Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our main
conclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion,
but very decidedly of selection--and rejection. The educationist must
find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it
must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must
be orthodox. The teacher may think it antiquated to have to decide
precisely between the faith of Calvin and of Laud, the faith of Aquinas
and of Swedenborg; but he still has to choose between the faith of
Kipling and of Shaw, between the world of Blatchford and of General
Booth. Call it, if you will, a narrow question whether your child shall
be brought up by the vicar or the minister or the popish priest. You
have still to face that larger, more liberal, more highly civilized
question, of whether he shall be brought up by Harmsworth or by
Pearson, by Mr. Eustace Miles with his Simple Life or Mr. Peter Keary
with his Strenuous Life; whether he shall most eagerly read Miss Annie
S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short, whether he shall end up in the
mere violence of the S. D. F., or in the mere vulgarity of the Primrose
League. They say that nowadays the creeds are crumbling; I doubt it, but
at least the sects are increasing; and education must now be sectarian
education, merely for practical purposes. Out of all this throng of
theories it must somehow select a theory; out of all these thundering
voices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all this awful and aching
battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it
must manage somehow to trace and to track a star.
I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too vague and
vast and which therefore has accomplished little. But as it happens
there is in England something to compare it with. There is an
institution, or class of institutions, which began with the same popular
object, which has since followed a much narrower object, but which had
the great advantage that it did follow some object, unlike our modern
elementary schools.
In all these problems I should urge the solution which is positive,
or, as silly people say, “optimistic.” I should set my face, that is,
against most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist.
Most educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the
poor man not to drink. I should be quite content if they teach him to
drink; for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink
that is accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like
some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public
schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we
should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working,
but rather to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather to
open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of
property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly
universal and property decently proper.
In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going
back to the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality. It
would be a great step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn. It
is incontrovertibly true that to mediaevalize the public schools would
be to democratize the public schools. Parliament did once really mean
(as its name seems to imply) a place where people were allowed to talk.
It is only lately that the general increase of efficiency, that is, of
the Speaker, has made it mostly a place where people are prevented from
talking. The poor do not go to the modern church, but they went to the
ancient church all right; and if the common man in the past had a grave
respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes
had some of his own. I therefore can claim that I have no vulgar itch of
innovation in anything I say about any of these institutions. Certainly
I have none in that particular one which I am now obliged to pick out
of the list; a type of institution to which I have genuine and personal
reasons for being friendly and grateful: I mean the great Tudor
foundations, the public schools of England. They have been praised for a
great many things, mostly, I am sorry to say, praised by themselves and
their children. And yet for some reason no one has ever praised them the
one really convincing reason.
*****