constructiveness, though it is they who have it most strongly. It is
almost universal in boys, and in men it usually survives in a greater
or less degree, according to the greater or less outlet which it is
able to find. Work inspired by this instinct is satisfying, even when
it is irksome and difficult, because every effort is as natural as
the effort of a dog pursuing a hare. The chief defect of the present
capitalistic system is that work done for wages very seldom affords
any outlet for the creative impulse. The man who works for wages has
no choice as to what he shall make: the whole creativeness of the
processes concentrate in the employer who orders the work to be done.
For this reason the work becomes a merely external means to a certain
result, the earning of wages. Employers grow indignant about the trade
union rules for limitation of output, but they have no right to be
indignant, since they do not permit the men whom they employ to have
any share in the purpose for which the work is undertaken. And so
the process of production, which should form one instinctive cycle,
becomes divided into separate purposes, which can no longer provide any
satisfaction of instinct for those who do the work.
This result is due to our industrial system, but it would not be
avoided by socialism. In a socialist community, the State would be
the employer, and the individual workman would have almost as little
control over his work as he has at present. Such control as he could
exercise would be indirect, through political channels, and would be
too slight and roundabout to afford any appreciable satisfaction. It is
to be feared that instead of an increase of self-direction, there would
only be an increase of mutual interference.
The total abolition of private capitalistic enterprise, which is
demanded by Marxian socialism, seems scarcely necessary. Most men who
construct sweeping systems of reform, like most of those who defend the
_status quo_, do not allow enough for the importance of exceptions and
the undesirability of rigid system. Provided the sphere of capitalism
is restricted, and a large proportion of the population are rescued
from its dominion, there is no reason to wish it wholly abolished. As a
competitor and a rival, it might serve a useful purpose in preventing
more democratic enterprises from sinking into sloth and technical
conservatism. But it is of the very highest importance that capitalism
should become the exception rather than the rule, and that the bulk of
the world’s industry should be conducted on a more democratic system.
Much of what is to be said against militarism in the State is also
to be said against capitalism in the economic sphere. Economic
organizations, in the pursuit of efficiency, grow larger and larger,
and there is no possibility of reversing this process. The causes of
their growth are technical, and large organizations must be accepted
as an essential part of civilized society. But there is no reason
why their government should be centralized and monarchical. The
present economic system, by robbing most men of initiative, is one
of the causes of the universal weariness which devitalizes urban and
industrial populations, making them perpetually seek excitement, and
leading them to welcome even the outbreak of war as a relief from the
dreary monotony of their daily lives.
If the vigor of the nation is to be preserved, if we are to retain any
capacity for new ideas, if we are not to sink into a Chinese condition
of stereotyped immobility, the monarchical organization of industry
must be swept away. All large businesses must become democratic and
federal in their government. The whole wage-earning system is an
abomination, not only because of the social injustice which it causes
and perpetuates, but also because it separates the man who does the
work from the purpose for which the work is done. The whole of the
controlling purpose is concentrated in the capitalist; the purpose of
the wage-earner is not the produce, but the wages. The purpose of the
capitalist is to secure the maximum of work for the minimum of wages;
the purpose of the wage-earner is to secure the maximum of wages for
the minimum of work. A system involving this essential conflict of
interests cannot be expected to work smoothly or successfully, or to
produce a community with any pride in efficiency.
Two movements exist, one already well advanced, the other in its
infancy, which seem capable, between them, of effecting most of what
is needed. The two movements I mean are the coöperative movement and
syndicalism. The coöperative movement is capable of replacing the wage
system over a very wide field, but it is not easy to see how it could
be applied to such things as railways. It is just in these cases that
the principles of syndicalism are most easily applicable.
If organization is not to crush individuality, membership of an
organization ought to be voluntary, not compulsory, and ought always
to carry with it a voice in the management. This is not the case with
economic organizations, which give no opportunity for the pride and
pleasure that men find in an activity of their own choice, provided it
is not utterly monotonous.
It must be admitted, however, that much of the mechanical work which is
necessary in industry is probably not capable of being made interesting
in itself. But it will seem less tedious than it does at present if
those who do it have a voice in the management of their industry.
And men who desire leisure for other occupations might be given the
opportunity of doing uninteresting work during a few hours of the day
for a low wage; this would give an opening to all who wished for some
activity not immediately profitable to themselves. When everything
that is possible has been done to make work interesting, the residue
will have to be made endurable, as almost all work is at present, by
the inducement of rewards outside the hours of labor. But if these
rewards are to be satisfactory, it is essential that the uninteresting
work should not necessarily absorb a man’s whole energies, and that
opportunities should exist for more or less continuous activities
during the remaining hours. Such a system might be an immeasurable
boon to artists, men of letters, and others who produce for their own
satisfaction works which the public does not value soon enough to
secure a living for the producers; and apart from such rather rare
cases, it might provide an opportunity for young men and women with
intellectual ambitions to continue their education after they have
left school, or to prepare themselves for careers which require an
exceptionally long training.
The evils of the present system result from the separation between the
several interests of consumer, producer, and capitalist. No one of
these three has the same interests as the community or as either of
the other two. The coöperative system amalgamates the interests of
consumer and capitalist; syndicalism would amalgamate the interests
of producer and capitalist. Neither amalgamates all three, or makes
the interests of those who direct industry quite identical with those
of the community. Neither, therefore, would wholly prevent industrial
strife, or obviate the need of the State as arbitrator. But either
would be better than the present system, and probably a mixture of
both would cure most of the evils of industrialism as it exists now.
It is surprising that, while men and women have struggled to achieve
political democracy, so little has been done to introduce democracy in
industry. I believe incalculable benefits might result from industrial
democracy, either on the coöperative model or with recognition of a
trade or industry as a unit for purposes of government, with some
kind of Home Rule such as syndicalism aims at securing. There is
no reason why all governmental units should be geographical: this
system was necessary in the past because of the slowness of means of
communication, but it is not necessary now. By some such system many
men might come to feel again a pride in their work, and to find again
that outlet for the creative impulse which is now denied to all but a
fortunate few. Such a system requires the abolition of the land-owner
and the restriction of the capitalist, but does not entail equality of
earnings. And unlike socialism, it is not a static or final system: it
is hardly more than a framework for energy and initiative. It is only
by some such method, I believe, that the free growth of the individual
can be reconciled with the huge technical organizations which have been
rendered necessary by industrialism.
V
EDUCATION
No political theory is adequate unless it is applicable to children as
well as to men and women. Theorists are mostly childless, or, if they
have children, they are carefully screened from the disturbances which
would be caused by youthful turmoil. Some of them have written books on
education, but without, as a rule, having any actual children present
to their minds while they wrote. Those educational theorists who have
had a knowledge of children, such as the inventors of Kindergarten and
the Montessori system,[14] have not always had enough realization of
the ultimate goal of education to be able to deal successfully with
advanced instruction. I have not the knowledge either of children or
of education which would enable me to supply whatever defects there
may be in the writings of others. But some questions, concerning
education as a political institution, are involved in any hope of
social reconstruction, and are not usually considered by writers on
educational theory. It is these questions that I wish to discuss.
The power of education in forming character and opinion is very
great and very generally recognized. The genuine beliefs, though not
usually the professed precepts, of parents and teachers are almost
unconsciously acquired by most children; and even if they depart
from these beliefs in later life, something of them remains deeply
implanted, ready to emerge in a time of stress or crisis. Education is,
as a rule, the strongest force on the side of what exists and against
fundamental change: threatened institutions, while they are still
powerful, possess themselves of the educational machine, and instil a
respect for their own excellence into the malleable minds of the young.
Reformers retort by trying to oust their opponents from their position
of vantage. The children themselves are not considered by either party;
they are merely so much material, to be recruited into one army or the
other. If the children themselves were considered, education would not
aim at making them belong to this party or that, but at enabling them
to choose intelligently between the parties; it would aim at making
them able to think, not at making them think what their teachers think.
Education as a political weapon could not exist if we respected the
rights of children. If we respected the rights of children, we should
educate them so as to give them the knowledge and the mental habits
required for forming independent opinions; but education as a political
institution endeavors to form habits and to circumscribe knowledge in
such a way as to make one set of opinions inevitable.
The two principles of _justice_ and _liberty_, which cover a very great
deal of the social reconstruction required, are not by themselves
sufficient where education is concerned. Justice, in the literal sense
of equal rights, is obviously not wholly possible as regards children.
And as for liberty, it is, to begin with, essentially negative: it
condemns all avoidable interference with freedom, without giving a
positive principle of construction. But education is essentially
constructive, and requires some positive conception of what constitutes
a good life. And although liberty is to be respected in education as
much as is compatible with instruction, and although a very great
deal more liberty than is customary can be allowed without loss to
instruction, yet it is clear that some departure from complete liberty
is unavoidable if children are to be taught anything, except in the
case of unusually intelligent children who are kept isolated from more
normal companions. This is one reason for the great responsibility
which rests upon teachers: the children must, necessarily, be more
or less at the mercy of their elders, and cannot make themselves
the guardians of their own interests. Authority in education is to
some extent unavoidable, and those who educate have to find a way of
exercising authority in accordance with the _spirit_ of liberty.
Where authority is unavoidable, what is needed is _reverence_. A man
who is to educate really well, and is to make the young grow and
develop into their full stature, must be filled through and through
with the spirit of reverence. It is reverence towards others that
is lacking in those who advocate machine-made cast-iron systems:
militarism, capitalism, Fabian scientific organization, and all the
other prisons into which reformers and reactionaries try to force
the human spirit. In education, with its codes of rules emanating
from a Government office, its large classes and fixed curriculum and
overworked teachers, its determination to produce a dead level of glib
mediocrity, the lack of reverence for the child is all but universal.
Reverence requires imagination and vital warmth; it requires most
imagination in respect of those who have least actual achievement or
power. The child is weak and superficially foolish, the teacher is
strong, and in an every-day sense wiser than the child. The teacher
without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily despises
the child for these outward inferiorities. He thinks it is his duty
to “mold” the child: in imagination he is the potter with the clay.
And so he gives to the child some unnatural shape, which hardens with
age, producing strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of which
grow cruelty and envy, and the belief that others must be compelled to
undergo the same distortions.
Tho man who has reverence will not think it his duty to “mold” the
young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and
most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited,
something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of
life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. In the
presence of a child he feels an unaccountable humility—a humility not
easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to
wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers. The
outward helplessness of the child and the appeal of dependence make him
conscious of the responsibility of a trust. His imagination shows him
what the child may become, for good or evil, how its impulses may be
developed or thwarted, how its hopes must be dimmed and the life in it
grow less living, how its trust will be bruised and its quick desires
replaced by brooding will. All this gives him a longing to help the
child in its own battle; he would equip and strengthen it, not for some
outside end proposed by the State or by any other impersonal authority,
but for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking.
The man who feels this can wield the authority of an educator without
infringing the principle of liberty.
It is not in a spirit of reverence that education is conducted by
States and Churches and the great institutions that are subservient to
them. What is considered in education is hardly ever the boy or girl,
the young man or young woman, but almost always, in some form, the
maintenance of the existing order. When the individual is considered,
it is almost exclusively with a view to worldly success—making money
or achieving a good position. To be ordinary, and to acquire the art
of getting on, is the ideal which is set before the youthful mind,
except by a few rare teachers who have enough energy of belief to break
through the system within which they are expected to work. Almost all
education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group,
national or religious or even social, in the competition with other
groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects
taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also
decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly
anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in
fact, those who have had most education are very often atrophied in
their mental and spiritual life, devoid of impulse, and possessing only
certain mechanical aptitudes which take the place of living thought.
Some of the things which education achieves at present must continue to
be achieved by education in any civilized country. All children must
continue to be taught how to read and write, and some must continue
to acquire the knowledge needed for such professions as medicine or
law or engineering. The higher education required for the sciences
and the arts is necessary for those to whom it is suited. Except in
history and religion and kindred matters, the actual instruction is
only inadequate, not positively harmful. The instruction might be given
in a more liberal spirit, with more attempt to show its ultimate uses;
and of course much of it is traditional and dead. But in the main it is
necessary, and would have to form a part of any educational system.
It is in history and religion and other controversial subjects that
the actual instruction is positively harmful. These subjects touch the
interests by which schools are maintained; and the interests maintain
the schools in order that certain views on these subjects may be
instilled. History, in every country, is so taught as to magnify that
country: children learn to believe that their own country has always
been in the right and almost always victorious, that it has produced
almost all the great men, and that it is in all respects superior to
all other countries. Since these beliefs are flattering, they are
easily absorbed, and hardly ever dislodged from instinct by later
knowledge.
To take a simple and almost trivial example: the facts about the battle
of Waterloo are known in great detail and with minute accuracy; but
the facts as taught in elementary schools will be widely different in
England, France, and Germany. The ordinary English boy imagines that
the Prussians played hardly any part; the ordinary German boy imagines
that Wellington was practically defeated when the day was retrieved
by Blücher’s gallantry. If the facts were taught accurately in both
countries, national pride would not be fostered to the same extent,
neither nation would feel so certain of victory in the event of war,
and the willingness to fight would be diminished. It is this result
which has to be prevented. Every State wishes to promote national
pride, and is conscious that this cannot be done by unbiased history.
The defenseless children are taught by distortions and suppressions and
suggestions. The false ideas as to the history of the world which are
taught in the various countries are of a kind which encourages strife
and serves to keep alive a bigoted nationalism. If good relations
between States were desired, one of the first steps ought to be to
submit all teaching of history to an international commission, which
should produce neutral textbooks free from the patriotic bias which is
now demanded everywhere.[15]
Exactly the same thing applies to religion. Elementary schools are
practically always in the hands either of some religious body or of a
State which has a certain attitude towards religion. A religious body
exists through the fact that its members all have certain definite
beliefs on subjects as to which the truth is not ascertainable. Schools
conducted by religious bodies have to prevent the young, who are often
inquiring by nature, from discovering that these definite beliefs are
opposed by others which are no more unreasonable, and that many of the
men best qualified to judge think that there is no good evidence in
favor of any definite belief. When the State is militantly secular, as
in France, State schools become as dogmatic as those that are in the
hands of the Churches (I understand that the word “God” must not be
mentioned in a French elementary school). The result in all these cases
is the same: free inquiry is checked, and on the most important matter
in the world the child is met with dogma or with stony silence.
It is not only in elementary education that these evils exist. In more
advanced education they take subtler forms, and there is more attempt
to conceal them, but they are still present. Eton and Oxford set a
certain stamp upon a man’s mind, just as a Jesuit College does. It
can hardly be said that Eton and Oxford have a _conscious_ purpose,
but they have a purpose which is none the less strong and effective
for not being formulated. In almost all who have been through them
they produce a worship of “good form,” which is as destructive to life
and thought as the medieval Church. “Good form” is quite compatible
with a superficial open-mindedness, a readiness to hear all sides,
and a certain urbanity towards opponents. But it is not compatible
with fundamental open-mindedness, or with any inward readiness to give
weight to the other side. Its essence is the assumption that what
is most important is a certain kind of behavior, a behavior which
minimizes friction between equals and delicately impresses inferiors
with a conviction of their own crudity. As a political weapon for
preserving the privileges of the rich in a snobbish democracy it is
unsurpassable. As a means of producing an agreeable social _milieu_ for
those who have money with no strong beliefs or unusual desires it has
some merit. In every other respect it is abominable.
The evils of “good form” arise from two sources: its perfect assurance
of its own rightness, and its belief that correct manners are more to
be desired than intellect, or artistic creation, or vital energy, or
any of the other sources of progress in the world. Perfect assurance,
by itself, is enough to destroy all mental progress in those who have
it. And when it is combined with contempt for the angularities and
awkwardnesses that are almost invariably associated with great mental
power, it becomes a source of destruction to all who come in contact
with it. “Good form” is itself dead and incapable of growth; and by its
attitude to those who are without it it spreads its own death to many
who might otherwise have life. The harm which it has done to well-to-do
Englishmen, and to men whose abilities have led the well-to-do to
notice them, is incalculable.
The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose
of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the
young to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than to
let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of
mind. Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction
that some particular creed is the truth. But it is creeds that hold
men together in fighting organizations: Churches, States, political
parties. It is intensity of belief in a creed that produces efficiency
in fighting: victory comes to those who feel the strongest certainty
about matters on which doubt is the only rational attitude. To produce
this intensity of belief and this efficiency in fighting, the child’s
nature is warped, and its free outlook is cramped, by cultivating
inhibitions as a check to the growth of new ideas. In those whose
minds are not very active the result is the omnipotence of prejudice;
while the few whose thought cannot be wholly killed become cynical,
intellectually hopeless, destructively critical, able to make all
that is living seem foolish, unable themselves to supply the creative
impulses which they destroy in others.