Now what has Caste to do with Education? Quite as much as Magic. You
shall see.
From the point of view of the student of education, the Caste system
appears as _a method of simplifying the hereditary transmission of
knowledge_--in short, as a primitive method of education. This will be
the more readily apparent if we glance for a moment at its prehistoric
origins.
Before man was man, he was an animal. He relied, like the rest of
the animals, on a psychically easy--and lazy--mode of adaptation to
reality. He had a specific set of “instinctive” reactions to familiar
stimuli. Doubt had not entered his soul. He had no conflicting impulses
to torment him. His bag of instinctive animal tricks sufficed.
But something happened to mar the easy perfection of his state. Some
change in environmental conditions, perhaps, made his set of definite
reactions inadequate. For the first time he didn’t know exactly how to
meet the situation. Conflicting impulses shook his mind; doubt entered
his soul--and Thought was born. Man thought because he _had_ to think.
But he hated to, because it was the hardest thing he had ever done! He
learned--unwillingly--more and more about how to live; he increased the
number and the complexity of his adaptations; but he sought always to
codify these adaptations into something resembling the bag of tricks
which he had had to leave behind. And when it came to passing on the
knowledge of these new adaptations to the younger generation--when it
came, in short, to education--he did the job in as easy a way as he
conscientiously could.
You have seen a cat teaching her kittens how to catch mice, or a pair
of birds teaching their young ones to fly. It is so simple! The thing
to be learned is easy--easy, because the cat is formed to catch mice
and the bird to fly. And, once mastered, these tricks and a few others
as simple constitute the sum of animal education. There is no more to
learn; these equip the animal to deal successfully with reality. How a
human parent must envy Tabby the simplicity and certainty of her task!
She has only to go on the theory that a cat is an animal which lives by
catching mice in order to fulfil her whole educational duty. And human
parents did desire (as indeed, consciously or unconsciously, they do
yet) such a simplification of their task. Primitive mankind wanted to
pass on to the new generation a simple bag of tricks. Of course, there
is no specific bag of tricks which suffices Man to live by; he is what
he is precisely by virtue of a capacity for unlimited adaptation to
environment. If the bag of monkey-tricks had sufficed, about all we
know now would be how to climb trees and pick cocoanuts. Our ancestors
learned because they must; and they passed on what they had learned to
their successors--but in a form dictated by their wish to keep human
behaviour as near as possible to the simple and easy character of
animal life. They put on the brakes.
_Because mankind already knew more than it thought one animal species
ought to have to know, it started to divide itself into sub-species._
The division into the male and female sub-species came first--and has
lasted longest. The young men were educated for war and the chase, and
the young women for domestic duties. And this is essentially a division
not of physical but rather of intellectual labour. It was a separation
of the burden of _knowing_ how to behave in life’s emergencies--a
separation which by its simplicity gave such satisfaction to the
primitive mind that he hated and feared any disturbance of it.
To this day a man is not so much ashamed of doing “woman’s work” as
of seeming to _know how_ to do it. It is no disgrace for a man to sew
on a button--provided he does it clumsily; and the laugh with which
men and women greet each other’s awkward intrusions into each other’s
“spheres of effort” is a reassurance to the effect that the real taboo
against _knowing how_ has not been violated. It is for this reason that
women had so much harder a time to fight their way into the “masculine”
professions to which a preliminary education was necessary than to
enter the factories, where only strength was supposed to be required;
and why (aside from the economic reasons) they have so much difficulty
in entering trades which must be _learned_ by apprenticeship. An
interesting echo of this primitive taboo is to be found in New York
City, where a telephone girl who wants to study the science which
underlies her labours would find in certain public schools that the
electricity classes are for _boys_ exclusively.
The other social and economic groups into which mankind divided
itself tended to perpetuate themselves as simulated sub-species by
the transmission of special knowledge along strict hereditary lines.
Crafts of every sort--whether metal-working or magic, architecture
or agriculture, seafaring or sheep-breeding, even poetry and
prostitution--came more and more to be inherited, until among some of
the great ancient peoples the caste system became the foundation of
society.
Ultimately the caste system _per se_ was shattered by the demand of
the process which we call civilization for a more variously adaptable
creature--for human beings. But it survives almost intact in certain
class educational institutions, such as the finishing schools for
girls--institutions devoted to teaching the particular bag of tricks
which will enable those who learn them to occupy successfully and
without further adaptation a hereditary (or quasi-hereditary) position
in society--to be a “finished” and perfect member of a definite and
unchanging human sub-species.
The most potent harm which the caste theory of education has effected,
however, is in its stultification of the true magic of the written
word. Let us see how that came about.