EDUCATION AND EUGENICS
A healthy wave of reaction seems setting in against the old ideal of "cramming" which once masqueraded as education. Already signs are apparent that in order to have a healthy mind a healthy body is necessary. A sentiment in favour of physical education is slowly arising and may some day be translated into statutes and administrative rule. At present the sentiment is a vague one and is not wholly free from the suspicion of ulterior motives connected with national defence. It cannot be gainsaid that the army and navy will gain in strength and efficiency by the improvement of the racial physique but the same forces might be equally increased by some new discovery in aviation, some new invention in machinery or some new combination in explosives peculiar to America. Methods of education must justify themselves first and last by their conformity to the physical, and moral and intellectual needs of the human basis of society. They must not be devoted to the development of a healthy manhood only, the interests of the race demand that healthy womanhood shall be the care of any truly national system of education. Until we have built up the body we are little likely to succeed in creating a race of pure-thinking, pure-living men and women. This is the universal need. Higher education, the highest intellectual culture is for the few, not for the wealthy few—but for the proved fit, for those whose antecedents and character show that their brain is capable of receiving and their powers are capable of using a fully developed education which would otherwise be a ridiculously wasted acquisition.
The intellectual education of the future will probably average a higher standard than at present but we must revise our criterion of judgment. We must realise that our current ideals tend rather towards making a nation of priggish inefficients than of happy, healthy home builders.
If our teachers have aimed in the past at cramming comparatively useless knowledge into every brain independent of individual capacity, it is not strange that our educational faults have been to neglect the physical side and to ignore the vital teaching which might have led our scholars in the direction of their own physical development. These two things must inevitably stand or fall together. If you neglect physical training it will be because you do not realise its importance. If you realise its importance you will not only devote your principal educational efforts towards its universal practice in the schools but you will see that nothing is left undone to induce the young to adopt in the privacy of their own lives the principles which make for physical perfection.
Heredity and environment alike teach this lesson. The child is father to the man, the parents of to-morrow are now being made. The weak should learn early their limitations, the strong should be taught how best to economise their strength. No Eugenist believes in over-emphasis of sexual knowledge, but every Eugenist believes in the absolute importance of early familiarity with the essential information of sex-life. To emphasise this knowledge would mean being guilty of the same kind of error as is at present prevalent. A knowledge of the laws of sex should never be separated from other physiological and moral education, its acquisition should be gradual, its full meaning should be so well prepared for that its physical manifestations in the youth of both sexes would be understood, without the necessity of a sudden jump from abysmal ignorance to overwhelming experience.
Co-education, the schooling together of boys and girls until puberty, is a step in the right direction. It familiarises children with each other in quite the best and most innocent manner; it is no more likely to create evil results than the daily life at home of the perfect family of boys and girls meeting under the protection of their own parents.
Co-education renders unnecessary that departing into separate schools which is so mysterious in early life. It aims at giving girls the benefit of boys' play, encouraging them in the boys' code of honour, and tending to prepare them for a citizenship they have to share with the boys whom they may even now regard as "chums." For boys the familiarity with girls' ways and girls' characteristics will help them to be courteous without being weak and to lose that shamefaced sex-consciousness which is the opposite to a healthy knowledge of the existence of another sex.