THE VILLAGE SCHOOL MASTER

📚  THE VILLAGE SCHOOL MASTER  

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- Oliver Goldsmith 

The poet portrays the schoolmaster as a respected figure of learning in a rural village in which basic reading and writing skills were the highest education many villagers attained.

The figure of the schoolmaster,therefore, is an awesome presence, a man deserving of respect and admiration.

 He is described thus: ‘A man severe he was, and stern to view’, who commands respect from his pupils. The children ‘laugh’d with counterfeited glee’ at his many jokes, whether they were funny or not.

 Yet the schoolmaster is not a fearsome figure as the narrator is quick to point out: 

‘Yet he was kind; or if severe in aught, / The love he bore to learning was in fault’.

His faults, if any, are due to his dedication to education and learning rather than as character defects.

The villagers are impressed with his ability to read and write, measure lands, do complex calculations, and mark the cycle of religious holy days.

 Adults and children alike hold his learning in awe; but this is an ironic passage which emphasises the ignorance of the villages rather than the learnedness of the schoolmaster.

 In arguments with the parson, the schoolmaster does not always triumph, but uses ‘words of learned length and thund’ring sound’ to further the argument, gaining respect from the audience of villagers as well.

While words of learned length and thund’ring sound

Amazed the gaxing rustics rang’d around

And still they gaz’d and still the wonder grew,

That one small head could carry all he knew.

His basic knowledge and ability to read make him seem knowledgeable to the ‘gazing rustics’, but he is not the intellectual god he is held up to be.

His importance is relative only to their own ignorance. However, this is not a satirical portrait meant to reveal weakness or fault; the poet’s admiration of the schoolmaster is clear.

He is the source of education to the village, at times ruled by the ‘love he bore to learning’ but doing a good deed in bring education to the common people and fulfilling a vital role in village life.

 In eulogizing the passing the schoolmaster, the poet is mourning the passing of the community of which the schoolmaster was central.

The poem is more than a wistful nostalgia of the poets own childhood experience. His message is an explicit criticism of the decline of rural life in favour of urban centres.

The revered figure of the schoolmaster is lost and forgotten, his value and respect is no more. ‘But past is all his fame’ the poet laments,

 ‘The very spot / Where many a time he triumph’d is forgot’.

The poet stands against the ideals of the modern world: industrialism, commerce and materialism.

 The portrait of the schoolmaster is a tribute to that part of the world, the rural countryside, which is fading away to make room for capitalist enterprise.

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