CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - III: THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT
When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education,
a certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken
by the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened
of sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoning
irritation against "dogma" did arise out of some ridiculous excess
of such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be
laying up a fine crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of.
Probably the word "education" will some day seem honestly as old and
objectless as the word "justification" now seems in a Puritan folio.
Gibbon thought it frightfully funny that people should have fought about
the difference between the "Homoousion" and the "Homoiousion." The time
will come when somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered
against Sectarian Education and also against Secular Education;
that men of prominence and position actually denounced the schools for
teaching a creed and also for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words
in Gibbon look rather alike; but they really mean quite different things.
Faith and creed do not look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing.
Creed happens to be the Latin for faith.
Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education,
and even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening
and indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever
since I was born, about whether religion was part of education,
about whether hygiene was an essential of education,
about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education,
I naturally pondered much on this recurring substantive,
and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively late in life
that I saw the main fact about it.
Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no
such thing. It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist.
Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word
like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no as hobbies;
but they deal with stone and kettles, with definite things.
But education is not a word like geology or kettles.
Education is a word like "transmission" or "inheritance"; it
is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying
of certain facts, views or qualities, to the last baby born.
They might be the most trivial facts or the most preposterous
views or the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed
on from one generation to another they are education.
Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior
or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms.
Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter
to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational
as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational.
It is giving something--perhaps poison. Education is tradition,
and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.
This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually
ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain.
A little boy in a little house, son of a little tradesman,
is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medicine, to love
his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes.
Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink gin,
to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers.
But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the boy's breakfast;
Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would rebuke
him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford would stop his prayers,
and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday clothes,
and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of these advanced views,
not even Fagin's. But I do ask what, between the lot of them, has become
of the abstract entity called education. It is not (as commonly supposed)
that the tradesman teaches education plus Christianity; Mr. Salt,
education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime. The truth is,
that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers,
except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one
thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of authority.
It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education.
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education.
It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher
who is not teaching.
The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people
something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think
it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious
hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air
and freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident;
we can create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course,
no other general purpose than to point out that we cannot create
anything good until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people,
who in the matter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law,
in the matter of environment seem almost to believe in miracle.
They insist that nothing but what was in the bodies of the parents
can go to make the bodies of the children. But they seem somehow
to think that things can get into the heads of the children which were
not in the heads of the parents, or, indeed, anywhere else.
There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry
typical of the confusion. I mean the cry, "Save the children."
It is, of course, part of that modern morbidity that
insists on treating the State (which is the home of man)
as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic.
This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist
and other schemes. Just as they would collect and share
all the food as men do in a famine, so they would divide
the children from their fathers, as men do in a shipwreck.
That a human community might conceivably not be in a condition
of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds.
This cry of "Save the children" has in it the hateful
implication that it is impossible to save the fathers;
in other words, that many millions of grown-up, sane,
responsible and self-supporting Europeans are to be treated
as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion;
called dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead
of private houses; called unemployables because nobody knows
how to get them work; called dullards if they still adhere
to conventions, and called loafers if they still love liberty.
Now I am concerned, first and last, to maintain that unless you
can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that at
present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves.
We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot
free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom.
Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we
pass on truth if it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that
education is of all the cases the clearest for our general purpose.
It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain children.
By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men; and how can it
be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain
and hopeless to find one for ourselves?
I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this
difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all,
does not teach by authority at all. They present the process
as coming, not from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely
from inside the boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for
leading out or drawing out the dormant faculties of each person.
Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearning
to learn Greek accents or to wear clean collars; and the schoolmaster
only gently and tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose.
Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to
eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The educator
only draws out the child's own unapparent love of long division;
only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milk
pudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation;
I have heard the disgraceful suggestion that "educator," if applied
to a Roman schoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions
into freedom; but only meant taking out little boys for a walk.
But I am much more certain that I do not agree with the doctrine;
I think it would be about as sane to say that the baby's milk comes
from the baby as to say that the baby's educational merits do.
There is, indeed, in each living creature a collection of forces
and functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes
and training them to particular purposes, or it means nothing at all.
Speaking is the most practical instance of the whole situation.
You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from the child by simply
poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel pastime to
which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and watch
very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him.
That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the matter.
But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow
get rid of authority in education; it is not so much
(as poor Conservatives say) that parental authority ought to
be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw
once said that he hated the idea of forming a child's mind.
In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself;
for he hates something inseparable from human life.
I only mentioned educere and the drawing out of the faculties
in order to point out that even this mental trick does not avoid
the inevitable idea of parental or scholastic authority.
The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and coercive
as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses.
He decides what in the child shall be developed and what
shall not be developed. He does not (I suppose) draw out
the neglected faculty of forgery. He does not (so far at least)
lead out, with timid steps, a shy talent for torture.
The only result of all this pompous and precise distinction
between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor
pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes.
Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature
who is poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility
of this intellectual violence. Education is violent;
because it is creative. It is creative because it is human.
It is as reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic
as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house.
In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference
with life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even
a jocular question whether we say of this tremendous tormentor,
the artist Man, that he puts things into us like an apothecary,
or draws things out of us, like a dentist.
The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims
the right to take his mother Nature under his control;
he claims the right to make his child the Superman, in his image.
Once flinch from this creative authority of man, and the whole
courageous raid which we call civilization wavers and falls
to pieces. Now most modern freedom is at root fear.
It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules;
it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from
that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers
committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men.
I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human
tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority,
an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education;
to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell
it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns
are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is,
(of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked
and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves
enough to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course,
is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat
of a separate subject. Suffice it to say here that when I say
that we should instruct our children, I mean that we should do it,
not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should do it.
The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State,
being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and
experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never
passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house,
the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be
the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people;
the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby.
But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system
that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four
actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer,
than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school
boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not
even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence,
divine as it is, may learn something from experience.
But this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact that we are
managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes that men
who govern themselves will govern their children. To-day we
all use Popular Education as meaning education of the people.
I wish I could use it as meaning education by the people.
The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators
do not avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old
school masters. Nay, it might be maintained that they avoid it less.
The old village schoolmaster beat a boy for not learning grammar
and sent him out into the playground to play anything he liked;
or at nothing, if he liked that better. The modern scientific
schoolmaster pursues him into the playground and makes him play
at cricket, because exercise is so good for the health. The modern
Dr. Busby is a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of divinity.
He may say that the good of exercise is self-evident; but he must
say it, and say it with authority. It cannot really be self-evident
or it never could have been compulsory. But this is in modern
practice a very mild case. In modern practice the free educationists
forbid far more things than the old-fashioned educationists.
A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless creature
could exist) might with some plausibility maintain concerning
all our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism
and its replacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion
has not been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that
less and less beautiful and humane things have been permitted.
The Puritans destroyed images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales.
Count Tostoi practically issued one of his papal encyclicals
against music; and I have heard of modern educationists who forbid
children to play with tin soldiers. I remember a meek little madman
who came up to me at some Socialist soiree or other, and asked me to use
my influence (have I any influence?) against adventure stories for boys.
It seems they breed an appetite for blood. But never mind that;
one must keep one's temper in this madhouse. I need only insist here
that these things, even if a just deprivation, are a deprivation.
I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments were often idiotic
and cruel; though they are much more so in a country like England
(where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment and only a poor
man receives it) than in countries with a clearer popular tradition--
such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflicted by peasants
on a peasant. In modern England flogging can only in practice
be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus only a few
days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course)
was sentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having
picked up a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d.
I am entirely on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as
have protested against this almost bestial ignorance about boys.
But I do think it a little unfair that these humanitarians, who excuse
boys for being robbers, should denounce them for playing at robbers.
I do think that those who understand a guttersnipe playing with a piece
of coal might, by a sudden spurt of imagination, understand him
playing with a tin soldier. To sum it up in one sentence:
I think my meek little madman might have understood that there
is many a boy who would rather be flogged, and unjustly flogged,
than have his adventure story taken away.
In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no
it is as high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula,
is stiff with authority. It is because the humane father thinks
soldiers wrong that they are forbidden; there is no pretense,
there can be no pretense, that the boy would think so.
The average boy's impression certainly would be simply this:
"If your father is a Methodist you must not play with soldiers
on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play
with them even on week days." All educationists are utterly
dogmatic and authoritarian. You cannot have free education;
for if you left a child free you would not educate him at all.
Is there, then, no distinction or difference between the most hide-bound
conventionalists and the most brilliant and bizarre innovators?
Is there no difference between the heaviest heavy father and the most
reckless and speculative maiden aunt? Yes; there is. The difference
is that the heavy father, in his heavy way, is a democrat.
He does not urge a thing merely because to his fancy it should
be done; but, because (in his own admirable republican formula)
"Everybody does it." The conventional authority does claim
some popular mandate; the unconventional authority does not.
The Puritan who forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least
expressing Puritan opinion; not merely his own opinion.
He is not a despot; he is a democracy, a tyrannical democracy,
a dingy and local democracy perhaps; but one that could do
and has done the two ultimate virile things--fight and appeal
to God. But the veto of the new educationist is like the veto
of the House of Lords; it does not pretend to be representative.
These innovators are always talking about the blushing modesty
of Mrs. Grundy. I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more modest
than they are; but I am sure she is more humble.
But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern
may again attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education
should only be an enlargement of the mind, an opening of all
the organs of receptivity. Light (he says) should be brought
into darkness; blinded and thwarted existences in all our ugly
corners should merely be permitted to perceive and expand; in short,
enlightenment should be shed over darkest London. Now here is
just the trouble; that, in so far as this is involved, there is no
darkest London. London is not dark at all; not even at night.
We have said that if education is a solid substance, then there
is none of it. We may now say that if education is an abstract
expansion there is no lack of it. There is far too much of it.
In fact, there is nothing else.
There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated;
only most people are educated wrong. The state schools were not
the first schools, but among the last schools to be established;
and London had been educating Londoners long before the
London School Board. The error is a highly practical one.
It is persistently assumed that unless a child is civilized by
the established schools, he must remain a barbarian. I wish he did.
Every child in London becomes a highly civilized person.
But here are so many different civilizations, most of them born tired.
Anyone will tell you that the trouble with the poor is not so much that
the old are still foolish, but rather that the young are already wise.
Without going to school at all, the gutter-boy would be educated.
Without going to school at all, he would be over-educated. The
real object of our schools should be not so much to suggest
complexity as solely to restore simplicity. You will hear venerable
idealists declare we must make war on the ignorance of the poor;
but, indeed, we have rather to make war on their knowledge.
Real educationists have to resist a kind of roaring cataract
of culture. The truant is being taught all day. If the children
do not look at the large letters in the spelling-book, they need
only walk outside and look at the large letters on the poster.
If they do not care for the colored maps provided by the school,
they can gape at the colored maps provided by the Daily Mail. If they
tire of electricity, they can take to electric trams.
If they are unmoved by music, they can take to drink.
If they will not work so as to get a prize from their school,
they may work to get a prize from Prizy Bits. If they cannot
learn enough about law and citizenship to please the teacher,
they learn enough about them to avoid the policeman. If they will
not learn history forwards from the right end in the history books,
they will learn it backwards from the wrong end in the party newspapers.
And this is the tragedy of the whole affair: that the London poor,
a particularly quick-witted and civilized class, learn everything
tail foremost, learn even what is right in the way of what is wrong.
They do not see the first principles of law in a law book;
they only see its last results in the police news.
They do not see the truths of politics in a general survey.
They only see the lies of politics, at a General Election.
But whatever be the pathos of the London poor, it has nothing
to do with being uneducated. So far from being without guidance,
they are guided constantly, earnestly, excitedly; only guided wrong.
The poor are not at all neglected, they are merely oppressed;
nay, rather they are persecuted. There are no people in London
who are not appealed to by the rich; the appeals of the rich
shriek from every hoarding and shout from every hustings.
For it should always be remembered that the queer, abrupt ugliness
of our streets and costumes are not the creation of democracy,
but of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected to the Embankment
being disfigured by trams. But most of the rich men who disfigure
the street-walls with their wares are actually in the House
of Lords. The peers make the country seats beautiful by making
the town streets hideous. This, however, is parenthetical.
The point is, that the poor in London are not left alone,
but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and despotic advice.
They are not like sheep without a shepherd. They are more like one
sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are shouting at. All the newspapers,
all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new theologies,
all the glare and blare of the gas and brass of modern times--
it is against these that the national school must bear up if it can.
I will not question that our elementary education is better
than barbaric ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance.
I do not doubt that our schools would be good for uninstructed boys.
But there are no uninstructed boys. A modern London school
ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more
rapid than ignorance and darkness. It must also be clearer
than a picture postcard, cleverer than a Limerick competition,
quicker than the tram, and kindlier than the tavern. The school,
in fact, has the responsibility of universal rivalry. We need not
deny that everywhere there is a light that must conquer darkness.
But here we demand a light that can conquer light.
I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example:
the case of color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows)
talking about the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor.
But whatever the poor streets are they are not gray;
but motley, striped, spotted, piebald and patched like a quilt.
Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be monochrome; and there is
nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As a matter of fact,
a London gutter-boy walks unscathed among furnaces of color.
Watch him walk along a line of hoardings, and you will see him
now against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest;
now black like a bird against the burning blue of the Midi;
now passant across a field gules, like the golden leopards
of England. He ought to understand the irrational rapture of that cry
of Mr. Stephen Phillips about "that bluer blue, that greener green."
There is no blue much bluer than Reckitt's Blue and no blacking
blacker than Day and Martin's; no more emphatic yellow than
that of Colman's Mustard. If, despite this chaos of color,
like a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not exactly
intoxicated with art and culture, the cause certainly does not lie
in universal grayness or the mere starving of his senses. It lies
in the fact that the colors are presented in the wrong connection,
on the wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive.
It is not colors he lacks, but a philosophy of colors.
In short, there is nothing wrong with Reckitt's Blue except that it
is not Reckitt's. Blue does not belong to Reckitt, but to the sky;
black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to the abyss.
Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very
large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way
about the iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment,
a small luxury; a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity.
There is a special irony in these starving streets to see
such a great deal of mustard to such very little meat.
Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent pleasure.
But to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man
who should swallow gallons of mustard. He would either die,
or lose the taste of mustard altogether.
Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on
the hoardings with those tiny and tremendous pictures in
which the mediaevals recorded their dreams; little pictures
where the blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire,
and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold.
The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its
nature more hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely
that the ancient artist was serving the Lord while the modern
artist is serving the lords. It is that the old artist contrived
to convey an impression that colors really were significant
and precious things, like jewels and talismanic stones.
The color was often arbitrary; but it was always authoritative.
If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was silver,
if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that
these colors were important and almost painfully intense;
all the red red-hot and all the gold tried in the fire.
Now that is the spirit touching color which the schools must
recover and protect if they are really to give the children
any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing.
It is not so much an indulgence in color; it is rather, if anything,
a sort of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry
as straitly as a green field in peasant proprietorship.
It would not fling away gold leaf any more than gold coin;
it would not heedlessly pour out purple or crimson, any more
than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood.
That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter;
they have to teach people to relish colors like liquors.
They have the heavy business of turning drunkards into wine tasters.
If even the twentieth century succeeds in doing these things,
it will almost catch up with the twelfth.
The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life.
Morris and the merely aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated
that a crowd in the time of Chaucer would have been brightly
clad and glittering, compared with a crowd in the time of
Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real distinction
is here. There would be brown frocks of friars in the first
scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second.
There would be purple plumes of factory girls in the second
scene as well as purple lenten vestments in the first.
There would be white waistcoats against white ermine; gold watch
chains against gold lions. The real difference is this:
that the brown earth-color of the monk's coat was instinctively
chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown color
of the clerk's hat was not chosen to express anything.
The monk did mean to say that he robed himself in dust.
I am sure the clerk does not mean to say that he crowns
himself with clay. He is not putting dust on his head,
as the only diadem of man. Purple, at once rich and somber,
does suggest a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy.
But the factory girl does not intend her hat to express a triumph
temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy; far from it. White ermine
was meant to express moral purity; white waistcoats were not.
Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold watch chains do not.
The point is not that we have lost the material hues, but that we
have lost the trick of turning them to the best advantage.
We are not like children who have lost their paint box and
are left alone with a gray lead-pencil. We are like children
who have mixed all the colors in the paint-box together
and lost the paper of instructions. Even then (I do not deny)
one has some fun.
Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty
perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals
and especially with our modern education. It is the same with
ethical education, economic education, every sort of education.
The growing London child will find no lack of highly controversial
teachers who will teach him that geography means painting the map red;
that economics means taxing the foreigner, that patriotism
means the peculiarly un-English habit of flying a flag on
Empire Day. In mentioning these examples specially I do not mean
to imply that there are no similar crudities and popular fallacies
upon the other political side. I mention them because they
constitute a very special and arresting feature of the situation.
I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists;
but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern
Conservative no longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator.
Thus all the current defenses of the House of Lords which describe
it as a bulwark against the mob, are intellectually done for;
the bottom has fallen out of them; because on five or six of the most
turbulent topics of the day, the House of Lords is a mob itself;
and exceedingly likely to behave like one.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - III: THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT