So far we have concerned ourselves with the introductory and foundation
matter of the New Republican project, with the measures and methods that
may be resorted to, firstly, if we would raise the general quality
of the children out of whom we have to make the next generation,
and, secondly, if we would replace divergent dialects and partial
and confused expression by a uniform, ample and thorough knowledge of
English throughout the English-speaking world. These two things are
necessary preliminaries to the complete attainment of the more essential
nucleus in the New Republican idea. So much has been discussed. This
essential nucleus, thus stripped, reveals itself as the systematic
direction of the moulding forces that play upon the developing citizen,
towards his improvement, with a view to a new generation of individuals,
a new social state, at a higher level than that at which we live to-day,
a new generation which will apply the greater power, ampler knowledge
and more definite will our endeavours will give it, to raise its
successor still higher in the scale of life. Or we may put the thing
in another and more concrete and vivid way. On the one hand imagine an
average little child let us say in its second year. We have discussed
all that can be done to secure that this average little child shall be
well born, well fed, well cared for, and we will imagine all that can
be done has been done. Accordingly, we have a sturdy, beautiful healthy
little creature to go upon, just beginning to walk, just beginning to
clutch at things with its hands, to reach out to and apprehend things
with its eyes, with its ears, with the hopeful commencement of speech.
We want to arrange matters so that this little being shall develop into
its best possible adult form. That is our remaining problem.
Is our contemporary average citizen the best that could have been made
out of the vague extensive possibilities that resided in him when he was
a child of two? It has been shown already that in height and weight
he, demonstrably, is not, and it has been suggested, I hope almost
as convincingly, that in that complex apparatus of acquisition and
expression, language, he is also needlessly deficient. And even upon
this defective foundation, it is submitted, he still fails, morally,
mentally, socially, aesthetically, to be as much as he might be. “As
much as he might be,” is far too ironically mild. The average citizen
of our great state to-day is, I would respectfully submit, scarcely more
than a dirty clout about his own buried talents.
I do not say he might not be infinitely worse, but can any one believe
that, given better conditions, he might not have been infinitely better?
Is it necessary to argue for a thing so obvious to all clear-sighted
men? Is it necessary, even if it were possible, that I should borrow the
mantle of Mr. George Gissing or the force of Mr. Arthur Morrison, and
set myself in cold blood to measure the enormous defect of myself and my
fellows by the standards of a remote perfection, to gauge the extent
of this complex muddle of artificial and avoidable shortcomings through
which we struggle? Must one, indeed, pass in review once more, bucolic
stupidity, commercial cunning, urban vulgarity, religious hypocrisy,
political clap-trap, and all the raw disorder of our incipient
civilization before the point will be conceded? What benefit is there in
any such revision? rather it may overwhelm us with the magnitude of what
we seek to do. Let us not dwell on it, on all the average civilized man
still fails to achieve; admit his imperfection, and for the rest let us
keep steadfastly before us that fair, alluring and reasonable conception
of all that, even now, the average man might be.
Yet one is tempted by the effective contrast to put against that clean
and beautiful child some vivid presentation of the average thing, to
sketch in a few simple lines the mean and graceless creature of our
modern life, his ill-made clothes, his clumsy, half-fearful, half-brutal
bearing, his coarse defective speech, his dreary unintelligent work, his
shabby, impossible, bathless, artless, comfortless home; one is provoked
to suggest him in some phase of typical activity, “enjoying himself” on
a Bank Holiday, or rejoicing, peacock feather in hand, hat askew, and
voice completely gone, on some occasion of public festivity--on the
defeat of a numerically inferior enemy for example, or the decision of
some great international issue at baseball or cricket. This, one would
say, we have made out of that, and so point the New Republican question,
“Cannot we do better?” But the thing has been done so often without ever
the breath of a remedy. Our business is with remedies. We mean to do
better, we live to do better, and with no more than a glance at our
present failures we will set ourselves to that.
To do better we must begin with a careful analysis of the process of
this man’s making, of the great complex of circumstances which mould the
vague possibilities of the average child into the reality of the citizen
of the modern state.
We may begin upon this complex most hopefully by picking out a few of
the conspicuous and typical elements and using them as a basis for an
exhaustive classification. To begin with, of course, there is the home.
For our present purpose it will be convenient to use “home” as a general
expression for that limited group of human beings who share the board
and lodging of the growing imperial citizen, and whose personalities are
in constant, close contact with his until he reaches fifteen or sixteen.
Typically, the chief figures of this group are mother, brothers and
sisters, and father, to which are often added nursemaid, governess,
and other servants. Beyond these are playmates again. Beyond these
acquaintances figure. Home has indeed nowadays, in our world, no very
definite boundaries--no such boundaries as it has, for example, on the
veldt. In the case of a growing number of English upper middle-class
children, moreover, and of the children of a growing element in the life
of the eastern United States, the home functions are delegated in a very
large degree to the preparatory school. It is a distinction that needs
to be emphasized that many so-called schools are really homes, often
very excellent homes, with which schools, often very inefficient
schools, are united. All this we must lump together--it is, indeed,
woven together almost inextricably--when we speak of home as a formative
factor. The home, so far as its hygienic conditions go, we have already
dealt with, and we have dealt, too, with the great neglected necessity,
the absolute necessity if our peoples are to keep together, of making
and keeping the language of the home uniform throughout our world-wide
community. Purely intellectual development beyond the matter of language
we may leave for a space. There remains the distinctive mental and
moral function of the home, the determination by precept, example,
and implication of the cardinal habits of the developing citizen, his
general demeanour, his fundamental beliefs about all the common and
essential things of life.
This group of people, who constitute the home, will be in constant
reaction upon him. If as a whole they bear themselves with grace and
serenity, say and do kindly things, control rage, and occupy themselves
constantly, they will do much to impose these qualities upon the
new-comer. If they quarrel one with another, behave coarsely and
spitefully, loiter and lounge abundantly, these things will also stamp
the child. A raging father, a scared deceitful mother, vulgarly acting,
vulgarly thinking friends, all leave an almost indelible impress.
Precept may play a part in the home, but it is a small part, unless it
is endorsed by conduct. What these people do, on the whole, believe in
and act upon, the child will tend to believe in and act upon; what they
believe they believe, but do not act upon, the child will acquire also
as a non-operative belief; their practices, habits, and prejudices will
be enormously prepotent in his life. If, for example, the parent talks
constantly of the contemptible dirtiness of Boers and foreigners, and
of the extreme beauty of cleanliness and--even obviously--rarely washes,
the child will grow to the same professions and the same practical
denial. This home circle it is that will describe what, in modified
Herbartian phraseology, one may call the child’s initial circle of
thought; it is a circle many things will subsequently enlarge
and modify, but of which they have the centering at least and the
establishment of the radial trends, almost beyond redemption. The
effect of home influence, indeed, constitutes with most of us a sort
of secondary heredity, interweaving with, and sometimes almost
indistinguishable from, the real unalterable primary heredity, a
moral shaping by suggestion, example, and influence, that is a sort of
spiritual parallel to physical procreation.
It is not simply personalities that are operative in the home influence.
There is also the implications of the various relations between one
member of the home circle and another. I am inclined to think that the
social conceptions, for example, that are accepted in a child’s home
world are very rarely shaken in afterlife. People who have been brought
up in households where there is an organized under-world of servants are
incurably different in their social outlook from those who have passed
a servantless childhood. They never quite emancipate themselves from
the conception of an essential class difference, of a class of beings
inferior to themselves. They may theorise about equality--but theory
is not belief. They will do a hundred things to servants that between
equals would be, for various reasons, impossible. The Englishwoman and
the Anglicised American woman of the more pretentious classes honestly
regards a servant as physically, morally, and intellectually different
from herself, capable of things that would be incredibly arduous to
a lady, capable of things that would be incredibly disgraceful, under
obligations of conduct no lady observes, incapable of the refinement
to which every lady pretends. It is one of the most amazing aspects of
contemporary life, to converse with some smart, affected, profoundly
uneducated, flirtatious woman about her housemaid’s followers. There is
such an identity; there is such an abyss. But at present that contrast
is not our concern. Our concern at present is with the fact that the
social constitution of the home almost invariably shapes the fundamental
social conceptions for life, just as its average temperament shapes
manners and bearing and its moral tone begets moral predisposition. If
the average sensual man of our civilization is noisy and undignified in
his bearing, disposed to insult and despise those he believes to be his
social inferiors, competitive and disobliging to his equals; abject,
servile, and dishonest to those he regards as his betters; if his wife
is a silly, shallow, gossiping spendthrift, unfit to rear the children
she occasionally bears, perpetually snubbing social inferiors and
perpetually cringing to social superiors, it is probable that we have
to blame the home, not particularly any specific class of homes, but our
general home atmosphere, for the great part of these characteristics.
If we would make the average man of the coming years gentler in manner,
more deliberate in judgment, steadier in purpose, upright, considerate,
and free, we must look first to the possibility of improving the tone
and quality of the average home.
Now the substance and constitution of the home, the relations and order
of its various members, have been, and are, traditional. But it is
a tradition that has always been capable of modification in each
generation. In the unlettered, untravelling past, the factor of
tradition was altogether dominant. Sons and daughters married and set
up homes, morally, intellectually, economically, like those of their
parents. Over great areas homogeneous traditions held, and it needed
wars and conquests, or it needed missionaries and persecutors and
conflicts, or it needed many generations of intercourse and filtration
before a new tradition could replace or graft itself upon the old. But
in the past hundred years or so the home conditions of the children of
our English-speaking population have shown a disposition to break from
tradition under influences that are increasing, and to become much more
heterogeneous than were any home conditions before. The ways in which
these modifications of the old home tradition have arisen will indicate
the means and methods by which further modifications may be expected and
attempted in the future.
Modification has come to the average home tradition through two
distinct, though no doubt finally interdependent channels. The first of
these channels is the channel of changing economic necessities, using
the phrase to cover everything from domestic conveniences at the one
extreme to the financial foundation of the home at the other, and
the next is the influx of new systems of thought, of feeling, and of
interpretation about the general issues of life.
There are in Great Britain three main interdependent systems of home
tradition undergoing modification and readjustment. They date from the
days before mechanism and science began their revolutionary intervention
in human affairs, and they derive from the three main classes of the old
aristocratic, agricultural, and trading state, namely, the aristocratic,
the middle, and the labour class. There are local, there are even racial
modifications, there are minor classes and subspecies, but the rough
triple classification will serve. In America the dominant home
tradition is that of the transplanted English middle class. The English
aristocratic tradition has flourished and faded in the Southern States;
the British servile and peasant tradition has never found any growth in
America, and has, in the persons of the Irish chiefly, been imported in
an imperfect condition, only to fade. The various home traditions of
the nineteenth century immigrants have either, if widely different,
succumbed, or if not very different assimilated themselves to the
ruling tradition. The most marked non-British influence has been the
intermixture of Teutonic Protestantism. In both countries now the old
home traditions have been and are being adjusted to and modified by
the new classes, with new relationships and new necessities, that the
revolution in industrial organization and domestic conveniences has
created.
The interplay of old tradition and new necessities becomes at times very
curious. Consider, for example, the home influences of the child of
a shopman in a large store, or those of the child of a skilled
operative--an engineer of some sort let us say--in England. Both these
are new types in the English social body; the former derives from
the old middle class, the class that was shopkeeping in the towns and
farming in the country, the class of the Puritans, the Quakers, the
first manufacturers, the class whose mentally active members become
the dissenters, the old Liberals, and the original New Englanders. The
growth of large businesses has raised a portion of this class to the
position of Sir John Blundell Maple, Sir Thomas Lipton, the intimate
friend of our King, and our brewer peers; it has raised a rather more
numerous section to the red plush glories of Wagon-Lit trains and their
social and domestic equivalents, and it has reduced the bulk of the
class to the status of employees for life. But the tradition that our
English shopman is in the same class as his master, that he has been
apprentice and improver, and is now assistant, with a view to presently
being a master himself, still throws its glamour over his life and his
home, and his child’s upbringing. They belong to the middle class, the
black coat and silk-hat class, and the silk hat crowns the adolescence
of their boys as inevitably as the toga made men in ancient Rome. Their
house is built, not for convenience primarily, but to realize whatever
convenience is possible after the rigid traditional requirements have
been met; it is the extreme and final reduction of the plan of a better
class house, and the very type of its owner. As one sees it in the
London suburbs devoted to clerks and shopmen, it stands back a yard or
so from the road, with a gate and a railing, and a patch, perhaps two
feet wide, of gravel between its front and the pavement. This is the
last pathetic vestige of the preliminary privacies of its original type,
the gates, the drive-up, the front lawn, the shady trees, that gave a
great impressive margin to the door. The door has a knocker (with an
appeal to realities, “ring also”) and it opens into a narrow passage,
perhaps four feet wide, which still retains the title of “hall.” Oak
staining on the woodwork and marbled paper accentuate the lordly memory.
People of this class would rather die than live in a house with a front
door, even had it a draught-stopping inner door, that gave upon the
street. Instead of an ample kitchen in which meals can be taken and one
other room in which the rest of life goes on, these two covering the
house site, the social distinction from the servant invades the house
space first by necessitating a passage to a side-door, and secondly
by cutting up the interior into a “dining-room” and a “drawing-room.”
Economy of fuel throughout the winter and economy of the best furniture
always, keeps the family in the dining-room pretty constantly, but there
you have the drawing-room as a concrete fact. Though the drawing-room is
inevitable, the family will manage without a bath-room well enough. They
may, or they may not, occasionally wash all over. There are probably
not fifty books in the house, but a daily paper comes and _Tit Bits_
or _Pearson’s Weekly,_ or, perhaps, _M.A.P.,_ _Modern Society,_ or some
such illuminant of the upper circles, and a cheap fashion paper, appear
at irregular intervals to supplement this literature.
The wife lives to realize the ideal of the “ladylike”--lady she resigns
to the patrician--and she insists upon a servant, however small. This
poor wretch of a servant, often a mere child of fourteen or fifteen,
lives by herself in a minute kitchen, and sleeps in a fireless attic. To
escape vulgar associates, the children of the house avoid the elementary
schools--the schools called in America public schools--where there
are trained, efficient teachers, good apparatus, and an atmosphere of
industry, and go to one of those wretched dens of disorderly imposture,
a middle-class school, where an absolute failure to train or educate
is seasoned with religious cant, lessons in piano-playing, lessons in
French “made in England,” mortarboard caps for the boys, and a high
social tone. And to emphasize the fact of its social position, this
bookless, bathless family tips! The plumber touches his hat for a tip,
the man who moves the furniture, the butcher-boy at Christmas, the
dustman; these things also, the respect and the tip, at their minimum
dimensions. Everything is at its minimum dimensions, it is the last
chipped, dwarfed, enfeebled state of a tradition that has, in its time,
played a fine part in the world. This much of honour still clings to
it, it will endure no tip, no charity, no upper-class control of its
privacy. This is the sort of home in which the minds of thousands
of young Englishmen and Englishwomen receive their first indelible
impressions. Can one expect them to escape the contagion of its cramped
pretentiousness, its dingy narrowness, its shy privacy of social
degradation, its essential sordidness and inefficiency?
Our skilled operative, on the other hand, will pocket his tip. He is on
the other side of the boundary. He presents a rising element coming
from the servile mass. Probably his net income equals or exceeds the
shopman’s, but there is no servant, no black coat and silk hat, no
middle-class school in his scheme of things. He calls the shopman
“Sir,” and makes no struggle against his native accent. In his heart he
despises the middle class, the mean tip-givers, and he is inclined
to overrate the gentry or big tippers. He is much more sociable, much
noisier, relatively shameless, more intelligent, more capable, less
restrained. He is rising against his tradition, and almost against his
will. The serf still bulks large in him. The whole trend of circumstance
is to substitute science for mere rote skill in him, to demand
initiative and an intelligent self-adaptation to new discoveries and new
methods, to make him a professional man and a job and pieceworker after
the fashion of the great majority of professional men. Against all these
things the serf element in him fights. He resists education and clings
to apprenticeship, he fights for time-work, he obstructs new inventions,
he clings to the ideal of short hours, high pay, shirk and let the
master worry. His wife is a far more actual creature than the clerk’s;
she does the house herself in a rough, effectual fashion, his children
get far more food for mind and body, and far less restraint. You can
tell the age of the skilled operative within a decade by the quantity of
books in his home; the younger he is the more numerous these are likely
to be. And the younger he is the more likely he is to be alive to
certain general views about his rights and his place in the social
scale, the less readily will his finger go to his cap at the sight
of broad-cloth, or his hand to the proffered half-crown. He will have
listened to Trade Union organizers and Socialist speakers; he will have
read the special papers of his class. The whole of this home is, in
comparison with the shopman’s, wide open to new influences. The
children go to a Board School, and very probably afterwards to evening
classes--or music-halls. Here again is a new type of home, in which
the English of 1920 are being made in thousands, and which is forced
a little way up the intellectual and moral scale every year, a
little further from its original conception of labour, dependence,
irresponsibility, and servility.
Compare, again, the home conditions of the child of a well-connected
British shareholder inheriting, let us say, seven or eight hundred a
year, with the home of exactly the same sort of person deriving from
the middle class. On the one hand, one will find the old aristocratic
British tradition in an instructively distorted state. All the
assumptions of an essential lordliness remain--and none of the duties.
All the pride is there still, but it is cramped, querulous, and
undignified. That lordliness is so ample that for even a small family
the income I have named will be no more than biting poverty, there will
be a pervading quality of struggle in this home to avoid work, to frame
arrangements, to discover cheap, loyal servants of the old type, to
discover six per cent. investments without risk, to interest influential
connections in the prospects of the children. The tradition of the
ruling class, which sees in the public service a pension scheme for poor
relations, will glow with all the colours of hope. Great sacrifices will
be made to get the boys to public schools, where they can revive and
expand the family connections. They will look forward as a matter of
course to positions and appointments, for the want of which men of gifts
and capacity from other social strata will break their hearts, and they
will fill these coveted places with a languid, discontented incapacity.
Great difficulty will be experienced in finding schools for the girls
from which the offspring of tradesmen are excluded. Vulgarity has to be
jealously anticipated. In a period when Smartness (as distinguished from
Vulgarity) is becoming an ideal, this demands at times extremely subtle
discrimination. The art of credit will be developed to a high level.
Now in the other family economically indistinguishable from this,
a family with seven or eight hundred a year from investments, which
derives from the middle class, the tradition is one that, in spite of
the essential irresponsibility of the economic position, will urge this
family towards exertion as a duty. As a rule the resultant lies in the
direction of pleasant, not too arduous exertion, the arts are attacked
with great earnestness of intention, literature, “movements” of many
sorts are ingredients in these homes. Many things that are imperative
to the aristocratic home are regarded as needless, and in their
place appear other things that the aristocrat would despise, books,
instruction, travel in incorrect parts of the world, _games_, that
most seductive development of modern life, played to the pitch of
distinction. Into both these homes comes literature, comes the Press,
comes the talk of alien minds, comes the observation of things without,
sometimes reinforcing the tradition, sometimes insidiously glossing upon
it or undermining it, sometimes “letting daylight through it”; but
much more into the latter type than into the former. And slowly the
two fundamentally identical things tend to assimilate their superficial
difference, to homologize their traditions, each generation sees a
relaxation of the aristocratic prohibitions, a “gentleman” may tout for
wines nowadays--among gentlemen--he may be a journalist, a fashionable
artist, a schoolmaster, his sisters may “act,” while, on the other
hand, each generation of the ex-commercial shareholder reaches out
more earnestly towards refinement, towards tone and quality, towards
etiquette, and away from what is “common” in life.
So in these typical cases one follows the strands of tradition into the
new conditions, the new homes of our modern state. In America one
finds exactly the same new elements shaped by quite parallel economic
developments, shopmen in a large store, skilled operatives, and
independent shareholders developing homes not out of a triple strand of
tradition, but out of the predominant home tradition of an emancipated
middle class, and in a widely different atmosphere of thought and
suggestion. As a consequence, one finds, I am told, a skilled operative
already with no eye (or only an angry eye) for tips, sociable shopmen,
and shareholding families, frankly common, frankly intelligent, frankly
hedonistic, or only with the most naïve and superficial imitation of
the haughty incapacity, the mean pride, the parasitic lordliness of the
just-independent, well-connected English.
These rough indications of four social types will illustrate the quality
of our proposition, that home influence in the making of men resolves
itself into an interplay of one substantial and two modifying elements,
namely:--
(1) Tradition.
(2) Economic conditions.
(3) New ideas, suggestions, interpretations, changes in the general
atmosphere of thought in which a man lives and which he mentally
breathes.
The net sum of which three factors becomes the tradition for the next
generation.
Both the modifying elements admit of control. How the economic
conditions of homes may be controlled to accomplish New Republican
ends has already been discussed with a view to a hygienic minimum, and
obviously the same, or similar, methods may be employed to secure less
materialistic benefits. You can make a people dirty by denying them
water, you can make a people cleaner by cheapening and enforcing
bath-rooms. Man is indeed so spiritual a being that he will turn every
materialistic development you force upon him into spiritual growth. You
can aerate his house, not only with air, but with ideas. Build, cheapen,
render alluring a simpler, more spacious type of house for the clerk,
fill it with labour-saving conveniences, and leave no excuse and no
spare corners for the “slavey,” and the slavey--and all that she means
in mental and moral consequence--will vanish out of being. You will beat
tradition. Make it easy for Trade Unions to press for shorter hours
of work, but make it difficult for them to obstruct the arrival of
labour-saving appliances, put the means of education easily within the
reach of every workman, make promotion from the ranks, in the Army, in
the Navy, in all business concerns, practicable and natural, and
the lingering discolouration of the serf taint will vanish from the
workman’s mind. The days of mystic individualism have passed, few
people nowadays will agree to that strange creed that we must deal
with economic conditions as though they were inflexible laws. Economic
conditions are made and compact of the human will, and by tariffs, by
trade regulation and organization, fresh strands of will may be woven
into the complex. The thing may be extraordinarily intricate and
difficult, abounding in unknown possibilities and unsuspected dangers,
but that is a plea for science and not for despair.
Controllable, too, is the influx of modifying suggestions into our
homes, however vast and subtle the enterprise may seem. But here we
touch for the first time a question that we shall now continue to touch
upon at other points, until at last we shall clear it and display it as
the necessarily central question of the whole matter of man-making so
far as the human will is concerned, and that is the preservation and
expansion of the body of human thought and imagination, of which
all conscious human will and act is but the imperfect expression and
realization, of which all human institutions and contrivances, from
the steam-engine to the ploughed field, and from the blue pill to
the printing press, are no more than the imperfect symbols, the rude
mnemonics and memoranda.
But this analysis of the modifying factors in the home influence, this
formulation of its controllable elements, has now gone as far as the
purpose of this paper requires. It has worked out to this, that the
home, so far as it is not traditional organization, is really only on
the one hand an aspect of the general economic condition of the state,
and on the other of that still more fundamental thing, its general
atmosphere of thought. Our analysis refers back the man-maker to these
two questions. The home, one gathers, is not to be dealt with separately
or simply. Nor, on the other hand, are these questions to be dealt with
merely in relation to their home application. As the citizen grows
up, he presently emerges from his home influences to a more direct and
general contact with these two things, with the Fact of the modern state
and with the Thought of the modern state, and we must consider each of
these in relation to his development as a whole.
The next group of elements in the man-making complex that occurs to one
after the home, is the school. Let me repeat a distinction already drawn
between the home element in boarding-schools and the school proper.
While the child is out of the school-room, playing--except when it
is drilling or playing under direction--when it is talking with its
playmates, walking, sleeping, eating, it is under those influences that
it has been convenient for me to speak of as the home influence. The
schoolmaster who takes boarders is, I hold, merely a substitute for the
parent, the household of boarders merely a substitute for the family.
What is meant by school here, is that which is possessed in common by
day school and boarding-school--the schoolroom and the recess playground
part. It is something which the savage and the barbarian distinctively
do not possess as a phase in their making, and scarcely even its
rudimentary suggestion. It is a new element correlated with the
establishment of a wider political order and with the use of written
speech.
Now I think it will be generally conceded that whatever systematic
intellectual training the developing citizen gets, as distinguished from
his natural, accidental, and incidental development, is got in school or
in its subsequent development of college, and with that I will put aside
the question of intellectual development altogether for a later, fuller
discussion. My point here is simply to note the school as a factor in
the making of almost every citizen in the modern state, and to point
out, what is sometimes disregarded, that it is only one of many factors
in that making. The tendency of the present time is enormously to
exaggerate the importance of school in development, to ascribe to it
powers quite beyond its utmost possibilities, and to blame it for evils
in which it has no share. And in the most preposterous invasions of the
duties of parent, clergyman, statesman, author, journalist, of duties
which are in truth scarcely more within the province of a schoolmaster
than they are within the province of a butcher, the real and necessary
work of the school is too often marred, crippled, and lost sight of
altogether. We treat the complex, difficult and honourable task of
intellectual development as if it were within the capacity of any
earnest but muddle-headed young lady, or any half-educated gentleman in
orders; we take that for granted, and we demand in addition from
them the “formation of character,” moral and ethical training and
supervision, aesthetic guidance, the implanting of a taste for the Best
in literature, for the Best in art, for the finest conduct; we demand
the clue to success in commerce and the seeds of a fine passionate
patriotism from these necessarily very ordinary persons.
One might think schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were inaccessible
to general observation in the face of these stupendous demands. If we
exacted such things from our butcher over and above good service in
his trade, if we insisted that his meat should not only build up
honest nerve and muscle, but that it should compensate for all that was
slovenly in our homes, dishonest in our economic conditions, and slack
and vulgar in our public life, he would very probably say that it took
him all his time to supply sound meat, that it was a difficult
and honourable thing to supply sound meat, that the slackness of
business-men and statesmen in the country, the condition of the arts and
sciences, wasn’t his business, that however lamentable the disorders of
the state, there was no reasonable prospect of improving it by upsetting
the distribution of meat, and, in short, that he was a butcher and not a
Cosmos-healing quack. “You must have meat,” he would say, “anyhow.” But
the average schoolmaster and schoolmistress does not do things in that
way.
What a school may do for the developing citizen, the original and the
developed function of the school, and how its true work may best be
accomplished, we shall discuss later. But it may be well to expand a
little more fully here the account of what the school has no business
to attempt, and what the scholastic profession is, as a whole, quite
incapable of doing, and to point to the really responsible agencies in
each case.
Now, firstly, with regard to all that the schoolmaster and
schoolmistress means by the “formation of character.” A large proportion
of the scholastic profession will profess, and a still larger proportion
of the public believes, that it is possible by talk and specially
designed instruction, to give a boy or girl a definite bias towards
“truth,” towards acts called “healthy” (a word it would puzzle the
ordinary schoolmaster or schoolmistress extremely to define, glib as
they are with it), towards honour, towards generosity, enterprise,
self-reliance, and the like. The masters in our public schools are far
from blameless in this respect, and you may gauge the quality of many
of these gentlemen pretty precisely by their disposition towards the
“school pulpit” line of business. Half an hour’s “straight talk to the
boys,” impromptu vague sentimentality about Earnestness, Thoroughness,
True Patriotism, and so forth, seems to assuage the conscience as
nothing else could do, for weeks of ill-prepared, ill-planned teaching,
and years of preoccupation with rowing-boats and cricket. The more
extreme examples of this type will say in a tone of manly apology,
“It does the boys good to tell them plainly what I think about serious
things”--when the simple fact of the case is too often that he does
all he can not to think about any things of any sort whatever, except
cricket and promotion. Schoolmistresses, again, will sometimes come near
boasting to the inquiring parent of our “ethical hour,” and if you probe
the facts you will find that means no more and no less than an hour
of floundering egotism, in which a poor illogical soul, with a sort of
naive indecency, talks nonsense about “Ideals,” about the Higher and the
Better, about Purity, and about many secret and sacred things, things
upon which wise men are often profoundly uncertain, to incredulous
or imitative children. All that is needed to do this sort of thing
abundantly and freely is a certain degree of aggressive egotism, a
certain gift of stupidity, good intentions, and a defective sense of
educational possibilities and limitations.
In addition to moral discussions, that at the best are very second-rate
eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying
gabble, there are various forms of “ethical” teaching, advocated and
practised in America and in the elementary schools of this country.
For example, a story of an edifying sort is told to the children, and
comments are elicited upon the behaviour of the characters. “Would you
have done that?” “Oh, _no_, teacher!” “Why not?” “Because it would be
mean.” The teacher goes into particulars, whittling away at the verdict,
and at last the fine point of the lesson stands out. Now it may
be indisputable that such lessons can be conducted effectively and
successfully by exceptionally brilliant teachers, that children may be
given an excellent code of good intentions, and a wonderful skill in the
research for good or bad motives for any given course of action they may
or may not want to take, but that they can be systematically trained by
the average teacher at our disposal in this desirable “subject” is quite
another question. It is one of the things that the educational
reformer must guard against most earnestly, the persuasion that what an
exceptional man can do ever and again for display purposes can be done
successfully day by day in schools. This applies to many other
things besides the teaching of ethics. Professor Armstrong can give
delightfully instructive lessons in chemistry according to the heuristic
method, but in the hands of the average teacher by whom teaching _must_
be done for the next few years the heuristic system will result
in nothing but a pointless fumble. Mr. Mackinder teaches
geography--inimitably--just to show how to do it. Mr. David Devant--the
brilliant Egyptian Hall conjuror--will show any assembly of parents how
to amuse children quite easily, but for some reason he does not present
his legerdemain as a new discovery in educational method.
To our argument that this sort of teaching is not within the capacity
of such teachers as we have, or are likely to have, we can, fortunately
enough, add that whatever is attempted can be done far better through
other agencies. More or less unknown to teachers there exists a
considerable amount of well-written literature, true stories and
fiction, in which, without any clumsy insistence upon moral points, fine
actions are displayed in their elementary fineness, and baseness is seen
to be base. There are also a few theatres, and there might be more, in
which fine action is finely displayed. Now one nobly conceived and
nobly rendered play will give a stronger moral impression than the best
schoolmaster conceivable, talking ethics for a year on end. One great
and stirring book may give an impression less powerful, perhaps,
but even more permanent. Practically these things are as good as
example--they are example. Surround your growing boy or girl with a
generous supply of good books, and leave writer and growing soul to
do their business together without any scholastic control of their
intercourse. Make your state healthy, your economic life healthy and
honest, be honest and truthful in the pulpit, behind the counter, in the
office, and your children will need no specific ethical teaching; they
will inhale right. And without these things all the ethical teaching in
the world will only sour to cant at the first wind of the breath of the
world.
Quite without ethical pretension at all the school is of course bound
to influence the moral development of the child. That most important
matter, the habit and disposition towards industry, should be acquired
there, the sense of thoroughness in execution, the profound belief that
difficulty is bound to yield to a resolute attack--all these things are
the necessary by-products of a good school. A teacher who is punctual,
persistent, just, who tells the truth, and insists upon the truth, who
is truthful, not merely technically but in a constant search for exact
expression, whose own share of the school work is faultlessly done,
who is tolerant to effort and a tireless helper, who is obviously more
interested in serious work than in puerile games, will beget essential
manliness in every boy he teaches. He need not lecture on his virtues. A
slack, emotional, unpunctual, inexact, and illogical teacher, a fawning
loyalist, an incredible pietist, an energetic snob, a teacher as
eager for games, as sensitive to social status, as easy, kindly, and
sentimental, and as shy really of hard toil as--as some teachers--is
none the better for ethical flatulence. There is a good deal of cant
in certain educational circles, there is a certain type of educational
writing in which “love” is altogether too strongly present; a reasonably
extensive observation of school-children and school-teachers makes
one doubt whether there is ever anything more than a very temperate
affection and a still more temperate admiration on either side. Children
see through their teachers amazingly, and what they do not understand
now they will understand later. For a teacher to lay hands on all
the virtues, to associate them with his or her personality, to smear
characteristic phrases and expressions over them, is as likely as not
to give the virtues unpleasant associations. Better far, save through
practice, to leave them alone altogether.
And what is here said of this tainting of moral instruction with the
personality of the teacher applies still more forcibly to religious
instruction. Here, however, I enter upon a field where I am anxious to
avoid dispute. To my mind those ideas and emotions that centre about the
idea of God appear at once too great and remote, and too intimate and
subtle for objective treatment. But there are a great number of people,
unfortunately, who regard religion as no more than geography, who
believe that it can be got into daily lessons of one hour, and
adequately done by any poor soul who has been frightened into conformity
by the fear of dismissal. And having this knobby, portable creed, and
believing sincerely that lip conformity is alone necessary to salvation,
they want to force every teacher they can to acquire and impart its
indestructible, inflexible recipes, and they are prepared to enforce
this at the price of inefficiency in every other school function. We
must all agree--whatever we believe or disbelieve--that religion is the
crown of the edifice we build. But it will simply ruin a vital part of
the edifice and misuse our religion very greatly if we hand it over to
the excavators and bricklayers of the mind, to use as a cheap substitute
for the proper intellectual and ethical foundations; for the ethical
foundation which is schooling and the ethical foundation which is habit.
I must confess that there is only one sort of man whose insistence
upon religious teaching in schools by ordinary school teachers I can
understand, and that is the downright Atheist, the man who believes
sensual pleasure is all that there is of pleasure, and virtue no more
than a hood to check the impetuosity of youth until discretion is
acquired, the man who believes there is nothing else in the world but
hard material fact, and who has as much respect for truth and religion
as he has for stable manure. Such a man finds it convenient to profess
a lax version of the popular religion, and he usually does so, and
invariably he wants his children “taught” religion, because he so
utterly disbelieves in God, goodness, and spirituality that he cannot
imagine young people doing even enough right to keep healthy and
prosperous, unless they are humbugged into it.
Equally unnecessary is the scholastic attempt to take over the relations
of the child to “nature,” art, and literature. To read the educational
journals, to hear the scholastic enthusiast, one would think that no
human being would ever discover there was any such thing as “nature”
were it not for the schoolmaster--and quotation from Wordsworth. And
this nature, as they present it, is really not nature at all, but a
factitious admiration for certain isolated aspects of the universe
conventionally regarded as “natural.” Few schoolmasters have discovered
that for every individual there are certain aspects of the universe
that especially appeal, and that that appeal is part of the
individuality--different from every human being, and quite outside their
range. Certain things that have been rather well treated by poets and
artists (for the most part dead and of Academic standing) they regard
as Nature, and all the rest of the world, most of the world in which we
live, as being in some way an intrusion upon this classic. They propound
a wanton and illogical canon. Trees, rivers, flowers, birds, stars--are,
and have been for many centuries Nature--so are ploughed fields--really
the most artificial of all things--and all the apparatus of the
agriculturist, cattle, vermin, weeds, weed-fires, and all the rest of
it. A grassy old embankment to protect low-lying fields is Nature, and
so is all the mass of apparatus about a water-mill; a new embankment
to store an urban water supply, though it may be one mass of splendid
weeds, is artificial, and ugly. A wooden windmill is Nature and
beautiful, a sky-sign atrocious. Mountains have become Nature and
beautiful within the last hundred years--volcanoes even. Vesuvius, for
example, is grand and beautiful, its smell of underground railway most
impressive, its night effect stupendous, but the glowing cinder heaps
of Burslem, the wonders of the Black Country sunset, the wonderful
fire-shot nightfall of the Five Towns, these things are horrid and
offensive and vulgar beyond the powers of scholastic language. Such a
mass of clotted inconsistencies, such a wild confusion of vicious mental
practices as this, is the stuff the schoolmaster has in mind when he
talks of children acquiring a love of Nature. They are to be trained,
against all their mental bias, to observe and quote about the canonical
natural objects and not to observe, but instead to shun and contemn
everything outside the canon, and so to hand on the orthodox Love of
Nature to another generation. One may present the triumph of scholastic
nature-teaching, by the figure of a little child hurrying to school
along the ways of a busy modern town. She carries a faded cut-flower,
got at considerable cost from a botanical garden, and as she goes she
counts its petals, its stamens, its bracteoles. Her love of Nature, her
“powers of observation,” are being trained. About her, all unheeded,
is a wonderful life that she would be intent upon but for this precious
training of her mind; great electric trains loom wonderfully round
corners, go droning by, spitting fire from their overhead wires; great
shop windows display a multitudinous variety of objects; men and women
come and go about a thousand businesses; a street-organ splashes a spray
of notes at her as she passes, a hoarding splashes a spray of colour.
The shape and direction of one’s private observation is no more the
schoolmaster’s business than the shape and direction of one’s nose. It
is, indeed, possible to certain gifted and exceptional persons that they
should not only see acutely, but abstract and express again what they
have seen. Such people are artists--a different kind of people from
schoolmasters altogether. Into all sorts of places, where people have
failed to see, comes the artist like a light. The artist cannot create
nor can he determine the observation of other men, but he can, at any
rate, help and inspire it. But he and the pedagogue are temperamentally
different and apart. They are at opposite poles of human quality. The
pedagogue with his canon comes between the child and Nature only to
limit and obscure. His business is to leave the whole thing alone.
If the interpretation of nature is a rare and peculiar gift, the
interpretation of art and literature is surely an even rarer thing.
Hundreds of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who could not write one
tolerable line of criticism, will stand up in front of classes by the
hour together and issue judgments on books, pictures, and all that is
comprised under the name of art. Think of it! Here is your great artist,
your great exceptional mind groping in the darknesses beneath the
surface of life, half apprehending strange elusive things in those
profundities, and striving--striving sometimes to the utmost verge of
human endeavour--to give that strange unsuspected mystery expression,
to shape it, to shadow it in form and wonder of colour, in beautiful
rhythms, in phantasies of narrative, in gracious and glowing words.
So much in its essential and precious degree is art. Think of what
the world must be in the wider vision of the great artist. Think,
for example, of the dark splendours amidst which the mind of Leonardo
clambered; the mirror of tender lights that reflected into our world
the iridescent graciousness of Botticelli! Then to the faint and faded
intimations these great men have left us of the things beyond our scope,
comes the scholastic intelligence, gesticulating instructively, and in
too many cases obscuring for ever the naive vision of the child. The
scholastic intelligence, succulently appreciative, blind, hopelessly
blind to the fact that every great work of art is a strenuous, an almost
despairing effort to express and convey, treats the whole thing as some
foolish riddle--“explains it to the children.” As if every picture was
a rebus and every poem a charade! “Little children,” he says, “this
teaches you”--and out comes the platitude!
Of late years, in Great Britain more particularly, the School has been
called upon to conquer still other fields. It has become apparent
that in this monarchy of ours, in which honour is heaped high upon
money-making, even if it is money-making that adds nothing to the
collective wealth or efficiency, and denied to the most splendid public
services unless they are also remunerative; where public applause is the
meed of cricketers, hostile guerillas, clamorous authors, yacht-racing
grocers, and hopelessly incapable generals, and where suspicion and
ridicule are the lot of every man working hard and living hard for any
end beyond a cabman’s understanding; in this world-wide Empire whose
Government is entrusted as a matter of course to peers and denied as a
matter of course to any man of humble origin; where social pressure of
the most urgent kind compels every capable business manager to sell out
to a company and become a “gentleman” at the very earliest opportunity,
the national energy is falling away. That driving zeal, that practical
vigour that once distinguished the English is continually less apparent.
Our workmen take no pride in their work any longer, they shirk toil and
gamble. And what is worse, the master takes no pride in the works; he,
too, shirks toil and gambles. Our middle-class young men, instead of
flinging themselves into study, into research, into literature, into
widely conceived business enterprises, into so much of the public
service as is not preserved for the sons of the well connected, play
games, display an almost oriental slackness in the presence of work and
duty, and seem to consider it rather good form to do so. And seeking for
some reason and some remedy for this remarkable phenomenon, a number of
patriotic gentlemen have discovered that the Schools, the Schools are
to blame. Something in the nature of Reform has to be waved over our
schools.
It would be a wicked deed to write anything that might seem to imply
that our Schools were not in need of very extensive reforms, or that
their efficiency is not a necessary preliminary condition to general
public efficiency, but, indeed, the Schools are only one factor in a
great interplay of causes, and the remedy is a much ampler problem
than any Education Act will cure. Take a typical young Englishman, for
example, one who has recently emerged from one of our public schools,
one of the sort of young Englishmen for whom all commissions in the Army
are practically reserved, who will own some great business, perhaps, or
direct companies, and worm your way through the tough hide of style
and restraint he has acquired, get him to talk about women, about his
prospects, his intimate self, and see for yourself how much of him, and
how little of him, his school has made. Test him on politics, on the
national future, on social relationships, and lead him if you can to
an utterance or so upon art and literature. You will be astonished how
little you can either blame or praise the teaching of his school for
him. He is ignorant, profoundly ignorant, and much of his style and
reserve is draped over that; he does not clearly understand what he
reads, and he can scarcely write a letter; he draws, calculates and
thinks no better than an errand boy, and he has no habit of work; for
that much perhaps the school must answer. And the school, too, must
answer for the fact that although--unless he is one of the small
specialized set who “swat” at games--he plays cricket and football quite
without distinction, he regards these games as much more important than
military training and things of that sort, spends days watching his
school matches, and thumbs and muddles over the records of county
cricket to an amazing extent. But these things are indeed only symptons,
and not essential factors in general inefficiency. There are much wider
things for which his school is only mediately or not at all to blame.
For example, he is not only ignorant and inefficient and secretly aware
of his ignorance and inefficiency, but, what is far more serious,
he does not feel any strong desire to alter the fact; he is not only
without the habit of regular work, but he does not feel the defect
because he has no desire whatever to do anything that requires work in
the doing. And you will find that this is so because there is woven into
the tissue of his being a profound belief that work and knowledge “do
not pay,” that they are rather ugly and vulgar characteristics, and that
they make neither for happiness nor success.
He did not learn that at school, nor at school was it possible he should
unlearn it. He acquired that belief from his home, from the conversation
of his equals, from the behaviour of his inferiors; he found it in the
books and newspapers he has read, he breathed it in with his native
air. He regards it as manifest Fact in the life about him. And he is
perfectly right. He lives in a country where stupidity is, so to speak,
crowned and throned, and where honour is a means of exchange; and he
draws his simple, straight conclusions. The much-castigated gentleman
with the ferule is largely innocent in this account.
If, too, you ransack your young Englishman for religion, you will be
amazed to find scarcely a trace of School. In spite of a ceremonial
adhesion to the religion of his fathers, you will find nothing but a
profound agnosticism. He has not even the faith to disbelieve. It is not
so much that he has not developed religion as that the place has been
seared. In his time his boyish heart has had its stirrings, he has
responded with the others to “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the earnest
moments of the school pulpit, and all those first vague things. But
limited as his reading is, it has not been so limited that he does not
know that very grave things have happened in matters of faith, that the
doctrinal schemes of the conventional faith are riddled targets, that
creed and Bible do not mean what they appear to mean, but something
quite different and indefinable, that the bishops, socially so much in
evidence, are intellectually in hiding.
Here again is something the school did not cause, the school cannot
cure.
And in matters sexual, in matters political, in matters social, and
matters financial you will find that the flabby, narrow-chested,
under-trained mind that hides in the excellent-looking body of the
typical young Englishman is encumbered with an elaborate duplicity.
Under the cloak of a fine tradition of good form and fair appearances
you will find some intricate disbeliefs, some odd practices. You will
trace his moral code chiefly to his school-fellows, and the intimates
of his early manhood, and could you trace it back you would follow
an unbroken tradition from the days of the Restoration. So soon as he
pierces into the realities of the life about him, he finds enforcement,
ample and complete, for the secret code. The schoolmaster has not
touched it; the school pulpit has boomed over its development in vain.
Nor has the schoolmaster done anything for or against the young man’s
political views, his ideas of social exclusiveness, the peculiar code
of honour that makes it disgraceful to bilk a cabman and permissible to
obtain goods on credit from a tradesman without the means to pay. All
this much of the artificial element in our young English gentleman was
made outside the school, and is to be remedied only by extra-scholastic
forces.
School is only one necessary strand in an enormous body of formative
influence. At first that mass of formative influence takes the outline
of the home, but it broadens out as the citizen grows until it reaches
the limits of his world. And his world, just like his home, resolves
itself into three main elements. First, there is the traditional
element, the creation of the past; secondly, there is the contemporary
interplay of economic and material forces; and thirdly, there is
literature, using that word for the current thought about the world,
which is perpetually tending on the one hand to realize itself and to
become in that manner a material force, and on the other to impose fresh
interpretations upon things and so become a factor in tradition. Now
the first of these elements is a thing established. And it is the
possibility of intervening through the remaining two that it is now our
business to discuss.