LIFE ITSELF

Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 71, 23 February 1932, Page 9

LIFE ITSELF

"WHOLESALE EDUCATION” AND FUTILITY. HAPPINESS AND THE MANY. ABILITY AND THE FEW. (By St. John Ervine in the London Observer.) My generation, in its youth, was enormously enthusiastic about education, and, in its more extravagant moments, demanded that the way from the elementary school to the university should be made easy for everybody. That was, perhaps, our fault: that we wanted things made easy for everybody. We would have done better to have demanded that some things should be made harder. Our faith in education was illimitable and pathetic: we fondly imagined that we had only to tell people and instantly people would know; and we gave greater value to literary instruction than we now know to have been good. I. Our mistake was to suppose that one sort of education would be useful to every person, which is as sensible as the assumption that one sort of hat fits or suits everybody; and a lesson we drew from the War was that instruction must be as various almost as individuals. We discovered that everybody cannot learn the same thing in the same way, that just as a man has his own peculiar habits, so he has his own peculiar way of picking up knowledge. We learned, too, that it is one thing to tell a man how to do a thing and a far other thing for him to be able to do it. Leaders, we learned, are not made by courses of instruction, but neither are they made by spontaneous combustion. There has to be instruction, but it must be instruction to develop the individual, not to adapt him to a particular service. We have, I think, to revise our beliefs about the purpose of education and the capacity of people to receive it. We have also to learn that filling heads with facts, or at all events ipformation, is not education at all. The general assumption that we are a betterinstructed people than our forefathers is a dubious one. The late Professor John Burnet, in his Romanes Lecture for 1923 on “Ignorance,” declared his belief that “the young men of to-day are absolutely and relatively more ignorant than those of forty years ago, and, what is worse, that they have less curiosity and. intellectual independence. In Scotland, at any rate, this is true! . . .” But when I quoted this , assertion in the presence of the late Lord Haldane, he denied its truth. That vilely-used great man contained in himself all the enthusiasm for education that was left over from the War. 11. Whether or not we are better educated than our ancestors were is not, however, to be settled by statistics or by examination records, and the point that i 6 quickly being perceived by us is that we must somehow relate a man’s instruction to his character and nature. A first-class education is wasted on a third-class person, but that is not a good reason for abolishing the first-class education: it is a good reason for abolishing the third-class person. When, some time ago, I was shown over a handsomely appointed secondary school, I said to the headmaster, “Do you eveV feel that you are wasting your time here?” He replied, “Yes, in nine cases out of ten!” His comfort was the tenth case. But we may wonder whether it is worth while to misuse a man’s ability to teach in an attempt to put knowledge into the skulls of nine dunderheads in the hope that he may catch one person who can pass complicated examinations, especially when we are not satisfied that the tenth person is able to do anything else than pass examinations and are fairly confident that the nine dunderheads may be very competent with their hands. We tend, I think, too much to make specialists of people, specialists, too, not in a whole job, but in part of a job, and there seems to be a decrease in the number of. general handy-men, people who can do a variety of workpretty well. 111.

We shall have to ask ourselves what is the purpose of education. To make mankind happy? But I doubt if educated people are as happy as the uneducated. If it be true, as some assert, that education gives us greater opportunities for finding joy, it is equally true that it gives us greater opportunities for finding sorrow. Socrates was a learned and a wise man, but was he a happy man? He may, indeed, have liked to hear himself talk, but had he any pleasure in the contemplation of a world full of fools ? That, largely, was the knowledge that his learning and wisdom gave him. The thoughtful face is rarely a happy-looking face. It will be useless to say that each of us has hie own way of finding happiness, and that.what will enthrall Dr. Einstein would bore Miss Gracie Fields. That is true, but it is also true that the highly-cultured people appear to find less satisfaction in life than the lowly-cultured ones. That, perhaps, is desirable, for where there is intense satisfaction, there is no development, but it leaves us with the dreadful thought that there may never be any happiness for civilised man, that happiness will become more and more remote as he becomes more and more cultured. Education, then, it seems to me, has little or nothing to do with happiness, unless it enables us to find the full sum of our abilities jmd helps us to the greatest amount of appreciation of the greatest variety of things. Bridges says that since man cannot revert to animalism and be content to be well-fed and momentarily pleased . . . ther is no hope for him but to i attune

nature’s diversity to a human harmony, and with faith in his hope and full courage of soul realising his will at one with all nature,devise a spiritual ethic for conduct in life. Easily said, but how hard to be done t The flaw in much of the intellectual discussion of to-day is the assumption that we can be something other than we are, merely by taking thought and assuring responsibility. There are some who talk as if they believed that one has only to put the cabin-boy on the bridge and say to him, “You are responsible for taking this ship to New York ! and he will safely take it there. He is likelier to take it to the bottom of. the Atlantic. He_ needs education and he needs authority and he needs character, if he is to be a commander, and we shall not rightly order our commonwealth until we have learned that its government must be left to those who are fit to govern it, wherever they may be born; and our chief job now should be to open the way of authority to every man and woman who is fit to take it and to shut out from authority all those, the overwhelming mass of men aiuj women, who are totally unfit to take it.

And here, I think, we come to the true charge that may be brought against the English public school, which has been heavily, and often unjustly, criticised in recent years. The theory of the public school is sound,

and makes an immense appeal to the foreign mind, but the practice is 'ess sound than it ought to be. In my journeys abroad, I find, with interest, that parents wish that the English public school system were common in their countries. In the United States, in France, in Scandinavia, I have heard much admiration and envy expressed for our public schools, yet condemnation of them is common in Britain. Why? Because, I think, only the virtues of the system are apparent to the foreigners, while its defects are palpable to us. The' public school boy, despite his excellent discipline and his sense of form and his training in a high tradition, is inclined to trade upon his public school, to regard his education in it as a justification of himself, and 4 to expect deference and preferment to which his abilities may not entitle him, merely because he can announce that he lias been to Eton or Harrow or Rugby or Winchester. The assumption, too commonly made, that a lad, because he has been to one of these schools, is therefore superior in nearly every respect to a lad who has been to an elementary school or a grammar school is responsible for much of the sloppy conduct of our affairs; for lads from “good schools’ are pitchforked into jobs they are not fit to hold when lads who have the ability to hold them are denied them because their schools were common. I will not deny that the tradition or the public school imposes a decency of behaviour on the boys who attend it, for it plainly does, but it is absurb to corterid that the standard of decency of behaviour among such boys is highef than it is among other boys, or that attendance at a public school necessarily fits a lad for leadership. The belief that the public school reduces all its pupils to a dull level seems baseless to me. Attendance at Eton, indeed, seems to have an inflammatory effect on many boys, and a list of Etonians who have taken to turbulent politics and erratic ways of life would probably astound its readers and make the influence of elementary schools, by comparison, seem terribly taming. Those who complain of the flattening effect of the public school make the unwarrantable assumption that every boy who goes to one has the potentialities of a very unusual person, and the still more unwarrantable assumption that any boy who has such potentialities can be robbed of them by a schoolmaster ! Mr Wells, in a charming story called “The Wonderful Visit,” makes the Respectable Tramp compare the pupils at a national school to pithed frogs. J.t s a thing these here vivisectionists da They takes a frog and they cuts out his brains and they shoves a bit of pith in the place of ’em. That’s a pithed fr°SWell—that there village is full of pithed human beings. . . . Everyone of them ’as ’ad their brains but out and chunks of rotten touchwood put in the place of.it. And you see that little red place there.” He indicates the national school. “Yes, that’s where they piths ’em!” Then follows a long and speciously clever passage in which the process of pithing is described. Yet no one has been more eager than Mr Wells to send boys and girls to school, and in the days when he sat on the Bench at Folkstone, he was severe in his punishment of parents who neglected to send their children to be pithed. But what, in the Respectable Tramp’s opinion, was the alternative to a pithed human being The Respectable Tramp? It was a very young and impatient Mr Wells who wrote The Wonderful Visit,” and I imagine that if the Respectable Tramp had been brought before him at Folkestone on a charge of failing to have any infants lie possessed well and truly pithed, Mr Wells would have had no compunction in heavily fining him. Pithing is good for the majority of us. For we keep the balance of the world. We are spending enormous sums of money on an educational system which causes many prejudiced persons to wonder if we are not wasting our means; and it is likely that we shall greatly revise our ideas on education and # its purpose. I think that we send workingclass children to school too soon and withdraw them from it earlier than we should, with the result that we obtain little value for the money their schooling costs us; but whether that be so or not there seems Lttle doubt that the sort of education we give is insufficiently individualised, and that we are more concerned to produce clerks than to produce craftsmen.