The Curse of Education Part 5

A great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about the spectacled Girton girl competing with men in knowledge, at the expense of forfeiting their admiration and thereby losing her vantage-ground.

Spectacles do not enter into the matter at all. As has already been pointed out, physical attraction has nothing, or very little, to do with feminine wire-pulling.

Women derive their real powers from a gift of trained observation, and from the subtlety conferred upon them by the capacity to apply their intelligence to the numerous small matters which go to make up the sum of human life. Their minds will no longer develop these powers when they are systematically subjected to a process of education which has invariably failed to evoke them in the opposite s.e.x. And with the loss of them, woman is bound also to lose the empire which she has. .h.i.therto exercised over masculine nature.

From this point of view alone, the education of women on the modern system is much to be deplored. There is no doubt that women in general have always exercised their predominant influence for the good of mankind. Striking exceptions might easily be adduced from history; but, on the whole, it must be acknowledged that woman has seldom abused her power. Therefore, anything that is calculated to undermine or destroy this favourable influence on human affairs cannot be regarded as otherwise than pernicious.

The more the idea spreads that girls must be given the same educational equipment as boys, the more rapid will be the degeneration of woman. It is a well-known fact in the medical profession that weakly boys are often unable to withstand the strain of school cramming; therefore girls, with their more delicate organization, will suffer proportionately in a greater degree. Physical training, of course, obviates a great deal of this evil. But the same thing is bound to happen in the case of girls as has already been experienced where boys are concerned; that is to say, the most promising intellects will be sacrificed, partly through the ambition of the school authorities, whose princ.i.p.al anxiety is to see their pupils distinguish themselves in examinations, and partly owing to the fact that exceptional ability so often implies a nervous temperament and delicate physique.

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

It is the crude and untutored stage of development of the thinking faculty in woman that causes it to work intuitively, instead of by the slower and sounder processes of logic. To neglect a faculty is by no means synonymous with developing it. Hence woman's powers of thought and observation are embryonic rather than matured. The work they perform is not a t.i.the of what would be accomplished by them under the auspices of judicious encouragement and skilled training. The faculty has neither been destroyed by over-cramming nor fostered by enlightened treatment.

It has simply been allowed to lie more or less dormant, according to the natural environment of the individual.

If man, with his superior brain capacity, were encouraged to cultivate the habits of observation at present restricted to woman, and to apply his intelligence to everything, instead of to a few selected objects, the ratio of the world's progress would be enormously increased. Who first started the notion that man is being manufactured into a superior article, and that woman cannot do better than submit herself with all haste to the same process, I do not know. At any rate, it is a disastrous doctrine, and the sooner the fallacy of it is perceived the more chance there will be of saving future generations of women from the blunder that is handicapping the masculine s.e.x at the present moment.

It would be a grand thing if educationists could be persuaded to open their eyes to the fact that women, having been providentially saved from school instruction for past generations, have been enabled to preserve mental faculties that no amount of cramming and corporal punishment has ever succeeded in awakening in man. They would then cease from their ignorant attempt to deprive woman of her intellectual gift, and possibly even do something towards securing man a little mental room for the installation of his own thinking faculty.

CHAPTER X

YOUTH AND CRIME

We now come to the consideration of an aspect of the educational problem that involves questions of great difficulty and importance. The discussion has. .h.i.therto been limited to the lesser evils attributable to the forcing upon the ma.s.ses of the people a useless and unsuitable kind of education. But there are far graver possibilities than the mere unfitting of large numbers of individuals for the occupations their natural propensities intended them to pursue.

People are, as has been pointed out, driven by the stupidity of the teaching system into all kinds of uncongenial employment. The suffering and waste caused by this constant production of the unfit are incalculable. It is scarcely to be wondered at that some persons have formed the ingenious theory that this world is h.e.l.l itself, and that we are now actually undergoing our punishment in purgatory. Certainly there is some ground for the supposition in the fact that the lives of so many of us seem to have been ordered in direct opposition to our individual tastes and wishes.

This is bad enough. The question we have to face now is whether we have not to thank education systems for something a great deal worse. Mere unhappiness is not necessarily soul-destroying. But there is only too good reason to suppose that the evil effects of the mock education provided by the State do not stop at making its victims unhappy, but even go so far as to plunge a certain proportion of them into actual crime.

At the outset it must be acknowledged that the allegation is very difficult to prove. No satisfactory evidence on the point is derivable from published statistics. It is quite possible to determine by means of the latter how many young persons between the ages of twelve and twenty-one have been convicted of indictable offences during the year.

But everybody who is acquainted with criminology, or who is conversant with the compilation of statistical information, must be well aware of the futility of depending upon the apparently clear testimony of official figures.

It would be extremely useful to find out whether juvenile offenders have increased or decreased since the inst.i.tution of compulsory education.

Statistics relating to this subject are procurable, but it is impossible to place any reliance upon them.

In the first place, there is nothing to show the cause of any such increase or decrease in the offences committed by young persons. It may be due to a variety of circ.u.mstances, none of which can be accurately determined. For instance, it is a well-known fact that youthful offenders have of late years been treated by magistrates with ever-increasing leniency. Consequently, fewer convictions take place now, in regard to this cla.s.s of offence, than was the case some years ago. The number of the convictions is, therefore, no guide at all as to the increasing or diminishing proportion of youthful criminals.

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

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

There may be, and there probably are, many other and even more substantial reasons for discrediting statistics that are commonplaces to experts in crime. But those that have been cited, and which are at once suggested by common sense, fully suffice to show the impossibility of arriving at satisfactory conclusions on the basis of statistical tables published by the authorities.

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

'PROPORTION OF YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS CONVICTED OF INDICTABLE OFFENCES TO TOTAL 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 has diminished with the general diminution of crime, but that they still bear almost the same ratio as before to the total of criminals.'

All this is, as has been pointed out, absolutely misleading. The number of persons convicted has nothing whatever to do with the increase or decrease of crime; and the proportion of youthful offenders to the total number of persons convicted is only calculated, in view of the great amount of clemency shown to young people both by magistrates and by the public, to give one a wholly false impression as to the prevalence of juvenile crime.

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

In Germany, Austria, France, Russia, Italy, Holland, and the United States juvenile crime has, according to statistical information, largely increased during the last quarter of a century. But, without making an exhaustive inquiry into the alterations that may have taken place in the law, the relative activity of the police, and a dozen other contingencies, it would not be honest to attempt to draw definite conclusions from these figures.

One has, after all, in these matters to fall back upon logic and common sense. There is the solid fact that youthful criminals abound in spite of education systems, and although there is a considerable leakage in respect to school-attendance, it does not follow that juvenile offenders are drawn from this truant cla.s.s to a disproportionate extent. It must be remembered, on the contrary, that a great amount of non-attendance at school is due to the employment of children--especially in rural districts, where the members of School Boards are often the very people who extract most profit from child labour.

A prison chaplain of great experience, the Rev. J. W. Horsley, wrote, in his interesting work on 'Prisons and Prisoners': 'While covetousness is a factor of crime, the tools education places in the hands make crimes of greed more possible, and possible at an earlier age than in past generations. This week I got the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society to take under its care a child of ten, who had written, filled up, and cashed, a postal order that it might buy more lollipops.

Increased knowledge, especially when not adequately accompanied by moral and religious education, will create new tastes, desires, and ambitions, that make for evil as well as for good. Let instruction abound, let education in its fullest sense more abound, but let us be aware of the increased power for evil as well as for good that they produce, and at any rate let us not imagine that education and crime cannot co-exist.

Crime is varied, not abolished, not even most effectually decreased, by the sharpening of wits.'

Speaking of intemperance in relation to crime, he states that: 'Brain-workers provide the most hopeless cases of dipsomania. Increased brain-power--more brain-work; more brain-exhaustion--more nervous desire for a stimulant, more rapid succ.u.mbing to the alcoholic habit--these are the stages that can be noted everywhere among those who have had more "schooling" than their fathers. Australia consumes more alcohol per head than any nation. In Australia primary education is more universal than in England, and yet there criminals have increased out of all proportion to the population. Of much crime, of many forms of crime, it is irrefragably true that crime is condensed alcohol, and it is certainly not true that the absolutely or comparatively illiterate alone comprise those who swell these categories.'

I have taken pains to ascertain the opinions of several of the chaplains attached to the great convict prisons, and they are practically unanimous in condemning the present system of education.

'It is liable,' writes one of these experienced clergymen, 'to foster conceit, discontent, a disinclination to submit to discipline and authority, and a dangerous phase of ambition, which are fruitful sources of that kind of crime which is in these days most prevalent.... This superficial education causes, I think, self-deceit as well as self-conceit, and makes young people imagine that because, in addition to 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 desire to rise in the social scale to attempt by dishonest means to live at a higher rate than is justifiable, to gamble and speculate, in order to keep up a false position. I have come across those who have fallen where this has confessedly been the case, and who have lamented that such wrong ideas had been put into their heads. Young people now look upon many honourable and useful employments as beneath them, and there is a general rush for those which seem to offer a better social position.'

The conventional belief in the efficacy of cramming boys with moral plat.i.tudes and all kinds of commonplace facts and theoretical knowledge is so ingrained that there is a natural reluctance to ascribe any evil effects to the process of education. I am contented, however, to let the facts speak for themselves. It cannot well be disputed that unsuitable education, or sham education, or whatever one may like to call it, is the direct cause of widespread dissatisfaction amongst the very cla.s.ses from which the majority of criminals are recruited. Whilst vast numbers of people are constantly being unfitted for the commonest occupations of life, there must result an overcrowding of the callings which are considered suitable to the dignity of those who have eaten the unripe fruit of the elementary tree of knowledge.

It is self-evident that the unsuitably educated have much greater incentive to wrong-doing than the merely illiterate, and it is also a corroborative fact that by far the greater proportion of criminals have been taught at least to read and write. Given two boys, one of whom had acquired a smattering of facts at school and had learnt the Catechism very perfectly by rote, whilst the other had merely been encouraged to apply a little common sense to manual labour, who would have any hesitation in pointing out the former as the more likely to fall into evil 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 if he is at the same time unfitted for his station in life. People do not need moral instruction; they acquire all their morality in the school of life. It is impossible to teach boys and girls theoretically to be virtuous. All that can be done is to turn them into first-cla.s.s hypocrites, ready to quote texts and to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, whilst they are busy breaking the Ten Commandments every day of the week.

A surprising amount of virtue would come into the world of its own accord if a little more pains were taken to preserve for each individual the environment to which he is adapted by nature. This life has become such a mockery that people talk of heaven as a state in which every person will be free to do the things he likes best--as if that blissful condition were utterly unattainable here.

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

CHAPTER XI

MENTAL BREAKDOWN

It was frankly stated in the last chapter that there is no concrete evidence of a reliable nature as to the immoral effects of our education system. The inquirer has to depend rather upon the logic of philosophical speculation than upon the testimony of our available statistics, common sense being generally a far more truthful witness than figures that can be manipulated to mean almost anything.

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

We all of us know, probably, of some isolated instances here and there where the severe strain of cramming for a compet.i.tive examination has resulted in loss of health and physical breakdown. Some are even aware of cases in which the unhappy victim of overwork has lost his reason altogether, and has been compelled to be placed under restraint. But it is only the physician who has made a special study of mental diseases that is in a position to form wide and accurate generalizations on the subject.

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