The Madhouse and the Nursery

New Zealand Tablet, 19 January 1922, Page 11

The Madhouse and the Nursery

(By G. K. Chesteueon, in the 'New Witness.)

The much criticised criticism of nursery rhymes, which was recently uttered by Mrs. Barnett, was hut part of a current cant generally uttered less courageously. Mrs. Barnett’s surprise on discovering that a nonsense rhyme was nonsensical is only the logical application of a criticism now turned against all natural things, and therefore especially against all childish things. Our grandfathers made a child dress like a grown-up person; but they allowed him to think as a child and feel as a child, and did not prematurely or impatiently require him to put away childish things. It is true that St. Paid says that when he became a man he put away childish things; and, with all reverence, I think it is perhaps one reason why popular Christian tradition has preferred St. Peter. But we do not wait until little Paul has become a man. People a hundred years ago dressed him like-a mute at a funeral but they allowed him to go on bowling a hoop to the verge of manhood. We dress him like a fairy in a pantomine, and then ask his opinion upon Relativity and the League of Nations. For instance, there are new schools where children are taught to play at being politicians. They are no longer left to play at being pirates that infinitely more honorable trade. They are assembled in little parliaments to vote on amendments, and move the previous question, and draw the Speaker’s attention to the fact that there are not forty members present, or whatever are the terms of the oligarchical tomfoolery which their elders endure. The child also will have nothing to add to what his right honorable friend told the house on April the first, 1901. The infant also will discover that it is not in the public interest to state whether the Germans have landed in Kent. If this were all, indeed, the training of the rising generation in Parliamentary politics would be merely elegant and external. But I presume that they 1 are taught the realities as well as the ritual. A charming comedy is enacted when little Tommy toddles across to little Willy, and offers him a coin or counter representing a financial share, in return for his support for a Government contract. Even more exciting would be the scene in which Polly aged six boldly attempts to blackmail Peter aged seven, and threatens to cover the nursery wall with posters (in colored chalks) revealing his naughtiness, unless he hands over an adequate amount of toffee. Nor must we forget the occasion on which Tommy buys his toy coronet for two thousand acid drops; or the responsibility of the two infants who act as Party Whips, and have to carry all these sweets secretly in their pockets until they have dispensed, them in various forms of corruption for the good of the Cause. These are all operations requiring skill and training; and as it is obviously impossible to imagine modern parliamentary politics being conducted without them, it naturally follows that we shall carefully equip our young politicians with them. For the older and more experienced politicians perpetually tell us that the anomalies and abuses we criticise are inevitable and inseparable from all practical politics; as when Mr. Balfour said, of the Marconi case, that poli-

ticians must judge each other differently from the judgment of the cold world without; or Mr. Bonar Law said it would bo useless to audit the Party Funds, apparently because politicians are so passionately resolved on secrecy that they would start another secret fund to evade the audit. So that if these things are a part of parliamentary politics, and if -those politics are to be taught to the little ones, we must certainly lose no time in teaching them the safest and most delicate methods of concealment and corruption. The truth is that all our educational experiments are in the wrong direction. They are concerned with turning children, not only into men, but into modern men; whereas modern men need nothing so much as to be made a little more like children. The whole object of real education is a renascence of wonder, a revival of that receptiveness to which poetry and religion appeal. Instead of turning the nursery or the infant school into an image of the political meeting or the stock exchange, there would be a far better case for turning the senate or the market into an imitation of the nursery. It would do the masters of bureaucracy or big business a great deal of good to be governed as children are governed, and taught to amuse themselves easily as children do. Those aristocrats who suffer the charge of inhumanity, when they hunt the fox, would be wisely limited until they had learned to hunt the slipper. Those financial magnates who are never happy till they have made a corner would have to be content with puss-in-the-corner. Their only ring would be poetically described as a ring of roses; and they would play at honeypots instead of moneypots, as in the ordinary sense of making pots of money. I am not prepared to say how far such a saturnalia of simplicity can be regarded as being within the sphere of practical politics. But I am quite serious when I say that this should be the direction of all education; and that nearly all modern education is a wild waste of money and time, because it is working in the opposite direction. It is trying to sophisticate the people who are simple; or in other words to pervert the only people who are right. When I was in America, for instance, some lunatics were actually trying to teach children to take care of their health. In other words, they were teaching babies to be valetudinarians and hypochondriacs in order that they might be healthy. They were even proud of their halfwitted and wicked amusement; and one of them actually boasted that his schoolchildren were “health-mad.” That it is not exactly the aim of all mental, hygiene to be mad did not occur to him; but surely such teachers have everything to learn, I will not say from healthy children, but from all the naughty children who ever fell into the river, and possibly got drowned, before they could grow up into maniacs. If anyone thinks this a merely violent form of words, I refer again to the example in which the words themselves were used by the people themselves. In America some educational enthusiasts did really announce with pride that the children in a particular school were “all health-mad.” This meant, it really and truly meant, that the infantsAvere in an intense state of vigilance and concentrated excitement on the problem of the preservation of their own bodily health; on how to forsee indigestion or mark the stages of a cold. And the man meant, he really and‘truly meant, that this was a condition on which they were'to be congratulated. So that, instead of toy helmets or toy swords, they would have toy goggles and toy respirators; possibly little toy bottles of disinfectant or even a toy hypodermic syringe. That anybody should bo mad on anything is not exactly the goal and ideal of all mental science. That anybody should be mad on health is always of all things the most unhealthy. That children should be mad on health is something so horrible that one would hardly dream of it, outside some such torture-chamber as the tale called “The Turn of the Screw”; where children are possessed of devils. Yet I repeat that I read the boast with my own eyes in an American paper, as a report of the success of a hygienic educational campaign. It was some silly stuff about sending a clown round to give serious advice on hygiene, enlivened with jokes; I bet the jokes were not so amusing’as the serious remarks. I have noted more than once that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. If we have grown so ignorant of the very shape and posture of Man that we do

not know his head - from his heels, it will riot even amuse ; us ; that he should stand on his head. There ,would be but faint amusement in an amaeba standing on his head, because we are a little vague;- about which is* his , head. If - we met some monster on the syclic pattern of certain, animalculae, but swollen to monstrous size and rolling down the road, we might. show a shade of surprise; but we should hardly be overwhelmed with really. hearty laughter. There would be nothing comic about his turning a cartwheel; he would be too like a cartwheel. It is amusing to see a little boy turn a cartwheel (in moderation) precisely because a little boy is not a wheel, and'is designed by his Creator for a. loftier end than that o( drawing a cart. Now the modern world cannot make head or tail of itself, and thereX ' fore cannot see the fun itself, even when it' is engaged like a kitten in chasing its own tail. The little boy cannot become funny by being upside down, because his earnest and thoughtful teachers are by 'no means certain about when hs is right side up. At any moment a professor of the new "hygiene or the higher athletics may prove that a child standing on his feet is in a strained, unnatural posture, throwing too much weight on the ankle-bones, and undermining the whole nervous system. And then all tho children will rest standing on their heads; and we should all be expected to take it seriously. And if the image be considered exaggerative, I recur to the example I have given before that in certain educational institutions in America, children are actually taught to cultivate a meticulous and medicinal care of their health; and that a" eulogist of. this extraordinary system actually used, as part of his eulogy, the statement that the children were ‘“health-mad.” You canot get anything madder than that. You cannot get anything regarded as mad where that is regarded as sane. You cannot get anything treated satirically where that is treated seriously. Satire is necessarily dead in a society so incapable of any natural reaction; in a society that has no kick in it, even when it has such things to kick. Imagine what a satirist of saner days would have made of ■'the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted to be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in which that great extravaganza could be written but I dimly see some of its episodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the child pausing, in the middle of a cartwheel, or when he has performed threequarters of a cartwheel, and consulting a little notebook about the amount of exercise per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he has climbed exactly onethird of a tree; and then producing a clinical thermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the use of blazoning to the whole universe, in all imaginative colors, the manifestation of this idiot’s madness, when he himself praises it for being mad?