Civics: as Applied Sociology Part 5

FOLK

PLACE-WORK WORK FOLK-WORK (Natural advantages) (Occupation)

PLACE

This again naturally develops into a regular table, of which the [Page: 72] filling up of some of the squares has been already suggested above, and that of the remaining ones will be intelligible on inspection:--

PLACE FOLK WORK-FOLK FOLK ("Natives") ("Producers")

PLACE-WORK WORK FOLK-WORK

PLACE WORK-PLACE FOLK-PLACE

So complex is the idea of even the simplest Town--even in such a rustic germ as the "farm-town" of modern Scottish parlance, the _ton_ of place-names without number.

The varying development of the Folk into social cla.s.ses or castes night next be traced, and the influence and interaction of all the various factors of Place, Work, and Family tabulated. Suffice it here, however, for the present to note that such differentiation does take place, without entering into the cla.s.sification and comparison of the protean types of patrician and plebeian throughout geography and history.

G--a.n.a.lYSIS CONTINUED.--(2) THE SCHOOL

Once and again we have noted how from the everyday life of action--the Town proper of our terminology--there arises the corresponding subjective world--the _Schools_ of thought, which may express itself sooner or later in schools of education. The types of people, their kinds and styles of work, their whole environment, all become represented in the mind of the community, and these react upon the individuals, their activities, their place itself. Thus (the more plainly the more the community is a simple and an isolated one, but in appreciable measure everywhere and continually) there have obviously arisen local turns of thought and modes of speech, ranging from shades of accept and idiom to distinctive dialect or language. Similarly, there is a characteristic variety of occupational activity, a style of workmanship, a way of doing business. There are distinctive [Page: 73]

manners and customs--there is, in short, a certain recognisable likeness, it may be an indefinably subtle or an unmistakably broad and general one, which may be traced in faces and costumes, in tongue and literature, in courtesy and in conflict, in business and in policy, in street and in house, from hovel to palace, from prison to cathedral.

Thus it is that every folk comes to have its own ways, and every town its own school.

While the complex social medium has thus been acquiring its characteristic form and composition, a younger generation has been arising. In all ways and senses, Heredity is commonly more marked than variation--especially when, as in most places at most times, such great racial, occupational, environmental transformations occur as those of modern cities. In other words, the young folk present not only an individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity proper, but with their social predecessors also. The elements of organic continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the _inheritance_--a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the term _heritage_, material or immaterial alike. This necessary distinction between the inheritance, bodily and mental, and the heritage, economic and social, obviously next requires further elaboration, and with this further precision of language also. For the present, let us leave the term heritage to the economist for the material wealth with which he is primarily concerned, and employ the term _tradition_ for these immaterial and distinctively social elements we are here specially considering. This in fact is no new proposal, but really little more than an acceptance of ordinary usage. Broadly speaking, tradition is in the life of the community what memory is for its individual units. The younger generation, then, not only inherits an organic and a psychic diathesis; not only has transmitted to it the acc.u.mulations, instruments and land of its predecessors, but grows up in their tradition also. The importance of imitation in this process, a matter of common experience, has been given the fullest sociological prominence, by M. Tarde especially.[9] Thanks to these and other convergent lines of thought, we no longer consent to look at the acquirement of the social tradition as a matter requiring to be imposed upon reluctant youth almost entirely from without, and are learning anew as of old, with the simplest and the most developed peoples, the barbarians and the Greeks, to recognise and respect, and, if it may be, to nourish the process of self-instruction, viewed as normal accompaniment of each developing being throughout the phases of its [Page: 74] organic life, the stages of its social life. Upon the many intermediate degrees of advance and decline, however, between these two extremes of civilisation, specific inst.i.tutions for the instruction of youth arise, each in some way an artificial subst.i.tute, or at least a would-be accelerant, for the apprenticeship of imitation in the school of experience and the community's tradition, which we term a school in the restricted and pedagogic sense. This whole discussion, however, has been in order to explain and to justify the present use of the term "School" in that wide sense in which the historian of art or thought--the sociologist in fact--has ever used the term, while yet covering the specialised pedagogic schools of all kinds also.

[9] Tarde, "L'imitation Sociale," and other works.

Once more, then, and in the fullest sense, every folk has its own tradition, every town its school.

We need not here discriminate these unique and characteristic elements to which the art-historians--say of Venice and of Florence, of Barbizon or Glasgow--specially attend from those most widely distributed ones, in which the traditions and schools of all towns within the same civilisation broadly agree. Indeed, even the most widely distributed of these--say from Roman law to modern antiseptic surgery--arose as local schools before they became general ones.

Similarly for the general social tradition. The fundamental occupations and their division of labour, their differentiation in detail and their various interactions up to our own day, at first separately considered, are now seen to be closely correlated with the status of woman; while all these factors determine not only the mode of union of the parents, but their relation to the children, the const.i.tution of the family, with which the mode of transmission of property is again thoroughly interwoven.

H--TOWN AND SCHOOL COMPARED

"TOWN" FOLK

WORK

PLACE

SURVEY

CRAFT-KNOWLEDGE

"SCHOOL" CUSTOM

We may now summarise and tabulate our comparison of Town and School,[10] and on the schema (p.75) it will be seen [Page: 76]

that each element of the second is printed in the position of a mirror-reflection of the first. This gives but the merest outline, which is ready, however, to be applied in various ways and filled up accordingly. A step towards this is made in the next and fuller version of the scheme (p. 77). It will be noted in this that the lower portion of the diagram, that of School, is more fully filled up than is the upper. This is partly for clearness, but partly also to suggest that main elements in the origins of natural sciences and geography, of economics and social science, are not always so clearly realised as they might be. The preceding diagram, elaborating that of Place, Work, Folk (p. 75), however, at once suggests these. Other features of the scheme will appear on inspection; and the reader will find it of interest and suggestiveness to prepare a blank schedule and fill it up for himself.

[10] For the sake of brevity, an entire chapter has been omitted, discussing the manifold origins of distinct governing cla.s.ses, whether arising from the Folk, or superimposed upon them from without, in short, of the contrast of what we may broadly call patricians and plebeians, which so constantly appears through history, and in the present also.

These modes of origin are all in a.s.sociation respectively with Place, Work, and Family, or some of the various interactions of these. Origin and situation, migration, individual or general, with its conflict of races, may be indicated among the first group of factors; technical efficiency and its organising power among the second; individual qualities and family stocks among the third, as also military and administrative apt.i.tude, and the inst.i.tutional privileges which so readily arise from them. Nor need we here discuss the rise of inst.i.tutions, so fully dealt with by sociological writers. Enough for the present then, if inst.i.tutions and social cla.s.ses be taken as we find them.

These two forms of the same diagram, the simple and the more developed, thus suggest comparison with the scheme previously outlined, that of People, Affairs, Places (p. 68), and is now more easily reconciled with this; the greater prominence popularly given to People and Affairs being expressed upon the present geographic and evolutionary scheme by the ascending position and more emphatic printing (or by viewing the diagram as a transparency from the opposite side of the leaf).

In the column of People, the deepening of custom into morals is indicated. Emphasis is also placed upon the development of law in connection with the rise of governing cla.s.ses, and its tendency to dominate the standards previously taken as morals--in fact, that tendency of moral law to become static law, a process of which history is full.

GOVERNING ========= ========= CLa.s.sES ======= ======= ^ | FAMILY TYPES ============ ---------------------------------------------- INDUSTRIES ========== ---------- ---------------------------------------------- (FOLK-PLACE) REGION (WORK PLACE) ------------ ====== ------------ (TOWN) | ====== | V -------------------------------------------- | V SURVEY ("SCHOOL") ====== ========== !--LANDSCAPE (CRAFT-TRADITION) ----------------- (FOLK-LORE) ?--TERRITORY ----------- | | V --------------------------------------------- | V [NATURAL [APPLIED [SOCIAL -------- ======== ======= SCIENCES] SCIENCES] SCIENCES]

--------- ========= ========= | | V ------------------------------------------- | CUSTOMS V ------- MORALS ====== GEOGRAPHY ECONOMICS ------ --------- ========= & LAWS ==== ====

In the present as in the past, we may also note upon the scheme the different lines of Place, Work and Folk on which respectively develop the natural sciences, the applied or [Page: 78] technical sciences, and finally the social sciences, and the generalising of these respectively.

Thus, as we see the popular survey of regions, geography in its literal and initial sense, deepening into the various a.n.a.lyses of this and that aspect or element of the environment which we call the natural sciences--but which we might with advantage also recognise as what they really are, each a _geolysis_--so these sciences or geolyses, again, are tending to reunite into a higher geography considered as an account of the evolution of the cosmos.

Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic process which specialist men of science and their public are alike apt to overlook, but which is none the less vitally important. For we cannot really understand, say Pasteur, save primarily as a thinking peasant; or Lister and his antiseptic surgery better than as the shepherd, with his tar-box by his side; or Kelvin or any other electrician, as the thinking smith, and so on. The old story of geometry, as "_ars metrike_," and of its origin from land-surveying, for which the Egyptian hieroglyph is said to be that of "rope stretching," in fact, applies far more fully than most realise, and the history of every science, of course already thus partially written, will bear a far fuller application of this principle. In short, the self-taught man, who is ever the most fertile discoverer, is made in the true and fundamental school--that of experience.

The need of abbreviating the recapitulation of this, however, sooner or later develops the school in the pedagogic sense, and its many achievements, its many failures in accomplishing this, might here be more fully a.n.a.lysed.

Still more evident is this process in the column of Folk. From the mother's knee and the dame's school of the smallest folk-place, the townlet or hamlet, _ton_ or home, up to the royal and priestly school of the law of ancient capitals, or from the "humanities" of a mediaeval university to the "Ecole de Droit" of a modern metropolis, the series of essential evolutionary stages may be set down. Or in our everyday present, [Page: 79] the rise of schools of all kinds, primary, secondary, higher up to the current movement towards university colleges, and from these to civic and regional universities, might again be traced. The munic.i.p.alisation of education is thus in fact expressed, and so on.

Leaving the schools in the main to speak for themselves of their advancing and incipient uses, a word may be said upon the present lines.

As a first and obvious application of this mode of geographic study of cities appears the criticism, and; when possible, the amendment of the city's plan, the monotonous rectangularity of the American city, and the petty irregularity more common in our own, being alike uneconomic and inartistic because ungeographic, irrational because irregional. With the improvement of communications, the physicist's point of view thus introduced--that of the economy of the energies of the community--is only beginning; the economy of fuel, the limitation of smoke and fogs being symptoms of this and pointing to a more economic organisation of industrial activities generally. But this next carries with it the improved efficiency of the producers themselves, with whom, however, the standpoint changes from the mere economisation of physical energies to the higher economy of organic evolution. The convention of traditional economics, that the productive capacity of the actual labourer is the sole concern of his science, thus gives place to what is at once the original conception of economics and the evolutionist one, viz., that the success of industry is ultimately measured neither by its return in wealth of the capitalist nor in money wages of the labourer, nor even by both put together, but in the results of industry upon the concrete environment, the family budget, the home, and the corresponding state of development of the family--its deterioration or progress. The organisation of industrial groups or of representative inst.i.tutions found conducive to the well-being and progress of these prime civic units, the families, may now be traced into its highest outcome in city government. The method of a.n.a.lysis and graphic statement thus outlined may be shown to be even capable of useful application towards the statement of the best [Page: 80] arguments of both progressive and moderate parties in city politics.

Pa.s.sing from Politics to Culture. Culture, the needs of this also become clearer; each community developing a similar general series of culture inst.i.tutions, from the simplest presentation of its geography, landscape and architecture, to the complex development of industrial, technical and scientific instruction; and for provision also for the inst.i.tutions of custom and ethic in school, law, and church. Just as place, occupation, and family are intimately connected in the practical world, so their respective culture inst.i.tutions must more and more be viewed as a whole. Civic improvers will find their ideals more realisable as they recognise the complex unity of the city as a social development of which all the departments of action and thought are in organic relation, be it of health or disease. The view of theoretic civics as concrete sociology, and of practical civics as applied sociology may be more simply expressed as the co-adjustment of social survey and social service, now becoming recognised as rational, indeed in many cities being begun.

I--DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL, AND ITS REACTION UPON TOWN

The reactions of the School upon the Town are observed in practice to be of very different values;--how are these differences to be explained?

From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers.

The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention, is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the fixation of habit and custom, so that at length "custom lies upon us with a weight heavy as death, and deep [Page 81] almost as life." This continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral ones is thus a prime explanation of each reformer's difficulty in making his moral standard the fashionable one, and also, when his doctrine has succeeded, of the loss of life and mummification of form which it so speedily undergoes.

Of conventional "education," considered as the memorisation of past records, however authoritative and cla.s.sic, the decay is thus intelligible and plain, and the repet.i.tion of criticisms already adequately made need not therefore detain us here.

For this process is there no remedy? Science here offers herself--with senses open to observe, and intellect awake to interpret. Starting with Place, she explores and surveys it, from descriptive travel books at very various levels of accuracy, she works on to atlas and gazetteer, and beyond these to world-globe and "Geographie Universelle." With her charts and descriptions we are now more ready for a journey; with her maps and plans we may know our own place as never before; nay, rectify it, making the rough places plain and the crooked straight; even restoration may come within our powers.

Similarly as regards Work. Though mere empiric craft-mastery dies with the individual, and fails with his successors, may we not perpetuate the best of this? A museum of art treasures, a collection of the choicest examples of all times and lands, will surely raise us from our low level of mechanical toil; nay, with these carefully observed, copied, memorised, and duly examined upon, we shall be able to imitate them, to reproduce their excellencies, even to adapt them to our everyday work.

To the art museum we have thus but to add a "School of Design," to have an output of more and less skilled copyists. The smooth and polished successes of this new dual inst.i.tution, responding as they do to the mechanical elements of modern work and of the mechanical worker-mind, admitting also of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pa.s.s onwards from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and certificated art-mastery. Our School of Design thus becomes a School of Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction of the nation, to the satisfaction not only of its promoters, but of the general public and their representatives, so that annual votes justly increase. Lurking discontent may now and then express itself, but is for practical purposes negligible.

[Page: 82] The example of art acc.u.mulation and art instruction is thus naturally followed in other respects. For the commercial information of the public, varied representative exhibitions--primarily, therefore, international ones--naturally suggest themselves; while so soon as expansion of imperial and colonial interests comes upon the first plane, a corresponding permanent Exhibition is naturally inst.i.tuted. But when thus advancing commercial instruction, we must also recognise the claims of industry in all its crafts and guilds, and in fact the technical instruction of the community generally. Hence the past, present, and promised rise of technical inst.i.tutes upon increasing scales of completeness.

In the rise of such a truly encylopaedic system of schools, the university cannot permanently be forgotten. Since from the outset we have recognised the prime elements of the school in observation and memory, the testing of these by examinations--written, oral, and practical--however improvable in detail, must be fairly recognised, and the examining body or university has therefore to be adopted as the normal crown of our comprehensive educational system. Teaching, however is found to be increasingly necessary, especially to examination, and for this the main field left open is in our last column, that of People.