What Is and What Might Be

E >> Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be

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I could easily make a long list of Utopian virtues and graces, but I
must content myself with touching on one more typical product of
Egeria's philosophy of education,--the joy which the children wear in
their faces and bear in their hearts. The sense of well-being which
must needs accompany healthy and harmonious growth is realised by him
who experiences it as joy. The Utopian children are by many degrees
the happiest that I have met with in an elementary school, and I
must therefore conclude that all is well with them, that their
well-being--the true end of all education--has been, and is being,
achieved. If you look at any of them with more than a mere passing
glance, you will be sure to win from him the quick response of a
sunny smile,--a smile which is half gladness, half goodwill. And the
joy of their hearts goes with them when their schooldays are over and
they begin to work for their bread. Last year one of the boys, on
leaving school, found employment in a large field on the lower slopes
of the hills, where he had to collect flints and pile them in heaps,
his wage for this dull and tiresome work being no more than fivepence
a day. But he found the work neither dull nor tiresome; for as he
marched up and down the field, collecting and piling the flints with
cheery goodwill, he sang his Folk Songs with all the spontaneous
happiness of a soaring lark.

Activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a wide and free outlook,
self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--these are
qualities which might be expected to unfold themselves under the
influence of the Utopian training, and which do, in point of fact,
flourish vigorously in the soil and atmosphere of Utopia. They are
the outcome of a type of education which differs radically from that
which has hitherto been accepted as orthodox,--differing from it with
the unfathomable difference between vital and mechanical obedience,
between life and machinery.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] The child is struggling to do this, and more than this.
The search for order resolves itself into the search for cause; and
the search for cause will resolve itself, in the last resort, into
the greatest of all adventures,--the search for that pure essence of
things on which all the deeper desires of the soul converge, which
imagination dreams of as absolute beauty, and reason as a beacon-lamp
of all-illuminating light, flashing forth alternately as absolute
reality and absolute truth.

[17] I shall perhaps be told that my extravagant idealism is
out of place in a book on elementary education. To this possible
reproach I can but answer, in Mrs. Browning's words, that--

It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off
The dust of the actual.

My experience of Utopia has convinced me that in taking thought for
the education of the young it is impossible to be too idealistic, and
that the more "commonsensical" and "utilitarian" one's philosophy of
education, the shallower and falser it will prove to be.

[18] An informal report to me, not a formal report to the
Board of Education.

[19] Real, in the sense that the beauty of form and colour
is more real than either form or colour, and that a law of Nature is
more real than an isolated fact.

CHAPTER V

EDUCATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION

Activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a large and free
outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--are
there many schools in England in which the soil and atmosphere are
favourable to the vigorous growth of all these qualities? I doubt it.
In the secondary schools, of all grades and types, the education
given is so one-sided, thanks to the inexorable pressure of the
scholarship system, that the harmonious development of the child's
nature is not to be looked for. In the elementary schools, from which
the chilling shadow cast by thirty years of "payment by results" is
passing slowly--very slowly--away, the instinct of the teacher is to
distrust the child and do everything, or nearly everything, for him,
the result being that the whole _regime_ is still unfavourable to the
spontaneous outgrowth of the child's higher qualities. There are of
course schools, both secondary and elementary, in which one or more
of the Utopian qualities flourish with considerable vigour. There are
elementary schools, for example, in which the children, being allowed
by enterprising teachers to walk in new paths without leading
strings, have become unexpectedly active and versatile. And there are
others--mostly in the slum regions of great towns--in which the
devotion, the sympathetic kindness, and the gracious bearing of the
teachers have won from the children the response of unselfish
affection, attractive manners, and happy faces.[20] Yet even in these
exceptional cases it may be doubted if the development of the
particular quality or qualities for which the school is distinguished
reaches the high-water mark which is reached in each and all of the
seven qualities in Utopia. As for the elementary schools which remain
faithful, as so many still do, to the traditions of the old
regime,--if in these any of the seven qualities manage to resist the
adverse influences to which they are all exposed, they have at best
but a starved and stunted life.

I have spoken much and with unsparing frankness of the shortcomings
of our elementary schools. The time has come for me to say with
emphasis that however grave and however numerous may be the defects
of elementary education in England, they are defects which it shares
with all other branches of education, and which England shares with
all other Western lands. The plain truth is that education as such is
a failure in the West, a failure in the sense that the very qualities
which it ought to foster--the cardinal virtues, mental, moral, and
spiritual, which are present in embryo in every child, waiting to be
realised--are not merely neglected by it, in its insane ardour for
"results," but are also exposed, in most of its schools, to strongly
adverse influences. And the reason why education as such is a failure
in the West is that from its earliest days it has been a house
divided against itself, those who were and are responsible for
it having been under the influence of two mutually destructive
assumptions, which they have vainly tried to reconcile with one
another.

The first of these assumptions is my initial "truism,"--that the
function of education is to foster growth. This is admitted,
implicitly if not directly, by all who think and speak about
education, and even, in their unguarded moments, by most of those
who teach. It is generally admitted, for example, that such mental
qualities as attention, memory, judgment, intelligence, reason,
such moral qualities as loyalty, courage, truthfulness, kindness,
unselfishness, such semi-moral qualities as cleanliness, orderliness,
carefulness, alertness, industry, punctuality, are capable of being
developed by education. It is further admitted that such special
qualities as literary or artistic taste, the mathematical or the
historical sense, an aptitude for business or finance, are ready
to evolve themselves, in response to the fostering influence of
practical experience directed by skilful teaching. It is admitted,
in other words, that there is much in human nature, apart from what
is purely or mainly physical, which is both capable and worthy of
cultivation, and which education ought therefore to try to cultivate.

So far, so good. These admissions, with the fundamental admission
which underlies them all, might form the basis of a sound philosophy
of education, if they were not liable to be stultified and even
nullified by the counter assumption that human nature is innately
evil and corrupt. For from the latter assumption has followed, both
logically and naturally, a theory of education which is not merely
unfavourable but fatal to growth. If human nature is innately evil,
if it has no inborn capacity for goodness or truth, what is there in
it that is worth training? So far as the "great matters" of life are
concerned, the child must be educated by being told in minute detail
what to do, and by being alternately bribed and bullied into doing
it. As he can neither think, nor believe, nor desire, nor do what
is right, he must be told what to think, what to believe, what to
desire, what to do; and as it is assumed that the tasks set him by
his teacher will not be intrinsically attractive, he must be induced
to perform them by the threat of external punishments and the promise
of external rewards. In other words, in the spheres of religion and
morals, so far as these can be walled off from the rest of human
life, he must be educated, not by being helped to grow, but by being
compelled to obey; and as the spheres of religion and morals cannot
possibly be walled off from the rest of human life, the idea of
educating the child through the medium of passive and mechanical
obedience will gradually extend its influence over all the other
departments and aspects of his home and school life, his innate
sinfulness finding its equivalent, in secular matters, in his innate
helplessness and stupidity, while in the place of the creeds, codes,
and catechisms by which his spiritual welfare is provided for, he
will be fed during the hours of secular instruction on rations of
information, formulated rules, and minute directions of various
kinds. Under this _regime_ of wire-pulling on the part of the teacher
and puppet-like dancing on the part of the child, the growth of
the child's faculties,--of the whole range of his faculties, for
they will all come under the blighting influence of the current
misconception of the bent of his nature and the consequent
under-estimate of his powers,--far from being fostered, will be
systematically thwarted and starved. This is the fate which might be
expected to befall the child if the doctrine of his innate sinfulness
were allowed to dominate his education; and this is the fate which
has befallen and is befalling him in all grades of society and in all
the countries of the West.

It is the doctrine of original sin, of the congenital depravity of
man's nature, which blocks the way to the reform of education,--blocks
the way to it by compelling education to become the destroying angel
instead of the foster-nurse of the child's expanding life. In
criticising the defects of our educational system, we have too long
mistaken symptoms for causes, and believed that we were removing the
latter when we were only palliating or at best excising the former.
To pinch off a withered bud, to lop off a withered limb, of the
diseased tree of education, to train in this or that direction a
branch which is as yet unaffected, is but lost labour so long as
the tree is being slowly poisoned at its roots by a fundamental
misconception of the character and capacity of the child. It is time
that we should reconsider our whole attitude towards human nature.
The widespread belief that sundry faculties, physical, mental, and
moral, admit of being cultivated and ought to be cultivated in the
schoolroom--a belief which is ever affirming itself against the
educational systems and practices that are ever giving it the
lie--may surely be construed into an admission that my primary truism
is at least a truth. If this is so, if the business of the teacher
is, as I contend, to help the child to grow, healthily, vigorously,
and symmetrically, on all the planes of his being, the inference is
irresistible that education will achieve nothing but failure until
its foundations have been entirely relaid. For faith in the inherent
soundness, in the natural goodness, of the seed or sapling, or
whatever else he may undertake to rear, is the first condition of
success on the part of the grower. And to ask education to bring to
sane and healthy maturity the plant which we call human nature, and
in the same breath to tell it that human nature is intrinsically
corrupt and evil, is to set it an obviously impracticable task. One
might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and
poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of wheat. Growth can and
does transform potential into actual good, but no process of growth
can transform what is innately evil into what is finally good. A
poisonous seed will ripen of inner necessity into a poisonous plant;
and the more carefully it is fed and tended, the larger and stronger
will the poisonous plant become.

The time has come, then, for us to throw to the winds the
time-honoured, but otherwise dishonoured and discredited, belief that
the child is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, and that
therefore his nature, if allowed to obey its own laws and follow its
own tendencies, will ripen into death, instead of into a larger
and richer life. I shall perhaps be told that if this belief is
abandoned, other religious beliefs will go with it. Let them go. They
have kept bad company, and if they cannot dissociate themselves from
it, they had better share its fate. What is real and vital in our
religious beliefs will gain incalculably by being disengaged from
what may once have had a life and a meaning of its own but is now
nothing better than a morbid growth. To tell a man that, apart from a
miracle, he is predestined to perdition, is the surest way to send
him there; and it is probable that the doctrine of his own innate
depravity is the deadliest instrument for achieving his ruin, that
Man, in his groping endeavours to explain to himself the dominant
facts of his existence, has ever devised.

Nor is the practical failure of the doctrine--its failure to achieve
any lasting result but the strangulation of Man's expanding life--the
only proof that it is inherently unsound. There is positive proof
that the counter doctrine, the doctrine of Man's potential goodness,
is inherently true. We have seen that the great arterial instincts
which manifest themselves in the undirected play of young children,
are making for three supreme ends,--the sympathetic instincts for the
goal of _Love_, the artistic instincts for the goal of _Beauty_, the
scientific instincts for the goal of _Truth_. We have seen, in other
words, that the push of Nature's forces in the inner life of the
young child is ever tending to take him out of himself in the
direction of a triune goal which I may surely be allowed to call
_Divine_. If we follow towards "infinity" the lines of love, of
beauty, and of truth, we shall begin at last to dream of an ideal
point--the meeting-point of all and the vanishing-point of each--for
which no name will suffice less pregnant with meaning or less
suggestive of reality than that of God. It is towards God, then, not
towards the Devil, that the ripening, expansive forces of Nature
which are at work in the child, are directing the process of his
growth. We are taught that Man is by nature a "child of wrath." The
more closely we study his ways and works when, as a young child, he
is left (more or less) to his own devices, the stronger does our
conviction become that he is by nature a "child of God." Those who
are in a position to speak tell us that the normal child is born
physically healthy. If the men of science would study the other sides
of his being as carefully as they have studied his physique, they
would, I feel sure, be able to tell us that he is also born mentally,
morally, and spiritually healthy, and that on these sides, as well as
on the physical side, his growth might be and ought to be a natural
movement towards perfection. For some of my readers such arguments as
these are perhaps too much in the air to be convincing. Well, then,
let us appeal to experience. Let us see what the systematic
cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in
Utopia. I have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the
children--the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion--is
one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. Now
there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the
school: and I can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation
of morality is wholly foreign to Egeria's conception of education.
How, then, has the emancipation of the child from the first enemy of
Man's well-being--from all those narrowing, hardening, and
demoralising influences which we speak of collectively as egoistic or
selfish--been effected in Utopia? By no other means than that of
allowing the child's nature to unfold itself, on many sides of its
being and under thoroughly favourable conditions. The twofold desire
which we all experience,--to accept and rest in the ordinary
undeveloped self, and at the same time to exalt and magnify it,--is
the surest and most fruitful source of moral evil. Indeed, it may be
doubted if there is any source of moral evil, apart from those which
are purely sensual, which has not at least an underground connection
with this. If we are to "cap" this deadly fountain, and so prevent it
from desolating human life, we must realise, once and for all, that
the two desires which master us cannot be simultaneously gratified;
that we cannot both rest in the ordinary self and magnify it; that we
can magnify it only by _making it great_, by helping it to grow. When
we have realised this, we shall be ready to receive the further
lesson that in proportion as the self magnifies itself by the natural
process of growth, so does its desire to magnify itself gradually die
away,--die away with the dawning consciousness that in and through
the process of its growth it is outgrowing itself, forgetting itself,
escaping from itself, that the thing which so ardently desired to be
magnified is in fact ceasing to be. This vital truth,--which my
visits to Utopia have borne in upon me,--that healthy and harmonious
growth is in its very essence _out_growth or escape from self, has
depths of meaning which are waiting to be fathomed. For one thing, it
means, if it has any meaning, that what is central in human nature
is, not its inborn wickedness but its infinite capacity for good, not
its rebellious instincts and backsliding tendencies but its
many-sided effort to achieve perfection.

We must now make our choice between two alternatives. We must decide,
once and for all, whether the function of education is to foster
growth or to exact mechanical obedience. If we choose the latter
alternative, we shall enter a path which leads in the direction of
spiritual death. If we choose the former, we must cease to halt
between two opinions, and must henceforth base our system of
education, boldly and confidently, on the conviction that growth is
in its essence a movement towards perfection, and therefore that
self-realisation is the first and last duty of Man.

It is by answering possible objections to Utopianism that I shall
best be able to unfold Egeria's philosophy of education. I shall
perhaps be told that in my advocacy of that philosophy _I am
preaching dangerous doctrines; that the only alternative for
obedience is the lawlessness of unbridled licence; and that anarchy,
social, moral, and spiritual, is the ultimate goal of the path which
I am urging the teacher to enter._ Let me point out, in answer to
this protest, that it is mechanical obedience which I condemn, not
obedience as such. If I condemn mechanical obedience, I do so
because it is unworthy of the name of obedience, because the higher
faculties of Man's being, the faculties which are distinctively
human--reason, imagination, aspiration, spiritual intuition, and the
like--take no part in it, because it is the obedience of an
automaton, not of a living soul. What I wish to oppose to it is
_vital obedience_, obedience to the master laws of Man's being,
obedience to the laws which assert themselves as central and supreme,
obedience more particularly to those larger and obscurer laws which
obedience itself helps us to discover, obedience in fine to that
hierarchy of laws--(the superior law always claiming the fuller
measure and the higher kind of obedience)--which, if we are to use
the Divine Name, we must needs identify with the will of God.
Obedience, in this sense of the word, is a sustained and soul-deep
effort in which all the higher faculties of Man's being take part,
an effort which is in some sort a voyage of discovery, the doing of
the more obvious duty being always rewarded by the deepening of the
doer's insight and the widening of his outlook, and by the consequent
unveiling to him of the way in which he is to walk and the goal at
which he is to aim. That the path of soul-growth is the path of vital
obedience can scarcely be doubted. The effort to grow is always
successful just so far as it implies knowledge of the laws of the
nature that is unfolding itself, and readiness to obey those laws;
and so far as it is successful, it carries with it the outgrowth of
the very faculties by which knowledge--the higher knowledge which
makes further growth possible--is to be gained. Here, as
elsewhere, there is an unceasing interaction between perception and
expression, between knowledge of law and obedience to law, what is
given as obedience being received back as enlightenment, and what is
received as enlightenment being given back as larger, fuller, and
more significant obedience.

And, be it carefully observed, it is obedience to the laws of human
nature, not obedience to the idiosyncrasies of the individual nature,
which the process of soul-growth at once implies and makes possible.
Growth is, in its essence, a movement towards that perfect type which
is the real self of each individual in turn, and the approach to
which involves the gradual surrender of individuality, and the
gradual escape from the ordinary self. A man is to cling to and
affirm his individuality, not in order that he may rest in it and
make much of it, but in order that he may outgrow it and pass far
beyond it in that one way--the best way for him--which it, and it
alone, is able to mark out for him. In other words, he is to assert
his individual self in order that he may universalise himself in his
own way, and not in obedience to the ruling of custom and authority,
in order that he may escape from himself through the real outlet of
sincere self-expression, and not through the sham outlet of hypocrisy
and cant.

What I may call the Utopian scheme of education, far from making for
antinomianism and anarchy, is the sworn enemy of individualism and
therefore, _a fortiori_, of everything that savours of licence. It is
the conventional type of education, with its demands for mechanical
obedience to external authority, which leads through despotism to
social and political chaos. The whole _regime_ of mechanical
obedience is favourable, in the long run, to the development of
anarchy. Let us take the case of a church or an autocracy which
demands implicit obedience from its subjects, and is prepared to
exact such obedience by the application of physical force or its
moral equivalent. What will happen to it when its subjects begin to
ask it for its credentials? The fact that it has always demanded from
them literal rather than spiritual obedience, and that, in its
application of motive force, it has appealed to their baser desires
and baser fears, makes it impossible for it to justify itself to
their higher faculties, rational or emotional, and makes it necessary
for it to meet their incipient criticism with renewed threats of
punishment and renewed promises of reward. But the very fact that it
is being asked for its credentials means that the force on which it
has hitherto relied is weakening, that its power to punish and
reward, which has always been resolvable into the power to make
people believe that it can punish and reward, is being called in
question and is therefore crumbling away. And behind that power there
is nothing but chaos. For the _regime_ of mechanical obedience, by
arresting the spontaneous growth of Man's higher nature, and by
making its chief appeal to his baser desires and baser fears, becomes
of necessity the foster-mother of egoism; and when egoism, which
makes each man a law to himself and the potential enemy of his kind,
is unrestrained by authority, the door is thrown wide open to
anarchy, and through anarchy to chaos. This is what is happening in
the West, in our self-conscious and critical age. In every field of
human action, in religion, in politics, in social life, in art, in
letters, authority is being asked for its credentials; and as this
demand, besides being a disintegrating influence, is a sign that the
force on which authority relies is weakening, it is not to be
wondered at that there is a steady drift in many Western countries in
the direction of anarchy,--religious, political, social, artistic,
literary,--or that this _regime_ of incipient anarchy is taking the
form of an ignoble scramble for wealth, for power, for position, for
fame, for notoriety, for anything in fine which may serve to exalt a
man above his fellows, and so minister to the aggrandizement of his
lower self.

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