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What in Calvin had been a qualified concession to practical exigencies appeared in some of his later followers as a frank idealization of the life of the trader, as the service of God and the training-ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives, which had been as characteristic of the reformers as of medieval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation.
R. H. Tawney
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The organization of education on lines of class, which, though qualified in the last twenty years, has characterized the English system of public education since its very inception, has been at once a symptom, an effect, and a cause of the control of the lives of the mass of men and women by a privileged minority. The very assumption on which it is based, that all that the child of the workers needs is "elementary education" — as though the mass of the people, like anthropoid apes, had fewer convolutions in their brains than the rich — is in itself a piece of insolence.
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That seductive border region where politics grease the wheels of business and polite society smiles hopefully on both.
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Defined by its purpose, its [education's] main aim is not to impart the specialized technique of any particular trade or profession, but to develop the faculties which, because they are the attribute of man, are not peculiar to any particular class or profession of men, and to build up the interests which, while they may become the basis of specialization at a later stage, have a value extending beyond their utility for any particular vocation, because they are the condition of a rational and responsible life in society.
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An erring colleague is not an Amalkite to be smitten hip and thigh.
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The characteristic virtue of Englishmen is power of sustained practical activity and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles.
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Labour can claim with some confidence that it is both voicing the demands of nearly all enlightened educationalists and working for the only organization of education which will enable the community to make the best use of the most precious of its natural resources — the endowments of its children.
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The real economic cleavage is not... between employers and employed, but between all who do constructive work, from scientist to laborer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest is the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon the other, irrespective of whether they contribute to constructive work or not.
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Laborare est orare. [To work is to pray.] By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material necessity.
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Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.
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Virtues are often conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete when it is inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more efficient, or more congenial.
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In England it is not ungentlemanly to steal halfpennies from children, and industrial interests, it may be assumed, will oppose any reform which interferes with the supply of cheap juvenile labour.
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Those who dread a dead-level of income or wealth…do not dread, it seems, a dead-level of law and order, and of security for life and property.
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Even before 1918 we had traveled far from the doctrine of 1870, that "elementary" education was the education of a special class which would obtain no other — what the Committee of Council called in 1839 education "suited to the condition of workmen and servants" — and secondary education that of their masters.
R. H. Tawney
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
R. H. Tawney
Creative Commons
Born:
November 30, 1880
Died:
January 16, 1962
(aged 81)
Bio:
Richard Henry "R. H." Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist, Christian socialist, and an important proponent of adult education.
Known for:
Religion and the rise of capitalism (1926)
The Acquisitive Society (1920)
History and society
Social history and literature (1950)
Most used words:
education
children
secondary
public
economic
society
class
schools
men
life
order
higher
riches
work
england
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