SHAMS OF THE SCHOOL
THE constructive scheme which I have in mind throughout this
criticism of our prejudices and institutions may, as I said, be summed
essentially in two words: industrial organisation and education. When
we have reformed our administrative machinery, which we miscall
"government," and abandoned our military and naval atrocities, and
simplified international life, our chosen public servants will find
that these two are their chief concerns. Probably the supreme concern
will--once we have constructed an orderly industrial machinery--be
education, in the sense which I would attach to the word. Every year a
million new citizens will join the community, and it will be the
State's first business to see that they are thoroughly prepared in
every respect to contribute to its weal and happiness, and that they
maintain throughout life sufficient intellectual alertness to control
their common concerns with wisdom and in a progressive spirit. It is
as a necessary preliminary to this that I have dealt critically and
reconstructively with the home and the parent.
That glorification of indolence which we call the principle of
_laissez-faire_ is so successful in this department of our public life
that what ought to be the State's chief concern is hardly ever
mentioned in our orgies of parliamentary debate. We peck at it
occasionally. We enact that babies must have orange-boxes, and that
children must not smoke cigarettes or approach within a certain number
of yards of a bar (so that we get bar-scenes outside the door); and
occasionally the representatives of rival sects get up a grand debate
on the Bible in the school. These things emphasise the general
neglect. _Laissez-faire_ meant originally, "Leave things as they
are"--it sounded better in French, but, like many ancient
sentiments, it was converted into a respectable philosophy: "The
State must leave as much as possible to the individual and the
amateur." Nineteenth-century Radicals fought heroically for this
Conservative principle.
Education, however, was so flagrantly neglected by the parent and the
Church that we had to compromise and take the child's mind out of
their care: leaving its body and character to the old hazards. At last
it dawns on us that a sound body and character are just as important
to the State as the capacity to read comic journals and stories: that
the entire being of the child needs expert training, and it is worth
the State's while to give it. This broad ideal of education is
increasingly accepted by pædagogists and social writers, and it is
already largely embodied in educational practice. It has provoked the
usual reaction, the usual determination that we will not allow our
ways to be reformed without a struggle. "Advanced" teachers fight
with Conservative teachers and politicians (particularly of the vestry
type), and the familiar old hymn-tunes are heard throughout the land.
We must not weaken parental responsibility: we must not lessen the
charm of the domestic circle: we must not encroach on the sphere of
the Church: we must beware of Socialism: we must resist the thin end
of the wedge wherever we see one.
Why did the State, in the first half of the nineteenth century,
undertake the task of educating the young? I do not mean that
State-education was a new thing in history when a few European
Governments adopted it little over a century ago. The Roman Empire had
had a very fair system of municipal and State-education, and it is one
of the gravest charges against the clergy that they suffered it to
decay, and allowed or compelled ninety per cent. of their followers to
remain in a state of gross ignorance for fourteen hundred years. At
the end of the eighteenth century, as the revolt against
ecclesiastical authority spread, the idea of State-education was
revived. In England the clergy warmly resisted the progress of the
idea, but the appalling ignorance of the people proved intolerable to
the increasing band of reformers. Quakers like Lancaster and Agnostics
like Robert Owen demanded and provided schools for the children of the
workers, and the Church of England was forced to meet this danger of
unsectarian education by founding a rival and orthodox association.
But for fifty years the schooling remained so primitive, and the
proportion of illiterates remained so enormous, that at last the
bishops were brushed aside and the Government was compelled to resume
the work of the old Roman municipalities and Senate.
The motives of the reformers and statesmen who secured this advance
were complex. Some of them were frankly anti-clerical and eager to
undermine superstition: some of them were business-men who pleaded
that a lettered worker was worth more to the State than an illiterate
worker. The predominant feeling was, as it had been among the Stoic
reformers at Rome, humanitarian. The gross ignorance of the mass of
the people was a disgrace to civilisation and a source of brutality
and crime: it was a human duty to educate. It was very widely
recognised that this sentiment imposed on us a duty of developing the
child's character as well as its mind, but here the Churches were
inflexible. Unblushingly asserting that they were the historic
educators of Europe, they refused to relinquish their last hold on the
school, and the State was compelled to accept the compromise of
religious instruction in the public schools, as well as the endowment
of sectarian schools. As to the third part of the ideal of education,
the cultivation of the body, we may admit that science itself was not
yet sufficiently advanced to demand it.
With the growth of democratic aspirations, the Conservative began to
see a danger in this plea that the community must see to the full
development of all its children, and new phrases were invented.
"Industrial efficiency" was the most plausible of these checks on
education. The manual workers were to have their intellects awakened
to the slight extent which was needed to make them better instruments
of production, but no further: lest they should become dissatisfied
with their position of inferiority and disturb our excellent
industrial order. Educators, however, refused to be restrained by this
kind of sociology. It was their business to develop the child's
intelligence, and they had a fine ambition to do it thoroughly. They
built infant-schools, which took the tender young away from their
mothers, to the great advantage of both. They found that large numbers
of children were too poorly fed or too defective in body to receive
real education, and they instituted drill and demanded cheap or free
meals and medical inspection. They abolished the half-timer, and
raised the age of compulsory attendance. They began to resent the idea
that lessons from the Bible were a training of character. These
developments have alarmed many. They begin to see that in the long-run
these things will impose on the State the duty of developing the
child's whole being--body, mind, and character--before the boy or
girl is allowed to enter the industrial world. We hesitate, as we do
in face of all large and fully developed ideals, and look round for
ways of escape.
The chief of these evasions is still the doctrine of what we call
"parental responsibility." Some day the idea that a parent is the
best-fitted person to train a child will be regarded as a medieval
superstition. The parent is as amateurish in training children as in
cooking or making frocks. The notion that "nature tells" a mother
what to do is part of the crude psychology of the Schoolmen. From the
moment of birth, and during the months before birth, the human mother
has no inspiration whatever. She goes by tradition, by the crude
advice of elders and neighbours, as every observer of the arrival of
the first baby knows. A cat acts by what we call "instinct,"--by
certain neuro-muscular reactions which natural selection has
perfected,--but a human being has intelligence instead of instinct,
and the first thing intelligence enjoins is that experts ought to be
trained for particular duties. The death-rate in every civilised
country has gone down enormously since we ceased to rely on motherly
instinct, or grandmotherly fables. A time may come, therefore, when
the State will receive a bearing woman in a properly appointed home,
and will care for the child from the moment of birth until, in its
later teens, it is equipped for work. I will suggest in the next
chapter that this ought by no means to be regarded as the completion
of education; here I am concerned only with the earlier part. Many are
convinced that this is the last and logical term of the development on
which we have entered.
I am avoiding remote ideals as much as possible, but it is important
to meet the prejudice which opposes reform along this line. Many
people tell us that, if this unnatural dethronement of the mother and
invasion of the home are to be the final terms of our present
development, they will resist it at every step: on the familiar
thin-end-of-the-wedge principle. Our beautiful "home life" must be
preserved at all costs. Our "parental instincts" shall not be
enfeebled.
Candidly, in what proportion of the real homes of England, as distinct
from the home of a fiction-writer, is the life "beautiful"? In
what proportion does it not rather present the spectacle of an
overburdened mother struggling heroically to live up to her
reputation for gentleness under the strain of ill or wayward children
and an irritating husband? In what proportion are the beautiful homes
of the novel written by spinsters or bachelors, or people who restrict
the number of their children, or men whose posthumous biographies do
not reveal a very sweet home life? I believe it was Carlyle who
originated that fond boast that no nation in the world has a word for
"home" like the English. It was certainly Dickens who gave us the
most touching pictures of domestic tenderness and happiness. How many
mothers of the working and lower middle class do not dread the
holidays, when the children threaten to be near them all day? How many
are capable of training children? How many do not regard a blow as the
supreme moral agency? How many would not welcome the easing of their
burden, and the training of their children by experts? And why in the
world should mothers be likely to have less affection for their
children because they have infinitely less trouble with them, and see
them only in their smiling hours?
The happiest phase of English home life is, surely, found in those
middle-class families which can send the children away to school for
four-fifths of the year and welcome them home periodically in the
holiday mood. In the vast majority of cases the teacher has to
struggle despairingly against the influence of the home and the
street; for it is to the street that the mother entrusts the child. A
lady (an educational expert) once observed to me that it was
remarkable to find the children in Gaelic districts of Scotland
speaking the purest English. On the contrary, it was wholly natural,
and it points an important pædagogical moral. The children learned
English _from their teachers only_; there was no corrupt English
dialect in the home or village to undo the teacher's lessons. In
other matters besides language the school-lessons are constantly
frustrated outside the school.
I pass frequently through the stream of children pouring out of a
large and handsome suburban school. It is not in a slum. There are
broad green fields on every side, and there are vast and beautiful
public spaces not far away. But the homes from which many of the
children come are squalid, and the street-scenes, especially in front
of the local inn, are often disgusting. On more than one occasion I
have heard the men openly talk of their practice of unnatural vice. I
have seen a girl of ten watch her intoxicated father misconduct
himself with a prostitute, while the mother--whose attention was
called to the fact by the child, in the mono-syllabic language of the
district--chatted with a neighbour. And I am not surprised to notice
that, when the children burst from school, which they hate, numbers of
them break into foul language, indecent behaviour, and fighting. Their
world, outside the school, is one mighty drag on the teacher's
efforts. When they leave school, with brains half-developed and only
the maxims of ancient Judæa (at which half their world scoffs) to
guide their conduct, when they enter workshops and laundries and join
the company of ring-eyed boys and girls in the first flush of
sex-development, they shed the feeble influence of the school-lessons
in a few months.
The district I have in mind is a very common type of district: a
healthy, open suburb on the fringe of London, tainted by one of those
older villages in which the poorest workers are apt to congregate. It
has an expensive Church-Institute and numerous chapels. You may see
the thing in almost any part of London, and most other towns. I have a
vivid recollection of passing from a Catholic elementary school and
strict home in Manchester to a large warehouse thirty-five years ago.
There is little change in that respect to-day. A very few years ago a
Manchester boy passed the same way; and a month or two later, his
father told me, he returned home chuckling over a "funny story"
about Christ. The school fails, not from lack of devotion in the
teachers, but because the child learns more in the street, and often
in the home; and these lessons are, somehow, more congenial.
Now if we are not satisfied with this comparative waste of effort and
sterility of result, we have to consider candidly the ambition of the
educationist. He wants to turn out a young citizen with an active
mind, a sound body, and a character prepared to resist the more
degrading influences of the world he will enter. He cannot carry out
this aim in the case of every child entrusted to him, but he can in
most cases, if the State will help him. He must have his children
properly nourished: neither underfed nor stuffed with coarse food by
ignorant mothers. He must have them seasonably clothed and shod: again
the mothers need instruction and pressure. He must have, not only
drill and more natural forms of exercise, but more control over the
children outside of school-hours; he is already beginning, with great
promise of good, to walk and play with them, to take them to museums,
and so on. He must have adequate medical assistance, and must have the
support of the law in counteracting dirty homes and careless parents.
He must keep the child still a few years longer at school, because a
child only begins to be really educable at thirteen or fourteen. He
must have the encouragement of knowing that the more promising boys
and girls will find the avenue open to higher schools, and that the
community will make some serious provision of mental stimulation for
the adolescent and the adult. And in order to carry out properly this
large and promising scheme of training he must have twice as many
colleagues as he has, so that each may be able to give individual
attention to pupils, and in order that too great demands be not made
on their hours of rest.
But where are we to find the very large sums of money which would be
required for carrying out such a scheme? I wish everybody in England
realised that we should have the funds to carry out this scheme in its
entirety, in its most advanced developments, if we abolished
militarism; that if we had done this before 1914, we should have had,
in the cost of the war, the funds to carry out such a scheme two or
three times over. We have to reflect also whether the increased
prosperity of England would not pay the cost. There are other
considerations which I give later, but I would add here at least a
word about experience in other lands. At New York and Chicago I
visited schools--elementary and secondary, but both free--with which
we have nothing to compare in this country: palatial structures with
superb equipment and devoted staffs. Yet when I asked ratepayers how
they contrived to spend so lavishly on education, the three or four
public men I asked were so little conscious of a burden that they were
unable to explain satisfactorily where the funds came from!
We are, however, making progress here and there,--Bradford, for
instance, has had the courage to be quite Socialistic in its care of
the young,--and the triple ideal of education is generally, if at
times reluctantly, recognised. As far as the education of the body is
concerned, in fact, we have no ground for quarrelling with our
teachers, whatever we may say of some of our educational authorities.
Medical inspection, drill, hygiene, play, excursions, feeding, etc.,
are discussed very conscientiously at every meeting of teachers, and
the reforms proposed are more or less admitted in all places, even
under the London County Council. The teachers themselves often go far
beyond their prescribed tasks in endeavouring to help the children. In
places they yield part of their necessary midday rest to attend to the
feeding of poor children: which I found admirably, and most cheerfully
and expeditiously, done in Chicago (where 1500 children at one school
were quietly and excellently fed in thirty minutes) by a committee of
ladies of the district. They give Saturdays and holidays for
conducting visits to museums or excursions, or for controlling sports.
What is chiefly needed is that the authorities should deal stringently
with backward sectarian schools, and provide a very much larger supply
of teachers and servants. The municipal authority of the richest city
in the world--the London County Council--is scandalously stingy and
reactionary in this respect.
When we turn to the question of educating the intelligence, it is not
possible to approve so cordially. No one, assuredly, can fail to
appreciate the zeal and efforts of educationists and teachers,
especially in the last few decades. Hardly any body of professional
men and women among us, certainly no body of public servants, has a
deeper and sounder ambition to conduct its work on the most effective
lines. A vast literature is published, frequent congresses are held,
and the science of psychology is assiduously cultivated. One must
appreciate also the fatal limitations of the teacher's activity; as
long as we withdraw children from him at the age of fourteen,
education is impossible. It may seem, therefore, ungracious or unwise
to criticise,--though I am not wholly a layman in regard to
education,--but there is at least one feature of our school life to
which I would draw serious critical attention.
The general public is apt to express this feature resentfully by
saying that the modern teacher "crams." Better informed critics
have put it that modern education is little more than a process of
"encephalisation," or the imprinting of certain facts on the
child's brain almost as mechanically as the indenting of marks on
the cylinder of a gramophone. Each of these criticisms implies an
injustice. Educationists and teachers have, of course, discussed this
very point for decades, and the present system is the formulation of
their deliberate judgment. They still differ amongst themselves as to
the proportion of memory-work and stimulation-work, but it is too late
in the day (if accurate at all) to tell teachers that to "educate"
means "to draw out" the child's "faculties," not to put in.
Every elementary teacher knows that he must train the child to think
as well as furnish it with positive information. The point one may
legitimately raise is whether the general educational practice
represents a fair adjustment of the two functions.
It is essential in such disputes to have clear principles. What is the
aim of education? The current phrase, "to make good citizens," is
far too vague. A good citizen is, in a large employer's mind, a man
who will work for two pounds a week and not annoy wealthier people by
demanding more: in a clergyman's mind, one who goes to church. The
point is serious and relevant, because there is a growing tendency
among the middle and upper class to insist on a return to the ideal of
the old Church of England school society: the children must not be
educated in such a way that they will aspire above the station to
which the Almighty has called them. As, however, the educationist will
probably reply at once that his duty is to do all in his power to
promote intelligence during such period as the State thinks advisable,
we need not discuss the larger ideal of developing the child's
powers on general humanitarian grounds.
But glance at the manuals which are used in our schools, and consider
whether we have as yet realised the true ideal of education. These
manuals, and the methods employed, are the outcome of a hundred years
of critical discussion, yet I venture to say that they need to be
entirely rewritten. I pass over the infant-schools and earlier
standards, where the first general ideas are carefully, and on the
whole judiciously, implanted. As soon, however, as the child enters
its teens, it is painfully overloaded with memory-work. I take, for
example, the manuals of geography and history which are used in
educating children of eleven in a first-class London secondary school.
They are crammed with information which will never be of the least use
to one man in ten thousand, and which we have no right whatever to
impose on the young brain with so much necessary work to do.
The manual of early English history which I have before me is a
characteristically modern production. Instead of the grim old
paragraphs, in alternate large and small type, on which the eye of the
child nearly always gazes with reluctance, there are vivid sketches of
life in successive ages. There is danger, perhaps, that the child will
pass to the opposite extreme, and take the manual as a story-book, a
work of ephemeral interest; at least careful guidance will be needed
to enable it to select the necessary material which is to be
memorised. But the chief defect still is the overloading of the pages
with matter of no serious usefulness. The doings of Ethelbert and
Ethelfrith and Redwald and Penda and Offa, whose very names bewilder
the young mind, are compressed into a few forbidding paragraphs,
instead of being relegated to the University. Later come Ethelwulf and
Osburh and Ethelbald and Ethelbert; and Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf
Trygvasson and Guhilda; and Rhodri and Llywelyn and Griffith ap Rees
and Own Gwynedd and Egfrith and Malcolm Canmore and John Balliol. How
many of us know, or need to know, a word about them, and their
families, and their battles? Then the French wars are told in detail,
and the pages bristle with dates and French names and genealogies; and
the Wars of the Roses introduce a new series of repellent and useless
names and dates. The child, in a word, is enormously overburdened with
stuff which we adults would refuse to commit to memory or even to
read. Yet this is a very modern manual, the last word in the
adaptation of history to the mind of a child of ten or eleven.
The manual of European geography, also, is one of the most modern and
enlightened that a teacher can choose, but it imposes a mass of
pedantic and useless knowledge. Isotherms and isobars and the freezing
of the Oder and Vistula and Danube; the navigability of the Ebro and
Guadalquiver, and the wheat-growing areas of France and Spain, and the
industries of Lille and Roubaix and Magdeburg and Lombardy and Smyrna;
in a word, fully one-third of the details in the little manual--the
details which it is most difficult to remember, which tax the
child's brain most, and will be forgotten soonest and with least
loss--ought not to have been inserted. The whole plan is academic and
pedantic: it is built on the supposition that the child must have a
summary of the kind of knowledge which a geographical expert would
have to master. And in later years the child must laboriously cover
the whole globe with the same unnecessary attention to useless
details.
In mathematics, at least, the same criticism will hold. Geometry is,
of course, no longer a mere task of memorisation; but the positive
knowledge of problems is not of the least use, save in a few
exceptional cases, and the training of the mind might be achieved by
lessons in natural science. In natural science itself one might
quarrel with much of the material given: not one in ten thousand, for
instance, will even remember in later years the elements of botany.
But at least we are, in giving scientific information, training the
young to inquire into the nature of positive reality and initiating
them to branches of knowledge in which they can easily advance in
later years, since we have so fine a popular literature of science,
and the advance will be a considerable gain in their whole mental
outlook. It is chiefly in regard to history and geography that time
and labour might be spared, and more leisure given for ensuring that
the child will assimilate the knowledge imparted. Mental energy should
not be wasted in mastering an immense collection of facts which,
experience shows, are certain to be forgotten within a few years.
I may also recall that, when we choose to carry out the elementary
reform of abolishing the plurality of tongues, a vast economy will be
made in the curriculum, and really useful knowledge will be imparted
more thoroughly and with finer attention to the texture of the
child's brain. The academic plea, that there is excellent training
in a thorough study of Latin and Greek, may be freely granted. But
there is just as excellent a training in the thorough study of such
branches of science as are fitted for the school, and the positive
information gained is permanently useful.
If we thus eliminate languages and simplify geography and history we
give the modern teacher a more hopeful opportunity. It is surely the
universal experience that we forget nine-tenths of the geographical
details we learn at school, and we find little inconvenience in
re-learning such as we need to master in later years. A judicious
outline-scheme, with more physiography and less of useless detail, and
a fuller account of one's national geography (not because it
describes the child's country, but because it is practical
information) would suffice. The remainder, or part of it, could be
imparted in technical training for commerce. History should be wholly
remodelled. It is ludicrous to-day to make the child grow pale and
worn over the past royal families and wars of England, and dismiss the
general history of the race in a page or two. A fine scheme of the
history, and even the prehistory and origin, of the human race, with
so much fuller information about the child's own country as is
useful for the understanding of its institutions and monuments, could
be imparted in less time, with more interest, and with far greater
profit. The patriotic sham deeply vitiates our scheme of instruction
and makes the training of the child scandalously one-sided and
exacting. Germany has recently shown us the pernicious results of this
political perversion of education.
Passing to the moral education of children, we at once find it cruelly
distorted and enfeebled by a religious sham of the least defensible
nature. Such moralists as Kant and Emerson hardly exaggerated the
human importance of moral law, however much they failed to understand
its human significance. Character is the pivot on which life turns.
The general diffusion of fine qualities of character would transform
the earth, quite apart from economic and political reform, and lead to
a speedier settlement of our industrial and international
difficulties. It is therefore of supreme importance to train the will
or character of the child from its earliest years. Yet there is no
other branch of our education, and hardly any other branch of our
life, in which we tolerate so crude and ludicrous a pretence of work.
The education authority of the Metropolis of England would, one
supposes, have the advantage of the finest expert advice in the world.
Enter one of the thousands of schools under its control, however, and
ask how the training of character is conducted. A teacher informs you
that at college he has learned only to impart "Biblical
knowledge." He will show you a scheme of lessons founded on the Old
and New Testament. The younger the child, the more preposterous the
lesson. In the lower standards the child must learn the story of the
Creation, the Fall, the Deluge, etc. It is still too young to imagine
that its teacher may, at the command of our education authorities, be
grossly deceiving it, or to perceive that these ancient Babylonian
legends contain no particular incentive to virtue. When it passes to
the higher standards it is initiated to some equally remarkable
stories about the early history of mankind and the early conduct of
the Deity. The teacher rarely believes these things, and it may be
assumed that men like Mr. Sidney Webb, who voted for this scheme of
education in the L.C.C., do not. If the child has intelligence enough
to raise the question of veracity, it must be snubbed or deceived. A
London teacher told me that on one occasion, when he had described
some of the remarkable proceedings of the Israelites in ancient
Palestine, a precocious youngster asked: "Please, sir, is it
true?" Our education authorities forbid him to reply to such a
question. Indeed, his headmaster was a Nonconformist (very zealous for
Bible lessons), and would find a way to punish any departure from the
appointed untruths.
The lessons from the New Testament are, it is true, devoid of this
atmosphere of Oriental animalism, ferocity, and superstition which
clings to the Old Testament lesson, but here again the teacher is
forced to violate the elementary principles of education. He must
gravely tell the story of the miraculous birth, the crucifixion, and
the resurrection of Christ. He probably knows that some of the most
learned divines in England and other countries regard these stories as
false, but he must deliberately and solemnly tell the young that
Christ was God and that these things are written in the "Word of
God." He must repeat parables which we know to have been borrowed
(and often spoiled in the borrowing) from the Jewish rabbis, yet teach
that this was the unique feature of Christ's preaching. He must use
all his ingenuity to wring a moral lesson out of the parables of the
workers in the vineyard, the royal banquet, and so on. He must keep up
this elaborate deception of the child until it leaves his care; and he
knows that, in nine cases out of ten in London or any large city, the
child is already hearing on all sides sneers at these ancient myths,
and laughing at the system which inculcates them in the name of all
that is most sacred.
The aim of our London authorities, and education authorities generally
in England, is not to train character, but to teach the contents of
the Bible. Why a civic authority should include the teaching of the
Bible no man knows; and whether a civic authority can be indifferent
to the truth or untruth of the lessons it imposes few seem to ask. Mr.
Sidney Webb, endorsing these lessons, said that the Bible was "great
literature"; and scores of our parochial legislators, who were not
generally known to admire great literature (but _were_ known to have
numbers of Nonconformist constituents), fervently repeated the phrase.
Does the child appreciate or hear a single word about the literary
qualities of the Bible? Does a literary lesson need to be a deliberate
lesson in untruth? Can we find no great literature which has not the
taint of untruth?
Dr. Clifford says that these lessons tend to make "good citizens."
It is not at first sight apparent why we should go to the literature
of an ancient, mendacious, polygamous, and bloodthirsty tribe for
lessons in citizenship in a modern civilisation. Let us suppose,
however, that the ingenious teacher has wrung a moral of truthfulness,
fraternity, respect for women, self-reliance, and universal justice
out of these peculiar records of ancient Judæa. Follow the child, in
imagination, into the later years of citizenship. He hardly leaves the
school before he learns that the whole Biblical scheme is very
generally ridiculed, and is rejected even by large numbers of learned
theologians. Before many years, at least, he is fairly sure to learn
this. The prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount he, of course,
never had the slightest intention of observing. The teacher, even
while he reads the quixotic counsels, knows, and possibly notes with
approval, that the boy's code is: "If any smite thee on the one
cheek, smite him forthwith on both." But the boy now learns that
from the Creation to the Resurrection the whole story is seriously
disputed and is rejected by the majority of well-educated people. He
looks back on his "Bible lessons" and his teacher with derision,
and he discards the whole authority of his code of conduct. Surely an
admirable foundation for virtue and citizenship!
Into the larger question of the relation of religious education and
crime I cannot enter here. I have shown elsewhere that France,
Victoria, and New Zealand, the countries with longest experience of
secular education, have the best record among civilised nations in the
reduction of crime. The carelessness of clerical writers as to the
truth of their statements on this subject is appalling. There is not a
tittle of reason in criminal statistics, or any other exact
indications of national health, for retaining religious lessons in our
schools. They are there merely because the clergy find it conducive to
their prestige to have their sacred book enthroned with honour in the
national scheme of education. As in the case of divorce, they ask us
to maintain immorality in the name of religion. German schools are
saturated with religious teaching, yet we have seen the issue of it
all.
For one hundred years our English school-system has been hampered and
perverted by this clerical insistence on religious lessons. Parents,
they sometimes say, desire it; but when the Trades Union Congress, the
only large body of parents which ever pronounced on the subject,
repeatedly voted for secular education, by overwhelming majorities,
the clergy, through the minority of their followers, could only secure
the exclusion of the subject from the agenda. Neither do the majority
of teachers desire it; while educationists, as a whole, resent this
grievous complication of their work. Nothing but the complete
secularisation of all schools receiving funds from the nation or
municipality will enable us to advance. The clergy must do their own
work on their own premises. The moral pretext is a thin disguise of an
effort to use the nation's resources and authority for the purpose
of attaching children to the churches.
Writers on the subject are not wholly agreed whether we ought to
substitute moral lessons for the discarded Bible lessons. We can in
such a matter proceed only on probabilities, and it seems to me that
judicious lessons for the training of character are very desirable. I
do not so much mean abstract or direct lessons on the various
qualities of character. If such lessons (on truthfulness, honesty,
manliness, etc.) were tactfully and sensibly conducted, they could be
of great service. There is really not much danger of turning the
average British schoolboy into a prig. But indirect lessons,
especially from history and biography, should be more effective.
In either case our teachers would need special training for the
lessons, and no philosophic or religious or anti-religious view of
moral principles should be admitted. Experience has surely shown how
little use there is in giving children a "categorical imperative,"
or a set of arbitrary commandments, or an æsthetic lesson on
"modesty." You cannot in one hour teach the child to think, and in
the next expect it to accept your instruction without thinking,
because you are not prepared to give reasons for your commands. It is
sometimes forgotten that even children share the mental awakening of
our age, and must be treated wisely. The American or the Australian
child well illustrates the change that is taking place. It is
increasingly dangerous to give children dogmatic or mystic instruction
in rules of conduct, nor is it in the least necessary to base this
important part of their training on disputable grounds. Every quality
of character that is inculcated may be related to the child's actual
or future experience of life, and will find an ample sanction therein.
Life is full of material for such lessons: material far richer and
easier of assimilation than the doings of an ancient Oriental people
with a different code of morals. Let these lessons of history and
contemporary life be developed, let the child learn in plain human
speech the social significance of justice and honour, avoiding
namby-pamby dissertations on the beauty of virtue, and there will be
placed in the mind of the young, not an exotic plant which the child
will be tempted to eradicate, but a germ which will grow and bear
fruit under the influence of its own experience.
The modern ideal of education further implies that the State shall
provide higher tuition for those youths and maidens to whom it will be
profitable to impart it. Scholastic evolution is advancing so rapidly
in this direction that the ideal hardly needs vindication. Seventeen
hundred years ago such a "ladder of education" existed in Europe;
from the municipally-endowed elementary school the promising youth
could pass, through secondary colleges, to the imperial schools at
Rome. Had that model been retained and improved instead of being
abandoned for fourteen centuries, Europe would be in an immeasurably
greater state of efficiency than it is. We are restoring and improving
the pagan model, and there are signs that in time we shall have a
complete system of secondary, technical, and higher education, quite
apart from the schools in which the children of more or less wealthy
parents learn their traditional virtues and vices. If we have also
some means by which able children whose talent has escaped the
academic eye (of which we have many classical instances) may in later
years have a chance of recognition, we shall exploit the intelligence
of the race with splendid results.
The cost of this great reform need not intimidate us. Enormous sums of
money have been given (by men like Mr. Carnegie) or bequeathed for the
purpose, and the admirable practice will continue. But we need a
searching revision of educational endowments, foundations,
scholarships, etc. There is strong reason to suspect that estates
which are now of great value are not applied to the scholastic
purposes for which they were intended, or are badly administered, or
are used in giving gratuitous or cheap education to the children of
comfortable parents who secure favour or influence. A consolidation of
all the endowments which had not in their origin an express sectarian
purpose would provide a fund to which the State and municipal
authorities need add little. The scheme would bring some order into
our chaos of schools and colleges, and, while the more snobbish
establishments would continue to preserve their pupils from the
society of the children of tradesfolk, and would waste valuable
resources on uncultivable minds, the youth of the nation generally, of
both sexes, would be developed to the full extent of its capacity.
These things have a monetary value. A distinguished historical writer
told me that, on sending his son to Sandhurst, he proposed that they
should study together the campaigns of Napoleon. The youth presently
informed him that the traditions of Sandhurst did not allow them to do
serious work outside the general routine. A few years later we heard
the details of our South African War.
It will be a part of this increased efficiency to rid our secondary
and higher schools of clerical domination. It is futile to say that
the clergyman must represent morals and religion in the school. His
record as a moralist during fifteen hundred years does not recommend
his services. Even to-day public schools which retain the tradition of
clerical masters are deplorable from the moral point of view. Some of
them are nurseries of a vice which, unless it be discontinued when the
youth goes out into the world, may bring on him one of the most
degrading sentences of our penal law. The clerical _method_ of
character-training--one admits, of course, great occasional
personalities--has little influence on these things. Public-school
boys, and especially young men at our universities, know that every
syllable which the preacher addresses to them is disputed, and no
other ground of right and healthy conduct is, as a rule, impressed on
them. Many will know that the grossest opinion of the clergy
themselves is current in our public schools and older universities,
and is embodied in numbers of scurrilous stories. The position of the
clergyman in our educational world is false. He is there for the same
reason that the Bible is in the elementary school: in the interest of
the Churches. We have improved mental education enormously since it
ceased to be a monopoly of the clergy. Possibly we will make a similar
improvement in character-training; we can hardly do it with less
success than they have done.