It is of course true, as modern psychologists insist, that the excessive influence of father or mother is a very harmful thing. But I do not believe it is likely to exist where children have gone to school from the age of two or three, as I have suggested that they should. Day school from an early age affords, to my mind, the right compromise between parental domination and parental insignificance. So far as concerns the set of considerations with which we have just been occupied, this seems clearly the best course, given a good home.
In the case of sensitive boys, there is a certain risk in leaving them to the exclusive society of other boys. Boys of about twelve are, for the most part, at a rather barbarous and insensitive stage. Quite recently, at a leading English school, there was a case of a boy suffering grave bodily injury for being sympathetic to the Labour Party. Boys who differ from the average in their opinions and tastes are likely to suffer seriously. Even at the most modern and progressive boarding schools in existence, pro-Boers had a bad time during the Boer war. Any boy who is fond of reading, or does not dislike his work, is pretty sure to be ill-treated. In France, the cleverest boys go to the Ecole Normale Supérieure and do not mix any longer with the average. This plan certainly has advantages. It prevents the intellectuals from having their nerve broken and becoming sycophants of the average Philistine, as happens to many of them in this country. It avoids the strain and misery which an unpopular boy must suffer. It makes it possible to give to clever boys the kind of teaching which suits them, which goes at a much more rapid pace than is possible for the less intelligent. On the other hand, it isolates the intellectuals from the rest of the community in later life, and makes them, perhaps, less able to understand the average man. In spite of this possible disadvantage, I think it on the whole better than the British upper-class practice of torturing all boys who have exceptional brains or exceptional moral qualities, unless they happen also to be good at games.[23]
However, the savagery of boys is not incurable, and is in fact much less than it was. “Tom Brown’s School Days” gives a black picture, which would be exaggerated if applied to the public schools of our own day. It would be still less applicable to boys who had had the kind of early training which we considered in previous chapters. I think also that co-education—which is possible at a boarding school, as Bedales shows—is likely to have a civilizing effect upon boys. I am chary of admitting native differences between the sexes, but I think that girls are less prone than boys to punish oddity by serious physical cruelty. At present, however, there are very few boarding schools to which I should venture to send a boy if he were above the average in intelligence, morals, or sensitiveness, or if he were not conservative in politics and orthodox in theology. For such boys, I am convinced that the existing school system for the sons of rich parents is bad. And among such boys are included almost all who have any exceptional merit.
Of the above considerations, both for and against boarding schools, there are only two that are essential and unalterable, and these two are on opposite sides. On the one side there is the benefit of the country and air and space; on the other, the family affections and the education derived from knowledge of family responsibilities. In the case of parents who live in the country, there is a different argument in favour of boarding schools, namely, the improbability of a really good day school in their neighbourhood. I do not think it is possible, in view of these conflicting considerations, to arrive at any general conclusion. Where children are so strong and vigorous that considerations of health need not be taken very seriously, one argument for boarding schools fails. Where they are very devoted to their parents, one argument for day schools fails, since the holidays will suffice to keep family affection alive, and term time may just prevent it from becoming excessive. A sensitive child of exceptional ability had better not go to boarding school, and in extreme cases had better not go to school at all. Of course, a good school is better than a bad home, and a good home is better than a bad school. But where both are good, each case must be decided on its merits.
So far, I have written from the standpoint of a well-to-do parent, to whom individual choice is possible. When the matter is considered politically, from the point of view of the community, other considerations enter in. We have on the one hand the expense of boarding schools, on the other the simplification of the housing problem if children are away from home. I hold strongly that, apart from a few rare cases, every one ought to have a scholastic education up to the age of eighteen, and exclusively vocational training should only begin after that age. Although much might be urged both ways on our present topic, the financial consideration will, for a long time to come, decide the question, in the case of most wage-earners’ sons and daughters, in favour of day schools. Since there is no clear ground for thinking this decision wrong, we may accept it, in spite of the fact that it is not made on educational grounds.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE UNIVERSITY
In previous chapters, we have considered the education in character and knowledge which, in a good social system, should be open to everybody, and should in fact be enjoyed by everybody, except for serious special reasons such as musical genius. (It would have been unfortunate if Mozart had been obliged to learn ordinary school subjects up to the age of eighteen.) But even in an ideal community there would, I think, be many people who would not go to the university. I am convinced that, at present, only a minority of the population can profit by a scholastic education prolonged to the age of twenty-one or twenty-two. Certainly the idle rich who at present infest the older universities very often derive no benefit from them, but merely contract habits of dissipation. We have therefore to ask on what principle we are to select those who should go to the university. At present, they are in the main those whose parents can afford to send them, though this principle of selection is being increasingly modified by the scholarship system. Obviously, the principle of selection ought to be educational, not financial. A boy or girl of eighteen, who has had a good school education, is capable of doing useful work. If he or she is to be exempted for a further period of three or four years, the community has a right to expect that the time will be profitably employed. But before deciding who is to go to the university, we must have some view as to the function of the university in the life of the community.
British universities have passed through three stages, of which, however, the second is not yet wholly displaced by the third. At first, they were training colleges for the clergy, to whom, in the Middle Ages, learning was almost wholly confined. Then, with the renaissance, the idea gained ground that every well-to-do person ought to be educated, though women were supposed to need less education than men. “The education of a gentleman” was given at the universities throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still given at Oxford. For reasons which we considered in Chapter I, this ideal, which was formerly very useful, is now out-of-date; it depended upon aristocracy, and cannot flourish either in a democracy or in an industrial plutocracy. If there is to be an aristocracy, it had better be composed of educated gentlemen; but it is better still to have no aristocracy. I need not argue this question, since it was decided in England by the Reform Bill and the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in America by the War of Independence. It is true that we still have in England the forms of aristocracy, but the spirit is that of plutocracy, which is quite a different thing. Snobbery makes successful business men send their sons to Oxford to be turned into “gentlemen”, but the result is to give them a distaste for business, which reduces their children again to comparative poverty and the need of earning a living. The “education of a gentleman” has therefore ceased to be an important part of the life of the nation, and may be ignored in considering the future.
The universities are thus reverting to a position more analogous to that which they occupied in the Middle Ages; they are becoming training schools for the professions. Barristers, clergymen and medical men have usually had a university education; so have the first division of the civil service. An increasing number of engineers and technical workers in various businesses are university men. As the world grows more complicated and industry becomes more scientific, an increasing number of experts are required, and in the main they are supplied by the universities. Old-fashioned people lament the intrusion of technical schools into the haunts of pure learning, but it continues none the less, because it is demanded by plutocrats who care nothing for “culture”. It is they, much more than the insurgent democracy, who are the enemies of pure learning. “Useless” learning, like “art for art’s sake”, is an aristocratic, not a plutocratic, ideal; where it lingers, it is because the renaissance tradition is not yet dead. I regret the decay of this ideal profoundly; pure learning was one of the best things associated with aristocracy. But the evils of aristocracy were so great as easily to outweigh this merit. In any case, industrialism must kill aristocracy, whether we desire it or not. We may as well make up our minds, therefore, to save what we can by attaching it to new and more potent conceptions; so long as we cling to mere tradition, we shall be fighting a losing battle.
If pure learning is to survive as one of the purposes of universities, it will have to be brought into relation with the life of the community as a whole, not only with the refined delights of a few gentlemen of leisure. I regard disinterested learning as a matter of great importance, and I should wish to see its place in academic life increased, not diminished. Both in England and in America, the main force tending to its diminution has been the desire to get endowments from ignorant millionaires. The cure lies in the creation of an educated democracy, willing to spend public money on objects which our captains of industry are unable to appreciate. This is by no means impossible, but it demands a general raising of the intellectual level. It would be much facilitated if our learned men would more frequently emancipate themselves from the attitude of hangers-on of the rich, which they have inherited from a time when patrons were their natural source of livelihood. It is of course possible to confound learning with learned men. To take a purely imaginary example, a learned man may improve his financial position by teaching brewing instead of organic chemistry; he gains, but learning suffers. If the learned man had a more genuine love of learning, he would not be politically on the side of the brewer who endows a professorship of brewing. And if he were on the side of democracy, democracy would be more ready to see the value of his learning. For all these reasons, I should wish to see learned bodies dependent upon public money rather than upon the benefactions of rich men. This evil is greater in America than in England, but it exists in England, and may increase.