A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

“The comfortress of unsuccess,

To bid the dead good-night.”

Neither in the material and the intellectual spheres alone do we aspire more nobly for our children than for ourselves. Not success and not fame limit our demand of Fate, that she repair in our children the injustice of which we ourselves cease to complain. We want them to be better men and women than we have been. To put the thing on its lowest ground (and nothing but the lowest motives ever seem to be accorded the smallest validity by the more conspicuous among recent vaticinators of human action) it behoves us to make the best we can of our children’s morals, if we are presently in old age likely to be dependant upon them. But for those who, like Malvolio, “think nobly of the soul,” it is sufficient to rely upon the manifested predilection of every parent in order to be convinced that the education of the future will be moralised as well as rationalised through the natural emotions of man. Only the dullest and most turgid imagination will consent to believe that the horrible conditions of competitive struggle will be permitted to foster only the lower faculties, as greed, selfishness, unscrupulous cunning and subtle evasiveness, at the expense of all the finer characteristics of man. There is no cynic so base as would deliberately seek the fortune of his sons in the inculcation of chicane. Struggle must sharpen all our intellects as life grows yearly more difficult, but one by-product of this attrition will be the increased morality with which the education of each generation successively arising will be conceived.

Pausing for a moment to remark, in regard to the methods in detail by which the improvement of education will most likely be sought, that to foresee what is probable is not necessarily to endorse it as ideal, and that the object of this book is not to formulate Utopia, but to predict the consequences implied by existing forces after the latter have been during a stated time in operation; and admitting that no reform ever practised within the recorded history of man has been without drawbacks inherent in its own constitution, it may be said at once that the work of instruction is capable of mechanical and instrumental improvement not less considerable than any other labour to be undertaken by ourselves and our successors. Even within a lifetime’s limits all sorts of appliances for assisting the mind of the learner to apprehend the facts sought to be learnt have been invented, and our children, as we all know, are much more easily taught than we were ourselves. The laudator temporis acti is always pretty ready to depreciate the value of these improvements, and perhaps it is natural enough in most of us to find it difficult to believe that any plan of teaching can be better for our children than the one which produced results so pleasingly exemplified by ourselves. But at all events, it will be generally, if a little grudgingly, admitted that any form of apparatus capable of saving time and trouble in teaching is capable of being ranked as an improvement. Unquestionably appliances having this object will be constantly invented and used during the present century. For instance, it is hardly conceivable that something less than perfection in the teaching of a foreign pronunciation by the mouth of the best teacher who can be hired for the work will content us, when perfected talking-machines presently enable us to give examples of the still better speech. Evidently a boy would learn to speak French with a purer accent by listening to a phonograph which, freed of the present tin-trumpet timbre and whirring, repeated the speech of the Comédie Française, than by hearing an ordinary master read aloud. To say this is not to suggest that professors of languages will be dispensed with; but their teaching can be thus supplemented. Similarly the use of magic-lanterns and kinetoscopic pictures is capable of improving greatly upon the blackboard and chalk still used. But the plan of education in itself is so greatly more important to be foreseen than the mechanism by which the details can be worked out, and the latter can with so very little difficulty be imagined by anyone interested in them, that the reader shall not be troubled with any discussion of this branch of the subject, but will rather be asked to concentrate his attention upon the moral and intellectual aspects of it.

Conceiving, what I have all along endeavoured to show is reasonable to conceive, that all social institutions will be governed with ever-increasing intelligence and rationality as time goes on, and that they could not possibly be tolerated otherwise, it is easy to see that education as hitherto and at present practised would never do for our grandchildren, let alone for our more advanced descendants a hundred years hence. To begin with, parents in that era would certainly consider it hopelessly and criminally unethical, if not actively immoral. Projects of reform, especially in morals, are often dismissed as visionary, because it is pointed out that no changes can take place in the social order which do not appeal directly to the self-interest of the individual. In other words, there is no mainspring of social action except aggregated selfishness. Without delaying to examine the validity of the belief, it may be said at once that its full acceptance is no obstacle to the admission of the whole case on which is founded the belief that education will be conducted chiefly with a view to its moral effect at the period I am attempting to describe. The very circumstances on which writers rely, who predict the ethical deterioration of man, are those which make the ethical reform of education inevitable. Precisely in proportion as competition tends to harden and debase, there will arise the unavoidable necessity for deliberate counter-action of this tendency, resulting, as the effect of the measures necessitated becomes felt, in the changes of commercial and political conditions already[1] predicted. If we consider at all thoughtfully the necessities of a hundred years hence, it is not difficult to foresee the general lines upon which they are likely to be met—lines not necessary to be accepted as representing a perfect or ideal state, but broadly indicating the methods which the effect of visible tendencies will by that time demand of a practical people.

Here, as everywhere else, the only safe guidance as to the practice of the future must be sought in the tendencies of the present. The tendency most forcibly in evidence during recent times is that in favour of softening the former acerbities of education. Whereas the schoolhouse of half a century ago was something like a penitentiary in the way it was conducted, the schoolhouse of to-day is managed as much like a place of recreation as it possibly can be. At all events, recreation is at least as assiduously cultivated as study, and the candidate for an under-mastership who has a good cricket record will find employment a good deal more easily than one with a double-first. If there be any complaint of public and other upper-class schools at the present time—and there is room for plenty of complaint—it is more often that games are too much insisted upon than that brains are overtaxed. There is a visible reaction in regard to this; but it is not to be regarded as a reaction in favour of the old draconic methods. On the contrary, “the growing sentimentality of the age” steadily demands amenity of treatment for the fortunate offspring of the twentieth century. The late James Payn, sanest and kindliest of men, was never tired of denouncing what he called the barbarous and indecent corporal punishments of Eton. He used to say that if a picture of an Eton boy being birched were published in the Illustrated London News no boy would ever be birched again, and I believe that he tried to get either Mr Latey or Mr Shorter to insert such a picture. Be this as it may, what he said was perfectly true. I shall have something to say presently on this same question of school discipline: meantime it may with perfect safety be predicted of the master’s cane a hundred years hence that it will be found only in museums, and (whether rightly or wrongly) be regarded as a relic of degrading barbarism. One reason why corporal punishment will have to be abolished is that boys and girls will certainly be educated together instead of apart. As we could hardly cane girls (and it would be of very little use if we could) we shall assuredly have to get on without caning their masculine schoolmates.

I suppose that few will contest the statement that the religious teaching practised in schools at the present time not only has very little to do with the question of morality but tends distinctly, except in Roman Catholic seminaries and some few non-conforming colleges where a special kind of education is given, to have less and less connection therewith. Whatever moral effect “schooling” has upon the adolescent is recognisably and recognisedly due to the “tone” of the school itself, that is, to public opinion among the taught, and only indirectly to anything which emanates from the teachers. Assuredly a proficient knowledge of Biblical history has no ethical effect greater than a proficient knowledge of Greek mythology (at least of so much of it as is properly selected for school use), and we have it on the authority of Mr E. H. Cooper, a very entertaining if not particularly sound writer on children, that even “Confirmation” classes are by no means uniform in promoting a religious sentiment in boys.[2]

The moral advantages of education, therefore, tend to be found in the effect of public opinion and the general “tone” of a school. It is discovered in practice that direct moral inculcation is not very successful. It is to be assumed that the ingenuity of future pædagogues will be devoted to the discovery of the best ways in which indirect moral influence can be cultivated. In view of the high importance which will evidently be attached to such influence, we may take it for granted that it is not in connection with any single branch of tuition that it will be sought for, but that it will be root and branch of the whole scheme of educational work. One very powerful assistance will be rendered to this by the system of co-education.

It is quite certain that boys and girls will always be educated together a hundred years hence. The tendency of the sexes to become less different intellectually is a known fact of sociology.[3] It carries with it an inevitable tendency to dispense with the separation of the sexes in education. Wherever co-education has been tried its effects have been excellent. The presence of female students in medical colleges has had a markedly reformative influence on the manners and moral tone of medical student life, not long ago the opprobrium of civilisation. The advantages to a parent of being able to send his sons and his daughters to one place of instruction, and to the children themselves of the companionship and maintenance of family relations thus afforded, are equally obvious. In one other respect, which can only be touched upon lightly here, the system of joint education must be enormously beneficial, at all events to boys, and greatly beneficial to their sisters. Every competent schoolmaster is acquainted with special difficulties liable to arise about the age of puberty. The monastic seclusion of the schoolboy (like that of the single men in barracks who, according to Mr Kipling, “don’t grow into plaster saints”), and the glamorous mystery surrounding the opposite sex, tend to accentuate these difficulties. The habit of constant association with girls who are not his sisters relieves a boy of the exaggerated sense of sexual isolation. A boy always brought up with girls is not liable to be constantly thinking about girlhood: and in practical experience many people are aware that boys who have had the opportunity of frequent association with the girl friends of their sisters grow into purer-minded and more chivalrous men, than those who have lacked this advantage; and the thoughtful future will assuredly cultivate the system which affords it. It is quite evident, in addition, that the fatuous and unreasonable mystery with which for centuries the natural facts most liable to be important in adult life have been made inevitable subjects of unholy curiosity, will be swept away, to the great enhancement of sane and clean thought in girls as well as in boys, in young women even more than in young men: while the tragedies which knowledge can avert, hidden horrors of our own day that we are too sentimental to envisage, but that everyone must now and then have met with a hint of, will happily exist no more, or occur but rarely.

Among the indirect considerations which will assist us to the conclusion that co-education is the best, will be the endeavour, everywhere apparent, to make the work of teaching agreeable to the taught. This is the keynote of the tendencies whose fruition we may look for at the end of this century. It will have been recognised that to conceive of education as a process of forcing knowledge into unwilling memories is to place the greatest possible obstacle in the way of success. Even the child whose natural faculties are joyously receptive is bound to resist more or less unconsciously teaching that is conducted on the assumption that he won’t learn if he can possibly help it. The worst child in the class sets the tone of the rest. The boy who can most successfully evade real learning, and trick his instructors well enough to escape punishment, is the hero of the place. Nothing could be much worse for morality. Public opinion in schools, useful as it is in other respects, is everywhere harmful in this particular. The pædagogue of the future will proceed on a method far more rational.