In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), D. H. Lawrence wrote with emphasis: ‘The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write – never’ (Lawrence 2004: 118). Lawrence’s post-First World War writings on education can seem to epitomise the democracy-shy paranoia of a certain strain of high modernism. His proposition (or provocation) concerning literacy follows from what he called at Fantasia’s outset ‘an age of mistaken democracy’ (62). In a prior essay, ‘Education of the People’ (1920), Lawrence had claimed that the modern aspiration to universal literacy was wrongheadedly based on the notion that all humans are equally capable of, and would equally benefit from, intellectual or ‘mental’ development. The untruth of this notion is apprehended, Lawrence insisted, by all actual teachers (he had been a schoolteacher himself for some six years, three as a pupil-teacher in Nottinghamshire, and three, qualified and salaried, in Croydon, South London): ‘every teacher’ knows that they are always confronted by a majority of ‘uninstructibles’, the extent of the latter varying, within the unstable rhetoric of Lawrence’s essay, between ‘at least fifty-per cent’ of scholars and ‘a very large majority’ (Lawrence 1988: 96).

For the liberal education system of the early twentieth-century British state to insist on administering culture and literacy to such scholars was, Lawrence maintained, to ‘allow nothing except in terms of itself’ (1988: 96). Given (it is a considerable assumption) the inaptitude of the young people themselves, Lawrence’s concern was that such a policy was directly harmful to them – ‘psychologically barbaric’ – and also a form of idealist bullying (Lawrence reserved some of his most scathing moral disapprobation for the violence of bullying) (2004: 115). Conversely, he argued, the same children are clever enough to realise – with what might be called the alternative intelligence of the uninstructible – that only the ‘smatterings’ or ‘imbecile pretence’ of culture were on offer to them, through which the state could assuage its conscience whilst maintaining the necessary division of labour between minds and bodies (1988: 112). Beyond this schooling, they knew, lay their own inevitable capture by the industrial system – the laundry and the bottle factory. Either way, Lawrence insisted, the political correlative of this system could not be an educated democracy.