William Morris on Teaching and The Silicon Valley of Hardware

After the introduction lecture I was surprised by how many of the thinkers and researchers associated with  pedagogical ideas were unfamiliar to me. While this has been a good challenge of my thinking and reading comfort zone, I thought, in order to transition smoothly into different ideas, it would be beneficial to relate the ideas of a writer I’m familiar with theories around teaching and learning. This will probably become an ongoing process. I started with John Ruskin — and some Nabokov — in a previous post and today I’ll be looking at William Morris in relation to capitalism (including Michel Houellebecq from his novel The Map and the Territory). Next in this series I would like to examine Marcel Proust and his reading of Rouen Cathedral as a visual and spatial educational device for people who couldn’t read scripture (then maybe even W. H. Auden from his time as a teacher). 

William Morris’ ideas on society seem now to come from a position of luxury and romance, and as Michel Houellebecq mentions in his novel The Map and Territory, his utopia would only come to fruition if everyone was William Morris and looked like him, by which I think he means a utopia, or subtopia, of men (ignoring Morris’ would-be feminism). Despite these shortfalls, and Ruskin had them too, his essay entitled  Thoughts on Education Under Capitalism contains some very timely themes. 

How do we safeguard education against Capitalism?

Early in the essay Morris writes that Charles Leland (better known as Hans Breitman) was concerned primarily with how children should learn (more on the difference between teaching and learning later) arts and handicrafts while in education to consequently contribute to their happiness in work and life — a sentiment he agrees with. It’s from this starting point that Morris (who doesn’t consider the link between head and hand like Ruskin) mounts his attack on Capitalism. He speculates that while this kind of education would work and consequently produce items of high artistic and commercial value, it would be quickly fed upon by capitalist production lines: ‘For just as the capitalists would at once capture this education in craftsmanship, suck out what little advantage there is in it and then throw it away, so they do with all other education.’  

The problems don’t end there for Morris. This endemic issue also means that education has morphed to suit capitalism — becoming weakened, as ‘real’ education, as Morris depicts it, slows down the production line.  Education runs the risk of becoming a production line, and not of a rarity and artistic clarity that can counteract the wider forces of capitalism. So how do we safeguard education against capitalism?

In response to this question Morris conjures an overly romantic image of the past to try and solve the issues as he sees them: ‘handicraft for ‘manufacturing’ in all the wares of which art or beauty forms a party and which admit of being done by handicraft, in short to take us back to the Middle Ages as far as these wares are concerned.’ The rose-tinted medieval system of production may seem rather twee but actually aligns with small-scale contemporary trends that don’t segregate education and production but merge them into one whole (Ruskin’s head and hand analogy). Examples include start-ups, open-source learning, and hardware hacking culture in Shenzhen. 

Shenzhen: Morris predicts The Silicon Valley of Hardware

The hardware hacking culture in Shenzhen combines all this characteristics. It shares many attributes with Morris’ ideas of small-scale and bespoke artisanal production lines. The subculture of hardware development in Shenzhen runs counter to capitalism and is inoculated against it because it’s streamlined by merging education and production. It connects the head and the hand (has Ruskin wrote about it) and products are developed as they are iterated, smoothly slipping between making and thinking — a self-educating system that teaches itself through open-source knowledge (open-source mimics ‘The Cloud’ of knowledge Morris mentioned in the medieval period). It is an educational/production system that is further safeguarded against capitalism because it relies on links of transferring knowledge by word of mouth (like a medieval ‘guild’ systems — nothing was written down so nobody can copy you). And finally, there is no red tape and meetings — all the things that slow large corporations down.  

Further watching/reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY    

The Difference Between Teaching and Learning 

This is a distinction which I hadn’t really considered in any depth before. Similar to Ruskin’s work and labour distinction, Morris seems to equate teaching with being told what to do and the capitalist production lines, and learning as something which goes hand in hand with experience and developing your own personality (This also happens in Shenzhen).  

Morris writes: ’People are ‘educated’ to become workmen or the employers of workmen, or the hangers-on of the employers, they are not educated to become men.’ And so echoes the sinister autocratic systems of Taylorism and Fordism, which favoured the modernism dictum as man as machine, rather than person. 

The section finishes on Morris’ own education, and made me think that within our teaching we should plan to plant the seeds of curiosity sometimes rather than just convey information: ‘I was taught – nothing; but learned archaeology and romance on the Wiltshire downs.’ Or, alternatively, as educators we could develop things that are stealth learning tasks, that guide little aspects of life towards learning — like walking through the city, seeing a film, or, visiting an art gallery (this is something I’ve attempted with my own students). 

The Importance of Leisure

‘Capitalism will not allow us the leisure, either for education or the use of it.’

In order for our own teaching to react against the capitalist production lines, we should ensure the amounts of work we set our students is carefully weighed, so that they can build a life and personalty beyond the university structure. And maybe give some pointers about how leisure (and sometimes even boredom) is not laziness, but leisure as another type of learning. 

Finally, this is something that Shenzhen, once again, does so well. The open-source hardware culture is a lifestyle before it’s a job. There could also be a more sinister angle to this (exploiting leisure, no work-life balance, etc.) but it still serves as a good educational model that counteracts the wider forces of capitalism, and it incorporates some of Morris’ more progressive ideas.

Criticism: Bedales School

Morris’ educational ideals probably best manifested themselves in Bedales School, where the students are given a flexible curriculum that mixes academic subjects with farming and making (a student each week is elected to make bread for the whole school). While this exposes the students to a more natural way of learning, I’ve met many people who went to the school and they said that on leaving they had issues adjusting to the radically different environment of the outside world. Education, it would seem, can be radical, but it must have touchstones and reference points to the world outside, so as not to alienate students once they leaves.