Education : its data and first principles

Front matter

The Modern Educator's Library

EDUCATION

ITS DATA AND

Contents

CHAPTER

editor's pebface author's preface - i. the aim of education ii. life and individuality iii. the will to live - iv. the living past v. the relations between horme and mneme vi. routine and ritual

VII. PLAY .....

Chapter I

" Every art," said Aristotle in his famous exordium, " is thought to aim at some good." Now education, as we shall consider it in this book, is certainly an art. It is reasonable, then, to begin by asking at what good it aims.

There is no lack of confident answers to the question. The purpose of education, one says, is to form character; another, to prepare for complete living ; a third, to produce a sound mind in a sound body ; and the series of replies of this kind could easily be continued. All of them seem satisfactory until, pursuing the matter farther, we ask what kind of character it is desirable to " form," what activities " complete living " includes, or what are the marks of a healthy mind. We then find, as Dr. M. W. Keatinge has trenchantly pointed out, that the success of these attempts to state a universal aim for education is largely illusory, being due chiefly to the happy fact that every one may, within wide limits, interpret them exactly as he pleases. For A.'s idea of a fine character turns out to be either ridiculous or rankly offensive to B.; what 0. regards as complete living would be a spiritual death for D.; while the mens sana in corpore sano that E. reveres, F. loathes as the soul of a prig housed in the body of a barbarian. In face of such discoveries a cynic might declare that the real use of the maxims we have quoted is to conceal, as behind a verbal fog-screen, differences of educational faith and practice too radical to be harmonized and too serious to be exposed to the public view.

The origin of these unhappy differences is easily disclosed.

Every scheme of education being, at bottom, a practical philosophy, necessarily touches life at every point. Hence /any educational aims which are concrete enough to give definite guidance are correlative to ideals of life — and, as ideals of life are eternally at variance, their conflict will be reflected in educational theories. For example, if the " Greek view of life " cannot be reconciled with that of the Puritan reformers, it is idle to look for harmony between the conceptions of education that sprang from them. Moreover, it is not only true that no ideal of life has for long reigned unchallenged over civilized men, even of the same race and nation; we must also recognize that among the nominal followers of an ideal there are always rival sections, doubtful adherents and secret rebels. Is it wonderful, then, that the prophets of education constantly gainsay one another and that the plain man knows not where to turn for truth ?

The root of the trouble doubtless lies in the complexity of human nature, and especially in one of its strangest paradoxes. From one standpoint men seem like solitary inhabitants of islands, each sundered from the rest by an impassable sea. Your spirit, for example, and mine can communicate indirectly and clumsily by means of the sounds our lips utter and the written or printed marks our fingers frame ; but there is no direct touch between us and no community of being: you are for ever you and I, I. Yet from another standpoint men are seen most truly to be every one members one of another. We come into the world with minds as empty as our bodies are naked; and just as our bodies are clothed by others' hands, so our spirits are furnished with vfhat enters into them from other spirits. Stripped of these borrowings we could hardly live, and should certainly be less than human .

When men philosophize about life they are prone to lay exclusive stress upon one or other of its contradictory aspects. Thus to many thinkers of post-Reformation Europe the individual life seemed not only self-contained but also selfsufficient; men, they held, formed themselves into societies only because the life according to nature, besides being "solitary," was also "poor, nasty, brutish, short." This exaggerated individualism was followed, when it had run its dramatic course in history, by a reaction which reached its theoretical climax in the pages of Hegel. Here Hobbes' order is completely reversed : society, instead of being the offspring of man's invention, becomes the parent of his spiritual being. Conceived in the hardened form of the State, it is a super-personal entity, a Leviathan in a sense Hobbes never reached, of which the single life is but a fugitive element — an age-long spiritual life from which the individual spirit, with its private will and conscience, drawls whatever measure of reality it possesses.

Each of these rival ideas arose, as philosophies generally arise, out of the social and political conditions of the time, and, in turn, reacted strongly both upon those conditions and upon the educational practice that reflected them. For the results in the former case the reader must consult the historians, but the bitter fruit of the Hegelian ideas has ripened and been gathered under his own eyes. It would be absurd as well as unjust to charge upon any philosopher the whole guilt of Armageddon; for philosophers, as we have said, only give definite form and direction to movements which are stirring vaguely and irresistibly in a million minds around them.^ Nevertheless the connection between the World War and Hegelianism is too close to be ignored. From the idealist of Jena more than from any other source, the Prussian mind derived its fanatical belief in the absolute value of the State, its deadly doctrine that the State can admit no moral authority greater than its own, and the corollary that the educational system, from the primary school to the university, should be used as an instrument to engrain these notions into the soul of a whole people.

^ And it should be remembered that a noble line of British thinkers — e.g., T. H. Green, the Cairds, F. H. Bradley, B. Bosanquet, Lord Haldane, Sir H. Jones — have drawn inspiration from Hegel.

The most urgent question before the educators of to-day is whether they are to foster this sinister tradition or to help humanity to escape from it to something better. There can, of course, be no return to tlie doctrine of Hobbes ; his leadership would be quite as fatal as Hegel's. The idea that social bonds are imposed upon the individual from without and accepted under the terms of a ** social contract " has, in fact, long been exploded. It is now recognized universally that they originate within man's nature and are woven inextricably into the texture of his being. The strongest " self-regarding " impulses cannot fashion a life that would not fall to pieces if the social elements were withdrawn. The most original personality is unintelligible apart from the social medium in which it grows ; no Thoreau could hide himself so deeply in the woods as to escape from the social in his own mind. What is needed is not the repudiation of these facts, but a doctrine which, while admitting their full significance, yet reasserts the importance of the individual and safeguards his indefeasible rights.

Such a doctrine we seek to set out in these pages and to make the basis of a stable educational policy. We shall stand throughout on the position that nothing good enters into the human world except in and through the free activities of individual men and women, and that educational practice must be shaped to accord with that truth . This view does not deny or minimize the responsibilities of a man to his fellows : for the individual life can develop only in terms of its own nature, and that is social as truly as it is " self -regarding." Nor does it deny the value of tradition and " discipline " or exclude the influences of religion. But it does deny the reality of any super-personal entity of which the single life, taken by itself, is but an insignificant element. It reaffirms the infinite value of the individual person ; it reasserts his ultimate responsibility for his own destiny ; and it accepts all the practical corollaries that assertion implies.

Returning to an earlier remark, we may state the position in another way. While every man tends to draw his ideal of life largely from the inspiration of others, yet it may be maintained that, in a perfectly good sense of the words, each must have his own unique ideal. It is the sense in which every work of art — for instance, every poem — has its own ideal. A poet who recognizes that his creative impulse has failed would never point to another poem and say, " That is what I intended to do." His ideal was concrete, and to be embodied, if at all, in his poem and in no other. It marks the perfect achievement from which Ids work has fallen short ; not a goal that another has or might have reached. It follows that there can be no universal aim of education if that aim is to include the assertion of any particular ideal of life ; for there are as many ideals as there are persons. Educational efforts must, it would seem,^ be limited to securing for every one the conditions under which individuality is most completely developed — that is, to enabling him to make his original contribution to the variegated whole of human life as full and as truly characteristic as his nature permits ; the form of the contribution being left to the individual as something which each must, in living and by living, forge out for himself.

We shall have to inquire shortly whether this view is supported by the facts of human development — that is, whether it is based upon the solid ground of nature or only upon an amiable illusion. That will be our task in the following chapters. Meanwhile it may be useful to indicate some of its consequences and to discount some misconceptions to which it is liable.

Our doctrine, as stated crudely above, may seem to permit no discrimination between good and bad ideals of life — between forms of individuality that ought to be encouraged and forms that ought to be suppressed. Is the schoolmaster, it may be asked, to foster with impartial sympathy the making both of an Emile Pasteur and a Cesare Borgia ? We reply that the ultimate responsibility of a child for himself does not free the others from responsibihty towards him; an educator is not to foster a bad life on the ground that it promises to achieve the uniqueness of a good poem. There are things as certainly destructive of the soul as prussic acid is of the body. Life is fenced round with prohibitions which the young explorer must not be allowed to ignore. But within the circle thus marked out there is infinite room for his activity. It takes all sorts to make a world, and the world becomes richer the better each becomes after his own kind. Even where the moral law is positive and not merely permissive, obedience may take forms endless and incalculable: thus a motorist, it has been said, best shows his love for his neighbour by keeping to the left of the road. The point need not be laboured. It is manifest that there is no limit to the number of life-patterns into which good or blameless actions may be woven, and that it is impossible to formulate in advance the concrete principle of excellence of any of them.

We may go farther, and say that the prudent teacher will take care not to multiply his prohibitions beyond necessity. Few things are more difficult than to foresee whether a new type of individuality, a new form of expression in thought or action, will ultimately add to or detract from the real riches of the world. It is fatally easy to condemn as contrary to beauty, truth, or goodness what merelyruns counter to our conservative prejudices. We know how often in the past men have sought to suppress the creative activity whose fruits have later been seen to be among mankind's greatest treasures. We need to remind ourselves — teachers, perhaps, more than laymen — that these " old, unhappy, far-ofi things " are constantly being repeated and paralleled, now in trivial instances, now in matters of serious importance. The younger of this generation have seen the " futurists " break away from the tradition of painting — a portent met here with ridicule, there with anger, with active reprobation all round. Their elders remember that the same phenomena attended (how incredible it is I) the emergence of Wagner and the " music of the future." And how long is it since the entrance of women into medical studies shook Victorian England to the very foundations of its respectability ? E pur si muove. The teacher will do well, then, always to have in mind the warning of GramalieP and to beware lest haply he should be found to fight against Grod. In particular, he must be careful, in teaching social duties, not to seek to confine his pupils to the purview of an outworn text. Social obligations can be discharged in an infinite number of ways, and none can foresee or set bounds to ,vhat the human spirit may do in this as in all other directions. A daring and powerful soul may raise the whole moral quality of the social structure by asserting an individuality that may at first seem hostile to its very existence. And the unheroic soul, too, will best serve society by becoming most fully and truly himself. In short, the claims of society upon its members are best satisfied, not when each is made as like his fellows as possible, but when, in Dr. Bosanquet's language, " he values himself as the inheritor of the gifts and surroundings that are focused in him, and which it is his business to raise to their highest power."

The reader may have noticed that we have so far avoided a very difficult question — namely, whether society (or, to be precise, the State) may not at times of crisis demand from its members services that entail the supersession, even the final sacrifice, of their individual development, and whether an affirmative answer would not greatly weaken the general force of our argument. To this we may reply that mankind is not condemned for ever to endure its present evils ; if there is a will to escape from them, its nobler spirits (" Saluons ces genies futurs 1") will certainly find a way. But if it is lawful to dream

of a world in which the good of all would be much more nearly the good of each than it is at present, it is lawful to do whatever may help to make the dream reality. WTiat, then, could education do better than to strengthen men's sense of the worth of individuality — their own and others' — teaching them to esteem the individual life, not, indeed, as a private possession, but as the only means by which real value can enter the world ? In this, it may be claimed, is the strongest bulwark of freedom and the firmest guarantee against the rule of violence.

Some who are satisfied that the intentions of our doctrine are good may yet doubt whether they are practicable. Does it not require, if not a separate school, at least a separate curriculum for every pupil ? Here again we insist that we do not seek to change the unchangeable conditions of human existence, but merely to make the best use of them. Individuality develops only in a social atmosphere where it can feed on common interests and common activities. All we demand is that it shall have free scope, within the common life, to grow in its own way, and that it shall not be warped from its ideal bent by forces "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." Under such conditions some boys and girls will show themselves to be by nature secluded and cloistral spirits, and it is to the general interest that they should be allowed to be so.^ But the crowd and the hero have such potent influence that few are likely in their development to wander far from the established types. In short, individuality is by no means the same thing as eccentricity. Teachers are not called upon to manufacture it deliberately, but merely to let it grow unimpeded out of the materials of each child's nature, fashioned by whatever forces, strong or weak, that nature may include.

It is the common boast of Englishmen that throughout their history they have clung stubbornly to the idea of

* The poet Shelley is a classic example of a type poignantly illustrated in the author of the recently published "Diary of a Dead Officer." Miss May Sinclair has vividly realized it in one of ^le characters of her novel, "The Tree of Heaven."

individual liberty and have refused to exchange it for anymore specious but delusive good. The worst charge that can be brought against them is that in refusing equal liberty to others they have too often sinned against the light that is in them. Upon what basis does that historic claim to liberty rest if not upon the truth, seen darkly by some, by others clearly envisaged, that freedom for each to conduct life's adventure in his own way and to make the best he can of it is the one universal ideal sanctioned by nature and approved by reason ; and that the beckoning gleams of other ideals are but broken lights from this ? That freedom is, in truth, the condition, if not the source, of all the higher goods. Apart from it duty has no meaning, self-sacrifice no value, authority no sanction. It ofEers the one possible foundation for a brotherhood of nations, the only basis upon which men can join together to build the city of God. Hunger for it is the secret source of much of the restless fever of our age. By a paradox, as superb as cruel, millions of men who share our speech, and millions more who share our hopes, have given up their own claims to it, so that in the end it may become the law of the world. For if " to make the world safe for democracy " means not this, it can mean nothing but to exchange one tyranny for another. Dare we take a lower, and can we find a higher, ideal to be our inspiration and guide in education ?

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC.

John Abams, "The Evolution of Educational Theory" (Macmillan, 1912), gives the most compreheiisive and illuminating review^ of the subject. M. W. Kkatinge, " Studies in Education" (Black, 1916), contains au acute criticism of educational aims. J, Welton, " What do we mean by Education ?" (Macmillan, 1915), develops the relation between educational theory and ideals of life. Two volumes in the Home University Librar}^ (Williams and Norgate) give, with bibliographical references, a clear account of the movements associated in the text with Hobbes and Hegel: G. P. GoocH, "Political Thought from Bacon to Halifax," and E. Barker, "Political Thought from Spencer to To-day." The Hegelian position is brilliantly criticized in L. T. Hobhouse, "The Metaphysical Theory of the State" (Allen and Unwin, 1918). It receives a more friendly treatment in Muir- HEAD and Hetherington, "Social Purpose" (Allen and Unwin, 1918).

Chapter II

The central notion of the last chapter may be compressed into an aphorism : Individuality is the ideal of Life. To call it an ideal implies that it is at once a goal of effort and a standard by which the success of the effort may be judged; also that it is something that may be approached indefinitely yet never reached. What is, then, its precise character ?

To answer that question it will be helpful to develop farther the comparison (p. 5) between a man's life and a work of art. For every one will agree, on the one hand, that individuality is in some sense the goal and standard of aesthetic creation, and, on the other hand, that the individuality of a poem, a sonata, a picture, a statue, is a partial expression of the artist's own. It is not diflSicult, therefore, to see that aesthetic activity shows, in a peculiarly concentrated and energetic form, characters that actually belong to life in all its modes of expression.

The more prominent of those characters are easily recognized. In the first place, the artist strives to express through his materials a single scheme, in which the elements, however diverse in nature, have each its place, not accidental or irrelevant, but necessary and meaningful. He succeeds in so far as he can impose upon them this "unity in diversity " ; he fails in so far as they break from his control. In the second place, aesthetic creation is autonomous. This does not mean that a poet is independent of grammar and logic, that a musician need not regard the natural properties of chords and progressions, or a painter the form and structure of his model. But it does mean that there is no external law determining beforehand the use he may make of these things. Eighteenthcentury critics censured the " incorrectness " of Shakespeare, but a wiser generation recognizes that the plays have a logic of their own which can be judged only by its results.-^

To speak of individuality as the ideal of life implies, then, that life as a whole is autonomous and that it constantly strives after unity. Upon the first point we have already said enough in the preceding chapter ; we need add only that autonomy, as defined above, is the essence of man's "freedom" as a self-determining agent. The statement that man's will is free is ridiculous if understood as a claim that he can escape from the laws of his own nature ; but it is sound sense when understood as extending to the whole of life the obvious truth that it is impossible to invent a machine before it is invented or to compose a sonata before it is composed.

The second point could be illustrated in a thousand ways from every phase of human life. Unity in diversity is, for instance, the clear mark of all purposive actions, from (say) the skilled handling of knife and fork in eating a chop to the world-wide operations of a Napoleon of finance. Again, it is the mark of all knowledge, from the power to " perceive " objects and events, such as tables and chairs and the movements of taxi-cabs,^ to the power to understand the behaviour of a planet or a system of metaphysics. This unity, whether shown in action or in understanding, is always a partial expression of the individual's unity, and is felt by him as a pulse of the energy which is the very stuff of his life. And that it

^ Similarly, an inveutor must, of course, take account of the properties of his materials and the laws of physics, but no one can prescribe the use he is to make of them. To do so would be to invent the machine before it is invented. {Gf. Bosanquet, "The Principle of Individuality and Value," p. 331.)

2 Whenever, for example, I recognize an object as a chair, a great number of vary ditfarent former exparieaoe^ contribute to the present experience and help to give it its character.

extends, potentially, to the whole of life is shown by the fascination of any well told biography in which the writer brings out the unity which his subject's life strove after, and shows where and how it was broken and frustrated. Needless to say, the art of the novel and the drama draws largely from the same source of interest.

We have undertaken (p. 5) to seek a scientific basis for this view of life, and must now proceed to fix the general lines of our inquiry. But before we can do so, a very difl&cult question must be faced and answered. What we have said about individuality has been applied, so far, only to man's conscious nature or " mind "; but reflection will show that it can be said with equal truth about his body, and, indeed, about the bodies of all animals and even about plants. Eor, from the first division of the fertilized egg, bodily growth suggests everywhere the unfolding of a unitary plan, or the concerted action of individuals who thoroughly understand one another and have devoted themselves to a common purpose. ■"• Thus the history of the bodily organs may be likened to the parts of a piece of polyphonic music wherein each pursues its own melodic course, yet takes account all the time of the other parts and of the musical whole they are conspiring to realize. And in growing to its final form the body seems to show only in a less degree than the mind the same quality of self-determination.^ It seems clear, then, that whatever explanation we give of the broad facts of life must apply, in principle, equally to body and to mind. Hence the question : Are we, since our bodies are " matter," to seek in physical laws an explanation for the whole of life ; or are we, since our bodies are alive, to interpret their activities by what we know of life where its character appears in the highest

1 Of. "Die Pflauze bildeb Zellen, nicht die Zelle bildet Pflanzen" (De Bary). ''Each part acts as if it knew what the other parts are doing" (Naseli). (Quoted by T. H. Morgan.)

2 We have, in fact, borrowed the term "autonomy" from the biologist Hans Driesch, who applies it in this sense to the facts of morphogenesis.

and clearest form — namely, in the conscious life of the mind ?

The urgency of the question lies in the fact that men of science, and particularly physiologists, generally seek to interpret the life of the body entirely in terms of facts and notions derived from physics and chemistry. This tendency (or prejudice) is natural. The ultimate elements of the body are the familiar chemical elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and the rest, combined in forms which can often be reproduced in the laboratory ; the water of the body is ordinary water^ and behaves as such; the oxygen we breathe does the usual work of oxygen, breaking down compounds and setting free heat; the net heat- value of food consumed is precisely equal to the heat-value of the mechanical work the body performs, just as it is in the steam-engine or petrol-motor. Immersed in discoveries of this order, and seeing their number daily increased, it is not surprising that physiologists come to think of the body as nothing but an exceedingly complicated physico-chemical machine. Theirs is, in fact, essentially the view of Descartes which made so much stir in the seventeenth century — namely, that man might be regarded as only a very cunningly fashioned automaton if we did not know from inner experience that he has a soul.

Descartes did not shrink — at least in theory — from the deduction that where, as in the case of other animals, direct knowledge of a soul is impossible, we need not suppose the creature to be anything more than a bete-machine. Thus (he would have said) the cry uttered by a beaten dog is an event essentially of the same order as the emission of sound by a bell, and no logic compels us to ascribe it to pain. No modern biologists would go so far as that, at least where the higher animals are concerned; but their scruples necessarily bring

1 It is even maintained that the aqueous solution which foims the basis of the blood-plasm has the composition of the ancient seas wheiein life probably began.

14 EDUCATION: DATA AND IIRST PRINCIPLES

them face to face with an awkward dilemma. Either mental facts belong to a distinct province of being whose connection with physiological facts must be for ever inscrutable, or else they, too, are reducible somehow to facts of physics and chemistry.

Most advocates of the " mechanistic conception of life " elect, prudently, if unheroically, the former course ;i but there are bolder spirits who do not shrink from the latter. Of these Dr. Jacques Loeb is at present the most thorough-going and daring representative. His experiments on artificial fertilization, on the artificially directed growth of animals, and on the " tropistic " factors in instinct, are undoubtedly most impressive. They have given him the hope — perhaps we must not call it a pious hope — that a physico-chemical explanation will be found in time for all the " wishes and hopes, efforts and struggles, . . . disappointments and sufferings " that form " the contents of life from the cradle to the bier."

Meanwhile, psychologists, who do not welcome the annexation of mental facts by physics and chemistry, have been hard put to it to formulate a view which shall at once satisfy the just claims of those sciences and preserve the prerogative position of mind in life. For Descartes sundered body and mindso effectively that he was himself unable, except byamost unconvincing tour de force, to bring them together again ; and he left the problem practically insoluble for his successors. Most of them have been driven, therefore, to a position which answers almost completely to that of the less intransigent mechanists. In brief, they treat the mind, or, rather, " experience " as if it were a self-contained field of events and causation which has some inscrutable connection with bodily events, but plays no part in determining them. To hold this view — in the form called the "doctrine of psycho-physical