Why Were Victorian Elites So Effective?

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• > Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century.

  That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?

  by simonw
• This has it backwards. The Victorian elite had a high standard of life because they had an empire that funded their decadent lifestyle - at the expense of their colonies! They were cushioned from negative consequences of their be debaucherous lifestyle.

  Such macro effects exist today as well, in certain countries, that enjoy exorbitant privileges.

  A focus on STEM is how a up and coming nation builds itself — innovation, and making something the world wants, rather than subjugation or rent seeking.

  by smath
• Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants who did their laundry, cooked their food, poured their Port and generally did all the work.
  by jimbo456
• "Oxbridge tutors believed overwhelmingly that the purpose of an undergraduate degree was not training for work nor even preparation for academic research, but rather a general moral and intellectual formation that would fit students for any professional role they might later pursue."

  This is what the Japanese are still doing; the top companies seek out top achievers regardless of the major, and then employ them, and teach them the things the employee lacks inside the company.

  by jan_m_savage
• On the last supposition: they've managed something better for themselves, which is an order where they have substantial control over public policy without being subject to the full brunt of public inquiry or responsibility. You would have to force Sam Altman to run for office; Oprah famously laughs when questioned about pursuing the presidency.
  by 59percentmore
• I question this framing:

  > Caricaturing a little, we can distinguish two groups in modern educational debates: traditionalists and progressives. Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop personally and socially.

  Today's proponents of "classical education", whom I would categorize as quite conservative, sound like the supposed progressives described above, preferring to teach students how to learn.

  From Dorothy L. Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning":

  > What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a cry to which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back -- or can we?

  > Is the Trivium [1], then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the age of fourteen they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of sixteen, thus proving himself the equal of his mediæval counterpart, whose precocity often appears to us so astonishing and unaccountable.

  [1] Grammar -> Logic / Dialectic -> Rhetoric

  https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfL...

  by gred
• The article doesn't also quite give the numbers to say how effective they actually were. By modern standards the amount of people actually governing the empire was tiny. For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850 [1]. The total colonial service including most overseas posts (except India and a few others) was about 1000 people by 1900, the Indian civil service was never more than ~1200. This over an empire of ~450 million subjects.

  By contrast today's Civil service is about 550,000 governing a population of 69 million [3]. Of course it must be pointed out that todays government does more things for better or worse, so it's not saying they did the same with a few orders of magnitude fewer people. But still, seems pretty effective to me.

  [1]: Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830: "At the Colonial Office in 1816, there was a tiny establishment of 14: the Secretary of State, Earl Bathurst, his Under Secretary, Henry Goulburn, MP, the Permanent Secretary, a librarian, a translator and nine clerks. According to Goulburn, 'several' of the clerks were employed on slavery-law enforcement duties all the time. The enforcement of the antislavery law seems to have had priority over any other policy objective."

  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Service

  [3]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-stati...

  by gampleman
• Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.
  by cafebeen