THE BLUNDER OF MODERN EDUCATION

In these days of unexampled international competition, when, on the one hand, England has reached a stage of her Imperial development that must inevitably make great demands upon the British race, while, on the other, we are compelled to acknowledge ourselves far inferior to our great rivals in educational equipment for the impending commercial struggle, the question must force itself upon us: Whence comes this obvious waste of educational effort and of the material it serves to manufacture? It is a question which must come to the forefront now that we stand upon the threshold, not so much of a new century—for that merely signifies a mechanical calculation of time-as of a new era in political and social life. And it is one that cannot be shirked if the Anglo-Saxon race is to survive in the struggle of the nations, and to accomplish the great mission - which some of the most far-seeing world politicians have ascribed to it.

The assertion that our entire system of education is totally wrong from beginning to end will probably scandalise both the conventional Conservative and the progressive-minded Educationalist. The vast majority of people either cling to the conviction that the system itself is adequate, or believe that its principles only require extension to meet the growing necessities of a rapid increase in population and commercial competition. Such persons can be induced to tinker with the existing machinery, but they are unable to grasp the idea that the whole foundations of our educational system are absolutely false in principle; that most of the great educationalists and teachers of the past have expended their genius in building up this system upon altogether wrong lines; and that their efforts have had the effect of retarding, instead of encouraging, the intellectual development of the race. The greatest obstacle to human progress that evolution has to encounter is this mental conventionality, which is the direct product of a system of education that aims at creating a uniform type of mind. Thousands of young men and women are turned out every year by our schools and universities upon an exact pattern, like sausages from a Chicago factory. Each is provided with precisely the same stock of know

ledge, and consequently the market becomes overcrowded with enormous numbers of workers all trained to perform the same set of functions. The number of university graduates who sink into poverty and obscurity has often been remarked upon by persons who have made a special study of cheap lodging-houses and their inmates. What is the explanation of this circumstance? Is it because education is in itself an ineffectual preparation for the actualities of life? Or are the subjects taught in our schools and universities useless and unprofitable of themselves? The answer is that education is an indispensable preparation for any kind of efficient work, but that it must be education applied in a sensible and logical manner. The curriculum itself probably contains all the subjects that may be necessary or useful. It is not what is taught that is ridiculous, but the cramming of each individual with the identical stock of knowledge possessed by his neighbour, without regard to his personal taste and capacity.

Let us take the case of the average well-educated man. He is born, we will suppose, of parents whose means just enable them to give him the best obtainable education, but do not suffice to render him independent of earning his own livelihood. At the age of five, probably earlier, he is taught to read and write. Half a dozen years are then spent in preparing him, by a conventional course of elementary study, for a public school. He is sent to the latter at eleven or twelve, and remains there until he is twenty or thereabouts. During this period he is crammed with precisely the same information as the other boys. His recreations are practically organised for him, and he acquires uniform habits of mind with his companions. When he leaves, the school has stamped upon him a common individuality shared by all his schoolfellows. This process is then continued at the university. He enters with hundreds of other young men upon a certain course with a fixed object—the taking of his degree. The same kind of inflexible routine is conscientiously gone through, and his mind thoroughly flavoured with the university sauce which is to identify him throughout life. By the time he has graduated—not only in book knowledge, but in manners, habits of dress, thought, and everything else—his parents have done all they can for him. He has now to choose a career for himself. Feeling no call to the Church, he elects to go in for the Civil Service competitive examinations. Then follows the greatest of all educational crimes the stuffing of the brain with so much knowledge avoirdupois. He muffs at everything, however, and, having no taste for the law and being absolutely unfitted for business, he tries to make a living by his pen. Hundreds of others, he finds, are in a similar plight and are trying to do the same thing. But here, if anywhere, the defects of his training become conspicuous. Journalism wants ideas. He can only offer good grammar, a style founded upon the

Latin syntax, and some classical ornamentation. There is no market, he discovers, for these commodities. They may be excellent accessories, but they are to be found, like the Masters of Arts who pen them, at every street corner. So, being equally unfitted by reason of his grammatical accomplishments for cheap reporting on the daily Press, he drags on a miserable and immoral existence as a university coach, helping others to the same unhappy state of existence into which he has himself fallen. By the time he has arrived at middle age, he begins to discover that the world is not very well ordered; a fact which he probably ascribes to some defect in the political system. An exceptionally gifted man, even at this mature period, sometimes succeeds in shaking off the parasitic traces of his early training. But for the average person it is too late; and it is even doubtful if he ever realises that he is the victim, not of a cruel and callous world, but of an idiotic system of education specially designed to fit the smallest possible number for survival.

The whole theory upon which our educational method is based is, in fact, utterly absurd and hopelessly unsuited to the ordinary conditions of life. If we wish to establish a rational system, we must go to the root of the evil and build up an entirely new edifice upon fresh foundations. The modern method of bringing up children, in the first instance, completely stunts their educational growth; and the process of teaching to which they are subjected at too early an age succeeds in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in merely checking their intellectual development; while the final touch of the university-unless it be happily escaped-deals it the coup de grâce in the most approved fashion. The mischief really commences, therefore, with early childhood. It has found its origin in the stupidity of parents, due of course to the cast-iron conventionality which has been forced upon them from youth upwards, warping all tendency to independent and rational thought. But of late years the State, equally hide-bound from precisely the identical causes, has stepped in and translated this parental ignorance into an Act of Parliament. It is now actually an offence against the law to give a child a proper chance of developing the faculties with which evolution has been trying, in its struggle against the imbecility of mankind, to endow the human race. The moment an infant has learnt enough words to enable it to form ideas, down swoops the State (or, in better classes of society, the parent or guardian) and hands it over to the pedagogue to manufacture its thoughts and force its mind into conventional channels. This wicked proceeding stops the natural growth of the mind. Genius and originality, both of which exist potentially in the unsophisticated child, are eradicated with a perversity that is almost malicious. If not utterly and wantonly destroyed, they are kept under and discouraged, until, like all disused faculties, they finally disappear of their own accord. At the age of

five, children begin to develop powers of observation. If left alone, or merely encouraged to exercise this function in their own way, children will contract the habit of thinking things out for themselves. How many grown-up people do this? The whole science of life as we practise it consists in using substitutes for individual reflection. Novelists save us the trouble of philosophising on our own account about human nature; the Press provides us with manufactured opinions on all the topics of the day; the pulpit bolsters up our religious beliefs with ready-made arguments. It is all the result of our early training; and the wonder is that people can be found to express any new ideas at all. On this fatal plan the youth of the nation is brought up. Original thought is methodically nipped in the bud; and with the first initiation into the mysteries of the alphabet commences an organised attempt to infuse into every child's brain the same heritage of conventional, thought-paralysing facts.

As far as the bringing up of young children is concerned, the remedy is obvious. Until they have reached the age of seven years, at the least, children must not receive any instruction at all. The duty of the School Attendance Officer should be reversed. It ought to be his function to see, not that children attend school at a certain age, but that they do not attend before attaining a minimum number of years, which might be fixed at seven or even more. Such a prohibition would undo a vast amount of evil, although parents would of course be free to act as they pleased in their own homes. Doubtless it would take a generation or more to get rid of conventional notions respecting the teaching of children; but if the State set the necessary example, common sense would in the end prevail against case-hardened stupidity. By this means a chance would be given to children to show the bent of their minds. Any body Anybody who has had much to do with children will know that there is a wonderful development of curiosity and speculation regarding almost everything in the universe between the ages of five and seven. Education should consist in encouraging and fostering it, instead of in diverting the brain into the channels of the common-place. The teaching of elementary subjects ought to be applied tentatively and with great caution, the main objective of the teacher being to allow the mind to expand as much as possible outside of reading, writing, and arithmetic. It should be remembered that the first of these subjects is too apt to supply a substitute for original reflection, while the other two are more or less mechanical exercises of the brain and hand. Primary education should, in fact, be limited to the fewest possible subjects. Reading, writing, history, and the native language would form a sufficient basis upon which to rest the foundations of individual development.

Our existing school system consists in lumping together masses of school children in what are called classes, and stuffing into their

heads collectively a quantity of knowledge based, not upon the individual bent of each child, but upon a fixed code and curriculum. The principle is to set forty or fifty children doing and thinking precisely the same thing. The result is inevitable. There is a top of the class and a bottom of the class. Those who reach the former are regarded as the clever ones; those who remain at the latter are looked upon as dunces. The classification is wholly unfair and grossly idiotic. All that it really reveals is the perniciousness of a system which creates stupid children by forcing upon their brains subjects for which they are not receptive. The fool of the Latin class might distinguish himself in natural history; but the pedagogue goes on stuffing him with syntax and grammar, regardless of the fact that his mind is absorbed in beetles, and that he never attends school without a pocketful of mice. Not only must this method of teaching en bloc be abolished altogether, but teaching in itself, as we understand the term, should be rigorously avoided. Every encouragement ought to be given to pupils to think. There should be less reading and more reflection. The pernicious custom of learning by rote ought to be inscribed upon the penal code. Hanging would be too light a punishment for the teacher who destroyed the minds of his charges by making them commit Casabianca to memory. It is not the duty of the schoolmaster to drone out set lessons to a class, but to get into touch with each pupil and to assist the development of his individuality. Teachers should not lead, but follow. It should be their function to discover the natural bent of each child, and to shape its course of study accordingly. The minds of children cannot be developed to full advantage under a compulsory and uniform method. The aim of education should be to get the best out of each individual, and not to obtain an average of mediocrity. This result can only be attained by differential treatment, not by wholesale cramming on a cast-iron system. In Germany some attempt, it is true, is made in the direction of specialisation. Bat it is made too late. The uniform type of young man is first produced by the conventional method, and specialisation is grafted on at the end of the process. It is a half-measure which retains the erroneous principles of education, whilst making a lame effort to counterbalance some of the evils they serve to produce. But the results, as the last quarter of a century has shown, are at least very much in advance of what we are attaining in this country.

In fact, without descending to personalities, it may be pointed out that England has never felt more acutely than during the past eighteen months the want of great men. There are hundreds of conventionally educated, uniform-patterned, honourably-intentioned mediocrities to grace our public service upon ordinary occasions, capable, at the outside, to use Lord Rosebery's famous phrase, of muddling out right in the end. But in times of national emergency