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

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

Life is a superb goddess, always advancing, overthrowing the obstacles which environment places in the way of her triumph. This is the basic or fundamental truth,-whether it be a question of species or individuals, there persists always the forward march of those victorious ones in whom this mysterious life-force is strong and vital. (Method 106)

In Fascist Italy and for Yeats in this period, such an appropriation of survival of the fittest into cultural and educational terms was appealing and useful. Both Gentile and especially Montessori have continued to be used by educators. A pasticcio of ideologies competes for attention in twentieth-century Italy, in the field of education as in society generally. Montessori schools have been widely influential upon contemporary education there as have remnants of the Riforma Gentile, despite political implications that might be expected, in the post-War years, to limit their usefulness. A study of the cities of Bologna and the nearby town of Reggio Emilia, for example, shows that in the 1970s, under communist-led government, public education featured a blend of left-leaning preschools and rightist national schools whose structure and educational philosophy derived from Gentile; in some cases elementary-age students learned under one system in the morning and another in the afternoon (Muller). Recent educational trends that downplay theoretical certainty in favor of mixed approaches probably account for part of this trend, but another factor may be a phenomenon that is reminiscent of Yeats's educational poem: whether one begins with the "living individual" or "actual idealism" it is possible to end with an enlivened environment in which

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

Of course, accepting contradictory ideas and forcing them together in poetry is common to Yeats, the poet of masks, drama, "terrible beauty," and vacillation who had announced ten years before "Among School Children" was written his often-cited opinion that "we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (Mythologies 331). Such a quarrel has long been recognized in "Among School Children." In 1964, for example, Thomas Parkinson, assuming that "what [Yeats] took to be the true poetic" resides in the transformation of the last stanza, found the oscillation of the rest of the poem a weakness, for the "exaltation posited by the poem's conclusion can be called into question" by the "texture of the whole":

Even in so great a poem as "Among School Children," with its sophisticated surface of benign retrospect, the interplay of naturalistic and symbol ic tone, the complaint against old age, the sudden unforgettable apostrophe to the chestnut tree-we can still ask why the moment of enraptured apprehension of reality should be so brief, whether it does genuinely transcend the limits so fully and even affectionately treated in the bulk of the poem. The poem flirts with the danger of casting doubt on its own resolutions, largely because it exhibits in its dramaturgy a multiple poetics. (51)