CAPTURE BY THE STATE
"It is a great and perilous discovery that the State can [as in
Germany] impress the minds of masses of men by a carefully organised
system of political education, and we hope the authors will bear it in
mind."--_Westminster Gazette_.
"Germany has shown the world to what evil ends the dishonest use of
schools and schoolmasters must lead."--_Contemporary Review_.
We have discussed the pros and cons of propaganda--the propaganda, that
is to say, by each master of his particular point of view--and have
concluded that, if certain safeguards are adopted and honestly adhered
to, such propaganda is desirable. But there is one particular form of
propaganda which no one, if he has any reverence at all for the
individuality of his pupils and the freedom of the world, can regard as
anything but an abomination. And here we meet with the most serious
criticism which can be, and has been, levelled against the project of
political education. Suppose, it has been urged, that your scheme is
adopted by a number of the public schools; suppose that by a steady
process of attack, this new and very powerful piece of machinery is
captured by the State, as a means of imposing orthodoxy on the nation
and nipping in the bud a great part of our potential vigour and
independence; have you not then defeated most disastrously your own
object, and desiring above everything more liberty in thought and more
self-reliance in action, merely succeeded in setting up a system
similar to that which created the national character of modern Germany?
It is at first sight a most damaging criticism; and a criticism which
seems to gather weight as we look about us and observe the terrible
results which have occurred when the State has been allowed to
manipulate opinion for its own ends. No Englishman will need to have
the lesson of Germany brought home to him; he knows too well how
inculcation through the schools of the worst type of narrow patriotism,
rendered seemingly noble by a deliberate falsification of history, has
warped the generosity which all children, German or other, possess,
into a pitiful acquiescence in every form of intellectual and moral
vileness. But in England, too, the danger signals are not wanting. We
have observed the people falling more and more under the sway of one
man's ideas, carried by his Press into every town and village of the
countryside: we have noticed that complete independence does not appear
always to exist as between the Press and the men who are responsible
for the gravest acts of public policy; and some of us do not much like
what we have seen. Are we then to help forward the forces making for
our own Prussianisation? We desire to see Politics taught by masters
of every shade of political opinion, so that the boys may have all the
materials from which to form an independent judgment; but will not the
State see to it, as it grows more and more powerful, that only those
men are allowed to become, or to remain, schoolmasters, who will teach
a doctrine not abhorrent to the powers that be? Those who know the
public schools will not be at a loss to understand how such a
consummation could be achieved. Even now there is the pressure of
parents, members of the financial or political wing of the ruling
class--a pressure few head masters are big enough to resist. And in
the future--to take only one instance--may not Conscription remain, and
the Government exercise a direct control through the medium of the
O.T.C.?
And as one writes these words; as one sees the ghastly prospect of more
and more State control, more and more authoritarianism and docility,
less and less of the free co-operation which is the very life-blood of
society, one sees also that the only way in which we can prevent the
remedy we have proposed from becoming another instrument in the hands
of our enemies, is simply by adopting that remedy itself. We must
break in on the vicious circle while and how we can. For why is there
a danger of our instrument of education being turned into an instrument
of obscurantism? Only because there is a danger of our whole society
becoming rotten to the core; only because there is a danger of the
present cleavage between the two English nations becoming wider and
wider, until we have, on the one hand, a class ruling in the interests
of money and privilege, and, on the other, a slaving and possibly
pampered proletariate. And unless a start is made here and now with
the political education of Europe--unless boys and girls are made to
think politically while their generosity and idealism is still
untainted by motives of personal profit, and their powers of vital
thought not yet decayed by disuse--these and worse things will happen;
love, tolerance, and the independence which is the birthright of men,
will all be engulfed in a mad welter of personal, class, and national
selfishness. In such a society it really would not matter very much if
political education were captured by the State; and the only way, as it
seems to us, of preventing its advent is by getting up a system of
political education. For by political education we are creating the
only possible safeguard against a misuse of it--we are creating a
society which will not _desire_ to misuse it.
And so we would make, if we may, an appeal to all who are considering
what their future work shall be, and to those also who may be finding
their present work unprofitable--we would urge them to become
schoolmasters. We like sometimes to think of a little Greek army of
devoted warriors--a band of five hundred young men, who will go into
the public schools and there gradually help to set up a system of
political education. The word "Greek" is not out of place. For there
is something about the sunlit freshness of a cricket field--something
too, about the boys, belonging for the most part to a class which, with
all its faults, has a great tradition of public service behind it--that
brings before the mind a gathering of Greek humanity in the smiling
peace of a Greek country place. It is idle to pretend that a man of
ability who goes into the schoolmastering profession does not have to
make many sacrifices. His salary is usually miserable; his chances of
a head mastership must be at present in inverse ratio to the vigour
with which he acts on the principles he believes in, for these posts
are mostly reserved for the "safe," as the debates of the Head Masters'
Conference used to show, until, a few years ago, that body very wisely
decided to exclude reporters. But the compensations are enormous. He
will live all his life close to boys whom, when he once gets to know
them, he will find to have a freshness and high-heartedness which will
be a constant source of hope and inspiration; he will have the joy of
watching their minds develop, and of feeling that it is due in some
measure to him that they are growing into makers of happiness for
themselves and the world. And when in his work he is met by the
opposition of those who misinterpret or misunderstand, he will have an
almost fierce satisfaction in the faith that the future may be all on
his side, and that many years hence a little of him will live in men
who have realised not his, but their, individuality, and that
potentiality for goodness which, as well as he was able, he fostered
and brought to the light.
We have both been schoolmasters; at the moment we are neither of us
anything so useful; and we feel that we can say quite dogmatically that
there is no happiness equal to that of the profession that was ours.
And both of us fell into it accidently, as so many others have done.
Yet the appeal for schoolmasters should surely not be based entirely or
even mainly on the idyllic picture of the happy schoolmaster. John
Stuart Mill reduced hedonism to its fundamental paradox when he
declared that the way to find happiness was to turn your back on it.
If there is one lesson which political education rightly conducted
cannot fail to impress upon its best boys, it is the crying need of the
schools for their services. From Plato and Aristotle down to the
latest treatises on Reconstruction, be it the "Principles of
Reconstruction," as laid down by Mr. Bertrand Russell, or the "Elements
of Reconstruction," as reprinted from _The Times_ with an introduction
by Lord Milner, all alike come round to education as the keystone of
the arch of politics. The final appeal is always to the schoolmaster,
and it is perhaps less hopeful to appeal to the actual schoolmaster of
to-day than to the possible schoolmaster of to-morrow. As are our
schools, so will be our Parliaments and our Civil Service, and some at
any rate who have mapped out for themselves a career of political
usefulness and honour in Westminster, Whitehall, or abroad, might
bethink themselves first of Banquo.
"Lesser than Macbeth and greater:
Not so happy yet much happier;
Thou shalt get kings though thou be none."