The Lost Art of Reading Part 24

All knowledge, I have said in my heart, instead of being a kind of vast overseer-and-slave system for a man to lock himself up in, and throw away his key in, becomes free, fluent, daring, and glorious the moment it is conceived through persons and for persons and with persons.

Knowledge is not knowledge until it is conceived in relation to persons; that is, in relation to all the facts. Persons are facts also and on the whole the main facts, the facts which for seventy years, at least, or until the planet is too cooled off, all other facts are for. The world belongs to persons, is related to persons, and all the knowledge thereof, and by heaven, and by my soul's delight, all the persons the knowledge is related to shall belong to me, and the knowledge that is related to them shall belong to me, the whole human round of it. The spirit and rhythm and song of their knowledge, the thing in it that is real to them, that sings out their lives to them, shall sing to me.

Book IV

What to Do Next

"I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, Crying, 'Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!'"

I

See Next Chapter

It is good to rise early in the morning, when the world is still respectable and n.o.body has used it yet, and sit and look at it, try to realise it. One sees things very differently. It is a kind of yawn of all being. One feels one's soul lying out, all relaxed, on it, and resting on real things. It stretches itself on the bare bones of the earth and knows. On a hundred silent hills it lies and suns itself.

And as I lay in the morning, soul and body reaching out to the real things and resting on them, I thought I heard One Part of me, down underneath, half in the light and half in the dark, laughing softly at the Other. "What is this book of yours?" it said coldly, "with its proffered scheme of education, its millenniums and things? What do you think this theory, this heaven-spanning theory of reading of yours, really is, which you have held up objectively, almost authoritatively, to be looked at as truth? Do you think it is anything after all but a kind of pallid, unreal, water-colour exhibition, a row of blurs of faintly coloured portraits of yourself, spread on s.p.a.ce? Do you not see how unfair it is--this spinning out of one's own little dark, tired inside, a theory for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling with one temperament a star?"

Then I made myself sit down and compose what I feared would be a strictly honest t.i.tle-page for this book. Instead of:

THE LOST ART OF READING

A STUDY OF EDUCATION BY ETC.

I wrote it:

HOW TO BE MORE LIKE ME

A SHY AT EDUCATION BY ETC.

And when I had looked boldly (almost scientifically) at this t.i.tle-page, let it mock me a little, had laughed and sighed over it, as I ought, there came a great hush from I know not where. I remembered it was the t.i.tle, after all, for better or worse, in some sort or another, of every book I had craved and delighted in, in the whole world. Then suddenly I found myself before this book, praying to it, and before every struggling desiring-book of every man, of other men, where it has prayed before, and I dared to look my t.i.tle in the face. I have not denied--I do not need to deny--that what I have uncovered here is merely my own soul's glimmer--my interpretation--at this mighty, pa.s.sing show of a world, and it comes to you, Oh Gentle Reader, not as I am, but as I would like to be. Out of chaos it struggles to you, and defeat--can you not see it?--and if but the benediction of what I, or you, or any man would like to be will come and rest on it, it is enough. Take it first and last, it is written in every man's soul, be his theory whatsoever it may of this great wondering world--wave after wave of it, shuddering and glorying over him--it is written after all that he does not know that anything is, can be, or has been in this world until he possesses it, or misses possessing it himself--feels it slipping from him. It is in what a man is, has, or might have, that he must track out his promise for a world. His life is his prayer for the ages as long as he lives, and what he is, and what he is trying to be, sings and prays for him, says ma.s.ses for his soul under the stars, and in the presence of all peoples, when he is dead. By this truth, I and my book with you, Gentle Reader, must stand or fall. Even now as I bend over the click of my typewriter, the years rise dim and flow over me out of the east, ... generations of brothers, out of the mist of heaven and out of the dust of the earth, trooping across the world, and wondering at it, come and go, and out of all these there shall not be one, no not one, Gentle Reader, but shall be touched and loved by you, by me. In light out of shadow or in the shadow out of the light, our souls fleck them, fleck them with the invisible, blessing them and cursing them. We shall be the voices of the night and day to them, shall live a shadow of life with them, and be the sounds in their ears; did any man think that what we are, and what we are trying to be, is ours, is private, is for ourselves? Boundlessly, helplessly scattered on the world, upon the faces of our fellows, our souls mock to us or sing to us forever.

So if I have opened my windows to you, say not it is because I have dared. It is because I have not dared. I have said I will protect my soul with the street. I will have my vow written on my forehead. I will throw open my window to the pa.s.ser-by. Fling it in! I beg you, oh world, whatever it is, be it prayer or hope or jest. It is mine. I have vowed to live with it, to live out of it--so long as I feel your footsteps under my cas.e.m.e.nt, and know that your watch is upon my days, and that you hold me to myself. I have taken for my challenge or for my comrade, I know not which, a whole world.

And what shall a man give in exchange for a whole world?

And my soul said "He shall not save nor keep back himself."

Who is the Fool--that I should be always taking all this trouble for him,--tiptoeing up and down the world with my little cover over my secret for him? To defy a Fool, I have said, speak your whole truth.

Then G.o.d locks him out. To hide a secret, have enough of it. Hide it outdoors. Why should a man take anything less than a world to hide in?

If a soul is really a soul, why should it not fall back for its reserve on its own infinity? G.o.d does. Even daisies do it. It is too big a world to be always bothering about one's secret in it. "Who has time for it?"

I have said. "Give it out. Move right on living. Get another." The only way for a man in this twentieth century to hide his soul is by letting it reach out of sight. Not by locks, nor by stiflings, nor by mean little economizings of the heart does a man earn a world for a comrade.

Let the laughers laugh. On the great still street in s.p.a.ce where souls are,--who cares?

II

Diagnosis

Compelled as I am, as most of us are, to witness the unhappy spectacle, in every city of the land, of a great ma.s.s of unfortunate and mutilated persons whirled round and round in rows, in huge reading-machines, being crunched and educated, it is very hard not to rush thoughtlessly in to the rescue sometimes, even if one has nothing better than such a pitiful, helpless thing as good advice.

I am afraid it does not look very wise to do it. Civilisation is such a vast, hypnotising, polarising spectacle, has the stage so fully to itself, everybody's eyes glued on it, it is hard to get up and say what one thinks in it. One cannot find anything equally objective to say it with. One feels as if calling attention to one's self, to the little, private, shabby theatre of one's own mind. It is as if in a great theatre (on a back seat in it) one were to get up and stand in his chair and get the audience to turn round, and say, "Ladies and gentlemen. That is not the stage, with the foot-lights over there. This is the stage, here where I am. Now watch me twirl my thumbs."

But the great spectacle of the universal reading-machine is too much for me. Before I know it I try to get the audience to turn around.

The spectacle of even a single lad, in his more impressionable and possible years, reading a book whether he has anything to do with it or not, in spite of the author and in spite of himself, when one considers how many books he might read which really belong to him, is enough to make a mere reformer or outlaw or parent-interferer of any man who is compelled to witness it.

But it seems that the only way to interfere with one of these great reading-machines is to stop the machine. One would say theoretically that it would not take very much to stop it--a mere broken thread of thought would do it, if the machine had any provision for thoughts. As it is, one can only stand outside, watch it through the window, and do what all outsiders are obliged to do, shout into the din a little good advice. If this good advice were to be summed up in a principle or prepared for a text-book it would be something like this:

The whole theory of our prevailing education is a kind of unanimous, colossal, "I can't," "You can't"; chorus, "We all of us together can't."

The working principle of public-school education, all the way from its biggest superintendents or overseers down to its littlest tow-heads in the primary rooms, is a huge, overbearing, overwhelming system of not expecting anything of anybody. Everything is arranged throughout with reference to not-expecting, and the more perfectly a system works without expecting, or needing to expect, the more successful it is represented to be. The public does not expect anything of the politicians. The politicians do not expect anything of the superintendents. The superintendents do not expect anything of the teachers, and the teachers do not expect anything of the pupils, and the pupils do not expect anything of themselves. That is to say, the whole educational world is upside down,--so perfectly and regularly and faultlessly upside down that it is almost hopeful. All one needs to do is to turn it accurately and carefully over at every point and it will work wonderfully.

To turn it upside down, have teachers that believe something.

III

Eclipse

When it was decreed in the course of the nineteenth century that the educational world should pa.s.s over from the emphasis of persons to the emphasis of things, it was decreed that a generation that could not emphasise persons in its knowledge could not know persons. A generation which knows things and does not know persons naturally believes in things more than it believes in persons.

Even an educator who is as forward-looking and open to human nature as President Charles F. Thwing, with all his emphasis of knowing persons and believing in persons as a basis for educational work, seems to some of us to give an essentially unbelieving and pessimistic cla.s.sification of human nature for the use of teachers.

"Early education," says President Thwing, "occupies itself with description (geometry, s.p.a.ce, arithmetic, time, science, the world of nature). Later education with comparison and relations." If one asks, "Why not both together? Why learn facts at one time and their relations at another? Is it not the most vital possible way to learn facts to learn them in their relations?"--the answer that would be generally made reveals that most teachers are pessimists, that they have very small faith in what can be expected of the youngest pupils. The theory is that interpretative minds must not be expected of them. Some of us find it very hard to believe as little as this, in any child. Most children have such an incorrigible tendency for putting things together that they even put them together wrong rather than not put them together at all. Under existing educational conditions a child is more of a philosopher at six than he is at twenty-six.

The third stage of education for which Dr. Thwing part.i.tions off the human mind is the "stage in which a pupil becomes capable of original research, a discoverer of facts and relations" himself. In theory this means that when a man is thirty years old and all possible habits of originality have been trained out of him, he should be allowed to be original. In practice it means removing a man's brain for thirty years and then telling him he can think. There never has been a live boy in a school as yet that would allow himself to be educated in this way if he could help it. All the daily habits of his mind resent it. It is a pessimistic, postponing way of educating him. It does not believe in him enough. It may be true of men in the bulk, men by the five thousand, that their intellectual processes happen along in this conveniently scientific fashion, at least as regards emphasis, but when it is applied to any individual mind, at any particular time, in actual education, it is found that it is not true, that it is pessimistic. G.o.d is not so monotonous and the universe is not graded as accurately as a public school, and things are much more delightfully mixed up. If a great university were to give itself whole-heartedly and pointedly to one single individual student, it would find it both convenient and pleasant and natural and necessary to let him follow these three stages all at once, in one stage with one set of things, and in another stage with another.

Everyone admits that the first thing a genius does with such a convenient, three-part system, or chart for a soul, is to knock it endwise. He does it because he can. Others would if they could. He insists from his earliest days on doing all three parts, everything, one set of things after the other--description, comparison, creation, and original research sometimes all at once. He learns even words all ways at once. All of these processes are applied to each thing that a genius learns in his life, not the three parts of his life. One might as well say to a child, "Now, dear little lad, your life is going to be made up of eating, sleeping, and living. You must get your eating all done up now, these first ten years, and then you can get your sleeping done up, and then you can take a spell at living--or putting things together."

The first axiom of true pedagogics is that nothing can be taught except the outside or letter of a thing. The second axiom is that there is nothing gained in teaching a pupil the outside of a thing if he has not the inside--the spirit or relations of it. Teachers do not dare to believe this. They think it is true only of men of genius. They admit that men of genius can be educated through the inside or by calling out the spirit, by drawing out their powers of originality from the first, but they argue that with common pupils this process should not be allowed. They are not worthy of it. That is to say, the more ordinary men are and the more they need brains, the less they shall be allowed to have them.

Inasmuch, then, as the inside cannot be taught and there is no object in teaching the outside, the question remains how to get the right inside at work producing the right outside. This is a purely spiritual question and brings us to the third axiom. Every human being born into the world is ent.i.tled to a special study and a special answer all to himself. If, as President Thwing very truly says, "The higher education as well as the lower is to be organised about the unit of the individual student,"

what follows? The organisation must be such as to make it possible for every teacher to study and serve each individual student as a special being by himself. In other words, if this last statement of Dr. Thwing's is to be acted on, it makes havoc with his first. It requires a somewhat new and practically revolutionary organisation in education. It will be an organisation which takes for its basic principle something like this:

_Viz._: The very essence of an average pupil is that he needs to be studied more, not less, than any one else in order to find his master-key, the master-pa.s.sion to open his soul with. The essence of a genius is that almost any one of a dozen pa.s.sions can be made the motive power of his learning. His soul is opening somewhere all the time.

The less individuality a student has, the more he is like other students, the more he should be kept away from other students until what little individuality he has has been brought out. It is not only equally true of the ordinary man as well as of the man of genius that he must educate himself, but it is more true. Other people's knowledge can be poured into and poured over a genius innocently enough. It rolls off him like water on a duck's back. Even if it gets in, he organically protects himself. The genius of the ordinary man needs special protection made for it. As our educational inst.i.tutions are arranged at present, the more commonplace our students are the more we herd them together to make them more commonplace. That is, we do not believe in them enough. We believe that they are commonplace through and through, and that nothing can be done about it. We admit, after a little intellectual struggle, that a genius (who is bound to be an individual anyway) should be treated as one, but a common boy, whose individuality can only be brought out by his being very vigorously and constantly reminded of it, and exercised in it, is dropped altogether as an individual, is put into a herd of other common boys, and his last remaining chance of being anybody is irrevocably cut off. We do not believe in him as an individual. He is a fraction of a roomful. He is a 67th or 734th of something. Some one has said that the problem of education is getting to be, How can we give, in our huge learning-machines, our exceptional students more of a chance? I state a greater problem: How can we give our common students a chance to be exceptional ones?

The problem can only be solved by teachers who believe something, who believe that there is some common ground, some spiritual law of junction, between the man of genius, the natural or free man, and the cramped, _i. e._, artificial, ordinary one. It would be hard to name any more important proposition for current education to act on than this, that the natural man in this world is the man of genius. The Church has had to learn that religion does not consist in being unnatural. The schools are next to learn that the man of genius is not unnatural. He is what nature intended every man to be, at the point where his genius lies. The way out in education, the only believing, virile, man's way out, would seem to be to begin with the man of genius as a principle and work out the application of the principle to more ordinary men--men of slowed-down genius. We are going to use the same methods--faster or slower--for both. A child's greater genius lies in his having a more lively sense of relation with more things than other children. Teachers are going to believe that if the right thing can be done about it, this sense of a live relation to knowledge can be uncovered in every human soul, that there is a certain sense in which every man is his own genius. "By education," said Helvetius, "you can make bears dance, but never create a man of genius." The first thing for a teacher who believes this to do, is not to teach.

IV

Apocalypse

There is a spirit in this book, struggling down underneath it, which neither I nor any other man shall ever express. It needs a nation to express it, a nation fearless to know itself, a great, joyous, trustful, expectant nation. The centuries break away. I almost see it now, lifting itself in its plains and hills and fields and cities, in its smoke and cloud-land, as on some huge altar, to supreme destiny, a nation freed before heaven by the mighty, daily, childlike joy of its own life. I see it as a nation full of personalities, full of self-contained, normally self-centred, self-delighted, self-poised men--men of genius, men who balance off with a world, men who are capable of being at will magnificently self-conscious or unconscious, self-possessed and self-forgetful--balanced men, comrades and equals of a world, neither its slaves nor its masters.