What Is and What Might Be
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Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be
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To this the master replies:
"Help except this there is none: you must strive with
might to contemn them,
And with horror perform then what the law may enjoin."
If this conception of morality is correct, if it is true that the
atmosphere of the virtuous life should be one of horror and even of
hatred, then it must be admitted that the Utopian children are
receiving a seriously defective education. But the "if" is a large
one; and for my part I incline to the belief that love, as a motive
to action, is better than hatred, joy than horror, sunshine than
gloom.
The day will indeed come when the Utopian--a child no longer--will
have to do things, either for his own sake or in order to discharge
obligations to others, which will be, or will seem to be, against the
grain even of his happy nature; and the sense of duty will then have
to come to his aid. But there is no reason why he, or his teachers,
should anticipate that day. To compel him, while still a child, to
work against the grain of his nature, when there was no real need for
this, would not be the best preparation for the trials that await
him. To compel him to spend the greater part of his school-life in
doing what was distasteful to him, would be the worst possible
preparation for them.
For, to begin with, the sense of duty is not the highest motive to
action. A far higher motive is love. If the sense of duty to God, for
example, had not devotion to God and love of God behind it, the
object of one's worship would be a malignant rather than a beneficent
deity, a devil rather than a God. Or let us take the case of a child
who is dangerously ill, and who needs to be carefully and even
devotedly nursed. By whom will he be the more effectively nursed,--by
his mother who loves him passionately, or by a hired nurse who cannot
be expected to love him but who has a strong sense of duty to her
employers? (I am assuming that as regards professional skill, and
the sense of duty to God, the two women are on a level.) Surely the
mother, sustained by love in the endurance of sleeplessness and
fatigue, and in the exercise of that unceasing vigilance which lets
no symptom escape it, will be the better nurse. Love, as a motive to
moral action, has the immense advantage over the sense of duty of
being able to rob the hour of trial of its gloom, by strengthening
the lover to make light of labour and difficulty till at last the
sense of effort is lost in the sense of joy. But if love is the
highest of all motives, is it not well that the child's life should
as far as possible, and for as long as possible, be kept under its
influence, to the exclusion of other motives. We have seen that the
Utopian child takes many things in his stride which other children
would regard as distasteful. If they are not distasteful to him, the
reason is that he does them, not from a sense of duty, but under the
inspiration of love,--love of life, love of Egeria, love of his
schoolmates, love of his school. And the longer he can remain on the
high plane of love, the better it will be for his after life.
And when the time comes for him to yield himself to the "saving arms"
of duty, he will have had the best of all preparations for that hour
of trial, for he will have been braced and strengthened for it by the
most moralising of all disciplines, that of growth. What is the sense
of duty? We too seldom ask ourselves this question. Is it not a
feeling of obligation, of being in debt, to some person, or persons,
or institution, or society, or even to some invisible Power;--to
a friend, for example, a relative, a dependent, an employer, a
"contracting party," a commanding officer,--or, again, to one's trade
or profession, to one's political party, to one's church, to one's
country,--or, in the last resort, to God? And is not this feeling
accompanied by the secret conviction that until the debt has been
liquidated, to the best of the debtor's ability, justice will not
have been done? The sense of duty is, I think, a derivative sense,
an offshoot from the more primitive sense of justice,--a sense so
primitive that it may almost be said to have made possible our social
life. If this is so, if the sense of duty is resolvable into the
sense of justice, then the training which is given in Utopia--a
training which makes for healthy and harmonious growth, and therefore
(as we have seen) for outgrowth or escape from self--is the best
preparation for a life of duty, that can possibly be given. For under
its influence the sense of justice, which is essentially a social
instinct, knowing no distinction between oneself and one's neighbour,
will be relieved of the hostile pressure of its arch-enemy, the
anti-social instinct of selfishness,[21] and will therefore make
rapid and vigorous growth. The sense of justice is, as might be
expected, strongly developed in the selfless atmosphere of Utopia,
where indeed it has helped, in no small degree, to evolve the
wonderful social life of the school; and, that being so, there is no
fear but what the Utopian will be sustained by the sense of duty when
the time comes for him to work against the grain of his nature. But
however strong may be his sense of duty, he will always have the
great advantage of being seldom called upon to do what he dislikes,
and therefore of being able to keep the fibre of his sense of duty
from being either unduly relaxed or unduly hardened by overwork; for
he has been accustomed from his earliest days to make light of, and
even find a pleasure in, what is usually accounted drudgery, and he
has been accustomed to work, in school and out of school, under the
inspiration of joy and love.
_But is the education given in Utopia useful?_ I wish I knew who was
asking this question, for I cannot hope to answer it to his
satisfaction until I know what is his standard of values. What end
does he set before the teachers of our elementary schools? If he
would tell me this, I might be able to say Yes or No to his question.
At present there seems to be no agreement among educationalists,
professional or amateur, as to what constitutes usefulness in
education. Those who belong to the "upper classes" are apt to assume
that the "lower orders" will have been adequately educated when they
have been taught reading, writing, arithmetic, needlework, and
"religion," subjected to a certain amount of repressive discipline,
and compelled to go to church or chapel. If, after having passed
through this mill, the children of the "lower orders" do not develop
into good men and women and useful citizens, it is not their
education which is to blame, but the inborn sinfulness of their
corrupt and fallen natures. Such an education is regarded by those
who advocate it as pre-eminently _useful_. There is no nonsense about
it, no cant of idealism, no taint of socialism. It keeps the "lower
orders" in their places, and forbids them to dream of rising above
"that state of life unto which it" has pleased "God to call them." As
it is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the conventional type of education,
my objection to it is that it makes the best possible provision for
securing the end which the conventional type seems to have set
before itself,--in other words, for depressing the vitality of the
child, for starving his faculties, for arresting his growth. As
such, it has not even the merit of being sordidly useful; for
unless stupidity is a better thing than intelligence, slowness than
alertness, helplessness than initiative, lifelessness than vital
activity, the child who has passed through that dreary mill will be
far less effective, even as a day-labourer, than the child whose
school-life has been one of continuous and many-sided growth. It is
strange that the reactionary members of the "upper classes" should be
too short-sighted to discern this obvious truth. But perhaps they
have a secret conviction that by so educating the "lower orders" as
to make them slow and stupid, helpless and lifeless, they will be the
better able to keep them in a state of subservience to and dependence
on themselves.[22] If this is so, there is method in the madness of
the "upper classes"; and their conception of the course that
education ought to take has the merit of being entirely true to their
basely selfish conception of the end that education ought to serve.
I have alluded to this pseudo-utilitarian theory, not because it is
intrinsically worthy of serious attention, but because there is
undoubtedly a strong and influential current of opinion which sets in
its direction. There are other advocates of a "useful" education who
seem to regard the elementary school, not as a training ground for
good men and women, but as a kind of technical institute in which the
children are to be trained for the various callings by which, when
they grow up, they will have to earn their daily bread. This theory
need not be seriously considered, for its inherent absurdity has
caused it to be tacitly abandoned by all whose opinion carries
weight; and the more reasonable theory that the education given in
the elementary school should be as far as possible adapted to the
environment of the school--that it should be given a rural bias, for
example, or a marine bias, or even an urban bias--has begun to take
its place. That it should ever have found advocates is interesting as
showing how easy it is for unenlightened public opinion to
misinterpret the word "useful."[23]
There is a third class of critics, composed for the most part of
members of Local Education Committees, who seem to think that ability
to pass a "leaving" examination is the only valid proof of the
usefulness of elementary education. If these influential critics, who
are showing in various ways that they care more for machinery than
for life, could have their will, they would probably revert to the
"good old days" of cut-and-dried syllabuses, formal examinations of
individual scholars, percentages of passes, and the like. As I have
already taken pains to explain what the _regime_ of the "good old
days" really meant, I need not waste my time in exposing the
fallacies which underlie this conception of "usefulness."
Here, then, are three distinct standards of usefulness in elementary
education. According to the first, education is useful in proportion
as it tends, by repressing the activities and atrophying the
faculties of the scholars, to keep the "lower orders" in their
places, and in so doing to provide the "upper classes" with a
sufficiency of labourers and servants. According to the second, it is
useful in proportion as it is able to prepare the scholars for their
various callings in after life.[24] According to the third, in
proportion as it enables the scholars to pass with credit certain
"leaving" and other examinations of a formal type.
I will now assume that the end of education is to produce, or at any
rate contribute to the production of, good men and women; and that
the education given in elementary schools is useful in exact
proportion as it serves this end. I am not using the word "good" in
its Sunday School sense. Nor does the word suggest to my mind that
blend of stupidity, patience, and submissiveness which sometimes
passes for "goodness" when the "upper classes" are taking thought for
the welfare of the "lower orders." The good man, as I understand the
phrase, is a good son, a good brother, a good husband, a good father,
a good citizen, a good townsman, a good workman, a good servant, a
good master. In fine, he is a good specimen of his kind, well
grown and well developed, efficient on all the planes of his
being,--physical, mental, moral, spiritual. This conception of what
constitutes useful education differs radically from those which I
have just been considering; but I believe that when it has been
adequately expounded, and submitted to the judgment of those whose
opinion is worth having, it will not be seriously gainsaid.
If education is useful in proportion as it tends to produce good men
and women, the education given in Utopia is useful to the highest
degree. For a child cannot become a good man (or woman) except by
_growing_ good; and if he is to grow good, his nature must be allowed
to develop itself freely and harmoniously (for just so far as it is
normal and healthy it is necessarily making for its own perfection),
and the one end and aim of the teacher must be to stimulate and
direct this process of spontaneous growth. This, as we have seen, is
the one end and aim of Egeria; and it is therefore clear that she
is taking effective steps--the most effective that can possibly
be taken--to produce good men and women. We have but to name the
qualities which are characteristic, as we have already seen, of her
pupils and ex-pupils,--activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy,
a large and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy
of heart,--in order to convince ourselves that those who have passed
through the Utopian school are on the high road which leads to
"goodness." So obvious is all this, that in defining the word
"useful" I may be said to have decided the question in favour of
Utopia; and what is now in dispute is not whether Utopianism is
"useful," in any sense of the word, but whether my sense of the word
is the right one.
I cannot go much further into this question without exceeding the
limits of the theme which I am handling in this chapter. For in
considering the after life of the Utopian child, I am entering a
region in which the idea of _education_ begins to merge itself in the
larger idea of _salvation_; and though education, as begun in Utopia,
is in its essence a life-long process, I must pay some heed to the
limits which tradition and custom have imposed on the meaning of the
word.
But before I close this chapter I must be allowed to give one
illustration in support of my contention that the education given in
Utopia is useful. Of the many complaints that are brought against the
output of our elementary schools, one of the most serious is that the
boys and girls who have recently left school are voracious readers of
a vicious and demoralising literature which seems to be provided for
their special benefit. The reason why they take so readily to this
garbage is that they have lost their appetite for wholesome food.
They are not interested in healthy literature, in Nature-study, in
music, in art, in handicraft,--in any pursuit which might take them
out of themselves into a larger and freer life; and so they fall
victims to the allurements of a literature which appeals to their
baser, more sensual, and more selfish instincts,--the very instincts
which growth (in the true sense of the word) spontaneously relegates
to a subordinate position and places under effective control. It is
the inertness, the apathy, the low vitality of the average child of
fourteen, which is the cause of his undoing. His taste for false and
meretricious excitement--a taste which may lead him far along the
downward path--is the outcome of his very instinct to live, an
instinct which, though repressed by the influences that have choked
its natural channels, cannot resign itself to extinction, and at
last, in its despairing effort to energise, forces for itself the
artificial outlet of an imaginative interest in vice and crime.
The "young person" who, on leaving school, becomes a voracious
devourer of unwholesome literature, cannot be said to have received
a "useful" education. That vice and crime--whether practised or
imagined--are in the first instance artificial outlets, outlets which
the soul would not use if its expansive instincts were duly fostered,
is proved by the absence of "naughtiness" in the Utopian school,
and the absence of any taste for morbid excitement amongst Utopian
ex-scholars. The unwholesome literature which gives so much concern
to those who are interested in the welfare of the young, is unknown
in Utopia. And in this, as in other matter, the "goodness" of the
children and "young persons" is due, not to any lack of life and
spirit, but to the very abundance of their vitality. Apart from the
fact that vigorous growth, whether in plant or animal or human soul,
is in itself a sure prophylactic against the various evils to which
growing life is exposed, the Utopians are guarded against the danger
of demoralising books and demoralising amusements by their many-sided
interest in life. Their instinct to live, finding natural and
adequate outlets in many directions, has no need to force for itself
the artificial outlet of morbid excitement,--an outlet for imprisoned
energies, which has too often proved an opening to a life of vice and
crime. There is a Shakespeare in every cottage in Utopia; but the
advocates of a repressive and restrictive education for the "lower
orders" need not be alarmed at this, for the Utopians, who have found
the secret of true happiness, are freer than most villagers from
social discontent. Nor are Egeria's ex-pupils less efficient as
labourers or domestic servants because they are interested in good
literature, in Nature-study, in acting, or because they can still
dance the Morris Dances and sing the Folk Songs which they learned in
school.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] I am thinking more particularly of some of the Roman
Catholic schools in the Irish quarter of Liverpool, where the
singularly kind and gracious bearing of the teaching "sisters"
towards their poor, ill-fed, and ill-clad pupils is an educative
influence of incalculable value.
[21] The sense of justice, which would give to each his due,
and therefore not more than his due to oneself, seems to hold the
balance between selfishness and love, being as it were, equidistant
from the greed and self-indulgence of the former and the lavishness
and self-devotion of the latter. If this is so, and if the sense of
duty is, as I have suggested, an offshoot from the sense of justice,
one can understand why, on the one hand, the sense of duty should be
needed to hold the self-seeking instincts in check, and why, on the
other hand, it should be an altogether lower and weaker motive than
love, by which indeed, _in its own interest_, it should always be
ready to be superseded.
[22] I was once present when the Utopian children were going
through a programme of Folk Songs and Morris Dances in the village
hall. A lady who was looking on remarked to me: "This is all very
fine; but if this sort of thing goes on, where are we going to find
our servants?" The selfishness of this remark is obvious. What is
less obvious, but more significant, is its purblindness. In point of
fact the Utopian girls make excellent domestic servants, and are well
content to "go into service."
[23] Some two or three years ago it was seriously proposed
that _marine navigation_ should be taught in all the elementary
schools of a certain maritime county!
[24] The parent who wrote to a schoolmaster, "Please do not
teach my boy any more poetry, as he is going to be a grocer," must
have been under the influence of this conception of usefulness.
CHAPTER VI
SALVATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION
In Utopia the transition from _education_ to _salvation_, both in
theory and practice, is obvious and direct. The difference between
education and salvation is, indeed, purely nominal: in their essence
the two processes are one. As the education given in Utopia is, in
the main, self-education, there is no reason why it should not be
continued indefinitely after the child has left school; and as its
function is to foster the growth of the child's many-sided nature
(with its vast potentialities), there is every reason why it should
be continued as long as he lives. In other words, the path of
salvation is the path of self-realisation, the most important part of
which is traversed in childhood; and to attain to salvation (which is
in a sense unattainable) is to remain faithful to that path till it
passes beyond our thought.
Outside Utopia there is a widely different conception of the meaning
and purpose of education, and a correspondingly different conception
of the nature of salvation and the means by which it is to be
achieved. The idea of salvation, with the complementary idea of
perdition, may be regarded as the crown and completion of that scheme
of external rewards and punishments which plays so prominent a
part in Western education. Salvation, which is the highest of all
external rewards, just as perdition is the severest of all external
punishments, is not a path to be followed, but a state of happiness
to be won and enjoyed. It follows that the relation between education
and salvation is, in the main, one of analogy, rather than of
identity (as in Utopia), or even of vital connection. Or shall we say
that education is not so much the first act in the drama of salvation
as the first rehearsal of the play?
There are, of course, two conceptions of salvation in the West, just
as there are two worlds to be lived in,--the Supernatural world and
the world of Nature.
In what are called religious circles, to be saved is to have gained
admission to Heaven, and, in doing so, to have escaped the torment
and misery of Hell. There was a time when Hell was taken very
seriously; but the idea of never-ending torment and misery is found,
when steadily faced, to be so intolerable that popular thought, even
in religious circles, is now turning away from it; and so loosely do
men sit, in these "degenerate days," to the old doctrine of eternal
punishment, that "to die" and "to go to heaven" are becoming
interchangeable terms. But if all men are to be admitted to Heaven
(or to its ante-room, Purgatory) at the end of this, their one
earth-life, it is clear that there can be no causal connection
between conduct and salvation. For though there may be degrees of
happiness in Heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on
earth, all these are dwarfed to nothing by the unimaginable abyss
of difference which yawns between Heaven and Hell; and the
practical upshot of the current eschatology is that all men--the
self-sacrificing equally with the self-indulgent, the kind and
compassionate equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded
equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the
indifferent--are to reap the same reward. If a man is a notoriously
evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently
scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in
consigning him to Hell, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put
up its shutters. But though the doors of Heaven may be closed against
a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all
the rest of Mankind; and the maxim, "Live anyhow, and you will be
saved somehow," seems to sum up with tolerable accuracy the popular
attitude towards the twofold problem of duty and destiny.
I do not for a moment suggest that this happy-go-lucky eschatology is
formally countenanced by the Churches and Sects. They would doubtless
repudiate it with indignation; but the fact remains that their
own teaching is largely responsible for it. For not only is the
idea of _natural_ retribution wholly foreign to the genius of
supernaturalism, but also, in the two great schools of Western
theology, there is, and always has been, a strong tendency to
undervalue conduct (in the broad, human sense of the word), and to
make the means of salvation mechanical rather than vital. At any rate
the sacramental teaching of the Catholic Church, and the Calvinistic
doctrine of salvation through faith in the finished work of Christ,
readily lend themselves to such an interpretation.
So ineffective is the current eschatology, in its bearing on
conduct, that the latent energy of Man's nature--his latent desire to
have a central purpose in life--is compelling him to work out for
himself another and a more mundane conception of salvation, to set
before himself as the end of life the winning of certain temporal
prizes, and to keep this end steadily in view from day to day and
from year to year. Such a conception of salvation has always had a
strong attraction for him, though in his more orthodox days he found
it desirable to subordinate it to, or if possible harmonise it with,
the conception which his religion dictated to him; and of late its
attractiveness has been increased by the fact that he is beginning to
throw his eschatology (even in its present emasculated form) to the
winds.
So far, I have had in my mind those quarters of Western thought in
which the belief in the reality of the soul and the kindred belief
in immortality still survive. But in point of fact both beliefs
are dying before our eyes,--dying as a dumb protest against the
inadequacy of the popular philosophy, against the intrinsic
incredibility of its premises, against its fundamental misconception
of the meaning of life and the nature and conditions of salvation,
above all against the way in which the beliefs themselves have been
persistently misinterpreted and travestied. And where the beliefs are
dying, the latent externalism and materialism of Western thought and
Western life are able to assert themselves without let or hindrance.
"To be saved," as the phrase is now widely understood, means to get
on in life, to succeed in business or in a profession, to make money,
to rise in the social scale (if necessary, on the shoulders of
others), to force one's way to the front (if necessary, by trampling
down others), to be talked about in the daily papers, to make a
"splash" in some circle or coterie,--in these and in other ways to
achieve some measure of what is called "success."
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