Orwell the Teacher: Such, Such Were The Joys.

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Crook, Tim. 2017. Orwell the Teacher: Such, Such Were The Joys. George Orwell Studies Journal, 2(1), pp. 38-51. ISSN 2399-1267 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Orwell’s essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ amounts to an excoriating condemnation of the preparatory school system. The young Eric Arthur Blair graduated from his prep school by scholarship to Eton– regarded as the preeminent elitist institution in British private education. Orwell further denounced many aspects of the private education system of the 1920s and 1930s in his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter. He also took up teaching and private tutoring during the early 1930s. Biographers and writers have reported on what it was like to be taught by him. In this paper, Tim Crook investigates the significance of Orwell’s adventures in education. How credible were his views on teaching and the nature of the education that he received? How good a teacher was he in the context of the professionalisation of teaching at the training colleges of the time? To what extent was his writing on education tantamount to another development of his self-fashioning and transformation from Eric
Arthur Blair, child of imperialism, to the democratic socialist writer George Orwell?

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