Reforms of this kind will enormously relieve the home life and enable even mothers to earn, if they wish, quite as much as the State would ever be able to award them. The work will be better done, by trained workers, at less cost. People do not reflect that this change has been proceeding for centuries. Once the wife brewed the ale, and baked the bread, and spun the linen: later she entrusted these things to experts working for the community, and reserved for herself the making of preserves, pickles, underclothing, and antimacassars: now these things have gone to the expert, and the wife confines her amateur efforts to scolding children and cooking refractory joints. She will be relieved when it is all over, and we shall have no more of the “beautiful doll” or the domestic drudge. The independent position and greater leisure and broader interest in life will make her intellectual activity more similar to that of man’s.
I speak, of course, of the mass of women, and do not forget that already the intellect of alert and thoughtful women is equal to that of men of the corresponding class. The majority will be, as it were, differently orientated toward life by these changes. A saner muscular activity will restore the balance of the system, and will rid them of the excessive nerve-energy, particularly of the sympathetic system, which finds expression in facile and explosive emotion. There will assuredly always be a bias toward sentiment in woman, and we have no reason to fear a deterioration of the distinctively feminine sentiments of tenderness, refinement, and sympathy. The relief from the more irritating domesticities ought to accentuate them. On the other hand, the idea of obeying the male or practising self-sacrifice for his undue benefit, will certainly disappear; and it is quite time that it did. Self-sacrifice, in case of need, comes instinctively to either sex, but the kind of self-sacrifice which a selfish masculine tradition has pressed on women is degrading to the man and unjust to wife and daughter. All that is attractive and really beneficent in woman will be fostered, but on the emotional side it will become less and less characteristic of one sex. The sharp contrast of the sexes tends to disappear. There is something grotesque about the traditional idea that the human male must be distinguished by a greater capacity for taking alcohol and using meaningless expletives and telling sexual stories. Even in physical strength and athletic skill the sexes are approaching; nor does one find any loss of charm or grace in some of the finest women athletes.
These changes are proceeding, and, apart from inevitable errors and excesses, on which caricaturists fasten with their genial unscrupulousness, the result is promising. Contemporary expressions of alarm are often ludicrous. Thousands of ladies who are horrified at the emergence of “a new sex” are themselves contriving, by means which would have caused their prolific grandmothers to raise white hands to heaven, to limit their families to two children. We take our reform in small doses, as if complete social health were a thing to be considered very seriously. Yet if one patiently traces in imagination the effect of all these changes on the womanhood of the race, one foresees a generation of women which recalls Shelley’s lines:
“And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kindAs the free heaven which rains fresh light and dewOn the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms,From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,Looking emotions once they feared to feel,And changed to all which once they dared not be,Yet, being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride,Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill-shame,The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.”
“And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kindAs the free heaven which rains fresh light and dewOn the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms,From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,Looking emotions once they feared to feel,And changed to all which once they dared not be,Yet, being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride,Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill-shame,The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.”
Grant the poet his licence; women are not more likely than men to become angels. The moral superiority which some Feminist writers claim for their sex is founded on a curiously narrow view of life; if man, instead of woman, had to pay the penalty of sexual intercourse, we should probably find the aggression on the other side. Yet the most sober-minded of us must expect from this healthier balance of powers, this easing of the domestic burden, this limitation of care to a few children, and this independence of marital generosity or marital selfishness, a great advancement in the character and happiness of woman.
Shelley, however, was thinking less of wives than of free women, and economic independence will swell their numbers. The changes I have described will make marriage far less onerous, but they will also make it easier for a woman to dispense with marriage, and before the end of the twentieth century there will be in every city a growth of temporary unions and independent conduct. Woman will be mistress, morally and economically, of her own destiny; she will consult neither husband nor priest. The plain moral law, which forbids a man to inflict pain or injustice, will be more faithfully observed than it ever was before. There will be an immense reduction of the hypocrisy, the prostitution, the misery and illness, which this fictitious law of chastity has always caused; and the alteration of public opinion will remove from a woman the unpleasant consequences which unwedded love entails at the present time. It is preposterous to say that the State will be injured by these changes, and it seems clear that woman will be happier, more healthily developed, and not less tender and graceful than she can be under the present reign of shams.
Theconstructive scheme which I have in mind throughout this criticism of our prejudices and institutions may, as I said, be summed essentially in two words: industrial organisation and education. When we have reformed our administrative machinery, which we miscall “government,” and abandoned our military and naval atrocities, and simplified international life, our chosen public servants will find that these two are their chief concerns. Probably the supreme concern will—once we have constructed an orderly industrial machinery—be education, in the sense which I would attach to the word. Every year a million new citizens will join the community, and it will be the State’s first business to see that they are thoroughly prepared in every respect to contribute to its weal and happiness, and that they maintain throughout life sufficient intellectual alertness to control their common concerns with wisdom and in a progressive spirit. It is as a necessary preliminary to this that I have dealt critically and reconstructively with the home and the parent.
That glorification of indolence which we call the principle oflaissez-faireis so successful in this department of our public life that what ought to be the State’s chief concern is hardly ever mentioned in our orgies of parliamentary debate. We peck at it occasionally. We enact that babies must have orange-boxes, and that children must not smoke cigarettes or approach within a certain number of yards of a bar (so that we get bar-scenes outside the door); and occasionally the representatives of rival sects get up a grand debate on the Bible in the school. These things emphasise the general neglect.Laissez-fairemeant originally, “Leave things as they are”—it sounded better in French, but, like many ancient sentiments, it was converted into a respectable philosophy: “The State must leave as much as possible to the individual and the amateur.” Nineteenth-century Radicals fought heroically for this Conservative principle.
Education, however, was so flagrantly neglected by the parent and the Church that we had to compromise and take the child’s mind out of their care: leaving its body and character to the old hazards. At last it dawns on us that a sound body and character are just as important to the State as the capacity to read comic journals and stories: that the entire being of the child needs expert training, and it is worth the State’s while to give it. This broad ideal of education is increasingly accepted by pædagogists and social writers, and it is already largely embodied in educational practice. It has provoked the usual reaction, the usual determination that we will not allow our ways to be reformed without a struggle. “Advanced” teachers fight with Conservative teachers and politicians (particularly of the vestry type), and the familiar old hymn-tunes are heard throughout the land. We must not weaken parental responsibility: we must not lessen the charm of the domestic circle: we must not encroach on the sphere of the Church: we must beware of Socialism: we must resist the thin end of the wedge wherever we see one.
Why did the State, in the first half of the nineteenth century, undertake the task of educating the young? I do not mean that State-education was a new thing in history when a few European Governments adopted it little over a century ago. The Roman Empire had had a very fair system of municipal and State-education, and it is one of the gravest charges against the clergy that they suffered it to decay, and allowed or compelled ninety per cent. of their followers to remain in a state of gross ignorance for fourteen hundred years. At the end of the eighteenth century, as the revolt against ecclesiastical authority spread, the idea of State-education was revived. In England the clergy warmly resisted the progress of the idea, but the appalling ignorance of the people proved intolerable to the increasing band of reformers. Quakers like Lancaster and Agnostics like Robert Owen demanded and provided schools for the children of the workers, and the Church of England was forced to meet this danger of unsectarian education by founding a rival and orthodox association. But for fifty years the schooling remained so primitive, and the proportion of illiterates remained so enormous, that at last the bishops were brushed aside and the Government was compelled to resume the work of the old Roman municipalities and Senate.
The motives of the reformers and statesmen who secured this advance were complex. Some of them were frankly anti-clerical and eager to undermine superstition: some of them were business-men who pleaded that a lettered worker was worth more to the State than an illiterate worker. The predominant feeling was, as it had been among the Stoic reformers at Rome, humanitarian. The gross ignorance of the mass of the people was a disgrace to civilisation and a source of brutality and crime: it was a human duty to educate. It was very widely recognised that this sentiment imposed on us a duty of developing the child’s character as well as its mind, but here the Churches were inflexible. Unblushingly asserting that they were the historic educators of Europe, they refused to relinquish their last hold on the school, and the State was compelled to accept the compromise of religious instruction in the public schools, as well as the endowment of sectarian schools. As to the third part of the ideal of education, the cultivation of the body, we may admit that science itself was not yet sufficiently advanced to demand it.
With the growth of democratic aspirations, the Conservative began to see a danger in this plea that the community must see to the full development of all its children, and new phrases were invented. “Industrial efficiency” was the most plausible of these checks on education. The manual workers were to have their intellects awakened to the slight extent which was needed to make them better instruments of production, but no further: lest they should become dissatisfied with their position of inferiority and disturb our excellent industrial order. Educators, however, refused to be restrained by this kind of sociology. It was their business to develop the child’s intelligence, and they had a fine ambition to do it thoroughly. They built infant-schools, which took the tender young away from their mothers, to the great advantage of both. They found that large numbers of children were too poorly fed or too defective in body to receive real education, and they instituted drill and demanded cheap or free meals and medical inspection. They abolished the half-timer, and raised the age of compulsory attendance. They began to resent the idea that lessons from the Bible were a training of character. These developments have alarmed many. They begin to see that in the long-run these things will impose on the State the duty of developing the child’s whole being—body, mind, and character—before the boy or girl is allowed to enter the industrial world. We hesitate, as we do in face of all large and fully developed ideals, and look round for ways of escape.
The chief of these evasions is still the doctrine of what we call “parental responsibility.” Some day the idea that a parent is the best-fitted person to train a child will be regarded as a medieval superstition. The parent is as amateurish in training children as in cooking or making frocks. The notion that “nature tells” a mother what to do is part of the crude psychology of the Schoolmen. From the moment of birth, and during the months before birth, the human mother has no inspiration whatever. She goes by tradition, by the crude advice of elders and neighbours, as every observer of the arrival of the first baby knows. A cat acts by what we call “instinct,”—by certain neuro-muscular reactions which natural selection has perfected,—but a human being has intelligence instead of instinct, and the first thing intelligence enjoins is that experts ought to be trained for particular duties. The death-rate in every civilised country has gone down enormously since we ceased to rely on motherly instinct, or grandmotherly fables. A time may come, therefore, when the State will receive a bearing woman in a properly appointed home, and will care for the child from the moment of birth until, in its later teens, it is equipped for work. I will suggest in the next chapter that this ought by no means to be regarded as the completion of education; here I am concerned only with the earlier part. Many are convinced that this is the last and logical term of the development on which we have entered.
I am avoiding remote ideals as much as possible, but it is important to meet the prejudice which opposes reform along this line. Many people tell us that, if this unnatural dethronement of the mother and invasion of the home are to be the final terms of our present development, they will resist it at every step: on the familiar thin-end-of-the-wedge principle. Our beautiful “home life” must be preserved at all costs. Our “parental instincts” shall not be enfeebled.
Candidly, in what proportion of the real homes of England, as distinct from the home of a fiction-writer, is the life “beautiful”? In what proportion does it not rather present the spectacle of an overburdened mother struggling heroically to live up to her reputation for gentleness under the strain of ill or wayward children and an irritating husband? In what proportion are the beautiful homes of the novel written by spinsters or bachelors, or people who restrict the number of their children, or men whose posthumous biographies do not reveal a very sweet home life? I believe it was Carlyle who originated that fond boast that no nation in the world has a word for “home” like the English. It was certainly Dickens who gave us the most touching pictures of domestic tenderness and happiness. How many mothers of the working and lower middle class do not dread the holidays, when the children threaten to be near them all day? How many are capable of training children? How many do not regard a blow as the supreme moral agency? How many would not welcome the easing of their burden, and the training of their children by experts? And why in the world should mothers be likely to have less affection for their children because they have infinitely less trouble with them, and see them only in their smiling hours?
The happiest phase of English home life is, surely, found in those middle-class families which can send the children away to school for four-fifths of the year and welcome them home periodically in the holiday mood. In the vast majority of cases the teacher has to struggle despairingly against the influence of the home and the street; for it is to the street that the mother entrusts the child. A lady (an educational expert) once observed to me that it was remarkable to find the children in Gaelic districts of Scotland speaking the purest English. On the contrary, it was wholly natural, and it points an important pædagogical moral. The children learned Englishfrom their teachers only; there was no corrupt English dialect in the home or village to undo the teacher’s lessons. In other matters besides language the school-lessons are constantly frustrated outside the school.
I pass frequently through the stream of children pouring out of a large and handsome suburban school. It is not in a slum. There are broad green fields on every side, and there are vast and beautiful public spaces not far away. But the homes from which many of the children come are squalid, and the street-scenes, especially in front of the local inn, are often disgusting. On more than one occasion I have heard the men openly talk of their practice of unnatural vice. I have seen a girl of ten watch her intoxicated father misconduct himself with a prostitute, while the mother—whose attention was called to the fact by the child, in the mono-syllabic language of the district—chatted with a neighbour. And I am not surprised to notice that, when the children burst from school, which they hate, numbers of them break into foul language, indecent behaviour, and fighting. Their world, outside the school, is one mighty drag on the teacher’s efforts. When they leave school, with brains half-developed and only the maxims of ancient Judæa (at which half their world scoffs) to guide their conduct, when they enter workshops and laundries and join the company of ring-eyed boys and girls in the first flush of sex-development, they shed the feeble influence of the school-lessons in a few months.
The district I have in mind is a very common type of district: a healthy, open suburb on the fringe of London, tainted by one of those older villages in which the poorest workers are apt to congregate. It has an expensive Church-Institute and numerous chapels. You may see the thing in almost any part of London, and most other towns. I have a vivid recollection of passing from a Catholic elementary school and strict home in Manchester to a large warehouse thirty-five years ago. There is little change in that respect to-day. A very few years ago a Manchester boy passed the same way; and a month or two later, his father told me, he returned home chuckling over a “funny story” about Christ. The school fails, not from lack of devotion in the teachers, but because the child learns more in the street, and often in the home; and these lessons are, somehow, more congenial.
Now if we are not satisfied with this comparative waste of effort and sterility of result, we have to consider candidly the ambition of the educationist. He wants to turn out a young citizen with an active mind, a sound body, and a character prepared to resist the more degrading influences of the world he will enter. He cannot carry out this aim in the case of every child entrusted to him, but he can in most cases, if the State will help him. He must have his children properly nourished: neither underfed nor stuffed with coarse food by ignorant mothers. He must have them seasonably clothed and shod: again the mothers need instruction and pressure. He must have, not only drill and more natural forms of exercise, but more control over the children outside of school-hours; he is already beginning, with great promise of good, to walk and play with them, to take them to museums, and so on. He must have adequate medical assistance, and must have the support of the law in counteracting dirty homes and careless parents. He must keep the child still a few years longer at school, because a child only begins to be really educable at thirteen or fourteen. He must have the encouragement of knowing that the more promising boys and girls will find the avenue open to higher schools, and that the community will make some serious provision of mental stimulation for the adolescent and the adult. And in order to carry out properly this large and promising scheme of training he must have twice as many colleagues as he has, so that each may be able to give individual attention to pupils, and in order that too great demands be not made on their hours of rest.
But where are we to find the very large sums of money which would be required for carrying out such a scheme? I wish everybody in England realised that we should have the funds to carry out this scheme in its entirety, in its most advanced developments, if we abolished militarism; that if we had done this before 1914, we should have had, in the cost of the war, the funds to carry out such a scheme two or three times over. We have to reflect also whether the increased prosperity of England would not pay the cost. There are other considerations which I give later, but I would add here at least a word about experience in other lands. At New York and Chicago I visited schools—elementary and secondary, but both free—with which we have nothing to compare in this country: palatial structures with superb equipment and devoted staffs. Yet when I asked ratepayers how they contrived to spend so lavishly on education, the three or four public men I asked were so little conscious of a burden that they were unable to explain satisfactorily where the funds came from!
We are, however, making progress here and there,—Bradford, for instance, has had the courage to be quite Socialistic in its care of the young,—and the triple ideal of education is generally, if at times reluctantly, recognised. As far as the education of the body is concerned, in fact, we have no ground for quarrelling with our teachers, whatever we may say of some of our educational authorities. Medical inspection, drill, hygiene, play, excursions, feeding, etc., are discussed very conscientiously at every meeting of teachers, and the reforms proposed are more or less admitted in all places, even under the London County Council. The teachers themselves often go far beyond their prescribed tasks in endeavouring to help the children. In places they yield part of their necessary midday rest to attend to the feeding of poor children: which I found admirably, and most cheerfully and expeditiously, done in Chicago (where 1500 children at one school were quietly and excellently fed in thirty minutes) by a committee of ladies of the district. They give Saturdays and holidays for conducting visits to museums or excursions, or for controlling sports. What is chiefly needed is that the authorities should deal stringently with backward sectarian schools, and provide a very much larger supply of teachers and servants. The municipal authority of the richest city in the world—the London County Council—is scandalously stingy and reactionary in this respect.
When we turn to the question of educating the intelligence, it is not possible to approve so cordially. No one, assuredly, can fail to appreciate the zeal and efforts of educationists and teachers, especially in the last few decades. Hardly any body of professional men and women among us, certainly no body of public servants, has a deeper and sounder ambition to conduct its work on the most effective lines. A vast literature is published, frequent congresses are held, and the science of psychology is assiduously cultivated. One must appreciate also the fatal limitations of the teacher’s activity; as long as we withdraw children from him at the age of fourteen, education is impossible. It may seem, therefore, ungracious or unwise to criticise,—though I am not wholly a layman in regard to education,—but there is at least one feature of our school life to which I would draw serious critical attention.
The general public is apt to express this feature resentfully by saying that the modern teacher “crams.” Better informed critics have put it that modern education is little more than a process of “encephalisation,” or the imprinting of certain facts on the child’s brain almost as mechanically as the indenting of marks on the cylinder of a gramophone. Each of these criticisms implies an injustice. Educationists and teachers have, of course, discussed this very point for decades, and the present system is the formulation of their deliberate judgment. They still differ amongst themselves as to the proportion of memory-work and stimulation-work, but it is too late in the day (if accurate at all) to tell teachers that to “educate” means “to draw out” the child’s “faculties,” not to put in. Every elementary teacher knows that he must train the child to think as well as furnish it with positive information. The point one may legitimately raise is whether the general educational practice represents a fair adjustment of the two functions.
It is essential in such disputes to have clear principles. What is the aim of education? The current phrase, “to make good citizens,” is far too vague. A good citizen is, in a large employer’s mind, a man who will work for two pounds a week and not annoy wealthier people by demanding more: in a clergyman’s mind, one who goes to church. The point is serious and relevant, because there is a growing tendency among the middle and upper class to insist on a return to the ideal of the old Church of England school society: the children must not be educated in such a way that they will aspire above the station to which the Almighty has called them. As, however, the educationist will probably reply at once that his duty is to do all in his power to promote intelligence during such period as the State thinks advisable, we need not discuss the larger ideal of developing the child’s powers on general humanitarian grounds.
But glance at the manuals which are used in our schools, and consider whether we have as yet realised the true ideal of education. These manuals, and the methods employed, are the outcome of a hundred years of critical discussion, yet I venture to say that they need to be entirely rewritten. I pass over the infant-schools and earlier standards, where the first general ideas are carefully, and on the whole judiciously, implanted. As soon, however, as the child enters its teens, it is painfully overloaded with memory-work. I take, for example, the manuals of geography and history which are used in educating children of eleven in a first-class London secondary school. They are crammed with information which will never be of the least use to one man in ten thousand, and which we have no right whatever to impose on the young brain with so much necessary work to do.
The manual of early English history which I have before me is a characteristically modern production. Instead of the grim old paragraphs, in alternate large and small type, on which the eye of the child nearly always gazes with reluctance, there are vivid sketches of life in successive ages. There is danger, perhaps, that the child will pass to the opposite extreme, and take the manual as a story-book, a work of ephemeral interest; at least careful guidance will be needed to enable it to select the necessary material which is to be memorised. But the chief defect still is the overloading of the pages with matter of no serious usefulness. The doings of Ethelbert and Ethelfrith and Redwald and Penda and Offa, whose very names bewilder the young mind, are compressed into a few forbidding paragraphs, instead of being relegated to the University. Later come Ethelwulf and Osburh and Ethelbald and Ethelbert; and Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf Trygvasson and Guhilda; and Rhodri and Llywelyn and Griffith ap Rees and Own Gwynedd and Egfrith and Malcolm Canmore and John Balliol. How many of us know, or need to know, a word about them, and their families, and their battles? Then the French wars are told in detail, and the pages bristle with dates and French names and genealogies; and the Wars of the Roses introduce a new series of repellent and useless names and dates. The child, in a word, is enormously overburdened with stuff which we adults would refuse to commit to memory or even to read. Yet this is a very modern manual, the last word in the adaptation of history to the mind of a child of ten or eleven.
The manual of European geography, also, is one of the most modern and enlightened that a teacher can choose, but it imposes a mass of pedantic and useless knowledge. Isotherms and isobars and the freezing of the Oder and Vistula and Danube; the navigability of the Ebro and Guadalquiver, and the wheat-growing areas of France and Spain, and the industries of Lille and Roubaix and Magdeburg and Lombardy and Smyrna; in a word, fully one-third of the details in the little manual—the details which it is most difficult to remember, which tax the child’s brain most, and will be forgotten soonest and with least loss—ought not to have been inserted. The whole plan is academic and pedantic: it is built on the supposition that the child must have a summary of the kind of knowledge which a geographical expert would have to master. And in later years the child must laboriously cover the whole globe with the same unnecessary attention to useless details.
In mathematics, at least, the same criticism will hold. Geometry is, of course, no longer a mere task of memorisation; but the positive knowledge of problems is not of the least use, save in a few exceptional cases, and the training of the mind might be achieved by lessons in natural science. In natural science itself one might quarrel with much of the material given: not one in ten thousand, for instance, will even remember in later years the elements of botany. But at least we are, in giving scientific information, training the young to inquire into the nature of positive reality and initiating them to branches of knowledge in which they can easily advance in later years, since we have so fine a popular literature of science, and the advance will be a considerable gain in their whole mental outlook. It is chiefly in regard to history and geography that time and labour might be spared, and more leisure given for ensuring that the child will assimilate the knowledge imparted. Mental energy should not be wasted in mastering an immense collection of facts which, experience shows, are certain to be forgotten within a few years.
I may also recall that, when we choose to carry out the elementary reform of abolishing the plurality of tongues, a vast economy will be made in the curriculum, and really useful knowledge will be imparted more thoroughly and with finer attention to the texture of the child’s brain. The academic plea, that there is excellent training in a thorough study of Latin and Greek, may be freely granted. But there is just as excellent a training in the thorough study of such branches of science as are fitted for the school, and the positive information gained is permanently useful.
If we thus eliminate languages and simplify geography and history we give the modern teacher a more hopeful opportunity. It is surely the universal experience that we forget nine-tenths of the geographical details we learn at school, and we find little inconvenience in re-learning such as we need to master in later years. A judicious outline-scheme, with more physiography and less of useless detail, and a fuller account of one’s national geography (not because it describes the child’s country, but because it is practical information) would suffice. The remainder, or part of it, could be imparted in technical training for commerce. History should be wholly remodelled. It is ludicrous to-day to make the child grow pale and worn over the past royal families and wars of England, and dismiss the general history of the race in a page or two. A fine scheme of the history, and even the prehistory and origin, of the human race, with so much fuller information about the child’s own country as is useful for the understanding of its institutions and monuments, could be imparted in less time, with more interest, and with far greater profit. The patriotic sham deeply vitiates our scheme of instruction and makes the training of the child scandalously one-sided and exacting. Germany has recently shown us the pernicious results of this political perversion of education.
Passing to the moral education of children, we at once find it cruelly distorted and enfeebled by a religious sham of the least defensible nature. Such moralists as Kant and Emerson hardly exaggerated the human importance of moral law, however much they failed to understand its human significance. Character is the pivot on which life turns. The general diffusion of fine qualities of character would transform the earth, quite apart from economic and political reform, and lead to a speedier settlement of our industrial and international difficulties. It is therefore of supreme importance to train the will or character of the child from its earliest years. Yet there is no other branch of our education, and hardly any other branch of our life, in which we tolerate so crude and ludicrous a pretence of work.
The education authority of the Metropolis of England would, one supposes, have the advantage of the finest expert advice in the world. Enter one of the thousands of schools under its control, however, and ask how the training of character is conducted. A teacher informs you that at college he has learned only to impart “Biblical knowledge.” He will show you a scheme of lessons founded on the Old and New Testament. The younger the child, the more preposterous the lesson. In the lower standards the child must learn the story of the Creation, the Fall, the Deluge, etc. It is still too young to imagine that its teacher may, at the command of our education authorities, be grossly deceiving it, or to perceive that these ancient Babylonian legends contain no particular incentive to virtue. When it passes to the higher standards it is initiated to some equally remarkable stories about the early history of mankind and the early conduct of the Deity. The teacher rarely believes these things, and it may be assumed that men like Mr. Sidney Webb, who voted for this scheme of education in the L.C.C., do not. If the child has intelligence enough to raise the question of veracity, it must be snubbed or deceived. A London teacher told me that on one occasion, when he had described some of the remarkable proceedings of the Israelites in ancient Palestine, a precocious youngster asked: “Please, sir, is it true?” Our education authorities forbid him to reply to such a question. Indeed, his headmaster was a Nonconformist (very zealous for Bible lessons), and would find a way to punish any departure from the appointed untruths.
The lessons from the New Testament are, it is true, devoid of this atmosphere of Oriental animalism, ferocity, and superstition which clings to the Old Testament lesson, but here again the teacher is forced to violate the elementary principles of education. He must gravely tell the story of the miraculous birth, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Christ. He probably knows that some of the most learned divines in England and other countries regard these stories as false, but he must deliberately and solemnly tell the young that Christ was God and that these things are written in the “Word of God.” He must repeat parables which we know to have been borrowed (and often spoiled in the borrowing) from the Jewish rabbis, yet teach that this was the unique feature of Christ’s preaching. He must use all his ingenuity to wring a moral lesson out of the parables of the workers in the vineyard, the royal banquet, and so on. He must keep up this elaborate deception of the child until it leaves his care; and he knows that, in nine cases out of ten in London or any large city, the child is already hearing on all sides sneers at these ancient myths, and laughing at the system which inculcates them in the name of all that is most sacred.
The aim of our London authorities, and education authorities generally in England, is not to train character, but to teach the contents of the Bible. Why a civic authority should include the teaching of the Bible no man knows; and whether a civic authority can be indifferent to the truth or untruth of the lessons it imposes few seem to ask. Mr. Sidney Webb, endorsing these lessons, said that the Bible was “great literature”; and scores of our parochial legislators, who were not generally known to admire great literature (butwereknown to have numbers of Nonconformist constituents), fervently repeated the phrase. Does the child appreciate or hear a single word about the literary qualities of the Bible? Does a literary lesson need to be a deliberate lesson in untruth? Can we find no great literature which has not the taint of untruth?
Dr. Clifford says that these lessons tend to make “good citizens.” It is not at first sight apparent why we should go to the literature of an ancient, mendacious, polygamous, and bloodthirsty tribe for lessons in citizenship in a modern civilisation. Let us suppose, however, that the ingenious teacher has wrung a moral of truthfulness, fraternity, respect for women, self-reliance, and universal justice out of these peculiar records of ancient Judæa. Follow the child, in imagination, into the later years of citizenship. He hardly leaves the school before he learns that the whole Biblical scheme is very generally ridiculed, and is rejected even by large numbers of learned theologians. Before many years, at least, he is fairly sure to learn this. The prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount he, of course, never had the slightest intention of observing. The teacher, even while he reads the quixotic counsels, knows, and possibly notes with approval, that the boy’s code is: “If any smite thee on the one cheek, smite him forthwith on both.” But the boy now learns that from the Creation to the Resurrection the whole story is seriously disputed and is rejected by the majority of well-educated people. He looks back on his “Bible lessons” and his teacher with derision, and he discards the whole authority of his code of conduct. Surely an admirable foundation for virtue and citizenship!
Into the larger question of the relation of religious education and crime I cannot enter here. I have shown elsewhere that France, Victoria, and New Zealand, the countries with longest experience of secular education, have the best record among civilised nations in the reduction of crime. The carelessness of clerical writers as to the truth of their statements on this subject is appalling. There is not a tittle of reason in criminal statistics, or any other exact indications of national health, for retaining religious lessons in our schools. They are there merely because the clergy find it conducive to their prestige to have their sacred book enthroned with honour in the national scheme of education. As in the case of divorce, they ask us to maintain immorality in the name of religion. German schools are saturated with religious teaching, yet we have seen the issue of it all.
For one hundred years our English school-system has been hampered and perverted by this clerical insistence on religious lessons. Parents, they sometimes say, desire it; but when the Trades Union Congress, the only large body of parents which ever pronounced on the subject, repeatedly voted for secular education, by overwhelming majorities, the clergy, through the minority of their followers, could only secure the exclusion of the subject from the agenda. Neither do the majority of teachers desire it; while educationists, as a whole, resent this grievous complication of their work. Nothing but the complete secularisation of all schools receiving funds from the nation or municipality will enable us to advance. The clergy must do their own work on their own premises. The moral pretext is a thin disguise of an effort to use the nation’s resources and authority for the purpose of attaching children to the churches.
Writers on the subject are not wholly agreed whether we ought to substitute moral lessons for the discarded Bible lessons. We can in such a matter proceed only on probabilities, and it seems to me that judicious lessons for the training of character are very desirable. I do not so much mean abstract or direct lessons on the various qualities of character. If such lessons (on truthfulness, honesty, manliness, etc.) were tactfully and sensibly conducted, they could be of great service. There is really not much danger of turning the average British schoolboy into a prig. But indirect lessons, especially from history and biography, should be more effective.
In either case our teachers would need special training for the lessons, and no philosophic or religious or anti-religious view of moral principles should be admitted. Experience has surely shown how little use there is in giving children a “categorical imperative,” or a set of arbitrary commandments, or an æsthetic lesson on “modesty.” You cannot in one hour teach the child to think, and in the next expect it to accept your instruction without thinking, because you are not prepared to give reasons for your commands. It is sometimes forgotten that even children share the mental awakening of our age, and must be treated wisely. The American or the Australian child well illustrates the change that is taking place. It is increasingly dangerous to give children dogmatic or mystic instruction in rules of conduct, nor is it in the least necessary to base this important part of their training on disputable grounds. Every quality of character that is inculcated may be related to the child’s actual or future experience of life, and will find an ample sanction therein. Life is full of material for such lessons: material far richer and easier of assimilation than the doings of an ancient Oriental people with a different code of morals. Let these lessons of history and contemporary life be developed, let the child learn in plain human speech the social significance of justice and honour, avoiding namby-pamby dissertations on the beauty of virtue, and there will be placed in the mind of the young, not an exotic plant which the child will be tempted to eradicate, but a germ which will grow and bear fruit under the influence of its own experience.
The modern ideal of education further implies that the State shall provide higher tuition for those youths and maidens to whom it will be profitable to impart it. Scholastic evolution is advancing so rapidly in this direction that the ideal hardly needs vindication. Seventeen hundred years ago such a “ladder of education” existed in Europe; from the municipally-endowed elementary school the promising youth could pass, through secondary colleges, to the imperial schools at Rome. Had that model been retained and improved instead of being abandoned for fourteen centuries, Europe would be in an immeasurably greater state of efficiency than it is. We are restoring and improving the pagan model, and there are signs that in time we shall have a complete system of secondary, technical, and higher education, quite apart from the schools in which the children of more or less wealthy parents learn their traditional virtues and vices. If we have also some means by which able children whose talent has escaped the academic eye (of which we have many classical instances) may in later years have a chance of recognition, we shall exploit the intelligence of the race with splendid results.
The cost of this great reform need not intimidate us. Enormous sums of money have been given (by men like Mr. Carnegie) or bequeathed for the purpose, and the admirable practice will continue. But we need a searching revision of educational endowments, foundations, scholarships, etc. There is strong reason to suspect that estates which are now of great value are not applied to the scholastic purposes for which they were intended, or are badly administered, or are used in giving gratuitous or cheap education to the children of comfortable parents who secure favour or influence. A consolidation of all the endowments which had not in their origin an express sectarian purpose would provide a fund to which the State and municipal authorities need add little. The scheme would bring some order into our chaos of schools and colleges, and, while the more snobbish establishments would continue to preserve their pupils from the society of the children of tradesfolk, and would waste valuable resources on uncultivable minds, the youth of the nation generally, of both sexes, would be developed to the full extent of its capacity. These things have a monetary value. A distinguished historical writer told me that, on sending his son to Sandhurst, he proposed that they should study together the campaigns of Napoleon. The youth presently informed him that the traditions of Sandhurst did not allow them to do serious work outside the general routine. A few years later we heard the details of our South African War.
It will be a part of this increased efficiency to rid our secondary and higher schools of clerical domination. It is futile to say that the clergyman must represent morals and religion in the school. His record as a moralist during fifteen hundred years does not recommend his services. Even to-day public schools which retain the tradition of clerical masters are deplorable from the moral point of view. Some of them are nurseries of a vice which, unless it be discontinued when the youth goes out into the world, may bring on him one of the most degrading sentences of our penal law. The clericalmethodof character-training—one admits, of course, great occasional personalities—has little influence on these things. Public-school boys, and especially young men at our universities, know that every syllable which the preacher addresses to them is disputed, and no other ground of right and healthy conduct is, as a rule, impressed on them. Many will know that the grossest opinion of the clergy themselves is current in our public schools and older universities, and is embodied in numbers of scurrilous stories. The position of the clergyman in our educational world is false. He is there for the same reason that the Bible is in the elementary school: in the interest of the Churches. We have improved mental education enormously since it ceased to be a monopoly of the clergy. Possibly we will make a similar improvement in character-training; we can hardly do it with less success than they have done.
Ifit be granted that it is the interest and the duty of a nation to develop the intelligence of its people, we must conclude that the work is only half done, or not half done, by even an ideal system of what is commonly called education. I am assuming that a time will come when no youth or maiden will enter workshop or office before the age of seventeen, if not eighteen; and that the better endowed minority of our children will, without regard to their private resources, be promoted to secondary, technical, and higher schools. This minority will, on the whole, need no further attention. Cultural interest and professional stimulation will ensure that their studies continue. But the majority will fall lamentably short of the ideal of developed and alert intelligence. The added three or four years will be enormously valuable to the teacher, but in the majority of cases the intellectual interest will still be so feeble that the distractions of life will at once extinguish it.
If we speak of our actual world, not of an ideal world, this fact is too patent to need proving. Forty-five years ago a band of enthusiasts fought for the establishment of universal elementary education. The survivors of that band confess that the splendid results they anticipated have not been secured. One is, indeed, tempted sometimes to wonder whether there was not more zeal for culture among the workers half a century ago than there is to-day. When you listen to a conversation, of workers or of average middle-class people, on politics or theology or some other absorbing topic, you are astounded at the slender amount of personal thinking and the slavery to phrases which they have heard. Their minds seem to resemble the screen of a kaleidoscope, on which the coloured phrases they have read in journals or cheap literature weave automatic patterns. I speak, of course, of the mass. I have given hundreds of scientific lectures to keen audiences of working men, and I know that tens of thousands of them have excellent collections of familiar books. But the result of forty-five years of education is far from satisfactory. It was thought that, when the people learned to read, and the ideas of an Emerson or a Darwin could be appropriated by any man of moderate endowment, the level of the race would rise materially. It has not risen as much as was expected. The phrases are learned and repeated: the ideas are not vitally assimilated, because the intellect is not sufficiently developed.
Two classes of people will impatiently retort that there is no need for further development. One class consists of those who dread a higher intelligence in the workers because it leads to discontent with their condition. To which one may reply that this concern comes too late. One needs little intelligence to perceive the inequalities of the distribution of wealth. The workers of the world have perceived it, and, although only an extreme Socialist minority demands equalisation, the mass of the workers demand a higher reward. Midway between Australia and England, on the deck of a liner, I heard a group of middle-class men and women contrasting the menace of the Australian workers with the industrial content of the mother-country. We landed, to find from the journals that the whole United Kingdom was punctuated by strikes, agitations, and demands. It is too late. A distinguished Belgian prelate was taken into a large foundry, and, observing the workers, he impulsively cried: “What a slave’s life!” “Hush, they will hear you,” said the manager. In repeating the experience he added: “They have heard: it is too late.” It will be better now if, in the industrial struggle of the future, there is intelligence as well as principle on both sides. If any large proportion of work in the human economy requires the sacrifice of the intelligence, there is something wrong with the work.
Curiously enough, the other class of people who are impatient of the design to stimulate their minds consists of the mass of the workers themselves. After eight or nine or ten hours of heavy muscular work every day, they say, they have no inclination or fitness for serious literature, serious lectures, or serious art. They prefer a drink, a bioscope, a music-hall. Eight hours’ work, eight hours’ play, eight hours’ sleep; that is the ideal. A very natural and symmetrical ideal, but—it is just the ideal which “the capitalist” wishes them to cultivate, and this might suggest reflection. Someone will do the thinking while they play. Democratic government is a mischief and a blunder unless Demos is capable of thinking. If the workers of the world have an ambition to control their destinies, they must realise that their destinies are things too large and complex and important to be controlled by men with sleepy brains. There is no solution of the broad social problem of this planet which does not imply that every adult man and woman, of normal powers, shall be alert and informed and self-assertive enough to take an intelligent part in its administration.
Therefore, it seems to many that a scheme of education which ceases to operate at the age of fourteen, which teaches children to read and has no further concern with what they read, which impresses on their cortex a mass of facts of no utility or stimulation, is not a fulfilment of a nation’s duty, or a proper consideration of a nation’s interest. The grander lessons of history, the more impressive truths of science, the vital features of economics and sociology, the ennobling characters of fine art, cannot be even faintly impressed on the young mind. Yet they can be impressed on the minds of nearly all adults, and it would be an incalculable gain to the race if they were. What is being done, and what might be done, to effect this?
The nation at present leaves it to commercial interest and to philanthropy to carry out, in some measure, this important function, and we may at once eliminate the commercial interest. It supplies, at a proper profit, what is demanded. A minority ask for cheap works of science and art and history, and several admirable series of manuals and serial publications are supplied. A majority, an overwhelming majority, asks only to be entertained, and there is a mighty flood of novels and amusing works, a rich crop of music-halls and bioscope-shows and theatres and skating rinks. It will readily be understood that, regarding happiness as the ultimate ideal, I regard entertainment as a proper part of life. The comedian and the story-teller and the professional football-player are rendering good service, and it is intellectual snobbery to murmur that they “merely entertain” people. A good deal of nonsense is written about sport and entertainment. Many of us can, with pleasant ease, suspend a severely intellectual task for a few hours to witness a first-class football match. One wonders if some of the ascetics who speak about “mudded oafs” and “the football craze” are aware that the game (except for professional players) occupies merely an hour and a half a week (or alternate week) for little more than half a year.
The mischief is that so much of our entertainment appeals to and fosters a state of mind or taste which does exclude culture. We have to-day an army of puritan scouts, watching our music-halls and cinematograph films, our picture-cards and novels, our open spaces by night and our bathing-beaches by day, calculating minutely what amount of dress or undress or sexual allusion they may permit. Certainly we need coercion in these matters. No one who moves amongst our average people, in any rank of society, can fail to recognise that there would be in time a volcanic outpour of sexuality if we did not impose restriction. Whether this chaste pruriency of the modern Churches is an admirable thing, and whether its hirelings are a desirable supplement to the police-force, need not be discussed here; but what amuses one is their intense zeal to detect the narrowest fringe of impropriety and their utter obtuseness to graver matters. I have sometimes, when waiting before a lecture in the dressing-room of a variety theatre, been confronted with a notice that “the curtain will be rung down on any artist who says ‘Damn’ or mentions the lodger,” or, more candidly (in the Colonies): “Don’t swear. We don’t care a damn, but the public does.” The general public would, if it were consulted, probably make the same reply as the framers of the notice, and would blame the police for the restriction of liberty. There is, in a word, an appalling poverty of taste in the general public, and it pays the purveyor of entertainment to adapt his wares to it as far as the police will permit. To this lamentable lack of taste and culture (in the broad sense) officials and moralists are entirely indifferent as long as thecomédiennedoes not refer to the seventh commandment. The public may be as ignorant and vulgar as they like, but they must not give expression to a natural effect of this.
The music-hall and the bioscope are the great academies of our people to-day, and their work is largely stupefying. Sentimental songs of the most vapid description alternate with patriotic songs of a medieval crudeness and humorous songs which might have appealed to a prehistoric intelligence. Bloodthirsty melodramas, sensational scenes, and infinite variations of “The girl who did what we are forbidden to talk about,” evoke and inflame elementary emotions at the lowest grade of culture. Clergymen give certificates of high moral efficacy to crude representations of passion in high life which are designed to appeal to raw feelings. The posters alone—the eccentric costumes and daubed faces and attempts at novelty in the way of leering—warn away people of moderate taste or intelligence. The bioscope is almost as bad. Apart from a few excellent travel and scenic and scientific pictures, the show is a mass of crude faking and boorish horse-play which presupposes an elementary intelligence in the spectators. Pictorial post-cards add to the monstrosities and puerilities of this kind of public education, and a large proportion of the stories published, especially in the periodicals which are read by girls and boys and uneducated women, fall in the same category. We may trust that the idea will not occur to anyone of making a collection of our picture-cards, films, music-hall posters, novelties, etc., for preservation as typical amusements of the twentieth century.
It is stupid to watch this lamentable exposure of our low average of culture week by week with complete indifference until more underclothing is displayed than we think proper. The bioscope and music-hall—I speak of the majority—are not merely entertaining; they are undoing the work of the educator. They are fostering the raw and primitive emotions which it is the task of education to refine and bring under control, debasing public taste, and appealing to a standard which is essentially unintellectual. The idea that fun may be utterly stupid and crude, provided it is “clean,” is the idea of a narrow-minded fanatic, an enemy of society.
When we pass to the next cultural level of entertainment—the better music-hall, the metropolitan type of theatre, the concert, the novel, etc.—we have a vast provision of entertainment which amuses or interests without cultural prejudice; rising at times to a positive measure of artistic education or intellectual stimulation. Two things only need be noticed here. The first is the stupidity of the kind of censorship which we tolerate; of which little need be said, since it is generally recognised. The amateur moral censorship of art reaches the culmination of its absurdity in our dramatic inquisition. The dramatist may deal with sex-passion as pruriently and provokingly as he likes, provided he leaves enough to the spectator’s facile imagination; but he must not attempt to raise love as an intellectual issue. Our people may feel love: they must not think about it as a serious problem.
The other, and more needed observation, regards the novel. There are novels of fine artistic value, like those of Phillpotts: novels of great intellectual use, like those of Wells: and novels of a general and more subtle educational value, like those of Meredith. There are novels which, like the melodrama, counteract education by their low standard of art and intelligence, and there are novels—the great majority—which entertain without prejudice. Since we have as much right to be entertained as to be instructed, novel-reading is a normal part of a normal life. Seeing, however, that a very large proportion of the community read nothing but novels, it has been felt that the novel might be used as a vehicle of instruction, and the didactic or historical novel has become an institution. Many believe that they are being educated when they read this literature.
Against this comforting assumption it is necessary to protest. Even the greatest historical novelists, Dumas and Scott, have taken remarkable liberties with the known facts, and added to the picture of the time a mass of imaginative detail. Many historical novels, likeQuo Vadisor Kingsley’sHypatia, misrepresent personalities or periods for controversial purposes; and the bulk of modern historical novels are worthless jumbles of fact and imagination. It is, as a rule, the same with the sociological novel. You must know the facts in advance—you must know where the facts end and the fiction begins—or else merely regard the book as a form of entertainment. Lately I read a serious historical work, by a distinguished writer, in which Hypatia (who was fifty or sixty years old when she was murdered) is described as a “girl-philosopher”; clearly because Kingsley, for controversial purposes, thought fit in his novel to make her a young and rather foolish maiden. Thousands of people take their convictions from “novels with a purpose,” especially religious or sociological novels, without reflecting that the author may legitimately give them either fact or fiction. Such novels are often profoundly mischievous. A conscientious didactic novelist like Mr. Wells aims rather at raising issues and stimulating reflection, and in this Mr. Wells has done splendid service. Others have done equal disservice, and have used artificially constructed characters for the purpose of raising prejudice against certain ideas, or have misled by a calculated mixture of fact and fiction. It was in recommending to the public one of these novels—an exceptionally silly and crude piece of work—that the Bishop of London described Christianity as “woman’s best friend.”
Religious literature is particularly offensive in this respect, but I will give special consideration to it later. Our press-criticism of books is a very imperfect system of checking the vagaries and prejudices of authors. The criticisms are very frequently marked by ignorance of the subject and by personal or doctrinal hostility to the author, while the more learned and conscientious journals often show the most ludicrous pedantry. I once published a novel, pseudonymously, and was amused to read in a London weekly, which takes great pride in the smartness of its reviews, that the author had neither an elementary knowledge of the art of writing nor an elementary acquaintance with the subject on which he wrote. I had already at that time written about twenty volumes, and I had had twelve years’ intimate experience of the monastic life with which the book was concerned. Mr. Clement Shorter, not knowing the author, had generously described the book as “a brilliant novel.” On another occasion an historical work of mine was gravely censured, though no specific errors were noted in it, by our leading literary organ, on the ground that I was not an expert on the period. I looked up the same journal’s critique of a work written on the same historical period by an academic authority, and published by his university, and I found that, though there were dozens of errors in the work, it had passed the censor with full honours. I add with pleasure that some of the most generous notices of my works have appeared in papers (such asThe Daily TelegraphandThe Spectator) to which my ideas must be repugnant. But most literary men agree with me that reviewing is, to a large extent, prejudiced and incompetent, and few of us would cross a room to read ordinary press-notices of our books.
One might extend this criticism to the general work of the press as the great popular educator. We must, however, reflect that the press is hampered by restrictions which the public ought to bear in mind: a journal is always a commercial transaction with a particular section of the public, and it is generally pledged to political partisanship. It is only just to remark that this materially restricts the educational ambition of many journalists. The public themselves are to blame that a large section of our press devotes so much space to sensational murders, adulteries, burglaries, royal births and marriages, wars and other crimes and follies. Sunday journals often contain twenty columns of this rubbish, and the worst parts of it are, with the most disgusting hypocrisy, thrust into prominence by especially large head-lines announcing “A Painful Case.” One imagines the working man spending five or six hours of the Sabbath reading this sort of stuff. Great and grave things, which he ought to know, are happening all over the world, but he must have sharp eyes if he is to catch the obscure little paragraphs which—if there is any reference at all—tell him how many have been put to death in Russia in the last quarter, or how the republican experiment fares in Portugal, or how democracy advances in Australia or the United States. The space is needed for pictures of burned mansions and notorious murderers and the commonplace relatives of politicians, for verbatim reports of divorce and criminal cases, for inquests and royal processions, and for the magnificent speeches of Cabinet Ministers and would-be Cabinet Ministers.
This stricture applies to the press generally. How far it sacrifices to these meretricious purposes the serious function of educating the public has been painfully impressed on us by recent experience. Only one or two journals in England surpassed our drowsy politicians in sagacity and foresight. Though an extensive reader of German literature (scientific and historical), it had never been my business to follow political or military utterances; yet, when the war broke out and I looked back on Germany’s enormous output in this department, I realised that there had been in London for a year or two enough German literature to convince any moderate observer that war was fast approaching—and this was only a fragment of an enormously larger literature. Our press had ridiculed the one or two men and journals who warned the public of the danger. Further, when it transpired that our Government had met the crisis with painful slowness and inefficiency, nearly the whole press again conspired to check criticism, and it is probable that when the war is over the press will unite with the Churches in cultivating a foolish and dangerous contentment on the part of the public. Our press is, in fact, very largely an instrument of our corrupt party-system. It never initiates reform, and it mirrors, day by day, all the crimes and follies and maladies of our social order without the least resentment or the faintest suggestion of reconstruction. Journals are constantly appearing with the professed intention of correcting these defects, yet they are almost invariably spoiled by illiberalism in one or more departments of their work, or by gross exaggerations, hysterical language, or impracticable proposals.
All this is a reflection of the generally low state of public culture, and it will not alter until we devote serious care to the education of the general intelligence. We begin at school to cultivate the child’s imagination, though it is the quality of a child’s mind which least requires stimulating and is most in need of subordinating to intelligence. In later years, when the feeble intellectual stimulation we have given is exhausted, we have to appeal to the imagination or go unheard. “I have not read a book since I left school,” a music-hall artist observed to me. At twenty-five he had become incapable of doing more than look at illustrations, as he had done in his childhood. We go on until we make the imagination itself feeble on its constructive side. Miles of generally dauby and grotesque posters line our streets; tons of the trashiest literature for the young are discharged from marble palaces in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street; novels multiply until the general public takes the words author and novelist to be synonymous; and the daily organ of the millions tends more and more to be a collection of pictures of unimportant events and persons, with a very slender and peculiar quantity of news.
If we agree that democracy will advance until the majority rule in reality, and not merely in theory, these things must concern us. It is of little use to point to the occasional periodical with small circulation which endeavours to educate, to the occasional educative column in more important journals, or to the occasional lecture or serious concert or drama. The broad fact remains that our future rulers are increasingly encouraged to refrain from mental cultivation, to mistake an appeal to the imagination for knowledge, and to debase their taste more and more with raw representations of crime and passion. The working man reads with indignation of fashionable ladies struggling to find a place in court when a man is being tried for a series of sordid murders; and the working man then reads, day after day, a three-column verbatim report of the trial, and regrets that there is not more of it.
In order to meet this grave public need an earlier generation invented night-schools and Mechanics’ Institutes. Many of these still do useful work, but their number shrinks rather than increases. The Co-operative Movement, again, set up in the early days a fine ambition to educate its adult members, but this ambition has not been generally sustained in the vast modern movement. Hundreds of lecture-societies were founded, and hundreds (about seven hundred in Great Britain, I believe) exist to-day and do some excellent work; but many of the societies which adhered most faithfully to the educational ideal are in difficulties or extinct. The travel-lecture or funny lecture and the “popular” concert encroach more and more on the serious programme. Free libraries were another hope of the reformers of the last generation, and they are now endowed by millionaires and maintained by municipalities. They exhibit, perhaps, the saddest perversion of social ambition. Neither Mr. Carnegie nor any serious municipality thinks it a duty to provide gratuitous entertainment, but at least two-thirds of their resources are really devoted to this. The enormously greater part of the work of free libraries is to beguile the idle hours of young men and the idle days of young women with novels that rarely contain a particle of intellectual stimulation.
Public museums were another device for educating the mass of the people, and they have largely failed. There has been in recent years a little more regard for the public, as well as for students, but it is still painful to see crowds passing with bovine eyes amidst our accumulated treasures. The grouping and labelling are still too academic: the general scheme and the immense wealth of detail daze the eye of the inexpert. More guides and lecturers, in touch with and informally accessible to the public, and a closer association with University Extension and Gilchrist and other lectures, are very much needed. Saturday afternoon in the British Museum is a melancholy spectacle of wasted wealth. A small model museum, designed solely for the education of the general public, would be more useful in this respect than our magnificent national museum. Unfortunately, the small museums copy the academic defects of the larger. The curator of one, on whom I urged the needs of the public, replied wearily: “Well, it will take me three years to arrange my Cephalopods, and then I will see what I can do.”
We need a comprehensive and serious organisation and development of our resources for educating the adult. Our Education Department needs to throw out a new wing with the purpose of preventing the utter waste of its work upon young children. Institutions like the British Museum ought to be relieved of the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury and one or two other somnolent gentlemen, and made the centre of a splendid and energetic system of popular instruction and stimulation. From such centres the educational officials (as distinct from learned curators and youths from Oxford and Cambridge who look upon the public as a nuisance) might issue attractive invitations and publications, and be prepared to welcome the non-student, either with “showmen” who understand the public mind or by a general and affable accessibility of the whole staff. Municipal museums and libraries and picture-galleries could be organised on similar lines by the Department, and useful private foundations, such as the Bishopsgate Institute, could be invited to co-operate, without interference in their management. The supply of novels ought to be restricted to the great masters of every country and a few moderns. The rich supply of serious literature ought to be made attractive and easily accessible to the public by good bibliographical guidance and constant lectures. These things are, of course, being done. It is not so much the local officials one quarrels with as the nation and its leaders. We want an immense co-ordination and development of our resources and efforts out of national funds. Lecture-societies and all kinds of educative centres and institutes—there are thousands in the country—need to be affiliated, encouraged, advised, and supplemented. The State should not even shrink from publishing. The trade supplies only the actual demand: the State must create a new and larger demand. Music would be an integral part of this scheme of education, and here again we have a large material ready for organisation.
Any man who has engaged in the work of educating and stimulating the general public will realise how urgently some such scheme is needed, and how splendid a service it would render. He will realise also that the task will be formidable. I do not for a moment conceive the general public as thirsting for culture. That is very largely due to the way in which the work has hitherto been done. The recent success of small but authoritative manuals of science and history, and of several cheap series of literary works of high value, shows that a fairly large public responds to every enlightened effort to assist them. It will become very much larger when the work is organised on a national scale and conceived as a really important function of the State. That even then the majority of the nation would rush to the reconstructed libraries and museums and lecture or concert-halls no one will imagine for a moment. We do not undo in a few years the effect of centuries of evil traditions. I am assuming, however, that these various reforms I am discussing will proceed more or less simultaneously, and will enormously assist each other. The abolition of war would release rich funds for educational purposes: the reorganisation of industry would provide a little more leisure and capacity for mental recreation: other reforms would give a general intellectual stimulation. Even now, however, much of this work could be done. If we think it sufficient that our people remain in a condition of elementary literacy and half-developed intelligence, if we fancy that theracewill advance because it sets aside a special caste of scholars for the promotion of culture, we may regard our actual situation without concern. But if we desire that general alertness of mind and decision of character which a democratic rule implies, we cannot be indifferent. Aristocrats justly rail at the democracy of Athens and Rome; it was an uneducated democracy—literate, but uneducated, like ours. We need to advance, if we are not to recede; and the uplifted race of the days to come will honour the generation that taught men the compatibility of culture and entertainment.
I am speaking, in the main, of the mass of the workers, but it would be entirely unjust to insinuate that they alone need adult education. The conventions of social life, the extraordinary slavery to fashions and artificial rules, betray an intellectual flabbiness in the wealthier members of society which just as urgently calls for stimulation. We seem at times quite incapable of drawing a line between acts of real courtesy and taste, which imply a certain grace or delicacy of character, and conventional usages which have no rational basis. The insistence on these conventional usages is part of that general slavery to false traditions which I am assailing.
The most flagrant instance of this weakness of mind and character is the docility with which we meet changes of fashion in dress, or retain eccentric forms of clothing. Hardly any other feature so strongly impresses the close observer with the fact that the race, as a whole (and I speak only of civilised communities), advances little in intelligence and self-possession in spite of the progress made by its intellectual experts. One would say that here, especially, we need a strong draught of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,—the gospel of self-assertion, of strong personality, of severe reasoning,—but I have not observed that our modern Nietzscheans differ much from their neighbours in such matters. Yet the commercial expansion of modern times is making this tyranny of fashion more ludicrous than it ever was before.
The fashion-plates and descriptions contained in ladies’ journals have always provoked the furtive smile of the male. A coterie of tradesmen, who are eager to promote business, and of wealthy ladies who are equally eager to show that their purses are unlimited, decree that the hat or costume shall continually vary in shape and colour. The Anglo-French jargon of the sartorial journalist then impresses on a larger circle of ladies the need of alertness and the horror of beingdémodée,—it would be proof of incapacity to say “out of fashion,”—and, as the season approaches, the proclamation of the forthcoming colour or model is awaited with more feverish anxiety than the announcement of the national budget. Schools of artists are secretly inventing some variation—the wider the variation the better—on the thousands of costumes which have already graced the feminine frame, or discussing bold suggestions of reviving an ancient model which has long disappeared even from the shops of wardrobe-dealers. Privileged ladies rise in prestige by obtaining and whispering advance information. At length the shop-windows blaze with the new colour, the journals depict an ingenious new combination of edges and folds and puckers, and womanhood plunges to the bottom of its purse with an eagerness to avoid the suspicion of financial stringency; while the discarded hats and dresses percolate romantically through lower strata of society. Is it not good for trade?