MATTHEW ARNOLD ON THE CURRICULUM

FEW READERS OF ARNOLD’S LITERARY ESSAYS are able, perhaps, to construct the context of daily work and practical observation from which he spoke or to realize the simple immediacy of his pronouncements. For thirty-five years (1851-1886) Arnold served as Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, a business that entailed for him a dull and enervating routine; for nineteen years he endured the immense hardship of travelling throughout the winter months by coach and cab on the back-country roads of England and Wales; and-worst of all,, perhaps-for the whole period he witnessed the blundering, invidious obstructionism of politicians, always more concerned with religious Voluntaryism than the welfare of children. The religious factions of Arnold’s day had prevented the passage of every constructive education act in the British Parliament up to the year 1870, the year after the publication of his Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold’s Philistine was no straw man; his sinister presence still pervades the record of the Parliamentary Debates. Arnold saw the Philistine actually in control of the nation’s destinythat “wild ass alone by himself,” arrogantly and ignorantly out of contact “with the main current of national life”; an “incomplete and mutilated man,” with a “natural taste for the bathos,” a “want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, a disbelief in right reason, a dislike of authority”; a man preoccupied by his “cartloads of rubbish,” his morbid concern for “marriage with a deceased wife’s sister,” his querulous insistence upon the unbounded right to do exactly as he pleased.