"Well, Lawson, it's like this, my scheme could only be a success if the
economic basis of society were altered. So long as one million people
take half the national yearly income you can't have any decent scheme of
education."
"Right O!" said Lawson cheerfully, "for the sake of argument, or rather
peace, we'll give you a Utopia where there are no idle rich. Fire away!"
"Good! I'll talk about the present day education first.
"Twenty years ago education had one aim--to abolish illiteracy. In
consequence the Three R.'s were of supreme importance. Nowadays they are
held to be quite as important, but a dozen other things have been
placed beside them on the pedestal. Gradually education has come to aim
at turning out a man or a woman capable of earning a living. Cookery,
Woodwork, Typing, Bookkeeping, Shorthand ... all these were introduced
so that we should have better wives and joiners and clerks.
"Lawson, I would chuck the whole blamed lot out of the elementary
school. I don't want children to be trained to make pea-soup and picture
frames, I want them to be trained to think. I would cut out History and
Geography as subjects."
"Eh?" said Lawson.
"They'd come in incidentally. For instance, I could teach for a week on
the text of a newspaper report of a fire in New York."
"The fire would light up the whole world, so to speak," said Lawson with
a smile.
"Under the present system the teacher never gets under way. He is just
getting to the interesting part of his subject when Maggie Brown ups and
says, 'Please, sir, it's Cookery now.' The chap who makes a religion of
his teaching says 'Damn!' very forcibly, and the girls troop out.
"I would keep Composition and Reading and Arithmetic in the curriculum.
Drill and Music would come into the play hours, and Sketching would be
an outside hobby for warm days."
"Where would you bring in the technical subjects?"
"Each school would have a workshop where boys could repair their bikes
or make kites and arrows, but there would not be any formal instruction
in woodwork or engineering. Technical education would begin at the age
of sixteen."
"Six what?"
"Sixteen. You see my pupils are to stay at school till they are twenty.
You are providing the cash you know. Well, at sixteen the child would be
allowed to select any subject he liked. Suppose he is keen on mechanics.
He spends a good part of the day in the engineering shop and the drawing
room--mechanical drawing I mean. But the thinking side of his education
is still going on. He is studying political economy, eugenics,
evolution, philosophy. By the time he is eighteen he has read Nietzsche,
Ibsen, Bjornson, Shaw, Galsworthy, Wells, Strindberg, Tolstoi, that is
if ideas appeal to him."
"Ah!"
"Of course, I don't say that one man in a hundred will read Ibsen. You
will always have the majority who are averse to thinking if they can get
out of it. These will be good mechanics and typists and joiners in many
cases. My point is that every boy or girl has the chance to absorb ideas
during their teens."
"Would you make it compulsory? For instance, that boy Willie Smith in
your school; do you think that he would learn much more if he had to
stay at school till he was twenty?"
"No," I said, "I wouldn't force anyone to stay at school, but to-day
boys quite as stupid naturally as Smith stay at the university and love
it. A few years' rubbing shoulders with other men is bound to make a man
more alert. Take away, as you have done for argument's sake, the
necessity of a boy's leaving school at fourteen to earn a living and you
simply make every school a university."
"And it isn't three weeks since I heard you curse universities!" said
Lawson with a grin.
"I'm thinking of the social side of a university," I explained. "That
is good. The educational side of our universities is bad because it is
mostly cram. I crammed Botany and Zoo for my degree and I know nothing
about either; I was too busy trying to remember words like
Caryophylacia, or whatever it is, to ask why flowers droop their heads
at night. So in English I had to cram up what Hazlitt and Coleridge said
about Shakespeare when I should have been reading _Othello_. The
university fails because it refuses to connect education with
contemporary life. You go there and you learn a lot of rot about
syllogisms and pentameters, and nothing is done to explain to you the
meaning of the life in the streets outside. No wonder that Oxford and
Cambridge dons write to the papers saying that life has no opening for a
university man."
"But I thought that you didn't want education to produce a practical
man. You wanted a theoretical chimney-sweep, didn't you?" said Lawson
smiling.
"The present university turns out men who are neither practical nor
theoretical. I want a university that will turn out thinkers. The men
who have done most to stimulate thought these past few years are men
like Wells and Shaw and Chesterton; and I don't think that one of them
is a 'varsity man.'"
"You can't run a world on thought," said he.
"I don't know," I said, "we seem to run this old State of ours _without_
thought. The truth is that there will always be more workers than
thinkers. While one chap is planning a new heaven on earth, the other
ninety-nine are working hard at motors and benches.
"H. G. Wells is always asking for better technical schools, more
research, more invention. All these are absolutely necessary, but I want
more than that; along with science and art I want the thinking part of
education to go on."
"It goes on now."
"No," I said, "it doesn't. Your so-called educated man is often a stupid
fellow. Doctors have a good specialist education, yet I know a score of
doctors who think that Socialism means 'The Great Divide.' When
Osteopathy came over from America a few years ago thousands of medical
men pronounced it 'damned quackery' at once; only a few were wide
enough to study the thing to see what it was worth. So with inoculation;
the doctors follow the antitoxin authority like sheep. At the university
I once saw a raid on an Anti-Vivisection shop, and I'm sure that not one
medical student in the crowd had ever thought about vivisection. Mention
Women's Freedom to the average lawyer, and he will think you a madman.
"Don't you see what I am driving at? I want first-class doctors and
engineers and chemists, but I want them to think also, to think about
things outside their immediate interests. This is the age of the
specialist. That's what's wrong with it. Somebody, Matthew Arnold, I
think, wanted a man who knew everything of something and something of
everything. It's a jolly good definition of education."
"That is the idea of the Scotch Code," said Lawson.
"Yes, perhaps it is. They want our bairns to learn tons of somethings
about everything that doesn't matter a damn in life."
* * *
My talk with Lawson last night makes me realise again how hopeless it is
to plan a system of education when the economic system is all out of
joint. I believe that this nation has the wealth to educate its children
properly. I wonder what the Conscriptionists would say if I hinted to
them that if a State can afford to take its youth away from industry to
do unprofitable labour in the army and navy it can afford to educate its
youth till the age of twenty is reached.
The stuff we teach in school leads nowhere; the Code subjects simply
lull a child to sleep. How the devil is a lad to build a Utopia on
Geography and Nature Study and Woodwork? Education should prove that the
world is out of joint, and it should point a Kitchener finger at each
child and say, "Your Country Needs _You_ ... to set it Right."