T. S. E. and the TES: Eliot and Educationalism

This article examines T. S. Eliot's response to the wartime discourse of educational reform articulated by the Times Educational Supplement and its editor H. C. Dent. Eliot attacked Dent over three main points: Dent's preference for the centralised direction of British culture via speculative models of 'democratic' education; the notion of popular mobilisation and its promotion by the Church; the reliance of Dent's discourse upon a journalistic tenor capable of galvanising public will for wholesale social reconstruction. The overlooked relationship between Eliot and Dent reveals a fascinating dialogue between late literary modernism and its wartime social corollary. Encompassing Eliot's writings in The Criterion, The Idea of a Christian Society, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, letters to the TES, papers delivered to the Christian Moot group, and Four Quartets, this article reveals the degree to which Dent's polemic negatively informed many of Eliot's educational pronouncements.