EDUCATION INTO DEMOCRACY.
“Education teaches in what social welfare consists. It is of first
importance to you that your sons should be taught what are the
ruling principles and beliefs which guide the lives of their
fellowmen in their own times and in their own country; what the
moral, social and political programme of their nation is; what the
spirit of the legislation by which their deeds will have to be
judged; what degree of progress Humanity has already attained and
that which it has yet to attain. And it is important to you that
they should feel themselves from their earliest years, united in the
spirit of equality and of love for a common aim, with the millions
of brothers that God has given them.”—MAZZINI.
I
“IT was,” says Mr. Benjamin Kidd, “with a well-founded instinct that
William II. of Germany, on his accession turned to the elementary school
teachers of his country when he aimed to impose the elements of a new
social heredity on the whole German people.” It is impossible at this
time of day not to go far in agreement with Mr. Kidd when he tells us
that it is not so much what is born in a man as what he is born into
that shapes his life. The most powerful formative influence in the
shaping of character and outlook is “social heredity,” “imposed on the
young at an early age and under conditions of emotion.”[55] This
judgment is no longer a matter of speculation. Dr. Stanley Hall’s work
upon the phenomena of adolescence has made it clear that the plastic and
absorbent stuff of youth will inevitably take its abiding shape and
colour from the cultural setting in which it finds itself. The advocates
of sectarian education in the famous English controversy about the
Balfour Acts were, from their own point of view, speaking within the
universe of the soundest possible psychology when they insisted that in
religious education “atmosphere” was paramount. It was a piece of very
astute observation on the part of the ancient Jews that led to the
practice of bringing their twelve-year-old boys to Jerusalem for the
Passover ceremonies. All the early training was crystallised into a
definite direction of life by the induction of the youth at his most
sensitive moment into the highly charged emotional atmosphere of the
Holy City at the great festival of national remembrance and hope. He
went there a boy; he returned home a Jew.
Footnote 55:
Benjamin Kidd, _The Science of Power_, p. 305.
Again and again in the course of this examination of the conditions of
democratic evolution, we have had reason to look to education for a
solution of many fundamental matters. It is indeed no longer possible to
overlook the absolute primacy of the school in any progressive
democratic polity; and if the foundations of the coming democratic
commonwealth are to be well and truly laid, they must be laid around
about the child. Our present purpose does not require that we should
consider the actual machinery of the education proper to democratic
development—that is a matter for the educator. Our business here and now
is to consider the broad general characters of such an education.
It is a commonplace that needs no labouring that modern education
suffers many things from the “dead hand.” The tradition of the “grammar
school” which aimed at opening the field of knowledge by a training in
letters is still with us, despite the fact that we have become
familiarised in recent years with a rounder and fuller conception of
education. We have been told again and again that the business of
education is to produce good citizens, to promote the growth of moral
character, and so forth; and slowly this emphasis has made some headway
in the minds of educational officials. But the whole implication of this
conception of education is far from being realised, even by those who
are actively engaged in the work of education. A disproportionate
pre-occupation with “letters” and knowledge still remains to betray our
bondage to traditional ideas; and this in spite of the fact that popular
education has in recent years received a very definite orientation
through the demand for industrial efficiency. But as yet there has not
been—save in the region of what is called “technical education”—any
serious and sustained effort to co-ordinate the whole subject matter of
education to this particular end. “Technical” education appears in the
scheme not as an integral or organic part of the process as a whole, but
as a somewhat arbitrary and unrelated annex to the last stage of the
process.
To this demand that education should minister to industrial efficiency
we shall have reason to return presently. Here we are concerned only
with the fact that though this demand has been fairly general and
insistent, it has not succeeded in shaking the hold of tradition upon
the method of the educational process. Popular education still consists
in the main of variations upon and extensions of the three R’s; and
though the experts have discussed widely and in detail the ways and
means of directing the educational processes to given ends, the
solutions have not yet arrived in any very substantial way in the
schools.
Roughly, our popular education is still governed by the idea of
equipping the young person with such a quantum of knowledge as he may be
supposed to require in order to make a living and gain some sort of
settled place in life. It has become more and more possible in recent
times for boys and girls who show unusual aptitudes to proceed to the
higher branches of learning; but in the main our thought of popular
education has been coloured by a pernicious doctrine of “minimums.” We
have asked how little education can be given consistently with the need
of the individual and the society in which he lives; and the opposition
which meets any endeavour to raise the “school leaving age” proves quite
conclusively that we have not generally advanced beyond the stage of
regarding that education as best which is soonest done with. For this
the economic strain of life is partly accountable; it is desirable that
the boys and girls should be wage-earning as speedily as possible; but
even more responsible for this state of things is a general ignorance
concerning the meaning and purpose of education. Indeed, few of those
who are now parents have reason to recall with any profound interest or
gratitude the days when they were receiving an alleged education.
Something in the nature of a systematic campaign of education in the
interests of education would seem to be necessary if the popular
indifference is to be removed to any good purpose.
It has indeed to be remembered that popular education is still in its
infancy; and the prejudice it has to overcome is the result of the
inevitable failures of its experimental stages. When it is recalled that
elementary education in England was until 1870 in the hands of voluntary
agencies, and that only since that date has education become universally
accessible, it is perhaps remarkable that education should have made as
much headway as it has made; and much of our criticism of current
educational methods tends to overlook what is under the circumstances
the real magnitude of the achievement in education. At the same time it
is plain that our educational methods are in need of much sustained
radical criticism if our purposes in education are to be saved from
mis-carriage.
II
But most of all do we require to clear our minds concerning the goal we
are seeking through education. It is true, as Professor Dewey has
pointed out, that it is not possible to define an end for education; for
in a profound sense, education has no end. A true education will be that
which fits an individual to go on learning to the end of his life. The
aim of education is more education. At the same time this education will
not be for its own sake, or for the learning it helps the scholar to
acquire. Here again Dr. Dewey helps us by reminding us that one aim of
education is social efficiency. Plainly and beyond peradventure no
education will serve a democracy which does not produce socially
efficient persons.
But this word _efficiency_ has become discredited by its recent use. We
have heard something of efficiency engineers who have tried to reduce
human faculty into mathematical formulæ for the purpose of speeding up
and suitably supplementing the mechanical processes of industry. It
amounts to no more than a systematic endeavour to fit the human agent to
the machine so as to get more out of the machine. The result for the
life of the human agent as a whole is hardly taken into account. And
even if this myth of efficiency engineering has met the fate it
deserved, its very appearance and name are symptomatic of the general
direction of popular thought upon the main business of a community. Nor
is this confined to the classes that are interested in getting the
utmost out of the worker, or to the unreflecting public. The British
National Union of Teachers at its Annual Conference in 1916 declared
that “this great war, with its terrible wastage of human life and
material has brought into bold relief the economic potentialities of the
child. As never before, the nation now realises that efficient men and
women are the best permanent capital the state possesses.”[56] So that
the business of education is to develop the economic potentialities of
the child in order to provide capital for the state. It does not appear
that the child has any rights in the matter at all. He is to be trained
in order to become “the best permanent capital” of the state. It is to
be hoped that two more years of war have brought a more fruitful vision
to the National Union of Teachers.
Footnote 56:
Quoted in the _Public_ (N.Y.), July 6th, 1918.
Yet the word _efficiency_ is worth keeping, for it embodies the true
conception of educational aim so long as it is rightly interpreted; and
industrial efficiency must be allowed to enter into our interpretation
of it. Industrial efficiency gains its preponderant emphasis in recent
discussion because we are still in the toils of the disastrous illusion
that the national ideal is national wealth. We think of the nation’s
well-being in terms of its financial prosperity; and naturally we tend
to subordinate all our social processes to this end. But the result of
this tendency will be to create not a society, but a wealth-producing
machine; and those human possibilities in which the final wealth of life
lies, will have to fight a doubtful battle for their very existence, and
at best can gain no more than a precarious foothold in the interstices
of the money-making organisation.
From this bias education must be delivered—at whatever cost; and a
doctrine of social efficiency enunciated which will be comprehensive
enough to satisfy the requirements of the single mind and the social
whole at the same time. In point of fact, these requirements are
virtually identical, for that which makes a full man makes also for a
full fellowship. The individual is to find himself in precisely those
things which enable him to contribute his due to society. We need,
therefore, to enquire somewhat broadly into the nature of the things in
which the individual shall render his due to the commonality. We shall
then be in a position to state in general terms what we should look to
the educational process to provide.
Professor Dewey has laid down in this connection a principle of the
utmost importance. He affirms that “we may produce in schools a
projection in type of the society we should like to realise.”[57] If we
are to train the young for social life, the proper method is to surround
them in childhood, so far as that may be, with the conditions of the
ideal social life toward which we look. The school should be the
_societas perfecta_ in miniature. This naturally requires a very
considerable departure in _tone_ from the conditions which still
prevail. The pontifical and authoritarian tradition of the mediæval
school is still with us; and an attention is devoted to problems of
discipline and order which is disproportionate to the real business of
preparing for life in a democratic commonwealth, and is to a great
extent from an angle and in a spirit alien to the purpose in hand. A
considerable breach in this system has already been made by the new
emphasis upon the value of self-determination in education from the
earliest stages; but the relaxation of the traditional canons of
discipline does not carry us far enough. Self-determination must be
recognised not only as an individual right but as a group
responsibility; and the practice of popular self-government should begin
in the schools. It is symptomatic of the present tendency among
educators of a liberal and radical type that in the prospectus of a
school soon to be established, it is laid down that the internal
government “shall be increasingly democratic, scholars and teachers
sharing both legislation and administration,” and that the external
government shall be vested in a council, representing the trustees, the
faculty and the scholars. This is a sane and fruitful method of
initiating boys and girls into the larger responsibilities of social
life. Already the plan has been adopted in some existing schools with a
considerable measure of success; and if the school is to be the organ of
a genuine training in social efficiency, we need a wide extension of
this method.
Footnote 57:
_Democracy and Education_, p. 370.
But beyond this discipline in self-government, the school has to
undertake the fitting of the child for other kinds of social
contribution.
(_a_) He must be trained to contribute his share to the supply of the
physical needs of the community. Obviously, in a school, the direct and
complete application of this principle is impossible. It is laid down in
the prospectus before referred to that “all must share, teacher and
scholar alike, in the labour that lies at the basis of human life and
unites all men through their common need”; and it is ordained that “the
kitchen, the crafts-room and the garden shall rank equally with the
classroom.” It is proposed to give the scholars “direct experience of
agricultural processes and the preparation of the main articles of food,
spinning, weaving, dyeing, sewing, carpentry, building, pottery,
printing and any other crafts directly contributing to the life of the
community.” Naturally, no child is required to become expert in all
these occupations; but his training in them will presently serve to
reveal his special aptitudes and to determine his own personal choice.
It is not contemplated in this particular experiment that machinery will
be introduced to any considerable extent; and while it is stated that
machinery will not be excluded, it is obvious that it is regarded with
some dubiety, if not hostility. But it is necessary to accept the
position that the machine industry is here with us and is here to stay;
and a proper perception of its true function will save us from assuming
a fallacious attitude in regard to it. While the incentive to the
development and improvement of large scale mechanical processes has been
the pursuit of profit, the real office of these processes is to diminish
the purely mechanical and menial operations which are necessary to life,
and consequently to release a larger volume of human energy for tasks of
a more independent and creative nature. There are certain necessities of
life concerning which our requirements are that they should be good in
quality and abundant in quantity—and as no question but of utility
arises in relation to them, they may be assigned to the large-scale
machine industry. This, however, does not in the least absolve us from
including in our school curriculum a provision for the habituation of
children to mechanical processes of this kind. But because these
processes are necessarily monotonous and irksome, every effort should be
made to introduce into them what elements of interest may be attached to
them; and to reduce to the lowest possible point the current tendency to
make the worker a mere accessory of the machine.
Miss Helen Marot has recently described proposals for an educational
experiment which aims at the association of discipline in industrial
production with the educational process. This particular experiment
takes the form of producing wooden toys; and while, as Miss Marot sees,
the production of toys has anyhow an intrinsic interest, the details
which are given show how radically the atmosphere of the machine
industry might be changed by giving it a place in the school curriculum.
Miss Marot’s assumption that the machine industry can be so transformed
by democratic control as to satisfy the creative instinct has already
been adversely criticised in these pages; but the present discussion is
not affected by criticism of that particular point. What it is to our
purpose to observe is that mechanical processes may be relieved of some
of their present irksomeness by supplying them with their appropriate
background. First of all, it is necessary that the worker should be
acquainted with the whole process of manufacture in order that he may
participate in his own special task with a measure of intelligent
interest; and this will involve a degree of familiarity with the
technical problems of management, with accounting and costing, with the
internal conditions of the industry and the plant, and with the larger
economics of the enterprise. But in addition to all this more immediate
business of habituation to routine, provision is made for the
development of artistic judgment and execution and for the acquisition
of knowledge relating to the craft itself—consisting in this case of
“authentic accounts and inspirational stories of industrial life,
especially of the lumber, wood-working and the toy industry.”
Obviously not all trades command the interest which can be created
around toy-making. In the manufacture of articles of utility which are
produced by processes of a highly standardised kind, it would be less
easy to introduce elements of romance and sentiment. Still much can and
should be done in every trade; and admission to any particular trade
should be preceded by some discipline of this kind. If ever industry is
organised on the basis of national Guilds, surely one function of the
Guilds will be to establish national trade schools in which a generous
training of this kind can be given and which shall be closely
co-ordinated to the entire scheme of public education.
III
But it cannot be too frequently emphasised that we are not to accept the
present subordination of social life to the exigencies of the machine
industry. That the machine industry is here to stay need not be argued;
and we may dismiss as impracticable the suggestion of a return to the
handicraft system. The machine industry must be retained for the
production of utilities where no question of beauty or ornament arises;
and it should be so ordered as to reduce the purely mechanical
operations entailed in the manufacture of the staple commodities to a
minimum. Consequently care should always be had to prevent an
exaggerated emphasis upon the place of the machine industry in
education. It is not to be pretended that mechanical processes can ever
in themselves minister substantially to the joy of life. The best that
can be said is that their present disadvantages can be materially
reduced; but not even the sense of partnership and democratic control,
the shortening of hours and the addition of intellectual interest, taken
all together, can turn factory life into “a thing of beauty and a joy
for ever.”
Some emphasis has already been laid upon the difference between
productive and creative activity. Creation is not merely production, but
reproduction, that is to say, the activity in which we express
_ourselves_ for the joy of the thing itself. The present writer was
brought up in a slate-quarrying town in North Wales. The workers spent
their time in mining and dressing roofing-slates—an industry which
involves no special skill save only in the department of
slate-splitting. This is handwork and no satisfactory mechanical
substitute for it has yet been contrived; and there is much emulation
among the workers in this process. Apart from this there is nothing
note-worthy about the industry except the very considerable extent of
partnership which prevails (or used to prevail) in the work itself and
of fellowship in the dressing shops. But after the day’s work was done
there was a somewhat remarkable activity of another kind. Sometimes a
worker would take a piece of raw slate home with him and spend his spare
time in turning it into candlesticks or some other article by means of a
lathe or by direct manual work. The result from an artistic standpoint
was doubtless very crude; but it was interesting and instructive to
observe the almost instinctive way in which men, released from necessary
toil, turned to the production of things of beauty. This free
self-expression took other forms in other men. Welsh quarrymen have
always been well-known for their literary tastes; and the town contained
a considerable number of quite capable writers of both prose and verse
in the Welsh language. Others there were—and these were a large
number—whose dispositions were musical; and since the purchase of
musical instruments was as a rule beyond these men’s pockets, they
devoted themselves to vocal music. The congregational singing in the
churches was famous throughout the country; and while there were many
individual vocalists and composers of considerable merit, the
development of choral singing reached an extremely high point. It was an
intensely religious community and was full of religious activities of
many kinds. It was perfectly plain that the real business and joy of
life lay not in the production of roofing-slates but in the exercises of
creative self-expression to which the men appeared to turn naturally and
instinctively when the business of making a livelihood was over.
This is a parable for the educator. While the business of producing the
necessities of life should be so conceived and ordered as to make
participation in it as much a pleasure as a duty, it is not to be
gainsaid that the joy and the ultimate wealth of life lies in the free
and self-directed activity of self-expression whether by the individual
himself or in some free concert with his neighbours. Education for life
will necessarily take account of this circumstance—not only because it
provides a means of personal satisfaction but also because it might, and
properly developed would, become the chief and the most characteristic
contribution of the individual to the life and growth of the community.
The school must therefore provide opportunity of independent personal
self-expression—in every manner of medium—in order that the peculiar
creative aptitude of each child may be discovered and encouraged.
Whether it be wood-carving or verse-writing, pattern-designing or
violin-playing, any education that pretends to fit a child for a vital
social service must make room for it.
It is in this region that we are to look for the differentiation of
future social function according to particular aptitudes. To-day,
education reproduces the traditional social schism between the
privileged and the disinherited classes. On the one hand, we have
schools and universities which aim to provide a culture appropriate to
those who have to assume the business of leadership and government in
the community; on the other we have a popular education which appears in
the main to aim at providing a docile mass amenable to leadership and
government. There is virtually no attempt to sift out of the mass those
who have aptitudes for special social tasks or genius for any form of
artistic production. Its methods—mitigated only by the vagaries of the
personal equation—are calculated to turn out human products having the
uniformity of a sheet of postage stamps. This method can have no result
but that of producing and perpetuating a general spiritual poverty. In a
democratic community it should be intolerable that schools for children
should exist other than the common school. The common school being what
it is, it is not surprising that there should be a demand for schools
that give a better chance to the human material of boys and girls. This,
however, tends to stereotype a class-distinction; and for that reason to
limit the field in which the talent for public leadership and artistic
and political genius might be discovered. In the common school there
should be provision and encouragement for the exercise of free and
original self-expression in every possible way so that each child may be
enabled to discover its own peculiar vocation in the commonwealth. Not
every child will reveal a faculty for creative self-expression of a high
order; but every child should have the chance of doing so. And it is the
only safe assumption on which to proceed that every child has in it the
latent capacity for making a unique and original personal contribution
to the total life and wealth and beauty of the community. The common
school should become the mine out of which we dig the raw material of
our poets, whether minor or major, our singers, our sculptors, our
fabricators of beautiful garments, our painters of pictures, our
orators, our thinkers and our house-decorators; and there is an untold
wealth of this raw material which is lost to society all the time under
the conditions of our present preoccupation with the making of money. It
would be stupid to suppose that every child can become a great artist;
but some kind of artist in some kind of medium every child should have
the opportunity of becoming, on the assumption that here—in this region
of creative self-expression—lies the richest contribution he can make to
the common life.
IV
But the democratic principle further requires the intelligent
co-operation of persons in the conduct of affairs; and it is the part of
the common school to furnish the necessary equipment of this
partnership. In this equipment there are two main elements. The first is
the provision of adequate capital of information for the stimulation and
direction of thought; the second is the encouragement of independent and
original thought.
There is a certain body of knowledge which it is essential that the
child should have if he is to think rightly and to order his conduct
accordingly. This body of knowledge may be roughly described as
knowledge of the world in which we live; and its two chief parts have
reference to the world as it now is, and to the story of how it came to
be what it is. The former involves observation and interpretation of the
actual conditions of the life in which the child lives; and the process
should begin where the child stands. In the modern teaching of
geography, the beginning is made in school-yard or the precinct and from
this centre it broadens out to cover one’s city, one’s county, one’s
state or province, one’s country, until at last it embraces the round
earth. This is as it should be. In the past the teaching of geography
has been a mere imparting of a mass of facts, which have seemed to
possess no direct relation to life; by making the child’s own location a
focus round about which the available and necessary knowledge of the
world can be gathered in a more or less coherent fashion, the relation
of facts, which in themselves might seem remote and irrelevant to the
business of life, becomes more evident, and the entire study gains a new
vitality. This discussion is now trenching dangerously upon the province
of educational theory; but it is needful to emphasise how indispensable
it is that knowledge should not be, as it has so often been, allowed to
appear unconnected with the actual business of living in this world.
Even yet one may hear children asking in a bewildered way—“What on earth
is the use of my learning the height of Popocatapetl?” Or “what good is
it to know the length of the Yang-Tse-Kiang?” Information of this kind
has no doubt a certain fascination for some types of mind; but it may be
left for those minds to seek it out for themselves. The business of the
school is to make possible the acquisition of the knowledge which bears
upon the contribution which the pupil is expected to make to the
community. This is not to say that there is not knowledge which is
desirable for its own sake, or that the love of knowledge should not be
encouraged for what it brings. Moreover, soon or late all knowledge will
possess a social value. But the knowledge which is most valuable is that
which the individual acquires for himself; and the responsibility of the
school in this matter is to release and quicken the capacity for
independent and continuous acquisition of knowledge. But this
_desideratum_ is not in the least compromised or neglected by ordering
the acquisition of knowledge in the first instance with reference to the
actual business of social life.
It is the business of the educator to determine what the subject-matter
of the curriculum must be in order to give the pupil adequate knowledge
of the world in which he has to live; it is our business here simply to
stress the point that this knowledge shall be of a relevant and vital
kind. It should have to do not only with the physical features of the
world, but with social and political institutions and the like; and
indeed throughout it should have more to say about the ways than about
the places in which people live. But chiefly this aspect of the
educational process should aim to equip the pupil with the necessary
knowledge to enable him to acquire more knowledge through his own direct
experience of the world.
But this knowledge of the world as it is would be hopelessly inadequate
were it not connected with some knowledge of how the world came to be
what it is. Here again the subject-matter must be defined by the
experience of the educator. The business of this writing is to emphasise
the requirement that this knowledge of the past shall be ordered
conformably to the ultimate social fruitfulness of the pupil. In his
boyhood the present writer was required to study geology—at first sight
a somewhat irrelevant subject for a lad in his early teens. But he
happened to live in a district where slate-quarrying was the only
industry; and when he learnt that his bread and butter came from the
“Llandeilo Beds”; and that these same “beds” occupied a specific place
in a more or less orderly process of world-making, the study of geology
assumed a new interest. But its most important action was the awakening
of a dim sense of being an “heir of all the ages.” This feeling received
a very powerful reinforcement from another side. The writer well
remembers his first reading of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Hitherto history had seemed to consist mainly of the puerile and
discreditable exploits of a succession of royal persons of whom none
were better than they should be; and he had wondered what on earth all
this had to do with a boy living among the Welsh mountains in the
nineteenth century. But the Pilgrims Fathers were different; here at
last was something that seemed to have a meaning, and it is easy to see
what that meaning would be to a lad whose upbringing had been in a
Strong Nonconformist tradition. It took long years to fill with a
connected content the interval between the sailing of the _Mayflower_
and the campaign for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in
Wales; but from henceforth the lad knew that he stood in the succession
of a tradition that had made a difference to the world and that he owed
a very great deal to it.
The story of how we have come by our inheritance of freedom, of the
age-long upward struggle of mankind, this above all should furnish the
inspiration and the guidance for our service of the present. For this
reason, emphasis should be laid upon the history of peoples rather than
of states, upon the movement of social life rather than upon historical
biography. It seems hardly credible but it is strictly true that the
present writer left school without ever having heard of the Craft Guilds
of the Middle ages; or of the great tradition of ecclesiastical
architecture which enters so organically into the story of social
development in England. He had heard in a somewhat casual manner of Wat
Tyler and John Ball, and of other incidents which disturbed the normal
flow of royal intrigue and adventure; but of the story of the common
people he knew virtually nothing at all. Yet after all that is the
history that chiefly matters; and much has yet to be done to give it its
proper place in the school curriculum.
Whatever the subject-matter, its arrangement and presentation should be
so ordered as to inspire and enable the child to make a willing and
worthy contribution to the life of his community. But the social
emphasis in education, if it is to be true to itself and indeed to the
general history of mankind, must define society in wider terms than that
of the immediate community. Mr. Wells has told us that mankind has been
forever “pursuing the frontiers of its possible community.” Whether by
revolution within the commonwealth, by imperial expansion or by fusion
with other commonwealths, there has been an abiding impulse—erratic and
often perverse in its operations—to broaden the basis of human
fellowship. And in the present position of the world, there is nothing
so urgent as to quicken a social sympathy wide enough to embrace the
world. It is peculiarly the function of geography and history to serve
this purpose. Geography should assume that frontiers are the lines at
which peoples meet rather than part; and history should lay stress upon
the forces that have made for human unity rather than for national
power. If the writer may be permitted to indulge in a last personal
reminiscence, the tendency in the teaching of history in the past may be
illustrated by the fact that the outstanding impression left upon him by
the school history was that the French were the hereditary enemies of
the British; and it is something to the point to observe that the text
books of American history have in the past failed to lay proper emphasis
upon the circumstance that during the Revolutionary War the best mind of
England was on the side of the colonists. The gratuitous and
unhistorical prejudice which the traditional attitude in school history
has bred is not a little accountable for the divisive tempers that have
led to wars. To-day the shrinkage of the world has made this attitude
more than ever disastrous; and in view of our hope of a League of
Nations it is essential that geography and history in particular should
be treated as the opportunity for a general expansion of social
sympathy.
V
It is hardly necessary to point out that the conception of history which
is pleaded for here includes the history of thought, of art, and of
religion; and that so far as is possible, this history should be learnt
by direct recourse to its sources in the classic literature and art of
the past. But generous and comprehensive as the provision for acquiring
knowledge should be, the educational process has not finished its
business until it has habituated the youth to the task of using this
knowledge as the basis and material of independent thought. Democracy
faces no greater danger than the inability of the people to exercise a
critical judgment upon the voices that clamour for their suffrages; and
the experiences of war-time have shown that freedom is not inconsistent
with a very dangerous unreflective docility on the part of the public.
This danger is the greater when the staple of a people’s reading is the
daily press, which envelops men in the tumult and the clangour of
passing events without providing them with the longer perspective
necessary to a valid judgment. The power of the demagogue and the
tyranny of the press are to be mitigated only by an educational process
which does two things—first of all, provides a background of general
knowledge and interest, and second, turns out individuals able and
accustomed to think for themselves. And just because the life of
democracy requires free discussion, the school curriculum should contain
stated provision for the discussion of current matters, which would turn
out to be a powerful stimulant of independent thought, especially in its
critical aspects. The more constructive and sustained elements in
independent thought may be encouraged by a careful development of the
time-honoured method of the essay. But whatever the precise methods may
be, the aim must be the systematic encouragement of the habit of
independent thought; and in this connection, with proper safeguards
against putting a premium on “cussedness,” it is important that
dissenting and minority opinions, which whether right or wrong contain
some guarantee of independence, should be welcomed and valued as the
promise of ultimate social usefulness.
VI
Important as the materials and methods of education are, we cannot
afford to forget that there are two other elements of our problem,
closely related to one another, which are in the end of greater
importance. The first of these is the teacher. It is not a gratuitous
slander upon the general body of teachers to say that the whole method
of recruiting teachers and the conditions of the teaching profession
tend to degrade teaching into a trade. A great deal needs to be done to
exalt the teacher’s office in the public mind; and the teaching
profession should be so honoured as to give it the first call upon the
human material in the community. As things are, it is far too much
regarded as a means of livelihood, comparatively easily qualified for,
and tolerably well remunerated; and the training required for admission
into the profession is quite inadequate. If only teaching were rightly
esteemed and its practitioners held in such honour as even judges, who
do a much inferior work, are held, it would be possible to exercise a
far more careful selection of persons suited by their temperamental and
moral characters for the work. For we have to look for something
infinitely greater than the successful communication of knowledge, or
the training of mental faculties. Robert Owen followed an essentially
sound instinct when, having established a school for infants in New
Lanark he put at the head of it a man who could neither read or write,
but who was familiar with birds and flowers and had “a way with him.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, writing of Wordsworth, says, “I do not know that
you learn a lesson. You need not agree with any of his beliefs; and yet
a spell is cast. Such are the best teachers. A dogma learned is only a
new error, the old one was perhaps as good. But a spirit communicated is
a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the
plane of art; it is themselves and what is best in themselves that they
communicate.” It was said during the education controversy in England
that some teachers taught more religion in an hour’s arithmetic lesson
than others did in a year of “religious instruction,” and the saying is
true. It is the spirit communicated that makes the difference between a
real and a spurious education.
Especially is this the case when we consider the business of education
from the point of view of social efficiency. For the prerequisite of
social efficiency is social vision, social passion; and this is
supremely a matter of contagion. For this reason, the true type of
teacher will be devoid of the pontifical, _ex-cathedra_ temper and will
rather seek out a relation of comradeship with his pupils. The form of a
democratic education will be essentially co-operative; and its spirit
will be that of fellowship. This brings us to the second outstanding
point of our discussion, namely, the question of “atmosphere.” Upon this
subject there is little more to be said than what is contained in
Professor Dewey’s dictum that the school should so far as possible be a
miniature of the society we desire to create. The creation of
“atmosphere” is of course specifically the task of the faculty; and the
eagerness and the enthusiasm of their participation in the more informal
amenities of school life is an important factor in the process. But most
of all is a genuine social passion in themselves the surest guarantee
that they will help in the making of socially creative and effective
persons.
Much is being said at the present time concerning the introduction of
military training into schools. It is worth notice in passing that Mr.
Fisher, the British Minister of Education, recently informed a
deputation of miners that the government had canvassed the question and
had decided that the innovation had neither educational nor military
value and would not be adopted. It is no doubt true that military
training would have a beneficial effect upon the physique of the boys;
but, quite apart from its dubious value for education and any subsequent
purpose, it must be observed that the genius of the military business is
intrinsically hostile to the development of the democratic ideals. For
the military organisation is a regimentation of men for power; it
entails the mechanisation of the human material and imposes a discipline
of uniformity upon those who are subject to it. Democratic education has
to do with life, and its genius moves in the direction of the largest
possible spontaneity and variation in the individuals with whom it has
to do. Moreover, military discipline introduces the authoritarian temper
into the atmosphere; and this is a temper altogether at variance with
the spirit of frank comradeship in which a democratic education should
be pursued. What advantages may accrue to the future in the shape of
improved physical health and strength in the community is more than
counter-balanced by the injection of an undemocratic virus into the
minds of those who are called to sustain the democracy of the future.
Nor is it impossible to compensate ourselves for the loss of physical
training consequent upon the rejection of military training. For there
are other ways of providing for physical efficiency; and those other
ways are more consistent with the aim of a democratic education. In the
sports field, for instance, you have at once an instrument of physical
training as well as a definite education in a team work, which does not
depend upon uniform and synchronous movements commanded from without,
but upon the intelligence and dexterity of the players themselves.
Moreover, the sports field affords an illustration of the proper use of
the competitive spirit. The military discipline has its eye upon
potential enemies to be destroyed; the sports discipline has its eye
upon rival teams of friends and thus always a cheer for the beaten team
in the end. It has been observed that the difference in temper between
the behaviour of the German and the English soldier was to be traced to
the fact that the football field had played a large part in the training
of the latter; and it is not unlikely that even the superior military
efficiency of the English soldier in the latter stages of the war has to
be attributed to the same circumstance. In any case, sportsmanship is
nearer akin to the spirit of democracy than the military discipline.
A plea has been made for military training on the ground that the rhythm
of its movements has a certain psychological value. That the place of
rhythm in education has been neglected is indeed true; and there is
little doubt that a more sustained attention to it would add much to
physical grace and the joy and beauty of life. The question, however,
remains whether the military rhythm which rests upon a principle of
regularity is likely to have the psychological effects proper to such
education as these pages contemplate. The rhythm of the folk-dance like
the rhythm of the ballad is a far more accurate version of the rhythm
which is natural to men and women; and the rhythm of Walt Whitman, which
is of the same order, reflects the genuine rhythm of democracy. The
Eurhythmics of Dalcroze, because they encourage a spontaneous
self-expression through the free rhythmical movement of the body promise
more for the future grace and beauty of democratic life than a military
discipline can from its very nature do.
VII
The sum of the matter then is this, that the test of a true democratic
education lies in the quality and power of the social vision it evokes
in the growing child, in the measure of power and capacity it gives to
the child to share in the realisation of the vision, and in this sharing
to give to the child the inspiring and joyous promise of personal
self-fulfilment. Here we have tried only to sketch in very rough and
fragmentary outline what would appear to be the temper and the general
configuration of such an educational process; and much has been omitted
which naturally belongs to a full discussion of the subject. Of the
place of dramatic and symbolic activities in education, generous notice
should be taken in any extended treatment, for it is obvious, first of
all that the dramatic and the symbolic make a peculiar appeal to the
child, and second, that the social enthusiasm which it is our desire to
quicken can be quickened more effectively in no other way. There is one
point, however, upon which it might serve an immediate purpose to dwell.
The graduation ceremony in an American school provides a fitting close
to a school career; it rounds it off with dignity and solemnity. But
something more than this should be done—whether on leaving school or
college or trade school—in order to impress upon the individual that he
is passing into another world demanding other and more responsible
service. Some solemn ceremonial of initiation into the rights and
responsibilities of citizenship, accompanied by every circumstance of
gravity and reverence, should furnish the fitting close to the period of
training. At present we slip out into the business of life in a ragged
insignificant way. Our entry upon responsible citizenship should be
signalised by a great public observance which should serve the purpose
not only of launching the youth upon his course in life, but also of
reminding the rest of the community of its vows and its obligations to
the common life.[58]
Footnote 58:
This discussion closes without any attempt to deal with the problem of
education beyond the school age. The office of the University in
democratic development is obviously large and important; but here
again the writer confesses his inability to handle the subject
adequately with any degree of confidence. Valuable suggestions
concerning the social ministry of the University may be found in _The
Coming Polity_, by Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, especially in
the chapter on “The University Militant.”
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HEADLEY BROS., ASHFORD, KENT & 18 DEVONSHIRE ST., E.C.2.
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).