Whether it is that State-educated youths think that their accomplishments have made them the equals of everybody else, or whether the inanity of the system to which they have been subjected has given them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine. Probably both misconceptions are evenly distributedamongst the victims of the process. But the fact that this should be the case at all speaks eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding, on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and subject-compulsion with the proper development of the human faculties.
Having considered the evils produced by sham education, such as is compulsorily given to the masses of the people, we can proceed to examine into the average results effected by more genuine and efficient systems of cramming and instruction. It is not in the least degree necessary, for this purpose, to go into minute comparisons of the various types of secondary schools and colleges that have been established in this country. In the actual method of teaching there is little to choose between them. All have practically a common aim, namely, the preparation of boys and young men for examinations.
Of course, all boys who go to school are not destined for professions that necessitate the passing of an examination, competitive or otherwise. But that does not disturb the school authorities a jot, or involve the slightest relaxation of the school system. The boys are crammed just the same. Whoever wishes to pass through the mill must go in like a pig at one end and come out as a sausage at the other. There is no middle course except the private tutor; and he, owing to the defects of his own early trainingand to the terrific Conservatism peculiar to his profession, probably knows no better process than the familiar routine of cram and idea-suppression.
The whole of school life is a scramble for marks. The school managers and masters are interested in getting the boys stuffed with facts, dates, figures, and inflections, because the prestige of the school—and consequently its commercial success—is mainly dependent upon the creditable placing of pupils in public examinations. Therefore the boys are encouraged, or rather compelled, to occupy themselves with what will best conduce to secure this object, regardless of their own wishes or obvious inclinations.
A boy might enter a grammar-school, or one of the great public schools, teeming to his finger-tips with an inborn thirst for scientific knowledge; he might spend all his spare moments making crude experiments with an air-pump, or gazing at planets through a cheap astronomical telescope; he might fail dismally to grasp the rudiments of the Latin grammar, and be incapable of conjugating an irregular verb; but his nose would be kept down to the grindstone of the school curriculum all the same, and not the smallest attention paid to his obvious bent of mind.
He had been placed there, the authorities would say, to receive a general education, and a general education he should have. If during the process all the scientific enthusiasm is ground out of him, that is not the business of the schoolmaster. The boy, for the ordinary purposes of instruction, is an empty bottle into which a certain prescription is to be poured. The prescription has been made upbeforehand, and cannot be altered. The school undertakes to administer a draught, but it refuses to bother about diagnosing each case. There is only one method of treatment, and every patient who enters the establishment has to be submitted to it.
There have been, of course, enlightened pedagogues. The names of Arnold and Thring will always stand out prominently in the history of English school life, and it will be a bad day indeed for the youth in our public schools when their traditional influence shall have been entirely obliterated. They grafted upon the established methods of teaching a liberal and broad-minded effort to bring out what was best in each pupil by other influences. 'It is no wisdom,' Dr. Arnold declared, 'to make boys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty to cultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory and imagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, and to excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait with confidence God's blessing on the result.'
Edward Thring wrote the following remarks in his diary:
'Education is not bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power of observation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hidden truths and new creative genius. If the cursed rule-mongering and technical terms could be banished to limbo, something might be done. Three parts of teaching and learning in England is the hiding common sense and disguising ignorance under phrases.'
No stranger anomaly can be conceived than thatpresented by the constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a universal system of education. It is not often that people strive to set their house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to them for the courageous endeavour. The mistake they made was in tinkering with a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the bold step of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and sound principles.
The energies of schoolmasters of the type of Thring and Arnold are, in fact, concentrated mainly upon a constant struggle to prevent the ordinary process of school instruction from producing prigs. Stupid boys are generally rendered more stupid by teaching, for reasons that will be analyzed later on. But boys whose brains are amenable to academic training are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarly unfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish.
It is the purely academic training that produces the prig. Football, cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. The important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or artifice. The same law of nature applies tothe working of the brain. Stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind, and the result must necessarily be as artificial as the process. The mind becomes incapable of thinking individually and naturally; it becomes pedantic and circumscribed, powerless to give simple expression to simple thoughts; and the prig is made.
It requires a great deal of kicking and hustling on the part of the victim's schoolfellows to arrest this process, and the cure is generally only effected outwardly. Priggishness cannot be eradicated from the system in a moment, even by the most heroic measures. Its excision involves a slow mental process, the converse of that which served to call it into existence. The prig has to divest himself of the false mental outlook imposed upon him by his education, and to begin all over again. It is a hard lesson which can only be learnt in the school of life, generally after humiliating experience and bitter suffering. Many never succeed in learning it. There must be some material to work upon, and probably their individuality, weak at the commencement and therefore doubly in need of tender treatment and fostering care, has been hopelessly crushed out of existence by the conventional training of school and university.
Under present conditions prigs can and do grow up everywhere. In some educational institutions—notably in great public schools like Eton and Harrow—they are more discouraged than in others; but the cramming system has reached such proportions that all schools and colleges are affected in a greater orless degree. They infect our public life, as we have seen; largely recruit our public service; and are in evidence in the pulpit, at the schoolmaster's desk, on public platforms, in the lecture-room of the university, and wherever the services of educated men are employed.
The ideals of men like Arnold and Thring cannot be carried out as long as the examination system puts a premium upon cramming. 'I call that the best theme,' said Dr. Arnold, alluding to original composition, 'which shows that the boy has read and thought for himself; that the next best, which shows that he has read several books, and digested what he has read; and that the worst, which shows that he has followed but one book, and followed that without reflection.'
There is no time nowadays for a boy to read and think for himself. Besides the examinations inside his own school for which he has to be prepared, there are scholarships, university examinations, competitive examinations for the civil service, and a host of other possibilities of the kind, all of which necessitate the acquisition of an enormous number of useless facts in every branch of learning.
Too much attention is concentrated on the admirable physical product of the athletic side of our public school and university life. This advantage of the English system of education has been dwelt upon to such an extent, that people are apt to overlook the fact that, side by side with these fine specimens of healthy and for the most part unintellectual manhood, we are manufacturing a purely academic articleof the least inspired and most retrogressive description.
If somebody, wishing to make you acquainted with a friend, says to you: 'I want you to meet So-and-so; he was at Eton and Trinity Hall, and came out tenth in the mathematical tripos,' you know exactly the kind of man to whom you are going to be introduced. He will have a very proper contempt for made-up ties, and will refuse to fasten the bottom button of his waistcoat. You know beforehand the precise point of view that he will take upon every conceivable topic, and the channels in which his conversation is certain to flow.
His entire mental horizon will be bounded by academic conventionalities in such a cast-iron fashion that it would, you are well aware, waste your time to attempt to extend its boundaries by the fraction of an inch. If you say anything yourself out of the beaten track, you know that you will be looked down upon as a fool or a faddist. The Eton stamp will be upon his dress and manners; the Cambridge brand seared into every crevice of his mind. There will be an individuality about him, but it will be an individuality shared in common with hundreds of young men of the same educational antecedents.
That is the fault of the system. It takes away, or fails to evoke, the distinguishing traits of each individual, and substitutes a kind of manufactured personality according to the particular institution, or type of institution, in which the educational metamorphosis has taken place. 'A mob of boys,' said the man who raised Uppingham from completeobscurity to the front rank of public schools, 'cannot be educated.' It is, nevertheless, the process that is going on all over the civilized world. Reform does not lie alone in making instruction itself more effective. As long as the principle is retained of forcing certain facts and certain subjects into the mind of every boy, the country will continue to breed conventionality, to produce a uniform type of useless mediocrity, and to make prigs.
This is, unfortunately, exactly what the average educationist aims at. There is no disguise about the belief that conventional ideas, and the manufacture of what is called average ability, are the sheet-anchor of the State. And this type of fossilized Conservatism seems to grow in proportion to the number of schools and colleges in the country.
Lower-middle-class young men, of no intellectual predisposition at all, are being turned out on all sides crammed with the narrowest type of educational tradition. Prigs are produced wholesale; the worst and most odious branch of the family being the semi-illiterate prig—the man who gets drummed out of decent regimental messes, the man who wants to go on the stage and declaim Shakespeare through his nose, the man who vulgarizes the public service by dropping his h's in the great Government departments, and others too numerous to be specified.
Everything is vulgar that pretends to be what it is not. Priggishness is an artificial mental condition that is far more common than people generally suspect. We are most of us prigs, if we only knew it. The man who is unable to get rid of conventions andto think for himself is a prig. England is peopled with them. We meet them at every turn; we see them driving the country to the dogs by sheer inability to grasp its needs;—and we send our sons to the schools and universities to be manufactured after the same pattern.
If some boys thrive, according to ordinary school standards, on the cramming system, what becomes of those to whose nature the process is entirely antagonistic?
The question is best answered by a glance at the schools themselves. Take one of the great public schools, and it will be found that much the same conditions are prevalent in every class or form. There is a small percentage of boys at the top of each class who are considered the most intelligent, and by whom most of the questions asked by the master are answered. The remaining majority are divided into two sections, one of which consists of what are termed boys of average ability, whilst the other contains the lazy element, the refractory boys, and the dullards.
In the last chapter we chiefly discussed those individuals who may be taken as representing the average of the best results achieved by higher schools and universities. These form, however, only a fraction of the scholars who pass through such institutions. It still remains for us to discover the rôle which is played by the other four-fifths in school-life.According to scholastic methods of classification, the bulk of this residue are boys of medium intelligence who plod on without specially distinguishing themselves, and contrive, by dint of industry and application, to blunder through the ordinary course of study without coming to grief.
It would be difficult to conjure up a more melancholy picture than that presented by these plodders, whose work is rendered trebly hard by being performed against the grain. They suffer more under the system than the dull, the lazy, and the fractious, who escape its worst evils, either because some active power of resistance comes to their rescue, or because the mind itself is so formed as to be incapable of receiving instruction imparted on the cramming principle.
But the average mediocrity amongst schoolboys are often inferior in ability both to those who rank above and below them in school attainment. They neither profit by the teaching process, nor do they possess those qualities that would enable them to resist its consequences. Thus they fall between two stools, being carried out of their natural sphere, and at the same time failing to attain such a measure of artificial success as would afford them compensation for the injury.
Success in life is not an easy thing to generalize about. It is, however, important to note as far as possible the results brought about by school education. The boy who is trained to pass examinations has a respectable chance of getting into some branch of the public service; and, as we have seen, it is fromamongst his ranks that the permanent officials of the various departments of Government are recruited. A great number of those who distinguish themselves academically also pass into the teaching profession; though a considerable percentage of graduates, for reasons that will be discussed in due course, drift into the ranks of the unemployed.
The average schoolboy, who does his work mechanically and without enthusiasm, probably furnishes the greatest number of examples of the misplaced individual. His application to his studies is not natural; it is enforced by what is called school discipline. That is to say, the authorities devise every conceivable form of punishment to make a constant grind at obligatory subjects less disagreeable than the consequences of idleness. These are the simple arts by means of which unwilling boys are driven, like cattle, along the highway of what is termed, by an inaccurate application of the English language, knowledge.
Anybody who has been coerced, andpœnaed, and flogged through the curriculum of a public school will acknowledge that the performance is not an exhilarating one for the victim. It is preposterous to dignify this nigger-driving by the term 'education.' One might as well talk of the Chinese eagerly embracing Christianity, when, as a matter of fact, the missionaries have been forced upon them, like their foreign trade, at the point of the bayonet.
The wonder is that anybody survives the process and retains his sanity. That many nervous temperaments and highly-gifted minds do not survive it is a point of so much importance that it will be dealt withlater on in a separate chapter. What needs emphasizing here is that to make boys do certain things under compulsion is not developing their faculties, but is absolutely preventing their development; and secondly, that this infamous but universal proceeding is responsible for a positive degeneration amongst those whom it is supposed to educate and improve.
Dr. Arnold held that a low standard of schoolboy morality was inevitable. 'With regard to reforms at Rugby,' he wrote to a friend, 'give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it a place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boyhood of the human race.'
In a letter to another friend he spoke still more strongly on the subject. 'Since I began this letter,' he wrote, 'I have had some of the troubles of school-keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of boy nature which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very account, and divers instances of boys joining in it out of purecowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they would rather have shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's "Shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and take part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the Scriptures say about the strait gate and the wide one—a view of human nature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize. But here, in the nakedness of boy nature, one is quite able to understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in a whole city.'
This sweeping statement has been quoted because it comes with double force from an undisputed authority such as the late Dr. Arnold. Everybody who has had experience of school-life knows that the average boy spends a great deal of his time in cheating the masters, lying to the authorities, and playing every sort and kind of mischievous or disreputable prank that comes into his head. But it is better to have this fact testified to by a man who has been in a position to observe large numbers of boys over a very extended period. The accusation of exaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained.
Where, however, I venture to differ with Dr. Arnold is in the assumption that this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone. Undoubtedlythis is the case in part. But there is a far more potent cause than natural instinct. It is to be found in the system of education which not only fails to develop and encourage the boy's individual tastes or faculties, but actually forces upon him occupations that are, for the most part, absolutely foreign to his nature. This is the real key to the vagaries of boyhood, and without such an explanation one must hold, with the great headmaster of Rugby, that boy nature is inherently bad.
Boys, like other rational beings, must have their interests and amusements. If the legitimate and normal ones are prohibited, solace will be sought in those which are illegitimate and abnormal. By failing to encourage the faculties that nature intended a particular boy to develop, a vacuum is created. This vacuum must be filled up, and it is no earthly use trying to fill it up, against the grain, with mathematical problems or the irregular inflections of Latin verbs. The average boy is as little capable of taking an absorbing interest in these exhilarating features of the school curriculum as would be the average Hottentot.
Every healthy boy stores up energy. It should be the first object of the schoolmaster—if such a being ought to have any existence at all—to see that this energy is not allowed to waste. Natural forces of this kind do not, it must be recollected, evaporate. There they are, and the laws of nature have decreed that they shall be constantly expended and renewed. If this or that boy's store of energy is not turned into one channel, it will expend itself through another.If the schoolmaster were to take the trouble to find out the particular bent of a pupil, and were then to proceed to foster and educate it, all the energy of the boy would be used in this useful and congenial work. But this can never be the case until the present methods of instruction have been revolutionized.
The discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is an altogether false and pernicious discipline. The only liberty which is vouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. No doubt it is an excellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in which they make use of their leisure hours. There would be a great uproar amongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games they wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste. It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets; or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising oarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him into the playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob.'
But the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also to mental discipline. In the class-room there is practically no latitude given to the boy at all. In many schools, it is true, there is the choice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents', not the boy's. The latter is always treated, in reference to his school-work, as a machine. There is simply the offer of a classical strait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and theboy is put into one or the other according to the fancy of a third person.
Strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. It has been discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is the worst possible treatment for the brain. Whilst our lunatics, however, are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expert is busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboy brain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case of madmen.
The school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is a mental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effect upon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint acts perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm must be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold and Thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have grasped this simple fact.
Schoolmasters are like mothers. They imagine that because a boy happens to have survived their system of teaching the latter must necessarily be the one perfect method—just as the fond mother, whose infant has been enabled by means of a phenomenal digestion to outlive a particular food, believes that it is the only food upon which babies can possibly be brought up.
When we come to survey impartially the effects of this system of education upon boys in general, it must surely be brought home to us that something is radically wrong somewhere. If a few manage tosurvive the treatment and remain the ten righteous individuals, what is to be said of the degeneration of the majority? It is surely absurd, with the anomalies and defects of the whole method of educating youth staring one in the face, to ascribe it to mere boy nature.
The truth is that in boyhood the natural tendencies incline to push their way boisterously to the front. They are constantly trying to find an egress. But the parent and the pedagogue, in their blindness, can only see in this law of nature a wicked and perverse propensity that must be restrained at all hazards by a speedy application of the educational strait-waistcoat.
So far we have chiefly discussed the effect produced upon the individual by a compulsory course of study. It has been seen that he suffers in a number of ways, through being subjected, from his earliest childhood, to a more or less inflexible method of training. All of these, however, have been directly attributable to his education. We may now consider, before pursuing the subject any further, certain disabilities that may be traced to the same cause, but which are brought about indirectly.
It is bad enough, as most of us will have perceived, to compel a boy to learn certain things whether they are congenial to him or not. But it is preposterous that the same stock of knowledge should be forced upon all alike. This is, however, exactly what is being done in every educational establishment throughout the Empire, with the most disastrous consequences to the victims of the system.
Let us turn once more to the map of life for an illustration.
The average educated man begins to learn his alphabet at the age of four or five. During the following years he receives the necessary groundingto prepare him for the lower forms of a public school. At eleven, or thereabouts, he commences his school career. Throughout the whole of this period he is put through a course of study identical in every respect with that pursued by his schoolfellows. Every boy in the school is crammed with the same facts, and in the same way. The sixth-form boy is exactly like the rest of his class, exactly like the sixth-form boy of ten years ago, and probably exactly like the sixth-form boy of ten years hence. Not only does he possess precisely the same knowledge as his companions, hold the same opinions, and enjoy the same mental horizon, but he has acquired uniform tastes and habits. In other words, the school has stamped upon him a common individuality shared by all its pupils.
After he has left school the same process is carried on at the university. Here he is crammed again with the same facts, the same rules, and the same ideas, borrowed from the same people, that are being dinned into scores of other young men who are working for their degree. Having gone conscientiously through this routine, he takes his degree with the rest.
This aim being accomplished, his educational career is over. He has graduated; that is to say, he has obtained a certificate to the effect that he has acquired a certain regulation stock of knowledge.
What happens next?
The unhappy graduate suddenly makes the discovery that his university qualification is not the ready passport to employment that he had fondlyimagined it to be. Unless he has a reasonable chance of a curacy and chooses to enter the Church, or can scrape together a few pupils to coach, or has the means to go on reading for the Bar or cramming for the public examinations, his prospects of immediate starvation are excessively favourable.
It was remarked some years ago by a writer who had spent a great deal of time in investigating life at common lodging-houses in the poorer districts of the Metropolis, that a startling number of university men seemed to drift into them. Yet these are the men who are supposed to have qualified themselves most highly for the holding of good positions. In some way, therefore, it is clear that this academic training has disadvantages which serve to handicap its victims severely in practical life. It cannot be mere accident that those who, according to all educational tradition, are classed as the most fit for responsible employment necessitating good mental ability, actually labour under obvious disabilities in this connection.
Nobody can urge that there is not enough work of a nature demanding high attainments to go round. Literature itself offers an enormous field for the exhibition of special talent; and there are many other walks in life where mental superiority is sadly needed, and which should therefore provide ample work and remuneration for those who show capability and resource. But in spite of all these openings some of our scholars are driven to eke out a miserable pauper's existence in the common lodging-house, or even in extreme cases to solicit parish relief.
The explanation of this strange anomaly lies simply in the fact that the educational mill not only manufactures dummies, but makes them all exactly alike. In the higher types of schools and colleges there is generally a choice of three patterns—the classical dummy, the modern language dummy, and the scientific dummy. But each pattern is very like the other, for all the practical purposes of this life; that is to say, they are all equally useless and equally unfitted for the task of moving forward with the times.
The result of fitting out everybody with a common stock of knowledge is to institute a disastrous form of intellectual competition. Thousands of young men are being equipped annually by our schools and universities for the performance of precisely the same functions. Intelligence brought wholesale to the market in this stereotyped form is in much the same unhappy condition as unskilled labour. There is a supply far in excess of the demand, and consequently employment cannot be found for all.
Perhaps the profession of literature and journalism affords the aptest illustration of the utter folly and uselessness of producing these machine-made scholars, all filled chock-full with the same ideas, facts, figures, and dates. Here, as in reality everywhere else, there is need of originality, intellectual independence, insight, judgment, and imagination. Journalism wants ideas; facts are amply provided by the news agency and the reporter. The gates of literature are opened wide for striking and vigorous thought, trenchant criticism, and imaginative flights of fancy.
What has the average academically-trained man to offer? He has an assortment of second-hand ideas borrowed from Plato and Socrates, from Ovid and Virgil and Horace; he can echo Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Shakespeare, Dante; he can dish up Aristotle, Pythagoras, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday and Darwin. He can borrow illustrations from classical mythology; he knows the Dynasties of ancient Egypt; and he is able to furnish, without reference to history, the exact date upon which King John signed Magna Charta, and the precise number of battles fought in the Wars of the Roses.
Such are the literary accomplishments of numberless university graduates, and it is small wonder that they often lead to the workhouse. The demand for the dressed-up ideas of the poets, philosophers, and scientists of a former generation is not great. Those who like their literature at second hand prefer snippets from the Newgate Calendar to the wise saws of Bacon; and they would rather have their blood stirred by quotations from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' or 'Pay, pay, pay,' than read a paraphrase of the combined wisdom of all the philosophers of the nineteenth century.
The same argument holds good in relation to other professions and occupations. The university graduate has no practical accomplishments. He may be an ornamental, but he is certainly notipso factoa useful, member of society. The only thing for which he is pre-eminently fitted is to assist others, by means of extension lectures and cramming, to be his companions in misfortune. But this can hardlybe designated a beneficial sphere of activity, and he is handicapped in all he undertakes by the fact that thousands of others possess the same educational equipment as himself.
Why should every educated man be like the other? There is absolutely no reason for it. The similarity is purely artificial. Nature never intended all men to be cast in the same mould, and it is only the perversity of man himself that has brought the human race down to such a level. The stupidity of giving every scholar the same mental outfit is so self-evident as scarcely to need further comment. Even following the modern plan of stuffing minds instead of developing them, one would have thought that common sense would dictate the necessity of manufacturing as much variety as possible.
The whole trend of evolution is to differentiate; and if natural laws were not completely disregarded by education systems, the absurdity of filling the world with two or three human species instead of a hundred thousand would never have been perpetrated. As long as this arbitrary interference with Nature is continued, educated men will not cease to be a drug in the market. Its immediate effect is not to endow the individual with special qualities, but to handicap him heavily for the real business of life.
Competition amongst the 'well-educated' is not the result of over-population or of a too liberal supply of competent men. It is caused by uniformity of attainment; and until this is generally realized, one of the most pressing social problems cannot hope to find a solution.
Men have always been reluctant to acknowledge the truth about woman's real position in the world. They keep up a beautiful kind of masculine myth about the mastery of the sterner sex and their mental superiority, and they talk of woman in a patronizing way as man's helpmate.
There is no doubt—it is a physiological fact—that man possesses more brain-power or capacity than woman. But woman has, on the other hand, an enormous advantage in the use to which she has put her mental machinery from time immemorial. The truth is that women think out things for themselves a great deal more than does the average man. As, however, they concentrate their attention for the most part on what are called the minor interests of life, whilst men are occupied with bigger and more important things, it has come to be accepted that the mind of woman is inferior to the mind of man.
In one sense this is true. Potentially, woman's mind has not the capacity of man's. One has only to look for female Shakespeares, Newtons, Bismarcks, Raphaels, and Beethovens, to verify the fact beyond dispute. But we are dealing here with existingcircumstances, not with potentialities. Therefore I have no hesitation in saying that, as a general rule, women use what brain power they have to much better advantage than men; which amounts to a confession that woman, apart from intellectual specialization, is, on the average, man's mental superior.
This is a sweeping statement to make, but it is made only in the interests of truth, and it admits of a great deal of plausible explanation.
Man's mental training, as has been fully pointed out, consists almost entirely in pouring facts into a vacuum created by the careful elimination of original thought. Until recently, women have not been subjected to this agreeable process. For a very long time they were not educated at all, and when governesses first came into fashion in better class families, the idea was rather to endow girls with a few graceful accomplishments than to cram them with dates and other kinds of mechanical knowledge.
This tradition is still kept up to a certain degree in the higher social circles; but there have also sprung up a large number of girls' colleges, in which all the bad points of masculine education are carefully copied. These colleges are frequented by girls of the upper and middle classes, chiefly the latter, and no doubt they are gradually working a revolution in feminine character. But heredity—especially when it is, within a generation or so, the heredity of long ages—is a very potent factor in the formation of both mind and body, and offers a steady resistance to innovation.The full effects, therefore, of this educational revolution in respect to womankind are not yet apparent.
The net result of this is that the majority of women are still addicted to thought. Facts have not yet entirely taken the place of ideas in their minds, except in extreme cases which may be called exceptional, although it must be confessed that they are becoming every day less rare. They think, no doubt, for the most part about the commonplace incidents of their daily life, and possibly they are given too much to morbid introspection. But anything that serves to make a human being exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should be regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for the development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than to babble off the dates of the Sovereigns from William the Conqueror, or to construe Horace's Odes without taking in a syllable of their sense.
Women have thus formed a habit of reflection about trifles, which the more gifted amongst them extend to weightier topics. And it is in this way that they are able to gain an ascendancy over man that is the more potent because it is unobtrusive. The average woman sees things the subtleties of which escape man altogether, and she perceives them because her mind has been trained, by natural development, to observation.
The average man, on the other hand, is the most unobservant creature under the sun. He rarely understands even what is going on under his nose.It is all very well to say that his superior mind is wrapt up in percentages, or absorbed in grand schemes for the regeneration of mankind. The plain truth is that he does not possess the faculty of applying his intelligence to everything within his range of observation. Evolution intended him to possess it; but education systems, which harbour very little respect for the laws of Nature, have found ready means to curb the propensity or to destroy it altogether.
It is small matter for surprise, therefore, that woman should have succeeded in subjecting man to an empire as autocratic as it is, to all outward appearances, unsuspected. Some people maintain that this empire is gained solely by physical attraction; but this contention is disproved easily enough. All women do not possess the charm of beauty; yet there is scarcely a woman of any nationality, or belonging to any station in life, who does not exercise a more or less powerful influence over her menkind.
Husbands are guided by their wives, even in matters of business or affecting public interests, far more than they are generally ready to acknowledge. Staying at a seaside hotel some time ago, I made the acquaintance of a hard-headed Lancashire merchant who had amassed a comfortable independence. In an outburst of confidence he told me one day that he had never taken a single important step in the conduct of his business without consulting his wife, and he also acknowledged that he had never had to regret asking her advice.
The moral of this story is the more significant when it is recollected that in such a case the wife hasnot had the same opportunities as her husband of forming a correct judgment. The latter has the business details at his finger-ends; he is acquainted with the person or persons with whom the dealings are taking place; and he has his experience to fall back upon. But somehow or other the wife seems to grasp all the points, and to see more clearly into the motives of the person concerned. 'Why,' she will exclaim to her husband, 'can't you see that So-and-so is trying to bamboozle you?' And, the scales falling from the deluded husband's eyes, he suddenly makes the discovery that his wife thinks where his own powers of reflection are contented to remain dormant.
The fact is, that the habit of thinking cannot be acquired through exercise in mental gymnastics. Philosophers, mathematicians, and men of science are notoriously up in the clouds, and incapable often to a remarkable degree of managing the affairs of everyday life with common sense. Yet these are the individuals who have been subjected to the highest form of what is called mental training. If fact-cramming and mental gymnastics are the best developers of the human mind, these men ought to be perfect models of intelligence. But will any candid-minded person call it the highest form of intellectual development to have a clear conception of the precession of the equinoxes, or to manufacture metaphysical conundrums, whilst remaining utterly incapable of applying common sense to human affairs that demand at least an equal amount of attention?
It is clear that this type of mental training doesnot teach people to think at all, but has the contrary effect of restricting the intelligence to an altitude very far beyond the ordinary requirements of our social existence. Man may have a very broad horizon; but the broader it becomes, the further he seems to be transported from the capacity to exercise the normal functions of the brain. To designate this the proper development of the mind would be manifestly absurd; yet many people seem contented to regard it as such, and accept the anomaly without giving its obvious contradictoriness a second thought.
Of course it is not argued that woman's mental training is, or has been, all that can be desired. It is, in her case, more the neglect to apply severe educational methods, than anything else, that has permitted the negative development of her thinking faculties; and this tends to demonstrate all the more conclusively that the real use of the brain is practically destroyed by conventional modes of instruction.
Women, left to their own devices for countless generations, have acquired a faculty that all the education systems in the world have failed to pound into the mind of man. It is their superiority in this respect that has given them far-reaching empire over the opposite sex. That this should be generally appreciated is of the utmost importance, because the modern metamorphosis of woman, if rightly understood, is the best conceivable object-lesson in the evils brought about by the educational methods of the present day. It is not that the academically-trained woman threatens to push man out of his place in the world, but that she is herself in danger of losing thevery weapon that has given her so large a share of power and influence.
A great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about the spectacled Girton girl competing with men in knowledge, at the expense of forfeiting their admiration and thereby losing her vantage-ground. Spectacles do not enter into the matter at all. As has already been pointed out, physical attraction has nothing, or very little, to do with feminine wire-pulling.
Women derive their real powers from a gift of trained observation, and from the subtlety conferred upon them by the capacity to apply their intelligence to the numerous small matters which go to make up the sum of human life. Their minds will no longer develop these powers when they are systematically subjected to a process of education which has invariably failed to evoke them in the opposite sex. And with the loss of them, woman is bound also to lose the empire which she has hitherto exercised over masculine nature.
From this point of view alone, the education of women on the modern system is much to be deplored. There is no doubt that women in general have always exercised their predominant influence for the good of mankind. Striking exceptions might easily be adduced from history; but, on the whole, it must be acknowledged that woman has seldom abused her power. Therefore, anything that is calculated to undermine or destroy this favourable influence on human affairs cannot be regarded as otherwise than pernicious.
The more the idea spreads that girls must begiven the same educational equipment as boys, the more rapid will be the degeneration of woman. It is a well-known fact in the medical profession that weakly boys are often unable to withstand the strain of school cramming; therefore girls, with their more delicate organization, will suffer proportionately in a greater degree. Physical training, of course, obviates a great deal of this evil. But the same thing is bound to happen in the case of girls as has already been experienced where boys are concerned; that is to say, the most promising intellects will be sacrificed, partly through the ambition of the school authorities, whose principal anxiety is to see their pupils distinguish themselves in examinations, and partly owing to the fact that exceptional ability so often implies a nervous temperament and delicate physique.
Women, it must be acknowledged, by no means use their faculties of thinking and observation to the best advantage. The conclusions at which they arrive are often far too definite, and have been formed in too great haste. So rapid is this operation of thought that it often becomes a mere intuition. Yet the remarkable accuracy of a woman's intuitions is evidence that there underlies them some intellectual process resting on a more solid basis than conjecture or guesswork.
It is the crude and untutored stage of development of the thinking faculty in woman that causes it to work intuitively, instead of by the slower and sounder processes of logic. To neglect a faculty is by no means synonymous with developing it. Hence woman's powers of thought and observation are embryonic rather than matured. The work theyperform is not a tithe of what would be accomplished by them under the auspices of judicious encouragement and skilled training. The faculty has neither been destroyed by over-cramming nor fostered by enlightened treatment. It has simply been allowed to lie more or less dormant, according to the natural environment of the individual.
If man, with his superior brain capacity, were encouraged to cultivate the habits of observation at present restricted to woman, and to apply his intelligence to everything, instead of to a few selected objects, the ratio of the world's progress would be enormously increased. Who first started the notion that man is being manufactured into a superior article, and that woman cannot do better than submit herself with all haste to the same process, I do not know. At any rate, it is a disastrous doctrine, and the sooner the fallacy of it is perceived the more chance there will be of saving future generations of women from the blunder that is handicapping the masculine sex at the present moment.
It would be a grand thing if educationists could be persuaded to open their eyes to the fact that women, having been providentially saved from school instruction for past generations, have been enabled to preserve mental faculties that no amount of cramming and corporal punishment has ever succeeded in awakening in man. They would then cease from their ignorant attempt to deprive woman of her intellectual gift, and possibly even do something towards securing man a little mental room for the installation of his own thinking faculty.
We now come to the consideration of an aspect of the educational problem that involves questions of great difficulty and importance. The discussion has hitherto been limited to the lesser evils attributable to the forcing upon the masses of the people a useless and unsuitable kind of education. But there are far graver possibilities than the mere unfitting of large numbers of individuals for the occupations their natural propensities intended them to pursue.
People are, as has been pointed out, driven by the stupidity of the teaching system into all kinds of uncongenial employment. The suffering and waste caused by this constant production of the unfit are incalculable. It is scarcely to be wondered at that some persons have formed the ingenious theory that this world is hell itself, and that we are now actually undergoing our punishment in purgatory. Certainly there is some ground for the supposition in the fact that the lives of so many of us seem to have been ordered in direct opposition to our individual tastes and wishes.
This is bad enough. The question we have to face now is whether we have not to thank educationsystems for something a great deal worse. Mere unhappiness is not necessarily soul-destroying. But there is only too good reason to suppose that the evil effects of the mock education provided by the State do not stop at making its victims unhappy, but even go so far as to plunge a certain proportion of them into actual crime.
At the outset it must be acknowledged that the allegation is very difficult to prove. No satisfactory evidence on the point is derivable from published statistics. It is quite possible to determine by means of the latter how many young persons between the ages of twelve and twenty-one have been convicted of indictable offences during the year. But everybody who is acquainted with criminology, or who is conversant with the compilation of statistical information, must be well aware of the futility of depending upon the apparently clear testimony of official figures.
It would be extremely useful to find out whether juvenile offenders have increased or decreased since the institution of compulsory education. Statistics relating to this subject are procurable, but it is impossible to place any reliance upon them.
In the first place, there is nothing to show the cause of any such increase or decrease in the offences committed by young persons. It may be due to a variety of circumstances, none of which can be accurately determined. For instance, it is a well-known fact that youthful offenders have of late years been treated by magistrates with ever-increasing leniency. Consequently, fewer convictions take place now, in regard to this class of offence, than was thecase some years ago. The number of the convictions is, therefore, no guide at all as to the increasing or diminishing proportion of youthful criminals.
Then there is the increased vigilance of the police, which leads to the more frequent detection of crime; whilst, as a set-off against this, there is the fact that education teaches the criminal, by assisting him to the reading of police-court reports and sensational storyettes, to be more wary.
Besides these, there is the important consideration that by far the larger number of young persons guilty of offences of various kinds are not prosecuted at all. This is due to two causes: firstly, to the fact that in the majority of cases they are not found out; and secondly, that many people are reluctant to bring youthful offenders within the meshes of the criminal law, as a conviction, whether or not it be followed by punishment, generally spells ruin to the person who has been found guilty.
There may be, and there probably are, many other and even more substantial reasons for discrediting statistics that are commonplaces to experts in crime. But those that have been cited, and which are at once suggested by common sense, fully suffice to show the impossibility of arriving at satisfactory conclusions on the basis of statistical tables published by the authorities.
The Blue-book containing the latest judicial returns attempts to deal with this question of the increase or decrease of juvenile crime; figures being only available, however, from the year 1893. 'To answer this question,' it is stated, 'it is necessary to ascertain theproportion which youthful offenders bear to the total number of convicted persons. This is given in the following table, where it will be seen that the proportion of offenders under the age of twenty-one remains almost constant:
'PROPORTION OF YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS CONVICTED OF INDICTABLE OFFENCES TO TOTAL NUMBER OF PERSONS CONVICTED.