I’ve long been puzzled by some of the weirder aspects of William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem.” What was this man talking about, imagining Jesus bopping around England, touching down on a verdant hill here and a sooty factory there? Having taught the poem on occasion, I have pondered it both as an example of English Romanticism and as what it has become (for better or for worse, we admit): the anthem of a particular vision, or version, of England.
Scholars have commented extensively on the role that Blake’s rather off-beat and romantic Christian—gnostic, if you will—faith played in his life and poetry, but as I have continued to ponder “Jerusalem”—some days I can’t get the tune of the hymn out of my head—I have realized that what Blake really believed in was not God, or Christ, but England. Why else would he express the notion that England had been, and could be, a Promised Land, even with her “dark Satanic mills”? A part of Blake must have been consumed by a romantic, perfectionist vision not of an England as a Holy Land based on testamentary principles but rather as a green and pleasant Utopia, based on the humble, humane values and virtues that the word “pleasant” shouts so loudly by its own almost absurd modesty. You’d mark a student down who used “pleasant” in an essay to describe anything so important.
I think I know what Blake was getting at. Social psychologists, evangelicals, sports fans, and athletes know it, too. It’s that feeling of oneness with a corporate whole—a congregation, a filled stadium, the bench, even a family group—when some extraordinary, affirming, positive event (a great sermon, a last-minute goal, an expression of warmth and love from great-grandmother, even a choir singing “Jerusalem” in exquisite harmony) draws the group together in a moment of transcendent community and joy. (I’ll go so far as to suggest that the U.S. men’s ice hockey victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics may have been the largest expression of this feeling in my lifetime.)
For me, as a non-religious person in whom the spirit occasionally stirs, this feeling is how I define “god,” or at least a godly intention for humankind: the intention of peace and brotherhood that is manifest as Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount. I’ve always been moved by the idea that those folks discovered that with a little generosity of spirit, the loaf of Wonder Bread and half-can of tuna fish to which the crowd initially copped could expand, when the people turned from protecting their own stuff to sharing it with others, into a satisfying meal for a multitude. This belief in the goodness and fairness of one’s fellows is the root of my personal hope for a New Jerusalem, for utopia.
I’ve spent most of my life in schools, and I’m slowly coming to define the tenets of my true faith.
I believe in school the way Blake, amid the squalor of the Industrial Revolution, believed in England.
I believe that any school—with an optimistic, generous mission and clear, affirming, pro-human values—and the right students and the right faculty and the right leadership, can be what Blake dreamt of for England: Jerusalem, or at least a promised land. I love that feeling of being almost (and sometimes not just almost) weepy for joy at Commencement and that sense of complete sharing that would come over me in those occasional faculty meetings where everyone was in agreement about something wonderful. I loved watching my own kids walk off down the hall each morning as we arrived in the building. My spirit has been renewed by those random conversations with students in which all parties—old and young—suddenly drill down to some important truths about one another and about their experience of learning. I’m physically and emotionally thrilled when I go back to the words of the most idealistic of founders and find eternal truths about student-centered education, and I have been equally thrilled when colleagues have voiced their own faith in similar truths.
What better vision can a school aspire to than being, in its way, “a green and pleasant land”? To be a place where growth is nourished and in which growing beings flourish, and to be a place where kindness and decency prevail? That’s an ideal school, that’s a paradise worthy of faith and hope, and love.
Why can’t every school be Jerusalem, and why shouldn’t I believe in this?