Procrustes

by M. Alderton Pink

There can be little doubt that this particular aspect of the educational problem will attract much official attention in the near future. There is even a chance that the issue may not be unduly obscured by political controversy, for leading politicians of both sides agree in their diagnosis. The President of the Board of Education, Lord Eustace Percy, has recently told a meeting that the desire of the working man to-day is to use the school to get his son into some black-coated job and to keep him away from skilled manual labour. This he regarded as a most extraordinary mistake. We should never get any real success until we re-created the pride of skilled manual work. In another speech he said that the danger of the secondary school system was that, when we should be using these schools for training leaders for all the professions and industries and businesses, we are in fact using them to train the subordinates in a few “respectable” industries. Such remarks might pass with many people for an expression of reactionary Toryism, if their attention were not called to the fact that Mr. Philip Snowden has recently written to the same effect in a Sunday newspaper—“A scholastic education is apt to make a youth despise useful mechanical work. The products of our secondary schools and universities are crowding the black-coated professions and occupations. Education is a failure unless it inculcates the idea that all useful work is honourable, and that the working engineer, or carpenter, or weaver is a more useful member of society than a ‘commission agent’. Society needs men and women with the highest scholastic attainments. But the number of such will always be small. The main part of the education problem is to fit the average person for the work of the average person.” The practical urgency of these views is indicated by the fact that the President of the Board of Education and the Minister of Labour have now jointly appointed a committee to inquire into the public system of education in relation to the requirements of trade and industry.

Idealists of a certain sort, however, will brush aside the sordid controversy about commercial values and will put up a hard fight for the principle of a Liberal Education,—an All-round Training that will provide an Outfit for Life. They will continue to maintain that the traditional modicum of the classics, mathematics, science, and the modern tongues, provides the best training for a lad, whether he is to become a clerk, an engineer, a company-promoter, or a pork-butcher. They will recoil in horror from the mere mention of “vocational training.”

But this “liberal education” theory involves several fallacies,—fallacies which are now being perceived in many quarters, and which will be completely exposed in the next few years. In the first place, an education completely divorced from the requirements of a vocation is a luxury appropriate only to a leisured class, or a class free from economic pressure: it is, in fact, a legacy from the independent families of the upper classes or the well-to-do middle classes who sent their children to the public schools and the old grammar schools, knowing that the question of bread and butter was not an urgent one. Now, in the changed conditions of the twentieth century, we still complacently take boys from working-class homes, give them a “liberal” education until they are sixteen or eighteen, and then turn many of them adrift to become clerks or grocers’ assistants, laying the flattering unction to our soul, as we say farewell, that they will add their figures or cut their rashers all the better for having tasted the sweets of poetry or wrestled with the problems of geometry. Of course, some of the boys concerned may find their true niche in clerking or in the grocery line; in which case their intellectual ability is such that training in the more abstruse mathematical or linguistic processes has been wasted on them. But if we give a boy of ability in any direction a prolonged education and then fail to find him a position in life which gives scope for his ability, we are surely conferring on him a very doubtful blessing. The major portion of his time after his leaving school will be spent in earning a livelihood; and the way in which he spends that time will have an enormous effect on his happiness. The frustrated and disgruntled man of culture is socially objectionable and politically dangerous. The dictum that education should teach a man how to use his leisure is one of those half-truths whose easy acceptance is so dangerous; in the future we shall have to learn the complementary half-truth that education must fit the individual for his life’s work.

The exponents of the “liberal education” theory are usually those who are most urgent in pleading that the aim of the school should be the formation of character. They maintain that the pupil’s personality can be developed and modified by the influences brought to bear on him in the school environment. Holding such views, they cannot ignore the need for providing a suitable career for the pupil after he leaves school. The process of forming his character does not cease as soon as he enters business; on the contrary, the nature of his occupation—its suitability or unsuitability to his temperament—will profoundly influence him for good or for evil. The school cannot, therefore, ignore the duty imposed on it of guiding its pupils as far as possible into the vocations for which they are naturally fitted.

The theoretical considerations just mentioned are reinforced by others of the most practical importance. For Great Britain, and indeed for the whole of Europe, the economic struggle during the next few years will be most intense. Conditions will be such that this country, in particular, will have to make the most of its human as well as its material resources. It will not be able to afford the wastage of human ability either through failure to find out and cultivate the best brains or through neglect to fit the man to the job. It will be forced to adopt a system of training which will provide an education at once liberal and adapted to economic needs. And it will be useless for the more narrow idealist to bewail the intrusion of economics into the domain of education. After all, literature, the arts, and the study of pure science flourish only so long as economic conditions permit. Just as the man who is constantly toiling for bread is debarred from purely cultural pursuits, so the nation whose economic position is unsound can spare its children neither the money nor the time for any education beyond the most elementary.

Nor is there any real antagonism between the claims of culture and those of economics. The State which seeks economic health must demand that each citizen shall do his best work. He will do his best work in the vocation for which he has a natural aptitude. The business of the school is to discover and foster natural aptitudes. The business of the State as an economic entity is to contrive by all possible means to guide its children into suitable vocations. In a state with a proper economic organisation there must, therefore, of necessity be a vital connection between a child’s school-training and his future career.

But this statement of the essential relationship between aptitudes, education, and vocation does not mean that schools should become merely training-establishments to act as feeders to particular professions or industries: it does not mean that the schoolmaster or a government official should examine every pupil at the age of twelve or fourteen and decide that he must be an engineer or a draper’s assistant and proceed to train him for that purpose and draft him into a post in due course. It does mean, however, that the boy, for instance, who wants to use his hands, and may eventually become an engineer, should not be given a bookish education which takes little or no account of his abilities and interests; it does mean that such a boy should pass through a course of instruction which will at once give scope for his native powers and through them develop his whole mentality; it does mean, also, that the school and the State should not dismiss that boy at a given age and allow him to drift into a clerkship merely because of some accidental financial considerations or because conditions of entrance to the engineering trade clash with academic arrangements. In short, it means that the school-system should be adapted to the boy and not the boy to the system, and, further, that education authorities should regard it as part of their function to guide into proper channels the special abilities which the teachers have reared.

Presented in this way, the case for some sort of correlation between education and vocation should convince even those obstinate opponents of “vocational training” who are apt to see in such a proposal nothing but a device of the devil (in the guise of the Federation of British Industries) for the more efficient production of “wage-slaves.” As ever increasing numbers of boys and girls pass into places of higher education, teachers are realising more and more the need for reform on the lines indicated. They see the waste of effort involved in passing boys and girls wholesale through a system which takes little account of individual differences or even of broad differences of type. They see that for many children a “liberal education” is not necessarily one which follows the traditional academic curriculum, but rather one which suits itself to individual needs and which seeks to develop the pupil’s powers by setting him to do what he can do, instead of forcing him to try to do what he can never do with success.