But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of
authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say)
that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be
destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming
a child’s mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself;
for he hates something inseparable from human life. I only mentioned
educere and the drawing out of the faculties in order to point out that
even this mental trick does not avoid the inevitable idea of parental or
scholastic authority. The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and
coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses.
He decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be
developed. He does not (I suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of
forgery. He does not (so far at least) lead out, with timid steps, a
shy talent for torture. The only result of all this pompous and
precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the
instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes.
Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is
poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this
intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative.
It is creative because it is human. It is as reckless as playing on the
fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house.
In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with
life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even a jocular question
whether we say of this tremendous tormentor, the artist Man, that he
puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws things out of us, like
a dentist.
The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to take
his mother Nature under his control; he claims the right to make
his child the Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative
authority of man, and the whole courageous raid which we call
civilization wavers and falls to pieces. Now most modern freedom is at
root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it
is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw
and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral
responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild
step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth
of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an
unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough
that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this
high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only
excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so
half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough
to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the
decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it
to say here that when I say that we should instruct our children, I mean
that we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should
do it. The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State,
being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments
to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through
the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the
marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught
to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put
first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to
a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four
actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than
the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having
the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea;
for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn
something from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to the mere
fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes
that men who govern themselves will govern their children. To-day we all
use Popular Education as meaning education of the people. I wish I could
use it as meaning education by the people.
The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do
not avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old school
masters. Nay, it might be maintained that they avoid it less. The old
village schoolmaster beat a boy for not learning grammar and sent him
out into the playground to play anything he liked; or at nothing, if he
liked that better. The modern scientific schoolmaster pursues him into
the playground and makes him play at cricket, because exercise is so
good for the health. The modern Dr. Busby is a doctor of medicine as
well as a doctor of divinity. He may say that the good of exercise is
self-evident; but he must say it, and say it with authority. It cannot
really be self-evident or it never could have been compulsory. But this
is in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice the
free educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashioned
educationists. A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless
creature could exist) might with some plausibility maintain concerning
all our expansion since the failure of Luther’s frank paganism and its
replacement by Calvin’s Puritanism, that all this expansion has not
been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that less and less
beautiful and humane things have been permitted. The Puritans destroyed
images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practically
issued one of his papal encyclicals against music; and I have heard of
modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. I
remember a meek little madman who came up to me at some Socialist soiree
or other, and asked me to use my influence (have I any influence?)
against adventure stories for boys. It seems they breed an appetite for
blood. But never mind that; one must keep one’s temper in this madhouse.
I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation,
are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments
were often idiotic and cruel; though they are much more so in a country
like England (where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment
and only a poor man receives it) than in countries with a clearer
popular tradition--such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflicted
by peasants on a peasant. In modern England flogging can only in
practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus only a
few days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course) was
sentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having picked
up a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am entirely
on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against
this almost bestial ignorance about boys. But I do think it a little
unfair that these humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers,
should denounce them for playing at robbers. I do think that those who
understand a guttersnipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a sudden
spurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. To
sum it up in one sentence: I think my meek little madman might have
understood that there is many a boy who would rather be flogged, and
unjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away.
*****