What's Wrong with the World
When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a
certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by
the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened
of sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoning
irritation against “dogma” did arise out of some ridiculous excess of
such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up
a fine crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of. Probably the
word “education” will some day seem honestly as old and objectless as
the word “justification” now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought
it frightfully funny that people should have fought about the difference
between the “Homoousion” and the “Homoiousion.” The time will come when
somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered against Sectarian
Education and also against Secular Education; that men of prominence and
position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also
for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather
alike; but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do
not look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to
be the Latin for faith.
Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, and
even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and
indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I
was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether
hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was
inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on this
recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively
late in life that I saw the main fact about it.
Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing.
It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word
like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may
be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with
definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles.
Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an
object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views
or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial
facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities;
but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are
education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior
or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms.
Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the
General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong;
in practice probably more educational. It is giving something--perhaps
poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can
be treason.
This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored
in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a
little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast,
to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to
wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would
teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme
and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would
abolish the boy’s breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine;
Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford
would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically
denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of
these advanced views, not even Fagin’s. But I do ask what, between the
lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is
not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus
Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education
plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between
these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they
share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of
authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from
education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated
from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply
a teacher who is not teaching.
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V. AN EVIL CRY
The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people
something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think
it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious
hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and
freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can
create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no other
general purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything good
until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people, who in the
matter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law, in the matter of
environment seem almost to believe in miracle. They insist that nothing
but what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of
the children. But they seem somehow to think that things can get into
the heads of the children which were not in the heads of the parents,
or, indeed, anywhere else.
There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of
the confusion. I mean the cry, “Save the children.” It is, of course,
part of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which
is the home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic.
This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other
schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in
a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men
do in a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a
condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This
cry of “Save the children” has in it the hateful implication that it is
impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that many millions of
grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans are to be
treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion; called
dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private
houses; called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work;
called dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers
if they still love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to
maintain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the
children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save
ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot
free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is
only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if
it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education is of
all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save
children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching
them to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to
others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?
I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this
difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all, does
not teach by authority at all. They present the process as coming, not
from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy.
Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the
dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish
soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean
collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this
imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic
secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn.
The educator only draws out the child’s own unapparent love of long
division; only leads out the child’s slightly veiled preference for milk
pudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I have
heard the disgraceful suggestion that “educator,” if applied to a Roman
schoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions into freedom; but
only meant taking out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certain
that I do not agree with the doctrine; I think it would be about as
sane to say that the baby’s milk comes from the baby as to say that the
baby’s educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature
a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing
these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or
it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the
whole situation. You may indeed “draw out” squeals and grunts from the
child by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel
pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and
watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out
of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the
matter.
*****
VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE
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