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WHAT IS AND WHAT
MIGHT BE
A STUDY OF EDUCATION IN GENERAL AND
ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN PARTICULAR
BY
EDMOND HOLMES
AUTHOR OF
"THE CREED OF CHRIST," "THE CREED OF BUDDHA," "THE SILENCE
OF LOVE," "THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE," ETC.
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY
1912
First published, May 1911.
Second impression, July 1911.
Third impression, September 1911.
Fourth impression, November 1911.
Fifth impression, January 1912.
Sixth impression, October 1912.
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|Transcriber's note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected. All |
|other inconstancies in spelling or punctuation are as in the original.|
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PREFACE
My aim, in writing this book, is to show that the _externalism_ of
the West, the prevalent tendency to pay undue regard to outward and
visible "results" and to neglect what is inward and vital, is the
source of most of the defects that vitiate Education in this country,
and therefore that the only remedy for those defects is the drastic
one of changing our standard of reality and our conception of the
meaning and value of life. My reason for making a special study of
that branch of education which is known as "Elementary," is that I
happen to have a more intimate knowledge of it than of any other
branch, the inside of an elementary school being so familiar to me
that I can in some degree bring the eye of experience to bear upon
the problems that confront its teachers. I do not for a moment
imagine that the elementary school teacher is more deeply tainted
than his fellows with the virus of "Occidentalism." Nor do I think
that the defects of his schools are graver than those of other
educational institutions. In my judgment they are less grave because,
though perhaps more glaring, they have not had time to become so
deeply rooted, and are therefore, one may surmise, less difficult to
eradicate. Also there is at least a breath of healthy discontent
stirring in the field of elementary education, a breath which
sometimes blows the mist away and gives us sudden gleams of sunshine,
whereas over the higher levels of the educational world there hangs
the heavy stupor of profound self-satisfaction.[1] I am not
exaggerating when I say that at this moment there are elementary
schools in England in which the life of the children is emancipative
and educative to an extent which is unsurpassed, and perhaps
unequalled, in any other type or grade of school.
I am careful to say all this because I foresee that, without a
"foreword" of explanation, my adverse criticism of what I have called
"a familiar type of school" may be construed into an attack on the
elementary teachers as a body. I should be very sorry if such a
construction were put upon it. No one knows better than I do that the
elementary teachers of this country are the victims of a vicious
conception of education which has behind it twenty centuries of
tradition and prescription, and the malign influence of which was
intensified in their case by thirty years or more[2] of Code
despotism and "payment by results." Handicapped as they have been by
this and other adverse conditions, they have yet produced a noble
band of pioneers, to whom I, for one, owe what little I know about
the inner meaning of education; and if I take an unduly high
standard in judging of their work, the reason is that they
themselves, by the brilliance of their isolated achievements, have
compelled me to take it. I will therefore ask them to bear with me,
while I expose with almost brutal candour the shortcomings of many of
their schools. They will understand that all the time I am thinking
of education in general even more than of elementary education,
and using my knowledge of the latter to illustrate statements and
arguments which are really intended to tell against the former. They
will also understand that at the back of my mind I am laying the
blame of their failures, not on them but on the hostile forces which
have been too strong for many of them,--on the false assumptions of
Western philosophy, on the false standards and false ideals of
Western civilisation, on various "old, unhappy, far-off things," the
effects of which are still with us, foremost among these being that
deadly system of "payment by results" which seems to have been
devised for the express purpose of arresting growth and strangling
life, which bound us all, myself included, with links of iron, and
which had many zealous agents, of whom I, alas! was one.
PART I
WHAT IS
OR
THE PATH OF MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
CHAPTER I
SALVATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
The function of education is to foster growth. By some of my readers
this statement will be regarded as a truism; by others as a
challenge; by others, again, when they have realised its inner
meaning, as a "wicked heresy." I will begin by assuming that it is
a truism, and will then try to prove that it is true.
The function of education is to foster growth. The end which
the teacher should set before himself is the development of
the latent powers of his pupils, the unfolding of their latent
life. If growth is to be fostered, two things must be liberally
provided,--nourishment and exercise. On the need for nourishment I
need not insist. The need for exercise is perhaps less obvious, but
is certainly not less urgent. We make our limbs, our organs, our
senses, our faculties grow by exercising them. When they have reached
their maximum of development we maintain them at that level by
exercising them. When their capacity for growth is unlimited, as in
the case of our mental and spiritual faculties, the need for exercise
is still more urgent. To neglect to exercise a given limb, or organ,
or sense, or faculty, would result in its becoming weak, flabby, and
in the last resort useless. In childhood, when the stress of
Nature's expansive forces is strongest, the neglect of exercise will,
for obvious reasons, have most serious consequences. If a healthy
child were kept in bed during the second and third years of his life,
the damage done to his whole body would be incalculable.
These are glaring truisms. Let me perpetrate one more,--one which is
perhaps the most glaring of all. The process of growing must be done
by the growing organism, by the child, let us say, and by no one
else. The child himself must take in and assimilate the nourishment
that is provided for him. The child himself must exercise his organs
and faculties. The one thing which no one may ever delegate to
another is the business of growing. To watch another person eating
will not nourish one's own body. To watch another person using his
limbs will not strengthen one's own. The forces that make for the
child's growth come from within himself; and it is for him, and him
alone, to feed them, use them, evolve them.
All this is--
"As true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth."
But it sometimes happens that what is most palpable is least
perceptible; and perhaps it is because the truth of what I say is
self-evident and indisputable, that in many Elementary Schools in
this country the education given seems to be based on the assumption
that my "truisms" are absolutely false. In such schools the one end
and aim of the teacher is to do everything for the child;--to feed
him with semi-digested food; to hold him by the hand, or rather by
both shoulders, when he tries to walk or run; to keep him under close
and constant supervision; to tell him in precise detail what he is to
think, to feel, to say, to wish, to do; to show him in precise detail
how he is to do whatever may have to be done; to lay thin veneers of
information on the surface of his mind; never to allow him a minute
for independent study; never to trust him with a handbook, a
note-book, or a sketch-book; in fine, to do all that lies in his
power to prevent the child from doing anything whatever for himself.
The result is that the various vital faculties which education might
be supposed to train become irretrievably starved and stunted in the
over-educated school child; till at last, when the time comes for him
to leave the school in which he has been so sedulously cared for, he
is too often thrown out upon the world, helpless, listless,
resourceless, without a single interest, without a single purpose in
life.
The contrast between elementary education as it too often is, and as
it ought to be if the truth of my "truisms" were widely accepted, is
so startling that in my desire to account for it I have had recourse
to a paradox. "Trop de vérité," says Pascal, "nous étonne: les
premiers principes ont trop d'évidence pour nous." I have suggested
that the inability of so many teachers to live up to the spirit, or
even to the letter, of my primary "truism," may be due to its having
too much evidence for them, to their being blinded by the naked light
of its truth.
But there may be another explanation of the singular fact that a
theory of education to which the teacher would assent without
hesitation if it were submitted to his consciousness, counts for
nothing in the daily routine of his work. Failure to carry an
accepted principle into practice is sometimes due to the fact that
the principle has not really been accepted; that its inner meaning
has not been apprehended; that assent has been given to a formula
rather than a truth. The cause of the failure may indeed lie deeper
than this. It may be that the nominal adherents of the principle are
in secret revolt against the vital truth that is at the heart of it;
that they repudiate it in practice because they have already
repudiated it in the inner recesses of their thought. "This people
draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their
lips; but their heart is far from me." Tell the teacher that the
function of education is to foster growth; that therefore it is his
business to develop the latent faculties of his pupils; and that
therefore (since growth presupposes exercise) he must allow his
pupils to do as much as possible by and for themselves,--place these
propositions before him, and the chances are that he will say "Amen"
to them. But that lip assent will count for nothing. One's life is
governed by instinct rather than logic. To give a lip assent to the
logical inferences from an accepted principle is one thing. To give a
_real_ assent to the essential truth that underlies and animates the
principle is another. The way in which the teacher too often conducts
his school leads one to infer that the intuitive, instinctive side of
him--the side that is nearest to practice--has somehow or other held
intercourse with the inner meaning of that "truism" which he repeats
so glibly, and has rejected it as antagonistic to the traditional
assumptions on which he bases his life. Or perhaps this work of
subconscious criticism and rejection has been and is being done for
him, either by the spirit of the age to which he belongs or by the
genius of the land in which he lives.
Why is the teacher so ready to do everything (or nearly everything)
for the children whom he professes to educate? One obvious answer to
this question is that for a third of a century (1862-1895) the
"Education Department" did everything (or nearly everything) for him.
For a third of a century "My Lords" required their inspectors to
examine every child in every elementary school in England on a
syllabus which was binding on all schools alike. In doing this, they
put a bit into the mouth of the teacher and drove him, at their
pleasure, in this direction and that. And what they did to him they
compelled him to do to the child.
So far as the action of the "Education Department" was concerned,
this policy was abandoned--in large measure, if not wholly--in 1895;
but its consequences are with us still. What conception of the
meaning and purpose of education could have induced "My Lords" to
adopt such a policy, and, having adopted it, to adhere to it for more
than thirty years? Had one asked "My Lords" at any time during those
thirty years what they regarded as the true function of education,
and had one suggested to them (as they had probably never turned
their minds to the question) that the function of education was to
foster the growth of the child, they might possibly have given an
indolent assent to that proposition. But their educational policy
must have been dictated by some widely different conception. They
must have believed that the mental progress of the child--the only
aspect of progress which concerned educationalists in those
days--would best be tested by a formal examination on a prescribed
syllabus, and would best be secured by preparation for such a test;
and they must have accepted, perhaps without the consent of their
consciousness, whatever theory of education may be implicit in that
belief.
In acting as they did, "My Lords" fell into line with the
Universities, the Public Schools, the Preparatory Schools, the Civil
Service Commissioners, the Professional Societies, and (to make a
general statement) with all the "Boards" and "Bodies" that
controlled, directly or indirectly, the education of the youth of
England. We must, therefore, widen the scope of our inquiry, and
carry our search for cause a step farther back. How did the belief
that a formal examination is a worthy end for teacher and child to
aim at, and an adequate test of success in teaching and in learning,
come to establish itself in this country? And not in this country
only, but in the whole Western world? In every Western country that
is progressive and "up to date," and in every Western country in
exact proportion as it is progressive and "up to date," the
examination system controls education, and in doing so arrests the
self-development of the child, and therefore strangles his inward
growth.
What is the explanation of this significant fact? In my attempt to
account for the failure of elementary education in England to foster
the growth of the educated child, I have travelled far. But I
must travel farther yet. The Western belief in the efficacy
of examinations is a symptom of a widespread and deep-seated
tendency,--the tendency to judge according to the appearance of
things, to attach supreme importance to visible "results," to measure
inward worth by outward standards, to estimate progress in terms of
what the "world" reveres as "success." It is the Western standard of
values, the Western way of looking at things, which is in question,
and which I must now attempt to determine.
That I should have to undertake this task is a proof of the
complexity of education, of the bewildering tanglement of its
root-system, of the depths to which some of its roots descend into
the subsoil of human-life. The defect in our system of education
which I am trying to diagnose is one which the "business man," who
may have had reason to complain of the output of our elementary
schools, will probably account for in one sentence and propound a
remedy for in another. But I, who know enough about education to
realise how little is or can be known about it, find that if I am to
understand why so many schools turn out helpless and resourceless
children, I must go back to the first principles of modern
civilisation, or in other words to the cardinal axioms of the
philosophy of the West.
This does not mean that I must make a systematic study of Western
metaphysics. Professional thinkers abound in the West; but the rank
and file of the people pay little heed to them. It is true that they
take themselves very seriously; but so does every clique of experts
and connoisseurs. The indirect influence of their theories has at
times been considerable; but their direct influence on human thought
is, and has always been, very slight. For the plain average man, who
cannot rid himself of the suspicion that the professional thinker is
a professional word-juggler, has a philosophy of his own which was
formulated for him by an unphilosophical people, and which, though it
is now beginning to fail him, was once sufficient for all his needs.
At the present moment there are two schools of popular thought in the
West. For many centuries there was only one. For many centuries men
were content to believe that the outward and visible world--the world
of their normal experience--was the all of Nature. But they were not
content to believe that it was the "all of Being." The latter
conception would have said "No" to certain desires of the heart which
refuse to be negatived,--desires which are as large and lofty as they
are pure and deep: and in order to provide a refuge for these,
men added to their belief in a natural world which was bounded
by the horizon of experience (as they understood the word), the
complementary belief in a world which transcended the limits of
experience, and in which the dreams and hopes for which Nature could
make no provision might somehow or other be realised and fulfilled.
With the development of physical science, the conception of the
Supernatural has become discredited, and a materialistic monism has
begun to dispute the supremacy of that dualistic philosophy which had
reigned without a rival for many hundreds of years. But antagonistic
as these philosophies are to one another, they have one conception in
common. The popular belief that the world of man's normal experience
is the Alpha and Omega of _Nature_, is the very platform on which
their controversies are carried on. Were any one to suggest to them
that this belief was without foundation, that there was room and to
spare in Nature for the "supernatural" as well as for the normal,
that the supernatural world (as it had long been miscalled) was
nothing more nor less than "la continuation occulte de la Nature
infinie,"--they would at once unite their forces against him, and
assail him with an even bitterer hatred than that which animates them
in their own intestine strife.
The dualistic philosophy which satisfied the needs of the West for
some fifteen centuries was systematised and formulated for it, in the
language of myth and poetry, by an Eastern people. The acceptance of
official Christianity by the Graeco-Roman world was the result of
many causes, two of which stand out as central and supreme. The first
of these was the personal magnetism of Christ, in and through which
men came in contact with, and responded to, the attractive forces of
those moral and spiritual ideas which Christ set before his
followers. The second was the readiness of the Western mind to accept
the philosophy of Israel,--a philosophy with the master principles of
which it had long been subconsciously familiar, and for the clear and
convincing presentation of which it had long been waiting. Of the
personal magnetism of Christ and the part that it has played in the
life of Christendom, I need not now speak. My present concern is to
show how the philosophy of Israel--accepted nominally for Christ's
sake, but really for its own--has influenced the educational policy
of the West.
In the Old Testament the Western mind found itself face to face with
the philosophical theories--theories about the world and its origin,
about Man and his destiny, about conduct and its consequences--to
which its own mythologies had given inadequate expression, but which
the poetical genius of a practical people was able to formulate to
the satisfaction of a practical world. In the philosophy of Israel
"Nature" was conceived of, not as animated by an indwelling life or
soul, but as the handiwork of an omnipotent God. In six days--so runs
the story--"God created the heavens and the earth." Whether by the
word which we translate as "days" were meant terrestrial days or
cosmic ages matters nothing, for in either case the broad fact
remains that according to the Biblical narrative the work of creation
occupied a definite period of time, and that on a certain day in the
remote past the Creator rested from his labours, surveyed his
handiwork, and pronounced it to be very good.
His next step was to stand aside from the world that he had made,
leave it to its own devices and see how it would behave itself in the
person of its lord and his viceroy,--Man. That the Creator should
place Creation on its trial and that it should speedily misbehave
itself, may be said to have been preordained. The idea of a Creator
postulates the further idea of a Fall. The finished work of an
omnipotent Creator is presumably good,--good in this sense, if in
no other, that its actualities must needs determine the creature's
ideals and standards of good. But the world, as Man knows it, seems
to be deeply tainted with evil. How is this anomaly to be accounted
for? The story of the Fall is the answer to this question. Whether
modern theology regards the story of the Fall as literally or only as
symbolically true, I cannot say for certain. The question is of minor
importance. What is of supreme importance is that Christian theology
accepts and has always accepted the consequences of the _idea_ of the
Fall, and that in formulating those consequences it has provided the
popular thought of the West with conceptions by which its whole
outlook on life has been, and is still, determined and controlled.
The idea of the Fall, as dramatised by Israel and interpreted by the
"Doctors" of the West, gives adequate expression--on the highest
level of his thinking--to the crude dualism which constitutes the
philosophy of the average man. Hence the immense attractiveness of
the idea to the practical races of the West,--to peoples whose chief
idea is to get their mental problems solved for them as speedily, as
authoritatively, and as intelligibly as possible, that they may thus
be free to devote themselves to "business," to the tangible affairs
of life.
Let us follow the philosophy of the Fall into some of its more
obvious consequences. The Universe (to use the most comprehensive
of all terms) is conceived of as divided into two dissevered
worlds,--the world of Nature, which is fallen, ruined, and accursed,
and the Supernatural world, which shares in the perfection and
centres in the glory of God. Between these two worlds intercourse is,
_in the nature of things_, impossible. But Man is not content that
his state of godless isolation should endure for ever. As a thinker,
he has exiled God from Nature and therefore from his own daily life.
But, as a "living soul," he craves for reunion with God; and so long
as the gulf between the two worlds remains impassable, his philosophy
will be felt to be incomplete. A supplementary theory of things must
therefore be devised. Corrupt and fallen as he is, Man cannot hope
to climb to Heaven; but God, with whom nothing is impossible, can at
his own good pleasure come down to earth. And come he will, whenever
that sense of all-pervading imperfection which exiled him, in its
premature attempt to explain itself, to his supernatural Heaven, is
realised in man's heart as a desire for better things. But what will
be the signs of his advent? The philosophy of the Fall is at no loss
for an answer to this question. There was a time when Nature was
the mirror of God's face. But it is so no longer. The mirror was
shattered when Adam fell. Henceforth it is only by troubling the
waters of Nature, by suspending the operation of its laws, by turning
its order into confusion, by producing _supernatural_ phenomena, or
"miracles" as they are vulgarly called, that God can announce his
presence to Man.
The question of the miraculous is one into which we need not enter.
Let us assume that God can somehow or other come to Man, and that
Man can somehow or other recognise God's presence and interpret his
speech. We have now to ask ourselves one vital question. With what
purpose does God visit the world which has forfeited his favour, and
what does he propose to do for ruined Nature and fallen Man? For
Nature, nothing. For Man, to provide a way of escape from Nature.
The dualism of popular thought must needs control the very efforts
that men make to deliver themselves from its consequences. The
irremediable corruption of Man's _nature_ is the assumption on which
the whole scheme of salvation is to be hinged. His deliverance from
sin and death will be effected, not by the development of any natural
capacity for good, but by his being induced to quit the path (or
paths) of Nature, and to walk, under Divine direction, in some new
and narrow path.
But how will this end be achieved? That Man cannot discover the path
of salvation for himself will, of course, be taken for granted. The
catastrophe of the Fall has corrupted his whole nature, and has
therefore blinded him to the light of truth. "The way of man is not
in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." The
promptings of his own nature, which he would follow if left to
himself, can do nothing but lead him astray. It will also be taken
for granted that the path of salvation is a path of action. When the
whole inward disposition is hopelessly corrupt, the idea of achieving
salvation by growing, by bringing one's hidden life to the perfection
of maturity, must perforce be abandoned. It is only by _doing_ God's
will that Man can hope to regain his favour. One thing, then, is
clear. Man must be told in exact detail what he is to do and also
(should this be necessary) how he is to do it. In other words, an
elaborate Code of Law, covering the whole range of human life and
regulating all the details of conduct, must be delivered by God to
Man. If Man will obey this Law he will be saved. If he will not obey
it, he will be lost.
There is another aspect of the idea of a supernatural revelation on
which it is necessary to touch. As intercourse between Nature and the
Supernatural world takes place, not in the natural order of things
but at the good pleasure of the Supernatural God, revelation must
needs be conceived of as a highly-specialised process. A revelation
which was addressed to the whole human race, and to which the whole
human race was able to respond, could scarcely be regarded as of
supernatural origin. The distinction between the supernaturalness of
the appeal and the naturalness of the response would gradually tend
to efface itself: for "what is universal is natural," and the voice
which every man was able to recognise would come at last to be
regarded as a voice from within oneself. If the supernatural
character of an alleged revelation is to be established, its
uniqueness must be duly emphasised. A particular people must be
chosen for the purpose of the divine experiment. A particular
law-giver must be commissioned to declare to the chosen people the
will of the Supernatural God. And from time to time a particular
prophet must be sent to rebuke the chosen people for its
backslidings, to show it where it has gone astray, and to exhort
it to turn again to its God.
For if it is far from Man to discern good, it is still farther from
him to desire it. How, then, shall he be induced to walk in the path
which the Law has prescribed for him? To this question there can be
but one answer: By the promise of external reward, and the threat of
external punishment. To set before Man an ideal of life--an ideal
which would be to him an unfailing fountain of magnetic force and
guiding light--is not in the power of legalism. For if an ideal is
to appeal to one, it must be the consummation of one's own natural
tendencies; but the current of Man's natural tendencies is ever
setting towards perdition, and the vanishing point of his heart's
desires is death. Were an ideal revealed to the Law-giver and by him
presented to his fellow-men, and were the heart of Man to respond
to the appeal that it made to him, the basic assumption of
legalism--that of the corruption of Man's nature--would be
undermined; for Man would have proved that it belonged to his nature
to turn towards the light,--in other words, that he had a natural
capacity for good. The plain truth is that legalism is precluded, by
its own first principles from appealing to any motive higher than
that instinctive desire for pleasure which has as its counterpart a
quasi-physical fear of pain. It is impossible for the lawgiver to
appeal to Man's better nature, to say to him: "Cannot you see for
yourself that this course of action is better than that,--that love
is better than hatred, mercy than cruelty, loyalty than treachery,
continence than self-indulgence?" What he can and must say to him is
this, and this only; "If you obey the Law you will be rewarded. If
you disobey it you will be punished." And this he must say to him
again and again.
It is true that among the many commandments which the Law sets before
its votaries, there are some--the moral commandments, properly so
called--which do in point of fact, and in defiance of the
philosophical assumption of legalism, appeal to the better nature
of Man. But these are at best an insignificant minority; and their
relative importance will necessarily diminish with the development
into its natural consequences of the root idea of legalism. For
legalism, just so far as it is strong, sincere, and self-confident,
will try to cover the whole of human life. The religion that is
content to do less than this, the religion that acquiesces in the
distinction between what is religious and what is secular, is, as we
shall presently see, a religion in decay. Religion may perhaps be
defined as Man's instinctive effort to bring a central aim into his
life and so provide himself with an authoritative standard of values.
In its highest and purest form, Religion controls Man's life, both as
a whole and in all its essential details, through the central aim or
spiritual ideal which it sets before him and the consequent standard
of values with which it equips him. But legalism is debarred by its
distrust of human nature from trying to control the details of life
through any central aim or ideal; and its assumption that all the
commandments of the Law are of divine origin, and therefore equally
binding upon Man, is obviously incompatible with the conception of
a standard of moral worth. Its attempt to cover the whole of life
must therefore resolve itself into an attempt to control the details
of conduct _in all their detail_; to deal with them, one by one,
bringing each in turn under the operation of an appropriate
commandment, and if necessary deducing from the commandment a special
rule to meet the special case. In other words, besides being told
what he is not to do (in the more strictly moral sphere of conduct),
and what he is to do (in the more strictly ceremonial sphere), Man
must be told, in the fullest detail, how he is to do whatever may
have to be done in the daily round of his life. Such at least is the
aim of legalism. The nets of the Law are woven fine, and flung far
and wide. If there are any acts in a man's life which escape through
their clinging meshes, the force of Nature is to be blamed for this
partial failure, not the zeal of the Doctors of the Law.
It is towards this inverted ideal that the doctrine of salvation
through obedience will lead its votaries, when its master
principle--that of distrust of human nature--has been followed out
into all its natural consequences,--followed out, as it was by
Pharisaism, with a fearless logic and a fixed tenacity of purpose.
An immense and ever-growing host of formulated rules, not one in a
hundred of which makes any appeal to the heart of Man or has any
meaning for his higher reason, will crush his life down, slowly and
inexorably, beneath their deadly burden. "At every step, at the work
of his calling, at prayer, at meals, at home and abroad, from early
morning till late in the evening, from youth to old age, the dead,
the deadening formula"[3] will await him. The path of obedience
for the sake of obedience speedily degenerates into the path of
mechanical obedience; and the end of that path is the triumph of
machinery over life.
For it is to the letter of the Law, rather than to the spirit, that
the strict legalist is bound to conform. The letter of the Law is
divine; and obedience to it is within the power of every man who will
take the trouble to learn its commandments. What the spirit of the
Law may be, is beyond the power of fallen Man to determine; and were
an attempt made to interpret it, the result would be a state of
widespread moral chaos, for there would be as many interpretations of
it as there were minds that had the courage and the initiative to
undertake so audacious a task. As it is with the Law as such, so it
is with each of its numerous commandments. The man who professes to
obey the spirit of a commandment is in secret revolt against its
divine authority. For he is presuming to criticise it in the light
of his own conscience and insight, and to limit his obedience to it
to that particular aspect of it which he judges to be worthy of his
devotion. From such a criticism of the Fourth Commandment as "the
Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath" to open violation
of the letter of the commandment (on this occasion or on that) there
is but a single step. The whole structure of legalism would collapse
if men were allowed to absolve themselves from obedience to the
letter of the Law, out of regard for what they conceived to be its
spirit. To interpret a commandment, in the sense of providing for its
application to the fresh cases that may arise for treatment, is the
work, not of poets and prophets but of Doctors and Scribes. The path
of literal, and therefore of mechanical, obedience is the only path
of safety; and the more punctiliously the letter is obeyed, the more
perfect will be the machinery of salvation, and the nearer will
legalism get to the appointed goal of its labours,--the extinction
of spiritual life.
As is the life that legalism expects us to lead, so is the scheme of
rewards and punishments by which (as we have already seen) it
constrains us to lead it. The materialisation of life that takes
place under the sway of the Law is accurately matched and measured by
the materialisation of the doctrine of moral retribution. The general
idea that virtue is rewarded and vice punished is profoundly true.
But the idea is easily misinterpreted; and it necessarily shares in
the degradation of one's general conception of life. Virtue rewards
the virtuous by making them more virtuous. Vice punishes the vicious
by making them more vicious. So long as the rewards for which we hope
and the punishments which we dread are conceived of as inward and
spiritual, we are on safe ground. But such a scheme of rewards and
punishments is wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism. It
is not by becoming more virtuous that we are saved. It is not by
becoming more vicious that we are lost. We are saved by obedience,
we are lost by disobedience, to the formulated rules of a
divinely-delivered law. To appeal to Man's higher self, when there is
no higher self to appeal to,--to set before him as the supreme reward
of virtue the development of his better nature, when his nature is
intrinsically evil,--would be an obvious waste of labour. And as,
apart from the presumed repugnance of the "natural man" to the
presumed delights of the Law, the intrinsic attractiveness of the
life that legalism prescribes must needs diminish in exact proportion
as the authority of the Law becomes oppressive and vexatious, and the
letter of it tends to establish itself at the expense of the
spirit,--it is clear that a scheme of rewards and punishments will
become, in effect as well as in theory, the only weapon in the
armoury of the legalist. It is also clear that there will be much
work for that one weapon to do. The central tendencies of Man's
nature, besides being _ex hypothesi_ evil, are antagonistic _de
facto_ to the galling despotism and the irrational requirements of
the Law; and the lawgiver, far from being able to enlist those
tendencies under his banner by appealing to the highest of them--the
natural leaders of the rest,--must be prepared to overcome their
collective resistance by winning to his side the lowest of them, by
terrifying Man's weaker self with threats, by corrupting his baser
self with bribes. The ruin of Man's nature, whether hypothetical or
actual,[4] has left intact (or relatively intact) only the animal
base of it. It is to his animal instincts, then, that legalism must
appeal in its endeavour to influence his conduct. In other words, the
punishments and the rewards to which Man is to look forward must be
of the same _genus_, if not of the same _species_, as the lash of
the whip that punishes the lagging race-horse, or the lump of sugar
that rewards his exertions. And with the inevitable growth of egoism
and individualism in the demoralising atmosphere with which legalism
(and its lineal successors) must needs invest human life, Man's
conception of the rewards and punishments that await him will
deteriorate rather than improve. The Jewish desire for national
prosperity was an immeasurably nobler motive to action than is the
Christian's fear of the quasi-material fires of Hell. Indeed it is
nothing but our familiarity with the latter motive that has blinded
us to its inherent baseness. It is no exaggeration to say that there
have been epochs in the history of Christendom (as there are still
quarters of Christian thought and phases of Christian faith) in which
the trumpet-call that was meant to rouse the soldiers of God to
renewed exertion has rung in their ears as an ignominious "_sauve qui
peut_."
The tendency of legalism to externalise life has another aspect. In
the eyes of the strict legalist there is no such thing as an inward
state of human worth. The doctrine of the corruption of Man's nature
is incompatible with the idea of "goodness" being measurable
(potentially if not actually) in terms of the health and happiness
of the "inward man." Goodness, as the legalist conceives it, is
measurable in terms of correctness of outward conduct, and of that
only. And when life is regulated by an elaborate Law, the rules of
which are familiar to all men, there is no reason why a man's outward
conduct should not be appraised, with some approach to accuracy, by
his neighbours and friends. Hence it is that in the atmosphere of
legalism an excessive deference is wont to be paid to public, and
even to parochial, opinion. The life of the votary of the Law is
lived under strict and constant _surveillance_; and a man learns
at last to value himself as his conduct is valued by a critical
onlooker, and to make it the business of his life to produce
"results" which can be weighed and measured by conventional
standards, rather than to grow in grace,--with silent, subtle,
unobtrusive growth.
Were I to try to prove that the _régime_ of the Law was necessarily
fatal to the development of Man's higher faculties--conscience,
freedom, reason, imagination, intuition, aspiration, and the rest--I
should waste my time. Legalism, as a scheme of life, is based on the
assumption that development along the lines of Man's nature is a
movement towards perdition; and to reproach the legalist for having
arrested the growth of the human spirit by the pressure of the Law
were to provoke the rejoinder that he had done what he intended
to do. The two schemes of Salvation--the mechanical and the
evolutional--have so little in common that neither can pass judgment
on the other without begging the question that is in dispute. When I
come to consider the effect of legalism--or rather of the philosophy
that underlies legalism--on education, I may perhaps be able to find
some court of law in which the case between the two schemes can be
tried with the tacit consent of both. Meanwhile I can but note
that in the atmosphere of the Law growth is as a matter of fact
arrested,--arrested so effectually that the counter process of
degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of this statement,
if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has
been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of
Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count
himself to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his
spiritual achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has
closed his account with God.
Pharisaism is at once the logical consummation and the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of legalism. It is to the genius of Israel that we owe that
practical interpretation of the fundamental principle of
supernaturalism, which was embodied in the doctrine of salvation
through obedience to the letter of a Law. And it is to the genius
of Israel that we owe that rigorously logical interpretation of
the _axiomata media_ of legalism, which issued in due season in
Pharisaism. The world owes much to the courage and sincerity
of Israel,--to his unique force of character, to his fanatical
earnestness, to his relentless tenacity of purpose. In particular,
it owes a debt which it can never liquidate to what was at once the
cause and the result of his over-seriousness,--to his lack of any
sense of humour,--a negative quality which allowed his practical
logic to run its course without let or hindrance, and prevented
the "brakes" of common-sense from acting when he found himself, in
his very zeal for the Law, descending an inclined plane into an
unfathomable abyss of turpitude and folly. The man (or people) who is
able, of his own experience, to tell the rest of mankind what a given
scheme of life really means and is really worth, owing to his having
offered himself as the _corpus vile_ for the required experiment, is
one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. Had Israel been
less sincere or less courageous, we might never have known what
deadly fallacies lurk in the seemingly harmless dualism of popular
thought.
* * * * *
But the West, it will be said, is Christian, not Jewish. Is it
Christian? If the word "Christian" connotes acceptance of the
teaching as well as devotion to the person of Christ, it is scarcely
applicable either to the official or to the popular religion of
the West. For Christ, the stern denouncer of the Pharisees, was
the whole-hearted enemy of legalism; and the legal conception of
salvation through mechanical obedience still dominates the religion
and life of Christendom.
The Jewish Law tried to cover, and tended more and more to cover, the
whole of human life. It is true that it controlled the details rather
than the totality of life; but the reason why it dealt with life,
detail by detail, was that its exponents, owing to their spiritual
purblindness, were unable to see the wood for the trees. In
Christendom, while the doctrine of salvation through mechanical
obedience was retained, the authority of a Church was substituted
for that of a Code of Law. The growth of the idea of Humanity, as
opposed to that of mere nationality, made this necessary. As the
former idea began to compete with the latter, the need for a
divinely-commissioned society which should declare the will and
communicate the grace of God, not to one nation only but to all men
who were willing to hearken and obey,--and whose action, as a channel
of intercourse between God and Man, should be continuous rather
than spasmodic,--began to make itself felt. A Code of Law might
conceivably suffice to regulate the life of one small nation;
but when we consider under what varying conditions of climate,
occupation, custom, tradition, and so forth, the general life of
Humanity is carried on, we see clearly that no one Code can even
begin to suffice for the needs of the whole human race. Hence, and
for other reasons which we need not now consider, the West, in
accepting the philosophy of Israel, translated its master idea of
salvation through mechanical obedience into the notation of
ecclesiastical, as distinguished from legal, control.
That obedience to a supernaturally-commissioned Church, or rather to
the One supernaturally-commissioned Church, is the first and last
duty of Man, is the fundamental assumption on which the stately
fabric of Catholic Christianity has been reared. In various ways the
Church has striven to exact implicit obedience from her children.
Through the medium of the Confessional she has secured some measure
of control over their morals. By regulating the worship of God--both
public and private--she has been able to rule off a sphere of human
conduct in which her own authority is necessarily paramount. By
supplying the faithful with rations of "theological information" (to
quote the apt phrase of a pillar of orthodoxy), and requiring them to
accept these on her authority as indisputably true, she has succeeded
in imposing her yoke on thought as well as on conduct. By claiming
to control the outflow of Divine grace, through the channels of
the Sacraments, she has been able to threaten the rebellious with
the dread penalty of being cut off from intercourse with God.
And by telling men, with stern insistence, that the choice between
obedience and disobedience to herself is the choice between eternal
happiness and eternal misery, she has sought to extend her dominion
beyond the limits of time and to raise to an infinite power her
supremacy over the souls of men.
But just because the life of collective Humanity is large, complex,
and full of change and variety, the Church which aspires to be
universal, however strong may be her desire to superintend all the
details of human thought and conduct, and however ready she may be
to adapt herself to local and temporal variations, must needs allow
whole aspects and whole spheres of human life to escape from her
control. The history of Christendom is the history of the gradual
emancipation of the Western world from the despotism of the Church.
The various activities of the human spirit--art, science, literature,
law, statecraft, and the rest--have, one and all, freed themselves by
slow degrees from ecclesiastical control, till little or nothing has
been left for the Church to regulate but her own rites and
ceremonies, the morals (in a narrow and ever-narrowing sense of the
word), and the faith (in the theological sense of the word), of the
faithful.
With the emancipation of Man's higher activities from ecclesiastical
control, the distinction between the _religious_ and the _secular_
life has gradually established itself. That this should happen was
inevitable. Mechanical obedience being of the essence of supernatural
religion, the secularising of human life became absolutely necessary
if any vital progress was to be made. The Church patronised art,
music, and the drama so far as they served her purposes. When they
outgrew those purposes, in response to the expansive forces of human
nature, she treated them as secular and let them go their several
ways. In the interests of theology she tried to keep physical science
in leading-strings; but when, after a bitter struggle, science broke
loose from her control, she treated it too as secular and let it go
its way.
Let us see what this distinction involves. As salvation is to be
achieved by obedience to the Church and in no other way, it follows
that in all those spheres of life which are outside the jurisdiction
of the Church (except, of course, so far as questions of "morals" may
arise in connection with them), Man's conduct and general demeanour
are supposed to have no bearing on his eternal destiny. This is the
view of the secular life which is taken by the Church. And not by the
Church alone. As, little by little, the Institution--be it Church, or
Sect, or Code, or Scripture--which claims to be the sole accredited
agent of the Eternal God, relaxes its hold upon the ever-expanding
life of Humanity, all those developments of human nature which cease
to be amenable to its control come to be regarded as mundane, as
unspiritual, as carnal, as matters with which God has no concern.
Were this view of the secular life confined to those who call
themselves religious, no great harm would be done. Unfortunately, the
secular life, which is under the influence of the current conception
of God as one who holds no intercourse with Man except through
certain accredited agents, is ready to acquiesce in the current
estimate of itself as godless, and to accept as valid the distinction
between the religious life and its own. Hence comes a general
lowering of Man's aims. As the secular life is content to regard
itself as godless, and so deprives itself of any central and unifying
aim, it is but natural that success in each of its many branches
should come to be regarded as an end in itself. It is but natural, to
take examples at random, that the artist should follow art for art's
sake, that the man of science should deify positive knowledge, that
the statesman should regard political power as intrinsically
desirable, that the merchant and the manufacturer should live to make
money, and that the highest motive which appeals to all men alike
should be the desire to bulk large in the eyes of their fellow-men.
Even the ardent reformer, whose enthusiasm makes him unselfish,
pursues the ideal to which he devotes himself, as an end in itself,
and makes no attempt to define or interpret it in terms of its
relation to that supreme and central ideal which he ought to regard
as the final end of human endeavour. When we remind ourselves,
further, that secularism, equally with supernaturalism, tends to
identify "Nature" with lower nature--in other words, with the
material side of the Universe and the carnal side of Man's being,--we
shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost,
through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central
aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of
materialism,--a materialism of conduct as well as of thought.
But if the loss to the secular life, from its compulsory
despiritualisation, is great, the loss to religion, from the
secularisation of so much of Man's rational activity, is greater
still. The very distinction between the secular and the religious
life is profoundly irreligious, in that it rests on the tacit
assumption that there is no unity, no central aim, in human life;
and the fact that official religion is ready to acquiesce in the
distinction, is ready, in other words, to make a compromise with its
enemy "the world," is a proof that it is secretly conscious of its
own failing power, and is even beginning to despair of itself. As it
resigns itself to this feeling (as yet perhaps but dimly realised),
its reasons for entertaining it must needs grow stronger. The
progressive enlargement of the sphere of Man's secular activities is
accompanied, step for step, by the devitalisation of the idea of the
Divine. What kind of intercourse can God be supposed to hold with Man
if the latter is to be left to his own devices in what he must needs
regard as among the more important aspects of his life,--in his
commercial and industrial enterprises, in his art, in his literature,
in his study of Nature's laws, in his mastery of Nature's forces,
in his pursuit of positive truth and practical good? As in these
matters Man frees himself, little by little, from the yoke of
supernaturalism, which he has been accustomed to identify with
religion, his formal conception of his relation to God and of the
part that God plays in his life--the conception that is defined and
elucidated for him by religious "orthodoxy"--becomes of necessity
more irrational, more mechanical, more unreal, more repugnant to his
better nature and to the higher developments of his "common-sense."
The tendency to exalt the letter of what is spoken or written, at the
expense of the spirit, is as much of the essence of ecclesiasticism
as of legalism. "_Si dans les règles du salut le fond l'emporterait
sur la forme, ce serait la ruine du sacerdoce._" And, as a matter of
experience, the hair-splitting puerilities of Pharisaism under the
Old Dispensation have been matched, and more than matched, in the
spheres of ritual, of dogmatic theology, and of casuistical morality,
under the New. As Man gradually shifts the centre of gravity of his
being from the religious to the secular side of his life, this
puerile element in religion--the element of ultra-formalism, of
irrationality, of unreality--tends, like a morbid growth, to draw to
itself the vital energies of what was once a healthy organism but
is now degenerating into a "body of death." If, in these days of
absorbing secular activity, Man continues to tolerate the theories
and practices of the religious experts, the reason is--apart from the
influence of custom and tradition and of his respect for venerable
and "established" institutions--that they are things which he has
neither time nor inclination to investigate, and which he can
therefore afford to tolerate as being far removed from what is vital
and central in his life. I am told that the Catholic Church holds, in
the case of a dying man, "that the eternal fate of the soul, for good
or for evil, may depend upon the reception or the non-reception of
absolution, and even of extreme unction." That the truly appalling
conception of God which is implicit in this sentence should still
survive, that it should not yet have been swept out of existence by
the outraged common-sense and good feeling of Humanity, is a proof of
the immense indifference with which the Western world, absorbed as it
is in secular pursuits, regards religion.
It may indeed be doubted if men have ever been so non-religious as
are at the present day the inhabitants of our highly-civilised and
thoroughly-Christianised West. At any rate the absence of a central
aim in human life has never been so complete as it is now. Most men
are content to drift through life, toiling for the daily bread which
will enable them to go on living, yet neither knowing nor caring to
know why they are alive. There is a minority of stronger and more
resolute men who devote life with unwavering energy to the pursuit of
what I may call private and personal ends. Thus the man of business
lives for the acquisition of riches; the scholar and the scientist,
of knowledge; the statesman, of power; the speculator, of excitement;
the libertine, of pleasure; and so forth. Few are they who ever
dream of devoting life as a whole to the pursuit of an end which is
potentially attainable by all men, and which is therefore worthy of
Man as Man. The idea of there being such an end has indeed been
almost wholly lost sight of. Those among us who are of larger
discourse than the rest and less absorbed by personal aims, ask
themselves mournfully: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here?
Is life worth living? and other such questions; and being unable to
answer them to their satisfaction, or get them answered, resign
themselves to a state of quasi-stoical endurance. That religion
cannot be expected to answer these questions--the very questions
which it is its right and its duty to answer--seems to be taken for
granted by all who ask them. Religion, as it is now conceived of,
is a thing for priests and ministers, for churches and chapels, for
Sundays and Saints'-days, for the private devotions of women and
children, for educational debates in Parliament, for the first lesson
on the time-table (9.5 to 9.45 a.m.) of a Public Elementary School.
The "unbeliever" is eager to run a tilt against religion. The
"non-believer" is content to ignore it. The "believer" is careful to
exclude it from nine-tenths of his life. It is to this pass that the
gospel of salvation by machinery has brought the most "progressive"
part of the human race.
The phase of non-religiousness through which the West is passing has,
we may rest assured, a meaning and a purpose. At the meetings of the
Catholic Truth Society it is customary for the speakers to deplore
the steady relapse of Christendom into paganism, which is going on
before their eyes. As the Church had things her own way for ten
centuries or more, these complaints on the part of her champions are
equivalent to a confession on her part of disastrous failure. Why is
the Church, after having evangelised the West and ruled it for a
thousand years, allowing it to slide back into paganism? The answer
to this question is that she herself is unwittingly paganising it.
I mean by this that, without intending to do so, she is compelling
it to choose between secularised life and arrested growth. Were a
growing tree encircled with an iron band, the day would surely come
when the tree, by the force of its own natural expansion, would
either shatter the band or allow it to cut deep into its own stem.
The growing consciousness of Humanity has long been encircled by a
rigid and inadequate conception of God. The gradual secularisation of
the West means that the soul of man is straining that particular
conception of God to breaking-point: and it is infinitely better that
it should be broken to pieces than that its iron should be allowed to
sink deep into the soul.
The secularisation of contemporary life means this, and more than
this. It means the gradual handing back of Man's life to the control
of Nature,--of Nature which is as yet unequal to the task that is
being set it, owing to its having been through all these centuries
identified with its lower self, taught to distrust itself, and
otherwise misinterpreted and mismanaged, but which, in obedience to
the primary instinct of self-preservation, will gradually rise to
the level of the responsibility that is being laid upon it. With the
further secularisation of Man's life, the need for religion to make
effective the control of Nature, by pointing out to it its own ideal
and so co-ordinating and organising all its forces, will gradually
make itself felt, and the regeneration of religion will at last have
begun.
* * * * *
For many centuries the current of religious belief in the West was
almost entirely confined to the one channel of Catholic Christianity.
There the mighty river pursued his course, "brimming and bright and
large," till the time came when, with the gradual loss of his
pristine energy--
"Sands began
To hem his wintry march, and dam his streams
And split his currents";
Side channels were formed, and grew in number; and though Catholicism
is still the central channel for the moving waters, the river has now
fallen on evil days, and "strains along," "shorn and parcelled," like
the river of the Asian desert--
"forgetting the bright speed he bore
In his high mountain cradle."
Of the many side streams into which Western Christianity has split,
the majority may be spoken of collectively as Protestant.
Protestantism claims to have liberated a large part of Christendom
from the yoke of Rome; and it is therefore right that we should ask
ourselves in what sense and to what extent it has brought freedom
to the human spirit. The answer to this question is, I think, that
though Protestantism has fought a good fight for the _principle_ of
freedom, it has failed--for many reasons, the chief of which is that
it began its work before men were ripe for freedom--to lead its
votaries into the path of spiritual life and growth. Confronted by
the uncompromising dogmatism of Rome, it had to devise a counter
dogmatism of its own in order to rally round it the faint-hearted
who, though eager to absolve themselves from obedience to the
despotism of the Church, yet feared to walk by their own "inward
light." In making this move, which was not the less false because
it was in a sense inevitable, Protestantism may be said to have
renounced its mission. That it has done much, in various ways, for
human progress is undeniable; but the fact remains that it has
failed to revitalise Christianity. Its master-stroke in its struggle
with priestcraft--the substitution of "faith" for "works" as the
basis of salvation--has done little or nothing to relieve the West
from the deadly pressure of Israel's philosophy. For faith, as
Protestantism understands the word, is the movement of the soul,
not towards the ideal end of its being but towards an alleged
supernatural transaction,--the redemption of the world by the
death of Christ on the Cross. Gratitude to Christ for his love and
self-sacrifice may indeed be an effective motive to action, but faith
in the efficacy of Christ's atoning sacrifice is no guide to conduct.
The inability of Protestantism to deduce a scheme of life from its
own master-principle of salvation by "faith" has compelled it, in
its desire to avoid the pitfalls of antinomianism, to revive in a
modified form the practical legalism of the Old Testament. The
Protestant desires to show his gratitude to Christ by leading a
correct life; but his distrust of his own higher nature compels him
to go to some external authority for ethical guidance; and as he has
repudiated the authority of the supernaturally-inspired Church, he
is compelled to have recourse to the supernaturally-inspired Bible.
Hence the traditional alliance between Protestantism and the Old
Testament, in which the path of duty is far more clearly and
consistently defined than in the New. And hence the singular fact
that Calvinism, which is the backbone of Protestantism, and which in
theory, and even (at times) in practice, regards "works" as "filthy
rags," finds its other self in Puritanism, which is in the main a
recrudescence of Jewish legalism in the more strictly _moral_ sphere
of conduct.
It is owing to its alliance with the legalism of Israel, that
Protestantism has been in some respects an even greater enemy of
human freedom than Catholicism, and has on the whole done more than
the latter to narrow and maim human life. The strict legalist tries,
as we have seen, to bring the whole of human life under the direct
control of the Law; and when he finds, as the Puritan did in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that whole aspects of life have
in point of fact escaped from the control of religion and won from
the latter a tacit acceptance of themselves as secular, he not
unnaturally tends to regard these non-religious aspects of life as
"carnal," and therefore as unacceptable to God. Hence the antipathy
of the Protestant, in his seasons of Puritanical fanaticism, to
art, music, the drama, and other noble fruits of the human spirit.
Catholicism has found itself compelled to tolerate the secular
activities of the layman; Protestantism, while tolerating those
activities by which man earns his daily bread and which may be spoken
of collectively as "business," has from time to time waged war
against all the developments of human nature which are neither
spiritual (in the narrow and rigid sense of the word) nor obviously
useful, and has sought to extirpate the corresponding desires from
the heart of Man. On the more artistic side of human life, it has
done as much to impede the growth of the soul as Catholicism has
done on the more intellectual side; and through its influence on
character it has done as much to harden the fibre of the soul as
Catholicism has done to relax it, the tendency of both religions
being to destroy that elasticity of fibre which mediates between
hardness and flabbiness, and which has its counterpart in vigorous
health and strength.
The truth is--but it is a truth which Protestantism is apt
to misinterpret, and which Catholicism finds it expedient to
ignore--that religion is not a branch or department of human life,
but a way of looking at life as a whole. Indeed, it is of the essence
of religion (as has been already suggested) that it should look
at life as a whole, and so be able to look at each of its details
in the light of that supreme synthesis which we call Divine. And
the religion which sanctions, and by its own action necessitates,
the division of life into two branches--the secular and the
religious--has obviously missed its destiny and betrayed its trust.
* * * * *
A brief summary of the contents of this chapter will prepare the way
for the next. The movements of higher thought in the West have been
dominated, nominally by the professional thinker, really by the
average man. As a thinker, the average man is incurably dualistic.
Enslaved as he is to the requirements of his instrument, language, he
instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil,
the Creator to the Creation, God to Man; and in each case he fixes a
great gulf between the "mighty opposites" that constitute the given
antithesis. Confronted by the mystery of existence, he has explained
it by the story of Creation. Confronted by the twin mysteries of sin
and sorrow, he has explained them by the story of the Fall. From the
story of the Fall he has passed on to the doctrine of original sin,
to the belief that Nature in general, and human nature in particular,
is corrupt and ruined, and therefore intrinsically evil. Shrinking
from the hopeless prospect which this belief opens up to him, he
has found refuge in the conception of another world,--of a world
above and beyond Nature, a world of Divine perfection from which
information and guidance can at God's good pleasure be doled out
to Man. For a "supernatural revelation" (as theologians call this
sending of help from God to Man) special instruments are obviously
needed,--a special People, a special Scripture, a special Lawgiver,
a special Prophet, a special Church. Hence has arisen the idea that
certain persons, certain castes, certain institutions have a monopoly
of Divine truth and grace, and are therefore in a position to dictate
to their fellow-men how they are to bear themselves if they wish to
be "saved," what they are to believe, what they are to do. From this
the transition has been easy to the further idea that salvation is
to be achieved by blind and mechanical obedience,--by renouncing
the right to follow one's own higher nature, to obey one's own
conscience, to use one's own reason, to map out one's own life. In
order to induce men to yield the obedience which is required of them,
their lower instincts have had to be appealed to (for the higher,
ruined by the Fall, have presumably ceased to operate),--their desire
for pleasure by the promise of Heaven, their fear of pain by the
threat of Hell. And in order that their lives may be kept under
close supervision and their merits accurately appraised, an
ever-increasing stress has had to be laid on what is outward,
visible, and measurable in human life, as distinguished from what
is inward and occult,--on correctness in the details of prescribed
conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. As the idea of
salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised
scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's
nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. In other words, the
channel of soul growth--the only channel that leads to spiritual
health, and therefore to "salvation"--becomes gradually obstructed,
with the result that the vital energies of the soul tend either to
dissipate themselves and run to waste, or to make new channels for
themselves,--channels of degenerative tendency, the end of which is
spiritual death.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] By "self-satisfaction" I mean satisfaction with the
existing system _as a system_. That strenuous efforts are being made
to improve the system, within its own limits, I can well believe. But
the system itself, with the defects and limitations which are of its
essence, seems to be regarded as adequate, and even as final, by
nearly all who work under it.
[2] 1862 to 1895 A.D.
[3] The _Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ_, by Dr.
Emil Schürer.
[4] In its extreme form legalism tends to bring about that
ruin of human nature which it starts by postulating; for, by
forbidding Man's higher faculties to energise, it necessarily arrests
their development, and so makes it possible for the lower faculties
to draw to themselves an undue share of the rising sap of Man's
life.
CHAPTER II
EDUCATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
The God of popular theology has been engaged for more than thirty
centuries in educating his child, Man. His system of education has
been based on complete distrust of Man's nature. In the schools which
Man has been required to attend--the Legal School under the Old
Dispensation, the Ecclesiastical School under the New--it has
been taken for granted that he can neither discern what is true,
nor desire what is good. The truth of things has therefore been
formulated for him, and he has been required to learn it by rote and
profess his belief in it, clause by clause. His duty has also been
formulated for him, and he has been required to perform it, detail by
detail, in obedience to the commandments of an all-embracing Code, or
to the direction of an all-controlling Church.
It has further been taken for granted that Man's instincts and
impulses are wholly evil, and that "Right Faith" and "Right Conduct"
are entirely repugnant to his nature. In order to overcome the
resistance which his corrupt heart and perverse will might therefore
be expected to offer to the authority and influence of his teachers,
a scheme of rewards and punishments has had to be devised for his
benefit. As there is no better nature for the scheme to appeal to,
an appeal has had to be made to fears and hopes which are avowedly
base. The refractory child has had to be threatened with corporal
punishment in the form of an eternity of torment in Hell. And he has
had to be bribed by the offer of prizes, the chief of which is an
eternity of selfish enjoyment in Heaven,--enjoyment so selfish that
it will consist with, and even (it is said) be heightened by, the
knowledge that in the Final Examination the failures have been many
and the prize-winners few.
And as, under this system of education, obedience is the first and
last of virtues, so self-will--in the sense of daring to think and
act for oneself--is the first and last of offences. It is for the
sin of spiritual initiative--the sin of trying to work out one's
own salvation by the exercise of reason, conscience, imagination,
aspiration, and other spiritual faculties--that the direst penalties
are reserved. The path of salvation is the path of blind, passive,
mechanical obedience. To deviate even a little from that path is to
incur the penalty of eternal death.
* * * * *
As Man is educated by his father, God, so must the child be educated
by his father, the adult man. If the nature of Man is intrinsically
evil, the child must needs have been conceived in sin and shapen in
iniquity. If Man, even in his maturity, cannot be trusted to think
or desire or do what is right, still less can he be so trusted when
he is that relatively immature and helpless being, the child. If
the adult man has to be told in the fullest detail (whether by a
formulated Law or by a living Church) how he is to conduct himself,
still greater is the need for such or similar direction to be given
to the child. If the adult is to be "saved" by strict and mechanical
obedience, and by no other method, still greater is the need for
such obedience on the part of the child. If a system of external
and quasi-material rewards and punishments is indispensable in the
education of the adult, still less can it be dispensed with in the
education of the child. These _a fortiori_ arguments are strong; but
there is a stronger. The child will develop into the adult, and he
cannot too soon be initiated into the life which, as the adult, he
will have to lead. The process of educating the child is not merely
analogous to the process of "saving" the man. It is a vital part
of it. For childhood is the time when human nature is most easily
moulded; and the bent that is given to it then is, in nine cases out
of ten, decisive of its ultimate destiny.
It is clear, then, that if Man is to be "saved" by a _régime_ of
mechanical obedience, his education in his childhood must be based on
the same general conception of life and duty. This means, in the
first place, that the child must be brought up in an atmosphere of
severity. The God of the Old Testament--the Deity whose _nimbus_
overshadows the life of the West--combines in his own person the
functions of law-giver, governor, prosecutor, judge, and executioner.
His subjects are a race of vile offenders, whose every impulse is
bad, and whose nature turns towards evil as inevitably as a plant
turns towards the light. As he cannot trust them to know good from
evil, he has had to provide them with an elaborate code of law; and
he has had to take for granted that, left to themselves, they will
break his commandments, and find pleasure in doing so. From the very
outset, then, his attitude towards them has been one of suspicion and
rising anger. He is always on the look-out for disobedience, and he
is ready to chastise the offender almost before he has had time to
commit the offence. His pupils, brought up in an atmosphere of
suspicion, and taught from their earliest days to disbelieve in and
condemn themselves, can scarcely be blamed for living _down_ to the
evil reputation which they have unfortunately gained. To persuade a
man that he is a miserable sinner is to go some way towards leading
him into the path of sin. Systematic distrust paralyses and
demoralises those who live under it, and so tends to justify the
cruelty into which it too readily develops. The penalties which God
has attached to the sins which he may almost be said to have provoked
Man to commit, are so terrible and unjust that if the fear of them
has not robbed life of all its sunshine, the reason is that their
very horror has numbed Man's imagination, and made it impossible for
him even to begin to picture to himself their lurid gloom.
In the West men have loyally striven to reproduce towards their
children the supposed attitude of their God of Wrath towards
themselves. From very tender years the child has been brought up in
an atmosphere of displeasure and mistrust. His spontaneous activities
have been repressed as evil. His every act has been looked upon with
suspicion. He has been ever on the defensive, like a prisoner in the
dock. He has been ever on the alert for a sentence of doom. He has
been cuffed, kicked, caned, flogged, shut up in the dark, fed on
bread and water, sent hungry to bed, subjected to a variety of
cruel and humiliating punishments, terrified with idle--but to him
appalling--threats. In his misery he has shed a whole ocean of
tears,--the salt and bitter tears of hopeless grief and helpless
anger, not the soul-refreshing tears which are sometimes distilled
from sorrow by the sunshine of love. But of all the cruelties to
which he has been subjected, the most devilish has been that of
making him believe in his own criminality, in the corruption of his
innocent heart. In the deadly shade of that chilling cloud, the
flower of his opening life has too often withered before it has had
time to expand. For what is most cruel in cruelty is its tendency to
demoralise its victims, especially those who are of tender years--to
harden them, to brutalise them, to make them stubborn and secretive,
to make them shifty and deceitful, to throw them back upon
themselves, to shut them up within themselves, to quench the joy of
their hearts, to numb their sympathies, to cramp their expansive
energies, to narrow and darken their whole outlook on life. All this
the cruelty of his seniors would do to the child, even if he had not
been taught to believe in his own inborn wickedness. But that belief,
with which he has been indoctrinated from his earliest days,
necessarily weakens his power of resisting evil, and so predisposes
him to fall a victim to the malignant germs that cruelty sows in his
heart. We tell the child that he is a criminal, and treat him as
such, and then expect him to be perfect; and when our misguided
education has begun to deprave him, we shake our heads over his
congenital depravity, and thank God that we believe in "original
sin."[5]
In the next place, if Man is to be faithful to his model, he must
bring up the child in an atmosphere of vexatious interference and
unnatural restraint. That Man himself has been brought up in such an
atmosphere in both his schools--the Legal and the Ecclesiastical--I
need not take pains to prove. What he has suffered at the hands of
his Schoolmaster--the God of Israel (and of Christendom)--he has
taken good care to inflict on his pupil, the child. Such phrases as:
"Don't talk," "Don't fidget," "Don't worry," "Don't ask questions,"
"Don't make a noise," "Don't make a mess," "Don't do this thing,"
"Don't do that thing," are ever falling from his lips. And they are
supplemented with such positive instructions as: "Sit still," "Stand
on the form," "Hold yourself up," "Fold arms," "Hands behind backs,"
"Hands on heads," "Eyes on the blackboard." At every turn--from
infancy till adolescence, "from early morning till late in the
evening"--these "dead and deadening formulas" await the unhappy
child. The aim of his teachers is to leave nothing to his nature,
nothing to his spontaneous life, nothing to his free activity; to
repress all his natural impulses; to drill his energies into complete
quiescence; to keep his whole being in a state of sustained and
painful tension. And in order that we may see a meaning and a
rational purpose in this _régime_ of oppressive interference, we must
assume that its ultimate aim is to turn the child into an animated
puppet, who, having lost his capacity for vital activity, will be
ready to dance, or rather go through a series of jerky movements, in
response to the strings which his teacher pulls. It is the inevitable
reaction from this state of tension which is responsible for much of
the "naughtiness" of children. The spontaneous energies of the child,
when education has blocked all their lawful outlets, must needs force
new outlets for themselves,--lawless outlets, if no others are
available. The child's instinct to live will see to that. It
sometimes happens that, when the channel of a river has been blocked
by winter's ice, the river, on its awakening in Spring, will suddenly
change its course and carve out a new channel for itself, reckless of
the destruction that it may cause, so long as an outlet can by any
means be found for its baffled current. It is the same with the river
of the child's expanding life. The naughtiest and most mischievous
boy not infrequently develops into a hero, or a leader of men. The
explanation of this is that through his very naughtiness the current
of soul-growth, which ran stronger in him than in his school-mates,
kept open the channel which his teachers were doing their best to
close. Even Hooliganism--to take the most serious of the periodic
outbursts of juvenile criminality--resolves itself, when thoughtfully
considered, into a sudden and violent change in the channel of a
boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels)
of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational
repression. His wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last
despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself,
before it finally gives up the struggle for active existence.
* * * * *
When severity and constraint have done their work, when the spirit of
the child has been broken, when his vitality has been lowered to its
barest minimum, when he has been reduced to a state of mental and
moral serfdom, the time has come for the system of education through
mechanical obedience to be applied to him in all its rigour. In other
words, the time has come for Man to do to the child, what the God
whom he worships is supposed to have done to him,--to tell him in the
fullest and minutest detail what he is to do to be "saved," and to
stand over him with a scourge in his hand and see that he does it. In
the two great schools which God is supposed to have opened for Man's
benefit, freedom and initiative have ever been regarded (and with
good reason) as the gravest of offences. Literal obedience has
been exacted by the Law; blind obedience by the Church; passive
obedience--the obedience of a puppet, or at best of an automaton--by
both. The need for this insistence on the part of Law and Church is
obvious. If any lingering desire to think things out for himself, if
any intelligent interest in what he was taught, survived in the
disciple, the whole system of salvation by machinery would be in
danger of being thrown out of gear.
As it has been, and still is, in the schools which God has opened
for Man, so it has been, and still is, in the schools which Man
has opened for the child. Blind, passive, literal, unintelligent
obedience is the basis on which the whole system of Western education
has been reared. The child must distrust himself absolutely, must
realise that he is as helpless as he is ignorant, before he can begin
to profit by the instruction that will be given to him. His mind must
become a _tabula rasa_ before his teacher can begin to write on it.
The vital part of him--call it what you will--must become as clay
before his teacher can begin to mould him to his will.
The strength of the child, then, is to sit still, to listen, to say
"Amen" to, or repeat, what he has heard. The strength of the teacher
is to bustle about, to give commands, to convey information, to
exhort, to expound. The strength of the child is to efface himself in
every possible way. The strength of the teacher is to assert himself
in every possible way. The golden rule of education is that the child
is to do nothing for himself which his teacher can possibly do, or
even pretend to do, for him. Were he to try to do things by or for
himself, he would probably start by doing them badly. This is not to
be tolerated. Imperfection and incorrectness are moral defects; and
the child must as far as possible be guarded from them as from the
contamination of moral guilt. He must therefore trust himself to his
teacher, and do what he is told to do in the precise way in which
he is told. His teacher must stand in front of him and give such
directions as these: "Look at me," "See what I am doing," "Watch my
hand," "Do the thing this way," "Do the thing that way," "Listen to
what I say," "Repeat it after me," "Repeat it all together," "Say it
three times." And the child, growing more and more comatose, must
obey these directions and ask no questions; and when he has done what
he has been told to do, he must sit still and wait for the next
instalment of instruction.
What is all this doing for the child? The teacher seldom asks himself
this question. If he did, he would answer it by saying that the end
of education is to enable the child to produce certain outward and
visible results,--to do by himself what he has often done, either in
imitation of his teacher, or in obedience to his repeated directions;
to say by himself what he has said many times in chorus with his
class-mates; to disgorge some fragments of the information with which
he has been crammed; and so forth. What may be the value of these
outward results, what they indicate, what amount or kind of mental
(or other) growth may be behind them,--are questions which the
teacher cannot afford to consider, even if he felt inclined to
ask them. His business is to drill the child into the mechanical
production of quasi-material results; and his success in doing this
will be gauged in due course by an "examination,"--a periodic test
which is designed to measure, not the degree of growth which the
child has made, but the industry of the teacher as indicated by the
receptivity of his class.
The truth is that inward and spiritual growth, even if it were
thought desirable to produce it and measure it, could not possibly be
measured. The real "results" of education are in the child's heart
and mind and soul, beyond the reach of any measuring tape or weighing
machine. It follows that if the work of the teacher is to be tested,
an external test must be applied. This means that external results,
results which can be weighed and measured, must be aimed at by both
teacher and child, and that the value of these as symbols of what is
inward and intrinsic must be wholly ignored. Not that the inward
results of education would in any case be seriously considered. When
education is based on the passivity of the child, nothing matters to
him or to his teacher except the accuracy with which he can reproduce
what he has been taught,--can repeat what he has been told, or do by
himself what he has been told how to do. What connection there may be
between these achievements and his mental state matters so little
that the bare idea of there being such a connection is, as a rule,
entirely lost sight of. The externalisation of religion in the West,
as evidenced by its ceremonialism and its casuistry, has faithfully
mirrored itself in the externality of Western education. The
examination system (which I will presently consider) keeps education
in the grooves of externality, and drives those grooves so deep as
to make escape from them impossible. Yet it does but give formal
recognition to, and in so doing crown and complete--as the keystone
crowns and completes the arch--the whole system of education in the
West. It is because what is outward and visible counts for everything
in the West, first in the life of the adult and then in the life of
the child, that the idea of weighing and measuring the results of
education--with its implicit assumption that the real results of
education are ponderable and measurable (a deadly fallacy which now
has the force and authority of an axiom)--has come to establish
itself in every Western land.
* * * * *
The tendency of the Western teacher to mistake the externals for the
essentials of education, and to measure educational progress in terms
of the "appearance of things," gives rise to many misconceptions,
one of the principal of which is the current confusion between
information and knowledge. To generate knowledge in his pupils is
a legitimate end of the teacher's ambition. In schools and other
"academies" it tends to become the chief, if not the sole, end; and,
things being what they are, the teacher may be pardoned for regarding
it as such. But what is knowledge? The vulgar confusion between
knowledge and information is the accepted answer to this question.
But the answer is usually given before the question has been
seriously considered. One who allowed himself to reflect on it,
however briefly or cursorily, would quickly realise that it is
possible to have intimate and effective knowledge of a subject
without being able to impart any information about it. Successful
action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs
have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of
such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to
lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a
retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly,
without possessing any real knowledge of the subject in question.
The truth is that knowledge, which may perhaps be provisionally
defined as a correct attitude towards one's environment, has almost
as wide a range as that of human nature itself. At one end of the
scale we have the quasi-animal instinct which governs successful
physical action. At the other end we have the knowledge, of which,
and of the possession of which, its possessor is clearly, conscious.
Between these extremes there is an almost infinite series of strata,
ranging through every conceivable degree of subconsciousness. The
knowledge that is real and effective is absorbed into one or more of
the subconscious strata, from which it gradually ascends, under the
influence of attention and reflection, towards the more conscious
levels, gaining, as it ascends, in scope and outlook what it may
possibly lose in subtlety and nearness to action. When knowledge,
after passing upwards through many subconscious strata, rises to
what I may call the surface-level of consciousness, it is ready, on
occasion, to give itself off as information. This exhalation from the
surface of consciousness is genuine information, not to be confounded
with knowledge, to which it is related as the outward to the inward
state, still less to be confounded with that spurious information
which floats, as we shall presently see, like a film on the surface
of the mind, meaning nothing and indicating nothing except that it
has been artificially deposited, and that in due season it will be
skimmed off, if the teacher's hopes are fulfilled, for the
delectation of an examiner.
There are, of course, many cases in which the conscious acquisition
of information is a necessary stage in the acquisition of knowledge.
But in all such cases, if the information acquired is to have
any educative value, it must be allowed to sink down into the
subconscious strata, whence, after having been absorbed and
assimilated and so converted into knowledge, it will perhaps reascend
towards the surface of the mind, just as the leaves which fall in
autumn are dragged down into the soil below, converted into fertile
mould, and then gradually lifted towards the surface; or as the fresh
water that the rivers pour into the sea has to be slowly absorbed
into the whole mass of salt water before it (or its equivalent) can
return to the land as rain. When information which has been received
and assimilated rises to the surface of the mind, it will be ready,
when required to do so, to reappear as information, and perhaps
to return in that form to the source from which it came. But the
information which is given off will differ profoundly from that which
has been received, for between the two will have intervened many
stages of silent absorption and silent growth.
It may be necessary, then, in the course of education, both to supply
and to demand information. But the information which is supplied must
be regarded as the raw material of knowledge, into which it is to be
converted by a subtle and secret process. And the information which
is demanded must be regarded as an exhalation (so to speak) from the
surface of a mind which has been saturated with study and experience,
and therefore as a proof of the possession of knowledge. To assume
that knowledge and information are interchangeable terms, that to
impart information is therefore to generate knowledge, that to give
back information is therefore to give proof of the possession of
knowledge,--is one of the greatest mistakes that a teacher can make.
But the mistake is almost universally made. Information being related
to knowledge, as what is outward to what is inward, it is but natural
that education in the West, which on principle concerns itself with
what is outward, and ignores what is inward, should have always
regarded, and should still regard, the supplying of information as
the main function of the teacher, and the ability of the child to
retail the information which has been supplied to him as a convincing
proof that the work of the teacher has been successfully done. In
nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten, in nine lessons out
of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin films of information on
the surface of the child's mind, and then, after a brief interval,
in skimming these off in order to satisfy himself that they had been
duly laid. He cannot afford to do otherwise. If the child, like the
man, is to be "saved" by passive obedience, his teacher must keep
his every action and operation under close and constant supervision.
Were the information which is supplied to him allowed to descend into
the subconscious strata of his being, there to be dealt with by the
secret, subtle, assimilative processes of his nature, it would
escape from the teacher's supervision and therefore from his control.
In other words, the teacher would have abdicated his function. He
must therefore take great pains to keep the processes by which the
child acquires knowledge (or what passes for such) as near to the
surface of his mind as possible; in rivalry of the nurse who should
take so much interest in the well-being of her charges that she would
not allow them to digest the food which she had given them, but would
insist on their disgorging it at intervals, in order that she might
satisfy herself that it had been duly given and received. It is no
doubt right that the teacher should take steps to test the industry
of his pupils; but the information which the child has always to keep
at the call of his memory, in order that he may give it back on
demand in the form in which he has received it, is the equivalent
of food which its recipient has not been allowed to digest.
The confusion between information and knowledge lies at the heart of
the religion, as well as of the education, of the West. In this, as
in other matters, the training of the child by his teacher has been
modelled on the supposed training of Man by God. It is scarcely an
exaggeration to say that the whole scheme of salvation by mechanical
obedience is pivoted on the assumed identity of information and
knowledge. In both the schools which Man has attended three things
have always been taken for granted. The first is that salvation
depends upon right knowledge of God. The second, that right knowledge
of God and correct information about God are interchangeable phrases.
The third, that correct information about God is procurable by, and
communicable to, Man. From these premises it has been inferred that
if Man can be duly supplied with correct information about God, and
can be induced to receive and retain it, he will be able to "save
his soul alive." The difference between the two schools is, that in
the Legal School the information supplied to Man has been largely
concerned with the _Will_ of God, so far as it bears on the life
of Man, and has therefore taken the form of a Code of formulated
commandments; whereas in the Ecclesiastical School it has mainly been
concerned with the _Being_ of God, as interpreted from his doings and
especially from his dealings with Man, and has therefore taken the
form of catechisms and creeds. And there is, of course, the further
difference that in the Legal School Man's acceptance of what he is
taught has taken the _practical_ form of doing what he is told to do,
detail by detail; whereas in the Ecclesiastical School it has been
mainly _oral_ (though also partly ceremonial), the business of the
disciple being to commit to memory the creed or catechism which has
been placed in his hands, and recite it, formula by formula, with
flawless accuracy. But the difference between the two schools is
wholly superficial, being, in fact, analogous to that between the
conventional teaching of Drawing, in which the pupil finds salvation
in doing what he is told to do, line by line, and stroke by stroke,
and the conventional teaching of History and Geography, in which the
pupil finds salvation in saying what he is told to say, name by name,
and date by date. The relation between the two great branches of
education, the education of Man by God, and the education of the
child by the man, is one, not of analogy merely, but also of cause
and effect. It is because the Jew thought to "save his soul alive" by
obeying, blindly and unintelligently, a multitude of vexatious rules,
that the teacher of to-day thinks to educate his pupils in Drawing by
telling them in the fullest detail (either in his own person or by
means of a diagram) what lines and strokes they are to make. And it
is because the Christian has thought to "save his soul alive" by
reciting with parrot-like accuracy the formulæ of his creeds and
catechisms, that the teacher of to-day thinks to educate his pupils
in History and Geography by making them repeat from memory a series
of definitions, dates, events, names of persons, names of places,
articles of commerce, and the like. I do not say that the modern
teacher consciously imitates his models; but I say that he and they
have been inspired by the same conception of life, and that the
influence of that conception has been, in part at least, transmitted
by them to him.
* * * * *
That education in the West should ultimately be controlled by a
system of formal examination, may be said to have been predestined by
the general trend of religious thought and belief. Wherever literal
obedience is regarded as the first, if not the last, condition of
salvation, the tendency to measure worth and progress by the outward
results that are produced will inevitably spring up and assert
itself. In this tendency we have the whole examination system in
embryo. When Israel, with characteristic thoroughness, had embodied
in Pharisaism the logical inferences from his religious conceptions,
a merciless examination system came into being, in which every
one was at once examiner and examinee, and in which the whole of
human life was dragged out (as far as that was possible) into the
fierce light of public criticism, and placed under vigilant and
unintermittent supervision. When Pharisaism was revived, with many
modifications but with no essential change of character, under the
name of Puritanism, the tendency to arraign human life at the bar of
public opinion reasserted itself, and gave rise, as in New England
and covenanting Scotland, to an intolerable spiritual tyranny. In
Catholic countries the believer is subjected in the Confessional to a
periodical oral examination, in which he passes in review the outward
aspect of his inward and spiritual life, detailing for the benefit of
his confessor his sins of ceremonial omission or laxity, and such
lapses from moral rectitude as admit of being formulated in words and
accurately valued in terms of expiatory penance. Even in the Anglican
Church, which has too great a regard for the Englishman's traditional
love of personal freedom to be unduly inquisitorial, the clergyman is
apt to measure the spiritual health and progress of his parishioners
by the frequency with which they attend church and "Celebration,"
while the Bishop measures the spiritual health and progress of each
parish by the number of its communicants and the frequency with which
they communicate, statistics under both heads being (I am told)
regularly forwarded to him from all parts of his diocese.
It was inevitable, then, the relation between that sooner or later
the education of the young should come under the control of a
system of formal religion and education being what it was and is,
examination, and that it should be as much easier to apply the system
to education than to religion as it is easier to test knowledge (in
the conventional sense of the word) than conduct. It is to the vulgar
confusion between knowledge and information that we owe the formal
examination, as it is now conducted in most Western countries. In a
society which mistakes the externals for the essentials of life, it
is but natural that the teacher, with the full consent of the parents
of his pupils, should regard the imparting of knowledge as the end
and aim of his professional life, and that the parents should demand
some guarantee that knowledge has been successfully imparted to their
children. If by knowledge were meant a correct attitude of mind, the
teacher would realise that the idea of testing it in any way which
would satisfy the average parent was chimerical; and his clients, if
they continued to ask for a guarantee of successful teaching, would
require something widely different from that which has hitherto
contented them. But when information is regarded as the equivalent of
knowledge, the testing of the teacher's work becomes a simple matter,
for it is quite easy to frame an examination which will ascertain,
with some approach to accuracy, the amount of information that is
floating on the surface of the child's mind; and it is also easy to
tabulate the results of such an examination,--to find a numerical
equivalent for the work done by each examinee, and then arrange the
whole class in what is known as the "order of merit," and accepted
as such, without a moment's misgiving, by all concerned.
Unfortunately, however, it is equally easy to prepare children for an
examination of this, the normal type. As children have receptive
memories, it is easy for the teacher to lay films of information
on the surface of their minds. As they have capacious and fairly
retentive memories, it is easy for the teacher, especially if he is a
strict disciplinarian, to make his pupils retain the greater part of
what they have been taught. To skim off and give back to the teacher
(or examiner) portions of the floating films of information, is a
knack which comes with practice, and which the average child easily
acquires. The teacher will, of course, demand that his school shall
be examined on a clearly-defined syllabus; and the examiner, in his
own interest, will gladly comply with this demand. The examiner will
go further than this. If he happens to be employed by the State or by
a Local Authority, and has, therefore, many schools of the same type
to examine, he will, in order to save himself unnecessary trouble,
prescribe the syllabus on which all the schools in his area are to
be examined. This means that he will dictate to the teacher what
subjects he is to teach, how much ground he is to cover in each year
(or term), in what general order he is to treat each subject, and on
what general principles he is to teach it. Intentionally he will do
all this. Unintentionally he will do far more than this. As he wishes
his examination to be a test and not a mere formality, as he wishes
to sift the examinees and not to set the seal of approval on all of
them indiscriminately, he will take care that some at least of his
questions are different from what the teacher might expect them to
be. Also, as he is himself a rational being, he will probably
endeavour to test intelligence as well as memory; and, with this end
in view, he will set questions, the precise nature of which it will
be difficult for the teacher to forecast. But the teacher will make a
practice of studying the questions set in the periodical examinations
and of preparing his pupils accordingly, equipping them (if he is an
expert at his work) with a stock of superficial intelligence as well
as of information, and putting them up to whatever knacks, tricks,
and dodges will enable them to show to advantage on the examination
day. In his desire to outwit the teacher, the examiner will turn and
double like a hare who is pursued by a greyhound. But the teacher
will turn and double with equal agility, and will never allow himself
to be outdistanced by his quarry.
The more successful the teacher is in keeping up with the examiner,
the more fatal will his success be to his pupils and to himself.
In the ardour of the chase he is being lured on into a region of
treacherous quicksands; and the longer he is able to maintain the
pursuit, the more certain is it that he will lose himself at last
in depths and mazes of misconception and delusion. It is only by
stripping himself of his own freedom and responsibility that the
teacher is able to keep pace with the examiner, and each turn
or double that he makes involves a fresh surrender of those
prerogatives. In consenting to work on a prescribed syllabus he has
given up the idea of planning out his work for himself. In attempting
to adapt his teaching to the questions set by the examiner, he is
allowing the latter to dictate to him, in the minutest detail, how
each subject is to be taught. In other words, in order to achieve the
semblance of success, he is delivering himself, mind and soul, into
the hands of the examiner, and compelling the latter, perhaps against
his will, to become a Providence to him and to order all his goings.
This means that his distrust of himself is as complete as his
distrust of the child, and that his faith in the efficacy of
mechanical obedience has led him to seek salvation for himself,
as well as for his pupils, by following that fatal path.
It is in this way that a formal examination reacts upon and
intensifies the sinister tendencies of which it is at once a product
and a symptom. The examination system is, as I have said, the
keystone of the arch of Western education, crowning and completing
the whole structure, and at the same time holding it together, and
preventing it from falling, as it deserves to fall, into a ruinous
heap. Education, as it is now interpreted and practised in the West,
could not continue to exist without the support of the examination
system; but the price that it pays, and will continue to pay, for
this deadly preservative, is the progressive aggravation of all its
own inherent defects. The plight of an organism is indeed desperate
when the very poison which it ought, if healthy, to eliminate from
its system, has become indispensable to the prolongation of its life.
It is notorious that the application of the examination principle to
religion--the attempt to estimate spiritual health and growth in
terms of outward action--generates hypocrisy, or the pretence of
being more virtuous (and more religious) than one really is. When
applied to the education of the young, the same principle generates
hypocrisy of another kind,--the pretence of being cleverer than one
really is, of knowing more than one really knows. So long as the
hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But
when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between
outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete.
In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole
atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit
the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is
aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in
his fraud. The child who is being crammed for an examination, and who
is being practised at the various tricks and dodges that will, it
is hoped, enable him to throw dust in the examiner's eyes, may not
consciously realise that he and his teacher are trying to perpetrate
a fraud, but will probably have an instinctive feeling that he is
being led into crooked ways. If he has not that feeling, if the
crooked ways seem straight in his eyes, we may know that his sense
of reality is being poisoned by the vitiated atmosphere which he
has been compelled to breathe. Nor, if that is his case, will
he lack companionship in his delusion. In the atmosphere of the
examination system, deceit and hypocrisy are ever changing into
self-deception; and all who become acclimatised to the influence of
the system--pupils, teachers, examiners, parents, employers of
labour, ministers of religion, members of Parliament, and the
rest--fall victims, sooner or later, to the poison that infects
it, and are well content to cheat themselves with outward and
visible results, accepting "class-lists" and "orders of merit" as of
quasi-divine authority, mistaking official regulations for laws of
Nature, and the clumsy movements of over-elaborated yet ill-contrived
machinery for the subtle processes of life.
Of the many evils inherent in Western education, which the
examination system tends to intensify, one of the greatest is that of
starving the child's activities, of making him helpless, apathetic,
and inert. Original sin finds its equivalent, in the sphere of mental
action, in original impotence and stupidity. It is not in the child
to direct his steps, and the teacher must therefore direct them for
him, and, if necessary, support him with both hands while he makes
them. Even if the outward results which are the goal of the teacher's
ambition were to be produced for his own satisfaction only, he would
take care to leave as little as possible to the child's independent
effort. But when the results in question have to satisfy an examiner,
and when, as may well happen, the teacher's own professional welfare
depends on the examiner's verdict, it is but natural that he should
hold himself responsible for every stroke and dot that his pupil
makes. When the education given in a school is dominated by a
periodical examination on a prescribed syllabus, suppression of
the child's natural activities becomes the central feature of the
teacher's programme. In such a school the child is not allowed to do
anything which the teacher can possibly do for him. He has to think
what his teacher tells him to think, to feel what his teacher tells
him to feel, to see what his teacher tells him to see, to say what
his teacher tells him to say, to do what his teacher tells him to do.
And the directions given to him are always minute. Not the smallest
room for free action is allowed him if his teacher can possibly help
it. Indeed, it is the function of the skilful teacher to search for
such possible nooks and crannies, and fill them up. It is true that
if an examination is to be passed with credit some thinking has to be
done. But the greater part of this thinking must be done by the
teacher, the _rôle_ of the pupil, even when he is an adult student,
being essentially passive and receptive. The pupil must indeed be
actively passive and industriously receptive; but for the rest, he
must as far as possible leave himself in the teacher's hands. How
to outwit the examiner is the one aim of both the teacher and the
examinee; and as the teacher is presumably older, wiser, and far
more skilful at the examination game than his pupil, the duty of
thinking--of planning, of contriving, and even (in the deeper sense
of the word) of studying--necessarily devolves on the former; and the
latter, instead of relying upon himself and learning to use his own
wits and resources, becomes more and more helpless and resourceless,
and gradually ceases to take any interest in the work that he is
doing, for its own sake, his chief, if not his sole, concern being
to outwit the examiner and pass a successful examination. (One
frequently meets with clever University students who, having read a
certain book for a certain examination and had no question set from
it, regard the time given to the study of it as wasted, and have
no compunction about expressing this opinion!) If these are evils
incidental--I might almost say essential--to the examination of adult
scholars, it stands to reason that they will be greatly aggravated
when the examinees are young children. For the younger the child, the
more ignorant and helpless he is (however full he may be of latent
capacity and spontaneous activity), and therefore the more ready he
is to lean upon his teacher and to look to him for instruction and
direction.
The desire to outwit, and so win approval from, an examiner, is not
the only reason why the teacher so often reduces to an absurdity the
traditional distrust of the child. His own inability to educate the
child on other lines is another and not less potent reason. The
examination _régime_ to which he has been subjected himself, partly,
perhaps, under compulsion, but also and in larger measure of his
own choice, deprives him, as we have already seen, of much of his
freedom, initiative, and responsibility; and that being so, it is
inevitable that within the limited range of free action which is left
to him, he in his turn should devote his energies to depriving his
pupils of the same vital qualities, and to making them the helpless
creatures of habit and routine which he himself is tending to become.
To give free play to a child's natural faculties and so lead him
into the path of self-development and self-education, demands a high
degree of intelligence on the part of the teacher, combined with the
constant exercise of thought and initiative within a wide range of
free action. If you tell a teacher in precise detail, whether
directly or indirectly, that he is to do this thing, and that
thing, and the next thing, he will not be able to carry out your
instructions, except by telling his pupils, again in precise detail,
that they are to do this thing, and that thing, and the next thing.
He cannot help himself. He has no choice in the matter. He is the
victim of a quasi-physical compulsion. The pressure which is put upon
him will inevitably be transmitted by him and through him to his
pupils, and will inevitably be multiplied (the relations between
teacher and pupil being what they are) in the course of transmission.
There is nothing that a healthy child hates so much as to have the
use of his natural faculties and the play of his natural energies
unduly restricted by parental or pedagogic control. We may therefore
take for granted that the child will find himself ill at ease in a
school in which every vital activity is rigidly repressed, and in
which he spends most of his time in sitting still and waiting for
orders. Nor will it add to his happiness to live habitually in an
atmosphere of constraint, of austerity, of suspicion, of gloom. But I
need not take pains to prove that education, as it is conducted in
Western countries, is profoundly repugnant to the natural instincts
of the healthy child. For that is precisely what it is intended to
be. The idea of a child enjoying his "lessons" is foreign to the
genius of the West. Dominated as he is by the inherited conviction
that Man's nature is corrupt and that his instincts are evil, the
Western teacher has set himself the task of doing violence to the
child's instinctive tendencies, of thwarting his inborn desires, of
working against the grain of his nature. He has expected the child to
rebel against this _régime_, and he has welcomed his rebellion as a
proof of the corruption of Man's nature, and therefore of the
soundness of the traditional philosophy of education.
But if education is hateful to the child, how is he to be induced to
submit to being educated? Some co-operation on his part will be
necessary. How is it to be secured? By precisely the same methods as
those by which Man, in the course of his education, has been induced
to co-operate with God. The child, like Man, is to be "saved"--to be
rescued from Nature and from himself--by being led into the path of
mechanical obedience. The child, like Man, is to be kept in that path
by a system of external rewards and punishments. If he will not do
what he is told to do, he will be punished by his teacher. If he
will do what he is told to do, he will escape punishment, and he may
possibly, when his merits have accumulated sufficiently, receive a
reward. In the education of Man by the God of Israel the balance
between rewards and punishments has been kept fairly even. Hell has
been balanced by Heaven, calamity by prosperity, death by life. It
has been far otherwise with the child. His punishments have been
many, and his rewards few. At the present day men are more humane
than they used to be; and corporal punishment, though still resorted
to, counts for less than it used to do in the training of the child.
But punishments of various kinds are still regarded as indispensable
adjuncts to school discipline; and it is still taken for granted in
far too many schools that the fear of punishment and the hope of
reward are the only effective motives to educational effort.
It is difficult to say which of the two motives is the more likely to
demoralise the child. A _régime_ of punishment is not necessarily a
_régime_ of cruelty; but punishment can scarcely fail to savour of
severity, and when the doctrine of original sin is in the ascendant,
and the inborn wilfulness and stubbornness of the child are
postulated by his teachers, the indefinable boundary line between
severity and cruelty is easily crossed. Of the tendency of cruelty
to demoralise its victims I have already spoken. But the effect of
punishment on the child must be considered in its relation to his
mental, as well as to his moral, development. Scholarships, prizes,
high places in class, and other such rewards are for the few, not for
the many. If the many are to be roused to exertion, the fear of
punishment (in the hypothetical absence of any other motive) must
be ever before them. What will happen to them when that motive is
withdrawn, as it will be when the child becomes the adolescent? His
education has been distasteful to the child, partly because his
teachers have assumed from the outset that it would be and must be
so, but chiefly because in their ignorance they have taken pains to
make it so, his school life having been so ordered as to combine the
maximum of strain with the maximum of _ennui_. His teachers have done
everything for him, except those mechanical and monotonous exercises
which they felt they might trust him to do by himself. Some of
his mental faculties have become stunted and atrophied through lack
of exercise. Others have been allowed to wither in the bud. If he
happens to belong to the "masses," he will have completed his school
education at the age of thirteen or fourteen. What will he do with
himself when there is no longer a teacher at his elbow to tell him
what to do and how to do it, and to stand over him (should this be
necessary) while he does it? Why should he go on with studies which
he has neither the inclination nor the ability to pursue, and
which, in point of fact, he has never really begun? And why should he
continue to exert himself when, owing to his being at last beyond the
reach of punishment, the need for him to do so--the only need which
he has been accustomed to regard as imperative--has ceased to exist?
The objections to the hope of reward as a motive to educational
effort are of another kind. Prizes, as I have said, are for the few;
and it is the consciousness of being one of the elect which invests
the winning of a prize with its chief attraction. The prize system
makes a direct appeal to the vanity and egoism of the child. It
encourages him to think himself better than others, to pride himself
on having surpassed his class-mates and shone at their expense. The
clever child is to work hard, not because knowledge is worth winning
for its own sake and for his own sake, but because it will be
pleasant for him to feel that he has succeeded where others have
failed. It is a just reproach against the examination system that
while, by its demand for outward results it does its best to destroy
individuality, the essence of which is sincerity of expression, it
also does its best to foster individualism, by appealing, with its
offer of prizes and other "distinctions," to those instincts which
predispose each one of us to affirm and exalt that narrow,
commonplace, superficial aspect of his being which he miscalls his
_self_.
Thus the hope of reward tends to demoralise the clever child by
making an appeal to basely selfish motives. At the same time it is
probably deluding him with the belief that he has more capacity than
he really has. If the examination system is, as I have suggested, the
keystone of the arch of Western education, it is by means of the
prize system that the keystone has been firmly cemented into its
place. An examination which had no rewards or distinctions to offer
to the competitors would not be an effective stimulus to exertion.
That being so, our educationalists have taken care that to every
examination some external reward or rewards shall be attached. Even
if there are no material prizes to appeal to the child's cupidity,
there is always the class-list, with its so-called "order of merit,"
to appeal to his vanity. Our educationalists have also taken care
that during the periods of childhood, adolescence, and even early
maturity, every prize that is offered for competition shall be
awarded after a formal examination and on the consideration of its
tabulated results. The appointments in the Home, Colonial, and Indian
Civil Services, the promotions in the Army and Navy, the fellowships
and scholarships at the Universities, the scholarships at the Public
Schools, the medals, books, and other prizes that are offered to
school-children, are all awarded to those who have distinguished
themselves in the corresponding examinations, no other qualification
than that of ability to shine in an examination being looked for in
the competitors. There are, no doubt, exceptions to these general
statements, but they are so few that they scarcely count. We have
seen that the ascendency of the examination system in our schools and
colleges is largely due to the vulgar confusion between information
and knowledge; and we have also seen that the examination system
reacts upon that fatal confusion and tends to strengthen and
perpetuate it. If, then, the effect of the prize system is to
consolidate the authority of the formal examination and intensify
its influence, we shall not go far wrong in assuming that in the
various competitions for prizes the confusion between information
and knowledge will play a vital part. And, in point of fact, the
cleverness which enables the child--I ignore for the moment the
adolescent and the adult student--to win prizes of various kinds is
found, when carefully analysed, to resolve itself, in nine cases out
of ten, into the ability to receive, retain, and retail information.
As this particular, ability is but a small part of that mental
capacity which education is supposed to train, it is clear that the
clever child who gets to the top of his class, and wins prizes in so
doing, may easily be led to over-estimate his powers, and to take
himself far more seriously than it is either right or wise of him to
do. His over-confidence may for a time prove an effective stimulus to
exertion; but the exertion will probably be misdirected; and later
on, when he finds himself confronted by the complex realities of
life, and when problems have to be solved which demand the exercise
of other faculties than that of memory, his belief in himself, which
is the outcome of a false criterion of merit, may induce him to
undertake what he cannot accomplish, and may lead at last--owing to
his having lost touch with the actualities of things--to his complete
undoing.
And as under the prize system the child who is high in his class is
apt to over-estimate his ability, so the child who is low in his
class is apt to accept the verdict of the class-list as final, and to
regard himself as a failure because he lacks the superficial ability
which enables a child to shine on the examination day. Again and
again it happens that the dunce of his class goes to the front in the
battle of life. But numerous and significant as these cases are, they
are unfortunately exceptions to a general rule. For one dunce who
emerges from the depths of "apparent failure," there are ten who go
under after a more or less protracted struggle, and sink contentedly
to the bottom. The explanation of this is that though every child
has capacity (apart, of course, from the congenital idiot and the
mentally "defective"), there are many kinds of capacity which a
formal examination fails to discover, and which the education that
is dominated by the prize system fails to develop. The child whose
particular kind of capacity does not count, either in the ordinary
school lesson or on the examination day, is not aware that he is
capable; and as he is always low on the class-list, and is therefore
regarded by his teachers as dull and stupid, he not unnaturally
acquiesces in the current and apparently authoritative estimate, of
his powers, and, losing heart about himself, ends by becoming the
failure which he has been taught to believe himself to be. In brief,
while the prize system breeds ungrounded and therefore dangerous
self-esteem in the child whom it labels as bright, it breeds
ungrounded but not the less fatal self-distrust in the child whom
it labels as dull.
We have seen that there comes a time in the life of every man when
the fear of punishment ceases to act as a stimulus to educational
exertion. It is the same with the hope of reward. Examinations, and
the prizes which reward success in examinations, are for the young.
What will happen to the prize-winner when there are no more prizes
for him to compete for? Will he continue to pursue knowledge for its
own sake? Alas! he has never pursued it for its own sake. He has
pursued it for the sake of the prizes and other honours which it
brought him. When he has won his last prize the chances are that
he will lose all interest in that branch of learning in which he
achieved distinction, unless, indeed, he has to earn his livelihood
by teaching it. Of the scores of young men who distinguish themselves
in "Classics" at Oxford and Cambridge, how many will continue to
study the classical writers when they have gained the "Firsts" for
which they worked so diligently? Apart from those who are going
to teach Classics in the Public Schools or Universities, a mere
handful,--one in ten perhaps, though that is probably an extravagant
estimate. And yet the poets, philosophers, and historians whom they
have studied are amongst the greatest that the world has produced.
What is it, then, that kills, in nine cases out of ten, the
classical student's interest in the masterpieces of antiquity? The
obvious fact that he was never interested in them for their own
sakes--that he studied them, not in order to enjoy them or profit by
them, but in order to pass an examination in them, of which he might
be able to say in after years:
"I am named and known by that hour's feat,
There took my station and degree."
How many Wranglers, other than those who have or will become
schoolmasters or college tutors, continue to study mathematics? How
many of the First Classmen in Science, History, Law, and other Honour
"Schools" continue to study their respective subjects? In every case
an utterly insignificant minority.
But if the prize system does this to the young man of twenty-two or
twenty-three, if it kills his interest in learning, if it makes him
register an inward vow never again to open the books which he has
crammed so successfully for his examinations, what may it be expected
to do to the child whose school education comes to an end when he
is only thirteen or fourteen years old? When, with the fear of
punishment, the complementary hope of reward is withdrawn from him,
is it reasonable to expect him to continue his education, to continue
to apply himself to subjects with which his acquaintance has been
entirely formal and superficial, and which he has never been allowed
to digest and assimilate? The utter indifference of the average
ex-elementary scholar to literature, to history, to geography, to
science, to music, to art, is the world-wide answer to this question.
For what is, above all, hateful in any scheme of rewards and
punishments, when applied to the school life of the young, is that it
wholly externalises what is really an inward and spiritual process,
the evolution of the youthful mind. Just as in the sphere of religion
it is postulated as a self-evident truth that righteousness is not
its own reward, nor iniquity its own punishment,--so in the sphere of
education it is postulated as a self-evident truth, that knowledge is
not its own reward, nor ignorance its own punishment. And just as in
the sphere of religion the appeal to Man's selfish hopes and ignoble
fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning and
purpose of righteousness, which has caused his moral and spiritual
energies to be diverted into irreligious or anti-religious channels,
to the detriment of his inward and spiritual growth,--so in the
sphere of education the appeal to the child's selfish desires and
ignoble fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning
and purpose of knowledge, which has caused his mental energies to be
diverted into uneducational channels, to the detriment of his mental
growth. In each case the scheme of rewards and punishments, acting
like an immense blister, when applied to a healthy body, draws to the
surface the life-blood which ought to nourish and purify the vital
organs of the soul (or mind), thereby impoverishing the vital
organs, and inflaming and disfiguring the surface. For if the surface
life, with its outward and visible "results," is to be happy and
productive, the health of the vital organs must be carefully
maintained. This is the fundamental truth which those who control
education in the West have persistently ignored.
The system of education which I have tried to describe is a practical
embodiment of the ideas that govern the popular philosophy of the
West. One who had studied that philosophy, and who wished to
ascertain what provision it made for the education of the young,
would in the course of his inquiry construct _a priori_ the precise
system of education which is in vogue in all Western countries.
The supposed relation between God and his fallen and rebellious
offspring, Man, is obviously paralleled by the relation between the
teacher and the child; and it is therefore clear that the supposed
dealings of God with Man ought to be paralleled by the dealings of
the teacher with the child. That they are so paralleled--that
salvation by machinery has found its most exact counterpart in
education by machinery--the history of education has made abundantly
clear.
Whatever else the current system of education may do to the child,
there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,--to blight his
mental growth. What particular form or forms this blighting influence
may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of
circumstances. Experience tells us that what happens in most cases is
that Western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth
of others, stunts the growth of a third group, and distorts the
growth of a fourth.
Is it intended that education should do all this? This question is
not so paradoxical as it sounds. My primary assumption that the
function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the
eyes of those who agree with it; but Western orthodoxy, just so
far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs repudiate it
as a pestilent heresy. For if what grows is intrinsically evil,
what can growth do for it but carry it towards perdition?
What is it that grows? It is time that I should ask myself this
question. My answer to it is, in brief, that it is the whole human
being that grows, the whole nature of the child,--body, mind, heart
and soul. When I use these familiar words, I am far from wishing
to suggest that human nature is divisible into four provinces or
compartments. In every stage of its development human nature is a
living and indivisible whole. Each of the four words stands for a
typical aspect of Man's being, but one of the four may also be said
to stand for the totality of Man's being,--the word _soul_. For it
is the soul which manifests as _body_, which thinks as _mind_, which
feels and loves as _heart_, and which is what it is--though not
perhaps what it really or finally is--as _soul_.
The function of education, then, is to foster the growth of the
child's whole nature, or, in a word, of his soul. I ought, perhaps,
to apologise for my temerity in using this now discredited word. In
the West Man does not believe in the soul. How can he? He does not
believe in God either as the eternal source or as the eternal end of
his own nature. It follows that he does not and cannot believe in
the unity of his own being. He has been taught that his nature is
corrupt, evil, godless; and that the "soul," which is somehow or
other attached to his fallen nature during his "earthly pilgrimage,"
was supernaturally created at the moment of his birth. He is now
beginning to reject this conception of the soul; but he cannot yet
rise to the higher conception of it as the vital essence of his
being, as the divine germ in virtue of which his nature is no mere
aggregate of parts or faculties, but a living whole. So deeply rooted
in the Western mind is disbelief in the reality of the soul that it
is difficult to use the word, when speaking to a Western audience,
without exposing oneself to the charge of insincerity,--not to speak
of the graver charge of "bad form." A savour either of _cant_ or
_gush_ hangs about the word, and is not easily detached from it. That
being so, it must be clearly understood that I mean by the soul the
nature of Man considered in its unity and totality,--no more than
this, and no less.
In the opening paragraph of this book I said that some of my readers
would regard my fundamental assumption as a truism, others as a
challenge, and others again as a wicked heresy. Whether it shall be
regarded as a truism, a challenge, or a heresy, will depend on the
way in which it is worded. To say that the function of education is
to foster the growth of human nature, is to invite condemnation from
those who regard human nature as ruined and corrupt. To say that the
function of education is to foster the growth of the soul, is to
issue a challenge to Western civilisation, which is based on the
belief that the end of Man's being is not the growth of his soul, but
the growth of his balance at the bank of material prosperity. To say
that the function of education is to foster the growth of certain
faculties, is to insist on what no one who had given his mind to
the matter would care to deny. For even the orthodox, who regard
Man's nature in its totality as intrinsically evil, admit without
hesitation that there are faculties in Man which can be and ought
to be trained; while the "man of the world," whom we may regard as
the most typical product of Western civilisation, is clamorous in
his demand that education shall foster the growth of certain mental
faculties which will enable the child to become an efficient clerk or
workman, and so contribute to the enrichment of his employer and the
community to which he belongs.
The Western educationalist will admit, then, that the function of
education is to foster growth; and if you ask him what it is that
grows or ought to grow under education's fostering care, he will give
you a long list of faculties--mental, for the most part, but also
moral and physical--and then break off under the impression that he
has set education an adequate and a practicable task. But he has
set it an inadequate and an impracticable task. For behind all the
faculties that he enumerates dwells the living reality which he
cannot bring himself to believe in,--the soul. And because he cannot
bring himself to believe in the soul, he deprives the faculties
which he proposes to cultivate of the very qualities which make
them most worthy of cultivation,--of their interrelation, their
interdependence, their organic unity. In other words he devitalises
each of them by cutting it off from the life which is common to all
of them, and so paralyses its capacity for growing in the very act
of taking thought for its growth. He forgets that every faculty which
is worth cultivating both draws life from, and contributes life to,
the general life of the growing child. He forgets that the child
himself--"the living soul"--is growing in and through the growth of
each of his opening faculties; and that unless, when a faculty seems
to be growing, the life of the child is at once expressing itself in
and renewing itself through the process of its growth, its semblance
of growth is a pure illusion, the results that are produced being in
reality as fraudulent as artificial flowers on a living rose-bush.
But the whole question may be looked at from another point of view.
Let us assume, for argument's sake, that the function of education
is to train, or foster the growth of, certain faculties, which are
mainly though not exclusively mental, and that when those faculties
have been duly trained the teacher has done his work. What, then,
are the faculties which education is supposed to train? In my attempt
to answer this question I will confine myself to the elementary
school,--the only school which I can pretend to know well. A glance
at the time-table of an ordinary elementary school might suggest to
us that there were two chief groups of faculties to be trained--those
which perceive and those which express, those which take in and those
which give out. When such subjects as History, Geography, or Science
are being taught, the child's perceptive faculties are being trained.
When such subjects as Composition, Drawing or Singing are being
taught, the child's expressive faculties are being trained. So at
least one might be disposed to assume.
In what relation do the perceptive faculties stand to the expressive?
Is it possible to cultivate either group without regard to the other?
It must be admitted that the methods employed in the ordinary
elementary school seem to be governed by the assumption that the
perceptive and the expressive faculties are two distinct groups which
admit of being separately trained. In the ordinary Drawing lesson,
for example, the child is trying to express what he does not even
pretend to have perceived; whereas in the ordinary History or Science
lesson the process is reversed, and the child pretends to perceive
what he makes no attempt to express.
But is the assumption correct? Do the two groups of faculties admit
of being separately trained? Is it possible to devote this hour or
half-hour to the training of perception, and that to the training
of expression? Surely not. Perception and expression are not two
faculties, but one. Each is the very counterpart and correlate, each
is the very life and soul, of the other. Each, when divorced from
the other, ceases to be its own true self. When perception is real,
living, informed with personal feeling, it must needs find for
itself the outlet of expression. When expression is real, living,
informed with personal feeling, perception--the child's own
perception of things--must needs be behind it. More than that. _The
perceptive faculties_ (at any rate in childhood) _grow through the
interpretation which expression gives them, and in no other way. And
the expressive faculties grow by interpreting perception, and in no
other way_. The child who tries to draw what he sees is training his
power of observation, not less than his power of expression. As he
passes and repasses between the object of his perception and his
representation of it, there is a continuous gain both to his vision
and to his technique. The more faithfully he tries to render his
impression of the object, the more does that impression gain in truth
and strength; and in proportion as the impression becomes truer and
stronger, so does the rendering of it become more masterly and more
correct. So, again, if a man tries to set forth in writing his views
about some difficult problem--social, political, metaphysical, or
whatever it may be--the very effort that he makes to express himself
clearly and coherently will tend to bring order into the chaos and
light into the darkness of his mind, to widen his outlook on his
subject, to deepen his insight into it, to bring new aspects of it
within the reach of his conscious thought. And here, as in the case
of the child who tries to draw what he sees, there is a continuous
reciprocal action between perception and expression, in virtue of
which each in turn helps forward the evolution of the other. Even in
so abstract and impersonal a subject as mathematics, the reaction of
expression on perception is strong and salutary. The student who
wishes to master a difficult piece of bookwork should try to write
it out in his own words; in the effort to set it out concisely and
lucidly he will gradually perfect his apprehension of it. Were he to
solve a difficult problem, he would probably regard his grasp of the
solution as insecure and incomplete until he had succeeded in making
it intelligible to the mind of another. When perception is deeply
tinged with emotion, as when one sees what is beautiful, or admires
what is noble, the attempt to express it in language, action, or art,
seems to be dictated by some inner necessity of one's nature. The
meaning of this is that the perception itself imperatively demands
expression in order that, in and through the struggle of the artistic
consciousness to do full justice to it, it may gradually realise its
hidden potentialities, discover its inner meaning, and find its true
self.
Once we realise that expression is the other self of perception, it
becomes permissible for us to say that to train the perceptive
faculties--the faculties by means of which Man lays hold upon the
world that surrounds him, and draws it into himself and makes it his
own--is the highest achievement of the teacher's art. Even from the
point of view of my primary truism, this conception of the meaning
and purpose of education holds good. For according to that truism the
business of the teacher is to foster the growth of the child's soul;
and the soul grows by the use of its perceptive faculties, which, by
enabling it to take in and assimilate an ever-widening environment,
cause a gradual enlargement of its consciousness and a proportionate
expansion of its life. But the perceptive faculties in their turn
grow by expressing themselves; and unless they are allowed to express
themselves--unless the child is allowed to express himself (for
expression, if it is genuine, is always self-expression)--their
growth will be arrested, and the mission which _all_ educationalists
assign to education will not have been fulfilled.
The question is, then, Does the system of education which prevails in
all Western countries provide for self-expression on the part of the
child?
FOOTNOTES:
[5] I mean by the words "original sin" what the plain,
unsophisticated, believing Christian means by them. A modern poet,
in a moment of impulsive orthodoxy, praises Christianity because it
"taught original sin,
The corruption of man's heart ..."
This definition is sufficiently accurate. "Original sin," says the
Ninth Article of the Anglican Church, "... is the fault and
corruption of the Nature of every man ... whereby man is of his own
nature inclined to evil ... and therefore, in every person born into
the world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." How far the
popular interpretation of the doctrine of original sin coincides with
the latest theological refinement of the doctrine, I cannot pretend
to say. When it finds it convenient to explain things away, theology,
like Voltaire's Minor Prophet, "est capable de tout"; and the need
for reconciling the doctrine of original sin with the teaching of
modern science has in recent years laid a heavy tax on its
ingenuity.
CHAPTER III
A FAMILIAR TYPE OF SCHOOL[6]
In this chapter I shall have in my mind a type of school which is
familiar to all who are interested in elementary education. What
percentage of the schools of England are of that particular type
I cannot pretend to say. In the days of payment by results the
percentage was unquestionably very high. The system under which we
all worked made that inevitable. The days of payment by results are
over, but their consequences are with us still. The pioneer is abroad
in the land, but he has had, and still has, formidable difficulties
to overcome. The percentage of routine-ridden schools is considerably
lower than it used to be, and it is falling from year to year. Of
this there can be no doubt. Each teacher in turn who reads this
chapter will, I hope, be able to say that the school which is in my
mind is not his. But I can assure him that there are thousands of
schools in which all or most of the evils on which I am about to
comment are still rampant; and I will add, for his consolation, that
it would be a miracle if this were not so.
The first forty minutes of the morning session are given, in almost
every elementary school, to what is called _Religious Instruction_.
This goes on, morning after morning, and week after week. The child
who attends school regularly and punctually, as many children do,
will have been the victim of upwards of two thousand "Scripture
lessons" by the time he leaves school.
The question of religious education in elementary schools has long
been the centre of a perfect whirlpool of controversial talk. The
greater part of this talk is, to speak plainly, blatant cant. Every
candidate for a seat in the House of Commons thinks it incumbent upon
him to say something about religious education, but not one in a
hundred of them has ever been present in an elementary school while
religious instruction was being given. The Bishops of the Established
Church wax eloquent in the House of Lords over the wickedness of a
"godless education" and the virtue of "definite dogmatic teaching,"
but it may be doubted if there is a Bishop in the House who has in
recent years sat out a Scripture lesson in a Church of England
school. It would be well if all who talked publicly about religious
education could be sentenced to devote a month to the personal study
of religious instruction as it is ordinarily given in elementary
schools. At the end of the month they would be wiser and sadder men,
and in future they would probably talk less about religious education
and think more.
The Scripture lesson, as it is familiarly called, is supposed to make
the children of England religious, in the special sense which each
church or sect attaches to that word,--to make them good Catholics,
good Churchmen, good Wesleyans, good Bible Christians, good Jews. But
as those who are most in earnest about religion, and most sincere in
their religious convictions, unite in assuring us that England is
relapsing into paganism, it may be doubted if the religious education
of the elementary school child--a process which has been going on for
half a century or more--has been entirely successful. While the fact
that the English parent, who must himself have attended from 1,500
to 2,000 Scripture lessons in His schooldays, is not under any
circumstances to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own
children, shows that those who control the religious education of the
youthful "masses" have but little confidence in the effect of their
system on the religious life and faith of the English people.
They have good ground for their subconscious distrust of it. We have
seen that the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge is
at the root of much that is unsound in education. There is no branch
of education in which this confusion is so fallacious or so fatal as
in that which is called religious. The process of converting
information into knowledge is a comparatively easy one when we are
dealing with matters of detailed fact. Information as to the dates of
the kings of England, as to the bays and capes of the British Isles,
as to the exports and imports of Liverpool, as to the weights and
measures of this or that country, is in each case readily convertible
into knowledge of the given facts. But directly we get away from mere
facts, and begin to concern ourselves with what is large, vague,
subtle, and obscure,--with forces, for example, with causes, with
laws, with principles,--the difficulty of collecting adequate and
appropriate information about our subject becomes great, and the
difficulty of converting such information into knowledge becomes
greater still. Information as to the dates and names of the English
kings, and other historical facts, is easily converted into knowledge
of those facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of
English history. Information as to the names and positions of capes
and bays, as to areas and populations, and other geographical facts,
is easily converted into knowledge of those facts, but it is not
easily converted into knowledge of geography. Information as to
arithmetical rules and tables, as to weights and measures, and other
arithmetical facts, is easily converted into knowledge of those
facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of arithmetic.
In each case a _sense_ must be evolved if the information is to be
assimilated, and so converted into real knowledge; and though it is
true that the sense in question grows, in part at least, by feeding
on appropriate information, it is equally true that if, owing to
defective training, the sense remains undeveloped, the information
supplied will remain unassimilated, and the tacit assumption that the
possession of information is equivalent to the possession of real
knowledge will delude both the teacher and the taught. It is
possible, as one knows from experience, for a boy to have mastered
all the arithmetical rules and tables with which his master has
supplied him, and to have all his measures and weights at his
fingers' ends, and yet to be so destitute of the arithmetical sense
as to give without a moment's misgiving an entirely nonsensical
answer to a simple arithmetical problem,--to say, for example, as I
have known half a class of boys say, that a _room_ is _five shillings
and sixpence wide_. Such a boy, though his head may be stuffed with
arithmetical information, has no knowledge of arithmetic.
The gulf between memorised information and real knowledge becomes
deep and wide in proportion as the subject matter is one which
demands for its effective apprehension either intellectual effort or
emotional insight. When both these variables are demanded, the gulf
widens and deepens at a ratio which is "geometrical" rather than
"arithmetical"; and when a high degree of each is demanded, the
separation between knowledge and information is complete.
The Art Master who should try to train the æsthetic sense of his
pupils by making them learn by heart a string of propositions in
which he had set out the artistic merits of sundry masterpieces of
painting and sculpture, would expose himself to well-merited
ridicule. So would the teacher who should try to train the scientific
sense of his pupils by no other method than that of making them
learn scientific formulæ by heart. What shall we say, then, of the
teacher who tries to train the religious sense of his pupils by
supplying them with rations of theological and theologico-historical
information? Whatever else we may mean by the word God, we mean what
is infinitely great, and therefore beyond the reach of human thought,
and we mean what is "most high," and therefore beyond the reach of
the heart's desire. It follows that for knowledge of God the maximum
of intellectual effort is needed, in conjunction with the maximum of
emotional insight; and it follows further that the gulf between
knowledge of God and information about God is unimaginably wide and
deep,--so wide and so deep that out of our very attempts to span or
fathom it the doubt at last arises whether the idea of acquiring
information about God may not, after all, be the idlest of dreams.
Nevertheless the pastors and masters of our elementary schools are,
with few exceptions, engaged, _sanctâ simplicitate_, in trying to
make the children of England religious by cramming them with
theological and theologico-historical information,--information as to
the nature and attributes of God, as to the inner constitution of
his being, as to his relations to Man and the Universe, as to his
reported doings in the past. And in order that the giving, receiving,
and retaining of this unverifiable information may be regarded by
all concerned as the central feature of the Scripture lesson, to
the neglect of all the other aspects of religious education, the
spiritual "powers that be" (and also, I am told, some of the Local
Education Authorities) have decreed that the schools under their
jurisdiction shall be subjected to a yearly examination in
"religious knowledge" at the hands of a "Diocesan Inspector," or some
other official.
To one who has convinced himself, as I have, that a right attitude
towards the thing known is of the essence of knowledge, and that
reverence and devotion--to go no further--are of the essence of a
right attitude towards God, the idea of holding a formal examination
in religious knowledge seems scarcely less ridiculous than the idea
of holding a formal examination in unselfishness or brotherly love.
The phrase "to examine in religious knowledge" has no meaning for me.
The verb is out of all relation to its indirect object. What the
Diocesan Inspector attempts to do cannot possibly be done. The test
of religious knowledge is necessarily practical and vital, not formal
and mechanical. Even if I were to admit, for argument's sake, that
the information with which we cram the elementary school child
between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m. had been supernaturally communicated by God
to Man, my general position would remain unaffected. For experience
has amply proved that a child--or, for the matter of that, a man--may
know much theology and even be "mighty in the Scriptures," and yet
show by his conduct that his religious sense has not been awakened,
and that therefore he has no knowledge of God; just as we have seen
that a child may know by heart all arithmetical rules and tables, and
yet show, by his helplessness in the face of a simple problem, that
his arithmetical sense has not been awakened, and that therefore he
has no knowledge of arithmetic.
The time given to religious instruction is, to make a general
statement, the only part of the session in which the children are
being prepared for a formal _external_ examination. That being so, it
is no matter for wonder that many of the glaring faults of method and
organisation which the examination system fostered in our elementary
schools between the years 1862 and 1895, and which are now being
abandoned, however slowly, reluctantly, and sporadically, during the
hours of "secular" instruction, still find a refuge in the Scripture
lesson. Overgrouping of classes, overcrowding of school-rooms,
collective answering, collective repetition, scribbling on slates,
and other faults with which inspectors were only too familiar in
bygone days, are still rampant while religious instruction is being
given.[7] The Diocesan Inspector is an examiner, pure and simple, and
is never present when the Scripture lesson is in progress. Whether he
would find anything to criticise if he were present, may be doubted.
I have frequently been told by teachers that it is his demand for a
good volume of sound, when he is catechising the children, which
keeps alive during the Scripture lesson the pestilent habit of
collective answering, in defiance of the obvious fact that what is
everybody's business is nobody's business, and that an experienced
bell-wether can easily give a lead to a whole class. An inconvenient
train service may compel H.M. Inspector to be present when religious
instruction is being given; but though he may find much to deplore
in what he sees and hears, he must abstain from criticism, and be
content to play the _rôle_ of the man who looks over a hedge while a
horse is being stolen.
In most elementary schools religion is taught on an elaborate
syllabus which is imposed on the teacher by an external authority,
and which therefore tends to destroy his freedom and his interest in
the work. It is not his business to take thought for the religious
training of his pupils, to consider how the religious instinct may
best be awakened in them, how their latent knowledge of God may
best be evolved. His business is to prepare them for their yearly
examination, to cram them with catechisms, hymns, texts, and
collects, and with stories of various kinds,--stories from the
folk-lore of Israel, from the history of the Jews, from the Gospel
narratives. To appeal to the reasoning powers of his pupils would be
foreign to his aim, and foreign, let me say in passing, to the whole
tradition of religious teaching in the West. The burden of preparing
for an examination, whatever the examination may be, falls mainly on
the faculty of memory. This is a rule to which there are very few
exceptions. When the examination is one in "religious knowledge," the
burden of preparing for it falls wholly on the faculty of memory.
To appeal to the reasoning powers of the scholars might conceivably
provoke them to ask inconvenient questions, and might even give
rise to a spirit of rationalism in the school,--the spirit which
"orthodoxy" has always regarded as the very antipole to religious
faith.
But what of the child's emotional faculties? Will not the beauty of
the Gospel stories, will not the sublimity of the Old Testament
poetry, make their own appeal to these? They might do so if they were
allowed to exert their spiritual magnetism. But what chance have
they? The chilling shadow of the impending examination falls upon
them and cancels their educative influence. It is not because the
Gospel stories are full of beauty and spiritual meaning that the
child has to learn them, but because he will be questioned on them by
the Diocesan Inspector. It is not because certain passages from the
Old Testament are poetry of a high order that the child commits them
to memory, but because he may have to repeat them to the Diocesan
Inspector. We cannot serve God and Mammon,--the God of poetry and the
inward life, the Mammon of outward results. The thing is not to be
done, and the pretence of doing it is a mockery and a fraud. The
compulsory preparation of the plays of Shakespeare and other literary
masterpieces for a formal examination, too often gives the schoolboy,
or the college student, a permanent distaste for English literature.
The study of the Ancient Classics for the Oxford "Schools" or the
Cambridge "Tripos" too often gives the studious undergraduate a
permanent distaste for the literatures of Greece and Rome. Does it
not follow _a fortiori_ that to cram a young child, for the purposes
of a formal examination, to cram him, year after year, with the
idyllic stories of the New Testament and the poetic beauties of the
Old, will in all probability go a long way towards blighting in the
bud the child's latent capacity for responding to the appeal, not of
the Bible alone, but of spiritual poetry as such?
I do not wish to suggest that the religious instruction given in
our elementary schools is always formal and mechanical. There are
teachers who can break through the toils of any system, however
deadly, and give life to their teaching in defiance of conditions
which would paralyse the energies of lesser men. As I write, I recall
two teachers of elementary schools, who, in spite of having to
prepare their pupils for diocesan inspection, succeeded in quickening
their religious instincts into vital activity. The first was a
schoolmaster,--a "strong Churchman," and a sincerely religious man.
The second was a woman of genius, whose extraordinary sympathy with
and insight into the soul of the child, enabled her to give free play
to all his expansive instincts, and in and through the evolution of
these to foster the growth of his religious sense. I can never feel
quite sure that this teacher fully realised how deeply, and yet
healthily, religious her children were. If she did not, I can but
apply to her what Diderot said to David the painter, when the latter
confessed that he had not intended to produce some artistic effect
which the former had discovered in one of his pictures: "Quoi! c'est
à votre insu? C'est encore mieux." To make children religious without
intending to do so is a profoundly significant achievement, for
it means that the fatal distinction between religious and secular
education has been "utterly abolished and destroyed."
Both these teachers fell, as it happened, under the ban of the
Diocesan Inspector's displeasure. The schoolmaster took over a
school which was not only inefficient in the eyes of the Education
Department, in respect of instruction and discipline, but was also
tainted in its upper classes with moral depravity. He speedily
restored it to efficiency, and reformed its moral tone. In
accomplishing these salutary changes, he relied mainly on an appeal
which he made, in all manly sincerity, to the religious sense of the
older boys. The faith in human nature which prompted him to make this
appeal was justified by the response which it evoked. In less than a
year the school was transformed beyond recognition. In less than two
years it was one of the best in its county; indeed in respect of
moral tone and religious atmosphere it was perhaps _the_ best.
Meanwhile the work of cramming the children for the yearly diocesan
examination must have fallen into arrears; for the school, which
under my friend's incompetent predecessor had always been classed as
"Excellent," sank to the level of "Good" in the year after he left,
and in the following year to the level of "Fair." Any one who has any
acquaintance with the reports of the Diocesan Inspector knows that
the summary mark "Fair," when employed by him, is equivalent to
utter damnation.
The schoolmistress always had a horror of formal teaching, and a
special horror of cramming young children for formal examinations;
and I can only wonder that her downfall was so long delayed. Sooner
or later, if she was to remain true to her own first principles, her
work was bound to incur the condemnation of the Diocesan Inspector.
Nevertheless, having read hundreds of diocesan reports, and realised
how lavish of praise and chary of blame the Diocesan Inspector
usually is, I am inclined to suspect that the comparative failure
of the children on the examination day was not the sole or even the
chief cause of the severe censure which these two schools received.
I am inclined to think that in each case the inspector recognised in
the exceptional religious vitality of a school which was deficient,
from his point of view, in religious knowledge, an implicit challenge
to his own preconceived notions, and that, without for a moment
intending to be unfair, he responded to this challenge by giving the
school a strongly adverse report. Immorality and irreligiousness
as such are comparatively venial offences in the eyes of religious
orthodoxy. What it cannot tolerate is that men should be moral and
religious in any but the "orthodox" ways.
Apart from these two exceptional cases, there are of course hundreds
and even thousands of teachers whose personal influence is a partial
antidote to the numbing poison which is being distilled but surely,
from the daily Scripture lesson. But the net result of giving formal
and mechanical instruction on the greatest of all "great matters" is
to depress the spiritual vitality of the children of England to a
point which threatens the extinction of the spiritual life of the
nation. My schoolmaster friend, who, besides being deeply religious
(in the best sense of the word), is a man of sound judgment and wide
and varied experience, has more than once assured me that religious
instruction, as given in the normal Church of England school (his
experience has been limited to schools of that type), is paganising
the people of England,--paganising them because it presents religion
to them in a form which they instinctively reject, accepting it at
first under compulsion, but turning away from it at last with
deep-seated weariness and permanent distaste.
The boy who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to
himself when he leaves school: "If this is religion, I will have no
more of it," is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to
be honoured rather than blamed for having realised at last that the
chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain
which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands.
That England is relapsing into paganism is, as we have seen, the
sincere conviction of many earnest Christians. Why this should be so,
they cannot understand. In their desire to account for so distressing
a phenomenon, they will have recourse to any explanation, however
far-fetched and fantastic, rather than acknowledge that it is the
Scripture lesson in the elementary school which is paganising the
masses. If the Churches could have their way, they would doubtless
try to mend matters by doubling the hours that are given to
religious instruction, by making the Diocesan Inspector's visit
a half-yearly instead of a yearly function, and by cramming the
children for it with redoubled energy. In their refusal to reckon
with human nature, they are true to the first principles of their
religion and their philosophy. But it is possible to buy consistency
at too high a price. The laws and tendencies of Nature are what they
are; and it is madness, not heroism, to ignore them. To those who
refuse to reckon with human nature, the day will surely come when
human nature, evolving itself under the stress of its own forces and
in obedience to its own laws, will cease to take account of them.[8]
When the hands of the clock point to a quarter to ten, the religious
education of the child is over for the day, and his secular
instruction has begun. That the religious education of the child
should be supposed to end when the Scripture lesson is over, is the
last and strongest proof of the fundamental falsity of that
conception of religion on which, as on a quicksand, his education,
religious and secular, has been based.
After Scripture comes as a rule Arithmetic. During the former lesson
the teacher, acting under compulsion, does his best, as we have seen,
to deaden the child's spiritual faculties. During the latter, he not
infrequently does his best to deaden the child's mental faculties. In
each case he is to be pitied rather than blamed. The conditions under
which he works, and has long worked, are too strong for him. If we
are to understand why secular instruction, as given in our elementary
schools, is what it is, we must go back for half a century or so and
trace the steps by which the "Education Department" forced elementary
education in England into the grooves in which, in many schools,
it is still moving, and from which even the most enlightened and
enterprising teachers find it difficult to escape.
In 1861 the Royal Commission (under the Duke of Newcastle as
Chairman), which had been appointed in 1858 in order to inquire into
"the state of popular education in England, and as to the measures
required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction
to all classes of the people," issued its report, in which it
recommended _inter alia_ that the Grants paid to elementary schools
should be expressly apportioned on the examination of individual
children. This recommendation was carried into effect in the Lowe
Revised Code of 1862; and from that date till 1895 a considerable
part of the Grant received by each school was paid on the results of
a yearly examination held by H.M. Inspector on an elaborate syllabus,
formulated by the Department and binding on all schools alike. On the
official report which followed this examination depended the
reputation and financial prosperity of the school, and the reputation
and financial prosperity of the teacher.[9] The consequent pressure
on the teacher to exert himself was well-nigh irresistible; and he
had no choice but to transmit that pressure to his subordinates and
his pupils. The result was that in those days the average school was
a hive of industry.
But it was also a hive of misdirected energy. The State, in
prescribing a syllabus which was to be followed, in all the subjects
of instruction, by all the schools in the country, without regard to
local or personal considerations, was guilty of one capital offence.
It did all his thinking for the teacher. It told him in precise
detail what he was to do each year in each "Standard," how he was to
handle each subject, and how far he was to go in it; what width of
ground he was to cover; what amount of knowledge, what degree of
accuracy was required for a "pass," In other words it provided him
with his ideals, his general conceptions, his more immediate aims,
his schemes of work; and if it did not control his methods in all
their details, it gave him (by implication) hints and suggestions
with regard to these on which he was not slow to act; for it told him
that the work done in each class and each subject would be tested
at the end of each year by a careful examination of each individual
child; and it was inevitable that in his endeavour to adapt his
teaching to the type of question which his experience of the
yearly examination led him to expect, he should gradually deliver
himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the officials of the
Department,--the officials at Whitehall who framed the yearly
syllabus, and the officials in the various districts who examined
on it.
What the Department did to the teacher, it compelled him to do to the
child. The teacher who is the slave of another's will cannot carry
out his instructions except by making his pupils the slaves of
his own will. The teacher who has been deprived by his superiors
of freedom, initiative, and responsibility, cannot carry out his
instructions except by depriving his pupils of the same vital
qualities. The teacher who, in response to the deadly pressure of a
cast-iron system, has become a creature of habit and routine, cannot
carry out his instructions except by making his pupils as helpless
and as puppet-like as himself.
But it is not only because mechanical obedience is fatal, in the
long run, to mental and spiritual growth, that the regulation of
elementary or any other grade of education by a uniform syllabus is
to be deprecated. It is also because a uniform syllabus is, in the
nature of things, a bad syllabus, and because the degree of its
badness varies directly with the area of the sphere of educational
activity that comes under its control. It is easy for us of the
Twentieth Century to laugh at the syllabuses which the Department
issued, without misgiving, year after year, in the latter half of the
Nineteenth. We were all groping in the dark in those days; and our
whole attitude towards education was so fundamentally wrong that the
absurdities of the yearly syllabus were merely so much by-play in
the evolution of a drama which was a grotesque blend of tragedy and
farce. But let us of the enlightened Twentieth Century try our hands
at constructing a syllabus on which all the elementary schools of
England are to be prepared for a yearly examination, and see if
we can improve appreciably on the work of our predecessors. Some
improvement there would certainly be, but it would not amount to very
much. Were the "Board" to re-institute payment by results, and were
they, with this end in view, to entrust the drafting of schemes of
work in the various subjects to a committee of the wisest and most
experienced educationalists in England, the resultant syllabus would
be a dismal failure. For in framing their schemes these wise and
experienced educationalists would find themselves compelled to take
account of the lowest rather than of the highest level of actual
educational achievement. What is exceptional and experimental cannot
possibly find a place in a syllabus which is to bind all schools and
all teachers alike, and which must therefore be so framed that the
least capable teacher, working under the least favourable conditions,
may hope, when his pupils are examined on it, to achieve with decent
industry a decent modicum of success. Under the control of a uniform
syllabus, the schools which are now specialising and experimenting,
and so giving a lead to the rest, would have to abandon whatever was
interesting in their respective curricula, and fall into line with
the average school; while, with the consequent lowering of the
current _ideal_ of efficiency, the level of the average school would
steadily fall. A uniform syllabus is a bad syllabus, for this if for
no other reason, that it is compelled to idealise the average; and
that, inasmuch as education, so far as it is a living system, grows
by means of its "leaders," the idealisation of the average is
necessarily fatal to educational growth and therefore to educational
life.
It was preordained, then, that the syllabuses which the Department
issued, year by year, in the days of payment by results should have
few merits and many defects. Yet even if, by an unimaginable miracle,
they had all been educationally sound, the mere fact that all the
teachers in England had to work by them would have made them potent
agencies for evil. To be in bondage to a syllabus is a misfortune for
a teacher, and a misfortune for the school that he teaches. To be in
bondage to a syllabus which is binding on all schools alike, is a
graver misfortune. To be in bondage to a bad syllabus which is
binding on all schools alike, is of all misfortunes the gravest. Or
if there is a graver, it is the fate that befell the teachers of
England under the old _régime_,--the fate of being in bondage to a
syllabus which was bad both because it had to come down to the level
of the least fortunate school and the least capable teacher, and also
because it was the outcome of ignorance, inexperience, and
bureaucratic self-satisfaction.
Of the evils that are inherent in the examination system as such--of
its tendency to arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher
faculties, to externalise what is inward, to materialise what is
spiritual, to involve education in an atmosphere of unreality and
self-deception--I have already spoken at some length. In the days of
payment by results various circumstances conspired to raise those
evil tendencies to the highest imaginable "power." When inspectors
ceased to examine (in the stricter sense of the word) they realised
what infinite mischief the yearly examination had done. The children,
the majority of whom were examined in reading and dictation out of
their own reading-books (two or three in number, as the case might
be), were drilled in the contents of those books until they knew
them almost by heart. In arithmetic they worked abstract sums, in
obedience to formal rules, day after day, and month after month;
and they were put up to various tricks and dodges which would, it
was hoped, enable them to know by what precise rules the various
questions on the arithmetic cards were to be answered. They learned
a few lines of poetry by heart, and committed all the "meanings and
allusions" to memory, with the probable result--so sickening must
the process have been--that they hated poetry for the rest of their
lives. In geography, history, and grammar they were the victims of
unintelligent oral cram, which they were compelled, under pains and
penalties, to take in and retain till the examination day was over,
their ability to disgorge it on occasion being periodically tested by
the teacher. And so with the other subjects. Not a thought was given,
except in a small minority of the schools, to the real training of
the child, to the fostering of his mental (and other) growth. To get
him through the yearly examination by hook or by crook was the one
concern of the teacher. As profound distrust of the teacher was the
basis of the policy of the Department, so profound distrust of the
child was the basis of the policy of the teacher. To leave the child
to find out anything for himself, to work out anything for himself,
to think out anything for himself, would have been regarded as a
proof of incapacity, not to say insanity, on the part of the teacher,
and would have led to results which, from the "percentage" point of
view, would probably have been disastrous.
There were few inspectors who were not duly impressed from 1895
onwards by the gravity of the evils that inspection, as distinguished
from mere examination, revealed to them; but it may be doubted
if there were many inspectors who realised then, what some among
them see clearly now, that the evils which distressed them were
significant as symptoms even more than as sources of mischief,--as
symptoms of a deep-seated and insidious malady, of the gradual
ossification of the spiritual and mental muscles of both the teacher
and the child, of the gradual substitution in the elementary school
of machinery for life.
For us of the Twentieth Century who know enough about education to
be aware of the shallowness of our knowledge of it, and of the
imperfection of the existing educational systems of our country, it
may be difficult to realise that in the years when things were at
their worst, at any rate in the field of elementary education, the
Nation in general and the "Department" in particular were well
content that things should remain as they were,--well content that
the elementary school should be, not a nursery of growing seedlings
and saplings, but a decently efficient mill, and that year after year
this mill should keep on grinding out its dreary and meaningless
"results." But in truth that ignorant optimism, that cheap content
with the actual, was a sure proof that things _were_ at their
worst;--for
"When we in our viciousness grow hard,
(O misery on't) the wise gods seal our eyes
In our own filth; drop our clear judgments: make us
Adore our errors";
and the multiform discontent with education in its present stage of
development, which is characteristic of our own generation, and which
is in some ways so confusing and disconcerting, and so unfavourable
to the smooth working of our educational machinery, has the merit of
being a healthy and hopeful symptom.
But bad as things were in those days, there was at least one
redeeming feature. The children were compelled to _work_, to exert
themselves, to "put their backs into it." The need for this was
obvious. The industry of the child meant so much professional
reputation and, in the last resort, so much bread and butter to his
teacher. It is true that the child was not allowed to do anything by
or for himself; but it is equally true that he had to do pretty
strenuously whatever task was set him. He had to get up his two (or
three) "Readers" so thoroughly that he could be depended upon to pass
both the reading and the dictation test with success. He had to work
his abstract sums in arithmetic correctly. He had to take in and
remember the historical and geographical information with which he
had been crammed. And so forth. There must be no shirking, no
slacking on his part. His teachers worked hard, though "not according
to knowledge"; and he must do the same. Active, in the higher sense
of the word, he was never allowed to be; but he had to be actively
receptive, strenuously automatic, or his teacher would know the
reason why.
Such was the old _régime_. Its defects were so grave and so vital
that, now that it has become discredited (in theory, if not in
practice), we can but wonder how it endured for so long. As an
ingenious instrument for arresting the mental growth of the child,
and deadening all his higher faculties, it has never had, and I
hope will never have, a rival. Far from fostering the growth of
those great expansive instincts--sympathetic, æsthetic, and
scientific--which Nature has implanted in every child, it set itself
to extirpate them, one and all, with ruthless pertinacity. As a
partial compensation for this work of wanton destruction, it made the
child blindly obedient, mechanically industrious, and (within very
narrow limits) accurate and thorough. I have described it at some
length because I see clearly that no one who does not realise what
the elementary school used to be, in the days of its sojourn in the
Land of Bondage, can even begin to understand why it is what it is
to-day.
Having for thirty-three years deprived the teachers of almost every
vestige of freedom, the Department suddenly reversed its policy and
gave them in generous measure the boon which it had so long withheld.
Whether it was wise to give so much at so short a notice may be
doubted. What is beyond dispute is that it was unwise to expect so
great and so unexpected a gift to be used at once to full advantage.
A man who had grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to
the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad
daylight. This is what was done in 1895 to the teachers of England,
and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind
ever since. For thirty-three years they had been treated as machines,
and they were suddenly asked to act as intelligent beings. For
thirty-three years they had been practically compelled to do
everything for the child, and they were suddenly expected to give him
freedom and responsibility,--words which for many of them had
well-nigh lost their meaning. To comply with these unreasonable
demands was beyond their power. The grooves into which they had been
forced were far too deep for them. The routine to which they had
become accustomed had far too strong a hold on them. The one change
which they could make was to relax their own severe pressure on the
child. This they did, perhaps without intending to do it. Indeed,
now that there was no external examination to look forward to, the
pressure on the child may be said to have automatically relaxed
itself. What happened--I will not say in all schools, but in far too
many--was that the teaching remained as mechanical and unintelligent
as ever, that the teacher continued to distrust the child and to do
everything for him, but that the child gradually became slacker and
less industrious. Not that his teacher wished him to "slack," but
that the stimulus of the yearly examination had been withdrawn at a
time when there was nothing to take its place. Exercise is in itself
a delightful thing when it is wholesome, natural, and rational;
but when it is unwholesome, unnatural, and irrational, it will not
be taken in sufficient measure except in response to some strong
external stimulus. Under the old examination system an adequate
stimulus had been supplied by the combined influence of competition
and fear (chiefly the latter). When the examination system was
abolished, that stimulus necessarily lost its point. Had it then been
possible for the teacher to make the exercise which his pupils were
asked to take wholesome, natural, and rational, a new stimulus--that
of interest in their work--would have been applied to the pupils, and
they would have exerted themselves as they had never done before.
But it was not possible for the average teacher to execute at a
moment's notice a complete change of front, and it was unwise of the
Department to expect him to do so. Apart from an honourable minority,
who had always been in secret revolt against the despotism of the
Code, the old teachers were helpless and hopeless. The younger ones
had been through the mill themselves, first in the Elementary School,
then in the Pupil-Teacher Centre, and then in the Training College
(both the latter having been in too many cases cramming
establishments like the Elementary School); and when they went back
to work under a head teacher who was wedded to the old order of
things, they found no difficulty in falling in with his ways and
carrying out his wishes. If a young teacher, fresh from an
exceptionally enlightened Training College, became an assistant under
an old-fashioned head teacher, he soon had the "nonsense knocked out
of him," and was compelled to toe the line with the rest of the
staff.
But it was not only because the teachers of England had got
accustomed to the Land of Bondage, that they shrank from entering the
Promised Land. There was, and still is, another and a stronger
reason. Wherever the teacher looks, he sees that the examination
system, with its demand for machine-made results, controls education;
and he feels that it is only by an accident that his school has
been exempted (in part at least) from its pressure. The Board of
Education still examine for labour certificates, for admission as
uncertificated assistants, for the teacher's certificate. They expect
head teachers to hold terminal examinations of all the classes in
their schools. They allow Local Authorities to examine children in
their schools as formally and as stringently as they please, and to
hold examinations for County Scholarships, for which children from
elementary schools are eligible. Admission to secondary schools of
all grades depends on success in passing entrance examinations. So
does admission to the various Colleges and Universities. In the
schools which prepare little boys for the "Great Public Schools,"
the whole scheme of education Is dominated by the headmaster's desire
to win as many entrance scholarships as possible. In the "Great
Public Schools" the scheme of education is similarly dominated by
the headmaster's desire to win as many scholarships as possible
at the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. In the Universities all the
undergraduates without exception are reading for examinations of
various kinds,--pass "schools," honour "schools," Civil Service
examinations, and the like. Officers in the Army and Navy have never
done with examinations; and there is not a single profession which
can be entered through any door but that of a public examination.
Wherever the teacher looks he sees that examinations are held in high
honour, and that the main business of teachers of all grades is to
produce results which an outside examiner would accept as
satisfactory; and he naturally takes for granted that the production
of such results is the true function of the teacher, whether his
success in producing them is to be tested by a formal examination or
not. The air that he breathes is charged with ideas--ideas about life
in general and education in particular--which belong to the order of
things that he is supposed to have left behind him, and are fiercely
antagonistic to those as yet unrecognised ideas which give the new
order of things its meaning, its purpose, and its value.
How can we expect the teacher to look inward when all the conditions
of his existence, not as a teacher only but also as a citizen and a
man, conspire to make him look outward? But if the Fates are against
his looking inward, to what purpose has he been emancipated from the
direct control of a system which had at least the merit of being in
line with all the central tendencies of Western civilisation? How
does it profit him to be free if, under the pressure of those
tendencies, the chief use that he makes of his freedom is to grind
out from his pupils results akin to those which were asked for in the
days of schedules and percentages? Freedom was given him in order
that he might be free to take thought for the vital welfare of his
pupils. Or, if freedom was not given to him for that purpose, it were
better that it had been withheld from him until those who were able
to give or withhold it had formed a juster conception of its meaning.
The truth is that the exemption of the elementary school, and of it
alone among schools, from the direct pressure of the examination
system, is an isolated and audacious experiment, which is carried on
under conditions so unfavourable to its success that nothing but a
high degree of intelligence and moral courage (not to speak of
originality) on the part of the teacher can make it succeed. Can we
wonder that in many cases the experiment has proved a failure?
At the end of the previous chapter I asked myself whether the
education that was given in the ordinary elementary school tended to
foster self-expression on the part of the child. We can now see what
the answer to this question is likely to be. For a third of a
century--from 1862 to 1895--self-expression on the part of the child
may be said to have been formally prohibited by all who were
responsible for the elementary education of the children of England,
and also to have been prohibited _de facto_ by all the unformulated
conditions under which the elementary school was conducted. In 1895
the formal prohibition of self-expression ceased, but the _de facto_
prohibition of it in the ordinary school is scarcely less effective
to-day than it was in the darkest days of the old _régime_. For
"The evil that men do lives after them,"
and the old _régime_, though nominally abrogated, overshadows us
still. When I say this I do not merely mean that many teachers who
were brought up under the old _régime_ have been unable to emancipate
themselves from its influence. I mean that the old _régime_ was
itself the outcome and expression of traditional tendencies which
are of the essence of Western civilisation, of ways of thinking
and acting to which we are all habituated from our earliest days,
and that these tendencies and these ways of thinking and acting
overshadow us still. The formal abrogation of the old _régime_ counts
for little so long as the examination system, with its demand for
visible and measurable results and its implicit invitation to cram
and cheat, is allowed to cast its deadly shadow on education as
such,--and so long as the whole system on which the young of all
classes and grades are educated is favourable to self-deception on
the part of the teacher and fatal to sincerity on the part of the
child. Constrained by every influence that is brought to bear upon
him to judge according to the appearance of things, the teacher can
ill afford to judge righteous judgment,--can ill afford to regard
what is outward and visible as the symbol of what is inward and
spiritual, can ill afford to think of the work done by the child
except as a thing to be weighed in an examiner's balance or measured
by an examiner's rule.
Things being as they are in the various grades of education and in
the various strata of social life, it is inevitable that the
education given in many of our elementary schools should be based,
in the main, on complete distrust of the child. In such schools,
whatever else the child may be allowed to do, he must not be allowed
to do anything by or for himself. He must not express what he really
feels and sees; for if he does, the results will probably fall short
of the standard of neatness, cleanness, and correctness which
an examiner might expect the school to reach. At any rate, the
experiment is much too risky to be tried. In the lower classes
the results produced would certainly be rough, imperfect, untidy.
Therefore self-expression must not be permitted in that part of the
school. And if not there, it must not be permitted anywhere, for the
longer it is delayed the greater will be the difficulty of starting
it and the greater the attendant risk. The child must not express
what he really perceives; and as genuine perception forces for itself
the outlet of genuine expression, he must not be allowed to exercise
his perceptive faculties. Instead of seeing things for himself, he
must see what his teacher directs him to see, he must feel what his
teacher directs him to feel, he must think what his teacher directs
him to think, and so on. But to forbid a child to use his own
perceptive faculties is to arrest the whole process of his growth.
I will now go back to the _Arithmetic_ lesson. During the years in
which the children in elementary schools were examined individually
in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the one virtue which was
inculcated while the arithmetic lesson was in progress was that of
obedience to the formulated rule. On the yearly examination day it
was customary to give each child four questions in arithmetic, of
which only one was a "problem." Two sums correctly worked secured
a "pass"; and it was therefore possible for the child to achieve
salvation in arithmetic by blindly obeying the various rules with
which his teacher had equipped him. He had, indeed, to decide for
himself in each case which rule was to be followed; but he did this
(in most schools), not by thinking the matter out, but by following
certain by-rules given him by his teacher, which were based on a
careful study of the wording of the questions set by the inspector,
and which held good as long as that wording remained unchanged. For
example, if a subtraction sum was to be dictated to "Standard II,"
the child was taught that the number which was given out first was to
be placed in the upper line, and that the number which came next was
to be subtracted from this. He was not taught that the lesser of the
two numbers was always to be subtracted from the larger; for in order
to apply that principle he would have had to decide for himself which
was the larger of the two numbers, and the consequent mental effort
was one which his teacher could not trust him to make. It is true
that in his desire to save the child from the dire necessity of
thinking, the teacher ran the risk of being discomfited by a sudden
change of procedure on the part of an inspector. The inspector, for
example, who, having been accustomed to say "From 95 take 57," chose
to say, for a change, "Take 57 from 95," would cause widespread havoc
in the first two or three schools that were the victims of his
unlooked-for experiment. But the risks which the teacher ran who
taught his pupils to rely on trickery rather than thought were worth
running; for the inspectors, like the teachers and the children, were
ever tending to become creatures of routine, and the vagaries of
those who had the reputation of being tiresomely versatile could be
provided against--largely, if not wholly--by increased ingenuity on
the part of the teacher, and increased attention to tricky by-rules
on the part of the child.
The number of schools in which arithmetic is intelligently and even
practically taught is undoubtedly much larger than it was in the days
of payment by results; but there are still thousands of schools in
which obedience to the rule for its own sake is the basis of all
instruction in arithmetic. Now to live habitually by rule instead of
by thought is necessarily fatal, in every field of action, to the
development of that _sense_ or perceptive faculty, on which right
action ultimately depends. Following his reputed guide blindly,
mechanically, and with whole-hearted devotion, the votary of the rule
never allows his intuition, his faculty of direct perception and
subconscious judgment, to play even for a moment round the matters
on which he is engaged; and the result is that the faculty in
question is not merely prevented from growing, but is at last
actually blighted in the bud. This is but another way of saying what
I have already insisted upon,--that to forbid self-expression on the
part of the child is to starve his perceptive faculties into
non-existence.
There is no folly perpetrated in the elementary school of to-day for
which there are not authoritative precedents to be found in the
conduct of one or other of the two great schools which the God of
Western theology is supposed to have opened for the education of Man.
And it is in that special development of the Legal School which
is known as Pharisaism that we shall look for a precedent for the
conventional teaching of arithmetic in our elementary schools. The
ultra-legalism of the Pharisee in the days of Christ finds its exact
counterpart in the ultra-legalism of the child who has been taught
arithmetic by the methods which the yearly examination fostered, and
which are still widely prevalent. In the one case there was, in the
other case there is, an entire inability on the part of the zealous
votary of the rule to estimate the intrinsic value of the results of
his blind and unintelligent action. The sense of humour, which is a
necessary element in every other healthy sense, and which so often
keeps us from going astray, by suddenly revealing to us the inherent
absurdity of our proposed action, is one of the first faculties to
succumb to the blighting influence of an ultra-legal conception of
life. As an example of the unwavering seriousness of the Pharisee in
the presence of what was intrinsically ridiculous, let us take his
attitude towards the problem of keeping food warm for the Sabbath
day. "According to Exodus xvi. 23, it was forbidden to bake and to
boil on the Sabbath. Hence the food, which it was desired to eat hot
on the Sabbath, was to be prepared before its commencement, and kept
warm by artificial means. In doing this, however, care must be taken
that the existing heat was not increased, which would have been
'boiling.' Hence the food must be put only into such substances as
would maintain its heat, not into such as might possibly increase it.
'Food to be kept warm for the Sabbath must not be put into oil-dregs,
manure, salt, chalk, or sand, whether moist or dry, nor into straw,
grape-skins, flock, or vegetables, if these are damp, though it may
if they are dry. It may, however, be put into clothes, amidst fruits,
pigeons' feathers, and flax tow. R. Jehudah declares flax tow
unallowable and permits only coarse tow.'"[10] Following his rule
out, step by step, with unflinching loyalty, into these ridiculous
consequences, the Pharisee had entirely lost the power of seeing that
they were ridiculous, and was well content to believe, with Jehudah,
that the difference between keeping food warm in coarse tow and in
flax tow was the difference between life and death. This _reductio
ad absurdum_ of legalism is exactly paralleled, in many of our
elementary schools, in the answers to arithmetical questions given by
the children. The "Fifth Standard" boys who told their inspector, as
an answer to an easy problem, that a given room was five shillings
and sixpence wide, had followed out their rule--they had
unfortunately got hold of a wrong rule--step by step, till it led
them to a conclusion, the intrinsic absurdity of which they were one
and all unable to see.[11] There are many elementary schools in
England in which a majority of the answers given to quite easy
problems would certainly be wrong, and a respectable minority of them
ludicrously wrong. Nor is this to be wondered at; for though the
types of problems that can be set in elementary schools are not
numerous, to provide his pupils with the by-rules which shall enable
them in all, or even in most cases, to determine which of the
recognised rules are appropriate to the given situation, passes the
wit of the teacher. But if the helplessness of so many elementary
scholars in the face of an arithmetical problem is lamentable, still
more lamentable is the fact that the scholar is seldom met with who,
having given an entirely wrong answer to an easy problem, is able to
see for himself that, whatever the right answer may be, the answer
given is and must be wrong. So fatal to the development of the
arithmetical sense is the current worship of the rule for its own
sake, and so deadly a narcotic is the conventional arithmetic lesson
to all who take part in it!
It is not in the arithmetic lesson, then, that provision is
ordinarily made for the development of a sense, or perceptive
faculty, through the medium of self-expression on the part of the
child. On the contrary, the very _raison d'être_ of the arithmetic
lesson, as it is still given in many schools, is to destroy the
arithmetical sense, and make the child an inefficient calculating
machine, which, even when working, is too often inaccurate and
clumsy, and which the slightest change of environment throws at
once and completely out of gear.
After the arithmetical lesson come, as a rule, lessons in "_Reading_"
and "_Writing_"--in reading in some classes, in writing in others.
The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary
elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress, is that the
children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word.
They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the
contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual
nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up,
one by one, even in the highest class of all, and reading aloud to
their teacher.
Why are they doing this? Is it in order that their teacher may show
them how to master the more difficult words in their reading lesson?
This may be the reason, in some schools; but there are others,
perhaps a majority, in which the teacher tells his pupils the words
that puzzle them instead of helping them to make them out for
themselves. Besides, if reading were properly taught in the lower
classes, the children in the upper classes would surely be able to
master unaided the difficulties that might confront them.
Or is it in order that elocution may be cultivated? But elocution is
seldom, if ever, cultivated in the ordinary elementary school, the
veriest mumbling on the part of the child being accepted by his
teacher (who follows him with an open book in his hand), provided
that he can read correctly and with some attempt at "phrasing."
Indeed, the indistinct utterance of so many school children may be
attributed to the fact that they have read aloud to their teachers
for many years, and that during the whole of that time a very low
standard of distinctness has been accepted as satisfactory.
Or is it in order that the teacher may help his pupils to understand
what they are reading? This may be one of his reasons for hearing
them read aloud; but so far as the higher classes are concerned it is
a bad reason, for the older the child the more imperative is it that
he should try to make out for himself the meaning of what he reads;
and the teacher who spoon-feeds his pupils during the reading lesson
is doing his best to make them incapable of digesting the contents of
books for themselves.
No, there are two chief reasons why the teacher makes children of
eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen years of age read aloud to him
as if they were children of six or seven. The first reason is that
the unemancipated teacher instinctively does to-day what he did
twenty years ago, and that twenty years ago, when children were
examined in reading from their own books, the teacher heard them read
aloud, day after day in order that he might make sure that they knew
their books well enough to pass the inspector's test. The second
reason, which is wider than the first, and may be said to include and
account for it, is that the reading-aloud lesson fits in with the
whole system of Western education, being the outcome and expression
of that complete distrust of the child which is, and always has been,
characteristic of the popular religion and philosophy of the West. If
you ask the teacher why the children, even in the highest classes,
are never allowed to work at such subjects as history and geography
by themselves, he will tell you frankly that he cannot trust them to
do so, that they do not know how to use a book. And he cannot see
that in giving this excuse he is condemning himself, and making open
confession of the worthlessness of the training that he has given to
his pupils.
Whatever else the reading-aloud lesson may be, it is a dismal waste
of time. Child after child stands up, reads for a minute or so, and
then sits down, remaining idle and inert (except when an occasional
question is addressed to him) for the rest of the time occupied
by the so-called lesson. In this, as in most oral lessons, the
elementary school child passes much of his time in a state which is
neither activity nor rest,--a state of enforced inertness combined
with unnatural and unceasing strain. Activity is good for the child,
and rest, which, is the complement of activity, is good for the
child; but the combination of inertness with strain is good for
neither his body nor his mind. Indeed, it may be doubted if there is
any state of mind and body which is so uneducational as this, or so
unfavourable to healthy growth.
But the main objection to the reading-aloud lesson is, I repeat, that
while it is going on the children are not reading at all, in the
proper sense of the word, not attacking the book, not enjoying it,
not extracting the honey from it. And the consequences of the
inability to read which is thus engendered are far-reaching and
disastrous. The power to read is a key which unlocks many doors. One
of the most important of these doors--perhaps, from the strictly
scholastic point of view, _the_ most important--is the door of study.
The child who cannot read to himself cannot study a book, cannot
master its contents. It is because the elementary school child cannot
be trusted to do any independent study, that the oral lesson, or
lecture, with its futile expenditure of "chalk and talk," is so
prominent a feature in the work of the elementary school. And it is
because the oral lesson necessarily counts for so much, that the
over-grouping of classes, with all its attendant evils, is so widely
practised. The grouping together of "Standards" V, VI, and VII, with
the result that the children who go through all those Standards are
compelled to waste the last two years of their school life, is a
practice which is almost universal in elementary schools of a certain
size. And there are few schools of that size in which those Standards
could not be broken up into two, if not three, independent classes,
if the children, whose ages range as a rule between eleven and
fourteen, could be trusted to work by themselves. In many cases this
over-grouping is wholly inexcusable, the headmaster having no class
of his own to teach, and being therefore free to do what obviously
ought to be done,--to separate the older and more advanced children
from the rest of the top class, and form them into a separate class
(a real top class) for independent study and self-education under his
direction and supervision. But so strong is the force of habit, and
so deeply rooted in the mind of the teacher is distrust of the child,
that it is rare to find the head teacher to whom the idea of breaking
up an over-grouped top class has suggested itself as practicable, or
even as intrinsically desirable.
We owe it, then, to the reading-aloud fetich that in many of our
schools the children are compelled to spend the last two (or even
three) years of their school life--the most important years of all
from the point of view of their preparation for the battle of
life--in marking time, in staying where they were. It is to those
years of enforced stagnation that the reluctance of the ex-elementary
scholar to go on with his education is largely due; for no one can
keep on moving who is not already on the move, and the desire to
continue education is scarcely to be looked for in one who has been
given to understand that his education has come to an end. But there
is another and a shorter cut from the conventional reading lesson to
the early extinction of the child's educational career. The child who
leaves school without having learned how to use a book, will find
that the one door through which access is gained to most of the halls
of learning--the door of independent study--is for ever slammed in
his face. Not that he will seriously try to open it; for with the
ability to read the desire to read will have aborted. The distrust of
the child, on which Western education is based, is a bottomless gulf
in which educational effort, whatever form it may take or in whatever
quarter it may originate, is for the most part swallowed up and made
as though it had not been. The child who leaves school at the age of
fourteen will have attended some 2,000 or 3,000 reading lessons in
the course of his school life. From these, in far too many cases, he
will have carried nothing away but the ability to stumble with
tolerable correctness through printed matter of moderate difficulty.
He will not have carried away from them either the power or the
desire to read.
In the days of percentages, instruction in "_Writing_" below Standard
V was entirely confined to handwriting and spelling; and even in the
higher Standards the teacher thought more about handwriting and
spelling than any other aspect of this composite subject. Now
handwriting and spelling are merely means to an end,--the end of
making clear to the reader the words that have been committed to
paper by the writer. But it is the choice rather than the setting
out of words that really matters, and the name that we give to the
choosing of words is Composition. The excessive regard that has
always been paid in our elementary schools to neat handwriting and
correct spelling is characteristic of the whole Western attitude
towards education. No "results" are more easily or more accurately
appraised than these, and it follows that no "results" are more
highly esteemed by the unenlightened teacher. For wherever the
outward standard of reality has established itself at the expense of
the inward, the ease with which worth (or what passes for such) can
be measured is ever tending to become in itself the chief, if not the
sole, measure of worth. And in proportion as we tend to value the
results of education for their measureableness, so we tend to
undervalue and at last to ignore those results which are too
intrinsically valuable to be measured.
* * * * *
Hence the neglect of _Composition_ in so many elementary schools. I
mean by composition the sincere expression in language of the child's
genuine thoughts and feelings. The effort to "compose," whether
orally or on paper, is one of the most educational of all efforts;
for language is at once the most readily available and the most
subtle and sympathetic of all media of expression; and the effort
to express himself in it tends, in proportion as it is sincere
and strong, to give breadth, depth, and complexity to the child's
thoughts and feelings, and through the development of these to weave
his experiences into the tissue of his life. But sincerity of
expression is not easily measured, and the true value of the thoughts
and feelings that are struggling to express themselves in a child's
composition is beyond the reach of any rule or scale; whereas
neatness of handwriting and correctness of spelling are, as we have
seen, features which appeal even to the carelessly observant eye.
Knowing this, the teacher takes care that the exercise-books of his
pupils shall be filled with neat and accurate composition exercises,
and that some of the neatest and most accurate of these shall be
exhibited on the walls of his school. The visitor whose eye ranges
over these exercises and goes no further may be excused if he forms
a highly favourable opinion of the school which can produce such
seemingly excellent work. But let him spend a morning in the school,
and see how these "results" have been produced. He will probably
change his mind as to their value. The teaching of composition in
the ordinary elementary school is too often fraudulent and futile.
Indeed, there is no lesson in which the teacher's traditional
distrust of the child goes further than in this. In the lower classes
the child is taught how to construct simple sentences (as if he
had never made one in the previous course of his life), and he is
not trusted to do more than this. He listens to a so-called object
lesson, and when it is over he is told to write a few simple
sentences about the Cow or the Horse, or whatever the subject of the
lesson may have been; and lest his memory (the only faculty which he
is allowed to exercise) should fail him, the chief landmarks of the
lesson are placed before him on the blackboard. This string of simple
sentences reproduced from memory passes muster as composition. And
yet that child began to practise oral composition at the age of
eighteen months, and at the age of three was able to use complex
sentences with freedom and skill. In the upper classes the
composition is too often as mechanical, as unreal, and as insincere
as in the lower. Sometimes a given subject is worked out by the
teacher with the class, the children, one by one, suggesting
sentences, which are shaped and corrected by the teacher and then
written up on the blackboard, until there are enough of them to fill
one page of an ordinary exercise book. Then the whole essay (if one
must dignify it with that name) is copied out, very neatly and
carefully, by every child in the class; and the result is shown to
the inspector as original composition. At other times or in other
schools the class teacher does not go quite so far as this. He
contents himself with talking the subject over with the class, and
then writing a series of headings[12] on the blackboard. Or, again,
trusting to the child's red-hot memory, he will allow him to write
out what he remembers of an object-lesson, or a history lesson, or
whatever it may be. Composition exercises which are the genuine
expression of genuine perception, which have behind them what the
child has experienced, what he has felt or thought, what he has read,
what he has studied, are the exception rather than the rule; for
in such exercises there would probably be faults of spelling,
faults of grammar, colloquialisms, careless writing (due to the
child's eagerness), and so forth; and the work would therefore be
unsatisfactory from the showman's point of view. The child's natural
capacity for expressing himself in language is systematically starved
in order that outward and visible results, results which will win
approval from those who judge according to the appearance of things,
may be duly produced.
The case of oral composition in the unemancipated elementary school
is even more hopeless than that of written composition. The latter
has a time set apart for it on the time-table, and is at any rate
supposed to be taught. The former is wholly ignored. Many teachers
seem to have entirely forgotten that the desire and the ability to
talk are part of the normal equipment of every healthy child. There
was, indeed, a time when children were taught to answer questions
in complete sentences even when one-word answers would have amply
sufficed. For example, when a child was asked how many pence there
were in a shilling, he was expected to answer, "There are twelve
pence in a shilling"; when he was asked what was the colour of snow,
he was expected to answer, "The colour of snow is white "; and so on.
And both he and his teacher flattered themselves that this waste of
words was oral composition! In point of fact the sentence in each of
these cases was worth no more, as an effort of self-expression, than
its one important word--_twelve_, _white_, or whatever it might be;
and the child, who was allowed to think that he had produced a real
sentence, had in effect done no more than envelop one real word in a
hollow formula. There are still many schools in which this ridiculous
practice lingers, and in which it constitutes the only attempt at
oral composition that the child is allowed to make. Where it has died
out the idea of teaching oral composition has too often died with it.
Young children are, as a rule, voluble talkers, with a considerable
command of language. But it not infrequently happens that at the
close of his school life the once talkative child has lapsed into a
state of sullen taciturnity. In common with other vital faculties,
his power of expressing himself in speech has withered in the
repressive atmosphere to which he has so long been exposed.
It is in the oral lesson that one would expect oral composition to
be taught or at any rate practised. In such subjects as _History_,
_Geography_, _English_, _Elementary Science_, the teaching in most
elementary schools is mainly, if not wholly, oral. In the days of
payment by results separate and variable grants were given for these
subjects; and which, if either, of two grants should be recommended
depended in each case on the result of an oral examination conducted
by H.M. Inspector, the employment of a written test in any class
being strictly forbidden by "My Lords." In this examination proof
of the possession of information was all that the inspector could
demand; and the quickest and easiest way of obtaining such proof
was to ask the class questions which could be briefly answered by
the children individually. Questions which were designed to test
intelligence might, of course, have been asked, and in some districts
were freely asked; but to have reduced the grant because the children
failed to answer these would have provoked an outcry; while, had the
inspector asked questions which demanded long answers, he would, in
the limited time at his command, have given but few children the
chance of showing that they had been duly prepared for the
examination. The consequence was that the oral lesson on a "class
subject" usually took the form of stuffing the children with pellets
of appropriate information, some of which they would, in all
probability, have the opportunity of disgorging when they were
questioned by the inspector on the yearly "parade day."
Not only, then, did the official examination in history, geography
and elementary science direct the teaching of these subjects into
channels in which the golden opportunities that they offer for the
practice of written composition were perforce thrown away, but also
the examination was so framed that even the practice of oral
composition, in preparation for it, was actively discouraged. And the
neglect of composition acted disastrously on the teaching of the
subjects in question; for wherever self-expression on the part of the
child is forbidden, the appropriate "sense," or perceptive faculty,
cannot possibly evolve itself,--perception and expression being, as
we have elsewhere seen, the very life and soul of each other; and in
the absence (to take pertinent examples) of the historical or the
geographical sense, the possession of historical or geographical
information cannot possibly be converted into knowledge of history
or geography. The prompt, accurate, and general answering which was
rewarded by the award of the higher grants for "class subjects" was,
in nine cases out of ten, the outcome of assiduous and unintelligent
cram,--a mode of preparation for which the policy of the Education
Department was mainly responsible.
But when separate grants ceased to be paid for class subjects, were
not the teachers free to teach them by rational methods? No doubt
they were--in theory. In point of fact they were in bondage to the
strongest of all constraining influences,--the force of inveterate
habit. For twenty years they had taught the class subjects by the one
safe method of vigorous oral cram. This method had answered their
purpose, and it was but natural that they should continue to teach by
it. What happened, when separate grants ceased to be paid, was that
the need for responsiveness on the part of the scholar gradually
lessened. The pellets of information were still imparted, but it
became less and less incumbent upon the teacher to see that his
pupils were ready to disgorge them at a moment's notice. And so the
cramming lesson gradually transformed itself into a _lecture_, in
which the teacher did all or nearly all the talking, while the
children sat still and listened or pretended to listen, an occasional
yawn giving open proof of the boredom from which most of them were
suffering.
That is the type of oral lesson which is most common at the present
day. "Results" in history, geography, nature study and English are
seldom asked for by the inspector; and the teacher takes but little
trouble to produce them. But his distrust of the child is as firmly
rooted as ever, and his unwillingness to allow the child to work by
or for himself is as strong as it ever was. The consequence is that
there are many schools in which the teacher now does everything
during the oral lesson, while the child does as nearly as possible
nothing. Formerly the child was at any rate allowed (or rather
required) to be actively receptive. Now he is seldom allowed to do
anything more active than to yawn. And all the time he is secretly
longing to energise--to do something with himself--to use his mental,
if not his physical faculties--to work, if not to play. One might
have thought that in the history and geography lessons, if in no
other, "Standards VI" and "VII" (where the numbers were too small
to admit of these standards having a teacher to themselves) would
be separated from "Standard V," and allowed to work out their own
salvation by studying suitable text-books under proper supervision
and guidance. But no; the force of habit is too strong for the
machine-made teacher. Twenty years ago history and geography were
"class subjects," and as such were taught orally to whole classes of
children. And they must still be taught as "class subjects," even
if this should involve the "Sixth" and "Seventh Standards" being
brigaded with, and kept down for one or even two years to, the level
of the "Fifth,"--kept down, it would seem, for no other purpose than
that of being the passive recipients of the teacher's windy "talk,"
and the helpless witnesses of his futile "chalk," and of having their
own activities paralysed and their own powers of expression starved
into inanition.
I will deal with one more "secular" subject before I bring this
sketch to a close. There are still many schools in which the hours
that are set apart for _Drawing_ are devoted in large measure to the
slavish reproduction of flat copies. A picture of some familiar
object--outlined, shaded, or tinted as the case may be, and not
infrequently highly conventionalised--hangs in front of the class;
and the children copy it, stroke by stroke, and curve by curve, and
put in the shading and lay on washes of colour. As long practice at
work of this kind develops a certain degree of manual dexterity, and
as the free use of india-rubber is permitted and even encouraged, the
child's finished work may be so neat and accurate as to become worthy
of a place on the school wall. But what is the value, what is the
meaning of work of this kind? When such a drawing lesson as I have
described is in progress, the divorce between perception and
expression is complete. And as each of these master faculties is the
very life and soul of the other, their complete divorce from one
another involves the complete eclipse of each. The child who copies
a flat copy does not perceive anything except some other person's
reproduction of a scene or object; and even this he does not
necessarily grasp as a whole, his business being to reproduce it with
flawless accuracy, line by line. Indeed, it may well happen that he
does not even know what the picture or diagram before him is intended
to represent. Nor is he expressing anything, for he has not made his
model in any sense or degree his own. Thus, during the whole of a
lesson in which the perceptive and expressive faculties are supposed
to be receiving a special training, they are lying dormant and inert.
Each of them is, for the time being, as good as dead. And each of
them will assuredly die if this kind of teaching goes on for very
long, die for lack of exercise, die wasted and atrophied by disuse.
The extent to which the copying of copies can injure a child's power
of observation exceeds belief. I have seen a bowl placed high above
the line of sight of a class of fifty senior boys, each one of whom
(his memory being haunted, I suppose, by some diagram which he had
once copied) drew it as if he were looking into it from above. Not
one of those boys could see the bowl as it really was, or rather
as it really was to be seen. A child who had never drawn a stroke
in his life, but whose perceptive faculties had not been deadened
by education, would have sketched the bowl more correctly than
any of those quasi-experts. And with the wasting of the power of
observation, the executive power is gradually lost; for perception
is ever interpenetrating, reinforcing, and stimulating expression;
and when the eye is blind, the hand, however skilful its mere
manipulation may be, necessarily falters and loses its cunning.
Four or five years ago, had one entered an elementary school while
drawing was being taught, such a lesson as I have just described
would have been in progress in ninety-nine cases out of every
hundred. Since then a systematic warfare has been waged by the Board
against the "flat copy"; and though it is still very far from
extinct, there is now perhaps an actual majority of schools in which
its use has been discontinued. But the number of schools in which
drawing from the object is effectively taught, though increasing
steadily, is still small. In those schools, indeed, the results are
surprisingly good,--so good as to justify, not only the new gospel of
drawing from the object, but also the whole gospel of education
through self-reliance and self-expression. But elsewhere there has
been but little improvement, except so far as it may be better to
draw from an object without guidance, or with quite ineffective
guidance, than to draw from a flat copy. In some schools the formula
or "tip" is beginning to take the place of the flat copy. There is a
formula for the tulip, a formula for the snowdrop, a formula for the
daffodil, and so on; and the children draw from these formulæ while
the actual flowers are before them and they are making believe to
reproduce them. In other schools an object is placed before the
class, and the teacher draws this for them on the blackboard,
explaining to them in detail how it ought to be drawn; and when he
has finished, the children pretend to draw the object, but really
copy his blackboard copy of it. In this, as in other matters, the
teacher who has become a victim of routine will give a facile but
mainly "notional" assent to the suggestions that are placed before
him, will promise to try them, and will make an unintelligent and
half-hearted attempt to do so, but will as often as not slide back
into practices which do not materially differ from those which he
professes to have abandoned. The pressure of the whole system of
Western education--not to speak of Western civilisation--will be too
strong for him. The flat copy, with its demand for mechanical work
and servile obedience, fits into that system. Drawing from the
object, with its demand for initiative and self-reliance, does not.
Hence the attractive force of the former,--a secret attractive force
which will neutralise the efforts that the teacher consciously makes
to free himself from its influence, and will arm him, as with
a hidden shirt of mail, against the missionary zeal of his
inspector.[13] Even the zeal of the inspector will be affected by his
possible inability to harmonise his gospel of self-expression in
drawing with any general system of self-education. It is because the
educational reformer is fighting, in his sporadic attempts at reform,
against his own deepest conviction, that he achieves so little even
in the particular directions in which he sees clearly that reform is
needed.
But how, it will be asked, is such a school as I have described to be
kept going? The whole _régime_ must be eminently distasteful to the
healthy child, and it can scarcely be attractive to his teacher. By
what motive force, then, is the school to be kept in motion,--in
motion, if not along the path of progress, at any rate along the
well-worn track of routine? By the only motive force which
the religion and the civilisation of the West recognise as
effective,--the hope of external reward, with its complement, the
fear of external punishment. From highest to lowest, from the head
teacher of the school to the youngest child in the bottom class, all
the teachers and all the children are subjected to the pressure of
this quasi-physical force. The teachers hope for advancement and
increase of salary, and fear degradation and loss of salary, or at
any rate loss of the hoped-for increment.[14] The children hope for
medals, books, high places in their respective classes, and other
rewards and distinctions, and fear corporal and other kinds of
punishment. The thoroughly efficient school is one in which this
motive force is duly transmitted to every part of the school
by means of a well-planned and carefully-elaborated machinery,
analogous to that by which water and gas are laid on at every
tap in every house in a well-governed town. Only those who are
intimately acquainted with the inside of the elementary school can
realise to what an extent the machinery of education has in recent
years encroached upon the vital interests of the school and the time
and thought of the teacher. In schools which are administered by
business-like and up-to-date Local Authorities, this encroachment is
becoming as serious as that of drifting sands on a fertile soil.
Time-tables, schemes of work, syllabuses, record books, progress
books, examination result books, and the rest,--hours and hours are
spent by the teachers on the clerical work which these mechanical
contrivances demand. And the hours so spent are too often wholly
wasted. The worst of this machinery is that, so long as it works
smoothly, all who are interested in the school are satisfied. But
it may all work with perfect smoothness, and yet achieve nothing
that really counts. I know of hundreds of schools which are to all
appearance thoroughly efficient,--schools in which the machinery of
education is as well contrived as it is well oiled and cleaned,--and
yet in which there is no vital movement, no growth, no life. From
highest to lowest, all the inmates of those schools are cheating
themselves with forms, figures, marks, and other such empty symbols.
The application of the conventional motive force to the school
children goes by the name of _Discipline_. If the pressure at each
tap is steady, constant, and otherwise effective, the discipline is
good. If it is variable, intermittent, and otherwise ineffective,
the discipline is bad. The life of the routine-ridden school is so
irksome to the child, that if he is healthy and vigorous he will long
to find a congenial outlet for his vital energies, which are as a
rule either pent back (as when he sits still listening to a lecture),
or forced into uninteresting and unprofitable channels. When this
desire masters him during school hours, it goes by the name of
"naughtiness," and is regarded as a proof of the inborn sinfulness
of his "fallen" nature. To repress the desire, to keep the child in
a state either of absolute inaction or of mechanically regulated
activity, is the function of school discipline. Whatever in the
child's life is free, natural, spontaneous, wells up from an evil
source. If educational progress is to be made, that source must be
carefully sealed. As an educator, the teacher must do his best
to reduce the child to the level of a wire-pulled puppet. As a
disciplinarian, he must overcome the child's instinctive repugnance
to being subjected to such unworthy treatment. The better the
"discipline" of the school, the easier it will be for the mechanical
education given in it to achieve its deadly work.
In making this sketch of what is still a common type of elementary
school, my object has been to provide myself with materials for
answering the question: Does elementary education, as at present
conducted in this country, tend to foster the growth of the child's
faculties? If my sketch is even approximately faithful to its
original, the answer to the question, so far at least as thousands of
schools are concerned, must be an emphatic No. For in the school, as
I have sketched it, the one end and aim of the teacher is to prevent
the child from doing anything whatever for himself; and where
independent effort is prohibited, the growth of faculty must needs be
arrested, the growth of every faculty, as of every limb and organ,
being dependent in large measure on its being duly and suitably
exercised by its owner. If this statement is true of faculty as such,
and of effort as such, still more is it true of the particular
faculties which school life is supposed to train, the faculties which
we speak of loosely as perceptive,--and of the particular effort by
which alone the growth of the perceptive faculties is effected, the
many-sided effort which we speak of loosely as self-expression. Far
perception and expression are, as I have endeavoured to prove, the
face and obverse of the same vital process; and the educational
policy which makes self-expression, or, in other words, sincere
expression, impossible, is therefore fatal to the outgrowth of the
whole range of the perceptive faculties.
The education given in thousands of our elementary schools is, then,
in the highest degree anti-educational. The end which education
ought to aim at achieving is the very end which the teacher labours
unceasingly to defeat. The teacher may, indeed, contend that his
business is not to evoke faculty but to impart knowledge. The answer
to this argument is that the type of education which impedes the
outgrowth of faculty is necessarily fatal to the acquisition of
knowledge. For the teacher can no more impart knowledge to his pupils
than a nurse can impart flesh and blood to her charges. What the
teacher imparts is information, just as what the nurse imparts is
food; and until information has been converted into knowledge the
child is as far from being educated as the infant, whose food
remains unassimilated, is from being nourished. The teacher may pump
information into the child in a never-ending stream; but so long as
he compels the child to adopt an attitude of passive receptivity, and
forbids him to react, through the medium of self-expression, on the
food that he is receiving, so long will the food remain unassimilated
and even undigested, and the soul and mind of the child remain
uneducated and unfed.
Whether, then, we concern ourselves, as educationalists, with the
growth of the child's whole nature, or with the growth of his master
faculties, or again with the growth of those special "senses"
which evolve themselves in response to the stimulus of special
environments, we see that in each case the effect of the teacher's
policy of distrust and repression is to arrest growth. When the
stern supernaturalist reminds us that the child's nature is
intrinsically evil, and that therefore in arresting its growth
education renders him a priceless service, we answer that, in
arresting the growth of the child's nature as a whole, education
arrests the growth of all the master faculties of his being, and
that there are some at least among these which, even in the judgment
of the supernaturalist, imperatively need to be trained. When the
strait-laced, result-hunting teacher reminds us that his sole
business is to teach certain subjects, and that therefore he cannot
concern himself with growth, we answer that, in neglecting to foster
growth, he makes it impossible for the child to put forth a special
"sense," a special faculty of direct perception, in response to each
new environment, and so (for reasons which have already been given)
incapacitates him for mastering any subject. There is always one
point of view, if no more, from which my primary assumption--that
the function of education is to foster growth--is seen to be a
truism. And from that point of view, if from no other, the failure
of the routine-ridden school to fulfil its destiny is seen to be
final and complete.
Yet to say that elementary education, as it is given in such a
school, tends to arrest growth, is to under-estimate its capacity for
mischief. In the act of arresting growth it must needs distort
growth, and in doing this it must needs deaden and even destroy the
life which is ever struggling to evolve itself. It is well that from
time to time we should ask ourselves what compulsory education has
done for the people of England. How much it has done to civilise
and humanise the masses is beginning to be known to all who are
interested in social progress, and I for one am ready to second any
vote of thanks that may be proposed to it for this invaluable
service.[15] But when we ask ourselves what it has done to _vitalise_
the nation, we may well hesitate for an answer. Twenty years ago, in
the days of "schedules" and "percentages," elementary education was,
on balance, an actively devitalising agency. The policy of the
Education Department made that inevitable. But things have changed
since then; and it is probable that the balance is now in favour of
the elementary school. But the balance, though growing from year to
year, is as yet very small compared with what it will be when the
teacher, relieved from the pressure of the still prevailing demand
for "results," is free to take thought for the vital interests of the
child.
Whom shall we blame for the shortcomings of our elementary schools?
The Board of Education? Their Inspectors? The Teachers? The Training
Colleges? The Local Authorities? We will blame none of these. We will
blame the spirit of Western civilisation, with its false philosophy
of life and its false standard of reality.
Shall we blame the Board because, in the days when they called
themselves the Department, they made the teachers of England the
serfs of their soul-destroying Code? For my own part I prefer to
honour the Board, not only because on a certain day they liberated
their serfs by a departmental edict, but also and more especially
because, in defiance of the protests and criticisms of Members of
Parliament, employers of labour, Chairmen of Education Committees,
and others, in defiance of the ubiquitous pressure of Western
externalism and materialism, in defiance of the trend of contemporary
opinion, in defiance of their own practice,--for they themselves are
an examining body whose nets are widely spread,--they refuse to
revoke the gift of freedom, which they gave, perhaps over-hastily, to
the teachers of England, and continue to exempt them, so far as their
own action is concerned, from the pressure of a formal examination on
a uniform scheme of work.
Shall we blame the teachers as a body because too many of them are
machine-made creatures of routine? For my own part I honour the
teachers as a body, if only because here and there one of them has
dared, with splendid courage, to defy the despotism of custom, of
tradition, of officialdom, of the thousand deadening influences that
are brought to bear upon him, and to follow for himself the path of
inwardness and life. To blame the average teacher for being unable to
resist the pressure to which he is unceasingly exposed would be
almost as unfair as to blame a pebble on the seashore for being
unable to resist the grinding action of the waves, and would ill
become one who has special reason to remember how the Department, in
its misguided zeal for efficiency, strove for thirty years or more
to grind the teachers of England to one pattern in the mill of
"payment by results." It is to a certificated teacher that, as an
educationalist (if I may give myself so formidable a title), "I owe
my soul." And there are many other teachers to whom my debts, though
less weighty than this, are by no means light. Most of the failings
of the elementary teachers are wounds and strains which adverse Fate
has inflicted on them. Most of their virtues are their own.
Shall we blame the Training Colleges because, with an unhappy past
behind them, they have yet many things to unlearn?
Shall we blame the local Education Authorities because, with an
unknown future before them, they have yet many things to learn?
No, I repeat, we will blame none of these. We will lay the blame on
broader shoulders. We will blame our materialistic philosophy of
life, which we complacently regard--orthodox and heretics alike--as
"_The_ truth"; and we will blame our materialised civilisation, which
we complacently regard--cultured and uncultured alike--as
civilisation, pure and simple, whatever lies beyond its confines
being lightly dismissed as "barbarism." These are the forces against
which every teacher, every manager, every inspector, who strives for
emancipation and enlightenment, has to fight unceasingly. If the
fight is an unequal one; if there are many would-be reformers who
have shrunk from it; if there are others who retired from it early in
the day; if there are others, again, who have been crushed in
it;--we will blame the forces of darkness for these disasters; we
will not blame their victims. On the contrary, we will honour all who
have fought and fallen; for when the cause is large and worthy of
devotion, failure in the service of it is only less triumphant than
success. But if there is honour for failure what shall be the guerdon
of success? What tribute shall we pay to those who have fought and
won?
For there are some who have fought and won.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] It must be clearly understood that throughout this
chapter the school that I have in mind is one for "older children"
only. Whatever may be the defects of the elementary infant schools,
an excessive regard for outward and visible results is not one of
them. Exemption from the pressure of a formal external examination
has meant much more to them than to the schools for older children;
and the atmosphere of the good infant schools is, in consequence,
freer, happier, more recreative, and more truly educative than that
of the upper schools of equivalent merit. And when we compare grade
with grade, we find that the superiority of the elementary infant
schools is still more pronounced. The "Great Public Schools," and the
costly preparatory schools that lead up to them, may or may not be
worthy of their high reputation; but as regards facilities for the
education (in school) of their "infants," the "classes" are
unquestionably much less fortunate than the "masses."
[7] Not long ago I happened to enter the Boys' Department of
an urban Church School at about 9.15 a.m. The Headmaster was sitting
at his desk, drawing up schemes of "secular" work. All the boys above
"Standard III"--94 in number--were grouped together, listening, or
pretending to listen, to a "chalk-and-talk" lecture on "Prayer" [of
which there are apparently five varieties, viz., (1) Invocation, (2)
Deprecation, (3) Obsecration, (4) Intercession, (5) Supplication].
The Headmaster explained to me that "of course it was only during the
Scripture lesson" that this overgrouping went on. The lecture on
Prayer was given by a young Assistant-master, whose naive delight in
the long words that he rolled out _ore rotundo_ and then chalked up
on the blackboard, had blinded him to the obvious fact that he was
making no impression whatever on his audience. The boys, one and all,
reminded me forcibly of the "white-headed boy" in Dickens' village
school, who displayed "in the expression of his face a remarkable
capacity of totally abstracting his mind from the spelling on which
his eyes were fixed."
[8] There are many elementary schools which the Diocesan
Inspector does not enter. In the "Provided" or "Council" Schools
"undenominational Bible teaching" takes the place of the "definite
dogmatic instruction in religious knowledge" which is tested by
Diocesan Inspection. But even when undogmatic Bible teaching is
given, the shadow of an impending examination, external or internal
as the case may be, too often sterilises the efforts of the teacher.
Not that the efforts of the teacher would in any case be productive
so long as the attitude of popular thought towards the Bible remained
unchanged. To go into this burning question would involve me in an
unjustifiable digression; but I must be allowed to express my
conviction that the teaching of the Bible in our elementary schools
will never be anything but misguided and mischievous until those who
are responsible for it have realised that the Old Testament is the
inspired literature of a particular people, and have ceased to regard
it as the authentic biography of the Eternal God. It is to the
current misconception of the meaning and value of the Bible, and the
consequent misconception of the relation of God to Nature and to Man,
that the externalism of the West, which is the source of all the
graver defects of modern education, is (as I contend) largely due;
and it is useless to try to remedy those defects so long as we allow
our philosophy of life to be perennially poisoned at its highest
springs.
[9] In far too many cases the teacher received a certain
proportion of the Grant; and in any case his value in the market
tended to vary directly with his ability to secure a large Grant for
his school by his success in the yearly examination.
[10] _The Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ_, by Dr.
Emil Schürer.
[11] Here is another example of the mental blindness which
rule-worship in Arithmetic is apt to induce. The boys in a large
"Standard II," who had been spending the whole year in adding,
subtracting, multiplying, and dividing tens of thousands, were given
the following sum: A farmer had 126 sheep. He bought nine. How many
had he then? Out of 50 boys, one only worked the sum correctly. Of
the remaining 49, about a third _multiplied_ 126 by 9, another third
_divided_ 126 by 9, while the remaining third _subtracted_ 9 from
126.
[12] Reinforced in many cases by suggestive words. I
recently found myself in an urban school while the "Fourth Standard"
boys were doing "Composition." The subject--Trees--had already been
dealt with in a preparatory "talk." In front of the class was a
blackboard, on which were written the following words:
"fruit, flowers,
I. _Roots_ tough, strong, stretch, extend.
II. _Trunk_ thick, branches, bark.
III. _Branches_ strong, tough, leaves.
IV. _Leaves_ green, shapes, sizes, beautiful, clothe, autumn, brown."
I am told that sometimes as many as twelve headings are given, each
with its own list of suggestive words.
[13] I was recently present at a large gathering of teachers
who had assembled to discuss the teaching of Drawing and other
kindred topics. The district is one in which the gospel of self-help
in Drawing has been preached with diligence and with much apparent
success. One of the teachers, who was expected to support the Board
in their crusade against the "flat copy," played the part of Balaam
by reading out letters from certain distinguished R.A.'s, in which
the use of the flat copy in elementary schools was openly advocated.
It was evident that those distinguished R.A.'s knew as much about
elementary education as the man in the street knows about naval
tactics, for the arguments by which they supported their paradoxical
opinions were worth exactly nothing. But the salvos of applause,
renewed again and again, which greeted the extracts from their
letters showed clearly in which direction the current of subconscious
conviction was running in that evangelised and apparently converted
district.
[14] There are few teachers who do not also work from higher
motives than these; but there are very few who are exempt from the
pressure of these.
[15] It is pleasant to read that at Southend on Easter
Monday (1910) there were 65,000 excursionists and only two cases of
drunkenness. It is also pleasant to hear from an officer who has
served for many years in India that the modern English private
soldier in India is an infinitely superior being to his predecessors,
and that India could not now be held by the old type of British
soldier. We must not, however, forget that the "old type" conquered
India.
PART II
WHAT MIGHT BE
OR
THE PATH OF SELF-REALISATION