V Education

THIS diversion of the sexual instinct into art and games (a prophylactic which has long since been applied to individuals, and awaits application to groups) must begin in the early days of personal development; so that our Society for Social Research would, if it were to take on this task, find itself inextricably mixed up with the vast problem of educational method and aim.

Here more than anywhere one hears the call for enlightenment and sees the need for clarification. Here is an abundance of ’isms and a dearth of knowledge. Most teachers use methods which they themselves consider antiquated, and teach subjects which they will admit not one in a hundred of their pupils will ever need to know. Curious lessons in ethics are administered, which are seldom practised in the classroom, and make initiative children come to believe that commandment-breaking is heroic. Boys and girls bursting with vitality and the splendid exuberance of youth are cramped for hours into set positions, while by a sort of water-cure process knowledge is pumped into them from books duller than a doctor’s dissertation in philosophy. And so forth: the indictment against our schools has been drawn up a thousand times and in a thousand ways, and needs no reënforcement here. But though we have indicted we have not made any systematic attempt to find just what is wrong, and how, and where; and what may be done to remedy the evil. Experiments have been made, but their bearings and results have been very imperfectly recorded.

Suppose now that our Society for Social Research should appoint a great Committee on Education to hire expert investigators and make a thorough attempt to clarify the issues in education. Here the function of philosophy should be clear; for the educator touches at almost every point those problems of values, individual and social, which are the special hunting-ground of the philosopher. The importance of psychology here is recognized, but the importance of biology and pathology has not been seen in fit perspective. Why should not a special group of men be set aside for years, if necessary, to study the applicability of the several sciences to education? Why should not all scientific knowledge, so far as it touches human nature, be focused on the semi-darkness in which the educator works?

Two special problems in this field invite research. One concerns the effect, on national character and capacity, of a system of education controlled by the government. The point was made by Spinoza, as may be remembered, that a government will, if it controls the schools, aim to restrain rather than to develop the energies of men. Kant remarked the same difficulty. The function of education in the eyes of a dominant class is to make men able to do skilled work but unable to do original thinking (for all original thinking begins with destruction); the function of education in the eyes of a government is to teach men that eleventh commandment which God forgot to give to Moses: thou shalt love thy country right or wrong. All this, of course, requires some marvellous prestidigitation of the truth, as school text-books of national history show. The ignorant, it seems, are the necessary ballast in the ship of state.

The alternative to such schools seems to be a return to private education, with the rich man’s son getting even more of a start on the poor boy than he gets now. Is there a tertium quid here? Perhaps this is one point which a resolute effort to get the facts would clarify. What does such governmentally-regulated education do to the forces of personal difference and initiative? Will men and women educated in such a way produce their maximum in art and thought and industry? Or will they be automata, always waiting for a push? What different results would come if the nationally-owned schools were to confine their work absolutely to statements of fact, presentations of science, and were to leave “character-moulding” and lessons in ethics to private persons or institutions? Then at least each parent might corrupt his own child in his own pet way; and there might be a greater number of children who would not be corrupted at all.

Another problem which might be advanced towards a solution by a little light is that of giving higher education to those who want it but are too poor to pay. There are certain studies, called above the social disciplines, which help a man not so much to raise himself out of his class and become a snob, as to get a better understanding of himself and his fellow-men. Since mutual understanding is a hardly exaggerable social good, why should not a way be found to provide for all who wish it evening instruction in history, sociology, economics, psychology, biology, philosophy, and similar fields of knowledge? Every added citizen who has received instruction in these matters is a new asset to the community; he will vote with more intelligence, he will work better in coöperation, he will be less subject to undulations of social mania, he will be a hint to all office-seekers to put their usual nonsense on the shelf. Perhaps by this medium too our Society would spread its reports and widen its influence. Imagine a nation of people instructed in these sciences: with such a people civilization would begin.

And then again, our busy-body Society would turn its research light on the universities, and tell them a thing or two of what the light would show. It would betray the lack of coördination among the various sciences,—the department of psychology, for example, never coming to so much as speaking terms with the department of economics; it would call for an extension, perhaps, of the now infrequent seminars and conferences between departments whose edges overlap, or which shed light on a common field. It would invite the university to give less of its time to raking over the past, and help it to orient itself toward the future; it would suggest to every university that it provide an open forum for the responsible expression of all shades of opinion; it would, in general, call for a better organization of science as part of the organization of intelligence; it would remind the universities that they are more vital even than governments; and it might perhaps succeed in getting engraved on the gates of every institution of learning the words of Thomas Hobbes: “Seeing the universities are the foundation of civil and moral doctrine, from whence the preachers and the gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same upon the people, there ought certainly to be great care taken to have it pure.”