The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

The district I have in mind is a very common type of district: a healthy, open suburb on the fringe of London, tainted by one of those older villages in which the poorest workers are apt to congregate. It has an expensive Church-Institute and numerous chapels. You may see the thing in almost any part of London, and most other towns. I have a vivid recollection of passing from a Catholic elementary school and strict home in Manchester to a large warehouse thirty-five years ago. There is little change in that respect to-day. A very few years ago a Manchester boy passed the same way; and a month or two later, his father told me, he returned home chuckling over a “funny story” about Christ. The school fails, not from lack of devotion in the teachers, but because the child learns more in the street, and often in the home; and these lessons are, somehow, more congenial.

Now if we are not satisfied with this comparative waste of effort and sterility of result, we have to consider candidly the ambition of the educationist. He wants to turn out a young citizen with an active mind, a sound body, and a character prepared to resist the more degrading influences of the world he will enter. He cannot carry out this aim in the case of every child entrusted to him, but he can in most cases, if the State will help him. He must have his children properly nourished: neither underfed nor stuffed with coarse food by ignorant mothers. He must have them seasonably clothed and shod: again the mothers need instruction and pressure. He must have, not only drill and more natural forms of exercise, but more control over the children outside of school-hours; he is already beginning, with great promise of good, to walk and play with them, to take them to museums, and so on. He must have adequate medical assistance, and must have the support of the law in counteracting dirty homes and careless parents. He must keep the child still a few years longer at school, because a child only begins to be really educable at thirteen or fourteen. He must have the encouragement of knowing that the more promising boys and girls will find the avenue open to higher schools, and that the community will make some serious provision of mental stimulation for the adolescent and the adult. And in order to carry out properly this large and promising scheme of training he must have twice as many colleagues as he has, so that each may be able to give individual attention to pupils, and in order that too great demands be not made on their hours of rest.

But where are we to find the very large sums of money which would be required for carrying out such a scheme? I wish everybody in England realised that we should have the funds to carry out this scheme in its entirety, in its most advanced developments, if we abolished militarism; that if we had done this before 1914, we should have had, in the cost of the war, the funds to carry out such a scheme two or three times over. We have to reflect also whether the increased prosperity of England would not pay the cost. There are other considerations which I give later, but I would add here at least a word about experience in other lands. At New York and Chicago I visited schools—elementary and secondary, but both free—with which we have nothing to compare in this country: palatial structures with superb equipment and devoted staffs. Yet when I asked ratepayers how they contrived to spend so lavishly on education, the three or four public men I asked were so little conscious of a burden that they were unable to explain satisfactorily where the funds came from!

We are, however, making progress here and there,—Bradford, for instance, has had the courage to be quite Socialistic in its care of the young,—and the triple ideal of education is generally, if at times reluctantly, recognised. As far as the education of the body is concerned, in fact, we have no ground for quarrelling with our teachers, whatever we may say of some of our educational authorities. Medical inspection, drill, hygiene, play, excursions, feeding, etc., are discussed very conscientiously at every meeting of teachers, and the reforms proposed are more or less admitted in all places, even under the London County Council. The teachers themselves often go far beyond their prescribed tasks in endeavouring to help the children. In places they yield part of their necessary midday rest to attend to the feeding of poor children: which I found admirably, and most cheerfully and expeditiously, done in Chicago (where 1500 children at one school were quietly and excellently fed in thirty minutes) by a committee of ladies of the district. They give Saturdays and holidays for conducting visits to museums or excursions, or for controlling sports. What is chiefly needed is that the authorities should deal stringently with backward sectarian schools, and provide a very much larger supply of teachers and servants. The municipal authority of the richest city in the world—the London County Council—is scandalously stingy and reactionary in this respect.

When we turn to the question of educating the intelligence, it is not possible to approve so cordially. No one, assuredly, can fail to appreciate the zeal and efforts of educationists and teachers, especially in the last few decades. Hardly any body of professional men and women among us, certainly no body of public servants, has a deeper and sounder ambition to conduct its work on the most effective lines. A vast literature is published, frequent congresses are held, and the science of psychology is assiduously cultivated. One must appreciate also the fatal limitations of the teacher’s activity; as long as we withdraw children from him at the age of fourteen, education is impossible. It may seem, therefore, ungracious or unwise to criticise,—though I am not wholly a layman in regard to education,—but there is at least one feature of our school life to which I would draw serious critical attention.

The general public is apt to express this feature resentfully by saying that the modern teacher “crams.” Better informed critics have put it that modern education is little more than a process of “encephalisation,” or the imprinting of certain facts on the child’s brain almost as mechanically as the indenting of marks on the cylinder of a gramophone. Each of these criticisms implies an injustice. Educationists and teachers have, of course, discussed this very point for decades, and the present system is the formulation of their deliberate judgment. They still differ amongst themselves as to the proportion of memory-work and stimulation-work, but it is too late in the day (if accurate at all) to tell teachers that to “educate” means “to draw out” the child’s “faculties,” not to put in. Every elementary teacher knows that he must train the child to think as well as furnish it with positive information. The point one may legitimately raise is whether the general educational practice represents a fair adjustment of the two functions.

It is essential in such disputes to have clear principles. What is the aim of education? The current phrase, “to make good citizens,” is far too vague. A good citizen is, in a large employer’s mind, a man who will work for two pounds a week and not annoy wealthier people by demanding more: in a clergyman’s mind, one who goes to church. The point is serious and relevant, because there is a growing tendency among the middle and upper class to insist on a return to the ideal of the old Church of England school society: the children must not be educated in such a way that they will aspire above the station to which the Almighty has called them. As, however, the educationist will probably reply at once that his duty is to do all in his power to promote intelligence during such period as the State thinks advisable, we need not discuss the larger ideal of developing the child’s powers on general humanitarian grounds.

But glance at the manuals which are used in our schools, and consider whether we have as yet realised the true ideal of education. These manuals, and the methods employed, are the outcome of a hundred years of critical discussion, yet I venture to say that they need to be entirely rewritten. I pass over the infant-schools and earlier standards, where the first general ideas are carefully, and on the whole judiciously, implanted. As soon, however, as the child enters its teens, it is painfully overloaded with memory-work. I take, for example, the manuals of geography and history which are used in educating children of eleven in a first-class London secondary school. They are crammed with information which will never be of the least use to one man in ten thousand, and which we have no right whatever to impose on the young brain with so much necessary work to do.

The manual of early English history which I have before me is a characteristically modern production. Instead of the grim old paragraphs, in alternate large and small type, on which the eye of the child nearly always gazes with reluctance, there are vivid sketches of life in successive ages. There is danger, perhaps, that the child will pass to the opposite extreme, and take the manual as a story-book, a work of ephemeral interest; at least careful guidance will be needed to enable it to select the necessary material which is to be memorised. But the chief defect still is the overloading of the pages with matter of no serious usefulness. The doings of Ethelbert and Ethelfrith and Redwald and Penda and Offa, whose very names bewilder the young mind, are compressed into a few forbidding paragraphs, instead of being relegated to the University. Later come Ethelwulf and Osburh and Ethelbald and Ethelbert; and Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf Trygvasson and Guhilda; and Rhodri and Llywelyn and Griffith ap Rees and Own Gwynedd and Egfrith and Malcolm Canmore and John Balliol. How many of us know, or need to know, a word about them, and their families, and their battles? Then the French wars are told in detail, and the pages bristle with dates and French names and genealogies; and the Wars of the Roses introduce a new series of repellent and useless names and dates. The child, in a word, is enormously overburdened with stuff which we adults would refuse to commit to memory or even to read. Yet this is a very modern manual, the last word in the adaptation of history to the mind of a child of ten or eleven.

The manual of European geography, also, is one of the most modern and enlightened that a teacher can choose, but it imposes a mass of pedantic and useless knowledge. Isotherms and isobars and the freezing of the Oder and Vistula and Danube; the navigability of the Ebro and Guadalquiver, and the wheat-growing areas of France and Spain, and the industries of Lille and Roubaix and Magdeburg and Lombardy and Smyrna; in a word, fully one-third of the details in the little manual—the details which it is most difficult to remember, which tax the child’s brain most, and will be forgotten soonest and with least loss—ought not to have been inserted. The whole plan is academic and pedantic: it is built on the supposition that the child must have a summary of the kind of knowledge which a geographical expert would have to master. And in later years the child must laboriously cover the whole globe with the same unnecessary attention to useless details.