The Unfinished Programme of Democracy

by Richard Roberts

I

“IT was,” says Mr. Benjamin Kidd, “with a well-founded instinct that William II. of Germany, on his accession turned to the elementary school teachers of his country when he aimed to impose the elements of a new social heredity on the whole German people.” It is impossible at this time of day not to go far in agreement with Mr. Kidd when he tells us that it is not so much what is born in a man as what he is born into that shapes his life. The most powerful formative influence in the shaping of character and outlook is “social heredity,” “imposed on the young at an early age and under conditions of emotion.”[^[55]] This judgment is no longer a matter of speculation. Dr. Stanley Hall’s work upon the phenomena of adolescence has made it clear that the plastic and absorbent stuff of youth will inevitably take its abiding shape and colour from the cultural setting in which it finds itself. The advocates of sectarian education in the famous English controversy about the Balfour Acts were, from their own point of view, speaking within the universe of the soundest possible psychology when they insisted that in religious education “atmosphere” was paramount. It was a piece of very astute observation on the part of the ancient Jews that led to the practice of bringing their twelve-year-old boys to Jerusalem for the Passover ceremonies. All the early training was crystallised into a definite direction of life by the induction of the youth at his most sensitive moment into the highly charged emotional atmosphere of the Holy City at the great festival of national remembrance and hope. He went there a boy; he returned home a Jew.

[55]. Benjamin Kidd, The Science of Power, p. 305.

Again and again in the course of this examination of the conditions of democratic evolution, we have had reason to look to education for a solution of many fundamental matters. It is indeed no longer possible to overlook the absolute primacy of the school in any progressive democratic polity; and if the foundations of the coming democratic commonwealth are to be well and truly laid, they must be laid around about the child. Our present purpose does not require that we should consider the actual machinery of the education proper to democratic development—that is a matter for the educator. Our business here and now is to consider the broad general characters of such an education.

It is a commonplace that needs no labouring that modern education suffers many things from the “dead hand.” The tradition of the “grammar school” which aimed at opening the field of knowledge by a training in letters is still with us, despite the fact that we have become familiarised in recent years with a rounder and fuller conception of education. We have been told again and again that the business of education is to produce good citizens, to promote the growth of moral character, and so forth; and slowly this emphasis has made some headway in the minds of educational officials. But the whole implication of this conception of education is far from being realised, even by those who are actively engaged in the work of education. A disproportionate pre-occupation with “letters” and knowledge still remains to betray our bondage to traditional ideas; and this in spite of the fact that popular education has in recent years received a very definite orientation through the demand for industrial efficiency. But as yet there has not been—save in the region of what is called “technical education”—any serious and sustained effort to co-ordinate the whole subject matter of education to this particular end. “Technical” education appears in the scheme not as an integral or organic part of the process as a whole, but as a somewhat arbitrary and unrelated annex to the last stage of the process.

To this demand that education should minister to industrial efficiency we shall have reason to return presently. Here we are concerned only with the fact that though this demand has been fairly general and insistent, it has not succeeded in shaking the hold of tradition upon the method of the educational process. Popular education still consists in the main of variations upon and extensions of the three R’s; and though the experts have discussed widely and in detail the ways and means of directing the educational processes to given ends, the solutions have not yet arrived in any very substantial way in the schools.

Roughly, our popular education is still governed by the idea of equipping the young person with such a quantum of knowledge as he may be supposed to require in order to make a living and gain some sort of settled place in life. It has become more and more possible in recent times for boys and girls who show unusual aptitudes to proceed to the higher branches of learning; but in the main our thought of popular education has been coloured by a pernicious doctrine of “minimums.” We have asked how little education can be given consistently with the need of the individual and the society in which he lives; and the opposition which meets any endeavour to raise the “school leaving age” proves quite conclusively that we have not generally advanced beyond the stage of regarding that education as best which is soonest done with. For this the economic strain of life is partly accountable; it is desirable that the boys and girls should be wage-earning as speedily as possible; but even more responsible for this state of things is a general ignorance concerning the meaning and purpose of education. Indeed, few of those who are now parents have reason to recall with any profound interest or gratitude the days when they were receiving an alleged education. Something in the nature of a systematic campaign of education in the interests of education would seem to be necessary if the popular indifference is to be removed to any good purpose.

It has indeed to be remembered that popular education is still in its infancy; and the prejudice it has to overcome is the result of the inevitable failures of its experimental stages. When it is recalled that elementary education in England was until 1870 in the hands of voluntary agencies, and that only since that date has education become universally accessible, it is perhaps remarkable that education should have made as much headway as it has made; and much of our criticism of current educational methods tends to overlook what is under the circumstances the real magnitude of the achievement in education. At the same time it is plain that our educational methods are in need of much sustained radical criticism if our purposes in education are to be saved from mis-carriage.