What Is and What Might Be

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

It is notorious that the application of the examination principle to
religion--the attempt to estimate spiritual health and growth in
terms of outward action--generates hypocrisy, or the pretence of
being more virtuous (and more religious) than one really is. When
applied to the education of the young, the same principle generates
hypocrisy of another kind,--the pretence of being cleverer than one
really is, of knowing more than one really knows. So long as the
hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But
when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between
outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete.
In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole
atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit
the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is
aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in
his fraud. The child who is being crammed for an examination, and who
is being practised at the various tricks and dodges that will, it
is hoped, enable him to throw dust in the examiner's eyes, may not
consciously realise that he and his teacher are trying to perpetrate
a fraud, but will probably have an instinctive feeling that he is
being led into crooked ways. If he has not that feeling, if the
crooked ways seem straight in his eyes, we may know that his sense
of reality is being poisoned by the vitiated atmosphere which he
has been compelled to breathe. Nor, if that is his case, will
he lack companionship in his delusion. In the atmosphere of the
examination system, deceit and hypocrisy are ever changing into
self-deception; and all who become acclimatised to the influence of
the system--pupils, teachers, examiners, parents, employers of
labour, ministers of religion, members of Parliament, and the
rest--fall victims, sooner or later, to the poison that infects
it, and are well content to cheat themselves with outward and
visible results, accepting "class-lists" and "orders of merit" as of
quasi-divine authority, mistaking official regulations for laws of
Nature, and the clumsy movements of over-elaborated yet ill-contrived
machinery for the subtle processes of life.

Of the many evils inherent in Western education, which the
examination system tends to intensify, one of the greatest is that of
starving the child's activities, of making him helpless, apathetic,
and inert. Original sin finds its equivalent, in the sphere of mental
action, in original impotence and stupidity. It is not in the child
to direct his steps, and the teacher must therefore direct them for
him, and, if necessary, support him with both hands while he makes
them. Even if the outward results which are the goal of the teacher's
ambition were to be produced for his own satisfaction only, he would
take care to leave as little as possible to the child's independent
effort. But when the results in question have to satisfy an examiner,
and when, as may well happen, the teacher's own professional welfare
depends on the examiner's verdict, it is but natural that he should
hold himself responsible for every stroke and dot that his pupil
makes. When the education given in a school is dominated by a
periodical examination on a prescribed syllabus, suppression of
the child's natural activities becomes the central feature of the
teacher's programme. In such a school the child is not allowed to do
anything which the teacher can possibly do for him. He has to think
what his teacher tells him to think, to feel what his teacher tells
him to feel, to see what his teacher tells him to see, to say what
his teacher tells him to say, to do what his teacher tells him to do.
And the directions given to him are always minute. Not the smallest
room for free action is allowed him if his teacher can possibly help
it. Indeed, it is the function of the skilful teacher to search for
such possible nooks and crannies, and fill them up. It is true that
if an examination is to be passed with credit some thinking has to be
done. But the greater part of this thinking must be done by the
teacher, the _role_ of the pupil, even when he is an adult student,
being essentially passive and receptive. The pupil must indeed be
actively passive and industriously receptive; but for the rest, he
must as far as possible leave himself in the teacher's hands. How
to outwit the examiner is the one aim of both the teacher and the
examinee; and as the teacher is presumably older, wiser, and far
more skilful at the examination game than his pupil, the duty of
thinking--of planning, of contriving, and even (in the deeper sense
of the word) of studying--necessarily devolves on the former; and the
latter, instead of relying upon himself and learning to use his own
wits and resources, becomes more and more helpless and resourceless,
and gradually ceases to take any interest in the work that he is
doing, for its own sake, his chief, if not his sole, concern being
to outwit the examiner and pass a successful examination. (One
frequently meets with clever University students who, having read a
certain book for a certain examination and had no question set from
it, regard the time given to the study of it as wasted, and have
no compunction about expressing this opinion!) If these are evils
incidental--I might almost say essential--to the examination of adult
scholars, it stands to reason that they will be greatly aggravated
when the examinees are young children. For the younger the child, the
more ignorant and helpless he is (however full he may be of latent
capacity and spontaneous activity), and therefore the more ready he
is to lean upon his teacher and to look to him for instruction and
direction.

The desire to outwit, and so win approval from, an examiner, is not
the only reason why the teacher so often reduces to an absurdity the
traditional distrust of the child. His own inability to educate the
child on other lines is another and not less potent reason. The
examination _regime_ to which he has been subjected himself, partly,
perhaps, under compulsion, but also and in larger measure of his
own choice, deprives him, as we have already seen, of much of his
freedom, initiative, and responsibility; and that being so, it is
inevitable that within the limited range of free action which is left
to him, he in his turn should devote his energies to depriving his
pupils of the same vital qualities, and to making them the helpless
creatures of habit and routine which he himself is tending to become.
To give free play to a child's natural faculties and so lead him
into the path of self-development and self-education, demands a high
degree of intelligence on the part of the teacher, combined with the
constant exercise of thought and initiative within a wide range of
free action. If you tell a teacher in precise detail, whether
directly or indirectly, that he is to do this thing, and that
thing, and the next thing, he will not be able to carry out your
instructions, except by telling his pupils, again in precise detail,
that they are to do this thing, and that thing, and the next thing.
He cannot help himself. He has no choice in the matter. He is the
victim of a quasi-physical compulsion. The pressure which is put upon
him will inevitably be transmitted by him and through him to his
pupils, and will inevitably be multiplied (the relations between
teacher and pupil being what they are) in the course of transmission.

There is nothing that a healthy child hates so much as to have the
use of his natural faculties and the play of his natural energies
unduly restricted by parental or pedagogic control. We may therefore
take for granted that the child will find himself ill at ease in a
school in which every vital activity is rigidly repressed, and in
which he spends most of his time in sitting still and waiting for
orders. Nor will it add to his happiness to live habitually in an
atmosphere of constraint, of austerity, of suspicion, of gloom. But I
need not take pains to prove that education, as it is conducted in
Western countries, is profoundly repugnant to the natural instincts
of the healthy child. For that is precisely what it is intended to
be. The idea of a child enjoying his "lessons" is foreign to the
genius of the West. Dominated as he is by the inherited conviction
that Man's nature is corrupt and that his instincts are evil, the
Western teacher has set himself the task of doing violence to the
child's instinctive tendencies, of thwarting his inborn desires, of
working against the grain of his nature. He has expected the child to
rebel against this _regime_, and he has welcomed his rebellion as a
proof of the corruption of Man's nature, and therefore of the
soundness of the traditional philosophy of education.

But if education is hateful to the child, how is he to be induced to
submit to being educated? Some co-operation on his part will be
necessary. How is it to be secured? By precisely the same methods as
those by which Man, in the course of his education, has been induced
to co-operate with God. The child, like Man, is to be "saved"--to be
rescued from Nature and from himself--by being led into the path of
mechanical obedience. The child, like Man, is to be kept in that path
by a system of external rewards and punishments. If he will not do
what he is told to do, he will be punished by his teacher. If he
will do what he is told to do, he will escape punishment, and he may
possibly, when his merits have accumulated sufficiently, receive a
reward. In the education of Man by the God of Israel the balance
between rewards and punishments has been kept fairly even. Hell has
been balanced by Heaven, calamity by prosperity, death by life. It
has been far otherwise with the child. His punishments have been
many, and his rewards few. At the present day men are more humane
than they used to be; and corporal punishment, though still resorted
to, counts for less than it used to do in the training of the child.
But punishments of various kinds are still regarded as indispensable
adjuncts to school discipline; and it is still taken for granted in
far too many schools that the fear of punishment and the hope of
reward are the only effective motives to educational effort.

It is difficult to say which of the two motives is the more likely to
demoralise the child. A _regime_ of punishment is not necessarily a
_regime_ of cruelty; but punishment can scarcely fail to savour of
severity, and when the doctrine of original sin is in the ascendant,
and the inborn wilfulness and stubbornness of the child are
postulated by his teachers, the indefinable boundary line between
severity and cruelty is easily crossed. Of the tendency of cruelty
to demoralise its victims I have already spoken. But the effect of
punishment on the child must be considered in its relation to his
mental, as well as to his moral, development. Scholarships, prizes,
high places in class, and other such rewards are for the few, not for
the many. If the many are to be roused to exertion, the fear of
punishment (in the hypothetical absence of any other motive) must
be ever before them. What will happen to them when that motive is
withdrawn, as it will be when the child becomes the adolescent? His
education has been distasteful to the child, partly because his
teachers have assumed from the outset that it would be and must be
so, but chiefly because in their ignorance they have taken pains to
make it so, his school life having been so ordered as to combine the
maximum of strain with the maximum of _ennui_. His teachers have done
everything for him, except those mechanical and monotonous exercises
which they felt they might trust him to do by himself. Some of
his mental faculties have become stunted and atrophied through lack
of exercise. Others have been allowed to wither in the bud. If he
happens to belong to the "masses," he will have completed his school
education at the age of thirteen or fourteen. What will he do with
himself when there is no longer a teacher at his elbow to tell him
what to do and how to do it, and to stand over him (should this be
necessary) while he does it? Why should he go on with studies which
he has neither the inclination nor the ability to pursue, and
which, in point of fact, he has never really begun? And why should he
continue to exert himself when, owing to his being at last beyond the
reach of punishment, the need for him to do so--the only need which
he has been accustomed to regard as imperative--has ceased to exist?

The objections to the hope of reward as a motive to educational
effort are of another kind. Prizes, as I have said, are for the few;
and it is the consciousness of being one of the elect which invests
the winning of a prize with its chief attraction. The prize system
makes a direct appeal to the vanity and egoism of the child. It
encourages him to think himself better than others, to pride himself
on having surpassed his class-mates and shone at their expense. The
clever child is to work hard, not because knowledge is worth winning
for its own sake and for his own sake, but because it will be
pleasant for him to feel that he has succeeded where others have
failed. It is a just reproach against the examination system that
while, by its demand for outward results it does its best to destroy
individuality, the essence of which is sincerity of expression, it
also does its best to foster individualism, by appealing, with its
offer of prizes and other "distinctions," to those instincts which
predispose each one of us to affirm and exalt that narrow,
commonplace, superficial aspect of his being which he miscalls his
_self_.

Thus the hope of reward tends to demoralise the clever child by
making an appeal to basely selfish motives. At the same time it is
probably deluding him with the belief that he has more capacity than
he really has. If the examination system is, as I have suggested, the
keystone of the arch of Western education, it is by means of the
prize system that the keystone has been firmly cemented into its
place. An examination which had no rewards or distinctions to offer
to the competitors would not be an effective stimulus to exertion.
That being so, our educationalists have taken care that to every
examination some external reward or rewards shall be attached. Even
if there are no material prizes to appeal to the child's cupidity,
there is always the class-list, with its so-called "order of merit,"
to appeal to his vanity. Our educationalists have also taken care
that during the periods of childhood, adolescence, and even early
maturity, every prize that is offered for competition shall be
awarded after a formal examination and on the consideration of its
tabulated results. The appointments in the Home, Colonial, and Indian
Civil Services, the promotions in the Army and Navy, the fellowships
and scholarships at the Universities, the scholarships at the Public
Schools, the medals, books, and other prizes that are offered to
school-children, are all awarded to those who have distinguished
themselves in the corresponding examinations, no other qualification
than that of ability to shine in an examination being looked for in
the competitors. There are, no doubt, exceptions to these general
statements, but they are so few that they scarcely count. We have
seen that the ascendency of the examination system in our schools and
colleges is largely due to the vulgar confusion between information
and knowledge; and we have also seen that the examination system
reacts upon that fatal confusion and tends to strengthen and
perpetuate it. If, then, the effect of the prize system is to
consolidate the authority of the formal examination and intensify
its influence, we shall not go far wrong in assuming that in the
various competitions for prizes the confusion between information
and knowledge will play a vital part. And, in point of fact, the
cleverness which enables the child--I ignore for the moment the
adolescent and the adult student--to win prizes of various kinds is
found, when carefully analysed, to resolve itself, in nine cases out
of ten, into the ability to receive, retain, and retail information.
As this particular, ability is but a small part of that mental
capacity which education is supposed to train, it is clear that the
clever child who gets to the top of his class, and wins prizes in so
doing, may easily be led to over-estimate his powers, and to take
himself far more seriously than it is either right or wise of him to
do. His over-confidence may for a time prove an effective stimulus to
exertion; but the exertion will probably be misdirected; and later
on, when he finds himself confronted by the complex realities of
life, and when problems have to be solved which demand the exercise
of other faculties than that of memory, his belief in himself, which
is the outcome of a false criterion of merit, may induce him to
undertake what he cannot accomplish, and may lead at last--owing to
his having lost touch with the actualities of things--to his complete
undoing.

And as under the prize system the child who is high in his class is
apt to over-estimate his ability, so the child who is low in his
class is apt to accept the verdict of the class-list as final, and to
regard himself as a failure because he lacks the superficial ability
which enables a child to shine on the examination day. Again and
again it happens that the dunce of his class goes to the front in the
battle of life. But numerous and significant as these cases are, they
are unfortunately exceptions to a general rule. For one dunce who
emerges from the depths of "apparent failure," there are ten who go
under after a more or less protracted struggle, and sink contentedly
to the bottom. The explanation of this is that though every child
has capacity (apart, of course, from the congenital idiot and the
mentally "defective"), there are many kinds of capacity which a
formal examination fails to discover, and which the education that
is dominated by the prize system fails to develop. The child whose
particular kind of capacity does not count, either in the ordinary
school lesson or on the examination day, is not aware that he is
capable; and as he is always low on the class-list, and is therefore
regarded by his teachers as dull and stupid, he not unnaturally
acquiesces in the current and apparently authoritative estimate, of
his powers, and, losing heart about himself, ends by becoming the
failure which he has been taught to believe himself to be. In brief,
while the prize system breeds ungrounded and therefore dangerous
self-esteem in the child whom it labels as bright, it breeds
ungrounded but not the less fatal self-distrust in the child whom
it labels as dull.

We have seen that there comes a time in the life of every man when
the fear of punishment ceases to act as a stimulus to educational
exertion. It is the same with the hope of reward. Examinations, and
the prizes which reward success in examinations, are for the young.
What will happen to the prize-winner when there are no more prizes
for him to compete for? Will he continue to pursue knowledge for its
own sake? Alas! he has never pursued it for its own sake. He has
pursued it for the sake of the prizes and other honours which it
brought him. When he has won his last prize the chances are that
he will lose all interest in that branch of learning in which he
achieved distinction, unless, indeed, he has to earn his livelihood
by teaching it. Of the scores of young men who distinguish themselves
in "Classics" at Oxford and Cambridge, how many will continue to
study the classical writers when they have gained the "Firsts" for
which they worked so diligently? Apart from those who are going
to teach Classics in the Public Schools or Universities, a mere
handful,--one in ten perhaps, though that is probably an extravagant
estimate. And yet the poets, philosophers, and historians whom they
have studied are amongst the greatest that the world has produced.
What is it, then, that kills, in nine cases out of ten, the
classical student's interest in the masterpieces of antiquity? The
obvious fact that he was never interested in them for their own
sakes--that he studied them, not in order to enjoy them or profit by
them, but in order to pass an examination in them, of which he might
be able to say in after years:

"I am named and known by that hour's feat,
There took my station and degree."

How many Wranglers, other than those who have or will become
schoolmasters or college tutors, continue to study mathematics? How
many of the First Classmen in Science, History, Law, and other Honour
"Schools" continue to study their respective subjects? In every case
an utterly insignificant minority.

But if the prize system does this to the young man of twenty-two or
twenty-three, if it kills his interest in learning, if it makes him
register an inward vow never again to open the books which he has
crammed so successfully for his examinations, what may it be expected
to do to the child whose school education comes to an end when he
is only thirteen or fourteen years old? When, with the fear of
punishment, the complementary hope of reward is withdrawn from him,
is it reasonable to expect him to continue his education, to continue
to apply himself to subjects with which his acquaintance has been
entirely formal and superficial, and which he has never been allowed
to digest and assimilate? The utter indifference of the average
ex-elementary scholar to literature, to history, to geography, to
science, to music, to art, is the world-wide answer to this question.

For what is, above all, hateful in any scheme of rewards and
punishments, when applied to the school life of the young, is that it
wholly externalises what is really an inward and spiritual process,
the evolution of the youthful mind. Just as in the sphere of religion
it is postulated as a self-evident truth that righteousness is not
its own reward, nor iniquity its own punishment,--so in the sphere of
education it is postulated as a self-evident truth, that knowledge is
not its own reward, nor ignorance its own punishment. And just as in
the sphere of religion the appeal to Man's selfish hopes and ignoble
fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning and
purpose of righteousness, which has caused his moral and spiritual
energies to be diverted into irreligious or anti-religious channels,
to the detriment of his inward and spiritual growth,--so in the
sphere of education the appeal to the child's selfish desires and
ignoble fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning
and purpose of knowledge, which has caused his mental energies to be
diverted into uneducational channels, to the detriment of his mental
growth. In each case the scheme of rewards and punishments, acting
like an immense blister, when applied to a healthy body, draws to the
surface the life-blood which ought to nourish and purify the vital
organs of the soul (or mind), thereby impoverishing the vital
organs, and inflaming and disfiguring the surface. For if the surface
life, with its outward and visible "results," is to be happy and
productive, the health of the vital organs must be carefully
maintained. This is the fundamental truth which those who control
education in the West have persistently ignored.

The system of education which I have tried to describe is a practical
embodiment of the ideas that govern the popular philosophy of the
West. One who had studied that philosophy, and who wished to
ascertain what provision it made for the education of the young,
would in the course of his inquiry construct _a priori_ the precise
system of education which is in vogue in all Western countries.
The supposed relation between God and his fallen and rebellious
offspring, Man, is obviously paralleled by the relation between the
teacher and the child; and it is therefore clear that the supposed
dealings of God with Man ought to be paralleled by the dealings of
the teacher with the child. That they are so paralleled--that
salvation by machinery has found its most exact counterpart in
education by machinery--the history of education has made abundantly
clear.

Whatever else the current system of education may do to the child,
there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,--to blight his
mental growth. What particular form or forms this blighting influence
may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of
circumstances. Experience tells us that what happens in most cases is
that Western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth
of others, stunts the growth of a third group, and distorts the
growth of a fourth.

Is it intended that education should do all this? This question is
not so paradoxical as it sounds. My primary assumption that the
function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the
eyes of those who agree with it; but Western orthodoxy, just so
far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs repudiate it
as a pestilent heresy. For if what grows is intrinsically evil,
what can growth do for it but carry it towards perdition?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20