"_Did_ yer ever think in yer life?"
"No, sergeant," I said humbly.
"I blinkin' well thought so!" he said and moved away.
Then the worm turned. Who was he that he should bully a scholar and a
gentleman? I would lower him to the dust.
"Sergeant!"
He turned quickly.
"Wot d'ye want?" and he tried to freeze me with his look.
"It isn't my fault I can't think, sergeant; I was unfortunate enough to
spend five years at a university."
His mouth gaped, and his eyes stared, but only for a moment. Then he
rose to the occasion.
"I blinkin' well thought so!" he cried. "Squad! . . . . Tshun!"
* * * * *
It is Sunday night, and I have just been to town. At the Cross I stood
and listened to a revivalist bellowing from a soap-box. His message
was Salvation but I was more interested in the man than his message.
Consciously he is out to save sinners, but I suspect that unconsciously
he is out to draw attention to himself. I do not blame him. I do the
same thing when I publish a book; Lloyd George and George Robey and the
revivalist and I are all striving each in his little corner to draw
attention to ourselves.
The exhibition impulse is in every child. A child loves to run about
naked, but then society in the form of the mother steps in and says:
"You must not do that!" But we know that every wish lives on in the
depths of the mind, and the childish wish to exhibit the body appears
in later years as a desire to preach or sing or act or lecture.
This is the psychology of the testimonials for liver pills which appear
in every local paper. It is the psychology of much crime. Many a slum
youth glories in having been birched, simply because his gang looks on
him as a hero.
I hasten to state that exhibitionism alone does not make a Cabinet
Minister or a comedian. There are other motives from infancy, an
important one being the desire for power. I recall that as a boy I
delighted in following a drove of cattle and smiting the poor creatures
hard with a cudgel. Freud would say that in this way I was releasing
sex energy, but I think that the infantile sense of power was at the
root of my cruelty; here was I, a wee boy, controlling a big heavy
stot. It is love of power that makes little boys want to be
engine-drivers.
To the teacher this love of power is the most vital thing in a child's
make-up. Discipline thwarts the boy at every turn, and our adult
authority is fatally injuring the boy's character. Our task is to
provide the child with opportunity to wield his power. We suppress it
and the lad shows his power in destructive instead of constructive
activities. I find that I keep returning to this subject of
suppression, but it is the most important evil in education. It does
not matter how perfect a teacher makes his instruction in arithmetic;
if he has not come to see that suppression of a child is a tragedy, his
instruction is of no value. From an examination point of view, yes;
from a spiritual point of view, no.
* * * * *
Parents and teachers fail because they cannot see the world as the
child sees it. The child of three is a frank egoist. He cares for no
one but himself, and the world is his. Anger him and he would have you
drawn and quartered if he had the power. His instincts prompt him to
master his environment, and to begin with, when he is a few weeks old,
his environment and his own person are indistinguishable.
Homer Lane gives a delightful description of the child's first efforts
and how they are frustrated by ignorant adults.
"At a very early age the child becomes aware through various processes
that his own hand which he has seen moving across his line of vision is
a part of himself, and that he can move it himself. He has discovered
power. He then enters upon his career. The same motive that will
govern his behaviour for the rest of his life comes into operation, and
he wants to use this new-found power for some purpose that will
increase his enjoyment of life. Up to this time he has had only one
pleasure, and that was to do with the commissariat. Having discovered
power over his fist he therefore wants to put it in his mouth . . . a
difficult task requiring much practice and patient perseverance.
"As he goes on working he learns that his power increases with effort,
and now his motive is modified. At first it was purely materialistic;
he wanted to have his fist in his mouth. Now he wants to put it there.
His interest is in doing the thing rather than in having it.
"This is the spiritual element in his present desire, and now comes the
first mistake in education. The mother, analysing the behaviour of the
child, has noticed his complaint at the difficulty of the task as
fatigue sets in, and, misunderstanding the motive of the child she
helps him to put his fist in his mouth. But that is just what the
child did not want, and he protests violently against this interference
with his purpose in life.
"The mother again makes a false analysis of the situation, and
concludes that his protest is the result of his disappointment that
there is no nourishment in the fist. She then gives him food or
paregoric, whatever may be her method of dealing with the spiritual
unrest of her child, and thus drugs his creative faculties."
I have said that the infant is an egoist. If his egoism is allowed
full scope he will enter upon the next stage of life, the
self-assertive stage, with a huge capacity for being altruistic. This
stage comes on about the age of six or seven. But if the child has had
parents who believe in moulding character he will have had many severe
lectures about his selfishness. These lectures will not have cured his
selfishness; they will have driven it underground for the moment. The
selfishness of adults is one result of the moral lecture in childhood,
for no wish or emotion will remain buried for ever.
The age of self-assertion is the rowdy age, and naturally it is now
that father uses his authority. The child is still ego-centric, but in
a different way. At the age of three he was the king of the world; at
the age of seven he is the king of the other boys who play with him.
He is now reckoning with society, and he uses society as a background
against which he may play the hero. Thus be bleeds Jack's nose for no
reason in the world other than that he thus asserts himself. If he
plays horses with the boy next door he insists upon being the driver.
It is at this period that he should be free from authority. If
authority in the shape of father or teacher or policeman steps in to
suppress his self-assertion the boy becomes an enemy of all authority
and very often anti-social. The "rebel" in the Socialist camp is a
good specimen of the man whose self-assertive period was injured by
authority, and I suspect that the truculent drunk is letting off the
steam that he should have let off at the age of eight.
The third stage in the evolution of a child is the adolescent stage.
For the first time the boy becomes a unit in society. Hitherto he has
played for his own hand; his games have been games in which personal
prowess was the desired aim. Now he feels that he is one of a team.
Even before puberty the team-forming impulse is seen; Putter, for
instance, in _The Boy and his Gang_, gives ten to sixteen as the gang
age.
These divisions are purely arbitrary, and children differ much in
evolution. The teacher, however, should have a general knowledge of
these three phases. I have often seen a school prescribe cricket or
hockey for boys who are still in the self-assertive stage. The result
was that, having no team impulse, each boy had no further interest in
the game when the umpire shouted: "Out!"
I used to umpire for boys and girls of eight to eleven, and it was a
tiresome business. Quite often when a boy had been bowled with the
first ball, he would throw down the bat in disgust and refuse to give
the other side an innings. There was nothing wrong with the children;
what was wrong was that a team phase game was being forced on a
self-assertive phase group.
* * * * *
Duncan and two other dominies were in to-night and we got on to golf
yarns. I remarked that there were very few good ones, and they all
trotted out their favourites. I liked Duncan's best.
An oldish man was ploughing his way to the tenth hole at St. Andrews,
and, when he ultimately holed out in nineteen, he turned to his caddie.
"Caddie," he cried in disgust, "this is the worst game I ever played."
The caddie stared at him open-mouthed.
"So ye _have_ played afore, have ye?" he gasped in amazement.
Why are there no cricket or football stories, I wonder? Possibly
because they are team games; a team is a crowd, and I never heard of a
joke against a crowd. A crowd is an impersonal thing, and no one can
joke about an impersonal thing. I never heard of a joke about the moon
or a turnip. Yet are there not jokes against a nation, and a nation is
a crowd? Take the joke about the Scot who was brought up at Bow Street
for being drunk and disorderly. The magistrate, before passing
sentence, asked the accused if he had anything to say for himself.
"Weel, ma lord, it was like this. I travelled frae Glesga to London
yesterday, and I got into bad company in the train."
"Bad company?"
"Aye, ma lord. When I got into the train at Glesga Central I had twa
bottles o' whuskey in my bag, and . . . a' the other men in my
compartment was teetotal."
That looks like a joke against a long-suffering race, but is it so in
reality? Make the traveller an 'Oodersfield' man on his way to see the
Cup-tie Final at Chelsea, and it is not changed in essence. Only it
has become a convention that the Scot is a hard drinker. It is the
personal touch that makes the joke, and it is the individual that we
laugh at.
I presume that the typical joke about Scots' meanness appeals to
Englishmen because Englishmen are mean themselves. No joke appeals to
a man unless it releases some repressed wish of his own. No one
expects a devout Roman Catholic to see the point of a joke about
extreme unction. The professional comedian to be a success must know
what the crowd repressions are. Dickens is a great humorist because he
knew by intuition what the crowd would laugh at. And that brings me to
the subject of human types.
Broadly speaking there are two types of man. One is called an
extrovert (Latin, to turn outwards); he identifies himself with the
crowd, and he lives the life of the crowd. Lloyd George and Horatio
Bottomley are typical extroverts; they seem to know instinctively what
the crowd is thinking, and unconsciously they speak and act as the
crowd wants them to speak and act. Dickens was another, and that is
why he has so universal an appeal.
The other type, the introvert type, turns inward. They do not identify
themselves with the crowd. What the public wants does not concern
them; they give the crowd what they think it ought to want. This class
includes the thinkers, the men who are in advance of their time. An
introvert is never popular with the crowd because the crowd never
understands him. He can never get away from himself, and he sums up
events according to the personal effect they have on himself. Yet to
the unconscious of the introvert crowd opinion is of the greatest
importance.
In the realm of humour the extrovert is a success; what amuses him
amuses the crowds. But the introvert laughs alone, and in some cases
he decides that the crowd has no sense of humour, and he becomes a
cynic.
It is necessary that the teacher should be able to recognise the
different types. The extrovert is popular; he it is who leads the
gang. Doubts and fears do not trouble him; life is pleasant and he
laughs his way through it. But the introvert is the boy who stands
apart in a corner of the playground; he is timid and fears the rough
and tumble of team games. He feels inferior and he turns in upon
himself to find superiority. Thus he will day-dream of situations in
which he is a hero like David Copperfield when he stood at Dora's
garden gate and saw himself rescuing her from the burning house.
I think that the job of the teacher is to help each type to a position
midway between introversion and extroversion. The boy who lives in the
crowd might well be tempted to take more interest in his own
individuality, and the introvert might well be encouraged to project
his emotions outward.
* * * * *
To-night Mac told me a story about old Simpson the dominie over at
Pikerton. Last summer an English bishop was touring Scotland, and one
morning he drove up to Simpson's school in a big car, flung open the
door and walked in.
"Good morning, children," he cried.
The bairns sat gazing at him in awe. He turned to Simpson.
"My good sir," he protested, "when I enter a village school in England,
the children all rise and say: 'Good morning, sir'!"
"Possibly," said Simpson dryly, "but in Scotland children are not
accustomed to see strangers walk into a school. Scots visitors always
knock at the door and await the headmaster's invitation to enter."
* * * * *
Mac and I were talking about education to-night.
"I never heard you mention the teaching side of education," he
remarked. "Giving a child freedom isn't enough, you know. What about
History and Geography and so on?"
"I think they are jolly well taught in many schools, Mac," I said. "It
is the psychological side of education that is a thousand years behind
the times."
"Yes," said Mac doubtfully, "but suppose you have a school of your own,
I presume you'd teach the English yourself?"