Authoritative image: "Among school children" and Italian education reform, The

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1997 by Harper, Margaret Mills

Such convictions would be expressed in the ringing sentence just as the former orientation might prompt a tone of acceptance or humility ("Better to smile on all that smile") or perhaps a rhetorical question or two. Yeats's politics in the twenties, his interest in educational theory, and his poetry can be read as conservative idealism that scorns materialism while remaining naive about its own ideological presuppositions. If so, the intellectual naivete is not matched by poetry that fails to display its tensions openly. Yeats's ringing tones and repeated questions form one stand that quarrels with itself. Despite his famous poetic search for unity and fierce denunciations of disunity in contemporary culture and art, the later Yeats also writes of "masterful images" that "Grew in pure mind" but come from a "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" (Poems 347) or that "man's life is thought" so he therefore "cannot cease / Ravening. . . that he may come / Into the desolation of reality"(Poems 289). In a poem, this unresolved tension creates, among other things, the power of a final line that is no less ambiguous than it is often authoritatively quoted. Does "Among School Children" finally ask how we can tell the difference between the dancer and the dance, a question proper to idealism, such as Gentile might be prompted to propose? Or does it wonder how we can possibly know the dancer by watching the dance, the abstract product, without attending to the person performing it, which is the kind of question that Montessori would put forward? .............

NOTES

' The poem appears on pages 215-17 of Yeats's Poems; hereafter it will not be cited by page number.

2 Torchiana 130-37; see also Hone (368-74) for biographical detail and Jeffares (25055) for specific allusions in the poem to Montessori and Gentile. For one of the best single readings of the poem see Kermode, especially chapters 4 and 5, "The Dancer" and "The Tree" (49-103).

3 For further information about the occult experiments that led to A Vision see Harper. 4 Edward P. Culverwell, a professor at Trinity College, published The Montessori Principles and Practices in 1913, a book that "stimulated a good deal of interest in Montessori's ideas in Ireland" according to Rita Kramer, Montessori's biographer. Culverwell's thesis is that "Montessori's ideas would prove right because they were consistent with the biological principles of child development and because their emphasis on liberty was consistent with the political direction in which society was moving through history" (Kramer 237). Such a thesis might have had considerable local implication for Ireland, which in 1913 had been undergoing labor crises culminating in the Dubin Lock-Out, political turning points such as the rejection of a Home Rule Bill in Ulster (1912), and ominous military turmoil, especially in the mustering of private volunteer armies following the Ulster decision (see Foster 46171).

' Gonne 17. See Gonne's account of her early years, before her father took the advice of a "lady" who told him "that his daughters were being allowed to run wild like little savages and, -which was quite true,-were quite shockingly ignorant" (19). 6 Regarding the issue of external control, it is interesting to remember that Gentile's Riforma dell `educazione was originally a series of lectures to teachers in a city that had just been transferred back to Italian control. The burden of his message to Triestine teachers is to establish a nation by means of good teaching, not just to teach well. Indeed, in a conclusion that rings with high rhetoric, he reasserts the connection of spirituality, identity, and the State: "The patriotic character of the event which was the immediate cause of this work induced me to show that the common spirit which brought us together was not a mere political sentiment, of which we should rid ourselves in crossing the threshold of the school. For we could not but bring into the classroom our own humanity" which is by virtue of "this historical development of our universal personality" Italian: "we could not possibly be ourselves were we not all at the same time Italian educators" (Reform 246-47). See Senate Speeches 173.