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Robert Owen: education the fun way?

Neil Southwell, Education Studies, School of Education, University College Northampton, 2000

“the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again” (Engels, undated, in http://www.marxists.org, 17.10.1999).

A great capitalist lived through a time of great British industrialism; born in Newtown Wales 1771, and, after serving his apprenticeship in drapery at Stamford in Lincolnshire, he went on to later become the owner of the New Lanark textile mills and village. It is the school and social/industrial reforms created by this successful capitalist, Robert Owen, to which Engels refers as a forerunner of the socialist model. The adoption of such a successful capitalist/industrialist by Engels, and later writers, as a pioneer of socialism stands out as a paradox. Somewhere along the road of capitalist endeavour, Robert Owen came to realise the potential of mass education (combined with social and industrial reform) as a facilitation of his personal quest for capital accumulation; yet the model he devised and introduced came to be regarded as belonging to the socialist tradition rather than to that of capitalism.

This paradoxical opposition is popularly solved by attributing Owen’s reforms to philanthropy. Indeed it was as a philanthropist that he became referred by “a whole generation after 1815” to whom “he was ‘Mr Owen, the philanthropist’ or ‘the benevolent Mr Owen’” (Harrison, 1969 p11). The debate concerning Owen’s motivation can therefore be said to encompass facilitation of socialism, capitalism, and/or philanthropy. Moving behind this debate of Owen’s motivation is an equally fascinating issue of the success of Owenite education. In addressing the issue of what resulted from Owen’s education of his masses, Owen’s motivation can today be ignored to discover what it was about the Owen-school (or ‘Institute for the Formation of Character’, as Owen called it), its use and the education provided therein that combined to produce an education experience exceeding that commonly associated with present schools which was so much fun as to be ‘enjoyed’ to the degree stated by Engels. This essay therefore will firstly seek to identify those features of the Owen-school experience, including aspects that now would be regarded as being within non-school educational territory, that contributed to its pupils’ enjoyment to provide ‘education the fun way’. Secondly, it will seek to establish what changes could be made to our current schools in order to expand them into ‘super-schools’ that encompass the territory of ‘non-school’, in an ‘Owenisation’. Finally, it will address some of the issues surrounding the funding of such ‘super-schools’.

Education the ‘fun way’ occurs via encouragement and kindness as opposed to punishment and threat. Owen himself called this the ‘Rational approach’ in which large coloured canvasses were employed as jolly teaching aids, and the three R’s were complimented by singing and dancing. Even the school uniform was both educational and fun as “the children assembled every day in cotton Highland or Roman dress” ( http://www.aboutscotland.co.uk, 17/10/99). The ‘fun way’ however does not start with a kind approach, bright visual aids, singing and dancing, or fancy dress, but begins, as does Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen’s account of the system of education at New Lanark, with the school building.

“The ‘New Institution’, or School, which is open for the instruction of the children and young people connected with the establishment, to the number of about 6oo, consists of two stories. The upper story, which is furnished with a double range of windows, one above the other, all round, is divided into two apartments; one, which is the principal school-room, fitted up with desks and forms, on the Lancasterian plan, having a free passage down the centre of the room, is about 90 feet long, 40 feet broad, and 20 feet high. It is surrounded, except at one end, where a pulpit stands, with galleries, which are convenient, when this room is used, as it frequently is, either as a lecture room or place of worship.
The other apartment, on the second floor, is of the same width and height as that just mentioned, but only 49 feet long. The walls are hung round with representations of the most striking zoological and mineralogical specimens; including quadrupeds, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects, shells, minerals, &c. At one end there is a gallery, adapted for the purpose of an orchestra, and at the other are hung very large representations of the two hemispheres; each separate country, as well as the various seas, islands, &c. being differently coloured, but without any names attached to them. This room is used as a lecture and ball-room, and it is here, that the dancing and singing lessons are daily given. It is likewise occasionally used as a reading room for some of the classes.
The lower story is divided into three apartments, of nearly equal dimensions, 12 feet high, and supported by hollow iron pillars, serving, at the same time, as conductors, in winter, for heated air, which issues through the floor of the upper story, and by which means the whole building may, with ease, be kept at any required temperature. It is in these three apartments that the younger classes are taught reading, natural history, and geography” (Owen, 1824, in Silver, 1969, pp.149-150).

Part of the ‘fun way’ was the sheer exhilaration of daily removal of the pupils from their one-room overcrowded family hovels to such palatial surroundings. Each day the children of the town were transformed from paupers into little princes and princesses, and each evening and weekend the workers became as the gentry. The impact of such a school building, which even from the outside emulated a classical Georgian country house on its attendees is almost impossible for us to imagine in the 21st century. Historians talk of the awe in which the peasantry held the early castles and cathedrals, and although New Lanark school was not built to that scale, the proportions of the building and its interior would have been sufficiently beyond that of their own homes to have inspired such awe. Railway enthusiasts talk of the grand Victorian railway stations as being the cathedrals of their day, but all that was yet to come. Well over a hundred years after New Lanark the working classes would describe cinemas as palaces (some establishments even being called such) and this was the level of awe in which the school building would have been held. The fun way started, then, with the excitement of being educated somewhere very special indeed. To enter the New Lanark School as a pupil in itself, was to be elevated to the education environmental level of Britain’s elite at a time when such large-scale social mobility did not otherwise exist.

Once inside, the splendour continued. At a time when a working man had to bow his head to physically enter the home without hitting his head, the ground floor (1st storey in Owen’s description) was twice the height of a grown man, and was centrally heated by hot air conduits. Upstairs, the ceiling hung at twice that height. As well as galleries, (one for an orchestra!), there was a double range of windows separated by huge canvasses (oil paintings) of zoological animals. The effect of the double windows would have been no less impressive than the ‘Cathedral of Light’ later created for Hitler’s rally at Nuremberg, as the interiors usually frequented by the working class were dark having few windows or other openings. The canvasses, in those days before cinema or television, would in themselves have been wondrous. None of the pupils would have before experienced such bright colours or large portrayals (certainly not on a regular basis). Even the animals depicted would have been unknown to them and exotic. Altogether, the experience of entering such a building would have been akin to having been instantly transported to an impressive other reality in which everything was splendid beyond the bounds of normal contemporary imagination. Once inside the splendid building, the ‘fun way’ continued in the way pupils were regarded and treated:

“As soon as infants could be brought to the school they were received, encouraged to play happily, and were well looked after. In this way they began to learn and to acquire confidence very young. They were also saved from the terrible neglect that was the fate of nearly all young children whose parents were both working long hours in the factories” (Morton, 1969, p.30).

The subjects taught at New Lanark, (writing, arithmetic, sewing, natural history, geography, ancient history, modern history, religion, singing, and dancing) are not so remarkable today as the teaching method employed. It was more like that found now in higher education than in primary schools being composed of mass-lectures and small-group seminars. Although a certain amount of rivalry that arose naturally between the pupils was accepted, no artificial stimuli, such as gold stars or hierarchical positioning, were employed to promote competition. An important outcome of their education, as Owen’s son noted, was that:

“The general appearance of the children is to a stranger very striking. The leading character of their countenances is a mixed look of openness, confidence and intelligence, such as is scarcely to be met with among children in their situation. Their animal spirits are always excellent. Their manners and deportment towards their teachers and towards strangers, are fearless and unrestrained, yet neither forward, nor disrespectful” (Owen, 1824, in Silver,1969, p.164).

Owen’s son also states that the standard of reading achieved was equal to that at any school, and that the pupil’s knowledge of certain subject areas was “superior to his own” (Owen, 1824, in Silver,1969, p.164). The ‘fun way’ therefore did not prevent the attainment of high standards (assuming that Robert Dale Owen’s own level of education was high). Owen however did not see education as something that began in infancy to end at pubescence, nor did he envisage school as a place that expelled its pupils into the world of work after a prescribed period. The Owen school was more than a building in which to teach children. It was the centre of the village social life. The building was also used as “a club, adult education centre, dance hall, and concert room in the evenings” (Morton, 1969, p.31). Thus the inventor of nursery schools, the early provider of primary education for the masses stepped beyond school education to provide a focal point of industrial village society in which the educational, leisure and recreational needs of the whole populous were catered for. In this way school became more of a public resource than a simply ‘a place to send children whilst their parents are working’. For Owen, an effective school was more than a place of petty rules and a list of punishments, it was a social resource at which education, leisure pursuits, and recreation were melded into one life-long ‘fun way’ experience, designed not to serve the community, but to be at the heart of community life. School was not to be a nine to five foreboding day-prison, but an ‘open nearly all hours’ palace of fun.

During the two centuries since Owen started to first formulate and initiate his ideas for mass education, the fun way has been largely lost. So much so that some would argue that fun has not only been lost, but that it has been actively replaced by unhappiness. A century after New Lanark A. S. Neill founded a school in which unhappiness was to be abolished. “All crimes, all hatreds, all wars, Neill claims, can be reduced to unhappiness” (Neill, 1985, front cover). Neill’s methods are very different to Owen’s (particularly in regard of pupil freedom and autonomy), but the guiding principles they share include the believe that education is more than fact learning, and that it is best served by making school-life fun.

Nearly two centuries after New Lanark, the schools for the masses that evolved from his early endeavours, stand empty and under used beyond the nine to four school day. Sometimes a car-boot sale is held, some evenings a few people will attend evening classes, or keep fit. Our schools are not the vibrant centre of community that Owen produced. Those sports fields that haven’t been sold off for building land stand empty and dark whilst entrepreneurs charge people to use what are often inferior facilities ‘up the road’ at leisure centres. Bowling clubs, snooker halls, and night-clubs fill up with youngsters night after night, whilst schools are guarded against intrusion by security firms. Schools have become places where our children learn that which is felt necessary by our government, to standards judged largely by newspaper editors, in the hours of daylight, for as many years as it is possible to keep them off the jobs-market. Instead of education being a part of society, it has become apart from society. A school is now a place where children are segregated from their community and by age, in order to be injected with the precise amount of knowledge judged suitable for them by others, rather than an Owenesque palace of community integration in which the route to all knowledge is accessible by all and where leisure activity is part and parcel of the resource. Our school system divides our towns and cities along lines of social class that excludes those from one side of a line from the educational access enjoyed by those on the other side (e.g. in the city of Sheffield pupils with parents wealthy enough to transport them across the city to certain schools regarded as good, have left their local schools to become sink schools where only the poor remain). Rather than being a resource of social adhesion school has become a pit of both ageism and social division.

If our inheritance of run down schools is to be revitalised, it is to Owen that we can look for guidance. Little palaces need to be built from their crumbling remains, not like Owen’s Georgian house, but more along the lines of the revitalised cinemas where fixtures, fittings, furniture, equipment, and especially the buildings have been firmly projected stylistically into this new century. Just as ‘a bit of C19th flash’ and open access transformed Owen’s pupils’ perception of school into one of excited anticipation, so turning on ‘a bit of C21st flash’ and open access will, if accompanied by high quality teaching carried out ‘the fun way’, transform pupils’ and parents’ perception of education today to put the school at the centre of modern community. This simple, if expensive, remedy assumes however that there is still such a thing as community, and that community is a good thing. Neither is necessarily so.

Britons, particularly in highly populated areas, have embraced individualism as they spend more and more time in their homes relying on modern communication technology to provide the media of community. Television soap operas increasingly create a virtual community in which people now take a passive role and will soon, via new interactive technology, take an active role. Some argue that this has destroyed community, but the national and international nature of such broadcasts has prompted people to feel part of a single national or even international community rather than of many small local communities. Globalisation of media via international films and soaps, plus the World Wide Web of the Internet are making people feel part, more and more, of the ‘global village’ that Marshall Macluhan predicted would be the product of easy access to global communication technology. Our communication no longer mainly takes place within local geographic areas, but increasingly within the cyberspace of globalised technology. It is on this scale that super-schools of the future must be built to regain an Owenesque centre of community. It is this community in which our children must feel “fearless and unrestrained” (Owen, 1824, in Silver, 1969 p.164). It is with this technology that they must be literate, and about which they must know more than their teachers. The alternative is to hide from globalisation by artificially and arbitrarily dividing each other into pseudo-communities bound by locked gates and high walls in which education becomes a gaoler keeping our children imprisoned behind walls of division, mistrust, and prejudice to become like the sometimes covetous and other-times disapproving citizens of Ancient Greece, always at war with their neighbours. Schooling here would become reduced to the prevention of access to knowledge, and wider social participation with the aim of shrinking and segregating community rather than of expanding and integrating it. Owen, although dubbed ‘communitarian’ by many writers, did not carve up New Lanark by building many smaller schools, each to serve a district or type of pupil and so create artificial & rival sub-communities, he rather built a large single school as a focus of unity for a residentially divided community.

What manner of school would Owen have built for our new millennium? There seems little doubt that it would be impressive and on a large scale. The window on the world provided at New Lanark by large colourful canvasses would be provided by large screen satellite video/television links. All manner of subjects would be studied from a global perspective via a proliferation of internet access points throughout the buildings. The Higher Education methodology employed at New Lanark would be expanded to transform the presently diverse city schools into many campuses of one city seat of learning in which one site would become the language campus, another the science campus, yet another would become the three Rs campus, another the sports campus etc. The interiors would be superior to that of the home with higher levels of comfort, better technology, and greater aesthetic beauty. Together, the different campuses would form one school serving the whole city in which subject specific expertise would concentrate within its own faculty, from which global resources could be utilised via new technology, so that all levels and ages would be catered for at each campus. Schools would be ‘open all hours’ and the provision would include entertainment, leisure activities, social clubs, discos ‘n’ bars, cyber-cafes, etc. Using modern technology, the school would expand beyond the confines of its buildings and lands to include other schools, private homes and businesses throughout the country and around the globe from where interested parties could participate via their own communication terminals. In short, comprehensive provision on a scale never before attempted; yet within which the ‘fun way’ would prevail.

In Sheffield, one head-teacher complained recently that her school was virtually empty during the England world-cup soccer matches as pupils truanted to remain at home with their parents and watch the games on television (Davis, 1999, in The Guardian, 14.09.99). Such a divisive occurrence would never happen at a new Owenised super-school as the whole community (pupils and parents) would have been in school watching the action on large screen. The whole tournament would have been utilised as a teaching aid by every faculty, with lessons and projects centred around the various aspects of such a globally enjoyed phenomena. Thus the community’s leisure interests would have improved participation in schooling and increased the people’s evaluation of school. Instead of real-life being something to be left outside the school gates, or to be analysed as an external entity, school would have been re-centred in the Owen ‘fun way’ at the heart of real-life.

The remaining issue is of course one of finance, which brings us full circle to the motivation argument. Should capitalism, socialism, or benevolence finance it? And what influences would each bring to bear on the provision offered? If capitalism is to fund super-schools, the curriculum will reflect the requirements of capital, and the capital expenditure would therefore be restricted to (or at best centralised on) those areas that would offer the best rate of return to the investors. Furthermore, the provision will be at risk of reduction whenever the capitalist market has to endure its characteristic recessions. If socialism finances them via taxation, the curriculum will reflect socialism’s needs, and the finance would become restricted to (or at best centred on) those areas thought to aid the promotion of socialist ideology. If we seek a modern day ‘benevolent Mr. Owen’ to finance the super-school, Richard Branson perhaps, control (or at least a major influence) would fall into the lap of the self-appointed whose only authorisation would be their wealth. The impact on the curriculum would be unpredictable, liable to change at the whim of the benefactor, and the whole provision would be at risk of being deserted in a sell off should the benevolence end or seek a new cause. (It should be born in mind that Robert Owen eventually sold off New Lanark in order to pursue new interests) Whoever pays for it will become the consumer of its product and will be able to impose their will (wholly or partially) on its curriculum. If the state pays, then the state defines what is to be taught, if industry pays, then industry will define the curriculum, if the people have to pay via tuition fees, the most influential among them will control the provision to the detriment of the rest. However, no matter whether the super-school will be paid for by capital, the state, or philanthropy it is the people who will ultimately finance it, either through our purchases in the capitalist market-place, by deductions from our wages, or by paying individual fees; even the philanthropist must derive wealth from the people somewhere along the line!

Perhaps there was only one New Lanark, because there has only been one Robert Owen. No matter what his motivation, he stood alone, often deserted by his financial backers, in wishing to provide accessible quality enjoyable wide education to his workers. Maybe New Lanark’s success was founded on the boss/worker authoritative relationship in place there. If this was the case though it would suggest that education is successful if it is thrust upon people, but Engels assures us that it was enjoyed by the people, and the picture painted by Robert Dale Owen is one of happiness. We do not readily accept the notion of being forced to have fun these days, nor, this writer suspects, have we ever done so.

The conclusion therefore of this essay is that the success of Robert Owen’s New Lanark School was due to its utilisation as a central public resource providing for both the educational and leisure aspirations of the whole community in a spectacular environment within which the members of that community willingly enjoyed themselves and had fun. That a school offering such a spectacular ‘fun-way’ provision today would have to be a ‘super-school’ encompassing both traditional school and non-school territory to become the single heart of a real-life community with hi-tech communication arteries spreading across that community pumping the blood of education and distributing the oxygen of global input (and output). And that if the people are to get such a school, they must pay for it one way or another, the particular means of which will likely shape what’s on offer.

Bibliography

Anon WWW.athiests.org/Atheism/roots/robertowen/, 17.10.99

Anon b WWW.aboutscotland.co.uk/water/cldenl.html, 17.10.99

Davis, N. (1999) ‘Schools in Crisis part1’ in The Guardian, 14.09.99, p.5.

Engels, F. (undated), in:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/bio/owen.htm, 17.10.99.

Harrison, J. F. C. (1969) Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: the quest for the new moral world, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

Morton, A. L. (1969) The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Neill, A. S. (1985) Summerhill, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.

Owen, R. D. (1824) ‘An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark’, in: H. Silver (ed.) (1969) Robert Owen on Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

© Neil Southwell, 9th January 2008

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