I was introduced to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” by Dr. John Silber’s book, Straight Shooting—What’s Wrong with America and How We Can Fix It. It was 1984, and Silber was president of Boston University. He had a PhD in philosophy from Yale. Formerly a Dean at the University of Texas and a Democratic candidate for governor in Massachusetts, Silber served as president and, later, chancellor of BU for more than 30 years. At the time, he was very concerned about the state of American education and American culture. He opened the book with this:
“Our society is in trouble and we all know it.” In the first chapter, he introduced the poem.
Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” in 1919. Kipling had lost his son in the first world war, which had ended on November 11, 1918. Many have explained the poem as his reaction to the shifting social and moral dynamic of the time.
According to Dr. Martin S. Spiller, “the war-related traumas of death and destruction, combined with the outbreak of the great Spanish flu epidemic between 1918 and 1920 (which killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide), left the people dazed, and desperate for some sort of deliverance. Pacifism became popular, patriotism unpopular, and religious beliefs and their attendant morality suffered a serious setback.”
Kipling, it appears, found this unsettling and responded in writing.
Who Are the Gods of the Copybook Headings?
A copybook was used to teach penmanship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because it was considered an important business skill. A student’s copybook had a different, perfectly handwritten phrase or statement at the top of each blank, lined page–thus, copybook headings. The student was required to copy the heading down through the lines on the page, attempting to reproduce it faithfully.
Inasmuch as moral education and citizenship were features of education at that time, the copybook headings often reflected that focus. Instead of isolated words or random phrases, the copybook headings were more often proverbs or maxims. Kipling included examples in the poem. Every teacher and parent surely expected that, by the time a child had written, “A stitch in time saves nine,” down the entire page, they would have internalized the lesson.
Thus, the “gods” of the copybook headings were the dictates of a culture attempting to live in peace with itself, knowing one of the requisites of educating children was to explain the realities of getting along with others and thinking of more than oneself, whether one had faith or not.
John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was inaugurated in March of 1825. He was the first who had not been a member of the founders. In his address, he referred to our “social compact” and noted that “we now receive it as a precious inheritance from those to whom we are indebted for its establishment, doubly bound by the examples which they have left us and by the blessings which we have enjoyed as the fruits of their labors to transmit the same unimpaired to the succeeding generation.”
As John Silber put it, “these copybook headings were the efforts of an earlier generation to pass on their moral heritage to their children, to acquaint their children with nature, not merely physical, but moral and spiritual.”
Who Are the Gods of the Market Place?
Tiffany Madison, a solutions strategist and writer, did an analysis of the poem, and she came to this conclusion: “The Gods of the Marketplace peddle promises and ideas, various schemes for “social progress”, and fallacious ideologies based on defying basic truths. The peddlers are politicians, philosophers, social engineers, elitist academics, pundits, tyrants, etc.”
When Silber authored his book, he expressed his discouragement at how far the education system had fallen from its original success and its original intent. He pointed out that early schools had produced the likes of Abraham Lincoln and now (in 1984) were turning out millions of functionally illiterate graduates deprived of any cultural heritage.
In addition to the failure of the public education system, Silber laid out what he felt were the major manifestations of a “sick” society, citing:
2) the grip of drugs,
3) breakdown of the family,
4) existence of a permanent underclass,
5) declining ability to compete in world markets,
6) computer-driven programmed trading converting the stock market, “once a forum for raising capital,” into a casino, and
7) invention and enterprise stymied by the cancerous growth of regulation and litigation.
Who are the current gods of the marketplace? I’m sure we could name quite a few in business, media, academia, and government. What are their promises and ideas for a better future? Is there any consideration of natural law or unifying principles?
When it comes to public education, the issues usually relate to more money and less work for teachers. Despite having spent decades and billions of dollars increasing salaries and reducing class sizes, public education continues to slide. Civics and citizenship disappeared long ago. Furthermore, we are no better at teaching reading or math, though the gods of the education marketplace continue to tinker and market new strategies.
Sliding Forward Relentlessly or Backing Up?
Seeing the chaos and division currently in our culture, how many of us can possibly be confused? Having abandoned the demands of our historical and spiritual traditions, by what are we now guided? How do we pass on to future generations the promise that was passed to our parents and for which they worked so tirelessly on our behalf? Will the latest gods of the marketplace reveal the as yet undiscovered cure for all our ills, or should we revisit the gods of the copybook pages and their age old wisdom?
Our hope has to be in the restoration of our families, our churches, and our schools, providing the education and discipline that children need to be prepared to make the most of their lives and their communities. I can’t say it better than John Silber did:
“If we have the courage to face reality, we will know and proclaim these harrowing truths: that the degenerate society consumed in pleasure-seeking will not survive (“the wages of sin is death”), that the society that will not defend its freedom will lose it (“stick to the Devil you know”), that a society that consumes more than it produces will go bankrupt (“if you don’t work, you die”).
“We ill serve ourselves and our children by preparing ourselves and them for a life of freedom and easy living that may never come and most certainly will never last. We had better prepare ourselves and them for reality—a reality that is infused with moral laws as surely as it is infused with physical laws; a reality in which there is no consumption without production, no freedom without defense, no self-fulfillment and no self-government without self-disciplined persons who govern themselves, persons who are capable of subordinating their desires long enough to achieve the conditions on which freedom and survival, and even pleasure, depend.”