Pleasure, Leisure, Work?

1. Morris on education

In the first section of New from Nowhere, Dick says to a gaping William Guest:

I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a 'system of teaching' or not. Why, you will not find one of these children about here, boy or girl, who cannot swim, and every one of them has been used to tumbling about the little forest ponies - there's one of them now! They all of them know how to cook; the bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering...I tell you they know plenty of things (66)

This seems a bit strange, given Morris' later statements on leisure (leisure as work, etc). I don't know how far Morris got into educational reform - on art education, his thoughts seem pretty straightforward - but it would be interesting to read these early passages against J.S. Mill (or Dickens, for that matter) - or anyone else interested in educational reform.

More to the point -- how Morris approaches childhood here! I don't think this was one of his major issues (handcrafting and workers' education being quite a different creature than secondary school reform). If he was, though, these are some pretty interesting passages. Especially given the following section:

You don't mean that children learn all these things?

That depends on what you mean by children: and also you must remember how much they differ. As a rule, they don't do much reading except for a few storybooks, till they are about fifteen years old; we dont encourage early bookishness: though you will find some children who will take to books very early; which perhaps is not good for them; but it's no use thwarting them....

You see, children are mostly given to imitating their elders, and when they see most people around them engaged in genuinely amusing work, like house-building and street-paving, and gardening, and the like, that is what they want to be doing, so I don't think we need fear having too many book-learned men. (68)

It's blunt-force reform-speak here -- see the children frolicking! - so I'm not sure how much to read into this. At the same time -- an odd thing to say, given that Morris' utopian is predicated (through Dick / Clara / Ellen) on being in a state of perpetual childhood. Children learn from imitating their elders -- but what their elders give them (what Hammond gives Guest; what Ellen's grandfather provides) is a pretty ambiguous rendering of the recent past -- which children, more often than not, patently reject in favor of this state of feigned ignorance.

Strange indeed. How does history get taught, if utopia is fundamentally ahistorical? (at the very least, this seems like an important divergence from Marx -- might be more to say on this topic)

2. Morris on art - on aesthetic production

Cooking and carpentry aside, this passage implies that pleasure rests in the cessation of that labor. The actual work involved here -- swimming -- is far removed from the 'work' of the classroom. Sure, there is 'work' involved (learning how to swim), but what's really being pictured here is pleasure as leisure -- enjoying an act as an end in itself, regardless of whether it serves a higher purpose.

This takes us far away from education, and into labor proper -- specifically, at this broader corollary drawn between labor / pleasure, and where leisure (as cessation?) falls into this mix. Morris describes this pleasure - the active "pleasure" of labor (as I take it, the pleasure of using one's body for the production of goods, where pleasure is strongly correlated with use-value). Morris writes:

Nothing can be a work of art which is not useful; that is to say, which does not minister to the body when well under command of the mind, or which does not amuse, soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy state.

The point being, the swimming hole is maybe not the best example here, insofar as it implies a cessation of labor - swimming in lieu of school - over and above the transmutation into a higher form. Here, swimming as an end in itself doesn't cut it -- pleasure and work come together in this particular nexus over artistic production, which requires this higher form of transmutation. Making art, on the other hand, is a whole different ballgame.

This, I guess, is why he's writing utopian fiction rather than political economy. You can let these things slip a bit, and people don't get mad. I'm not sure how far I want to push this distinction -- Morris makes this case for all kinds of work -- for farming, hoeing, selling wares, as well as the more 'artistic' trades -- but the fact that his heart is in the aesthetics seems to insist on some kind of implicit differential here. More to the point, aesthetics sublimates the physical part of this, in a way that mere physicality (and leisure) don't.