreign language, but are not even printed intelligibly. Is our national alphabet good enough for us, or is it not?’ ⁵¹ The students burn the books, having only understood their value as remnants of a linguistic past, not as texts with political import. The Professor’s pedagogical failure buttresses their burgeoning fascism; he has never made the classics relevant or accessible to his pupils. Professor A is subsequently imprisoned but told he can be released if he halts ‘any political activities.’ ⁵² He refuses, marking his first and only brave stance against the fascist regime. They bring him to the doors of the prison, indicating he can walk out. He does and is executed in the final paragraph of the novel; the press reports he was trying to escape. This pedagogical allegory warns us of the dangers of the professor’s erudite pacifism.

Learning the lessons of the past: The classics as political allegory

The Professor theorises the role an educator plays in the political enlightenment of students. The failure to take this role seriously emboldens fascistic rhetoric against academia. But as Warner’s fiction addressed insular public school ideology, political debates around classical education were contemplating how a new curriculum might help students become more vibrant members of a democracy. The Board of Education proposals in the interwar period, which informed post-war legislation, began the process of demoting traditional classicism in the English school system. The 1931 Hadow Report began the institutional process of decentralising Latin in the curriculum. It denigrated the tradition of teaching English grammar through the ‘transference of Latin rules,’ suggesting a more ‘informal’ method of English grammar, only after which students would be able to ‘appreciate the construction of a foreign language.’ ⁵³ Seven years later, The Spens Report endorsed a radical (though unrealised) multilateral secondary education where all students would be educated together. The report saw a primary goal of education to be

the development of the power thus acquired to benefit the child as a social being, and to help him to take his place as a thinking individual and a wise citizen. ⁵⁴

Aside from his dedication to translating the classics, Warner’s investment in classical education was significantly less reliant on knowledge of the original languages, a quality which aligned with the new theories of classical education demonstrated by the Hadow and Spens reports. ‘[I]t is altogether a sounder thing,’ Warner wrote,

for a boy to leave school after having read the classics widely and with interest, even though he has read them in English, than for him to leave with the impression, won by hours of labour with crib, dictionary and grammar, that the whole of classical literature is a record of minor battles or the retiring into and emerging from winter quarters. ⁵⁷

While Rex Warner’s novels abound with critiques of authoritarian education, his other interwar novel, The Wild Goose Chase (1937), also demonstrates Warner’s antagonism towards a recitative classicist pedagogy that has excluded the working class. While The Professor testifies to the cultural rejection of tradition recitative classicism, The Wild Goose Chase theorises the dangers if such a classicism was to maintain a stranglehold on pedagogical practice. The novel’s structure incorporates a series of allegorical vignettes that comprise the quest of the protagonist George to, as the title suggests, locate a goose as part of a cultural tradition unsurprisingly called the ‘wild goose chase.’ The reasoning behind the chase is opaque; George’s mother was rumoured to carry a birthmark of a webbed foot on her belly, a feature shared by ‘other ladies in the town,’ though ‘their husbands were quite unaware of it’. The rumours and innuendos are related to various classical sources, including ‘early mytho-poetry’ and ‘Leda and the Swan.’ ⁶⁰ This is the total of the villagers’ knowledge of the mythical origins of the story, but the speculation about birthmarks gives rise to a dangerous tradition of sending men off to distant lands in search of the goose responsible. Local superstitions, born of a literal interpretation of the myth, suggest that a failure of education has led three brothers, including George, to take on a perilous journey in search of something that may not exist. Like the Professor’s students, the villagers have not internalised the allegorical meaning of the classical avian parable. Rather, a recitation of mythical innuendo is enough to justify the fraught flight to a foul city aimed at finding the befuddling fowl. George unexpectedly returns from his journey, sharing his journey to a totalitarian country in the form of a series of vignettes that comprise the novel.

In one of the first stops on his long journey, George comes across a self-made philosopher named Don Antonio. Compared to his hometown’s customs, Don Antonio’s lifestyle is quaint. The emergence of classicism in this allegory comes in the form of Don Antonio’s semi-primitive lifestyle, as he disregards ‘modern’ language at home in favour of Latin and Greek; he teaches these two languages (albeit poorly) to his two nude female concubines. The nuances of Don Antonio’s lifestyle mirror the aesthetic optimism of the classicist defenders. His home promises an idyllic pre-lapsarian space, isolated from anything as profane as politics. But cracks in this utopian facade form rather early as Warner describes the unconventional family reading Horace: ‘They read the Odes, with great exactitude, although, as Don Antonio said, they did not understand a word of what they were reading.’ ⁶¹ Like the people of the village, the women fail to understand the import of classical texts; like the warning of the Hadow Report a few years earlier, classical training has neither increased critical awareness, nor liberated the concubine-students’ minds from the authoritarian leader who enslaved them. Despite the troubling teaching he witnesses, George identifies with Don Antonio, seeing his cabin as testimony to the life of the mind and removed from the pressures of community and commerce. In fact, George thinks that Don Antonio ‘should be capable of transforming our present unsatisfactory conditions’ through his classicist approach. ⁶² But, like the naïve Professor, George is finally faced with a truth that upsets his rose-coloured vision of traditional classicism; this is not a utopia free of class violence, but a harsh and exploitative dystopian household domineered by a totalitarian leader.

In short, the allegory unveils the authoritarian nature of classicism’s traditional defenders. The nightmarish impact of Warner’s imaginary classicist habitus becomes fully apparent when one of Don Antonio’s female companions, Pyrrha, murders Don Antonio and reveals she can speak some English. Pyrrha’s vitriol is unmasked as she looks ‘up at [George] distrustfully and says in broken English: “Master old rat’s tail dead good”.’ ⁶³ Eventually, Pyrrha returns to English natively. Free from the constraints of authoritarian classicism, Pyrrha paints the idyllic philosopher’s home with the spectre of slavery on which it was founded; she recognises that the desire to return to the past, particularly the classicist one marked by linguistic ‘purification,’ masks inconceivable oppression. Conversely, Cleobyle, the other concubine, remains trapped in false consciousness and dies of grief. George, looking at the dead Cleobyle, quickly embraces the horror of the civically minded modern man now confronted by the regressive and even evolutionarily stunted hermits. ‘He looked at the body of Cleobyle and saw waste matter … a thing that had lived diabolically, the parody of an ape.’ ⁶⁴ The disdain for Cleobyle is born of her refusal to witness the meaning of her own allegory. She not only shallowly absorbed and mirrored Don Antonio’s devolutionary values, aping them, but the behaviour she mimed was farcical from the start – she remains a parody of an ape. Far from producing a race of the superbly civil, the adaptation of recitative classicism produces a collapsed community.

In sum, the scene in Don Antonio’s cabin highlights the importance of the murky division between mindless recitative education (represented by Don Antonio’s classicism), and more holistic education – between a form that obfuscates power relations and one that reveals them. Don Antonio ‘had not only debauched their bodies but had stifled their souls’ by ‘instructing them only in the recitation of Latin verses, which he was careful that they should not understand, and the singing of German songs.’ ⁶⁵ The allusion to Germany suggests the tie between authoritarianism and recitative classical education. Like the Don Antonio allegory, the Spens Report would link the conservative vision of education to authoritarianism. In its argument against the vision of secondary education as ‘education of the privileged few,’ the report ties the public-school-centric past of English schooling to the ‘totalitarian state,’ which uses ‘human engineering’ to ‘[deflect] large numbers from … secondary schools.’ ⁶⁶

Conclusion: Anti-fascist propaganda and revisionist classicism

Documentarian John Grierson, in his essay ‘The Nature of Propaganda,’ argues for his own radical and quirky revision of pedagogy. In addition to the three ‘R’s – reading, writing and arithmetic, he states we should include a new category called ‘Rooted Belief.’ ⁶⁷ And with this quirky revision of the tried-and-true pedagogical trilogy, Grierson bound the grimy spectre of propaganda to the more genteel project of education. He seemed to be partnering unlikely bedfellows, but embraced the partnership confidently in his 1942 essay, arguing that failing to accept the inherently political aims of education suggested a repressive instinct, best fitting those who clutched onto their pearls of neutrality amidst the moral crises of the preceding decade. For those brave enough to admit it, propaganda was – and would continue to be – vital to the function of any democratic education. Grierson provided more than just a witty slogan for this movement in education; he and other 1930s writers brought the politicisation of education back from a forgotten past to reestablish its rightful place at the centre of pedagogical practice. Grierson’s laments that ‘propaganda is the part of democratic education which the educators forgot.’ ⁶⁸ Grierson laments reprisal of the three (now four) R’s represented a host of writers contributing to the re-politicisation of the educational field.

Warner’s revisionist classicism was motivated by similar principles. In the socialist essay collection The Mind in Chains (1937), his essay ‘Education,’ also advocated for the vital role of pedagogy in the larger political aims of the left. He wrote, ‘education, if it is not perverted, must lead up to our point of view.’ ⁶⁹ He subsequently labelled this practice ‘propaganda on the broadest possible basis.’ ⁷⁰ Like Grierson, Warner was following a trend of thinkers who sought to re-establish the role of politics within education. Always the dissenting academic, Warner was deeply troubled by the possible devolution of education towards totalitarianism. As such, his weaponisation of revisionist classicism aimed to protect education from any authoritarian tendencies. In the final paragraphs of English Public Schools, Warner reflects on the long-standing values of English schooling, reflecting on looming threats that could challenge these values:

[I]t is plain enough that the feeling for the community, the emphasis on character and on the use of leisure, the promotion of an integrated personality, reverence for what is great in the past, the sense of fair play – all, however much they have at times been distorted, parts of the theory and practice of the public schools – are things of inestimable value, rooted in national character, and among our most efficient safeguards against the dangers of a bureaucracy with low aims or a totalitarianism with hysterical ones. ⁷¹