The School and the World Part 2

The conscientious modern head master often finds it hard to rise above the ma.s.s of administrative work attached to his office. He resembles Philip II. of Spain, of whom it was said that he was always trying to be his own private secretary. Meanwhile his a.s.sistants go their own ways, each narrowing into his own little intellectual groove. The result, at any rate in the more remote and less distinguished schools--that is to say, the vast majority--is a society far from idyllic. Even if politics were to engender "a formidable strife," the discords would not be breaking in upon any very beautiful harmonies. Two novels have recently been written by schoolmasters about their profession, and even if "Mr.

Perrin and Mr. Traill" may be discounted as the ill-natured revenge of a clever man who had mistaken his profession, "The Lanchester Tradition"

has, we believe, been generally hailed as a truthful record. Masters at many schools have exclaimed, "How on earth does this Rugby man come to know all about _us_?" Teaching is spiritual work or it is nothing, and the head master ought to be, as the greatest head masters have been, a true leader of his staff in spiritual things.

Our profession is the most insanely individualistic in the world.

Probably the teaching of every subject would be improved by the establishment of a really organised co-operation between the various masters teaching it, and "politics," with its strong human appeal would, with a leader worthy of his position, be the best place to begin.

Masters would meet for a genuine educational purpose--and the last thing ever discussed at the masters' meetings we have attended has been educational principles--they would learn to see into each others' minds and methods, enlarge their intellectual sympathies and understand their differences. Thus a real corporate intellectual life of the staff might begin. Often at present this does not exist, and its absence is fatal to the school as a seriously intellectual inst.i.tution.

And surely the need for the tolerant staff can hardly be exaggerated.

And here we are thinking not so much of the war and its controversies as of the days that will follow. After the war a baser motive than even the crudest jingo patriotism will claim a monopoly over the political thought of public schoolboys for the defence not of "country," but of property.

The unorthodox will be denounced not as "pacifists," but as "socialists,"

and the enemy will be not the Kaiser, but perhaps the Prime Minister of a Labour Government. But just as the only hope for the world after the war seems to lie in a League of Nations, so the only hope for England lies in the co-operation of all cla.s.ses in a common search for industrial justice. The public schools are "cla.s.s preserves" of the rich, and their opportunity for good, as for harm, will be almost boundless. "To turn out the young of the capitalist cla.s.s with all their capitalist prejudices intact will be sheer dereliction of duty on the part of public schoolmasters." So wrote a great teacher of the older generation. The obvious way of destroying those prejudices as prejudices is by an enthusiastic and capable exposition of various forms of socialism. This can best be done by socialist masters. But, supposing the socialist teaching is false, why should those who are not Socialists fear for the result? It is a necessary part of the scheme that they on their side should make a reasoned defence of a reformed capitalism. If this is done "the young of the capitalist cla.s.s" may be turned out Socialists or anti-Socialists, but at least they will go out into the world men of some economic understanding, with views based on reasoning, and by further reasoning or experience liable to be changed, not men with inherited prejudice intact.

If we a.s.sume in our staff a general inclination towards freedom of opinion, everything becomes possible. A hundred questions of organisation arise, essentially practical questions, and more easily solved by concrete experiment than by literary methods. It may, however, be worthy while to glance at a few of these.

Masters will always be human; and political education must be so organised as to suggest in every way that the masters of divergent views are co-operating in a general scheme of political education such as no one of them alone could impart, not competing for the political allegiance of the boys. A school is not a bye-election in permanent session. Thus, though a controversial element is bound to come into political education, we would mitigate this element by not allowing any one form to go to more than one master for political work. The boy will pa.s.s from form to form, and thus the conservatism of a summer term will be tempered by the radicalism of the following winter. But these political compartments will not be particularly air-tight in any case.

The house master will be a permanent influence, and when a keen-witted boy has just got out of the form of a sympathetic master, it is unlikely that they will altogether lose touch with one another.

At the top of the school, however, the controversial element should be more frankly accepted. We believe in the permanent inst.i.tution of a voluntary _Politics Cla.s.s_ in which the best boys will hear again the best of the masters who have taught them on their way up the school.

Between such a _Politics Cla.s.s_ and a really efficient school Debating Society it might be hard to draw a precise line. One would play into the hands of the other.

The "judicial" teacher, the man who from an Olympian elevation surveys the political strivings of past and present alike, and a.n.a.lyses, catalogues, and defines, creating all the while an impression of luminous impartiality, may, of course, do much good work. The present writer would be the last man to deny it when he remembers his own debt to a teacher of that kind. None the less, we believe that it is the other kind of teaching that is really needed in the schools of the well-to-do to-day.[2] The political problems of our time are of intense and terrible importance: on their solution this way or that depends the happiness or the misery of uncounted millions; and it is so largely on the way that the young of the privileged cla.s.ses learn to look at them that their solution depends. "Judicial" teaching creates the impression that so long as you "know the case" for or against a policy, it does not matter whether you believe it, and as for acting upon it, or making sacrifices for it, there is no question of doing anything so "extreme."

Education _must_ create enthusiasm.

It must also make for many-sidedness, and so we arrive at the function of the staff, the many-sided staff of enthusiasts. Let each one believe himself, if he is young enough to do so, the monopolist of political truth. Let each one differ from all his colleagues on every subject under the sun, except two, the infinite possibilities of the boys he teaches, and the infinite importance of freedom of opinion.

[1] Is there a little irony here?

[2] Whether any particular single school can afford to experiment in such teaching is, of course, another matter altogether. Gallio is a less troublesome colleague than Paul, and Paul will waste his breath if he complains of the obvious fact that such things are so. But he has a better ground of complaint when he sees himself silenced, while Sosthenes is allowed to carry on as vigorously as he pleases.

CHAPTER V

CAPTURE BY THE STATE

"It is a great and perilous discovery that the State can [as in Germany] impress the minds of ma.s.ses of men by a carefully organised system of political education, and we hope the authors will bear it in mind."--_Westminster Gazette_.

"Germany has shown the world to what evil ends the dishonest use of schools and schoolmasters must lead."--_Contemporary Review_.

We have discussed the pros and cons of propaganda--the propaganda, that is to say, by each master of his particular point of view--and have concluded that, if certain safeguards are adopted and honestly adhered to, such propaganda is desirable. But there is one particular form of propaganda which no one, if he has any reverence at all for the individuality of his pupils and the freedom of the world, can regard as anything but an abomination. And here we meet with the most serious criticism which can be, and has been, levelled against the project of political education. Suppose, it has been urged, that your scheme is adopted by a number of the public schools; suppose that by a steady process of attack, this new and very powerful piece of machinery is captured by the State, as a means of imposing orthodoxy on the nation and nipping in the bud a great part of our potential vigour and independence; have you not then defeated most disastrously your own object, and desiring above everything more liberty in thought and more self-reliance in action, merely succeeded in setting up a system similar to that which created the national character of modern Germany?

It is at first sight a most damaging criticism; and a criticism which seems to gather weight as we look about us and observe the terrible results which have occurred when the State has been allowed to manipulate opinion for its own ends. No Englishman will need to have the lesson of Germany brought home to him; he knows too well how inculcation through the schools of the worst type of narrow patriotism, rendered seemingly n.o.ble by a deliberate falsification of history, has warped the generosity which all children, German or other, possess, into a pitiful acquiescence in every form of intellectual and moral vileness. But in England, too, the danger signals are not wanting. We have observed the people falling more and more under the sway of one man's ideas, carried by his Press into every town and village of the countryside: we have noticed that complete independence does not appear always to exist as between the Press and the men who are responsible for the gravest acts of public policy; and some of us do not much like what we have seen. Are we then to help forward the forces making for our own Prussianisation? We desire to see Politics taught by masters of every shade of political opinion, so that the boys may have all the materials from which to form an independent judgment; but will not the State see to it, as it grows more and more powerful, that only those men are allowed to become, or to remain, schoolmasters, who will teach a doctrine not abhorrent to the powers that be? Those who know the public schools will not be at a loss to understand how such a consummation could be achieved. Even now there is the pressure of parents, members of the financial or political wing of the ruling cla.s.s--a pressure few head masters are big enough to resist. And in the future--to take only one instance--may not Conscription remain, and the Government exercise a direct control through the medium of the O.T.C.?

And as one writes these words; as one sees the ghastly prospect of more and more State control, more and more authoritarianism and docility, less and less of the free co-operation which is the very life-blood of society, one sees also that the only way in which we can prevent the remedy we have proposed from becoming another instrument in the hands of our enemies, is simply by adopting that remedy itself. We must break in on the vicious circle while and how we can. For why is there a danger of our instrument of education being turned into an instrument of obscurantism? Only because there is a danger of our whole society becoming rotten to the core; only because there is a danger of the present cleavage between the two English nations becoming wider and wider, until we have, on the one hand, a cla.s.s ruling in the interests of money and privilege, and, on the other, a slaving and possibly pampered proletariate. And unless a start is made here and now with the political education of Europe--unless boys and girls are made to think politically while their generosity and idealism is still untainted by motives of personal profit, and their powers of vital thought not yet decayed by disuse--these and worse things will happen; love, tolerance, and the independence which is the birthright of men, will all be engulfed in a mad welter of personal, cla.s.s, and national selfishness. In such a society it really would not matter very much if political education were captured by the State; and the only way, as it seems to us, of preventing its advent is by getting up a system of political education. For by political education we are creating the only possible safeguard against a misuse of it--we are creating a society which will not _desire_ to misuse it.

And so we would make, if we may, an appeal to all who are considering what their future work shall be, and to those also who may be finding their present work unprofitable--we would urge them to become schoolmasters. We like sometimes to think of a little Greek army of devoted warriors--a band of five hundred young men, who will go into the public schools and there gradually help to set up a system of political education. The word "Greek" is not out of place. For there is something about the sunlit freshness of a cricket field--something too, about the boys, belonging for the most part to a cla.s.s which, with all its faults, has a great tradition of public service behind it--that brings before the mind a gathering of Greek humanity in the smiling peace of a Greek country place. It is idle to pretend that a man of ability who goes into the schoolmastering profession does not have to make many sacrifices. His salary is usually miserable; his chances of a head mastership must be at present in inverse ratio to the vigour with which he acts on the principles he believes in, for these posts are mostly reserved for the "safe," as the debates of the Head Masters'

Conference used to show, until, a few years ago, that body very wisely decided to exclude reporters. But the compensations are enormous. He will live all his life close to boys whom, when he once gets to know them, he will find to have a freshness and high-heartedness which will be a constant source of hope and inspiration; he will have the joy of watching their minds develop, and of feeling that it is due in some measure to him that they are growing into makers of happiness for themselves and the world. And when in his work he is met by the opposition of those who misinterpret or misunderstand, he will have an almost fierce satisfaction in the faith that the future may be all on his side, and that many years hence a little of him will live in men who have realised not his, but their, individuality, and that potentiality for goodness which, as well as he was able, he fostered and brought to the light.

We have both been schoolmasters; at the moment we are neither of us anything so useful; and we feel that we can say quite dogmatically that there is no happiness equal to that of the profession that was ours.

And both of us fell into it accidently, as so many others have done.

Yet the appeal for schoolmasters should surely not be based entirely or even mainly on the idyllic picture of the happy schoolmaster. John Stuart Mill reduced hedonism to its fundamental paradox when he declared that the way to find happiness was to turn your back on it.

If there is one lesson which political education rightly conducted cannot fail to impress upon its best boys, it is the crying need of the schools for their services. From Plato and Aristotle down to the latest treatises on Reconstruction, be it the "Principles of Reconstruction," as laid down by Mr. Bertrand Russell, or the "Elements of Reconstruction," as reprinted from _The Times_ with an introduction by Lord Milner, all alike come round to education as the keystone of the arch of politics. The final appeal is always to the schoolmaster, and it is perhaps less hopeful to appeal to the actual schoolmaster of to-day than to the possible schoolmaster of to-morrow. As are our schools, so will be our Parliaments and our Civil Service, and some at any rate who have mapped out for themselves a career of political usefulness and honour in Westminster, Whitehall, or abroad, might bethink themselves first of Banquo.

"Lesser than Macbeth and greater: Not so happy yet much happier; Thou shalt get kings though thou be none."

CHAPTER VI

THE MAKING OF "POLITICIANS"

"The way the authors wish to realise their ideal would, I fear, merely increase the output of politicians and political journalists, of whom an adequate supply already exists."--Mr. E. B. Osborn, in _The Morning Post_.

Sharp-wittedness playing on ignorance to the end of personal advancement--so dominant a feature has this become of our political life, that any protest against the misuse of a n.o.ble word, when men speak contemptuously of politics, is no doubt quite untimely.

Untimely, because it is too early, not because it is too late. We retain the word ourselves, and call the kind of education we advocate political education; appropriately it seems to us, for we believe that its wide adoption would remove the root cause which has made such a stigma possible, and free the very name of politics from the indignities it now justly suffers.

Nothing, indeed, could be wider of the mark than the notion that a system of political education would increase the number of self-seeking, power-hunting "politicians." Such men are the product, not of political education, but of the lack of it. What is the present situation? To the ordinary boy, politics, when it first obtrudes itself on his attention, appears under one or other of two aspects. If he is clever, or is imagined to be so by ambitious parents, or again, if, though stupid, he happens to belong to a political family, the air begins to be thick with talk of his "going into" politics. He is to "go into" politics in the same way as men "go into" the Stock Exchange or the law; by virtue either of birth or brains he is to enter one of those little strongholds of his cla.s.s, and earn his living there by playing the appropriate game.

This is the guise under which politics appears to one type of boy. The other type, hears in some quarter or other a babble about income-tax and little navies and big loans; and either dismisses the whole thing as "absolute rot," which can have no possible meaning for him, or imbibes the ideas and prejudices of the people whose talk he is listening to, without in the least understanding their implications.

From these two types is developed the great bulk of the population, considered under its political aspect. On the one side, politicians, whether clever or stupid; on the other, the electorate, ignorant and apathetic, or prejudiced and inflammable, as the case may be. There are, of course, other cla.s.ses too. There is the man who has made money in business, and late in the day conceives the idea of entering Parliament--which he sometimes succeeds in doing even when he has been unable to avoid making an election speech or two. There is the idealist who takes up political work with the sole object of doing useful service. There is the well-informed and open-minded student of public affairs. There is the intellectualist. But the great majority are as we have described them.

The introduction of a far-reaching system of political education would have three results, each of which would reinforce the others in putting an end to the present state of affairs. Make every one a politician, and "politicians" will become rare. Politics will cease to be an essentially specialised profession; men will no longer "go into" it as into a thing apart. Some will administer, guide, and direct; others will know and criticise. But every one will be politically active; and instead of the stronghold of politics in a desert of ignorance, there will be that interplay of political functions, distributed among the whole body of the people, which is the real meaning of democracy.

And not only will politics cease to be a preserve, kept ready for spoliation by the clever, the pushing, the rich, and the well-born, but also the very desire in these men so to misuse their citizenship will cease altogether to come to birth. For political education, properly so called, awakens political idealism; it teaches principles, arouses aspirations after public service. The "politician" is a man who finds in political intrigue the fruitful source of his own advancement; one who catches at every breeze to further his personal ends. But if politics had formed the basis of his education; if, while his idealism was still untainted, he had been led to consider fundamental principles, and to examine public affairs in the light of them: then the potential goodness of his political nature would have been so fully realised, that no vain or mean thing would disfigure his maturity.

"Ah, but 'potential goodness' and 'while his idealism was still untainted'; there's the rub," we hear the cynic saying. Such criticism moves us not at all. We had to do during the course of our experiment with a great number of boys of many different types; one can recall hardly a case in which, when vital thought had really been awakened, often after much sweat and agony, virtue was not found to be the fundamental characteristic of the boy's intellectual nature. But the teacher must not, of course, rest satisfied until he is certain that the goal in very truth has been reached; until he is sure that his pupil has thrown off the weight of carelessness, thoughtlessness, and prejudice, and that his mind is really awake and is in actual contact with ideas.

Finally, just as the leader and administrator will not desire to misuse his powers, so the education of the rest of the nation will deprive him of his opportunity. For it is only among a people politically uneducated that corruption and intrigue on a grand scale can exist.

The unscrupulous creation and manipulation of public opinion; the concealment of low and mean designs under an appearance of n.o.bility and disinterestedness; the putting forward of one argument in support of a policy, while a thousand are kept back which weaken or invalidate it; the appeal to prejudice and blind pa.s.sion; the cunning use of suggestion; worst of all that pitiable game which consists of turning the people's n.o.blest instincts--instincts of fellowship, solidarity, romance--to the basest ends; marks of degradation such as these would vanish gradually but surely as knowledge and power of criticism spread to every section of the community. Such evil motives as still existed would be seen through and exposed; events would be regarded, not as isolated occurrences, but as a part of history, to be viewed in their relation to the whole and to be judged in accordance with a definite philosophy of life. So that if, here and there, a "politician"

survived or made his reappearance in the clearer atmosphere, he would find his playthings gone; waiting instead for him would be men, citizens, politicians--ready to sweep him aside and gaily choose a better man.

CHAPTER VII

PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND FREAK SCHOOLS

The Radical--and by the Radical we mean any one who sees that life for the majority at the present time is not as fine and happy as it should be, and who is determined to leave no stone unturned to make it so--commonly looks askance at the public schools. He thinks of them, rightly, as the stronghold of those in possession, the cla.s.s which, as a whole, not only opposes such fundamental reforms as would result in a fairer distribution of wealth, but also itself has failed to do what might conceivably justify its favoured position, to keep alive, by virtue of special opportunities such as would disappear in a society based on equality, the finest ideas of which the race is capable.

Individual and national power, privilege, commercialism--it is on these things that it has set its eyes in its leadership of the nation. And so our fellow-radicals have more than once said to us, "If you are really keen on education, why don't you start a school of your own?"

Now it is, no doubt, difficult for any one who has fallen under the sway of a public school, and who has been so caught up by its fascination as to feel for it a love more compelling than anything in his life, to be certain that personal predilections do not dictate a reply unjustified by intellectual considerations. Yet for all that we give our answer without hesitation. For the multiplication of what may be conveniently, if somewhat unkindly, cla.s.sed together as "freak"

schools, breaks no fresh ground at all. Boys who have been brought up in an "intellectualist" atmosphere, and those alone, are sent there; and even if there were no schools to which they could be sent, home influence would turn them out intellectualists still. The ranks of the intellectualists, in fact, are recruited from three main sources.