[PART II]
WHAT MIGHT BE
OR
THE PATH OF SELF-REALISATION
CHAPTER IV
A SCHOOL IN UTOPIA
Having painted in gloomy colours some of the actualities of elementary education, I will now try to set forth its possibilities. In opposing the actual to the possible, I am perhaps running the risk of being misunderstood. The possible, as I conceive it, is no mere "fabric of a dream." What are possibilities for the elementary school, as such, are already actualities in certain schools. Were it not so, I should not speak of them as possibilities. I do not pretend to be a prophet, in the vulgar sense of the word. The ends which I am about to set before managers and teachers are ends which have been achieved, and are being achieved, under entirely normal conditions, in various parts of the country, and which are therefore not impracticable. There are many elementary schools in England in which bold and successful departures have been made from the beaten track; and in each of these cases what is at present a mere possibility for most schools has been actually realised. And there is one elementary school at least in which the beaten track has been entirely abandoned, with the result that possibilities (as I may now call them) which I might perhaps have dismissed on a priori grounds as too fantastic for serious consideration, have become part of the everyday life of the scholars.
That school shall now become the theme of my book; for I feel that I cannot serve the cause of education better than by trying to describe and interpret the work that is being done in it. The school belongs to a village which I will call Utopia. It is not an imaginary village—a village of Nowhere—but a very real village, which can be reached, as all other villages can, by rail and road. It nestles at the foot of a long range of hills; and if you will climb the slope that rises at the back of the village, and look over the level country that you have left behind, you will see in the distance the gleaming waters of one of the many seas that wash our shores. The village is fairly large, as villages go in these days of rural depopulation; and the school is attended by about 120 children. The head teacher, whose genius has revolutionised the life, not of the school only, but of the whole village, is a woman. I will call her Egeria. She has certainly been my Egeria, in the sense that whatever modicum of wisdom in matters educational I may happen to possess, I owe in large measure to her. I have paid her school many visits, and it has taken me many months of thought to get to what I believe to be the bed-rock of her philosophy of education,—a philosophy which I will now attempt to expound.
Two things will strike the stranger who pays his first visit to this school. One is the ceaseless activity of the children. The other is the bright and happy look on every face. In too many elementary schools the children are engaged either in laboriously doing nothing,—in listening, for example, with ill-concealed yawns, to lectures on history, geography, nature-study, and the rest; or in doing what is only one degree removed from nothing,—working mechanical sums, transcribing lists of spellings or pieces of composition, drawing diagrams which have no meaning for them, and so forth. But in this school every child is, as a rule, actively employed. And bearing in mind that "unimpeded energy" is a recognised source of happiness, the visitor will probably conjecture that there is a close connection between the activity of the children and the brightness of their faces.
That the latter feature of the school will arrest his attention is almost certain. Utopia belongs to a county which is proverbial for the dullness of its rustics, but there is no sign of dullness on the face of any Utopian child. On the contrary, so radiantly bright are the faces of the children that something akin to sunshine seems always to fill the school. When he gets to know the school, the visitor will realise that the brightness of the children is of two kinds,—the brightness of energy and intelligence, and the brightness of goodness and joy. And when he gets to know the school as well as I do, he will realise that these two kinds of brightness are in their essence one.
Let me say something about each of them.