"The best men don't enter public life," I continued. "No man with a real
passion for ideas could tolerate the jobbery and gabble of the House of
Commons. Public life is for the most part concerned with small things.
The Cabinet settles mighty things like war and peace, but if you read
Hansard you'll find that ninety-nine per cent. of the members' speeches
deal with little things like Old Age Pensions or the working of the
Insurance Act. So in the School Board you have to deal with the
incidental things. The Scotch Education Department settles the broad
lines of education, and the local School Boards simply administer the
Education Act of 1908. What could I do on the Board anyway?... arrange
for the closing of the school at the tattie holidays, discuss your
application for a rise in screw, grant a certain amount of money for
prizes. I couldn't persuade the Board to convert your school into a
Neo-Montessorian Play-Garden; if I did persuade them the Department
would very likely step in and protest. Besides I haven't the type of
mind. I hate all the formalism of public meetings; I had enough of it at
the 'varsity to last me a life time; the debating societies spent most
of their time reading minutes and moving 'the previous question.' I'm
not a practical man, Macdonald. In art I like pure black and white work,
and I think in black and white; I see the broad effect without noting
the detail. Detail gives me a headache, and the public man must have
something like a passion for detail. Look at the Scotch Education
Department; it is full of splendid officials who will spend a week
nosing out an error of ten attendances in an unfortunate dominie's
registers. That's what should be; the official should have the mind of a
ready-reckoner ... rather, he must have, else he would drown himself
after a day in Whitehall."
Macdonald has a passion for detail, and I smiled to note a growing look
of aggression on his face.
"Somebody's got to do the detail work," he growled.
"Most of it could very well be left undone," I suggested. "You have to
calculate laboriously all the attendances for the year, how many have
left school, how many are of such and such an age, and so on. What for?
Simply to allow the busy officials of Whitehall to settle what grant
should be paid."
"How could they settle it otherwise?" he asked.
"In fifty ways. The obvious way is to find out how much the school
requires to run it each year. I would go the length of abolishing the
daily register. You don't call the roll in a cinema house or a kirk or a
political meeting. Why, man, in the big schools in the cities the
headmaster is a junior clerk; his whole time is spent in making up
statistical returns for the Department."
"You couldn't get on without the returns," said Macdonald.
"Possibly not at present," I said, "seeing that the system of grants
obtains, but if an Education Guild of Teachers controlled the education
of Scotland most of the returns could be scrapped. All the returns
needed for your school would be a list of expenditure on salaries,
books, etc.; main headquarters would control the broad policy and pay
the bills."
"And attendance wouldn't count?"
"Not if I had any say in the matter. To have an average attendance of 96
per cent. is about the lowest ideal a dominie can aim at. The teachers
and the school boards aim at a high average because of the higher grant;
the Department, with an eye on Blue Book statistics, encourages them to
aim at a high average because a high average means a country with the
minimum of illiteracy."
"Would you abolish compulsory attendance?"
"Certainly--so far as the children are concerned. Make their schools
playgrounds instead of prisons, and you'll have no truancy. But I would
have compulsion for parents. The State should have the power to say to
parents: 'You are only the guardians of these children, and we can't
allow you to keep them from education to do your work for you.'"
"You aren't consistent," he said, "here you are advocating Authority!"
"Macdonald," I said wearily, "you must have authority and law of a kind.
You must have a law that you take the left side of the road when you are
cycling for instance. You must give the community power to overpower a
man like that lunatic who assaulted Mary Ramsay the other day, and if
the community feels that it must protect children from assaults on their
bodies, surely to goodness it must step in and protect little children
when parents try to commit assaults on their souls. Compulsion should
step in to destroy compulsion."
"Now, what in all the earth do you mean by that?"
"A man compels his son to stay from school; the compulsion of the State
overrules the compulsion of the father. So with compulsion of men for
military purposes; in theory at least the Military Service Act compels
men to fight in order that they may overrule the compulsion that Germany
is trying to force on Europe. The Fatherland and the father are
interfering with human souls, but if a boy does not want to go to school
he is a free agent choosing as he wills, and interfering with the soul
of no one."
"What about his children coming after him?"
"A good point," I cried; "in other words you mean that no man liveth
unto himself and no man dieth unto himself, eh? Yes, that's quite true,
but we don't know what the boy is to turn out. Given a home of comfort
and food ... as every boy would have in a well-ordered community ... I
think that the lad who could resist the attraction of a play-garden
school with its charms of social intercourse with other children would
be either a lunatic or a genius. Besides we have given up the idea in
other departments. I expect that the community is of opinion that the
teachings of Christianity are good for a man to hand on to his children,
yet I don't think that the community would pass a law that every parent
must send his family to a Sunday School. The whole trend of society is
to recognise and provide for the conscientious objector, and society
should certainly recognise the conscientious objector to school-going."
"A boy doesn't know his own mind."
"Neither do I," I sighed. "I can't make up my mind about anything;
rather, I make up my mind to-day and change it to-morrow. And I don't
want it to be otherwise; when my opinions become definite and fixed I
shall be dead spiritually. The boy doesn't know his own mind! Well, how
the deuce can I claim to help him to make it up when I can't make up my
own? It's his mind, not mine. I don't mind telling him what I think of a
subject, but I wouldn't compel him to do a blamed thing."
"You have a queer idea of education," he said with a dry laugh.
"Macdonald," I said, with real modesty, "I don't know that I have any
idea of education. I am simply groping. I don't exactly know what I
want, but I have a pretty definite notion of what I don't want ... and
that is finality. I begin to think that what I want education to do is
to train men not to make up their minds about anything."
Macdonald rose to go.
"Matrimony does that, old chap," he said with a chuckle, "and you'll
soon discover that you won't get the chance of making up your mind
ever."