I went to Richmond to-day, hired a skiff, and rowed up to Teddington. I
tied the painter to a tuft of grass on the bank and lazed in the
sunshine. For a time I watched the boats go by, and I smiled at the
windmill rowing of a boatload of young Italians. Then a gilded youth
went by feathering beautifully ... and I smiled again, for the Italians
seemed to be getting ever so much more fun out of their rowing than this
artist got.
By and by the passers-by wearied me, and I thought of my village up
north. The kirk would be in. Macdonald would probably be there, and the
bairns would be glancing at him sidelong, while I, the failure, lay in a
boat among strangers. I began to indulge in the luxury of self-pity;
feeling oneself a martyr is not altogether an unpleasant sensation.
I turned my face to the bank and thought of what had taken place. The
villagers accused me of wasting their children's time, but when I asked
them what they would have me make their children do they were unable to
answer clearly.
"Goad!" said Peter Steel the roadman, "a laddie needs to ken hoo to read
and write and add up a bit sum."
"Just so," I said. "When you go home to-night just try to help your Jim
with his algebra, will you? I'll give you five pounds if you can beat
him at arithmetic."
"Aw'm no sayin' that he doesna ken his work," he protested, "but Aw want
to ken what's the use o' a' this waste o' time pluckin' flowers and
drawin' hooses. You just let the bairns play themsells."
"That's what childhood is for," I explained, "for playing and playing
again. In most schools the children work until they tire, and then they
play. My system is the reverse; they play until they are tired of play
and then they work ... ask for work."
I know that the villagers will never understand what I was trying to do.
My neighbour, Lawson of Rinsley School, had a glimmering of my ideal.
"I see your point," he said, "but the fault of the system is this: you
are not preparing these children to meet the difficulties of life. In
your school they choose their pet subjects, but in a factory or an
office they've got to do work that they may hate. I say that your kids
will fail."
"You aren't teaching them character," he added.
Lawson's criticism has made me think hard. I grant that I am not an
efficient producer of wage-slaves. The first attribute of a slave is
submission; he must never question. Macdonald is the true wage-slave
producer. He sets up authority to destroy criticism, and the children
naturally accept their later slavery without question. Macdonald is the
ideal teacher for the reactionists and the profiteers.
Will my bairns shirk the difficulties of life? There is Dan MacInch. He
shirked algebra; he told me frankly that he didn't like it. I said
nothing, and I allowed him to read while the others were working
algebraical problems. In less than a week he came to me. "Please, sir,
give me some algebra for home," he said, and in three weeks he was as
good as any of them. I hold that freedom does not encourage the shirking
of difficulties. I found that my bairns loved them. Some of them
delighted in making them. Jim Jackson would invent the most formidable
sums and spend hours trying to solve them.
Of course there were aversions. Jim hated singing and grammar. Why
should I force him to take an interest in them? No one forces me to take
an interest in card-playing ... my pet aversion, or in horse-racing.
Freedom allows a child to develop its own personality. If Jim Jackson,
after being with me for two years, goes into an office and shirks all
unpleasant duties, I hold that Jim is naturally devoid of grit. I
allowed him to develop his own personality and if he fails in life his
personality is manifestly weak. If Macdonald can turn out a better
worker than I can ... and I deny that there is any evidence that he can
... I contend that he has done so at the expense of a boy's
individuality. He has forced something from without on the boy. That's
not education. The word derives from the Latin "to lead forth."
Macdonald would have made Jim Jackson a warped youth; he would have
Macdonaldised him. I took the other way. I said to myself: "This chap
has something bright in him. What is it?" I offered him freedom and he
showed me what he was--a good-natured clever laddie with a delightful
sense of the comic. I think that his line is humour; more than once have
I told him that he has the makings of a great comedian in him. I said
this to Lawson and he scoffed.
"Good Lord!" he cried, "what a mission to have in life!"
"Better an excellent Little Tich," I replied, "than an average
coal-heaver. To amuse humanity is a great mission, Lawson."
There was wee Doris Slater, the daughter of people who lived in a
caravan. That child moved like a goddess. I think that if Pavlova saw
Doris she would beg her mother to allow the child to become a dancer.
Macdonald would try to make Doris a typist, I fancy, and pride himself
on the fact that he had improved her social position. I would have Doris
a dancer, for she looks like being fit to become a very great artist.
Music moves her to unconscious ecstatic grace in movement.
I want education to guide a child into finding out what best it can do.
At present our schools provide for the average child ... and heaven
only knows how many geniuses have been destroyed by stupid coercion. I
want education to set out deliberately to catch genius in the bud. And
what discovers genius cannot be bad for the children who have no genius.
I want education to produce the best that is in a child. That is the
only way to improve the world. The naked truth is that we grown-ups have
failed to make the world better than the gigantic slum it is, and when
we pretend to know how a child should be brought up we are being merely
fatuous. We must hand on what we have learned to the children, but we
must do it without comment. We must not say: "This is right," because we
don't know what is right: we must not say: "This is wrong," because we
don't know what is wrong. The most we should do is to tell a child our
experience. When I caught my boys smoking I did not say: "This is
wrong"; I merely said: "Doctors say that cigarettes are bad for a boy's
health. They are the specialists in health; you and I don't know
anything about it."
When I tell a boy that a light should not be taken near to petrol I am
handing on bitter experience of my own, but when I say that he must know
the chief dates of history by Monday morning I am doing an absolutely
defenceless thing, for no one can prove by experience that a knowledge
of dates is a good thing. Macdonald would say: "Quite so, but could you
prove that it is a bad thing?" I would reply that I could prove it is a
senseless thing; moreover education should not aim at giving children
things that do not do them harm. I don't suppose that it would do me any
harm to learn up the proper names in the Bible beginning with Adam. The
point is would it do me any good?
I once had a discussion with Macdonald on Socialism. He accused me of
attempting to force humanity to be of a pattern.
"Socialism kills individualism," he said.
I smile to think that the Conservative Macdonald is trying to mould
children to a pattern, while I, a Socialist, insist on each child's
being allowed to develop its own separate individuality.
The Socialist would appear to be the keenest individualist in the world,
for it is from the heretical section of society that the demand for
freedom in education is coming.
* * *
To-day I visited Watterson, an old college friend of mine. He is now in
Harley Street, and is fast becoming famous as a specialist in nervous
disorders.
"Your nerves are all to pot," he said; "what have you been doing with
yourself?"