In the modern education and in the Socialist doctrines that are preached, emulation, competition and success are spoken of almost as though they were evils in themselves. People are to have without attaining. Children and men and women are taught to forget that ‘they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize.’ It is considered bad form to remember that there is a Box Office, that it is the world’s medium for deciding human values; and that to gain prizes it is necessary to ‘so run that ye may obtain.’
These old-world notions are worth repeating, for however we may wish they were otherwise, they remain with us and have to be faced. And on the whole they are good. Success at the Box Office is not only to be desired on account of the money it brings in, but because it means an appreciation and belief in one’s work by one’s fellow-men. In professions such as the actor’s, the barrister’s, the politician’s, and to a great extent the dramatist’s, and all those vocations where a man to succeed at all must succeed in his own lifetime, the Box Office is, for all practical purposes, the sole test of merit. The suggestion—a very common one to-day—that a man can only make a Box Office success by pandering to low tastes, or indulging in some form of dishonesty or chicanery, is a form of cant invented by the man who has failed, to soothe his self-esteem and to account pleasantly to himself for his own failure. A study of the lives of great men will show that they all worked for the two main things, popular recognition and substantial reward, that are summed up in the modern phrase Box Office.
It may be that in some ideal state the incentive to work may be found in some other institution rather than the Box Office. It is the dream of a growing number of people that a time is nearly at hand when the Box Office results attained by the workers are to be taken away and shared among those high-souled unemployables who prefer talking to toiling and spinning. Such theories are nothing new, though just at the moment they may be uttered in louder tones than usual. St. Paul knew that they were troubling the Thessalonians when he reminded them ‘that if any would not work neither should he eat,’ and he added, ‘for we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies.’ St. Paul makes the sensible suggestion ‘that with quietness they work and eat their own bread.’ To eat your own bread and not someone else’s, you must work for it successfully and earn it. That really is the Box Office principle.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF EDUCATION.
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine:
But a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
Proverbs xvii., 22.
The Professors of dry bones have broken so many spirits in their machine that they will not grudge me a laugh at their little failings. A mere “man in the street” like myself can do little more than call attention to some of the weaknesses of our educational system, well understanding that the earnest Schoolmaster knows far more about the disadvantages of education than anything he can learn from his surviving pupils. For my part I have never made any secret of the fact that from my earliest days I disliked education, and had a natural, and I hope not unhealthy, distrust of schoolmasters. Let it here be understood with the greatest respect to the sex that “schoolmaster” embraces “schoolmistress.” Most school-boys that I remember have had that attitude of mind, but many remained so long in scholastic cloisters that the sane belief of their youth, that the schoolmaster was their natural enemy, became diminished and was ultimately lost altogether. Indeed, there are few minds that undergo the strain of years of toil among scholastic persons without becoming dulled into the respectable belief that schoolmasters are in themselves desirable social assets, like priests and policemen and judges. Now no small boy with a healthy mind believes this. He knows that the schoolmaster and the policeman are merely evidences of an imperfect social system, that no progress is likely to be made until society is able to dispense with their services, and though he cannot put these ideas into words he can and does act upon that assumption, and continues to do so until his natural alertness is destroyed and he is dragooned into at all events an outward observance of the official belief in the sanctity of schoolmasters.