But there was another influence making for the collapse. We quoted in our previous book a head master who remarked at a school prize-giving that the only questions worth asking are those that cannot get a definite answer. Political education consists almost entirely of such questions. Its sheet anchor is freedom of thought; its method is controversy; its end is not in complete mastery of a box of intellectual tricks such as will win full marks in an examination, but in the modesty of realised ignorance and the enthusiastic search for fresh lights in the darkness. Socrates was put to death by the Athenians because he would not desist from asking them questions, and it is to be feared that some of our pupils would have incurred the same fate had the customs of the time permitted it. The taste for controversy on the fundamental subjects will grip a youth like the taste for drink, as many who have passed through undergraduate days at Oxford or Cambridge can remember. Suppose a boy enters into political controversy with his form master, over the| giving back of an essay, or with his house master at the luncheon table….
Now, there is a Divinity that doth hedge a schoolmaster, and the hedge must be kept in somewhat careful repair. So long as we are concerned with subjects like elementary Latin and Greek or Mathematics, we are dealing with a body of knowledge in which, to take the examinations standard, all the masters get full marks. All knowledge is contained in a set of small school books which the masters, for their sins, know more or less by heart backwards. Even history, if it is sufficiently badly taught, may be grouped among such subjects, for, strange as it may seem, it is quite possible to teach it in such a way that no boy feels impelled to ask questions either insoluble in themselves or beyond the scope of the master's immediate memory. There are schoolmasters who definitely discourage or even forbid the asking of questions by the class. "Little boys should be seen and not heard"—that worst of all educational maxims—makes a larger contribution to the buttressing up of the present system than is usually supposed. A lowering diet of irregular verbs keeps the boy mind "docile," to use a word of ironically perverted meaning, and prevents it from impinging embarrassingly upon the lightly guarded regions of the master's intellectual entrenchments. In fact, political education set up a new intellectual standard. It was a subject in which no one, boy or master, got "full marks,"—scarcely even President Wilson, perhaps, if you took his "work" as a whole! All were learners, all were fellow workers together, and before the vast scope of the task, differences of proficiency between the various workers seemed hardly to matter.
Here, then, rises a difficult question. Ought the schoolmaster to possess, or appear to possess, complete knowledge of the subject he teaches? The present writer has taught a good variety of subjects during nine years, and on the whole he has found his ignorance, not only of politics, but of far more finite matters, a very helpful educational instrument. As an emergency teacher of Latin on the modern side, for instance, he found it a positive advantage that he had forgotten more of the language than his pupils had ever learnt. His occasional quaint errors did not always pass undetected, and their detection had probably an educational stimulus for the form which outweighed the loss incurred when his mistakes passed without notice. Nor did he feel greatly the loss of intellectual stature. It was partly made good by the ingenuity with which he explained how he had come to make the mistake. And if there was loss in intellectual prestige, there was an increased sense of intellectual comradeship. But this is a trifling and not wholly serious digression.
Some masters stand for intellectual infallibility. These political discussions disturbed them. They felt that their credentials as schoolmasters were being examined and found wanting. They accused the boys of priggery. It was a most false charge, for the boys were enthusiasts, and enthusiasm is a form of self-forgetfulness as priggery is a form of self-consciousness. Still priggery was the word. The charge of "priggery" was added to the charge of "pacifism."
On these two lines the opposition developed and ultimately triumphed. It was suggested that "the school would be empty in a couple of years," if political education continued. Here, it would seem, our critics were trading on their false idea of the parent, and believing what they wished to believe. Take the statistics of entries, which is the only tangible evidence on the subject, and the only conclusion you can draw is that political education either had no effect at all, or that it slightly increased the commercial well-being of the school. It was not on such ground as this that political education was doomed. As we said at the beginning of the chapter, the material of our experiments was the boys and them alone. We had made a short cut. We had made no effort to convert our colleague. We trusted to results for their conversion. But, as the preceding narrative will have shown, the greater our success, the greater became their irritation, when success was labelled "pacifism" and "priggery." Without intending it, we had played "Pied Piper" upon some of the best of the house masters' foster children. We had envisaged a school as a single corporate society, boys and masters working together with the maximum of frankness and equality for the common end, education. We had not allowed for the fact that a school cannot become such a corporate society, unless the staff has become such at the same time. Like three-quarters of the reformers of history, we had, in our own despite, become rebels. And so all was over. There is now no Politics Class, no School Observer in the school of their foundation, though two other schools of fame have started papers on similar lines, with handsome acknowledgments to our example. There are no political societies in the Houses. Two or three of our pupils have left before their time, and we, the authors, are no longer schoolmasters, only "educationists,"—it is a change for the worse.
[1] Generally speaking, the liberalism of The Manchester Guardian or of President Wilson's speeches.
CHAPTER III
PROPAGANDA
"A point hardly touched on in the book is the difficulty of teaching politics without the disadvantages of partisanship. It is worth discussion."—Manchester Guardian.
"If 'politics'—even politics as an art culled from the classics, from pro-German[1] economists and historians, from poets such as Shelley, and from German[1] higher critics of the Bible—were taught to fifth form boys with crude impressionable minds, the result would be Bolshevism. We agree that under careful guidance much of ultimate political value can be taught from history and literature. But it must be done with infinite care, and opinions must be excluded from the teaching. That is the difficulty."—Contemporary Review.