Old Schools

📘 About This Book

Winner: AAIS First Book Prize Old Schools marks out a modernist countertradition. The book makes sense of an apparent anachronism in twentieth-century literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in progressive pedagogical theories. Advocates of progressive education turned against Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested means including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint. Yet McGlazer’s remarkable book reminds us that progressive education was championed not only by political progressives, but also by Fascists in Italy, where it was an object of Gramsci’s critique. Building on Gramsci’s pages on the Latin class, McGlazer shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, returned to and reimagined the old school. Strikingly, the works that McGlazer considers valorize this school’s outmoded techniques even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away. Registering the past’s persistence even while they respond to the mounting pressures of modernization, writers and filmmakers from Pater to Joyce to Pasolini retain what might look like retrograde attachments—to tradition, transmission, scholastic rites, and repetitive forms. But the counter-progressive pedagogies that they devise repeat the past to increasingly radical effect. Old Schools teaches us that this kind of repetition can enable the change that it might seem to impede.

📖 Summary

Old Schools by Ramsey McGlazer is a vital work of literary criticism that explores a striking cultural paradox within twentieth-century literature and cinema. Winner of the AAIS First Book Prize, this 258-page study uncovers a modernist countertradition defined by a persistent fascination with outmoded, pre-modern educational forms. While progressive pedagogical theories sought to sweep away traditional schooling methods, various twentieth-century artists and thinkers repeatedly returned to the archaic structures of the past. Progressive educational reformers argued that older pedagogical techniques, particularly the teaching of dead languages like Latin through rote methods such as memorization, recitation, copying out, and relentless repetition, needed to be updated or completely eliminated. To these reformers, traditional schooling represented a constraint on the student, and discarding it was seen as essential for achieving modernity, breathing free, and breaking entirely with convention. Yet, as McGlazer brilliant demonstrates, the rejection of traditional pedagogy was not universally accepted, nor was the push for progressive education championed by everyone in a straightforward manner. Instead, the book maps out how literature and cinema frequently looked backward, finding critical value in the very forms that reformers deemed obsolete. By examining these dynamics, McGlazer challenges standard historical narratives about the evolution of education and modernity. Rather than viewing the persistence of pre-modern schooling simply as reactionary nostalgia, the book treats it as a complex site of engagement for modernist writers and filmmakers. These creators recognized something enduring, or perhaps critically useful, in the disciplined, repetitive structures of traditional education—even as society at large rushed toward progressive ideals. Through rigorous textual analysis, Old Schools offers readers a fresh perspective on the tensions between old and new ways of learning, showing how twentieth-century culture continuously wrestled with the ghosts of its educational past. The result is a sophisticated investigation into pedagogy, aesthetics, and the ways in which outmoded institutions continue to shape modern artistic imagination.

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