A Somerset Lad

Gardening was a matter of necessity. In our front garden, we had a few wallflowers and a lilac bush at the gate, in the back garden there was a full range of vegetables. Gardening was about digging trenches for potatoes, tying wigwams of sticks for runner beans, putting in lines of sticks for peas, sowing rows of seeds and hoeing endless weeds.

Our perception of gardening was far removed from an activity that would merit a glossy magazine, a far remove from Voltaire’s classic novel Candide which concludes with the words, “let us cultivate our garden.”

The novel closes with a discussion of what great fortune Candide has enjoyed, a noting of however bad things might have been at times, everything has turned out for the good. Candide accepts that he has met with extraordinary luck and has arrived at a point of great happiness when it seems that nothing could be better, but Candide still believes there is still a step further that can be made, “let us cultivate our garden.”

Voltaire was a philosopher, a major figure in the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, a writer recalled in the streets named after him in countless French towns and villages, his regard for gardening would have been noted by readers.

Writing in 1759, thirty years before the Revolution, writing at a time when life was not easy, suggesting that gardening was something that might have been done for pleasure probably seemed a strange idea. There might have been beautiful formal gardens of flowers, shrubs and trees at places like the palace of Versailles, and at the chateaux of the Loire Valley, but for  most people, gardens were a matter of necessity, small plots of land on which to try to grow vegetables to feed the family. Gardening as something done for leisure, something done unnecessarily, would have seemed an odd choice. In 1759, perhaps the only people with the means and the level of literacy to read Voltaire’s work were those who could afford to regard gardening as a matter of personal inclination.

Gardening has become something closer to Candide and further from the gardening of my childhood days. A contributor on this evening’s Gardener’s World talked about how someone’s garden spoke of their “inner person.” Monty Don said, “I think the more a garden reflects a person’s personality, the better it is.”

Monty Don’s attitude seems the sort of gardening that Candide would have recognised. Candide has come through trials and tribulations, all of which are met with cheer by Pangloss, his companion. Candide has triumphed over adversity. But Candide is looking for something more, something beyond himself.

Voltaire would have been unsurprised that many of the people of the current times, people leading lives far more affluent than the lives of his time, would find refuge and transcendence in their gardens. After all the other material things have been enjoyed, there are many who would join in Candide’s words.

I started primary school in September 1965. Long Sutton Primary School, where I spent the first eighteen months of my education, was probably typical of most small rural primary schools in England.

In infant class, pupils were given blackboard slates and chalk for our writing. I attracted the displeasure of the teacher in requiring pencil and paper because the chalk dust aggravated my asthma. Our learning was predominantly memorising, often it was simply learning by rote.

The teaching and learning we experienced was not so different from the teaching and learning of centuries. The medieval universities set the example for other educational institutions to follow. People came to listen and to discuss and to remember. Teachers and pupils alike might be able to recall lengthy they had learned.

What happened to that medieval capacity for remembering? Has our ability to remember become so reduced?

Even in classical times, in the days of Plato, there were concerns that the human faculty for remembering was in decline. Socrates tells a story of a conversation between Thamus and Theuth in ancient Egypt. Theuth has come to Thamus with inventions that include the invention of writing and Thamus is concerned that writing will damage the memories of those who use it.

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”

It is extraordinary that two and a half thousand years ago Socrates regarded the most obvious of our aides memoire, one that we have for centuries assumed to be a matter of common sense, as something that would damage the human capacity for wisdom.

In the context of the Covid-19 crisis, the return to school next week brings challenges about the use of books, about how lessons are to be taught, about how materials can be used. It would be a step too far to suggest stepping back into a past where everything was not about writing, but it is a reminder that there is more than one way of learning.