BOY DEGENERATION
If some boys thrive, according to ordinary school standards, on the
cramming system, what becomes of those to whose nature the process is
entirely antagonistic?
The question is best answered by a glance at the schools themselves.
Take one of the great public schools, and it will be found that much the
same conditions are prevalent in every class or form. There is a small
percentage of boys at the top of each class who are considered the most
intelligent, and by whom most of the questions asked by the master are
answered. The remaining majority are divided into two sections, one of
which consists of what are termed boys of average ability, whilst the
other contains the lazy element, the refractory boys, and the dullards.
In the last chapter we chiefly discussed those individuals who may be
taken as representing the average of the best results achieved by higher
schools and universities. These form, however, only a fraction of the
scholars who pass through such institutions. It still remains for us to
discover the role which is played by the other four-fifths in
school-life. According to scholastic methods of classification, the
bulk of this residue are boys of medium intelligence who plod on without
specially distinguishing themselves, and contrive, by dint of industry
and application, to blunder through the ordinary course of study without
coming to grief.
It would be difficult to conjure up a more melancholy picture than that
presented by these plodders, whose work is rendered trebly hard by being
performed against the grain. They suffer more under the system than the
dull, the lazy, and the fractious, who escape its worst evils, either
because some active power of resistance comes to their rescue, or
because the mind itself is so formed as to be incapable of receiving
instruction imparted on the cramming principle.
But the average mediocrity amongst schoolboys are often inferior in
ability both to those who rank above and below them in school
attainment. They neither profit by the teaching process, nor do they
possess those qualities that would enable them to resist its
consequences. Thus they fall between two stools, being carried out of
their natural sphere, and at the same time failing to attain such a
measure of artificial success as would afford them compensation for the
injury.
Success in life is not an easy thing to generalize about. It is,
however, important to note as far as possible the results brought about
by school education. The boy who is trained to pass examinations has a
respectable chance of getting into some branch of the public service;
and, as we have seen, it is from amongst his ranks that the permanent
officials of the various departments of Government are recruited. A
great number of those who distinguish themselves academically also pass
into the teaching profession; though a considerable percentage of
graduates, for reasons that will be discussed in due course, drift into
the ranks of the unemployed.
The average schoolboy, who does his work mechanically and without
enthusiasm, probably furnishes the greatest number of examples of the
misplaced individual. His application to his studies is not natural; it
is enforced by what is called school discipline. That is to say, the
authorities devise every conceivable form of punishment to make a
constant grind at obligatory subjects less disagreeable than the
consequences of idleness. These are the simple arts by means of which
unwilling boys are driven, like cattle, along the highway of what is
termed, by an inaccurate application of the English language, knowledge.
Anybody who has been coerced, and _poena_ed, and flogged through the
curriculum of a public school will acknowledge that the performance is
not an exhilarating one for the victim. It is preposterous to dignify
this nigger-driving by the term 'education.' One might as well talk of
the Chinese eagerly embracing Christianity, when, as a matter of fact,
the missionaries have been forced upon them, like their foreign trade,
at the point of the bayonet.
The wonder is that anybody survives the process and retains his sanity.
That many nervous temperaments and highly-gifted minds do not survive it
is a point of so much importance that it will be dealt with later on in
a separate chapter. What needs emphasizing here is that to make boys do
certain things under compulsion is not developing their faculties, but
is absolutely preventing their development; and secondly, that this
infamous but universal proceeding is responsible for a positive
degeneration amongst those whom it is supposed to educate and improve.
Dr. Arnold held that a low standard of schoolboy morality was
inevitable. 'With regard to reforms at Rugby,' he wrote to a friend,
'give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it
a place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, if
possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope
to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they
are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development
upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many
respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in
what I consider the boyhood of the human race.'
In a letter to another friend he spoke still more strongly on the
subject. 'Since I began this letter,' he wrote, 'I have had some of the
troubles of school-keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of
boy nature which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility
of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a
system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then,
when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very
account, and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure
cowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they
would rather have shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys
who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and
the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's
"Shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and take
part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the
Scriptures say about the strait gate and the wide one--a view of human
nature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies
and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize.
But here, in the nakedness of boy nature, one is quite able to
understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in
a whole city.'
This sweeping statement has been quoted because it comes with double
force from an undisputed authority such as the late Dr. Arnold.
Everybody who has had experience of school-life knows that the average
boy spends a great deal of his time in cheating the masters, lying to
the authorities, and playing every sort and kind of mischievous or
disreputable prank that comes into his head. But it is better to have
this fact testified to by a man who has been in a position to observe
large numbers of boys over a very extended period. The accusation of
exaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained.
Where, however, I venture to differ with Dr. Arnold is in the assumption
that this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone.
Undoubtedly this is the case in part. But there is a far more potent
cause than natural instinct. It is to be found in the system of
education which not only fails to develop and encourage the boy's
individual tastes or faculties, but actually forces upon him occupations
that are, for the most part, absolutely foreign to his nature. This is
the real key to the vagaries of boyhood, and without such an explanation
one must hold, with the great headmaster of Rugby, that boy nature is
inherently bad.
Boys, like other rational beings, must have their interests and
amusements. If the legitimate and normal ones are prohibited, solace
will be sought in those which are illegitimate and abnormal. By failing
to encourage the faculties that nature intended a particular boy to
develop, a vacuum is created. This vacuum must be filled up, and it is
no earthly use trying to fill it up, against the grain, with
mathematical problems or the irregular inflections of Latin verbs. The
average boy is as little capable of taking an absorbing interest in
these exhilarating features of the school curriculum as would be the
average Hottentot.
Every healthy boy stores up energy. It should be the first object of the
schoolmaster--if such a being ought to have any existence at all--to see
that this energy is not allowed to waste. Natural forces of this kind do
not, it must be recollected, evaporate. There they are, and the laws of
nature have decreed that they shall be constantly expended and renewed.
If this or that boy's store of energy is not turned into one channel, it
will expend itself through another. If the schoolmaster were to take
the trouble to find out the particular bent of a pupil, and were then to
proceed to foster and educate it, all the energy of the boy would be
used in this useful and congenial work. But this can never be the case
until the present methods of instruction have been revolutionized.
The discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is an
altogether false and pernicious discipline. The only liberty which is
vouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. No doubt it is an
excellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in which
they make use of their leisure hours. There would be a great uproar
amongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games they
wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste.
It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital
bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets;
or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising
oarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him into
the playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob.'
But the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also to
mental discipline. In the class-room there is practically no latitude
given to the boy at all. In many schools, it is true, there is the
choice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents',
not the boy's. The latter is always treated, in reference to his
school-work, as a machine. There is simply the offer of a classical
strait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and the boy is put into
one or the other according to the fancy of a third person.
Strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. It has
been discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is the
worst possible treatment for the brain. Whilst our lunatics, however,
are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expert
is busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboy
brain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case of
madmen.
The school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is a
mental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effect
upon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint acts
perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm
must be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold and
Thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have grasped
this simple fact.
Schoolmasters are like mothers. They imagine that because a boy happens
to have survived their system of teaching the latter must necessarily be
the one perfect method--just as the fond mother, whose infant has been
enabled by means of a phenomenal digestion to outlive a particular food,
believes that it is the only food upon which babies can possibly be
brought up.
When we come to survey impartially the effects of this system of
education upon boys in general, it must surely be brought home to us
that something is radically wrong somewhere. If a few manage to survive
the treatment and remain the ten righteous individuals, what is to be
said of the degeneration of the majority? It is surely absurd, with the
anomalies and defects of the whole method of educating youth staring one
in the face, to ascribe it to mere boy nature.
The truth is that in boyhood the natural tendencies incline to push
their way boisterously to the front. They are constantly trying to find
an egress. But the parent and the pedagogue, in their blindness, can
only see in this law of nature a wicked and perverse propensity that
must be restrained at all hazards by a speedy application of the
educational strait-waistcoat.