Education Notes From a Better Past

Insight on the News, May 28, 2001 by Stephen Goode

Thomas Arnold, who lived from 1795 to 1842, was one of those 19th-century larger-than-life Englishmen such as Charles Dickens, William Gladstone or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who helped define what it meant to be British more than a century ago. As headmaster of Rugby, one of the great English public schools, Arnold made his name a household word all over the British Empire for the rigor, discipline and thoroughness of the Christian education he provided.

The severity of Arnold's approach to mining the young (and how much it differs from many of today's education fads) is apparent from the following Arnold quotes taken from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. But what is apparent, too, is how seriously Arnold took education and how deeply he valued the solid training of the young.

* "My love for any place, or person or institution, is exactly the measure of my desire to reform them."

* "My object will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make."

* "What we must look for here is, 1st, religious and moral principles: 2ndly, gentlemanly conduct: 3rdly, intellectual ability."

* "It is quite awful to watch the strength of evil in such young minds and how powerless is every effort against it. It would give the vainest man alive a very fair notion of his own insufficiency, to see how little he can do."

* "As for rioting [by the school-boys], the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian rock [the high place from which criminals traditionally were hurled]."

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