What's Wrong with the World
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.
*****
XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT
There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper
inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The
only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of
the children are the parents. Yet the English poor have very definite
traditions in many ways. They are hidden under embarrassment and irony;
and those psychologists who have disentangled them talk of them as very
strange, barbaric and secretive things. But, as a matter of fact, the
traditions of the poor are mostly simply the traditions of humanity,
a thing which many of us have not seen for some time. For instance,
workingmen have a tradition that if one is talking about a vile thing it
is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is the less likely to be
seduced into excusing it. But mankind had this tradition also, until the
Puritans and their children, the Ibsenites, started the opposite idea,
that it does not matter what you say so long as you say it with long
words and a long face. Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most
jesting about personal appearance; but in doing this they taboo not only
the humor of the slums, but more than half the healthy literature of
the world; they put polite nose-bags on the noses of Punch and Bardolph,
Stiggins and Cyrano de Bergerac. Again, the educated classes have
adopted a hideous and heathen custom of considering death as too
dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain a secret for each person,
like some private malformation. The poor, on the contrary, make a great
gossip and display about bereavement; and they are right. They have hold
of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs
of the children of men. The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it.
The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a
crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important.
In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization;
and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of
the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games of
Patroclus.
The things philanthropists barely excuse (or do not excuse) in the life
of the laboring classes are simply the things we have to excuse in all
the greatest monuments of man. It may be that the laborer is as gross as
Shakespeare or as garrulous as Homer; that if he is religious he talks
nearly as much about hell as Dante; that if he is worldly he talks
nearly as much about drink as Dickens. Nor is the poor man without
historic support if he thinks less of that ceremonial washing which
Christ dismissed, and rather more of that ceremonial drinking which
Christ specially sanctified. The only difference between the poor man of
to-day and the saints and heroes of history is that which in all classes
separates the common man who can feel things from the great man who can
express them. What he feels is merely the heritage of man. Now nobody
expects of course that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be complete
instructors of their children any more than the squires and colonels and
tea merchants are complete instructors of their children. There must be
an educational specialist in loco parentis. But the master at Harrow is
in loco parentis; the master in Hoxton is rather contra parentem. The
vague politics of the squire, the vaguer virtues of the colonel, the
soul and spiritual yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in veritable
practice, conveyed to the children of these people at the English public
schools. But I wish here to ask a very plain and emphatic question. Can
anyone alive even pretend to point out any way in which these special
virtues and traditions of the poor are reproduced in the education of
the poor? I do not wish the coster’s irony to appeal as coarsely in the
school as it does in the tap room; but does it appear at all? Is
the child taught to sympathize at all with his father’s admirable
cheerfulness and slang? I do not expect the pathetic, eager pietas of
the mother, with her funeral clothes and funeral baked meats, to be
exactly imitated in the educational system; but has it any influence at
all on the educational system? Does any elementary schoolmaster accord
it even an instant’s consideration or respect? I do not expect the
schoolmaster to hate hospitals and C.O.S. centers so much as the
schoolboy’s father; but does he hate them at all? Does he sympathize
in the least with the poor man’s point of honor against official
institutions? Is it not quite certain that the ordinary elementary
schoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply conscientious
to eradicate all these rugged legends of a laborious people, and on
principle to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? In
the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but
against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of
the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of
their Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high
Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere
pedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must think
a bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury; they must
swing Swedish clubs because their masters are afraid of English cudgels;
and they must get over their prejudice against being fed by the parish,
because aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by the nation.
*****
XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION
It is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked what
I think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no new
ideas about female education. There is not, there never has been, even
the vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to ask
what was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls; just as they
asked what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to young
chimney sweeps. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong
place. Boys play football, why shouldn’t girls play football; boys
have school colors, why shouldn’t girls have school-colors; boys go
in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn’t girls go in hundreds to
day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn’t girls go to Oxford--in
short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn’t girls grow mustaches--that is
about their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing
at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that,
and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and
heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but
plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case
of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless
inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least,
which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet
there is no boy’s game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics have
not promoted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls very
heavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work already
in their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there
must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is
already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if he
wore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.
It will then be answered, not without a sneer, “And what would you
prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with
ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling
a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar
albums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?” To which
I answer, “Emphatically, yes.” I solidly prefer it to the new female
education, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design,
while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in
point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more
than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was
stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain
she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could