Blake on Formal Education

Blake’s “The School Boy” was certainly relatable. It seems I continually move back and forth between whether formal education is of any use or not depending on the day. I can certainly sympathize with the poem’s content, but its placement in Blake’s collection is perhaps more interesting than Blake’s opinion of a system of education. The poem suggests that one is deprived of the joy of learning in school, and joy and learning can be combined in observing or experiencing nature. Songs of Innocence was the collection in which “The School Boy” was originally included, but it was later moved to Songs of Experience, as the footnote reads. Songs of Innocence is supposedly about the beauty or joy in childlike sensibilities, and a general lack of understanding of the world. Poems like “Infant Joy” speak to the bliss enjoyed when only two days old. The rest of the collection seems to speak to a sorrow that prevails with age, and thus understanding of the world’s evils like “The Chimney Sweeper.” However, “The School Boy” seems to segue into Songs of Experience, and that is perhaps why Blake chose to move it. The poem details a child’s understanding how terrible it is to waste a day at school “When the birds sing on every tree…And the sky-lark sings with me” on a summer morning. It furthers this notion with “How can the bird that is born for joy,/ Sit in a cage and sing,” perhaps to illustrate the inhibiting nature of structured schooling—that it’s cage-like. The reader then, when reading this poem in conjunction with the rest of Songs of Innocence must understand organized schooling as another detraction from infantile innocence, and another ruin of child-like sweetness.