Language Structure and Moral Education

Extract

My theme is really the Socratic proposition that knowledge is virtue. This is an idea which is never far from the minds of those concerned either with literature or with education. Yet when we look into our own lives, the proposition seems obviously false. We know from our own experience the truth of video meliora proboque. deteriora sequor. Most Catholics moreover, have been brought up to venerate (rightly but perhaps for the wrong reasons), sancta simp/icitas. the faith of a Breton peasant; to feel that a lot of learning is a dangerous thing, and that nothing good ever came out of Cambridge – at least not since the time of St John Fisher.

Nevertheless we can see that there is something in the proposition, at any rate negatively. If it is not true that virtue necessarily accompanies knowledge, it is commonly true that crime accompanies ignorance. Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday School movement, wrote of the prisoners in Gloucester gaol for whom he was working in the 1770's; ‘extreme ignorance was the principal cause of those enormities which brought them into this deplorable situation, precluding all hope of any lasting or real amendment from their punishment'. The uneducated classes a hundred years ago were still referred to as the ‘criminal classes', and it remains true today that those social areas where education is least successful are also those where delinquency is most common. Ignorance is, in modern Western society anyway, at least a contributory cause of crime, and education, if not a cure for crime, would at any rate create, as Jeanne Hirsch said of politics, a vacuum within which something is possible.