EDUCATION BY ILLUSION

Evening Star, Issue 20985, 26 December 1931, Page 2

EDUCATION BY ILLUSION

We are in the middle of the season of Illusions. Christmas turns things upside down and inside out for the young and even for most of the old. The great feature of it is the Christmas stocking. What hopes and fears have come and gone these last two days! The long-expected visit of Santa Claus is over. Nothing remains but the investigation of the gifts he has brought. Alas I for those he has forgotten or deceived! But hope in childhood is hard to kill, easy to keep alive. And perhaps to-morrow the great thing may happen, if impatient youth can wait so long. Then there are the hosts of fairy books and stories of impossible happenings. Tho children drift off into lands and scenes where logic has no place, where facts are as elusive and clastic as tho air, where the intellectual and ethical principles of a Peter Pan or an Alice in Wonderland are the order of tho day. It is a groat, magic world this, in which children live for a time and are as happy as the day is long. It is the magic world of illusion.

But now we arc being told that it is all w'rong; that we are doing immense injury to the children in thus feeding their feelings and minds with things that are not facts, that are not actual realities. So great an educationist as Madame Montossori enters her caveat against it. Others of lesser note agree .with her. But it has been reserved for Hussia to prohibit it altogether by law. And what do they propose to substitute for it? They propose to wipe out all books and references to fairies, gnomes, Sa'nta Claus, Peter Pan and Wendy, Alice in Wonderland, and all such stuff, and substitute just bare facts, scientific facts. They are translating Mr Cradgrind into actuality. " Teach these boys and girls nothing but Pacts. Pacts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else; you can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Pacts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” Hero is how the Bolshevist would set about doing that. Take, e.g., tho story of ‘ .Jack and the Beanstalk.’ Of course there never was any real Jack, and tho beanstalk never existed. They are not facts. But there are other things that arc facts and can be made as interesting and far more useful than the absurd Jack and his beanstalk. Here, 0.g., is a real boy called Tom, Ho was just an ordinary boy in his early years, like any other. But when he grow up he got an idea about how a string could bo heated till it became red, oven white, and how this string could be put in a glass bottle and hung up to give a light almost ns bright as tho sun. .So tho children arc thus introduced to 'Thomas Edison and his electricity. Some day they will discover that Jack and the beanstalk never had any reality. But Edison and his electricity arc veritable facts that will not deceive them. They will never outgrow them.

Now, let us put in contrast to it a story of Santa Claus. Wo liavo to go to America to understand the pomp and ceremony of Santa. Ho looks rather out of. date in this country arriving in midsummer. But in America ho comes with winter—winter With one choppy finger on his lip. Ho had torn the icicles from the hills And they clanked at his girdle like manacles. An American writer, in one of his books, gives a very realistic account of Santa’s arrival in Kansas City. A letter in the papers informed the kiddies that Santa was to arrive at a certain date and a certain hour. He did. Santa drives reindeers. So these were got. An elaborate car was constructed, and Santa himself driving it rigged out in full canonicals. His car was crammed full with presents for all the kiddies in the city, and they and their parents thronged the streets in their thousands. The entire police force was required to control the crowd. In other cities and towns Santa was announced to arrive in a similar way and at a different hour. So the fun was spread over the State, and tens of thousands of boys, old and young, had a jolly time.

Of course, it was all a deception. All? The older ones, of course, saw through it. But there were certain other things that were no deception. A groat quantity of money was put into circulation. Merchants, tradesmen, storekeepers had their gains greatly increased. But, better than this, was an increase of joy and sympathy.' The latter was stimulated by the sight of an Eskimo snow house, though even Alaska reindeer herders had never seen such u thing. Bub it certainly increased the sense of comfort, though at the expense of fact. As one sat at one’s own fireside with all its surrounding amenities it helped ono to visualise what it must mean to dwell in a snow house for several months of the year. And as for joy, children usually lose their belief in the reality of Santa when they get to the age of five. But this show would probably add a year or two to tbo fiction, and multiplying this gain of happiness years by the total number of children affected wo got an aggregate of tens of thousands of .such years added to the country’s children. That was a gift not lightly to bo despised in these clays when it is so meagre. It was therefore quite in order for the Merchants’ Association, the Parent-Teacher Association, and tbo Chamber of Commerce to express their appreciation of the enterprise of those who staged the show. “ The old spirit of Christmas has been revived and stimulated, and everybody has been made happier and better by this Yuletide entertainment.”

But after nil it was a deception, a fiction, a fraud. Well, what then? Where will you begin to draw the line? At history? But think of the deceptions that historians practise. Head American histories of a generation ago or less and compare their narratives of

events and tlicir meaning with those of our own country, and you will ho halfinclined to agree with Napoleon that “ history is a set of lies agreed upon.” We read the romances of the middle and earlier-ages, done up in beautiful poetry by Morris and Tennyson and others. It is not hinted that Sir Galahad never had a bath, that some of the “ revered saints of the church made vows never to hath and never to bo unkind to the Hoc that crawled over them. And that the only two great bathing eras of known history wore tho ancient period which historians call the decline of the Roman Empire and our modern period when Fundamentalists tell us we are ail going to thS devil.” Such information might be bad for tbo health of youngsters, who seem to bo born with a medieval propensity to dirt, not to speak of tho profits of soap manufacturers. Or take the sphere of what are called facts on which Russia insists on dosing its youth. What is a fact? Who knows? They are constantly changing tlicir form and reality. Life cannot be, expressed in terms of the multiplication table. Even in these omniscient days of ours it is being discovered that our knowledge of so-called facts is of a very precarious tenure. The Tom Edison method of teaching children which Russia proposes to substitute is halted at ouco .by tbo query which a youngster put after hearing a lecture by Professor Tyndall on ‘ Electricity ’: “ Rut what is electricity?” To that question nobody has yet found an answer. And so of other so-called facts of the external world. When wc track them all hack to their ultimates wc are confronted by a rim of mystery wo cannot pierce. Says one of our greatest scientists, Professor Eddington: “The exploration of tho external world by the methods of physical science leads not to concrete reality, but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which these methods arc unadapted for penetrating,” Wo aro resting tho whole science of the physical world on something wo call atoms —something that nobody has ever seen, something that rests on an inference from mathematical symbols, and these again rest on our perceptive faculties. Tho whole outside world is nothing but a series of thoughts, and we have no surety that they correspond to external reality. A single new sense, of sight or hearing added to the five wo have might upset the whole apple cart of science and philosophy to-morrow, even as the discovery of radium has already done in a very largo degree.

So wo aro driven back to the truth that the progress of life is a progress through illusions, not delusion. For those who think they can abolish this lot them study whore that leads to in Dickens’s great book, ‘ Hard Times.’ He shows there with unerring instinct and power the results of the “fact” philosophy and what becomes of those who practise it upon the young. As Professor James says, when you have reduced the ‘ Fifth Symphony ’ of Beethoven to the scraping of horsehair over the intestines of a cat, you may have fact of a sort, but you have missed the soul of the truth, which is the only thing that matters. So education by illusion is the groat law of life from which there is no escape. The man outgrows the illusions of the child, but he never outgrows his own. The danger with him, as with the child, emerges when the illusions aro found out; when the little girl discovers that her doll is only a dead thing stuffed with sawdust, and the grown man finds out that things aro not what they seem and begins to wander if ho himself is not tho shadow of the dream. The groat business of life is to distinguish between the symbol and the reality, between the illusion and the truth which it half conceals and half reveals—all life is a march through illusions. It is a constant dropping of symbols to gain tho deeper reality of which they aro the shadow. When it fails to do this, when it takes its illusions for facts or delusions and comes to believe that all existence is a game of blind man’s bull’ and the world a fraud, thou tho game is lost. Ami that is so with how many in these Christinas days!