THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION
PROCRUSTESIINTRODUCTIONThe Procrustean Bed
PROCRUSTES
Andrew Undershaft.—“Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnado homes, or School Board Officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with second-hand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching.”—(Bernard Shaw).
Andrew Undershaft.—“Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnado homes, or School Board Officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with second-hand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching.”—(Bernard Shaw).
During the Debate on the last Education Estimates (1925), Lord Hugh Cecil made a speech which most enthusiasts of education dismissedoffhand as hopelessly reactionary. In the central part of his argument he deprecated the doctrine that education is to be equally distributed to all sorts of people, irrespective of their real capacity. He maintained that we must train children for the station to which, not by birth but by natural capacity, they properly belong. He would select the clever children and spend money liberally in giving them the fullest possible opportunities for higher study. But to the great body of children who are incapable of really using any higher teaching he would give a very low standard of education confined to the three R’s: the teaching of reading should be made the basis, for reading is the key to knowledge.
These views are certainly extreme; but, looked at impartially, they contain so much plain common-sense that it is rather remarkable that they provoked such bitter opposition. Of course, Lord Hugh Cecil laid himself open to two obvious charges: first, that he had no special knowledge of his subject, and, secondly, that his reforms were presumably intended for the children of masses and not those of his own class. But his opponents must take account of the statement made a few weeks later by the headmaster of Rugby, whose opinions cannot be discounted on these two grounds. Speaking as President of the Education Section of the British Association, Dr Vaughan disputed the assumptionthat the State should develop to the full the intellectual abilities of all its citizens. He considered that schooling is even now continued too long for some boys. He would give a thrice-generous remission after fourteen to those who had shewn no special aptitude for book-learning or any other form of direct education, on condition that they were kept within the spell of corporate life. Thus a distinguished practical schoolmaster corroborates the view of Lord Hugh Cecil that before providing unlimited educational facilities we should face the fact that many children are not amenable to the present educational process; and we ought therefore to consider whether we are promoting either their efficiency ascitizens or their happiness as individuals by submitting them to a training for which they are not fitted. We are reminded that education has of recent years become a cult whose followers allow their zeal to blind them to stubborn realities.
The suggestion that we are on a false track in seeking to multiply indefinitely the educational institutions of existing type naturally provokes strong opposition, for it runs counter to one of the most cherished democratic doctrines of to-day. Ever since the first extension of the franchise, publicists have been preaching that the success of democracy depends upon the diffusion of culture among the masses who have the ultimate control of affairs. And whenever fearshave been expressed that popular government has fallen short of the original ideal we have been assured that all will be well as soon as the electorate is properly educated. The public has thus been taught to believe that it is the duty of the State (so long as the financial position permits) to increase to the utmost the facilities for training its citizens.
The need for more education has, in fact, become a political commonplace. It has been only too easy for statesmen who have little real interest in the matter to talk vaguely about the educational ladder from the elementary school to the university, because such talk provides plausible material for the platform-speaker whose business it is to rehabilitate apopular system which has not quite come up to expectations. In a somewhat disillusioned democratic world education has threatened to become a political nostrum to be unintelligently applied and to be foolishly regarded as a panacea.
It is, in fact, the latest of a series of expedients prompted by belief in the perfectibility of mankind. A century or so ago republican reformers imagined that all the ills the State is heir to would be cured if King George’s government were replaced by a government of Tom Paine’s. Later on, the radicals thought that the millennium would be reached when every adult had a vote. The present generation has been too readily fooled by the equally delusivehope that the new Utopia will be created when everybody receives a university education at public expense.
It is therefore all to the good that our leaders should occasionally remind us that education is not a magic weapon of unlimited power. It is time that the public mind was disabused of the notion that a perfect system of education would of itself prove the salvation of the State. The fallacy lies, of course, in the assumption that everybody is capable of being educated. Those who are personally in touch with schools see only too clearly how unwarrantable such an assumption is. While they realise that every child, dull or clever, benefits by being under discipline and by taking part in the social life of aschool, they know also that a certain proportion of children undergo no mental development commensurate with the time and labour expended on their behalf. Thus even if we imagine a perfect educational process, carried out by teachers who are all men and women of light and leading, the result of that process will be ultimately conditioned by the quality of the human beings who pass through it. Just as democracy pre-supposes education, so education pre-supposes children who are educable. It would seem, therefore, that political and social reformers who are still looking for a panacea must go to the eugenists.
The public statement of considered views such as those of Lord HughCecil and the Headmaster of Rugby is one of the signs that we are at length emerging from the mental attitude which expresses itself in the crude demand for more and more education to be doled out indiscriminately. It is indeed time that we got rid of the prevalent notion that schools are factories (chiefly brain-factories) which can pass any sort of human material through a standardised course and in so many years turn out satisfactory finished products. And the friends of education need not be alarmed at the new trend of opinion. All reasonable people now admit the theoretical principle that the State must provide adequate training for all future citizens; and the Labour Party is flogging a dead horsewhen it insists so laboriously that every child, irrespective of social status, should be given the fullest educational opportunities. Present-day informed discussion has advanced beyond the consideration of this almost platitudinous statement of principle to an enquiry of a much more important character. The question being now asked is not whether every child should be given education to the age of sixteen or beyond, but what kinds of education ought to be provided for the many thousands of children of varied types who will receive advanced training through the increased facilities to be provided in the future.
The stage of educational development upon which we are now enteringwill, in fact, be marked by greater realism in the attitude of both the authorities and the general public towards the problems to be solved. We are gradually coming to acknowledge the fairly obvious truth that not every child is a potential Prime Minister, or even a capable civil servant, or a manager of a business. When we have shed the more romantic of the democratic habits of thought we shall even publicly admit that a certain proportion of mankind (whether the offspring of dukes or of dustmen) are fitted by nature to be nothing better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that to give them more than a limited amount of ordinary schooling is to perform a work of sentimental supererogation.We shall also realise that the course of instruction which has now become stereotyped as secondary, however admirable in itself, is a course for which relatively few children are really suited. And when we have taken more account than at present of the profound differences in individual capacities we shall cease to think of an education as something extraneous to the person educated, and to regard the school-curriculum as a Procrustean bed, to suit the dimensions of which the child’s mentality can be extended or truncated as required.