Part 10

With the second category of education through experience we need not deal at this time; it is a question by itself and of no mean quality; the matter I would consider is the more formal and narrow one of scholastic training in so far as it bears on the Great Peace that, though perhaps after many days, must follow the Great War and the little peace.

Answering along this line, the protagonists of salvation through education pretty well agree that the thing itself means the widest possible extension of our public school system, with free state universities and technical schools, and the extension of the educational period, with laws so rigid, and enforcement so pervasive and impartial, that no child between the ages of six and sixteen can possibly escape. This free, compulsory and universal education is assumed to be scrupulously secular and hedged about with every safeguard against the insidious encroachments of religion; it will aim to give a little training in most of the sciences, and much in the practical necessities of business life, as for example, stenography, book-keeping, advertising and business science; it will cover a broad field of manual training leading to "graduate courses" in special technical schools; the "laboratory method" and "field practice" will be increasingly developed and applied; Latin, Greek, logic and ancient history will be minimized or done away with altogether, and modern languages, applied psychology and contemporary history will be correspondingly emphasized. As for the state university, it will allow the widest range of free electives, and as an university it will aim to comprise within itself every possible department of practical activity, such as business administration, journalism, banking and finance, foreign trade, political science, psycho-analysis, mining, sanitary engineering, veterinary surgery, as well as law, medicine, agriculture, and civil and mechanical engineering. I am curious to inquire at this time if education such as this does, as a matter of fact, educate, and how far it my be relied upon as a corrective for present defects in society; or rather, first of all, whether education of this, or of any sort, may be looked on as a sufficient saving force, and whether general education, instead of being extended should not be curtailed, or rather safeguarded and restricted.

I have already tried to indicate, in my lecture on the Social Organism, certain doubts that are now arising as to the prophylactic and regenerative powers of education, whether this is based on the old foundation of the Trivium and Quadrivium under the supreme dominion of Theology, or on the new foundation of utilitarianism and applied science under the dominion of scientific pedagogy. While the active-minded portion of society believed ardently in progressive evolution, in the sufficiency of the intellect, the inerrancy of the scientific method, and the transmission by inheritance of acquired characteristics, this supreme confidence in free, secular, compulsory education as the cure-all of the profuse and pervasive ills of society was not only natural but inevitable. I submit that experience has measurably modified the situation, and that we are bound therefore to reconsider our earlier persuasions in the light of somewhat revealing events.

We may admit that the system of modern education works measurably well so far as intellectual training is concerned; training as distinguished from development. It works measurably well also in preparing youth for participation in the life of applied science and for making money in business and finance. Conscientious hard labour has been given, and is being given, to making it more effective along these lines, and almost every year some new scheme is brought forward enthusiastically, tried out painstakingly, and then cast aside ignominiously for some new and even more ingenious device. The amount of education is enormous; the total of money spent on new foundations, courses, buildings, equipment--on everything but the pay of the teachers--is princely; the devotion of the teachers, themselves, in the face of inadequate wages, is exemplary, and yet, somehow the results are disappointing. The truth is, the development of character is not in proportion to the development of public and private education. The moral standing of the nation, taken as a whole, has been degenerating; in business, in public affairs, in private life, until the standards of value have been confused, the line of demarcation between right and wrong blurred to indistinctness, and the old motives of honour, duty, service, charity, chivalry and compassion are no longer the controlling motive, or at least the conscious aspiration, of active men.

This is not to say that these do not exist; the period that has seen the retrogression has recorded also a reaction, and there are now perhaps more who are fired by the ardent passion for active righteousness, than for several generations, but the average is lower, for where, many times in the past, there has been a broad, general average of decency, now the disparity is great between the motives that drive society as a whole, and its methods of operation, and the remnant that finds itself an unimportant minority. Newspapers are perhaps hardly a fair criterion of the moral status of a people--or of anything else for that matter--but what they record, and the way they do it, is at least an indication of a condition, and after every possible allowance has been made, what they record is a very alarming standard of public and private morality, both in the happenings themselves and in the fashion of their publicity.

No one would claim that the responsibility for this weakening of moral standards rests predominantly on the shoulders of the educational system of today; the causes lie far deeper than this, but the point I wish to make is that the process has not been arrested by education, in spite of its prevalence, and that therefore it is unwise to continue our exclusive faith in its remedial offices. The faith was never well founded. Education can do much, but what it does, or can do, is to foster and develop inherent possibilities, whether these are of character, intelligence or aptitude: it cannot put into a boy or man what was not there, in posse, at birth, and humanly speaking, the diversity of potential in any thousand units is limited only by the number itself. Whether our present educational methods are those best calculated to foster and develop these inherent possibilities, so varied in nature and degree, is the question, and it is a question the answer to which depends largely on whether we look on intelligence, capacity or character as the thing of greatest moment. For those who believe that character is the thing of paramount importance--amongst whom I count myself--the answer must be in the negative.

Nor is an affirmative reply entirely assured when the question is asked as to the results in the case of intellect and capacity. There are few who would claim that in either of these directions the general standard is now as high as it was, for example, in the last half of the last century. The Great War brought to the front few personalities of the first class, and the peace that has followed has an even less distinguished record to date. We may say with truth, I think, that the last ten years have provided greater issues, and smaller men to meet them in the capacity of leaders, than any previous crisis of similar moment. The art of leadership, and the fact of leadership, have been lost, and without leadership any society, particularly a democracy, is in danger of extinction.

Here again one cannot charge education with our lack of men of character, intelligence and capacity to lead; as before, the causes lie far deeper, but the almost fatal absence at this time of the personalities of such force and power that they can captain society in its hours of danger from war or peace, must give us some basis for estimating the efficiency of our educational theory and practice, and again raise doubts as to whether here also we shall be well advised if we rely exclusively upon it as the ultimate saviour of society, while we are bound to ask whether its methods, even of developing intelligence and capacity, are the best that can be devised.

Another point worth considering is this. So long as we could lay the flattering unction to our souls that acquired characteristics were heritable, and that therefore if an outcast from Posen, migrating to America, had taken advantage of his new opportunities and so had developed his character-potential, amassed money and acquired a measure of education and culture, he would automatically transmit something of this to his offspring, who would start so much the further forward and would tend normally to still greater advance, and so on ad infinitum, so long we were justified in enforcing the widest measure of education on all and sundry, and in waiting in hope for a future when the cumulative process should have accomplished its perfect work. Now, however, we are told that this hope is vain, that acquired characteristics are not transmitted by heredity, and that the old folk-proverb "it is only three generations between shirtsleeves and shirtsleeves," is perhaps more scientifically exact than the evolutionary dictum of the nineteenth century. Which is what experience and history have been teaching, lo, these many years.

The question then seems to divide itself into three parts; (a) are we justified in pinning our faith in ultimate social salvation to free, secular, and compulsory education carried to the furthest possible limits; (b) if not, then what precisely is the function of formal education; and (c) this being determined, is our present method adequate, and if not how should it be modified?

It is unwise to speak dogmatically along any of these lines, they are too blurred and uncertain. I can only express an individual opinion.

It seems to me that life unvaryingly testifies to the extreme disparity of potential in individuals and in families and in racial strains, though in the two latter the difference is not necessarily absolute and permanent, but variable in point of both time and degree. In individuals the limit of this potentiality is inherent, and it can neither be completely inhibited by adverse education and environment nor measurably extended by favourable education and environment. Characteristics acquired outside inherent limitations are personal and non-heritable, however intimately they may have become a part of the individual himself.

If this is true, then the question of education becomes personal also; that is to say, we educate for the individual, and with an eye to the part he himself is to play in society. We do not look for cumulative results but in a sense deal with each personality in regard to itself alone. I think this has a bearing both on the extent to which education should be enforced and on the quality and method of education itself, and though the contention will receive little but ridicule, I am bound to say that I hold that general education should be reduced in quantity and considerably changed in nature.

If the limit of development is substantially determined in each individual and cannot be extended by human agencies (I say "human" because God in His wisdom and by His power can raise up a prophet or a saint out of the lowest depths, and frequently does so), then the quantity and extent of general education should be determined not by a period of years and the facilities offered by a government liberal in its expenditures, but entirely by the demonstrated or indicated capacity of the individual. Our educational system should, so far as it is free and compulsory, normally end with the high school grade. Free college, university and technical training should not be provided, except for those who had given unmistakable evidences that they could, and probably would, use it to advantage. This would be provided for by non-competitive scholarships, limited in number only by the number of capable candidates, and determination of this capacity would be, not on the basis of test examinations, but on an average record covering a considerable period of time. It is doubtful if even these scholarships should be wholly free; some responsibility should be recognized, for a good half of the value of a thing (perhaps all its value) lies in working for it. A grant without service, a favour accepted without obligations, privilege without function, both cheapen and degrade.

Let us now turn to the second question, i.e., what precisely is the function of formal education. For my own part I can answer this in a sentence. It is primarily the fostering and development of the character-potential inherent in each individual. In this process intellectual training and expansion and the furthering of natural aptitude have a part, but this is secondary to the major object which is the development of character.

This is not in accordance with the practice or the theory of recent times, and in this fact lies one of the prime causes of failure. The one thing man exists to accomplish is character; not worldly success and eminence in any line, not the conquest of nature (though some have held otherwise), not even "adaptation to environment" in the argot of last century science, but character; the assimilation and fixing in personality of high and noble qualities of thought and deed, the furtherance, in a word, of the eternal sacramental process of redemption of matter through the operation of spiritual forces. Without this, social and political systems, imperial dominion, wealth and power, a favourable balance of trade avail nothing; with it, forms and methods and the enginery of living will look out for themselves. And yet this thing which comprises "the whole duty of man" has, of late, fallen into a singular disregard, while the constructive forces that count have either been discredited and largely abandoned, as in the case of religion, or, like education, turned into other channels or reversed altogether, as has happened with the idea and practice of obedience, discipline, self-denial, duty, honour and unselfishness; surely the most fantastic issue of the era of enlightenment, of liberty and of freedom of conscience.

As a matter of fact character, as the chief end of man and the sole guaranty of a decent society, has been neglected; it was not disregarded by any conscious process, but the headlong events that have followed since the fifteenth century have steadily distorted our judgment and confused our standards of value even to reversal. By an imperceptible process other matters have come to engage our interest and control our action, until at last we are confronted by the nemesis of our own unwisdom, and we entertain the threat of a dissolving civilization just because the forces we have engendered or set loose have not been curbed or directed by that vigorous and potent personal character informing a people and a society, that we had forgot in our haste and that alone could give us safety.

Formal education is but one of the factors that may be employed towards the development of character; you cannot so easily separate one force in life from another, assigning a specific duty here, a definite task there. That is one of the weaknesses of our time, the water-tight compartment plan of high specialization, the cellular theory of efficiency. Life must be seen as a whole, organized as a whole, lived as a whole. Every thought, every emotion, every action, works for the building or the unbuilding of character, and this synthesis of living must be reestablished before we can hope for social regeneration. Nevertheless formal education may be made a powerful factor, even now, and not only in this one specific direction, but through this, for the accomplishing of that unification of life that already is indicated as the next great task that is set before us; and this brings me to a consideration of the last of the questions I have proposed for answer, viz.: is our present system of education adequate to the sufficient development of character, and if not, how should it be modified?

I do not think it adequate, and experience seems to me to prove the point. It has not maintained the sturdy if sometimes acutely unpleasant character of the New England stock, or the strong and handsome character of the race that dwelt in the thirteen original colonies as this manifested itself well into the last century, and it has, in general, bred no new thing in the millions of immigrants and their descendants who have flooded the country since 1840 and from whom the public schools and some of the colleges are largely recruited. It is not a question of expanded brain power or applied aptitude, but of character, and here there is a larger measure of failure than we had a right to expect. And yet, had we this right? The avowed object of formal education is mental and vocational training, and by no stretch of the imagination can we hold these to be synonymous with character. We have dealt with and through one thing alone, and that is the intellect, whereas character is rather the product of emotions judiciously stimulated, balanced (not controlled) by intellect, and applied through active and varied experience. Deliberately have we cut out every emotional and spiritual factor; not only religion and the fine arts, but also the studies, and the methods of study, and the type of text-books, that might have helped in the process of spiritual and emotional development. We have eliminated Latin and Greek, or taught them as a branch of philology; we have made English a technical exercise in analysis and composition, disregarding the moral and spiritual significance of the works of the great masters of English; we minimize ancient history and concentrate on European history since the French Revolution, and on the history of the United States, and because of the sensitiveness of our endless variety of religionists (pro forma) text books are written which leave religion out of history altogether--and frequently economics and politics as well when these cannot be made to square with popular convictions; philosophy and logic are already pretty well discarded, except for special electives and post-graduate courses, and as for art in its multifarious forms we know it not, unless it be in the rudimentary and devitalized form of free-hand drawing and occasional concerted singing. The only thing that is left in the line of emotional stimulus is competitive athletics, and for this reason I sometimes think it one of the most valuable factors in public education. It has, however, another function, and that is the coordination of training and life; it is in a sense an école d'application, and through it the student, for once in a way, tries out his acquired mental equipment and his expanding character--as well as his physical prowess--against the circumstances of active vitality. It is just this sort of thing that for so long made the "public schools" of England, however limited or defective may have been the curriculum, a vital force in the development of British character.

At best, however, this seems to me but an indifferent substitute, an inadequate "extra," doing limitedly the real work of education by indirection. What we need (granting my assumption of character as the terminus ad quem) is an educational system so recast that the formal studies and the collateral influences and the school life shall be more coordinated in themselves and with life, and that the resulting stimulus shall be equally operative along intellectual, emotional and creative lines.

It is sufficiently easy to make suggestions as to how this is to be accomplished, to lay out programmes and lay down curricula, but here as elsewhere this does not amount to much; the change must come and the institutions develop as the result of the operations of life. If we can change our view of the object of education, the very force of life, working through experience, will adequately determine the forms. It is not therefore as a meticulous and mechanical system that I make the following suggestions as to certain desirable changes, but rather to indicate more exactly what I mean by a scheme of education that will work primarily towards the development of character.

Now in the first place, I must hold that there can be no education which works primarily for character building, that is not interpenetrated at every point by definite, concrete religion and the practice of religion. As I shall try to show in my last two lectures, religion is the force or factor that links action with life. It is the only power available to man that makes possible a sound standard of comparative values, and with philosophy teaching man how to put things in their right order, it enters to show him how to control them well, while it offers the great constructive energy that makes the world an orderly unity rather than a type of chaos. Until the Reformation there was no question as to this, and even after, in the nations that accepted the great revolution, the point was for a time maintained; thereafter the centrifugal tendency in Protestantism resulted in such a wealth of mutually antagonistic sects that the application of the principle became impracticable, and for this, as well as for more fundamental reasons, it fell into desuetude. The condition is as difficult today for the process of denominational fission has gone steadily forward, and as this energy of the religious influence weakens the strenuosity of maintenance strengthens. With our 157 varieties of Protestantism confronting Catholicism, Hebraism, and a mass of frank rationalism and infidelity as large in amount as all others combined, it would seem at first sight impossible to harmonize free public education with concrete religion in any intimate way. So it is; but if the principle is recognized and accepted, ways and means will offer themselves, and ultimately the principle will be embodied in a workable scheme.

For example; there is one thing that can be done anywhere, and whenever enough votes can be assembled to carry through the necessary legislation. At present the law regards with an austere disapproval that reflects a popular opinion (now happily tending towards decay), what are known as "denominational schools" and other institutions of learning. Those that maintain the necessity of an intimate union between religion and education, as for example the great majority of Roman Catholics and an increasing number of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are taxed for the support of secular public schools which they do not use, while they must maintain at additional, and very great, expense, parochial and other private schools where their children may be taught after a fashion which they hold to be necessary from their own point of view. Again, state support is refused to such schools or colleges as may be under specific religious control, while pension funds for the teachers, established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate themselves from any religious influence. I maintain that this is both unjust and against public policy. Under our present system of religious individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from the public funds must maintain, and then, this condition being carried out, distribute the funds received from general taxation to public and private schools alike. This would enable Episcopalians, let us say, or Roman Catholics, or Jews, when in any community they are numerous enough to provide a sufficiency of scholars for any primary, grammar, or high school, to establish such a school in as close a relationship to their own religion as they desired, and have this school maintained out of the funds of the city. This is not a purely theoretical proposition; after an agitation lasting nearly half a century, Holland has this year put such a law in force. From every point of view we should do well to recognize this plan as both just and expedient. One virtue it would have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most mechanistic manifestation in France.

Of course this need for the fortifying of education by religion is recognized even now, but the only plan devised for putting it into effect is one whereby various ministers of religion are allowed a certain brief period each week in which they may enter the public schools and give denominational instruction to those who desire their particular ministrations. This is one of the compromises, like the older method of Bible reading without commentary or exposition, which avails nothing and is apt to be worse than frank and avowed secularism. It is putting religion on exactly the same plane as analytical chemistry, psychoanalysis or salesmanship, (the latter I am told is about to be introduced in the Massachusetts high schools) or any other "elective," whereas if it is to have any value whatever it must be an ever-present force permeating the curriculum, the minds of the teachers, and the school life from end to end, and there is no way in which this can be accomplished except by a policy that will permit the maintenance of schools under religious domination at the expense of the state, provided they comply with certain purely educational requirements established and enforced by the state.

I have already pointed out what seems to me the desirability of a considerable variation between the curriculum of one school and another. This would be possible and probably certain under the scheme proposed, but barring this, it is surely an open question whether the pretty thoroughly standardized curriculum now in operation would not be considerably modified to advantage if it is recognized that the prime object of education is character rather than mental training and the fitting of a pupil to obtain a paying job on graduation. From my own point of view the answer is in a vociferous affirmative. I suggest the drastic reduction of the very superficial science courses in all schools up to and including the high school, certainly in chemistry, physics and biology, but perhaps with some added emphasis on astronomy, geology and botany. History should become one of the fundamental subjects, and English, both being taught for their humanistic value and not as exercises in memory or for the purpose of making a student a sort of dictionary of dates. This would require a considerable rewriting of history text books, as well as a corresponding change in the methods of teaching, but after all, are not these both consummations devoutly to be wished. There are few histories like Mr. Chesterton's "Short History of England," unfortunately. One would, perhaps, hardly commend this stimulating book as a sufficient statement of English history for general use in schools, but its approach is wholly right and it possesses the singular virtue of interest. Another thing that commends it is the fact that while it runs from Caesar to Mr. Lloyd George, it contains, I believe, only seven specific dates, three of which are possibly wrong. This is as it should be--not the inaccuracies but the commendable frugality in point of number. Dates, apart from a few key years, are of small historical importance; so are the details of palace intrigues and military campaigns. History is, or should be, life expressed in terms of romance, and it is of little moment whether the narrated incidents are established by documentary evidence or whether they are contemporary legend quite unsubstantiated by what are known (and overestimated) as "facts." There is more of the real Middle Ages in Mallory's "Mort d'Arthur" than there is in all Hallam, and the same antithesis can be established for nearly all other periods of history.

The history of man is one great dramatic romance, and so used it may be made perhaps the most stimulating agency in education as character development. I do not mean romance in the sense in which Mr. Wells takes it, that is to say, the dramatic assembling and clever coördination of unsubstantiated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any other art at communicating from one person to another something of the inner and essential quality of life as it has been lived, even if the material used is textually doubtful or even probably apocryphal. The deadly enemy of good, sound history is scientific historical criticism. The true history is romantic tradition; the stimulating thing, the tale that makes the blood leap, the pictorial incident that raises up in an instant the luminous vision of some great thing that once was.

I would not exchange Kit Marlowe's

"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"