“Education is but the giving or withholding of opportunity.”—Bateson.
“Education is but the giving or withholding of opportunity.”—Bateson.
It is true that education can seem to accomplish miracles; that in a single generation the results of an ideal education would be amazing. It is true, also, that in certain epochs of history, when wise counsels have prevailed, great results have been attained. It is true that at present scarcely a man or woman amongst us, if any, has reached the full stature which would have been attained under an ideal system of education. It is true, finally, that no system of race-culture can ignore education or be effective without it. Though the general question of education is not the specific question of the present volume, yet there is only too good reason for some brief allusion to the subject here, especially since it bears on the question of the measure of importance which we ascribe to heredity.
Modern education—the destruction of mind.—When we observe in such contrasted cases as those of Herbert Spencer and Wordsworth, for instance, that absence of early education, especially in the first septennium, has co-existed with the subsequent efflorescence of the mightiest genius, we may almost be inclined to enquire whether genius could not in effect be made to order even in the very next generation by the simple device of suspending the process which we are pleased to call education. Doubtless that is scarcely so, though every one who has any knowledge of the subject is well assured that meresuspension of the present destructive process might suffice to produce a population that would wonder at its ancestors.
A simple analogy will show the disastrous character of the present process, which may be briefly described as “education” by cram and emetic. It is as if you filled a child's stomach to repletion with marbles, pieces of coal and similar material incapable of digestion—the more worthless the material the more accurate the analogy: then applied an emetic and estimated your success by the completeness with which everything was returned, more especially if it was returned “unchanged,” as the doctors say. Just so do we cram the child's mental stomach, its memory, with a selection of dead facts of history and the like (at least when they are not fictions) and then apply a violent emetic called an examination (which like most other emetics causes much depression) and estimate our success by the number of statements which the child vomits on to the examination paper—if the reader will excuse me. Further, if we are what we usually are, we prefer that the statements shall come back “unchanged”—showing no signs of mental digestion. We call this “training the memory.”
Such a process as one has imagined in the physical case would assuredly ruin the physical digestion for life. In the mental case, which is not imaginary but actual, a similar result ensues. It is thus unfair to the Anglo-Saxon germ-plasm to credit it with the abundant stupidity of its products. Much of this stupidity is factitious and artificial. We shall continue to produce it so long as by education or drawing forth we understand intrusion or thrusting in, and so long as the only drawing forth which we practise is by means of the emetics we call examinations. The present type of education is a curse to modern childhood and a menace to the future. The teacher who cannot tell whether a child is doing well without formallyexamining it, should be heaving bricks; but such a teacher does not exist. In Berlin they are now learning that the depression caused by these emetics, for which the best physical parallel is antimony, often leads to child suicide—a steadily-increasing phenomenon mainly due to educational over-pressure and worry about examinations.
Short of such appalling disasters, however, we have to reckon with the existence of this enormous amount of stupidity, which those who fortunately escaped such education in childhood have to drag along with them in the long struggle towards the stars. This dead weight of inertia lamentably retards progress.
Our factitious stupidity is injurious both in the governing and the governed. As Professor Patrick Geddes once remarked to the present writer, there are three kinds of governments: the government of the future—as yet only ideal, which believes that there are ideas and that they may be worth acting upon: the second is instanced by the Russian government, which believes that there are ideas, but fears and suppresses them: the third by the British government, which denies that there are ideas at all, and prefers the method of “muddling through”—to use a Cabinet Minister's contented phrase—though truth is one and error infinite, though there are a million ways of going wrong for one of going right. This characteristic is not to be attributed to any germinal stupidity of the ruling classes in England. If it were we should of course look upon the decadence of their birth-rate with the utmost gratitude. It is a factitious product of their education. If you have been treated with marbles and emetics long enough, you may begin to question whether there is such a thing as nourishing food; if you have been crammed with dead facts, and then compelled to disgorge them, you may well question whether there are such things as nourishing facts or ideas.
Not less disastrous is this factitious stupidity amongst the governed. It produces, of course, the kind of man with whom we are all familiar. Having at great labour been taught to read, he is incapable of reading anything but rubbish. He never thinks for himself, and if he does you wish he had not, so inadequate is his machinery and so deplorable the result. He believes in politicians. He is, as we have said, so much dead weight for the reformer, whose energy is diverted from the discovery of new truth by the need of directing the eyes of stupidity to the old, though it shines as the sun in his strength.
Therefore, let not the reader suppose that in the advocacy of eugenics or race-culture we have become blinded to the possibilities offered us by reasonable education even of the very heterogeneous material offered us by heredity.
The limits of education—individual and racial.—Yet it must be maintained that, though we cannot do without education, and though something infinitely better than we practise at present will be necessary if the ideal of race-culture is ever to be realised, yet education alone, however good, can never enable us to achieve our end. It must be maintained, in the first place, that education is limited in its powers by the inherent nature of the educated material—it is a process ofdrawing out, and you cannot draw out what is not there: and secondly, that its value, so far as the nature of individuals is concerned, is confined to the individuals in question and is not reproduced or maintained in their children. Thus education alone would have similar material to act upon from age to age, would have to make a fresh beginning in each generation, and its results, however good, relatively, would still be limited and finite. We shall do well, perhaps, to obtain and retain an adequate definition of education. No true conception of education was possible, notwithstanding the derivation of the word, so long as the child's mind was likened to apiece of “pure white paper” for us to write upon: or an empty box waiting to be filled. Thetabula rasaof Locke is, we now know, the last thing in the world to resemble a child's mind. Indeed, if any such figure be demanded, the child's mind is a piece of mosaic—made of ancestral pieces—and education is the process of realising what is so given. Or, if a child's mind is a portmanteau, to educate is not to pack but to unpack it. We understand, at least, that education never can begin at the beginning, nor anywhere near it—that, as Professor MacCunn says in his admirable book,The Making of Character, “the page of the youngest life is so far from being blank that it bears upon it characters in comparison with which the faded ink of palæography is as recent history.”
We are learning, too, though none but the very few know this, that the process by which the “faded ink” is made visible must not be credited with having done the writing: any more than the fire to which you hold a paper written upon with ink that fire makes visible. Still less do we realise that what really seems to be the product of education is often the result of an inherent mechanism now developed, which was not yet formed when we began the educational process. One reason why the baby cannot walk is that it has not the nervous apparatus. A child may walk at the first attempt, if that attempt be delayed until the machinery is developed. A child may similarly speak sentences at the first attempt. Very commonly we start teaching a child something, which, after some years, it learns. We have done nothing but interfere. The learning is none of our doing: merely the mental apparatus is now evolved—and lo! the result. At birth the sucking apparatus is perfect. If we could, doubtless we should start teaching the unborn infant to suck long before the machinery was ready—and should applaud ourselves for its facility at birth; only that probably this facility wouldbe impaired by our efforts, as many capacities of later development are damaged by our interference. What we understand, or misunderstand, by education should begin approximately when a child is seven. The first seven years of life should really have the term of childhood confined to them, for there is a natural term so indicated. The growth of the brain is a matter of the first seven years almost wholly. It grows relatively little after that period; and until that is completed the physical apparatus of mind is not ready for educational interference. Without any such interference, and with merely the provision of conditions, physical and mental, for its spontaneous development, the brain of the seven year old will suffice for surprising things—so surprising that if their evolution were possible under any system of schooling practised before that date, we should applaud it as ideal. Probably there is no such system—much less any that will improve on the spontaneous process.
Education the provision of an environment.—We are prepared, then, to realise the limits to the action of education upon the individual. We shall not confuse this great and many-sided thing with such of its factors as instruction or schooling. It is not intrusion but education: “the guidance of growth,” to use Sir James Crichton-Browne's phrase. This guidance, this process of unpacking, educing or realising, is accomplished by the action of circumstances or the environment. Environment is a large word and is invariably abused when it is used in less than the large sense. Here it includes, for instance, air and food, mother-love and the schoolmaster. I therefore define education asthe provision of an environment. This definition prepares us to understand the limitations of the process. If we think of education as a packing or cramming process, we shall err in this respect; we shall expect limitlessresults from education provided that one packs early and tightly and carefully enough. It is this erroneous conception which rules us and daily betrays us in practice. If, however, we think of education as the provision of an environment, capable of creating nothing, but merely of causing the expression or the repression of potential characters inherent in the individual educated, then we shall begin to recast our methods on the lines determined by this truth. Yet, further, we shall begin to understand the cardinal truth, one of the many platitudes which we have yet to appreciate, that “you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.”
Heredity and environment.—Let us consider the question in general terms. The characters of any living thing are determined by two factors—heredity and environment. The old phrases were character and circumstances, but they were less than useful, since character is modified by circumstances. Now one of the most important questions in the world, and not least for the eugenist, is as to the relative importance of these two factors. The technical terms may not be in our mouths, but we discuss this instance or that of the question in point almost every day of our lives. One part of the business of philosophy and of science is not only to answer questions but to ask them correctly. This question is always wrongly asked, and therefore cannot be answered, or is incorrectly answered. We persist in using the mathematical idea of addition, and we seek to show that, say, seventy per cent. of the result is due to the innate factor and thirty per cent. to the acquired. But the truth is that so long as we begin with this idea we may prove what we please. If we keep our attention fixed upon the environmental or educational factor we can easily and correctly demonstrate that in certain circumstances Mozart would have been tone-deaf and Shakespearea gibbering idiot—hence, but incorrectly, we argue that environment is practically everything.Per contra, we can easily and correctly demonstrate that no education in the world could enable a door-mat or a cabbage or ourselves to writeDon GiovanniorHamlet—hence, but incorrectly, we argue that the material to be operated upon is everything. We have to learn, however, that the analogyis one not of addition but of multiplication. Neither inheritance nor environment, as such, gives anything. The environmental factor may be potentially one hundred—an ideal education—but the innate or inherited factor may be nothing, as when the pupil is a door-mat or a fool. The result then is nothing. Darwin had the trombone played to a plant, but he did not make a Palestrina. No academy of music will make a beetroot into a Beethoven, though I dare say a well-trained beetroot might write a musical comedy. The point is that one hundred multiplied by nothing equals nothing. Similarly, the innate factor may be one hundred, as in the case of a potential genius, but he may be brought up upon alcohol and curses amongst savages, and the result again is nothing. Keep the idea of multiplication in the mind, and the facts are seen rightly. No matter how big either factor be, if it be multiplied by nothing it yields nothing, or if it be multiplied by a fraction, as in the ordinary education of a genius, it yields less than it should. But in this controversy people persist in assuming that inheritance or education gives definitely so much which is there anyhow, whereas, really, it only supplies a potential figure, which may realise infinity or nothing, according to what it is multiplied by. With all deference, I submit this as a real answer to these endless disputes.
But further, granted that neither factor in itself produces any actuality, which is normally the weightier ofthe two factors? We must make the qualification, “normally,” because such a thing as disease or poison, included in the environmental factor, will dominate the result, completely overshadowing the importance of whatever heredity gave. Such things apart, however, we may be thoroughly assured that heredity is the weightier of the two factors. The more we study education, the more we recognise its true nature. Indeed, the more we realise its ideal, the more do we realise its limitations. The more we study education the more important does heredity appear. If the reader has not had opportunities of observing children for himself let him refer to such a book as Mr. Galton'sInquiries into Human Faculty, and he will begin to realise how large is the factor given by inheritance and how relatively small is the factor given by education.
Education can educate only what heredity gives.—Heredity, as the eugenist must never forget, gives not actualities but only potentialities. It depends upon circumstances whether they shall become actualities. That, however, we all know. No one supposes that education is superfluous or impotent. We do, however, persistently forget the converse truth that education, on the other hand, makes no definite contribution, but merely multiplies—or alas, divides—the potentialities given by inheritance. These potentialities constitute a limiting condition which no education can transcend. Education can educate only what heredity gives. Long ago Helvetius thought, as did Kant, that the differences between men were due to differences in education. But it is not so. We make, of course, the most ridiculous claims for education. The remark wrongly attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton,” is an instance in point. Recently, when Francis Thompson, the poet, died, the localnewspaper of his birthplace said that it should be proud to have produced him. We may laugh at this conception of the genesis of genius, but we all talk in this fashion. A genius was educated at Eton, and we say that Eton produced him. The truth is, of course, that Eton failed to destroy him. (One says Eton for convenience, but the name of any accepted school will do.) If Eton produced him, why does not it produce thousands like him? There is plenty of material: but it is not the right material. We should cease to speak, in our pride for our ownAlma Materor our own methods, as if education created genius or anything else. Men are born unequal. To realise the nature of education is not only to avoid the popular assumption that an ideal education will do everything for us, forgetting that no amount of polishing will make pewter shine like silver; it is not only to send us back to the principle of selection in recognition of the power of inheritance; it is not merely to dispose of the idea that men are born inherently equal; but it is also to combat the idea that education is a levelling process. On the contrary, it accentuates the differences between men. You may confuse the unpolished pebble and the diamond, but not when education has done its utmost for both. If education were a process of addition to what inheritance gives, it would almost level men: the addition of a large sum to figures such as, say, 1, 2, and 3, would almost obliterate their original disproportion. But the analogy is with multiplication, as I have suggested: and the larger the sum by which 1, 2 and 3 are multiplied, the greater is the disparity between the products. This is, perhaps, one of the truths of vast importance which the common rim of contemporary Socialism implicitly denies: though it is of course abundantly recognised by such a socialist as that master-thinker Professor Forel. The socialist'spanacea, ideal education for all, is much to be desired, and will accomplish much, as we began by admitting; but it is not a panacea. Those who believe it to be such do not understand the nature of education nor its limitations. They should remember the remark of Epictetus, “the condition and characteristic of a fool is this: he never expects from himself profit nor harm, but from externals.” The dogma of the unthinking socialist—who exists, though he is doubtless rarer than the unthinking individualist—is that all evil is of economic origin: correct your economics and your education and you obliterate evil. But it is not so. As Lowell said, “A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.” When by means of eugenics we can give education the right material to work upon, we shall have a Utopia, and as for forms of government they may be left for fools to contest. Forel, incomparably the greatest socialist thinker of the day, sees this. He makes his Utopian predictions not so much as to mere externals, like clothing and language, but as regards the kind of man and woman: and, unlike some writers, he entitles himself to paint these pictures, for in that great eugenic treatiseDie Sexuel Frage, he tells us how to realise them by pedagogic reform working upon the materials provided by human selection. A paragraph may be quoted from Forel:—
“Malgré tout l'enthousiasme qu'on doit montrer pour une pédagogie rationelle, il ne faut jamais oublier qu'elle est incapable de remplacer la sélection. Elle sert au but immédiat et rapproché, qui est d'utiliser le mieux possible le matérial humain tel qu'il existe maintenant. Mais, par elle-même, elle n'améliore en rien la qualité des germes à venir. Elle peut, néanmoins, grâce à l'instruction donnée à la jeunesse sur la valeur sociale de la sélection, la préparer à mettre cette dernière en œuvre.”
“Malgré tout l'enthousiasme qu'on doit montrer pour une pédagogie rationelle, il ne faut jamais oublier qu'elle est incapable de remplacer la sélection. Elle sert au but immédiat et rapproché, qui est d'utiliser le mieux possible le matérial humain tel qu'il existe maintenant. Mais, par elle-même, elle n'améliore en rien la qualité des germes à venir. Elle peut, néanmoins, grâce à l'instruction donnée à la jeunesse sur la valeur sociale de la sélection, la préparer à mettre cette dernière en œuvre.”
and another from Spencer:—
“We are not among those who believe in Lord Palmerston's dogma, that all children are born good. On the whole, the opposite dogma, untenable as it is, seems to us less wide of the truth. Nor do we agree with those who think that, by skilful discipline, children may be made altogether what they should be. Contrariwise, we are satisfied that though imperfections of nature may be diminished by wise management, they cannot be removed by it. The notion that an ideal humanity might be forthwith produced by a perfect system of education, is near akin to that implied in the poems of Shelley, that would make mankind give up their old institutions and prejudices, all the evils in the world would at once disappear; neither notion being acceptable to such as have dispassionately studied human affairs.”
“We are not among those who believe in Lord Palmerston's dogma, that all children are born good. On the whole, the opposite dogma, untenable as it is, seems to us less wide of the truth. Nor do we agree with those who think that, by skilful discipline, children may be made altogether what they should be. Contrariwise, we are satisfied that though imperfections of nature may be diminished by wise management, they cannot be removed by it. The notion that an ideal humanity might be forthwith produced by a perfect system of education, is near akin to that implied in the poems of Shelley, that would make mankind give up their old institutions and prejudices, all the evils in the world would at once disappear; neither notion being acceptable to such as have dispassionately studied human affairs.”
Ruskin on education and inequality.—Three great paragraphs may be quoted from Ruskin'sTime and Tide:—
“... Educationwas desired by the lower orders because they thought it would make them upper orders, and be a leveller and effacer of distinctions. They will be mightily astonished, when they really get it, to find that it is, on the contrary, the fatallest of all discerners and enforcers of distinctions; piercing, even to the division of the joints and marrow, to find out wherein your body and soul are less, or greater, than other bodies and souls, and to sign deed of separation with unequivocal seal.“171. Education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely appointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undivinely poor, it will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed, and halt, and blind, it will make whole, and equal, and seeing. The blind and the lame are to it as to David at the siege of the Tower of the Kings, ‘hated of David's soul.’ But there are other divinely-appointed differences, eternal as the ranks of the everlasting hills, and as the strength of their ceaseless waters. And these, education does not do away with; but measures, manifests, and employs.“In the handful of shingle which you gather from the sea-beach, which the indiscriminate sea, with equality of fraternal foam, has only educated to be, every one, round, you will seelittle difference between the noble and the mean stones. But the jeweller's trenchant education of them will tell you another story. Even the meanest will be the better for it, but the noblest so much better that you can class the two together no more. The fair veins and colours are all clear now, and so stern is nature's intent regarding this, that not only will the polish show which is best, but the best will take most polish. You shall not merely see they have more virtue than the others, but see that more of virtue more clearly; and the less virtue there is, the more dimly you shall see what there is of it.“172. And the law about education, which is sorrowfullest to vulgar pride, is this—that all its gains are at compound interest; so that, as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther behind the greater men with whom we began on equal terms. Two children go to school hand in hand, and spell for half an hour over the same page. Through all their lives, never shall they spell from the same page more. One is presently a page a-head, two pages, ten pages—and evermore, though each toils equally, the interval enlarges—at birth nothing, at death infinite.”
“... Educationwas desired by the lower orders because they thought it would make them upper orders, and be a leveller and effacer of distinctions. They will be mightily astonished, when they really get it, to find that it is, on the contrary, the fatallest of all discerners and enforcers of distinctions; piercing, even to the division of the joints and marrow, to find out wherein your body and soul are less, or greater, than other bodies and souls, and to sign deed of separation with unequivocal seal.
“171. Education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely appointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undivinely poor, it will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed, and halt, and blind, it will make whole, and equal, and seeing. The blind and the lame are to it as to David at the siege of the Tower of the Kings, ‘hated of David's soul.’ But there are other divinely-appointed differences, eternal as the ranks of the everlasting hills, and as the strength of their ceaseless waters. And these, education does not do away with; but measures, manifests, and employs.
“In the handful of shingle which you gather from the sea-beach, which the indiscriminate sea, with equality of fraternal foam, has only educated to be, every one, round, you will seelittle difference between the noble and the mean stones. But the jeweller's trenchant education of them will tell you another story. Even the meanest will be the better for it, but the noblest so much better that you can class the two together no more. The fair veins and colours are all clear now, and so stern is nature's intent regarding this, that not only will the polish show which is best, but the best will take most polish. You shall not merely see they have more virtue than the others, but see that more of virtue more clearly; and the less virtue there is, the more dimly you shall see what there is of it.
“172. And the law about education, which is sorrowfullest to vulgar pride, is this—that all its gains are at compound interest; so that, as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther behind the greater men with whom we began on equal terms. Two children go to school hand in hand, and spell for half an hour over the same page. Through all their lives, never shall they spell from the same page more. One is presently a page a-head, two pages, ten pages—and evermore, though each toils equally, the interval enlarges—at birth nothing, at death infinite.”
So much for one relation of this question to Socialism. Quite lately (The New Age, April 11th, 1908) Mr. Havelock Ellis has summed the matter up as follows:—
“Education has been put at the beginning, when it ought to have been put at the end. It matters comparatively little what sort of education we give children; the primary matter is what sort of children we have got to educate. That is the most fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than the great question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed touches a foundation that is common to both. The best organised social system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed with sound individuals; and no individualism worth the name is possible, unless a sound social organisation permits the breeding of individuals who count. On this plane Socialism and Individualism move in the same circle.”
“Education has been put at the beginning, when it ought to have been put at the end. It matters comparatively little what sort of education we give children; the primary matter is what sort of children we have got to educate. That is the most fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than the great question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed touches a foundation that is common to both. The best organised social system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed with sound individuals; and no individualism worth the name is possible, unless a sound social organisation permits the breeding of individuals who count. On this plane Socialism and Individualism move in the same circle.”
We cannot agree with Socialism when, as we think, it assumes that all evil is of economic or of educational origin. The student of heredity finds elements of evilabundant in poisoned germ-plasm and not absent from the best. Surely, surely, the products of progress are not mechanisms but men; and surely no economic system as such can be the only mechanism worth naming—which would be one that made men. The germ-plasm is such a mechanism, indeed; and hence its quality is all important.
But if Socialism, sooner than any other party, is going to identify itself with the economic principle of Ruskin that “there is no wealth but life”; and if in its discussion of the conditions of industry it will concern itself primarily with the culture of the racial life, which is the vital industry of any people (and basis enough for a New Imperialism, or at least a New Patriotism, that might be quite decent); if so, then it seems to me that we must look to the socialists for salvation. But books which describe future externals, books which assume that education is a panacea, forgetting that education can educate only what heredity gives, turn us away again when we are almost persuaded. Theeconomicpanacea must fail (at least as a panacea); theeducationalpanacea must fail; theeugenicpanacea may not fail.
Education, then, cannot achieve our ideal of race-culture. No matter how good our polishing, we must have silver and diamonds to work upon, not pewter and pebbles. When we have the right material to work upon, our labour will not be wasted, or far worse than wasted, as it now too often is.
Education a Sisyphean task.—But the belief in education as in itself an adequate instrument of race-culture chiefly depends upon the popular doctrine as to its influence upon the race. It is supposed, in a word, that if we educate the parents, the child will beginwhere the parents left off. This is the doctrine of Lamarck, who said that if the necks of the parent giraffe were educated or drawn out, the baby giraffe would have this anatomical acquirement transmitted to it, and, so to speak, when it grew up, would be able to begin feeding on the leaves of trees at the level where its parents had to leave off. In the course of its life its own neck would become elongated or educated, and its children would outstretch both itself and their grand-parents. This doctrine of the transmission of acquired characters by heredity, as we have seen, is, at the present day, repudiated by biologists. It is generally believed by the medical profession and by the public, notwithstanding the fact that, for instance, the skin of the heel of every new baby is almost as thin and delicate as it is anywhere else, though for unthinkable generations all the ancestors of that baby on both sides have greatly thickened the skin of both heels by the act of walking.
It is quite evident that, if the Lamarckian theory were true, education would be a completely adequate instrument of race-culture, incomparable in its rapidity and certainty. It would not reform the world in a single generation because, as we have seen, its results would be limited by the inherent nature of its material; but since those results would involve the vast amelioration of the material upon which it worked in the second generation, mankind would be little lower than the angels in a century. The good habits acquired by one generation would be innate in the next. If the father learnt one language in addition to his own, the child would start with the knowledge of two, waiting only for opportunity, and could accumulate more and hand them on to its child. “My father's environment would be my heredity.” If we desired muscular strength we could in two generations produce a race amongst whomSandow would be a puny weakling. We should not need to discuss any question of selection for parenthood. Without any such process we could answer Browning's prayer and “elevate the race at once”—physically, mentally and morally.
But the Lamarckian theory does not correspond with facts. The results of education, physical, mental, or moral, are limited to the individuals educated. The children do not begin where the parents left off, but they make a fresh start where the parents did. Thus even though we had and employed an ideal method of education, we should make no permanent improvement by its means alone in the breed of mankind, any more than the breeder of race-horses could attain his end by the same means. In each generation the same problem, the same difficulties, the same limitations inherent in the nature of the new material, would have to be faced. We must learn from the horse-breeder, who knows that the blood of a single horse, Eclipse, runs in the veins of the great majority of winners since his time.
It is exceedingly difficult to dispossess the popular mind of the Lamarckian idea, the more especially as members of the medical profession, who are regarded as authorities on heredity, contentedly accept this idea themselves. Yet the advocates of eugenics or race-culture have to recognise that, so long as the Lamarckian idea obtains, their crusade will fail to find a hearing. We believe that nothing can really be accomplished in the way of race-culture until public opinion—that “chaos of prejudices,” as Huxley called it—is marshalled on our side. But the popular notion of heredity is a most formidable obstacle. The Lamarckian idea seems to provide a method for the improvement of a species which cannot be surpassed for simplicity, rapidity and certainty. It even excludes the possibility of mistakes.You cannot go wrong if you simply educate every one to the utmost. Doubtless some persons are more suited for parenthood than others, but only let education be wise and universal, and any question of selection by marriage or otherwise will be superfluous. A thousand difficulties offered by public sentiment, by convention, by the churches, by the large measure of uncertainty which attends the working of heredity, could be ignored, if race-culture were simply a matter of education.
Nevertheless, these difficulties have to be faced by the eugenist. The popular misconception of heredity—instanced by Sir James Simpson's belief, not inexcusable sixty years ago, that the education of a future mother will enlarge her child's brain—must be removed. It can scarcely be doubted that the sway of the Lamarckian idea will soon be diminished, and then, at last, those who are interested in the future will discover that only by the process of selection for parenthood, which has brought mankind thus far, can further progress be assured.
Real functions of education for race-culture.—Nevertheless education has a true function for race-culture in addition to the obvious fact of its necessity in order to realise the inherent potentialities of the individual. One of its functions is to provide a level of public opinion and public taste such that the finer specimens of each generation shall receive their due reward and shall not be crushed out of existence or perverted. There is a passage in Goethe which suggests the true function of education, and makes us suspect that, so far as many kinds of genius and talent are concerned, our immediate business is perhaps less to endeavour to produce them by breeding—if that be possible—than to make the most of them when they are vouchsafed us. Says Goethe:—
“We admire the Tragedies of the ancient Greeks; but to take a correct view of the case, we ought to admire the period and the nation in which their production was possible rather than the individual authors; for though these pieces differ in some points from each other, and though one of these poets appears somewhat greater and more finished than the other, still, taking all things together, only one decided character runs through the whole.“This is the character of grandeur, fitness, soundness, human perfection, elevated wisdom, sublime thought, pure, strong intuition, and whatever other qualities one might enumerate. But when we find all these qualities, not only in the dramatic works which have come down to us, but also in lyrical and epic works—in the philosophers, orators, and historians, and in an equally high degree in the works of plastic art that have come down to us—we must feel convinced that such qualities did not merely belong to individuals, but were the current property of the nation and the whole period.”
“We admire the Tragedies of the ancient Greeks; but to take a correct view of the case, we ought to admire the period and the nation in which their production was possible rather than the individual authors; for though these pieces differ in some points from each other, and though one of these poets appears somewhat greater and more finished than the other, still, taking all things together, only one decided character runs through the whole.
“This is the character of grandeur, fitness, soundness, human perfection, elevated wisdom, sublime thought, pure, strong intuition, and whatever other qualities one might enumerate. But when we find all these qualities, not only in the dramatic works which have come down to us, but also in lyrical and epic works—in the philosophers, orators, and historians, and in an equally high degree in the works of plastic art that have come down to us—we must feel convinced that such qualities did not merely belong to individuals, but were the current property of the nation and the whole period.”
Education as to the principle of selection.—Further, the hope may be warranted that, though education, as such, will not achieve the ideal of true race-culture, and though it has never hitherto averted the ultimate failure of all civilisations, yet the case may be different to-day, in that our acquired or traditional progress, transmitted by the process of education accumulating from age to age—not in our blood and bone and brain, but mainly in books, whereby the non-transmission of the results of education is circumvented in a sense—has reached the point at which the laws of racial or inherent progress have been revealed to us, as to none of our predecessors.[38]Having the knowledge of these laws it is possible that we may avert our predecessors' fate by putting them into force. If we do not, we must ultimately become “one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Fifty years have now elapsed since the principle of natural selection was demonstrated for all time by the genius of Darwin. We must not be guilty of starting to tell the story of organic evolution and leaving out the point. So long as we supposed that man was created as he is, the idea of racial progress was anabsurdity. It is the correct thing now-a-days to decry the possibility of human perfection. This possibility is rightly to be decried if it be assumed that ideal education of the present material or anything like it would realise perfection. We have seen that it would not. It is the principle of selection, in which Darwin has educated us, that must be taught to all mankind, and thus education may indeed become the factor of an effective race-culture.
The power of individual opinion.—Since ultimately opinion rules the world, it is for us to create sound opinion. That is the purpose of this book. But every individual may be a centre of eugenic opinion, and the time has assuredly come for attempting to realise this ideal, though a thousand years should pass before the facts of heredity are completely ascertained and understood. The main principles are of the simplest character, and can be readily imparted to a child. Especially does the responsibility fall upon parents and those who are in charge of childhood.
The young people of the next and all succeeding generations must be taught the supreme sanctity of parenthood. The little boy who asks what he is to become when he grows up, must be taught that the highest profession and privilege he can aspire to is responsible fatherhood; the little girl may less frequently ask these questions, the answer to which has been imparted to her by her own Mother-Nature—as the doll instinct, so little appreciated or utilised, sufficiently demonstrates; but she likewise must be taught reverence for Motherhood. As childhood gives place to youth, what may be called the eugenic sense must be cultivated as a cardinal aspect of the moral sense itself; so that even personal inclination—at the controllable and self-controllable stage which precedes“head over ears” affection—will wither when it is directed to some one who, on any ground, offends the educated eugenic sense. There is here a field for moral education of the highest and most valuable kind, both for the individual and for the race. Is there any other aspect of duty which can claim a higher warrant? Is there any hitherto so wholly ignored?
The preceding paragraph is re-printed from a brief account of its objects written for the Eugenics Education Society, as a Society which amongst other purposes exists “to further eugenic teaching at home and in the schools and elsewhere.” The difficulties of teaching this subject to children are more apparent than real. I may freely confess that though I have been speaking, writing, and thinking about eugenics for six years, I did not realise the importance of eugenic education until I heard the views of some of the women who belong to this Society, and even then I was at first sceptical as to its practicability. The subject has been entirely ignored by the pioneers of this matter. But if we turn to such a work as Forel's masterpiece we begin to realise that the eugenic education of children is the real beginning at the beginning, that it is in fact indispensable, and must be antecedent to all legislation in the direction of positive eugenics, though not to certain forms of legislation in the direction of negative eugenics.[39]In the earlier chapters of his great work Professor Forel offers the parent and the guardian abundant, detailed and accurate guidance as to the lines and methods of this teaching. It is urgently necessary for both sexes, but more especially for girls, who may suffer incredibly from the cruel prudery ordained by Mrs. Grundy, the only old woman to whom the word “hag” should be applied. We must remove the reproachof Herbert Spencer, made nearly fifty years ago in words which may well be quoted:—
“The greatest defect in our programmes of education is entirely overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improvement of our systems in respect both of matter and manner, the most pressing desideratum, to prepare the young for the duties of life, is tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and schoolmasters should have in view; and happily, the value of the things taught, and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching them, are now ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end. The propriety of substituting for an exclusively classical training, a training in which the modern languages shall have a share, is argued on this ground. The necessity of increasing the amount of science is urged for like reasons. But though some care is taken to fit youth of both sexes for society and citizenship, no care whatever is taken to fit them for the position of parents. While it is seen that for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of children, no preparation whatever is needed. While many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge of which the chief value is that it constitutes ‘the education of a gentleman’; and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities—the management of a family. Is it that this responsibility is but a remote contingency? On the contrary, it is sure to devolve on nine out of ten. Is it that the discharge of it is easy? Certainly not; of all functions which the adult has to fulfil, this is the most difficult. Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent? No; not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognised, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed.”
“The greatest defect in our programmes of education is entirely overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improvement of our systems in respect both of matter and manner, the most pressing desideratum, to prepare the young for the duties of life, is tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and schoolmasters should have in view; and happily, the value of the things taught, and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching them, are now ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end. The propriety of substituting for an exclusively classical training, a training in which the modern languages shall have a share, is argued on this ground. The necessity of increasing the amount of science is urged for like reasons. But though some care is taken to fit youth of both sexes for society and citizenship, no care whatever is taken to fit them for the position of parents. While it is seen that for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of children, no preparation whatever is needed. While many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge of which the chief value is that it constitutes ‘the education of a gentleman’; and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities—the management of a family. Is it that this responsibility is but a remote contingency? On the contrary, it is sure to devolve on nine out of ten. Is it that the discharge of it is easy? Certainly not; of all functions which the adult has to fulfil, this is the most difficult. Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent? No; not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognised, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed.”
The lines of eugenic education.—The teaching of the main facts of heredity must come first in order to the end of eugenic education. The vegetable world is at our service in this regard, the products of horticulture with their beauty and grace and novelty are illustrations oneand all of what heredity means and what the due choice of parents will effect. There need be no personal allusions at this stage; the thing can be presented in an impersonal biological setting. And as heredity produces these wonderful results in plants, so also does it in the animal world. Numberless domestic forms are at our service. You take your children and your dog to the Zoological gardens, and show the resemblance between wolf and dog. What easier, then, than to point out that by consistent choosing for many generations of the least ferocious wolves, you may make a domesticated race?[40]
The mind of any child that has fortunately escaped “education” will make the transition for itself from sub-human races to mankind, and instances will occur, say, where extreme short-sightedness or deafness appears in children whose parents were similarly afflicted, and were perhaps closely related. At yet a later age a boy or girl may learn the doom which often falls upon the children of drunkards.
And then may it not be possible, when a little boy asks what he is to be when he grows up, to suggest that the highest profession to which he can be called, for which he may strive to make himself worthy, is fatherhood? And when the racial instinct awakes, would it be wrong, improper, indecent, to teach that it has a purpose, that no attribute of mind or body has a higher purpose, that this is holy ground? Or is it better that by silence, both as to the fact and as to its meaning, we should make it unmentionable, indecent, dishonourable? The Bible is used now-a-days as an instrument of political immorality, but if and when it should be employed for the function of other great literature, there is a passage sufficiently relevant to our present argument.[41]
Perhaps we are wrong in regarding and treating the racial instinct as if it were animal and low, a thing as far as possible to be ignored, repressed, treated with silent contempt in education and elsewhere. We may be wrong in practice because the method is not successful, because the development of this instinct is inevitable and little short of imperious in every normal child if that child is ever to become a man or a woman, and because our silence does not involve the silence of less responsible persons who are less likely even than we ourselves to teach the young enquirer that this thing exists for parenthood, and is therefore holy and to be treated as such.
Perhaps we are wrong in principle also, since that which exists for parenthood, and without which the continuance and future terrestrial hope of mankind is impossible, cannot be animal and low, unless human life, even at its best attained or attainable, be animal and low. Our business rather is to treat this great fact in a spirit worthy of the purpose for which it exists; and therefore, as part of that process of education by which we desire to make the young into reasonable, moral and fully human beings, to teach explicitly, without unworthy shame, that this thing exists for the highest of purposes that nothing which the future holds for boy or girl can conceivably be higher or happier than worthy parenthood, however commonplace that may appear to common eyes, and that accordingly this instinct is to be guarded, treated, used, honoured as for parenthood, a fact which immediately raises it from the egoistic to the altruistic plane. We have to learn and to teach that worthy parenthood is the highest end which education can achieve—highest alike on the ground of its services to the individual and its services to the future, and the relation of the racial instinct to parenthood being whatit is, we have to look upon it in that light, at once austere and splendid.
In the teaching of girls, only a false and disastrous prudery offers any great obstacle. The idea of motherhood is essentially natural to the normal girl. It is the eugenic education of boys that is more difficult, and the possibility of which will be questioned in some quarters, especially by those who regard the type of boy evolved in semi-monastic institutions, devoid of feminine influence, as a normal and unchangeable being. Co-educationists, however, are teaching us to revise that opinion, and will yet demonstrate, perhaps, that the inculcation of the idea of fatherhood is not so impossible nor so alien to the boy nature as some would suppose. If such a duty devolved upon the present writer, he would feel inclined, perhaps, to present his teaching in terms of patriotism. He would urge that “there is no wealth but life”; that nations are made not of provinces nor property but of people; that modern biology is teaching historians to explain such phenomena as the fall of Rome in terms of the quality of the national life; that therefore, individuals being mortal, parenthood necessarily takes its place as the supreme factor of national destiny; that the true patriotism must therefore concern itself with the conditions and the quality of parenthood—much less with its quantity; that the patriotism which ignores these truths is ignorant and must be disastrous; that we must turn our attention therefore from flag waving to questions of individual conduct; that if alcohol and syphilis, for instance, can be demonstrated to be what I would call racial poisons, the young patriot must make himself aware of their relation to parenthood, and must act upon his knowledge of that relation. It can thus be demonstrated that righteousness exalteth a nation not only in the spiritual but also in the most concrete sense.
To this we shall come. We may even recognise eugenic education as the most urgent need of the day, as the most radical and rational, perhaps even the most hopeful, of the methods by which the cleansing of the city, and much more, is to be achieved. We must create a eugenic aspect for the moral sense. We can associate this alike with individual and civic duty, and with those very ideals to which, as we all know, the young most readily respond. Thus I believe it shall be said of us in the after time that we have raised up the foundations of many generations.
And so, finally, the unselfish significance of marriage might conceivably be taught, alike to boys and girls, and especially in the case of undoubtedly good stocks might we inculcate, as Mr. Galton has pointed out, a rational pride in ancestry—that is to say, a rational pride in the quality of the germ-plasm which has been entrusted to us. And so may be cultivated a eugenic aspect of the moral sense—which is immeasurably more plastic than any but the student of moral ideas knows—and, thus endowed, the young man or woman will be prepared for the possibility of marriage. It is perfectly conceivable that in days to come the argument—in any case false—that affection never brooks control, may become wholly irrelevant, when there arises a generation in whose members there has been cultivated or created the eugenic sense. It is conceivable that, just as to-day the mere possibility of falling in love is arrested by any of a thousand trivial considerations, so misplaced affection may be incapable of arising because its possible object affronts the educated eugenic sense. The natural basis for such education already exists. But the natural eugenic sense still works mainly on the physical plane, and although we owe to it the maintenance of our present modest standard of physical beauty, we aim at higher ideals—and will one day thus attain them.