EDUCATION AND RACE-CULTURE
“Education is but the giving or withholding of
opportunity.”--Bateson.
It is true that education can seem to accomplish miracles; that in a
single generation the results of an ideal education would be amazing.
It is true, also, that in certain epochs of history, when wise counsels
have prevailed, great results have been attained. It is true that at
present scarcely a man or woman amongst us, if any, has reached the
full stature which would have been attained under an ideal system
of education. It is true, finally, that no system of race-culture
can ignore education or be effective without it. Though the general
question of education is not the specific question of the present
volume, yet there is only too good reason for some brief allusion to
the subject here, especially since it bears on the question of the
measure of importance which we ascribe to heredity.
=Modern education--the destruction of mind.=--When we observe in such
contrasted cases as those of Herbert Spencer and Wordsworth, for
instance, that absence of early education, especially in the first
septennium, has co-existed with the subsequent efflorescence of the
mightiest genius, we may almost be inclined to enquire whether genius
could not in effect be made to order even in the very next generation
by the simple device of suspending the process which we are pleased to
call education. Doubtless that is scarcely so, though every one who has
any knowledge of the subject is well assured that mere suspension of
the present destructive process might suffice to produce a population
that would wonder at its ancestors.
A simple analogy will show the disastrous character of the present
process, which may be briefly described as “education” by cram
and emetic. It is as if you filled a child's stomach to repletion
with marbles, pieces of coal and similar material incapable of
digestion--the more worthless the material the more accurate the
analogy: then applied an emetic and estimated your success by the
completeness with which everything was returned, more especially if it
was returned “unchanged,” as the doctors say. Just so do we cram the
child's mental stomach, its memory, with a selection of dead facts of
history and the like (at least when they are not fictions) and then
apply a violent emetic called an examination (which like most other
emetics causes much depression) and estimate our success by the number
of statements which the child vomits on to the examination paper--if
the reader will excuse me. Further, if we are what we usually are, we
prefer that the statements shall come back “unchanged”--showing no
signs of mental digestion. We call this “training the memory.”
Such a process as one has imagined in the physical case would assuredly
ruin the physical digestion for life. In the mental case, which is not
imaginary but actual, a similar result ensues. It is thus unfair to
the Anglo-Saxon germ-plasm to credit it with the abundant stupidity
of its products. Much of this stupidity is factitious and artificial.
We shall continue to produce it so long as by education or drawing
forth we understand intrusion or thrusting in, and so long as the
only drawing forth which we practise is by means of the emetics we
call examinations. The present type of education is a curse to modern
childhood and a menace to the future. The teacher who cannot tell
whether a child is doing well without formally examining it, should
be heaving bricks; but such a teacher does not exist. In Berlin they
are now learning that the depression caused by these emetics, for which
the best physical parallel is antimony, often leads to child suicide--a
steadily-increasing phenomenon mainly due to educational over-pressure
and worry about examinations.
Short of such appalling disasters, however, we have to reckon with
the existence of this enormous amount of stupidity, which those who
fortunately escaped such education in childhood have to drag along
with them in the long struggle towards the stars. This dead weight of
inertia lamentably retards progress.
Our factitious stupidity is injurious both in the governing and the
governed. As Professor Patrick Geddes once remarked to the present
writer, there are three kinds of governments: the government of the
future--as yet only ideal, which believes that there are ideas and
that they may be worth acting upon: the second is instanced by the
Russian government, which believes that there are ideas, but fears and
suppresses them: the third by the British government, which denies
that there are ideas at all, and prefers the method of “muddling
through”--to use a Cabinet Minister's contented phrase--though truth is
one and error infinite, though there are a million ways of going wrong
for one of going right. This characteristic is not to be attributed to
any germinal stupidity of the ruling classes in England. If it were we
should of course look upon the decadence of their birth-rate with the
utmost gratitude. It is a factitious product of their education. If you
have been treated with marbles and emetics long enough, you may begin
to question whether there is such a thing as nourishing food; if you
have been crammed with dead facts, and then compelled to disgorge them,
you may well question whether there are such things as nourishing facts
or ideas.
Not less disastrous is this factitious stupidity amongst the governed.
It produces, of course, the kind of man with whom we are all familiar.
Having at great labour been taught to read, he is incapable of reading
anything but rubbish. He never thinks for himself, and if he does you
wish he had not, so inadequate is his machinery and so deplorable
the result. He believes in politicians. He is, as we have said, so
much dead weight for the reformer, whose energy is diverted from the
discovery of new truth by the need of directing the eyes of stupidity
to the old, though it shines as the sun in his strength.
Therefore, let not the reader suppose that in the advocacy of eugenics
or race-culture we have become blinded to the possibilities offered us
by reasonable education even of the very heterogeneous material offered
us by heredity.
=The limits of education--individual and racial.=--Yet it must be
maintained that, though we cannot do without education, and though
something infinitely better than we practise at present will be
necessary if the ideal of race-culture is ever to be realised, yet
education alone, however good, can never enable us to achieve our end.
It must be maintained, in the first place, that education is limited
in its powers by the inherent nature of the educated material--it is a
process of _drawing out_, and you cannot draw out what is not there:
and secondly, that its value, so far as the nature of individuals
is concerned, is confined to the individuals in question and is not
reproduced or maintained in their children. Thus education alone would
have similar material to act upon from age to age, would have to make
a fresh beginning in each generation, and its results, however good,
relatively, would still be limited and finite. We shall do well,
perhaps, to obtain and retain an adequate definition of education.
No true conception of education was possible, notwithstanding the
derivation of the word, so long as the child's mind was likened to
a piece of “pure white paper” for us to write upon: or an empty box
waiting to be filled. The _tabula rasa_ of Locke is, we now know, the
last thing in the world to resemble a child's mind. Indeed, if any
such figure be demanded, the child's mind is a piece of mosaic--made
of ancestral pieces--and education is the process of realising what is
so given. Or, if a child's mind is a portmanteau, to educate is not to
pack but to unpack it. We understand, at least, that education never
can begin at the beginning, nor anywhere near it--that, as Professor
MacCunn says in his admirable book, _The Making of Character_, “the
page of the youngest life is so far from being blank that it bears upon
it characters in comparison with which the faded ink of palæography is
as recent history.”
We are learning, too, though none but the very few know this, that the
process by which the “faded ink” is made visible must not be credited
with having done the writing: any more than the fire to which you hold
a paper written upon with ink that fire makes visible. Still less do we
realise that what really seems to be the product of education is often
the result of an inherent mechanism now developed, which was not yet
formed when we began the educational process. One reason why the baby
cannot walk is that it has not the nervous apparatus. A child may walk
at the first attempt, if that attempt be delayed until the machinery is
developed. A child may similarly speak sentences at the first attempt.
Very commonly we start teaching a child something, which, after some
years, it learns. We have done nothing but interfere. The learning is
none of our doing: merely the mental apparatus is now evolved--and lo!
the result. At birth the sucking apparatus is perfect. If we could,
doubtless we should start teaching the unborn infant to suck long
before the machinery was ready--and should applaud ourselves for its
facility at birth; only that probably this facility would be impaired
by our efforts, as many capacities of later development are damaged by
our interference. What we understand, or misunderstand, by education
should begin approximately when a child is seven. The first seven years
of life should really have the term of childhood confined to them,
for there is a natural term so indicated. The growth of the brain is
a matter of the first seven years almost wholly. It grows relatively
little after that period; and until that is completed the physical
apparatus of mind is not ready for educational interference. Without
any such interference, and with merely the provision of conditions,
physical and mental, for its spontaneous development, the brain of
the seven year old will suffice for surprising things--so surprising
that if their evolution were possible under any system of schooling
practised before that date, we should applaud it as ideal. Probably
there is no such system--much less any that will improve on the
spontaneous process.
=Education the provision of an environment.=--We are prepared, then,
to realise the limits to the action of education upon the individual.
We shall not confuse this great and many-sided thing with such of its
factors as instruction or schooling. It is not intrusion but education:
“the guidance of growth,” to use Sir James Crichton-Browne's phrase.
This guidance, this process of unpacking, educing or realising, is
accomplished by the action of circumstances or the environment.
Environment is a large word and is invariably abused when it is used
in less than the large sense. Here it includes, for instance, air and
food, mother-love and the schoolmaster. I therefore define education
as _the provision of an environment_. This definition prepares us to
understand the limitations of the process. If we think of education as
a packing or cramming process, we shall err in this respect; we shall
expect limitless results from education provided that one packs early
and tightly and carefully enough. It is this erroneous conception
which rules us and daily betrays us in practice. If, however, we think
of education as the provision of an environment, capable of creating
nothing, but merely of causing the expression or the repression of
potential characters inherent in the individual educated, then we shall
begin to recast our methods on the lines determined by this truth. Yet,
further, we shall begin to understand the cardinal truth, one of the
many platitudes which we have yet to appreciate, that “you cannot make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear.”
=Heredity and environment.=--Let us consider the question in general
terms. The characters of any living thing are determined by two
factors--heredity and environment. The old phrases were character and
circumstances, but they were less than useful, since character is
modified by circumstances. Now one of the most important questions
in the world, and not least for the eugenist, is as to the relative
importance of these two factors. The technical terms may not be in
our mouths, but we discuss this instance or that of the question in
point almost every day of our lives. One part of the business of
philosophy and of science is not only to answer questions but to ask
them correctly. This question is always wrongly asked, and therefore
cannot be answered, or is incorrectly answered. We persist in using
the mathematical idea of addition, and we seek to show that, say,
seventy per cent. of the result is due to the innate factor and thirty
per cent. to the acquired. But the truth is that so long as we begin
with this idea we may prove what we please. If we keep our attention
fixed upon the environmental or educational factor we can easily and
correctly demonstrate that in certain circumstances Mozart would
have been tone-deaf and Shakespeare a gibbering idiot--hence, but
incorrectly, we argue that environment is practically everything. _Per
contra_, we can easily and correctly demonstrate that no education
in the world could enable a door-mat or a cabbage or ourselves to
write _Don Giovanni_ or _Hamlet_--hence, but incorrectly, we argue
that the material to be operated upon is everything. We have to
learn, however, that the analogy _is one not of addition but of
multiplication_. Neither inheritance nor environment, as such, gives
anything. The environmental factor may be potentially one hundred--an
ideal education--but the innate or inherited factor may be nothing, as
when the pupil is a door-mat or a fool. The result then is nothing.
Darwin had the trombone played to a plant, but he did not make a
Palestrina. No academy of music will make a beetroot into a Beethoven,
though I dare say a well-trained beetroot might write a musical comedy.
The point is that one hundred multiplied by nothing equals nothing.
Similarly, the innate factor may be one hundred, as in the case of a
potential genius, but he may be brought up upon alcohol and curses
amongst savages, and the result again is nothing. Keep the idea of
multiplication in the mind, and the facts are seen rightly. No matter
how big either factor be, if it be multiplied by nothing it yields
nothing, or if it be multiplied by a fraction, as in the ordinary
education of a genius, it yields less than it should. But in this
controversy people persist in assuming that inheritance or education
gives definitely so much which is there anyhow, whereas, really,
it only supplies a potential figure, which may realise infinity or
nothing, according to what it is multiplied by. With all deference, I
submit this as a real answer to these endless disputes.
But further, granted that neither factor in itself produces any
actuality, which is normally the weightier of the two factors? We must
make the qualification, “normally,” because such a thing as disease or
poison, included in the environmental factor, will dominate the result,
completely overshadowing the importance of whatever heredity gave. Such
things apart, however, we may be thoroughly assured that heredity is
the weightier of the two factors. The more we study education, the more
we recognise its true nature. Indeed, the more we realise its ideal,
the more do we realise its limitations. The more we study education
the more important does heredity appear. If the reader has not had
opportunities of observing children for himself let him refer to such
a book as Mr. Galton's _Inquiries into Human Faculty_, and he will
begin to realise how large is the factor given by inheritance and how
relatively small is the factor given by education.
=Education can educate only what heredity gives.=--Heredity, as
the eugenist must never forget, gives not actualities but only
potentialities. It depends upon circumstances whether they shall
become actualities. That, however, we all know. No one supposes that
education is superfluous or impotent. We do, however, persistently
forget the converse truth that education, on the other hand, makes no
definite contribution, but merely multiplies--or alas, divides--the
potentialities given by inheritance. These potentialities constitute
a limiting condition which no education can transcend. Education can
educate only what heredity gives. Long ago Helvetius thought, as did
Kant, that the differences between men were due to differences in
education. But it is not so. We make, of course, the most ridiculous
claims for education. The remark wrongly attributed to the Duke of
Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields
of Eton,” is an instance in point. Recently, when Francis Thompson,
the poet, died, the local newspaper of his birthplace said that it
should be proud to have produced him. We may laugh at this conception
of the genesis of genius, but we all talk in this fashion. A genius
was educated at Eton, and we say that Eton produced him. The truth
is, of course, that Eton failed to destroy him. (One says Eton for
convenience, but the name of any accepted school will do.) If Eton
produced him, why does not it produce thousands like him? There is
plenty of material: but it is not the right material. We should
cease to speak, in our pride for our own _Alma Mater_ or our own
methods, as if education created genius or anything else. Men are born
unequal. To realise the nature of education is not only to avoid the
popular assumption that an ideal education will do everything for us,
forgetting that no amount of polishing will make pewter shine like
silver; it is not only to send us back to the principle of selection
in recognition of the power of inheritance; it is not merely to
dispose of the idea that men are born inherently equal; but it is
also to combat the idea that education is a levelling process. On the
contrary, it accentuates the differences between men. You may confuse
the unpolished pebble and the diamond, but not when education has done
its utmost for both. If education were a process of addition to what
inheritance gives, it would almost level men: the addition of a large
sum to figures such as, say, 1, 2, and 3, would almost obliterate
their original disproportion. But the analogy is with multiplication,
as I have suggested: and the larger the sum by which 1, 2 and 3 are
multiplied, the greater is the disparity between the products. This
is, perhaps, one of the truths of vast importance which the common rim
of contemporary Socialism implicitly denies: though it is of course
abundantly recognised by such a socialist as that master-thinker
Professor Forel. The socialist's panacea, ideal education for all, is
much to be desired, and will accomplish much, as we began by admitting;
but it is not a panacea. Those who believe it to be such do not
understand the nature of education nor its limitations. They should
remember the remark of Epictetus, “the condition and characteristic
of a fool is this: he never expects from himself profit nor harm, but
from externals.” The dogma of the unthinking socialist--who exists,
though he is doubtless rarer than the unthinking individualist--is
that all evil is of economic origin: correct your economics and your
education and you obliterate evil. But it is not so. As Lowell said,
“A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man,
and not in that of his institutions.” When by means of eugenics we
can give education the right material to work upon, we shall have a
Utopia, and as for forms of government they may be left for fools to
contest. Forel, incomparably the greatest socialist thinker of the
day, sees this. He makes his Utopian predictions not so much as to
mere externals, like clothing and language, but as regards the kind of
man and woman: and, unlike some writers, he entitles himself to paint
these pictures, for in that great eugenic treatise _Die Sexuel Frage_,
he tells us how to realise them by pedagogic reform working upon the
materials provided by human selection. A paragraph may be quoted from
Forel:--
“Malgré tout l'enthousiasme qu'on doit montrer pour une pédagogie
rationelle, il ne faut jamais oublier qu'elle est incapable de
remplacer la sélection. Elle sert au but immédiat et rapproché, qui
est d'utiliser le mieux possible le matérial humain tel qu'il existe
maintenant. Mais, par elle-même, elle n'améliore en rien la qualité
des germes à venir. Elle peut, néanmoins, grâce à l'instruction
donnée à la jeunesse sur la valeur sociale de la sélection, la
préparer à mettre cette dernière en œuvre.” #/
and another from Spencer:--
“We are not among those who believe in Lord Palmerston's dogma,
that all children are born good. On the whole, the opposite dogma,
untenable as it is, seems to us less wide of the truth. Nor do we
agree with those who think that, by skilful discipline, children
may be made altogether what they should be. Contrariwise, we are
satisfied that though imperfections of nature may be diminished by
wise management, they cannot be removed by it. The notion that an
ideal humanity might be forthwith produced by a perfect system of
education, is near akin to that implied in the poems of Shelley, that
would make mankind give up their old institutions and prejudices, all
the evils in the world would at once disappear; neither notion being
acceptable to such as have dispassionately studied human affairs.”
=Ruskin on education and inequality.=--Three great paragraphs may be
quoted from Ruskin's _Time and Tide_:--
“... Education _was desired by the lower orders because they thought
it would make them upper orders_, and be a leveller and effacer of
distinctions. They will be mightily astonished, when they really
get it, to find that it is, on the contrary, the fatallest of all
discerners and enforcers of distinctions; piercing, even to the
division of the joints and marrow, to find out wherein your body and
soul are less, or greater, than other bodies and souls, and to sign
deed of separation with unequivocal seal.
“171. Education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely
appointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undivinely
poor, it will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed, and halt, and
blind, it will make whole, and equal, and seeing. The blind and the
lame are to it as to David at the siege of the Tower of the Kings,
‘hated of David's soul.’ But there are other divinely-appointed
differences, eternal as the ranks of the everlasting hills, and as
the strength of their ceaseless waters. And these, education does not
do away with; but measures, manifests, and employs.
“In the handful of shingle which you gather from the sea-beach, which
the indiscriminate sea, with equality of fraternal foam, has only
educated to be, every one, round, you will see little difference
between the noble and the mean stones. But the jeweller's trenchant
education of them will tell you another story. Even the meanest
will be the better for it, but the noblest so much better that you
can class the two together no more. The fair veins and colours are
all clear now, and so stern is nature's intent regarding this, that
not only will the polish show which is best, but the best will take
most polish. You shall not merely see they have more virtue than the
others, but see that more of virtue more clearly; and the less virtue
there is, the more dimly you shall see what there is of it.
“172. And the law about education, which is sorrowfullest to vulgar
pride, is this--that all its gains are at compound interest; so that,
as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther behind the greater
men with whom we began on equal terms. Two children go to school hand
in hand, and spell for half an hour over the same page. Through all
their lives, never shall they spell from the same page more. One is
presently a page a-head, two pages, ten pages--and evermore, though
each toils equally, the interval enlarges--at birth nothing, at death
infinite.”
So much for one relation of this question to Socialism. Quite lately
(_The New Age_, April 11th, 1908) Mr. Havelock Ellis has summed the
matter up as follows:--
“Education has been put at the beginning, when it ought to have
been put at the end. It matters comparatively little what sort of
education we give children; the primary matter is what sort of
children we have got to educate. That is the most fundamental of
questions. It lies deeper even than the great question of Socialism
versus Individualism, and indeed touches a foundation that is
common to both. The best organised social system is only a house
of cards if it cannot be constructed with sound individuals; and
no individualism worth the name is possible, unless a sound social
organisation permits the breeding of individuals who count. On this
plane Socialism and Individualism move in the same circle.”
We cannot agree with Socialism when, as we think, it assumes that
all evil is of economic or of educational origin. The student of
heredity finds elements of evil abundant in poisoned germ-plasm and
not absent from the best. Surely, surely, the products of progress are
not mechanisms but men; and surely no economic system as such can be
the only mechanism worth naming--which would be one that made men. The
germ-plasm is such a mechanism, indeed; and hence its quality is all
important.
But if Socialism, sooner than any other party, is going to identify
itself with the economic principle of Ruskin that “there is no wealth
but life”; and if in its discussion of the conditions of industry it
will concern itself primarily with the culture of the racial life,
which is the vital industry of any people (and basis enough for a New
Imperialism, or at least a New Patriotism, that might be quite decent);
if so, then it seems to me that we must look to the socialists for
salvation. But books which describe future externals, books which
assume that education is a panacea, forgetting that education can
educate only what heredity gives, turn us away again when we are almost
persuaded. The _economic_ panacea must fail (at least as a panacea);
the _educational_ panacea must fail; the _eugenic_ panacea may not fail.
* * * * *
Education, then, cannot achieve our ideal of race-culture. No matter
how good our polishing, we must have silver and diamonds to work upon,
not pewter and pebbles. When we have the right material to work upon,
our labour will not be wasted, or far worse than wasted, as it now too
often is.
=Education a Sisyphean task.=--But the belief in education as in itself
an adequate instrument of race-culture chiefly depends upon the popular
doctrine as to its influence upon the race. It is supposed, in a word,
that if we educate the parents, the child will begin where the parents
left off. This is the doctrine of Lamarck, who said that if the necks
of the parent giraffe were educated or drawn out, the baby giraffe
would have this anatomical acquirement transmitted to it, and, so to
speak, when it grew up, would be able to begin feeding on the leaves of
trees at the level where its parents had to leave off. In the course
of its life its own neck would become elongated or educated, and its
children would outstretch both itself and their grand-parents. This
doctrine of the transmission of acquired characters by heredity, as
we have seen, is, at the present day, repudiated by biologists. It
is generally believed by the medical profession and by the public,
notwithstanding the fact that, for instance, the skin of the heel of
every new baby is almost as thin and delicate as it is anywhere else,
though for unthinkable generations all the ancestors of that baby on
both sides have greatly thickened the skin of both heels by the act of
walking.
It is quite evident that, if the Lamarckian theory were true, education
would be a completely adequate instrument of race-culture, incomparable
in its rapidity and certainty. It would not reform the world in a
single generation because, as we have seen, its results would be
limited by the inherent nature of its material; but since those results
would involve the vast amelioration of the material upon which it
worked in the second generation, mankind would be little lower than
the angels in a century. The good habits acquired by one generation
would be innate in the next. If the father learnt one language in
addition to his own, the child would start with the knowledge of two,
waiting only for opportunity, and could accumulate more and hand them
on to its child. “My father's environment would be my heredity.” If we
desired muscular strength we could in two generations produce a race
amongst whom Sandow would be a puny weakling. We should not need to
discuss any question of selection for parenthood. Without any such
process we could answer Browning's prayer and “elevate the race at
once”--physically, mentally and morally.
But the Lamarckian theory does not correspond with facts. The
results of education, physical, mental, or moral, are limited to the
individuals educated. The children do not begin where the parents left
off, but they make a fresh start where the parents did. Thus even
though we had and employed an ideal method of education, we should make
no permanent improvement by its means alone in the breed of mankind,
any more than the breeder of race-horses could attain his end by the
same means. In each generation the same problem, the same difficulties,
the same limitations inherent in the nature of the new material, would
have to be faced. We must learn from the horse-breeder, who knows that
the blood of a single horse, Eclipse, runs in the veins of the great
majority of winners since his time.
It is exceedingly difficult to dispossess the popular mind of the
Lamarckian idea, the more especially as members of the medical
profession, who are regarded as authorities on heredity, contentedly
accept this idea themselves. Yet the advocates of eugenics or
race-culture have to recognise that, so long as the Lamarckian idea
obtains, their crusade will fail to find a hearing. We believe that
nothing can really be accomplished in the way of race-culture until
public opinion--that “chaos of prejudices,” as Huxley called it--is
marshalled on our side. But the popular notion of heredity is a most
formidable obstacle. The Lamarckian idea seems to provide a method for
the improvement of a species which cannot be surpassed for simplicity,
rapidity and certainty. It even excludes the possibility of mistakes.
You cannot go wrong if you simply educate every one to the utmost.
Doubtless some persons are more suited for parenthood than others, but
only let education be wise and universal, and any question of selection
by marriage or otherwise will be superfluous. A thousand difficulties
offered by public sentiment, by convention, by the churches, by the
large measure of uncertainty which attends the working of heredity,
could be ignored, if race-culture were simply a matter of education.
Nevertheless, these difficulties have to be faced by the eugenist. The
popular misconception of heredity--instanced by Sir James Simpson's
belief, not inexcusable sixty years ago, that the education of a
future mother will enlarge her child's brain--must be removed. It can
scarcely be doubted that the sway of the Lamarckian idea will soon be
diminished, and then, at last, those who are interested in the future
will discover that only by the process of selection for parenthood,
which has brought mankind thus far, can further progress be assured.
=Real functions of education for race-culture.=--Nevertheless education
has a true function for race-culture in addition to the obvious fact
of its necessity in order to realise the inherent potentialities
of the individual. One of its functions is to provide a level of
public opinion and public taste such that the finer specimens of each
generation shall receive their due reward and shall not be crushed out
of existence or perverted. There is a passage in Goethe which suggests
the true function of education, and makes us suspect that, so far as
many kinds of genius and talent are concerned, our immediate business
is perhaps less to endeavour to produce them by breeding--if that be
possible--than to make the most of them when they are vouchsafed us.
Says Goethe:--
“We admire the Tragedies of the ancient Greeks; but to take a
correct view of the case, we ought to admire the period and the
nation in which their production was possible rather than the
individual authors; for though these pieces differ in some points
from each other, and though one of these poets appears somewhat
greater and more finished than the other, still, taking all things
together, only one decided character runs through the whole.
“This is the character of grandeur, fitness, soundness, human
perfection, elevated wisdom, sublime thought, pure, strong intuition,
and whatever other qualities one might enumerate. But when we find
all these qualities, not only in the dramatic works which have come
down to us, but also in lyrical and epic works--in the philosophers,
orators, and historians, and in an equally high degree in the works
of plastic art that have come down to us--we must feel convinced that
such qualities did not merely belong to individuals, but were the
current property of the nation and the whole period.”
=Education as to the principle of selection.=--Further, the hope
may be warranted that, though education, as such, will not achieve
the ideal of true race-culture, and though it has never hitherto
averted the ultimate failure of all civilisations, yet the case may
be different to-day, in that our acquired or traditional progress,
transmitted by the process of education accumulating from age to
age--not in our blood and bone and brain, but mainly in books, whereby
the non-transmission of the results of education is circumvented in a
sense--has reached the point at which the laws of racial or inherent
progress have been revealed to us, as to none of our predecessors.[38]
Having the knowledge of these laws it is possible that we may avert our
predecessors' fate by putting them into force. If we do not, we must
ultimately become “one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Fifty years have now
elapsed since the principle of natural selection was demonstrated for
all time by the genius of Darwin. We must not be guilty of starting
to tell the story of organic evolution and leaving out the point. So
long as we supposed that man was created as he is, the idea of racial
progress was an absurdity. It is the correct thing now-a-days to decry
the possibility of human perfection. This possibility is rightly to be
decried if it be assumed that ideal education of the present material
or anything like it would realise perfection. We have seen that it
would not. It is the principle of selection, in which Darwin has
educated us, that must be taught to all mankind, and thus education may
indeed become the factor of an effective race-culture.
=The power of individual opinion.=--Since ultimately opinion rules the
world, it is for us to create sound opinion. That is the purpose of
this book. But every individual may be a centre of eugenic opinion,
and the time has assuredly come for attempting to realise this ideal,
though a thousand years should pass before the facts of heredity are
completely ascertained and understood. The main principles are of the
simplest character, and can be readily imparted to a child. Especially
does the responsibility fall upon parents and those who are in charge
of childhood.
The young people of the next and all succeeding generations must be
taught the supreme sanctity of parenthood. The little boy who asks
what he is to become when he grows up, must be taught that the highest
profession and privilege he can aspire to is responsible fatherhood;
the little girl may less frequently ask these questions, the answer to
which has been imparted to her by her own Mother-Nature--as the doll
instinct, so little appreciated or utilised, sufficiently demonstrates;
but she likewise must be taught reverence for Motherhood. As childhood
gives place to youth, what may be called the eugenic sense must be
cultivated as a cardinal aspect of the moral sense itself; so that even
personal inclination--at the controllable and self-controllable stage
which precedes “head over ears” affection--will wither when it is
directed to some one who, on any ground, offends the educated eugenic
sense. There is here a field for moral education of the highest and
most valuable kind, both for the individual and for the race. Is there
any other aspect of duty which can claim a higher warrant? Is there any
hitherto so wholly ignored?
The preceding paragraph is re-printed from a brief account of its
objects written for the Eugenics Education Society, as a Society
which amongst other purposes exists “to further eugenic teaching at
home and in the schools and elsewhere.” The difficulties of teaching
this subject to children are more apparent than real. I may freely
confess that though I have been speaking, writing, and thinking about
eugenics for six years, I did not realise the importance of eugenic
education until I heard the views of some of the women who belong
to this Society, and even then I was at first sceptical as to its
practicability. The subject has been entirely ignored by the pioneers
of this matter. But if we turn to such a work as Forel's masterpiece
we begin to realise that the eugenic education of children is the real
beginning at the beginning, that it is in fact indispensable, and must
be antecedent to all legislation in the direction of positive eugenics,
though not to certain forms of legislation in the direction of negative
eugenics.[39] In the earlier chapters of his great work Professor Forel
offers the parent and the guardian abundant, detailed and accurate
guidance as to the lines and methods of this teaching. It is urgently
necessary for both sexes, but more especially for girls, who may suffer
incredibly from the cruel prudery ordained by Mrs. Grundy, the only
old woman to whom the word “hag” should be applied. We must remove the
reproach of Herbert Spencer, made nearly fifty years ago in words
which may well be quoted:--
“The greatest defect in our programmes of education is entirely
overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improvement
of our systems in respect both of matter and manner, the most
pressing desideratum, to prepare the young for the duties of life,
is tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and schoolmasters
should have in view; and happily, the value of the things taught,
and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching them, are now
ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end. The propriety of
substituting for an exclusively classical training, a training in
which the modern languages shall have a share, is argued on this
ground. The necessity of increasing the amount of science is urged
for like reasons. But though some care is taken to fit youth of
both sexes for society and citizenship, no care whatever is taken
to fit them for the position of parents. While it is seen that
for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation
is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of
children, no preparation whatever is needed. While many years are
spent by a boy in gaining knowledge of which the chief value is that
it constitutes ‘the education of a gentleman’; and while many years
are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her
for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either in preparation
for that gravest of all responsibilities--the management of a family.
Is it that this responsibility is but a remote contingency? On the
contrary, it is sure to devolve on nine out of ten. Is it that the
discharge of it is easy? Certainly not; of all functions which the
adult has to fulfil, this is the most difficult. Is it that each may
be trusted by self-instruction to fit himself, or herself, for the
office of parent? No; not only is the need for such self-instruction
unrecognised, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of
all others in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed.”
=The lines of eugenic education.=--The teaching of the main facts of
heredity must come first in order to the end of eugenic education.
The vegetable world is at our service in this regard, the products of
horticulture with their beauty and grace and novelty are illustrations
one and all of what heredity means and what the due choice of parents
will effect. There need be no personal allusions at this stage; the
thing can be presented in an impersonal biological setting. And as
heredity produces these wonderful results in plants, so also does it
in the animal world. Numberless domestic forms are at our service. You
take your children and your dog to the Zoological gardens, and show the
resemblance between wolf and dog. What easier, then, than to point out
that by consistent choosing for many generations of the least ferocious
wolves, you may make a domesticated race?[40]
The mind of any child that has fortunately escaped “education” will
make the transition for itself from sub-human races to mankind, and
instances will occur, say, where extreme short-sightedness or deafness
appears in children whose parents were similarly afflicted, and were
perhaps closely related. At yet a later age a boy or girl may learn the
doom which often falls upon the children of drunkards.
And then may it not be possible, when a little boy asks what he is to
be when he grows up, to suggest that the highest profession to which
he can be called, for which he may strive to make himself worthy, is
fatherhood? And when the racial instinct awakes, would it be wrong,
improper, indecent, to teach that it has a purpose, that no attribute
of mind or body has a higher purpose, that this is holy ground? Or is
it better that by silence, both as to the fact and as to its meaning,
we should make it unmentionable, indecent, dishonourable? The Bible is
used now-a-days as an instrument of political immorality, but if and
when it should be employed for the function of other great literature,
there is a passage sufficiently relevant to our present argument.[41]
Perhaps we are wrong in regarding and treating the racial instinct as
if it were animal and low, a thing as far as possible to be ignored,
repressed, treated with silent contempt in education and elsewhere. We
may be wrong in practice because the method is not successful, because
the development of this instinct is inevitable and little short of
imperious in every normal child if that child is ever to become a man
or a woman, and because our silence does not involve the silence of
less responsible persons who are less likely even than we ourselves to
teach the young enquirer that this thing exists for parenthood, and is
therefore holy and to be treated as such.
Perhaps we are wrong in principle also, since that which exists for
parenthood, and without which the continuance and future terrestrial
hope of mankind is impossible, cannot be animal and low, unless human
life, even at its best attained or attainable, be animal and low. Our
business rather is to treat this great fact in a spirit worthy of the
purpose for which it exists; and therefore, as part of that process of
education by which we desire to make the young into reasonable, moral
and fully human beings, to teach explicitly, without unworthy shame,
that this thing exists for the highest of purposes that nothing which
the future holds for boy or girl can conceivably be higher or happier
than worthy parenthood, however commonplace that may appear to common
eyes, and that accordingly this instinct is to be guarded, treated,
used, honoured as for parenthood, a fact which immediately raises it
from the egoistic to the altruistic plane. We have to learn and to
teach that worthy parenthood is the highest end which education can
achieve--highest alike on the ground of its services to the individual
and its services to the future, and the relation of the racial instinct
to parenthood being what it is, we have to look upon it in that light,
at once austere and splendid.
In the teaching of girls, only a false and disastrous prudery offers
any great obstacle. The idea of motherhood is essentially natural to
the normal girl. It is the eugenic education of boys that is more
difficult, and the possibility of which will be questioned in some
quarters, especially by those who regard the type of boy evolved in
semi-monastic institutions, devoid of feminine influence, as a normal
and unchangeable being. Co-educationists, however, are teaching us
to revise that opinion, and will yet demonstrate, perhaps, that the
inculcation of the idea of fatherhood is not so impossible nor so
alien to the boy nature as some would suppose. If such a duty devolved
upon the present writer, he would feel inclined, perhaps, to present
his teaching in terms of patriotism. He would urge that “there is no
wealth but life”; that nations are made not of provinces nor property
but of people; that modern biology is teaching historians to explain
such phenomena as the fall of Rome in terms of the quality of the
national life; that therefore, individuals being mortal, parenthood
necessarily takes its place as the supreme factor of national destiny;
that the true patriotism must therefore concern itself with the
conditions and the quality of parenthood--much less with its quantity;
that the patriotism which ignores these truths is ignorant and must be
disastrous; that we must turn our attention therefore from flag waving
to questions of individual conduct; that if alcohol and syphilis,
for instance, can be demonstrated to be what I would call racial
poisons, the young patriot must make himself aware of their relation to
parenthood, and must act upon his knowledge of that relation. It can
thus be demonstrated that righteousness exalteth a nation not only in
the spiritual but also in the most concrete sense.
To this we shall come. We may even recognise eugenic education as the
most urgent need of the day, as the most radical and rational, perhaps
even the most hopeful, of the methods by which the cleansing of the
city, and much more, is to be achieved. We must create a eugenic aspect
for the moral sense. We can associate this alike with individual and
civic duty, and with those very ideals to which, as we all know,
the young most readily respond. Thus I believe it shall be said of
us in the after time that we have raised up the foundations of many
generations.
And so, finally, the unselfish significance of marriage might
conceivably be taught, alike to boys and girls, and especially in the
case of undoubtedly good stocks might we inculcate, as Mr. Galton has
pointed out, a rational pride in ancestry--that is to say, a rational
pride in the quality of the germ-plasm which has been entrusted to us.
And so may be cultivated a eugenic aspect of the moral sense--which
is immeasurably more plastic than any but the student of moral ideas
knows--and, thus endowed, the young man or woman will be prepared
for the possibility of marriage. It is perfectly conceivable that in
days to come the argument--in any case false--that affection never
brooks control, may become wholly irrelevant, when there arises a
generation in whose members there has been cultivated or created
the eugenic sense. It is conceivable that, just as to-day the mere
possibility of falling in love is arrested by any of a thousand trivial
considerations, so misplaced affection may be incapable of arising
because its possible object affronts the educated eugenic sense. The
natural basis for such education already exists. But the natural
eugenic sense still works mainly on the physical plane, and although we
owe to it the maintenance of our present modest standard of physical
beauty, we aim at higher ideals--and will one day thus attain them.