Victorian Education

Education

"Education is an admirable thing but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught". Daily Life in Victorian England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).

This quote by Oscar Wilde shows his distaste for formal education with no self reflection and self thought. Often Wilde is able to express his views through his characters such as in "The Importance of Being Earnest" with a particular exchange between Lady Bracknell and Jack Worthing.

Lady Bracknell: A man who desires to marry should know everything or nothing. Which do you know?

Jack Worthing: I know nothing.

Lady Bracknell: I am pleased. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.

This exchange can be compared to education in that a man who knows nothing would be a man who knows only what he is told through formal education (memorizing languages, learning facts, and rewritting various information). A man who knows everything would be someone who knows both how to take the important information from formal education that he recieves and apply that information to the way he thinks. The fact that Lady Bracknell is pleased that Jack does not know anything is showing that Jack Worthing is someone who relies solely on formal education and Lady Bracknell believes that is all that is important. Oscar Wilde seemes to have made Lady Bracknell exemplify an educated, close-minded individual of the upper class of whom he does not agree with.

Robert Browning agrees with Oscar Wilde in that education is necessary, but individual thinking and coming to realizations through your own experiences and thoughts is not only more rewarding but necessary. In "The Ring and the Book" Robert Browning renders the Pope as handling the morality through the book. Guido is condemned to death by the pope who was considering pardoning him but instead cannot be pardoned. In response to the Pope's decision he says, "There's a new tribunal now higher than God's- the educated man's".

The fact that Robert Browning was indecisive about his belief in Christianity makes this statement in the "The Ring and the Book" fairly ambiguous. It is hard to determine whether this quote is satirizing the fact that no tribunal can be higher than God's, or if Browning is trying to show that through the Victorian Era the ideological shift to man being equal to god becomes prevalent. This quote is also very ambiguous because an educated man could mean that he is self-taught, or formally taught which begs that question, "What is education?" It is tough to be able to see where Robert Browning stands.