speak of verses written in literary Latin (meaning a sort of Latin
that nobody ever spoke), of Greek, and of algebra. Many an unhappy lad
who would have voluntarily picked up enough Latin and Greek to read
Virgil, Horace, and Homer, or to whom Descartes, Newton, and Einstein
would be heroes such as Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner are to
unspoilt musicians, loathes every printed page except in a newspaper
or detective story, and shrinks from an algebraic symbol or a diagram
of the parallelogram of forces as a criminal from a prison. This is
the result of our educational mania. When Eton was founded, the idea
was that the boys should be roused at six in the morning and kept hard
at their Latin without a moment’s play until they went to bed. And
now that the tendency is to keep them hard at play instead, without
a moment for free work, their condition is hardly more promising.
Either way an intelligent woman, remembering her own childhood, must
stand aghast at the utter disregard of the children’s ordinary human
rights, and the classing of them partly as animals to be tamed and
broken in, for which, provided the methods are not those of the trainer
of performing animals, there is something to be said, and partly as
inanimate sacks into which learning is to be poured _ad libitum_, for
which there is nothing to be said except what can be said for the water
torture of the Inquisition, in which the fluid was poured down the
victims’ throats until they were bloated to death. But there was some
method in this madness. I have already hinted to you what you must have
known very well, that children, unless they are forced into a quiet,
sedentary, silent, motionless, and totally unnatural association with
adults, are so troublesome at home that humane parents who would submit
to live in a bear-garden or a monkey-house rather than be cruelly
repressive, are only too glad to hand them over to anyone who will
profess to educate them, whilst the desperate struggle of the genteel
disendowed younger son and unmarried daughter class to find some means
of livelihood produces a number of persons who are willing to make a
profession of child farming under the same highly plausible pretext.
Socialism would abolish this class by providing its members with less
hateful and equally respectable employment. Nobody who had not a
genuine vocation for teaching would adopt teaching as a profession.
Sadists, female and male, who now get children into their power so
as to be able to torture them with impunity, and child fanciers (who
are sometimes the same people) of the kind that now start amateur
orphanages because they have the same craze for children that some
people have for horses and dogs, although they often treat them
abominably, would be checkmated if the children had any refuge from
them except the homes from which they had been practically turned out,
and from which they would be promptly returned to their tyrants with
the assurance that if they were punished it served them right for being
naughty. Within a few days of writing this I have read as part of the
day’s news of a case in which a mother summoned a schoolmaster because
he had first caned her boy for hiccuping, which is not a voluntary
action, and then, because the boy made light of the punishment, fell
on him in a fury and thrashed him until he raised wheals on him that
were visible eight days afterwards. Magistrates are usually as lenient
in dealing with these assaults as with similar assaults by husbands
on their wives (assaults by wives are laughed out of court): indeed
they usually dismiss the case with a rebuke to the victim for being
an unmanly little coward and not taking his licking in good part;
but this time they admitted that the punishment, as they called it,
was too severe; and the schoolmaster had to pay the mother’s costs,
though nobody hinted at any unfitness on his part for the duties he had
assumed. And, in fairness, it did not follow that the man was a savage
or a Sadist, any more than it follows that married people who commit
furious assaults on one another have murderous natural dispositions.
The truth is that just as married life in a one-room tenement is
more than human nature can bear even when there are no children to
complicate it, life in the sort of prison we call a school, where
the teacher who hates her work is shut in with a crowd of unwilling,
hostile, restless children, sets up a strain and hatred that explodes
from time to time in onslaughts with the cane, not only for hiccuping,
but for talking, whispering, looking out of the window (inattention),
and even moving. Modern psychological research, even in its rather
grotesque Freudian beginnings, is forcing us to recognize how serious
is the permanent harm that comes of this atmosphere of irritation on
the one side and suppression, terror, and reactionary naughtiness
on the other. Even those who do not study psychology are beginning
to notice that chaining dogs makes them dangerous, and is a cruel
practice. They will presently have misgivings about chained children
too, and begin to wonder whether thrashing and muzzling them is the
proper remedy.
As a general result we find that what we call education is a failure.
The poor woman’s child is imprisoned for nine years under pretext
of teaching it to read, write, and speak its own language: a year’s
work at the outside. And at the end of the nine years the prisoner
can do none of these things presentably. In 1896, after twenty-six
years of compulsory general education, the secretary of the Union of
Mathematical Instrument Makers told me that most of his members signed
with a mark. Rich male children are kept in three successive prisons,
the preparatory school, the public school (meaning a very exclusive
private school malversating public endowments), and the university, the
period of imprisonment being from twelve to fourteen years, and the
subjects taught including classical languages and higher mathematics.
Rich female children, formerly imprisoned in the family dungeon under
a wardress called a governess, are now sent out like their brothers.
The result is a slightly greater facility in reading and writing,
the habits and speech of the rich idle classes, and a moral and
intellectual imbecility which leaves them politically at the mercy of
every bumptious adventurer and fluent charlatan who has picked up their
ways and escaped their education, and morally on the level of medieval
robber barons and early capitalist buccaneers. When they are energetic
and courageous, in spite of their taming, they are public dangers:
when they are mere sheep, doing whatever their class expects them to
do, they will follow any enterprising bell-wether to the destruction
of themselves and the whole community. Fortunately humanity is so
recuperative that no system of suppression and perversion can quite
abort it; but as far as our standard lady’s and gentleman’s education
goes the very least that can be said against it is that most of its
victims would be better without it.
It is, however, incidentally advantageous. The university student who
is determined not to study, gains from the communal life of the place
a social standing that is painfully lacking in the people who have
been brought up in a brick box in ill mannered intercourse with two
much older people and three or four younger ones, all keeping what
they call their company manners (meaning an affectation which has no
desirable quality except bare civility) for the few similarly reared
outsiders who are neither too poor to be invited in nor too rich to
condescend to enter the box. Nobody can deny that these middle class
families which cannot afford the university for their sons, and must
send them out as workers at fifteen or so, appear utterly unpresentable
vulgarians compared to our university products. The woman from the
brick box maintains her social position by being offensive to the
immense number of people whom she considers her inferiors, reserving
her civility for the very few who are clinging to her own little ledge
on the social precipice; for inequality of income takes the broad,
safe, and fertile plain of human society and stands it on edge so
that everyone has to cling desperately to her foothold and kick off
as many others as she can. She would cringe to her superiors if they
could be persuaded to give her the chance, whereas at a university
she would have to meet hundreds of other young women on equal terms,
and to be at least commonly civil to everybody. It is true that
university manners are not the best manners, and that there is plenty
of foundation for the statement that Oxford and Cambridge are hotbeds
of exclusiveness, university snobs being perhaps the most incorrigible
of all snobs. For all that, university snobbery is not so disabling as
brick box snobbery. The university woman can get on without friction or
awkwardness with all sorts of people, high or low, with whom the brick
box woman simply does not know how to associate. But the university
curriculum has nothing to do with this. On the contrary, it is the
devoted scholar who misses it, and the university butterfly, barely
squeezing through her examinations, who acquires it to perfection.
Also, it can now be acquired and greatly improved on by young people
who break loose from the brick box into the wider social life of clubs
and unofficial cultural associations of all kinds. The manners of
the garden city and the summer school are already as far superior to
the manners of the university college as these are to the manners of
the brick box. There is no word that has more sinister and terrible
connotations in our snobbish society than the word promiscuity; but
if you exclude its special and absurd use to indicate an imaginary
condition of sexual disorder in which every petticoat and every coat
and trousers fall into oneanother’s embraces at sight, you will see
that social promiscuity is the secret of good manners, and that it is
precisely because the university is more promiscuous than the brick
box, and the Theosophical or Socialist summer school more promiscuous
than the college, that it is also the better mannered.
Socialism involves complete social promiscuity. It has already gone
very far. When the great Duke of Wellington fell ill, he said “Send
for the apothecary”, just as he would have said “Send for the barber”;
and the apothecary no doubt “your Graced” him in a very abject manner:
indeed I can myself remember famous old physicians, even titled ones,
who took your fee exactly as a butler used to take your tip. In the
seventeenth century a nobleman would sometimes admit an actor to an
intimate friendship; but when he wrote to him he began his letter, not
“My dear So and So”, but “To Betterton the player”. Nowadays a duke who
went on like that would be ridiculed as a Pooh Bah. Everybody can now
travel third class in England without being physically disgusted by
their fellow-travellers. I can remember when second class carriages,
now extinct, were middle class necessities.
The same process that has levelled the social intercourse between
dukes and doctors or actors can level it between duchesses and
dairymaids, or, what seems far less credible, between doctors’ wives
and dairymaids. But whilst Socialism makes for this sort of promiscuity
it will also make for privacy and exclusiveness. At present the
difference between a dairymaid and any decent sort of duchess is
marked, not by a wounding difference between the duchess’s address
to the dairymaid and her address to another duchess, but by a very
marked difference between the address of a dairymaid to the duchess
and her address to another dairymaid. The decent duchess’s civility is
promiscuous; but her intimate friendship and society is not. Civility
is one thing, familiarity quite another. The duchess’s grievance at
present is that she is obliged by her social and political position
to admit to her house and table a great many people whose tastes and
intellectual interests are so different from her own that they bore her
dreadfully, whilst her income cuts her off from familiar intercourse
with many poor people whose society would be delightful to her, but
who could not afford her expensive habits. Equality would bring to
the duchess the blessing of being able to choose her familiars as far
as they were willing to respond. She would no longer have to be bored
by men who could talk about nothing but fox hunting or party politics
when she wanted to talk about science or literature, dressmaking or
gardening, or, if her tastes were more curious, the morbidities of
psycho-analysis. Socialism, by steam-rollering our class distinctions
(really income distinctions) would break us up into sets, cliques, and
solitaries. The duchess would play golf (if people could still find
no more interesting employment for their leisure) with any charwoman,
and lunch with her after; but the intimate circle of the duchess and
the charwoman would be more exclusive and highly selected than it can
possibly be now. Socialism thus offers the utmost attainable society
and the utmost attainable privacy. We should be at the same time much
less ceremonious in our public relations and much more delicate about
intruding on oneanother in our private ones.
You may say, what has all this to do with education? Have we not
wandered pretty far from it? By no means: a great part of our education
comes from our social intercourse. We educate oneanother; and we
cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough
to talk to. But enough of that side of the subject. Let us leave
the social qualifications which children, like adults, pick up from
their surroundings and from the company they keep, and return to
the acquirements which the State must impose on them compulsorily,
providing the teachers and schools and apparatus; testing the success
of the teaching; and giving qualifying certificates to those who have
passed the tests.
It is now evident in all civilized States that there are certain things
which people must know in order to play their part as citizens. There
are technical things that must be learned, and intellectual conceptions
that must be understood. For instance, you are not fit for life in a
modern city unless you know the multiplication table, and agree that
you must not take the law into your own hands. That much technical
and liberal education is indispensable, because a woman who could
not pay fares and count change, and who flew at people with whom she
disagreed and tried to kill them or scratch their eyes out, would
be as incapable of civilized life as a wild cat. In our huge cities
reading is necessary, as people have to proceed by written directions.
In a village or a small country town you can get along by accosting
the police officer, or the railway porter or station-master, or the
post-mistress, and asking them what to do and where to go; but in
London five minutes of that would bring business and locomotion to a
standstill: the police and railway officials, hard put to it as it is
answering the questions of foreigners and visitors from the country,
would be driven mad if they had to tell everybody everything. The
newspapers, the postal and other official guides, the innumerable
notice boards and direction posts, do for the London citizen what the
police constable or the nearest shopkeeper rather enjoys doing for the
villager, as a word with a stranger seems an almost exciting event in a
place where hardly anything else happens except the motion of the earth.
In the days when even the biggest cities were no bigger than our
country towns, and all civilized life was conducted on what we should
call village lines, “clergy”, or the ability to read and write, was
not a necessity: it was a means of extending the mental culture of the
individual for the individual’s own sake, and was quite exceptional.
This notion still sticks in our minds. When we force a girl to learn
to read, and make that an excuse for imprisoning her in a school, we
pretend that the object of it is to cultivate her as an individual,
and open to her the treasures of literature. That is why we do it so
badly and take so long over it. But our right to cultivate a girl in
any particular way against her will is not clear, even if we could
claim that sitting indoors on a hard seat and being forbidden to talk
or fidget or attend to anything but the teacher cultivated a girl
more highly than the free activities from which this process cuts her
off. The only valid reason for forcing her at all costs to acquire
the technique of reading, writing, and arithmetic enough for ordinary
buying and selling is that modern civilized life is impossible without
them. She may be said to have a natural right to be taught them just as
she has a natural right to be nursed and weaned and taught to walk.
So far the matter is beyond argument. It is true that in teaching
her how to write you are also teaching her how to forge cheques and
write spiteful anonymous letters, and that in teaching her to read
you are opening her mind to foul and silly books, and putting into
her hands those greatest wasters of time in the world, the novels
that are not worth reading (say ninetynine out of every hundred).
All such objections go down before the inexorable necessity for the
accomplishments that make modern life possible: you might as well
object to teaching her how to use a knife to cut her food on the ground
that you are also teaching her how to cut the baby’s throat. Every
technical qualification for doing good is a technical qualification
for doing evil as well; but it is not possible to leave our citizens
without any technical qualifications for the art of modern living on
that account.
But this does not justify us in giving our children technical education
and damning the consequences. The consequences would damn us. If we
teach a girl to shoot without teaching her also that thou shalt not
kill, she may send a bullet through us the first time she loses her
temper; and if we proceed to hang her, she may say, as so many women
now say when they are in trouble, “Why did nobody tell me?” This is why
compulsory education cannot be confined to technical education. There
are parts of liberal education which are as necessary in modern social
life as reading and writing; and it is this that makes it so difficult
to draw the line beyond which the State has no right to meddle with
the child’s mind or body without its free consent. Later on we may
make conditions: for instance, we may say that a surveyor must learn
trigonometry, a sea captain navigation, and a surgeon at least as much
dexterity in the handling of saws and knives on bones and tissues as a
butcher acquires. But that is not the same thing as forcing everybody
to be a qualified surveyor, navigator, or surgeon. What we are now
considering is how much the State must force everyone to learn as the
minimum qualification for life in a civilized city. If the Government
forces a woman to acquire the art of composing Latin verses, it is
forcing on her an accomplishment which she can never need to exercise,
and which she can acquire for herself in a few months if she should
nevertheless be cranky enough to want to exercise it. There is the same
objection to forcing her to learn the calculus. Yet somewhere between
forcing her to learn to read and put two and two together accurately,
and forcing her to write sham Horace or learn the calculus, the line
must be drawn. The question is, where to draw it.
On the liberal side of education it is clear that a certain minimum
of law, constitutional history, and economics is indispensable as a
qualification for a voter even if ethics are left entirely to the inner
light. In the case of young children, dogmatic commandments against
murder, theft, and the more obvious possibilities of untutored social
intercourse, are imperative; and it is here that we must expect fierce
controversy. I need not repeat all that we have already been through
as to the impossibility of ignoring this part of education and calling
our neglect Secular Education. If on the ground that the subject is a
controversial one you leave a child to find out for itself whether the
earth is round or flat, it will find out that it is flat, and, after
blundering into many mistakes and superstitions, be so angry with you
for not teaching it that it is round, that when it becomes an adult
voter it will insist on its own children having uncompromising positive
guidance on the point.
What will not work in physics will not work in metaphysics either. No
Government, Socialist or anti-Socialist or neutral, could possibly
govern and administer a highly artificial modern State unless every
citizen had a highly artificial modern conscience: that is, a creed or
body of beliefs which would never occur to a primitive woman, and a
body of disbeliefs, or negative creed, which would strike a primitive
woman as fantastic blasphemies that must bring down on her tribe the
wrath of the unseen powers. Modern governments must therefore inculcate
these beliefs and disbeliefs, or at least see that they are inculcated
somehow; or they cannot carry on. And the reason we are in such a mess
at present is that our governments are trying to carry on with a set
of beliefs and disbeliefs that belong to bygone phases of science and
extinct civilizations. Imagine going to Moses or Mahomet for a code to
regulate the modern money market!
If we all had the same beliefs and disbeliefs, we could go smoothly
on, whether to our destruction or the millennium. But the conflicts
between contradictory beliefs, and the progressive repudiations of
beliefs which must continue as long as we have different patterns of
mankind in different phases of evolution, will necessarily produce
conflicts of opinion as to what should be taught in the public schools
under the head of religious dogma and liberal education. At the present
moment there are many people who hold that it is absolutely necessary
to a child’s salvation from an eternity of grotesque and frightful
torment in a lake of burning brimstone that it should be baptized with
water, as it is born under a divine curse and is a child of wrath and
sin, and that as it grows into a condition of responsibility it must
be impressed with this belief, with the addition that all its sins
were atoned for by the sacrifice of Christ, the Son of God, on the
cross, this atonement being effectual only for those who believe in
it. Failing such belief the efficacy of the baptism is annulled, and
the doom of eternal damnation reincurred. This is the official and
State-endowed religion in our country today; and there is still on the
statute book a law decreeing heavy punishments for anyone who denies
its validity, which no Cabinet dares repeal.
Now it is not probable that a fully developed Socialist State will
either impress these beliefs on children or permit any private person
to do so until the child has reached what is called in another
connection the age of consent. The State has to protect the souls of
the children as well as their bodies; and modern psychology confirms
common experience in teaching that to horrify a young child with
stories of brimstone hells, and make it believe that it is a little
devil who can only escape from that hell by maintaining a sinless
virtue to which no saint or heroine has ever pretended, is to injure it
for life more cruelly than by any act of bodily violence that even the
most brutal taskmaster would dare to prescribe or justify. To put it
quite frankly and flatly, the Socialist State, as far as I can guess,
will teach the child the multiplication table, but will not only not
teach it the Church Catechism, but if the State teachers find that the
child’s parents have been teaching it the Catechism otherwise than as
a curious historical document, the parents will be warned that if they
persist the child will be taken out of their hands and handed over to
the Lord Chancellor, exactly as the children of Shelley were when their
maternal grandfather denounced his son-in-law as an atheist.