For this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned
indifference to the truth, the English public school does not provide
us with the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics
to remember that right or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is
working, the wheels are going around, the gentlemen are being produced,
with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete. And in
this, as we have said before, the public school really has an advantage
over all the other educational schemes of our time. You can pick out a
public-school man in any of the many companies into which they stray,
from a Chinese opium den to a German Jewish dinner-party. But I doubt
if you could tell which little match girl had been brought up by
undenominational religion and which by secular education. The great
English aristocracy which has ruled us since the Reformation is really,
in this sense, a model to the moderns. It did have an ideal, and
therefore it has produced a reality.
We may repeat here that these pages propose mainly to show one thing:
that progress ought to be based on principle, while our modern progress
is mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in
theory, but by what has been already admitted in practice. That is why
the Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited
person can have much sympathy. They wanted a specific thing; they were
ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for
it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations
that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a
reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform
the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of
armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties
is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon
have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed
by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o’clock, so soon they
must shut them by eleven o’clock; children stop at school till they
are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of
reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of
any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of
mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution.
By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much into a rut as the
Conservative. We meet one hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather
told him to stand by one stile. We meet another hoary old lunatic who
says his grandfather told him only to walk along one lane.
I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument, because
we have just now come to the place where it is most startlingly and
strongly shown. The final proof that our elementary schools have no
definite ideal of their own is the fact that they so openly imitate the
ideals of the public schools. In the elementary schools we have all the
ethical prejudices and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copied
for people to whom they do not even roughly apply. We have the same
wildly disproportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanliness
on moral character. Educators and educational politicians declare,
amid warm cheers, that cleanliness is far more important than all the
squabbles about moral and religious training. It would really seem that
so long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether he
is washing off his mother’s jam or his brother’s gore. We have the
same grossly insincere pretense that sport always encourages a sense of
honor, when we know that it often ruins it. Above all, we have the
same great upperclass assumption that things are done best by large
institutions handling large sums of money and ordering everybody about;
and that trivial and impulsive charity is in some way contemptible.
As Mr. Blatchford says, “The world does not want piety, but soap--and
Socialism.” Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and
Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.
These “healthy” ideals, as they are called, which our politicians and
schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied
to the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to an
impoverished democracy. A vague admiration for organized government and
a vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all into
the lives of people among whom kindness means lending a saucepan and
honor means keeping out of the workhouse. It resolves itself either into
discouraging that system of prompt and patchwork generosity which is a
daily glory of the poor, or else into hazy advice to people who have no
money not to give it recklessly away. Nor is the exaggerated glory of
athletics, defensible enough in dealing with the rich who, if they did
not romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means so
much to the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a great
deal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for
the third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric
about corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental class
cannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman is
expected to be substantially spotless all the time. But it is no more
discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to
be wet. A sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with soot
than Michael Angelo when he is covered with clay, or Bayard when he
is covered with blood. Nor have these extenders of the public-school
tradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for the
present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impossible to the
poor; I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast-off
clothes of the rich. One man moves into another man’s clothes as he
moves into another man’s house. No wonder that our educationists are
not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat’s second-hand trousers,
when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat’s second-hand
ideas.
*****