I have described an extreme case, and the judicious reader will realise that the process is rarely completed in so short a time as the last paragraph suggests. But sooner or later most men and women come to believe in experience, and to this belief is due our tyrannous treatment of the young. I can conceive that an age will come that will shrink with horror from the excesses we commit in the name of education, and will regard us who force children to do their lessons against their will very much in the way in which we regard the slave-owners of the past, only with added indignation that our tyranny is imposed on the children’s minds, and not on the bodies of adults. Let those conservative readers who find this comparison a little strained reflect for a moment on what it is that we have to teach the next generation, with what manner of wisdom we chain the children’s imaginations and brand their minds. We teach them in the first place to express themselves in sounds that shall be intelligible to us, and this, I suppose, is necessary, though I should like to doubt it. Further, we invariably instruct them in the sciences of reading and writing, which seems to me frankly unfortunate. In Utopia, as I conceive it, the child who thought there was anything worth reading would teach itself to read, as many children have done before it, and in the same way the rarer child who desired to express itself on paper would teach itself to write. That any useful purpose is served by the general possession of this knowledge I cannot see. Even civilisation cannot rejoice that her children are able to read the Sunday newspapers and scrawl gutter sentiments on the walls of churches.
Beyond this we teach children geography, which robs the earth of its charm of unexpectedness and calls beautiful places by ugly names; history, which chronicles inaccurate accounts of unimportant events in the ears of those who would be better employed in discovering the possibilities of their own age; arithmetic, which encourages the human mind to set limits to the infinite; botany, which denotes the purposeless vivisection of flowers; chemistry, which is no more than an indelicate unveiling of matter; and a hundred other so-called arts and science, which, when examined without prejudice, will be found to have for their purpose the standardisation and ultimate belittlement of life.
In Utopia, the average human being would not know how to read or write, would have no knowledge of the past, and would know no more about life and the world in general, than he had derived from his own impressions. The sum of those impressions would be the measure of his wisdom, and I think that the chances are that he would be a good deal less ignorant than he is now, when his head is full of confused ideas borrowed from other men and only half-comprehended. I think that our system of education is bad, because it challenges the right of the individual to think constructively for himself. In rustic families, where the father and mother have never learnt to read and the children have had the advantages of “scholarship,” the illiterate generation will always be found to have more intelligence than their educated descendants. The children were learning French and arithmetic when they should have been learning life.
And, after all, this is the only kind of education that counts. We all know that a man’s knowledge of Latin or the use of the globes does not affect his good-fellowship, or his happiness, or even the welfare of the State as a whole. What is important is, that he should have passed through certain experiences, felt certain emotions, and dreamed certain dreams, that give his personality the stamp of a definite individual existence. Tomlinson, the book-made man, with his secondhand virtues and secondhand sins, is of no use to any one. Yet while we all realise this, we still continue to have a gentle, unreasoning faith in academic education; we still hold that a man should temper his own impressions with the experience of others.
ON COMMON SENSE
About this time last year I was fortunate enough to go to a very nice children’s party, or, rather, a very nice party for children. I add the appreciative epithet because there was only one grown-up person there, and that person was not I; and when all is said it may be stated confidently that the fewer the grown-ups the better the children’s party. Nevertheless, although there was only one grown-up for about thirty children, and she the most charming and tactful of girls, I had not been long in the place of fairy-lamps before I discovered that with one exception I was the youngest person there. I had come out that night in the proper party frame of mind. My shoes were tight and my mind was full of riddles of which I had forgotten the answers, and as I drove along in a four-wheeler—who ever went to a party in anything else?—I noticed that the stars smelt of tangerine oranges. When I reached the house everything looked all right. The place was very busy, and there were lots of white frocks and collars, and pink faces.
Yes, it ought to have been a jolly party, but it came about twenty years too late, and the children, I had almost added, were about twenty years too old. Instead of forgetting everything else in the whirl and clamour of play and dancing, they were, it seemed to me, too busy registering the impressions to enjoy themselves. One of them, a child of eleven, was already smitten with a passion for the mot juste. “My tongue,” she told me gravely, “is like a cloud”; and, later, “a marigold is like a circus.” She had a crushing word for a comrade who was looking at herself in a mirror. “But you don’t really look as nice as you do in the looking-glass!” The other children did not seem much better, and I stood forlornly in their midst, as a child stands among the creased trouser-legs of its elders, until I saw a scared little face in a corner apart from the rest. “Why aren’t you playing?” I asked. The child looked me straight in the face, and burst into a thousand tears. At least here was something young, something not wholly wise. We sat together, exchanging grave confidences all the evening.
Possibly this is a queer way in which to start an article on common sense, but there is more than madness in my method, for I feel assured that the children have derived their new wisdom—a senseless wisdom, a wisdom of facts—from their absurd parents. The latest creed, the belief that comfort for the masses prevents remorse in the individual, may be well enough in its way, but it creates a very bad atmosphere in which to bring up children. They are taught that life is an agglomeration of facts, and no sort of miracle, and by learning these facts like little parrots they lose the whole thrill and adventure of life. They do not go out to kill dragons, because they know that there are no dragons there. Chivalry survived with children long after common sense had killed it as dead as mutton in the adult mind. But now they, too, have found it out, and there are only a few silly poets and mad lovers to keep the memory of Quixote green.
What are these facts by which we are to guide our lives, of which, indeed, our lives are to consist? One of the simplest, one that has come to have the force of a proverbial expression, is the fact that two and two make four, and this is one of the first things we teach our children.
I have a friend who suspects that in moments of intense consciousness two and two, weary of making four, would make five for a change. I have heard it argued against him by mathematicians that the fourness of four—four’s very existence, as it were—depends on its being related to two in the subtle fashion suggested by the well-known dogma, but I can discern no grounds for this assertion. Consider the fate that would befall a man who went for a ride on an omnibus for the purpose of making use of this one fact. He might be aware that the fare to Putney was fourpence, and, proud of his mathematical knowledge, might pay his fare in two instalments of twopence. What would be his consternation to find that, as he reached his journey’s end, he would have to pay another penny because he had not paid his fourpence in one lump sum? In terms of ’bus fares, two and two do not make four, and I would multiply examples of such exceptions to the accepted rule.