“So we have always new problems,” Mr. Eliot concludes a paragraph, “and the old ones in new forms”: a designedly lame and impotent conclusion, declining to raise us to some rhetorical Pisgah. His prose affords no sights of promised lands for posterity to inherit once it has profited by Mr. Eliot’s instruction. Four lectures on The Aims of Education do not tell us a single thing we can do, by way of improving the education we are busy offering. They assume our willingness to reduce the scope of the delusion under which we suffer, when we assume that we can say what the aims of education are, or that in our schools we do something or other calculated to fulfill these aims.
For Eliot believed—very profoundly believed—that you can usefully discuss things without coming to a conclusion. He distrusted conclusions, because they resemble recipes. They imply that once you have followed their instructions you can dispose of a problem. And he regarded as the shallowest delusion of his time the reduction of social reality to a congeries of solvable problems. He has something to say about where these “problems” come from:
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