The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

The College at Large
Harper and Row, 1973), p. 64.]. My parents with their truncated
elementary education shared Weil’s perception that such a
‘transcendent kingdom’ exists.
We are currently (late 2009) misgoverned by an elected body
which may be the worst since Chamberlain’s appeasement
cabinet of 1938. Even so, I would acknowledge that anyone
attempting to govern, whether it is done well or ill, is facing
a perennial, ineluctable, and probably insoluble problem.
Put in the form of a question it reads: ‘how do you translate
intractable values into tractable instruments and effects?’ This
question applies as much to the arts and to education as to
forms of polity. In education and the arts (particularly poetry
as it so happens) it is concentrated in the struggle to sustain
unpredictable yet unassailable intensity — let’s call it ‘intrinsic
value’ — with some form of communication with others, a
form of communication to which such terms as ‘relevance’
and ‘accessibility’ relate only as terms of helpless and hapless
travesty.
The question of insolubility need not be crippling; it may
indeed be salutary, if it is kept in mind as, so to speak, a tensile
thread in the mind between what is pre-eminent but probably
unsustainable and what is predictable, or expedient, but underachieving.
Know thyself.
Education in particular is currently in thrall to a species of
technocratic ‘angelism’ as one of my early poetic masters
Allen Tate (1899–1979) could well have said. Such angelism
latterly in vogue as ‘social engineering’ cares no more for the
heritage of my parents (for all its impertinent chatter about
the ‘under-privileged’) than it cares for the intellectual and
sensuous terrain of a notoriously ‘rebarbative’ poet approaching
extinction. I have only very recently encountered Frank
Musgrove’s: ‘The English working class has been betrayed twice
in my lifetime: first in the General Strike of 1926 and then forty
years later when the grammar schools “went comprehensive”’.
[Cited in Chris Woodhead, A Desolation of Learning: Is This the
Education our Children Deserve? (s.l.: Pencil Sharp Publishing,
2009), p. 135.] This now seems to me as indisputable as William
Morris’s denunciation (in 1883, at Oxford) of the workings of
‘anarchical Plutocracy’. [William Morris, Collected Works, 24 vols
(London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1910–15), vol. 23, p.
191 (‘Art under Plutocracy’). ] But of course it will be disputed,
perhaps by readers of The Record, especially by those who have
come triumphantly through a ‘comprehensive’ education. All
credit to past and present working class members of Keble
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