EDUCATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION
Activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a large and free
outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--are
there many schools in England in which the soil and atmosphere are
favourable to the vigorous growth of all these qualities? I doubt it.
In the secondary schools, of all grades and types, the education
given is so one-sided, thanks to the inexorable pressure of the
scholarship system, that the harmonious development of the child's
nature is not to be looked for. In the elementary schools, from which
the chilling shadow cast by thirty years of "payment by results" is
passing slowly--very slowly--away, the instinct of the teacher is to
distrust the child and do everything, or nearly everything, for him,
the result being that the whole _régime_ is still unfavourable to the
spontaneous outgrowth of the child's higher qualities. There are of
course schools, both secondary and elementary, in which one or more
of the Utopian qualities flourish with considerable vigour. There are
elementary schools, for example, in which the children, being allowed
by enterprising teachers to walk in new paths without leading
strings, have become unexpectedly active and versatile. And there are
others--mostly in the slum regions of great towns--in which the
devotion, the sympathetic kindness, and the gracious bearing of the
teachers have won from the children the response of unselfish
affection, attractive manners, and happy faces.[20] Yet even in these
exceptional cases it may be doubted if the development of the
particular quality or qualities for which the school is distinguished
reaches the high-water mark which is reached in each and all of the
seven qualities in Utopia. As for the elementary schools which remain
faithful, as so many still do, to the traditions of the old
régime,--if in these any of the seven qualities manage to resist the
adverse influences to which they are all exposed, they have at best
but a starved and stunted life.
I have spoken much and with unsparing frankness of the shortcomings
of our elementary schools. The time has come for me to say with
emphasis that however grave and however numerous may be the defects
of elementary education in England, they are defects which it shares
with all other branches of education, and which England shares with
all other Western lands. The plain truth is that education as such is
a failure in the West, a failure in the sense that the very qualities
which it ought to foster--the cardinal virtues, mental, moral, and
spiritual, which are present in embryo in every child, waiting to be
realised--are not merely neglected by it, in its insane ardour for
"results," but are also exposed, in most of its schools, to strongly
adverse influences. And the reason why education as such is a failure
in the West is that from its earliest days it has been a house
divided against itself, those who were and are responsible for
it having been under the influence of two mutually destructive
assumptions, which they have vainly tried to reconcile with one
another.
The first of these assumptions is my initial "truism,"--that the
function of education is to foster growth. This is admitted,
implicitly if not directly, by all who think and speak about
education, and even, in their unguarded moments, by most of those
who teach. It is generally admitted, for example, that such mental
qualities as attention, memory, judgment, intelligence, reason,
such moral qualities as loyalty, courage, truthfulness, kindness,
unselfishness, such semi-moral qualities as cleanliness, orderliness,
carefulness, alertness, industry, punctuality, are capable of being
developed by education. It is further admitted that such special
qualities as literary or artistic taste, the mathematical or the
historical sense, an aptitude for business or finance, are ready
to evolve themselves, in response to the fostering influence of
practical experience directed by skilful teaching. It is admitted,
in other words, that there is much in human nature, apart from what
is purely or mainly physical, which is both capable and worthy of
cultivation, and which education ought therefore to try to cultivate.
So far, so good. These admissions, with the fundamental admission
which underlies them all, might form the basis of a sound philosophy
of education, if they were not liable to be stultified and even
nullified by the counter assumption that human nature is innately
evil and corrupt. For from the latter assumption has followed, both
logically and naturally, a theory of education which is not merely
unfavourable but fatal to growth. If human nature is innately evil,
if it has no inborn capacity for goodness or truth, what is there in
it that is worth training? So far as the "great matters" of life are
concerned, the child must be educated by being told in minute detail
what to do, and by being alternately bribed and bullied into doing
it. As he can neither think, nor believe, nor desire, nor do what
is right, he must be told what to think, what to believe, what to
desire, what to do; and as it is assumed that the tasks set him by
his teacher will not be intrinsically attractive, he must be induced
to perform them by the threat of external punishments and the promise
of external rewards. In other words, in the spheres of religion and
morals, so far as these can be walled off from the rest of human
life, he must be educated, not by being helped to grow, but by being
compelled to obey; and as the spheres of religion and morals cannot
possibly be walled off from the rest of human life, the idea of
educating the child through the medium of passive and mechanical
obedience will gradually extend its influence over all the other
departments and aspects of his home and school life, his innate
sinfulness finding its equivalent, in secular matters, in his innate
helplessness and stupidity, while in the place of the creeds, codes,
and catechisms by which his spiritual welfare is provided for, he
will be fed during the hours of secular instruction on rations of
information, formulated rules, and minute directions of various
kinds. Under this _régime_ of wire-pulling on the part of the teacher
and puppet-like dancing on the part of the child, the growth of
the child's faculties,--of the whole range of his faculties, for
they will all come under the blighting influence of the current
misconception of the bent of his nature and the consequent
under-estimate of his powers,--far from being fostered, will be
systematically thwarted and starved. This is the fate which might be
expected to befall the child if the doctrine of his innate sinfulness
were allowed to dominate his education; and this is the fate which
has befallen and is befalling him in all grades of society and in all
the countries of the West.
It is the doctrine of original sin, of the congenital depravity of
man's nature, which blocks the way to the reform of education,--blocks
the way to it by compelling education to become the destroying angel
instead of the foster-nurse of the child's expanding life. In
criticising the defects of our educational system, we have too long
mistaken symptoms for causes, and believed that we were removing the
latter when we were only palliating or at best excising the former.
To pinch off a withered bud, to lop off a withered limb, of the
diseased tree of education, to train in this or that direction a
branch which is as yet unaffected, is but lost labour so long as
the tree is being slowly poisoned at its roots by a fundamental
misconception of the character and capacity of the child. It is time
that we should reconsider our whole attitude towards human nature.
The widespread belief that sundry faculties, physical, mental, and
moral, admit of being cultivated and ought to be cultivated in the
schoolroom--a belief which is ever affirming itself against the
educational systems and practices that are ever giving it the
lie--may surely be construed into an admission that my primary truism
is at least a truth. If this is so, if the business of the teacher
is, as I contend, to help the child to grow, healthily, vigorously,
and symmetrically, on all the planes of his being, the inference is
irresistible that education will achieve nothing but failure until
its foundations have been entirely relaid. For faith in the inherent
soundness, in the natural goodness, of the seed or sapling, or
whatever else he may undertake to rear, is the first condition of
success on the part of the grower. And to ask education to bring to
sane and healthy maturity the plant which we call human nature, and
in the same breath to tell it that human nature is intrinsically
corrupt and evil, is to set it an obviously impracticable task. One
might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and
poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of wheat. Growth can and
does transform potential into actual good, but no process of growth
can transform what is innately evil into what is finally good. A
poisonous seed will ripen of inner necessity into a poisonous plant;
and the more carefully it is fed and tended, the larger and stronger
will the poisonous plant become.
The time has come, then, for us to throw to the winds the
time-honoured, but otherwise dishonoured and discredited, belief that
the child is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, and that
therefore his nature, if allowed to obey its own laws and follow its
own tendencies, will ripen into death, instead of into a larger
and richer life. I shall perhaps be told that if this belief is
abandoned, other religious beliefs will go with it. Let them go. They
have kept bad company, and if they cannot dissociate themselves from
it, they had better share its fate. What is real and vital in our
religious beliefs will gain incalculably by being disengaged from
what may once have had a life and a meaning of its own but is now
nothing better than a morbid growth. To tell a man that, apart from a
miracle, he is predestined to perdition, is the surest way to send
him there; and it is probable that the doctrine of his own innate
depravity is the deadliest instrument for achieving his ruin, that
Man, in his groping endeavours to explain to himself the dominant
facts of his existence, has ever devised.
Nor is the practical failure of the doctrine--its failure to achieve
any lasting result but the strangulation of Man's expanding life--the
only proof that it is inherently unsound. There is positive proof
that the counter doctrine, the doctrine of Man's potential goodness,
is inherently true. We have seen that the great arterial instincts
which manifest themselves in the undirected play of young children,
are making for three supreme ends,--the sympathetic instincts for the
goal of _Love_, the artistic instincts for the goal of _Beauty_, the
scientific instincts for the goal of _Truth_. We have seen, in other
words, that the push of Nature's forces in the inner life of the
young child is ever tending to take him out of himself in the
direction of a triune goal which I may surely be allowed to call
_Divine_. If we follow towards "infinity" the lines of love, of
beauty, and of truth, we shall begin at last to dream of an ideal
point--the meeting-point of all and the vanishing-point of each--for
which no name will suffice less pregnant with meaning or less
suggestive of reality than that of God. It is towards God, then, not
towards the Devil, that the ripening, expansive forces of Nature
which are at work in the child, are directing the process of his
growth. We are taught that Man is by nature a "child of wrath." The
more closely we study his ways and works when, as a young child, he
is left (more or less) to his own devices, the stronger does our
conviction become that he is by nature a "child of God." Those who
are in a position to speak tell us that the normal child is born
physically healthy. If the men of science would study the other sides
of his being as carefully as they have studied his physique, they
would, I feel sure, be able to tell us that he is also born mentally,
morally, and spiritually healthy, and that on these sides, as well as
on the physical side, his growth might be and ought to be a natural
movement towards perfection. For some of my readers such arguments as
these are perhaps too much in the air to be convincing. Well, then,
let us appeal to experience. Let us see what the systematic
cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in
Utopia. I have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the
children--the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion--is
one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. Now
there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the
school: and I can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation
of morality is wholly foreign to Egeria's conception of education.
How, then, has the emancipation of the child from the first enemy of
Man's well-being--from all those narrowing, hardening, and
demoralising influences which we speak of collectively as egoistic or
selfish--been effected in Utopia? By no other means than that of
allowing the child's nature to unfold itself, on many sides of its
being and under thoroughly favourable conditions. The twofold desire
which we all experience,--to accept and rest in the ordinary
undeveloped self, and at the same time to exalt and magnify it,--is
the surest and most fruitful source of moral evil. Indeed, it may be
doubted if there is any source of moral evil, apart from those which
are purely sensual, which has not at least an underground connection
with this. If we are to "cap" this deadly fountain, and so prevent it
from desolating human life, we must realise, once and for all, that
the two desires which master us cannot be simultaneously gratified;
that we cannot both rest in the ordinary self and magnify it; that we
can magnify it only by _making it great_, by helping it to grow. When
we have realised this, we shall be ready to receive the further
lesson that in proportion as the self magnifies itself by the natural
process of growth, so does its desire to magnify itself gradually die
away,--die away with the dawning consciousness that in and through
the process of its growth it is outgrowing itself, forgetting itself,
escaping from itself, that the thing which so ardently desired to be
magnified is in fact ceasing to be. This vital truth,--which my
visits to Utopia have borne in upon me,--that healthy and harmonious
growth is in its very essence _out_growth or escape from self, has
depths of meaning which are waiting to be fathomed. For one thing, it
means, if it has any meaning, that what is central in human nature
is, not its inborn wickedness but its infinite capacity for good, not
its rebellious instincts and backsliding tendencies but its
many-sided effort to achieve perfection.
We must now make our choice between two alternatives. We must decide,
once and for all, whether the function of education is to foster
growth or to exact mechanical obedience. If we choose the latter
alternative, we shall enter a path which leads in the direction of
spiritual death. If we choose the former, we must cease to halt
between two opinions, and must henceforth base our system of
education, boldly and confidently, on the conviction that growth is
in its essence a movement towards perfection, and therefore that
self-realisation is the first and last duty of Man.
It is by answering possible objections to Utopianism that I shall
best be able to unfold Egeria's philosophy of education. I shall
perhaps be told that in my advocacy of that philosophy _I am
preaching dangerous doctrines; that the only alternative for
obedience is the lawlessness of unbridled licence; and that anarchy,
social, moral, and spiritual, is the ultimate goal of the path which
I am urging the teacher to enter._ Let me point out, in answer to
this protest, that it is mechanical obedience which I condemn, not
obedience as such. If I condemn mechanical obedience, I do so
because it is unworthy of the name of obedience, because the higher
faculties of Man's being, the faculties which are distinctively
human--reason, imagination, aspiration, spiritual intuition, and the
like--take no part in it, because it is the obedience of an
automaton, not of a living soul. What I wish to oppose to it is
_vital obedience_, obedience to the master laws of Man's being,
obedience to the laws which assert themselves as central and supreme,
obedience more particularly to those larger and obscurer laws which
obedience itself helps us to discover, obedience in fine to that
hierarchy of laws--(the superior law always claiming the fuller
measure and the higher kind of obedience)--which, if we are to use
the Divine Name, we must needs identify with the will of God.
Obedience, in this sense of the word, is a sustained and soul-deep
effort in which all the higher faculties of Man's being take part,
an effort which is in some sort a voyage of discovery, the doing of
the more obvious duty being always rewarded by the deepening of the
doer's insight and the widening of his outlook, and by the consequent
unveiling to him of the way in which he is to walk and the goal at
which he is to aim. That the path of soul-growth is the path of vital
obedience can scarcely be doubted. The effort to grow is always
successful just so far as it implies knowledge of the laws of the
nature that is unfolding itself, and readiness to obey those laws;
and so far as it is successful, it carries with it the outgrowth of
the very faculties by which knowledge--the higher knowledge which
makes further growth possible--is to be gained. Here, as
elsewhere, there is an unceasing interaction between perception and
expression, between knowledge of law and obedience to law, what is
given as obedience being received back as enlightenment, and what is
received as enlightenment being given back as larger, fuller, and
more significant obedience.
And, be it carefully observed, it is obedience to the laws of human
nature, not obedience to the idiosyncrasies of the individual nature,
which the process of soul-growth at once implies and makes possible.
Growth is, in its essence, a movement towards that perfect type which
is the real self of each individual in turn, and the approach to
which involves the gradual surrender of individuality, and the
gradual escape from the ordinary self. A man is to cling to and
affirm his individuality, not in order that he may rest in it and
make much of it, but in order that he may outgrow it and pass far
beyond it in that one way--the best way for him--which it, and it
alone, is able to mark out for him. In other words, he is to assert
his individual self in order that he may universalise himself in his
own way, and not in obedience to the ruling of custom and authority,
in order that he may escape from himself through the real outlet of
sincere self-expression, and not through the sham outlet of hypocrisy
and cant.
What I may call the Utopian scheme of education, far from making for
antinomianism and anarchy, is the sworn enemy of individualism and
therefore, _a fortiori_, of everything that savours of licence. It is
the conventional type of education, with its demands for mechanical
obedience to external authority, which leads through despotism to
social and political chaos. The whole _régime_ of mechanical
obedience is favourable, in the long run, to the development of
anarchy. Let us take the case of a church or an autocracy which
demands implicit obedience from its subjects, and is prepared to
exact such obedience by the application of physical force or its
moral equivalent. What will happen to it when its subjects begin to
ask it for its credentials? The fact that it has always demanded from
them literal rather than spiritual obedience, and that, in its
application of motive force, it has appealed to their baser desires
and baser fears, makes it impossible for it to justify itself to
their higher faculties, rational or emotional, and makes it necessary
for it to meet their incipient criticism with renewed threats of
punishment and renewed promises of reward. But the very fact that it
is being asked for its credentials means that the force on which it
has hitherto relied is weakening, that its power to punish and
reward, which has always been resolvable into the power to make
people believe that it can punish and reward, is being called in
question and is therefore crumbling away. And behind that power there
is nothing but chaos. For the _régime_ of mechanical obedience, by
arresting the spontaneous growth of Man's higher nature, and by
making its chief appeal to his baser desires and baser fears, becomes
of necessity the foster-mother of egoism; and when egoism, which
makes each man a law to himself and the potential enemy of his kind,
is unrestrained by authority, the door is thrown wide open to
anarchy, and through anarchy to chaos. This is what is happening in
the West, in our self-conscious and critical age. In every field of
human action, in religion, in politics, in social life, in art, in
letters, authority is being asked for its credentials; and as this
demand, besides being a disintegrating influence, is a sign that the
force on which authority relies is weakening, it is not to be
wondered at that there is a steady drift in many Western countries in
the direction of anarchy,--religious, political, social, artistic,
literary,--or that this _régime_ of incipient anarchy is taking the
form of an ignoble scramble for wealth, for power, for position, for
fame, for notoriety, for anything in fine which may serve to exalt a
man above his fellows, and so minister to the aggrandizement of his
lower self.
In this drift towards anarchy the school is playing its part. I do
not wish to suggest that the boys and girls of this or any other
Western country are beginning to ask their teachers for their
credentials, or are likely to rise in rebellion against them. The
preparation for anarchy that is going on in the school is not only
quite compatible with what is known as "strict discipline," but is
also, in part at least, the effect of it. What is happening is that
in an acutely critical age the _régime_ of mechanical obedience to
external authority which has been in force in the West for nearly
2000 years, and which is now taking its victims straight towards
anarchy, is being carefully rehearsed in our schools of all types and
grades. During the years when human nature is most pliable (owing to
its richness in sap), most easily trained, and most amenable to
influence, good or evil, the child's spontaneous effort to outgrow
himself and so escape from his lower self,--an end which is not to be
reached except by the path of free self-expression,--is persistently
thwarted till at last it dies away; blind and literal obedience to
external authority, for which the consent of his higher faculties
is not asked, and in the giving of which they are not allowed to
take part, is persistently exacted from him till at last his
higher faculties cease to energise, and his lower nature begins to
monopolise the rising sap of his life; in order to enforce the blind
obedience that is asked for, an appeal is made, by an elaborate
system of external rewards and external punishments, to his selfish
desires and ignoble fears; while the examination system, with
its inevitable accompaniments of prizes and class-lists, makes a
special appeal to his competitive instincts,--instincts which are
anti-social, and may even, in extreme cases, become anti-human in
their tendency. And when authority has thus been presented to him, in
a form which he has never been expected to welcome, and when, by the
same process, the growth of his higher self has been arrested, and
his anarchical instincts--his selfishness and self-assertion--have
been systematically cultivated, the critical spirit and temper will
be deliberately aroused in him, especially if he happens to attend
one of those secondary schools which are regarded as highly efficient
because their lists of University distinctions and other "successes"
are inordinately long; for the education given to him in such a
school by his scholarship-hunting teachers is of necessity so bookish
and so one-sided that his intellectual, dialectically critical
faculties are apt to become hypertrophied, while other faculties
which might have kept these in check are neglected and starved. The
product of such a system of education,--benumbed or paralysed on many
sides of his being by the repressive _régime_ to which he has so long
been subjected, but vigorously alive on the sides of egoism and
intellectual criticism,--will be an anarchist _in posse_ (unless,
indeed, his vitality has been depressed by his school-life below the
point at which reaction becomes possible);--an anarchist _in posse_,
even though, in his terror of anarchism in others, he should become a
pillar of the Established Church of his country, a J.P. of his town
or county, and an active member of the nearest Conservative
Association.
In Utopia, on the other hand, where selfishness is outgrown and
forgotten, and where the spirit of comradeship and brotherhood
pervades the school, there can be no preparation for anarchy, if only
for the reason that there is no authority--no despotic authority,
forcibly imposing its will on the school _ab extra_--to be
potentially dethroned. For all her scholars, Egeria is the very
symbol and embodiment of love, the centre whence all happy,
harmonious, life-giving, peace-diffusing influences radiate, and to
which, when they have vitalised the souls of the children and
transformed themselves into sentiments of loyalty and devotion, they
all return. I am not exaggerating a whit when I say that the Utopian
school is an ideal community, a community whose social system,
instead of being inspired by that spirit of "competitive selfishness"
which makes "each for himself, and the devil take the hindmost" its
motto, seems to have realised the Socialistic dream of "Each for all,
and all for each."
I shall perhaps be asked _what provision is made in Utopia for
enabling the children to go through the drudgery of school-life, to
master the "3 R's," to "get up" the various subjects which the Code
prescribes, and so forth_. To this question there is but one answer:
the best possible provision. "Qui veut la fin veut les moyens." In
the life of organised play which the children lead, attractive ends
are ever being set before them. If they are to achieve these ends,
they must take the appropriate means. What children in other schools
might regard as drudgery, the Utopian takes in his stride. Reading,
writing, and arithmetic are means to ends beyond themselves, ends
which are constantly presenting themselves to the Utopian. If he is
to gratify his communicative instinct, he must learn to read and
write. If he is to gratify his dramatic instinct, he must, _inter
alia_, read with intelligence books of reference which would be
considered too advanced for the ordinary school-child. If he is to
gratify his inquisitive and constructive instincts, he must learn
to count, measure, and calculate. For whatever means may have to
be taken, must be taken by him. Egeria, as he knows well, will
do nothing for him which he can reasonably be expected to do for
himself. There are subjects, such as drawing, dancing, and singing,
which are, or at any rate ought to be, intrinsically delightful,
as being natural channels of self-expression. There are other
subjects, such as history, geography, and English, which can be made
delightful by being treated dramatically. The word "drudgery" has no
meaning for the Utopian child. A group of children in the highest
class recently committed to memory the whole "Trial Scene" of the
_Merchant of Venice_--some 300 lines or so of blank verse--in order
that they might give themselves the pleasure of acting it. They
accomplished this feat in a little more than a month. In the ordinary
elementary school the child who has committed 150 lines to memory
in the course of a year has done all that is required of him. The
getting up of a subject is drudgery only when the child can see no
meaning in what he is doing, only when the getting up of the subject
is regarded as an end in itself. In Utopia no subject, apart from
those which I have spoken of as intrinsically delightful, is taught
for its own sake. Subjects are taught there either as the means to
desired ends, or because they afford opportunities for the training
of the expansive instincts, the gratification of which is a pure
pleasure to every healthy child.
But not only does the Utopian child, with his eyes always fixed on
desirable ends, find a pleasure in doing things which other children
are wont to regard as drudgery, but he has the further advantage of
being able to master with comparative facility what other children
find difficult as well as distasteful. From first to last, the
training given in Utopia makes, as we have seen, for the development
of faculty. In my last chapter I set forth in detail some of the ways
and means by which Egeria tries to cultivate the expansive instincts
of her pupils. Behind all these ways and means stands the master
method--or shall I say the master principle?--of self-expression.
Recognising, as she does, that each of the expansive instincts is a
definite expression of the soul's spontaneous effort to grow, and a
clear indication of a particular direction in which Nature wishes the
soul to grow,--and recognising, as she also does, that the business
of growing must be done by the growing organism and cannot be
delegated to any one else,--Egeria entrusts the work of
self-realisation to the child himself, and makes no attempt to
relieve him of an obligation which no one but himself can discharge.
Now self-realisation is a twofold process. In the absence of a fitter
and more adequate word, I have applied the term _perceptive_ to those
faculties by means of which we lay hold upon the world that surrounds
us, and draw it into ourselves and make it our own. And I have
contended that this group of faculties has, as its counterpart
and correlate, another group of faculties which I have called
_expressive_,--the faculties by means of which we go out of ourselves
into the world that surrounds us, and give ourselves to it and try to
identify ourselves with it,--and that the relation between these two
groups is so vital and so intimate that each in turn may be regarded
as the very life and soul of the other. In words which I have already
used, 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. That these two groups of faculties
are, as it were, the reciprocating engines by means of which the
vital movement which we call self-realisation is effected, is the
conviction on which Egeria's whole scheme of education may be said to
be pivoted. In Utopia self-expression is the medium through which the
expansive instincts are encouraged to unfold themselves. And this
life of self-expression has as its necessary counterpart the
continuous development of the perceptive faculties along the whole
range of the child's nature.
Hence the all-round capacity of the Utopian child. The development of
his perceptive faculties which his life of self-expression tends to
produce, takes many forms. One of these, and one which in some sort
underlies and interpenetrates all the rest, is the outgrowth of what
I may call the _intuitional_ faculty,--a general capacity for getting
into touch with any new environment in which the child may find
himself, of subconsciously apprehending its laws and properties, of
feeling his way through its unexplored land. It is by means of this
capacity for putting forth a new _sense_ in response to the stimulus
of each new environment, that the Utopian child is able to master
with comparative ease the various subjects which he is expected to
learn. And not with ease only, but with effect. It is, as we have
seen, through the action of an appropriate sense, and in no other
way, that the information which is supplied to the scholar, when he
is learning this or that subject, is converted into _knowledge_, and
is so made available both for the further understanding of the given
subject and for the nutrition of the scholar's own inner life.
From every point of view, then, the Utopian scholar has a marked
advantage, in respect of the things with which education is supposed
to be mainly concerned--the mastery of subjects and the acquisition
of knowledge--over the product of the conventional type of school.
Whatever the Utopian may have to learn, is a pleasure to him either
for its own sake or as a means to some desirable end. Whatever he may
have to learn, he learns with comparative ease, because his
perceptive faculties have been systematically trained, and he is
therefore at home, in greater or lesser degree, in any new
environment. And whatever he may have to learn, he learns with
effect, because he is able to digest the information that he
receives, and convert it into knowledge, and so retain it in the form
in which it will best conduce both to his further progress in that
particular branch of study and to the general building up of his
mind.
In the ordinary result-hunting school the scholar fares very
differently from this. As a rule, he takes but little pleasure in his
work, for subjects which have their chief value as means to desirable
ends are presented to him as ends in themselves, and as such are
rightly regarded by him as meaningless and therefore as intolerably
dull; while subjects which are either intrinsically attractive, as
being natural channels of self-expression, or potentially attractive
as providing opportunities for self-expression, have no attraction
for him, as in neither case is self-expression on his part permitted.
Again, he finds great difficulty in mastering the subjects on his
time-table, or even in making the first step towards mastering them,
for, owing to his perceptive faculties as a whole having been
starved by the repressive _régime_ which denied them the outlet
of expression, he has not evolved the power of putting forth an
appropriate sense in response to the stimulus of a new environment,
and is therefore helpless in the presence of what is unfamiliar or
unexpected. One of his faculties, his memory, has indeed been
hypertrophied by being unduly exercised, and his capacity for
receiving information is in consequence unhealthily great; but
because he lacks, in this case or in that, the _sense_ which might
enable him to digest the information received and convert it into
knowledge, the food with which he has been crammed speedily passes
through him, undigested and unassimilated, and the hours which he has
spent in acquiring information will have done as little for his
progress in the given subject as for the general growth of his mind.
The difference between the two schemes of education--that which
exacts mechanical obedience, and that which seeks to foster
growth--may be looked at from another point of view. Under the
former, interference with what I may call the subconscious processes
of Nature is at its maximum. Under the latter, at its minimum. In
order to realise what this means let us suppose that such
interference were possible where fortunately it is and must ever be
impossible,--in the first and second years of the child's life.
Fortunately for the child, it is impossible for us to educate him,
in any formal sense of the word, until he has mastered his mother
tongue. Were it otherwise, his mother tongue would never be mastered.
Before he reaches the age of two the child accomplishes the
marvellous feat of acquiring an entirely new language. While he is
learning it Nature is his only teacher, and under her tuition he
masters the new language without the least strain and with complete
success. But let us suppose that it was possible for a teacher of the
conventional type to give minute directions to a child by some other
medium of expression than that of language. And let us suppose that
such a teacher made up her mind that she, and not Nature, was to
teach the child his mother tongue. One can readily imagine what would
happen. The teacher would probably have a theory that no child should
begin to talk till he was two or even two and a half years old; and
if so, the child would be kept in a state of enforced dumbness till
he reached that age. In any case, he would be strictly forbidden
to speak till his teacher gave him formal permission to do so.
Half-an-hour in the morning, and half-an-hour in the afternoon would
probably be set aside for the language lesson. For so many weeks or
months the child would be strictly limited to words of two or three
letters. For so many more weeks or months, to words of four or five
letters. Things which had names of more than the prescribed number
of letters would be kept away from the child; or, if that was
impossible, he would not be allowed to talk about them. For half a
year perhaps he would be limited to the use of nouns and verbs.
Prepositions might then be introduced into his vocabulary; and,
later, adjectives and adverbs. And so on; and so on. And the outcome
of all this elaborate training would be that the child would never
learn to talk his mother tongue.
It is by methods analogous in all respects to this that many of the
subjects on the time-table are taught in thousands of our schools.
The teacher seems to imagine that he knows, fully and precisely, how
each subject ought to be taught; and instead of standing aside, and
trying to learn how Nature wishes this or that subject to be taught
(if Nature can be said to take any interest in "subjects"), and then
trying to co-operate with her subconscious tendencies, he makes out
his elaborate scheme of instruction, sets before the child as the
goal of his efforts the production of certain formal results, and
drives him towards these with whip and bridle, satisfied that if he
succeeds in producing them, the subject will have been duly mastered.
And all the time he will not have given a thought to what is
happening to the child's inner life. Yet it is more than probable
that the teacher's disregard of, and therefore incessant interference
with, the subconscious processes of Nature has quite as disastrous
results in the teaching of composition, let us say, or drawing, as it
would certainly have in the hypothetical case of the teaching of the
child's mother tongue.
But in truth the Utopian conception of what constitutes efficiency
differs so radically from the current conception, that little is to
be gained by comparing them. If I am asked by those who value outward
and visible results for their own sake, whether the training given in
Utopia is "efficient," I can but answer: "Yes, but efficient in a
sense which you cannot even begin to understand,--efficient in the
sense of developing faculty and fostering life, whereas the price
paid for your boasted efficiency is the starvation of faculty and the
destruction of life."
* * * * *
"_But how_," it will be asked, "_are the Utopian children, one and
all, induced to exert themselves? The standard of activity in the
school is, on your own showing, exceptionally high. Much is expected
of the children. Yet there are no rewards for them to hope for, and
no punishments for them to fear. How, then, are those who are by
nature less energetic or less persevering than the rest to be induced
to rise to the level of the teacher's expectation?_" By implication
this question has been answered again and again. But it deserves a
direct answer, and I will try to give it one.
To begin with, it is incorrect to say that there are no rewards or
punishments in Utopia. Outward rewards and outward punishments are
entirely unknown there; but there are inward rewards to be had for
the seeking, and there are inward punishments to be feared, though it
must be admitted that the fear of them seldom overshadows, even for
a passing moment, the sunlit life of the Utopian child. What induces
the Utopian child to work is, in brief, delight in his work. He is
allowed and even encouraged to energise along the lines which his
nature seems to have marked out for him, and in response to the
stress of forces which seem to be welling up from the depths of his
inner life. Exertion of this kind is in itself a delight. Nature has
taken care to make all the exercises by which growth is fostered, at
any rate in the days of childhood when growth is most rapid and
vigorous, intrinsically attractive. Had she done otherwise she would
have failed to make due provision for the growth of Man's being
during the years which precede the outgrowth of self-consciousness,
and the possibility of self-discipline, of the narrower and sterner
kind.
And not only are the exercises by which healthy and harmonious growth
is secured intrinsically attractive, but also the sense of well-being
which accompanies such growth is an unfailing source of happiness. In
Utopia the end for which the children are working is not an external
reward or prize to be conferred on them if they achieve certain
prescribed results, but rather the actual goal to which the path that
they have entered is taking them,--a goal which is ever lighting the
path with its foreglow, and which is therefore at once an infinitely
distant lodestar and an ever present delight. For the consummation of
any process of growth is always the perfection, the final well-being,
of the thing that grows; and therefore in each successive stage of
the process there is a truer prefigurement of the perfection which
is being gradually achieved, and a fuller sense of that well-being
which, at its highest level, is perfection's other self.
For the Utopian, then, to walk in the path of self-realisation is its
own reward; and to wander from that path is its own punishment. But
as the forces of Nature are all co-operating to keep the child in
the path of self-realisation, and as Egeria has allied herself with
those forces and is working with them in every possible way, the
rewards which the Utopian wins for himself are very many, while the
punishments which he inflicts on himself are very few. In other
words, the pressure on him to exert himself is so strong, his
opportunities for exerting himself (under Egeria's sympathetic rule)
are so many, and the pleasure of exerting himself is found to be so
great, that the temptation to be idle or rebellious can scarcely be
said to exist.
It is indeed in respect of the motives to exertion which they
respectively supply, that the superiority of the Utopian to the
conventional type of education is perhaps most pronounced. I have
said that Egeria allies herself with the expansive forces of Nature.
The teacher of the conventional type has to fight against those
forces. Let us assume that the two teachers are on a level in respect
of their capacity for influencing and stimulating their pupils,
and let us indicate that level by the algebraical symbol _x_. Then
the difference between the motive force which Egeria exerts, and
the motive force which her rival exerts, is the difference between
_x_ + _y_, and _x_ - _y_, _y_ being used to symbolise the aggregate
motive force of the expansive tendencies of the child's inner nature.
Such a difference is incalculable. The scheme of education which is
based on distrust of the child's nature and belief in its intrinsic
sinfulness and stupidity, necessarily arrays against itself the
hidden forces of that maligned and despised nature, and must needs
overcome their resistance before it can hope to achieve its proposed
end. While Egeria is helping Nature to provide suitable channels for
the various expansive tendencies that are at work in the child, and
to guide them all into the central channel of self-realisation, her
rival is engaged in digging a canal (to be filled, when finished,
with dead, stagnant water) which is so designed that not only will no
use be made by it of the life stream of the child's latent energies,
but also costly culverts and other works will have to be constructed
for it in order to divert and send to waste that troublesome
current.
The waste of motive force which goes on under any scheme of education
through mechanical obedience, is indeed enormous. And what is most
lamentable is that the energies of the teacher are being largely
wasted in the effort to neutralise the latent energies of the child.
No wonder that, in order to produce his meagre and illusory,
"results," the teacher should have to resort to motive forces which,
by appealing to the lower side of the child's nature, will enable
him to bear down the resistance, and, in doing so, to impede the
outgrowth of the higher,--to the hope of external rewards and the
threat of external punishments. And no wonder that, owing to the
teacher having to work unceasingly against the grain of the
child's nature, of these two demoralising forces, the fear of
punishment--which, if not the more demoralising, is certainly the
more wasteful of energy--should bulk the more largely in the eyes
of the child.
In fine, then, whereas the conventional type of education is so
wasteful of motive force that it dissipates the greater part of the
teachers' and the scholars' energies in needless friction,--in
Utopia, on the other hand, there is such an economy of motive force
that the very joy which, under its scheme of education, always
accompanies the child's expenditure of energy, and which might be
regarded as merely a waste by-product, becomes in its turn a powerful
incentive to further exertion.
* * * * *
"_But is there not too much joy in Utopia? Is not the sky too
cloudless? Is not the atmosphere too clear? Does the Utopian never
act from a sense of duty? Has he never to do anything that is
distasteful to him?_" This objection raises an interesting question.
Is the function of the sense of duty to enable us to do distasteful
things? And if so, are we to regard it as the highest of motives to
moral action? In the days when Kant's idea of the "moral imperative"
was in the ascendant, the belief got abroad that the essence of
virtue was to do what you hated doing. Looking back to my Oxford
days, I recall some doggerel lines, of German origin, in which this
belief finds apt expression. A disciple who is in trouble about his
soul says to his master:
"Willing serve I my friends, but do it, alas! with affection,
And so gnaws me my heart, that I'm not virtuous yet."
To this the master replies:
"Help except this there is none: you must strive with
might to contemn them,
And with horror perform then what the law may enjoin."
If this conception of morality is correct, if it is true that the
atmosphere of the virtuous life should be one of horror and even of
hatred, then it must be admitted that the Utopian children are
receiving a seriously defective education. But the "if" is a large
one; and for my part I incline to the belief that love, as a motive
to action, is better than hatred, joy than horror, sunshine than
gloom.
The day will indeed come when the Utopian--a child no longer--will
have to do things, either for his own sake or in order to discharge
obligations to others, which will be, or will seem to be, against the
grain even of his happy nature; and the sense of duty will then have
to come to his aid. But there is no reason why he, or his teachers,
should anticipate that day. To compel him, while still a child, to
work against the grain of his nature, when there was no real need for
this, would not be the best preparation for the trials that await
him. To compel him to spend the greater part of his school-life in
doing what was distasteful to him, would be the worst possible
preparation for them.
For, to begin with, the sense of duty is not the highest motive to
action. A far higher motive is love. If the sense of duty to God, for
example, had not devotion to God and love of God behind it, the
object of one's worship would be a malignant rather than a beneficent
deity, a devil rather than a God. Or let us take the case of a child
who is dangerously ill, and who needs to be carefully and even
devotedly nursed. By whom will he be the more effectively nursed,--by
his mother who loves him passionately, or by a hired nurse who cannot
be expected to love him but who has a strong sense of duty to her
employers? (I am assuming that as regards professional skill, and
the sense of duty to God, the two women are on a level.) Surely the
mother, sustained by love in the endurance of sleeplessness and
fatigue, and in the exercise of that unceasing vigilance which lets
no symptom escape it, will be the better nurse. Love, as a motive to
moral action, has the immense advantage over the sense of duty of
being able to rob the hour of trial of its gloom, by strengthening
the lover to make light of labour and difficulty till at last the
sense of effort is lost in the sense of joy. But if love is the
highest of all motives, is it not well that the child's life should
as far as possible, and for as long as possible, be kept under its
influence, to the exclusion of other motives. We have seen that the
Utopian child takes many things in his stride which other children
would regard as distasteful. If they are not distasteful to him, the
reason is that he does them, not from a sense of duty, but under the
inspiration of love,--love of life, love of Egeria, love of his
schoolmates, love of his school. And the longer he can remain on the
high plane of love, the better it will be for his after life.
And when the time comes for him to yield himself to the "saving arms"
of duty, he will have had the best of all preparations for that hour
of trial, for he will have been braced and strengthened for it by the
most moralising of all disciplines, that of growth. What is the sense
of duty? We too seldom ask ourselves this question. Is it not a
feeling of obligation, of being in debt, to some person, or persons,
or institution, or society, or even to some invisible Power;--to
a friend, for example, a relative, a dependent, an employer, a
"contracting party," a commanding officer,--or, again, to one's trade
or profession, to one's political party, to one's church, to one's
country,--or, in the last resort, to God? And is not this feeling
accompanied by the secret conviction that until the debt has been
liquidated, to the best of the debtor's ability, justice will not
have been done? The sense of duty is, I think, a derivative sense,
an offshoot from the more primitive sense of justice,--a sense so
primitive that it may almost be said to have made possible our social
life. If this is so, if the sense of duty is resolvable into the
sense of justice, then the training which is given in Utopia--a
training which makes for healthy and harmonious growth, and therefore
(as we have seen) for outgrowth or escape from self--is the best
preparation for a life of duty, that can possibly be given. For under
its influence the sense of justice, which is essentially a social
instinct, knowing no distinction between oneself and one's neighbour,
will be relieved of the hostile pressure of its arch-enemy, the
anti-social instinct of selfishness,[21] and will therefore make
rapid and vigorous growth. The sense of justice is, as might be
expected, strongly developed in the selfless atmosphere of Utopia,
where indeed it has helped, in no small degree, to evolve the
wonderful social life of the school; and, that being so, there is no
fear but what the Utopian will be sustained by the sense of duty when
the time comes for him to work against the grain of his nature. But
however strong may be his sense of duty, he will always have the
great advantage of being seldom called upon to do what he dislikes,
and therefore of being able to keep the fibre of his sense of duty
from being either unduly relaxed or unduly hardened by overwork; for
he has been accustomed from his earliest days to make light of, and
even find a pleasure in, what is usually accounted drudgery, and he
has been accustomed to work, in school and out of school, under the
inspiration of joy and love.
_But is the education given in Utopia useful?_ I wish I knew who was
asking this question, for I cannot hope to answer it to his
satisfaction until I know what is his standard of values. What end
does he set before the teachers of our elementary schools? If he
would tell me this, I might be able to say Yes or No to his question.
At present there seems to be no agreement among educationalists,
professional or amateur, as to what constitutes usefulness in
education. Those who belong to the "upper classes" are apt to assume
that the "lower orders" will have been adequately educated when they
have been taught reading, writing, arithmetic, needlework, and
"religion," subjected to a certain amount of repressive discipline,
and compelled to go to church or chapel. If, after having passed
through this mill, the children of the "lower orders" do not develop
into good men and women and useful citizens, it is not their
education which is to blame, but the inborn sinfulness of their
corrupt and fallen natures. Such an education is regarded by those
who advocate it as pre-eminently _useful_. There is no nonsense about
it, no cant of idealism, no taint of socialism. It keeps the "lower
orders" in their places, and forbids them to dream of rising above
"that state of life unto which it" has pleased "God to call them." As
it is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the conventional type of education,
my objection to it is that it makes the best possible provision for
securing the end which the conventional type seems to have set
before itself,--in other words, for depressing the vitality of the
child, for starving his faculties, for arresting his growth. As
such, it has not even the merit of being sordidly useful; for
unless stupidity is a better thing than intelligence, slowness than
alertness, helplessness than initiative, lifelessness than vital
activity, the child who has passed through that dreary mill will be
far less effective, even as a day-labourer, than the child whose
school-life has been one of continuous and many-sided growth. It is
strange that the reactionary members of the "upper classes" should be
too short-sighted to discern this obvious truth. But perhaps they
have a secret conviction that by so educating the "lower orders" as
to make them slow and stupid, helpless and lifeless, they will be the
better able to keep them in a state of subservience to and dependence
on themselves.[22] If this is so, there is method in the madness of
the "upper classes"; and their conception of the course that
education ought to take has the merit of being entirely true to their
basely selfish conception of the end that education ought to serve.
I have alluded to this pseudo-utilitarian theory, not because it is
intrinsically worthy of serious attention, but because there is
undoubtedly a strong and influential current of opinion which sets in
its direction. There are other advocates of a "useful" education who
seem to regard the elementary school, not as a training ground for
good men and women, but as a kind of technical institute in which the
children are to be trained for the various callings by which, when
they grow up, they will have to earn their daily bread. This theory
need not be seriously considered, for its inherent absurdity has
caused it to be tacitly abandoned by all whose opinion carries
weight; and the more reasonable theory that the education given in
the elementary school should be as far as possible adapted to the
environment of the school--that it should be given a rural bias, for
example, or a marine bias, or even an urban bias--has begun to take
its place. That it should ever have found advocates is interesting as
showing how easy it is for unenlightened public opinion to
misinterpret the word "useful."[23]
There is a third class of critics, composed for the most part of
members of Local Education Committees, who seem to think that ability
to pass a "leaving" examination is the only valid proof of the
usefulness of elementary education. If these influential critics, who
are showing in various ways that they care more for machinery than
for life, could have their will, they would probably revert to the
"good old days" of cut-and-dried syllabuses, formal examinations of
individual scholars, percentages of passes, and the like. As I have
already taken pains to explain what the _régime_ of the "good old
days" really meant, I need not waste my time in exposing the
fallacies which underlie this conception of "usefulness."
Here, then, are three distinct standards of usefulness in elementary
education. According to the first, education is useful in proportion
as it tends, by repressing the activities and atrophying the
faculties of the scholars, to keep the "lower orders" in their
places, and in so doing to provide the "upper classes" with a
sufficiency of labourers and servants. According to the second, it is
useful in proportion as it is able to prepare the scholars for their
various callings in after life.[24] According to the third, in
proportion as it enables the scholars to pass with credit certain
"leaving" and other examinations of a formal type.
I will now assume that the end of education is to produce, or at any
rate contribute to the production of, good men and women; and that
the education given in elementary schools is useful in exact
proportion as it serves this end. I am not using the word "good" in
its Sunday School sense. Nor does the word suggest to my mind that
blend of stupidity, patience, and submissiveness which sometimes
passes for "goodness" when the "upper classes" are taking thought for
the welfare of the "lower orders." The good man, as I understand the
phrase, is a good son, a good brother, a good husband, a good father,
a good citizen, a good townsman, a good workman, a good servant, a
good master. In fine, he is a good specimen of his kind, well
grown and well developed, efficient on all the planes of his
being,--physical, mental, moral, spiritual. This conception of what
constitutes useful education differs radically from those which I
have just been considering; but I believe that when it has been
adequately expounded, and submitted to the judgment of those whose
opinion is worth having, it will not be seriously gainsaid.
If education is useful in proportion as it tends to produce good men
and women, the education given in Utopia is useful to the highest
degree. For a child cannot become a good man (or woman) except by
_growing_ good; and if he is to grow good, his nature must be allowed
to develop itself freely and harmoniously (for just so far as it is
normal and healthy it is necessarily making for its own perfection),
and the one end and aim of the teacher must be to stimulate and
direct this process of spontaneous growth. This, as we have seen, is
the one end and aim of Egeria; and it is therefore clear that she
is taking effective steps--the most effective that can possibly
be taken--to produce good men and women. We have but to name the
qualities which are characteristic, as we have already seen, of her
pupils and ex-pupils,--activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy,
a large and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy
of heart,--in order to convince ourselves that those who have passed
through the Utopian school are on the high road which leads to
"goodness." So obvious is all this, that in defining the word
"useful" I may be said to have decided the question in favour of
Utopia; and what is now in dispute is not whether Utopianism is
"useful," in any sense of the word, but whether my sense of the word
is the right one.
I cannot go much further into this question without exceeding the
limits of the theme which I am handling in this chapter. For in
considering the after life of the Utopian child, I am entering a
region in which the idea of _education_ begins to merge itself in the
larger idea of _salvation_; and though education, as begun in Utopia,
is in its essence a life-long process, I must pay some heed to the
limits which tradition and custom have imposed on the meaning of the
word.
But before I close this chapter I must be allowed to give one
illustration in support of my contention that the education given in
Utopia is useful. Of the many complaints that are brought against the
output of our elementary schools, one of the most serious is that the
boys and girls who have recently left school are voracious readers of
a vicious and demoralising literature which seems to be provided for
their special benefit. The reason why they take so readily to this
garbage is that they have lost their appetite for wholesome food.
They are not interested in healthy literature, in Nature-study, in
music, in art, in handicraft,--in any pursuit which might take them
out of themselves into a larger and freer life; and so they fall
victims to the allurements of a literature which appeals to their
baser, more sensual, and more selfish instincts,--the very instincts
which growth (in the true sense of the word) spontaneously relegates
to a subordinate position and places under effective control. It is
the inertness, the apathy, the low vitality of the average child of
fourteen, which is the cause of his undoing. His taste for false and
meretricious excitement--a taste which may lead him far along the
downward path--is the outcome of his very instinct to live, an
instinct which, though repressed by the influences that have choked
its natural channels, cannot resign itself to extinction, and at
last, in its despairing effort to energise, forces for itself the
artificial outlet of an imaginative interest in vice and crime.
The "young person" who, on leaving school, becomes a voracious
devourer of unwholesome literature, cannot be said to have received
a "useful" education. That vice and crime--whether practised or
imagined--are in the first instance artificial outlets, outlets which
the soul would not use if its expansive instincts were duly fostered,
is proved by the absence of "naughtiness" in the Utopian school,
and the absence of any taste for morbid excitement amongst Utopian
ex-scholars. The unwholesome literature which gives so much concern
to those who are interested in the welfare of the young, is unknown
in Utopia. And in this, as in other matter, the "goodness" of the
children and "young persons" is due, not to any lack of life and
spirit, but to the very abundance of their vitality. Apart from the
fact that vigorous growth, whether in plant or animal or human soul,
is in itself a sure prophylactic against the various evils to which
growing life is exposed, the Utopians are guarded against the danger
of demoralising books and demoralising amusements by their many-sided
interest in life. Their instinct to live, finding natural and
adequate outlets in many directions, has no need to force for itself
the artificial outlet of morbid excitement,--an outlet for imprisoned
energies, which has too often proved an opening to a life of vice and
crime. There is a Shakespeare in every cottage in Utopia; but the
advocates of a repressive and restrictive education for the "lower
orders" need not be alarmed at this, for the Utopians, who have found
the secret of true happiness, are freer than most villagers from
social discontent. Nor are Egeria's ex-pupils less efficient as
labourers or domestic servants because they are interested in good
literature, in Nature-study, in acting, or because they can still
dance the Morris Dances and sing the Folk Songs which they learned in
school.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] I am thinking more particularly of some of the Roman
Catholic schools in the Irish quarter of Liverpool, where the
singularly kind and gracious bearing of the teaching "sisters"
towards their poor, ill-fed, and ill-clad pupils is an educative
influence of incalculable value.
[21] The sense of justice, which would give to each his due,
and therefore not more than his due to oneself, seems to hold the
balance between selfishness and love, being as it were, equidistant
from the greed and self-indulgence of the former and the lavishness
and self-devotion of the latter. If this is so, and if the sense of
duty is, as I have suggested, an offshoot from the sense of justice,
one can understand why, on the one hand, the sense of duty should be
needed to hold the self-seeking instincts in check, and why, on the
other hand, it should be an altogether lower and weaker motive than
love, by which indeed, _in its own interest_, it should always be
ready to be superseded.
[22] I was once present when the Utopian children were going
through a programme of Folk Songs and Morris Dances in the village
hall. A lady who was looking on remarked to me: "This is all very
fine; but if this sort of thing goes on, where are we going to find
our servants?" The selfishness of this remark is obvious. What is
less obvious, but more significant, is its purblindness. In point of
fact the Utopian girls make excellent domestic servants, and are well
content to "go into service."
[23] Some two or three years ago it was seriously proposed
that _marine navigation_ should be taught in all the elementary
schools of a certain maritime county!
[24] The parent who wrote to a schoolmaster, "Please do not
teach my boy any more poetry, as he is going to be a grocer," must
have been under the influence of this conception of usefulness.