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Title: The School and the World
Author: Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
Release Date: June 15, 2008 [eBook #25797]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCHOOL AND THE WORLD***
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THE SCHOOL AND THE WORLD
by
VICTOR GOLLANCZ and DAVID SOMERVELL
Authors of "Political Education in a Public School"
London
Chapman & Hall, Ltd.
1919
TO
THE SCHOOL
WHICH BOTH WE
AND THOSE WHO DIFFERED FROM US
SOUGHT TO SERVE
PREFACE
In December, 1917, the present writers wrote a little book entitled
"Political Education in a Public School," in which they put forward
their views as to what the aims and methods of a modern liberal
education should be. They also described certain experiments which
they had been permitted to make in one of our old English Public
Schools, experiments which both illustrated the authors' principles and
tested their value. In July, 1918, that book was published.
But in the intervening seven months several things had happened. On
the one hand, "Political Education" had produced further striking
evidence of its power over boys' intellects and characters, evidence
altogether more striking than anything that had occurred up to the time
of writing the book. On the other hand, the movement in the full tide
of its success ran upon rocks and has been, for the time being at any
rate, utterly and completely destroyed. The authors have left the
school in which their experiments were made.
When the book was published, its reviewers in the press raised one by
one a series of problems which we had already encountered in a
practical shape in the course of our work, problems hardly touched on,
however, in our book, which was devoted to exposition rather than
argument. Such problems were: How far is political propaganda
inseparable from political education, and in what respects is such
propaganda desirable or undesirable? How can political differences
among the masters themselves be made to play a helpful rather than an
injurious part? Does the introduction of politics into the curriculum
open a way, as the very able reviewer in _The Westminster Gazette_
suggested, for Prussianism in its most insidious form, the conscription
of educated opinion? Are the old Public Schools the best medium for
political education, or should the new wine be poured into new bottles?
and lastly--for educational "subjects" are or should be but aspects of
a single whole--what of political education in relation to morality,
and to religion?
The present volume, therefore, essays a twofold task. The first two
chapters briefly recapitulate and continue the history of our work down
to its abrupt end. The latter chapters deal with such questions as
those mentioned above. One feature of the earlier volume survives in
its successor. The Appendix to that volume contained a selection of
articles written by boys for our political paper, _The School
Observer_. As an Appendix to this volume we print a few more articles
by boys whose work did not then appear. We are under no delusions as
to there being anything very extraordinary about these articles and
those printed in the previous volume. Abler work has been done by
abler boys in various schools at various times. They are interesting
as the combined effort of a group rather than as the work of
individuals. We reproduce them as the only concrete evidence available
of the character of one aspect of our experiment.
In the former volume we suppressed the name of the school out of
deference to the wishes of the Head Master, and though our own judgment
was against the concealment as a wholly superfluous piece of
mystification, we continue to respect his wishes.
One word of apology is needed for the use to which we have put the
utterances of our reviewers. The reviews revealed the interesting and
important fact that thoughtful people really felt strongly, one way or
the other, on the subject of political education. They constitute a
symposium of conflicting judgments upon an educational problem of which
they one and all recognize the importance, and as such their main
features are worth preserving.
Having said this much about the reviews it is necessary to add a word
more. The quotations we have chosen are, quite naturally, very largely
critical, and as such give no idea of the very warm welcome the general
policy of the book received. Not one in five among the reviewers was
hostile. One of them, however, the _Church Times_ reviewer, was
virulently hostile, and appeared to us not merely to dislike our
educational policy, which he had every right to do, but to blaspheme
against the very idea of a liberal education. As we have quoted from
no other "Church" paper, we should like to remark here that a number of
other such papers, representing various schools of religious thought,
gave the book a generous welcome.
Our experiments perished in the dark days of last spring. Within only
a month or two came the turn of the tide. It is bitter to reflect
that, could they but have survived until victory and peace brought a
return of political sanity, they might have weathered the storm and
conciliated some of their bitterest enemies, and reached safety.
Possibly, though gone, they have left their mark.
Meanwhile pneumonia has carried off, in the prime of early manhood,
their staunchest friend among our colleagues. He was not one who took
any but a very small part in the actual conduct of the experiments. He
once lectured to _The Politics Class_ on "Liberalism." But he had a
genius for sympathy, and always, when difficulties arose, it was to him
that we turned, because he had the gift of making us feel that it was
still worth while to persevere. Had we been wiser, he could perhaps
have served us still further by bringing us into touch with some of
those who differed from us, and helping to a mutual understanding. For
everyone was his friend. The dedication of this book had already been
chosen before he died, and we are unwilling to alter it, but perhaps we
may also venture to offer it as an unworthy tribute to the memory of
Alan Gorringe.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
PREFACE
I. THE RISE
II. THE COLLAPSE
III. PROPAGANDA
IV. CONTROVERSY
V. CAPTURE BY THE STATE
VI. THE MAKING OF "POLITICIANS"
VII. PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND FREAK SCHOOLS
VIII. MORALITY
IX. RELIGION
X. CURRICULUM
XI. THE YOUNG GENERATION AND THE OLD
APPENDIX
"That such an experiment should have been permitted in one of the great
public (English) schools is a sign of the greatest promise for the
future."--_Aberdeen Free Press_.
"Of all the objectionable and inept proposals for reforming the
education of our public schools we must award the palm to the scheme of
teaching boys politics."--_Saturday Review_.
"We do not believe the authors have delivered all their
message."--_Scottish Educational Journal_.
THE SCHOOL AND THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
THE RISE
The school in which political education was tried for a space of
something under two years is in no way a very remarkable school. It
has its sixteenth-century founder, "of pious memory," and its "second
founder," of memory almost more pious, in early Victorian days. That
second founder made the school famous as a centre of stalwart
evangelicalism. More recently its fame has been won chiefly in the
production of first-class cricketers. Until the early years of the
present century the school had also, we are told, a kind of inverted
fame as one of the "stupidest" of the public schools, as a dumping
ground for young hopefuls who could not pass entrance examinations
elsewhere. From that reputation, however, it had struggled fairly
successfully to free itself.
The present writers started with the common assumption that the
"Classical" scheme of a liberal education had long broken down in
practice, and survived only as feudalism survived in eighteenth-century
France, because sufficient energy had not yet generated to create a new
scheme to replace it. In part it had already disappeared and given
place to the patchwork innovations of the earnest but painfully
cautious and conservative reformers who have ruled the schools since
the days of Dr. Arnold.[1] The classical system had become the
classical compromise, a clipped and truncated classics, fighting a
losing battle for air space amidst a crowd of inadequately provided
"new subjects"--history, literature, science, modern languages. In
some ways the last state was worse than the first. For the first state
had at least been based upon a great tradition and an ordered
philosophy of life, but in the last state there was no tradition, no
ordered philosophy; only a jumble and a scramble, and a passing of
examinations. Such a system or lack of system must fall a prey sooner
or later to some educational movement based on a coherent and
defensible doctrine.
Now, as it chances, such a movement is already in the field; we may
call it the "Cult of Efficiency." It proclaims a great many truths
about the necessity of increasing productivity, about the connection
between education and the world of business, and generally speaking
points to the achievements of Germany for our envious imitation; it
proclaims the commercial utility of Spanish and Russian, and ranges in
its advocacy from advanced chemistry to shorthand and book-keeping.
Much that writers on these lines have to urge against the present
system is perfectly sound and reasonable. Many of their claims will
have to be recognised in the educational system of the future. But the
admission of their claim as a whole, of the claim of "efficiency" to be
the true and rightful heir of the old classical education, would be, to
speak without exaggeration, the greatest disaster that could possibly
befall this country.
What was wanted then was a conception of education at once "liberal"
and "modern," and such the writers found in "politics," using that word
in its widest Platonic sense. The classical education set out to study
the ancient world, and in the case of most of its pupils achieved
little more than the dry elements of two dead languages. The study of
the modern world has so far usually meant no more than the study of how
to make a little money out of it; the trail of commercialism has been
drawn over our Modern Sides. Why should not the modern world be
studied in the same noble and disinterested spirit as that in which the
best of the old teachers studied the world of Greece and Rome? It is
surely worthy of such study. Only perhaps by such study in our schools
can its wounds be healed. The central subject of a liberal education
should be "To-day," the great difficulties amongst which we are all
groping, the great problems awaiting solution, the great movements,
capitalism and socialism, imperialism and internationalism, freedom and
authority, that are battling for mastery or negotiating for a workable
compromise. The value of the classics lies wholly in the contribution
that classical art, philosophy, and history can make to the enrichment
of our minds for the study of our own problems. The value of modern
history lies in the inspiration of its great men, and the warning of
its tragic experiences. The value of "Divinity" is only found when we
face the fundamental question, Are we to apply Christianity in our
political and economic relations to-day, or are we not? But over and
above this reorientation of subjects already scheduled in the orthodox
time-table, there is the new subject within which all these (except
Divinity, which is fundamental) must be regarded as merely
contributory, and that subject is "politics," the treatment, elementary
yet thorough, vigorous yet many sided, of the great questions of the
day, with all the diverse lines of thought along which each can be
approached. Here the fundamental "text-book" is the newspaper.
Growing up in such a world as this of 1918, how can it be anything but
sheer monasticism to divert the main part of a boy's intellectual
energies away from this subject to anything else? Our educational
"America is here or nowhere."
With this principle in view, and after various tentative experiments,
we obtained permission to found the _Politics Class_ described in our
previous book. Suffice it to say here that the class was a voluntary
body of some thirty or forty senior boys, that met once a week on a
half-holiday evening to hear informal lectures from one or other of us,
and occasionally from one or other of our colleagues, on questions of
the day. Sometimes the topic was purely general--"Competition and
Co-operation," "The Spirit of the Reformer," or the like. Sometimes a
historical topic was traced rapidly from its beginnings down to a
crisis of last week's newspaper, the discourse ending on the brink of
the future with a note of interrogation; such were brief courses of
lectures on "The Irish Question," and "The Russian Revolution." A
third type were those that confined themselves to an analysis of a
strictly contemporary situation, such as the lectures on the various
"peace terms" speeches that led up to the Versailles declaration of
February, 1918. No attempt was made to create any artificial
popularity for the class. The scene was the ordinary bleak class-room
with all its sad suggestiveness. Ordinary notes were taken in ordinary
note-books. No one, in fact, can have come from any motive but a
genuine desire to know what was deemed worth knowing.
Parallel with the foundation of the _Politics Class_ had come a
remodelling of the sixth form time-table. Indeed, not modern politics
but Greek philosophy had been the first subject to stir that almost
religious passion for a real understanding of things, without which
knowledge is in the old man mere pedantry and in the young man mere
grist for the examination mill. In the present educational chaos,
school sixth forms are quite bewilderingly fissiparous. Every one is a
"specialist" of some sort or other; specialism means "private work,"
and if private work enables the gifted few to escape into
self-education from the hampering attentions of the form master, it
gives the rest a terrible training in the habits of time-wasting and
evasion. Yet so long as sixth form orthodoxy is classical scholarship
work, the majority will rightly be found among the heretics, and that
is the "specialists." The remodelled sixth form time-table made at
least a move towards the recognition of the principle that, over and
above specialisms, there were certain subjects that were the common
concern of all educated men. A heterogeneous body drawn from all
corners of the school time-table met together for Modern History, for
Outlines of World History, and for General Principles of Science, and
(with some regrettable abstentions) for Political Science and
Economics. Some day it will appear ridiculous that these last subjects
should not have been deemed a necessity for all the "specialists" alike.
The real test of an educational system is not what the masters do for
the boys, but what the boys do for themselves, and in this matter only
one large undertaking fell within the scope of our previous book,
namely the paper, _The School Observer_, therein described and largely
quoted. The idea of this paper, a political journal on the lines of a
high-class weekly, published twice a term, with "Notes on Current
Events," political "leaders," literary and philosophic "middles," a
poem or so, and correspondence all complete--this laughably magnificant
idea came entirely from a little group of boys, and one at any rate of
the present writers was at first frankly sceptical. Well,--enthusiasm
has a way of beating scepticism, at any rate when youth is thrown into
the scale. We were quickly harnessed to our task as members of the
editorial committee. Our literary contributions were confined to a
part of the "Notes on Current Events," the portion of the paper that
naturally attracted least outside notice, and was rarely singled out
for praise. It is true that a discerning schoolmaster from another
school remarked that these notes displayed "restrained strength even
more remarkable in boys than the qualities of the other parts of the
paper." I am ashamed to say we smiled and held our peace.
Five of the six issues of the paper appeared, and we had already
contracted with our advertisers for a second volume when the crash
came. In general, of course, the paper was much less important than
the _Politics Class_. The class was a necessity to political
education; the paper was a luxury. But it is a man's luxuries that
give the clue to his character, and it was the very fact that the paper
was always of the nature of a _jeu d'esprit_, a glorious game, a kind
of Fleet Street doll's-house affair, that gave a sense of gay adventure
to the pursuit of politics. When the paper had been suppressed, a boy
who had never contributed to it said to me, "What a shame!" and he
added very pensively, "It was all so extraordinarily romantic!"
But so far the movement had only touched the sixth form, and in a minor
degree such lower forms as the writers happened to meet in the course
of their professional duties. That was plainly not enough. If boys
are learning from their masters something that they really value, their
natures are so essentially communicative and sociable that they will be
eager to pass it on to their friends. This may seem a paradox, but it
is true enough. If of two boys in constant contact, A is learning
algebra and B is not, and if A refrains from talking algebra to B, one
of two causes must be the explanation of A's reticence. Either he does
not care about B or else he does not care about algebra, and since by
hypothesis he cares about B, we can only assume that he does not care
about algebra. A simple experiment will verify our conclusion. Drop
an indiscretion about a colleague during the algebra lesson, and B, C,
D and all the rest of them to a long way beyond Z will know all about
it before sunset. A, B, C, and D are interested in masters' opinions
of each other.
Now we would not claim for a moment that all educational subjects
should be required to pass this test of "interest," and rejected if
they do not.[2] That would be grotesque. But it seems to us that the
central subject of a liberal education, that subject to which all
others cohere and in relation to which all others are justified, ought
to make some such appeal to enthusiasm. Unless education produces
enthusiasm for something, there is no education, and that is why it has
so often been maintained that the real education of Public Schools is
in the playing fields, because there alone, for most boys, enthusiasm
is generated, if it is generated at all. (For most, one may remark in
passing, it is not generated even there. The notion that the average
boy is an enthusiast for cricket is as wide of the mark as would be the
idea that he was an enthusiast for Greek, Natural Science, or the
Church of England.)
Judged by this test of infectious enthusiasm, political education was
to produce in the early months of 1918, evidence of its educational
worth such as we never dreamt of, and here again the pioneer was not
ourselves but a boy, and that boy not one of the group that had started
the paper. This boy, who had recently become head of his House,
conceived the idea that politics could become the medium of the same
spirit of joyous and unforced co-operation as is traditionally (and
sometimes actually) associated with athletics. His idea of a school
house was of a vigorous and jolly community, living together on terms
of friendly equality such as reduced fagging and the oligarchial
"prefect system" to a minimum, and uniting in a real effort to keep
abreast with the great world outside by means of a co-operative study
of politics and the Press. The idea will seem mere foolishness and an
impossibility to many of those who did not see it actually at work. At
the best it will seem the kind of thing we may have read of in books
about "freak schools," where so much loss has obviously to be set
against whatever is gained. In this case, not only the idea, but all
the practical details came from the boy himself and the little band of
enthusiasts that gathered round him. Indeed, one feels a sense of
impropriety in describing what was essentially not our work, but his.
However, it was the fine flower of political education, and as such may
fitly close this chapter. "Houses," after all, and not "forms," are
the natural social units that compose a public school, and a scheme of
education that becomes in the best sense popular may, indeed must, take
its rise in the classroom, but will find its freest development in the
life of house reading-room and house study.
The chief among many "stunts," as they were called, was a political
society. The twenty-five members of this society, rather over half the
house, undertook to read between them nearly all the more important
newspapers, including one or two French papers. On Sunday the society
sat in conclave, the three or four leading events of the week were
taken each in turn, and the individual or group responsible for each
newspaper put forward the view of the event in question taken by his
own particular organ. These views were compared and debated, and
ultimately a brief synopsis was drawn up, consisting of the event
itself, with the chief typical utterances of the press on the subject
set out underneath, for purposes of comparison and contrast. These
were typed and posted on a board as "news of the week." Neither of us
ever attended a meeting of this society, and it is obvious, from the
fact that more than half the house joined in, that we are not concerned
here with the activities of a little set of intellectualists. In the
fullest sense in which the word is applicable in a public school, these
political activities were "democratic," and the effect on the "English"
work of some of the boys in middle forms was most remarkable. The
present writer recalls, for instance, a Middle Fifth essay of some
three thousand words on the complex, and in some ways repellent,
subject of "National Guilds." On how many successive nights the rule
against "sitting up" was broken over the composition of this work the
recipient of the essay forebore to inquire.
From this beginning other developments rapidly opened. A modest but
useful idea was a question paper, on which any one who liked could set
down questions that occurred to him in the course of his reading. The
House Library naturally felt the impact of the movement, and a
political section was started in which books about the Greeks and
Mill's "Liberty" stood side by side with the latest essay on
"Reconstruction." But it would be giving an altogether unworthy notion
of the movement if it were suggested that politics alone, in the
narrower sense, marked the limit of these activities. The best modern
plays and poetry began to appear on shelves whence rubbishy novels of a
past generation were removed to make room for them. Nor were older
books neglected. The general drift of interest was inevitably towards
the moderns; but the great poets of the past were also finding their
way in before the end came.
Then, of course, there was a gramophone, with its "popular" and
"classical" repertoires; and before the end came, the "classical" had
so far surpassed the "popular" in popularity that House piano recitals
had begun as well.
Another development was on lines that would have gladdened the heart of
Ruskin and Morris, though I do not know that either of these was
consciously recognised as an influence. A movement arose for
beautifying the studies, which began with pseudo-Japanese lamp-shades,
and moved upward through pretty curtains and tablecloths to framed
"Medici" pictures. Before the end there was hardly a study that had
not its big framed Medici, and often a selection of Medici postcards as
well.
All these things involved, of course, some considerable expenditure;
but the cost was met with an eagerness astonishing to the boys
themselves when they reflected that, a few months before, So-and-so
"had never cared about anything but the tuck shop."
Other houses began to catch the spirit of the thing--a trifle
reluctantly and tentatively, it must be admitted, for there is a good
deal of improper pride about a school house, and imitations have not
quite the glamour of originals. Also the whole movement was by this
time falling under a cloud, and it is now time to give some account of
the collapse.
[1] A brilliant "depreciation" of Arnold and his school has recently
appeared in Mr. Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians."
[2] Something more is said on this subject in Chapter X.
CHAPTER II
THE COLLAPSE
"Teachers though they are, Mr. Gollancz and Mr. Somervell do not seem
quite to realise ... what obstacles have to be overcome before the advice
given in their little book is generally taken."--_The Westminster
Gazette_.
Our account of the collapse of our experiment has to be written, as the
reader will easily understand, with a good deal of reserve. "The rise"
was the work of ourselves and our pupils. "The collapse" was the work of
others. It is not a question of "Dora"; it is not a question of the
common law of libel; there are certain older laws of courtesy and
forbearance which we would fain observe, for he who has not learnt to
observe these has hardly made a beginning with political education. So
let it be said to begin with that no one was to blame. Things followed
their predestined course, and every actor in the drama played the part
that was natural and proper to him. It was natural that the movement
should be destroyed by masters as that its success should be made by
boys. If any one is to blame it is ourselves. It was we who chose to
pour new wine into old bottles--the preference for old bottles is
explained in Chapter VI.--and when the custodians of the bottles awoke to
the fact and hastily poured the wine out again, fearing disaster, they
certainly thought they were acting for the best. Needless to say, we
have often discussed the question whether, had the movement run on other
lines, had we been content with rather less to begin with, had we
considered principle rather less and prudence rather more, had we added
the _rôle_ of diplomatist to the _rôle_ of missionary, had we hardened
our hearts against some of the best boys in order to soften the hearts of
some of the more tractable masters--had we done all these things, could
we have postponed or even permanently escaped the collapse? On the
whole, we come to the conclusion that, much as we regret many plain
mistakes of detail, in the main it is best that the bold course was
taken, We rode boldly, and, in the last months, we had to ride for a
fall. An experiment has been made by frontal attack, and with the
slenderest of resources. Now that all that is over, the time has come to
begin the slow and circuitous approach toward political education as a
normal institution.
The material of our experiment was boys and boys alone. Now, at first
sight, a school might seem to consist of boys, but in point of fact boys
are only one element in a complex organisation embracing boys, masters,
head master, bursar, governors, and parents. The boys are only there to
be educated, and education is a matter about which very few people have
any strongly cherished ideas. For very many, public school education is
a species of "doing time," whereby a child of fourteen is taken and
simply kept out of mischief (or, at any rate, kept away from home, where
he would be a nuisance), until at eighteen he is become a man. But the
other constituent parts of the school have serious commercial interests
at stake. For the masters the school is the means of livelihood, and the
livelihood afforded them is in many cases so niggardly that they very
rightly consider that the smallest financial mishap to the school might
plunge them below the line of bare subsistence. From a slightly
different angle, the eyes of the higher officials and the governors are
fixed upon the same point. A head master once remarked to me of one of
his governors, "Old X.'s only idea is that the school should pay five per
cent."
And the parents. It is an article of faith with the present writers that
parents are wiser, more tolerant and more open to ideas on educational
matters, than schoolmasters generally suppose. But parents live at a
distance, and only make themselves felt at moments of crisis, and then
the crisis is one which they probably only very imperfectly understand.
That is all the fault of the schools, for the schools have never made a
serious attempt to take the parents into partnership in the matter of
their sons' education. And here we are back against the root of all
evil, for the reason why this has not been done is that the schools have
not yet seriously faced the fact that a liberal education for the average
boy is an unsolved problem, for the solution of which they need all the
help they can possibly get. Of course this taking of the parent into
partnership would be no easy matter. Readers of that wise and humorous
tale, "The Lanchester Tradition," will remember the comical failure of
the head master's attempt at a "Parents' Committee." Still, all this
being so, the fact emerges that the important factor in the problem of
the moment is not the real parent but the traditional parent, and the
false image of the traditional parent has been created in the
schoolmaster's mind by that fussy and ill-informed individual who is
always "writing to complain." Now, he who pays the piper does not
necessarily call the tune. That would be too absurd. But he has a veto
on any tune he too positively dislikes, and it is well known that the
unmusical generally dislike a _new_ tune.
The opposition to political education developed along two lines. One of
them makes this story a microcosm of the world history of the years
1917-1918. The other is something peculiar to the English public
schools, and might have befallen at any period since Dr. Arnold
inaugurated their modern history.
When we began our experiments the "party truce," in the moral as distinct
from the formal sense, still held good. Outside the circles of strict
pacifism--and with pacifism in any but a merely abusive sense we never
had any concern--English people were agreed upon the great questions of
the war. Such differences of opinion as there were concerned only
questions of method and expediency, not questions of principle. The
"gospel" of August, 1914, had not yet become a battle-ground disputed by
fiercely earnest rival sects. We were Liberals in a general sense, but
we differed on a great many topics, and we were genuinely anxious, in the
words of one of our pupils in the school magazine, "not so much to
advocate any one particular remedy of any given problem as to lay before
the class the problems themselves and the principal reforms which have
been or are being suggested, so that thought and criticism may have full
scope for exercise." It would be unfair to ourselves to admit that we
abandoned that ideal, but the events of 1917 brought a new spirit into
the world. On the one hand, the early days of the Russian Revolution and
the demand for a peace "without annexations or indemnities," coupled with
the entry of America and the war speeches of President Wilson, seemed to
revive the flagging idealism of the Allies and lift it to a more
universal and exalted level than ever before. On the other hand, the
publication of the Secret Treaties and the many incomplete revelations
that followed thereon, laid bare the fact that quite another act of
motives were also at work among our leaders; that territorial greed and
diplomatic hypocrisy were enemies to be fought in our own midst as well
as on the battlefield. The issues of the war assumed a grander and a
more terrible aspect. More than ever before perhaps in the history of
the world--and we do not overlook the period of the so-called religious
wars--religion and politics fused. To us, at any rate, the calm
aloofness suggested by the quotation above became impossible. A cry
seemed to have gone forth, "Who is on the Lord's side? Who?" A great
gulf opened up between those who only a year before had believed
themselves to be for the time at any rate in one political camp. On one
side of that gulf we found ourselves, and on the other most of our
colleagues. It was not that we differed from them as to the necessity of
winning the war, and of putting forward every possible military effort
for that end. But everything depends on the uses to which the victory is
put, and the spirit in which it is approached, and there the differences
were profound.
And thus the _Politics Class_ became a school of liberalism.[1] It was
no intolerant liberalism, for intolerant liberalism is not liberalism at
all. From first to last we stood for the examination of all points of
view. We were for reading the views of those we disagreed with, not for
abusing them unheard or burning their books unread. In so far as some of
our pupils carried liberalism to the point of intolerance, they lost the
spirit of the movement they professed to support. There were not many
against whom this charge could be brought. One of our most ardent
democrats, I remember, sent me during the time of his military training a
careful and painstaking examination of Mr. Mallock's latest big book.
The excuse of those that fell into intolerance must be, I suppose, that
they were young, and that they found themselves confronted by an
astonishing spectacle of intolerance in some of their "conservative"
masters.
When this change was taking place, we sought to redress the balance by
taking into partnership in the running of the _Politics Class_ a strongly
Conservative master. Such an arrangement would have been admirable had
the genuine educational spirit been there. It was not. The overture was
a failure and only added to our difficulties. To some men it seemed
better to root out the Liberal masters as "traitors" than to co-operate
with them as teachers.
On the eve of the final collapse, a similar experiment was tried with
_The School Observer_. The last number bears the names of two "editors,"
and contains both a Liberal and a Conservative "leader" written on the
same topic. The innovation was made at the last minute, and the
Conservative "leader" is not a genuine schoolboy production, but the
model may be a useful one for future work on the same lines.
But there was another influence making for the collapse. We quoted in
our previous book a head master who remarked at a school prize-giving
that the only questions worth asking are those that cannot get a definite
answer. Political education consists almost entirely of such questions.
Its sheet anchor is freedom of thought; its method is controversy; its
end is not in complete mastery of a box of intellectual tricks such as
will win full marks in an examination, but in the modesty of realised
ignorance and the enthusiastic search for fresh lights in the darkness.
Socrates was put to death by the Athenians because he would not desist
from asking them questions, and it is to be feared that some of our
pupils would have incurred the same fate had the customs of the time
permitted it. The taste for controversy on the fundamental subjects will
grip a youth like the taste for drink, as many who have passed through
undergraduate days at Oxford or Cambridge can remember. Suppose a boy
enters into political controversy with his form master, over the| giving
back of an essay, or with his house master at the luncheon table....
Now, there is a Divinity that doth hedge a schoolmaster, and the hedge
must be kept in somewhat careful repair. So long as we are concerned
with subjects like elementary Latin and Greek or Mathematics, we are
dealing with a body of knowledge in which, to take the examinations
standard, all the masters get full marks. All knowledge is contained in
a set of small school books which the masters, for their sins, know more
or less by heart backwards. Even history, if it is sufficiently badly
taught, may be grouped among such subjects, for, strange as it may seem,
it is quite possible to teach it in such a way that no boy feels impelled
to ask questions either insoluble in themselves or beyond the scope of
the master's immediate memory. There are schoolmasters who definitely
discourage or even forbid the asking of questions by the class. "Little
boys should be seen and not heard"--that worst of all educational
maxims--makes a larger contribution to the buttressing up of the present
system than is usually supposed. A lowering diet of irregular verbs
keeps the boy mind "docile," to use a word of ironically perverted
meaning, and prevents it from impinging embarrassingly upon the lightly
guarded regions of the master's intellectual entrenchments. In fact,
political education set up a new intellectual standard. It was a subject
in which no one, boy or master, got "full marks,"--scarcely even
President Wilson, perhaps, if you took his "work" as a whole! All were
learners, all were fellow workers together, and before the vast scope of
the task, differences of proficiency between the various workers seemed
hardly to matter.
Here, then, rises a difficult question. Ought the schoolmaster to
possess, or appear to possess, complete knowledge of the subject he
teaches? The present writer has taught a good variety of subjects during
nine years, and on the whole he has found his ignorance, not only of
politics, but of far more finite matters, a very helpful educational
instrument. As an emergency teacher of Latin on the modern side, for
instance, he found it a positive advantage that he had forgotten more of
the language than his pupils had ever learnt. His occasional quaint
errors did not always pass undetected, and their detection had probably
an educational stimulus for the form which outweighed the loss incurred
when his mistakes passed without notice. Nor did he feel greatly the
loss of intellectual stature. It was partly made good by the ingenuity
with which he explained how he had come to make the mistake. And if
there was loss in intellectual prestige, there was an increased sense of
intellectual comradeship. But this is a trifling and not wholly serious
digression.
Some masters stand for intellectual infallibility. These political
discussions disturbed them. They felt that their credentials as
schoolmasters were being examined and found wanting. They accused the
boys of priggery. It was a most false charge, for the boys were
enthusiasts, and enthusiasm is a form of self-forgetfulness as priggery
is a form of self-consciousness. Still priggery was the word. The
charge of "priggery" was added to the charge of "pacifism."
On these two lines the opposition developed and ultimately triumphed. It
was suggested that "the school would be empty in a couple of years," if
political education continued. Here, it would seem, our critics were
trading on their false idea of the parent, and believing what they wished
to believe. Take the statistics of entries, which is the only tangible
evidence on the subject, and the only conclusion you can draw is that
political education either had no effect at all, or that it slightly
increased the commercial well-being of the school. It was not on such
ground as this that political education was doomed. As we said at the
beginning of the chapter, the material of our experiments was the boys
and them alone. We had made a short cut. We had made no effort to
convert our colleague. We trusted to results for their conversion. But,
as the preceding narrative will have shown, the greater our success, the
greater became their irritation, when success was labelled "pacifism" and
"priggery." Without intending it, we had played "Pied Piper" upon some
of the best of the house masters' foster children. We had envisaged a
school as a single corporate society, boys and masters working together
with the maximum of frankness and equality for the common end, education.
We had not allowed for the fact that a school cannot become such a
corporate society, unless the staff has become such at the same time.
Like three-quarters of the reformers of history, we had, in our own
despite, become rebels. And so all was over. There is now no _Politics
Class_, no _School Observer_ in the school of their foundation, though
two other schools of fame have started papers on similar lines, with
handsome acknowledgments to our example. There are no political
societies in the Houses. Two or three of our pupils have left before
their time, and we, the authors, are no longer schoolmasters, only
"educationists,"--it is a change for the worse.
[1] Generally speaking, the liberalism of _The Manchester Guardian_ or of
President Wilson's speeches.
CHAPTER III
PROPAGANDA
"A point hardly touched on in the book is the difficulty of teaching
politics without the disadvantages of partisanship. It is worth
discussion."--_Manchester Guardian_.
"If 'politics'--even politics as an art culled from the classics, from
_pro-German_[1] economists and historians, from poets such as Shelley,
and from _German_[1] higher critics of the Bible--were taught to fifth
form boys with crude impressionable minds, the result would be
Bolshevism. We agree that under careful guidance much of ultimate
political value can be taught from history and literature. But it must
be done with infinite care, and opinions must be excluded from the
teaching. That is the difficulty."--_Contemporary Review_.
"Clever boys will learn their politics for themselves."--_Saturday
Review_.
"The public schools have for years past covered their quiet
infiltration of Conservative principles with a camouflage of strict
neutrality. Teachers though they are, the authors do not seem quite to
realise what a formidable protective device this banning of the modern
history which we call politics has been, and what obstacles have to be
overcome before the advice given in their little book is generally
taken."--_Westminster Gazette_.
Two great objections have to be met if Politics is to become the
central subject in our public school education. The desirability of
such a change may be urged from many points of view; and the practical
results obtained during the course of our recent experiment seemed to
us even more valuable than preliminary theorising had led us to expect.
Once make a boy think about the life of his own time and the great
principles whose fight for mastery he is witnessing; once make him
wonder about the actual machinery by which his world is moved; once set
him speculating about the meaning of the universe and of his own
existence; and you have created such a spirit of eager enthusiasm and
inquiry, that at last that development of the individual personality is
achieved which, as every great educationist since Plato has told us,
must be the aim of all who desire to be more than mere teachers.
Modern History, Politics, Sociology, Economics, Ethics, even
_Metaphysics_--we may class all these under the broad heading of
Politics, for one and all they deal with the life and destiny of the
individual as a member of human society and a part of the Universe.
There is no human being who, at least while he is young, does not feel
a keen interest in such things; the deepest waters are stirred and the
classroom becomes the meeting-place of minds engaged in an exciting
adventure instead of being, as is so often now the case, a prison cell
in which all a boy's spontaneity and joy of life are crushed out beyond
recall.
Yet the two objections remain, and to one of them we address ourselves
in this chapter.[2] When the possibility of political teaching is
considered, the first thought that leaps to the mind is: Can the
subject be taught without the introduction of propaganda? and is not
Politics just the one subject in which propaganda is above everything
undesirable? Now it may be pointed out that the present system of
public school education is itself a form of political propaganda none
the less effective for being concealed. A boy is sent to a public
school with a set of political notions imbibed from his parents and the
circle in which he moves, and during the whole period of his boyhood,
no genuine effort is made to develop his powers of independent thought
and so to enable him to revise his inherited opinions. A certain
stimulus no doubt is given to his mental activity by setting him
mathematical problems to solve and passages in the classical authors to
construe; but his thought on political and social questions remains a
thing apart, unstirred, atrophied. What else is this but political
propaganda? And when it is reinforced by a thousand subtle hints in
and out of the classroom, hints suggesting that, of course, there can
be no two opinions about so-and-so and his supporters, it becomes one
of the most potent instruments of mental darkness that has ever been
allowed to function in a rational community.
But the objection to propaganda is not to be met by a "Tu quoque." It
is one which raises the most fundamental issues of educational theory.
To develop, we are told, and not to mould, is the aim of education; and
every genuine educationist will eagerly agree. Yet you cannot develop
in a vacuum. You must impart some background for the young mind, give
it some material on which to work. How, then, can the compromise be
effected? How can we inculcate and yet at the same time aim above
every thing at the development of an individuality, which may and
indeed must, be so very different from our own? The answer is not
really hard to find. What we inculcate, the background we give, must
be considered by us as merely a stop-gap, a poor temporary support
which the child may fling away when he can support himself. And even
while we are giving the support, we must at every moment be developing
the power which will as soon as possible dispense with it.
If this _caveat_ is borne in mind and honestly observed, propaganda,
whether in political, philosophical, or religious teaching, becomes not
only defensible but actually desirable. Nothing can be more fatal than
to give the impression that it does not very much matter which of
several conflicting principles or policies a boy adopts; that there are
after all equally strong arguments on both sides, and that the adhesion
of the world to one philosophy of life and code of conduct rather than
another will make no very vital difference to anybody. Yet if the
teacher presents his subject in a perfectly balanced and passionless
manner such a result will inevitably follow. The boy will notice his
master's lack of enthusiasm, and consequently remain unenthusiastic
himself; and not only will that intellectual eagerness remain
undeveloped, which is as a spark to set his whole nature ablaze, but
also he will feel none of that moral passion for principles which is
the crying need of the world to-day. A master in another school, which
had adopted the idea of a Politics Class, heard of the excitement and
controversy which ours was occasioning, and remarked adversely on our
methods. "We teach Politics too," he said, "but we are careful that
the boys should never be able to discover on which side our own
sympathies lie. Consequently there is no excitement and no
controversy. Politics are thought of in just the same way as any other
school subject." We can well believe it. Our whole idea, of course,
is that they should not be so thought of; that they should be regarded
rather as a matter of most vital interest and importance both for the
boy himself and for the world as a whole. We would have a boy feel an
attachment to principles as romantic and absorbing as his affections
for his dearest friend, not coldly cancel one principle against the
other as if he were doing a sum in mathematics.
But it is time that we explained exactly what we mean when we say that
a master should not shrink from propaganda in political teaching. We
do not by any means intend that he should state only his own point of
view, and pass over the arguments that may be urged against it. That
would be the merest parody of education. Rather do we mean that he
should adopt a threefold method. He should put forward his own view
with all the enthusiasm that he feels for it (we have been called
"missionaries" by way of abuse, but find nothing but honour in the
word); simultaneously, he should impress on his pupils the fact that it
after all is only his view, and urge them not merely to accept but to
examine and criticise; and finally, he should explain with complete
honesty every point that has been, or possibly could be, raised against
it. We call this method "propaganda," because a fire is imparted to
the statement of one side which cannot, from the nature of the case, be
imparted to that of the other; but it is propaganda in which there is
no touch of dishonesty or obscurantism.
We have said that, while he is presenting his case, the master should
be urging his pupils to examine and criticise it. But he should do
more than this; if he is a Liberal, he should spend much of his time in
a direct propaganda of the great Liberal principles--freedom of thought
and discussion; the sanctity of the individual conscience; the
paramount importance of moral and intellectual independence. In this
way he will be creating a habit of mind which will _naturally_
criticise; and so by his propaganda of general liberalism he will
annihilate the vantage-point he would otherwise occupy in his
propaganda of particular principles and policies.
We speak of "liberal education," and surely the epithet is meaningless
unless it be taken to imply that conversion to those general principles
is the very bed-rock of education. But others think otherwise, and so
we would point out the broad distinction which must be drawn between
propaganda of the simple liberal and propaganda of the simple
reactionary principle--on the one hand freedom of thought, on the other
acceptance of ideas not one's own. Our liberal propaganda carries with
it the instrument of its own overthrow. If you can inspire a boy with
a desire to put all things to the test of his own free conscience, you
are empowering him to criticise everything you teach--even that very
liberty of opinion, a belief in which you have been so anxious to
create. But with reactionary propaganda it is quite otherwise. By it
a static habit of mind is produced--a habit of mind which, except by
way of a mercifully not uncommon revolt, is a pawn in the hands of its
present teacher, and that public opinion which in time to come will
take its teacher's place.
A word may be added on the means best calculated to produce the free
mind at which we are aiming. Use, of course, can and should be always
made of the fundamental arguments (all to be found in Mill) in favour
of liberty of opinion. But there is one case in which the employment
of a subsidiary method may give even more valuable results. Where a
boy holds tenaciously to an opinion which you think to be evil, argue
against it unceasingly; show him the errors of it; point out
passionately the beauty of its alternative. The stronger his
conviction, the better; indeed, deliberately choose his deepest-seated
prejudice--attack him in the very heart of what you regard as his
error. Then, when at last he sees that the opinion which he had
thought of as the only possible one is in reality wrong, and that
another which he had loathed is in reality right, a tremendous
intellectual conversion will have taken place; his own case will
constantly act as a warning to him whenever he is again tempted to
prejudice or narrowness of outlook.
[1] The italics are ours. Why were these two words inserted, we wonder.
[2] The other is dealt with in Chapter V.
CHAPTER IV
CONTROVERSY
"While a formidable strife between masters of different creeds might be
engendered, it is arguable that the finest political spirit might be
fostered by approaching the problems under the conditions of fairness and
courtesy on which the public schools pride themselves."[1]--_Manchester
Guardian_.
"Tolerance, to be more than a pale and negative virtue, needs to be based
on an understanding of these different points of view, which means,
again, bringing an educated mind to bear on them."--_Westminster Gazette_.
"Boys always will be boys" they say, and the saying can be interpreted in
many ways. "Masters always will be masters" is a more sobering
reflection. The reputation of schoolmasters for sweet reasonableness has
never stood, perhaps, particularly high. Even supposing that, with a
staff of angels, such a scheme of teaching as that sketched in the
preceding chapter were desirable, will not the actual result be something
very different? Will not "a formidable strife between masters of
different creeds be engendered," and will not the spectacle of that
strife, and a possible participation in it, be the very worst possible
training for the new generation?
The difficulty is one that has got to be faced, and the present writers,
at any rate, are not at all likely to overlook it. As was shown in
Chapter II., our experiments collapsed not because our colleagues
differed from us in political opinion, but because, differing from us in
political opinion, they also differed from us in educational theory. Had
the experiment collapsed simply because they differed from us in
political opinion, it would be no use pursuing the subject of political
education further; for a staff in which all the masters held the same
political views would be unlikely to exist, and in any case altogether
undesirable. We may take it for granted that the staff will consist of
men of diverse political opinions. Indeed we may go further and take it
for granted that in a school in which political education flourishes,
those diversities, though certainly less bitter, will be more clearly
marked than at present. In such a school the masters, for the most part,
will be keenly interested in politics, for the school must be a single
society of men and boys in real intellectual co-operation. What is good
for the boys will be good for the masters. Perverse metaphors comparing
masters and boys to hounds and hares will be seen as the symptom of a
radically false educational philosophy.
If political education becomes not merely an experiment but an integral
part of the timetable, the staff as a whole, not necessarily all the
masters, but all those concerned with what are at present ironically
called "the humanities," will be taking a part in it. But how can this
be worked? We are here faced with a problem such as none of the ordinary
school subjects has ever raised, at any rate in this acute form.
Everything depends upon the educational philosophy of the staff.
Everything depends upon the extent of their belief in freedom of opinion.
The case for freedom of opinion, like the case for self-government, has
suffered from the fact that we take the theory so completely for granted
that we do not notice how far we are removed from the practice of it.
Freedom is supposed to be an Englishman's speciality. "Britons never
shall be slaves," we say, and suppose that settles the matter. Very
likely Thomson, when he wrote his feeble verses (they have been redeemed
by an excellent tune), never paused to reflect that the sailors he was
glorifying were mostly victims of the press-gang. It is but a step from
a press-gang to a Press Bureau. Most Englishmen are not very anxious to
tolerate any opinions but their own, if the subject be one that they deem
of vital importance. Very few have the faith of the great apostles of
freedom, the conviction that right opinion can only triumph through fair
and open conflict with the wrong.
The cause of freedom, then, fares badly enough in the world outside, when
we are only concerned with its application to those who have reached
"years of discretion." Inside the school the difficulties are admittedly
greater, and freedom has hitherto had a poor chance. Yet without
freedom, though there may be instruction, there can hardly be education.
In so far then as the staff fall short in this vital matter of
toleration, they must themselves go to school and learn; and he is
probably a poor teacher who is not himself ever learning something more.
Here perhaps the head master might find one of his finest opportunities.
The conscientious modern head master often finds it hard to rise above
the mass of administrative work attached to his office. He resembles
Philip II. of Spain, of whom it was said that he was always trying to be
his own private secretary. Meanwhile his assistants go their own ways,
each narrowing into his own little intellectual groove. The result, at
any rate in the more remote and less distinguished schools--that is to
say, the vast majority--is a society far from idyllic. Even if politics
were to engender "a formidable strife," the discords would not be
breaking in upon any very beautiful harmonies. Two novels have recently
been written by schoolmasters about their profession, and even if "Mr.
Perrin and Mr. Traill" may be discounted as the ill-natured revenge of a
clever man who had mistaken his profession, "The Lanchester Tradition"
has, we believe, been generally hailed as a truthful record. Masters at
many schools have exclaimed, "How on earth does this Rugby man come to
know all about _us_?" Teaching is spiritual work or it is nothing, and
the head master ought to be, as the greatest head masters have been, a
true leader of his staff in spiritual things.
Our profession is the most insanely individualistic in the world.
Probably the teaching of every subject would be improved by the
establishment of a really organised co-operation between the various
masters teaching it, and "politics," with its strong human appeal would,
with a leader worthy of his position, be the best place to begin.
Masters would meet for a genuine educational purpose--and the last thing
ever discussed at the masters' meetings we have attended has been
educational principles--they would learn to see into each others' minds
and methods, enlarge their intellectual sympathies and understand their
differences. Thus a real corporate intellectual life of the staff might
begin. Often at present this does not exist, and its absence is fatal to
the school as a seriously intellectual institution.
And surely the need for the tolerant staff can hardly be exaggerated.
And here we are thinking not so much of the war and its controversies as
of the days that will follow. After the war a baser motive than even the
crudest jingo patriotism will claim a monopoly over the political thought
of public schoolboys for the defence not of "country," but of property.
The unorthodox will be denounced not as "pacifists," but as "socialists,"
and the enemy will be not the Kaiser, but perhaps the Prime Minister of a
Labour Government. But just as the only hope for the world after the war
seems to lie in a League of Nations, so the only hope for England lies in
the co-operation of all classes in a common search for industrial
justice. The public schools are "class preserves" of the rich, and their
opportunity for good, as for harm, will be almost boundless. "To turn
out the young of the capitalist class with all their capitalist
prejudices intact will be sheer dereliction of duty on the part of public
schoolmasters." So wrote a great teacher of the older generation. The
obvious way of destroying those prejudices as prejudices is by an
enthusiastic and capable exposition of various forms of socialism. This
can best be done by socialist masters. But, supposing the socialist
teaching is false, why should those who are not Socialists fear for the
result? It is a necessary part of the scheme that they on their side
should make a reasoned defence of a reformed capitalism. If this is done
"the young of the capitalist class" may be turned out Socialists or
anti-Socialists, but at least they will go out into the world men of some
economic understanding, with views based on reasoning, and by further
reasoning or experience liable to be changed, not men with inherited
prejudice intact.
If we assume in our staff a general inclination towards freedom of
opinion, everything becomes possible. A hundred questions of
organisation arise, essentially practical questions, and more easily
solved by concrete experiment than by literary methods. It may, however,
be worthy while to glance at a few of these.
Masters will always be human; and political education must be so
organised as to suggest in every way that the masters of divergent views
are co-operating in a general scheme of political education such as no
one of them alone could impart, not competing for the political
allegiance of the boys. A school is not a bye-election in permanent
session. Thus, though a controversial element is bound to come into
political education, we would mitigate this element by not allowing any
one form to go to more than one master for political work. The boy will
pass from form to form, and thus the conservatism of a summer term will
be tempered by the radicalism of the following winter. But these
political compartments will not be particularly air-tight in any case.
The house master will be a permanent influence, and when a keen-witted
boy has just got out of the form of a sympathetic master, it is unlikely
that they will altogether lose touch with one another.
At the top of the school, however, the controversial element should be
more frankly accepted. We believe in the permanent institution of a
voluntary _Politics Class_ in which the best boys will hear again the
best of the masters who have taught them on their way up the school.
Between such a _Politics Class_ and a really efficient school Debating
Society it might be hard to draw a precise line. One would play into the
hands of the other.
The "judicial" teacher, the man who from an Olympian elevation surveys
the political strivings of past and present alike, and analyses,
catalogues, and defines, creating all the while an impression of luminous
impartiality, may, of course, do much good work. The present writer
would be the last man to deny it when he remembers his own debt to a
teacher of that kind. None the less, we believe that it is the other
kind of teaching that is really needed in the schools of the well-to-do
to-day.[2] The political problems of our time are of intense and
terrible importance: on their solution this way or that depends the
happiness or the misery of uncounted millions; and it is so largely on
the way that the young of the privileged classes learn to look at them
that their solution depends. "Judicial" teaching creates the impression
that so long as you "know the case" for or against a policy, it does not
matter whether you believe it, and as for acting upon it, or making
sacrifices for it, there is no question of doing anything so "extreme."
Education _must_ create enthusiasm.
It must also make for many-sidedness, and so we arrive at the function of
the staff, the many-sided staff of enthusiasts. Let each one believe
himself, if he is young enough to do so, the monopolist of political
truth. Let each one differ from all his colleagues on every subject
under the sun, except two, the infinite possibilities of the boys he
teaches, and the infinite importance of freedom of opinion.
[1] Is there a little irony here?
[2] Whether any particular single school can afford to experiment in such
teaching is, of course, another matter altogether. Gallio is a less
troublesome colleague than Paul, and Paul will waste his breath if he
complains of the obvious fact that such things are so. But he has a
better ground of complaint when he sees himself silenced, while Sosthenes
is allowed to carry on as vigorously as he pleases.
CHAPTER V
CAPTURE BY THE STATE
"It is a great and perilous discovery that the State can [as in
Germany] impress the minds of masses of men by a carefully organised
system of political education, and we hope the authors will bear it in
mind."--_Westminster Gazette_.
"Germany has shown the world to what evil ends the dishonest use of
schools and schoolmasters must lead."--_Contemporary Review_.
We have discussed the pros and cons of propaganda--the propaganda, that
is to say, by each master of his particular point of view--and have
concluded that, if certain safeguards are adopted and honestly adhered
to, such propaganda is desirable. But there is one particular form of
propaganda which no one, if he has any reverence at all for the
individuality of his pupils and the freedom of the world, can regard as
anything but an abomination. And here we meet with the most serious
criticism which can be, and has been, levelled against the project of
political education. Suppose, it has been urged, that your scheme is
adopted by a number of the public schools; suppose that by a steady
process of attack, this new and very powerful piece of machinery is
captured by the State, as a means of imposing orthodoxy on the nation
and nipping in the bud a great part of our potential vigour and
independence; have you not then defeated most disastrously your own
object, and desiring above everything more liberty in thought and more
self-reliance in action, merely succeeded in setting up a system
similar to that which created the national character of modern Germany?
It is at first sight a most damaging criticism; and a criticism which
seems to gather weight as we look about us and observe the terrible
results which have occurred when the State has been allowed to
manipulate opinion for its own ends. No Englishman will need to have
the lesson of Germany brought home to him; he knows too well how
inculcation through the schools of the worst type of narrow patriotism,
rendered seemingly noble by a deliberate falsification of history, has
warped the generosity which all children, German or other, possess,
into a pitiful acquiescence in every form of intellectual and moral
vileness. But in England, too, the danger signals are not wanting. We
have observed the people falling more and more under the sway of one
man's ideas, carried by his Press into every town and village of the
countryside: we have noticed that complete independence does not appear
always to exist as between the Press and the men who are responsible
for the gravest acts of public policy; and some of us do not much like
what we have seen. Are we then to help forward the forces making for
our own Prussianisation? We desire to see Politics taught by masters
of every shade of political opinion, so that the boys may have all the
materials from which to form an independent judgment; but will not the
State see to it, as it grows more and more powerful, that only those
men are allowed to become, or to remain, schoolmasters, who will teach
a doctrine not abhorrent to the powers that be? Those who know the
public schools will not be at a loss to understand how such a
consummation could be achieved. Even now there is the pressure of
parents, members of the financial or political wing of the ruling
class--a pressure few head masters are big enough to resist. And in
the future--to take only one instance--may not Conscription remain, and
the Government exercise a direct control through the medium of the
O.T.C.?
And as one writes these words; as one sees the ghastly prospect of more
and more State control, more and more authoritarianism and docility,
less and less of the free co-operation which is the very life-blood of
society, one sees also that the only way in which we can prevent the
remedy we have proposed from becoming another instrument in the hands
of our enemies, is simply by adopting that remedy itself. We must
break in on the vicious circle while and how we can. For why is there
a danger of our instrument of education being turned into an instrument
of obscurantism? Only because there is a danger of our whole society
becoming rotten to the core; only because there is a danger of the
present cleavage between the two English nations becoming wider and
wider, until we have, on the one hand, a class ruling in the interests
of money and privilege, and, on the other, a slaving and possibly
pampered proletariate. And unless a start is made here and now with
the political education of Europe--unless boys and girls are made to
think politically while their generosity and idealism is still
untainted by motives of personal profit, and their powers of vital
thought not yet decayed by disuse--these and worse things will happen;
love, tolerance, and the independence which is the birthright of men,
will all be engulfed in a mad welter of personal, class, and national
selfishness. In such a society it really would not matter very much if
political education were captured by the State; and the only way, as it
seems to us, of preventing its advent is by getting up a system of
political education. For by political education we are creating the
only possible safeguard against a misuse of it--we are creating a
society which will not _desire_ to misuse it.
And so we would make, if we may, an appeal to all who are considering
what their future work shall be, and to those also who may be finding
their present work unprofitable--we would urge them to become
schoolmasters. We like sometimes to think of a little Greek army of
devoted warriors--a band of five hundred young men, who will go into
the public schools and there gradually help to set up a system of
political education. The word "Greek" is not out of place. For there
is something about the sunlit freshness of a cricket field--something
too, about the boys, belonging for the most part to a class which, with
all its faults, has a great tradition of public service behind it--that
brings before the mind a gathering of Greek humanity in the smiling
peace of a Greek country place. It is idle to pretend that a man of
ability who goes into the schoolmastering profession does not have to
make many sacrifices. His salary is usually miserable; his chances of
a head mastership must be at present in inverse ratio to the vigour
with which he acts on the principles he believes in, for these posts
are mostly reserved for the "safe," as the debates of the Head Masters'
Conference used to show, until, a few years ago, that body very wisely
decided to exclude reporters. But the compensations are enormous. He
will live all his life close to boys whom, when he once gets to know
them, he will find to have a freshness and high-heartedness which will
be a constant source of hope and inspiration; he will have the joy of
watching their minds develop, and of feeling that it is due in some
measure to him that they are growing into makers of happiness for
themselves and the world. And when in his work he is met by the
opposition of those who misinterpret or misunderstand, he will have an
almost fierce satisfaction in the faith that the future may be all on
his side, and that many years hence a little of him will live in men
who have realised not his, but their, individuality, and that
potentiality for goodness which, as well as he was able, he fostered
and brought to the light.
We have both been schoolmasters; at the moment we are neither of us
anything so useful; and we feel that we can say quite dogmatically that
there is no happiness equal to that of the profession that was ours.
And both of us fell into it accidently, as so many others have done.
Yet the appeal for schoolmasters should surely not be based entirely or
even mainly on the idyllic picture of the happy schoolmaster. John
Stuart Mill reduced hedonism to its fundamental paradox when he
declared that the way to find happiness was to turn your back on it.
If there is one lesson which political education rightly conducted
cannot fail to impress upon its best boys, it is the crying need of the
schools for their services. From Plato and Aristotle down to the
latest treatises on Reconstruction, be it the "Principles of
Reconstruction," as laid down by Mr. Bertrand Russell, or the "Elements
of Reconstruction," as reprinted from _The Times_ with an introduction
by Lord Milner, all alike come round to education as the keystone of
the arch of politics. The final appeal is always to the schoolmaster,
and it is perhaps less hopeful to appeal to the actual schoolmaster of
to-day than to the possible schoolmaster of to-morrow. As are our
schools, so will be our Parliaments and our Civil Service, and some at
any rate who have mapped out for themselves a career of political
usefulness and honour in Westminster, Whitehall, or abroad, might
bethink themselves first of Banquo.
"Lesser than Macbeth and greater:
Not so happy yet much happier;
Thou shalt get kings though thou be none."
CHAPTER VI
THE MAKING OF "POLITICIANS"
"The way the authors wish to realise their ideal would, I fear, merely
increase the output of politicians and political journalists, of whom
an adequate supply already exists."--Mr. E. B. Osborn, in _The Morning
Post_.
Sharp-wittedness playing on ignorance to the end of personal
advancement--so dominant a feature has this become of our political
life, that any protest against the misuse of a noble word, when men
speak contemptuously of politics, is no doubt quite untimely.
Untimely, because it is too early, not because it is too late. We
retain the word ourselves, and call the kind of education we advocate
political education; appropriately it seems to us, for we believe that
its wide adoption would remove the root cause which has made such a
stigma possible, and free the very name of politics from the
indignities it now justly suffers.
Nothing, indeed, could be wider of the mark than the notion that a
system of political education would increase the number of
self-seeking, power-hunting "politicians." Such men are the product,
not of political education, but of the lack of it. What is the present
situation? To the ordinary boy, politics, when it first obtrudes
itself on his attention, appears under one or other of two aspects. If
he is clever, or is imagined to be so by ambitious parents, or again,
if, though stupid, he happens to belong to a political family, the air
begins to be thick with talk of his "going into" politics. He is to
"go into" politics in the same way as men "go into" the Stock Exchange
or the law; by virtue either of birth or brains he is to enter one of
those little strongholds of his class, and earn his living there by
playing the appropriate game.
This is the guise under which politics appears to one type of boy. The
other type, hears in some quarter or other a babble about income-tax
and little navies and big loans; and either dismisses the whole thing
as "absolute rot," which can have no possible meaning for him, or
imbibes the ideas and prejudices of the people whose talk he is
listening to, without in the least understanding their implications.
From these two types is developed the great bulk of the population,
considered under its political aspect. On the one side, politicians,
whether clever or stupid; on the other, the electorate, ignorant and
apathetic, or prejudiced and inflammable, as the case may be. There
are, of course, other classes too. There is the man who has made money
in business, and late in the day conceives the idea of entering
Parliament--which he sometimes succeeds in doing even when he has been
unable to avoid making an election speech or two. There is the
idealist who takes up political work with the sole object of doing
useful service. There is the well-informed and open-minded student of
public affairs. There is the intellectualist. But the great majority
are as we have described them.
The introduction of a far-reaching system of political education would
have three results, each of which would reinforce the others in putting
an end to the present state of affairs. Make every one a politician,
and "politicians" will become rare. Politics will cease to be an
essentially specialised profession; men will no longer "go into" it as
into a thing apart. Some will administer, guide, and direct; others
will know and criticise. But every one will be politically active; and
instead of the stronghold of politics in a desert of ignorance, there
will be that interplay of political functions, distributed among the
whole body of the people, which is the real meaning of democracy.
And not only will politics cease to be a preserve, kept ready for
spoliation by the clever, the pushing, the rich, and the well-born, but
also the very desire in these men so to misuse their citizenship will
cease altogether to come to birth. For political education, properly
so called, awakens political idealism; it teaches principles, arouses
aspirations after public service. The "politician" is a man who finds
in political intrigue the fruitful source of his own advancement; one
who catches at every breeze to further his personal ends. But if
politics had formed the basis of his education; if, while his idealism
was still untainted, he had been led to consider fundamental
principles, and to examine public affairs in the light of them: then
the potential goodness of his political nature would have been so fully
realised, that no vain or mean thing would disfigure his maturity.
"Ah, but 'potential goodness' and 'while his idealism was still
untainted'; there's the rub," we hear the cynic saying. Such criticism
moves us not at all. We had to do during the course of our experiment
with a great number of boys of many different types; one can recall
hardly a case in which, when vital thought had really been awakened,
often after much sweat and agony, virtue was not found to be the
fundamental characteristic of the boy's intellectual nature. But the
teacher must not, of course, rest satisfied until he is certain that
the goal in very truth has been reached; until he is sure that his
pupil has thrown off the weight of carelessness, thoughtlessness, and
prejudice, and that his mind is really awake and is in actual contact
with ideas.
Finally, just as the leader and administrator will not desire to misuse
his powers, so the education of the rest of the nation will deprive him
of his opportunity. For it is only among a people politically
uneducated that corruption and intrigue on a grand scale can exist.
The unscrupulous creation and manipulation of public opinion; the
concealment of low and mean designs under an appearance of nobility and
disinterestedness; the putting forward of one argument in support of a
policy, while a thousand are kept back which weaken or invalidate it;
the appeal to prejudice and blind passion; the cunning use of
suggestion; worst of all that pitiable game which consists of turning
the people's noblest instincts--instincts of fellowship, solidarity,
romance--to the basest ends; marks of degradation such as these would
vanish gradually but surely as knowledge and power of criticism spread
to every section of the community. Such evil motives as still existed
would be seen through and exposed; events would be regarded, not as
isolated occurrences, but as a part of history, to be viewed in their
relation to the whole and to be judged in accordance with a definite
philosophy of life. So that if, here and there, a "politician"
survived or made his reappearance in the clearer atmosphere, he would
find his playthings gone; waiting instead for him would be men,
citizens, politicians--ready to sweep him aside and gaily choose a
better man.
CHAPTER VII
PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND FREAK SCHOOLS
The Radical--and by the Radical we mean any one who sees that life for
the majority at the present time is not as fine and happy as it should
be, and who is determined to leave no stone unturned to make it
so--commonly looks askance at the public schools. He thinks of them,
rightly, as the stronghold of those in possession, the class which, as
a whole, not only opposes such fundamental reforms as would result in a
fairer distribution of wealth, but also itself has failed to do what
might conceivably justify its favoured position, to keep alive, by
virtue of special opportunities such as would disappear in a society
based on equality, the finest ideas of which the race is capable.
Individual and national power, privilege, commercialism--it is on these
things that it has set its eyes in its leadership of the nation. And
so our fellow-radicals have more than once said to us, "If you are
really keen on education, why don't you start a school of your own?"
Now it is, no doubt, difficult for any one who has fallen under the
sway of a public school, and who has been so caught up by its
fascination as to feel for it a love more compelling than anything in
his life, to be certain that personal predilections do not dictate a
reply unjustified by intellectual considerations. Yet for all that we
give our answer without hesitation. For the multiplication of what may
be conveniently, if somewhat unkindly, classed together as "freak"
schools, breaks no fresh ground at all. Boys who have been brought up
in an "intellectualist" atmosphere, and those alone, are sent there;
and even if there were no schools to which they could be sent, home
influence would turn them out intellectualists still. The ranks of the
intellectualists, in fact, are recruited from three main sources.
First, there are the sons of intellectualists, sent either to a freak
school or to no school at all; secondly, sons of intellectualists of a
slightly different type, sent to a public school yet nevertheless
retaining in the new environment their own peculiar stamp; and,
thirdly, the clever sons of "ordinary" parents, sent to a public school
and becoming intellectualists by revolt against the philistinism of it
and of their homes. The community thus composed leads a life as
distinct and separate from that of the rest of the nation as was ever
lived by the "Intelligentzia" in Russia's darkest hour. It has hardly
a point of contact with the average Englishman; it does not understand
his revues and musical comedies, his novels and cinemas, his hunting
and race meetings; it speaks a different language, thinks altogether
different thoughts. And being itself not in the least understood, it
has acquired a certain hardness of mind, a certain contempt for
ordinary people and ordinary things, which has widened the gulf, and
led to mutual suspicion and sometimes even hatred. Inevitably its
mental health has been affected by such a situation. Feeling itself
different, it has consciously made itself as different as possible;
intellectual extravagances indulged in from mere bravado, these and
similar stigmata of balance lost and sanity impaired have made their
appearance in varying degrees at one time or another. Under a
different set of circumstances--those of the war, for instance, so far
as concerns a section of the group of which we are speaking--there has
been a pitiful relapse into mere boredom, cynicism, and inactivity;
remote from the passions of the crowd, and unable to give service to a
cause in which they disbelieve, some of our cleverest men have provided
an English parallel with the vodka-drinking, bridge-playing, and
unutterably tired community of highly-developed intellects which
Tchekoff describes so brilliantly.
Now, in saying all this we would not have it thought that we are
bringing a sweeping accusation against one section of the nation. For
the fault lies, not mainly with them, but with the lack of culture,
idealism, and genuine education which characterises England (and most
other countries) to-day. In a country in which regard for things of
the mind and spirit was the rule and not the exception, these men would
form the backbone of the nation; they would develop along healthy
lines, be marked by love and sympathy instead of contempt, use their
great powers to the full in the public service. What they are to be
blamed for is their failure to see their real duty; their failure to
understand that it is among the philistines, and not in their own
exclusive set, that their most important work lies. Some of them, of
course, do understand this, and spend their lives in an unselfish
attempt to spread light in the darkness. But even so they commonly
speak a language which is not understood; and inevitably they fail to
achieve any widespread result.
It is not, then, in the multiplication of schools designed to cater for
intellectualists that we see the best hope for the progress of the
nation. We see it rather in the creation of an army of missionaries
from among the ordinary men themselves; missionaries of thought about
the great problems of life and society, fashioned out of those who are
of the people and understand and sympathise with their emotions. When
once the average, revue-loving, thoughtless, "sporting" public school
boy has been taught to think vigorously about politics and sociology;
when once he has been so fired with enthusiasm for these things that he
will teach and talk to others of his kind: then, at last, slowly and
painfully no doubt, but none the less inevitably, will war, poverty,
and materialism vanish altogether from a world not meant for them.
That is why we have ventured to urge all those who both are idealists
and love the public schools--but those alone--to break in on them and
help to awaken the great sleeping instrument of salvation.
And they will find good material awaiting them. The English public
school boy shares with all the youth of all the nations an immense
store of latent idealism, which can be brought to a splendid fruition
if atrophy and decay are not allowed to overtake it. But he possesses
other things also, over and above this common heritage. The
intellectualist has often got beyond the big ideas, if such a paradox
may be allowed; they have been for so long the platitudes of his caste,
and he has grown so hopeless of their general acceptance, that he has
turned to a search after subtle refinements and intellectual novelties,
in the course of which much generous breadth of vision has been lost.
Again, many working-class reformers--can it be wondered?--not only
bring to their task a bitterness against the world which has so misused
them and their fellows, but also have inevitably been cut off from
those gentle manners of life which have been gradually evolved by the
more fortunate to express, however imperfectly, the feeling for grace
and beauty which it should be our aim, not to crush, but to extend to
all. But with the public school boy all is different. Once he has
begun to think in any real sense of the word, his intellectual life
develops as joyfully and naturally as does the physical life of the
beasts of the field. Freshly and spontaneously, and with no trace of
self-consciousness or affectation, he leaps to greet ideas and
principles, between which and his own true nature there is a glorious
bond of kinship. We have seen boy after boy, as he realises, for
instance, the meaning of Liberty, and gets his first glimpse of the
wide country which such a realisation opens up, experiencing an emotion
of happiness which we can only compare to the catch of breath with
which men see great scenes of beauty, or hear of lovely deeds of
generosity and heroism. Given their chance, public school boys (not
one or two, but great masses of average humanity) will rediscover for
themselves the simple things which Christ and Plato taught; and once
that is achieved a general advance all along the line toward the goal
of a worthy human society may begin.
CHAPTER VIII
MORALITY
"Generally speaking, the intellectualist phase [of a boy's career] is
remarkably brief. Just occasionally its morals are such as to cause
the swift expulsion of its leaders. More often they leave in the
natural course of things, or grow weary of their pose--which has,
indeed, not made them popular--and return after the holidays frankly
and unaffectedly Philistine. This transient fashion is not new. What
is new is the deliberate encouragement given to it by a certain type of
assistant master. We do not imply that the wise master will
suppress... That kind of intellectual measles will work itself out...
But to leave the phase alone is one thing; deliberately to foster and
give it official backing is quite another."--_The Church Times_.
When the morality of the public schools is being discussed, attention
is usually concentrated almost exclusively on that particular branch of
morality which is concerned with sex. Nor is this unnatural; for sex
plays so important a part in the life of a growing boy, and the
development of his character is so closely bound up with the
development of his physical nature, that the determining part may be
very easily confused with the whole. Yet there are many boys who are
sexually virtuous, but filled with the worst type of hardness and
intolerance; many, too, who are sexually vicious, yet full of love and
sympathy. To imagine that the problem of public school morality is
solved as soon as we have discovered the best method of making public
school boys continent, is to look at the matter from an altogether too
narrow angle; for the sins of the spirit, we have been told, are more
unpardonable than the sins of the flesh.
Nevertheless, when we have said this, as say it we must, the fact
remains that the sex question is one of overwhelming importance. For
if once self-indulgence is allowed to become firmly rooted in a boy's
character, in the majority of cases it will be ineradicable; and he
will either be the victim throughout a great part of his life of
temptations which he loathes, and which will be a constant source of
unhappiness to him, or he will end by acquiescing in a manner of life
which is degrading, it may be to himself alone, it may be both to
himself and others. It will be urged, of course, as it has been urged
against every school novel which has attempted to give a true picture
of the "manners" of a school house, that we are grotesquely
exaggerating the whole business; that there may be a problem in the
case of this boy or that, but that in general there is no problem at
all. This simply will not do. There is a problem, and a very grave
one; and we had better anticipate the possibility of being
misunderstood by stating very directly what it is. We believe that the
number of cases in which boys have undesirable relationships with one
another is not very large, but we believe also that there is a very
great deal of that purely personal self-indulgence, that purely
self-regarding licentiousness, which is the cause of so much
unhappiness in boyhood.
But the reader will already be asking, "What is all this to do with
political education?" The connection is a close one. For the
prevalence of this particular form of immorality may be ascribed to two
main causes. At some time during early adolescence the majority of
boys automatically become acquainted with the sensation of sex, and, as
part of a natural process, try to reproduce the pleasurable experience.
But why do so many of these repeat and repeat the process, until the
thing becomes a habit for which they can find no escape? Partly
because the verbal warning which is given to them by parents and
masters is made in a wrong form, and partly because there is not that
constant joy and romance in their daily lives in comparison with which
temptation, when it comes, will appear sordid and unworthy. In the
second place, there is an atmosphere in the houses of tolerance towards
these practices, accompanied by constant discussion, sometimes open,
sometimes secret, which encourages and not rarely actually suggests
them. This is certainly true of many houses in many schools. The
house prefects, it is true, usually try to suppress as much of the
unhealthiness as they can; but since, on the one hand, they are often
known to have been "as bad as any one" in their day, and on the other
they use the method of pretending that these are things which no decent
boy could possibly be guilty of, they meet at best with a very partial
success, derived only from the fear which they inspire.
The common method of dealing with the evil is a system of "talks" by
masters and heads of houses. The "talks" follow a fairly stereotyped
plan; they are either religious in nature, and contain references to
"the temple of the body," or medical, and convey warnings of the
physical consequences which will follow if excess is persisted in.
Sometimes the two types of address are dovetailed into a single whole.
Neither are wholly satisfactory. The medical variety sometimes
terrifies a sensitive boy, who will imagine that his whole life is
ruined and all his chance of future happiness wrecked. He will become
somewhat morose, and not unfrequently will finally turn, in his
despair, to the very thing against which he has been warned. On the
other hand, and with another type of boy, it often fails equally
disastrously, because, judged by the medical standards to which it
appeals, it is proved by experience to be unsound. In his anxiety to
create a strong impression the schoolmaster will sometimes make
statements that are simply untrue. He will tell the boy that these
practices will ruin his cricket or his football. No doubt it sometimes
will; but it is more than likely that the boy knows several highly
successful athletes who are, as the boy knows, though the master may
not, complete adepts in schoolboy vice. Then there is the old threat,
possibly obsolete to-day, though one hesitates to say that anything is
obsolete in the conservative world with which we deal--the old threat
that half the inmates of the asylums of England have been brought there
by this practice. That, again, is simply untrue, and if the boy
happens to know it, the effect of such an untruth upon him may be very
bad. Equally unsuccessful, in the majority of cases, is the religious
talk. The unspeculative, dogmatic type of school religion does not
make an appeal to the ordinary boy sufficiently strong to override what
he has found to be the most fascinating thing in his experience. It is
too much a conventional decency imposed upon him from without, too
little a force within him which he has been helped to develop, such as
is alone powerful enough to contend with a desire itself arising
spontaneously from within. And when the sermon is accompanied by
exhortations to pray against temptation, it is sometimes not only
useless, but (again in the case of the ordinary boy) positively
harmful. For to get into the habit of praying against temptation means
to get into the habit of thinking about it, to become self-conscious,
and to succumb. Not but that there are some quite young boys who feel
Christ's nearness to them as Friend and Helper so vividly that they can
gain real strength from praying to Him. But we are talking of the
average boy; and the average boy is not of this type.
Conversations between master and boy on the subject are, of course,
quite necessary and often very helpful. Very often a boy is mystified,
or it may be terrified, by what seems to him some peculiarity in his
nature, and it may do him all the good in the world to unburden his
soul to some one older and more experienced than himself. It is best,
too, that the House master should be the man to whom such a boy
naturally turns; though if the boy should prefer to turn elsewhere, the
fact should be to the House master food for thought rather than for
anger. Indeed, while in one way there is far too much talk on this
subject, in another there is far too little. Too much may easily be
made of conventional "talks" on conventional occasions. What is rather
wanted is a relationship between boy and master, created by frank
intercourse on other topics, such as will naturally bring the boy to
the master for help in these difficulties, with the sure knowledge that
the latter will not "lecture" him, but will speak as one who has been
through similar difficulties in his own boyhood, and is anxious only to
help and to explain.
Under the present system, when the verbal appeal fails, recourse is
often had to corporal punishment. We have no room here for a
discussion of the ethics of punishment; but a method more foolish could
scarcely be devised, if the aim is to enable the boy to overcome
temptation. And of all forms of punishment, corporal punishment is the
worst. The physical side of the boy's nature is asserting itself in
all its strength; and you attempt to combat it by making a physical
appeal which must from the nature of the case be far less powerful and
compelling. Moreover, any one with even a slight knowledge of sexual
psychology (and it is curious how few schoolmasters take the trouble to
acquire such knowledge) is aware that given a certain temperament on
the part whether of the giver or the receiver, perils lurk in this form
of punishment of the very type which it is designed to meet.
But the only sound way of combating the over-development of one side of
a boy's nature is to develop the other. Make a boy's whole life one of
joy and interest; let him live with a constant sense of the beauty of
grass and sky, of the exultation of vital work, of the happiness of
love and friendship. As the days go by, let him feel his latent powers
developing, and glory in the thought that they have been given him for
his own joy and that of humanity. Then when temptation comes to him,
and he remembers how its indulgence has left him slack and bored, it
will seem to him like a candle-flame in the sun of his happiness, a
wretched little mean and unworthy thing breaking in on and threatening
to ruin the peace and harmony of his life. And so he will not give it
a second thought, and soon all danger will be over. This may seem
preposterously difficult. It is: but it is also the only way. The
master cannot do it for the boy, but he can perhaps give the boys some
help towards doing it for themselves.
What we want is that every house should become a small community of
boys carrying on together absorbingly interesting and romantic
activities--a kind of club in which they may forgather and undertake in
common the intellectual and spiritual adventure which thus become a
part of their individual daily lives.
In this way there will be none of that boredom, that feeling of "having
nothing on earth to do or think about," the presence of which is the
chief cause impelling a boy to turn to the one thing which at least can
provide him at any moment with a temporary excitement. Rather will his
whole nature develop harmoniously, and sex, about which we have become
too self-conscious, take its proper place as the (normally) unconscious
inspirer of many of our most vital activities and happiest emotions.
And once morbidity has been put away, and with it the constant
preoccupation of boys and masters with this one topic, and all that
suspicion and suggestiveness which we know so well, then the graver
problem which has to do with the relationship of boy to boy will be
found to have been solved at the same time. No one who knows a public
school is likely to deny that sexual emotion is nearly always an
element in the intensest schoolboy friendships; but that makes them
neither the less lovely nor the less desirable. Indeed, the value of
such friendships at their finest cannot be overestimated. For when a
boy "falls in love," he learns for the first time something of the real
splendour of living: he comes into his birthright of beauty and
ecstacy, and understands how the greatest happiness is to be found in
doing everything for the service of another. There is something very
loathsome about the spying, and secretiveness, the jokes and unclean
hintings which, in the majority of schools, make such a friendship
appear a thing to be ashamed rather than proud of, and often in the end
actually render it shameful. Given a clean atmosphere, an absence of
suspicion on the part of masters and of morbidity on that of boys, and
we believe that very rarely would physical acts result from schoolboy
love.
But the reader will be asking, for the second time, "What is all this
to do with political education?" And again we answer--everything. For
we believe that the joy in life, and the intellectual interest of which
we have spoken can be awakened from where they lie dormant in a boy's
nature by political education. The subject is the boy's own destiny as
a member of human society and a part of the universe (for it will be
remembered that we include ethics and philosophy with history and
politics under the one broad heading); and there is hardly a boy who
does not find, at best in all these subjects, at worst in one of them,
the inspiration to vital work and the sense of living well, which goes
with it. The boys start reading, widely; a thousand topics occupy
their attention; poetry, plays, novels--all these are reached from the
one starting point. Then clubs and groups of various kinds are started
in their houses; and the sex problem has become as much as it ever can
become, a thing of the past.
Nor, we may add, are we merely theorising, and talking of hypothetical
goods which might conceivably follow from the adoption of our plan.
All that we have written of is within our own experience. Time after
time while we were making our experiments did we come across cases of
boys whose moral health had been saved by their new-found interest.
One had turned to physical excitement as the only possible relief from
the tedium of Latin grammar; after a year under the altered
circumstances he turned to it no longer. The parents of another (a boy
of about sixteen) had attempted to base his morality solely on
Christian dogma, which meant nothing to him; and the result was
disastrous. But a course of lectures on Plato's philosophy gave him
what religion had previously failed to give him--a belief in an ideal
and the distinction between right and wrong, and a determination to do
always what seemed to him the absolute best.[1] But by far the most
remarkable results were achieved in the house of which we have already
spoken in Chapter I. During his first fortnight of office, the new
head boy followed the old method; he examined all suspicious cases,
discovered some that he had not suspected, and dealt out the
traditional treatment. Then he followed the old method no longer; nor
did he ever return to it from that day till the day when he finally
left the school before his time. Instead, he set about interesting the
boys in politics. We have already described the course of his
experiments; how enthusiasm, kindled over newspapers, spread to plays,
to poetry, to pictures, and to music. And the result? The house was
transformed: it became such a place as every mother hopes the house
where her own son is may be. And yet during the whole time of which we
are speaking only one boy was beaten, and he for an act quite unrelated
to the seventh or indeed to any other of the Ten Commandments.
NOTE.--A fortnight after the writing of the present book was projected,
one of the writers was dispatched on military duty to India, and the
above chapter was sent home from "Somewhere" in "Somewhere"--I believe
Taranto. Close co-operation in authorship became impossible, and upon
his collaborator in England devolved the responsibility of sole
editorship. I leave the above chapter almost as it was written, for
there is about it, as it seems to me, an indomitable optimism which was
a characteristic of the writer's work and a cause of its success.
Still, in so far as it suggests that a complete solution has been found
for a problem I believe to be insoluble, I must in honesty add a few
words on my own account.
Our direct experience, or the more remarkable part of it, amounts to
this: that a certain head of a house achieved during the course of a
year, using the methods described, an uplifting of the whole tone of
his house that can only be described as marvellous. Other heads
elsewhere have no doubt achieved similar results by other means, though
we have never come across an example equally remarkable. The goal can
be reached, presumably, by the road of saintliness. It might be
reached, though it is doubtful, by the road of Puritanism and
"efficiency," the appeal to abstinence and "living hard." It cannot be
reached, that is certain, by merely disciplinary methods and the appeal
to fear, for the commonest form of schoolboy vice is such that, even
allowing for the casualness of boys, it will not be detected once in a
hundred cases.
Something, however, must be discounted from this result, by reason of
the fact that the experiments were new. These boys had an enthusiasm
bred of the fact that they rightly felt themselves to be pioneers.
They felt themselves to be making history, certainly for the first,
possibly for the last, time in their lives, and whether you admire them
or whether you laugh at them, making history they were, so far as their
own world was concerned. It seems doubtful whether the spiritual force
engendered would have lasted at full strength when the thing had become
normal, and it was no longer possible to start the hare of some new
"stunt" (as they called it, I am sorry to say) once every two or three
weeks. The experiment was cut short in its prime, and how it would
have developed when the first generation of enthusiasts had passed
away, one cannot say.
As for the other houses, something had been begun in two or three, but
nothing of much value had been achieved. The minorities hesitated
between a desire to imitate and a desire to be quite original, and the
majorities looked a trifle askance upon the whole affair. And the
masters came in here and put every sort of difficulty in the way, for
by this time the collapse was visibly approaching.
None the less, the lines on which this strange and temporary
achievement was based are the only lines along which the moral problem
can be grappled with. A perfectly "pure" public school is as
impossible as a perfectly satisfactory Marriage Law. A few
incorrigibly bad boys there will always be--incorrigible, that is, when
they have reached public school age. Hopelessly inanimate and feeble
boys there will be also, doomed to become the victims of the bad. But
the present moral average might be immensely raised, and the plain way
to raise it is to provide other adventures for the soul. A boy once
said to me, speaking of the matter in hand, "You see, it's the only
thing I've ever found to do here really 'on my own.'" It was, in fact,
his one adventure. No amount of class-room tasks, however well
devised, no amount of organised games, however healthy, no amount of
school religion, however sincere, could fill that gap. We must put the
boys on the lines to organise their own adventures, and the only
adventures that can compete with this absorbing adventure of misapplied
sexuality, must be adventures that really lead up to the highest and
best things of life. It was only when he found an empire to save that
Clive ceased to be a young ruffian. Nothing lower than "politics" will
suffice.
[1] Not that we believe that Plato is a greater teacher than Christ.
Our opinion is the opposite; but we are also of Shelley's opinion when
he said, "I would rather go to hell with Plato than to heaven with
Paley." Much that is called Christian is not of Christ. Also there
are no doubt minds so constituted that they will get more good in
certain circumstances from the lesser teacher.
CHAPTER IX
RELIGION
"It may be a slight shock to some people to hear that 'Divinity' should
grapple with Capitalism and Imperialism."--_Manchester Guardian_.
"Politics, in the large sense, is one of the main gateways to the
understanding of fellowship, and of that which lies beyond fellowship,
and leads boys to express something further-reaching than the thought of
the dear city of Cecrops."--Mr. Kenneth Richmond in _The New Age_.
This chapter will be as short as its subject-matter is important.
Indeed, the problem of religion as it presents itself in a public school
is so interesting and so difficult that one might well apologise for
relegating it to a late chapter in a brief book upon an apparently quite
alien subject. But we have set out to recount our experience of
political education; and in our experience we found that politics and
religion lay not so very far apart. Without any very direct suggestion
from us, several of our pupils to whom the Kingdom of Heaven had been
hitherto a somewhat uninteresting abstraction found that they could not
think out to their satisfaction the problems of the city of Cecrops until
they had formulated their ideas upon the city of God. The history of
_The School Observer_ illustrates this well enough. That journal showed
a distinct tendency to become a religious organ. At the time of its
suppression the embarrassed editor was confronted with three long
articles--the longest, it must be confessed, his own--all of them bearing
upon the nature of the Deity, and, lest we should be misunderstood, all
of them broadly Christian in character.
Now, a certain type of clerical head master has often tried to impress
upon his boys--he would try it on his staff also did he not know that it
would be waste of time and energy--that the two hours devoted to
"divinity" are the two most important school hours of the week. And he
is quite right: they are the most important, or, rather, but for
opportunities missed, they would be. For a liberal education without a
foundation in religion is not merely defective, it is impossible. If the
religious foundation offered by the teacher proves no foundation, proves
a mere meaningless excrescence upon the time-table, then a religion will
be sought and found elsewhere, even though it be, as is most likely, a
religion such as is generally classed as no-religion, mere worship, as
Ruskin called it, of Britannia Agoraia, Britannia of the Market Place,
the Goddess of Getting-on. That, it is to be feared, is very much what
we have at present, for the religion of the divinity lesson is usually
nothing at all, and the religion of the school chapel has hardly got
beyond the tribal stage, and does not suffice for the modern man in his
maturity, nor for most types of thoughtful schoolboy. There are some old
boys, perhaps many, who have a strong sentimental regard for "the old
chapel"; but it is as a venerable symbol of the corporate life of their
boyhood that they regard it, not as a place of divine worship. The
religion they carry away from the school chapel has very little
connection with the message of the gospel they heard there: it is a
religion not of Jesus Christ, but of Alma Mater. Their attitude to it is
not strictly religious at all, but romantic.
It is easy to write with a certain irony on this subject, but that is the
last thing we want to do, for the problem of the public schools is here,
as elsewhere, a profoundly difficult one, and many good men have devoted
the best of their life's energies to it, and have achieved here and there
a fine measure of success. But their success has been personal and
exceptional. The rule is what we have just described. Indeed, the
problem of the schools is but a single aspect of the problem of the
Church and the world at large. Two years ago the National Mission came,
proclaiming that the Church had been a failure, and so much has recently
been written on these lines by the leaders of the Churches themselves
that it is unnecessary for us to enlarge upon the well-worn theme.
Nominally the schools are "Church" schools. "Chapels" are as compulsory
as football, and all boys, with a very few marked and conscious
exceptions, are confirmed and expected to become communicants. But in
actual fact, many of them come from homes where connection with the
Church is purely nominal, even if it exists at all. Thus a dangerous
element of formalism and make-believe is introduced from the start. The
masters again;--fifty years ago they were parsons almost without
exception--stern, godly, whiskered individuals--singularly unlike, as it
would seem, to our colleagues or ourselves. The masters of to-day are
nearly all laymen, and laymen with as wide a variety of religious
opinions as the members of the Stock Exchange; but--and this is where
they differ from the members of the Stock Exchange--they will all be,
during term time, formal members of the Church of England. Once again,
formalism and make-believe. Yet what would you have? The schools are
the schools of the nation, not of a sect; and to-day the Church of
England is, within the nation, but a sect. And even supposing the
schools were, or could be, genuinely Church of England schools, another
problem would remain, for within the Church itself there is a wide
variety of opinions, and beliefs without which Christianity is impossible
to one will be mere blasphemy to another. It has been said with some
truth that our religious ideas have undergone as great a revolution in
the last hundred years as our knowledge of machinery, and that the
sermons of 1820 are as obsolete as its stage coaches. For the author of
this notion--and he is a clergyman--this may be true; but whereas none of
his congregation travel in stage coaches, it is very likely that the
theology of some of them is nearer to that of the sermons of 1820 than to
his own.
Now, it is obvious that our experience of political education does not
provide a way out of all these difficulties; but it seems to us to throw
a certain glimmering of light upon them. Several of our boys who, in
spite of schoolroom "divinity" and the school chapel, had more or less
outgrown the religious faith of their childhood, and found nothing
satisfactory to take its place, were led back towards religion by their
interest in politics. In fine, they had discovered the intellectual need
for a religion, and liberalism pointed the way to Christianity. As in
the Middle Ages, philosophy had been the "ancilla Fidei." The suggestion
is that the fault of our religious teaching in school and chapel has been
that it is not sufficiently philosophical. By a philosophical religion
it need hardly be said that we do not mean the obtrusion of a remote and
contentious theology, but a religion based upon a real understanding of
political principles and crying social needs.
"It may be a slight shock to some people to hear that 'divinity' should
grapple with capitalism and imperialism," says the _Manchester Guardian_
reviewer. It may: none the less we believe that it is with such problems
that Christianity has to grapple if there is ever to be a Christian
society upon earth. The last thing we wish to suggest is the off-hand
conclusion that capitalism and imperialism are in all their
manifestations anti-Christian. The world is not so simple a place. But
we cannot go on applying one set of principles to our private lives and
another set of principles to our politics and industry. Man is not so
illogical a creature as that. There is bound to be, finally, either a
levelling up or a levelling down towards a single uniform standard. No
proverb is more dangerous than "Charity begins at home." When it begins
in the place most congenial to its exercise, it is apt to end there.
Lord Melbourne is said to have complained, after hearing a sermon,
"Things are coming to a pretty pass, when religion claims to interfere
with a man's private life." We smile at Lord Melbourne's honest
indignation. Our turn come to be indignant when the sermon applies the
Christian "paradoxes" to industry, commerce, and international relations.
And it is along these lines that religious teaching can be made
absorbingly interesting. It all comes round to the old question, "Are we
going to apply Christianity to the problems of modern society or are we
not?" The case against doing so can be found every day in the press, so
here, at any rate, is an issue worth facing, with a presumably infallible
authority to support each side. The direction of most religious teaching
hitherto has been too purely personal; the exhortation is too obvious and
the appeal falls flat. Politics without religion lacks foundation; but
religion without politics lacks quite half its content. Christianity is
the leaven, but so also is politics the lump.
Along these lines, we believe, one might get in the middle and lower
parts of the school results analogous to those we have described in the
cases of some sixth form boys. The present writer used to teach Divinity
to a middle form on the Modern Side, and whenever a Gospel happened to be
scheduled, he found ample material to his hand. It is surprising how
little, for all the sermons they have heard, most boys of sixteen have
faced the ideas expressed in the most hackneyed texts. "It is easier for
a camel to go through the eye of a needle...." "Love your enemies."
"Take no thought for the morrow." A most mischievous half-truth has got
about that these sayings are not to be taken literally. Boys have told
me that a "rich man" means one who has grown rich by robbery. Well, what
is robbery? "La propriété, c'est le vol"? "Love your enemies" means, I
have been told, "Have no enemies: lead a peaceable life; but if..."
There was a case apparently not provided for. "Take no thought for the
morrow." On this I once got the delightfully honest comment, "Christ
must have said this to cheer the disciples when they were depressed.
Taken literally it would be absurd." With such candour on the pupils'
side, surely the teacher's task is not hopeless. Here at last we have
the atmosphere of honest controversy, and without controversy there is no
freedom of thought; without freedom of thought no conviction; without
conviction, no education and no religion.
CHAPTER X
CURRICULUM
It is always difficult to define the limits of a topic. This book is
concerned with one educational subject alone, politics in the very
broad sense we here attach to the term. Our contention is that that
subject is of paramount importance, and that it should provide the
basis and foundation of liberal education. With that idea in view, we
have given some account of our own experience; we have also considered
what seemed the most reasonable and weighty objections; we have also
shown how politics reacted, in our experience, upon morality and
religion. And then it might seem well to make an end. But an
education is, or should be, a single whole, and the entire omission of
certain aspects lends itself to misunderstanding. Our previous book
suggested to one reader, at least, that we regarded subjects other than
those we treated of, as possessing no educational value other than a
purely utilitarian one. That was not at all the impression we wished
to create, and it is with a view to correcting it that we attempt a
brief general survey of the non-political subjects and their place in a
curriculum which took politics as its centre. But we offer these
remarks with much diffidence. If this book and its predecessor have
any value, it is due to the fact that they are based on direct and
vivid teaching experience; and here for the most part the guidance of
experience deserts us.
One very natural criticism of our thesis is that politics, though it
may stimulate interest, cannot provide intellectual discipline. The
criticism is natural because, so long as the English subjects are
regarded as a subsidiary matter, they are and will be treated by
masters and boys in an easy going manner. Other and sterner subjects
are reckoned on to supply the disciplinary factor which the English
subjects lack. There is, in fact, a very prevalent idea that interest
and discipline vary inversely to one another; that discipline is to be
found in doing what is uninteresting; and that interest is to be found
in doing what is "slack." This is very bad psychology. For we aim at
training willing servants, fit to become masters, not slaves fit for
nothing but slavery. The only valuable discipline is self-discipline,
and self-discipline will only be reached when the boy has realised for
himself that the work is intrinsically worth doing, and when he has
realised that he will have become interested. Again, what is
interesting must be absorbing, and such work can never be "slack." The
mistake seems to arise from a confusion of ideas in connection with the
word "easy." It is no more "easy" to write an adequate essay on the
subject of National Guilds than it is to learn the principal parts of a
large number of irregular verbs: possibly it is much more difficult.
But under certain conditions which we have seen produced, a boy will
find it "easy" to gird himself up to the former task; indeed, he will
get so absorbed that he will find it difficult to leave off. Few
questions are less "easy" than those connected with a paper-money
currency, but one half-holiday afternoon we found a vigorous discussion
on this subject in progress between a group of cricketers whom rain had
driven to the pavilion. Ordinary history teaching, if only time is
allowed and certificate examinations do hot threaten, affords scope for
a great variety of exercises demanding careful thought and accurate
knowledge.
So much in answer to the suggestion that only through the non-political
subjects can real hard work be secured.
The non-political subjects fall into three groups--languages,
mathematics, and the natural sciences.
Probably no one regards the teaching of foreign languages in the public
schools as at all satisfactory at present, and the chief reason is that
far too much is attempted, with far too little consideration of what
will be achieved. Most boys are either simultaneously learning, or
have at one time simultaneously tried to learn, three foreign
languages, Latin, Greek, and French, or Latin, French, and German. The
burden is too heavy for them to bear. Only the minority have any real
gift for foreign languages, and for the rest the aim should be one
foreign language only. Little will be accomplished in any subject
unless there is a real ambition to learn, and there can be no such
ambition unless a definite goal is in sight. The goal here is real
knowledge in a foreign language, for half or quarter-knowledge of a
foreign language is a most unsatisfying accomplishment. The obvious
language is French. Even so, many will not learn to write it
correctly, and as for speaking it, that is an accomplishment so much
more conveniently acquired elsewhere that we offer no opinion as to how
far it is worth attempting at school.[1] But fluent reading of French
is a thing within the reach of practically any boy, and even the stupid
boy, if he concentrates upon this, to the exclusion of other and more
difficult linguistic tasks, will make such unmistakable progress that
his ambitions may well be roused. And the accomplishment is one that
can quickly be made useful. For instance, probably the best general
history of Europe is still Guizot's book, and its French is about the
easiest ever written. But we would go further. We remember once a boy
being birched for circulating a copy of _La Vie Parisienne_. Does not
this suggest that every house should take a French daily newspaper, and
also an illustrated weekly, other than that above mentioned?
But while advocating the single language for the ordinary boy, we are
pulled up short by the claims of Latin; and here we feel a difficulty.
A good deal of what is said in favour of Latin we regard as pure
superstition. It is not true that boys can only learn to write their
own language correctly by means of Latin prose. Nor is it true that
Latin prose supplies the ideal mental discipline. That is only true
for the minority of boys who reach the stage at which real Latin prose
is written. Most flounder about all their time in the stage of
artificial Latin prose, wherein is nothing more than the meticulous
application of a set of laboriously acquired grammatical rules--a
tolerable training in conscientious application, such as any subject
can supply, but nothing more. Yet it may well be true--on this point
we feel uncertain--that an elementary knowledge of Latin supplies such
a foundation for the understanding both of English and French, that it
is worth making some sacrifices to retain it. If that be so, we would
start every boy on Latin as his first foreign language. Those who
showed little ability would abandon it at about the time they began
French.
In the case of boys with some real linguistic ability, we are happy to
find ourselves thoroughly conservative. We believe firmly in the grand
old fortifying classical curriculum, provided it is understood that the
languages themselves are but means to an end, to the understanding of
the classical civilisation. In fine, the goal of classics should be
to-day, as it was for the Renaissance scholars, ultimately political.
The classical student who, at the time when his schooling ends, is
still doing no more than "settling Hoti's business" and "properly
basing Oun," is in the position of Browning's "Grammarian," with this
vital difference that he probably does not intend to employ his future
life in building any superstructure upon the foundations thus
laboriously laid.
In mathematics there is probably a deeper cleavage than in any other
subject between the real thing, as mathematicians understand it, and
the elementary knowledge within the reach of all. "The real thing" is
perhaps the most remote and specialised of all branches of learning.
For a few it is the best, indeed, the only natural, line of
development; but these are few and easily recognised, and even they
should not be allowed to specialise too narrowly--that is a point which
no one who is not a mathematician will dispute. At the other end of
the scale comes the third of the three R's; and about that again there
is no controversy, except as to the best methods of teaching it.[2]
Yet the schools do not recognise sufficiently clearly this line of
cleavage, and many boys who are presumed to have reached the end of the
elementary stage remain for some time battering in vain at the doors of
the inner temple. These should go back once over the elements again to
see if they know them, and then give it up for good. This will mean a
cheerful exodus from the upper-middle mathematical divisions. We
confess to sympathy with the conservative-radical head master who said,
"I shall not advocate the abolition of compulsory Greek in University
examinations until I can get people to agree to the abolition of
compulsory Algebra."
There is perhaps a middle term between elementary and "real"
mathematics; that is the mathematics that is the handmaid of physics,
and leads us on to the natural sciences.
To-day the claims of natural science are very insistent, and they come
from more than one quarter. From one quarter comes the claim that
science alone of the subjects in the time-table "means business," and
makes money, and that in these strenuous times other subjects that lead
to mere elegant accomplishments must crowd into a narrow space to make
room for the one subject that makes for sheer efficiency. The point is
often put with a certain crudity; but we may as well ignore that, and
recognise that the just claims of commercial training will have to be
met by the schools more fully than heretofore. Only let us recognise
commercial training for what it is, and not pretend that it can ever
offer a substitute for the liberal education which must continue
alongside of it. But the teacher of science will more often take quite
other ground, and will claim that his subject, over and above its
commercial usefulness, provides most of the ingredients of a Liberal
education in itself. He will point to the training it offers in habits
of conscientious accuracy, its exemplification of the laws of cause and
effect, its undeviating respect for truth, and the inspiration of its
endless progress, built up on the heroic researches of the great
pioneers.
This claim demands careful and sympathetic scrutiny. To begin with
criticism, we are quite unconvinced that science alone can train the
mind to logical methods, or imbue it with a respect for truth in
matters outside the scientific sphere. "Science," as the term is
commonly understood, deals with material things, and, as such, it gives
but little support to the mind when confronted with the problems of
humanity, whether personal or political. It is only too common for the
science specialist to respect cause and effect in a test-tube and
despise it in a newspaper. In science no passions are evoked in favour
of one solution or another. The search for truth may well be
disinterested, since it is, humanly speaking, uninterested. A liberal
education must train the mind to master prejudice and self-interest,
and this training cannot be given in a material where prejudice and
self-interest will not come into play.
As regards ordinary laboratory work, and lectures on laboratory detail,
of which science teaching at present, as many science masters agree,
far too exclusively consists, our view is similar to our view on
mathematics. It is often instructive, both for boy and master, to get
the boys to draw up an ideal time-table. The results, as a rule, are
disappointingly conventional, it is true. Few boys have ever
criticised their education, except in a purely destructive and cynical
spirit, and when confronted with the constructive task, produce
something not very far removed from the time-table they follow out
every week. But as regards science, it will often be found that the
form falls into two clearly marked divisions. One part cut it down to
a minimum, and would, if they had the courage of their convictions, cut
it out altogether; the other part give it half, or more than half, the
time-table. This probably marks the fact that for many boys a very
small amount of laboratory experience, just enough to give them a
notion of method, is all that they will benefit by. For the rest the
training has real value and interest; but these are a minority.
But there is another aspect of science, receiving as yet far too little
attention at school, which seems to us an essential part of a liberal
education. Indeed, when our own sixth form time-table was remodelled,
we put in a claim for a weekly lecture on General Principles of
Science, alongside with modern history and political science and
economics. The general principles of natural law, evolution and
heredity, the nature and cure of disease, the atomic theory of matter,
general principles of astronomy--these things seem to us second only in
importance to the great principles of politics themselves. Here is an
extraordinary record of patient achievement, some contact with which is
in itself an inspiration not merely intellectual, but moral. For it
seems to us hardly fanciful to suggest that such knowledge should
react--so subtle are the reactions of the boy-mind, as we have already
tried to show--most favourably on the political spirit. Dr. Gregory,
in his enthusiastic work in praise of his subject, "Discovery: or the
Spirit and Service of Science," writes: "In the discussion of political
questions, prejudice and party determine the view taken, and facts are
selected and exploited not so much with the object of arriving at the
truth as to confound the other side.... A politician may place party
above truth, and a diplomatist will conceal it on behalf of his
country, but it is the duty of the man of science to attain truth at
all costs. In direct opposition to the narrowness of thought which
views all subjects through the distorting mirage of party prejudice,
stands the absolute freedom of mind of the man of science who stands
with open arms to welcome truth...." And Dr. Gregory's moral would
seem to be: Eschew politics and devote yourself to science. As if the
world could exist without politics! As if the happy alternative to bad
politicians were no politicians! The right moral surely is that which
we have been drawing, with possibly wearisome repetition, throughout
this book; that all that is best in the scientific mind, all that is
best in the literary and artistic mind, all that is best in the
religious mind, must be brought to bear upon the problems of our
corporate life.
[1] We offer no opinion, also, on the "oral method" of teaching both
modern and classical tongues, as we have no experience at all to guide
us.
[2] Surely, too, the third of the three R's should include a knowledge
of book-keeping, balance sheets, etc. Here we join hands heartily with
the "utilitarian" school of educational reformers. We also wish that
every one learnt shorthand almost as soon as he had learnt longhand.
CHAPTER XI
THE YOUNG GENERATION AND THE OLD
"There, it is to be feared, they will find the parents most in their
way. The normal father may endure his son being taught poetry, but he
will object to the instilling of opinion other than his
own."--_Outlook_.
"Fancy some imp of fifteen or sixteen assailing the author of his
being, a court-worn barrister or 'rattled' stockbroker, at his evening
meal: 'Father, I think Lord Bryce's bill for the reform of the House of
Lords radically unsound,' or suddenly asking his mother, who, good,
easy woman, is revolving in her mind the merits of a coat and skirt she
has seen that afternoon at Debenham's: 'Mother, what is your opinion of
the Trading with the Enemy Bill?'"--_Saturday Review_.
"Youth is asking questions as never before--asking awkward, burning
questions, which put its seniors in a flutter. The seniors, under
question, discover that they have no body of doctrine, and have never
till now dreamt of the need of any. If they are wise, they will put
away the taboo on politics and sit down with their juniors to hammer
these things out, and perchance clear their own minds in the
process."--_Westminster Gazette_.
By way of epilogue--an appeal to the parents.
What is it that the parents want from the schools? The question is
all-important; for by the spiritual law of demand and supply, what they
want they will get. It has been said that every nation has the
government it deserves. So it is with the press, and so it is with the
schools: we get what we want, and what we want is what we deserve.
What do we want?
There are some parents who take the public schools quite seriously as
places of professional training, places where their sons will be taught
to earn their livings, and they are encouraged in this notion by the
fact that several professional bodies insist on successful candidature
in some pass examination in school subjects as a first step towards
entrance into the profession, and thereby rivet these examinations upon
the schools. The result is not altogether bad. The examinations make
for a deplorable ossification of the curriculum; but they also set a
certain low standard, and drive a certain type of boy and master to
work, and, though the type of work is not very exalted, it is better
than nothing at all. On the individual boy the effect will be various.
"Look here," says the house master, "there's London Matric. at the end
of next term. Hadn't you better give up all this foolery with politics
and do a little real work?" The advice was taken, and perhaps we are
not sufficiently impartial to offer a valuable opinion on the result.
However, the boy was no fool, and the first part of the advice need
never have been given. Except in the case of boys, far too numerous,
who are taking examinations that ought never to have been imposed on
them, "modern aiders" and the like who are mugging up "prepared books"
of Virgil and Euripides, work for a pass examination ought not to mean
the cessation of all other intellectual activity.
There is another much more old-fashioned type of parent who stands for
everything that is traditional, who is seriously disturbed if his boy
wanders far afield from the old classical curriculum, who regards all
new subjects as foolish fads. It is this parent, helped by an
old-fashioned type of house master, who retains in a mild torture of
boredom the boys who linger wasting their time in the lower reaches of
the classical side.
But anything is better than nothing, and the attitude of many more
parents is purely cynical. They just leave it to the schoolmaster.
"Cynical" might seem a hard word with which to repay this compliment of
trust; but it is not, for there is really no compliment and no trust.
The parent does not really believe in the school-master's judgment. He
believes in him so little that he thinks it simply does not matter what
happens in the class-room, provided the boy seems to enjoy himself--how
many parents really _know_ whether their boys do enjoy themselves at
school?--and provided the house master is not actively complaining.
Now, there is only one hope, and that is that the parents should come
to look at this matter of their son's education politically.
School-time is a training, and we are all familiar enough with the idea
of training now. Before the war, as since, schools had their O.T.C.'s.
But these O.T.C.'s were wretched perfunctory affairs, boring everybody,
because we hardly any of us seriously envisaged them as a training,
only as an incubus. Now, we all see them as training for a part that
has got to be played, and the whole spirit is different. But the
country will soon be calling upon our public school boys to play
another and perhaps even more difficult part, and where is the training
for that? When the war is won we shall plunge into another maelstrom;
and it will all be politics, politics, politics. The leaders of labour
have roughly charted their course; they mean to make a new world for
the masses whether we like it or not, and they mean in the main right.
But what part are the public school men going to play? It is an
extremely difficult position, and the difficulties crop up not only in
the details, of which only mature experience can give a knowledge, but
in the elementary principles regulating our outlook, our attitude. And
that is where the public schools could come in with irresistible effect
if only they would brace themselves to the task. "Your king and
country need you," said the old recruiting poster of 1914. "Good God!
have they never wanted me till now?" was the natural rejoinder. In any
case they will not cease to want the public school boy when the war is
over.
In this task the parents must co-operate. The normal father, we are
told, will object if his son brings home opinions other than his own.
But, in sober truth, if the son brings home the same opinions as the
fathers have always held, we are in a poor way. It was the fathers and
the grandfathers who brought the world to its present pass. It is the
sons who, starting with new principles from new beginnings, have got to
set it on a better road. The _Saturday Review_ and _The Westminster
Gazette_ offer us, in the quotations at the head of this chapter two
little vignettes of parentage. Which would you have?
The holidays occupy rather more than a quarter, and rather less than a
third of the year. If you asked what the boys do in the holidays, you
would ask a question that puzzles many boys themselves to answer. The
waste of school holidays is even more striking than the waste of school
terms. For education should not be, indeed, cannot be, limited to term
time. The proportion of boys who require "rest" in the holidays, even
for the first week or two, is small. A slack time, prolonged beyond a
week or so, bores most boys consumedly and ought to bore them all. We
are not thinking here of the favoured few who get their fill of fishing
and field sports. Such things have their limitations, perhaps, but
they offer at least a time of activity, resourcefulness, and keen
enjoyment. Most boys, however, live in quiet homes in towns, far from
the opportunity for such things, and how these pass the time is a
mystery even to themselves, as many have confessed to us. In plain
words, they _kill_ the time, and thereby acquire a most dangerous
accomplishment. Some few, it is true, make themselves endlessly useful
to their parents, and nothing could be better. But only a few homes
provide scope for an "odd-jobs man" of this type. For the bulk,
holidays are simply times of unemployment.
Now, when a schoolmaster ventures to offer advice about the holidays,
he might seem to be stepping presumptuously outside his own province;
but that plea for reticence is one we cannot admit. Term and holidays
alike are an education, and they interact upon one another so closely
that the schoolmaster not only may, but must, form his judgment upon
both. It is not for us to compile a detailed "Parent's Assistant."
Heaven forbid! Every home has its own problems and its own
opportunities, but surely there is no home in which the parents have
not a range of activities, professional, commercial, political, or
literary. So often, as it seems, from various motives, good and bad,
the boy remains more or less excluded from these long after he has
become capable of a certain partnership in his parents' interests. The
drawback of life at a public school is that it is highly artificial.
Call it as you please a barrack or a monastery, a boarding-school is
something cut off from the main streams of ordinary life. In the
holidays the boy renews contact with ordinary life, and that periodic
renewal is an essential part of his education. But surely his holidays
should bring him into contact with some more of life than its
superficial frivolities.
The kind of holidays we have in mind would make some call on the time
and energy of the parents; and perhaps it will be said that the time
and energy simply cannot be spared. Well, there was a time, fifteen
years or so before, when these same parents gave ungrudgingly any
amount of time and energy to the task of watching over the development
of the little child now rapidly approaching manhood. But the boy of
seventeen, though much more difficult to understand, is every bit as
fascinating as the child of two, and the parents' time and energy
devoted to the boy will be as certainly well spent.
And it will, we believe, bring a new happiness to many parents
themselves. As school-masters, our widest experience of parents--not
that we pretend it is very wide--is our experience of boys' talk about
their homes. Boys speak of their parents with deep affection and
respect, as a rule; but so very often they leave an impression that
they do not really know them. It is the commonest thing in the world
for fathers and sons, without any positive estrangement, to get
entirely out of touch with one another during the latter part of a
boy's school-time. The boy develops rapidly, and the greater part of
his development is quite concealed from the father. He returns home to
find his father "just the same," and apparently quite unable to divine
the new developments which the son is too proud to reveal uninvited.
Or maybe he does attempt to reveal them, and, bungling his task, finds
himself misunderstood, and lays the blame on the father. So often, as
it seems, the father might have helped matters by playing a rather more
active part, and going half, or even three-quarters, of the way to meet
his son's confidences. But there is a natural shyness of fathers
towards their sons at this stage, and shyness on one side begets
shyness and misunderstanding on the other. More than once a boy has
said to one of us, "What am I to do to get into touch with my father?
Last holidays we found we'd nothing sensible to talk to each other
about at all." It is difficult to advise, but the most obvious thing
to say is, presumably, to remind the boy that his father is but a human
being like himself; that possibly the boy is himself rather
unnecessarily enigmatic, and that instead of expecting the father to
make all the moves, the son might himself hold out a hand and help the
father to understand the changes that had taken place within him. That
is how the matter stands on the boy's side, and it may help some
fathers to know it.
One of our boys, we remember, wanted to discover something at first
hand of the real interests of employees in his father's firm. Whatever
he discovered, it made an excellent holiday interest for him. Among
other things, he attended some W.E.A. lectures, because he found that
the more intelligent men were interested by them. This was a boy of
rather unusual initiative; but we believe there are many boys who would
find a genuine interest in such matters, if the fathers gave them the
lead. Thus the wretched tradition that the holidays are for
unemployment would be gradually broken down, and games would take their
proper place--in holidays and term alike. Perhaps, too, the father on
looking back might find that there had been some "education" in it for
himself also.
The principle from which we started was that the public schools were
full of glorious possibilities, to-day largely unrealised. Is not the
same true of many homes?
APPENDIX
"It is quite evident that the boys have been encouraged to read
periodicals such as _The Nation_ and _The English Review_, and their
articles read like elaborate parodies. There is no particular harm in
allowing a clever boy to do monkey tricks of this type, but there is a
good deal of harm in printing it instead of gently deriding the
self-sufficiency of these youthful oracles."--_Church Times_.
"The most obvious fact about these articles is that the boys are
writing what they mean, and what they want to say, and that they are
able to do so because they feel sure of the community that forms their
audience."--Mr. Kenneth Richmond in _The New Age_.
[Of the three articles that follow, the first was printed in the first
issue of _The School Observer_; the second was written for the
suppressed sixth issue; the last was written on the day after the final
collapse of the whole experiment, and was, of course, never intended
for the paper at all.]
I
EDUCATION AND THE FUTURE
If workmen strike, if employers oppress, if prostitution flourishes, if
paper demagogues are allowed to rule, if poverty exists, if men fight,
whatever evil it is, the remedy lies at the root--education. All
reforms are mere palliatives until the fundamental reform of education
is perfected. There are no connecting links of argument. It is a
natural corollary, justified by any particular example that may be
traced.
It is another question whether education or lack of it is more
calculated to hasten the ultimate ideal of well-ordered anarchy, which,
consciously or unconsciously, we all entertain; but for the meanwhile
the affirmative assumption must be adopted. The sole remaining
question, then, is, By what means is education to rectify the immediate
evils?
While it is fairly generally established that the purpose of education
is efficient citizenship, it is clear that, owing to the diminished
proportion of the individual to the community, the purpose is being
gradually lost sight of. To borrow from scientific phraseology, the
tendency of the unit to remaining an "idiot" (in the Greek sense of the
word!) varies directly as the magnitude of the mass. And this is a
truism that public schools do not help to abolish. Although "school
patriotism" is invariably quoted as a denial of this, there prevails in
modern schools a definite inclination towards unsentimental cynicism in
the matter. This does not necessarily denote an unhealthy spirit, but
an increase of intellect that, whether with justification or not,
vaguely asks for something wider or more substantial.
Perhaps our grandfathers are right when they tell us that the modern
youth becomes a man sooner than his predecessors. Perhaps our
grandfathers are right when they tell us it is a pity.
However that may be, the two facts remain, that there is a rather
benighted tendency in the direction of intellectual activity, which the
public school spirit makes no effort to assist, and that the public
schools are inclined to produce gentlemen rather than citizens. Of
course the former make better advertisements. Yet they ought not to.
They would not in Germany. One day they will not here. The instance
shows that the Chestertonian "England of Romance" is really the one
that exists. The word "gentleman" is purely a romantic one, and a
gentleman a purely romantic though enviable figure. A state in the
future will not be able to thrive on gentlemen: it will need citizens.
It has cost me dear to write down this, for in my illogical mind (and
no one, by the way, save a politician, could have a logical one!) I
would choose without hesitation the gentleman. But that is probably
because, if I could, I would sell my quills for brushes.
The conclusion from all this, then, is that I was not holding Germany
up as a paragon just now, but leading up to an obvious improvement--a
gentleman-citizen. Whoever thinks he fulfils the conditions implicated
in the _rôle_ may know that not only is he an uncommon and a great man,
but also the embodiment of a high, practicable ideal; in the attainment
of which lies the solution of the whole educational question--how, of
the two component parts, to maintain the moral position of the first
and create one for the second.
Except for the few, favoured with a productive imagination, the public
school can as yet do nothing in this direction. It would be useless,
for instance, to crowd a dull, technical science of politics on an
already over-amended curriculum. One day it may not be useless. But
until a new species of governess can be bred, it is. Of the species in
question, I know of one example. There may be more, but not many,
though of course they are, I am aware, rapidly multiplying. The only
possible children's governess is the governess who attempts to teach
nothing except how to learn. The ideal education is undoubtedly an _à
la carte_ one, but as this is impossible both physically and because a
public school master has not the time to find out how to teach any
particular boy, the difficulty is solved if the boy has found out how
to learn from any particular master.
A man's life depends altogether on the first morsel of education he
receives, so that a governess's responsibility is colossal. And, of
course, a competent governess is a far holier thing than any parson's
wife. Not only must she teach not so much what he will have to learn
(which would scarcely encourage him in view of its magnitude) as how he
will have to learn (which could only make him eager to put the theory
to the test of practice--all the more so when he finds it succeeds),
but also she must attempt to discover and develop, even at this very
early stage, the seeds of mental independence and originality, which
alone can make him a competent citizen. Think how much easier
legislation would be in a state composed of such as these! It is the
only condition that really justifies democracy. There could be no
question of denying a people of this quality a voice in their own
government. Representation could no longer be a game for gamblers and
contortionists.
As things are, however, the progress of the public schools (and I have
been dealing exclusively with public-school classes) cannot make much
headway until they have clay to mould instead of granite to chisel. It
is not their fault if there is no way to teach the majority, and if the
few are thrown back on their own inadequate resources. The remedy lies
in some measure to ensure the right primary education. Seventy-five
per cent. of the public school boys have not had brilliant, discerning
governesses--or even mothers. There are not enough of either to go
round. So that the seventy-five per cent., possibly more, don't know
how to learn, and the mere twenty-five per cent. do. It is hard to
tackle effectively so intangible a problem as the correct primary
method of teaching, and the statesman, through whose instrumentality
this percentage is reversed, may give up politics for gold not had
brilliant, discerning governesses with a clear conscience. The first
step, therefore, is to reform the education of women. "Take care of
the women, the men will take care of themselves."
Nevertheless, be the solution what it may, the importance of the
subject cannot be over-estimated. One more illustration. The better
educated a man is, the more capable he is of soaring above the spirit
of national citizenship....
And the next stage is the spirit of world citizenship ... which, in the
course of many, many years, together, possibly, with the development of
Esperanto, means the brotherhood of men....
Then perpetual peace....
Then advancement to a primitive condition....
Then the much-dreamed-of well-ordered anarchy....
To continue till a second Milton is called upon to write as misty
history a second "Paradise Lost." ...
B.W.L.
II
"And He saw that it was good...."
Throughout the Universe which He had created He set a Great Road, and
on it was Man, at first invisible, but soon an infinite multitude. And
then unto Man, as to nothing else in His Universe, He gave the power to
move, and to walk on the Road, which He made to pass through all the
Great and Beautiful Worlds, coming at last to where He is, where all is
happy because all is good, and where nothing ends because there is the
End. And as He looked and beheld Man scattered out upon the great Road
as it wound about through the Universe, He thought to try His people,
and show by a certain proof whether they were possessed of the goodness
through which alone they could comprehend all things, and become able
to enter the realm of perfect goodness. And so He sent the semblance
of a great Fire into the Universe, which should seem utterly to destroy
all things which He had made, and to cut off the hope and possibility
of a future perception and life eternal.
* * * * *
As the fire rolls on, devouring all that it meets, humanity on the Road
sees its advance, and realises that in the course of a few hours the
Universe will be reduced to a smouldering cinder, that its hopes for a
future life, where the Road ends, is cut short and never to be
realised, and that apparently its former belief, albeit a vague and
ill-defined one, in a God who is all-merciful and kind, was altogether
an illusion, and merely a cause for false confidence and
self-righteousness. And how will it stand the test? Would the good or
the bad element in human nature assert itself in the face of absolute
annihilation? It is obvious that with such a position several of the
possible and no doubt ordinary motives for goodness, such as the idea
of doing good in order to reap benefits or escape punishment in a
future existence, and of doing good for the sake of having it
recognised among others, are excluded from the proposition. Even the
idea of doing good because it is in accordance with a "will of God" is
excluded, since the idea of destruction coming from the direction of
the End is unheard of to man, and is in direct contradiction to his
ideas of God. We are brought, therefore, down to the very foundation;
and the question we have to answer becomes--Is one of the elements of
human nature a feeling of necessity to pursue goodness for its own
sake, quite apart from any motives?
In the first place, when a supreme danger such as that already
described is rapidly approaching humanity, if such a thing could be,
what would be the immediate result? We know that with the ordinary
dangers, such as shipwreck and air-raid, the tendency among people
gathered together in large numbers is to panic, to herd together and
become temporarily deprived of normal reasoning powers. Would this be
the result of the sight of approaching universal destruction? Surely
not. Panic is the result, I believe, not of approaching danger simply,
but necessarily of a danger which threatens to affect some of a number
of people more than others, and which there is a possibility of
avoiding. It is entirely the element of uncertainty or suspense which
causes panic among numbers of people. Now this is an important point
in the argument. It seems very easy to defeat it on the grounds that
animals almost invariably herd together and panic in the face of
danger, and that such action cannot be due to the element of
uncertainty and suspense, since this necessitates the employment of
calculative and reasoning faculties which animals presumably do not
possess. The justification is to be found in a closer examination of
the part played by the uncertainty in producing the panic which is
common to men and animals. In the face of danger, as in everything
else, man's first instinct is to reason and calculate, and his
calculation results in finding the danger either avoidable and
uncertain, which is almost always the case, or unavoidable and
inevitable. If the danger is found avoidable, fear is the immediate
result. Fear as we know it has come into being with reason, but at the
same time, as will be seen later, it is only reason which can triumph
over and destroy fear. This fear then brings about the destruction of
reason, and the animal standard is reached, from which time the man
behaves in the same way as the animals, to whom the danger is merely
something out of the ordinary. He then comes under the domination of
the instinct to panic. It will thus be seen that all the mental
processes which came before the reversion to the animal standard in
men, are unknown to animals, and are the outcome of the purely human
faculty of reason. However, if reason can by any means retain its
foothold and its entirety, there will neither be fear nor the
consequent breakdown of reason and the domination of panic. Now this
is the position in the other case, the case in which reason finds the
danger unavoidable. In the case of a danger which is unavoidable there
will be no panic. It is this fact which accounts for the bravery of
numbers of people going to their death on board a sinking ship; but
such a position has never--or very seldom, indeed--avoided a relapse,
to a certain extent, to panic, inasmuch as there is a possibility of
avoiding the danger, and a possibility that some may survive, while
others are doomed to perish.
In the face of universal destruction, therefore, there will be no fear
and no panic. The fact that he is facing annihilation together with
the rest of humanity would have an extraordinary influence on each
individual, which, of course, would be just the same if he alone was
aware of the danger. I remember very well an evening at school when I
was told and convinced by several boys older than myself that (I even
remember the date) on June 18th the earth was going to be destroyed.
It had been proved, I was told, beyond the shadow of a doubt that on
that particular date some natural phenomenon would take place which
would inevitably entail the destruction of everything living on the
earth. This forms an interesting parallel to the present case; for at
the time I was only about eight years old, and I had very scanty ideas
about God and future life. To me the earth was the Universe. And,
furthermore, for about an hour most of us thoroughly believed that the
destruction of the earth, or the End of the World as we called it, was
at hand. Of course, it might be said that there is no real parallel,
since we were only children; but I believe that argument to be
absolutely fallacious. In the matter of fundamental tendencies and
characteristics of human nature one cannot assume such divisions.
Since the present state of good and evil in human nature has taken
thousands of years to become evolved, it seems unlikely that there can
be caused in the individual at present any fundamental change. I
therefore contend that as soon as personality and independence of
character becomes evident in the individual, both the good and the evil
in his nature will be present in the same way and in the same relation,
although not necessarily in the same proportions or degrees, as they
will be throughout the greater part of his life. This personality
becomes evident without any doubt at a very early age, certainly by the
age of eight; and in so far as the development of good and evil is
dependent upon the development of character, it seems likely that these
elements will be more clearly marked in the child of eight than in the
second infancy of the man of eighty.
To return to the personal incident. I recall very vividly now the
half-hour which followed my conviction of Universal destruction, and,
of course, I realise my actual feelings and their probable causes more
clearly now than I did at the time. The real force of my conviction
only lasted for about an hour, but in that time, and aided no doubt by
a rather strained imagination, I was, I feel convinced, in the same
position as any one of the individuals on that great Road as they see
the Fire approaching and devouring the entire Universe.
As the affair was being explained to me I remember I was terrified, but
very soon, and as soon as I realised the situation, which it must be
remembered the people on the Road would do almost instantaneously, this
feeling entirely left me. And the next feeling, a very forcible one,
was rather extraordinary, being as it was an overpowering feeling of
solitude. It was evening, and twenty or thirty of us were all in a
large classroom together, and for many minutes I felt more lonely than
I ever had before; I felt cut off from all those around me, and I see
that, as Peer Gynt would have said, "I had become myself." As has
already been said, I was not frightened, and what I did in those
minutes was to work. It was "prep-time," and it is an interesting
fact, as bearing out what has already been said both about the
establishment of individuality with consequent opportunities of
concentration, and also about the maintenance of reason, that I was
able to "do" in those minutes, and do better than usual, the work that
generally demanded more than the allotted hour.
Very soon, however, the feeling of solitude passed away and its place
was taken by a feeling of exactly the opposite nature, a feeling of
Unity, of extraordinary fellowship, followed by a wonderful sensation
of happiness. All this sounds rather grotesque, and the continued use
of these rather meaningless epithets is very ineffectual in expressing
what they are meant to convey. But it must be remembered that the
position is altogether an extraordinary one; and the feelings and
sensations resulting from such a position were extraordinary at the
time and still are extraordinary. The position seems quite unique; it
is difficult to imagine where and how else that same mental condition
could be produced: older people would not have credited the story even
for the short time that we did, and younger children would not have had
the independence of thought and imagination to picture and contemplate
the situation. At the time it was my good fortune to experience things
which I have never experienced before or since, and which I believe few
ever have experienced.
However, you ask for a return to the question of whether goodness is an
immanent reality in human nature; you ask perhaps, in view of the
incident described, "If it had been in your power to do something at
that time which was supremely pleasurable but at the same time contrary
to your moral ideas, would you have done it?" The answer, which is
mainly contained in or drawn from what has gone before is--No; and the
direct reason is, because, in the conditions produced by the position
described, nothing but what is good remains in the human nature. The
bed-rock has been reached, and it is good; the causes of evil and of
its continuance are removed.
Ever since man has led a corporate life it seems probable that one
outstanding evil has prevailed, in greater or less degrees according to
the rate and amount of progress made by any community. And this evil
is the lack and suppression of individuality. It seems impossible to
account for it, except by simply saying that it is, and has always been
a characteristic tendency of human nature; however, this is the most
encouraging answer possible, because it assumes that this evil can
eventually be eradicated. No one can surely deny that there is a lack
of individuality at present; its chief manifestations, of course, are
to be found in hatred, and in the spirit of competition and rivalry; it
produces a clash between individual opinions and actions which is so
apparent that it cannot be denied, and need not be enlarged upon. But,
apart from these more obvious manifestations, this failing has been
responsible for the production and continuance of _all_ that is evil in
man. Human nature is the foundation of our life, of that foundation
every individual is entitled to partake; and, furthermore, that
foundation is good. Every individual possesses a portion of this
foundation as his right; and what is the result, under these
circumstances, of lack of individuality? Surely the result is that
some parts of those individual sections, parts which are in some cases
similar to and in other cases different from parts of other individual
sections, are used as the foundation, while the remainder is left
unused. For, for the most part, men either employ those parts of their
portion of the foundation of goodness which are common to as many other
individual sections as possible, or, like Alceste, the parts which are
definitely opposed to most others. In any case where the foundation is
undeveloped and unused there grows, like a poisonous growth, sin, which
is made of and feeds upon the material of the good foundation, which
has been put to the wrong use. Sin and evil are not separate, in the
strict sense, from good. It seems inconceivable that good and evil
should have had different origins, and should have existed as rival
elements in human nature without the one having by this time triumphed
over the other.
In matters which affect every member of a body similarly, the combined
influence of all those members should be brought to bear; but where
every individual can "be himself" and interpret and use his portion of
the foundation of goodness in the complete way for which he was made
and intended, without affecting others, he should be allowed to
influence them or be influenced by them, without interference on the
part of any other individual. Since this has not been the case, we
have had the continuance of sin, and until it is the case, there always
will be sin.
Now, in the position described, complete individuality is established
and evil ceases to exist and becomes a thing of the past. With the
near prospect of universal destruction, there is immediately a
cessation of progress; and then, as in the incident described, there
comes complete individuality--every individual becomes himself. With a
common destruction inevitable and with the establishment of
individuality, co-operation in its true sense prevails, and with it the
surpassing and disappearance of evil; and then that wonderful happiness
... of all this I am convinced. I remember well the effect for an hour
or so among a few of us that evening. The contrast between the
atmosphere in the little room in which the most impressed of us
gathered during that time, which was free, I know, from everything but
good, and that of a day or two later when we made fun of the whole
affair, is so marked that my opinion on the matter is very definite.
Goodness alone there was at the beginning, and goodness alone there
will be at the end. No man is the cause of his own downfall, but he
alone as an individual can be the maintainer of his foothold.
Individuality in all that concerns the individual, alone can make and
keep life clean and sweet. If this individuality could, by such means
as education, be established, there would be constituted a _uniting_
force through humanity which could lead it, in the course of time, in
the way it should go.
* * * * *
And as He raised the semblance of the Fire from the Universe, He looked
upon Man and saw that he was good.
J. A. A. J.
III
THE DREAM
How much of our life seems and is a dream! How often we feel ourselves
carried off our feet and borne along on a tide of circumstances, tossed
backwards and forwards on a sea of conflicting events, now hurried
along by a current of opinion, now blinded with the spray of false
accusation, then motionless for a moment, trying to collect our
shattered thoughts before the next onslaught: but all the time out of
touch, consciously, with what is going on, utterly powerless, trying to
gather up the threads and recover consciousness. Any action that we
take, any word that we utter, is done without thought, without
knowledge, and without any result. And yet neither the cause nor the
effect are, strictly speaking, physical. The position is a mental
attitude, in this case mental helplessness, and this is dependent
solely upon the relation of the mind to exterior circumstances. When
we are fully conscious, we are ourselves each the centre of a little
world, which includes all that concerns us, and the appearance of this
depends entirely upon its particular meaning for us. We do not,
cannot, under these circumstances, see anything exactly as it is: its
appearance is influenced by its importance for us or by the degree of
approval, or disapproval which we ourselves attach to it. When our
life becomes a dream, our sphere is broken into and usurped by the
changing of values, shapes, and appearance of things within it. The
old familiar forms are transfigured and tampered with, our mistaken or
incomplete idea of persons is revealed, and a host of new and
inexplicable forms appear; with the result that we are literally
bewildered, and instead of regarding things with reference to their
influence upon us, we see things as they are in themselves--when we can
see at all--and feel what they actually do to us.
There can be no one who is not aware of this experience, in a greater
or a less degree. I speak of it as dreaming because that is the
analogy which best represents the circumstances, all of which have been
explained except one. In the same way as we are not conscious that
what we have been dreaming is a dream until we awake, so in these
periods of our actual life in which we are deprived of will and are
borne along by exterior circumstances and forces, we are not aware of
our helplessness, of our utter weakness, of the significance of what we
have seen and heard, until we have regained consciousness and woken
again to our freedom.
In this sense I have recently had a dream, and only since have I
realised that what I dreamt was fact; and then I was able to place it
all within my sphere--its ideas, its causes, and its effects have
become or are becoming the familiar forms and shapes, in the midst of
which I am, like a spider at the centre of its web, placed with my
hands on every thread. And this is that dream.
Full of life and happiness I set out with another, one who was a friend
and had lived with me for a time, sharing the same hopes, methods, and
ideals. Laughing as we went, with the smiling world around us and the
glad faces of those we knew, we made our way to the house of one who,
older than ourselves, had inspired and befriended in us those hopes and
ideals. And there we learnt from him that the authorities of the
community, the institution to which we belonged, had taken offence at
our methods and by suppressing them had destroyed our aims and all that
was most dear to us. As we sat there in silence, my mind cast back
over the time--it was little more than a year--since our outlook had
been entirely changed. I saw the school a throbbing piece of mechanism
with its bells, its clocks, and its governors, set down in a place of
great beauty. Blind to anything of beauty, it worked with a rhythm and
a precision which became a twentieth-century development (although it
had been set up in 1557, and was still running on very nearly its
original lines--which was the reason, so they say, of why it "worked"
so "well"). I saw it at work and was myself made part of its raw
material. Into its hungry mouth there went childhood at its best, full
of energy, with every kind of ability, talent and promise, enterprise
and ambition; through its teeth, its moulds, and its classrooms they
passed, until they issued from the end a single and singular type of
humanity, moulded, stamped, docketed and numbered--to take their place,
or rather, and this is the saddest note of all, their very numerous and
different places in the world.
While this was passing through my mind we got up and went out for a
walk.
And then there came the War, and the men and institutions of Europe
were put to a supreme test. And the immediate result was that men
began to think, began to look about them, and realising the palpable
evil of war, began to wonder whether they had not been mistaken in
their values and systems. Men soon came to realise that they did not
fulfil their entire duty if they followed as nearly as possible in the
footsteps of their great-grandfathers, but that as the world moved it
behoved them to move; that each man is made with the possibility of
every attitude and achievement as seeds within him; that circumstances
alone had caused him to live on some of these and not on others; that
intolerance was therefore a crime of the most unpardonable character;
that it was wrong and unprofitable to let one's self be borne along on
the surface of the world's tide--and that it was every man's duty to
use the world as he finds it for the development and fulfilment of all
that is best within him, and not to depend upon one thing and reject
another, favour one opinion, and oppose or even disregard another. And
those in the school who first realised this, determined not to submit
to the guiding and moulding of this mechanical institution, but to look
at the world around and outside them--its beauty, its methods, its
effects, its possibility, its wonder and its joy, and to develop for
themselves, under the guidance and suggestion of those whom they
trusted, their own powers, with their own principles to guide them and
their own aims to reach.
And in the carrying out of this plan and in the suggesting of it to
others and in witnessing the results in others and in the institution
to which they belonged, they, and later I and all those who followed
them, found great happiness--a happiness which I felt could come from
nowhere else, and certainly a happiness such as I had never before
experienced. A greater facility in all intellectual activity, and in
avoiding and fighting everything which one felt to be wrong, a greater
confidence, and determination through self-dependence in all things,
are some of the natural immediate fruits of a self-conceived basis of
thought and action which refused to accept blindly everything that was
handed down or dealt out.
The permanent results in the shape of statistics and concrete evidence
are proof and witness to the rightness of the undertaking. But now it
is all of the past--the reasons are irrelevant; suffice it that they
are iniquitous, and more than iniquitous, since they have murdered what
is right.
And now we had come, after passing through a great field of green corn
rustling in the light wind, to a fence, on which we sat. My
retrospective thoughts had now caught up to the present--but I was
still dreaming. All that I thought was unconscious, out of my control
and wonderful. Our attempt had been very beautiful, had been a work of
art, and in many ways had come to a beautiful and artistic end. Like a
great and wonderful bubble, wrought in many and enchanting colours, it
rose up complete at that moment from its birthplace and deathbed--and I
was happy again.
Then from the place down below us--that place in which we had striven
and apparently failed--I seemed to hear the voice of those who opposed
and hated us in our ways--those who were making the school into a
machine again--and were rejoicing in it, as they pumped in the oil:
"The Germans are verrmin--it is your work in life to _krrussch_ them!"
And at that very moment there came by three German prisoners--passed
us, jumped over the fence and were gone; but the likeness! it was more
than striking; never, never shall I forget it--and I was convinced.
The school, its very self, its soul, had struggled to its feet, and as
a little child was taking its first conscious steps--the most
beautiful, perhaps, that it was ever destined to take--when they, those
mechanicians, with their mailed fists smote it in the face, crushed it
heartlessly to the ground, with Louvain and Belgium not only before
their eyes but on their very lips.
"Oh, this world is a rotten place," he said, at my side.
"I wonder," I murmured in reply, and I still do....
J. A. A. J.
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