A RACE BETWEEN EDUCATION AND RUIN.[1]
By Canon Barnett.March, 1912.
By Canon Barnett.
March, 1912.
1From “The Westminster Gazette”. By permission of the Editor.
1From “The Westminster Gazette”. By permission of the Editor.
“Twentyyears too late” is the reflection suggested by the report of the success of the Universities’ Experiment of Tutorial Classes for Working People. The present industrial situation needs, it may be agreed, a working-class able to take large and generous views, capable of shaping not only a class but a national policy, trained to separate the essential from the unessential, and to act consistently on principles tried and proved in the history of the past. The old Universities have the resources for giving the people this equipment. They have wealth; they have teachers penetrated by the traditions accumulated in Oxford and Cambridge; they exist, we are told, to give liberal culture a broader outlook, a historical perspective. The Universities, roused by the Workers’ Education Association, have, by means of the Tutorial Classes, achieved notable success. They have offered to groups of twenty or thirty working people in the great towns means by which they might enter a larger life, feel the years which are behind, and get a grasp of eternal principles. The meanshave been seized with surprising eagerness. Men after a hard day’s work have been found week after week at the tutors’ tables for the study of economics, political philosophy, or history; they have kept up attendance for three years, and they have learnt, to quote the words of some who attended a summer meeting in Balliol College, “the wonderful development which has taken place in my mind” now “that my prejudices have been dispelled and mental horizon widened”—that “study is a pleasure rather than a task”.
The students, in a word, receive a share of that larger education which the Universities exist to give. But success over so small an area, affecting only a few thousand men, but serves to show what might have been if the movement had commenced twenty years earlier.
The working people have now come into power, and they have many wrongs to put right. The anxious question is, Will they use their power more wisely and more generously than the capitalist class? There is not much sign of a wide and generous outlook in a policy which assumes that war is the necessary attitude of employed and employers. There is not much evidence of an inspiring vision of society when there is so little recognition of the interdependence of all sorts and conditions of men. There is not much grasp of principle among those who begin a strike, which must involve untold suffering, as if it were a holiday. The working people may have wrongs to bear, they may have splendid qualities of faithfulness to comrades and endurance under hardships, but they can hardly be said to have that knowledge of humanity which makes them humble before the best, with a capacity for judgment and a standard by which to apply it.
The race in all nations seems to be one between Education and Ruin. The Universities who are especially responsible for national education have too late begun toshare their resources with working people, and the success of their long-delayed start has only served to encourage the formation of the rival Central Labour College. This College is thus described by Mr. Rowland Kenney: “It makes no pretence of giving a ‘broad’ education.... Its teaching is frankly partisan. History is dealt with as a record of the struggles which have taken place in social groups, because of the conflicting interests of the various classes that have from time to time divided society.... Its key to the interpretation of Sociology is class interest; dividing the social groups into the owners and non-owners of property, it points out the common interest of all those who work for wages.... It absolutely cuts out any idea of conciliation as a final solution of labour problems.” The College, in the name of education, appears to be using its forces to block the way to peace and goodwill which it is largely the object of education to keep open. It preaches a class war, treats every member of the middle class as “suspect,” and bitterly opposes the Workers’ Education Association because its Council includes University men. This College is said to supply the brains behind the labour revolt.
The Universities, hating to be reformed, and allowing the misuse of their resources by undergraduates, sometimes described by Rhodes scholars as “British babes,” have been unable to do their part for the nation. They have stood aside from elementary education, only coldly tolerating the establishment of training colleges in their neighbourhood, and only timidly following a few of their members when they have led the way in the extension of University teaching. It may almost be said that they have lost influence over public opinion, and that their mission of raising the tone of democracy, of clarifying human sympathies and elevating human preferences have passed to other hands.A recent visitor to India remarked on his return that many of its difficulties seemed due to its government by “unreformed Oxford,” and reflecting on the strike, one is led to say that some of its most disturbing features are due to unreformed Universities.
There is something more needed, if not demanded, than a rise of wages. A few more shillings a week would soon be absorbed by men whose first use of leisure is in the enjoyment of somewhat sordid forms of sport. The men are hardly to be blamed for what are condemned as low tastes and brutal pleasures. They are what their environment has made them, and a mining village is not likely to develop a love of home-making, a taste for beauty, or any joy in the use of the higher faculties of admiration, hope, and love. The long, grimy rows of houses, without any distinctive features by which a man might recognize and become proud of his home. The absence of gardens which would call him to enjoy nature and be its fellow-worker; the want of a bathroom other than a tub in the sitting-room, by which to feel clean from the dirt of the day; the meanness of such public buildings as are provided—the church, the library, or the meeting-hall—do not provoke his soul to admiration or stir up a thirst for knowledge; such surroundings are likely to make the miner content with his pigeons, his dogs, and his football matches. Why, it may be asked, have not more owners done what some owners have done, and make a Bournville or a Port Sunlight for the workpeople. If out of the average 10 per cent profits, it is impossible to provide an appreciable addition to the men’s weekly wages, it is not impossible to provide better and pleasanter housing. Why is it that owners and managers, who by many acts have shownthemselves to be people of goodwill, have been content that workmen should live under conditions which unfit them to enjoy the best things: why is it that with all their charity they miss their opportunity? The fault lies, I believe, largely with the Church—Established and Free. The Church has too often gone on preaching a mediæval system, it has not moved with the times, and does not recognize that goodwill to-day must find other ways of charity than those trodden by our fathers, when they built almshouses and provided food or clothing. It has allowed a business man to be hard in his business, if he is easy in response to charitable appeals. But times have changed, and we no longer hope for a society in which rich people are kind to poor people; we rather think of a society where employers and employed share justly the profits of work; where there is no dependent class, and all find pleasure in the gifts of character which follow the full growth of manhood in rich and poor. If the Church recognized some such conception of society it would aim to humanize business relations and teach investors to ask, as Bishop Stubbs (whose “Social Creed,” lately published in the “Times,” well repays study) suggests, “Not only whether a business issafeto pay, but whether the businessdeservesto pay”. Coal-owners, under the Church’s influence, might substitute for such villages as Tonypandy, villages such as Earswick, and then every increase of wages would mean that widening of human interests which helps to satisfy the individual and to increase the stability of the nation.
The strike is doing vast mischief, as it dislocates trade, spreads poverty, and embitters class relationships. But all its mischief may be outweighed if it forces people to think. Our prosperity, the triumphs of machinery, the daily provisionof opinions by an ubiquitous Press, have encouraged a self-satisfied and easy-going spirit. We do not take pains to make up our minds; we do not try to think our rivals’ thoughts; employers do not put themselves in the men’s place, and the men do not put themselves in the employers’ place; none of us put ourselves in the Germans’ place when they are angry at our policy. The greatest danger of the time is the forgetfulness of danger, the light-heartedness of the people, and the want of seriousness which prefers enjoyment to study, and the carelessness which, for example, goes on refusing to consider the Insurance Act, saying, “It will never come into force”. People will not think. The Tariff Reform agitation has done untold good in making, at any rate, a few people think out the meaning of Free Trade. The strike will do good if it makes people—masters and men—think out the interdependence of trade—whence it is that profits come—what is the relation between home and foreign trade—what is the duty which a trade bears to the State—what is the justification for a strike or a lock-out which cripples the State—and what are the calls for State interference. Professor William James declares that the secret and glory of our English-speaking race “consists in nothing but two common habits carried into public life—habits more precious, perhaps, than any that the human race has gained.... One of them is the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings. The other is that of fierce and merciless resentment towards every man or set of men who break the public peace.” The strike and its sufferings will not be in vain if by making us think it strengthens our hold on those heirlooms.
Samuel A. Barnett.
Samuel A. Barnett.
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