ABSTRACT
Leavis, as a university teacher, had a lifelong concern with education that goes beyond that of Eliot, even if education was an important subject for the latter too. New Bearings, whilst seeing Eliot’s work as a ‘new start for poetry’, ends with gloomy outlook for poetry itself within modern culture. In September 1933 Scrutiny Knights continued his educational work with ‘Scrutiny of Examinations’, which collated reports received from dissatisfied schoolteachers; it is wholesale attack on systems of assessment which have nothing to do with education but simply amount to cramming. For Leavis and his Scrutiny colleagues, education ‘works in round—School, University, Training College, School’, and there is little chance of more enlightened approach to poetry being adopted in schools if higher education system, which produces the English teachers, is inadequate. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Eliot observes that ‘on the subject of education, there are some helpful remarks in Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious ’.
