The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

Writers on the subject are not wholly agreed whether we ought to substitute moral lessons for the discarded Bible lessons. We can in such a matter proceed only on probabilities, and it seems to me that judicious lessons for the training of character are very desirable. I do not so much mean abstract or direct lessons on the various qualities of character. If such lessons (on truthfulness, honesty, manliness, etc.) were tactfully and sensibly conducted, they could be of great service. There is really not much danger of turning the average British schoolboy into a prig. But indirect lessons, especially from history and biography, should be more effective.

In either case our teachers would need special training for the lessons, and no philosophic or religious or anti-religious view of moral principles should be admitted. Experience has surely shown how little use there is in giving children a “categorical imperative,” or a set of arbitrary commandments, or an æsthetic lesson on “modesty.” You cannot in one hour teach the child to think, and in the next expect it to accept your instruction without thinking, because you are not prepared to give reasons for your commands. It is sometimes forgotten that even children share the mental awakening of our age, and must be treated wisely. The American or the Australian child well illustrates the change that is taking place. It is increasingly dangerous to give children dogmatic or mystic instruction in rules of conduct, nor is it in the least necessary to base this important part of their training on disputable grounds. Every quality of character that is inculcated may be related to the child’s actual or future experience of life, and will find an ample sanction therein. Life is full of material for such lessons: material far richer and easier of assimilation than the doings of an ancient Oriental people with a different code of morals. Let these lessons of history and contemporary life be developed, let the child learn in plain human speech the social significance of justice and honour, avoiding namby-pamby dissertations on the beauty of virtue, and there will be placed in the mind of the young, not an exotic plant which the child will be tempted to eradicate, but a germ which will grow and bear fruit under the influence of its own experience.

The modern ideal of education further implies that the State shall provide higher tuition for those youths and maidens to whom it will be profitable to impart it. Scholastic evolution is advancing so rapidly in this direction that the ideal hardly needs vindication. Seventeen hundred years ago such a “ladder of education” existed in Europe; from the municipally-endowed elementary school the promising youth could pass, through secondary colleges, to the imperial schools at Rome. Had that model been retained and improved instead of being abandoned for fourteen centuries, Europe would be in an immeasurably greater state of efficiency than it is. We are restoring and improving the pagan model, and there are signs that in time we shall have a complete system of secondary, technical, and higher education, quite apart from the schools in which the children of more or less wealthy parents learn their traditional virtues and vices. If we have also some means by which able children whose talent has escaped the academic eye (of which we have many classical instances) may in later years have a chance of recognition, we shall exploit the intelligence of the race with splendid results.

The cost of this great reform need not intimidate us. Enormous sums of money have been given (by men like Mr. Carnegie) or bequeathed for the purpose, and the admirable practice will continue. But we need a searching revision of educational endowments, foundations, scholarships, etc. There is strong reason to suspect that estates which are now of great value are not applied to the scholastic purposes for which they were intended, or are badly administered, or are used in giving gratuitous or cheap education to the children of comfortable parents who secure favour or influence. A consolidation of all the endowments which had not in their origin an express sectarian purpose would provide a fund to which the State and municipal authorities need add little. The scheme would bring some order into our chaos of schools and colleges, and, while the more snobbish establishments would continue to preserve their pupils from the society of the children of tradesfolk, and would waste valuable resources on uncultivable minds, the youth of the nation generally, of both sexes, would be developed to the full extent of its capacity. These things have a monetary value. A distinguished historical writer told me that, on sending his son to Sandhurst, he proposed that they should study together the campaigns of Napoleon. The youth presently informed him that the traditions of Sandhurst did not allow them to do serious work outside the general routine. A few years later we heard the details of our South African War.

It will be a part of this increased efficiency to rid our secondary and higher schools of clerical domination. It is futile to say that the clergyman must represent morals and religion in the school. His record as a moralist during fifteen hundred years does not recommend his services. Even to-day public schools which retain the tradition of clerical masters are deplorable from the moral point of view. Some of them are nurseries of a vice which, unless it be discontinued when the youth goes out into the world, may bring on him one of the most degrading sentences of our penal law. The clerical method of character-training—one admits, of course, great occasional personalities—has little influence on these things. Public-school boys, and especially young men at our universities, know that every syllable which the preacher addresses to them is disputed, and no other ground of right and healthy conduct is, as a rule, impressed on them. Many will know that the grossest opinion of the clergy themselves is current in our public schools and older universities, and is embodied in numbers of scurrilous stories. The position of the clergyman in our educational world is false. He is there for the same reason that the Bible is in the elementary school: in the interest of the Churches. We have improved mental education enormously since it ceased to be a monopoly of the clergy. Possibly we will make a similar improvement in character-training; we can hardly do it with less success than they have done.

CHAPTER IX.
THE EDUCATION OF THE ADULT

If it be granted that it is the interest and the duty of a nation to develop the intelligence of its people, we must conclude that the work is only half done, or not half done, by even an ideal system of what is commonly called education. I am assuming that a time will come when no youth or maiden will enter workshop or office before the age of seventeen, if not eighteen; and that the better endowed minority of our children will, without regard to their private resources, be promoted to secondary, technical, and higher schools. This minority will, on the whole, need no further attention. Cultural interest and professional stimulation will ensure that their studies continue. But the majority will fall lamentably short of the ideal of developed and alert intelligence. The added three or four years will be enormously valuable to the teacher, but in the majority of cases the intellectual interest will still be so feeble that the distractions of life will at once extinguish it.

If we speak of our actual world, not of an ideal world, this fact is too patent to need proving. Forty-five years ago a band of enthusiasts fought for the establishment of universal elementary education. The survivors of that band confess that the splendid results they anticipated have not been secured. One is, indeed, tempted sometimes to wonder whether there was not more zeal for culture among the workers half a century ago than there is to-day. When you listen to a conversation, of workers or of average middle-class people, on politics or theology or some other absorbing topic, you are astounded at the slender amount of personal thinking and the slavery to phrases which they have heard. Their minds seem to resemble the screen of a kaleidoscope, on which the coloured phrases they have read in journals or cheap literature weave automatic patterns. I speak, of course, of the mass. I have given hundreds of scientific lectures to keen audiences of working men, and I know that tens of thousands of them have excellent collections of familiar books. But the result of forty-five years of education is far from satisfactory. It was thought that, when the people learned to read, and the ideas of an Emerson or a Darwin could be appropriated by any man of moderate endowment, the level of the race would rise materially. It has not risen as much as was expected. The phrases are learned and repeated: the ideas are not vitally assimilated, because the intellect is not sufficiently developed.

Two classes of people will impatiently retort that there is no need for further development. One class consists of those who dread a higher intelligence in the workers because it leads to discontent with their condition. To which one may reply that this concern comes too late. One needs little intelligence to perceive the inequalities of the distribution of wealth. The workers of the world have perceived it, and, although only an extreme Socialist minority demands equalisation, the mass of the workers demand a higher reward. Midway between Australia and England, on the deck of a liner, I heard a group of middle-class men and women contrasting the menace of the Australian workers with the industrial content of the mother-country. We landed, to find from the journals that the whole United Kingdom was punctuated by strikes, agitations, and demands. It is too late. A distinguished Belgian prelate was taken into a large foundry, and, observing the workers, he impulsively cried: “What a slave’s life!” “Hush, they will hear you,” said the manager. In repeating the experience he added: “They have heard: it is too late.” It will be better now if, in the industrial struggle of the future, there is intelligence as well as principle on both sides. If any large proportion of work in the human economy requires the sacrifice of the intelligence, there is something wrong with the work.

Curiously enough, the other class of people who are impatient of the design to stimulate their minds consists of the mass of the workers themselves. After eight or nine or ten hours of heavy muscular work every day, they say, they have no inclination or fitness for serious literature, serious lectures, or serious art. They prefer a drink, a bioscope, a music-hall. Eight hours’ work, eight hours’ play, eight hours’ sleep; that is the ideal. A very natural and symmetrical ideal, but—it is just the ideal which “the capitalist” wishes them to cultivate, and this might suggest reflection. Someone will do the thinking while they play. Democratic government is a mischief and a blunder unless Demos is capable of thinking. If the workers of the world have an ambition to control their destinies, they must realise that their destinies are things too large and complex and important to be controlled by men with sleepy brains. There is no solution of the broad social problem of this planet which does not imply that every adult man and woman, of normal powers, shall be alert and informed and self-assertive enough to take an intelligent part in its administration.