AUTHORITY AND DOCILITY
_The principles of Authority on the one hand and Docility on the
other are natural, necessary and fundamental_
The War has made surprises stale but in those remote pre-war
days we were enormously startled by the discovery of wireless
telegraphy. That communications should pass through almost infinite
space without sign or sound or obvious channel and arrive instantly
at their destination took away our breath. We had the grace to
value the discovery for something more than its utility; we were
awed in the presence of a law which had always been there but
was only now perceived. In something the same way we have been
electrified by the discovery in the fields of France of heroism
in the breast of every common soldier. Now, just such discoveries
wait us in the field of education and any miner in this field may
strike a vein of ore which shall enrich the world. The citizens
of an ancient city on the shores of Gennesaret made one of those
startling discoveries and knew how to give it a name; they found
out that Christ ‘spake with authority’ and not as their scribes.
It is not ours to speak with authority; the ‘verily, verily I
say unto you’ is a divine word not for us. Nevertheless deputed
authority is among us and in us. ‘He is an authority’ on such and
such a subject, is a correct expression because by much study
he has made it his own and has a right to speak. This deputed
authority appears to be lodged in everyone, ready for occasion.
Mr. Benjamin Kidd has told us how the London policeman is the very
embodiment of authority, implicitly obeyed in a way surprising to
strangers. Every king and commander, every mother, elder sister,
school prefect, every foreman of works and captain of games,
finds that within himself which secures faithful obedience, not
for the sake of his merits but because authority is proper to his
office. Without this principle, society would cease to cohere.
Practically there is no such thing as anarchy; what is so-called is
a mere transference of authority, even if in the last resort the
anarchist find authority in himself alone. There is an idea abroad
that authority makes for tyranny, and that obedience, voluntary or
involuntary, is of the nature of slavishness; but authority is, on
the contrary, the condition without which liberty does not exist
and, except it be abused, is entirely congenial to those on whom it
is exercised: we are so made that we like to be ordered even if the
ordering be only that of circumstances. Servants take pride in the
orders they receive; that our badge of honour is an ‘Order’ is a
significant use of words. It is still true that ‘Order is heaven’s
first law’ and order is the outcome of authority.
That principle in us which brings us into subjection to authority
is docility, teachableness, and that also is universal. If a man
in the pride of his heart decline other authority, he will submit
himself slavishly to his ‘star’ or his ‘destiny.’ It would seem
that the exercise of docility is as natural and necessary as that
of reason or imagination; and the two principles of authority and
docility act in every life precisely as do those two elemental
principles which enable the earth to maintain its orbit, the one
drawing it towards the sun, the other as constantly driving it into
space; between the two, the earth maintains a more or less middle
course and the days go on.
The same two principles work in every child, the one producing
ordered life, the other making for rebellion, and the _crux_ in
bringing up children is to find the mean which shall keep a child
true to his elliptical orbit. The solution offered to-day is
freedom in our schools; children may be governed but they must
not be aware that they are governed, and, ‘Go as you please,’
must be the apparent rule of their lives, while, ‘Do as you’re
bid,’ is the moving force. The result of an ordered freedom is
obtained, that ordered freedom which rules the lives of 999 in
1000 of the citizens of the world; but the drawback to an indirect
method of securing this result is that when, ‘Do as you please,’
is substituted for, ‘Do as you’re bid,’ there is dissimulation
in the air and children fail to learn that habit of ‘proud
subjection and dignified obedience’ which distinguishes great men
and noble citizens. No doubt it is pleasing that children should
behave naturally, should get up and wander about, should sit
still or frolic as they have a mind to, but they too, must ‘learn
obedience’; and it is no small element in their happiness and ours
that obedience is both delightful and reposeful.
It is the part of the teacher to secure willing obedience, not
so much to himself as to the laws of the school and the claims
of the matter in hand. If a boy have a passage to read, he obeys
the call of that immediate duty, reads the passage with attention
and is happy in doing so. We all know with what a sense of added
importance we say,--“I must be at Mrs. Jones’s by eleven.” “It
is necessary that I should see Brown.” The life that does not
obey such conditions has got out of its orbit and is not of use
to society. It is necessary that we should all follow an ordered
course, and children, even infant children, must begin in the way
in which they will have to go on. Happily they come to us with the
two inherent forces, centripetal and centrifugal, which secure to
them freedom, _i.e._, self-authority, on the one hand, and ‘proud
subjection’ on the other.
But parents and those who stand _in loco parentis_ have a delicate
task. There must be subjection, but it must be proud, worn as a
distinction, an order of merit. Probably the way to secure this
is to avoid standing between children and those laws of life and
conduct by which we are all ultimately ruled. The higher the
authority, the greater distinction in obedience, and children are
quick to discriminate between the mere will and pleasure of the
arbitrary teacher or parent and the chastened authority of him who
is himself under rule. That subservience should take the place
of docility is the last calamity for nation, family or school.
Docility implies equality; there is no great gulf fixed between
teacher and taught; both are pursuing the same ends, engaged on the
same theme, enriched by mutual interests; and probably the quite
delightful pursuit of knowledge affords the only intrinsic liberty
for both teacher and taught. “He is the freeman whom the truth
makes free,” and this freedom the steady pursuit and delightful
acquirement of knowledge afford to us day by day. “The mind is
its own place,” we are told, “and in itself can make a heaven of
hell, a hell of heaven”; and that heaven of the mind, is it not
continual expansion in ordered freedom? And that restless, burning,
inflammatory hell, does it not come of continual chafing against
natural and righteous order?
As for the superficial freedom of sitting or standing, going or
coming, that is a matter which settles itself, as do all the
relations between teacher and taught, once children are allowed a
due share in their own education, not a benefit for us to confer
but rather a provision for them to take. Our chief concern for
the mind or for the body is to supply a well-ordered table with
abundant, appetising, nourishing and very varied food, which
children deal with in their own way and for themselves. This
food must be served _au naturel_, without the predigestion which
deprives it of stimulating and nourishing properties and no sort
of forcible feeding or spoon feeding may be practised. Hungry
minds sit down to such a diet with the charming greediness of
little children; they absorb it, assimilate it and grow thereby in
a manner astonishing to those accustomed to the dull profitless
ruminating so often practised in schools. When the teacher avoids
hortatory methods, his scholars change position when they have a
mind to; but their mind is commonly to sit still during a lesson
time because they are so intent on their work that they have no
desire for small divagations; while, on the other hand, the teacher
makes it his business to see that the body gets its share, and an
abundant share, of gymnastics whether by way of games or drill.
But this is a subject well understood in modern schools and it is
only necessary to say that though mental activity promotes bodily
functions in a surprising way--has not an American physiologist
discovered that people may live to 160 or 1000 years (!) if they
continue to use their minds?--athleticism, on the other hand, if
unduly pursued, by no means promotes mental activity.
In days when the concern of educators seems to be to provide
an easy option for that mental activity, the sole condition of
education, it must be _urged_ that manual dexterity, gardening,
folk-dancing, and the like, while they fulfil their proper
function in training nerve and muscle to ready responsiveness,
_do not sustain mind_. Nor, again, can we educate children upon
the drama, even the Shakespearean drama, nor upon poetry, even
the most musical and emotional. These things children must have;
but they come into the world with many relations waiting to be
established; relations with places far and near, with the wide
universe, with the past of history, with the social economics of
the present, with the earth they live on and all its delightful
progeny of beast and bird, plant and tree; with the sweet human
affinities they entered into at birth; with their own country and
other countries, and, above all, with that most sublime of human
relationships--their relation to God. With such a programme before
his pupils only the uninstructed teacher will put undue emphasis
upon and give undue time to arithmetic and handicrafts, singing or
acting, or any of the hundred specifics which are passed off as
education in its entirety.
The sense of _must_ should be present with children; our mistake
is to act in such a way that they, only, seem to be law-compelled
while their elders do as they please. The parent or teacher who is
pestered for ‘leave’ to do this or that, contrary to the discipline
of the house or school, has only himself to thank; he has posed as
a person _in_ authority, not _under_ authority, and therefore free
to allow the breach of rules whose only _raison d’être_ is that
they minister to the well-being of the children. Two conditions are
necessary to secure all proper docility and obedience and, given
these two, there is seldom a conflict of wills between teacher and
pupils. The conditions are,--the teacher, or other head, may not
be arbitrary but must act so evidently as one under authority[16]
that the children, quick to discern, see that he too must do the
things he ought; and therefore that regulations are not made for
his convenience. (I am assuming that everyone entrusted with the
bringing up of children recognises the supreme Authority to Whom
we are subject; without this recognition I do not see how it is
possible to establish the nice relation which should exist between
teacher and taught.) The other condition is that children should
have a fine sense of the freedom which comes of knowledge which
they are allowed to appropriate as they choose, freely given with
little intervention from the teacher. They do choose and are happy
in their work, so there is little opportunity for coercion or for
deadening, hortatory talk.
But the principle of authority, as well as that of docility, is
inherent in children and it is only as the tact and judgment of the
teacher make opportunity for its free play that they are prepared
for the duties of life as citizens and members of a family.
The movement in favour of prefects, as in Public Schools, is a
recognition of this fact and it is well that children should become
familiar with the idea of representative authority, that is, that
they are governed by chosen members of their own body, a form of
self-government. To give effect to the idea, the prefect should be
elected and children shew extraordinary insight in choosing the
right officers. But that is not enough because only a few are set
in authority; certain small offices should be held in rotation
by every member of a class. The office makes the man as much as
the man makes the office and it is surprising how well rather
incompetent children will perform duties laid on them.
All school work should be conducted in such a manner that children
are aware of the responsibility of learning; it is _their business_
to know that which has been taught. To this end the subject
matter should not be repeated. We ourselves do not attend to the
matters in our daily paper which we know we shall meet with again
in a weekly review, nor to that if there is a monthly review in
prospect; these repeated aids result in our being persons of
wandering attention and feeble memory. To allow repetition of a
lesson is to shift the responsibility for it from the shoulders of
the pupil to those of the teacher who says, in effect,--“I’ll see
that you know it,” so his pupils make no effort of attention. Thus
the same stale stuff is repeated again and again and the children
get bored and restive, ready for pranks by way of a change.
Teachers are apt to slight their high office and hinder the
processes of education because they cherish two or three fallacies.
They regard children as inferior, themselves as superior,
beings;--why else their office? But if they recognized that the
potency of children’s minds is as great or greater than that of
their own, they would not conceive that spoon-feeding was their
mission, or that they must masticate a morsel of knowledge to make
it proper for the feeble digestion of the scholar.
We depreciate children in another way. We are convinced that
they cannot understand a literary vocabulary so we explain and
paraphrase to our own heart’s content but not to theirs. Educated
mothers know that their children can read anything and do not offer
explanations unless they are asked for them; and we have taken it
for granted that this quickness of apprehension comes only to the
children of educated parents.
Another misapprehension which makes for disorder is our way of
regarding attention. We believe that it is to be cultivated,
nursed, coddled, wooed by persuasion, by dramatic presentation,
by pictures and illustrative objects: in fact, the teacher,
the success of whose work depends upon his ‘personality,’ is
an actor of no mean power whose performance would adorn any
stage. Attention, we know, is not a ‘faculty’ nor a definable
power of mind but is the ability to turn on every such power,
to concentrate, as we say. We throw away labour in attempting
to produce or to train this necessary function. There it is in
every child in full measure, a very Niagara of force, ready to be
turned on in obedience to the child’s own authority and capable of
infinite resistance to authority imposed from without. Our part is
to regard attention, too, as an appetite and to feed it with the
best we have in books and in all knowledge. But children do it ‘on
their own’; we may not play Sir Oracle any more; our knowledge is
too circumscribed, our diction too poor, vague, desultory, to cope
with the ability of young creatures who thirst for knowledge. We
must put into their hands the sources which we must needs use for
ourselves, the best books of the best writers.
I will mention only one more disability which hinders us in our
work as teachers; I mean that depreciation of knowledge which is
just now characteristic of Englishmen. A well-known educationalist
lately nailed up the thesis that what children want in the way
of knowledge is just two things,--How to do the work by which
they must earn their living and how to behave as citizens. This
writer does not see that work is done and duties performed in the
ratio of the person who works: the more the man is as a person,
the more valuable will be his work and the more dependable his
conduct: yet we omit from popular education that tincture of humane
letters which makes for efficiency! One hears, for instance, of
an adolescent school with some nine thousand pupils who come in
batches of a few hundreds, each batch to learn one or other of a
score or so of admirable crafts and accomplishments; but not one
hour is spent in a three or four years’ course in this people’s
university on any sort of humane knowledge, in any reading or
thinking which should make the pupils better men and women and
better citizens.
To return to our method of employing attention; it is not a casual
matter, a convenient, almost miraculous way of covering the ground,
of getting children to know certainly and lastingly a surprising
amount; all this is to the good, but it is something more, a root
principle vital to education. In this way of learning the child
comes to his own; he makes use of the authority which is in him in
its highest function as a self-commanding, self-compelling, power.
It is delightful to use any power that is in us if only that of
keeping up in cup and ball a hundred times as (to the delight of
small nephews and nieces), Jane Austen did. But to make yourself
attend, make yourself know, this indeed is to come into a kingdom,
all the more satisfying to children because they are so made that
they revel in knowledge.
Here is some notice of a day or two spent in London by a child of
eleven which reaches me as I write:--
“Mother took her to Westminster Abbey one afternoon and while I
was seeing her to bed she told me all the things she had noticed
there which they had been hearing about in ‘architecture’ this
term. She loves ‘architecture.’ She also expressed her anxiety
to make acquaintance with the British Museum and see the things
there that they had been ‘having’ in their term’s work. So the
next morning we went there and studied the Parthenon Room in
great detail. She was a most interesting companion and taught me
ever so much! We also went to St. Paul’s and Madame Tussaud’s
where she was delighted to see so many people out of ‘history.’
The modern people did not interest her so much except Jack
Cornwell and Nurse Cavell.”
It will be noticed that the child is educating herself; her friends
merely take her to see the things she knows about and she tells
what she has read, a quite different matter from the act of pouring
information down the throats of the unhappy children who are taken
to visit our national treasure houses.
A short time ago when the King and Queen paid a private visit to
the British Museum, in the next hall, also, no doubt, examining
the Parthenon Room, were a group of children from a London County
Council School, as full of information and interest as the child
above mentioned because they had been doing the same work. It was
not a small thing for those children to know that their interests
and delights were common to them and their Sovereigns. Of such
strands are formed the cord which binds society; and one of the
main purposes of a ‘liberal education for all’ is to form links
between high and low, rich and poor, the classes and the masses, in
the strong sympathy of common knowledge. The Public Schools have
arrived at this through the medium of the classics; an occasional
‘tag’ from Horace moves and unites the House of Commons, not only
through the urbane thought of the poet but because it is a key to a
hundred associations. If this has been effected through the medium
of a dead language, what may we not hope for in the way of common
thought, universal springs of action, conveyed through our own rich
and inspiring literature?
Consider what this power of perfect attention and absolute
recollection should be to every employer and chief, what an asset
to the nation! I heard this week of a Colonel who said that his
best subaltern was an old “P.U.S.” (Parents’ Union School) boy; and
this sort of evidence reaches us continually. There are few who do
not know the mischievous and baffling effects of inattention and
forgetfulness on the part of subordinates; and we visualize a world
of surprising achievement when children shall have been trained to
quick apprehension and retention of instructions.
We may not pose before children, nor pride ourselves on dutiful
getting up of knowledge in order to deliver it as emanating from
ourselves. There are those who have a right to lecture, those who
have devoted a life-time to some one subject about which they
have perhaps written their book. Lectures from such persons are,
no doubt, as full of insight, imagination and power as are their
written works; but we cannot have a score of such lecturers in
every school, each to elucidate his own subject, nor, if we could,
would it be good for the children. The personality of the teacher
would influence them to distraction from the delight in knowledge
which is itself a sufficient and compelling force to secure perfect
attention, and seemly discipline.
I am not figuring an ‘Erewhon,’ some Utopia of our dreams; we of
the P.N.E.U. seem to have let loose a force capable of sending
forth young people firm with the resolve--
“I will not cease from mental strife
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.”
Practically all schools are doing wonders. The schoolmaster is
abroad in the land and we are educating ‘our masters’ with immense
zeal and self-devotion. What we have reason to deplore is that
after some eight or twelve years’ brilliant teaching in school,
the cinema show and the football field, polo or golf, satisfy the
needs of our former pupils to whatever class they belong. We are
filled with compassion when we detect the lifeless hand or leg,
the artificial nose or jaw, that many a man has brought home as
a consequence of the War. But many of our young men and women
go about more seriously maimed than these. They are devoid of
intellectual interests, history and poetry are without charm for
them, the scientific work of the day is only slightly interesting,
their ‘job’ and the social amenities they can secure are all that
their life has for them.
The maimed existence in which a man goes on from day to day without
either nourishing or using his intellect, is causing anxiety to
those interested in education, who know that after religion it is
our chief concern, is, indeed, the necessary handmaid of religion.