FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION
The first process of education is obviously not a mental process. When
a mother talks to a baby, she is not encouraging its little mind to
think. When she is coaxing her child to walk, she is not making a
theoretic exposition of the science of equilibration. She crouches
before the child, at a little distance, and spreads her hands. "Come,
baby--come to mother. Come! Baby, walk! Yes, walk! Walk to mother!
Come along. A little walk to its mother. Come! Come then! Why yes, a
pretty baby! Oh, he can toddle! Yes--yes--No, don't be frightened, a
dear. No--Come to mother--" and she catches his little pinafore by the
tip--and the infant lurches forward. "There! There! A beautiful walk!
A beautiful walker, yes! Walked all the way to mother, baby did. Yes,
he did--"
Now who will tell me that this talk has any rhyme or reason? Not a
spark of reason. Yet a real rhyme: or rhythm, much more important.
The song and the urge of the mother's voice plays direct on the
affective centers of the child, a wonderful stimulus and tuition. The
words hardly matter. True, this constant repetition in the end forms a
mental association. At the moment they have no mental significance at
all for the baby. But they ring with a strange palpitating music in
his fluttering soul, and lift him into motion.
And this is the way to educate children: the instinctive way of
mothers. There should be no effort made to teach children to think, to
have ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into dynamic activity. The
voice of dynamic sound, not the words of understanding. Damn
understanding. Gestures, and touch, and expression of the face, not
theory. Never have ideas about children--and never have ideas _for_
them.
If we are going to teach children we must teach them first to move.
And not by rule or mental dictation. Horror! But by playing and
teasing and anger, and amusement. A child must learn to move blithe
and free and proud. It must learn the fullness of spontaneous motion.
And this it can only learn by continuous reaction from all the
centers, through all the emotions. A child must learn to contain
itself. It must learn to sit still if need be. Part of the first phase
of education is the learning to stay still and be physically
self-contained. Then a child must learn to be alone, and to adventure
alone, and to play alone. Any peevish clinging should be quite roughly
rebuffed. From the very first day, throw a child back on its own
resources--even a little cruelly sometimes. But don't neglect it,
don't have a negative attitude to it. Play with it, tease it and roll
it over as a dog her puppy, mock it when it is too timorous, laugh at
it, scold it when it really bothers you--for a child must learn not to
bother another person--and when it makes you genuinely angry, spank it
soundly. But always remember that it is a single little soul by
itself; and that the responsibility for the wise, warm relationship is
yours, the adult's.
Then always watch its deportment. Above all things encourage a
straight backbone and proud shoulders. Above all things despise a
slovenly movement, an ugly bearing and unpleasing manner. And make a
mock of petulance and of too much timidity.
We are imbeciles to start bothering about love and so forth in a
child. Forget utterly that there is such a thing as emotional
reciprocity. But never forget your own honor as an adult individual
towards a small individual. It is a question of honor, not of love.
A tree grows straight when it has deep roots and is not too stifled.
Love is a spontaneous thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectual
soul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmitigated evil. Also
morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated
evil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all its
deportment, will be quite as moral as need be. Honor is an instinct, a
superb instinct which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, vice,
crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other of
the great primary centers. If one of these centers fails to maintain
its true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, or
both. And viciousness or crime are the result of a derangement in the
primary system. Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which
the soul makes in every circumstance, adjusting one thing to another
livingly, delicately, sensitively. There can be no law. Therefore, at
every cost and charge keep the first four centers alive and alert,
active, and vivid in reaction. And then you need fear no perversion.
What we have done, in our era, is, first, we have tried as far as
possible to suppress or subordinate the two sensual centers. We have
so unduly insisted on and exaggerated the upper spiritual or selfless
mode--the living in the other person and through the other
person--that we have caused already a dangerous over-balance in the
natural psyche.
To correct this we go one worse, and try to rule ourselves more and
more by the old ideas of sympathy and benevolence. We think that love
and benevolence will cure anything. Whereas love and benevolence are
our poison, poison to the giver, and still more poison to the
receiver. Poison only because there is practically _no_ spontaneous
love left in the world. It is all _will_, the fatal love-will and
insatiable morbid curiosity. The pure sympathetic mode of love long
ago broke down. There is now only deadly, exaggerated volition.
This is also why general education should be suppressed as soon as
possible. We have fallen into a state of fixed, deadly will.
Everything we do and say to our children in school tends simply to fix
in them the same deadly will, under the pretence of pure love. Our
idealism is the clue to our fixed will. Love, beauty, benevolence,
progress, these are the words we use. But the principle we evoke is a
principle of barren, sanctified compulsion of all life. We want to put
all life under compulsion. "How to outwit the nerves," for
example.--And therefore, to save the children as far as possible,
elementary education should be stopped at once.
No child should be sent to any sort of public institution before the
age of ten years. If I could but advise, I would advise that this
notice should be sent through the length and breadth of the land.
"Parents, the State can no longer be responsible for the
mind and character of your children. From the first day of
the coming year, all schools will be closed for an
indefinite period. Fathers, see that your boys are trained
to be men. Mothers, see that your daughters are trained to
be women.
"All schools will shortly be converted either into public
workshops or into gymnasia. No child will be admitted into
the workshops under ten years of age. Active training in
primitive modes of fighting and gymnastics will be
compulsory for all boys over ten years of age.
"All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic
workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition,
attend at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical
industry, or of art. Admission for three months' probation.
"All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop
of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labor, or
of technical industry, or of art. A boy may choose, with his
parents' consent, his school of labor, or technical industry
or art, but the directors reserve the right to transfer him
to a more suitable department, if necessary, after a three
months' probation.
"It is the intention of this State to form a body of active,
energetic citizens. The danger of a helpless, presumptuous,
news-paper-reading population is universally recognized.
"All elementary education is left in the hands of the
parents, save such as is necessary to the different branches
of industry.
"Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over
fourteen years of age.
"Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture
degree."
The fact is, our process of universal education is to-day so uncouth,
so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to
the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by
parrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By
unnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain amount
of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain
number of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many
inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they have
learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls.
The windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, Dulcinea del Toboso
beckons round every corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes jumps
on and off tram-cars, trains, bicycles, motor-cars, buses, in one mad
chase of the divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chewing chocolates
and feeling very, very bored. It is no use telling the poor devils to
stop. They read in the newspapers about more Dulcineas and more
chivalry due to them and more horrid persons who injure the fair fame
of these bored females. And round they skelter, after their own tails.
That is, when they are not forced to grind out their lives for a wage.
Though work is the only thing that prevents our masses from going
quite mad.
To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever
been injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection,
in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for.
An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started
spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our
misery to-day. Instead of living from the spontaneous centers, we live
from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We
grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside
ourselves. Our primary affective centers, our centers of spontaneous
being, are so utterly ground round and automatized that they squeak in
all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people--and
not we alone--of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even
know we are raving.
And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the
Ideal. The Ideal is _always_ evil, no matter what ideal it be. No
idea should ever be raised to a governing throne.
This does not mean that man should immediately cut off his head and
try to develop a pair of eyes in his breasts. But it does mean this:
that an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of living
dynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectly
expressed until its dynamic cause is finished; and that to continue to
put into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means the
nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism,
and all the resultant horrors of _ennui_, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and a
collapsing psyche.
The whole tree of our idea of life and living is dead. Then let us
leave off hanging ourselves and our children from its branches like
medlars.
The idea, the actual idea, must rise ever fresh, ever displaced, like
the leaves of a tree, from out of the quickness of the sap, and
according to the forever incalculable effluence of the great dynamic
centers of life. The tree of life is a gay kind of tree that is
forever dropping its leaves and budding out afresh, quite different
ones. If the last lot were thistle leaves, the next lot may be vine.
You never can tell with the Tree of Life.
So we come back to that precious child who costs us such a lot of
ink. By what right, I ask you, are we going to inject into him our own
disease-germs of ideas and infallible motives? By the right of the
diseased, who want to infect everybody.
There are _few, few people_ in whom the living impulse and reaction
develops and sublimates into mental consciousness. There are all kinds
of trees in the forest. But few of them indeed bear the apples of
knowledge. The modern world insists, however, that every individual
shall bear the apples of knowledge. So we go through the forest of
mankind, cut back every tree, and try to graft it into an apple-tree.
A nice wood of monsters we make by so doing.
It is not the _nature_ of most men to know and to understand and to
reason very far. Therefore, why should they make a pretense of it? It
is the nature of some few men to reason, then let them reason. Those
whose nature it is to be rational will instinctively ask why and
wherefore, and wrestle with themselves for an answer. But why every
Tom, Dick and Harry should have the why and wherefore of the universe
rammed into him, and should be allowed to draw the conclusion hence
that he is the ideal person and responsible for the universe, I don't
know. It is a lie anyway--for neither the whys nor the wherefores are
his own, and he is but a parrot with his nut of a universe.
Why should we cram the mind of a child with facts that have nothing to
do with his own experiences, and have no relation to his own dynamic
activity? Let us realize that every extraneous idea effectually
introduced into a man's mind is a direct obstruction of his dynamic
activity. Every idea which is introduced from outside into a man's
mind, and which does not correspond to his own dynamic nature, is a
fatal stumbling-block for that man: is a cause of arrest for his true
individual activity, and a derangement to his psychic being.
For instance, if I teach a man the idea that all men are equal. Now
this idea has no foundation in experience, but is logically deduced
from certain ethical or philosophic principles. But there is a disease
of idealism in the world, and we all are born with it. Particularly
teachers are born with it. So they seize on the idea of equality, and
proceed to instil it. With what result? Your man is no longer a man,
living his own life from his own spontaneous centers. He is a
theoretic imbecile trying to frustrate and dislocate all life.
It is the death of all life to force a pure _idea_ into practice. Life
must be lived from the deep, self-responsible spontaneous centers of
every individual, in a vital, _non-ideal_ circuit of dynamic relation
between individuals. The passions or desires which are thought-born
are deadly. Any particular mode of passion or desire which receives an
exclusive ideal sanction at once becomes poisonous.
If this is true for men, it is much more true for women. Teach a woman
to act from an idea, and you destroy her womanhood for ever. Make a
woman self-conscious, and her soul is barren as a sandbag. Why were we
driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of
unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the
animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not
because we sinned. But because we got our sex into our head.
When Eve ate that particular apple, she became aware of her own
womanhood, mentally. And mentally she began to experiment with it. She
has been experimenting ever since. So has man. To the rage and horror
of both of them.
These sexual experiments are really anathema. But once a woman is
sexually self-conscious, what is she to do? There it is, she is born
with the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her mother
before her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another,
in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixed
one, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. First she is
the noble spouse of a not-quite-so-noble male: then a _Mater
Dolorosa_: then a ministering Angel: then a competent social unit, a
Member of Parliament or a Lady Doctor or a platform speaker: and all
the while, as a side show, she is the Isolde of some Tristan, or the
Guinevere of some Lancelot, or the Fata Morgana of all men--in her own
idea. She can't stop having an idea of herself. She can't get herself
out of her own head. And there she is, functioning away from her own
head and her own consciousness of herself and her own automatic
self-will, till the whole man and woman game has become just a hell,
and men with any backbone would rather kill themselves than go on with
it--or kill somebody else.
Yet we are going to inculcate more and more self-consciousness, teach
every little Mary to be more and more a nice little Mary out of her
own head, and every little Joseph to theorize himself up to the
scratch.
And the point lies here. There will _have_ to come an end. Every race
which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has
perished. And then it has all started afresh, in a different way, with
another race. And man has never learnt any better. We are really far,
far more life-stupid than the dead Greeks or the lost Etruscans. Our
day is pretty short, and closing fast. We can pass, and another race
can follow later.
But there is another alternative. We still have in us the power to
discriminate between our own idealism, our own self-conscious will,
and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self. Certainly we
are so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can't get well in a
minute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, once
we recognize it. The disease of love, the disease of "spirit," the
disease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf
and good on somebody else's behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We can
retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone, like
lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease of
self-conscious idealism.
And we really can make a move on our children's behalf. We really can
refrain from thrusting our children any more into those hot-beds of
the self-conscious disease, schools. We really can prevent their
eating much more of the tissues of leprosy, newspapers and books. For
a time, there should be no compulsory teaching to read and write at
all. _The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and
write_--_never_.
And instead of this gnawing, gnawing disease of mental consciousness
and awful, unhealthy craving for stimulus and for action, we must
substitute genuine action. The war was really not a bad beginning. But
we went out under the banners of idealism, and now the men are home
again, the virus is more active than ever, rotting their very souls.
The mass of the people will never _mentally understand_. But they will
soon instinctively fall into line.
Let us substitute action, all kinds of action, for the mass of people,
in place of mental activity. Even twelve hours' work a day is better
than a newspaper at four in the afternoon and a grievance for the rest
of the evening. But particularly let us take care of the children. At
all cost, try to prevent a girl's mind from dwelling on herself, Make
her act, work, play: assume a rule over her girlhood. Let her learn
the domestic arts in their perfection. Let us even artificially set
her to spin and weave. Anything to keep her busy, to prevent her
reading and becoming self-conscious. Let us awake as soon as possible
to the repulsive machine quality of machine-made things. They smell of
death. And let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and the
very things of the home. Then keep the girls apart from any
familiarity or being "pals" with the boys. The nice clean intimacy
which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes
neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.
The same with the boys. First and foremost establish a rule over them,
a proud, harsh, manly rule. Make them _know_ that at every moment they
are in the shadow of a proud, strong, adult authority. Let them be
soldiers, but as individuals not machine units. There are wars in the
future, great wars, which not machines will finally decide, but the
free, indomitable life spirit. No more wars under the banners of the
ideal, and in the spirit of sacrifice. But wars in the strength of
individual men. And then, pure individualistic training to fight, and
preparation for a whole new way of life, a new society. Put money
into its place, and science and industry. The leaders must stand for
life, and they must not ask the simple followers to point out the
direction. When the leaders assume responsibility they relieve the
followers forever of the burden of finding a way. Relieved of this
hateful incubus of responsibility for general affairs, the populace
can again become free and happy and spontaneous, leaving matters to
their superiors. No newspapers--the mass of the people never learning
to read. The evolving once more of the great spontaneous gestures of
life.
We can't go on as we are. Poor, nerve-worn creatures, fretting our
lives away and hating to die because we have never lived. The secret
is, to commit into the hands of the sacred few the responsibility
which now lies like torture on the mass. Let the few, the leaders, be
increasingly responsible for the whole. And let the mass be free:
free, save for the choice of leaders.
Leaders--this is what mankind is craving for.
But men must be prepared to obey, body and soul, once they have chosen
the leader. And let them choose the leader for life's sake only.
Begin then--there is a beginning.