Educating for Utopia: William Morris on useful learning versus 'useless toil'

This is article was written for a special edition of The Journal of William Morris Studies, published Summer 2013 to honour Peter Faulkner, formerly of Exeter University and a leading Morris scholar. The article examines contemporary debates about higher education alongside similar debates in the nineteenth century, and more specifically in the nineteenth-century Socialist movement as exemplified in the work of William Morris. It provides an extensive analysis of Morris’s writings on education, something not addressed in any detail previously in Morris scholarship, drawing together a range of material from his political lectures, journalism and fiction. It considers how nineteenth-century Socialist concepts of education, and more specifically Morris’s own views on education, continue to be of relevance to contemporary debates about the nature, purpose and value of a public education system