THE GREATEST MISERY OF THE GREATEST NUMBER
It is now time to consider the effect of this system of compulsory
education upon the masses of the people. In the first two chapters an
attempt was made to sketch some of the anomalies brought about by the
educational methods of our public schools and universities, and by the
pernicious system of public competitive examinations. We will now turn
our attention exclusively to the masses, and endeavour to see what
national instruction does for them.
The common people labour under the delusion that children who have
passed the standards of an elementary school are educated. They have
been fitted, according to the popular belief, for a superior station in
life. The first ambition of parents is, therefore, for their child to
obtain a post suitable to its supposed scholarship.
Of course, the truth is, as we all know, that the product of the public
elementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting in
intelligence. But these facts are only discovered by the victims
themselves after years of bitter experience. Totally unfitted for any
station in life, many of them leave school full of self-confidence in
the belief that their superior education will secure them a good
opening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks,
shop-assistants, and such-like. The result is, of course, an over-supply
of candidates for employment of this kind. In consequence, the girls
have to fall back upon domestic service; while the boys swell the ranks
of unskilled labourers and unemployed loafers, or, worse still, betake
themselves to a life of dishonesty.
Nowhere are the evil effects of this education system more strikingly
illustrated than in the country districts. The children of agricultural
labourers and small farmers are given instruction which will be of no
earthly use to them in the occupation for which they are naturally
fitted. Instead of being prepared for country pursuits, they are given
an inferior type of all-round education which is equally useless
everywhere. When they leave school they can read, write, add, subtract,
divide, and multiply--after a fashion; they can mispronounce a few
French words, without being able to construct a single grammatical
sentence or understand a syllable that is said to them; they know enough
shorthand to write down simple words at one half the speed of ordinary
handwriting; and they have acquired by rote a few dry facts from history
and geography, all of which will be totally obliterated from their
memories within a space of twelve months.
Shorthand is not a very promising preparation for the plough; and French
and mathematics are equally valueless accomplishments for the carting of
manure. Dairymaids need neither history nor geography; they can even do
without grammar. Consequently these unhappy school-children have been
rendered useless for all the practical purposes of the life they ought
to lead. The result is inevitable. There is a constant, never-ceasing
exodus from the country into the towns. The rural school victims are
incited to look for employment in an altogether different sphere from
that for which nature originally intended them.
Philosophers and politicians crack their heads over this mysterious
problem of town immigration; but it is really a very simple affair. We
are pretending to educate the rural population by conferring upon them
the blessings of French and shorthand. The natural consequence of our
excellent foresight in spreading this type of culture throughout the
land is that there is a scarcely remarkable dearth of rural labour. Farm
hands are not quite as plentiful as they used to be, and there is some
difficulty in getting damsels to churn butter. But, on the other hand,
we are driving this mob of cultured yokels into the towns to crowd out
local labour, to starve, and to fill the gaols and workhouses.
London has at the present moment mainly to thank this process of
'education' for the overcrowding problem which is becoming every day
more dangerous and pressing. It is useless to talk of pulling down slums
and building up model blocks, or of inventing fresh means of
communication to convey artisans to suburban dwellings, whilst the real
cause of the evil is left untouched. Young men and women will continue
to pour in from the country districts as long as a smattering of
geography and arithmetic flatters them into the delusion that they are
educated, and that knowledge of the useless kind that has been drummed
into them is the high-road to fortune.
It is, however, of little use to urge overcrowding as a ground for
reforming educational methods. Few people are stirred by what to them is
a purely abstract question. They see nothing to indicate its existence,
and they know nothing of its evils. They seldom walk down the dreary
avenues of bricks and mortar which contain the houses of the working
classes; and if they do, they scarcely realize the fact that inside the
humble, dingy little dwellings whole families are crowded into single
rooms, share each other's beds, and are even thankful to find sleeping
accommodation upon the floor.
But everybody appreciates and understands the servant question. That
touches the comfort of the individual too nearly to be ignored. The
rapid extinction of good servants, the insolence and inefficiency of the
average domestic--these are facts of everyday life that will come home
to the suffering upper and middle classes. It is not because they are
educated that domestic servants have deteriorated, however, but on
account of the profound state of ignorance in which their elementary
schooling has left them, leading them to the misapprehension that, from
the standpoint of culture, they are as good as anybody and certainly
above their menial position.
Servants have as little need of French verbs and hieroglyphics as the
ploughboy or the dairymaid. There are many useful things that might be
learnt by a person who wished to be trained for domestic service; but
it is rare enough to find a cook that, amongst other items of a liberal
education, has been given cooking lessons. In this respect education is
like food: what is one man's meat is another man's poison. We do not
wish to teach book-keeping to a washerwoman, or fancy ironing to a
private secretary. Then, why stuff artisans, domestic servants, and farm
labourers with common denominators and the rules of syntax? It may be
highly satisfactory to schoolteachers to succeed in making their class
read aloud passages from Shakespeare and Milton without dropping more
than fifty per cent. of the aspirates, or mispronouncing more than half
a dozen multi-syllabic words. But, unfortunately, there is no demand for
parlourmaids who can quote 'Hamlet' amid the intervals of waiting at
table, or for page-boys capable of spouting 'Paradise Lost' for the
intellectual improvement of the servants' hall.
Perhaps these instances show as well as anything the grotesque absurdity
of collecting a number of children together, and attempting to teach
them things that they are not fitted to do, whilst no effort is made to
cultivate in each individual the faculties that are really capable of
development. It is not in the least surprising that occupations
involving manual labour are for the most part filled with dissatisfied
and incompetent grumblers, who have been obligingly provided by a State
system of education.
But if any further illustration be needed of the superficiality and
harmfulness of the education forced upon the masses, we have it
glaringly enough in the cheap literature of to-day. This stupendous
mass of bosh could not have been produced unless there were a demand for
it. Some people are never tired of abusing the millionaires who have
made their fortunes by providing the illiterate nonsense that forms the
intellectual food of the vast majority of the public. It is wholly
unjustifiable and illogical to blame them. They are not founders of new
schools of thought in the field of literature; they are men of business,
and do not pretend to be anything worse. As such, it is their vocation
to find out what the public want, and to supply it to them. They have no
interest in making the million take their literature after it has been
passed through a mincer. They chop up news and hash grammar at half
price because the patrons of cheap papers and periodicals like their
literature served up in that fashion.
It is not the millionaire trader who is to blame for this state of
affairs--he merely profits by its existence. The real culprit is the
education system, which is the universal provider of the peculiar type
of culture that interests itself in the number of beef sandwiches that
would be required to encircle the earth, or the rate at which the
population of the world would have to increase within a given time to
enable its inhabitants, by mounting upon each other's heads, to reach
the moon.
The enormous demand for this class of literature is the most pregnant
evidence of the miserable effects of misapplied education and defective
instruction that could well be brought forward. But it is by no means
confined to the uncultured masses who have been driven through the
standards of an elementary school. Thousands who have been put through
the paces of what is called 'higher education' may be seen in
railway-carriages, at health resorts, or in the public libraries, deeply
immersed in cheap-jack reading-matter that no self-respecting person of
moderate intelligence would care even to be capable of specifying.
This painful sight, which cannot have escaped the notice of the least
observant, must surely lead the reflective man or woman to doubt the
value of educational methods that have led to no better result. It is
monstrous to think of years spent in grinding out syntax rules,
mathematics, Latin, French, geography, science, history, composition,
and a dozen other branches of knowledge, in order to develop a taste for
sensational rags, middle-class magazines, and inferior fiction.
If the process were coupled with no worse consequences than this, nobody
of the least pretension to culture would wish to see it continued
another day. But we have seen that the mischief goes far beyond mere
superficiality and bad taste. It carries its pernicious influence into
every social problem by which modern statesmen are perplexed and
harassed. From the housing question to the dearth of servants we feel
its baneful effects. And as if it were not enough to have unfitted the
masses of the people for the occupations best suited to the great bulk
of them, to have instilled into the minds of working-men's children, by
means of illiterate Shakespeare recitations and burlesque efforts to
grasp geography, a contempt for the skilled labour of the artisan--this
education process has brought about a general deterioration in the
manners of the lower classes that has long been a subject of general
complaint.
Nobody wishes to see the common people in a constant attitude of
servility towards the classes above them. To thinking people nothing is
more painful than to observe such signs of a want of proper self-respect
and independence on the part of freeborn men and women of whatever
standing in the social scale. But it is a significant fact that
educating the masses, in the sense in which that term seems to be
generally employed, has had the effect of eradicating from them all
respect for education. The educated man of real attainments is not
looked up to in the smallest degree by the average individual of the
lower orders. It would be useless to quote, in support of a statement
made in the presence of unexceptional members of the working classes,
the opinion of any recognised authority. For the matter of that, there
are many persons of a higher rank who are supposed to have enjoyed the
benefits of a more liberal type of education than that afforded by the
elementary school, who are equally unimpressed by the value of expert
knowledge.
Whether it is that State-educated youths think that their
accomplishments have made them the equals of everybody else, or whether
the inanity of the system to which they have been subjected has given
them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine.
Probably both misconceptions are evenly distributed amongst the victims
of the process. But the fact that this should be the case at all speaks
eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding,
on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and
subject-compulsion with the proper development of the human faculties.