UPTON,
March 25, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--You are quite right about conventionality in education.
One of my perennial preoccupations here is how to encourage originality
and independence among my boys. The great danger of public-school
education nowadays, as you say, is the development of a type. It is not
at all a bad type in many ways; the best specimens of the public-school
type are young men who are generous, genial, unembarrassed, courageous,
sensible, and active; but our system all tends to level character, and
I do not feel sure whether it levels it up or levels it down. In old
days the masters concerned themselves with the work of the boys only,
and did not trouble their heads about how the boys amused themselves
out of school. Vigorous boys organised games for themselves, and
indolent boys loafed. Then it came home to school authorities that
there was a good deal of danger in the method; that lack of employment
was an undesirable thing. Thereupon work was increased, and, at the
same time, the masters laid hands upon athletics and organised them.
Side by side with this came a great increase of wealth and leisure in
England, and there sprang up that astonishing and disproportionate
interest in athletic matters, which is nowadays a real problem for all
sensible men. But the result of it all has been that there has grown up
a stereotyped code among the boys as to what is the right thing to do.
They are far less wilful and undisciplined than they used to be; they
submit to work, as a necessary evil, far more cheerfully than they used
to do; and they base their ideas of social success entirely on
athletics. And no wonder! They find plenty of masters who are just as
serious about games as they are themselves; who spend all their spare
time in looking on at games, and discuss the athletic prospects of
particular boys in a tone of perfectly unaffected seriousness. The only
two regions which masters have not organised are the intellectual and
moral regions. The first has been tacitly and inevitably extruded. A
good deal more work is required from the boys, and unless a boy's
ability happens to be of a definite academical order--in which case he
is well looked after--there is no loop-hole through which intellectual
interest can creep in. A boy's time is so much occupied by definite
work and definite games that there is neither leisure nor, indeed,
vigour left to follow his own pursuits. Life is lived so much more in
public that it becomes increasingly difficult for SETS to exist; small
associations of boys with literary tastes used to do a good deal in the
direction of fostering the germs of intellectual life; the net result
is, that there is now far less interest abroad in intellectual things,
and such interests as do exist, exist in a solitary way, and generally
mean an intellectual home in the background.
In the moral region, I think we have much to answer for; there is a
code of morals among boys which, if it is not actively corrupting, is
at least undeniably low. The standard of purity is low; a vicious boy
doesn't find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social
success. Then the code of honesty is low; a boy who is habitually
dishonest in the matter of work is not in the least reprobated. I do
not mean to say that there are not many boys who are both pure-minded
and honest; but they treat such virtues as a secret preference of their
own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to interfere
with the practice of others, or even to disapprove of it. And then
comes the perennial difficulty of schoolboy honour; the one
unforgivable offence is to communicate anything to masters; and an
innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity gave way before
perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be thought to have
erred, but would have scanty, if any, expression of either sympathy or
pity from other boys; while if he breathed the least hint of his
miserable position to a master and the fact came out, he would be
universally scouted.
This is a horrible fact to contemplate; yet it cannot be cured by
enactment, only from within. It is strange that in this respect it is
entirely unlike the code of the world. No girl or woman would be
scouted for appealing to police protection in similar circumstances; no
man would be required to submit to violence or even to burglary; no
reprobation would fall upon him if he appealed to the law to help him.
Is it not possible to encourage something of this feeling in a school?
Is it not possible, without violating schoolboy honour, which is in
many ways a fine and admirable thing, to allow the possibility of an
appeal to protection for the young and weak against vile temptations?
It seems to me that it would be best if we could get the boys to
organise such a system among themselves. But to take no steps to arrive
at such an organisation, and to leave matters severely alone, is a very
dark responsibility to bear.
It is curious to note that in the matter of bullying and cruelty, which
used to be so rife at schools, public opinion among boys does seem to
have undergone a change. The vice has practically disappeared, and the
good feeling of a school would be generally against any case of gross
bullying; but the far more deadly and insidious temptation of impurity
has, as far as one can learn, increased. One hears of simply
heart-rending cases where a boy dare not even tell his parents of what
he endures. Then, too, a boy's relations will tend to encourage him to
hold out, rather than to invoke a master's aid, because they are afraid
of the boy falling under the social ban.
This is the heaviest burden a schoolmaster has to bear; to be
responsible for his boys, and to be held responsible, and yet to be
probably the very last person to whom the information of what is
happening can possibly come.
One great difficulty seems to be that boys will only, as a rule,
combine for purposes of evil. In matters of virtue a boy has to act for
himself; and I confess, too, with a sigh, that a set of virtuous boys
banding themselves together to resist evil and put it down has an
alarmingly priggish sound.
The most that a man can do at present, it seems to me, is to have good
sensible servants; to be vigilant and discreet; to try and cultivate a
paternal relation with all his boys; to try and make the bigger boys
feel some responsibility in the matter; but the worst of it is that the
subject is so unpleasant that many masters dare not speak of it at all;
and excuse themselves by saying that they don't want to put ideas into
boys' heads. I cannot conscientiously believe that a man who has been
through a big public school himself can honestly be afraid of that. But
we all seem to be so much afraid of each other, of public opinion, of
possible unpopularity, that we find excuses for letting a painful thing
alone.
But to leave this part of the subject, which is often a kind of
nightmare to me, and to return to my former point; I do honestly think
it a great misfortune that we tend to produce a type. It seems to me
that to aim at independence, to know one's own mind, to form one's own
ideas--liberty, in short--is one of the most sacred duties in life. It
is not only a luxury in which a few can indulge, it ought to be a
quality which every one should be encouraged to cultivate. I declare
that it makes me very sad sometimes to see these well-groomed,
well-mannered, rational, manly boys all taking the same view of things,
all doing the same things, smiling politely at the eccentricity of any
one who finds matter for serious interest in books, in art or music:
all splendidly reticent about their inner thoughts, with a courteous
respect for the formalities of religion and the formalities of work;
perfectly correct, perfectly complacent, with no irregularities or
angular preferences of their own; with no admiration for anything but
athletic success, and no contempt for anything but originality of
ideas. They are so nice, so gentlemanly, so easy to get on with; and
yet, in another region, they are so dull, so unimaginative, so
narrow-minded. They cannot all, of course, be intellectual or
cultivated; but they ought to be more tolerant, more just, more wise.
They ought to be able to admire vigour and enthusiasm in every
department instead of in one or two; and it is we who ought to make
them feel so, and we have already got too much to do--though I am
afraid that you will think, after reading this vast document, that I,
at all events, have plenty of spare time. But it is not the case; only
the end of the half is at hand; we have finished our regular work, and
I have done my reports, and am waiting for a paper. When you next hear
I shall be a free man. I shall spend Easter quietly here; but I have so
much to do and clear off that I probably shall not be able to write
until I have set off on my travels.--Ever yours,