"I do not know how it is in foreign countries," says one of Goethe's heroes,[1] "but in Germany it is only the nobleman who can secure a certain amount of universal or, if I may say so, personal education. An ordinary citizen can learn to earn his living and, at the most, train his intellect; but, do what he will, he loses his personality…. He is not asked, 'What are you?' but only, 'What have you? what attainments, what knowledge, what capacities, what fortune?' … The nobleman is to act and to achieve. The common citizen is to carry out orders. He is to develop individual faculties, in order to become useful, and it is a fundamental assumption that there is no harmony in his being, nor indeed is any permissible, because, in order to make himself serviceable in one way, he is forced to neglect everything else. The blame for this distinction is not to be attributed to the adaptability of the nobleman or the weakness of the common citizen. It is due to the constitution of society itself." Much has changed in Germany since Goethe wrote these words, but they still ring true. And they have not been entirely without their echo in Great Britain itself.[2]
[Footnote 1: Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, Book v. chapter iii.]
[Footnote 2: The contrast which has been drawn in the preceding pages, as working-class readers in particular will understand, is between the aims, not the achievements, of German and British education. The German aims are far more perfectly achieved in practice than the British. Neither the law nor the administration of British education can be acquitted of "neglect for the claims of human personality." The opening words of the English code, quoted on p. 359 above, are, alas! not a statement of fact but an aspiration. We have hardly yet begun in England to realise the possibilities of educational development along the lines of the British ideal, both as regards young people and adults. If we learn the lesson of the present crisis aright, the war, so far from being a set-back to educational progress, should provide a new stimulus for effort and development.]
But man cannot live for himself alone. He is a corporate being; and, personality or no personality, he has to fit into a world of fellow-men with similar human claims. The second charge against the German system is that it ignores the value of human fellowship. It regards the citizens of a country as "useful and organisable subjects" rather than as fellow-members of a democracy, bound together by all the various social ties of comradeship and intercourse.
The Prussian system, with its elaborate control and direction from above, dislikes the free play of human groupings, and discourages all spontaneous or unauthorised associations. Schoolboy "societies," for instance, are in Germany an evil to be deplored and extirpated, not, as with us, a symptom of health and vigour, to be sympathetically watched and encouraged. Instead, there is a direct inculcation of patriotism, a strenuous and methodical training of each unit for his place in the great State machine. We do not so read human nature. Our British tendency is to develop habits of service and responsibility through a devotion to smaller and more intimate associations, to build on a foundation of lesser loyalties and duties. We do not conceive it to be the function of the school to teach patriotism or to teach fellowship. Rather we hold that good education is fellowship, is citizenship, in the deepest meaning of those words; that to discover and to exercise the responsibilities of membership in a smaller body is the best training for a larger citizenship. A school, a ship, a club, a Trade Union, any free association of Englishmen, is all England in miniature. "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society," said Burke long ago, "is the first principle, the germ, as it were, of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind…. We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, to our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places… so many images of the great country, in which the heart found something which it could fill."[1]
[Footnote 1: Reflections on the French Revolution, pp. 292, 494 (of vol. iii. of Collected Works, ed. 1899).]
There is one fairly safe test for a system of education: What do its victims think of it? "In Prussia," says Dr. Sadler, "a schoolboy seems to regard his school as he might regard a railway station—a convenient and necessary establishment, generally ugly to look at, but also, for its purpose efficient." The illustration is an apt one: for a Prussian school is too often, like a railway station, simply a point of departure, something to be got away from as soon as possible. "In England a boy who is at a good secondary school cares for it as an officer cares for his regiment or as a sailor cares for his ship," or, we may add, as a Boy Scout cares for his Troop.[1]
[Footnote 1: Special Reports, ix. p. 113. Dr. Sadler's article deals with secondary schools only. Unfortunately, no one can claim that the idea of fellowship is as prominent in English elementary schools, or even in all secondary schools, as the quotation might suggest.]
Democracy and discipline, fellowship and freedom, are in fact not incompatible at all. They are complementary: and each can only be at its best when it is sustained by the other. Only a disciplined and self-controlled people can be free to rule itself, and only a free people can know the full meaning and happiness of fellowship.
§5. German and British Ideals of Civilisation.—Lastly, the German system regards national "culture" rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation and the justification of its claim to a dominant place in the world. This view is so strange to those who are used to present-day British institutions that it is hard to make clear what it means. Civilisation is a word which, with us, is often misused and often misunderstood. Sometimes we lightly identify it with motor cars and gramophones and other Western contrivances with which individual traders and travellers dazzle and bewilder the untutored savage. Yet we are seldom tempted to identify it, like the Germans, with anything narrowly national; and in our serious moments we recognise that it is too universal a force to be the appanage of either nations or individuals. For to us, when we ask ourselves its real meaning, civilisation stands for neither language nor culture nor anything intellectual at all. It stands for something moral and social and political. It means, in the first place, the establishment and enforcement of the Rule of Law, as against anarchy on the one hand and tyranny on the other; and, secondly, on the basis of order and justice, the task of making men fit for free institutions, the work of guiding and training them to recognise the obligations of citizenship, to subordinate their own personal interests or inclinations to the common welfare, the "commonwealth." That is what is meant when it is claimed that Great Britain has done a "civilising" work both in India and in backward Africa. The Germans reproach and despise us, we are told,[1] for our failure to spread "English culture" in India. That has not been the purpose of British rule, and Englishmen have been foolish in so far as they have presumed to attempt it: England has to learn from Indian culture as India from ours. But to have laid for India the foundations on which alone a stable society could rest, to have given her peace from foes without and security within, to have taught her, by example, the kinship of Power and Responsibility, to have awakened the social conscience and claimed the public services of Indians in the village, the district, the province, the nation, towards the community of which they feel themselves to be members, to have found India a continent, a chaos of tribes and castes, and to have helped her to become a nation—that is not a task of English culture: it is a task of civilisation.