DH Lawrence was also a primary school teacher. His writings about that experience are remarkably prescient…

DH Lawrence was also a primary school teacher. His writings about that experience are remarkably prescient about the world we’re now confronted with. Thinking is a specialised skill, like plumbing, that the majority of people should (and used to) avoid. /1 https://t.co/FGJXPUqSZu

Lawrence’s critique of education bears little resemblance to any of the dominant educational narratives today or even of his own time. His greatest problem with education? That we massified it. /2

In a populist age like ours, immediately people will hear alarm bells of ‘elitism’ at that sort of suggestion. But Lawrence was making a pretty simple empirical argument, not arguing for the intrinsic superiority of some types of people over others. /3

For Lawrence, thinking is a skill. Which some are born with an aptitude for, and others not. Of course we all think to some degree, Lawrence is talking about school/book learning. Just as we’re not all born great at sports or singing, or whatever. /4

Nothing is more dangerous than ideas. Than belief. Ideas are so toxically seductive and dangerous that they need people with an aptitude and training to dissect them, to do that for the rest of us. Just like people with aptitude do every other job in society. /5

We don’t rally against plumbers who come to unblock our home toilets, saying it’s elitist that they do it when we could do it ourselves. Fuck that. We’re all mostly very happy to let somebody with expertise come and do that for us. /6

Lawrence’s views on democracy alongside his on education reflected the same basic understanding. That the idea of ‘the people’ as a thing was the death of not only democracy, but of civilisation itself. /7

The idea that we are all equal at all tasks, and that together we form some sort of magical collective mind. Codswallop. This is where Lawrence’s genius insight cuts right to the bone of the world we live in today. /8

Lawrence predicted that the idea of forcing mass academic learning on entire populations would lead to only one possible result. The utter contempt of most people towards ideas and those who work with them. /9

He brilliantly describes the experience of the vast numbers of students in schools who have little aptitude for school learning, and who then develop a visceral hatred for it and everything it represents. They feel humiliated. /10

Societies run on status, and the greatest wound to any person is the destruction of their status. Humiliation is the outcome. Forcing huge numbers to be humiliated by school learning leads to a mass movement of hatred for it. /11

And here we are, in a world dominated by social media. Where those we humiliated by forcing them to try to come to terms with knowledge they had no aptitude for, now rally on these platforms to ‘do their own research’. Really meaning rally in teams against ‘the elite’. /12

With that elite being those who succeed at schools and in universities. We brought this on ourselves with ridiculously idealistic and fact-free ideas about both democracy and thought. Try to mount an argument with anybody that thought is a specialised skill. /13

You’re violating their right to ‘free opinions’ even saying it. You will meet violent resistance. A person with aptitude and training for working with ideas is not a better person. Just as a plumber is not a better person than a hairdresser. /14

They just have a specific aptitude, and specific skills. Like we all do, in all of our jobs and other activities. That hierarchical ‘better than’ thing is the vicious hatred we inculcated in students who simply weren’t suited to school learning. /15

Schools now of course try to cater for a much wider range of aptitudes, but the cat is long out of the bag. Our passion for universal education was mostly our passion to get kids out of the way of adult life. /16

I’ve Tweeted about where that got us, the entrenched adolescence of adult culture itself, as children took their popularity school culture and rebuilt adult life with it. Including the contempt for learning and knowledge itself, and all those who work with it. /17

Social media is the enabling infrastructure for this destruction of adult hierarchies of expertise, replaced by the aggregating of likes and followers on these platforms. It gave the humiliated their chance to fight back. We’re living in the ruins. /end