[3] Its early history shows it to be a contrivance for the safe-guarding of infants in their earliest years by allocating a large proportion of responsibility to the father. Among Semitic and other Asiatic tribes, this allocation of responsibility was fortified by the somewhat crude precaution of secluding women. Marriage as a means of allocating responsibility will become superfluous as soon as parentage can be infallibly traced with the aid of the microscope, as some biologists confidently foretell. The chief raison d’etre of marriage will then be gone, but it will no doubt continue for a considerable time as a picturesque survival of an ancient custom.
Education.—In spite of the prodigious advance in educational methods in the last two generations, education is still in a state of primitive barbarity. We may, therefore, expect some very profound changes in the centuries to come. There is still too much of the methods of the pump about our education. The idea seems to be that the teacher draws from the well of knowledge and administers copious draughts to his pupils, and when they have swallowed these they are educated! There is no better illustration of this curious view than the modern method of imparting “higher” education. The University lecture is, of all methods of imparting knowledge, about the least effective. The student sits in a stiff attitude and maintains a pose of strained attention. He endeavours to keep his mind concentrated on the words and meaning of the professor. Every now and then he succeeds, but then his thoughts persist in following their own train of associations and the thread is broken. He jots down disconnected notes, hoping to piece them together afterwards. This piecing together is often the only process which really advances his knowledge. It brings his own will-power and faculties into action. The lecture only requires will-power for concentration on somebody else’s thought, and this effort is negative and sterile.
If lectures must be, then they should be interrupted after every ten minutes or so. The lecturer should then sit down and invite and encourage his students to ask pertinent questions or advance sound criticism.
In a class-room it is easier to keep the interest of the pupils alive. Every effort should be made to let the information come from the pupils rather than the teacher. In teaching history, for instance, I should not have set lessons at all, but ask the pupils to collect facts within a certain period, and reward them in accordance with their success in presenting the facts and linking them up with others.
The education of the future will be like the medicine of the future. Both will aim at eliciting and enlisting the powers of the pupil (or patient) rather than dosing them. For the real learning and the real cure must come from them.
Every normal child is anxious to learn, and can be easily brought to feel and appreciate the intellectual joy of comprehension. But in most children this joy is marred in early infancy by insufficient attention to their struggles to understand the great world about them. It is the years of infancy—the pre-school years—which are most important in forming habits of thought. The closest watch should be kept for early efforts at trains of reasoning. These efforts begin at the age of three or thereabouts. They are often absurd and ludicrous, but they should be treated with an indulgent and helpful respect, and wrong conclusions should be modified, not by contradiction, but by conviction of the contrary by example. If that is done, the child will learn to trust his own powers of reasoning. If it is neglected, the child’s mind will become shallow and unenterprising.
No child that can talk is too young to be asked for his opinion. He will enjoy stating it, and will, as a rule, receive protests or contrary opinions with interest and amusement.
All this may be a “counsel of perfection” to parents who are too busy to look after their infants themselves and are content to entrust their tender minds to more or less incompetent nurses. But the future will realize more and more the great importance of the growing minds of infants. In the United States this is to a large extent the case already, and, as a consequence, their infants are the brightest and most delightful creatures imaginable.
Labour.—In one of his earliest works, “The Time Machine,” Mr. H. G. Wells forecasts a development of the labour situation very different from that of the ordinary socialist Utopia. He figures an arrangement by which all labour is done underground, and is done by creatures (one can hardly call them “people”) whose bodies and minds are thoroughly adapted to their task. The picture seems to be a skit on the Victorian idea of the “family” upstairs and the servants in the basement, but a grim and novel touch is added by the information that the workers actually live on those that dwell in the light, coming up at night to take them away in their sleep.
Such a solution, though it may draw some justification from the bee-hive or the ant-heap, is not at all likely to be adopted by the human race of the future. The essential service of Christianity, the kernel which will remain after the mythological and dogmatic accretions have been shed, is to provide mankind with an imagination capable of conceiving and realizing the sufferings of other people and creatures, and the will to remedy or obviate them as far as possible. Through centuries of abuse, neglect and misinterpretation that gift has gradually worked into the mass of civilized humanity. The humanitarian ideal is explicit and articulate in France, while in England it is disguised under such expressions as “decency” and “playing the game,” or “live and let live.”