As regards the educational value of play, everybody would agree in praising the sort that consists in acquiring new aptitudes, but many moderns look with suspicion upon the sort that consists in pretence. Daydreams, in adult life, are recognized as more or less pathological, and as a substitute for efforts in the sphere of reality. Some of the discredit which has fallen upon daydreams has spilled over on to children’s pretences, quite mistakenly, as I think. Montessori teachers do not like children to turn their apparatus into trains or steamers or what not: this is called “disordered imagination”. They are quite right, because what the children are doing is not really play, even if to themselves it may seem to be nothing more. The apparatus amuses the child, but its purpose is instruction; the amusement is merely a means to instruction. In real play, amusement is the governing purpose. When the objection to “disordered imagination” is carried over into genuine play, it seems to me to go too far. The same thing applies to the objection to telling children about fairies and giants and witches and magic carpets and so on. I cannot sympathize with the ascetics of truth, any more than with ascetics of other kinds. It is commonly said that children do not distinguish between pretence and reality, but I see very little reason to believe this. We do not believe that Hamlet ever existed, but we should be annoyed by a man who kept reminding us of this while we were enjoying the play. So children are annoyed by a tactless reminder of reality, but are not in the least taken in by their own make-believe.
Truth is important, and imagination is important; but imagination develops earlier in the history of the individual, as in that of the race. So long as the child’s physical needs are attended to, he finds games far more interesting than reality. In games he is a king: indeed he rules his territory with a power surpassing that of any mere earthly monarch. In reality he has to go to bed at a certain time, and to obey a host of tiresome precepts. He is exasperated when unimaginative adults interfere thoughtlessly with his mise-en-scène. When he has built a wall that not even the biggest giants can scale, and you carelessly step over it, he is as angry as Romulus was with Remus. Seeing that his inferiority to other people is normal, not pathological, its compensation in fantasy is also normal and not pathological. His games do not take up time which might be more profitably spent in other ways: if all his hours were given over to serious pursuits, he would soon become a nervous wreck. An adult who indulges in dreams may be told to exert himself in order to realize them; but a child cannot yet realize dreams which it is right that he should have. He does not regard his fancies as a permanent substitute for reality; on the contrary, he ardently hopes to translate them into fact when the time comes.
It is a dangerous error to confound truth with matter-of-fact. Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit. Dreams are only to be condemned when they are a lazy substitute for an effort to change reality; when they are an incentive, they are fulfilling a vital purpose in the incarnation of human ideals. To kill fancy in childhood is to make a slave to what exists, a creature tethered to earth and therefore unable to create heaven.
This is all very well, you may say, but what has it to do with giants eating children, or Bluebeard cutting off his wives’ heads? Are these things to exist in your heaven? Must not imagination be purified and ennobled before it can serve any good purpose? How can you, a pacifist, allow your innocent boy to revel in the thought of destroying human life? How can you justify a pleasure derived from instincts of savagery which the human race must outgrow? All this I imagine the reader has been feeling. The matter is important, and I will try to state why I hold to a different point of view.
Education consists in the cultivation of instincts, not in their suppression. Human instincts are very vague, and can be satisfied in a great variety of ways. Most of them require, for their gratification, some kind of skill. Cricket and baseball satisfy the same instinct, but a boy will play whichever he has learnt. Thus the secret of instruction, in so far as it bears upon character, is to give a man such kinds of skill as shall lead to his employing his instincts usefully. The instinct of power, which in the child is crudely satisfied by identification with Bluebeard, can find in later life a refined satisfaction by scientific discovery, or artistic creation, or the creation and education of splendid children, or any one of a thousand useful activities. If the only thing a man knows is how to fight, his will to power will make him delight in battle. But if he has other kinds of skill, he will find his satisfaction in other ways. If, however, his will to power has been nipped in the bud when he was a child, he will be listless and lazy, doing little good and little harm; he will be “a Dio spiacente ed a’ nemici sui.” This kind of milksop goodness is not what the world needs, or what we should try to produce in our children. While they are small and cannot do much harm, it is biologically natural that they should, in imagination, live through the life of remote savage ancestors. Do not be afraid that they will remain at that level, if you put in their way the knowledge and skill required for more refined satisfactions. When I was a child, I loved to turn head over heels. I never do so now, though I should not think it wicked to do so. Similarly the child who enjoys being Bluebeard will outgrow this taste, and learn to seek power in other ways. And if his imagination has been kept alive in childhood by the stimuli appropriate to that stage, it is much more likely to remain alive in later years, when it can exercise itself in the ways suitable to a man. It is useless to obtrude moral ideas at an age at which they can evoke no response, and at which they are not yet required for the control of behaviour. The only effect is boredom, and imperviousness to those same ideas at the later age when they might have become potent. That is one reason, among others, why the study of child psychology is of such vital importance to education.
The games of later years differ from those of early childhood by the fact that they become increasingly competitive. At first, a child’s play is solitary; it is difficult for an infant to join in the games of older brothers and sisters. But collective play, as soon as it becomes possible, is so much more delightful that pleasure in playing alone quickly ceases. English upper-class education has always attributed an enormous moral importance to school games. To my mind, there is some exaggeration in the conventional British view, although I admit that games have certain important merits. They are good for health, provided they are not too expert; if exceptional skill is too much prized the best players overdo it, while the others tend to lapse into spectators. They teach boys and girls to endure hurts without making a fuss, and to incur great fatigue cheerfully. But the other advantages which are claimed for them seem to me largely illusory. They are said to teach co-operation, but in fact they only teach it in its competitive form. This is the form required in war, not in industry or in the right kind of social relations. Science has made it technically possible to substitute co-operation for competition, both in economics and in international politics; at the same time it has made competition (in the form of war) much more dangerous than it used to be. For these reasons, it is more important than in former times to cultivate the idea of co-operative enterprises in which the “enemy” is physical nature, rather than competitive enterprises in which there are human victors and vanquished. I do not want to lay too much stress upon this consideration, because competitiveness is natural to man and must find some outlet, which can hardly be more innocent than games and athletic contests. This is a valid reason for not preventing games, but it is not a valid reason for exalting them into a leading position in the school curriculum. Let boys play because they like to do so, not because the authorities think games an antidote to what the Japanese call “dangerous thoughts”.
I have said a great deal in an earlier chapter about the importance of overcoming fear and producing courage; but courage must not be confounded with brutality. Brutality is pleasure in forcing one’s will upon other people; courage is indifference to personal misfortunes. I would teach boys and girls, if opportunity offered, to sail small ships in stormy seas, to dive from heights, to drive a motor-car or even an aeroplane. I would teach them, as Sanderson of Oundle did, to build machines and incur risks in scientific experiment. As far as possible, I would represent inanimate nature as the antagonist in the game; the will to power can find satisfaction in this contest just as well as in competing with other human beings. The skill acquired in this way is more useful than skill in cricket or football, and the character developed is more in accordance with social morality. And apart from moral qualities, the cult of athletics involves an under-estimation of intelligence. Great Britain is losing her industrial position, and will perhaps lose her empire, through stupidity, and through the fact that the authorities do not value or promote intelligence. All this is connected with the fanatical belief in the paramount importance of games. Of course it goes deeper: the belief that a young man’s athletic record is a test of his worth is a symptom of our general failure to grasp the need of knowledge and thought in mastering the complex modern world. But on this topic I will say no more now, as it will be considered again at a later stage.
There is another aspect of school games, which is usually considered good but which I think on the whole bad; I mean, their efficacy in promoting esprit de corps. Esprit de corps is liked by authorities, because it enables them to utilize bad motives for what are considered to be good actions. If efforts are to be made they are easily stimulated by promoting the desire to surpass some other group. The difficulty is that no motive is provided for efforts which are not competitive. It is amazing how deeply the competitive motive has eaten into all our activities. If you wish to persuade a borough to improve the public provision for the care of children, you have to point out that some neighbouring borough has a lower infant mortality. If you wish to persuade a manufacturer to adopt a new process which is clearly an improvement, you have to emphasize the danger of competition. If you wish to persuade the War Office that a modicum of military knowledge is desirable in the higher commands—but no, not even fear of defeat will prevail in this case, so strong is the “gentlemanly” tradition.[12] Nothing is done to promote constructiveness for its own sake, or to make people take an interest in doing their job efficiently even if no one is to be injured thereby. Our economic system has more to do with this than school games. But school games, as they now exist, embody the spirit of competition. If the spirit of co-operation is to take its place, a change in school games will be necessary. But to develop this subject would take us too far from our theme. I am not considering the building of the good State, but the building of the good individual, in so far as this is possible in the existing State. Improvement in the individual and improvement in the community must go hand in hand, but it is the individual that specially concerns the writer on education.
CHAPTER VI
CONSTRUCTIVENESS
The subject of this chapter is one which has already been considered incidentally in connection with play, but it is now to be considered on its own account.