Education and social progress

Front matter

EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROGEESS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ELEMENTARY PHYSIOGRAPHY

Preface

This is the age of the Social question. At no previous time have the needs and problems of society been more keenly felt or more earnestly faced. Our social problems are spiritual and ethical as well as economic. In dealing with them two objects must always be kept in view: one is the improvement of the economic conditions of the people, and the other, and no less important, the improvement of personal character. Social workers have been slow to realise that prevention is better than cure, and that the child is the centre of the social problem and our strong hope of its ultimate solution. We have been devoting too much attention to adults and too little to the young. The words of an old writer contain much wisdom : ' Barren land should not be cultivated, nor even once ploughed ' ; or, as a modern writer even more pointedly puts it, ' Too much money is spent upon the diseased tree, not enough upon the growing twig.'

Let us honestly face the fact that we cannot do much to modify the hves and characters of the adults of the community who have gone astray, but we can do a great deal to bring physical, mental, and moral health into the lives of the children, and to give scope to their infinite potentialities for the good of the nation. Think of the fifteen million children in the vi PREFACE

country under fourteen years of age. The whole gamut of human capacity must be represented there, and lying latent in them is the collective power, if properly developed, to make our country the happiest and most prosperous of nations. Hence workers for social amelioration are concentrating their energies more on the training and education of the child than on any other form of social endeavour.

Education, not in the old narrow sense of school teaching, but as comprising all the forces that develop the powers and form the minds and characters of the young, is now recognised as the most important method of social intervention, and the most powerful means by which democracy can secure the realisation of its ideals. As a consequence, there is growing up a new body of educational literature less specialised in substance and less narrow in aim and interest than that which has hitherto been common. It is the aim of this volume to present some of those wider aspects of education, and to show the part that education, properly interpreted and exercised, may play in removing the barriers to social progress, and in improving the condition of the whole body pohtic.

I desire to acknowledge my great indebtedness to my colleague Mr. James Drever, M.A., B.Sc, Lecturer in Education, Edinburgh University, for revising the proofs and making many valuable suggestions in connection with them.

ALEX. MORGAN.

Edinburgh,

November I, 1915.

Contents

CHAPTER

I. Social Pathology

II. Imperfect Remedies of Social Diseases .

Chapter I

Until recent times there was a tendency, in Western nations at least, to emphasise the rights of the individual as against the rights of the community, and to regard the State as existing solely for the interests of its individual members. The laissezfaire doctrines of the last two centuries exaggerated unduly the importance of the individual, and the danger of interfering with his rights and liberties. Modern social philosophy is opposed to these views. Fouillee correctly represents the opinions of the present time when he says : ' The danger that, above all others, a democratic nation must avoid is the disintegration of society into units with no immediate concern but self-interest, into individuals to whom social duties and bonds are gradually ceasing to appeal.' ^

1 Education Jrom a National Standpoint, p. 4, by Alfred Fouillee. (International Education Series.)

B

Individualistic theories if carried to their logical development would lead to the destruction of the State. Hence at the present moment there is a return to something like the old Greek ideal of citizenship, that it is the office of a good citizen to serve the State, to live and, if need be, to die for the State, whose duty it is on the other hand to protect its citizens and to equip them for social service in which they develop their highest individuality. The modern biological conception of society as an organism, the living cells of which are the individual members, is changing the old-time demand for individual liberty to a demand for social solidarity. We prosper only by the welfare of the whole, and if there is disease or degeneration in any part, the entire community offers thereby. ' If one member suffers all the members suffer with it.' Hence those interested in social welfare are examining the ills of society at the present time with microscopic intensity. There never was a time when there was so much social endeavour, or when so many minds were engaged in examining our social ills, and in planning and working out schemes for their remedy. As a consequence, we know infinitely more than even our parents did about the problems of humanity, and, through the practical application of knowledge fast accumulating, we may confidently hope that a solution of the problems will be found. There is no reason in the nature of things why society should be oppressed for ever by the ills that at present afflict it. If we set ourselves earnestly to the task, it is within our power greatly to reduce, if not entirely to remove, them. What we have to do is to study with patience the symptoms and causes of the national malaise, and then to apply the appropriate remedies. It is not necessary in a general treatise such as this to give a minute and exhaustive analysis of the pathological conditions of society. They are chiefly three : poverty, vice and crime, and parasitism and the exploitation of the weak by the strong.

Poverty

Poverty is one of the commonest forms of social disease and one of the chief obstacles to social progress. Whether we advocate the entire abolition of child labour, the extension of the period of compulsory education, the improvement of housing, or any other proposal calculated to ameliorate the condition of the people, we are met at every turn by the same objection — the inability of a portion of the community to bear the increased cost. Our present economic and social conditions are producing an unending supply of broken and destitute people who are always within measurable reach of want, who suffer in body and in mind from lack of the necessaries of life, and are unable to lead healthy and useful lives.

Few reahse the extent to which our country is suffering from this disease. Mr. B. Seebohm Rowntree in his work on ' Poverty ' makes an exhaustive study of the economic conditions of York, and gives figures which show that ten per cent, of the population of

B 2 the city are very poor. Mr. Charles Booth in ' Life and Labour of the People in London ' shows that twelve per cent, of the people are in poverty. The recent investigations made by the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws reveal that over two millions of different persons are granted parochial relief every year, the expenditure for this purpose in England alone being £15,000,000 a year, and in Scotland £1,286,000, or altogether an average of 5s. 6c/. per head of the population of the United Kingdom — about the same as we spend on education} In addition to this at least nine millions sterling are expended in relieving poverty each year by public and private charities throughout the United Kingdom. The sum disbursed by charities in Edinburgh amounts to the large total of £290,000 a year, and from the Poor Rates £95,000. From figures such as these it is unfortunately but too plain that there are at all times within the United Kingdom between three and four million people of all ages on the borderland of destitution. The sufferings of these people have been thus described in a recent study (' Poverty,' by Robert Hunter) : ' As a class they have the longest hours of work, they have the lowest pay ; they have competition of the severest kind to face ; they are oppressed by sweating methods ; their employment is irregular ; their tenements are the most insanitary, and their rents

1 Mr. Rowntree shows that of the total expenditure of the city of York, 16 per cent, is spent on pauperism, 7 per cent, in dealing with •rime, and 12 per cent, on education.

relatively the highest that any class pay ; the prices for food and fuel are exorbitant, because they must buy in small quantities ; when they find it necessary to go into debt they are fleeced by loan sharks ; they are most often ill ; they bear the burden of more deaths than any other class ; and being without savings they are in actual distress as soon as they are unable to work, or as soon as they are unemployed as a result of economic or other causes.'

The poverty of our country districts is a very different thing from the congested poverty of our large towns, where it withdraws itself into the social swamps called slums. The condition of the slum-dweller is truly described by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in their recent work on ' The Prevention of Destitution.' ' Destitution in a densely-crowded modern city means, as all experience shows, not only oncoming disease and premature death from continued privation, but also, in the great majority of cases, the degradation of the soul. Massed in mean streets, working in sweating dens, or picking up a precarious livelihood by casual jobs ; living by day and by night in overcrowded one-room tenements through months of chronic unemployment or persistent under-employment ; infants and children, boys and girls, men and women, together find themselves subjected — in an atmosphere of drinking, begging, cringing, and lying — to unspeakable temptations to which it is practically inevitable that they should in different degrees succumb, and in which strength and purity of character are irretrievably lost. Anyone acquainted with the sights and sounds and smells of the quarters of great cities in which destitution is widely prevalent — especially anyone conversant with the life -histories of families below the " Poverty Line " — learns to recognise a sort of moral malaria which undermines the spiritual vitality of those subjected to its baleful influence, and, whilst here and there a moral genius may survive, saddened but otherwise unscathed, gradually submerges the mass of each generation, as it grows up, in coarseness and bestiality, apathy and cynical scepticism of every kind.'

And what of the children of the slums, the innocent victims, as Hall Caine says, of the social maelstrom ?

Is this a holy thing to see

In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery,

Fed with cold and usurous hand ?

And their sun doth never shine,

And their fields are bleak and bare,

And their ways are filled with thorns : It is eternal winter there.

For where'er the sun doth shiue, And where'er the rain does fall.

Babes should never hunger there Nor poverty the mind appal.^

In the name of our humanity let us do what is in our power to remove, as far as may be, the heavy

1 WiUiam Blake.

handicap on their young Hves, and to rescue them from the influences of their surroundings of poverty and crime.

We have only referred as yet to the three or four millions of our population in actual poverty. Great as their number is, it is small compared with those who live on the border line of poverty, always within measurable reach of starvation, and in a condition fluctuating between want and the fear of want. Twelve or thirteen millions ^ not actually overtaken by poverty have their lives overshadowed by a bitter and relentless struggle for the means of subsistence for themselves and those dependent on them. When all is well they may be able to keep the woK from the door, but they know that he is waiting to enter the moment there is sickness, or accident, or depression in trade. Something is wrong with a civilisation in which nearly a fourth of the people live, as in this country, below the level of fairly comfortable subsistence.

Vice and Crime

On the prevalence of vice and crime as a social disease there is no need for us to dwell. ' Sin is the longest, heaviest drift in human history. . . . Men have reared against it government, education, philosophy, system after system of religion. But sin has overwhelmed them all.' So writes Dr. George Adam Smith, Principal of Aberdeen University.

* See Poverty, by W. Reason, M.A., pp. 12-41. (Headley Bros.)

About a million of our population are committed to trial every year for criminal offences great and small, and more than haK of these, in spite of our prisons and penal code, return to their careers of wrongdoing. Our annual drink bill is £161,000,000, and betting and other forms of gambling are indulged in by vast numbers of our population. If these two vices alone could be removed a vast number of families would at once rise from poverty into the ranks of those Hving in comfort, and rearing families well clothed and AveU fed.

Exploitation and Parasitism

Exploitation is a common process both in the natural and the economic world. Natural selection and evolution are one long series of exploitations. So too in human society, so long as men are regarded as a means of production and of money making, and not primarily as spiritual beings wdth infinite potentialities, on the cultivation of which eternal issues depend, so long will the strong and intelligent prey upon the weak and ignorant and take advantage of them. This runs all through history. When Plato planned his Republic and Aristotle his ideal City-State, they took for granted that the educated citizens should be supported by the rest of the population. When in the Middle Ages a leisured class made up of the nobility and the cultured arose, it was natural in the existing conditions for its members to assume that they should be supported by the labour of the masses. And even when, in more recent times, the wage system replaced the various forms of feudal slavery the spirit of exploitation remained.

In modern times exploitation takes new forms — industrial concerns run solely for profit, sweating at the expense of the health and happiness generally of women and juvenile workers, and idleness preying on the industry of others and yielding no service to society in return. No community can afford to support permanently a mass of social parasites — the unemployed rich and idlers of every class, the pauper, the tramp, the criminal — all, in short, who are supported by the industry of the rest of the population and add nothing themselves to the sum total of achievement, whether in the realm of industry and commerce, or art and science, or morals and religion. Mankind is born to labour, and if society would rid itself of this form of disease it must put inflexibly into force the Scriptural injunction that 'if any will not work neither shall he eat.'

If we consider the prodigious waste of work and life and the loss of spiritual power to the world by the diseases of society, we cannot fail to be impressed by the urgent need to find and apply a remedy for them. They are a barrier to social progress, they drag down the national life. At present only part of the energies of the nation are available. We are handicapped like the builders of the waUs of Jerusalem, everyone of whom ' with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other held a weapon ' to ward off the enemies of the nation. We are within the mark if we say that in our islands a quarter of a million of the adult population is supported entirely by the community, and that four times that number is supported partly by it. These million and a quarter represent a loss of productive power to the nation of at least twenty-five million pounds per annum. The criminal classes represent an equal loss of productive power. Moreover, the money value of the products of society consumed by all these amounts to about the same as the productive power withheld — ^namely, fifty million pounds. Further, to complete our computation we must remember that this mass of defective society requires for its support or restraint a vast series of contrivances and institutions — asylums, workhouses, hospitals, courts of law, reformatories, prisons — all in an economic sense non-producing. In money terms these counterpoises to the defective, dependent, and criminal sections of the community equal all the other sums put together.^ If we estimate the annual pecuniary burden caused by the social diseases of the nation at two hundred million pounds, we shall not rate it too highly — truly ' an arithmetic of woe.' But if we further estimate it in terms of human misery and suffering, mutilated character, and destruction of spiritual power, the loss to the nation is appalling.

1 See Destitution, Can we erid it? p. 8, by Rev. Henry Carter. (London : J. J. Stark.)

Chapter II Imperfect Remedies Of Social Diseases

A DESIRE for the alleviation of the ills of society is moving all ranks and conditions of men. The practical question that faces every earnest mind is : what can the nation do to prevent the continuance of the discreditable and blighting state of affairs which has just been described ? Society has as yet seriously tried but two remedies — deterrence and relief ; and the result has been a complete failure to remove, or even greatly lessen, our social ills.

Until the present generation our main remedy for crime has been the prison. Recent investigations have shown that as a deterrent from crime the influence of imprisonment has been greatly over-estimated. It is calculated that about seventy per cent, of the inmates of our gaols have been imprisoned before — many of them several times. Consider the effects of this. A French writer, M. Lacassagne, has said that ' when a man has been two or three times in the prison of Paris we can have no further hope of him ; he is a gangrenous member of the social body.'

Our prison system has failed because its chief aim has been to punish crime rather than to reform character. Little real attempt has been made to make criminals into useful citizens. We have ample evidence to show that too often imprisonment hardens the criminal, and sends him back to the world no better qualified and no more inclined to lead an honest life than before. Sir Godfrey Lushington, in giving evidence before a Departmental Committee presided over by the Home Secretary of the day, Mr. Herbert Gladstone, said, ' I regard as unfavourable to reformation the status of a prisoner throughout his whole career ; the crushing of self-respect ; the starving of all moral instinct he may possess, the absence of all opportunity to do or, receive a kindness, the continual association with none but criminals, the forced labour, and the denial of all hberty.' Mr. W. F. Spaulding writing in the Forum says, ' Crime can no more be reduced by punishing or even reforming the criminal than an epidemic of smallpox can be stopped by curing its victims. The criminal is a product, and crime can be decreased only by stopping the production.'

Legislation, at the best, can do comparatively little to remedy social evils, and in the prevention of crime even that little has not been done because for centuries our legislators have been viewing the matter from the wrong standpoint. They have been devoting their attention too exclusively to the crime, and in their concern to ' make the punishment fit the crime ' they have lost sight of the criminal. Now we

IMPERFECT REMEDIES 13

are concentrating our attention upon the latter, and we find that he is not innately and hopelessly vicious, that his criminality is the resultant largely of defective physical and mental training, and bad physical and social environment. If this be so, the remedy for crime is not punishment but removal of the conditions that cause it, and a thorough process of training and education for some useful calling. Reformatories conducted on educational lines are slowly replacing the old prison regime. We have begun the new process by the Borstal System of training youths who, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, have been sentenced to imprisonment for at least twelve months. During their period of confinement they undergo educative and reformative treatment preparing them for useful callings. The system has been successful in the great majority of cases, and it is probable that similar methods will be extended yet to a considerable proportion of adult criminals.

Our Poor Law system has proved equally inadequate as a remedy for poverty, and it has done so because its root principles are deterrence and relief, not prevention. It has not reached the sources of poverty ; and whether the poverty has been brought about by the fault of the person himseK or of the community as a whole, whether the cause be moral or economic, physical or mental, the Poor Law requires that the stage of destitution must have been reached before help can be given. ' Thus it ordinarily deals with this social malady at its crisis, not at the commencement. At the crisis of destitution the family is a battered, breaking wreck, often past hope of salving ; had help been forthcoming when the storm first broke — help that self-respecting folk could accept without forfeiting self-respect — final disaster would probably never have been reached.' ^

The workhouse too often promotes rather than cures the evil it was intended to combat. By its undiscriminating relief of destitution it provides in many cases only a subsidy to misconduct. Further, it does nothing to build up the character of the ablebodied paupers who seek its shelter, or to enable them to become self-dependent and self-supporting. The recent Report (1909) of the Royal Commission on Poor Laws strongly condemns the workhouse system. ' These institutions [workhouses] have a depressing, degrading, and positively injurious effect on the character of all classes of their inmates, tending to unfit them for a life of respectable and independent citizenship. Life in the workhouse does not build character up, it breaks down what little independence and alertness of mind is left. It is too good for the bad, and too bad for the good.' Mrs. Bosanquet, one of the Commissioners, in her volume on ' The Poor Law Report ' says, ' The Commissioners were convinced, both from the evidence they received and from what they themselves saw, that there is a class of persons to whom workhouse life has ceased to be deterrent, and that many even of those who shrink

1 Destitution, Can we end it ? p. 8, by Rev. Henry Carter.

IMPERFECT REMEDIES 15

from it at first rapidly deteriorate under its influence, until they prefer it to the more strenuous and responsible life of the outside world.' If we want the poor to be always with us the continuance of the Poor Law and Workhouse system, as at present planned, will do much to bring about the result.

In addition to State Relief all nations have made, to some extent at least, voluntary provision for the care of the poor and helpless among their people. Charity, public and private, may have an important influence on the spirit of those who exercise it, and the note of humanity in it is probably worth all it costs; and while no one would seek to dry up entirely this stream of human sympathy, its general influence upon the recipients is open to serious question. It is an imperfect remedy for poverty in at least four respects — it is wasteful, it is undiscriminating, it is spasmodic and inadequate, and it does not prevent or cure the disease against which it is directed.

Everyone acknowledges that a large part of the millions of pounds disbursed every year in the United Kingdom in what is broadly called charity is ' poured into a slough of poverty which swallows it up, and leaves no trace of improvement.' The waste of money is a great evil, but the waste of character is a greater. Charity given to those who should not receive it undermines seK-respect and self-reliance, and encourages laziness, hypocrisy, and self-indulgence. In such cases charity gathers parasites round it, and only intensifies the need and degradation it was intended to relieve. There are times when giving alms is truly no charity.^ Churches, Charitable Associations, and philanthropic individuals have overlapped in their keen desire to administer relief, and have not always made sure that the recipients were not getting similar help from other sources, nor taken care that the money was reaching the really deserving and needy. By impulsive, indiscriminate giving, the really necessitous have often been overlooked, the wants of the work-shy and the bogus poor have been plentifully supplied, and our towns have been overrun by professional beggars who have reduced begging to a fine art. Charity may be so harmful in its results and may so aggravate existing evils as to be positively immoral.^ We do not for a moment suggest that charity should never be given, but we assert that the wise distribution of charity is one of the most difficult and delicate forms of social service, and should be engaged in only by those who have a full knowledge of the causes of poverty, and of the lives of those whom they desire to help. Poverty, for instance, due to industrial causes is not a problem which charity organisations can successfully deal with ; such cases are complicated ones, and money help will do little for them. Can we wonder that there is often wrung from the sufferers the bitter

* See Daniel De Foe's Essay on Giving Alms no Charity.

^ See The Prevention of Destitution, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, pp. 298 et seq. (Longmans, Green, and Co.) This is the most important work yet written on the remedies of destitution.

IMPERFECT REMEDIES 17

cry, ' Curse your charity ; we want work.' Or again, where poverty is due to personal fault, financial help will only make matters worse unless it is accompanied by a successful demand for effort and improvement on the part of the recipient. A cruel feature of the giving of charity is that it does not generally raise those who receive it above the need of further assistance, it does not make them able to bear their own burden, it does not communicate to them the energy and initiative to take advantage of opportunities to help themselves. Rather it tends to destroy what initiative they have, and to make them more dependent.

The spirit of philanthropy and charity was never so widely spread as it is to-day. It is fostered by the pulpit, the platform, and the press. And yet there is growing a keen sense of the total inadequacy of all our charity to cope with the evils of poverty. While we assist one family, a hundred others are drifting without hope into the morass of destitution. Our best efforts at relief do nothing to drain the social quagmire. Our spasmodic and inadequate doles generally do harm rather than good. Mr. Charles Booth, in the volume we have already referred to, says, ' Churches, Chapels and the like intervene and give a little help, and the widow struggles on for a time receiving something one week and nothing the next, she and her children becoming generally weaker, both morally and physically, through want of proper and sufficient food, and ultimately broken down in health and destitute, she comes upon the parish. . . . A little thought will show that shilling coal tickets and soup dinners and occasional half-crowns are practically useless to make up the loss of the breadwinner's wage.' Mr. Malcolm Spencer in his suggestive little work on ' Social Degradation ' gives expression to a similar opinion. * When charity is given at all it should be ungrudging and it should be adequate. . . . The giving of small sums or grocery tickets makes for the eradication of an honourable dislike to receive such help. A small sum is not generous enough to challenge a grateful spirit in the recipient, and it leaves the need unsatisfied, thus inviting further requests, and inducing a wheedling spirit.'

Not all the wealth of the British Isles dispensed as charity would cure the poverty in our midst. ^ The problems are too vast and too complex to be dealt with by charity. Our help is at best an alleviation. Our philanthropy is always a little too late, it is an imperfect patching of an evil that is done and should have been prevented. It does not lie in the unalterable nature of things that there should be destitution. On the contrary, we believe with Thoreau that it is ' a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.' It is our duty to find out what measures will prevent, in the general case, the occurrence of

1 Thackeray in The Virginians says, ' Whenever you take your walks abroad how many poor you meet ! If a philanthropist were for rescuing all of them, not all the wealth of all the provinces of America would suffice him.*

IMPERFECT REMEDIES 19