There is just one more nuisance to be disposed of before I come to
the positive side of my case. I mean the person who tells me that
my schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas and
institutions, and that schools are not now a bit like my old school.
I reply, with Sir Walter Raleigh, by calling on my soul to give this
statement the lie. Some years ago I lectured in Oxford on the subject
of Education. A friend to whom I mentioned my intention said, "You know
nothing of modern education: schools are not now what they were when
you were a boy." I immediately procured the time sheets of half a dozen
modern schools, and found, as I expected, that they might all have been
my old school: there was no real difference. I may mention, too, that
I have visited modern schools, and observed that there is a tendency to
hang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless manner on the walls,
and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a deplorable glass case
containing certain objects which might possibly, if placed in the hands
of the pupils, give them some practical experience of the weight of
a pound and the length of an inch. And sometimes a scoundrel who has
rifled a bird's nest or killed a harmless snake encourages the children
to go and do likewise by putting his victims into an imitation nest and
bottle and exhibiting them as aids to "Nature study." A suggestion that
Nature is worth study would certainly have staggered my schoolmasters;
so perhaps I may admit a gleam of progress here. But as any child who
attempted to handle these dusty objects would probably be caned, I do
not attach any importance to such modernities in school furniture.
The school remains what it was in my boyhood, because its real object
remains what it was. And that object, I repeat, is to keep the children
out of mischief: mischief meaning for the most part worrying the
grown-ups.
What is to be Done?
The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate
them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not
until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter
shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than
some homes and some schools.
The grotesque difficulty of making even a beginning was brought home to
me in the little village in Hertfordshire where I write these lines by
the lady of the manor, who asked me very properly what I was going to do
for the village school. I did not know what to reply. As the school kept
the children quiet during my working hours, I did not for the sake of
my own personal convenience want to blow it up with dynamite as I should
like to blow up most schools. So I asked for guidance. "You ought to
give a prize," said the lady. I asked if there was a prize for good
conduct. As I expected, there was: one for the best-behaved boy and
another for the best-behaved girl. On reflection I offered a handsome
prize for the worst-behaved boy and girl on condition that a record
should be kept of their subsequent careers and compared with the records
of the best-behaved, in order to ascertain whether the school criterion
of good conduct was valid out of school. My offer was refused because
it would not have had the effect of encouraging the children to give as
little trouble as possible, which is of course the real object of all
conduct prizes in schools.
I must not pretend, then, that I have a system ready to replace all
the other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization of
childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution
of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and
imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social
training. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of
undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutions
for children is segregation. If, for example, our children were set free
to roam and play about as they pleased, they would have to be policed;
and the first duty of the police in a State like ours would be to see
that every child wore a badge indicating its class in society, and that
every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge, or
any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by, say, the
College of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive with a birch
rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should
be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short,
there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism
would infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But something
like a change of heart is still possible; and since all the evils of
snobbery and segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may as
well make the best as the worst of them.