FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF REVOLUTION

II

THE RIGHT EDUCATION FOR THE WORKER'S CHILD

Of the people who count in the public eye there are distressingly few who really understand, or have any wish to understand, what education means. Labour may know, but Capital as a rule does not. Capital, for the most part, is only concerned with technical efficiency; it would teach people how to win a livelihood. Labour knows that, if we would avoid disaster, we must teach them how to live. To Sir Eric Geddes anything beyond the three R's is educating children for higher positions, educating them deliberately for removal from their class. Labour knows that it must be the aim of education to lift the whole class, and no mere beggarly elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic can avail for that.

'What is the use of giving an expensive education to these village children, when they are only going to be farm hands? said an excellent manager of a country school the other day. Why, they need it because they will be not only farm hands, but also citizens, voters, and masters of our fate,' was the reply.

It was a new point of view to him, though truly it should not have been. One had hoped that such people, from Sir Eric Geddes downwards, would have learned wisdom from the appalling fate of Russia, from the disappearance of capital, the destruction of credit, the collapse of industry, the judicial murder of tens of thousands, the death by starvation of tens of millions in a single year. That is what happens when a people take a hand in government who have not had the education necessary to enable them to do so with judgment and discretion.

In these times of upheaval those who are anxious to maintain something like stability should be lavish rather than niggardly in their expenditure on education. Ignorant or half-educated people are ready dupes for the extremist. Every plausible theory sweeps them off their feet. Teach them to think, and they can weigh opinions: they can play their part in the government,

central and local, of a democratic country. Deny them the education that alone can fit them to play that part, and you convince them that you do not intend them to have any part to play. They will believe that repression is to be your policy, and if they get that notion well into their heads there will be trouble.

They ask us to educate them, for they know the need. Three years ago, two years ago, it seemed that we really were about to make something like adequate provision. But the great extension of secondary and higher education then promised will not take place, and we must fall back once more upon the elementary schools.

The illustrious pioneers in the field of public education dreamed dreams of what it should do for the children of the people; but the schools of their day had no money. Pestalozzi and his pupils lacked food and clothes. Books in abundance and an adequate staff of efficient teachers he could never hope to have. It was the same in England. Those who established and administered public education in this country had no conception of its true aim. They invented a new type of education-elementary education— that led nowhere, but was good enough, they thought, for the children of the workers, who, as a measure of public safety, must be sent to school. With a ruinous parsimony the State provided the meanest possible equipment. The teachers were few, illeducated, and miserably paid; the apparatus was contemptible. Teachers had to teach, children had to learn, without anything that could properly be called a book. The system was a grief to Matthew Arnold and to every other enlightened educationist associated with it. There was nothing liberal about it: indeed, it was not the intention of its founders that there should be.

Stevenson somewhere makes play with a good lady who commended a prospective bride to her brother because, among other happy qualities, she had 'about as much religion as my William likes.' The sentiment is eloquent of the days when it was the general hope that the world would sing not only in harmony but in unison, and that education would teach it to do so. Public education had its origin in the days of authority, when it was conceived to be all important to teach people-not to think, that were far too dangerous, but-to believe: to dress them out in those suits of opinions which authority had inspected and passed as safe. The opinions of the world at large, and especially of the ' lower orders,' must be formed with care. There were facts of religion, facts of science, facts of industry, social facts, political facts. They were not to be inquired into; they were to be accepted. Authority, playing the part of my William,' selected and interpreted them. There never would be happy

union within the State unless the mass of the people would accept opinions carefully prescribed for them, unless they had about as much religion as my William likes,' and avoided free inquiry like the plague.

Now my William's' views are those of his circle. Their universal adoption would secure the safety, the prosperity, the happiness of William-of all the Williams. William's ideal dispensation requires that other and much wider circles shall surrender their individuality to him and his fellows; that they shall think,'-if one may use a word so inappropriate-think, and work, and live as best accords with his advantage; submit themselves to governors and teachers of his choice; order themselves as desired to all their betters. So long as they accept William for the type of their betters all is well-in William's eyes. But what if in the course of time they cast off William and choose a master and teacher from within their own circle, one who shall put their interest and advantage first? They will still take their opinions ready made. There will still be 'facts' to be accepted, but they will be poles asunder from William's opinions, William's facts.' When in due time this comes to pass, and some young trade union leader sits in the high place that once was William's, dealing out oracles, William is distressed. When he sat in the high place and voiced authority he did not ask that folk should examine they were to believe. Now that another speaks they should no longer believe-they should examine. Because they do not (and he never gave them the education for the task) at once they are blind; they cannot see reason; their credulity will ruin them and him, as it has done in Russia. Precisely. Those who are not soundly educated will believe anything. Some of them believe the reactionists, some the revolutionists. The marvel is that many more do not believe the latter. It speaks well for our elementary schools and their devoted teachers that there is so much capacity for sound independent judgment among the workers. There is no Russian débâcle ahead of us. But there will be many a rash experiment, great losses, and much suffering unless our people can be taught to take wide views, to interpret the past, to look far into the future-in a word, to judge.

In an elementary education that ends at thirteen or fourteen years of age there must always be much waste. Cheap teaching, cheap books, may succeed in putting a small and resolute minority upon the difficult path of self-education, unguided and often with ill-chosen aims, but the majority will never make much use of what they cease to learn so soon. They forget much, misuse much, and are a ready target for the gibes and sarcasms of the unbeliever who discourses now from the Bench, now to a Chamber of Commerce, now within the House of Commons.

Our elementary schools have never made the use that should be made of books in education. They could not make it, for they never had them. Good books, the work of master minds, were not for them. Such books as they had were very poor in quality, compilations written down to the supposed level of the worker's child. And there were few enough of those. There are many teachers still at work who had no more than three books in the year for each class, and there are those who can remember when, besides the Bible, there was only one. Under such conditions the voice of the teacher was necessarily the medium of instruction. The child was too often a passive listener. In many a school he is a passive listener still. The training colleges aimed at turning out teachers who could lecture, question, and use the blackboard in such a way as to hold the attention of the large class. Training college and teacher alike were in the position of those who must make bricks without straw. By a miracle of ingenuity they did it; they made bricks of a sort. Unfortunately, having made them, they are apt to think them good bricks after all, bricks perhaps equal to the best. So the importance of the technique of teaching, the place of method, the part of the teacher have been vastly over-estimated. Miss Mason at Ambleside an educational reformer whose name the centuries will honour-has taught us a better way. Instead of the class as unit she gives us the individual child; for the endless talk of teachers she substitutes the book (a real book of literary merit, not a mere classbook), for all the multitudinous tricks of method she teaches us to use narration. It sounds very simple; it is immensely simpler than anything that hitherto we have been taught to do. But behind it lie a philosophy and a faith to which we have been strangers. Now we know, for Miss Mason has taught us, that the child must do its own work on the book (there is no mental digestion unless it does); and we are persuaded of the right of every child to a liberal education, and of the child's power to respond to the teaching of the world's great writers. We have learned, too, that the children of Labour are not inferior in brain power to the children of Capital; and we have proved that, given the opportunity, they show a greater eagerness and will to learn. The best brains of a secondary school will generally be found among those who have come there with free places.

The inadequacy of the text-book and the supreme value of the method of narration had both been pointed out before, and both by the same man-Dr. Johnson.

I dined at Langton's with Johnson [said Mr. Longley, the father of the Archbishop]; I remember Lady Rothes spoke of the advantage children now derived from the little books published purposely for their instruction. Johnson controverted it, asserting that at an early age it was better to

gratify curiosity with wonders than to attempt planting truth before the mind was prepared to receive it, and that therefore Jack the Giant Killer, Parisenus and Parismenus, and the Seven Champions of Christendom were fitter for them than Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer.

Perhaps we may bring the Doctor up to date and claim his authority when we suggest that the Age of Fable and Sigurd the Volsung and the Morte d'Arthur are fitter than Science for the Schoolroom or Footpaths of Literature for Children and the like, prepared by those who believe that children like sections of truth and fiction dealt out to them in numbered paragraphs, and labelled ' for children only.' 'Babies do not want to hear about babies,' said Dr. Johnson on another occasion (Mrs. Thrale is our authority); they like to be told of giants and of castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.' There is no need of the play way; the child resents it. Miss Mason has shown us how more than right Dr. Johnson was. The child does like to have something that can stretch and stimulate his mind. Madame Montessori cumbers him with much unnecessary help. One need not always approach his mind by the way of sense impressions.

It is Mrs. Thrale, too, who tells us of the use that Dr. Johnson would have us make of the method of narration.

Little people [he said] should be encouraged always to tell whatever they hear particularly striking to some brother or sister or servant immediately, before the impression is erased by newer occurrences. . . . It was to that method chiefly that he owed his uncommon felicity of remembering distant occurrences and long past conversations.

There is the germ of the method of narration, which many teachers will tell you that they use, but few use rightly. They had not thought, any more than Dr. Johnson, of exciting interest by the use in school for teaching purposes of English books of literary merit (and no others), or of ensuring attention and concentration by always (not sometimes, but always) requiring narration after a single reading. That is Miss Mason's method, the method of the Parents' National Educational Union and their schools. Some eighty public elementary schools in Gloucestershire are following it, and the amazing results obtained in them have been witnessed by hundreds of teachers and other educationists from all parts of the British Isles, and from far beyond them. But let us call another witness.

As a child of five [says Mr. Robert Blatchford] I fell into a habit of repeating to myself in a soundless whisper whatever I heard spoken or read. In this way, without knowing it, I trained my memory and observation so thoroughly that as a young man I could repeat a long conversation, lecture or a speech, almost verbatim after one hearing. . . Such a practice holds and trains the attention. . . . That is one reason why I want . good English literature read to young children in schools by good readers.