It is a commonplace that needs no labouring that modern education suffers many things from the “dead hand.” The tradition of the “grammar school” which aimed at opening the field of knowledge by a training in letters is still with us, despite the fact that we have become familiarised in recent years with a rounder and fuller conception of education. We have been told again and again that the business of education is to produce good citizens, to promote the growth of moral character, and so forth; and slowly this emphasis has made some headway in the minds of educational officials. But the whole implication of this conception of education is far from being realised, even by those who are actively engaged in the work of education. A disproportionate pre-occupation with “letters” and knowledge still remains to betray our bondage to traditional ideas; and this in spite of the fact that popular education has in recent years received a very definite orientation through the demand for industrial efficiency. But as yet there has not been—save in the region of what is called “technical education”—any serious and sustained effort to co-ordinate the whole subject matter of education to this particular end. “Technical” education appears in the scheme not as an integral or organic part of the process as a whole, but as a somewhat arbitrary and unrelated annex to the last stage of the process.
To this demand that education should minister to industrial efficiency we shall have reason to return presently. Here we are concerned only with the fact that though this demand has been fairly general and insistent, it has not succeeded in shaking the hold of tradition upon the method of the educational process. Popular education still consists in the main of variations upon and extensions of the three R’s; and though the experts have discussed widely and in detail the ways and means of directing the educational processes to given ends, the solutions have not yet arrived in any very substantial way in the schools.
Roughly, our popular education is still governed by the idea of equipping the young person with such a quantum of knowledge as he may be supposed to require in order to make a living and gain some sort of settled place in life. It has become more and more possible in recent times for boys and girls who show unusual aptitudes to proceed to the higher branches of learning; but in the main our thought of popular education has been coloured by a pernicious doctrine of “minimums.” We have asked how little education can be given consistently with the need of the individual and the society in which he lives; and the opposition which meets any endeavour to raise the “school leaving age” proves quite conclusively that we have not generally advanced beyond the stage of regarding that education as best which is soonest done with. For this the economic strain of life is partly accountable; it is desirable that the boys and girls should be wage-earning as speedily as possible; but even more responsible for this state of things is a general ignorance concerning the meaning and purpose of education. Indeed, few of those who are now parents have reason to recall with any profound interest or gratitude the days when they were receiving an alleged education. Something in the nature of a systematic campaign of education in the interests of education would seem to be necessary if the popular indifference is to be removed to any good purpose.
It has indeed to be remembered that popular education is still in its infancy; and the prejudice it has to overcome is the result of the inevitable failures of its experimental stages. When it is recalled that elementary education in England was until 1870 in the hands of voluntary agencies, and that only since that date has education become universally accessible, it is perhaps remarkable that education should have made as much headway as it has made; and much of our criticism of current educational methods tends to overlook what is under the circumstances the real magnitude of the achievement in education. At the same time it is plain that our educational methods are in need of much sustained radical criticism if our purposes in education are to be saved from mis-carriage.
II
But most of all do we require to clear our minds concerning the goal we are seeking through education. It is true, as Professor Dewey has pointed out, that it is not possible to define an end for education; for in a profound sense, education has no end. A true education will be that which fits an individual to go on learning to the end of his life. The aim of education is more education. At the same time this education will not be for its own sake, or for the learning it helps the scholar to acquire. Here again Dr. Dewey helps us by reminding us that one aim of education is social efficiency. Plainly and beyond peradventure no education will serve a democracy which does not produce socially efficient persons.
But this word efficiency has become discredited by its recent use. We have heard something of efficiency engineers who have tried to reduce human faculty into mathematical formulæ for the purpose of speeding up and suitably supplementing the mechanical processes of industry. It amounts to no more than a systematic endeavour to fit the human agent to the machine so as to get more out of the machine. The result for the life of the human agent as a whole is hardly taken into account. And even if this myth of efficiency engineering has met the fate it deserved, its very appearance and name are symptomatic of the general direction of popular thought upon the main business of a community. Nor is this confined to the classes that are interested in getting the utmost out of the worker, or to the unreflecting public. The British National Union of Teachers at its Annual Conference in 1916 declared that “this great war, with its terrible wastage of human life and material has brought into bold relief the economic potentialities of the child. As never before, the nation now realises that efficient men and women are the best permanent capital the state possesses.”[[56]] So that the business of education is to develop the economic potentialities of the child in order to provide capital for the state. It does not appear that the child has any rights in the matter at all. He is to be trained in order to become “the best permanent capital” of the state. It is to be hoped that two more years of war have brought a more fruitful vision to the National Union of Teachers.
[56]. Quoted in the Public (N.Y.), July 6th, 1918.
Yet the word efficiency is worth keeping, for it embodies the true conception of educational aim so long as it is rightly interpreted; and industrial efficiency must be allowed to enter into our interpretation of it. Industrial efficiency gains its preponderant emphasis in recent discussion because we are still in the toils of the disastrous illusion that the national ideal is national wealth. We think of the nation’s well-being in terms of its financial prosperity; and naturally we tend to subordinate all our social processes to this end. But the result of this tendency will be to create not a society, but a wealth-producing machine; and those human possibilities in which the final wealth of life lies, will have to fight a doubtful battle for their very existence, and at best can gain no more than a precarious foothold in the interstices of the money-making organisation.
From this bias education must be delivered—at whatever cost; and a doctrine of social efficiency enunciated which will be comprehensive enough to satisfy the requirements of the single mind and the social whole at the same time. In point of fact, these requirements are virtually identical, for that which makes a full man makes also for a full fellowship. The individual is to find himself in precisely those things which enable him to contribute his due to society. We need, therefore, to enquire somewhat broadly into the nature of the things in which the individual shall render his due to the commonality. We shall then be in a position to state in general terms what we should look to the educational process to provide.