The Curse of Education Part 8

And this is precisely the case. Cramming has been brought throughout Germany to the level of a fine art. It is done, I must confess--for I was myself subjected to the process for some years--more completely and effectively than in this country. That is to say, the pupil is not crammed in such an idiotic fashion that he forgets all that has been stuffed into him immediately he has left school. The drilling, however wrong it may be in principle, is thorough enough, in all conscience. It may be, as it is elsewhere, the pestle and mortar system. But at least the pestle is applied consistently, and each ingredient is perfectly mixed before the next component is introduced.

If, therefore, the object of education be to produce an article of a certain type or consistency, then the Prussian school stands far in advance of our own cramming inst.i.tutions. It may well be taken in that case as a model for us to copy.

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

The answer seems to me to be plain enough.

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

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

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

There cannot be a question that she is deliberately and systematically throwing away the most precious of all human possessions--the character of the individual. At the Berlin Conference on Secondary Education, held in 1890, Dr. Virchow observed: 'I regret that I cannot bear my testimony to our having made progress in forming the character of pupils in our schools. When I look back over the forty years during which I have been Professor and Examiner--a period during which I have been brought in contact not only with physicians and scientific investigators, but also with many other types of men--I cannot say that I have the impression that we have made material advances in training up men with strength of character. On the contrary, I fear that we are on a downward path. The number of "characters" becomes smaller. And this is connected with the shrinkage in private and individual work done during a lad's school life. For it is only by means of independent work that the pupil learns to hold his own against external difficulties, and to find in his own strength, in his own nature, in his own being, the means of resisting such difficulties and of prevailing over them.'

The inevitable result of this sacrifice of individuality must be the intellectual decay of the nation, or at least its degeneration into a state of hopeless mediocrity. Unless, therefore, Germany can persuade other countries to adopt similar tactics, and to meet her on the plane where she has already obtained the start of a generation, she must come hopelessly to grief in the future.

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

This educational suicide, it must also be remembered, can only be committed without serious social disturbance in a despotically-governed country like the German Empire. In England, with our system of party government, a complete measure of State control in educational matters would create a political pandemonium that would be little short of appalling.

The party struggles of the future would, if this Prussian system were transplanted here, centre round educational control. The schools would no longer be regarded as establishments for the instruction of youth; they would be looked upon simply as the nursery of the future voter. A Conservative Government would cram everything into the curriculum calculated to stifle inconveniently progressive ideas, whilst a Radical Government would try to banish from the schools all established beliefs and conventions.

Between these opposing stools the manufactured scholar would fall lamentably to the ground. He would be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.

There would be a perpetual chopping and changing in the methods of his education, from which he would not even derive the benefit, so gratefully acknowledged by Wordsworth, of being neglected by his teachers.

To talk of beating Germany at her own game is, therefore, the height of absurdity. Nothing could result from such an endeavour but ruin to the country. Under our party system it is obvious that it could not be done with the remotest chance of success. And even if it were possible to obtain steady uniform State interference, working always towards a specific end, German methods would only be adopted at the expense of increasing the pressure of cramming _en bloc_, and thereby multiplying the 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 of which the observant scarcely need reminding. It is equally obvious, from the exquisite order and symmetry of animal and vegetable life, that Providence is not to blame for the colossal mess into which civilization has managed to lead the majority of mankind.

Man is himself responsible for the present state of human affairs; and although great things have been undeniably accomplished during the progress of the nations, the magnificent achievements of exceptional individuals pale beside the stupendous blundering of the many.

It must surely be clear to everybody that there has been some evil influence at work to arrest the fair promise and development of the human race. The splendid march of intellectual progress from the dark ages to the brilliant dawn of the nineteenth century, with its glittering array of master minds and its t.i.tanic roll of genius, has been suddenly brought to a dead halt. Here and there, during the past generation, great figures have struggled up on to the world's stage and grappled with the ebb-tide. But the majestic stream of mediocrity has swept away their d.y.k.es, and obliterated their landmarks with its increasing volume.

The remarkable fact can hardly have escaped attention that the more humanity attempts to equip itself for the serious business of life, by forcing itself into an educational strait-waistcoat, the more rapid becomes the disappearance of character and genius, and even of ordinary talent. Everybody is getting ground down to a level. It is scarcely possible to point to a single civilized man and say: 'There is somebody in whom every faculty has been developed and natural talent perfected to its 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 have knocked all the nonsense out of him you'll find he's not a bad fellow at bottom.'

We are not what we have made ourselves, but what we have chosen to allow others to make us. Whatever may once have been the nursery of the human race, it is now to a great extent the school. Some part--it generally is the best part--of education takes place outside the cla.s.s-room; but it must be remembered that the atmosphere of home is generally impregnated with the conventional traditions of the school and of the university.

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

Nothing is more astonishing than to reflect upon the unintelligent grounds on which people base their adherence to the principles of modern education. They are unable, in the first place, to get over the fact that their forefathers were brought up in the same fashion before them.

It is a sheer impossibility for most people to question anything that has been going on for any length of time unchecked.

The undisputed possession of a custom for so many years converts it into the legal property of the nation, whence it derives a sacred character, and n.o.body dreams of meddling with it. Any abuses it may bring in its train are then conveniently ascribed to the perversity of Providence.

The cherished convention is never questioned. That is the remarkable thing about it. People can be brought to understand, by means of a flourish of dazzling prospectuses and newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts, that a bicycle is an improvement on a bone-shaker, or that pneumatic tyres are more comfortable on rough roads than iron-rimmed wheels. But that appears to be the set limit of their comprehension.

They are capable of being made to grasp, after nearly exhausting the resources of a wealthy syndicate, something that obviously affects their material comfort. But progress in ideas, or anything in the shape of moral revolution, has to undergo a thousand-fold more tortuous process before it can be made to filter through a convention. The academic product is, it must be remembered, a bundle of conventions. If the article has been properly manufactured, and bears the hall-mark of the maker and the stamp of the country of its origin, there is nothing else there for the truth to filter into. It simply drops through and vapourizes without disturbing anything.

Conventionality is therefore an insuperable obstacle, as far as the majority of minds are concerned, to the discovery that the established principles of education are absolutely false. These principles will never be questioned. It is good enough for the average man that his fellow-creatures have been contented with them since time immemorial, and that they are diligently practised in the schools and colleges whose names have been household words for generations past.

Next to this antiquated conservatism of the least intelligent and most dispiriting type, comes the false shame that the majority of people exhibit when caught displaying ignorance of any of the facts which cramming systems have p.r.o.nounced to be indispensable to a general education. Probably more real culture is nipped in the bud by the ridiculous a.s.sumption that everybody must be a walking encyclopaedia, than by all the Philistine conventions and stupidities put together.

In the course of a recent conversation with an exceptionally brilliant woman of my acquaintance, it transpired that she believed Winchester and Cambridge to be in the same county. This lack of geographical knowledge did 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 thought that Cambridge was in Hampshire.

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

Life is short, and it is only possible within the limits of the brief span allotted to us upon earth to acquire a certain number of facts. It is monstrously absurd to sacrifice our best years in stuffing so many facts into the brain, in order to avoid being laughed at by a few thin-minded pedants as an ignoramus. Some consolation, at least, might surely be derived from the reflection that many of the greatest geniuses whom the world has produced were profoundly ignorant as to ninety per cent. of the things which are considered to be indispensable knowledge at the present day.

n.o.body can hope to read all the books that are popularly supposed to have been digested by the well-educated man. It would be impossible to get through a t.i.the of them. Yet how many people there are who will sooner tell a deliberate lie, than acknowledge having omitted to read some cla.s.sic that happens to be mentioned in the course of conversation!

And this is simply due to the infatuated belief that culture consists in stuffing one's self with the ideas of other people. A man whose brain was teeming with his own thoughts and creations, but who had neglected to stock it with the hundred thousand conventional facts culled from the hundred best books selected for him by other people, would be looked upon as an uneducated boor by cultured pedants of the conventional type.

It will be seen, therefore, that this false shame, inspired by an unwholesome terror of public ridicule, plays a very important part in tying people to the ap.r.o.n-strings of education, and warping their judgment.

But there is also a third factor which must be taken seriously into account. This is the widespread credulousness not only as to the efficacy, but as to the indispensability, of the ordinary methods of instruction as mental training. People have actually come to believe that no one can think without being taught to do so by means of all kinds of mathematical and cla.s.sical gymnastics.

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

In the whole history of education there is no greater absurdity than the notion that a boy can be taught to think by training his mind backwards and forwards in the conjugation of irregular verbs and the vagaries of Latin or Greek inflections. Exercises of this ingeniously ridiculous kind only serve to empty the brain of ideas, and to make room for the reception of facts crammed in on the wholesale system. It is an accepted fact, however, that the brain, in order to pursue its normal functions, must first be subjected to a course of training in abstract subjects as far removed as possible from all human interest; that common sense, in other words, is a product of Greek roots and algebraical formulae--not of the natural application of the thinking faculties to the ordinary circ.u.mstances of everyday life.

The hopeless imbecility of this tenet of faith is only equalled by the depth to which it has taken root in the popular mind. The wonderful thing is that the total failure of the plan has not long ago convinced everybody of its uselessness. But that is at once the mischief and the charm of the convention: no amount of practical demonstration will prejudice anybody against it.

In this way the great fallacy of education has been allowed to grow up and to spread its false and obnoxious principles like a network over the whole civilized world. With all the baneful effects produced by these fallacious dogmas staring them in the face, people do not seem to have been capable of tumbling to the fact that the origin of the social evils which surround them lies in the very calf of gold that they and their forefathers 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--have tried to abolish this abuse or to remedy that defect; but not one has gone to the root of the evil, and has boldly stated that the whole system 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 of humanity.

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

CHAPTER XV

REAL EDUCATION

There is no such thing in existence as a system of genuine education. A large number of inst.i.tutions exist, as we have seen, for the purpose of manufacturing and cramming, after an approved plan, the youth of the upper and middle cla.s.ses, and there is a well-organized system of sham education spread throughout the country under the t.i.tle of 'public elementary schools.' That is the sum of modern educational effort.

The word 'education,' when used in the sense that is commonly applied to it, could not be satisfactorily and adequately defined in less than a post octavo pamphlet. It signifies an enormous number of things, from pot-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, shaking everything out of its head, and then stuffing every nook and corner with facts it will never be able to remember, and with dates for which it cannot have any use. It means risking the mental shipwreck of the clever child, and making the stupid more dense. And it means popping the individual into a mould, and dishing him up as a dummy.