THE CURSE OF EDUCATION

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LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS9, Henrietta Street, W. C. 

TheCurse of Education

BYHAROLD E. GORST

LondonGrant Richards1901

PREFATORY NOTE

In calling this little book 'The Curse of Education, ' I trust that Ishall not be misunderstood to disparage culture. The term 'education' isused, for want of a better word, to express the conventional mode ofteaching and bringing up children, and of educating youth in this andother civilized countries. It is with education systems, with theuniversal method of cramming the mind with facts, and particularly withthe manufacture of uniformity and mediocrity by subjecting everyindividual to a common process, regardless of his natural bent, that Ihave chiefly to find fault. At a moment when the country is agitatedwith questions of educational reform, I thought it might be useful todraw attention to what I believe to be a fact, namely, that thefoundations of all existing education systems are absolutely false inprinciple; and that teaching itself, as opposed to natural developmentand self-culture, is the greatest obstacle to human progress that socialevolution has ever had to encounter. 

HAROLD E. GORST. 

LONDON, _April, 1901. _

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

 I. FLOURISHING MEDIOCRITY 1

 II. SQUARE PEGS IN ROUND HOLES 8

 III. THE DESTRUCTION OF GENIUS 18

 IV. HUMAN FACTORIES 26

 V. THE GREATEST MISERY OF THE GREATEST NUMBER 35

 VI. THE OUTPUT OF PRIGS 44

 VII. BOY DEGENERATION 53

VIII. THE STRUGGLE OF THE EDUCATED 62

 IX. WOMAN'S EMPIRE OVER MAN 68

 X. YOUTH AND CRIME 77

 XI. MENTAL BREAKDOWN 86

 XII. EVIDENCE OF HISTORY 92

XIII. THE APOTHEOSIS OF CRAM 109

 XIV. THE GREAT FALLACY 118

 XV. REAL EDUCATION 126

 XVI. THE OPEN DOOR TO INTELLIGENCE 135

THE CURSE OF EDUCATION

CHAPTER I

FLOURISHING MEDIOCRITY

Humanity is rapidly becoming less the outcome of a natural process ofdevelopment, and more and more the product of an organized educationalplan. The average educated man possesses no real individuality. He issimply a manufactured article bearing the stamp of the maker. 

Year by year this fact is becoming more emphasized. During the pastcentury almost every civilized country applied itself feverishly to theinvention of a national plan of education, with the result that themajority of mankind are compelled to swallow a uniform prescription ofknowledge made up for them by the State. Now there is a great outcrythat England is being left behind in this educational race. Othernations have got more exact systems. Where the British child is onlystuffed with six pounds of facts, the German and French schools contriveto cram seven pounds into their pupils. Consequently, Germany and Franceare getting ahead of us, and unless we wish to be beaten in theinternational race, it is asserted that we must bring our owneducational system up to the Continental standard. 

Before going more deeply into this vital question, it is just as well toconsider what these education systems have really done for mankind. There is a proverb, as excellent as it is ancient, which says that theproof of the pudding is in the eating. No doubt learned theoreticaltreatises upon the scope and aim of educational methods are capitalthings in their way, but they tell us nothing of the effects of thissystematic teaching and cramming upon the world at large. If we wish toascertain them, we must turn to life itself, and judge by results. 

To begin with, the dearth of great men is so remarkable that it scarcelyneeds comment. People are constantly expressing the fear that the age ofintellectual giants has passed away altogether. This is particularlyobvious in political life. Since the days of Gladstone and Disraeli, Parliamentary debate has sunk to the most hopeless level of mediocrity. The traditions of men such as Pitt, Fox, Palmerston, Peel, and others, sound at the present day almost like ancient mythology. Yet the supposedbenefits of education are not only now free to all, but have beencompulsorily conferred upon most nations. Nevertheless, even Prussianpedagogues have never succeeded in producing another Bismarck; andFrance has ground away at her educational mill for generations with theresult that the supply of Napoleons has distinctly diminished. 

Look at the methods by which our public service is recruited. 

Who are the men to whom the administration of all important departmentsof Government is entrusted, and how are they selected?

They are simply individuals who have succeeded in obtaining most marksin public competitive examinations--that is to say, men whose brainshave been more effectually stuffed with facts and mechanical knowledgethan were the brains of their unsuccessful competitors. 

There is no question, when a candidate presents himself for a post inthe Diplomatic Service or in one of the Government offices, whether hepossesses tact, or administrative ability, or knowledge of the world. All that is demanded of him is that his mind should be crammed with somany pounds avoirdupois of Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, geography, etc. , acquired in such a way that he will forget, within acouple of years, every fact that has been pestled into him. For everyvacancy in the various departments of the Administration there aredozens, or even scores, of applicants; and the candidate selected forthe post is the one whose mind has been most successfully subjected tothis process of over-cramming, and consequently most effectually ruinedfor all the practical purposes of life. 

Now, to whatever cause it may be ascribed, there can be no doubt thatthe general level throughout the various branches of the public serviceis one of mediocrity. We are not surrounded, faithful and devoted as ourpublic servants are universally admitted to be, by administrativegeniuses. Facts point altogether the other way. Great nationalcatastrophes, like the blunders and miscalculations that havecharacterized the conduct of the war in South Africa, have alwaysresulted in making the most uncomfortable revelations concerning theinefficiency of more than one important department of Government. 

The War Office has long since become a public scandal, and if the truthwere known about the inner domesticity of more than one greatAdministrative office, the susceptibilities of the nation would be stillfurther shocked and outraged. Fortunately, however--or it may beunfortunately--Government linen is usually washed at home; and it isonly in times of great emergency that the truth leaks out, to thegeneral consternation. 

When this does happen there is a great outcry about the inefficiency ofthis or that branch of the public service. The Government in power waitto see if the agitation dies a natural death; and if it is successfullykept up, a sort of pretence at reform takes place. There is are-shuffle. Fresh names are given to old abuses; incompetent officialsexchange posts; and a new building is erected at the public expense. Then all goes on as heretofore. 

Nobody seems to think of making an inquiry into the constitution of thepublic service itself. But until this is done no real reform of anypermanent value can possibly be effected. It is not the nomenclature ofappointments, the subdivision of departmental work, and such matters ofdetail, that stand in need of the reformer. The titles and duties of theseveral officials are of secondary importance. It is not in them thatthe evils of bad administration are to be located. 

The fault lies with the officials themselves, who are the victims of thestupid system which has placed them in the position they occupy. Theeducation they have received has, in the first case, unfitted them forthe performance of any but mechanical and routine work; and the strainof a competitive examination, involving the most unintellectual andbrain-paralyzing process of cram, has probably destroyed the faculty ofinitiative, which should be, but is not, a distinguishing characteristicof the administrative official. 

Herein lies the secret of all opposition to progress. It is thepermanent official who needs reforming. He is the embodiment of routineand conservatism, because he is the embodiment of mediocrity. Progressmeans ideas, and mediocrity does not deal in them. It has beenfurnished, instead, by a systematic course of instruction, with asufficient equipment of the ideas of other people to last its lifetime. Whilst we fill our public service with specially prepared mediocrity, the administrative departments will remain reactionary. And as long aseducation is synonymous with cramming on an organized plan, it willcontinue to produce mediocrity. 

The army affords at the present moment an admirable object-lesson inthis connection. The results of cramming young men as a preparation fora profession which demands, more than any other, individual initiativeand independence, have become painfully apparent upon the field ofbattle. One of our foremost generals has come home from the campaigndeclaring the necessity of both officers and men being trained to thinkand act for themselves. That is one, perhaps the chief, of the greatlessons which this war has taught us. But here, again, no useful reformcan be achieved by alterations in the drill-book, through lectures byexperienced generals, or by the issue of army orders. It is our entiresystem of education which is again at fault. 

Boys are stuffed with facts before they go to Sandhurst, and when theyget there they are crammed in special subjects. The whole object of theprocess is to enable candidates to pass examinations, and not to producegood officers. The effect here is the same as elsewhere. A quantity ofuseless and some useful knowledge is drilled into the pupil in such amanner that the mind retains nothing that has been put into it. And, tomake matters worse, all this is done at the expense of retarding theproper development of faculties which would be of incalculable value tothe soldier. 

Most of the blunders of the war are, in fact, attributable to want ofcommon sense, and common sense consists in the capacity of an individualto think for himself and to exercise his judgment. Educational methodswhich, in the majority of cases, appear to destroy this facultyaltogether are clearly pernicious. Common sense is the most valuablegift with which man can be endowed. It is the very essence of genius, for it consists in the application of intelligence to every detail, andthe highest order of intellect can accomplish no more than that. Yet itis the rarest of all attributes, for the very reason that it isdeliberately destroyed by conventional methods of bringing up childrenand instructing youth. Therefore, before we can hope to obtain a supplyof self-reliant officers and men, we must see some radical change in thevery principles upon which modern methods of education are founded. 

Wherever we go we find this curse of mediocrity. In the professions, atthe Bar, in the pulpit, amongst physicians, it is apparent everywhere. There are clever men, of course; but the very fact that their namesspring at once prominently to mind is in itself a proof that ability isexceptional. 

Some people, of course, accepting the world as they find it, may thinkit very unreasonable to expect able men to be plentiful in all walks oflife. That is, to my mind, the chief pathos of the situation. It hascome to be accepted that the world must be filled with a great majorityof very commonplace people, even amongst the educated classes. 

No doubt it is filled at the present moment with a very vastpreponderance of conventional minds manufactured to meet the supposedrequirements of our complicated civilization. But I deny that this needbe the case. On the contrary, we are surrounded on all sides by ability, by great possibilities of individual development, even by genius. 

And our education systems are busily engaged in the work of destroyingthis precious material, substituting facts for ideas, forcing the mindaway from its natural bent, and manufacturing a machine instead of aman. 

CHAPTER II

SQUARE PEGS IN ROUND HOLES

Perhaps the worst evil from which the world suffers in an educationalsense is the misplaced individual. Nothing is more tragic, and yetnothing is more common, than to see men occupying positions for whichthey are unfitted by nature and therefore by inclination; whilst it isobvious that, had the circumstances of their early training beendifferent, they might have followed with success and pleasure a naturalbent of mind tending in a wholly opposite direction. 

This miscarriage of vocation is one of the greatest causes of individualmisery in this world that exists; but its pernicious effects go farbeyond mere personal unhappiness: they exercise the most banefulinfluence upon society at large, upon the progress of nations, and uponthe development of the human race. One of the advantages of the divisionof labour which is most emphasized by political economists is that itoffers a fair field for personal adaptation. People select theparticular employment for which they are most fitted, and in this wayeverybody in the community is engaged in doing the best and most usefulwork of which he is capable. 

It is a fine theory. Perhaps in olden times, before the introduction ofeducation systems, it may have worked well in regard to most trades andindustries. A man had then at least some opportunity of developing anatural bent. He was not taken by the State almost from infancy, crammedwith useless knowledge, and totally unfitted for any employment withinhis reach. The object was not to educate him above his station and thenmake a clerk of him, or drive him into the lower branches of the CivilService. A bright youth was apprenticed by his father to some trade forwhich he may have shown some predisposition. 

Of course, mistakes were often made through the stupidity of parents orfrom some other cause. There are many such examples to be met with inthe biographies of men who attained eminence in wholly differentcallings from those into which they were forced in their youth. 

Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and who first conceived thegenerally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought upby his father to be a musician. In spite of his predilection forastronomy, he continued to earn his bread by playing the oboe, until hewas promoted from being a performer in the Pump Room at Bath to theposition of Astronomer Royal. 

Faraday was apprenticed by his father to a bookbinder, and he remainedin this distasteful employment until he was twenty-two. It was quite byaccident that somebody more intelligent than Michael Faraday's pastorsand masters discovered that the youth had a great natural love ofstudying science, and sent him to hear a course of lectures deliveredby Sir Humphry Davy. This led happily to the young bookbinder making theacquaintance of the lecturer, and eventually obtaining a position asassistant in the Royal Institution. 

Linnæus, the great naturalist, had a very narrow escape from missing hisproper vocation. He was sent to a grammar-school, but exhibited no tastefor books; therefore his father decided to apprentice him to ashoemaker. Fortunately, however, a discriminating physician had observedthe boy's love of natural history, and took him into his own house toteach him botany and physiology. 

Instances of the kind might be multiplied. Milton himself began life asa schoolmaster, and the father of Turner, one of the greatest landscapepainters who ever lived, did his best to turn his brilliant son into abarber. The point, however, is obvious enough without the need offurther illustration. A few examples have been adduced of great geniuseswho have contrived, by the accident of circumstances or through sheerforce of character, to escape from an environment which was forced uponthem against their natural inclination. But it is not everybody who isgifted with such commanding talent and so much obstinacy andperseverance as to be able to overcome the artificial obstacles placedin the way of his individual tendencies; and now we have, what happilydid not exist in the day of Herschel, Faraday, Turner, Linnæus andothers--a compulsory education system to strangle originality andnatural development at the earliest possible stage. 

Most people would probably find it far easier to quote instances offhandof friends who had missed their proper vocation in life than of thosewho were placed exactly in the position best suited to their taste andcapacity. The failures in life are so obviously in excess of those whomay be said to have succeeded that specific illustrations of the factare hardly necessary. 

One has only to exert ordinary powers of observation to perceive thatthe world is not at all well ordered in this respect. It has alreadybeen pointed out that the public service and the professions are almostentirely filled with what must be called mediocrity; and one of the mostpotent causes of this unhappy state of affairs is the exquisiteinfallibility with which a blind system is constantly forcing squarepegs into round holes. 

Every profession and calling teems with examples. There are men, intended by nature to be artists and musicians, leading a wretched andunnatural existence in many a merchant's office because their bestfaculties were undeveloped during the early years of schooling. Mathematicians, philosophers, even poets, are tied to trade or to someequally unsuitable occupation. Scores of so-called literary men ought tobe calculating percentages or selling dry goods; and no doubt there areshop-assistants and stock-jobbers who might, if led into the path ofculture, have become creditable authors and journalists. 

This is neither joke nor satire. It is sober earnest, as many observantreaders will readily testify. The loss is not only to the individual, itis to society at large, and to the whole world. No one will deny thefact; but to how many will it occur that such anomalies cannot be theoutcome of natural development and progress, but that they must bedirectly or indirectly attributable to some artificial cause?

It is the great difficulty against which all human advancement has tocontend, that people can rarely be brought to question principles whichhave become a part and parcel of their everyday existence. There areplenty of individuals who are ready to tinker with existinginstitutions, and who erroneously dignify that process by the name ofreform. But nothing is more despairing than the effort to convinceconventionally brought up people that some cherished convention, withwhich the world has put up for an indefinite period, is founded uponfallacy, and ought to be cast out root and branch. 

Even in the United States, where far greater efforts are made toencourage individuality in the schools and colleges than is the casewith the countries of the Old World, people are not much betterdistributed amongst the various professions and occupations than theyare here. I have made inquiries amongst Americans of wide experience andobservation, and have learnt that nothing is more common in the Statesthan to find individuals brought up to exercise functions for which theyare wholly unfitted by natural capacity and inclination. 

An instance was given me, by an American friend, of a boy who spent allhis leisure in constructing clever little mechanical contrivances, inrunning miniature locomotives, and in setting up electric appliances ofone kind and another. One day the youth's father came to him and said:'I don't know what to make of B----. Could you find him a place in awholesale merchant's office?' When it was pointed out to the parent thathis son showed unmistakable mechanical genius, he obstinately insistedon getting the boy a situation for which he was quite unsuited, andwhich was highly distasteful to him. 

I quote this instance to show that the parent is often as bad aneducator as the school itself. In this case the school would have takenas little notice of the boy's natural bent as his father. It would, inall probability, never have discovered it at all. But it has become somuch an accepted axiom that children are to be manufactured intoanything that happens to suit the taste or convenience of theirguardians, that it probably never occurred to the parent in questionthat he was committing a cruel and foolish act in forcing his son out ofthe path into which the boy's natural instinct was guiding him. Theyouth who might have pursued a happy and prosperous career as amechanical engineer is now a disappointed man, struggling on, withlittle hope of success, in an occupation which does not interest him, and for which he does not possess the slightest adaptability. 

Every nation is equally at fault in this respect. In Germany, forinstance, the child is quite as much a pawn at the disposal of itsparent and the school system as it is elsewhere. I spent a number ofyears in the country, and enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with manyGerman families. Nothing has left upon my mind a deeper impression thanthe tragedy I witnessed of a boy being gradually and systematicallyweaned from the pursuit to which he was passionately devoted, and forcedinto a career utterly unsympathetic and distasteful to his peculiartemperament. 

The boy was simply, from head to foot, a musician. He spent every momenthe could steal from his school studies in playing through the difficultscores of Wagner's music dramas. His taste, his musical memory, theenormous natural ability which enabled him to surmount all technicaldifficulties with ease, were apparent to everybody who knew him. Yet hisparents determined from the first that he should study law, and enterthe legal profession. 

I have never seen anything more painful than the deliberatediscouragement, during a period extending over several years, of theboy's natural bent, and the application of absolute compulsion to forcehim, against every natural instinct, to prepare himself for a professionrepugnant to his inclinations, and for which he was not in the smallestdegree adapted. 

Out of this promising musical material the _Stadt Gymnasium_manufactured the usual piece of intellectual mediocrity. He was stuffedwith the regulation measure of facts, scraped through the customaryexamination, and was despatched, much against his will, to theuniversities of Jena and Zürich. When I last saw him he was a ploddinglawyer of the conventional type, doing his duties in a listless manner, with very indifferent success, and quite broken down in spirit. The_Gymnasium_, the university, and the parental obstinacy had done theirwork very effectually. They had succeeded in reducing him to the levelof a machine, and in all probability Germany lost an excellent musicianwho might have given pleasure to thousands of others, besides enjoyingan honourable career of useful and congenial work. 

We have seen that between the stupidity of the parent and theinflexibility of the school system children have little chance ofdeveloping their natural propensities. The results surround useverywhere, and there is no getting away from them. All that the schoolprofesses to do is to stuff the pupil with a certain quantity of factsaccording to a fixed curriculum. It does not pretend to exercise anyother function. There is no effort to differentiate between individuals, or to discover the natural bent of each particular child. Instructionconsists in cramming and prescribing by a more or less perniciousmethod--according to the lights of the particular school authorities insome cases, and in others according to a hard and fast code enforced bythe State--a certain quantity of facts into all pupils withoutdistinction. 

Parents, on the other hand, think they have fulfilled their duty simplyby sending their children to school. The only thing considered necessaryto equip a child for the battle of life is to get him an education, andnobody bothers his head about the principles or the effects of theprocess. The parent leaves everything to the school, regardless of thefact that schools do not pretend to concern themselves about thenatural tendencies of their pupils. He is satisfied if his son isreceiving the same education as his neighbour's, and is quite contentedto leave the question of his future career to be an after-consideration. 

The result upon the world in general of this double neglect on the partof parents and school systems is disastrous in the extreme. In the firstplace, it makes the life of the misplaced individual a burden to himselfand to those by whom he is surrounded. Natural tendencies cannot bewholly suppressed, even by education systems; and the victim's existenceis not rendered more bearable by the reflection that, but forcircumstances which he is rarely able to analyze, he might havesucceeded in some other and more agreeable occupation had he onlyreceived the necessary encouragement in his youth. 

Secondly, there is the fact that the progress of civilization isenormously retarded by its being rarely in the hands of the most fit. The most fit are not, and cannot be, produced under prevailingconditions. The whole machinery of education is directed towards theproduction of a dead level of mediocrity. In many cases--such as, forexample, in Prussia--this is done by design, and not by accident. Instruction is imparted in such a manner that no regard is paid toindividual propensities. All are subjected, more or less, to the sameprocess. They are fitted for nothing in particular, and no trouble istaken to ascertain the direction in which an individual mind should bedeveloped. The consequence is that, from one end of the civilized worldto the other, resounds the cry, 'What shall we do with our boys?'

And, lastly, it scarcely requires pointing out that the enormous sums ofmoney spent by Governments, by municipalities, and by private personsupon education, in order to produce this lamentable state of affairs, isso much waste and extravagance. Not only does it bring in no practicalreturn, but it works out in a precisely opposite direction. Schools andcolleges that only serve to produce anomalous and unnatural socialconditions, that stifle genius and talent, and that cause widespreadmisery among the unsuitably educated, must be reckoned as a nationalloss. 

People deplore the heavy sums spent on armaments and on the maintenanceof enormous fleets and armies; but it may be doubted if this expenditureis as costly in the end as that which goes to support a systematicmanufacture of the unfit, and to assist in the distribution ofindividuals to stations in the social scheme for which they are whollyunsuited. 

CHAPTER III

THE DESTRUCTION OF GENIUS

Most people labour under the delusion that genius only makes itsappearance twice or thrice during a generation. It is certainly the factthat a Napoleon, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven, is only born once in acentury; and colossal intellects such as these are rightly regarded asunnatural phenomena. But genius of a less high order is far more commonthan is generally supposed. People are simply blind to it. Although itsurrounds them on all sides, they fail to recognise it. And nearlyeverybody is busily engaged in helping to destroy it, with a perversitythat is as unconscious as it is criminal. 

Those who have had the opportunity of observing the mental developmentof an intelligent child that has not been subjected to the ordinaryprocesses of teaching, must have been struck with the originality of itsmind. If children are left to themselves, they will breed ideas at anastonishing rate. Give an imaginative child of five or six some simpleobject, such as a button or a piece of tape, and it will weave round ita web of romance that would put many a poet or author to shame. 

Naturally brought up children will chatter fascinating nonsense to thevery motes that float in a sunbeam; they will spin an Odyssey out of themost trivial incident that has chanced to impress them. Everycommonplace object will be invested by them with mysterious andfantastic attributes. When left to observe facts for themselves, theywill develop powers of reasoning and logic which no amount of crammingand caning would ever succeed in driving into them. 

There are probably few parents who have not been startled, at someperiod or another, by hearing from the lips of a child an originalreflection that exhibited an unexpected degree of mental development. Did it ever occur to them that some intellectual process must have beengoing on in the child's mind to produce such powers of observation orthought? There is a fallacious notion, founded upon pure want ofobservation, that human beings are unable to form ideas or to think forthemselves until they have been put through an elaborate course ofmental gymnastics. A great deal of the process misnamed education isdirected towards this end, with the result that in nine cases out of tenthe brain is simply paralyzed and rendered incapable of performing itsproper functions. 

The fact is, that people, whether young or old, cannot be forced tothink. It is a habit that must come of its own accord, and that can onlybe stimulated by the most delicately-applied influences. Observant andreflective parents, who have not chosen to leave the entire developmentand upbringing of their children in the hands of nurses, will havenoticed that there is a natural tendency on the part of a child, if notinterfered with, to think and to expand its faculty of imagination. Thistendency is not shared to an equal extent by all children; there are, ofcourse, dissimilarities caused by varying degrees of intelligence. Butit is there, in however rudimentary and undeveloped a stage; and themore backward it appears to be, the more care should be taken not todestroy it or to check its natural growth. 

Now, the whole machinery of education is brought to bear, from themoment the child is of an age to receive any instruction, to stranglethe development of the thinking and imaginative faculties. That processwill be described presently. What I wish to point out first is that, long before the school or the governess commences this operation, theparents of the child, or those to whom they have delegated the duty oftaking charge of it during the tenderest and most momentous years of itsexistence, are generally engaged in doing everything they can to bringabout the same pernicious result. 

Of course the evil is committed in sheer ignorance. But it has been bredfor so many generations that individual judgment and common sense mustevery day be becoming more rare. Therefore the evil spreads, and peopleblame the introduction of railways and other mechanical improvements forthe diminishing supply of artistic and creative genius, whilst they arein reality themselves busily employed in stifling its development. 

There are two ways in which this unhappy result is brought about. Inthe first place, there is the invariable custom of giving young childrentoys which, far from stimulating the imagination, only serve to impressupon their minds the commonplace facts of everyday life. It is really, only in a different form, a part of the process by which, later on, theeducation system drives out ideas and crams in facts. 

To take a concrete instance, a doll is the plaything usually given tolittle girls. At first sight nothing can appear more charming orinstructive than the gift to a little girl, who will one day be a wifeand a mother, of the miniature representation of a baby. There will be abath provided, in which she may learn to wash it. Everything will becomplete--soap, sponge, loofah, puff-box, and powder. The present willbe accompanied by a _layette_, so that the child may learn to dress herinfant and to change its clothes. Hair-brushes will teach her to keepthe doll's hair neat; and probably a dozen other toilet requisites, ofwhich the masculine mind has no notion or is expected to affectignorance, will be found ready at hand to inculcate the lesson ofnursery routine. 

In this ingenious way the materialistic side of life is deliberatelyforced upon the attention of the child. Everything is providentlysupplied that would be calculated to occupy her attention withcommonplace facts instead of with fancies. The child is not encouragedto make a living creature of this inanimate dummy, to tell it stories, or to exercise her imagination in some other way. She is provided with around of prosaic and extremely material duties, and her mind iscarefully kept within these bounds by details of soap andfeeding-bottles, which do not offer scope for any flight of imagination. 

It would be far better to place a bundle of rags in the arms of a littlegirl, and to tell her to imagine it to be a baby. She would, if left toherself, with no other resource than her own invention, soon learn toexercise her dormant powers of imagination and originality. 

With the same lack of forethought boys are surrounded from earliestinfancy with objects designed to keep their minds within the narrowlimits of fact. Their playthings are ships, fire-engines, miniaturerailways, water-pumps, and such-like. The imagination is allowed aslittle play as possible. Interest is carefully concentrated upon themechanical details of spars, sails, rigging, watertight compartments, wheels, rods, cranks, levers, and the thousand-and-one items which go tomake up a mechanical contrivance. Great care is taken in constructingtoy models to reproduce at least the chief points of the original, inorder to give them a supposititious educational value. The parents thenfondly imagine that, in stocking the nursery with these abominations, they are largely assisting in the development of the boy's mind. 

To people who do not understand children it is difficult to convey anyadequate idea of the fatal result produced upon the dawning intellect bythis introduction of materialism into the nursery. The imaginative willat once say that the contention is too far fetched. Certainly thepernicious effects of such toys as have been described are not easilydiscernible; therein lies the insidiousness of this retarding process. But to those who have watched, as I have done, the natural developmentof an intelligent child's powers of reflection and imagination--uncheckedby dolls or toy locomotives--there will be neither absurdity norexaggeration in what I have written. 

Toys in themselves are harmless and unobjectionable things, though everyobservant person who has had much to do with young children will readilyconcede how superfluous they are as a means of amusement. The averagechild will treasure up a button or a shell long after it has destroyed, or maybe forgotten the existence of, the most elaborate and expensivetoy. That is a commonplace of the nursery. But it does not seem toconvey either meaning or moral to the majority of parents. 

The second way in which the thinking and imaginative faculties areimpeded in their development is by the discouragement of, or by theinjudicious answers given to, the questions asked by children. At acertain age the latter become inquisitive about everything in theuniverse. They ply their elders with perpetual questioning; and it mustbe acknowledged that many of their interrogations are highlyinconvenient and unanswerable. 

It is very difficult for the average person to reply offhand toelementary questions such as, Why does the sun shine? What makes thewind blow? How does a seed grow into a tree? and so forth. Few peoplehave the patience to answer the numerous inquiries of an intelligentchild; and sooner than expose their ignorance, parents will generallyquench this thirst for knowledge at the outset by a flat prohibition. The selfish desire for peace prompts them to refuse the solicitedinformation altogether, or, worse still, to return answers calculated tokill imaginative ideas or to impress the child's mind with a bare andprosaic materialism. 

They do not stop to think of the immense harm that may be done to thechild by throwing cold water upon its first attempts at research. Children, it must be remembered, do not possess the perseverance anddetermination which often come to the rescue of original genius at alater period. However active their minds may be, they are also timid, and shrink back quickly under the influence of unsympathetic treatment. 

The fact should be patent to everybody that children strive constantlyto use the brains with which Nature has endowed them. Being naturallyimaginative and original, these faculties only need ordinaryencouragement to develop and flourish. Yet the entire method of bringingup children, from the cradle to the school bench, is directed towardsstifling all originality and substituting for it a stock of commonplaceideas and conventional knowledge. 

The process is begun at home. It takes its root in conventionality, thecurse of all individuality and progress. Parents, brought up to be theslaves of custom, carry on the imbecile traditions that have been handeddown to them from former generations, without stopping to considerwhether they are rational or foolish. It is good enough for the majorityof people that the imbecile things they do were done by theirforefathers before them; and no tradition is more rigidly followed thanthat which prescribes the manner of bringing up children. 

It would have been thought that those who had themselves suffered fromthe effects of bad methods would be careful not to repeat the mistakeswith their own children. But that is the worst aspect of the evil. Itschief operation consists in hedging round the intelligence withconventionalities to such an extent as to exclude vigorous andindependent thought. The most intelligent people often find the utmostdifficulty in attempting to shake off the prejudices inculcated duringthe early years of life. 

Many, before accomplishing this end, have had to pass through a longperiod of suffering and adversity. But the average mind is generally ahopeless case. There must be strong inward impulses, or the necessarymeasure of initiative and courage will not be forthcoming. Everybody whochooses to think for himself knows that it is an operation which doesnot usually entail pleasant consequences. 

So much for the part played by the parent. The school system stands on adifferent plane altogether, and must be considered by itself. Forparents there is, as has been pointed out, a certain amount of excuse. For the school system there is none. 

CHAPTER IV

HUMAN FACTORIES

Distinction must be made, of course, in discussing the effects ofteaching methods upon children, between the various kinds of schools, and between public instruction and private tuition. It would not be fairto lump them all together, for the evils they produce are by no meansdistributed by them in equal proportion. One must differentiate. Fundamentally, all education is proceeding on a false principle. In thisrespect it is necessary to blame education systems, institutions, schoolteachers, tutors, governesses, and parents alike; for all are engaged inkeeping up an educational delusion that is working great harm to theworld in general. 

But when we come to consider the amount of evil produced by each ofthese factors, it will be seen at once that there is a good deal tochoose between them. The private tutor, under present methods ofteaching, is in a far better position to encourage the individualdevelopment of a child than is the schoolmaster who has the care of aclass. Children can contend, to a certain extent, against the tyranny ofthe tutor; they can force their own wishes upon his attention shouldthey possess the necessary strength of character. But the strongestmust succumb to the school system. Here there is no latitude toparticular pupils, no concession made to idiosyncrasies of mind orcharacter. The system must not be relaxed, and in consequence everybodyhas to be subjected to precisely the same course of study. 

Children begin to receive instruction at a very early age. The usualplan is to take a child the moment it is able to string enough wordstogether to form ideas, and to subject it to a methodical process ofteaching. The custom of beginning what is called a child's education ata tender age is verified by the fact that the State now compels, orrather pretends to compel, parents to send their children to school atthe age of five, whilst large numbers of the children of the poor arevoluntarily sent to school at three years of age, or even younger. Itwill be observed, therefore, that the State, as far as the masses of thepeople are concerned, takes the child in hand at the most impressionableperiod of its existence. 

The instruction of infants is not a very difficult task, if all that isaimed at is to teach them certain elementary subjects. At five years ofage children will generally learn with avidity. Their minds are justsufficiently formed to be receptive, and as all knowledge is a blank tothem they are ready to learn anything, within the limits of theircomprehension, that the teacher may choose to put before them. Thiswould place upon the latter a very heavy responsibility if the matterwere left entirely to his discretion. But this is by no means the case;the course of instruction is fixed beforehand by the school managers. It may differ slightly in schools of varying types; but in the main itis identical in all the essentials. 

To what extent this variation may occur is, however, entirely beside thepoint. What should be noted in this connection is that each school, andfor the matter of that every private teacher, has a fixed plan ofinstruction which is more or less rigidly enforced. In the case of theschool, as has already been stated, no attention whatever is paid toindividual requirements. All are subjected to exactly the same process, for better or for worse. The child, therefore, as soon as it begins toattend school is compelled to learn certain things. 

The stock subjects are reading, writing, and arithmetic. They arenecessary accomplishments in all stations of life, and education withoutthem would be practically impossible. I do not disparage them in theleast. But there is a good deal to be said about the method of teachingthem, and the grave error of making them the principal objective ofelementary teaching. 

In this connection it is both interesting and instructive to note asignificant alteration in the Day School Code issued by the Board ofEducation. Until quite recently reading, writing, and arithmetic wereclassed under the Code as 'obligatory subjects' in infant schools. Article 15 of the Code now reads: 'The course of instruction in infantschools and classes should, as a rule, include--Suitable instruction, writing, and numbers, ' etc. Compare this with the same passage containedin former Codes. 'The subjects of instruction, ' it runs, 'for whichgrants may be made are the following: (a) OBLIGATORY SUBJECTS--Reading, writing, arithmetic; hereinafter called "the elementary subjects, "' etc. 

This amendment is a recognition of the fact that nothing can be moredetrimental to education than hard-and-fast rules. It is a protestagainst the general assumption that the curricula of schools must be ofa more or less uniform pattern, and puts an end to the absurdity of thecentral authority prescribing subjects to be taught in all elementaryschools, regardless of varying circumstances or the possibility ofimproved methods of teaching. 

Formerly the pernicious custom existed of examining the pupils, at theannual visit of the inspector, in stereotyped subjects. Matthew Arnold, reporting to the Education Department in 1867, observed: 'The mode ofteaching in the primary schools has certainly fallen off inintelligence, spirit, and inventiveness during the four or five yearswhich have elapsed since my last report. It could not well be otherwise. In a country where everyone is prone to rely too much on mechanicalprocesses, and too little on intelligence, a change in the EducationDepartment's regulations, which, by making two-thirds of the Governmentgrant depend upon a mechanical examination, inevitably gives amechanical turn to the school teaching, a mechanical turn to theinspection, is, and must be, trying to the intellectual life of theschool. In the inspection the mechanical examination of individualscholars in reading a short passage, writing a short passage, andworking two or three sums, cannot but take the lion's share of room andimportance, inasmuch as two-thirds of the Government grant depend uponit. .. . In the game of mechanical contrivances the teachers will in theend beat us; and as it is now found possible, by ingenious preparation, to get children through the Revised Code examination in reading, writing, and ciphering without their really knowing how to read, write, and cipher, so it will with practice no doubt be found possible to getthe three-fourths of the one-fifth of the children over six through theexamination in grammar, geography, and history without their reallyknowing any one of these three matters. '

Throughout the whole of his career as an inspector of elementary schoolsArnold had to reiterate this complaint again and again. He saw theincentive to cramming provided by the mode of distributing the grants, and he perceived the uselessness of the type of instruction engenderedby it. 

To-day all this has been changed. There is no such thing now as acompulsory annual examination in the three elementary subjects. It hasbeen finally abolished by the central authority. The duty of theinspectors is no longer to examine the children, but to investigate themethods of teaching, the qualifications of the teachers, and so forth. They are, it is true, empowered to examine children when they think itadvisable to do so; but they are directed to use this power sparingly, and in exceptional cases. 

The Department at Whitehall does not, unfortunately, exist for thepurpose of abolishing education systems. It has been called intoexistence for the sole purpose of distributing grants of public money inaid of elementary education and for the support of training-colleges forteachers. The exercise of this function has necessitated the framing ofa code of regulations to be observed by schools wishing to qualifythemselves for the grant. This code is revised each year, and hasundergone some remarkable changes of late. There is a distinct tendencyto make it as elastic as possible, with the obvious aim of encouragingvariety in the schools and in the methods of teaching. 

For an example of this tendency one need only compare the presentconditions attaching to the payment of the principal grant to infantschools with those that were in force a few years ago. The higher grantwas formerly given if the scholars were taught under a certificatedteacher, or under a teacher not less than eighteen years of age, approved by the inspector, and in a room properly constructed andfurnished for the instruction of infants. There was also a proviso thatthe infants should be taught 'suitably to their age. ' The new codecontains the following regulation:

'A principal grant of 17s. Or 16s. Is made to infant schools andclasses. The Board shall decide which, if either, of these grants shallbe paid after considering the report and recommendation of the inspectorupon each of the following four points: (a) The suitability of theinstruction to the circumstances of the children and the neighbourhood;(b) the thoroughness and intelligence with which the instruction isgiven; (c) the sufficiency and suitability of the staff; (d) thediscipline and organization. '

Working in this spirit, the Board of Education is able to mitigate someof the evils of a State system. But it cannot attack them at the rootswithout initiating a complete revolution. Out and out reforms of thiskind are only politically practicable when they are demanded by theirresistible voice of a strong public opinion. The public are misled asto the true issues by the intrigues of political parties. The conflictis narrowed down by party politicians, who have particular interests toserve, to a mere squabble about school boards, voluntary schools, localauthorities, and religious instruction. 

The consequence is that these side issues have come to be regarded asthe great education question of the day. It is not easy to stir up anydeep feeling about the comparative merits of the two classes ofelementary schools. Most people do not care a jot whether their childrengo to one or the other. It is not the masses who agitate aboutdenominational or secular teaching, but those limited classes who havesome direct interest in matters affecting religion. 

But who would not cast aside their lethargy, if they were made tounderstand that the question to be decided is not whether this or thattype of school should be supported, but whether the present system ofeducation should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether newplan? that behind all these petty controversies lie great issues, affecting the fundamental principles of education, which must be pushedto the front unless the degeneration of the race--an inevitable resultof the present educational method--is to be continued indefinitely?

Let people consider for a moment what is effected by the present system. The child, as we have seen, is taken by the State at an early age andsubjected, for the most part, to a careful drilling in the threeelementary subjects. There is no harm in knowing how to read and write;it is a very necessary accomplishment. A little arithmetic is alsoindispensable to the fulfilment of many of the commonest duties ofeveryday life. But, apart from the iniquity of cramming or forcing thebrain in a particular direction, it must be recollected that by imposingcertain subjects upon the undeveloped mind of a child, others arenecessarily excluded. The process therefore, when rigidly carried out, has very serious and far-reaching effects. It prevents the developmentof the mind in any direction but that which is being enforced. 

The harm done to the individual child by this means is incalculable. Onthe very threshold of the development of its faculties according tonatural instincts this development is violently arrested by anartificial operation. Nor does the evil end here. This interference withNature is carried on throughout the whole school career of the child, and the tradition flourishes in a modified form in the colleges anduniversities. It is, in fact, the vital principle of modern education. 

These schools in which the children of the people are taught are nothingmore than factories for turning out a uniformly-patterned article. Theydo not succeed in their object of conferring what is called aneducation upon their pupils, but they contrive to drive out all originalideas without implanting any useful knowledge in their place. Thegeneral result of this wholesale manufacture of dummies will be dealtwith directly. The intention here is merely to point out that thepractical working of the machinery of State education is to check thenatural development of the mind, and to unfit those whom it hasvictimized, not only for one, but for all occupations that demand manualdexterity or practical intelligence. 

CHAPTER V

THE GREATEST MISERY OF THE GREATEST NUMBER

It is now time to consider the effect of this system of compulsoryeducation upon the masses of the people. In the first two chapters anattempt was made to sketch some of the anomalies brought about by theeducational methods of our public schools and universities, and by thepernicious system of public competitive examinations. We will now turnour attention exclusively to the masses, and endeavour to see whatnational instruction does for them. 

The common people labour under the delusion that children who havepassed the standards of an elementary school are educated. They havebeen fitted, according to the popular belief, for a superior station inlife. The first ambition of parents is, therefore, for their child toobtain a post suitable to its supposed scholarship. 

Of course, the truth is, as we all know, that the product of the publicelementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting inintelligence. But these facts are only discovered by the victimsthemselves after years of bitter experience. Totally unfitted for anystation in life, many of them leave school full of self-confidence inthe belief that their superior education will secure them a goodopening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks, shop-assistants, and such-like. The result is, of course, an over-supplyof candidates for employment of this kind. In consequence, the girlshave to fall back upon domestic service; while the boys swell the ranksof unskilled labourers and unemployed loafers, or, worse still, betakethemselves to a life of dishonesty. 

Nowhere are the evil effects of this education system more strikinglyillustrated than in the country districts. The children of agriculturallabourers and small farmers are given instruction which will be of noearthly use to them in the occupation for which they are naturallyfitted. Instead of being prepared for country pursuits, they are givenan inferior type of all-round education which is equally uselesseverywhere. When they leave school they can read, write, add, subtract, divide, and multiply--after a fashion; they can mispronounce a fewFrench words, without being able to construct a single grammaticalsentence or understand a syllable that is said to them; they know enoughshorthand to write down simple words at one half the speed of ordinaryhandwriting; and they have acquired by rote a few dry facts from historyand geography, all of which will be totally obliterated from theirmemories within a space of twelve months. 

Shorthand is not a very promising preparation for the plough; and Frenchand mathematics are equally valueless accomplishments for the carting ofmanure. Dairymaids need neither history nor geography; they can even dowithout grammar. Consequently these unhappy school-children have beenrendered useless for all the practical purposes of the life they oughtto lead. The result is inevitable. There is a constant, never-ceasingexodus from the country into the towns. The rural school victims areincited to look for employment in an altogether different sphere fromthat for which nature originally intended them. 

Philosophers and politicians crack their heads over this mysteriousproblem of town immigration; but it is really a very simple affair. Weare pretending to educate the rural population by conferring upon themthe blessings of French and shorthand. The natural consequence of ourexcellent foresight in spreading this type of culture throughout theland is that there is a scarcely remarkable dearth of rural labour. Farmhands are not quite as plentiful as they used to be, and there is somedifficulty in getting damsels to churn butter. But, on the other hand, we are driving this mob of cultured yokels into the towns to crowd outlocal labour, to starve, and to fill the gaols and workhouses. 

London has at the present moment mainly to thank this process of'education' for the overcrowding problem which is becoming every daymore dangerous and pressing. It is useless to talk of pulling down slumsand building up model blocks, or of inventing fresh means ofcommunication to convey artisans to suburban dwellings, whilst the realcause of the evil is left untouched. Young men and women will continueto pour in from the country districts as long as a smattering ofgeography and arithmetic flatters them into the delusion that they areeducated, and that knowledge of the useless kind that has been drummedinto them is the high-road to fortune. 

It is, however, of little use to urge overcrowding as a ground forreforming educational methods. Few people are stirred by what to them isa purely abstract question. They see nothing to indicate its existence, and they know nothing of its evils. They seldom walk down the drearyavenues of bricks and mortar which contain the houses of the workingclasses; and if they do, they scarcely realize the fact that inside thehumble, dingy little dwellings whole families are crowded into singlerooms, share each other's beds, and are even thankful to find sleepingaccommodation upon the floor. 

But everybody appreciates and understands the servant question. Thattouches the comfort of the individual too nearly to be ignored. Therapid extinction of good servants, the insolence and inefficiency of theaverage domestic--these are facts of everyday life that will come hometo the suffering upper and middle classes. It is not because they areeducated that domestic servants have deteriorated, however, but onaccount of the profound state of ignorance in which their elementaryschooling has left them, leading them to the misapprehension that, fromthe standpoint of culture, they are as good as anybody and certainlyabove their menial position. 

Servants have as little need of French verbs and hieroglyphics as theploughboy or the dairymaid. There are many useful things that might belearnt by a person who wished to be trained for domestic service; butit is rare enough to find a cook that, amongst other items of a liberaleducation, has been given cooking lessons. In this respect education islike food: what is one man's meat is another man's poison. We do notwish to teach book-keeping to a washerwoman, or fancy ironing to aprivate secretary. Then, why stuff artisans, domestic servants, and farmlabourers with common denominators and the rules of syntax? It may behighly satisfactory to schoolteachers to succeed in making their classread aloud passages from Shakespeare and Milton without dropping morethan fifty per cent. Of the aspirates, or mispronouncing more than halfa dozen multi-syllabic words. But, unfortunately, there is no demand forparlourmaids who can quote 'Hamlet' amid the intervals of waiting attable, or for page-boys capable of spouting 'Paradise Lost' for theintellectual improvement of the servants' hall. 

Perhaps these instances show as well as anything the grotesque absurdityof collecting a number of children together, and attempting to teachthem things that they are not fitted to do, whilst no effort is made tocultivate in each individual the faculties that are really capable ofdevelopment. It is not in the least surprising that occupationsinvolving manual labour are for the most part filled with dissatisfiedand incompetent grumblers, who have been obligingly provided by a Statesystem of education. 

But if any further illustration be needed of the superficiality andharmfulness of the education forced upon the masses, we have itglaringly enough in the cheap literature of to-day. This stupendousmass of bosh could not have been produced unless there were a demand forit. Some people are never tired of abusing the millionaires who havemade their fortunes by providing the illiterate nonsense that forms theintellectual food of the vast majority of the public. It is whollyunjustifiable and illogical to blame them. They are not founders of newschools of thought in the field of literature; they are men of business, and do not pretend to be anything worse. As such, it is their vocationto find out what the public want, and to supply it to them. They have nointerest in making the million take their literature after it has beenpassed through a mincer. They chop up news and hash grammar at halfprice because the patrons of cheap papers and periodicals like theirliterature served up in that fashion. 

It is not the millionaire trader who is to blame for this state ofaffairs--he merely profits by its existence. The real culprit is theeducation system, which is the universal provider of the peculiar typeof culture that interests itself in the number of beef sandwiches thatwould be required to encircle the earth, or the rate at which thepopulation of the world would have to increase within a given time toenable its inhabitants, by mounting upon each other's heads, to reachthe moon. 

The enormous demand for this class of literature is the most pregnantevidence of the miserable effects of misapplied education and defectiveinstruction that could well be brought forward. But it is by no meansconfined to the uncultured masses who have been driven through thestandards of an elementary school. Thousands who have been put throughthe paces of what is called 'higher education' may be seen inrailway-carriages, at health resorts, or in the public libraries, deeplyimmersed in cheap-jack reading-matter that no self-respecting person ofmoderate intelligence would care even to be capable of specifying. 

This painful sight, which cannot have escaped the notice of the leastobservant, must surely lead the reflective man or woman to doubt thevalue of educational methods that have led to no better result. It ismonstrous to think of years spent in grinding out syntax rules, mathematics, Latin, French, geography, science, history, composition, and a dozen other branches of knowledge, in order to develop a taste forsensational rags, middle-class magazines, and inferior fiction. 

If the process were coupled with no worse consequences than this, nobodyof the least pretension to culture would wish to see it continuedanother day. But we have seen that the mischief goes far beyond meresuperficiality and bad taste. It carries its pernicious influence intoevery social problem by which modern statesmen are perplexed andharassed. From the housing question to the dearth of servants we feelits baneful effects. And as if it were not enough to have unfitted themasses of the people for the occupations best suited to the great bulkof them, to have instilled into the minds of working-men's children, bymeans of illiterate Shakespeare recitations and burlesque efforts tograsp geography, a contempt for the skilled labour of the artisan--thiseducation process has brought about a general deterioration in themanners of the lower classes that has long been a subject of generalcomplaint. 

Nobody wishes to see the common people in a constant attitude ofservility towards the classes above them. To thinking people nothing ismore painful than to observe such signs of a want of proper self-respectand independence on the part of freeborn men and women of whateverstanding in the social scale. But it is a significant fact thateducating the masses, in the sense in which that term seems to begenerally employed, has had the effect of eradicating from them allrespect for education. The educated man of real attainments is notlooked up to in the smallest degree by the average individual of thelower orders. It would be useless to quote, in support of a statementmade in the presence of unexceptional members of the working classes, the opinion of any recognised authority. For the matter of that, thereare many persons of a higher rank who are supposed to have enjoyed thebenefits of a more liberal type of education than that afforded by theelementary school, who are equally unimpressed by the value of expertknowledge. 

Whether it is that State-educated youths think that theiraccomplishments have made them the equals of everybody else, or whetherthe inanity of the system to which they have been subjected has giventhem a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine. Probably both misconceptions are evenly distributed amongst the victimsof the process. But the fact that this should be the case at all speakseloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding, on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming andsubject-compulsion with the proper development of the human faculties. 

CHAPTER VI

THE OUTPUT OF PRIGS

Having considered the evils produced by sham education, such as iscompulsorily given to the masses of the people, we can proceed toexamine into the average results effected by more genuine and efficientsystems of cramming and instruction. It is not in the least degreenecessary, for this purpose, to go into minute comparisons of thevarious types of secondary schools and colleges that have beenestablished in this country. In the actual method of teaching there islittle to choose between them. All have practically a common aim, namely, the preparation of boys and young men for examinations. 

Of course, all boys who go to school are not destined for professionsthat necessitate the passing of an examination, competitive orotherwise. But that does not disturb the school authorities a jot, orinvolve the slightest relaxation of the school system. The boys arecrammed just the same. Whoever wishes to pass through the mill must goin like a pig at one end and come out as a sausage at the other. Thereis no middle course except the private tutor; and he, owing to thedefects of his own early training and to the terrific Conservatismpeculiar to his profession, probably knows no better process than thefamiliar routine of cram and idea-suppression. 

The whole of school life is a scramble for marks. The school managersand masters are interested in getting the boys stuffed with facts, dates, figures, and inflections, because the prestige of the school--andconsequently its commercial success--is mainly dependent upon thecreditable placing of pupils in public examinations. Therefore the boysare encouraged, or rather compelled, to occupy themselves with what willbest conduce to secure this object, regardless of their own wishes orobvious inclinations. 

A boy might enter a grammar-school, or one of the great public schools, teeming to his finger-tips with an inborn thirst for scientificknowledge; he might spend all his spare moments making crude experimentswith an air-pump, or gazing at planets through a cheap astronomicaltelescope; he might fail dismally to grasp the rudiments of the Latingrammar, and be incapable of conjugating an irregular verb; but his nosewould be kept down to the grindstone of the school curriculum all thesame, and not the smallest attention paid to his obvious bent of mind. 

He had been placed there, the authorities would say, to receive ageneral education, and a general education he should have. If during theprocess all the scientific enthusiasm is ground out of him, that is notthe business of the schoolmaster. The boy, for the ordinary purposes ofinstruction, is an empty bottle into which a certain prescription is tobe poured. The prescription has been made up beforehand, and cannot bealtered. The school undertakes to administer a draught, but it refusesto bother about diagnosing each case. There is only one method oftreatment, and every patient who enters the establishment has to besubmitted to it. 

There have been, of course, enlightened pedagogues. The names of Arnoldand Thring will always stand out prominently in the history of Englishschool life, and it will be a bad day indeed for the youth in our publicschools when their traditional influence shall have been entirelyobliterated. They grafted upon the established methods of teaching aliberal and broad-minded effort to bring out what was best in each pupilby other influences. 'It is no wisdom, ' Dr. Arnold declared, 'to makeboys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty tocultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory andimagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, andto excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait withconfidence God's blessing on the result. '

Edward Thring wrote the following remarks in his diary:

'Education is not bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power ofobservation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hiddentruths and new creative genius. If the cursed rule-mongering andtechnical terms could be banished to limbo, something might be done. Three parts of teaching and learning in England is the hiding commonsense and disguising ignorance under phrases. '

No stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by theconstant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of auniversal system of education. It is not often that people strive to settheir house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to themfor the courageous endeavour. The mistake they made was in tinkeringwith a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the boldstep of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and soundprinciples. 

The energies of schoolmasters of the type of Thring and Arnold are, infact, concentrated mainly upon a constant struggle to prevent theordinary process of school instruction from producing prigs. Stupid boysare generally rendered more stupid by teaching, for reasons that will beanalyzed later on. But boys whose brains are amenable to academictraining are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarlyunfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish. 

It is the purely academic training that produces the prig. Football, cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; andhe receives equally little encouragement from his companions. Theimportant point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he isthe embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitousinfluences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is notacquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consistsof natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness orartifice. The same law of nature applies to the working of the brain. Stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind, and the result must necessarily be as artificial as the process. Themind becomes incapable of thinking individually and naturally; itbecomes pedantic and circumscribed, powerless to give simple expressionto simple thoughts; and the prig is made. 

It requires a great deal of kicking and hustling on the part of thevictim's schoolfellows to arrest this process, and the cure is generallyonly effected outwardly. Priggishness cannot be eradicated from thesystem in a moment, even by the most heroic measures. Its excisioninvolves a slow mental process, the converse of that which served tocall it into existence. The prig has to divest himself of the falsemental outlook imposed upon him by his education, and to begin all overagain. It is a hard lesson which can only be learnt in the school oflife, generally after humiliating experience and bitter suffering. Manynever succeed in learning it. There must be some material to work upon, and probably their individuality, weak at the commencement and thereforedoubly in need of tender treatment and fostering care, has beenhopelessly crushed out of existence by the conventional training ofschool and university. 

Under present conditions prigs can and do grow up everywhere. In someeducational institutions--notably in great public schools like Eton andHarrow--they are more discouraged than in others; but the crammingsystem has reached such proportions that all schools and colleges areaffected in a greater or less degree. They infect our public life, aswe have seen; largely recruit our public service; and are in evidence inthe pulpit, at the schoolmaster's desk, on public platforms, in thelecture-room of the university, and wherever the services of educatedmen are employed. 

The ideals of men like Arnold and Thring cannot be carried out as longas the examination system puts a premium upon cramming. 'I call that thebest theme, ' said Dr. Arnold, alluding to original composition, 'whichshows that the boy has read and thought for himself; that the next best, which shows that he has read several books, and digested what he hasread; and that the worst, which shows that he has followed but one book, and followed that without reflection. '

There is no time nowadays for a boy to read and think for himself. Besides the examinations inside his own school for which he has to beprepared, there are scholarships, university examinations, competitiveexaminations for the civil service, and a host of other possibilities ofthe kind, all of which necessitate the acquisition of an enormous numberof useless facts in every branch of learning. 

Too much attention is concentrated on the admirable physical product ofthe athletic side of our public school and university life. Thisadvantage of the English system of education has been dwelt upon to suchan extent, that people are apt to overlook the fact that, side by sidewith these fine specimens of healthy and for the most partunintellectual manhood, we are manufacturing a purely academic articleof the least inspired and most retrogressive description. 

If somebody, wishing to make you acquainted with a friend, says to you:'I want you to meet So-and-so; he was at Eton and Trinity Hall, and cameout tenth in the mathematical tripos, ' you know exactly the kind of manto whom you are going to be introduced. He will have a very propercontempt for made-up ties, and will refuse to fasten the bottom buttonof his waistcoat. You know beforehand the precise point of view that hewill take upon every conceivable topic, and the channels in which hisconversation is certain to flow. 

His entire mental horizon will be bounded by academic conventionalitiesin such a cast-iron fashion that it would, you are well aware, wasteyour time to attempt to extend its boundaries by the fraction of aninch. If you say anything yourself out of the beaten track, you knowthat you will be looked down upon as a fool or a faddist. The Eton stampwill be upon his dress and manners; the Cambridge brand seared intoevery crevice of his mind. There will be an individuality about him, butit will be an individuality shared in common with hundreds of young menof the same educational antecedents. 

That is the fault of the system. It takes away, or fails to evoke, thedistinguishing traits of each individual, and substitutes a kind ofmanufactured personality according to the particular institution, ortype of institution, in which the educational metamorphosis has takenplace. 'A mob of boys, ' said the man who raised Uppingham from completeobscurity to the front rank of public schools, 'cannot be educated. ' Itis, nevertheless, the process that is going on all over the civilizedworld. Reform does not lie alone in making instruction itself moreeffective. As long as the principle is retained of forcing certain factsand certain subjects into the mind of every boy, the country willcontinue to breed conventionality, to produce a uniform type of uselessmediocrity, and to make prigs. 

This is, unfortunately, exactly what the average educationist aims at. There is no disguise about the belief that conventional ideas, and themanufacture of what is called average ability, are the sheet-anchor ofthe State. And this type of fossilized Conservatism seems to grow inproportion to the number of schools and colleges in the country. 

Lower-middle-class young men, of no intellectual predisposition at all, are being turned out on all sides crammed with the narrowest type ofeducational tradition. Prigs are produced wholesale; the worst and mostodious branch of the family being the semi-illiterate prig--the man whogets drummed out of decent regimental messes, the man who wants to go onthe stage and declaim Shakespeare through his nose, the man whovulgarizes the public service by dropping his h's in the greatGovernment departments, and others too numerous to be specified. 

Everything is vulgar that pretends to be what it is not. Priggishness isan artificial mental condition that is far more common than peoplegenerally suspect. We are most of us prigs, if we only knew it. The manwho is unable to get rid of conventions and to think for himself is aprig. England is peopled with them. We meet them at every turn; we seethem driving the country to the dogs by sheer inability to grasp itsneeds;--and we send our sons to the schools and universities to bemanufactured after the same pattern. 

CHAPTER VII

BOY DEGENERATION

If some boys thrive, according to ordinary school standards, on thecramming system, what becomes of those to whose nature the process isentirely antagonistic?

The question is best answered by a glance at the schools themselves. Take one of the great public schools, and it will be found that much thesame conditions are prevalent in every class or form. There is a smallpercentage of boys at the top of each class who are considered the mostintelligent, and by whom most of the questions asked by the master areanswered. The remaining majority are divided into two sections, one ofwhich consists of what are termed boys of average ability, whilst theother contains the lazy element, the refractory boys, and the dullards. 

In the last chapter we chiefly discussed those individuals who may betaken as representing the average of the best results achieved by higherschools and universities. These form, however, only a fraction of thescholars who pass through such institutions. It still remains for us todiscover the rôle which is played by the other four-fifths inschool-life. According to scholastic methods of classification, thebulk of this residue are boys of medium intelligence who plod on withoutspecially distinguishing themselves, and contrive, by dint of industryand application, to blunder through the ordinary course of study withoutcoming to grief. 

It would be difficult to conjure up a more melancholy picture than thatpresented by these plodders, whose work is rendered trebly hard by beingperformed against the grain. They suffer more under the system than thedull, the lazy, and the fractious, who escape its worst evils, eitherbecause some active power of resistance comes to their rescue, orbecause the mind itself is so formed as to be incapable of receivinginstruction imparted on the cramming principle. 

But the average mediocrity amongst schoolboys are often inferior inability both to those who rank above and below them in schoolattainment. They neither profit by the teaching process, nor do theypossess those qualities that would enable them to resist itsconsequences. Thus they fall between two stools, being carried out oftheir natural sphere, and at the same time failing to attain such ameasure of artificial success as would afford them compensation for theinjury. 

Success in life is not an easy thing to generalize about. It is, however, important to note as far as possible the results brought aboutby school education. The boy who is trained to pass examinations has arespectable chance of getting into some branch of the public service;and, as we have seen, it is from amongst his ranks that the permanentofficials of the various departments of Government are recruited. Agreat number of those who distinguish themselves academically also passinto the teaching profession; though a considerable percentage ofgraduates, for reasons that will be discussed in due course, drift intothe ranks of the unemployed. 

The average schoolboy, who does his work mechanically and withoutenthusiasm, probably furnishes the greatest number of examples of themisplaced individual. His application to his studies is not natural; itis enforced by what is called school discipline. That is to say, theauthorities devise every conceivable form of punishment to make aconstant grind at obligatory subjects less disagreeable than theconsequences of idleness. These are the simple arts by means of whichunwilling boys are driven, like cattle, along the highway of what istermed, by an inaccurate application of the English language, knowledge. 

Anybody who has been coerced, and _poena_ed, and flogged through thecurriculum of a public school will acknowledge that the performance isnot an exhilarating one for the victim. It is preposterous to dignifythis nigger-driving by the term 'education. ' One might as well talk ofthe Chinese eagerly embracing Christianity, when, as a matter of fact, the missionaries have been forced upon them, like their foreign trade, at the point of the bayonet. 

The wonder is that anybody survives the process and retains his sanity. That many nervous temperaments and highly-gifted minds do not survive itis a point of so much importance that it will be dealt with later on ina separate chapter. What needs emphasizing here is that to make boys docertain things under compulsion is not developing their faculties, butis absolutely preventing their development; and secondly, that thisinfamous but universal proceeding is responsible for a positivedegeneration amongst those whom it is supposed to educate and improve. 

Dr. Arnold held that a low standard of schoolboy morality wasinevitable. 'With regard to reforms at Rugby, ' he wrote to a friend, 'give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make ita place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, ifpossible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hopeto make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, theyare not susceptible of Christian principles in their full developmentupon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in manyrespects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale inwhat I consider the boyhood of the human race. '

In a letter to another friend he spoke still more strongly on thesubject. 'Since I began this letter, ' he wrote, 'I have had some of thetroubles of school-keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil ofboy nature which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibilityof advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been asystem of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that veryaccount, and divers instances of boys joining in it out of purecowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, theywould rather have shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boyswho can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, andthe way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's"Shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and takepart with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what theScriptures say about the strait gate and the wide one--a view of humannature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decenciesand civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize. But here, in the nakedness of boy nature, one is quite able tounderstand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous ina whole city. '

This sweeping statement has been quoted because it comes with doubleforce from an undisputed authority such as the late Dr. Arnold. Everybody who has had experience of school-life knows that the averageboy spends a great deal of his time in cheating the masters, lying tothe authorities, and playing every sort and kind of mischievous ordisreputable prank that comes into his head. But it is better to havethis fact testified to by a man who has been in a position to observelarge numbers of boys over a very extended period. The accusation ofexaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained. 

Where, however, I venture to differ with Dr. Arnold is in the assumptionthat this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone. Undoubtedly this is the case in part. But there is a far more potentcause than natural instinct. It is to be found in the system ofeducation which not only fails to develop and encourage the boy'sindividual tastes or faculties, but actually forces upon him occupationsthat are, for the most part, absolutely foreign to his nature. This isthe real key to the vagaries of boyhood, and without such an explanationone must hold, with the great headmaster of Rugby, that boy nature isinherently bad. 

Boys, like other rational beings, must have their interests andamusements. If the legitimate and normal ones are prohibited, solacewill be sought in those which are illegitimate and abnormal. By failingto encourage the faculties that nature intended a particular boy todevelop, a vacuum is created. This vacuum must be filled up, and it isno earthly use trying to fill it up, against the grain, withmathematical problems or the irregular inflections of Latin verbs. Theaverage boy is as little capable of taking an absorbing interest inthese exhilarating features of the school curriculum as would be theaverage Hottentot. 

Every healthy boy stores up energy. It should be the first object of theschoolmaster--if such a being ought to have any existence at all--to seethat this energy is not allowed to waste. Natural forces of this kind donot, it must be recollected, evaporate. There they are, and the laws ofnature have decreed that they shall be constantly expended and renewed. If this or that boy's store of energy is not turned into one channel, itwill expend itself through another. If the schoolmaster were to takethe trouble to find out the particular bent of a pupil, and were then toproceed to foster and educate it, all the energy of the boy would beused in this useful and congenial work. But this can never be the caseuntil the present methods of instruction have been revolutionized. 

The discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is analtogether false and pernicious discipline. The only liberty which isvouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. No doubt it is anexcellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in whichthey make use of their leisure hours. There would be a great uproaramongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games theywished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste. It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capitalbowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets;or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promisingoarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him intothe playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob. '

But the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also tomental discipline. In the class-room there is practically no latitudegiven to the boy at all. In many schools, it is true, there is thechoice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents', not the boy's. The latter is always treated, in reference to hisschool-work, as a machine. There is simply the offer of a classicalstrait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and the boy is put intoone or the other according to the fancy of a third person. 

Strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. It hasbeen discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is theworst possible treatment for the brain. Whilst our lunatics, however, are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expertis busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboybrain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case ofmadmen. 

The school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is amental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effectupon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint actsperniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harmmust be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold andThring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have graspedthis simple fact. 

Schoolmasters are like mothers. They imagine that because a boy happensto have survived their system of teaching the latter must necessarily bethe one perfect method--just as the fond mother, whose infant has beenenabled by means of a phenomenal digestion to outlive a particular food, believes that it is the only food upon which babies can possibly bebrought up. 

When we come to survey impartially the effects of this system ofeducation upon boys in general, it must surely be brought home to usthat something is radically wrong somewhere. If a few manage to survivethe treatment and remain the ten righteous individuals, what is to besaid of the degeneration of the majority? It is surely absurd, with theanomalies and defects of the whole method of educating youth staring onein the face, to ascribe it to mere boy nature. 

The truth is that in boyhood the natural tendencies incline to pushtheir way boisterously to the front. They are constantly trying to findan egress. But the parent and the pedagogue, in their blindness, canonly see in this law of nature a wicked and perverse propensity thatmust be restrained at all hazards by a speedy application of theeducational strait-waistcoat. 

CHAPTER VIII

THE STRUGGLE OF THE EDUCATED

So far we have chiefly discussed the effect produced upon the individualby a compulsory course of study. It has been seen that he suffers in anumber of ways, through being subjected, from his earliest childhood, toa more or less inflexible method of training. All of these, however, have been directly attributable to his education. We may now consider, before pursuing the subject any further, certain disabilities that maybe traced to the same cause, but which are brought about indirectly. 

It is bad enough, as most of us will have perceived, to compel a boy tolearn certain things whether they are congenial to him or not. But it ispreposterous that the same stock of knowledge should be forced upon allalike. This is, however, exactly what is being done in every educationalestablishment throughout the Empire, with the most disastrousconsequences to the victims of the system. 

Let us turn once more to the map of life for an illustration. 

The average educated man begins to learn his alphabet at the age of fouror five. During the following years he receives the necessary groundingto prepare him for the lower forms of a public school. At eleven, orthereabouts, he commences his school career. Throughout the whole ofthis period he is put through a course of study identical in everyrespect with that pursued by his schoolfellows. Every boy in the schoolis crammed with the same facts, and in the same way. The sixth-form boyis exactly like the rest of his class, exactly like the sixth-form boyof ten years ago, and probably exactly like the sixth-form boy of tenyears hence. Not only does he possess precisely the same knowledge ashis companions, hold the same opinions, and enjoy the same mentalhorizon, but he has acquired uniform tastes and habits. In other words, the school has stamped upon him a common individuality shared by all itspupils. 

After he has left school the same process is carried on at theuniversity. Here he is crammed again with the same facts, the samerules, and the same ideas, borrowed from the same people, that are beingdinned into scores of other young men who are working for their degree. Having gone conscientiously through this routine, he takes his degreewith the rest. 

This aim being accomplished, his educational career is over. He hasgraduated; that is to say, he has obtained a certificate to the effectthat he has acquired a certain regulation stock of knowledge. 

What happens next?

The unhappy graduate suddenly makes the discovery that his universityqualification is not the ready passport to employment that he hadfondly imagined it to be. Unless he has a reasonable chance of a curacyand chooses to enter the Church, or can scrape together a few pupils tocoach, or has the means to go on reading for the Bar or cramming for thepublic examinations, his prospects of immediate starvation areexcessively favourable. 

It was remarked some years ago by a writer who had spent a great deal oftime in investigating life at common lodging-houses in the poorerdistricts of the Metropolis, that a startling number of university menseemed to drift into them. Yet these are the men who are supposed tohave qualified themselves most highly for the holding of good positions. In some way, therefore, it is clear that this academic training hasdisadvantages which serve to handicap its victims severely in practicallife. It cannot be mere accident that those who, according to alleducational tradition, are classed as the most fit for responsibleemployment necessitating good mental ability, actually labour underobvious disabilities in this connection. 

Nobody can urge that there is not enough work of a nature demanding highattainments to go round. Literature itself offers an enormous field forthe exhibition of special talent; and there are many other walks in lifewhere mental superiority is sadly needed, and which should thereforeprovide ample work and remuneration for those who show capability andresource. But in spite of all these openings some of our scholars aredriven to eke out a miserable pauper's existence in the commonlodging-house, or even in extreme cases to solicit parish relief. 

The explanation of this strange anomaly lies simply in the fact that theeducational mill not only manufactures dummies, but makes them allexactly alike. In the higher types of schools and colleges there isgenerally a choice of three patterns--the classical dummy, the modernlanguage dummy, and the scientific dummy. But each pattern is very likethe other, for all the practical purposes of this life; that is to say, they are all equally useless and equally unfitted for the task of movingforward with the times. 

The result of fitting out everybody with a common stock of knowledge isto institute a disastrous form of intellectual competition. Thousands ofyoung men are being equipped annually by our schools and universitiesfor the performance of precisely the same functions. Intelligencebrought wholesale to the market in this stereotyped form is in much thesame unhappy condition as unskilled labour. There is a supply far inexcess of the demand, and consequently employment cannot be found forall. 

Perhaps the profession of literature and journalism affords the aptestillustration of the utter folly and uselessness of producing thesemachine-made scholars, all filled chock-full with the same ideas, facts, figures, and dates. Here, as in reality everywhere else, there is needof originality, intellectual independence, insight, judgment, andimagination. Journalism wants ideas; facts are amply provided by thenews agency and the reporter. The gates of literature are opened widefor striking and vigorous thought, trenchant criticism, and imaginativeflights of fancy. 

What has the average academically-trained man to offer? He has anassortment of second-hand ideas borrowed from Plato and Socrates, fromOvid and Virgil and Horace; he can echo Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Shakespeare, Dante; he can dish up Aristotle, Pythagoras, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday and Darwin. He can borrowillustrations from classical mythology; he knows the Dynasties ofancient Egypt; and he is able to furnish, without reference to history, the exact date upon which King John signed Magna Charta, and the precisenumber of battles fought in the Wars of the Roses. 

Such are the literary accomplishments of numberless universitygraduates, and it is small wonder that they often lead to the workhouse. The demand for the dressed-up ideas of the poets, philosophers, andscientists of a former generation is not great. Those who like theirliterature at second hand prefer snippets from the Newgate Calendar tothe wise saws of Bacon; and they would rather have their blood stirredby quotations from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade, ' or 'Pay, pay, pay, ' than read a paraphrase of the combined wisdom of all thephilosophers of the nineteenth century. 

The same argument holds good in relation to other professions andoccupations. The university graduate has no practical accomplishments. He may be an ornamental, but he is certainly not _ipso facto_ a useful, member of society. The only thing for which he is pre-eminently fittedis to assist others, by means of extension lectures and cramming, to behis companions in misfortune. But this can hardly be designated abeneficial sphere of activity, and he is handicapped in all heundertakes by the fact that thousands of others possess the sameeducational equipment as himself. 

Why should every educated man be like the other? There is absolutely noreason for it. The similarity is purely artificial. Nature neverintended all men to be cast in the same mould, and it is only theperversity of man himself that has brought the human race down to such alevel. The stupidity of giving every scholar the same mental outfit isso self-evident as scarcely to need further comment. Even following themodern plan of stuffing minds instead of developing them, one would havethought that common sense would dictate the necessity of manufacturingas much variety as possible. 

The whole trend of evolution is to differentiate; and if natural lawswere not completely disregarded by education systems, the absurdity offilling the world with two or three human species instead of a hundredthousand would never have been perpetrated. As long as this arbitraryinterference with Nature is continued, educated men will not cease to bea drug in the market. Its immediate effect is not to endow theindividual with special qualities, but to handicap him heavily for thereal business of life. 

Competition amongst the 'well-educated' is not the result ofover-population or of a too liberal supply of competent men. It iscaused by uniformity of attainment; and until this is generallyrealized, one of the most pressing social problems cannot hope to find asolution. 

CHAPTER IX

WOMAN'S EMPIRE OVER MAN

Men have always been reluctant to acknowledge the truth about woman'sreal position in the world. They keep up a beautiful kind of masculinemyth about the mastery of the sterner sex and their mental superiority, and they talk of woman in a patronizing way as man's helpmate. 

There is no doubt--it is a physiological fact--that man possesses morebrain-power or capacity than woman. But woman has, on the other hand, anenormous advantage in the use to which she has put her mental machineryfrom time immemorial. The truth is that women think out things forthemselves a great deal more than does the average man. As, however, they concentrate their attention for the most part on what are calledthe minor interests of life, whilst men are occupied with bigger andmore important things, it has come to be accepted that the mind of womanis inferior to the mind of man. 

In one sense this is true. Potentially, woman's mind has not thecapacity of man's. One has only to look for female Shakespeares, Newtons, Bismarcks, Raphaels, and Beethovens, to verify the fact beyonddispute. But we are dealing here with existing circumstances, not withpotentialities. Therefore I have no hesitation in saying that, as ageneral rule, women use what brain power they have to much betteradvantage than men; which amounts to a confession that woman, apart fromintellectual specialization, is, on the average, man's mental superior. 

This is a sweeping statement to make, but it is made only in theinterests of truth, and it admits of a great deal of plausibleexplanation. 

Man's mental training, as has been fully pointed out, consists almostentirely in pouring facts into a vacuum created by the carefulelimination of original thought. Until recently, women have not beensubjected to this agreeable process. For a very long time they were noteducated at all, and when governesses first came into fashion in betterclass families, the idea was rather to endow girls with a few gracefulaccomplishments than to cram them with dates and other kinds ofmechanical knowledge. 

This tradition is still kept up to a certain degree in the higher socialcircles; but there have also sprung up a large number of girls'colleges, in which all the bad points of masculine education arecarefully copied. These colleges are frequented by girls of the upperand middle classes, chiefly the latter, and no doubt they are graduallyworking a revolution in feminine character. But heredity--especiallywhen it is, within a generation or so, the heredity of long ages--is avery potent factor in the formation of both mind and body, and offers asteady resistance to innovation. The full effects, therefore, of thiseducational revolution in respect to womankind are not yet apparent. 

The net result of this is that the majority of women are still addictedto thought. Facts have not yet entirely taken the place of ideas intheir minds, except in extreme cases which may be called exceptional, although it must be confessed that they are becoming every day lessrare. They think, no doubt, for the most part about the commonplaceincidents of their daily life, and possibly they are given too much tomorbid introspection. But anything that serves to make a human beingexercise the function for which his brain was originally intended shouldbe regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for thedevelopment of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than tobabble off the dates of the Sovereigns from William the Conqueror, or toconstrue Horace's Odes without taking in a syllable of their sense. 

Women have thus formed a habit of reflection about trifles, which themore gifted amongst them extend to weightier topics. And it is in thisway that they are able to gain an ascendancy over man that is the morepotent because it is unobtrusive. The average woman sees things thesubtleties of which escape man altogether, and she perceives thembecause her mind has been trained, by natural development, toobservation. 

The average man, on the other hand, is the most unobservant creatureunder the sun. He rarely understands even what is going on under hisnose. It is all very well to say that his superior mind is wrapt up inpercentages, or absorbed in grand schemes for the regeneration ofmankind. The plain truth is that he does not possess the faculty ofapplying his intelligence to everything within his range of observation. Evolution intended him to possess it; but education systems, whichharbour very little respect for the laws of Nature, have found readymeans to curb the propensity or to destroy it altogether. 

It is small matter for surprise, therefore, that woman should havesucceeded in subjecting man to an empire as autocratic as it is, to alloutward appearances, unsuspected. Some people maintain that this empireis gained solely by physical attraction; but this contention isdisproved easily enough. All women do not possess the charm of beauty;yet there is scarcely a woman of any nationality, or belonging to anystation in life, who does not exercise a more or less powerful influenceover her menkind. 

Husbands are guided by their wives, even in matters of business oraffecting public interests, far more than they are generally ready toacknowledge. Staying at a seaside hotel some time ago, I made theacquaintance of a hard-headed Lancashire merchant who had amassed acomfortable independence. In an outburst of confidence he told me oneday that he had never taken a single important step in the conduct ofhis business without consulting his wife, and he also acknowledged thathe had never had to regret asking her advice. 

The moral of this story is the more significant when it is recollectedthat in such a case the wife has not had the same opportunities as herhusband of forming a correct judgment. The latter has the businessdetails at his finger-ends; he is acquainted with the person or personswith whom the dealings are taking place; and he has his experience tofall back upon. But somehow or other the wife seems to grasp all thepoints, and to see more clearly into the motives of the personconcerned. 'Why, ' she will exclaim to her husband, 'can't you see thatSo-and-so is trying to bamboozle you?' And, the scales falling from thedeluded husband's eyes, he suddenly makes the discovery that his wifethinks where his own powers of reflection are contented to remaindormant. 

The fact is, that the habit of thinking cannot be acquired throughexercise in mental gymnastics. Philosophers, mathematicians, and men ofscience are notoriously up in the clouds, and incapable often to aremarkable degree of managing the affairs of everyday life with commonsense. Yet these are the individuals who have been subjected to thehighest form of what is called mental training. If fact-cramming andmental gymnastics are the best developers of the human mind, these menought to be perfect models of intelligence. But will any candid-mindedperson call it the highest form of intellectual development to have aclear conception of the precession of the equinoxes, or to manufacturemetaphysical conundrums, whilst remaining utterly incapable of applyingcommon sense to human affairs that demand at least an equal amount ofattention?

It is clear that this type of mental training does not teach people tothink at all, but has the contrary effect of restricting theintelligence to an altitude very far beyond the ordinary requirements ofour social existence. Man may have a very broad horizon; but the broaderit becomes, the further he seems to be transported from the capacity toexercise the normal functions of the brain. To designate this the properdevelopment of the mind would be manifestly absurd; yet many people seemcontented to regard it as such, and accept the anomaly without givingits obvious contradictoriness a second thought. 

Of course it is not argued that woman's mental training is, or has been, all that can be desired. It is, in her case, more the neglect to applysevere educational methods, than anything else, that has permitted thenegative development of her thinking faculties; and this tends todemonstrate all the more conclusively that the real use of the brain ispractically destroyed by conventional modes of instruction. 

Women, left to their own devices for countless generations, haveacquired a faculty that all the education systems in the world havefailed to pound into the mind of man. It is their superiority in thisrespect that has given them far-reaching empire over the opposite sex. That this should be generally appreciated is of the utmost importance, because the modern metamorphosis of woman, if rightly understood, is thebest conceivable object-lesson in the evils brought about by theeducational methods of the present day. It is not that theacademically-trained woman threatens to push man out of his place in theworld, but that she is herself in danger of losing the very weapon thathas given her so large a share of power and influence. 

A great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about thespectacled Girton girl competing with men in knowledge, at the expenseof forfeiting their admiration and thereby losing her vantage-ground. Spectacles do not enter into the matter at all. As has already beenpointed out, physical attraction has nothing, or very little, to do withfeminine wire-pulling. 

Women derive their real powers from a gift of trained observation, andfrom the subtlety conferred upon them by the capacity to apply theirintelligence to the numerous small matters which go to make up the sumof human life. Their minds will no longer develop these powers when theyare systematically subjected to a process of education which hasinvariably failed to evoke them in the opposite sex. And with the lossof them, woman is bound also to lose the empire which she has hithertoexercised over masculine nature. 

From this point of view alone, the education of women on the modernsystem is much to be deplored. There is no doubt that women in generalhave always exercised their predominant influence for the good ofmankind. Striking exceptions might easily be adduced from history; but, on the whole, it must be acknowledged that woman has seldom abused herpower. Therefore, anything that is calculated to undermine or destroythis favourable influence on human affairs cannot be regarded asotherwise than pernicious. 

The more the idea spreads that girls must be given the same educationalequipment as boys, the more rapid will be the degeneration of woman. Itis a well-known fact in the medical profession that weakly boys areoften unable to withstand the strain of school cramming; thereforegirls, with their more delicate organization, will sufferproportionately in a greater degree. Physical training, of course, obviates a great deal of this evil. But the same thing is bound tohappen in the case of girls as has already been experienced where boysare concerned; that is to say, the most promising intellects will besacrificed, partly through the ambition of the school authorities, whoseprincipal anxiety is to see their pupils distinguish themselves inexaminations, and partly owing to the fact that exceptional ability sooften implies a nervous temperament and delicate physique. 

Women, it must be acknowledged, by no means use their faculties ofthinking and observation to the best advantage. The conclusions at whichthey arrive are often far too definite, and have been formed in toogreat haste. So rapid is this operation of thought that it often becomesa mere intuition. Yet the remarkable accuracy of a woman's intuitions isevidence that there underlies them some intellectual process resting ona more solid basis than conjecture or guesswork. 

It is the crude and untutored stage of development of the thinkingfaculty in woman that causes it to work intuitively, instead of by theslower and sounder processes of logic. To neglect a faculty is by nomeans synonymous with developing it. Hence woman's powers of thought andobservation are embryonic rather than matured. The work they perform isnot a tithe of what would be accomplished by them under the auspices ofjudicious encouragement and skilled training. The faculty has neitherbeen destroyed by over-cramming nor fostered by enlightened treatment. It has simply been allowed to lie more or less dormant, according to thenatural environment of the individual. 

If man, with his superior brain capacity, were encouraged to cultivatethe habits of observation at present restricted to woman, and to applyhis intelligence to everything, instead of to a few selected objects, the ratio of the world's progress would be enormously increased. Whofirst started the notion that man is being manufactured into a superiorarticle, and that woman cannot do better than submit herself with allhaste to the same process, I do not know. At any rate, it is adisastrous doctrine, and the sooner the fallacy of it is perceived themore chance there will be of saving future generations of women from theblunder that is handicapping the masculine sex at the present moment. 

It would be a grand thing if educationists could be persuaded to opentheir eyes to the fact that women, having been providentially saved fromschool instruction for past generations, have been enabled to preservemental faculties that no amount of cramming and corporal punishment hasever succeeded in awakening in man. They would then cease from theirignorant attempt to deprive woman of her intellectual gift, and possiblyeven do something towards securing man a little mental room for theinstallation of his own thinking faculty. 

CHAPTER X

YOUTH AND CRIME

We now come to the consideration of an aspect of the educational problemthat involves questions of great difficulty and importance. Thediscussion has hitherto been limited to the lesser evils attributable tothe forcing upon the masses of the people a useless and unsuitable kindof education. But there are far graver possibilities than the mereunfitting of large numbers of individuals for the occupations theirnatural propensities intended them to pursue. 

People are, as has been pointed out, driven by the stupidity of theteaching system into all kinds of uncongenial employment. The sufferingand waste caused by this constant production of the unfit areincalculable. It is scarcely to be wondered at that some persons haveformed the ingenious theory that this world is hell itself, and that weare now actually undergoing our punishment in purgatory. Certainly thereis some ground for the supposition in the fact that the lives of so manyof us seem to have been ordered in direct opposition to our individualtastes and wishes. 

This is bad enough. The question we have to face now is whether we havenot to thank education systems for something a great deal worse. Mereunhappiness is not necessarily soul-destroying. But there is only toogood reason to suppose that the evil effects of the mock educationprovided by the State do not stop at making its victims unhappy, buteven go so far as to plunge a certain proportion of them into actualcrime. 

At the outset it must be acknowledged that the allegation is verydifficult to prove. No satisfactory evidence on the point is derivablefrom published statistics. It is quite possible to determine by means ofthe latter how many young persons between the ages of twelve andtwenty-one have been convicted of indictable offences during the year. But everybody who is acquainted with criminology, or who is conversantwith the compilation of statistical information, must be well aware ofthe futility of depending upon the apparently clear testimony ofofficial figures. 

It would be extremely useful to find out whether juvenile offenders haveincreased or decreased since the institution of compulsory education. Statistics relating to this subject are procurable, but it is impossibleto place any reliance upon them. 

In the first place, there is nothing to show the cause of any suchincrease or decrease in the offences committed by young persons. It maybe due to a variety of circumstances, none of which can be accuratelydetermined. For instance, it is a well-known fact that youthfuloffenders have of late years been treated by magistrates withever-increasing leniency. Consequently, fewer convictions take placenow, in regard to this class of offence, than was the case some yearsago. The number of the convictions is, therefore, no guide at all as tothe increasing or diminishing proportion of youthful criminals. 

Then there is the increased vigilance of the police, which leads to themore frequent detection of crime; whilst, as a set-off against this, there is the fact that education teaches the criminal, by assisting himto the reading of police-court reports and sensational storyettes, to bemore wary. 

Besides these, there is the important consideration that by far thelarger number of young persons guilty of offences of various kinds arenot prosecuted at all. This is due to two causes: firstly, to the factthat in the majority of cases they are not found out; and secondly, thatmany people are reluctant to bring youthful offenders within the meshesof the criminal law, as a conviction, whether or not it be followed bypunishment, generally spells ruin to the person who has been foundguilty. 

There may be, and there probably are, many other and even moresubstantial reasons for discrediting statistics that are commonplaces toexperts in crime. But those that have been cited, and which are at oncesuggested by common sense, fully suffice to show the impossibility ofarriving at satisfactory conclusions on the basis of statistical tablespublished by the authorities. 

The Blue-book containing the latest judicial returns attempts to dealwith this question of the increase or decrease of juvenile crime;figures being only available, however, from the year 1893. 'To answerthis question, ' it is stated, 'it is necessary to ascertain theproportion which youthful offenders bear to the total number ofconvicted persons. This is given in the following table, where it willbe seen that the proportion of offenders under the age of twenty-oneremains almost constant:

'PROPORTION OF YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS CONVICTED OF INDICTABLE OFFENCES TOTOTAL NUMBER OF PERSONS CONVICTED. 

+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+| Age. | 1893. | 1894. | 1895. | 1896. | 1897. | 1898. |+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+| |Per cent. |Per cent. |Per cent. |Per cent. |Per cent. |Per cent. || Under 12 | 4. 6 | 4. 9 | 4. 6 | 5. 6 | 5. 6 | 5. 6 ||12 and under 16| 15. 0 | 15. 2 | 13. 4 | 14. 5 | 14. 0 | 14. 5 ||16 and under 21| 21. 2 | 22. 0 | 21. 8 | 19. 7 | 19. 5 | 20. 2 || | | | | | | |+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+|Total under 21 | 40. 8 | 42. 1 | 39. 8 | 39. 8 | 39. 1 | 40. 3 |+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+

'The general result is that the number of youthful offenders hasdiminished with the general diminution of crime, but that they stillbear almost the same ratio as before to the total of criminals. '

All this is, as has been pointed out, absolutely misleading. The numberof persons convicted has nothing whatever to do with the increase ordecrease of crime; and the proportion of youthful offenders to the totalnumber of persons convicted is only calculated, in view of the greatamount of clemency shown to young people both by magistrates and by thepublic, to give one a wholly false impression as to the prevalence ofjuvenile crime. 

It would be easy to take the criminal statistics of foreign countries, and to prove from them that the education of the masses there hasbrought about an overwhelming increase in the proportion of crimes andoffences committed by young persons under the age of twenty-one. 

In Germany, Austria, France, Russia, Italy, Holland, and the UnitedStates juvenile crime has, according to statistical information, largelyincreased during the last quarter of a century. But, without making anexhaustive inquiry into the alterations that may have taken place in thelaw, the relative activity of the police, and a dozen othercontingencies, it would not be honest to attempt to draw definiteconclusions from these figures. 

One has, after all, in these matters to fall back upon logic and commonsense. There is the solid fact that youthful criminals abound in spiteof education systems, and although there is a considerable leakage inrespect to school-attendance, it does not follow that juvenile offendersare drawn from this truant class to a disproportionate extent. It mustbe remembered, on the contrary, that a great amount of non-attendance atschool is due to the employment of children--especially in ruraldistricts, where the members of School Boards are often the very peoplewho extract most profit from child labour. 

A prison chaplain of great experience, the Rev. J. W. Horsley, wrote, inhis interesting work on 'Prisons and Prisoners': 'While covetousness isa factor of crime, the tools education places in the hands make crimesof greed more possible, and possible at an earlier age than in pastgenerations. This week I got the Church of England Waifs and StraysSociety to take under its care a child of ten, who had written, filledup, and cashed, a postal order that it might buy more lollipops. Increased knowledge, especially when not adequately accompanied by moraland religious education, will create new tastes, desires, and ambitions, that make for evil as well as for good. Let instruction abound, leteducation in its fullest sense more abound, but let us be aware of theincreased power for evil as well as for good that they produce, and atany rate let us not imagine that education and crime cannot co-exist. Crime is varied, not abolished, not even most effectually decreased, bythe sharpening of wits. '

Speaking of intemperance in relation to crime, he states that:'Brain-workers provide the most hopeless cases of dipsomania. Increasedbrain-power--more brain-work; more brain-exhaustion--more nervous desirefor a stimulant, more rapid succumbing to the alcoholic habit--these arethe stages that can be noted everywhere among those who have had more"schooling" than their fathers. Australia consumes more alcohol per headthan any nation. In Australia primary education is more universal thanin England, and yet there criminals have increased out of all proportionto the population. Of much crime, of many forms of crime, it isirrefragably true that crime is condensed alcohol, and it is certainlynot true that the absolutely or comparatively illiterate alone comprisethose who swell these categories. '

I have taken pains to ascertain the opinions of several of the chaplainsattached to the great convict prisons, and they are practicallyunanimous in condemning the present system of education. 

'It is liable, ' writes one of these experienced clergymen, 'to fosterconceit, discontent, a disinclination to submit to discipline andauthority, and a dangerous phase of ambition, which are fruitful sourcesof that kind of crime which is in these days most prevalent. .. . Thissuperficial education causes, I think, self-deceit as well asself-conceit, and makes young people imagine that because, in additionto what they have learnt, they can present a good outward appearance, they are qualified to fill any kind of appointment with success. 

'I think, also, ' he goes on to say, 'that it leads them in their desireto rise in the social scale to attempt by dishonest means to live at ahigher rate than is justifiable, to gamble and speculate, in order tokeep up a false position. I have come across those who have fallen wherethis has confessedly been the case, and who have lamented that suchwrong ideas had been put into their heads. Young people now look uponmany honourable and useful employments as beneath them, and there is ageneral rush for those which seem to offer a better social position. '

The conventional belief in the efficacy of cramming boys with moralplatitudes and all kinds of commonplace facts and theoretical knowledgeis so ingrained that there is a natural reluctance to ascribe any evileffects to the process of education. I am contented, however, to let thefacts speak for themselves. It cannot well be disputed that unsuitableeducation, or sham education, or whatever one may like to call it, isthe direct cause of widespread dissatisfaction amongst the very classesfrom which the majority of criminals are recruited. Whilst vast numbersof people are constantly being unfitted for the commonest occupations oflife, there must result an overcrowding of the callings which areconsidered suitable to the dignity of those who have eaten the unripefruit of the elementary tree of knowledge. 

It is self-evident that the unsuitably educated have much greaterincentive to wrong-doing than the merely illiterate, and it is also acorroborative fact that by far the greater proportion of criminals havebeen taught at least to read and write. Given two boys, one of whom hadacquired a smattering of facts at school and had learnt the Catechismvery perfectly by rote, whilst the other had merely been encouraged toapply a little common sense to manual labour, who would have anyhesitation in pointing out the former as the more likely to fall intoevil ways?

Therein lies the supreme foolishness of modern methods of instruction. All the moral aphorisms in the world will not help a boy to be honest ifhe is at the same time unfitted for his station in life. People do notneed moral instruction; they acquire all their morality in the school oflife. It is impossible to teach boys and girls theoretically to bevirtuous. All that can be done is to turn them into first-classhypocrites, ready to quote texts and to subscribe to the Thirty-NineArticles, whilst they are busy breaking the Ten Commandments every dayof the week. 

A surprising amount of virtue would come into the world of its ownaccord if a little more pains were taken to preserve for each individualthe environment to which he is adapted by nature. This life has becomesuch a mockery that people talk of heaven as a state in which everyperson will be free to do the things he likes best--as if that blissfulcondition were utterly unattainable here. 

Whilst such anomalies exist as those which curse the existence of themajority upon this earth, criminals will continue to be produced. And ifwe concede that these anomalies are directly or indirectly brought aboutby false and irrational methods of educating the youth of the country, we must also allow that education helps to manufacture criminals and toencourage crime. 

CHAPTER XI

MENTAL BREAKDOWN

It was frankly stated in the last chapter that there is no concreteevidence of a reliable nature as to the immoral effects of our educationsystem. The inquirer has to depend rather upon the logic ofphilosophical speculation than upon the testimony of our availablestatistics, common sense being generally a far more truthful witnessthan figures that can be manipulated to mean almost anything. 

But when we come to inquire into the physical evils that are produced bycramming and injudiciously-applied instruction, it must be acknowledgedthat the evidence as to their existence rests upon a much more solidfoundation. Clever brain specialists, who have made a lifelong study ofmental diseases and the causes of mental breakdown, are in a position tostate very definitely, from actual experience, whether or not thecramming system of modern education is productive of physical ill on alarge scale. 

We all of us know, probably, of some isolated instances here and therewhere the severe strain of cramming for a competitive examination hasresulted in loss of health and physical breakdown. Some are even awareof cases in which the unhappy victim of overwork has lost his reasonaltogether, and has been compelled to be placed under restraint. But itis only the physician who has made a special study of mental diseasesthat is in a position to form wide and accurate generalizations on thesubject. 

In approaching this question, therefore, I have realized the importanceof obtaining the opinions of experts who are alone qualified to expressa well-balanced judgment upon a matter demanding knowledge andopportunities of observation of a very special nature. Accordingly, Ihave consulted some of the greatest brain specialists in this country, and the brief remarks that I am enabled to make on the subject ofeducational cramming and mental breakdown are chiefly based upon thevaluable hints for which I am indebted to them. 

To take the case of healthy children first, it is satisfactory to learnupon high authority that they do not suffer much physical harm from theeffects of overwork. What happens in their case is that the vigorous andhealthy brain offers a sound resistance to the stuffing process, andspeedily forgets what has been forced into it. From an educational pointof view this is, of course, very disastrous; but as far as healthconsiderations are concerned it affords a certain amount of consolation. 

This is to say, one must bear in mind, that modern methods of educationare only salutary as long as they fail altogether to affect theintelligence. The moment they prove themselves to be efficacious theybecome an immediate source of danger. 

It follows from this fact that stupid children are as well protectedagainst the evil effects of the education system as the healthychildren. In fact, to a large extent the stupid children are the healthyones by reason of their stupidity. It is, however, a great mistake tosuppose that a stupid child necessarily implies one that is in any sensedeficient mentally. The dull schoolboy often proves in after life to bethe brilliant man. All that his dulness need be taken to signify is thathis mind is not receptive to the subjects which are being forced uponit. Linnæus was very stupid at Latin until an enlightened physician, whowas aware of his passion for botanical study, suggested his readingPlinius; and although he may not have imbibed very accurate informationabout natural history from that philosopher, he succeeded in makingimmediate progress in the Latin language. 

There should be, under a rational system of education, no such thing asa stupid child. What is, after all, stupidity or dulness in a schoolboy?It simply means that the boy's faculties are undeveloped, and that noamount of fact-cramming has succeeded in developing them. The wholemischief lies, of course, in the fact that the school is not trying todevelop the boy's own faculties at all, but merely to force him to adapthimself to its own curriculum and conventionality. 

The danger to the brain of the healthy or stupid child is notover-development but under-development. It is not they who suffer in theworst sense from the evil effects of over-education, but the giftedchildren, as they are called, or those whose quick, nervous intellectsare most susceptible to the process of receiving any kind ofinstruction. 

It is the nervous boy or girl who generally makes the most promisingpupil. A natural inclination to study leads children of this type toprefer the schoolroom to the playground. The boy who works hard to getto the top of his class, or to pass an examination, or to obtain ascholarship, is the one least given to games, and, in consequence, theweakest physically. 

These are the very children whom the teacher is most tempted toencourage to do more work than is good for them. The process of theirmental development is so rapid that it needs no stimulation fromoutside. But that is not, unfortunately, the concern of the schoolauthorities. The anxiety to produce scholars who will distinguishthemselves in public examinations, and thereby advertise the school, invariably leads the schoolmaster to cram and stuff the brains of thebrightest and most forward boys. 

There is special danger in over-working boys or girls of this type, because the brain is not strong enough to withstand the pressure. Theresult is never good, and in extreme cases it is as bad as it couldpossibly be. It follows, in fact, as a matter of course, that the finestand most sensitive intellects are the first to succumb to the perniciouseffects of over-cramming the brain. There is a strain that can only beendured by second-rate minds, and it is not, therefore, theintellectually fittest who are encouraged to survive under the presentsystem. 

What has been stated above refers rather to the higher class of schoolsand colleges, which prepare boys for examinations and academicdistinctions of various kinds, than to the elementary schools to whichthe children of the poor are commandeered. In the latter establishmentsa special barbarity takes place which has been so widely discussed inParliament and in the newspapers that I will do no more here than alludeto it in passing. 

I refer to the forcing of instruction upon under-fed school-children. 

Apart from the gross inhumanity of the proceeding, there is theindisputable fact that the compulsory teaching of children whose bodieshave not been properly nourished tends to weaken the intellect. If thesechildren were subjected to a process of cramming such as is usual in thehigher schools, their minds would undoubtedly break down altogether. Asit is, the comparatively mild method of the elementary school does noteffect anything worse in such cases than the prevention of thedevelopment of the mind, which is one degree better than completebreakdown or insanity. 

'The School Board system of cramming with smatterings, ' wrote one of thegreatest mental specialists in the world in reply to my inquiries, 'instead of teaching their victims to think--even if only by teachingone subject well--is perhaps responsible for some positive mentalbreakdown; but probably the main harm of it is that it stifles andstrangles proper mental development. ' 'Undeveloped mentality, ' he saysin conclusion, 'is perhaps the principal fault of our educational system(so-called). '

Another distinguished physician writes to me from a lunatic asylum:

'We have had a few cases who have broken down, the results of workingfor scholarships; also we have had one or two cases of ladies who havebroken down working for higher examinations. Dr. ---- and myself bothfeel certain that there is a good deal to be said against the increasedpressure put upon young adolescents at schools. From my own experience Iknow that boys who were considered especially clever, and were high upin forms in the public school I was at, have most of them now droppedback, and are very mediocre. On the other hand, many who matured slowlyhave continued to advance. This is only an observation, and has manyexceptions; but it is an observation that, as time passes, is more fullyconfirmed. '

It is not necessary to add anything to these valuable expressions ofopinion, proceeding from eminent men of wide experience, who are farmore capable judges than the layman who has no scientific knowledge anda necessarily limited range of observation. 

Facts speak very eloquently for themselves. If brain specialists arecontinually coming across cases of mental breakdown resulting fromcramming or over-education, it is quite clear that a system which isproductive of such evils must be altogether defective in principle andwanting in common sense. 

CHAPTER XII

EVIDENCE OF HISTORY

After an exhaustive inquiry into the multifarious evils which must belaid at the door of education, it is refreshing to turn to history forillustrious examples of men who not only did not owe their greatness toacademic training, but who actually owed it to what would nowadays bedesignated a neglected education. 

The chronicles of the past teem with instances of youths who havedeveloped into brilliant men, in spite of the fact that they had eitherhad no schooling at all, or had been considered the dunces of theirclass. It would, in fact, be far more difficult to supply illustrationsof great men who have succeeded on account of their academicdistinction, than to give examples of those who failed to distinguishthemselves at school, but who nevertheless became famous afterwards asmen of unusual talent. 

When Napoleon Bonaparte, at the age of fifteen, left the militarycollege of Brienne, where he had been a pupil for five years and a half, the inspector of military schools gave him the following certificate:

'M. De Buonaparte (Napoleon), born August 15, 1769; height 4 feet 10inches 10 lines; is in the fourth class; has a good constitution, excellent health, character obedient, upright, grateful, conduct veryregular; has always been distinguished by his application tomathematics. He knows history and geography very passably. He is notwell up in ornamental studies or in Latin, in which he is only in thefourth class. He will be an excellent sailor. He deserves to be passedon to the military school of Paris. '

This was an optimistic description of the youthful Napoleon'saccomplishments, for he was, as a matter of fact, so backward in Latinthat his removal to Paris was opposed by the sub-principal of thecollege. According to the testimony of his schoolfellow and biographer, M. De Bourrienne, he exhibited backwardness in every branch of educationexcept mathematics, for which he showed a distinct natural bent. 

The only professor at Brienne who took any notice of Napoleon was themathematical master. The others thought him stupid because he had notaste for the study of languages, literature, and the various subjectsthat formed the curriculum of the establishment; and as there seemed nochance of his becoming a scholar, they took no interest in him. 

'His superior intelligence was, however, sufficiently perceptible, 'writes M. De Bourrienne, 'even through the reserve under which it wasveiled. If the monks to whom the superintendence of the establishmentwas confided had understood the organization of his mind, if they hadengaged more able mathematical professors, or if we had had anyincitement to the study of chemistry, natural philosophy, astronomy, etc. , I am convinced that Bonaparte would have pursued these scienceswith all the genius and spirit of investigation which he displayed in acareer more brilliant, it is true, but less useful to mankind. Unfortunately, the monks did not perceive this, and were too poor to payfor good masters. .. . The often-repeated assertion of Bonaparte havingreceived a _careful education_ at Brienne is therefore untrue. '

Napoleon's military bent showed itself whilst he was at the College ofBrienne. Heavy snow fell during one winter, and prevented him fromtaking the solitary walks that were his chief recreation. He thereforefell back upon the expedient of getting his school companions to digtrenches and build snow fortifications. 'This being done, ' he said, 'wemay divide ourselves into sections, form a siege, and I will undertaketo direct the attacks. ' In this way he organized a sham war that wascarried on with great success for a fortnight. 

This brief sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte's schooldays has been given inorder to show that the development of his genius owed nothing toacademic training. Without being actually a dunce, he was backward inall the subjects except the one in which he took a vivid interest; and, doubtless, had he cared as little for mathematics as for Latin, he wouldhave left Brienne with a reputation for profound stupidity. 

The school career of his great opponent, Wellington, was even lessdistinguished. Tradition has handed down to posterity no further detailsregarding his Eton days beyond the record of a fight with Sydney Smith'selder brother 'Bobus. ' Alluding to him as a dull boy, Mr. Smilesstates, in a footnote, in his book on 'Self-Help': 'A writer in the_Edinburgh Review_ (July, 1859) observes that "the Duke's talents seemnever to have developed themselves until some active and practical fieldfor their display was placed immediately before him. He was longdescribed by his Spartan mother, who thought him a dunce, as only 'foodfor powder. ' He gained no sort of distinction, either at Eton or at theFrench Military College of Angiers. " It is not improbable that acompetitive examination, at this day, might have excluded him from thearmy. '

Lord Clive was a perfectly hopeless youth from the schoolmaster's pointof view. He loathed work, and was always up to some prank or other. Inthe vain hope of inducing him to learn something, he was sent to fourschools in succession; but, with a single exception, every master underwhom he was placed declared him to be an incorrigible idler. Theexception was Dr. Eaton of Lostock, who predicted a great career forClive, provided an opportunity were afforded him for the exercise of histalents. 

At Market Drayton he amused himself by organizing a band of idle scamps, who went about threatening to smash the windows of tradespeople unlessthey paid a fine of apples or pence; and on one occasion he alarmed theinhabitants of the town by climbing a church steeple and seating himselfupon a stone spout near the top. 

A man of the same stamp who received the scantiest education was GeorgeWashington. He is described as having been given a common-schooleducation, with a little mathematical training, but no instructionwhatever in ancient or modern languages. 

Christopher Columbus, another adventurous spirit, owed very little tohis schooling. 'He soon evinced a strong passion for geographicalknowledge, ' writes Washington Irving in his interesting Life of theexplorer, 'and an irresistible inclination for the sea. .. . His father, seeing the bent of his mind, endeavoured to give him an educationsuitable for maritime life. He sent him, therefore, to the university ofPavia, where he was instructed in geometry, geography, astronomy andnavigation. .. . He remained but a short time at Pavia, barely sufficientto give him the rudiments of the necessary sciences; the thoroughacquaintance with them which he displayed in after-life must have beenthe result of diligent self-schooling, and of casual hours of studyamidst the cares and vicissitudes of a rugged and wandering life. '

No better instance of the advantage of natural development andself-culture could be afforded than by the career of Dr. Livingstone. Working in a cotton factory as a boy of ten, he studied scientific worksand books of travel, besides the classics, not only at night, but duringthe hours of labour. 

'Looking back now at that life of toil, ' he wrote afterwards, 'I cannotbut feel thankful that it formed such a material part of my earlyeducation; and, were it possible, I should like to begin life over againin the same lowly style, and to pass through the same hardy training. '

Dr. Adam Clarke, the celebrated divine, scholar, and philanthropist, wasa regular dunce in his early youth. It was only with difficulty, and anundue proportion of whacking, that the elements of the alphabet weredriven into his head by an impatient teacher--a mode of instruction thatprobably caused him to remark, in after life, that 'many children, notnaturally dull, have become so under the influence of the schoolmaster. '

It is related of Dr. Clarke that when he reached the middle of 'As inpræsenti, ' in Lilly's Latin Grammar, he came to a dead stop and couldget no further. His fellow-pupils, however, jeered him to such an extentthat he determined to go on and conquer the difficulty. And thisresolution seems to have helped him considerably, as, instead of thegrammar being forced into him, he began to study and think for himself. 

Nevertheless, he always found great difficulty in learning anything atschool, but was passionately devoted to reading imaginative books andstories of adventure, such as 'Jack the Giant-killer, ' 'Arabian Nights, ''The Pilgrim's Progress, ' 'Sir Francis Drake, ' and a host of similarworks. To these, in fact, and not to his painfully acquired schooleducation, he was wont to attribute the formation of his literary taste. 

Disraeli's education was by no means thorough. There is no record of hishaving distinguished himself academically in the slightest degree. It isrelated of him, on the contrary, that he was such a duffer at classicsas to be incapable of grasping the rule that 'ut' should be followed bythe subjunctive mood. The following account of Disraeli's schooldays, given by one of his school-fellows, is quoted by Sir William Fraser:

'I cannot say that Benjamin Disraeli at this period of his lifeexhibited any unusual zeal for classical studies; and I doubt whetherhis attainments in this direction, when he left the school for Mr. Cogan's at Walthamstow, reached higher than the usual grind in Livy andCæsar. But I well remember that he was the compiler and editor of aschool newspaper, which made its appearance on Saturdays, when thegingerbread-seller was also to be seen, and that the right of perusalwas estimated at the cost of a sheet of gingerbread, the money value ofwhich was in those days the third of a penny. '

Turning to literary men, we find an imposing array of dunces. I have nothad time to examine into the school experiences of more than a limitednumber of great names. If the reader is anxious to pursue theinvestigation further, he will doubtless find that there is scarcely afamous man of letters who made his mark at school or university. 

The first person to teach Oliver Goldsmith his letters was a woman, whoafterwards became village schoolmistress, named Elizabeth Delap. She didnot form a very flattering opinion of her young pupil. 'Never was sodull a boy, ' she was wont to declare; 'he seemed impenetrably stupid. 'From this kind but undiscriminating teacher Oliver gravitated to thevillage school, where he learnt nothing. Thence he was sent to Elphin;and of this period of his school life Dr. Strean says: 'He wasconsidered by his contemporaries and school-fellows, with whom I haveoften conversed on the subject, as a stupid heavy blockhead, littlebetter than a fool, whom every one made fun of. '

Goldsmith has himself, in his 'Inquiry into the Present State of PoliteLearning, ' recorded some very striking impressions as to the value ofacademic success. 'A lad whose passions are not strong enough in youth, 'he writes, 'to mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his inclination, have chalked out, by four or five years'perseverance, probably obtains every advantage and honour his collegecan bestow. I forget whether the simile has been used before, but Iwould compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in thetranquillity of dispassionate prudence to liquors that never ferment, and consequently continue always muddy. Passions may raise a commotionin the youthful breast, but they disturb only to refine it. However thisbe, mean talents are often rewarded in colleges with an easysubsistence. '

Another 'impenetrable dunce, ' according to the opinion of his tutor, aneminent Dublin scholar, was Richard Sheridan. He was afterwards sent toHarrow, where he earned for himself a great reputation for idleness. Dr. Parr, one of the under-masters, wrote to Sheridan's biographer thefollowing expression of opinion:

'There was little in his boyhood worth communication. He was inferior tomany of his schoolfellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I donot remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself byLatin or English composition, in prose or verse. .. . He was at theuppermost part of the fifth form, but he never reached the sixth, and, if I mistake not, he had no opportunity of attending the most difficultand the most honourable of school business, when the Greek plays weretaught--and it was the custom at Harrow to teach these at least everyyear. He went through his lessons in Horace and Virgil and Homer wellenough for a time. But, in the absence of the upper master, Dr. Sumner, it once fell in my way to instruct the two upper forms, and upon callingup Dick Sheridan, I found him not only slovenly in construing, butunusually defective in his Greek grammar. .. . I ought to have told youthat Richard, when a boy, was a great reader of English poetry; but hisexercises afforded no proof of his proficiency. '

The latter statement speaks volumes for a method of teaching whichfailed to evoke, even in such a master of English literature as Sheridaneventually proved himself to be, a proper development of his greatesttalent. No doubt the exercises in which so little proficiency was shownwere compulsorily executed against the grain, being of such a pedanticcharacter that no sane schoolboy could possibly be found to evince thesmallest interest in them. 

Dean Swift and Sir Walter Scott were both dull boys. The former says ofhimself that he was 'stopped of his degree for dulness andinsufficiency. ' Scott, in his autobiographical sketch, does not makehimself out to have been the dunce that he really was supposed to be atschool. If not bright at his lessons, however, he was certainly cleverin other ways and capable of thinking for himself. An excellentillustration of this is contained in the story that though Scott, as aboy, used invariably to go to sleep in church in the course of thesermon, yet, when questioned about the latter afterwards, he wasgenerally able to sketch out most of the points dwelt upon by thepreacher--the explanation being, of course, that, given the text, he wasable to follow the probable train of thought inspired by its wording. Summing up Scott's attainments, a biographer gives expression to theopinion that he was 'self-educated in every branch of knowledge he everturned to account in the works of his genius. '

Neither Burns nor Carlyle was a scholar. The former received a groundingin grammar, reading, and writing. He acquired a little French, butlearnt no Latin at all. Whatever he knew he owed to the fact that heexercised his own taste for knowledge by choosing his own books anddevouring only what appealed to his mind. Carlyle, like many anotherfamous man of letters, had little Latin and less Greek. 'In theclassical field, ' he wrote, 'I am truly as nothing. ' For mathematics heshowed a certain amount of inclination, but even in that field did notsucceed in carrying off any prizes. His own opinion of a conventionaleducation is very tersely rendered by his exclamation: 'Academia! HighSchool instructors of youth! Oh, ye unspeakable!'

The poet Wordsworth was educated at the grammar school at Hawkshead. Healways declared that the great merit of the school was the libertyallowed to the scholars. No attempt was made to cram or to produce modelpupils. Within limits they appear, in fact, to have been allowed to readprecisely what they pleased. In this way Wordsworth received in everysense of the term a liberal education; and when he went to Cambridge, 'he enjoyed even more thoroughly than at Hawkshead whatever advantagesmight be derived from the neglect of his teachers. '

The poet had a great contempt for academical training, and refused to gothrough the usual Cambridge course. He finally graduated as B. A. Withouthonours, afterwards recording his indifference to academic distinctionin the well-known lines:

 Of College labours, of the Lecturer's room, All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand, With loyal students faithful to their books, Half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants, And honest dunces--of important days, Examinations, when the man was weighed As in a balance! Of excessive hopes, Tremblings withal and commendable fears, Small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad-- Let others that know more speak as they know. Such glory was but little sought by me, And little won. 

More forcibly expressed was Rousseau's derision of ordinary educationalmethods. Writing in his 'Confessions' about the school days of hiscousin and himself, he says: 'We were sent together to Bossey, to boardwith the Protestant minister Lambercier, in order to learn, togetherwith Latin, all the sorry trash which is included under the name ofeducation. .. . M. Lambercier was a very intelligent person who, withoutneglecting our education, never imposed excessive tasks upon us. Thefact that, in spite of my dislike to restraint, I have never recalled myhours of study with any feeling of disgust, and also that, even if I didnot learn much from him, I learnt without difficulty what I did learn, and never forgot it, is sufficient proof that his system of instructionwas a good one. '

As far as the history of science is concerned, there is a long array ofself-cultured men to whom most of the discoveries that have been madeare due. In no other occupation is the faculty of thinking originallyand independently more essential than in the pursuit of scientificknowledge, and it is significant that amongst famous scientists moreinstances are to be found of men who owe nothing to school instructionor academic training than in almost any other walk of life. 

In this connection mention has already been made of the famous botanistLinnæus. The whole of his school life was one unremitting protestagainst the usual educational methods of endeavouring to force the mindaway from its natural bent. Linnæus detested metaphysics, Latin, Greek, and every subject except physics and mathematics, in which he usuallyoutstripped his fellow-pupils. But his nose was kept to the grindstoneuntil the authorities informed his father that he was not fit for alearned education, and recommended his being given some manualemployment. Thus were twelve precious years of the life of one of themost gifted men of science, save for what he accomplished out of schoolhours, wasted to no purpose. It is not to be wondered at that he spokeof one of his masters as 'a passionate and morose man, better calculatedfor extinguishing a youth's talents than for improving them. '

One of the greatest anatomists that ever lived, John Hunter, whonumbered Dr. Jenner amongst his pupils, was scarcely educated at all forthe first twenty years of his life. Mr. Smiles states that 'it was withdifficulty that he acquired the arts of reading and writing. ' Originallya carpenter, he became assistant to his brother, who was established inLondon as a surgeon. He acquired all his knowledge of anatomy in thedissecting-room, and owed everything he had learnt to his own hard workand habit of thinking things out for himself. 

'The brilliant Sir Humphry Davy, ' says Mr. Smiles, 'was no cleverer thanother boys. His teacher, Dr. Cardew, once said of him, "While he waswith me I could not discern the faculties by which he was so muchdistinguished. " Indeed, Davy himself in after life considered itfortunate that he had been left to "enjoy so much idleness" at school. '

Newton was always at the bottom of his class, until he suddenly took itinto his head to give a boy, whom he had already thrashed in anothersense, an intellectual beating. 'It is very probable, ' writes Sir DavidBrewster in his biography, 'that Newton's idleness arose from theoccupation of his mind with subjects in which he felt a deeperinterest. ' Nobody could have penned a more incisive indictment againstthe imbecility of an education system that forces all boys, irrespectiveof their wishes or talents, into a fixed groove. It was Newton who, inanswer to an inquiry as to how the principle of gravity was discovered, replied: 'By always thinking of it. '

When Watt, as a boy, was engaged in investigating the condensation ofsteam, his aunt, who was sitting with him at the tea-table, exclaimed:

'James, I never saw such an idle boy! Take a book or employ yourselfusefully. For the last half hour you have not spoken a word, but takenoff the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup andnow a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, and counting the drops of water. '

In this sympathetic way children are usually encouraged to think bytheir elders. Watt's faculties were developed entirely at home. He wassent to a public elementary school in Scotland; but, fortunately forscience, he was so delicate that he was nearly always absent throughindisposition. A visitor, who found the boy drawing lines and circles onthe hearth with a piece of coloured chalk, once remonstrated with Mr. James Watt, senior, for allowing his son to waste his time at home. Watthad the good fortune, however, to possess an intelligent father, whoencouraged the boy as far as it lay in his power. 

Left to his own devices, Watt not only contrived to make himself theforemost engineer of his time, but he also developed his talents in manyother directions. Sir Walter Scott says of him that 'his talents andfancy overflowed on every subject. ' And M. Arago, the French scientist, in his memoir of Watt, expresses the view that the latter, in spite ofhis excellent memory, 'might, nevertheless, not have peculiarlydistinguished himself among the youthful prodigies of ordinary schools. He could never have learned his lessons like a parrot, for heexperienced a necessity of carefully elaborating the intellectualelements presented to his attention, and Nature had peculiarly endowedhim with the faculty of meditation. '

This is only a roundabout way of saying that the conventional process ofcramming would have destroyed the fine intellectual faculties possessedby Watt. But if in his case, why not in that of another? That is thestrange thing about the light shed upon educational problems by caseslike that of Watt, Newton, and other men of commanding genius. Peopleonly perceive in it a half-truth. They think that it is only in theseexceptional instances that the mind is incapable of being developed byordinary rough-and-ready methods. 

Upon what grounds is such an absurd deduction founded? It is true thatindividuals differ widely as to the capabilities of their mentalmachinery; but it does not follow that the intellectual fibre of oneperson is more delicate than that of another. 

The difference is not mental, but physical. It is because a boy ishealthy, and not because his intellectual fibre is coarse, that he isbetter able to withstand the strain of an educational training than aweaker and more nervous boy. 

Until the discovery is made that all minds are sensitive, when they havebeen actually reached, people will go on ignorantly destroying thefiner faculties under the impression that genius or talent is a veryrare thing, and can always shift for itself. 

Yet, as I have attempted to show, the evidence of history pointsconclusively to the fact that the contrary is the case. 

Is it really supposed that the great names that have been handed down toposterity represent all the genius to which the world has given birth?

The idea is preposterous. 

For every man of genius or talent who has been permitted to survive, education systems have killed a hundred. 

If it had not been for Dr. Rothmann, there would probably have been noLinnæus to revolutionize the system of botanical classification. Hadtyrannical parents and schoolmasters compelled Watt and Newton to giveup mechanics and scientific study for a thorough cramming in Latingrammar and Greek roots, we might to-day be without a steam-engine or atheory of the law of gravitation. Even the genius of Napoleon andWellington might easily have been crushed under the auspices of a moderncompetitive examination. 

Would stupid Oliver Goldsmith have written his immortal 'Vicar ofWakefield' and 'She Stoops to Conquer, ' or would idle Sheridan havepenned the exquisite comedies that have not to this day been approachedby any subsequent writer, if their idleness and stupidity had beensubmitted to the test of an enforced academic training for classical ormathematical honours?

Surely the evidence of history points to only one conclusion--namely, that all the genius in the world cannot survive the hopeless imbecilityof educational methods, except by successfully dodging them throughstupidity and idleness, whilst the faculties develop themselves atstolen intervals. 

CHAPTER XIII

THE APOTHEOSIS OF CRAM

We have reached a point at which it is advisable to take a broad surveyof the direction in which education systems are hurrying the world. Havethese educational methods a definite objective, or is their sole purposethe production of scholars manufactured _en bloc_?

These are important questions that need careful answering. Upon the faceof it, there is no doubt that in this country, at least, educationalestablishments have, up to the present, aimed only at turning outscholars of certain intellectual types. The result of this process hasbeen shown in the preceding pages to be sufficiently disastrous in itseffects upon its victims. There are, in fact, few social evils whichcannot be traced, directly or indirectly, to its agency. 

But as yet there has been no dominant motive-power, working invisiblytowards a definite end, behind the educational machinery of the country. 

A general feeling has been fomented of late, however, that alleducation, from the lowest step to the highest, ought to be co-ordinatedand organized into a single piece of State-directed machinery. Thedanger of this can only be appreciated by an examination of the effectsalready produced by such a system in other countries. 

Germany offers in this connection the best possible example. Theinterference of the State in educational matters has there been broughtto perfection. Absolute control is exercised by the Government ineverything appertaining to the instruction of youth all over Germany. The Emperor has become so autocratic in the exercise of this control inthe kingdom of Prussia, that he talks openly about manufacturing this orthat kind of educational article exactly in the manner in which amanufacturer would discuss putting some commodity upon the market. 

There is not the slightest attempt on the part of the PrussianGovernment to disguise the political uses to which their supremeauthority in educational matters is put. One of the first acts of theEmperor William II. , on succeeding to the throne, was to issue the mostplain-spoken instructions to the Government of Prussia in reference toState interference with the schools for political purposes. 

'For a long time, ' it was declared in the royal decree, [A] 'I have beenoccupied with the thought how to make the school useful for the purposeof counteracting the spread of socialistic and communistic ideas. .. . Thehistory of modern times down to the present day must be introduced morethan hitherto into the curriculum, and the pupils must be shown thatthe executive power of the State alone can protect for each individualhis family, his freedom, and his rights. '

 [A] For information on this and many other points connected with the subject of education in Prussia, I am indebted to Mr. Michael E. Sadler's special report to the Board of Education on 'Problems in Prussian Secondary Education for Boys. '

Later on follows the recommendation that, 'by striking references toactual facts, it should be made clear even to young people that awell-ordered constitution under secure monarchical rule is theindispensable condition for the protection and welfare of eachindividual, both as a citizen and as a worker; that, on the other hand, the doctrines of social democracy are, in point of fact, infeasible; andthat, if they were put into practice, the liberty of each individualwould be subjected to intolerable restraint, even within the very circleof the home. The ideas of the Socialists are sufficiently definedthrough their own writings for it to be possible to depict them in a waywhich will shock the feelings and the practical good-sense even of theyoung. '

The danger of this direct State control is obvious. It renders allliberty of thought absolutely impossible. Politics, religion, socialviews--all are systematically worked into the curriculum for the objectof stifling independent ideas, criticisms, and whatever else may be ofvalue to the interests of the community at large, although possiblyhighly inconvenient to the established order. 

To cram the youth of the nation after this fashion with all the factsand fancies that may happen to suit the weaknesses of the nationalconstitution, is exactly the way in which to bring about the decay ofboth Government and country. Merely from a political standpoint, therefore, nothing could be more disastrous to the State than to makeuse of its power of educational control in order to stifle oppositionand independent criticism. 

It is equally clear that, wherever the Government possesses this power, it will use it as far as is practicable for the purpose ofself-preservation. Almost for a century the Prussian authorities havebeen getting the control of their national schools more and more intotheir own hands. They have now succeeded in bringing the application ofthe theory of State interference to the high-water mark ofpracticability. From the rudiments of the alphabet to the history ofeconomics, everything in the Prussian curriculum may be suspected ofserving some political purpose. The schoolboy is regarded by theauthorities as a mere pawn, to be moved on the national board in strictaccordance with the political necessities of the hour. 

For some years past, the attention of Prussia and of the whole GermanEmpire has been concentrated upon the commercial rivalry of thedifferent nations of the world. The chief, if not the sole, educationalaim has been to produce a percentage-calculating machine on a wholesaleplan, equipped with certain devices for the successful carrying on oftrade. The German authorities became impregnated with the belief thatcommercial supremacy could best be attained by organizing the wholenation into a uniform body of workers trained to co-operation. Everything of late years has been subordinated to this design. 

The commercial success of the scheme has been notorious. Germanmanufacturers have been gaining ground in all parts of the world. Theconsular reports at the Foreign Office are filled with pessimisticwarnings about the decline of British trade at various points where itwas once supreme, and with significant statistics that show the rapidadvance of German commercial enterprise. 

But it does not follow, because Germany seems to have shot ahead of usby leaps and bounds of late years, that she has adopted sound means toaccomplish this end. On the contrary, if the expedients by which thiscommercial supremacy has been attained are an exaggeration of the worstevils of education systems, then Germany has started upon a downwardpath which must eventually lead her to the brink of ruin. 

And this is precisely the case. Cramming has been brought throughoutGermany to the level of a fine art. It is done, I must confess--for Iwas myself subjected to the process for some years--more completely andeffectively than in this country. That is to say, the pupil is notcrammed in such an idiotic fashion that he forgets all that has beenstuffed into him immediately he has left school. The drilling, howeverwrong it may be in principle, is thorough enough, in all conscience. Itmay be, as it is elsewhere, the pestle and mortar system. But at leastthe pestle is applied consistently, and each ingredient is perfectlymixed before the next component is introduced. 

If, therefore, the object of education be to produce an article of acertain type or consistency, then the Prussian school stands far inadvance of our own cramming institutions. It may well be taken in thatcase as a model for us to copy. 

People should, however, ask themselves these questions: Is itinternational commercial rivalry that produces the necessity of a Statesystem of education to equip the nation for the struggle? Or is it theState system of education, with its organized attempt to manufacture arace of traders, which has artificially created the state of commercialwarfare into which we are rapidly drifting?

The answer seems to me to be plain enough. 

The individuality of individuals is rapidly disappearing throughout thatpart of the world which has chosen to subject itself to uniformeducation systems. One Englishman is much like another, in the same waythat Russians, or Germans, or Frenchmen resemble each other. In otherwords, the only individuality which education is leaving us is that ofnationality; and the reason of this is because the manners, the customs, and the school systems of various countries still differ to a certainextent. 

Instead, therefore, of the individual competing against the individual, we are rapidly approaching the point where the whole strength andresources of each nation will be employed to co-operate against the restof the world. And this is no mere natural outcome of evolution. Germany, with her extraordinary cuteness and foresight, invented the game for herown benefit a generation or two ago. She has spent the best part of halfa century equipping herself, hand over fist, for this kind of commercialcontest. 

But what is she sacrificing in order to obtain this triumph of thetrader?

There cannot be a question that she is deliberately and systematicallythrowing away the most precious of all human possessions--the characterof the individual. At the Berlin Conference on Secondary Education, heldin 1890, Dr. Virchow observed: 'I regret that I cannot bear my testimonyto our having made progress in forming the character of pupils in ourschools. When I look back over the forty years during which I have beenProfessor and Examiner--a period during which I have been brought incontact not only with physicians and scientific investigators, but alsowith many other types of men--I cannot say that I have the impressionthat we have made material advances in training up men with strength ofcharacter. On the contrary, I fear that we are on a downward path. Thenumber of "characters" becomes smaller. And this is connected with theshrinkage in private and individual work done during a lad's schoollife. For it is only by means of independent work that the pupil learnsto hold his own against external difficulties, and to find in his ownstrength, in his own nature, in his own being, the means of resistingsuch difficulties and of prevailing over them. '

The inevitable result of this sacrifice of individuality must be theintellectual decay of the nation, or at least its degeneration into astate of hopeless mediocrity. Unless, therefore, Germany can persuadeother countries to adopt similar tactics, and to meet her on the planewhere she has already obtained the start of a generation, she must comehopelessly to grief in the future. 

Unfortunately, there seems every indication that the statesmen who leadrival nations are only too ready to follow Germany's blind lead. In thiscountry it is only the blessed ignorance of the people which is holdingback those who are anxious to commit the folly that has put pounds, shillings, and pence into German pockets, at the cost of takingoriginality and character out of German heads. 

This educational suicide, it must also be remembered, can only becommitted without serious social disturbance in a despotically-governedcountry like the German Empire. In England, with our system of partygovernment, a complete measure of State control in educational matterswould create a political pandemonium that would be little short ofappalling. 

The party struggles of the future would, if this Prussian system weretransplanted here, centre round educational control. The schools wouldno longer be regarded as establishments for the instruction of youth;they would be looked upon simply as the nursery of the future voter. AConservative Government would cram everything into the curriculumcalculated to stifle inconveniently progressive ideas, whilst a RadicalGovernment would try to banish from the schools all established beliefsand conventions. 

Between these opposing stools the manufactured scholar would falllamentably to the ground. He would be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. There would be a perpetual chopping and changing in the methods of hiseducation, from which he would not even derive the benefit, sogratefully acknowledged by Wordsworth, of being neglected by histeachers. 

To talk of beating Germany at her own game is, therefore, the height ofabsurdity. Nothing could result from such an endeavour but ruin to thecountry. Under our party system it is obvious that it could not be donewith the remotest chance of success. And even if it were possible toobtain steady uniform State interference, working always towards aspecific end, German methods would only be adopted at the expense ofincreasing the pressure of cramming _en bloc_, and thereby multiplyingthe evils which have been but faintly depicted in the foregoing pages. 

CHAPTER XIV

THE GREAT FALLACY

That the world is badly ordered for humanity is a self-evident truth ofwhich the observant scarcely need reminding. It is equally obvious, fromthe exquisite order and symmetry of animal and vegetable life, thatProvidence is not to blame for the colossal mess into which civilizationhas managed to lead the majority of mankind. 

Man is himself responsible for the present state of human affairs; andalthough great things have been undeniably accomplished during theprogress of the nations, the magnificent achievements of exceptionalindividuals pale beside the stupendous blundering of the many. 

It must surely be clear to everybody that there has been some evilinfluence at work to arrest the fair promise and development of thehuman race. The splendid march of intellectual progress from the darkages to the brilliant dawn of the nineteenth century, with itsglittering array of master minds and its titanic roll of genius, hasbeen suddenly brought to a dead halt. Here and there, during the pastgeneration, great figures have struggled up on to the world's stage andgrappled with the ebb-tide. But the majestic stream of mediocrity hasswept away their dykes, and obliterated their landmarks with itsincreasing volume. 

The remarkable fact can hardly have escaped attention that the morehumanity attempts to equip itself for the serious business of life, byforcing itself into an educational strait-waistcoat, the more rapidbecomes the disappearance of character and genius, and even of ordinarytalent. Everybody is getting ground down to a level. It is scarcelypossible to point to a single civilized man and say: 'There is somebodyin whom every faculty has been developed and natural talent perfected toits utmost capability. ' The most that can be said of the individual is:'There goes a Cambridge man or a grammar-school man, and when you haveknocked all the nonsense out of him you'll find he's not a bad fellow atbottom. '

We are not what we have made ourselves, but what we have chosen to allowothers to make us. Whatever may once have been the nursery of the humanrace, it is now to a great extent the school. Some part--it generally isthe best part--of education takes place outside the class-room; but itmust be remembered that the atmosphere of home is generally impregnatedwith the conventional traditions of the school and of the university. 

The evil influence that is so obviously undermining social and nationallife must, therefore, first be sought in the principles upon whicheducation systems have been founded. 

Nothing is more astonishing than to reflect upon the unintelligentgrounds on which people base their adherence to the principles of moderneducation. They are unable, in the first place, to get over the factthat their forefathers were brought up in the same fashion before them. It is a sheer impossibility for most people to question anything thathas been going on for any length of time unchecked. 

The undisputed possession of a custom for so many years converts it intothe legal property of the nation, whence it derives a sacred character, and nobody dreams of meddling with it. Any abuses it may bring in itstrain are then conveniently ascribed to the perversity of Providence. The cherished convention is never questioned. That is the remarkablething about it. People can be brought to understand, by means of aflourish of dazzling prospectuses and newspaper advertisements, that abicycle is an improvement on a bone-shaker, or that pneumatic tyres aremore comfortable on rough roads than iron-rimmed wheels. But thatappears to be the set limit of their comprehension. 

They are capable of being made to grasp, after nearly exhausting theresources of a wealthy syndicate, something that obviously affects theirmaterial comfort. But progress in ideas, or anything in the shape ofmoral revolution, has to undergo a thousand-fold more tortuous processbefore it can be made to filter through a convention. The academicproduct is, it must be remembered, a bundle of conventions. If thearticle has been properly manufactured, and bears the hall-mark of themaker and the stamp of the country of its origin, there is nothing elsethere for the truth to filter into. It simply drops through andvapourizes without disturbing anything. 

Conventionality is therefore an insuperable obstacle, as far as themajority of minds are concerned, to the discovery that the establishedprinciples of education are absolutely false. These principles willnever be questioned. It is good enough for the average man that hisfellow-creatures have been contented with them since time immemorial, and that they are diligently practised in the schools and colleges whosenames have been household words for generations past. 

Next to this antiquated conservatism of the least intelligent and mostdispiriting type, comes the false shame that the majority of peopleexhibit when caught displaying ignorance of any of the facts whichcramming systems have pronounced to be indispensable to a generaleducation. Probably more real culture is nipped in the bud by theridiculous assumption that everybody must be a walking encyclopædia, than by all the Philistine conventions and stupidities put together. 

In the course of a recent conversation with an exceptionally brilliantwoman of my acquaintance, it transpired that she believed Winchester andCambridge to be in the same county. This lack of geographical knowledgedid not appear, however, to have impaired her intellectual faculties. There are many persons who can accurately locate any town in England, and yet are vastly inferior in mental capacity to the lady who thoughtthat Cambridge was in Hampshire. 

Why should an individual know more than it is useful and convenient forhim to know? For the student of foreign politics it is essential to beaware of the geographical difference between Tokio and Peking; but ofwhat earthly use would this knowledge be to a man who devoted the wholeof his life to inquiring into the domestic routine of the extinct dodo, or to the improvement of agriculture by the application of scientificmanures?

Life is short, and it is only possible within the limits of the briefspan allotted to us upon earth to acquire a certain number of facts. Itis monstrously absurd to sacrifice our best years in stuffing so manyfacts into the brain, in order to avoid being laughed at by a fewthin-minded pedants as an ignoramus. Some consolation, at least, mightsurely be derived from the reflection that many of the greatest geniuseswhom the world has produced were profoundly ignorant as to ninety percent. Of the things which are considered to be indispensable knowledgeat the present day. 

Nobody can hope to read all the books that are popularly supposed tohave been digested by the well-educated man. It would be impossible toget through a tithe of them. Yet how many people there are who willsooner tell a deliberate lie, than acknowledge having omitted to readsome classic that happens to be mentioned in the course of conversation!And this is simply due to the infatuated belief that culture consists instuffing one's self with the ideas of other people. A man whose brainwas teeming with his own thoughts and creations, but who had neglectedto stock it with the hundred thousand conventional facts culled from thehundred best books selected for him by other people, would be lookedupon as an uneducated boor by cultured pedants of the conventional type. 

It will be seen, therefore, that this false shame, inspired by anunwholesome terror of public ridicule, plays a very important part intying people to the apron-strings of education, and warping theirjudgment. 

But there is also a third factor which must be taken seriously intoaccount. This is the widespread credulousness not only as to theefficacy, but as to the indispensability, of the ordinary methods ofinstruction as mental training. People have actually come to believethat no one can think without being taught to do so by means of allkinds of mathematical and classical gymnastics. 

Whence comes this monstrous notion I do not pretend to be capable ofexplaining--I merely note its universal existence. Probably no doctrineis more deeply ingrained in the mind of the average person. There doesnot seem to be any logic or sense in it; but somebody with a huge senseof humour must have once started the craze--much in the way that apractical joker will stare intently at nothing in a London street untilhe has collected a large and inquisitive crowd, and will then stealquietly away, leaving everybody looking vacuously at the same spot. 

In the whole history of education there is no greater absurdity than thenotion that a boy can be taught to think by training his mind backwardsand forwards in the conjugation of irregular verbs and the vagaries ofLatin or Greek inflections. Exercises of this ingeniously ridiculouskind only serve to empty the brain of ideas, and to make room for thereception of facts crammed in on the wholesale system. It is an acceptedfact, however, that the brain, in order to pursue its normal functions, must first be subjected to a course of training in abstract subjects asfar removed as possible from all human interest; that common sense, inother words, is a product of Greek roots and algebraical formulæ--not ofthe natural application of the thinking faculties to the ordinarycircumstances of everyday life. 

The hopeless imbecility of this tenet of faith is only equalled by thedepth to which it has taken root in the popular mind. The wonderfulthing is that the total failure of the plan has not long ago convincedeverybody of its uselessness. But that is at once the mischief and thecharm of the convention: no amount of practical demonstration willprejudice anybody against it. 

In this way the great fallacy of education has been allowed to grow upand to spread its false and obnoxious principles like a network over thewhole civilized world. With all the baneful effects produced by thesefallacious dogmas staring them in the face, people do not seem to havebeen capable of tumbling to the fact that the origin of the social evilswhich surround them lies in the very calf of gold that they and theirforefathers have set up and worshipped. 

Even the reformers of education appear to have deceived themselves. Many of them--Arnold and Thring conspicuous amongst their number--havetried to abolish this abuse or to remedy that defect; but not one hasgone to the root of the evil, and has boldly stated that the wholesystem of education is based upon totally erroneous principles--designed, not to encourage progress and generate ideas, but to stifle development, and to place an insurmountable obstacle in the path of the evolution ofhumanity. 

The world has acquiesced in the deceit, and so the great fallacy hasgrown up unchecked, and, like a rolling stone, gathered moss fromgeneration to generation, until its hideous proportions seem to haveembraced the universe, and to have shut out every particle of light fromthe vision of unhappy, convention-haunted mankind. 

CHAPTER XV

REAL EDUCATION

There is no such thing in existence as a system of genuine education. Alarge number of institutions exist, as we have seen, for the purpose ofmanufacturing and cramming, after an approved plan, the youth of theupper and middle classes, and there is a well-organized system of shameducation spread throughout the country under the title of 'publicelementary schools. ' That is the sum of modern educational effort. 

The word 'education, ' when used in the sense that is commonly applied toit, could not be satisfactorily and adequately defined in less than apost octavo pamphlet. It signifies an enormous number of things, frompot-hooks to trigonometry. It means history, geography, physics, chemistry, natural history, mineralogy, Latin, Greek, French, arithmetic, algebra, Euclid, and goodness knows how many more things, jammed in at so much a pound. It means taking a child, shakingeverything out of its head, and then stuffing every nook and corner withfacts it will never be able to remember, and with dates for which itcannot have any use. It means risking the mental shipwreck of the cleverchild, and making the stupid more dense. And it means popping theindividual into a mould, and dishing him up as a dummy. 

What it does not mean, is developing the faculties of each individual. 

There is, in fact, a wide difference between what education is and whatit should be. If every school and college throughout the country wereclosed to-morrow, it would probably effect some negative good within anappreciable measure of time, and it would certainly abolish muchpositive harm that is being unceasingly produced by the present methodsof instruction. If no effort be made to develop the faculties of eachindividual, then it is better to leave them alone to develop on theirown account. But nothing can be more pernicious than to take the youthof the nation wholesale, and to destroy most of the good that is latentin them, in order to manufacture them into something which Nature neverintended them to be. 

This is not education, but fabrication. It is destruction, notdevelopment. Real education would consist in assisting every individualto develop the faculties with which Nature had endowed him, and to trainto their highest capacity any special talents that might revealthemselves during the process. Above all things, real education wouldencourage the utilization of the brain for purposes of thought andreflection, instead of trying to make it a warehouse for storingvan-loads of useless knowledge. 

It is absurd to assume that this simple educational aim is beyond thereach of humanity. That its introduction into the practical affairs oflife would cause a stupendous revolution cannot be denied. But it doesnot follow, on that account, that it should be conveniently consigned, like many another pressing reform, to the pigeon-hole of the impossible. 

The main thing that is required to carry out the true principle ofeducation is more individual common sense and less State interference. The mischievous enactment that children should commence any process ofinstruction at the tender age of five should be at once struck off thestatute-book. No doubt something would have to be done to remove youngchildren of the poorest class, in large towns at least, from theinfluence of sordid homes for a certain period of the day. It does notfollow, however, that they should be subjected to the routine of anelementary school and crammed with superficial and unsuitable knowledge. 

Children want room to think; their minds have to grow up as well astheir bodies. Mental nourishment is quite as necessary as physicalnourishment; but it is nonsensical to apply them both in the samefashion. The mind has to be fed in a totally different manner to thebody. The former is a delicate operation, that requires far more careand common sense than is necessary for the boiling of milk or thepreparation of an infant food. 

The child's mind is not a blank, upon which anything may be written atwill; it is scored invisibly with heredity and individual tendencies. The function of the parent is to see that nothing is done to destroythis delicate fabric, and to watch carefully for revelations of naturalbent and character, in order to encourage and develop them. 

Anything in the shape of actual teaching or instruction ought to berigorously avoided. Facts should be regarded as poisons, to be usedsparingly and with discrimination. Every time that a fact is imparted anidea is driven out. That should be carefully borne in mind. Theoperation of the simplest fact upon the intelligence is highly complex. It is not only a thing to imprint upon the memory, but it is also ameans of diverting thought into the channels of the commonplace. Everyfact closes up an avenue of the imagination. 

To take an illustration, let us suppose someone to impart to a littlechild the information that it is a physiological impossibility forangels to have wings as well as arms. This prosaic piece of intelligencewould, in one moment, annihilate most of the romance of childhood. Itwould be a blow from which the imagination might never recover. Thechild would, by a rapid process of thought, lose all faith in fairyland, and in the thousand and one fancies of the youthful brain that are themainspring of the development of the imagination. 

Why is it that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred lose this faculty inthe earliest period of their childhood? It is simply because theirbringing-up has consisted in a persistent inoculation with the materialfacts of life, and a correspondingly persistent elimination of allimaginative ideas. 'Don't let the children believe such rubbish!' is aconstant ejaculation of the mechanical-minded person who does notpermit himself to suffer any illusions, and who has long since 'donewith romance and all that kind of twaddle. '

At any cost the imagination of the child should be encouraged anddeveloped. It is the richest vein in the whole mental machinery of man, the faculty within which genius most frequently lurks, and where it canbe most easily and permanently destroyed. Grown-up people shouldremember that an indiscreet answer to a childish question, or a snubadministered to an inquiring mind, is often sufficient to check thought. It should be mainly the care of the parent to encourage the imaginationin young children, recollecting that up to a certain age its developmentdepends upon all the absurdities and fantastic notions of childhoodwhich the average adult is so fond of repressing. 

By the exercise of prudence and some show of sympathy, it would then bepossible to bring a child up to the age of seven or eight withoutdamaging its mind or destroying its faculties. From that point onwardsthe child's education ought to depend upon the individual himself. Thereshould be no such thing as instruction, in the sense which implies thecramming of the brain with information, or such mental gymnastics asconjugating irregular verbs and hunting for the least common multiple. 

The position of teacher and pupil would have to be practically reversed. The pupil would lead, and the teacher follow. In fact, the latter shouldbecome an adviser rather than instructor, the child selecting thosestudies, or those arts or crafts, which are to be made the principalobjective of its education, whilst to the mentor would fall the rôle ofencouraging and assisting the course of study or practice at a morallysafe distance. 

Boys and girls would then not learn, but investigate. The process oflearning should be got rid of altogether, being a clumsy, dronish way ofacquiring knowledge, and one that tends to keep the brain in a perpetualstate of dependence. 

Ignorance, one ought to remember, is a valuable incentive toinvestigation. Young people should be left as much as possible to findthings out for themselves. Education should resemble a person gropingforward in the dark; and only so much light ought to be let in upon theprocess as seems desirable in each individual case. In that way, atleast, the pupil would learn to think for himself; and even if littlemore were accomplished than this, it would be of ten thousand timesgreater value to the individual, and to the community at large, than theacquisition of a large stock of facts at the price of losing all powerof reflection and initiative. 

Let me give an illustration of what I will call the opposing methods ofeducation. 

We will suppose, for the sake of argument, that the only available bookfor the instruction of a class of boys was that excellent but abstrusework known as 'Bradshaw's Railway Guide. ' The modern schoolmaster woulddraw up an exhaustive and complicated scheme. So much time would bedevoted to parsing every sentence through the book. The figures would beadded up, and subtracted, and divided. He would concoct neat littlemathematical problems: If the 11. 40 express from Paddington travelled toSwindon at fifty miles an hour and broke down half-way, at what o'clockwould the 12. 15 parliamentary train overtake it? and so forth. But--mostvaluable exercise of all--long tables of trains would be learnt off byheart, with the names of stopping places and the prices of thefirst-class tickets. 

A genuine educationist would set to work in a much simpler fashion. Hewould tell the boys to look out a good train from Birmingham toNewcastle. Each boy would be free to tackle the problem in his ownfashion, and the task--if successfully accomplished--would do muchtowards developing the thinking faculties. 

In any system of real education it would be impossible for theschoolmaster to dictate the subjects to which the pupil should give hisattention, and it would be equally impossible for the parent to say 'Iintend my son to enter such-and-such a profession. ' Nobody can settlebeforehand what talents the child is to develop. That is a privatematter in which no third person has any right to interfere between thechild itself and Nature. 

Modern education consists entirely of interference. There is, in thefirst place, the interference of the parent, who insists upon anartistic boy becoming a banker, puts an incipient tradesman into thearmy, or tries to make a scholar out of a mechanic. Then there comes theinterference of the schoolmaster, who has his favourite recipe of Latinverses, quadratic equations, and what not, to stuff into every head hecan get hold of for a few terms. Lastly appears the Government, whichdeclares that nobody shall enter the army, or navy, or civil service, without devoting his best years to being crammed in such a scandalousfashion, that it is a toss-up whether he breaks down altogether underthe ordeal, or simply forgets, a few months after the consummation ofthe process, all that has been pitchforked into his brain. 

When a baby is brought into the world the parents spend the first yearof its life in wondering and speculating about its future. Will it be agreat author, or a Bishop, or a Lord Chancellor? If its mouth twitcheswhen anyone slams a door, or it gurgles happily when a note is struck onthe piano, they declare it has genius for music; and if it amuses itselflater on by crude efforts to draw distorted figures with distorted facesand distorted arms and legs, they jump to the conclusion that they haveproduced an infant Correggio. 

Why does all this anxiety about the child's individuality disappear themoment its intelligence begins to dawn? One must suppose, at any rate, that it does, because the parent immediately sets about getting all theoriginality knocked out of his offspring, and does not grudge thepayment of heavy fees to secure this object. 

The dreams about the Lord Chancellorship, or the gold medal at themusical academy, vanish as if by magic. There is no more talk aboutbishoprics or artistic fame. The parents settle down to the conventionaltask of having the child fitted for something it has no desire to be;and the notion that the particular faculties they observed--or thoughtthey observed--during its early infancy should or could be developednever appears to enter their heads for a moment. 

Some children develop later than others; but with proper care andencouragement it would be possible not to lead, but to follow, eachchild to its own bent. The child must show the way--that is the essenceof real education, and it involves a complete upheaval of the principlesupon which systems of instruction are at present founded. 

There is only one way in which people are now able to obtain a genuineeducation, and it goes by the name--applied with more or lesscontempt--of self-culture. The process consists simply in the individualchoosing his own subjects and studying them as best he can. No doubt themethod could be immensely extended and improved, for the self-culturedman has no mentor to guide him when he is in perplexity, and wouldprofit by experienced advice. 

But even were this not the case, it would be far better to abolishschools and universities and to let everybody shift for himself, than toinsist upon subjecting the youth of the nation to a system thatingeniously manufactures failures for every walk in life, andaccomplishes practically nothing else. 

CHAPTER XVI

THE OPEN DOOR TO INTELLIGENCE

It has been the chief aim in these pages, not to elaborate a scheme ofeducation on new principles, but to point out the utter folly ofpersisting with a system that has worked a vast amount of evil, andcannot be proved to have achieved any real good. 

Our great men have not been the product of a school curriculum, or of anacademic training. In no single instance, as far as can be ascertained, has nobility of character, or the possession of genius, or soundness ofjudgment, or even beauty of diction in literature, been attributable tothe grind in grammatical rules, the fact-cramming, and the mentalgymnastics which go to make up what is called 'a liberal education. '

In science, where the highest intellectual qualities are brought intoplay, most of the great discoverers have owed their entire scientificknowledge to self-taught methods of investigation. And it is the samething in every field of research where the thinking faculties must reachthe supreme limit of development--namely, that nothing is traceable toacademic learning, and that everything is owing to the mentalinitiative which is produced solely by self-inculcated habits ofreflection. 

To give education systems the credit, or even a share in the credit, ofall the splendid achievements in politics, science, art, and literatureis sheer intellectual laziness. It is the curse of the age that fewpeople will trouble to question the existing order of things, and thatnobody--except those who make the manufacture of opinions theirprofession--can be found to express an independent opinion on anysubject under the sun. 

That is one reason why newspapers exist in their present form. Theleading article is primarily the invention of the stupid, conventional, well-educated man whose profound knowledge of dates and irregular verbshas, unfortunately, had the effect of preventing him from forming hisown judgment on public affairs. The Press, which must have beenoriginally established, like the famous _Peking Gazette_, for thedissemination of news, has long ago discovered that people prefer toobtain their opinions ready-made. 

The wise argument we hear being urged in a railway-carriage or at adinner-table is merely an intellectual reach-me-down purchased at abook-stall for the modest price of one penny. If there were only onenewspaper, and consequently only one leading article on a particulartopic, political discussion would die a natural death. 

The political opinion to which the majestic alderman or theclassically-trained savant gives such profound utterance is the opinion, not of himself, but of some poor devil who knows nothing of theblessings of a university education, but who writes in a garret, or ina dingy office off Fleet Street, to earn his bread and cheese. 

Its value or political insight need not be disparaged on that account. Iwould trust it a thousand times rather than I would trust theopinion--if such a thing should have any existence--of the averageeducated man whose brains have been jellified at school or college. Thepoint is not the value of the humble scribe's opinion, however, but thefact that a man, of what would be called inferior educationalattainments, has to be engaged to do mental work that cannot beperformed by the brains of people who have enjoyed all the advantagesthat a first-rate education is supposed to confer. 

The vote of the working-man is scarcely more unintelligently applied atelection times than the vote of the educated man. On the contrary, theformer may be said to think independently, or at least to use anindependent instinct, whilst the latter is contented to believe in theiniquity of one party or the virtue of another, according to the opinionof the man in the garret. The working man wants beer, and he knows it. The China question, the war in South Africa, the housing of the workingclasses, the great education controversy--everything is beer to him. Itis the Government who cheapen beer, or who regulate the percentage ofarsenic to be used in brewing, that command his support--not Ministerswho promise to maintain British supremacy in the Far East, or who putforward an attractive programme of domestic legislation. 

The natural consequence of this wholesale production of dummy members ofsociety is that the strings of government are really pulled by theintelligent few. Whatever the external constitution of Great Britain maybe, the real power does not lie with Parliament or with the Executive, but is invariably wielded by one or more men of commanding ability. 

Nominally, the administration is in the hands of the social aristocracy, that is to say, of a few peer families and their innumerable relations. Whichever of the two great parties in the State may happen to be inpower, the Government is invariably exploited by members of the peerclass, who practically divide the spoils of office amongst themselvesand their immediate entourage. 

Although, however, the English nobility manage to usurp all the officesof State, and to secure all the plums for themselves, it is not they whoreally govern the country. No doubt the landed aristocracy arepolitically the most fit to govern. They have no commercial orindustrial interests that may bring corrupt and undesirable influencesinto public life. But they are unfitted for the position they ought tooccupy by a system of education that manufactures mediocrity, andstifles the very qualities of imaginativeness and initiative which areindispensable to sound statesmanship. 

What is the inevitable result?

The self-made man, with all his splendid intellectual facultiesdeveloped, with his independence of judgment, and his acquired habit ofthinking for himself instead of leaning on precedent and borrowedwisdom, rides the dummy Government class with whip and spur. He lays onthe lash here and digs in the rowels there, goading on his steed in anydirection that chances to suit his purpose. He naturally places personalambition in front of national expediency, because his political careeris necessarily a constant fight against odds. Either he must risesuperior to the peer combination, as Disraeli succeeded in doing after astruggle unparalleled in the annals of political history, or he will becrushed by it. 

But the necessities of his position render the self-made man aparticularly undesirable element in the administration of publicaffairs. During the course of his successful upward struggle he has, innine cases out of ten, entangled himself in commercial or industrialinterests from which it is difficult or impossible for him to dissociatehimself. By this means, and through the necessarily adventurouscharacter of his political career, he can scarcely avoid becoming, however undeserved the imputation may be, an object of suspicion. Andwhen once distrust of this kind has been allowed to permeate through ourpublic life, the degeneration of parliamentary government must follow. 

Disraeli spent the greater part of his political life in manoeuvringfor the premiership. When his object had been successfully attained, allhis great qualities were turned to the advantage of the State. But up tothat point he was compelled, in order to survive in his colossalstruggle against the aristocratic element in politics, to play for hisown hand. 

That must always be the case with the self-made man. His first objectivemust be his own self-preservation, and if he wishes to gain power he isbound to exploit the political situation, regardless of the bestinterests of the country, because every man's hand is against him untilthe summit of his ambition has been reached. 

Schools and colleges in which the mind is crammed instead of beingdeveloped cannot produce statesmen. They can manufacture in unlimitedquantities the type of well-intentioned, honourable mediocrity withwhich our public service is stocked. But as long as this process iscontinued, the real power in the administration of the affairs of theEmpire will remain virtually in the hands of a few able individuals ofthe wrong calibre. There will be a dummy Prime Minister, and a dummyCabinet; but the wires will be worked by the self-made man who mustplace himself first and his country second, with consequences usuallydisastrous to the national welfare. 

There is no intended disparagement of the self-made man. He is, andalways has been, the best intellectual product of the age. The greateststatesmen, philosophers, scientists, writers, and other men of geniushave been self-made or self-cultured. But it does not follow becausegreat statesmen have been self-made men, that it is for the good of thecountry that its rulers should be drawn from that class. As has alreadybeen pointed out, the self-made man usually creates far more mischief inthe course of his upward political struggle, than is compensated forafterwards when he has secured his position and can turn his talents tothe account of his country, instead of for the purpose of securing hisown personal advancement. 

There is, it must be remembered, a national emergency for which we haveto prepare. Our extended Imperial obligations, and the sharp commercialcompetition which has caused some of the great Powers to sacrificeindividuality wholesale in order to mobilize an army of traders, make itimperative that measures should be taken to preserve the Anglo-Saxonrace. 

The thing to avoid at this moment is imitation of tactics that will sendevery nation adopting them backward in evolution. To secure a temporarycommercial triumph at the enormous sacrifice of the natural developmentof the individual, would be a fatal and short-sighted policy that couldonly end in national ruin. We have not yet reached the worst depths ofthe education fallacy, but we are complacently drifting in thatdirection. 

State interference in educational matters may be an excellent thing whenthe whole energies of the central authorities happen to be exerted inmitigation of the evils of the national system. But it must be borne inmind that political parties and the heads of departments are constantlychanging in this country. The reformer of to-day may to-morrow besuperseded by a retrogressive-minded mediocrity; and there would be noguarantee that the beneficial influence of the one would not beannihilated afterwards by the pernicious intermeddling of the other. 

Instead of casting about for means of securing a State monopoly of theruinous type of education supplied by our schools and colleges, it wouldbe more conducive to the salvation of the country if the whole energiesof the nation were directed towards revolutionizing the system ofinstruction itself. 

If schoolmasters can accomplish nothing better than the manufacture ofset types of humanity, the progress of mankind would be promoted morerapidly without their assistance. 

What is, after all, the main object of education?

It is to assist everybody to develop his faculties and talents, so thathe may be fitted for the position in life which Nature intended him tooccupy. 

Nobody can assert for an instant that the conventional methods ofinstructing youth either achieve, or even appear to aim at achieving, this end. The school does not pretend to discover or to encourageindividual talents. It offers to pound so much Latin grammar, mathematics, history, geography, etc. , into each pupil, and to turn himout at the end of the process with exactly the same mental equipment asthat acquired by the rest of his school-fellows. 

The principal aim of this book has been to draw attention to theincongruities and evils brought about by this sham and worthless systemof education. That the world contains many illustrious examples ofculture and genius is no proof that the slightest benefit has beenderived by anybody from parsing Ovid or cramming facts and dates. 'Thebest part of every man's education, ' said Sir Walter Scott, 'is thatwhich he gives to himself'; and it might be added, with literal truth, that it is the only part which is of the slightest service in developingthe mind with which he has been naturally endowed. 

All that I have presumed to advocate is that the door should be leftopen to intelligence. 

The education systems of the present day are particularly felicitous inkeeping it firmly closed. It is only by dodging the schoolmaster and thecoach that youthful talent stands a chance of being brought to maturity. The greatest achievements are not the work of senior wranglers andBalliol scholars: they have been accomplished by class-room dunces, likeClive and Wellington; by school idlers, such as Napoleon, Disraeli, Swift, and Newton; or by self-taught men like Stephenson, John Hunter, Livingstone, and Herschel. 

It cannot be doubted that the institution of a rational method ofdeveloping the mind of the individual would sweep away all theseanomalies. There are thousands of men in responsible positions who wouldwillingly exchange their entire stock of classical or mathematicalknowledge for a modicum of common sense and judgment. If everybody wereencouraged to think for himself, the Empire would have no lack of goodservants to carry on the traditions of the past; and the dummy unit ofadministration would give place to a self-reliant man, capable of movingwith the times, and of serving the public interest according to itswants, instead of clinging merely to routine and precedent. 

Nearly all the misery suffered by humanity has been produced byartificial means. Providence did not intend this world to be a place ofpurgatory for the majority of mankind. We are what we have madeourselves, and not what evolution intended us to be. It is in our powerto mitigate much of the evil we have ignorantly manufactured for our owndiscomfiture, if we only attack it at the roots. And the greatest cursehumanity has laid upon itself is that arbitrary interference with thenatural development of the mind which is misnamed 'education. '

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD. , PRINTERS, GUILDFORD