SQUARE PEGS IN ROUND HOLES
Perhaps the worst evil from which the world suffers in an educational
sense is the misplaced individual. Nothing is more tragic, and yet
nothing is more common, than to see men occupying positions for which
they are unfitted by nature and therefore by inclination; whilst it is
obvious that, had the circumstances of their early training been
different, they might have followed with success and pleasure a natural
bent of mind tending in a wholly opposite direction.
This miscarriage of vocation is one of the greatest causes of individual
misery in this world that exists; but its pernicious effects go far
beyond mere personal unhappiness: they exercise the most baneful
influence upon society at large, upon the progress of nations, and upon
the development of the human race. One of the advantages of the division
of labour which is most emphasized by political economists is that it
offers a fair field for personal adaptation. People select the
particular employment for which they are most fitted, and in this way
everybody in the community is engaged in doing the best and most useful
work of which he is capable.
It is a fine theory. Perhaps in olden times, before the introduction of
education systems, it may have worked well in regard to most trades and
industries. A man had then at least some opportunity of developing a
natural bent. He was not taken by the State almost from infancy, crammed
with useless knowledge, and totally unfitted for any employment within
his reach. The object was not to educate him above his station and then
make a clerk of him, or drive him into the lower branches of the Civil
Service. A bright youth was apprenticed by his father to some trade for
which he may have shown some predisposition.
Of course, mistakes were often made through the stupidity of parents or
from some other cause. There are many such examples to be met with in
the biographies of men who attained eminence in wholly different
callings from those into which they were forced in their youth.
Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and who first conceived the
generally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought up
by his father to be a musician. In spite of his predilection for
astronomy, he continued to earn his bread by playing the oboe, until he
was promoted from being a performer in the Pump Room at Bath to the
position of Astronomer Royal.
Faraday was apprenticed by his father to a bookbinder, and he remained
in this distasteful employment until he was twenty-two. It was quite by
accident that somebody more intelligent than Michael Faraday's pastors
and masters discovered that the youth had a great natural love of
studying science, and sent him to hear a course of lectures delivered
by Sir Humphry Davy. This led happily to the young bookbinder making the
acquaintance of the lecturer, and eventually obtaining a position as
assistant in the Royal Institution.
Linnaeus, the great naturalist, had a very narrow escape from missing his
proper vocation. He was sent to a grammar-school, but exhibited no taste
for books; therefore his father decided to apprentice him to a
shoemaker. Fortunately, however, a discriminating physician had observed
the boy's love of natural history, and took him into his own house to
teach him botany and physiology.
Instances of the kind might be multiplied. Milton himself began life as
a schoolmaster, and the father of Turner, one of the greatest landscape
painters who ever lived, did his best to turn his brilliant son into a
barber. The point, however, is obvious enough without the need of
further illustration. A few examples have been adduced of great geniuses
who have contrived, by the accident of circumstances or through sheer
force of character, to escape from an environment which was forced upon
them against their natural inclination. But it is not everybody who is
gifted with such commanding talent and so much obstinacy and
perseverance as to be able to overcome the artificial obstacles placed
in the way of his individual tendencies; and now we have, what happily
did not exist in the day of Herschel, Faraday, Turner, Linnaeus and
others--a compulsory education system to strangle originality and
natural development at the earliest possible stage.
Most people would probably find it far easier to quote instances offhand
of friends who had missed their proper vocation in life than of those
who were placed exactly in the position best suited to their taste and
capacity. The failures in life are so obviously in excess of those who
may be said to have succeeded that specific illustrations of the fact
are hardly necessary.
One has only to exert ordinary powers of observation to perceive that
the world is not at all well ordered in this respect. It has already
been pointed out that the public service and the professions are almost
entirely filled with what must be called mediocrity; and one of the most
potent causes of this unhappy state of affairs is the exquisite
infallibility with which a blind system is constantly forcing square
pegs into round holes.
Every profession and calling teems with examples. There are men,
intended by nature to be artists and musicians, leading a wretched and
unnatural existence in many a merchant's office because their best
faculties were undeveloped during the early years of schooling.
Mathematicians, philosophers, even poets, are tied to trade or to some
equally unsuitable occupation. Scores of so-called literary men ought to
be calculating percentages or selling dry goods; and no doubt there are
shop-assistants and stock-jobbers who might, if led into the path of
culture, have become creditable authors and journalists.
This is neither joke nor satire. It is sober earnest, as many observant
readers will readily testify. The loss is not only to the individual, it
is to society at large, and to the whole world. No one will deny the
fact; but to how many will it occur that such anomalies cannot be the
outcome of natural development and progress, but that they must be
directly or indirectly attributable to some artificial cause?
It is the great difficulty against which all human advancement has to
contend, that people can rarely be brought to question principles which
have become a part and parcel of their everyday existence. There are
plenty of individuals who are ready to tinker with existing
institutions, and who erroneously dignify that process by the name of
reform. But nothing is more despairing than the effort to convince
conventionally brought up people that some cherished convention, with
which the world has put up for an indefinite period, is founded upon
fallacy, and ought to be cast out root and branch.
Even in the United States, where far greater efforts are made to
encourage individuality in the schools and colleges than is the case
with the countries of the Old World, people are not much better
distributed amongst the various professions and occupations than they
are here. I have made inquiries amongst Americans of wide experience and
observation, and have learnt that nothing is more common in the States
than to find individuals brought up to exercise functions for which they
are wholly unfitted by natural capacity and inclination.
An instance was given me, by an American friend, of a boy who spent all
his leisure in constructing clever little mechanical contrivances, in
running miniature locomotives, and in setting up electric appliances of
one kind and another. One day the youth's father came to him and said:
'I don't know what to make of B----. Could you find him a place in a
wholesale merchant's office?' When it was pointed out to the parent that
his son showed unmistakable mechanical genius, he obstinately insisted
on getting the boy a situation for which he was quite unsuited, and
which was highly distasteful to him.
I quote this instance to show that the parent is often as bad an
educator as the school itself. In this case the school would have taken
as little notice of the boy's natural bent as his father. It would, in
all probability, never have discovered it at all. But it has become so
much an accepted axiom that children are to be manufactured into
anything that happens to suit the taste or convenience of their
guardians, that it probably never occurred to the parent in question
that he was committing a cruel and foolish act in forcing his son out of
the path into which the boy's natural instinct was guiding him. The
youth who might have pursued a happy and prosperous career as a
mechanical engineer is now a disappointed man, struggling on, with
little hope of success, in an occupation which does not interest him,
and for which he does not possess the slightest adaptability.
Every nation is equally at fault in this respect. In Germany, for
instance, the child is quite as much a pawn at the disposal of its
parent and the school system as it is elsewhere. I spent a number of
years in the country, and enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with many
German families. Nothing has left upon my mind a deeper impression than
the tragedy I witnessed of a boy being gradually and systematically
weaned from the pursuit to which he was passionately devoted, and forced
into a career utterly unsympathetic and distasteful to his peculiar
temperament.
The boy was simply, from head to foot, a musician. He spent every moment
he could steal from his school studies in playing through the difficult
scores of Wagner's music dramas. His taste, his musical memory, the
enormous natural ability which enabled him to surmount all technical
difficulties with ease, were apparent to everybody who knew him. Yet his
parents determined from the first that he should study law, and enter
the legal profession.
I have never seen anything more painful than the deliberate
discouragement, during a period extending over several years, of the
boy's natural bent, and the application of absolute compulsion to force
him, against every natural instinct, to prepare himself for a profession
repugnant to his inclinations, and for which he was not in the smallest
degree adapted.
Out of this promising musical material the _Stadt Gymnasium_
manufactured the usual piece of intellectual mediocrity. He was stuffed
with the regulation measure of facts, scraped through the customary
examination, and was despatched, much against his will, to the
universities of Jena and Zuerich. When I last saw him he was a plodding
lawyer of the conventional type, doing his duties in a listless manner,
with very indifferent success, and quite broken down in spirit. The
_Gymnasium_, the university, and the parental obstinacy had done their
work very effectually. They had succeeded in reducing him to the level
of a machine, and in all probability Germany lost an excellent musician
who might have given pleasure to thousands of others, besides enjoying
an honourable career of useful and congenial work.
We have seen that between the stupidity of the parent and the
inflexibility of the school system children have little chance of
developing their natural propensities. The results surround us
everywhere, and there is no getting away from them. All that the school
professes to do is to stuff the pupil with a certain quantity of facts
according to a fixed curriculum. It does not pretend to exercise any
other function. There is no effort to differentiate between individuals,
or to discover the natural bent of each particular child. Instruction
consists in cramming and prescribing by a more or less pernicious
method--according to the lights of the particular school authorities in
some cases, and in others according to a hard and fast code enforced by
the State--a certain quantity of facts into all pupils without
distinction.
Parents, on the other hand, think they have fulfilled their duty simply
by sending their children to school. The only thing considered necessary
to equip a child for the battle of life is to get him an education, and
nobody bothers his head about the principles or the effects of the
process. The parent leaves everything to the school, regardless of the
fact that schools do not pretend to concern themselves about the
natural tendencies of their pupils. He is satisfied if his son is
receiving the same education as his neighbour's, and is quite contented
to leave the question of his future career to be an after-consideration.
The result upon the world in general of this double neglect on the part
of parents and school systems is disastrous in the extreme. In the first
place, it makes the life of the misplaced individual a burden to himself
and to those by whom he is surrounded. Natural tendencies cannot be
wholly suppressed, even by education systems; and the victim's existence
is not rendered more bearable by the reflection that, but for
circumstances which he is rarely able to analyze, he might have
succeeded in some other and more agreeable occupation had he only
received the necessary encouragement in his youth.
Secondly, there is the fact that the progress of civilization is
enormously retarded by its being rarely in the hands of the most fit.
The most fit are not, and cannot be, produced under prevailing
conditions. The whole machinery of education is directed towards the
production of a dead level of mediocrity. In many cases--such as, for
example, in Prussia--this is done by design, and not by accident.
Instruction is imparted in such a manner that no regard is paid to
individual propensities. All are subjected, more or less, to the same
process. They are fitted for nothing in particular, and no trouble is
taken to ascertain the direction in which an individual mind should be
developed. The consequence is that, from one end of the civilized world
to the other, resounds the cry, 'What shall we do with our boys?'
And, lastly, it scarcely requires pointing out that the enormous sums of
money spent by Governments, by municipalities, and by private persons
upon education, in order to produce this lamentable state of affairs, is
so much waste and extravagance. Not only does it bring in no practical
return, but it works out in a precisely opposite direction. Schools and
colleges that only serve to produce anomalous and unnatural social
conditions, that stifle genius and talent, and that cause widespread
misery among the unsuitably educated, must be reckoned as a national
loss.
People deplore the heavy sums spent on armaments and on the maintenance
of enormous fleets and armies; but it may be doubted if this expenditure
is as costly in the end as that which goes to support a systematic
manufacture of the unfit, and to assist in the distribution of
individuals to stations in the social scheme for which they are wholly
unsuited.