MORALITY
"Generally speaking, the intellectualist phase [of a boy's career] is
remarkably brief. Just occasionally its morals are such as to cause
the swift expulsion of its leaders. More often they leave in the
natural course of things, or grow weary of their pose--which has,
indeed, not made them popular--and return after the holidays frankly
and unaffectedly Philistine. This transient fashion is not new. What
is new is the deliberate encouragement given to it by a certain type of
assistant master. We do not imply that the wise master will
suppress... That kind of intellectual measles will work itself out...
But to leave the phase alone is one thing; deliberately to foster and
give it official backing is quite another."--_The Church Times_.
When the morality of the public schools is being discussed, attention
is usually concentrated almost exclusively on that particular branch of
morality which is concerned with sex. Nor is this unnatural; for sex
plays so important a part in the life of a growing boy, and the
development of his character is so closely bound up with the
development of his physical nature, that the determining part may be
very easily confused with the whole. Yet there are many boys who are
sexually virtuous, but filled with the worst type of hardness and
intolerance; many, too, who are sexually vicious, yet full of love and
sympathy. To imagine that the problem of public school morality is
solved as soon as we have discovered the best method of making public
school boys continent, is to look at the matter from an altogether too
narrow angle; for the sins of the spirit, we have been told, are more
unpardonable than the sins of the flesh.
Nevertheless, when we have said this, as say it we must, the fact
remains that the sex question is one of overwhelming importance. For
if once self-indulgence is allowed to become firmly rooted in a boy's
character, in the majority of cases it will be ineradicable; and he
will either be the victim throughout a great part of his life of
temptations which he loathes, and which will be a constant source of
unhappiness to him, or he will end by acquiescing in a manner of life
which is degrading, it may be to himself alone, it may be both to
himself and others. It will be urged, of course, as it has been urged
against every school novel which has attempted to give a true picture
of the "manners" of a school house, that we are grotesquely
exaggerating the whole business; that there may be a problem in the
case of this boy or that, but that in general there is no problem at
all. This simply will not do. There is a problem, and a very grave
one; and we had better anticipate the possibility of being
misunderstood by stating very directly what it is. We believe that the
number of cases in which boys have undesirable relationships with one
another is not very large, but we believe also that there is a very
great deal of that purely personal self-indulgence, that purely
self-regarding licentiousness, which is the cause of so much
unhappiness in boyhood.
But the reader will already be asking, "What is all this to do with
political education?" The connection is a close one. For the
prevalence of this particular form of immorality may be ascribed to two
main causes. At some time during early adolescence the majority of
boys automatically become acquainted with the sensation of sex, and, as
part of a natural process, try to reproduce the pleasurable experience.
But why do so many of these repeat and repeat the process, until the
thing becomes a habit for which they can find no escape? Partly
because the verbal warning which is given to them by parents and
masters is made in a wrong form, and partly because there is not that
constant joy and romance in their daily lives in comparison with which
temptation, when it comes, will appear sordid and unworthy. In the
second place, there is an atmosphere in the houses of tolerance towards
these practices, accompanied by constant discussion, sometimes open,
sometimes secret, which encourages and not rarely actually suggests
them. This is certainly true of many houses in many schools. The
house prefects, it is true, usually try to suppress as much of the
unhealthiness as they can; but since, on the one hand, they are often
known to have been "as bad as any one" in their day, and on the other
they use the method of pretending that these are things which no decent
boy could possibly be guilty of, they meet at best with a very partial
success, derived only from the fear which they inspire.
The common method of dealing with the evil is a system of "talks" by
masters and heads of houses. The "talks" follow a fairly stereotyped
plan; they are either religious in nature, and contain references to
"the temple of the body," or medical, and convey warnings of the
physical consequences which will follow if excess is persisted in.
Sometimes the two types of address are dovetailed into a single whole.
Neither are wholly satisfactory. The medical variety sometimes
terrifies a sensitive boy, who will imagine that his whole life is
ruined and all his chance of future happiness wrecked. He will become
somewhat morose, and not unfrequently will finally turn, in his
despair, to the very thing against which he has been warned. On the
other hand, and with another type of boy, it often fails equally
disastrously, because, judged by the medical standards to which it
appeals, it is proved by experience to be unsound. In his anxiety to
create a strong impression the schoolmaster will sometimes make
statements that are simply untrue. He will tell the boy that these
practices will ruin his cricket or his football. No doubt it sometimes
will; but it is more than likely that the boy knows several highly
successful athletes who are, as the boy knows, though the master may
not, complete adepts in schoolboy vice. Then there is the old threat,
possibly obsolete to-day, though one hesitates to say that anything is
obsolete in the conservative world with which we deal--the old threat
that half the inmates of the asylums of England have been brought there
by this practice. That, again, is simply untrue, and if the boy
happens to know it, the effect of such an untruth upon him may be very
bad. Equally unsuccessful, in the majority of cases, is the religious
talk. The unspeculative, dogmatic type of school religion does not
make an appeal to the ordinary boy sufficiently strong to override what
he has found to be the most fascinating thing in his experience. It is
too much a conventional decency imposed upon him from without, too
little a force within him which he has been helped to develop, such as
is alone powerful enough to contend with a desire itself arising
spontaneously from within. And when the sermon is accompanied by
exhortations to pray against temptation, it is sometimes not only
useless, but (again in the case of the ordinary boy) positively
harmful. For to get into the habit of praying against temptation means
to get into the habit of thinking about it, to become self-conscious,
and to succumb. Not but that there are some quite young boys who feel
Christ's nearness to them as Friend and Helper so vividly that they can
gain real strength from praying to Him. But we are talking of the
average boy; and the average boy is not of this type.
Conversations between master and boy on the subject are, of course,
quite necessary and often very helpful. Very often a boy is mystified,
or it may be terrified, by what seems to him some peculiarity in his
nature, and it may do him all the good in the world to unburden his
soul to some one older and more experienced than himself. It is best,
too, that the House master should be the man to whom such a boy
naturally turns; though if the boy should prefer to turn elsewhere, the
fact should be to the House master food for thought rather than for
anger. Indeed, while in one way there is far too much talk on this
subject, in another there is far too little. Too much may easily be
made of conventional "talks" on conventional occasions. What is rather
wanted is a relationship between boy and master, created by frank
intercourse on other topics, such as will naturally bring the boy to
the master for help in these difficulties, with the sure knowledge that
the latter will not "lecture" him, but will speak as one who has been
through similar difficulties in his own boyhood, and is anxious only to
help and to explain.
Under the present system, when the verbal appeal fails, recourse is
often had to corporal punishment. We have no room here for a
discussion of the ethics of punishment; but a method more foolish could
scarcely be devised, if the aim is to enable the boy to overcome
temptation. And of all forms of punishment, corporal punishment is the
worst. The physical side of the boy's nature is asserting itself in
all its strength; and you attempt to combat it by making a physical
appeal which must from the nature of the case be far less powerful and
compelling. Moreover, any one with even a slight knowledge of sexual
psychology (and it is curious how few schoolmasters take the trouble to
acquire such knowledge) is aware that given a certain temperament on
the part whether of the giver or the receiver, perils lurk in this form
of punishment of the very type which it is designed to meet.
But the only sound way of combating the over-development of one side of
a boy's nature is to develop the other. Make a boy's whole life one of
joy and interest; let him live with a constant sense of the beauty of
grass and sky, of the exultation of vital work, of the happiness of
love and friendship. As the days go by, let him feel his latent powers
developing, and glory in the thought that they have been given him for
his own joy and that of humanity. Then when temptation comes to him,
and he remembers how its indulgence has left him slack and bored, it
will seem to him like a candle-flame in the sun of his happiness, a
wretched little mean and unworthy thing breaking in on and threatening
to ruin the peace and harmony of his life. And so he will not give it
a second thought, and soon all danger will be over. This may seem
preposterously difficult. It is: but it is also the only way. The
master cannot do it for the boy, but he can perhaps give the boys some
help towards doing it for themselves.
What we want is that every house should become a small community of
boys carrying on together absorbingly interesting and romantic
activities--a kind of club in which they may forgather and undertake in
common the intellectual and spiritual adventure which thus become a
part of their individual daily lives.
In this way there will be none of that boredom, that feeling of "having
nothing on earth to do or think about," the presence of which is the
chief cause impelling a boy to turn to the one thing which at least can
provide him at any moment with a temporary excitement. Rather will his
whole nature develop harmoniously, and sex, about which we have become
too self-conscious, take its proper place as the (normally) unconscious
inspirer of many of our most vital activities and happiest emotions.
And once morbidity has been put away, and with it the constant
preoccupation of boys and masters with this one topic, and all that
suspicion and suggestiveness which we know so well, then the graver
problem which has to do with the relationship of boy to boy will be
found to have been solved at the same time. No one who knows a public
school is likely to deny that sexual emotion is nearly always an
element in the intensest schoolboy friendships; but that makes them
neither the less lovely nor the less desirable. Indeed, the value of
such friendships at their finest cannot be overestimated. For when a
boy "falls in love," he learns for the first time something of the real
splendour of living: he comes into his birthright of beauty and
ecstacy, and understands how the greatest happiness is to be found in
doing everything for the service of another. There is something very
loathsome about the spying, and secretiveness, the jokes and unclean
hintings which, in the majority of schools, make such a friendship
appear a thing to be ashamed rather than proud of, and often in the end
actually render it shameful. Given a clean atmosphere, an absence of
suspicion on the part of masters and of morbidity on that of boys, and
we believe that very rarely would physical acts result from schoolboy
love.
But the reader will be asking, for the second time, "What is all this
to do with political education?" And again we answer--everything. For
we believe that the joy in life, and the intellectual interest of which
we have spoken can be awakened from where they lie dormant in a boy's
nature by political education. The subject is the boy's own destiny as
a member of human society and a part of the universe (for it will be
remembered that we include ethics and philosophy with history and
politics under the one broad heading); and there is hardly a boy who
does not find, at best in all these subjects, at worst in one of them,
the inspiration to vital work and the sense of living well, which goes
with it. The boys start reading, widely; a thousand topics occupy
their attention; poetry, plays, novels--all these are reached from the
one starting point. Then clubs and groups of various kinds are started
in their houses; and the sex problem has become as much as it ever can
become, a thing of the past.
Nor, we may add, are we merely theorising, and talking of hypothetical
goods which might conceivably follow from the adoption of our plan.
All that we have written of is within our own experience. Time after
time while we were making our experiments did we come across cases of
boys whose moral health had been saved by their new-found interest.
One had turned to physical excitement as the only possible relief from
the tedium of Latin grammar; after a year under the altered
circumstances he turned to it no longer. The parents of another (a boy
of about sixteen) had attempted to base his morality solely on
Christian dogma, which meant nothing to him; and the result was
disastrous. But a course of lectures on Plato's philosophy gave him
what religion had previously failed to give him--a belief in an ideal
and the distinction between right and wrong, and a determination to do
always what seemed to him the absolute best.[1] But by far the most
remarkable results were achieved in the house of which we have already
spoken in Chapter I. During his first fortnight of office, the new
head boy followed the old method; he examined all suspicious cases,
discovered some that he had not suspected, and dealt out the
traditional treatment. Then he followed the old method no longer; nor
did he ever return to it from that day till the day when he finally
left the school before his time. Instead, he set about interesting the
boys in politics. We have already described the course of his
experiments; how enthusiasm, kindled over newspapers, spread to plays,
to poetry, to pictures, and to music. And the result? The house was
transformed: it became such a place as every mother hopes the house
where her own son is may be. And yet during the whole time of which we
are speaking only one boy was beaten, and he for an act quite unrelated
to the seventh or indeed to any other of the Ten Commandments.
NOTE.--A fortnight after the writing of the present book was projected,
one of the writers was dispatched on military duty to India, and the
above chapter was sent home from "Somewhere" in "Somewhere"--I believe
Taranto. Close co-operation in authorship became impossible, and upon
his collaborator in England devolved the responsibility of sole
editorship. I leave the above chapter almost as it was written, for
there is about it, as it seems to me, an indomitable optimism which was
a characteristic of the writer's work and a cause of its success.
Still, in so far as it suggests that a complete solution has been found
for a problem I believe to be insoluble, I must in honesty add a few
words on my own account.
Our direct experience, or the more remarkable part of it, amounts to
this: that a certain head of a house achieved during the course of a
year, using the methods described, an uplifting of the whole tone of
his house that can only be described as marvellous. Other heads
elsewhere have no doubt achieved similar results by other means, though
we have never come across an example equally remarkable. The goal can
be reached, presumably, by the road of saintliness. It might be
reached, though it is doubtful, by the road of Puritanism and
"efficiency," the appeal to abstinence and "living hard." It cannot be
reached, that is certain, by merely disciplinary methods and the appeal
to fear, for the commonest form of schoolboy vice is such that, even
allowing for the casualness of boys, it will not be detected once in a
hundred cases.
Something, however, must be discounted from this result, by reason of
the fact that the experiments were new. These boys had an enthusiasm
bred of the fact that they rightly felt themselves to be pioneers.
They felt themselves to be making history, certainly for the first,
possibly for the last, time in their lives, and whether you admire them
or whether you laugh at them, making history they were, so far as their
own world was concerned. It seems doubtful whether the spiritual force
engendered would have lasted at full strength when the thing had become
normal, and it was no longer possible to start the hare of some new
"stunt" (as they called it, I am sorry to say) once every two or three
weeks. The experiment was cut short in its prime, and how it would
have developed when the first generation of enthusiasts had passed
away, one cannot say.
As for the other houses, something had been begun in two or three, but
nothing of much value had been achieved. The minorities hesitated
between a desire to imitate and a desire to be quite original, and the
majorities looked a trifle askance upon the whole affair. And the
masters came in here and put every sort of difficulty in the way, for
by this time the collapse was visibly approaching.
None the less, the lines on which this strange and temporary
achievement was based are the only lines along which the moral problem
can be grappled with. A perfectly "pure" public school is as
impossible as a perfectly satisfactory Marriage Law. A few
incorrigibly bad boys there will always be--incorrigible, that is, when
they have reached public school age. Hopelessly inanimate and feeble
boys there will be also, doomed to become the victims of the bad. But
the present moral average might be immensely raised, and the plain way
to raise it is to provide other adventures for the soul. A boy once
said to me, speaking of the matter in hand, "You see, it's the only
thing I've ever found to do here really 'on my own.'" It was, in fact,
his one adventure. No amount of class-room tasks, however well
devised, no amount of organised games, however healthy, no amount of
school religion, however sincere, could fill that gap. We must put the
boys on the lines to organise their own adventures, and the only
adventures that can compete with this absorbing adventure of misapplied
sexuality, must be adventures that really lead up to the highest and
best things of life. It was only when he found an empire to save that
Clive ceased to be a young ruffian. Nothing lower than "politics" will
suffice.
[1] Not that we believe that Plato is a greater teacher than Christ.
Our opinion is the opposite; but we are also of Shelley's opinion when
he said, "I would rather go to hell with Plato than to heaven with
Paley." Much that is called Christian is not of Christ. Also there
are no doubt minds so constituted that they will get more good in
certain circumstances from the lesser teacher.