The Curse of Education

by Harold Edward Gorst

Dr. Arnold held that a low standard of schoolboy morality was inevitable. 'With regard to reforms at Rugby,' he wrote to a friend, 'give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it a place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boyhood of the human race.'

In a letter to another friend he spoke still more strongly on the subject. 'Since I began this letter,' he wrote, 'I have had some of the troubles of school-keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of boy nature which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very account, and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure cowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they would rather have shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's "Shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and take part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the Scriptures say about the strait gate and the wide one—a view of human nature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize. But here, in the nakedness of boy nature, one is quite able to understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in a whole city.'

This sweeping statement has been quoted because it comes with double force from an undisputed authority such as the late Dr. Arnold. Everybody who has had experience of school-life knows that the average boy spends a great deal of his time in cheating the masters, lying to the authorities, and playing every sort and kind of mischievous or disreputable prank that comes into his head. But it is better to have this fact testified to by a man who has been in a position to observe large numbers of boys over a very extended period. The accusation of exaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained.

Where, however, I venture to differ with Dr. Arnold is in the assumption that this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone. Undoubtedly this is the case in part. But there is a far more potent cause than natural instinct. It is to be found in the system of education which not only fails to develop and encourage the boy's individual tastes or faculties, but actually forces upon him occupations that are, for the most part, absolutely foreign to his nature. This is the real key to the vagaries of boyhood, and without such an explanation one must hold, with the great headmaster of Rugby, that boy nature is inherently bad.

Boys, like other rational beings, must have their interests and amusements. If the legitimate and normal ones are prohibited, solace will be sought in those which are illegitimate and abnormal. By failing to encourage the faculties that nature intended a particular boy to develop, a vacuum is created. This vacuum must be filled up, and it is no earthly use trying to fill it up, against the grain, with mathematical problems or the irregular inflections of Latin verbs. The average boy is as little capable of taking an absorbing interest in these exhilarating features of the school curriculum as would be the average Hottentot.

Every healthy boy stores up energy. It should be the first object of the schoolmaster—if such a being ought to have any existence at all—to see that this energy is not allowed to waste. Natural forces of this kind do not, it must be recollected, evaporate. There they are, and the laws of nature have decreed that they shall be constantly expended and renewed. If this or that boy's store of energy is not turned into one channel, it will expend itself through another. If the schoolmaster were to take the trouble to find out the particular bent of a pupil, and were then to proceed to foster and educate it, all the energy of the boy would be used in this useful and congenial work. But this can never be the case until the present methods of instruction have been revolutionized.

The discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is an altogether false and pernicious discipline. The only liberty which is vouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. No doubt it is an excellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in which they make use of their leisure hours. There would be a great uproar amongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games they wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste. It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets; or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising oarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him into the playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob.'

But the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also to mental discipline. In the class-room there is practically no latitude given to the boy at all. In many schools, it is true, there is the choice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents', not the boy's. The latter is always treated, in reference to his school-work, as a machine. There is simply the offer of a classical strait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and the boy is put into one or the other according to the fancy of a third person.

Strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. It has been discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is the worst possible treatment for the brain. Whilst our lunatics, however, are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expert is busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboy brain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case of madmen.

The school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is a mental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effect upon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint acts perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm must be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold and Thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have grasped this simple fact.