Just because.

Not disingenuous, just genereous. He is obviously presuming a certain level of acquaintance with Dicekns’ success as a social crusader and popular writer, and assuming it would be obvious that that success depended on his being at least a little credible.

Authors of fiction are often cited as sources by historians and even anthroplogists precisely because these authors have to be fairly factual in constructing the settings for their fictions. This sin’t true only of Dickens – Cao Xueqin’s Dream of Red mansions is another example.

The characters themselves are usually grotesques and exaggerations and some of Dickens’ “morals” are questionable, but it’s not like Dickens didn’t know about what was actually going on in English education. Indeed, take a look at Nicholas Nickleby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Nickleby) — part of it is an expose of the infamous Yorkshire schools, which were really institutionalized child abuse, where unwanted boys were warehoused and most died or were disabled due to neglect (http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-0564(194912)4%3A3%3C237%3A%22NAER%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 and http://charlesdickenspage.com/nickleby.html). Some of the schools were shuttered due to their exposure in the novel.

Further: I have nothing against a classical education – see that I’m quoting Dickens? Indeed, I’ve read all of Dickens novels, which are a jumping off point for me in terms of history, social justice, education, psychology, etc. Hell, there’s examples akin to Enron and other business fraud in Dickens (my fave is Tigg Montague/Montague Tigg’s Anglo-Bengalee Mutual Assurance Company in Martin Chuzzlewit).

The problem is, in Dickens’ time and our time, is that schools are often seen as a way to warehouse annoying adolescents (how much value added in high school?) and college is a way to avoid the real world and gain a piece of paper.

The color produced was more redish than blue. “… the Tyrian hue … is considered of the best quality when it has exactly the colour of clotted blood …”

The color is complicated because the chief pigment produced by the snail was dibromoindigo. Oxidation,e.g. by exposure to sunlight, can turn it into ordinary indigo, the blue dye that makes blue jeans blue.

The Tyrian (or Imperial) Purple was so scarce and costly that its use was restricted to the imperial household. Indeed, it was considered treason for a commoner to posess items dyed purple.

Mauve is a lighter color closer to lilac. Ref.

In any event, “Gladiator” was wrong, the grape jelly colors usually refered to as purple are ugly and not the sort of thing that a Roman Emperor would have worn.

link

I wouldn’t worry too much about the gifted kids in the U.S. spinning their wheels, now that there’s stuff like OpenCourseWare from MIT, wikis, etc.
I got semi-screwed by my own high school in 1992, as I ran out of math classes and the math dept head didn’t want to admit that this special math/science school didn’t have enough math classes for its best math students. So I was forced to do an “independent study”, but all I had was a crappy text and no guidance. If only it had been 15 years later, I would have been in heaven, and would have taught myself Diff Eqns and probably some numerical integration stuff. I think the current times are much better for self-starters. Now, college and graduate education… that’s a different story.

As for the uselessness of the upper crust classical education in Victorian Britain, Charles Dickens points this out quite a few times, most pointedly in Bleak House, I would say. Richard Carstone excelled in the “public” schooling of the time, doing well in Latin translation of poetry…an exercise totally useless. He tries his hands at medicine, navigation, and then the law, which then draws him into the wealth-destroying Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case. He, of course, ends up dying as the case sputters out when the estate has been eaten up in court costs. His was an energy and intellect totally wasted.

Then there’s the Rouncewells. They’re of the “lower” classes (the eldest Rouncewell is a woman who is the longtime housekeeper of the Dedlocks, an aristocratic family), who are now up-and-coming because of their willingness to have practical education (in addition to some education in the “finer” things, but not to the exclusion of engineering) and leave the servant class behind. The Rouncewells have made it in a large way in industrialization, particularly in ironworks. Sir Leicester Dedlock takes umbrage at finding out that one of the Rouncewells is being asked to stand for Parliament, but even more that one of the Rouncewells objects to Lady Dedlock’s personal lady’s maid as a desirable match for his son. Mr. Rouncewell Sr. indicates he finds the lady’s maid to be entirely too low, and has come to propose to send the girl to a finishing school on the Continent where his own daughters have attended, to improve her mind. To say that Sir Leicester is insulted is an understatement, as he considered the basic literacy supplied to the girl via the village school to be entirely fitting for her station. The thought that such a girl might learn to speak modern French, the perquisite of an upper class girl?! The presumption!

The exploration of class in Bleak House is rather thorough, but only now did your essay dislodge how education played its part. Of course, Dickens also excoriated education in Our Mutual Friend, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Great Expectations… actually, probably all of his books. It’s hardly surprising considering how very little formal schooling Dickens himself had (maybe a year, I think).

This post was actually the start of my research into the topic in depth – I’m a physics type chemist, and I’ve neglected my studies of the history of organic chemistry.

The first book that I read that covered this topic was James Burke’s Connections, which I recommend (as opposed to his “The Day the Universe Changed”, which I will get around to eviscerating one of these days).

If you are interested, you can get a free one-year subscription to Chemical Heritage, whose article on Perkin spurred me to write this essay.

I have not read the book by the author of the Chemical Heritage article that is the second link in the first paragraph, but that might be a good place to start. One statement that jumped out as a red flag in that essay, though, is the blaming of the British loss of this market on industrial espionage. I’m sure there was a little of that, but that strikes me mostly as British sour grapes. They dropped the ball. Full stop.

I do have a list of materials I intend to buy to start my research project, such as the history of BASF.

You can find both of those on Amazon, but I can’t link here because the URL contains a series of eights, and the spam filter rejects them.

This looks pretty good.

This also looks to be good, and it is also on my list of things to buy.

David: there is another retardant on progress that the Germans practiced that is related to the Methdology fallacy: over-specialization leading to silos that do not communicate. From here:

It is the policy of the large German colour works to keep the chemists strictly to their own department and not to allow them access to other departments. The object of this is to prevent employees becoming conversant with other than their own work, so that it is less easy for them to carry away secrets to competitors.

I think that the Germans were destined to lose their lead to a less centralized society, but the thing was that in the late 19th century there was so much low-hanging fruit on the tree of knowledge that even an inefficient system was going to look good for quite some time.

At lunch, my daughter complained about her chemistry course; an idiot in science, I only commiserated. In appropriate mode, I did encourage her to study. Coming back to the computer, I see your post; it is inspiring & wonderfully interesting.

Re the “meta-skill” of being able to make a bold decision, “analysis paralysis” and its extreme opposite, “going wild” are equally counter- productive. Exquisite tension between “bold” and “reckless,” I’d say.