Sir Reason, in Piers Plowman: Can you “sing in a church, / Or pile hay into stacks?” From a 1427 rendering. Image: Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University

In July 2017, a Pew Research Center poll revealed that most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58 percent) believed “colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country.” Meanwhile, a solid majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (72 percent) saw higher education’s effects on the United States as positive.

Higher education has become a polarizing topic in U.S. politics, but the underlying issues—who should be taught, what should be taught, and to what end—stretch back to the Middle Ages, when universities first came into existence. In the late 14th century, the English writer William Langland considered these questions at length in his poem Piers Plowman, a religious and political work of 7,000-plus lines. Langland spent most of his adult life crafting and revising the poem; it is, alongside Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the greatest English literary achievement of its time. A highly educated man, Langland framed the idea of education as a social and ethical project—and a questionable one at that.

To be sure, Langland worked under very different circumstances from our own. Fourteenth-century English education had two tiers, grammar school and university. In grammar school, corporal punishment was not only condoned but expected. The curriculum laid a heavy emphasis on literacy, rote memorization, and ethics: The goal was less to inform students than to form them into competent readers and responsible citizens. The university curriculum stressed theology as the queen of the liberal arts and prepared undergraduates for ordination.

Grammar schools, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, were exclusive institutions serving boys and men from a relatively narrow, upper range of social classes. At the initiative of local community leaders or the government, the sons of some poor families had access to free or subsidized grammar schools. (These often fell under the purview of bishops and thus became an extension of the pastoral mission.) The most powerful members of medieval English society, the nobility, tended to bypass formal schooling entirely through home tutoring and independent study at their leisure.

We know very little about Langland’s life—”Langland” may be a pseudonym, a nickname, or his mother’s name—but Piers Plowman gives ample evidence that its author had studied in grammar school and probably also at Oxford. The poem, written in English alliterative verse, is studded with Latin words, phrases, verses, and quotations drawn from Holy Scripture and popular grammar-school texts.

Piers Plowman consists of a prologue and 22 “passus,” or steps, and the poem takes the form of a dream vision and a spiritual education. The narrator/dreamer is Will (at different moments, a given name or a personification of human volition), who discourses with Holy Church, Clergy, Theology, friars, and a host of other authoritative and allegorical “persons.” Langland does not portray these intellectual engagements in a purely positive light. Will is a mediocre student who often misunderstands his teachers. He does not represent an ideal but a real, flawed consciousness. And his teachers reveal their own limitations when they contradict themselves.

At the heart of the poem’s restlessness is unease about salvation. “How can I save my soul?”, Will asks Holy Church near the beginning. The task Langland sets the questioner is to discover whether society’s existing institutions, including schools and universities, can promote salvation for individual souls and for the Christian community.

Piers Plowman is notably ambivalent about that question. In the poem, institutions malfunction (for example, local government officials can be paid off), often because they serve the interests of the powerful. In one memorable passage, Will finds himself at a feast with Reason, Patience, and a fat doctor of divinity. The menu is mostly Scripture, though soup, stew, and wine are also on offer. In this disturbing scene, the doctor stuffs his face and bloviates on theology. Will remarks to himself that the university man is “a selfish glutton with two big cheeks— / He has no pity on us poor people; he misdoes / What he preaches and does not demonstrate compassion.” When asked, the doctor rather conveniently defines doing well as “doing what doctors teach.” Though accomplished in the most prestigious academic discipline, he is insulated by wealth from pressing social issues. His discourse is not heretical, but it is not sufficient, either. Will perceives that he doesn’t have the whole answer to the salvation question.

At times, the poem despairs that education could have any value whatsoever. In one powerful passage, Langland muses, “Unlearned honest laborers and land-tilling people / Pierce with a pater noster the palace of heaven / And pass through purgatory without penance on account of their perfect faith.” What if education simply equips students to justify sin to themselves? Would our souls be better off without it?, Langland wonders. Yet he hedges his bets by placing this radical sentiment in the mouth of a character named Recklessness, Will’s impetuous alter ego.

Langland’s strategy is to deconstruct education in order to re-form it on different grounds. In the penultimate scene of the poem, Piers the Plowman, a shadowy figure revealed to be Christ incarnate, receives the Four Evangelists as “four big oxen” with which “to teach the faith.” Langland takes the opportunity to pun on “team (of oxen)” and “theme (of a homily),” which were pronounced the same in Middle English. Education and its institutions are redeemed, we are meant to see, through a vision of society founded on manual labor and a faithful interpretation of Scripture. This is a synthesis of lay and learned cultures: It yokes together skills that pertain to peasants and skills that pertain to priests. But the vision doesn’t last. The poem ends with a successful assault on Conscience and the Church by devils, wicked friars, and other enemies. “‘By Christ,’ said Conscience then, ‘I will become a pilgrim / And walk as wide as the world reaches / To seek Piers the Plowman.'”

Piers Plowman comes from a particular social context, but one that, in broad strokes, is recognizable today. In the late 14th century, as in the early 21st century, everyday people felt the chasm between the haves and have-nots widening, even as emerging spheres of society such as trade and civil bureaucracy created new opportunities for social advancement. Langland was not simply for or against these changes; he responded to them poetically, inviting readers to imagine a better society while always reminding them of the gap between reality and imagination.

Like any social project, education risks being compromised by the very power differentials it is meant to redress. In the 1370s and 1380s, writing and rewriting, William Langland created a vision of social justice that recognized the dignity of the plowman in the field and the churchman with a conscience. Yet he felt compelled to present this vision with caveats. He represented within the dream the voices of those who would resent it whether because it challenged their privilege or because the dream itself remained insufficient to the magnitude of society’s problems. (One insufficiency we can perceive today is the very small role afforded to women in Piers Plowman.) Langland wondered whether education was living up to its promises. In 2018, so should we.

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who replied to the Pew Research Center’s questions, it was respondents of ages 50 and above who most disparaged the effects of colleges and universities. By contrast, among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, age mattered little. It was individuals earning less than $30,000 who were most likely to view higher education negatively. These results reveal groups who may feel alienated from the mission or practices of universities, possibly for reasons of age, ideology, or social class. Yet criticism of education implies (albeit negatively) an ideal conception of what education can accomplish. We in higher education should take these challenges seriously, in order to expand the ethical capacity of our work—the power to create common ground beyond the college gates and build a hoped-for world of lasting justice.

Eric Weiskott is an assistant professor of English at Boston College and the author of English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (2016).