THE OUTPUT OF PRIGS
Having considered the evils produced by sham education, such as is
compulsorily given to the masses of the people, we can proceed to
examine into the average results effected by more genuine and efficient
systems of cramming and instruction. It is not in the least degree
necessary, for this purpose, to go into minute comparisons of the
various types of secondary schools and colleges that have been
established in this country. In the actual method of teaching there is
little to choose between them. All have practically a common aim,
namely, the preparation of boys and young men for examinations.
Of course, all boys who go to school are not destined for professions
that necessitate the passing of an examination, competitive or
otherwise. But that does not disturb the school authorities a jot, or
involve the slightest relaxation of the school system. The boys are
crammed just the same. Whoever wishes to pass through the mill must go
in like a pig at one end and come out as a sausage at the other. There
is no middle course except the private tutor; and he, owing to the
defects of his own early training and to the terrific Conservatism
peculiar to his profession, probably knows no better process than the
familiar routine of cram and idea-suppression.
The whole of school life is a scramble for marks. The school managers
and masters are interested in getting the boys stuffed with facts,
dates, figures, and inflections, because the prestige of the school--and
consequently its commercial success--is mainly dependent upon the
creditable placing of pupils in public examinations. Therefore the boys
are encouraged, or rather compelled, to occupy themselves with what will
best conduce to secure this object, regardless of their own wishes or
obvious inclinations.
A boy might enter a grammar-school, or one of the great public schools,
teeming to his finger-tips with an inborn thirst for scientific
knowledge; he might spend all his spare moments making crude experiments
with an air-pump, or gazing at planets through a cheap astronomical
telescope; he might fail dismally to grasp the rudiments of the Latin
grammar, and be incapable of conjugating an irregular verb; but his nose
would be kept down to the grindstone of the school curriculum all the
same, and not the smallest attention paid to his obvious bent of mind.
He had been placed there, the authorities would say, to receive a
general education, and a general education he should have. If during the
process all the scientific enthusiasm is ground out of him, that is not
the business of the schoolmaster. The boy, for the ordinary purposes of
instruction, is an empty bottle into which a certain prescription is to
be poured. The prescription has been made up beforehand, and cannot be
altered. The school undertakes to administer a draught, but it refuses
to bother about diagnosing each case. There is only one method of
treatment, and every patient who enters the establishment has to be
submitted to it.
There have been, of course, enlightened pedagogues. The names of Arnold
and Thring will always stand out prominently in the history of English
school life, and it will be a bad day indeed for the youth in our public
schools when their traditional influence shall have been entirely
obliterated. They grafted upon the established methods of teaching a
liberal and broad-minded effort to bring out what was best in each pupil
by other influences. 'It is no wisdom,' Dr. Arnold declared, 'to make
boys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty to
cultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory and
imagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, and
to excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait with
confidence God's blessing on the result.'
Edward Thring wrote the following remarks in his diary:
'Education is not bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power of
observation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hidden
truths and new creative genius. If the cursed rule-mongering and
technical terms could be banished to limbo, something might be done.
Three parts of teaching and learning in England is the hiding common
sense and disguising ignorance under phrases.'
No stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by the
constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a
universal system of education. It is not often that people strive to set
their house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to them
for the courageous endeavour. The mistake they made was in tinkering
with a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the bold
step of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and sound
principles.
The energies of schoolmasters of the type of Thring and Arnold are, in
fact, concentrated mainly upon a constant struggle to prevent the
ordinary process of school instruction from producing prigs. Stupid boys
are generally rendered more stupid by teaching, for reasons that will be
analyzed later on. But boys whose brains are amenable to academic
training are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarly
unfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish.
It is the purely academic training that produces the prig. Football,
cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and
he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. The
important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all,
but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is
the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous
influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not
acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists
of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or
artifice. The same law of nature applies to the working of the brain.
Stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind,
and the result must necessarily be as artificial as the process. The
mind becomes incapable of thinking individually and naturally; it
becomes pedantic and circumscribed, powerless to give simple expression
to simple thoughts; and the prig is made.
It requires a great deal of kicking and hustling on the part of the
victim's schoolfellows to arrest this process, and the cure is generally
only effected outwardly. Priggishness cannot be eradicated from the
system in a moment, even by the most heroic measures. Its excision
involves a slow mental process, the converse of that which served to
call it into existence. The prig has to divest himself of the false
mental outlook imposed upon him by his education, and to begin all over
again. It is a hard lesson which can only be learnt in the school of
life, generally after humiliating experience and bitter suffering. Many
never succeed in learning it. There must be some material to work upon,
and probably their individuality, weak at the commencement and therefore
doubly in need of tender treatment and fostering care, has been
hopelessly crushed out of existence by the conventional training of
school and university.
Under present conditions prigs can and do grow up everywhere. In some
educational institutions--notably in great public schools like Eton and
Harrow--they are more discouraged than in others; but the cramming
system has reached such proportions that all schools and colleges are
affected in a greater or less degree. They infect our public life, as
we have seen; largely recruit our public service; and are in evidence in
the pulpit, at the schoolmaster's desk, on public platforms, in the
lecture-room of the university, and wherever the services of educated
men are employed.
The ideals of men like Arnold and Thring cannot be carried out as long
as the examination system puts a premium upon cramming. 'I call that the
best theme,' said Dr. Arnold, alluding to original composition, 'which
shows that the boy has read and thought for himself; that the next best,
which shows that he has read several books, and digested what he has
read; and that the worst, which shows that he has followed but one book,
and followed that without reflection.'
There is no time nowadays for a boy to read and think for himself.
Besides the examinations inside his own school for which he has to be
prepared, there are scholarships, university examinations, competitive
examinations for the civil service, and a host of other possibilities of
the kind, all of which necessitate the acquisition of an enormous number
of useless facts in every branch of learning.
Too much attention is concentrated on the admirable physical product of
the athletic side of our public school and university life. This
advantage of the English system of education has been dwelt upon to such
an extent, that people are apt to overlook the fact that, side by side
with these fine specimens of healthy and for the most part
unintellectual manhood, we are manufacturing a purely academic article
of the least inspired and most retrogressive description.
If somebody, wishing to make you acquainted with a friend, says to you:
'I want you to meet So-and-so; he was at Eton and Trinity Hall, and came
out tenth in the mathematical tripos,' you know exactly the kind of man
to whom you are going to be introduced. He will have a very proper
contempt for made-up ties, and will refuse to fasten the bottom button
of his waistcoat. You know beforehand the precise point of view that he
will take upon every conceivable topic, and the channels in which his
conversation is certain to flow.
His entire mental horizon will be bounded by academic conventionalities
in such a cast-iron fashion that it would, you are well aware, waste
your time to attempt to extend its boundaries by the fraction of an
inch. If you say anything yourself out of the beaten track, you know
that you will be looked down upon as a fool or a faddist. The Eton stamp
will be upon his dress and manners; the Cambridge brand seared into
every crevice of his mind. There will be an individuality about him, but
it will be an individuality shared in common with hundreds of young men
of the same educational antecedents.
That is the fault of the system. It takes away, or fails to evoke, the
distinguishing traits of each individual, and substitutes a kind of
manufactured personality according to the particular institution, or
type of institution, in which the educational metamorphosis has taken
place. 'A mob of boys,' said the man who raised Uppingham from complete
obscurity to the front rank of public schools, 'cannot be educated.' It
is, nevertheless, the process that is going on all over the civilized
world. Reform does not lie alone in making instruction itself more
effective. As long as the principle is retained of forcing certain facts
and certain subjects into the mind of every boy, the country will
continue to breed conventionality, to produce a uniform type of useless
mediocrity, and to make prigs.
This is, unfortunately, exactly what the average educationist aims at.
There is no disguise about the belief that conventional ideas, and the
manufacture of what is called average ability, are the sheet-anchor of
the State. And this type of fossilized Conservatism seems to grow in
proportion to the number of schools and colleges in the country.
Lower-middle-class young men, of no intellectual predisposition at all,
are being turned out on all sides crammed with the narrowest type of
educational tradition. Prigs are produced wholesale; the worst and most
odious branch of the family being the semi-illiterate prig--the man who
gets drummed out of decent regimental messes, the man who wants to go on
the stage and declaim Shakespeare through his nose, the man who
vulgarizes the public service by dropping his h's in the great
Government departments, and others too numerous to be specified.
Everything is vulgar that pretends to be what it is not. Priggishness is
an artificial mental condition that is far more common than people
generally suspect. We are most of us prigs, if we only knew it. The man
who is unable to get rid of conventions and to think for himself is a
prig. England is peopled with them. We meet them at every turn; we see
them driving the country to the dogs by sheer inability to grasp its
needs;--and we send our sons to the schools and universities to be
manufactured after the same pattern.