FOOTNOTES:

"Sands beganTo hem his wintry march, and dam his streamsAnd split his currents";

Side channels were formed, and grew in number; and though Catholicism is still the central channel for the moving waters, the river has now fallen on evil days, and "strains along," "shorn and parcelled," like the river of the Asian desert—

"forgetting the bright speed he boreIn his high mountain cradle."

Of the many side streams into which Western Christianity has split, the majority may be spoken of collectively as Protestant. Protestantism claims to have liberated a large part of Christendom from the yoke of Rome; and it is therefore right that we should ask ourselves in what sense and to what extent it has brought freedom to the human spirit. The answer to this question is, I think, that though Protestantism has fought a good fight for theprincipleof freedom, it has failed—for many reasons, the chief of which is that it began its work before men were ripe for freedom—to lead its votaries into the path of spiritual life and growth. Confronted by the uncompromising dogmatism of Rome, it had to devise a counter dogmatism of its own in order to rally round it the faint-hearted who, though eager to absolve themselves from obedience to the despotism of the Church, yet feared to walk by their own "inward light." In making this move, which was not the less false because it was in a sense inevitable, Protestantism may be said to have renounced its mission. That it has done much, in various ways, for humanprogress is undeniable; but the fact remains that it has failed to revitalise Christianity. Its master-stroke in its struggle with priestcraft—the substitution of "faith" for "works" as the basis of salvation—has done little or nothing to relieve the West from the deadly pressure of Israel's philosophy. For faith, as Protestantism understands the word, is the movement of the soul, not towards the ideal end of its being but towards an alleged supernatural transaction,—the redemption of the world by the death of Christ on the Cross. Gratitude to Christ for his love and self-sacrifice may indeed be an effective motive to action, but faith in the efficacy of Christ's atoning sacrifice is no guide to conduct. The inability of Protestantism to deduce a scheme of life from its own master-principle of salvation by "faith" has compelled it, in its desire to avoid the pitfalls of antinomianism, to revive in a modified form the practical legalism of the Old Testament. The Protestant desires to show his gratitude to Christ by leading a correct life; but his distrust of his own higher nature compels him to go to some external authority for ethical guidance; and as he has repudiated the authority of the supernaturally-inspired Church, he is compelled to have recourse to the supernaturally-inspired Bible. Hence the traditional alliance between Protestantism and the Old Testament, in which the path of duty is far more clearly and consistently defined than in the New. And hence the singular fact that Calvinism, which is the backbone of Protestantism, and which in theory, and even (at times) in practice, regards "works" as "filthy rags," finds its other self in Puritanism,which is in the main a recrudescence of Jewish legalism in the more strictlymoralsphere of conduct.

It is owing to its alliance with the legalism of Israel, that Protestantism has been in some respects an even greater enemy of human freedom than Catholicism, and has on the whole done more than the latter to narrow and maim human life. The strict legalist tries, as we have seen, to bring the whole of human life under the direct control of the Law; and when he finds, as the Puritan did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that whole aspects of life have in point of fact escaped from the control of religion and won from the latter a tacit acceptance of themselves as secular, he not unnaturally tends to regard these non-religious aspects of life as "carnal," and therefore as unacceptable to God. Hence the antipathy of the Protestant, in his seasons of Puritanical fanaticism, to art, music, the drama, and other noble fruits of the human spirit. Catholicism has found itself compelled to tolerate the secular activities of the layman; Protestantism, while tolerating those activities by which man earns his daily bread and which may be spoken of collectively as "business," has from time to time waged war against all the developments of human nature which are neither spiritual (in the narrow and rigid sense of the word) nor obviously useful, and has sought to extirpate the corresponding desires from the heart of Man. On the more artistic side of human life, it has done as much to impede the growth of the soul as Catholicism has done on the more intellectual side; and through its influence on characterit has done as much to harden the fibre of the soul as Catholicism has done to relax it, the tendency of both religions being to destroy that elasticity of fibre which mediates between hardness and flabbiness, and which has its counterpart in vigorous health and strength.

The truth is—but it is a truth which Protestantism is apt to misinterpret, and which Catholicism finds it expedient to ignore—that religion is not a branch or department of human life, but a way of looking at life as a whole. Indeed, it is of the essence of religion (as has been already suggested) that it should look at life as a whole, and so be able to look at each of its details in the light of that supreme synthesis which we call Divine. And the religion which sanctions, and by its own action necessitates, the division of life into two branches—the secular and the religious—has obviously missed its destiny and betrayed its trust.

A brief summary of the contents of this chapter will prepare the way for the next. The movements of higher thought in the West have been dominated, nominally by the professional thinker, really by the average man. As a thinker, the average man is incurably dualistic. Enslaved as he is to the requirements of his instrument, language, he instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil, the Creator to the Creation, God to Man; and in each case he fixes a great gulf between the "mighty opposites" that constitute the given antithesis. Confronted by the mystery of existence, he has explained it by the story of Creation. Confronted by the twinmysteries of sin and sorrow, he has explained them by the story of the Fall. From the story of the Fall he has passed on to the doctrine of original sin, to the belief that Nature in general, and human nature in particular, is corrupt and ruined, and therefore intrinsically evil. Shrinking from the hopeless prospect which this belief opens up to him, he has found refuge in the conception of another world,—of a world above and beyond Nature, a world of Divine perfection from which information and guidance can at God's good pleasure be doled out to Man. For a "supernatural revelation" (as theologians call this sending of help from God to Man) special instruments are obviously needed,—a special People, a special Scripture, a special Lawgiver, a special Prophet, a special Church. Hence has arisen the idea that certain persons, certain castes, certain institutions have a monopoly of Divine truth and grace, and are therefore in a position to dictate to their fellow-men how they are to bear themselves if they wish to be "saved," what they are to believe, what they are to do. From this the transition has been easy to the further idea that salvation is to be achieved by blind and mechanical obedience,—by renouncing the right to follow one's own higher nature, to obey one's own conscience, to use one's own reason, to map out one's own life. In order to induce men to yield the obedience which is required of them, their lower instincts have had to be appealed to (for the higher, ruined by the Fall, have presumably ceased to operate),—their desire for pleasure by the promise of Heaven, their fear of pain by the threat of Hell. And in order thattheir lives may be kept under close supervision and their merits accurately appraised, an ever-increasing stress has had to be laid on what is outward, visible, and measurable in human life, as distinguished from what is inward and occult,—on correctness in the details of prescribed conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. As the idea of salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. In other words, the channel of soul growth—the only channel that leads to spiritual health, and therefore to "salvation"—becomes gradually obstructed, with the result that the vital energies of the soul tend either to dissipate themselves and run to waste, or to make new channels for themselves,—channels of degenerative tendency, the end of which is spiritual death.

FOOTNOTES:[1]By "self-satisfaction" I mean satisfaction with the existing systemas a system. That strenuous efforts are being made to improve the system, within its own limits, I can well believe. But the system itself, with the defects and limitations which are of its essence, seems to be regarded as adequate, and even as final, by nearly all who work under it.[2]1862 to 1895 A.D.[3]TheJewish People in the time of Jesus Christ, by Dr. Emil Schürer.[4]In its extreme form legalism tends to bring about that ruin of human nature which it starts by postulating; for, by forbidding Man's higher faculties to energise, it necessarily arrests their development, and so makes it possible for the lower faculties to draw to themselves an undue share of the rising sap of Man's life.

[1]By "self-satisfaction" I mean satisfaction with the existing systemas a system. That strenuous efforts are being made to improve the system, within its own limits, I can well believe. But the system itself, with the defects and limitations which are of its essence, seems to be regarded as adequate, and even as final, by nearly all who work under it.

[2]1862 to 1895 A.D.

[3]TheJewish People in the time of Jesus Christ, by Dr. Emil Schürer.

[4]In its extreme form legalism tends to bring about that ruin of human nature which it starts by postulating; for, by forbidding Man's higher faculties to energise, it necessarily arrests their development, and so makes it possible for the lower faculties to draw to themselves an undue share of the rising sap of Man's life.

CHAPTER IIEDUCATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE

The God of popular theology has been engaged for more than thirty centuries in educating his child, Man. His system of education has been based on complete distrust of Man's nature. In the schools which Man has been required to attend—the Legal School under the Old Dispensation, the Ecclesiastical School under the New—it has been taken for granted that he can neither discern what is true, nor desire what is good. The truth of things has therefore been formulated for him, and he has been required to learn it by rote and profess his belief in it, clause by clause. His duty has also been formulated for him, and he has been required to perform it, detail by detail, in obedience to the commandments of an all-embracing Code, or to the direction of an all-controlling Church.

It has further been taken for granted that Man's instincts and impulses are wholly evil, and that "Right Faith" and "Right Conduct" are entirely repugnant to his nature. In order to overcome the resistance which his corrupt heart and perverse will might therefore be expected to offer to the authority and influence of his teachers, a scheme of rewards and punishments has had to be devised for his benefit. As there is no better nature for the scheme to appeal to, an appeal has had to be made to fearsand hopes which are avowedly base. The refractory child has had to be threatened with corporal punishment in the form of an eternity of torment in Hell. And he has had to be bribed by the offer of prizes, the chief of which is an eternity of selfish enjoyment in Heaven,—enjoyment so selfish that it will consist with, and even (it is said) be heightened by, the knowledge that in the Final Examination the failures have been many and the prize-winners few.

And as, under this system of education, obedience is the first and last of virtues, so self-will—in the sense of daring to think and act for oneself—is the first and last of offences. It is for the sin of spiritual initiative—the sin of trying to work out one's own salvation by the exercise of reason, conscience, imagination, aspiration, and other spiritual faculties—that the direst penalties are reserved. The path of salvation is the path of blind, passive, mechanical obedience. To deviate even a little from that path is to incur the penalty of eternal death.

As Man is educated by his father, God, so must the child be educated by his father, the adult man. If the nature of Man is intrinsically evil, the child must needs have been conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. If Man, even in his maturity, cannot be trusted to think or desire or do what is right, still less can he be so trusted when he is that relatively immature and helpless being, the child. If the adult man has to be told in the fullest detail (whether by a formulated Law or by a living Church) how he is to conduct himself, still greateris the need for such or similar direction to be given to the child. If the adult is to be "saved" by strict and mechanical obedience, and by no other method, still greater is the need for such obedience on the part of the child. If a system of external and quasi-material rewards and punishments is indispensable in the education of the adult, still less can it be dispensed with in the education of the child. Thesea fortioriarguments are strong; but there is a stronger. The child will develop into the adult, and he cannot too soon be initiated into the life which, as the adult, he will have to lead. The process of educating the child is not merely analogous to the process of "saving" the man. It is a vital part of it. For childhood is the time when human nature is most easily moulded; and the bent that is given to it then is, in nine cases out of ten, decisive of its ultimate destiny.

It is clear, then, that if Man is to be "saved" by arégimeof mechanical obedience, his education in his childhood must be based on the same general conception of life and duty. This means, in the first place, that the child must be brought up in an atmosphere of severity. The God of the Old Testament—the Deity whosenimbusovershadows the life of the West—combines in his own person the functions of law-giver, governor, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. His subjects are a race of vile offenders, whose every impulse is bad, and whose nature turns towards evil as inevitably as a plant turns towards the light. As he cannot trust them to know good from evil, he has had to provide them with an elaborate code of law; and he has had to take for granted that, left to themselves, they willbreak his commandments, and find pleasure in doing so. From the very outset, then, his attitude towards them has been one of suspicion and rising anger. He is always on the look-out for disobedience, and he is ready to chastise the offender almost before he has had time to commit the offence. His pupils, brought up in an atmosphere of suspicion, and taught from their earliest days to disbelieve in and condemn themselves, can scarcely be blamed for livingdownto the evil reputation which they have unfortunately gained. To persuade a man that he is a miserable sinner is to go some way towards leading him into the path of sin. Systematic distrust paralyses and demoralises those who live under it, and so tends to justify the cruelty into which it too readily develops. The penalties which God has attached to the sins which he may almost be said to have provoked Man to commit, are so terrible and unjust that if the fear of them has not robbed life of all its sunshine, the reason is that their very horror has numbed Man's imagination, and made it impossible for him even to begin to picture to himself their lurid gloom.

In the West men have loyally striven to reproduce towards their children the supposed attitude of their God of Wrath towards themselves. From very tender years the child has been brought up in an atmosphere of displeasure and mistrust. His spontaneous activities have been repressed as evil. His every act has been looked upon with suspicion. He has been ever on the defensive, like a prisoner in the dock. He has been ever on the alert for a sentence of doom. He has been cuffed, kicked,caned, flogged, shut up in the dark, fed on bread and water, sent hungry to bed, subjected to a variety of cruel and humiliating punishments, terrified with idle—but to him appalling—threats. In his misery he has shed a whole ocean of tears,—the salt and bitter tears of hopeless grief and helpless anger, not the soul-refreshing tears which are sometimes distilled from sorrow by the sunshine of love. But of all the cruelties to which he has been subjected, the most devilish has been that of making him believe in his own criminality, in the corruption of his innocent heart. In the deadly shade of that chilling cloud, the flower of his opening life has too often withered before it has had time to expand. For what is most cruel in cruelty is its tendency to demoralise its victims, especially those who are of tender years—to harden them, to brutalise them, to make them stubborn and secretive, to make them shifty and deceitful, to throw them back upon themselves, to shut them up within themselves, to quench the joy of their hearts, to numb their sympathies, to cramp their expansive energies, to narrow and darken their whole outlook on life. All this the cruelty of his seniors would do to the child, even if he had not been taught to believe in his own inborn wickedness. But that belief, with which he has been indoctrinated from his earliest days, necessarily weakens his power of resisting evil, and so predisposes him to fall a victim to the malignant germs that cruelty sows in his heart. We tell the child that he is a criminal, and treat him as such, and then expect him to be perfect; and when our misguided education has begun to deprave him, we shake our heads overhis congenital depravity, and thank God that we believe in "original sin."[5]

In the next place, if Man is to be faithful to his model, he must bring up the child in an atmosphere of vexatious interference and unnatural restraint. That Man himself has been brought up in such an atmosphere in both his schools—the Legal and the Ecclesiastical—I need not take pains to prove. What he has suffered at the hands of his Schoolmaster—the God of Israel (and of Christendom)—he has taken good care to inflict on his pupil, the child. Such phrases as: "Don't talk," "Don't fidget," "Don't worry," "Don't ask questions," "Don't make a noise," "Don't make a mess," "Don't do this thing," "Don't do that thing," are ever falling from his lips. And they are supplemented with such positive instructions as: "Sit still," "Stand on the form," "Hold yourself up," "Fold arms," "Hands behind backs," "Hands on heads," "Eyes on the blackboard." At every turn—frominfancy till adolescence, "from early morning till late in the evening"—these "dead and deadening formulas" await the unhappy child. The aim of his teachers is to leave nothing to his nature, nothing to his spontaneous life, nothing to his free activity; to repress all his natural impulses; to drill his energies into complete quiescence; to keep his whole being in a state of sustained and painful tension. And in order that we may see a meaning and a rational purpose in thisrégimeof oppressive interference, we must assume that its ultimate aim is to turn the child into an animated puppet, who, having lost his capacity for vital activity, will be ready to dance, or rather go through a series of jerky movements, in response to the strings which his teacher pulls. It is the inevitable reaction from this state of tension which is responsible for much of the "naughtiness" of children. The spontaneous energies of the child, when education has blocked all their lawful outlets, must needs force new outlets for themselves,—lawless outlets, if no others are available. The child's instinct to live will see to that. It sometimes happens that, when the channel of a river has been blocked by winter's ice, the river, on its awakening in Spring, will suddenly change its course and carve out a new channel for itself, reckless of the destruction that it may cause, so long as an outlet can by any means be found for its baffled current. It is the same with the river of the child's expanding life. The naughtiest and most mischievous boy not infrequently develops into a hero, or a leader of men. The explanation of this is that through his very naughtiness the current of soul-growth, which ran stronger in himthan in his school-mates, kept open the channel which his teachers were doing their best to close. Even Hooliganism—to take the most serious of the periodic outbursts of juvenile criminality—resolves itself, when thoughtfully considered, into a sudden and violent change in the channel of a boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels) of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational repression. His wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself, before it finally gives up the struggle for active existence.

When severity and constraint have done their work, when the spirit of the child has been broken, when his vitality has been lowered to its barest minimum, when he has been reduced to a state of mental and moral serfdom, the time has come for the system of education through mechanical obedience to be applied to him in all its rigour. In other words, the time has come for Man to do to the child, what the God whom he worships is supposed to have done to him,—to tell him in the fullest and minutest detail what he is to do to be "saved," and to stand over him with a scourge in his hand and see that he does it. In the two great schools which God is supposed to have opened for Man's benefit, freedom and initiative have ever been regarded (and with good reason) as the gravest of offences. Literal obedience has been exacted by the Law; blind obedience by the Church; passive obedience—the obedience of a puppet, or at best of an automaton—by both. The need for thisinsistence on the part of Law and Church is obvious. If any lingering desire to think things out for himself, if any intelligent interest in what he was taught, survived in the disciple, the whole system of salvation by machinery would be in danger of being thrown out of gear.

As it has been, and still is, in the schools which God has opened for Man, so it has been, and still is, in the schools which Man has opened for the child. Blind, passive, literal, unintelligent obedience is the basis on which the whole system of Western education has been reared. The child must distrust himself absolutely, must realise that he is as helpless as he is ignorant, before he can begin to profit by the instruction that will be given to him. His mind must become atabula rasabefore his teacher can begin to write on it. The vital part of him—call it what you will—must become as clay before his teacher can begin to mould him to his will.

The strength of the child, then, is to sit still, to listen, to say "Amen" to, or repeat, what he has heard. The strength of the teacher is to bustle about, to give commands, to convey information, to exhort, to expound. The strength of the child is to efface himself in every possible way. The strength of the teacher is to assert himself in every possible way. The golden rule of education is that the child is to do nothing for himself which his teacher can possibly do, or even pretend to do, for him. Were he to try to do things by or for himself, he would probably start by doing them badly. This is not to be tolerated. Imperfection and incorrectness are moral defects; and the child mustas far as possible be guarded from them as from the contamination of moral guilt. He must therefore trust himself to his teacher, and do what he is told to do in the precise way in which he is told. His teacher must stand in front of him and give such directions as these: "Look at me," "See what I am doing," "Watch my hand," "Do the thing this way," "Do the thing that way," "Listen to what I say," "Repeat it after me," "Repeat it all together," "Say it three times." And the child, growing more and more comatose, must obey these directions and ask no questions; and when he has done what he has been told to do, he must sit still and wait for the next instalment of instruction.

What is all this doing for the child? The teacher seldom asks himself this question. If he did, he would answer it by saying that the end of education is to enable the child to produce certain outward and visible results,—to do by himself what he has often done, either in imitation of his teacher, or in obedience to his repeated directions; to say by himself what he has said many times in chorus with his class-mates; to disgorge some fragments of the information with which he has been crammed; and so forth. What may be the value of these outward results, what they indicate, what amount or kind of mental (or other) growth may be behind them,—are questions which the teacher cannot afford to consider, even if he felt inclined to ask them. His business is to drill the child into the mechanical production of quasi-material results; and his success in doing this will be gauged in due course by an "examination,"—a periodic test which is designed to measure, not the degreeof growth which the child has made, but the industry of the teacher as indicated by the receptivity of his class.

The truth is that inward and spiritual growth, even if it were thought desirable to produce it and measure it, could not possibly be measured. The real "results" of education are in the child's heart and mind and soul, beyond the reach of any measuring tape or weighing machine. It follows that if the work of the teacher is to be tested, an external test must be applied. This means that external results, results which can be weighed and measured, must be aimed at by both teacher and child, and that the value of these as symbols of what is inward and intrinsic must be wholly ignored. Not that the inward results of education would in any case be seriously considered. When education is based on the passivity of the child, nothing matters to him or to his teacher except the accuracy with which he can reproduce what he has been taught,—can repeat what he has been told, or do by himself what he has been told how to do. What connection there may be between these achievements and his mental state matters so little that the bare idea of there being such a connection is, as a rule, entirely lost sight of. The externalisation of religion in the West, as evidenced by its ceremonialism and its casuistry, has faithfully mirrored itself in the externality of Western education. The examination system (which I will presently consider) keeps education in the grooves of externality, and drives those grooves so deep as to make escape from them impossible. Yet it does but give formal recognition to, and in so doingcrown and complete—as the keystone crowns and completes the arch—the whole system of education in the West. It is because what is outward and visible counts for everything in the West, first in the life of the adult and then in the life of the child, that the idea of weighing and measuring the results of education—with its implicit assumption that the real results of education are ponderable and measurable (a deadly fallacy which now has the force and authority of an axiom)—has come to establish itself in every Western land.

The tendency of the Western teacher to mistake the externals for the essentials of education, and to measure educational progress in terms of the "appearance of things," gives rise to many misconceptions, one of the principal of which is the current confusion between information and knowledge. To generate knowledge in his pupils is a legitimate end of the teacher's ambition. In schools and other "academies" it tends to become the chief, if not the sole, end; and, things being what they are, the teacher may be pardoned for regarding it as such. But what is knowledge? The vulgar confusion between knowledge and information is the accepted answer to this question. But the answer is usually given before the question has been seriously considered. One who allowed himself to reflect on it, however briefly or cursorily, would quickly realise that it is possible to have intimate and effective knowledge of a subject without being able to impart any information about it. Successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurateknowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of the subject in question.

The truth is that knowledge, which may perhaps be provisionally defined as a correct attitude towards one's environment, has almost as wide a range as that of human nature itself. At one end of the scale we have the quasi-animal instinct which governs successful physical action. At the other end we have the knowledge, of which, and of the possession of which, its possessor is clearly, conscious. Between these extremes there is an almost infinite series of strata, ranging through every conceivable degree of subconsciousness. The knowledge that is real and effective is absorbed into one or more of the subconscious strata, from which it gradually ascends, under the influence of attention and reflection, towards the more conscious levels, gaining, as it ascends, in scope and outlook what it may possibly lose in subtlety and nearness to action. When knowledge, after passing upwards through many subconscious strata, rises to what I may call the surface-level of consciousness, it is ready, on occasion, to give itself off as information. This exhalation from the surface of consciousness is genuine information, not to be confounded with knowledge, to which it is related as the outward to the inward state, still less to be confounded with that spurious information which floats, as we shall presently see, like a film on the surface of the mind,meaning nothing and indicating nothing except that it has been artificially deposited, and that in due season it will be skimmed off, if the teacher's hopes are fulfilled, for the delectation of an examiner.

There are, of course, many cases in which the conscious acquisition of information is a necessary stage in the acquisition of knowledge. But in all such cases, if the information acquired is to have any educative value, it must be allowed to sink down into the subconscious strata, whence, after having been absorbed and assimilated and so converted into knowledge, it will perhaps reascend towards the surface of the mind, just as the leaves which fall in autumn are dragged down into the soil below, converted into fertile mould, and then gradually lifted towards the surface; or as the fresh water that the rivers pour into the sea has to be slowly absorbed into the whole mass of salt water before it (or its equivalent) can return to the land as rain. When information which has been received and assimilated rises to the surface of the mind, it will be ready, when required to do so, to reappear as information, and perhaps to return in that form to the source from which it came. But the information which is given off will differ profoundly from that which has been received, for between the two will have intervened many stages of silent absorption and silent growth.

It may be necessary, then, in the course of education, both to supply and to demand information. But the information which is supplied must be regarded as the raw material of knowledge, into which it is to be converted by a subtle and secret process. And the information which is demandedmust be regarded as an exhalation (so to speak) from the surface of a mind which has been saturated with study and experience, and therefore as a proof of the possession of knowledge. To assume that knowledge and information are interchangeable terms, that to impart information is therefore to generate knowledge, that to give back information is therefore to give proof of the possession of knowledge,—is one of the greatest mistakes that a teacher can make.

But the mistake is almost universally made. Information being related to knowledge, as what is outward to what is inward, it is but natural that education in the West, which on principle concerns itself with what is outward, and ignores what is inward, should have always regarded, and should still regard, the supplying of information as the main function of the teacher, and the ability of the child to retail the information which has been supplied to him as a convincing proof that the work of the teacher has been successfully done. In nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten, in nine lessons out of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin films of information on the surface of the child's mind, and then, after a brief interval, in skimming these off in order to satisfy himself that they had been duly laid. He cannot afford to do otherwise. If the child, like the man, is to be "saved" by passive obedience, his teacher must keep his every action and operation under close and constant supervision. Were the information which is supplied to him allowed to descend into the subconscious strata of his being, there to be dealt with by the secret, subtle, assimilative processes of his nature, it wouldescape from the teacher's supervision and therefore from his control. In other words, the teacher would have abdicated his function. He must therefore take great pains to keep the processes by which the child acquires knowledge (or what passes for such) as near to the surface of his mind as possible; in rivalry of the nurse who should take so much interest in the well-being of her charges that she would not allow them to digest the food which she had given them, but would insist on their disgorging it at intervals, in order that she might satisfy herself that it had been duly given and received. It is no doubt right that the teacher should take steps to test the industry of his pupils; but the information which the child has always to keep at the call of his memory, in order that he may give it back on demand in the form in which he has received it, is the equivalent of food which its recipient has not been allowed to digest.

The confusion between information and knowledge lies at the heart of the religion, as well as of the education, of the West. In this, as in other matters, the training of the child by his teacher has been modelled on the supposed training of Man by God. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the whole scheme of salvation by mechanical obedience is pivoted on the assumed identity of information and knowledge. In both the schools which Man has attended three things have always been taken for granted. The first is that salvation depends upon right knowledge of God. The second, that right knowledge of God and correct information about God are interchangeable phrases. The third, that correct information about God isprocurable by, and communicable to, Man. From these premises it has been inferred that if Man can be duly supplied with correct information about God, and can be induced to receive and retain it, he will be able to "save his soul alive." The difference between the two schools is, that in the Legal School the information supplied to Man has been largely concerned with theWillof God, so far as it bears on the life of Man, and has therefore taken the form of a Code of formulated commandments; whereas in the Ecclesiastical School it has mainly been concerned with theBeingof God, as interpreted from his doings and especially from his dealings with Man, and has therefore taken the form of catechisms and creeds. And there is, of course, the further difference that in the Legal School Man's acceptance of what he is taught has taken thepracticalform of doing what he is told to do, detail by detail; whereas in the Ecclesiastical School it has been mainlyoral(though also partly ceremonial), the business of the disciple being to commit to memory the creed or catechism which has been placed in his hands, and recite it, formula by formula, with flawless accuracy. But the difference between the two schools is wholly superficial, being, in fact, analogous to that between the conventional teaching of Drawing, in which the pupil finds salvation in doing what he is told to do, line by line, and stroke by stroke, and the conventional teaching of History and Geography, in which the pupil finds salvation in saying what he is told to say, name by name, and date by date. The relation between the two great branches of education, the education of Man by God, and theeducation of the child by the man, is one, not of analogy merely, but also of cause and effect. It is because the Jew thought to "save his soul alive" by obeying, blindly and unintelligently, a multitude of vexatious rules, that the teacher of to-day thinks to educate his pupils in Drawing by telling them in the fullest detail (either in his own person or by means of a diagram) what lines and strokes they are to make. And it is because the Christian has thought to "save his soul alive" by reciting with parrot-like accuracy the formulæ of his creeds and catechisms, that the teacher of to-day thinks to educate his pupils in History and Geography by making them repeat from memory a series of definitions, dates, events, names of persons, names of places, articles of commerce, and the like. I do not say that the modern teacher consciously imitates his models; but I say that he and they have been inspired by the same conception of life, and that the influence of that conception has been, in part at least, transmitted by them to him.

That education in the West should ultimately be controlled by a system of formal examination, may be said to have been predestined by the general trend of religious thought and belief. Wherever literal obedience is regarded as the first, if not the last, condition of salvation, the tendency to measure worth and progress by the outward results that are produced will inevitably spring up and assert itself. In this tendency we have the whole examination system in embryo. When Israel, with characteristic thoroughness, had embodied in Pharisaismthe logical inferences from his religious conceptions, a merciless examination system came into being, in which every one was at once examiner and examinee, and in which the whole of human life was dragged out (as far as that was possible) into the fierce light of public criticism, and placed under vigilant and unintermittent supervision. When Pharisaism was revived, with many modifications but with no essential change of character, under the name of Puritanism, the tendency to arraign human life at the bar of public opinion reasserted itself, and gave rise, as in New England and covenanting Scotland, to an intolerable spiritual tyranny. In Catholic countries the believer is subjected in the Confessional to a periodical oral examination, in which he passes in review the outward aspect of his inward and spiritual life, detailing for the benefit of his confessor his sins of ceremonial omission or laxity, and such lapses from moral rectitude as admit of being formulated in words and accurately valued in terms of expiatory penance. Even in the Anglican Church, which has too great a regard for the Englishman's traditional love of personal freedom to be unduly inquisitorial, the clergyman is apt to measure the spiritual health and progress of his parishioners by the frequency with which they attend church and "Celebration," while the Bishop measures the spiritual health and progress of each parish by the number of its communicants and the frequency with which they communicate, statistics under both heads being (I am told) regularly forwarded to him from all parts of his diocese.

It was inevitable, then, the relation betweenthat sooner or later the education of the young should come under the control of a system of formal religion and education being what it was and is, examination, and that it should be as much easier to apply the system to education than to religion as it is easier to test knowledge (in the conventional sense of the word) than conduct. It is to the vulgar confusion between knowledge and information that we owe the formal examination, as it is now conducted in most Western countries. In a society which mistakes the externals for the essentials of life, it is but natural that the teacher, with the full consent of the parents of his pupils, should regard the imparting of knowledge as the end and aim of his professional life, and that the parents should demand some guarantee that knowledge has been successfully imparted to their children. If by knowledge were meant a correct attitude of mind, the teacher would realise that the idea of testing it in any way which would satisfy the average parent was chimerical; and his clients, if they continued to ask for a guarantee of successful teaching, would require something widely different from that which has hitherto contented them. But when information is regarded as the equivalent of knowledge, the testing of the teacher's work becomes a simple matter, for it is quite easy to frame an examination which will ascertain, with some approach to accuracy, the amount of information that is floating on the surface of the child's mind; and it is also easy to tabulate the results of such an examination,—to find a numerical equivalent for the work done by each examinee, and then arrange the whole class in what is known as the "order of merit," andaccepted as such, without a moment's misgiving, by all concerned.

Unfortunately, however, it is equally easy to prepare children for an examination of this, the normal type. As children have receptive memories, it is easy for the teacher to lay films of information on the surface of their minds. As they have capacious and fairly retentive memories, it is easy for the teacher, especially if he is a strict disciplinarian, to make his pupils retain the greater part of what they have been taught. To skim off and give back to the teacher (or examiner) portions of the floating films of information, is a knack which comes with practice, and which the average child easily acquires. The teacher will, of course, demand that his school shall be examined on a clearly-defined syllabus; and the examiner, in his own interest, will gladly comply with this demand. The examiner will go further than this. If he happens to be employed by the State or by a Local Authority, and has, therefore, many schools of the same type to examine, he will, in order to save himself unnecessary trouble, prescribe the syllabus on which all the schools in his area are to be examined. This means that he will dictate to the teacher what subjects he is to teach, how much ground he is to cover in each year (or term), in what general order he is to treat each subject, and on what general principles he is to teach it. Intentionally he will do all this. Unintentionally he will do far more than this. As he wishes his examination to be a test and not a mere formality, as he wishes to sift the examinees and not to set the seal of approval on all of them indiscriminately, he willtake care that some at least of his questions are different from what the teacher might expect them to be. Also, as he is himself a rational being, he will probably endeavour to test intelligence as well as memory; and, with this end in view, he will set questions, the precise nature of which it will be difficult for the teacher to forecast. But the teacher will make a practice of studying the questions set in the periodical examinations and of preparing his pupils accordingly, equipping them (if he is an expert at his work) with a stock of superficial intelligence as well as of information, and putting them up to whatever knacks, tricks, and dodges will enable them to show to advantage on the examination day. In his desire to outwit the teacher, the examiner will turn and double like a hare who is pursued by a greyhound. But the teacher will turn and double with equal agility, and will never allow himself to be outdistanced by his quarry.

The more successful the teacher is in keeping up with the examiner, the more fatal will his success be to his pupils and to himself. In the ardour of the chase he is being lured on into a region of treacherous quicksands; and the longer he is able to maintain the pursuit, the more certain is it that he will lose himself at last in depths and mazes of misconception and delusion. It is only by stripping himself of his own freedom and responsibility that the teacher is able to keep pace with the examiner, and each turn or double that he makes involves a fresh surrender of those prerogatives. In consenting to work on a prescribed syllabus he has given up the idea of planning out his work for himself. In attempting to adapthis teaching to the questions set by the examiner, he is allowing the latter to dictate to him, in the minutest detail, how each subject is to be taught. In other words, in order to achieve the semblance of success, he is delivering himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the examiner, and compelling the latter, perhaps against his will, to become a Providence to him and to order all his goings. This means that his distrust of himself is as complete as his distrust of the child, and that his faith in the efficacy of mechanical obedience has led him to seek salvation for himself, as well as for his pupils, by following that fatal path.

It is in this way that a formal examination reacts upon and intensifies the sinister tendencies of which it is at once a product and a symptom. The examination system is, as I have said, the keystone of the arch of Western education, crowning and completing the whole structure, and at the same time holding it together, and preventing it from falling, as it deserves to fall, into a ruinous heap. Education, as it is now interpreted and practised in the West, could not continue to exist without the support of the examination system; but the price that it pays, and will continue to pay, for this deadly preservative, is the progressive aggravation of all its own inherent defects. The plight of an organism is indeed desperate when the very poison which it ought, if healthy, to eliminate from its system, has become indispensable to the prolongation of its life.

It is notorious that the application of the examination principle to religion—the attempt to estimate spiritual health and growth in terms ofoutward action—generates hypocrisy, or the pretence of being more virtuous (and more religious) than one really is. When applied to the education of the young, the same principle generates hypocrisy of another kind,—the pretence of being cleverer than one really is, of knowing more than one really knows. So long as the hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete. In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in his fraud. The child who is being crammed for an examination, and who is being practised at the various tricks and dodges that will, it is hoped, enable him to throw dust in the examiner's eyes, may not consciously realise that he and his teacher are trying to perpetrate a fraud, but will probably have an instinctive feeling that he is being led into crooked ways. If he has not that feeling, if the crooked ways seem straight in his eyes, we may know that his sense of reality is being poisoned by the vitiated atmosphere which he has been compelled to breathe. Nor, if that is his case, will he lack companionship in his delusion. In the atmosphere of the examination system, deceit and hypocrisy are ever changing into self-deception; and all who become acclimatised to the influence of the system—pupils, teachers, examiners, parents, employers of labour, ministers of religion, membersof Parliament, and the rest—fall victims, sooner or later, to the poison that infects it, and are well content to cheat themselves with outward and visible results, accepting "class-lists" and "orders of merit" as of quasi-divine authority, mistaking official regulations for laws of Nature, and the clumsy movements of over-elaborated yet ill-contrived machinery for the subtle processes of life.

Of the many evils inherent in Western education, which the examination system tends to intensify, one of the greatest is that of starving the child's activities, of making him helpless, apathetic, and inert. Original sin finds its equivalent, in the sphere of mental action, in original impotence and stupidity. It is not in the child to direct his steps, and the teacher must therefore direct them for him, and, if necessary, support him with both hands while he makes them. Even if the outward results which are the goal of the teacher's ambition were to be produced for his own satisfaction only, he would take care to leave as little as possible to the child's independent effort. But when the results in question have to satisfy an examiner, and when, as may well happen, the teacher's own professional welfare depends on the examiner's verdict, it is but natural that he should hold himself responsible for every stroke and dot that his pupil makes. When the education given in a school is dominated by a periodical examination on a prescribed syllabus, suppression of the child's natural activities becomes the central feature of the teacher's programme. In such a school the child is not allowed to do anything which the teacher can possibly do for him. He has to think what histeacher tells him to think, to feel what his teacher tells him to feel, to see what his teacher tells him to see, to say what his teacher tells him to say, to do what his teacher tells him to do. And the directions given to him are always minute. Not the smallest room for free action is allowed him if his teacher can possibly help it. Indeed, it is the function of the skilful teacher to search for such possible nooks and crannies, and fill them up. It is true that if an examination is to be passed with credit some thinking has to be done. But the greater part of this thinking must be done by the teacher, therôleof the pupil, even when he is an adult student, being essentially passive and receptive. The pupil must indeed be actively passive and industriously receptive; but for the rest, he must as far as possible leave himself in the teacher's hands. How to outwit the examiner is the one aim of both the teacher and the examinee; and as the teacher is presumably older, wiser, and far more skilful at the examination game than his pupil, the duty of thinking—of planning, of contriving, and even (in the deeper sense of the word) of studying—necessarily devolves on the former; and the latter, instead of relying upon himself and learning to use his own wits and resources, becomes more and more helpless and resourceless, and gradually ceases to take any interest in the work that he is doing, for its own sake, his chief, if not his sole, concern being to outwit the examiner and pass a successful examination. (One frequently meets with clever University students who, having read a certain book for a certain examination and had no question set from it, regard the timegiven to the study of it as wasted, and have no compunction about expressing this opinion!) If these are evils incidental—I might almost say essential—to the examination of adult scholars, it stands to reason that they will be greatly aggravated when the examinees are young children. For the younger the child, the more ignorant and helpless he is (however full he may be of latent capacity and spontaneous activity), and therefore the more ready he is to lean upon his teacher and to look to him for instruction and direction.

The desire to outwit, and so win approval from, an examiner, is not the only reason why the teacher so often reduces to an absurdity the traditional distrust of the child. His own inability to educate the child on other lines is another and not less potent reason. The examinationrégimeto which he has been subjected himself, partly, perhaps, under compulsion, but also and in larger measure of his own choice, deprives him, as we have already seen, of much of his freedom, initiative, and responsibility; and that being so, it is inevitable that within the limited range of free action which is left to him, he in his turn should devote his energies to depriving his pupils of the same vital qualities, and to making them the helpless creatures of habit and routine which he himself is tending to become. To give free play to a child's natural faculties and so lead him into the path of self-development and self-education, demands a high degree of intelligence on the part of the teacher, combined with the constant exercise of thought and initiative within a wide range of free action. If you tell a teacher in precise detail,whether directly or indirectly, that he is to do this thing, and that thing, and the next thing, he will not be able to carry out your instructions, except by telling his pupils, again in precise detail, that they are to do this thing, and that thing, and the next thing. He cannot help himself. He has no choice in the matter. He is the victim of a quasi-physical compulsion. The pressure which is put upon him will inevitably be transmitted by him and through him to his pupils, and will inevitably be multiplied (the relations between teacher and pupil being what they are) in the course of transmission.

There is nothing that a healthy child hates so much as to have the use of his natural faculties and the play of his natural energies unduly restricted by parental or pedagogic control. We may therefore take for granted that the child will find himself ill at ease in a school in which every vital activity is rigidly repressed, and in which he spends most of his time in sitting still and waiting for orders. Nor will it add to his happiness to live habitually in an atmosphere of constraint, of austerity, of suspicion, of gloom. But I need not take pains to prove that education, as it is conducted in Western countries, is profoundly repugnant to the natural instincts of the healthy child. For that is precisely what it is intended to be. The idea of a child enjoying his "lessons" is foreign to the genius of the West. Dominated as he is by the inherited conviction that Man's nature is corrupt and that his instincts are evil, the Western teacher has set himself the task of doing violenceto the child's instinctive tendencies, of thwarting his inborn desires, of working against the grain of his nature. He has expected the child to rebel against thisrégime, and he has welcomed his rebellion as a proof of the corruption of Man's nature, and therefore of the soundness of the traditional philosophy of education.

But if education is hateful to the child, how is he to be induced to submit to being educated? Some co-operation on his part will be necessary. How is it to be secured? By precisely the same methods as those by which Man, in the course of his education, has been induced to co-operate with God. The child, like Man, is to be "saved"—to be rescued from Nature and from himself—by being led into the path of mechanical obedience. The child, like Man, is to be kept in that path by a system of external rewards and punishments. If he will not do what he is told to do, he will be punished by his teacher. If he will do what he is told to do, he will escape punishment, and he may possibly, when his merits have accumulated sufficiently, receive a reward. In the education of Man by the God of Israel the balance between rewards and punishments has been kept fairly even. Hell has been balanced by Heaven, calamity by prosperity, death by life. It has been far otherwise with the child. His punishments have been many, and his rewards few. At the present day men are more humane than they used to be; and corporal punishment, though still resorted to, counts for less than it used to do in the training of the child. But punishments of various kinds are still regarded as indispensableadjuncts to school discipline; and it is still taken for granted in far too many schools that the fear of punishment and the hope of reward are the only effective motives to educational effort.

It is difficult to say which of the two motives is the more likely to demoralise the child. Arégimeof punishment is not necessarily arégimeof cruelty; but punishment can scarcely fail to savour of severity, and when the doctrine of original sin is in the ascendant, and the inborn wilfulness and stubbornness of the child are postulated by his teachers, the indefinable boundary line between severity and cruelty is easily crossed. Of the tendency of cruelty to demoralise its victims I have already spoken. But the effect of punishment on the child must be considered in its relation to his mental, as well as to his moral, development. Scholarships, prizes, high places in class, and other such rewards are for the few, not for the many. If the many are to be roused to exertion, the fear of punishment (in the hypothetical absence of any other motive) must be ever before them. What will happen to them when that motive is withdrawn, as it will be when the child becomes the adolescent? His education has been distasteful to the child, partly because his teachers have assumed from the outset that it would be and must be so, but chiefly because in their ignorance they have taken pains to make it so, his school life having been so ordered as to combine the maximum of strain with the maximum ofennui. His teachers have done everything for him, except those mechanical and monotonous exercises which they felt they might trust him to do by himself.Some of his mental faculties have become stunted and atrophied through lack of exercise. Others have been allowed to wither in the bud. If he happens to belong to the "masses," he will have completed his school education at the age of thirteen or fourteen. What will he do with himself when there is no longer a teacher at his elbow to tell him what to do and how to do it, and to stand over him (should this be necessary) while he does it? Why should he go on with studies which he has neither the inclination nor the ability to pursue, and which, in point of fact, he has never really begun? And why should he continue to exert himself when, owing to his being at last beyond the reach of punishment, the need for him to do so—the only need which he has been accustomed to regard as imperative—has ceased to exist?

The objections to the hope of reward as a motive to educational effort are of another kind. Prizes, as I have said, are for the few; and it is the consciousness of being one of the elect which invests the winning of a prize with its chief attraction. The prize system makes a direct appeal to the vanity and egoism of the child. It encourages him to think himself better than others, to pride himself on having surpassed his class-mates and shone at their expense. The clever child is to work hard, not because knowledge is worth winning for its own sake and for his own sake, but because it will be pleasant for him to feel that he has succeeded where others have failed. It is a just reproach against the examination system that while, by its demand for outward results it does its best to destroy individuality, the essence of which issincerity of expression, it also does its best to foster individualism, by appealing, with its offer of prizes and other "distinctions," to those instincts which predispose each one of us to affirm and exalt that narrow, commonplace, superficial aspect of his being which he miscalls hisself.

Thus the hope of reward tends to demoralise the clever child by making an appeal to basely selfish motives. At the same time it is probably deluding him with the belief that he has more capacity than he really has. If the examination system is, as I have suggested, the keystone of the arch of Western education, it is by means of the prize system that the keystone has been firmly cemented into its place. An examination which had no rewards or distinctions to offer to the competitors would not be an effective stimulus to exertion. That being so, our educationalists have taken care that to every examination some external reward or rewards shall be attached. Even if there are no material prizes to appeal to the child's cupidity, there is always the class-list, with its so-called "order of merit," to appeal to his vanity. Our educationalists have also taken care that during the periods of childhood, adolescence, and even early maturity, every prize that is offered for competition shall be awarded after a formal examination and on the consideration of its tabulated results. The appointments in the Home, Colonial, and Indian Civil Services, the promotions in the Army and Navy, the fellowships and scholarships at the Universities, the scholarships at the Public Schools, the medals, books, and other prizes that are offered to school-children, are allawarded to those who have distinguished themselves in the corresponding examinations, no other qualification than that of ability to shine in an examination being looked for in the competitors. There are, no doubt, exceptions to these general statements, but they are so few that they scarcely count. We have seen that the ascendency of the examination system in our schools and colleges is largely due to the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge; and we have also seen that the examination system reacts upon that fatal confusion and tends to strengthen and perpetuate it. If, then, the effect of the prize system is to consolidate the authority of the formal examination and intensify its influence, we shall not go far wrong in assuming that in the various competitions for prizes the confusion between information and knowledge will play a vital part. And, in point of fact, the cleverness which enables the child—I ignore for the moment the adolescent and the adult student—to win prizes of various kinds is found, when carefully analysed, to resolve itself, in nine cases out of ten, into the ability to receive, retain, and retail information. As this particular, ability is but a small part of that mental capacity which education is supposed to train, it is clear that the clever child who gets to the top of his class, and wins prizes in so doing, may easily be led to over-estimate his powers, and to take himself far more seriously than it is either right or wise of him to do. His over-confidence may for a time prove an effective stimulus to exertion; but the exertion will probably be misdirected; and later on, when he finds himself confronted by the complex realitiesof life, and when problems have to be solved which demand the exercise of other faculties than that of memory, his belief in himself, which is the outcome of a false criterion of merit, may induce him to undertake what he cannot accomplish, and may lead at last—owing to his having lost touch with the actualities of things—to his complete undoing.

And as under the prize system the child who is high in his class is apt to over-estimate his ability, so the child who is low in his class is apt to accept the verdict of the class-list as final, and to regard himself as a failure because he lacks the superficial ability which enables a child to shine on the examination day. Again and again it happens that the dunce of his class goes to the front in the battle of life. But numerous and significant as these cases are, they are unfortunately exceptions to a general rule. For one dunce who emerges from the depths of "apparent failure," there are ten who go under after a more or less protracted struggle, and sink contentedly to the bottom. The explanation of this is that though every child has capacity (apart, of course, from the congenital idiot and the mentally "defective"), there are many kinds of capacity which a formal examination fails to discover, and which the education that is dominated by the prize system fails to develop. The child whose particular kind of capacity does not count, either in the ordinary school lesson or on the examination day, is not aware that he is capable; and as he is always low on the class-list, and is therefore regarded by his teachers as dull and stupid, he not unnaturally acquiesces in the current and apparently authoritative estimate, ofhis powers, and, losing heart about himself, ends by becoming the failure which he has been taught to believe himself to be. In brief, while the prize system breeds ungrounded and therefore dangerous self-esteem in the child whom it labels as bright, it breeds ungrounded but not the less fatal self-distrust in the child whom it labels as dull.

We have seen that there comes a time in the life of every man when the fear of punishment ceases to act as a stimulus to educational exertion. It is the same with the hope of reward. Examinations, and the prizes which reward success in examinations, are for the young. What will happen to the prize-winner when there are no more prizes for him to compete for? Will he continue to pursue knowledge for its own sake? Alas! he has never pursued it for its own sake. He has pursued it for the sake of the prizes and other honours which it brought him. When he has won his last prize the chances are that he will lose all interest in that branch of learning in which he achieved distinction, unless, indeed, he has to earn his livelihood by teaching it. Of the scores of young men who distinguish themselves in "Classics" at Oxford and Cambridge, how many will continue to study the classical writers when they have gained the "Firsts" for which they worked so diligently? Apart from those who are going to teach Classics in the Public Schools or Universities, a mere handful,—one in ten perhaps, though that is probably an extravagant estimate. And yet the poets, philosophers, and historians whom they have studied are amongst the greatest that the world has produced. What isit, then, that kills, in nine cases out of ten, the classical student's interest in the masterpieces of antiquity? The obvious fact that he was never interested in them for their own sakes—that he studied them, not in order to enjoy them or profit by them, but in order to pass an examination in them, of which he might be able to say in after years:

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