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diff --git a/57949-0.txt b/57949-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bbb2613 --- /dev/null +++ b/57949-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4623 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Were You Ever a Child?, by Floyd Dell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll
+have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
+this ebook.
+
+
+
+Title: Were You Ever a Child?
+
+Author: Floyd Dell
+
+Release Date: September 22, 2018 [EBook #57949]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WERE YOU EVER A CHILD? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by ellinora, David E. Brown, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Were You Ever
+ a Child?
+
+
+
+
+ _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+ MOON-CALF, a NOVEL
+ THE BRIARY-BUSH, a NOVEL
+
+
+
+
+ Were You Ever
+ a Child?
+
+ by
+
+ Floyd Dell
+
+ Second Edition, with a New Preface
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+ New York
+ Alfred · A · Knopf
+ 1921
+
+
+
+
+ COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1921, BY
+ ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
+
+
+ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+ TO
+ THE SCHOOL TEACHERS
+ OF MY CHILDHOOD
+ IN TOKEN OF FORGIVENESS
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+This book is intended as an explanation of the new educational ideals
+and methods now being fostered and developed, under great difficulties,
+by courageous educators, in various schools for the most part outside
+the public school system. These schools are “experimental” in the sense
+that they are demonstrating upon a small scale the vast possibilities
+of a modern kind of education. The importance of these schools consists
+not so much in the advantages which they are now able to give to a few
+of our children, but rather in the prophetic vision they afford of all
+youth growing up with the same advantages.
+
+Before that can happen, the public must discover what the new education
+signifies, and why the old educational system is unable to keep up with
+the demands of modern civilization.
+
+This book attempts only a small part of such a tremendous task of
+enlightenment. But it does undertake a brief review of the educational
+situation in the light of our present scientific knowledge of human
+nature--and more especially, of the human nature of the child.
+
+Education may be said to be, essentially, an adjustment between the
+child and the age in which he lives. That adjustment can be a painless
+and happy one; at present it is a sort of civil war. This book
+deals precisely with the special problems involved in the difficult
+process of reconciling the nature of the child with the nature of our
+twentieth-century machine-culture.
+
+The method chosen in these pages for the exposition of this situation
+is one which many readers will consider unduly flippant, particularly
+in those passages which deal with the failure of the old educational
+system. But one might as well laugh at that failure as cry over it; for
+it is a ridiculous as well as a pathetic failure. The important thing
+is to recognize that it is a failure, and to lend a hand if we can in
+the creating of a better kind of education.
+
+ F. D.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+ I The Child 13
+
+ II The School Building 22
+
+ III The Teacher 27
+
+ IV The Book 36
+
+ V The Magic Theory of Education 47
+
+ VI The Caste System of Education 53
+
+ VII The Canonization of Book-Magic 58
+
+ VIII The Conquest of Culture in America 63
+
+ IX Smith, Jones and Robinson 69
+
+ X Employer vs. Trade Unionist 74
+
+ XI The Goose-Step 77
+
+ XII The Gary Plan 80
+
+ XIII Learning to Work 83
+
+ XIV Learning to Play 90
+
+ XV First and Last Things 96
+
+ XVI The Child as Artist 100
+
+ XVII The Artist as a Child 115
+
+ XVIII The Drama of Education 124
+
+ XIX The Drama of Life 132
+
+ XX Curiosity 137
+
+ XXI The Right to be Wrong 149
+
+ XXII Enterprise 157
+
+ XXIII Democracy 167
+
+ XXIV Responsibility 173
+
+ XXV Love 180
+
+ XXVI Education in 1947 A. D. 190
+
+
+
+
+ Were You Ever
+ a Child?
+
+
+
+
+Were You Ever a Child?
+
+
+Were you ever a child?...
+
+I ask out of no indecent curiosity as to your past. But I wish to
+address only those who would naturally be interested in the subject
+of Education. Those who haven’t been children themselves are in many
+respects fortunate beings; but they lack the background of bitter
+experience which makes this, to the rest of us, an acutely interesting
+theme--and they might just as well stop reading right here. I pause to
+allow them to put the book aside....
+
+With my remaining audience, fit though few, I feel that I can get
+down at once to the brass tacks of the situation. _We have all been
+educated_--and just look at us!
+
+We ourselves, as products of an educational system, are sufficiently
+damning evidence against it. If we think of what we happily might
+have been, and then of what we are, we cannot but concede the total
+failure or the helpless inadequacy of our education to educe those
+possibilities of ours into actuality.
+
+Looking back on those years upon years which we spent in school, we
+know that something was wrong. In this respect our adult convictions
+find impressive support in our earlier views on the subject. If we
+will remember, we did not, at the time, exactly approve of the school
+system. Many of us, in fact, went in for I. W. W. tactics--especially
+sabotage. Our favourite brand of sabotage was the “withdrawal of
+efficiency”--in our case a kind of instinctive passive resistance.
+Amiable onlookers, such as our parents or the board of education, might
+have thought that we were learning something all the while; but that’s
+just where we fooled ’em! There were, of course, a few of us who really
+learned and remembered everything--who could state off-hand, right
+now, if anybody asked us, in what year Norman the Conqueror landed in
+England. But the trouble is that so few people ask us!
+
+There was one bit of candour in our schooling--at its very end.
+They called that ending a Commencement. And so indeed we found it.
+Bewildered, unprepared, out of touch with the realities, we commenced
+then and there to learn what life is like. We found it discouraging
+or inspiriting in a thousand ways; but the thing which struck us at
+the time most forcibly was that it was in every respect quite unlike
+school. The values which had obtained there, did not exist outside.
+One could not cram for a job as if it were an examination; one could
+not get in the good graces of a machine as if it were a teacher;
+the docility which won high “marks” in school was called lack of
+enterprise in the business world, dulness in social life, stupidity
+in the realm of love. The values of real life were new and different.
+We had been quite carefully prepared to go on studying and attending
+classes and taking examinations; but the real world was not like that.
+It was full of adventure and agony and beauty; its politics were not
+in the least like the pages of the Civics Text-Book; its journalism
+and literature had purposes and methods undreamed of by the professor
+who compiled (from other text-books compiled by other professors) the
+English Composition Book; going on the road for a wholesale house was
+a geographical emprise into whose fearful darknesses even the Advanced
+Geography Course threw no assisting light; the economics of courtship
+and marriage and parenthood had somehow been overlooked by the man who
+Lectured upon that Subject.
+
+Whether we had studied our lessons or not; whether we had passed our
+examinations triumphantly, or just got through by the skin of our
+teeth--what difference did it make, to us or to the world? And what to
+us now are those triumphs and humiliations, the failure or success of
+school, except a matter of occasional humorous reminiscence?
+
+What would we think of a long and painful and expensive surgical
+operation of which it could be said afterward that it made not the
+slightest difference to the patient whether it succeeded or failed?
+Yet, judged by results in later life, the difference between failing
+and succeeding in school is merely the difference between a railroad
+collision and a steamboat explosion, as described by Uncle Tom:
+
+“If you’s in a railroad smash-up, why--thar yo’ is! But if yo’s in a
+steamboat bus’-up, why--whar is yo’?”
+
+It is our task, however, to investigate this confused catastrophe, and
+fix the responsibility for its casualties.
+
+
+
+
+I. The Child
+
+
+Education, as popularly conceived, includes as its chief ingredients a
+Child, a Building, Text-Books, and a Teacher. Obviously, one of them
+must be to blame for its going wrong. Let us see if it is the Child. We
+will put him on the witness stand:
+
+Q. Who are you?
+
+A. I am a foreigner in a strange land.
+
+Q. What!
+
+A. Please, sir, that’s what everybody says. Sometimes they call me a
+little angel; the poet Wordsworth says that I come trailing clouds
+of glory from Heaven which is my home. On the other hand, I am often
+called a little devil; and when you see the sort of things I do in
+the comic supplements, you will perhaps be inclined to accept that
+description. I really don’t know which is right, but both opinions seem
+to agree that I am an immigrant.
+
+Q. Speak up so that the jury can hear. Have you any friends in this
+country?
+
+A. No, sir--not exactly. But there are two people, a woman and a man,
+natives of this land, who for some reason take an interest in me. It
+was they who taught me to speak the language. They also taught me many
+of the customs of the country, which at first I could not understand.
+For instance, my preoccupation with certain natural--[the rest of the
+sentence stricken from the record].
+
+Q. You need not go into such matters. I fear you still have many things
+to learn about the customs of the country. One of them is not to allude
+to that side of life in public.
+
+A. Yes, sir; so those two people tell me. I’m sure I don’t see why. It
+seems to me a very interesting and important--
+
+Q. That will do. Now as to those people who are looking after you: Are
+your relations with them agreeable?
+
+A. Nominally, yes. But I must say that they have treated me in a very
+peculiar way, which has aroused in me a deep resentment. You see, at
+first they treated me like a king--in fact, like a Kaiser. I had only
+to wave my hand and they came running to know what it was I wanted. I
+uttered certain magic syllables in my own language, and they prostrated
+themselves before me, offering me gifts. When they brought the wrong
+gifts, I doubled up my fists and twisted my face, and gave vent to loud
+cries--and they became still more abject, until at last I was placated.
+
+Q. That is what is called parental love. What then?
+
+A. I naturally regarded them as my slaves. But presently they rebelled.
+One of them, of whom I had been particularly fond, commenced to make me
+drink milk from a bottle instead of from--
+
+Q. Yes, yes, we understand. And you resented that?
+
+A. I withdrew the light of my favour from her for a long time. I
+expressed my disappointment in her. I offered freely to pardon her
+delinquency if she would acknowledge her fault and resume her familiar
+duties. But perhaps I did not succeed in conveying my meaning clearly,
+for at this time I had no command of her language. At any rate, my
+efforts were useless. And her reprehensible conduct was only the first
+of a series of what seemed to me indignities and insults. I was no
+longer a king. I was compelled to obey my own slaves. In vain I made
+the old magic gestures, uttered the old talismanic commands--in vain
+even my doubling up of fists and twisting of face and loud outcries;
+the power was gone from these things. Yet not quite all the power--for
+my crying was at least a sort of punishment to them, and as such I
+often inflicted it upon them.
+
+Q. You were a naughty child.
+
+A. So they told me. But I only felt aggrieved at my new helplessness,
+and wished to recover somewhat of my old sense of power over them.
+But as I gradually acquired new powers I lost in part my feeling of
+helplessness. I also found that there were other beings like myself,
+and we conducted magic ceremonies together in which we transformed
+ourselves and our surroundings at will. These delightful enterprises
+were continually being interrupted by those other people, our parents,
+who insisted on our learning ever more and more of their own customs.
+They wished us to be interested in their activities, and they were
+pleased when we asked questions about things we did not understand. Yet
+there were some questions which they would not answer, or which they
+rebuked us for asking, or to which they returned replies that, after
+consultation among ourselves, we decided were fabulous. So we were
+compelled to form our own theories about these things. We asked, for
+instance--
+
+Q. Please confine your answers to the questions. That is another
+matter not spoken of in public; though to be quite frank with you,
+public taste seems to be changing somewhat in this respect.
+
+A. I am very glad to hear it. I would like to know--
+
+Q. Not now, not now.--You say you have learned by this time many of the
+customs of the country?
+
+A. Oh, yes, sir! I can dress myself, and wash my face (though perhaps
+not in a manner quite above criticism), count the change which the
+grocer gives me, tell the time by a clock, say “Yes, ma’am” and “Thank
+you”--and I am beginning to be adept in the great national game of
+baseball.
+
+Q. Have you decided what you would do if you were permitted to take
+part in our adult activities?
+
+A. I would like to be a truck-driver.
+
+Q. Why?
+
+A. Because he can whip the big horses.
+
+Q. Do you know anything about machinery?
+
+A. No, sir; I knew a boy who had a steam-engine, but he moved away
+before I got a chance to see how it worked.
+
+Q. You spoke of truck-driving just now. Do you know where the
+truck-driver is going with his load?
+
+A. No, sir.
+
+Q. Do you know where he came from?
+
+A. No, sir.
+
+Q. Do you know what a factory is?
+
+A. Yes, sir; Jim’s father got three fingers cut off in a factory.
+
+Q. Do you know where the sun rises and sets?
+
+A. It rises in the East and sets in the West.
+
+Q. How does it get from the West back to the East during the night?
+
+A. It goes under the earth.
+
+Q. How?
+
+A. It digs a tunnel!
+
+Q. What does it dig the tunnel with?
+
+A. With its claws.
+
+Q. Who was George Washington?
+
+A. He was the Father of his country, and he never told a lie.
+
+Q. Would you like to be a soldier?
+
+A. Yes.
+
+Q. If we let you take part in the government of our country, what
+ticket would you vote?
+
+A. The Republican ticket. My father is a Republican.
+
+Q. What would you do if you had ten cents?
+
+A. I’d go to see Charley Chaplin in the moving-picture show.
+
+Q. Thank you. You can step down.
+
+A. Yes, sir. Where is my ten cents?
+
+And now, gentlemen, you have heard the witness. He has told the
+truth--and nothing but the truth--and he would have told the whole
+truth if I had not been vigilant in defence of your modesty. He is, as
+he says, a foreigner, incompletely naturalized. In certain directions
+his development has proceeded rapidly. He shows a patriotism and a
+sense of political principles which are quite as mature as most of
+ours. But in other directions there is much to be desired. He does not
+know what kind of world it is he lives in, nor has he any knowledge of
+how he could best take his place, with the most satisfaction to himself
+and his fellow-men, in that world--whether as farmer or engineer, poet
+or policeman, or in the humbler but none the less necessary capacities
+of dustman or dramatic critic.
+
+It would be idle for us to pretend that we think it will be easy for
+him to learn all this. But without this knowledge he is going to
+be a nuisance--not without a certain charm (indeed, I know several
+individuals who have remained children all their lives, and they are
+the most delightful of companions for an idle hour), but still, by
+reason of incapacity and irresponsibility, an undesirable burden upon
+the community: unable to support himself, and simply not to be trusted
+in the responsible relations of marriage and parenthood. We simply
+can’t let him remain in his present state of ignorance.
+
+And yet, how is he ever going to be taught? You have seen just about
+how far private enterprise is likely to help him. That man and woman of
+whom he told us have other things to do besides teach him. And if he is
+turned over to special private institutions, we have no guarantee that
+they will not take advantage of his helplessness, keep him under their
+control and rob him of freedom of movement for a long term of years,
+set him to learning a mass of fabulous or irrelevant information,
+instil in him a fictitious sense of its value by a system of prizes and
+punishments, and finally turn him out into our world no better prepared
+to take his proper part in it than he was before; and thus, having
+wasted his own time, he would have to waste ours by compelling us to
+teach him all over again.
+
+In fact, the difficulty of dealing with him appears so great that I am
+moved to make the statesmanlike proposal--never before, I believe,
+presented to the public--of passing a law which will prevent this kind
+of undesirable immigration altogether.
+
+Shall we abolish the Child?
+
+The only other reasonable alternative is for us to undertake this
+difficult and delicate business of education ourselves--assume as a
+public responsibility the provision of a full opportunity for this
+helpless, wistful, stubborn little barbarian to find out about the
+world and about himself. Well, shall we do that?
+
+Let us not allow any false sentimentality to affect our decision....
+
+The vote seems to be in favour of giving him his chance. Very well!
+
+
+
+
+II. The School Building
+
+
+It is clear that what is most of all the matter with the child is
+his sense of helplessness.... He told us how he lost inevitably his
+position of King in the magic realm of infancy--a kingship only to be
+recovered fragmentarily in dreams and in the fantasies of play--how
+he discovered himself to be little and weak and clumsy and ignorant
+of the ways of the strange real world. It is clear too that the chief
+difference which separates us from childhood is the acquisition of
+a few powers, physical and intellectual, which make us feel to some
+extent masters of our world.
+
+Does not education, then, first of all consist in giving to children
+a progressive sense of power, through a physical and intellectual
+mastery of their environment? And would not the acquisition of an
+adequately increasing mastership deprive the child of any need for
+those outbursts of rage and malice and mischief which are today the
+most characteristic trait of childhood, and which are only his attempt
+to deny his shameful helplessness? Shall we not try at the outset to
+make the child feel that he is a useful and important part of our world?
+
+The answer to these questions being “Yes,” we now turn to the building
+in which what now passes for education is conducted, and inquire
+whether it answers this primary requirement.
+
+But first of all, let us free our minds from any lingering
+superstitions we may cherish with reference to school buildings. Let
+us get over the notion that school-buildings are sacrosanct, like
+churches. I am inclined to think that we have transferred to the
+school building some of our traditional respect for churches. We feel
+that it is a desecration to allow dances and political meetings to be
+held there. We seem to regard with jealous pride the utter emptiness
+and uselessness of our school buildings after hours; it is a kind of
+ceremonial wastefulness which appeals to some deep-seated ridiculous
+barbaric sense of religious taboo in us. Well, we must get over it if
+we are to give the children a square deal. If it should turn out that
+the school building is wrong, we must be prepared to abolish it.
+
+And we must get over our notion that a school building is necessary in
+order for a school to exist. The most famous school in the world had no
+building at all--only a stretch of outdoors, with some grass and a few
+plane trees. Of course, the Greeks were fonder of the open air than we
+are, and their winters were less severe. And then, too, the Greek idea
+of education was simpler than ours. It comprised simply athletics and
+philosophy and one or two other aristocratic subjects which I forget
+at the moment--art being regarded as manual labour, just as the drama
+was considered a religious function, and government a kind of communal
+festivity! And, of course, the Persian theory of education--to be able
+to ride, shoot, and tell the truth--could be carried out under the
+open sky better than anywhere else. But our aims are more elaborate,
+and it may very well be true--in fact, I have been convinced of it
+all along--that much of our educational process should be carried on
+indoors.
+
+But let us not be too hasty in conceding the School Building’s right to
+existence. There is another side to the question.
+
+The trouble is, once you give a School Building permission to exist,
+it straightway commences to put on semi-sacerdotal airs--as if it were
+a kind of outcast but repentant church. It arranges itself into dingy
+little secular chapels, with a kind of furtive pulpit in front for the
+teacher, and a lot of individual pews for the mourners. It makes the
+chemistry laboratory, which it regards as a profane intruder, feel
+cramped and uncomfortable; it puts inconveniences in the way of the
+gymnasium; and it is dreadfully afraid some one will think that the
+assembly hall will look like a theatre; while as for carpentry and
+printing shops, ateliers for sculpture groups, and a furnace for the
+pottery class, it feels that it has lost caste utterly if it is forced
+to admit them; nor will it condescend to acknowledge such a thing as a
+kitchen-garden in its back yard as having any relation to itself. You
+can well understand that if it has these familiar adjuncts of everyday
+life, it will seem just like part of the ordinary world; and so it
+tries its hardest to keep them out, and generally succeeds pretty well.
+
+But since what we started out to do was to teach children what the
+world of reality is like, it is necessary that they should be in and of
+the real world. And since the real world outside is not, unfortunately,
+fully available for educational purposes, it is necessary to provide
+them with the real world on a smaller scale--a world in which they can,
+without danger, familiarize themselves with their environment in its
+essential aspects--a world which is theirs to observe, touch, handle,
+take apart and put back together again, play with, work with, and
+become master of; a world in which they have no cause to feel helpless
+or weak or useless or unimportant; a world from which they can go into
+the great world outside without any abrupt transition--a world, in
+short, in which they can learn to be efficient and happy human beings.
+
+The School Building, imposing upon our credulity and pretending to
+be too sacred for these purposes, needs to be taken down from its
+pedestal. It may be permitted to have a share in the education of our
+youth if it will but remember that it is no more important in that
+process than a garden, a swimming tank, a playground, the library
+around the corner, the woods where the botany class goes, or the sky
+overhead that exhibits its constellations gladly at the request of the
+science teacher. Let it humble itself while there is yet time, and not
+expect its little guests to keep silence within its walls as if they
+were in a church, for it may even yet be overthrown--and replaced by a
+combination theatre-gymnasium-studio-office-and-model-factory building.
+And _then_ it will be sorry!
+
+
+
+
+III. The Teacher
+
+
+Shall the Teacher be abolished?...
+
+What’s that you say?--Oh, but surely not before she has had a
+hearing!--the worst criminal deserves that much consideration. I beg
+of you to let me speak one moment in her behalf.--Ah, thank you, my
+friends.
+
+(Sister, you had a tight squeak just then! If it hadn’t been for my
+presence of mind and my habitual coolness in the presence of infuriated
+mobs, I hate to think what would have happened.--And now let me see:
+what _can_ I say in your behalf? H’m.... H’m....)
+
+My friends, this unhappy woman (for we shall centre our attention
+on the female of the species) is more sinned against than sinning.
+Reflect! The status of women in the United States has changed in the
+last fifty years. Modern industry has almost utterly destroyed the
+old pioneer home with its partnership-marriage; ambitious young men
+no longer have an economic need for capable women-partners; women
+have lost their wonted economic value as potential helpers, and their
+capacity for motherhood appears to the largest section of young
+manhood in the aspect of a danger rather than a blessing. Women have,
+to be sure, acquired a new value, in the eyes of a smaller class of
+economically “arrived” men, as a sign of their “arrival”--that is,
+they are desired as advertisements of their husbands’ economic status.
+In one sense, the task of demonstrating the extent of a husband’s
+income is easier than the pioneer task of helping take care of a farm
+and raising a houseful of babies; but, after all, such a career does
+require either natural talent or a high degree of training in the
+graceful habits of conspicuous idleness and honorific extravagance.
+And, whether it is that the vast majority of women spurned such
+a career as an essentially immoral one, or whether they were not
+really up to its requirements, or whether the demand was found to
+be more than met by the hordes of candidates turned out yearly by
+the boarding-schools--whatever the reason, the fact remains that a
+large number of women began to see the necessity and to conceive
+the desirability of some career other than marriage. But industrial
+evolution, which had destroyed their former opportunities, had failed
+to make any considerable or at least any decent room for them in
+the industrial scheme. Most particularly was this true for the young
+women of the middle class. They were unable to go into the professions
+or the respectable trades, and unwilling (for excellent reasons) to
+enter the factories; they were given no opportunity to learn how to
+do anything--they were (quite against their will, but inevitably)
+condemned to profound ignorance of the most important things in the
+world--work and love; and so, naturally, they became Teachers.
+
+The world did not want them, and so they stayed out of the world, in
+that drab, quasi-religious edifice, the School Building, and prepared
+others to go into the world....
+
+Good Heavens! do you suppose for a minute, if this unfortunate woman
+had known enough about Anything in Particular to get a respectable job
+outside, that she would have stayed in there to teach Everything in
+General?[1] Do you suppose she _wants_ to be a Teacher? Do you suppose
+she likes pretending to be adept in a dozen difficult subjects at once,
+inflicting an impossible ideal of “order” upon the forty restless
+children whom her weary, amateur, underpaid efforts at instruction
+have failed to interest, spending her days in the confronting of an
+impossible task and her nights in the “correcting” of an endless series
+of written proofs of her failure--and, on top of that, being denied
+most of her human rights? The munition-factory girls at least had
+their fling when the day’s work was over; but she is expected to be a
+Vestal. In some places she can’t get married without losing her job;
+in New York, if she is married, she can’t have a baby! No--it is her
+misfortune, not her fault, that she is what she is.
+
+In fact, I think that if we could have managed to keep the war going a
+little longer, she would have pretty much abolished herself. Abdication
+is becoming popular, and she among all the monarchs is not the least
+uncomfortable and restricted and hedged in by useless divinity. Her
+abdication will be as disturbing an event as the Russian Revolution.
+The Russians were accustomed to their Czar; but they just had to learn
+to get along without him. And perhaps a similar lesson is in store for
+us....
+
+You find it a little difficult to imagine what School would be like
+without Teachers? Well, for one thing, it would be more like the rest
+of the world than it is now--and that, we agreed, was what we wanted.
+Where else, indeed, except in School, do you find Teachers? The rest of
+the world manages to get along without them very well. Perhaps it is
+merely a superstition that they are needed in School! Let us inquire
+into the matter.
+
+What do people in the outside world do when they want to learn
+something? They go to somebody who knows about it, and ask him. They
+do not go to somebody who is reputed to know about everything--except,
+when they are very young, to their parents: and they speedily become
+disillusioned about _that_ variety of omniscience. They go to somebody
+who might reasonably be expected to know about the particular thing
+they are interested in. When a man buys a motor-car, he does not say
+to himself: “Where can I find somebody who can teach me how to run a
+motor-car and dance the tango and predict a rise on the stock-market?”
+He does not look in the telephone directory under T. He just gets an
+experienced driver to teach him. And when the driver tells him that
+this is the self-starter, and proceeds to start the car with it, a
+confidence is established which makes him inclined to believe all
+he can understand of what he is presently told about the mysterious
+functions of the carburetor. He does not even inquire if the man has
+taken vows of celibacy. He just pays attention and asks questions and
+tries to do the thing himself, until he learns.
+
+But this case, of course, assumes an interest of the pupil in the
+subject, a willingness and even a desire to learn about it, a feeling
+that the matter is of some importance to himself. And come to think of
+it, these motives are generally present in the learning that goes on in
+the outside world. It is only in School that the pupil is expected to
+be unwilling to learn.
+
+When you were a child, and passed the door of the village blacksmith
+shop, and looked in, day after day, you saw the blacksmith heating
+a piece of iron red hot in the furnace, or twisting it deftly with
+his pincers, or dropping it sizzling into a tub of water, or paring
+a horse’s hoofs, or hammering in the silvery nails with swift blows;
+you admired his skill, and stood in awe of his strength; and if he had
+offered to let you blow the bellows for him and shown you how to twist
+a red-hot penny, that would have been a proud moment. It would also
+have been an educational one. But suppose there had been a new shop
+set up in the town, and when you looked in at the open door you saw a
+man at work painting a picture; and suppose a bell rang just then, and
+the man stopped painting right in the middle of a brush-stroke, and
+commenced to read aloud “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to
+Aix”; and suppose when he was half way through, the bell rang again,
+and he said, “We will go on with that tomorrow,” and commenced to
+chisel the surface of a piece of marble; and then, after a little,
+somewhat exhaustedly, started in to play “The Rock of Ages” on a flute,
+interrupting the tune to order you to stand up straight and not whisper
+to the little boy beside you. There’s no doubt what you would think of
+him; you would know perfectly well that he was crazy; people don’t do
+things in that way anywhere in the world, except in school. And even
+if he _had_ assured you that painting and poetry, sculpture and music,
+were later in your life going to be matters of the deepest importance
+and interest, and that you should start in now with the determination
+of becoming proficient in the arts, it would not have helped much. Not
+very much.
+
+It’s nonsense that children do not want to learn. Everybody wants
+to learn. And everybody wants to teach. And the process is going
+on all the time. All that is necessary is to put a person who knows
+something--really knows it--within the curiosity-range of some one
+who doesn’t know it: the process commences at once. It is almost
+irresistible. In the interest of previous engagements one has to tear
+one’s self away from all sorts of opportunities to learn things which
+may never be of the slightest use but which nevertheless are alluring
+precisely because one does not know them.
+
+People talk about children being hard to teach, and in the next breath
+deplore the facility with which they acquire the “vices.” That seems
+strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application
+to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet
+consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a
+schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night
+parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the
+best map of the North Atlantic States? And when you come to think of
+it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to
+drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day.
+
+I think that if there were no teachers--no hastily and superficially
+trained Vestals who were supposed to know everything--but just ordinary
+human beings who knew passionately and thoroughly one thing (but
+you’d be surprised to find what a lot of other knowledge that would
+incidentally comprise!) and who had the patience to show little boys
+and girls how to do that thing--we might get along without Immaculate
+Omniscience pretty well. Of course, we’d have to pay them more, because
+they could get other jobs out in the larger world; and besides, you
+couldn’t expect to get somebody who knows how to do something, for
+the price you are accustomed to pay those who only know how to teach
+everything.
+
+Nor need the change necessarily be abrupt. It could probably be
+effected with considerable success by firing all the teachers at the
+beginning of the summer vacations, and engaging their services as human
+beings for the next year. Many of them would find no difficulty at all
+in readjusting themselves....
+
+
+
+
+IV. The Book
+
+
+Of the ingredients of the educational catastrophe, the only one
+remaining to be discussed is the Book. Is it to blame for the failure
+of the process which has brought us to our present state of elaborate
+ignorance, and ought it to be abolished?
+
+What have books got to do with education, anyway?
+
+Not half as much as most people think! If education is learning to be a
+civilized human being, books have their place in it. But civilized life
+is composed of a number of things besides books--it contains machinery,
+art, political organization, handicraft, flowers and birds, and other
+things too numerous to mention, all of which are notoriously capable
+of being learned about in the great world outside without the use of
+books. If in the great world outside the school, then why not in the
+little world inside the school?
+
+Not that the use of books should be ever avoided anywhere for the sake
+of the avoidance. Books are a convenience--or an inconvenience, as the
+case may be. Like other valuable human utilities, they are frequently a
+nuisance if obtruded in the place of better things. Every intelligent
+person has the same attitude toward books that he has toward his
+sweetheart’s photograph: if she is out of reach, if the picture
+furnishes him his only way of seeing her, he values it profoundly; but
+if she is in the next room, he does not linger with the image. True, he
+may fall in love with the picture first--the picture may reveal to him
+the girl whom otherwise he might never have appreciated; and books do
+make us appreciate aspects of reality which we have neglected. But in
+education books are not an adequate substitute for direct contact with
+the realities with which they deal, precisely because they do not give
+the sense of power which only comes from direct contact with reality.
+It is the function of books to assist in that educational contact--not
+to take the place of it.
+
+There is, indeed, a sense in which books are the most egregious fraud
+ever perpetrated upon a world hungry for the knowledge which _is_
+power. I am reminded of the scene in “The Wild Duck,” when the father
+returns home from a grand dinner party. He has promised to bring
+his little daughter some sweetmeats or cake--and he has forgotten
+to do so. But--he grandly draws from his pocket a piece of printed
+matter--“Here, my child, is the menu: you can sit down and read about
+the whole dinner!” Poor little Hedvig knew that she wasn’t getting
+anything to eat; but some of us don’t realize that for years and years;
+we dutifully masticate the innutritious contents of text-books while we
+are starving for a taste of reality.
+
+Take geography, for instance. I know quite well that it was not the
+intention of the author of the text-book which I studied that I should
+conceive the state of Illinois as yellow and the neighbouring state of
+Indiana as pale green: but I do to this day. They were not realities to
+me, but pictures in a book; and they were not realities because they
+had no relation whatever to real experience. If I had been asked to
+draw a map of the school grounds, with the boys’ side distinguished by
+one colour and the girls’ by another, that convention would thereafter
+have seemed only what it was. If I had drawn a map of the town I
+lived in, I would have been thenceforth unable, I am sure, to see a
+map without feeling the realities of stream and wood and hill and
+house and farm of which it is a conventional abstraction. I would, in
+short, have learned something about geography. The very word would
+have acquired a fascinating significance--the depiction of the surface
+of the earth! whereas all the word geography actually means to me now
+is--a large flat book. And if an aviator should stop me and ask which
+is the way to Illinois, I couldn’t for my life tell him: but if you
+brought me that old geography book and opened it to the map of the
+United States, I could put my finger on Illinois in the dark! You see,
+Illinois is for me not a part of the real world--it is a yellow picture
+in a large flat book.
+
+In the same way, I have the impression that the American Revolution
+happened in a certain thick book bound in red cloth--not by any chance
+in the New York and New England whose streets I have walked in. (And,
+for that matter, as I have later discovered, much of the American
+Revolution of the school histories--such as the Boston Tea-Party
+as described--did not happen anywhere except in the pages of such
+text-books). The only thing I know about the crossing of the Delaware,
+for example, is that it is a Leading Fact of American History, and
+occurred on the right hand page, a little below and to the left of
+a picture. And this conception of historical events as a series of
+sentences occurring in a certain order on a certain page, seems to me
+the inevitable consequence of learning history from a text-book.
+
+There are other objections to the use of text-books. One is their
+frequent perversion or suppression of truth for moral, patriotic or
+sentimental reasons: in this respect they are like practically all
+books intended for children. They are generally pot-boilers written by
+men of no standing in the intellectual or even in the scholastic world.
+But even when a text-book is written by a man of real learning, the
+absence of a critical audience of his equals seems often to deprive him
+of a stimulus necessary to good writing, and leave him free to indulge
+in long-repressed childishnesses of his own which he would never dare
+exhibit to a mature public. And even when text-books are neither
+grossly incompetent nor palpably dishonest, there is nevertheless
+almost invariably something cheap and trashy about their composition
+which repels the student who can choose his own books. Why should they
+be inflicted upon helpless children?
+
+Even if all text-books were miracles of accuracy and order, even if
+they all showed literary talent of a high degree, their usefulness
+would still be in question. If children are to be given a sense of the
+reality of the events which they study, they must get some feeling of
+contact with the facts. And to this project the use of a text-book is
+fatal. Let us turn to history once more. I take it that a text-book
+of history, as intended and as used, is a book which tells everything
+which it is believed necessary for the pupil to know. Right there
+it divorces itself, completely and irrevocably, from the historical
+category. History is _not_ a statement of what people ought to
+know. History is an _inquiry_ into the nature and relationship and
+significance of past events. Not a pronouncement upon these things,
+but a searching into them. Now the outstanding fact about past events
+is that they happened some time ago. The historian does not, to begin
+with, know what happened, let alone how and why it happened. He is
+dependent upon other people’s reports. His chief task is often to
+determine the comparative accuracy of these various reports. And when
+we read the writings of a real historian, the sense of contact we have
+with the events under discussion comes from our feeling that we have
+listened to a crowd of contrary witnesses, and, with our author’s
+assistance, got at the truth behind their words. More than that, the
+historian himself is addressing you, not as if he thought you had never
+read anything on the subject before and never would again, but with
+implicit or explicit reference to the opinions of other historians.
+He is himself only one of a crowd of witnesses, from all of whose
+testimony he expects you to form your own opinion of those past events
+which none of you will ever meet face to face.
+
+Compare this with the school text-book. It was evidently written by
+Omniscience Itself, for it does not talk as if the facts were in the
+slightest doubt, as if there were any two opinions about them, as
+if it were necessary to inquire into the past to find out something
+about it. It does not condescend to offer an opinion in agreement
+or in controversy with the views of others. It does not confess
+any difficulty in arriving at a just conclusion. No--it says _This
+happened_ and _That happened_. Perhaps it is all true as gospel. But
+facts so presented are abstractions, devoid of the warmth and colour
+of reality. Even the schools have learned how uninteresting dates are.
+But they do not realize that dates are uninteresting because, since
+nobody can possibly doubt them, it does no good whatever to believe in
+them. It is only those truths which need the assistance of our belief
+that engage our interest. It is only then that they concern us. We
+are interested in politics because it is the process of making up our
+minds about the future; and we are interested in history, when we _are_
+interested, because it is the process of making up our minds about the
+past.
+
+By eliminating the text-book, or by using it simply as a convenient
+syllabus and chronological guide to an inquiry into the significance
+and relationship of the events of the past, with the aid of every good
+historical work available for reference, the study of history would
+become a matter of concern to the pupil; and the past, looked at from
+several angles, and down a felt perspective of time, would become real.
+
+I am aware that this is done in the higher flights of the educational
+system. But why is it that the easy and profitable methods of learning
+are put off so long and the hardest and most profitless forced upon
+children? Is it that easier learning means harder teaching? I am
+not sure of that; the only difficulty about such a method as I have
+described would be in the mere change from the old to the new. No, I
+think the real trouble lies in the superstition of the Book.
+
+This may be seen in the teaching of mathematics. Before they come
+to school, children have usually learned to count, and learned
+easily because they were counting real objects. The objective aspect
+of mathematics is almost immediately lost sight of in school. Even
+the blackboard affords no release from the book, for who ever saw a
+blackboard outside a schoolroom? Mathematics comes to seem something
+horribly useless. The child simply does _not believe_ that people ever
+go through these tortures when they grow up. Even the suggestive fables
+into which the “examples” are sometimes cast, fail to convince him.
+“If a carpenter--” “A salesman has--” But he is neither a carpenter
+nor a salesman. He is a weary child, and he is not going to pretend to
+be a carpenter or a salesman unless he gets some fun out of it. The
+thing about a carpenter or a salesman which appeals to the child’s
+imagination is something other than mathematics. No, the printed word
+does not suffice. But let him _be_ a carpenter or salesman for the
+nonce, let him with saw or sugar-scoop in hand find it to be necessary
+to add, subtract, multiply, divide and deal in fractions, and he
+will rise undaunted to the occasion. And, having found in actual
+practice just what his difficulties are, he will cheerfully use book
+and blackboard. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and mathematics
+has only to come to seem a desirable acquisition to become an easily
+mastered one. I should say that the ideal way of teaching a boy of
+eight mathematics--including, if necessary, trigonometry--is as a part
+of the delightful task of constructing a motorcycle. I remember that I
+gained in twenty-four hours an insight into the mysteries of English
+grammar which I had failed to get in the 1200 odd lessons previously
+inflicted on me in school--and I gained that insight in writing my
+first short story. When an effect that you yourself want to achieve
+depends on a preposition or a fraction, then, and only then, are such
+things humanly worth knowing.
+
+If you want to see the most terrific and damning criticism of
+text-books, open one of them which has been used by a child, and see it
+written there on the margins in fretful and meandering curleques, which
+say as plainly as the handwriting on Belshazzar’s wall, “I have weighed
+this book in the balance and found it wanting. It does not interest me.
+It leaves my spirit vexed and impatient.” I have estimated that the
+scrawl-work in a single average schoolbook, if unwound and placed end
+to end, would extend along the Lincoln Highway from Weehawken, N. J.,
+to Davenport, Ia.; while the total energy which goes into the making
+of these scrawls each day in the public schools of New York City alone,
+would be sufficient to hoist a grand piano to the top of the Woolworth
+building. The grand total for the United States of the soul-power that
+dribbles out into these ugly pencilings, amounts to a huge Niagara of
+wasted energy.
+
+The Book, as the centre of our educational process, must be demoted. It
+is a good servant, but a bad master. And only as a servant can it be
+tolerated--as an adjunct to the gardens and workshops and laboratories
+and kitchens and studios and playgrounds of the school-world.
+
+
+
+
+V. The Magic Theory of Education
+
+
+But these are not the only superstitions which have muddled the
+educational process. You have heard that favourite speech of the
+condemned criminal: “I never had no education.”
+
+He does not refer to moral education; he is not complaining that he was
+never instructed as to the sacredness of life and private property. He
+means that he never studied arithmetic and geography and spelling--or
+not enough to mention. He means that geography, etc., would have saved
+him from a life of crime and a finish behind the bars.
+
+And you have heard some unlettered parent, come from a foreign shore,
+repeat over and over:
+
+“My boy, _he_ get education. I no have education. But my boy--he get
+education.” Or words to that effect.
+
+True; his boy will have a better chance than he himself had; he may
+become President of the United States or of a Fruit Trust. And it is
+equally true of the other man, that if he had learned arithmetic in
+school instead of sneak-thievery from the Carmine street gang, he would
+probably now be making shoes in a factory instead of in Sing Sing.
+There is much plain common sense in both these views of education. But
+there is more of plain folk-mysticism.
+
+Both speakers think of themselves as having had to struggle along in
+the ordinary natural way, in the one case by day-labour and in the
+other by petty larceny; and they contrast their lot with that of the
+fortunate ones who by means of an esoteric kind of knowledge have
+found an easy way of life. This knowledge, they believe, is reposed
+exclusively in certain difficult and officially designated books,
+which can be made to yield their secrets only through a process called
+going-to-school, and by the aid of a kind of public functionary called
+a teacher.
+
+This mysterious and beneficent procedure is the popular conception
+of education. The school building and the teacher are the later and
+more external elements of the cult. It is at heart a belief in the
+magic--one might call it the black-and-white magic--of books.
+
+Now the essence of the belief in magic is the wish of the weak person
+to be strong--magic being the short straight line in the wish-world
+from weakness to strength.
+
+Think for a moment of some childhood fairy tale. The Hero is not the
+strong man. It is the wicked Giant who is strong. The rôle of brute
+force is always played by malevolent powers. The Hero, stripped of his
+magical appurtenances, is not much to look at. Almost invariably he
+is the youngest of the family, and is often represented as diminutive
+in size or stature. And the older the fairy tale, the more physically
+insignificant he is. It is only later, when the motif of romantic love
+enters into folk-fiction, that the hero must be tall and handsome. At
+the earlier period he is frankly a weakling, as Man in primitive times
+no doubt felt himself to be, in comparison with the mastodon and the
+aurochs; and frequently he is regarded at the outset by the rest of the
+family with contempt, as no doubt was Man by the other animals when
+his great Adventure began. Like Man, the fairy-tale hero is confronted
+with an impossible task--sometimes by a whole series of such tasks,
+which he must somehow perform successfully if he wishes to survive;
+and, by no superior strength, but by some blessed help from outside, a
+singing bush, a talking bird, by the aid of some supernatural weapon,
+and, above all, by the use of some talismanic Word, he achieves his
+exploits. Thus does the weakling, the youngest child, the harassed prey
+of hateful powers, become the Giant-Killer, the Dragon-Slayer, the
+Conquering Hero!
+
+It is very human, this pathetic assertion that weakness _must_ turn
+into strength. And, if it had not been for such a confidence, primitive
+Man might very well have given up the game, surrendered the field to
+his contemporaries of the animal kingdom. And this confidence might,
+somewhat fancifully, be described as a previsionary sense in early
+Man of the larger destinies of his race. In very truth, the weakness
+from which it sprang was the thing which made possible these larger
+destinies. For the unlimited adaptations of mankind are due precisely
+to his weakness. It is because Man lacked the horns of the bull and the
+teeth of the tiger that he was forced to invent the club, the spear,
+the sword, the bow-and-arrow; it was because he lacked the fleetness of
+the deer that he had to tame and teach the horse to carry him; because
+he felt himself to be intolerably inferior to bird and fish that he
+could not rest content until he had invented the airplane and the
+submarine. In short, because he was the weakest of all the creatures
+on earth, he had to take refuge from the terrible truth in a childish
+but dynamic wish-dream of becoming--by some mysterious help from
+outside--the lord of creation.
+
+Fairy lore may be read as a record of the ancient awe and gratitude of
+mankind to the miracles of human adaptation which served that childish
+wish. The all-powerful fairy wand is simply that unnatural and hence
+supernatural thing, the stick, broken from a magically helping tree
+and made to serve a human purpose; the sceptre of royalty is that same
+magic stick preserved to us in the lingering fairy-tale of monarchy.
+But more potent even than the magic of wand or sword in fairy lore is
+the magic of words. And truly enough it was the miracle of language
+which made the weakest creature on earth the strongest. _Writing_, that
+mysterious silent speech, holding in leash the unknown powers of the
+magic word until it met the initiate eye, must have had for mankind a
+special awe and fascination, a quality of ultimate beauty and terror....
+
+This flavour of magical potency still clings to the Book. It is the
+greatest of the mysterious helps by which Man makes his dream of
+power come true. Who can blame the poor jailbird who thinks that
+there was, in the dull, incompetent pages of the text-books which you
+and I carried so unwillingly to school, an Open Sesame to a realm of
+achievement beyond his unaided power to reach! And who can blame the
+poor immigrant parent if he regards the officially designated Books
+which his children bring home from school as a talisman against those
+harsh evils of the world which he in his ignorance has had to suffer!
+
+But the magic theory is not the only popular superstition about
+education. There is another, even more deeply and stubbornly rooted in
+the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Caste System of Education
+
+
+Now what has Caste to do with Education? Quite as much as Magic. You
+shall see.
+
+From the point of view of the student of education, the Caste system
+appears as _a method of simplifying the hereditary transmission of
+knowledge_--in short, as a primitive method of education. This will be
+the more readily apparent if we glance for a moment at its prehistoric
+origins.
+
+Before man was man, he was an animal. He relied, like the rest of
+the animals, on a psychically easy--and lazy--mode of adaptation to
+reality. He had a specific set of “instinctive” reactions to familiar
+stimuli. Doubt had not entered his soul. He had no conflicting impulses
+to torment him. His bag of instinctive animal tricks sufficed.
+
+But something happened to mar the easy perfection of his state. Some
+change in environmental conditions, perhaps, made his set of definite
+reactions inadequate. For the first time he didn’t know exactly how to
+meet the situation. Conflicting impulses shook his mind; doubt entered
+his soul--and Thought was born. Man thought because he _had_ to think.
+But he hated to, because it was the hardest thing he had ever done! He
+learned--unwillingly--more and more about how to live; he increased the
+number and the complexity of his adaptations; but he sought always to
+codify these adaptations into something resembling the bag of tricks
+which he had had to leave behind. And when it came to passing on the
+knowledge of these new adaptations to the younger generation--when it
+came, in short, to education--he did the job in as easy a way as he
+conscientiously could.
+
+You have seen a cat teaching her kittens how to catch mice, or a pair
+of birds teaching their young ones to fly. It is so simple! The thing
+to be learned is easy--easy, because the cat is formed to catch mice
+and the bird to fly. And, once mastered, these tricks and a few others
+as simple constitute the sum of animal education. There is no more to
+learn; these equip the animal to deal successfully with reality. How a
+human parent must envy Tabby the simplicity and certainty of her task!
+She has only to go on the theory that a cat is an animal which lives by
+catching mice in order to fulfil her whole educational duty. And human
+parents did desire (as indeed, consciously or unconsciously, they do
+yet) such a simplification of their task. Primitive mankind wanted to
+pass on to the new generation a simple bag of tricks. Of course, there
+is no specific bag of tricks which suffices Man to live by; he is what
+he is precisely by virtue of a capacity for unlimited adaptation to
+environment. If the bag of monkey-tricks had sufficed, about all we
+know now would be how to climb trees and pick cocoanuts. Our ancestors
+learned because they must; and they passed on what they had learned to
+their successors--but in a form dictated by their wish to keep human
+behaviour as near as possible to the simple and easy character of
+animal life. They put on the brakes.
+
+_Because mankind already knew more than it thought one animal species
+ought to have to know, it started to divide itself into sub-species._
+The division into the male and female sub-species came first--and has
+lasted longest. The young men were educated for war and the chase, and
+the young women for domestic duties. And this is essentially a division
+not of physical but rather of intellectual labour. It was a separation
+of the burden of _knowing_ how to behave in life’s emergencies--a
+separation which by its simplicity gave such satisfaction to the
+primitive mind that he hated and feared any disturbance of it.
+
+To this day a man is not so much ashamed of doing “woman’s work” as
+of seeming to _know how_ to do it. It is no disgrace for a man to sew
+on a button--provided he does it clumsily; and the laugh with which
+men and women greet each other’s awkward intrusions into each other’s
+“spheres of effort” is a reassurance to the effect that the real taboo
+against _knowing how_ has not been violated. It is for this reason that
+women had so much harder a time to fight their way into the “masculine”
+professions to which a preliminary education was necessary than to
+enter the factories, where only strength was supposed to be required;
+and why (aside from the economic reasons) they have so much difficulty
+in entering trades which must be _learned_ by apprenticeship. An
+interesting echo of this primitive taboo is to be found in New York
+City, where a telephone girl who wants to study the science which
+underlies her labours would find in certain public schools that the
+electricity classes are for _boys_ exclusively.
+
+The other social and economic groups into which mankind divided
+itself tended to perpetuate themselves as simulated sub-species by
+the transmission of special knowledge along strict hereditary lines.
+Crafts of every sort--whether metal-working or magic, architecture
+or agriculture, seafaring or sheep-breeding, even poetry and
+prostitution--came more and more to be inherited, until among some of
+the great ancient peoples the caste system became the foundation of
+society.
+
+Ultimately the caste system _per se_ was shattered by the demand of
+the process which we call civilization for a more variously adaptable
+creature--for human beings. But it survives almost intact in certain
+class educational institutions, such as the finishing schools for
+girls--institutions devoted to teaching the particular bag of tricks
+which will enable those who learn them to occupy successfully and
+without further adaptation a hereditary (or quasi-hereditary) position
+in society--to be a “finished” and perfect member of a definite and
+unchanging human sub-species.
+
+The most potent harm which the caste theory of education has effected,
+however, is in its stultification of the true magic of the written
+word. Let us see how that came about.
+
+
+
+
+VII. The Canonization of Book-Magic
+
+
+It was inevitable that the particular kind of knowledge which is
+represented by books should become the property of a certain caste;
+and it was inevitable that this caste should confine the hereditary
+transmission of that knowledge chiefly to such works as had been
+transmitted from the previous generation.
+
+Fortunately, the literate caste could not extinguish literature. For
+the presumptively less sacred writings which had been denied entrance
+to the canon because they were _new_ were, so to speak, allowed to lie
+around loose where everybody could get at them. Thus the true magic of
+book-knowledge was released from the boundaries of caste, and became
+more and more a universal property.
+
+But nobody had any great respect for this growing body of “profane”
+literature. Popular awe was reserved for the body of sacred literature
+in the possession of the specifically literate caste. Frequently the
+distinction was marked by a deliberate difference in the languages or
+characters in which the two kinds of literature were written--sacred
+literature being written in the older, hieratic writing which nobody
+not of the literate caste could read.
+
+Note the result at this stage of the process: it is precisely those
+books which are, on the whole, least likely to be of present value to
+mankind, which are regarded with superstitious reverence. The most
+striking example is found in pre-revolutionary China, where the relics
+of an age utterly out of touch with the newer achievements in human
+adaptation were learned by heart in the schools and made the basis of
+civil-service examinations.
+
+At this point of our ideal but not at all fanciful sketch, a new factor
+enters--class jealousy. The literate caste is found to be associated
+and partly identified with the leisure class. Sacred literature has
+become leisure class literature, and the aspirations of the less
+fortunate classes toward leisure class prerogatives include a special
+desire, tinged with the old superstitious reverence, for the forbidden
+books. These were more or less unconsciously supposed to be, if
+not actually responsible for, at least bound up with, leisure class
+power. And finally the great democratizing movements in which some
+enterprising lower class wrests from some moribund leisure class its
+possessions, seizes triumphant hold on its “classics” and makes them a
+general possession.
+
+This sketch is so pieced together from all times and places that it
+may decidedly seem to need the reinforcement of evidence. Let us
+therefore call to the stand that young man over there who looks like
+an Intelligent Young Immigrant. He comes unabashed, and we proceed to
+question him:
+
+Q. Do you buy books?
+
+A. Yes, of course.
+
+Q. Admirable! You need a new pair of shoes, and yet you buy books!
+Well, what books do you buy?
+
+A. Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Zola, Nietzsche--
+
+Q. See here, you must be a Socialist!
+
+A. Yes. What of it?
+
+Q. What of it! Why, I’m talking about Reverence, and you haven’t got
+any. You’re not looking for the noblest utterances of mankind, you’re
+looking for weapons with which to cut your way through the jungle of
+contemporary hypocrisies!
+
+A. Of course.
+
+Q. Well, how do you expect me to prove my theory by you? You are
+excused!
+
+We’ll have to try again. There’s another one. Eager Young Immigrant,
+thirsting for the treasures locked in our English tongue. Come here, my
+lad.
+
+Q. What books do _you_ read? Shaw and Veblen, by any chance?
+
+A. No, sir. I’m going to the English Literature class at the social
+settlement, and I’m reading the “Idylls of the King.” I’ve read
+Addison’s Essays and Shakespeare, and I’m going to take up the Iliad.
+
+Q. The classics, eh?
+
+A. Yes, sir. All the things they study at college!
+
+Q. H’m. Ever hear of Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf?
+
+A. Yes, sir--I own it.
+
+Q. How much do you make a week?
+
+A. Eighteen dollars.
+
+Q. Thank you. That’s all!
+
+And there you are!
+
+But please don’t misunderstand me. Disparagement of the classics
+as such is far from being the point of my remarks! One may regard
+the piano as a noble instrument, and yet point out the unprecedented
+sale of pianos during the war as an example of the influence of class
+jealousy in interior decoration. For observe that it is not the
+intrinsic merit of book or piano which wins the regard of the class
+long envious of its “betters” and now able by a stroke of luck to
+parade its class paraphernalia; it is the stamp of caste that makes it
+desirable: an accordion, which merely makes music, would not serve the
+purpose! That boy who owns Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf does not want
+mere vulgar enlightenment; he wants an acquaintance with such books as
+have an aura of hereditary academic approval.
+
+And it is for the same reason that Latin and Greek have so apparently
+fixed a place in our public education. They were part of the system of
+educating gentlemen’s sons in England; and what was good enough to be
+threshed into the hides of gentlemen’s sons is good enough for us!
+
+
+
+
+VIII. The Conquest of Culture in America
+
+
+The first organized schools in America were theological seminaries.
+This was due to the fact that the New England colonies were
+theocracies, church-states. No one not a member of the church had any
+political rights. And the heads of the church were the heads of the
+state. In this special kind of class government it naturally followed
+that theology was the prime study of ambitious youth. But as the
+colonies grew more prosperous and the rule of the more godly became as
+a matter of fact the rule of the more rich, the theological seminaries
+of New England changed by degrees into more easily recognizable
+imitations of the great gentlemen’s sons’ schools in old England. Such,
+in particular, was the theo-aristocratic genesis of Harvard and Yale.
+
+The gentlemen’s sons’ school was thus our first, and for a long time
+our only, educational achievement. The humble theocratic beginnings of
+these institutions did indeed leave a quasi-democratic tradition which
+made it possible for not only the sons of the well-to-do, but for the
+ambitious son of poor parents, to secure the knowledge of Latin and
+Greek necessary to fit them to exploit and rule a virgin continent. But
+beneath this cultural perfection, to meet the needs of the great mass
+of the people, there was no organized or public education whatever.[2]
+The result was a vast illiteracy such as still exists in many parts of
+the South today. The private and pitiful efforts of the lower classes
+to secure an education took the form of paying some old woman to teach
+their children “the three R’s.”
+
+Of these three R’s the last has a significance of its own. It is there
+by virtue of a realistic conviction, born of harsh experience. A man
+may not be able to “figure,” and yet know that he is being cheated.
+And so far as getting along in a buying-and-selling age is concerned,
+’Rithmetic has an importance even more fundamental than Readin’ and
+’Ritin’. Yet in the list it stands modestly last--for it is a late and
+vulgar intruder into sacred company. Even in a young commercial nation,
+the old belief in the rescuing magic of the Word still holds its place
+in the aspiring mind.
+
+But why, you ask, quarrel with this wholesome reverence for books?
+Well--suppose the working class acquired such a reverence for books
+that it refused to believe it was being Educated unless it was being
+taught something out of a book! Suppose it worshipped books so much
+that when you offered its children flowers and stars and machinery and
+carpenters’ tools and a cook-stove to play with in order to learn how
+to live--suppose it eyed you darkly and said: “Now, what are you trying
+to put over on me?” But that is to anticipate.
+
+It was due to the organized effort of the working class that public
+education was at last provided for American children. Our free public
+school system came into existence in the thirties as a result of
+trade union agitation.[3] Its coming into existence is a great good
+upon which we need not dwell. But its subsequent history needs to be
+somewhat elucidated.
+
+The public school system was founded firmly upon the three R’s. But
+these were plainly not enough. It had to be enlarged to meet our
+needs--and to satisfy our genuine democratic pride in it. So wings
+were thrown out into the fields of history and geography. And then?
+There was still an earth-full of room for expansion. But no, it
+was builded up--Up! And why? The metaphor is a little troublesome,
+but you are to conceive, pinnacled dim in the intense inane, or
+suspended from heaven itself, the gentlemen’s sons’ school. And this
+was what our public school system was striving to make connections
+with. And lo! at last it succeeded! The structure beneath was
+rickety--fantastic--jerry-built--everything sacrificed to the purpose
+of providing a way to climb Up There; but the purpose was fulfilled.
+
+The democratic enthusiasm which created the public school had in fact
+been unaccompanied by any far-seeing theory of what education ought
+to be. And so that splendid enthusiasm, after its initial conquest
+of the three R’s, proceeded to a conquest of Greek and Latin and the
+whole traditional paraphernalia of aristocratic education. Every
+other purpose of public education was, for the time being lost sight
+of, forgotten, ignored, in the proud attempt to create a series of
+stairs which led straight up to the colleges. The high school became
+a preparatory school for college, and the courses were arranged,
+rearranged and deranged, with that intent. Final examinations were
+systematized, supervised and regulated to secure the proper penultimate
+degree of academic achievement--as for instance by the famous Regents’
+examinations. The public school lost its independence--which was worth
+nothing; and its opportunity--which was worth everything. It remains a
+monument to the caste ideal of education.
+
+For the theory which underlay the scheme was that every American boy
+and girl who wanted an education should have the whole thing in bang-up
+style. What was good enough for gentlemen’s sons was none too good for
+us. That there might be no mistake about it, the states erected their
+own colleges, with plenty of free scholarships to rob ignorance of
+its last excuse. These state colleges, while furnished with various
+realistic and technical adjuncts, and lacking in the authentic
+hereditary aura of their great Eastern predecessors, were still echoes,
+sometimes spirited and more often forlorn, of the aristocratic
+tradition of centuries agone. With the reluctant addition of a kindly
+scheme for keeping very young children in school, the system now
+stretched from infancy to full manhood, and embraced--in theory--the
+whole educable population of the United States.
+
+In its utter thoroughness of beneficent intention, the system was truly
+sublime.
+
+The only trouble was that it didn’t work.
+
+
+
+
+IX. Smith, Jones and Robinson
+
+
+At this point there seems to be an interruption from somebody at the
+back of the hall.--Louder, please! What’s that you say?
+
+“I thought,” says the voice, “that this was to be a _discussion_ of
+education. It sounds to me more like a monologue. When do we get a
+chance to talk?”
+
+Oh, very well! If you think you can do this thing better than I can,
+go ahead. Suppose _you_ tell us why the American public school system
+failed to work!--One at a time, please. Mr.--er--Smith has the floor.
+He will be followed in due order by Mr. Jones and Mr. Robinson. And
+then I hope everybody will be satisfied. Yes, Mr. Smith?
+
+MR. SMITH: “I am one of the so-called victims of our American public
+school system. I went to grammar school, to high school, and then to
+college. You say that is what the system is for--to lead up to college.
+Well, it worked in my case. My parents were poor, but I studied hard
+and got a free scholarship, and I worked my way through college by
+tending furnaces in the morning and tutoring at night. You say college
+is designed to impart a gentleman’s sons’ education. Well, I got that
+kind of education. And what I want to know is, what’s wrong with me? I
+can’t say I feel particularly stultified by my educational career!”
+
+No, no, Mr. Smith, don’t stop. Go right on!
+
+MR. SMITH (continuing): “I will admit that I have sometimes wished
+I had taken some kind of technical course instead of the straight
+classical. But I didn’t want to be an engineer or chemist, so why
+should I? In fact I didn’t know exactly _what_ I wanted to be.... I
+suppose my education might not unreasonably have been expected to help
+me understand myself better. And I confess that when I came out into
+the world with my A.B. I did feel a bit helpless. But I managed to find
+a place for myself, and I get along very well. I can’t say that I make
+any definite use of my college education, but I rather think it’s been
+an advantage.”
+
+Thank you for being so explicit. Mr. Jones next. Mr. Jones, you have
+just heard Mr. Smith’s splendid testimonial to the value of a college
+education--how it has unlocked for him the ages’ accumulated wealth
+of literature, of science, of art--how it has put him in vivid touch
+with the world in which he lives--how it has made him realize his own
+powers, and given him a serene confidence in his ability to use them
+wisely--how fully it has equipped him to live in this complex and
+difficult age--in a word, how it has helped him to become all that a
+twentieth century American citizen should be! Have you, Mr. Jones,
+anything to add to his account of these benefits?
+
+MR. JONES: “Your coarse sarcasm, if aimed at me, is misdirected.
+I never went to college. I didn’t want to tend furnaces, so when
+I finished high school I got a job. But there’s something to this
+gentleman’s sons’ stuff. I had four years’ start of Smith, but I
+feel that he’s got a certain advantage over me just because he _is_
+a college man. Now why is that, I’d like to know? I could have gone
+to college too, if I had cared enough about it. But studying didn’t
+interest me. I was bored with high school.”
+
+Exactly, Mr. Jones. And some hundreds of thousands of others were also
+so bored with high school that even the prestige which a college
+education confers, could not tempt them to further meaningless efforts.
+You have explained a large part of the breakdown of our public school
+system. In theory--but Mr. Robinson wishes to speak.
+
+MR. ROBINSON: “Theory--theory--theory! I think it’s about time a
+few facts were injected into this alleged discussion! The fact I’m
+interested in is just this: I quit school when I was twelve years old.
+I had just finished grammar school. I _couldn’t_ go to high school. I
+_had_ to go to work. What have your theories of education got to do
+with me?”
+
+Everything, Mr. Robinson! You smashed one theory to pieces, you were
+about to be condemned to a peculiar kind of slavery by another theory,
+and you were rescued after a fashion by a third theory. You are, to
+begin with, the rock upon which the good ship Education foundered.
+As I was about to say when I was interrupted: the grandiose ideal of
+a gentleman’s sons’ education for every American boy failed--because
+there were some millions of American boys like you who _could not_
+go to college, and some hundreds of thousands of others like Mr.
+Jones here, who _would not_--who did not feel that it was worth the
+necessary effort. And these vast hordes of you going out into the world
+at the age of twelve to sixteen with only the precarious beginning of
+a leisure class culture, became the educational problem which the last
+generation has been trying to solve.
+
+
+
+
+X. Employer vs. Trade Unionist
+
+
+It was the American Business Man who proposed the first “practical”
+reform; and if you have any doubt of the validity of the Caste
+theory, note what happened. The American Business Man knew that these
+millions of youths were going to enter his shops and factories; they
+were not going to be members of a leisure class, they were going to
+be wage-slaves; and so he proposed to educate them to be efficient
+wage-slaves.
+
+And he might have succeeded in imposing his capitalistic version of
+the Caste theory of education upon our public schools, had it not been
+for the trade unions, who perceived in these capitalist plans a means
+of breaking down their own apprentice system. “What! turn the schools
+into training-schools for strikebreakers? No!” they said--and they
+bitterly opposed every attempt to introduce industrial training into
+the schools, and mustered to their aid the old notions of the Magic of
+Books. “Let the children have an _education_”--meaning book-learning;
+“it will be time enough for them to learn to _work_ when they leave
+school,” was the general verdict. And so in this clash of economic
+interests, one theory warred with another, and the theory of Education
+as a mysterious communion with the Magic of Books happily won.
+
+Happily--for though the controversy had its unfortunate results, in
+the fixing of a prejudice in the minds of the working people against
+industrial education, we should not fail to realize that in that
+controversy the trade unions were right. We do not want to educate
+the children of the poor in this twentieth century to be a human
+sub-species; it would be better to give them fragments of a leisure
+class education than fix them into the wage-slave mould; it would
+be better that they learned Greek and Latin (or, for that matter,
+Sanscrit!) than merely a trade. It would be better to turn them out as
+they came in, helpless and ignorant, than to make them into efficient
+machines.
+
+But such a choice is not necessary. It is possible to have an education
+which produces human beings who are neither out of touch with their
+age nor hopelessly confined within it--a generation which will be the
+masters and not the slaves of its environment.
+
+The outlines of such an educational system were already being drawn,
+in theory and even experimentally in fact. But these radical proposals
+threatened to cost more money than governments are accustomed to expend
+on peaceful and constructive enterprises. Yet something had to be done
+in response to a popular sense of the imperfections of our system.
+
+Something was done accordingly.
+
+
+
+
+XI. The Goose-Step
+
+
+Bear in mind that the necessities of the case required something which
+would not cost any money, which would leave the system really intact,
+and yet which would impress beholders with the fact of Progress.
+
+The device which answered to this description was copied from Prussia
+and informed with the essence of the Prussian spirit--a quasi-military
+Uniformity. There is nothing, indeed, so impressive to the observer
+as the sight of everybody doing exactly the same thing at the same
+time. And when that thing is totally unnecessary and very difficult,
+the effect is to stun the mind into a bewildered admiration. Hence
+the preposterously military aspect of the schools of yesterday--the
+marching in line out to recess and back again. Hence the drillmaster
+airs of the teaching force--as, for instance, the New York teacher
+who boasted, “I said to my pupils, ‘All who live on Blank street
+raise their hands,’ and then I turned to talk to the superintendent,
+forgetting to say ‘Hands down’--and five minutes later, when I looked
+around, those Blank street children still had their hands up. That’s
+what I call discipline!” And hence the reprimand to the other New York
+teacher because, when she came back from a visit to Italy, she told the
+geography class about her journey and passed around picture postcards,
+instead of hearing the children recite the appointed Lesson from the
+appointed Book at the appointed Hour. Think how it sounds for a city
+superintendent to be able to pull out his watch and say to a visitor:
+“At this moment every sixth grade pupil, in every school in the whole
+city, is opening his geography!” That is System, and it must not be
+deranged in order to _interest_ a mere roomful of children in the
+realities of geography for half an hour!
+
+I experienced some of the benefits of the Goose-Step System myself,
+back in Illinois--and I know just how a child feels about it. He feels
+just as you would feel if at the conclusion of a theatrical performance
+you were commanded to “Rise! Turn! Pass!” He feels humiliated and
+ridiculous. He feels that he is being made a fool of. The Goose-Step
+System is not intended to make its little victims feel happy; it is
+only intended to impress beholders with the fact of Progress.
+
+_And this kind of Systematization, this fake reform, has been the
+only serious contribution to American educational practice in the
+public schools during the life of the generation to which you and I
+belong--until within the last few years._
+
+Fortunately, another crisis arose. In every large city the attendance
+at the public schools outgrew the school capacities, and it became
+necessary to put many children on a “half-time” basis. And this scandal
+demanded relief. It still demands relief. And at present we are faced
+with a choice between two methods of relief.
+
+One method is familiar--to turn the grammar schools into adjuncts of
+capitalist shops and factories. It is the system now approved by the
+educational authorities of most of the large cities, including New
+York. The other is a sane and democratic proposal for education on
+scientific principles, for the benefit of the child and of the race.
+
+
+
+
+XII. The Gary Plan
+
+
+It was in the nature of a happy accident that this sane and democratic
+proposal came before the public as a practical alternative to the
+scheme of turning the grammar schools into adjuncts of capitalist shops
+and factories.
+
+It happened that a man named Wirt solved in the schools of Gary,
+Indiana, the problem of accommodating two pupils with a desk built for
+one. He did this by the simple means of abolishing the private and
+exclusive character of the desks. By having one-half the pupils come a
+little later and leave a little later than the other half, and use the
+desks which the others had just vacated for the gymnasium or workshop
+or assembly room, it was found that there were desks enough for all.
+And because this plan made it unnecessary to spend some millions of
+dollars on new school-buildings, he was invited to come to New York and
+put his plan in practice there.
+
+If that had been all there was to the Gary system, it might have been
+adopted peacefully enough. But the Gary system was a real and hence
+a revolutionary kind of education, and so it met with immediate and
+bitter hostility.
+
+It made the child and his needs the center of the whole process of
+education. It undertook to give him a chance to learn how to live. It
+made the school to a large extent a replica of the world outside. It
+gave him machinery and gardens and printing presses to play with and
+learn from. And right there it aroused the suspicions of working class
+parents, who were afraid their children were not going to get enough
+Book-learning. It demanded something of teachers besides routine and
+discipline and stoic patience; and though they came with experience
+to be its most enthusiastic advocates, they were in prospect roused
+to angry opposition. It abolished the semi-sacerdotal dignities of
+the school-building, and thus offended a deep-lying superstitious
+reverence in a public which regarded education as something set
+apart from life. It clashed with the bureaucratic fads of the higher
+educational authorities, and provoked them to financial sabotage. And
+finally it was dragged into politics, where as the pet project of
+an administration of bureaucratic reform officials it was held up to
+popular scorn.
+
+But the ideal of education which was implicit in the Gary plan is still
+up for judgment.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. Learning to Work
+
+
+Here, then, is the situation as it stands. Our education is out of
+relation to the time in which we live. It is breaking down under the
+pressure of economic forces which demands that it turn out people who
+do not have to be _re-educated_ by modern industry. It cannot remain as
+it is. It will either be made the instrument of a democratic culture
+which accepts the present but foresees the future; or it will fall
+into the hands of those who are planning to make it a training school
+for wage-slaves. Here is the latter program, as described by the
+superintendent of schools in a great American city:
+
+“Three years ago the elimination of pupils from the upper grades
+of our elementary schools and the demands of industry led us to
+experiment with industrial education in the grades.... Our controlling
+idea was that adolescent boys and girls standing on the threshold of
+industrial life should be grouped in prevocational schools in which
+they would receive, in addition to instruction in formal subjects, such
+instruction and training in constructive activities as would develop
+aptitudes and abilities of distinct economic value. At present the
+opportunity to _rotate term by term through various shops_ is afforded
+in seven schools to approximately 3,000 boys and girls in the 7th, 8th
+and 9th years.”
+
+Between these two programs you must choose. Either efficient democratic
+education, or efficient capitalistic education.
+
+“But,” asks some one, “what is there to choose between them? Democratic
+education and capitalistic education both seem to me to consist in
+turning the school into a workshop.”
+
+Not at all! The democratic plan is rather to turn the workshop into a
+school. That may seem like a large order, but I may as well confess to
+you at once that the democratic scheme proposes ultimately to bring
+the whole of industry within the scope of the educational system:
+nothing less! But the benevolent assimilation of industry by education
+in the interest of human progress and happiness, is one thing; and the
+swallowing of the public school system by industry in the interest of
+the employing class, is quite another.
+
+For the present, however, democratic education merely brings the
+workshop into the school, so that the processes of industry may be
+the more readily mastered; while capitalist education merely sends
+the school-child into its workshops, in order that he may become
+more effectively exploitable. The difference should be sufficiently
+obvious: in the school-workshops of capitalism the child is taught how
+to work for somebody else, how to conduct mechanical operations in an
+industrial process over which he has no control; in the democratic
+workshops of the school he learns to use those processes to serve his
+own creative wishes. In the one he is taught to be a wage-slave--and
+bear in mind that this refers to the children of the poor--for the rich
+have their own private schools for their own children. In the other,
+the child learns to be a free man.
+
+That is just what irritates the capitalist reformers of our public
+school system. Since the children of the poor are going to be factory
+hands, what is the use of their having learned to be free men? They
+might as well have learned Greek and Latin, for all the use it is going
+to be to them!
+
+And that is why you must exercise your choice. The merits are not
+quite all on one side of the question. There are disadvantages in
+the democratic plan of education. These disadvantages have nowhere
+been made more clear than by H. G. Wells in his fantastic scientific
+parable, “The First Men in the Moon.” You will remember that his
+explorers visited the Moon in a queer sort of air-craft, and found
+there a people with institutions quite unlike our own. They too,
+however, had classes, and they had solved the problem of the education
+of these classes in a forthright manner which is utterly unlike our
+timid human compromises. One of the visitors from Earth thus describes
+the Lunar System:
+
+“In the Moon ... every citizen knows his place. He is born to that
+place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and
+surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has
+neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should he?’
+Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a
+mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end.
+They check the incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage
+his mathematical bias with a perfect physiological skill. His brain
+grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and
+the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential
+part of him. At last, save for rest and food, his one delight lies
+in the exercise and display of his faculty, his one interest in its
+application, his sole society with other specialists in his own line.
+His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the portions
+engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger and
+seem to suck all life and vigour from the rest of his frame; his
+limbs shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect
+face is hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere
+stridulation for the stating of formulae; he seems dead to all but
+properly enunciated problems.... And so he attains his end....
+
+“The bulk of these insects, however, ... are, I gather, of the
+operative [working] class. ‘Machine hands,’ indeed, some of these are
+in actual nature--it is no figure of speech; the single tentacle of
+the mooncalf-herdsman is profoundly modified for clawing, lifting,
+guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary subordinate appendages
+to these important parts ... others again have flat feet for
+treadles, with ankylosed joints; and others--who I have been told are
+glass-blowers--seem mere lung-bellows. But every one of these common
+Selenites I have seen at work is exquisitely adapted to the social need
+it meets....
+
+“The making of these various sorts of operatives must be a very
+curious and interesting process.... Quite recently I came upon a
+number of young Selenites confined in jars from which only the fore
+limbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine minders
+of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly developed system
+of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by
+injections, while the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo, unless I
+misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier stages these queer
+little creatures are apt to display signs of suffering in their various
+cramped situations, but they easily become indurated to their lot; and
+he took me on to where a number of flexible-limbed messengers were
+being drawn out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I know, but
+such glimpses of the educational methods of these beings affect me
+disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off, and I may be able to
+see more of this aspect of their wonderful social order. That wretched
+looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of
+limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of
+course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our
+earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then
+making machines of them.”
+
+The Lunar system has indeed much to be said for it; and the capitalist
+plan of wage-slave education has at least the merit of being a definite
+step in that direction.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. Learning to Play
+
+
+“But in either case,” exclaims an indignant mother, “the child ceases
+to be a child--under either the democratic or the capitalistic plan--”
+
+No, madam! The object of a genuine democratic education is to enable
+him to remain always a child.
+
+“Then,” says another interlocutor, “I must have misunderstood you. I
+thought you conceived of education as _growing-up_.”
+
+Growing up, yes--out of the helplessness, the fear, the misery of
+childhood, which come only from weakness and ignorance: growing up into
+knowledge and power.
+
+“But putting aside forever his toys and games,” protests the mother.
+“Forgetting how to play!”
+
+No, madam. Learning rather to take realities for his toys, and entering
+blithely into the fascinating and delightful game of life. Forget how
+to play? That is what he is condemned to now. It is a pity. And that
+is precisely what we want to change.
+
+“By setting him to work?”
+
+What! are we to quibble over words? Tell me, then, what is the
+difference between work and play?
+
+Or rather, to shorten the argument, let me tell you. Play is effort
+which embodies one’s own creative wishes, one’s own dreams. Work
+is any kind of effort which fails to embody such wishes and such
+dreams.... When you were first married, and began to keep house--under
+difficulties, it may be--was that work or play, madam? Do not be afraid
+of being sentimental--we are among friends. Is it not true that at
+first, while it was a part of the dream of companionship, while it
+seemed to you to be making that dream come true, it was play--no matter
+how much effort it took? And is it not true that when it came to seem
+to you merely something that had to be done, it was work, no matter how
+easily performed?--And you, my friend, who built a little house in the
+country with your own hands for pleasure, and worked far beyond union
+hours in doing it--was not that play?
+
+It was _your own house_, you say. Just so; and it is the child’s own
+house, that cave in the woods which he toils so cheerfully to create.
+And it was their own house, the cathedral which the artisans and
+craftsmen of the middle ages created so joyously--the realization of a
+collective wish to which the creative fancy of every worker might make
+its private contribution.
+
+You know, do you not, why we cannot build cathedrals now? Because
+craftsmen are no longer children at play--that is to say, no longer
+free men. They toil at something which is no affair of theirs, because
+they must. They have become the more or less unwilling slaves of a
+system of machine production, which they have not yet gained the
+knowledge and power to take and use to serve their own creative dreams.
+
+But men do not like to work; they like to play. They want to be the
+masters and not the slaves of the machine-system. That is why they
+have struggled so fiercely to climb out of the class of slaves into
+the class of masters; it has been that hope which has sustained them
+in what would otherwise have seemed an intolerable condition. And that
+is why, as such a hope goes glimmering, they join together to wrest
+from their employers some control over the conditions under which they
+work; and also why their employers so often prefer to lose money in
+strikes rather than concede such control--for the sense of mastery is
+dearer even than profits. That is, incidentally, why so many workers
+prefer a white collar job to a decent union wage--because it permits
+them to fancy themselves a part of the master class. And finally, that
+is why the industrial system is now at the point of breakdown--because
+a class of workers who have no sense of mastery over their jobs cannot
+and will not take enough interest in their work to meet the new and
+stupendous demands upon production. When pressure is put upon them,
+they revolt--and hell is raised, but not the production-rate.
+
+Every production manager knows that even our most efficient industries
+are producing far less than their maximum; and he knows why. The
+psychology of slavery does not make for efficiency. There was a time
+when inefficiency didn’t matter--when infants in agony from lack of
+sleep and girls terrorized by brutal foremen could produce more than
+could be sold, and were preferable to workers who had to be bargained
+with. Capitalism denied the worker the right to dare to think his job
+his own. But the wiseacres of capitalism now encourage the worker to
+believe his interests identical with those of his employer; they take
+out some of his wages and give it back to him in a separate envelope
+and call it “profit-sharing.” But the production manager knows that
+such a mess of doubtful pottage will scarcely take the place of their
+birthright. He knows that he has got out of the workers the utmost
+that their slave psychology will permit. He knows that there is no
+use to go on telling them that the business is their affair. He knows
+that the only thing left to be done is to make it their affair--to put
+into their collective control not only wages and hours, but what they
+create and how they create it. The job must be theirs before they can
+put into it the energy of free men. Their creative wish alone can bring
+production to its maximum. But that is not what he is paid to do. He,
+too, is denied the right to shape industry to his dream; he may not
+make it efficient; he must try to make it more profitable. He, too,
+is a slave ... a slave who wishes his master would set him free to
+play for a while with this great beautiful toy. He would show us how
+to increase production by 100 per cent on four hours work a day. He
+would show us how work could be made a joy to everybody. He would--but
+what is the use? He sits and looks out the window and wishes that
+something would happen. Perhaps these young men and women who have
+learned to play with machinery, who know it as a splendid toy and not
+as a hateful tyrant, who want to use it to make themselves and the
+world happier--perhaps a generation of such workers, the products of a
+democratic and efficient educational system, will have the knowledge
+and the power to take and use this machinery to serve their own
+creative dream of a useful and happy new society....
+
+Madam, have I answered your question?
+
+
+
+
+XV. First and Last Things
+
+
+“But is there nothing in the world of any importance except machinery?”
+
+Thank you for reminding me! We are all inclined to be too much
+preoccupied with the importance of machinery. I confess that I have
+been so ever since, as a child, I took my father’s watch apart and
+found myself unable to cope with the problem of putting it back
+together again. But note for a moment the pragmatic significance of
+such an infantile predicament. Of what use would it have been for
+some infinitely wise person to say to me: “Child, do not attach so
+much importance to those wheels and springs! They are interesting, in
+a way; but how much less interesting than the birds, the flowers and
+the stars!”--what good, I ask you, would such counsel have been to me
+at that moment? I wanted to get that watch put back together before
+something terrible happened to me. And mankind as a whole seems to me
+to be in much the same situation. For the best of reasons, it _has_ to
+master the problem presented by a machine civilization--lest something
+terrible happen. Its preoccupation is born of fear. The flowers and
+stars (it thinks) can wait: they are not so dangerous.
+
+And yet the infinitely wise person would have been right. Machinery
+must be ranked among (so to speak) the minor poetry of the universe.
+The astronomic epic, the botanical lyric, the biological drama, are,
+from any point of view not prejudiced by our fears, more important.
+It is only because we are so acutely conscious, all of us, of the
+failure of our educational system in the matter of preparing us to
+exist unbewilderedly in the midst of a machine civilization, that I
+have put such emphasis on the adequacy of the new education in dealing
+with that problem. It is of importance only as food is important to a
+starving man--merely so. And if you have heard enough about the place
+of machinery in education--
+
+I see that you have. Very well, then we will go on to the matters of
+real importance.
+
+What are they?
+
+(My rhetorical questions, it seems, are always being taken literally!
+I was about to tell you myself, but I suppose we shall have to listen
+to that elderly gentleman over there, who evidently has the answer
+ready.) Very well, sir. What _are_ they?
+
+“I am glad to hear that you have disposed at last of the crassly
+materialistic aspect of your theme, and are about to deal with its
+spiritual aspects. For these are naturally its more important aspects.
+And if you ask me to specify more particularly what these are, I can
+only reply in old-fashioned language, and say that the important things
+in life, and hence in education, are Beauty, Truth and Goodness. I
+trust that you agree with me?”
+
+Certainly, sir. Beauty and Truth and Goodness--or, if you will permit
+me to translate these eighteenth century abstractions into our
+contemporary terminology--the cultivation of the creative faculties,
+of disinterested curiosity, and of personal relationships, undoubtedly
+constitute the chief ends of democratic cultural endeavor. These,
+indeed, together with what you would call Usefulness and what we
+would call technical efficiency, comprise pretty much of the whole of
+existence. Not all of it--but quite enough to take as the subject of
+our new inquiry.
+
+How can education encourage and develop, not in a few individuals,
+but in the masses of the people, the creative faculties which are the
+source of beauty?--for it must conceive its task in these broad terms
+if it is to be a democratic education. How can it foster in these
+same masses that rare growth, disinterested curiosity, from which
+come the fruits of philosophy and science? And how can education deal
+effectively with the dangerous emotions of personal relationship?
+
+The task seems at first glance so difficult that it will be well for us
+to ask at the outset whether it can be accomplished at all!
+
+
+
+
+XVI. The Child as Artist
+
+
+In this matter, most decidedly, we need expert advice. Let us start
+with Beauty. The one who best understands Beauty is undoubtedly the
+Artist. Let us call in the Artist.... Will you question him, or shall
+I? You prefer to do it yourself, I see. Very well, then--but please try
+to get to the point as soon as possible!
+
+THE QUESTIONER. What we want to know is this: is it possible to teach
+the child to become an artist?
+
+THE ARTIST. He is an artist already.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. What do you mean!
+
+THE ARTIST. Just what I say. The child is an artist; and the artist is
+always a child. The greatest periods of art have always been those in
+which artists had the direct, naïve, unspoiled vision of the child.
+The aim of our best artists today is to recover that vision. They
+are trying to see the world as children see it, and to record their
+vision of it as a child would do. Have you ever looked at children’s
+drawings--not the sort of things they are taught to do by mistaken and
+mischievous adults, but the pictures that are the natural expressions
+of their creative impulses? And haven’t you observed that modern
+paintings are coming to be more and more like such pictures?
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Well--er, yes, I had noticed something of the kind! But
+is that sort of thing necessarily art? I mean--well, I don’t want to
+attempt to argue with you on a subject in which you are an expert, but--
+
+THE ARTIST. Oh, that’s all right! The modern artist is ready to discuss
+art with anybody--the more ignorant of the subject, the better! You
+see, we want art to cease to be the possession of a caste--we want it
+to belong to everybody. As a member of the human race, your opinions
+are important to us.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. That is very kind of you. I fear it is rather in the
+nature of a digression, but, since I may ask without fear of seeming
+presumptuous,--_are_ those horrid misshapen green nudes of Matisse, and
+those cubical blocks of paint by I-forget-his-name, and all that sort
+of thing--are they your notion of what art should be?
+
+THE ARTIST. Mine? Oh, not at all! They are merely two out of a
+thousand contemporary attempts to recover the naïve childlike vision
+of which I spoke. If you will compare them with a child’s drawing, or
+with a picture by a Navajo Indian, or with the sketch of an aurochs
+traced on the wall of his cave by one of our remote ancestors, you
+will note an essential difference. Those artists were not trying to be
+naïve and childlike; they _were_ naïve and childlike. The chief merit
+of our modern efforts, in my personal opinion, is in their quality as a
+challenge to traditional and mistaken notions of what art should be--an
+advertisement, startling enough, and sometimes maliciously startling,
+of the artist’s belief that he has the right to be first of all an
+artist.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Now we are coming to the point. What _is_ an artist?
+
+THE ARTIST. I told you, a child. And by that, I mean one who _plays_
+with his materials--not one who performs a set and perhaps useful task
+with them. A creator--
+
+THE QUESTIONER. But a creator of what? Not of Beauty, by any chance?
+
+THE ARTIST. Incidentally of Beauty.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. There we seem to disagree. If those horrid pictures--
+
+THE ARTIST. Suppose _you_ tell me what Beauty is.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. It seems to me quite simple. Beauty is--well--a thing
+is either beautiful, or it isn’t. And--
+
+THE ARTIST. Just so; the only trouble is that so few of us are able
+to agree whether it is or isn’t. You yourself have doubtless changed
+your opinions about what is beautiful many times in the course of your
+career as an art-lover; and the time may come when you will cherish
+some horrid nude of Matisse’s as your dearest possession. Let us admit,
+like the wise old poet, that Beauty is not a thing which can be argued
+about. It can only be produced.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. But if we don’t know what Beauty is, how can we produce
+it?
+
+THE ARTIST. I have already told you--as the incidental result of
+creative effort.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Effort to create _what_?
+
+THE ARTIST. Oh, anything.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Are you joking?
+
+THE ARTIST. I never was more serious in my life. And I should really
+inform you that I am merely repeating the familiar commonplaces of
+modern esthetics. Beauty is the incidental result of the effort to
+create a house, a sword,--
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Or a shoe?
+
+THE ARTIST. Yes. I have some peasant shoes from Russia which are very
+beautiful. You can see shoes which are works of art in any good museum.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. But hardly in any boot-shop window!
+
+THE ARTIST. Those shoes were not created--they were done as a set task.
+They were not made by peasants or craftsmen for pleasure--they were
+made by wage-slaves who did them only because they must. Do not for a
+moment imagine that it is the difference in materials or shape that
+matters--it is the difference in the spirit with which they are made. I
+have seen modern shoes which are works of art--because they were made
+by a bootmaker who is an artist and does what pleases himself.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Do they please anybody else?
+
+THE ARTIST. Eh?
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Would you be seen wearing them?
+
+THE ARTIST. Would I be seen drinking my coffee from a cup that had
+been turned on a wheel by a man who loved the feel of the clay under
+his fingers and who knew just the right touch to give the brim? Was
+Richard Coeur du Lion’s sword less a sword because it had been made
+by an artist who dreamed over the steel instead of by a tired man in
+a hurry? I cannot afford to wear shoes made by my bootmaker-artist
+friend--but I wish I could, for they _fit_!
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Will you give me his address?--I beg your
+pardon--Please go on.
+
+THE ARTIST. I was about to say, you wrong the artist if you think that
+he is not interested in utility. It is only because utility has become
+bound up with slavery that artists and people with artistic impulses
+revolt against it and in defiance produce utterly and fantastically
+useless things. This will be so, as long as being useful means being
+a slave. But art is not an end in itself; it had its origin, and will
+find its destiny, in the production of useful things. For example--
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Yes, do let us get down to the concrete!
+
+THE ARTIST. Suppose you are out walking in a hilly country, and decide
+to whittle yourself a stick. Your wish is to make something useful. But
+you can’t help making it more than useful. You can’t help it, because,
+if you are not in a hurry, and nobody else is bossing the job, you find
+other impulses besides the utilitarian one coming in to elaborate your
+task. Shall I name those impulses?
+
+THE QUESTIONER. If you will.
+
+THE ARTIST. I am not a psychologist, but I would call them the impulse
+to command and the impulse to obey.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. To command and obey _what_?
+
+THE ARTIST. Your material, whatever it is--paint and canvas, words,
+sounds, clay, marble, iron. In this case, the stick of wood.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. I’m afraid I do not quite--
+
+THE ARTIST. The impulse to command comes first--the impulse to just
+show that stick who is master! the desire to impose your imperial
+will upon it. I suppose you might call it Vanity. And that impulse
+alone would result in your making something fantastic and grotesque
+or strikingly absurd--and yet beautiful in its way. But it is met and
+checked by the other impulse--the impulse to obey. No man that ever
+whittled wood but has felt that impulse. He feels that he must not do
+simply what he wants to do, but also what the wood _wants done_ to it.
+The real artist does not care to treat marble as if it were soft, nor
+paint and canvas as though they were three-dimensional. He could if he
+wanted to--but he respects his medium. There is an instinctive pleasure
+in letting it have its way. I suppose you might call it Reverence. And
+this Vanity and this Reverence, the desire to command and the desire
+to obey, when they are set free in the dream and effort of creation,
+produce something which is more than useful. That _something more_
+is what we call Beauty.--Do you care to have me go further into the
+mechanics of beauty?
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Well--er--I suppose now that we have got this far into
+the subject, we might as well get to the end of it. Go on!
+
+THE ARTIST. What I am about to tell you is the only really important
+thing about art. Unfortunately, the facts at issue have never been
+studied by first-class scientific minds, and so they lack a proper
+terminology to make them clear. In default of such a scientific
+terminology, we are forced to use the word “rhythm” in the special
+sense in which artists understand it. You speak of the movements of
+a dance as being rhythmic. The artist understands the word to refer
+to the relation of these movements to each other and above all to the
+emotion which they express. And to him the whole world is a dance,
+full of rhythmic gestures. The gesture of standing still, or of being
+asleep, is also rhythmic; the body is itself a gesture--he will speak
+of the rhythm of the line of a lifted arm or a bent knee. Trees that
+lift their branches to the sky, and rocks that sleep on the ground
+have their rhythms--every tree and every rock its own special rhythm.
+The rhythm of a pine tree is different from that of a palm--the rhythm
+of granitic rocks different from that of limestone. So far the matter
+is simple enough. But the relations of these rhythms to each other
+are also rhythmic. These relations are in fact so manifold that they
+constitute a chaos. But in this chaos each person feels a different
+rhythm; and, according as he has the power, transmits his sense of
+it to us through a rhythmic treatment of his medium. In the presence
+of his work, we feel what he has felt about the world; but we feel
+something more than that--we feel also the rhythm of the struggle in
+the artist between his impulse to command and his impulse to obey. Our
+own impulses of vanity and of reverence go out to welcome his power and
+his faithfulness. And just as there are gay rhythms and sad rhythms in
+the gesture of movement, so there are magnificent rhythms and trivial
+rhythms in the gesture of a soul facing the chaos of the world. What
+has he found worth while to play with, and how has he played with it?
+What kind of creator is he? Ability to feel and express significant
+rhythm--that is nine-tenths of art.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. But my dear fellow, how are we to teach all this to
+children?
+
+THE ARTIST. Very simply: by giving them a knife and a piece of wood.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Well, really!
+
+THE ARTIST. And crayons and clay and singing-games and so forth.--But
+perhaps you prefer to show them pictures of alleged masterpieces, and
+tell them, “This is great art!” They will believe you, of course; and
+they will hate great art ever afterwards--just as they hate great
+poetry, and for the same excellent reason: because, presented to
+them in that way, it is nothing but a damned nuisance. Yet the child
+who enjoys hearing and telling a story has in him the capacity to
+appreciate and perhaps to create the greatest of stories; and the
+child who enjoys whittling a block of wood has in him the capacity to
+appreciate and perhaps to create the greatest art!
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Then you do not think children can be taught to
+appreciate art by looking at photographic reproductions of it?
+
+THE ARTIST. I would hardly expect a Fiji Islander to become an
+appreciator of civilized music by letting him look at my phonograph
+records. The dingy-brownish photograph of a gloriously colored painting
+has even less educational value--for it lies about the original. Do you
+know that there are thousands and thousands of American school children
+who think that the great masterpieces of the world’s painting are the
+color of axle-grease? They are never told that their own free efforts
+with colored crayons are more like Botticelli in every sense than any
+photograph could possibly be; but it is true.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. But don’t you want them to _respect_ Botticelli?
+
+THE ARTIST. No. I want them to look at Botticelli’s pictures as they
+look at those of another child--free to criticize, free to dislike,
+free to scorn. For only when you are free to despise, are you free to
+admire. After all, who was Botticelli? Another child. Perhaps they may
+prefer Goya--
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Or the Sunday comic supplement!
+
+THE ARTIST. A healthy taste. And if they know what drawing is, though
+having used a pencil themselves, they will prefer the better comic
+pictures to the worse, and be ready to appreciate Goya and Daumier--who
+were the super-Sunday-supplement comic artists of their day.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Left to themselves they may come to like Goya, as
+you say; but will they ever come to appreciate such a masterpiece as
+Leonardo’s Last Supper without some more formal teaching?
+
+THE ARTIST. Do you call it “teaching” to talk solemnly to children
+in language they cannot understand? If they are making pictures
+themselves, and being assisted in their enthusiastic experiments by a
+real artist instead of a teacher, they will naturally wonder why their
+friend should have the photograph of the Last Supper in the portfolio
+from which he is always taking out some picture in order to illustrate
+his answers to their questions. And having wondered, they will ask why,
+and their friend will tell them; and perhaps they will get some of
+their friends enthusiasm, and perhaps not. But they will know that the
+real human being who is like themselves _does_ like that picture.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. But it makes no difference whether _they_ like it or
+not?
+
+THE ARTIST. You can’t compel them to like it, can you? You can only
+compel them to pretend that they do.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Can’t you teach them what is called “good taste”?
+
+THE ARTIST. Only too easily. And their “good taste” will lead them
+infallibly to prefer the imitations of what they have been taught to
+praise, and quite as infallibly to reject the great new art of their
+generation. They will think some new Whistler a pot of paint flung in
+the public’s face, and the next Cezanne a dauber.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Then you don’t approve of good taste!
+
+THE ARTIST. Every artist despises it, and the people who have it. We
+know quite well that the people who pretend to like Titian and Turner,
+because they have been carefully taught that it is the thing to do,
+would have turned up their noses at Titian and Turner in their own
+day--because they were not on the list of dead artists whom it was
+the fashion to call great; they know moreover that these same people
+of good taste are generally incapable of distinguishing between a
+beautiful and an ugly wall-paper, between a beautiful and an ugly
+plate, or even between a beautiful and an ugly necktie! Outside the
+bounds of their memorized list, they have no taste whatever.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Cannot good taste be taught so as to include the whole
+of life?
+
+THE ARTIST. It would take too much time. And thank God for that! For
+good taste is simply a polite pretense by which we cover up our lack of
+that real sense of beauty which comes only from intimate acquaintance
+with creative processes. The most cultivated people in the world
+cannot produce beauty by merely having notions about it. But the most
+uncultivated people in the world cannot help producing beauty if only
+they have time to dream as they work--if only they have freedom to let
+their work become something besides utilitarian.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. You think, then, that education should not concern
+itself with good taste, but rather with creative effort?
+
+THE ARTIST. Exactly.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. You say that children are artists already?
+
+THE ARTIST. And that artists are children.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. Then the task of education in respect to them would
+seem to be easy!
+
+THE ARTIST. No--on the contrary, infinitely hard!
+
+THE QUESTIONER. What do you mean?
+
+The Artist. I have said that children are artists and that artists are
+children. The task of education is to help them to _grow up_.
+
+THE QUESTIONER. New difficulties!
+
+THE ARTIST. And tremendous ones! But if I am to discuss them, you must
+keep still for a while and let me talk in my own fashion.
+
+--Very well, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we adjourn for lunch, and when
+we reassemble here give the Artist the platform for half an hour? What
+is the sentiment of the meeting? The Ayes have it.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. The Artist as a Child
+
+
+Without any further delay, the Artist shall now address you.--Please
+take the platform, sir!
+
+“My friends! We are gathered here today to consider how to implant in
+the youthful and innocent minds which are entrusted to our care the
+beneficent and holy influences of that transcendent miracle which we
+know as Art. Sacred and mysterious subject that it is, we approach it
+with bated--”
+
+Wait! wait! There is some mistake here, I am sure. Just a moment!--
+
+“We approach with bated breath these austere and sacred--”
+
+Stop, I say!
+
+“Austere and sacred regions--”
+
+Usher, will you please throw this fellow out! He is not the man we were
+listening to this morning--he is a rank impostor, who has disguised
+himself as an artist in order to befuddle our deliberations with
+mystagogical cant. If you will pull off that false beard, I think
+you will find that he is a well-known Chautauqua lecturer.... Aha, I
+thought so!--Shame on you! And now get out of here as quickly as you
+can!--Ah, there comes the real Artist--late, as usual. What have you to
+say for yourself?
+
+“I’m sorry--I got to thinking of something else, and nearly forgot to
+come back here. Which brings me at once to the heart of what I want to
+say. Artists, as I have said, are children--and, children that they
+are, they forget the errands upon which the world sends them. They
+forget, because these errands are not part of their own life. You
+reproach us with being careless and irresponsible--but if you will
+study the child at play or the artist at work, you will discover that
+he is not careless or irresponsible in regard to his own concerns. But
+this deep divorce between the concerns of the artist and the child and
+the concerns of the world is the tragic problem for which we now seek a
+solution. The world has been unable to solve it. It has only made the
+breach deeper.
+
+“For the world does not know that its work can be play, that adult life
+can be a game like the games of children, only with more desperate
+and magnificent issues. It does not reflect that we gather sticks in
+the wood with infinite happy patience and labour to build our bonfires
+because those bonfires are our own dream creatively realized; and it
+cannot think of any better way to get us to bring in the wood for the
+kitchen stove than to say, ‘Johnny, I’ve told you three times to bring
+in that wood, and if you can’t mind I’ll have your father interview you
+in the woodshed.’ In brief, it presents our participation in adult life
+as meaningless toil performed at the bidding of another under coercion.
+And the whole of adult life gradually takes on this same aspect. We are
+to do the bidding of another in office or factory because otherwise we
+will starve.
+
+“So the child-artist unwillingly becomes a slave. But there are some
+children who rebel against slavery. They prefer to keep their dreams.
+They are regarded with disapproval and anxiety by their families, who
+tell them that they must grow up. But they do not want to grow up into
+slavery. They want to remain free. They want to make their dreams come
+true.
+
+“‘But who will pay for your dreams?’ the world asks. And it is not
+pleasant to face the possibility of starving to death. And so they
+comfort themselves with the illusion of fame and wealth. Sometimes
+their families are cajoled into investing in this rather doubtful
+speculative enterprise, and the child-artist becomes an artist-child,
+supported through life by his parents, and playing busily at his art.
+Sometimes the speculation turns out well financially, the illusion of
+success becomes a reality; but this, however gratifying to the artist
+as a justification of his career, is not his own reason for being an
+artist. The ‘successful’ artist has a childlike pleasure in the awe
+of really grown-up people at the material proofs of his importance;
+and if he has given hostages to fortune, if he must support a family
+of his own, he may ploddingly reproduce the happy accidents of his
+creative effort which gained him these rewards; but he feels that in so
+doing he has ceased to be a free man and become a slave--and all too
+often, as we know from the shocked comment of the world, he renounces
+these rewards, becomes a child at play again, and lets his wife and
+children get along as best they may. He yearns, perhaps, for fame--as
+a sort of public consent to his going on being a child. But whether he
+starves in the garret or bows from his limousine to admiring crowds,
+what he really wants of the world is just permission to play. He is not
+interested in the affairs of the world.
+
+“There are exceptions, of course. There are poets and musicians
+and painters who take an interest in the destinies of mankind; but
+this is regarded by their fellow-artists as a kind of heresy or
+disloyalty--much as school children (or college boys) regard the
+behaviour of one who really takes his school work seriously. The public
+also is accustomed to regard the artist as a child; they laugh at his
+‘ideas’ about practical affairs--though often enough they adopt his
+ideas in dead earnest later. Shelley, for instance, proposed to conduct
+campaigns of education by dropping leaflets from balloons. ‘A quaint
+idea, characteristic of his visionary and impractical mind,’ said his
+biographers; and then, having laughed at the idea, the world in its
+Great War proceeds to adopt that idea and carry it out on a tremendous
+scale....
+
+“When the child refuses to be a slave, he is thenceforth excluded by
+common consent from the affairs of the grown-up world. And as the
+breach widens between the artist and the world, as the world becomes
+more and more committed to slavery, the artist is more consciously and
+wilfully a child. He is forbidden by the growing public opinion of his
+group to write or sing about human destinies. ‘The artist must not be
+a propagandist,’ it is declared indignantly. And finally it comes to
+such a pass that it is not artistic good-form for the artist to tell
+stories which the public can understand--the painter is prohibited from
+making images which the common man is able to recognize--the musician
+scorns to compose tunes which anybody could dance to or whistle! And
+all this is simply the child’s defiance to the world--his games are
+his own, and the grown-ups can keep their hands off! If adult life is
+slavery (which it is), he will be damned before he will have anything
+to do with it.
+
+“And he is damned--damned to a childishness which contains only the
+stubborn wilfulness of the child’s playing, but has forgotten its
+motive. That motive is different from his. He has changed from the
+child who played at being a man, to a man who plays at being a child.
+The child’s dreams were large, and his are small. The child took
+all life for his province--was by turns a warrior, a blacksmith,
+a circus-rider, a husband, a store-keeper, a fireman, a savage,
+an undertaker. The child-artist wanted to play at everything. The
+artist-child has renounced these magnificent ambitions. The world may
+conscript him to fight in its wars, but he refuses to bother his head
+as to what they are about; if he finds that he has to walk up-town
+because there is a street-car strike, he is mildly annoyed, but (I am
+describing an extreme but not infrequent type) he declines to interest
+himself in the labour movement; he escapes from the responsibilities
+of a serious love-affair on the ground that ‘an artist should never
+marry’; he pays his grocery bills, or leaves them unpaid, but the
+co-operative movement bores him; and so on! He is content to live in
+that little corner of life in which he can play undisturbed by worldly
+interests. This type, I have said, is not infrequent; its perfect
+exemplars, the artists who were so completely children that they did
+not even know of the existence of the outside world, are revered as
+the saints of art, and often as its martyrs, which in truth they were;
+and they are admired by thousands of young artists who only aspire to
+such perfection, while shamefacedly admitting that they themselves are
+tainted with ordinary human interests.
+
+“This is what the world has done to us; it has made us choose between
+being children in a tiny sphere all our lives, or going into the larger
+world of reality as slaves. And I think we have made the right choice.
+For we have kept alive in our childish folly the flame of a sacred
+revolt against slavery. We have succeeded in making the world envious
+of our freedom. We have shown it the only way to be happy.
+
+“But the artist cannot get along without the world. His art springs
+from the commonest impulses of the human race, and those impulses are
+utilitarian at root; the savage who scratched the aurochs on the wall
+of his cave was hungry for meat and desirous of luck in the hunting
+tomorrow; the primitive Greeks who danced their seasonal dances from
+which sprang the glory of dramatic art, wanted the crops to grow;
+and that which we call great art everywhere is great only because
+it springs from a communal hunger and fulfils a communal wish. When
+art becomes divorced from the aspirations of the common man, all its
+technical perfection will not keep it alive; it revolts against its own
+technical perfection, and goes off into quaint and austere quests for
+new truths upon which to nourish itself; and only when it discovers the
+common man and fulfils his unfulfilled desires, does it flourish again.
+Art must concern itself with the world, or perish.
+
+“Nor can the world get along without the artist. Slavery cannot keep
+it going--it needs the free impulses of the creative spirit. It needs
+the artist, not as a being to scorn and worship by turns, but as the
+worker-director of its activities. It needs the artist as blacksmith,
+husband, and store-keeper--as teacher, priest, and statesman. Only so
+can it endure and fulfil its destinies.
+
+“But if the artist is to be all these things, if he is to enter into
+the activities of the real world instead of running away from them,
+he must grow up. And that is the task of education: to make a man
+of him without killing the artist. We must begin, then, before the
+artist in him is killed; we must begin with the child. So far as I
+can see, the school as it exists at present is utterly and hopelessly
+inadequate to the task. It requires a special mechanism, which happily
+exists in the outside world, and need only be incorporated into the
+educational system, in order to provide a medium of transition between
+the dream-creations of childhood and the realistic creativity of adult
+life. This mechanism is the Theatre.”
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. The Drama of Education
+
+
+“But why--in the name of all that is beautiful!--_why_ the Theatre?”
+
+Ah! Who uttered that agonized cry of protest?
+
+He comes forward.
+
+“It was I who spoke. Do not, I beg of you, as you love Beauty, have any
+truck with the Theatre. Leave it alone--avoid it--flee it as you would
+the pestilence! I know what I am talking about!”
+
+And who, pray, are you?
+
+“I am an Actor!”
+
+Well, well!--this is rather curious.
+
+“Not at all! Who should know better than the Actor the dreadful truth
+about the Theatre--that it is the home of a base triviality, the
+citadel of insincerity, the last refuge of everything that is banal in
+thought and action!”
+
+Really, the Theatre seems to have no friends nowadays except the
+professors who teach play-writing in the colleges! But I think we
+should hear what our friend the Artist has to say in its defence.
+
+THE ARTIST. “There is nothing wrong with the Theatre except what
+is wrong with the whole of modern life. Our newspapers are base
+and trivial, our politics are insincere, and the products of our
+slave-system of production have a banality which Broadway could
+scarcely surpass. In all these fields of effort, as in the Theatre,
+the creative spirit has surrendered to the slave-system. But in the
+Theatre, and in no place else in the world, we find the modes of
+child-life, of primitive creative activity, surviving intact into adult
+life. What is costume but the ‘dressing-up’ of childhood, the program
+with its cast of characters but a way of saying ‘Let’s pretend!’--what,
+in short, is the Playhouse but a house of Play? It is all there--the
+singing and dancing, the make-believe, the whole paraphernalia of
+child creativity: it is true that the game is played by children who
+are not free to create their own dreams, who must play always at some
+one else’s bidding, half children and half slaves! But--and this is
+its importance to us--the Theatre is the place where the interests of
+the child meet and merge into those of the adult. It is the natural
+transition between dreams and realities. And it is thereby the bridge
+across the gulf that separates art from the world.
+
+“Let me explain. When I use the phrase ‘The Theatre,’ I am not thinking
+of the dramatic arts in any restricted and special sense. For the
+Theatre, as the original source of all the arts, the spring from which
+half a hundred streams have poured, into the separate arts of music,
+dancing, singing, poetry, pageantry, and what not--the Theatre in its
+historic aspect as the spirit of communal festivity--is significant
+to us not as the vehicle of a so-called dramatic art, separate and
+distinct from the arts which go to make it up, but rather as the
+institution which preserves the memory of the common origin of all
+these arts and which still has the power to unite them in the service
+of a common purpose. In the Theatre, as in the child’s playing, they
+are not things alien from each other and isolate from life, but parts
+of each other and of a greater thing--the expressing of a common
+emotion.
+
+“So when I speak of making the Theatre a part of the educational system
+in the interest of art and artists, I mean to suggest a union of all
+the arts in the expression of communal purposes and emotions through
+a psychological device of which the Theatre, even in its contemporary
+form, stands as a ready-to-hand example.
+
+“I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Theatre for continuing to
+exist, in however trivial or base a form. Suppose it had perished for
+ever from the earth! Who would be so daring a theorist as to conceive
+the project of bringing together the story-teller, the poet, the
+musician, the singer, the dancer, the pantomimist, the painter, in the
+co-operative enterprise of creating ‘one common wave of thought and joy
+lifting mankind again’? Who, if such a thing were proposed, would have
+any idea what was being talked about? As it is, however, I can point to
+any musical comedy on Broadway and say, ‘What I mean is something like
+that, only quite different!’
+
+“Different, because the communal emotions which these artists would
+have joined themselves together to express would hardly be, if they
+were left free to decide the question themselves, the mere emotions
+of mob-anxiety, mob-lasciviousness and mob-humour which are the three
+motifs of commercial drama. No, you have to pay people to get them
+to take part in that dull and tawdry game! When they do things to
+suit themselves, as they sometimes adventurously do even now, it is
+something that it is more fun to play at. As free men and women they
+cannot help being artists, they must needs choose that their play shall
+be a ‘work of art whose rhythms fulfil some deep wish of the human
+soul.--’”
+
+“Just a moment! Some one, I think, wants to ask a question.--Louder,
+please!”
+
+“I said--this is all very well as a plea for a Free Theatre, but what
+has it to do with Education?”
+
+THE ARTIST. “Evidently I have not made myself clear. The problem of
+Education with respect to Art is to keep alive the child’s creative
+impulses, and use them in the real world of adult life. We don’t want
+to kill the artist in him; nor do we want to keep him a child all
+his life in some tiny corner of the world, apart from its serious
+activities. We don’t want the slave who has forgotten how to play, nor
+the dreamer who is afraid of realities. We want an education which will
+merge the child’s play into the man’s life, the artist’s dreams into
+the citizen’s labours. The Theatre--”
+
+“Excuse me, but what I can’t see is how a Children’s Theatre is going
+to do all that! Even if you put a theatre in every school-building--”
+
+THE ARTIST. “You quite mistake my meaning. I would rather confiscate
+the theatres and put a school into each of them; and so, for that
+matter, would I do with the factories! But, unfortunately, I am not
+Minister of Public Education. In default of that, what I propose is
+small enough--but it is not so small as you suppose when you think
+that I want to set children to rehearsing plays and making scenery for
+a school play. I propose rather that the spirit of the Theatre--the
+spirit of creative play--should enter into every branch of the school
+work, until the school itself becomes a Theatre--a gorgeous, joyous,
+dramatic festival of learning-to-live.
+
+“Think how real History would become if it were dramatized by the
+children themselves! I do not mean its merely picturesque moments, but
+its real meanings, acted out--the whole drama of human progress--a
+group of cave-men talking of the days before men knew how to make
+fire--Chaldean traders, Babylonian princes, Egyptian slaves, each with
+his story to tell--Greek citizens discussing politics just before the
+election--a wounded London artisan hiding from the King’s soldiers
+in a garret, and telling his shelterer the true story of Wat Tyler’s
+rebellion--a French peasant just before the Revolution, and his son
+who has been reading a strange book by that man Rousseau in which it is
+declared that there is no such thing as the Divine Right of Kings....
+
+“Mathematics as an organized creative effort centering around real
+planning and building and measuring and calculating....
+
+“Geography--a magnificent voyaging in play all round the world and
+in reality all round the town and surrounding countryside.... A
+scientific investigation of the natural resources of the community,
+its manufactures, exports and imports, discussed round bonfires in
+the woods by the committee at the end of a long day’s tramp, and the
+final drawing up of their report, to be illustrated on the screen by
+photographs taken by themselves.... The adventure of map-making....
+
+“(You get the idea, don’t you? You see _why_ it is more real than
+ordinary education--_because_ it is all play!)
+
+“And all these delightful games brought together in grand
+pageants--instead of examinations!--every half year....
+
+“That is what I mean.
+
+“Making whatever teaching of art there may be, part and parcel
+with these activities--and using the school-theatre, if one exists,
+_not_ to produce Sheridan’s ‘Rivals’ in, but as a convenience to the
+presentation of the drama of their own education; but in any case
+making all their world a stage, not forgetting that first and best
+stage of all, God’s green outdoors!
+
+“No, I say, I do not want to put a theatre into every school--I want
+every school to be a Theatre in which a Guild of Young Artists will
+learn to do the work of the world without ceasing to be free and happy.
+
+“I hope I have succeeded in making myself clear?”
+
+
+
+
+XIX. The Drama of Life
+
+
+As to his immediate proposals, I think the Artist has made himself
+quite clear. But he opened up an interesting vista of possibilities
+when he spoke of being Minister of Public Education. He said he
+couldn’t do certain things because he wasn’t Minister of Public
+Education. What we would like very much to know is what he would do if
+he were!--Do you mind telling us?
+
+THE ARTIST. “In the first place I would set fire to--But you are sure I
+am not taking up your time unduly?”
+
+No, no! Go on!
+
+THE ARTIST. “I would set fire to the coat-tails of all the present
+boards of education who are now running our educational system in
+complete indifference to the interests of the child. I would institute
+democratic control: turn the school system over to the National
+Guild of Young Artists. My career as an educational autocrat would
+necessarily stop right there, so far as the internal revolutionizing
+of education is concerned--for what I have been telling you is simply
+what I think the children themselves would do with the schools if they
+were allowed to run them.
+
+“But Education, as I understand it, does not stop short with the
+school--it extends throughout all life. It is what I would call the
+civilizing process. And there is much to be done to many departments of
+life before they can become part of a real civilizing process. I will
+describe only one, but not the least fundamental of these changes--the
+democratizing of the Theatre. Or rather, as I should say, turning it
+into a school.
+
+“A school of what? you will ask. A school of life, of aspiration, of
+progress, of civilization. It can be all these things if it becomes the
+People’s Theatre. Therefore, as Minister of Public Education, I propose
+to confiscate the Theatres and turn them over to the People.
+
+“But again, when I speak of ‘The Theatre,’ I do not mean merely the
+buildings in which plays are given. I mean all those arts which are
+part of communal creativity. I propose to unite them all in communal
+festivals of human progress. I do not propose that we shall begin by
+holding classes in the Hippodrome--though that will come. I propose to
+begin with solemn and magnificent national holiday pageants similar to
+those which were so frequently and gorgeously celebrated during the
+days of the great French Revolution--”
+
+At this moment a policeman approaches the stage.
+
+“I wish to warn the speaker that everything he says is being taken down
+in shorthand by one of our men, and if he wants to finish his speech
+the less he says about Revolution the better. That’s all.”
+
+THE ARTIST. “Thank you! I should have said, during the days of a
+certain great political and social upheaval which laid the foundations
+of modern life in general, and of our gallant ally, the French
+Republic, in particular. The historic festivals of which I speak were
+in charge of the great artists and composers of the nation, and their
+art and music were used to express the common emotion and purpose of
+the People. So it will be with ours. Our artists will unite to express
+the new ideals of mankind, and together with each other and with the
+People, will lay the foundations of a new and democratic art.
+
+“It is here that the theatres, which will already be in charge of the
+guilds of artists, will come into play. For the new art must have a
+solid basis in popular emotions such as only the theatre can give. They
+will therefore present plays which criticize the old slave-system,
+satirize its manners, its traditional heroes, its ideals; plays which
+invest with tragic dignity the age-long struggle of the People against
+oppressive institutions and customs; plays which creatively foreshadow
+a new popular culture and morality; and plays which celebrate the final
+victory of the People in their revolutionary strug--”
+
+Another policeman:
+
+“Are ye making an address on education, or trying to incite to riot?
+L’ave that word Revolution alone.--This is the second time we’re
+warning ye.”
+
+THE ARTIST. “I’m sorry. I had hoped to show the influence of the
+national aspirations of a great Celtic people upon their artistic life,
+and the final flowering of their dreams in a certain political and
+social upheaval--”
+
+THE POLICEMAN. “Oh, ye mean the Irish Revolution? That’s different!
+Ye’re all right. Go on!”
+
+THE ARTIST. “My time, however, is short. I shall leave to your
+imagination the means to be used in furthering these aims by the
+democratization of technical artistic culture. I shall speak only of
+its spiritual aspects. The Theatre, as I have said, will take the lead
+in preparing for the new day by presenting plays which will teach the
+People courage and confidence in their destiny, teach them to scorn the
+ideals of the traditional past, deepen their sense of community with
+the People in all lands in their world-wide struggle for freedom, and
+make them face the future with a clear and unshakable resolution, an
+indomitable will to victory.
+
+“If I had time, I should like to tell you how this educational program
+is already being carried out, in spite of the greatest difficulties, by
+a certain Slavic nation--”
+
+Another interruption!--by a red-faced, dictatorial, imperatorial
+personage who has been sitting there all this time, swelling with rage
+and awaiting his opportunity. He speaks:
+
+“Officer! I am a member of the Board of Education, and I demand that
+you arrest that man as a Bolshevik agitator!”
+
+(Tumultuous scenes.)
+
+
+
+
+XX. Curiosity
+
+
+Let us, my friends, pass over this unfortunate incident, and get on to
+the next thing as quickly as possible. The next thing on our program
+is Truth. The one who best understands Truth is undoubtedly the
+Philosopher.--Here he is, and we shall commence without delay. Will
+some one volunteer to conduct the examination? Thank you, madam. Go
+right ahead.
+
+THE LADY. We wish to ask you a few questions.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Certainly, madam. What about?
+
+THE LADY. About Truth.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Dear, dear!
+
+THE LADY. Whom are you addressing?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. I beg your pardon!--It was only an exclamation of
+surprise. It has been so long since anybody has talked to me about
+Truth. How quaint and refreshing!
+
+THE LADY. Please do not be frivolous.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. I am sorry--but really, it _is_ amusing. Tell me, to
+which school do you belong?
+
+THE LADY. To the Julia Richmond High School, if you must know--though I
+don’t see what that has to do with Truth.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Oh! You mean you are a school-teacher!
+
+THE LADY. Certainly. Doesn’t that suit you?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. It delights me. I feared at first you might be a
+Hegelian, or even a Platonist. Now that I find you are a Pragmatist
+like myself--
+
+THE LADY. Pragmatist? Yes, I have heard of Pragmatism. William
+James--summer course in Philosophy. But why do you think I am a
+Pragmatist?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. A school-teacher _must_ be a pragmatist, madam, or go
+mad. If you really believed the human brain to be an instrument capable
+of accurate thinking, your experiences with your pupils and your
+principal, not to speak of your boards of education, would furnish you
+a spectacle of human wickedness and folly too horrible to be endured.
+But you realize that the poor things were never intended to think.
+
+THE LADY. That’s true; they’re doing the best they can, aren’t they?
+They just _can’t_ believe anything they don’t want to believe!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. That is to say, man is not primarily a thinking
+animal--he is a creature of emotion and action.
+
+THE LADY. Especially action. They are always in such a hurry to get
+something done that they really can’t stop to think about it! But I’m
+afraid all this is really beside the point. What we want to know is why
+the school fails so miserably in its attempt to teach children to think?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Perhaps it is in too much of a hurry. But are you sure
+you really want children to learn to think?
+
+THE LADY. Of course we do!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. The greatest part of life, you know, can be lived
+without thought. We do not think about where we put our feet as we
+walk along an accustomed road. We leave that to habit. We do not think
+about how to eat, once we have learned to do it in a mannerly way. The
+accountant does not think about how to add a column of figures--he
+has his mind trained to the task. And there is little that cannot be
+done by the formation of proper habits, to the complete elimination
+of thought. The habits will even take care of the regulation of the
+emotions. For all practical purposes, don’t you agree with me that
+thinking might be dispensed with?
+
+THE LADY. I hardly know whether to take you seriously or not--
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Can you deny what I say?
+
+THE LADY. But--but life isn’t all habit. We must think--in order to
+make--decisions.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. It is not customary. We let our wishes fight it out,
+and the strongest has its way. But I once knew a man who did think
+in order to make his decisions. The result was that he always made
+them too late. And what was worse, the habit grew upon him. He got to
+thinking about everything he wanted to do, with the result that he
+couldn’t do anything. I told him that he’d have to stop thinking--that
+it wasn’t healthy. Finally he went to a doctor, and sure enough the
+doctor told him that it was a well known disease--a neurosis. Its
+distinguishing mark was that the patient always saw two courses
+open to him everywhere he turned--two alternatives, two different
+ways of doing something, two women between whom he must choose, two
+different theories of life, and so on to distraction. The reason for
+it, the doctor said, was that the patient’s will, that is to say the
+functioning of his emotional wish-apparatus, had become deranged, and
+the burden of decision was being put upon a part of the mind incapable
+of bearing it--the logical faculty. He cured my friend’s neurosis, and
+now he thinks no more about the practical affairs of life than you or I
+or anybody else. So you see thinking is abnormal--even dangerous. Why
+do you want to teach children to think?
+
+THE LADY. Well--it is rather taken for granted that the object of
+education is learning to think.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. But is that true? If it is, why do you teach your
+children the multiplication table, or the rule that the square of the
+hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares
+of the other two sides--unless in order to save them the trouble of
+thinking? By the way, what is the capital of Tennessee, and when did
+Columbus discover America?
+
+THE LADY. Nashville, 1492. Why?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER You didn’t have to stop to think, did you? Your memory
+has been well trained. But if you will forgive the comparison, so has
+my dog’s been well trained; when I say, ‘Towser, show the lady your
+tricks,’ he goes through an elaborate performance that would gladden
+your heart, for he is an apt pupil; but I don’t for a moment imagine
+that I have taught him to think.
+
+THE LADY. Then you don’t want children taught the multiplication table?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER.. I? Most certainly I do. And so far as I am concerned,
+I would gladly see a great many other short cuts in mathematics taught,
+so as to save our weary human brains the trouble of thinking about such
+things. I am in fact one of the Honorary Vice-Presidents of the Society
+for the Elimination of Useless Thinking.
+
+THE LADY. I am afraid you are indulging in a jest.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER.. I am afraid I am. But if you knew Philosophers better
+you would realize that it is a habit of ours to jest about serious
+matters. It is one of our short-cuts to wisdom. Read your Plato and
+William James again. Delightful humorists, both of them, I assure you.
+I fear you went to them too soberly, and in too much of a hurry.
+
+THE LADY. Doubtless your jokes have a historic sanctity, since you say
+so, but I do not feel that they have advanced our inquiry very much.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. What do
+you want to know?
+
+THE LADY. I want to know what is the use of thinking?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Ah, my jest was not in vain, if it provoked you to
+that. I should call that question the evidence of a real thought.
+
+THE LADY. Well, what is the answer?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Oh, please don’t stop, now that you have made such a
+good start! Think again, and answer your own question.
+
+THE LADY. Hm....
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Yes?
+
+THE LADY. I was thinking of Newton and the apple. If it hadn’t been for
+Newton’s ability to think, he would never have formulated the law of
+gravitation.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. And what a pity that would have been--wouldn’t it?
+
+THE LADY. You mean that it makes very little practical difference to us?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. It would if the town were being bombarded. The
+Newtonian calculations are considered useful by the artillery schools.
+But it is true that it was Newton and not an artillery officer who made
+them.
+
+THE LADY. You mean that the artillery captain would have been too
+intent on practical matters?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. And in too much of a hurry. Then there’s the
+steam-engine. Useful invention--the very soul of hurry. Who invented
+it--some anxious postilion who thought horses were too slow? Or
+somebody whose mind was so empty of practical concerns that it could be
+intrigued by a tea-kettle? And by the way, it was Stephenson, wasn’t
+it, who applied the steam-principle to locomotion? I’ve a very poor
+memory, but I think Watt’s engine was just a toy. No practical use
+whatever. Other people found out the practical uses for it. Arkwright.
+Fulton. Hoe. Et cetera.
+
+THE LADY. I see. The results of thinking may be put to use afterward,
+but the motive for thinking is not the desire to produce such results.
+I wonder if that is true?
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. What is the common reproach against philosophers and
+scientists?
+
+THE LADY. That they are impractical. But inventors--
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Did you ever know an inventor?
+
+THE LADY. Yes....
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Was he rich?
+
+THE LADY. He starved to death.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Why?
+
+THE LADY. Because every one said that his invention was very wonderful,
+but not of the slightest use to anybody.... Yes, it’s true.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. That the results of thinking do not provide the motive
+for thinking?
+
+THE LADY. Yes.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Then what is the motive for thinking?
+
+THE LADY. Just--curiosity, I suppose!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Disinterested curiosity?
+
+THE LADY. Yes.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Then in the interests of scientific truth we should
+cultivate disinterested curiosity?
+
+THE LADY. Doubtless.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. How would you go about doing so?
+
+THE LADY. I don’t know.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. By hurriedly thrusting upon the minds of the children
+in your charge so great a multitude of interests as to leave them no
+time to wonder about anything?
+
+THE LADY. That would hardly seem to be the way to do it. But--
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. When Newton looked at his famous apple, was there
+anyone there who said, “Now, Newton, look at this apple. Look at this
+apple, I say! Consider the apple. First, it is round. Second, it is
+red. Third, it is sweet. This is the Truth about apples. Now let me see
+if you have grasped what I have told you. What are the three leading
+facts about apples? What! Don’t you remember? Shame on you! I fear I
+will have to report you to the mayor!”--did anything like that happen?
+
+THE LADY. Newton was not a child.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. You should have talked to Newton’s family about him.
+That is just what they said he was! I will admit that if you left
+children free to wonder about things instead of forcing the traditional
+aspects of those things upon their attention, they might not all become
+great scientists. But are you a great archaeologist?
+
+THE LADY. No!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Did you ever go on a personally conducted tour of the
+ruins of Rome, and have the things you were to see and think pointed
+out to you by a guide?
+
+THE LADY. Yes, and I hated it!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. You are not a great archaeologist and you never
+expect to be one, and yet you thought you could get more out of those
+ruins yourself than with the assistance of that pesky guide. You
+preferred to be free--to see or not to see, to wonder and ponder and
+look again or pass by. And don’t you think the children in your charge
+might enjoy their trip a little more if they didn’t have to listen to
+the mechanically unctuous clatter of a guide?
+
+THE LADY. If one could only be sure they wouldn’t just waste their time!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Madam, are you quite sure that you, as a teacher, are
+not wasting _your_ time?
+
+THE LADY. You make me wonder whether that may not be possible. But
+sheer idleness--
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. Was Newton busy when he lay down under that tree? Did
+he have an appointment with the apple? Did he say he would give it ten
+minutes, and come again next day if it seemed worth while? What is
+disinterested curiosity, in plain English?
+
+THE LADY. Idle curiosity--I fear.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. I fear you are right. Then you would say that the way
+to approach Truth, in school and out, is to cultivate idle curiosity?
+
+THE LADY. I did not intend to say anything of the kind. But you compel
+me to say it.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. I compel you? Deny it if you wish!
+
+THE LADY. I thought you were going to answer my questions, and you have
+been making me answer yours!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. That is also an ancient habit of our profession. But
+since you have now arrived, of your own free will, at an inescapable
+if uncomfortable conclusion, you can now have no further need for my
+services, and I bid you all good day!
+
+
+
+
+XXI. The Right to be Wrong
+
+
+One moment!--I take it, my friends, we are agreed in demanding of
+the Philosopher that he condescend to some concrete and practical
+suggestions in regard to education.--Briefly, please!
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER. “You must draw your own conclusions. Traditional
+education is based on the assumption that knowledge is a mass of
+information which can be given to the child in little dabs at regular
+intervals. We know, however, that the education based on this
+assumption is a failure. It kills rather than stimulates curiosity;
+and without curiosity, information is useless. We are thus forced to
+realize that knowledge does not reside outside the child, but in the
+contact of the child with the world through the medium of curiosity.
+And thus the whole emphasis of education is changed. We no longer seek
+to educate the child--we only attempt to give him the opportunity to
+educate himself. He alone has the formula of his own specific needs;
+none of us is wise enough to arrange for him the mysterious series of
+beautiful and poignant contacts with reality by which alone he can
+‘learn.’ This means that he must choose his own lessons. And if you
+think that, left to choose, he would prefer no lessons at all, you
+are quite mistaken. Let me remind you that children are notoriously
+curious about everything--everything except, as you will very justly
+point out, the things people want them to know. It then remains for
+us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they
+will be curious about everything. You may imagine that they will prefer
+only the less complex kinds of knowledge; but do you regard children’s
+games as simple? They are in fact exceedingly complex. And they are all
+the more interesting because they are complex. We ourselves with our
+adult minds, penetrate cheerfully into the complexities of baseball,
+or embroidery, or the stock-market, following the lead of some natural
+curiosity; and if our minds less often penetrate into the complexities
+of music, or science, it is because these things have associations
+which bring them within the realm of the dutiful. Evolutionary
+biology is far more interesting than stamp-collecting; but it is,
+unfortunately, made to seem not so delightfully useless, and hence it
+is shunned by adolescent boys and girls. But postage-stamp collecting
+can be made as much a bore as biology; it needs only to be put into the
+schools as a formal course.
+
+“Consider for a moment the boy stamp-collector. His interest in his
+collection is in the nature of a passion. Does it astonish you that
+passionateness should be the fruit of idle curiosity? Then you need
+to face the facts of human psychology. The boy’s passion for his
+collection of stamps is akin to the passion of the scientist and
+the poet. Do you desire of children that they should have a similar
+passion for arithmetic, for geography, for history? Then you must
+leave them free to find out the interestingness of these things. There
+is no way to passionate interest save through the gate of curiosity;
+and curiosity is born of idleness. But doubtless you have a quite
+wrong notion of what idleness means. Idleness is not doing nothing.
+Idleness is _being free to do anything_. To be forced to do nothing
+is not idleness, it is the worst kind of imprisonment. Being made to
+stand in the corner with one’s face to the wall is not idleness--it
+is punishment. But getting up on Saturday morning with a wonderful
+day ahead in which one may do what one likes--that is idleness.
+And it leads straight into tremendous expenditures of energy. There
+is a saying, ‘The devil finds some mischief still for idle hands to
+do.’ Yes, but why should the devil have no competition? And that, as
+I understand it, is the function of education--to provide for idle
+and happy children fascinating contacts with reality--through games,
+tools, books, scientific instruments, gardens, and older persons with
+passionate interests in science and art and handicraft.
+
+“Such a place would in a few respects resemble the schools we know; but
+the spirit would be utterly different from the spirit of traditional
+education. The apparatus for arousing the child’s curiosity would be
+infinitely greater than the meagre appliances of our public schools;
+but however great, the child would be the centre of it all--not as the
+object of a process, but as the possessor of the emotions by force of
+which all these outward things become Education.
+
+“But, you may ask, what has all this to do with truth? Simply this.
+We have been forcing children to memorize alleged facts. A fact so
+memorized cannot be distinguished from a falsehood similarly memorized.
+And so we may very well say that we have failed to bring truth into
+education. For truth is reality brought into vital contact with the
+mind. It makes no difference whether we teach children that the earth
+is round or flat, if it means nothing to them either way. For truth
+does not reside in something outside the child’s mind; reality becomes
+truth only when it is made a part of his living.
+
+“But, you will protest--and you will protest the more loudly the more
+you know of children--that their processes of thought are illogical,
+fantastic and wayward. And you will ask, Do I mean that we must respect
+the child’s error in order to cultivate in him a love of truth? Yes, I
+do mean just that! Do I mean that we must respect the child’s belief
+that the earth is flat, you ask? More than that, we must respect a
+thousand obscure and pervasive childish notions, such as the notion
+that a hair from a horse’s tail will turn into a pollywog if left in
+the rainbarrel, or the notion that the way to find a lost ball is to
+spit on the back of the hand, repeat an incantation couched in such
+words as ‘Spit, Spit, tell me where the ball is!’ and then strike it
+with the palm of the other hand. You can doubtless supply a thousand
+instances of the kind of childhood thinking to which I refer. But
+for simplicity’s sake, let us use the childish notion that the earth
+is flat as a convenient symbol for them all. And I say that if we
+do not respect the error, we shall not have any real success in
+convincing the child of the truth. We shall easily persuade him that
+the globe in the schoolroom is round--that the picture of the earth
+in the geography-book is round--but not that the familiar earth upon
+which he walks is anything but flat! At best, we shall teach him a
+secondary, literary, schoolroom conception to put beside his workaday
+one. And, in the long run, we shall place a scientific conception of
+things in general beside his primitive childish superstitions--but
+we shall scarcely displace them; and when it comes to a show-down in
+his adult life, we shall find him acting in accordance with childish
+superstitions rather than with scientific knowledge. Most of us, as
+adults, are full of such superstitions, and we act accordingly, and
+live feebly and fearfully; for we have never yielded to the childish
+magical conception of the world the respect that is due to it as a
+worthy opponent of scientific truth--we have assumed that we were
+persuaded of truth, while in reality truth has never yet met error in
+fair fight in our minds.
+
+“If you wish to convince a friend of something, do you not first seek
+to find out what he really thinks about it, and make him weigh your
+truth and his error in the same balance? But in dealing with children,
+we fail to take account of their opinions at all. We say, ‘You must
+believe this because it is so.’ If they do believe it, they have only
+added one more superstition to their collection. Truths are _not_ true
+because somebody says so; nor even because everybody says so; they are
+true only because they fit in better with all the rest of life than
+what we call errors--because they bear the test of living--because they
+work out. And this way of discovering truth is within the capacity
+of the youngest school-child. If you can get him to state candidly
+and without shame his doubtless erroneous ideas about the world, and
+give him leave to prove their correctness to you, you will have set
+in motion a process which is worthy to be called education; for it
+will constitute a genuine matching of theory with theory in his mind,
+a real training in inductive logic, and what conclusions he reaches
+will be truly his. When he sees in a familiar sunset, as he will see
+with a newly fascinated eye, the edge of the earth swinging up past
+the sun--then astronomy will be real to him, and full of meaning--and
+not a collection of dull facts that must be remembered against
+examination-day.
+
+“This means that we must treat children as our equals. Education must
+embody a democratic relationship between adults and children. Children
+must be granted freedom of opinion--and freedom of opinion means
+nothing except the freedom to believe a wrong opinion until you are
+persuaded of a right one. They, moreover, must be the judges of what
+constitutes persuasion. You have asked me for practical and concrete
+suggestions in regard to education. I will make this one before I go:
+when I find an astronomy class in the first grade engaged in earnest
+debate as to whether the earth is round or flat, I will know that our
+school system has begun to be concerned for the first time with the
+inculcation of a love of truth. For, like Milton, I can not praise a
+fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never
+sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where
+that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.--I
+thank you for your attention!”
+
+
+
+
+XXII. Enterprise
+
+
+And so we come to Goodness--and at the same time to a change in our
+program. After calling on the Artist as an expert to testify in regard
+to Beauty, and the Philosopher to tell us about Truth, it would seem
+that we should hear about Goodness from a moralist. So, no doubt,
+you expected--and so I had originally intended. But it cannot have
+failed to secure your notice that our experts pursued a somewhat
+unconventional line of argument. The Artist told us that the way to
+teach children to love Beauty was to leave them free to hate it if they
+chose. The Philosopher said that the way to inculcate in children a
+love of Truth was to leave them free to hold wrong opinions. Now it is
+all very well to talk that way about Beauty and Truth. We might perhaps
+be persuaded to take such risks, so long as only Beauty and Truth were
+involved. But Goodness is a different matter. It simply would not do
+for us to hear any one who proposed a similar course in regard to
+conduct. Imagine any one suggesting that the way to teach children to
+be good is to leave them free to be bad! But that is just what I am
+afraid would happen if we called an expert on Morals to the stand. I
+have observed twenty or thirty of them shuffling their notes and their
+feet and waiting to be called on. But I do not trust them. No! Goodness
+is not going to be treated in so irreverent a fashion while I am
+running this discussion. I am going to see that this subject is treated
+with becoming reverence. And as the only way of making absolutely sure
+of this, I am going to address you myself.
+
+We want children to grow up to be good men and women; and we want to
+know how the school can assist in this process. First, we must define
+goodness; and I shall suggest the rough outline of such a definition,
+which we must presently fill up in detail, by saying that goodness
+is living a really civilized life. And as one’s conduct is not to
+be measured or judged except as it affects others, we may say that
+goodness is a matter of civilized relationships between persons.
+And furthermore, as the two most important things in life are its
+preservation and perpetuation, the two fields of conduct in which it is
+most necessary to be civilized are Work and Love. Let us first deal
+with Work and find out what constitutes civilized conduct in that field.
+
+We all exist, as we are accustomed to remind ourselves, in a world
+where one must work in order to live. That, in a broad sense, is true;
+but there are certain classes of persons exempt from any such actual
+compulsion; and with respect to almost any specific individual outside
+of those classes, it is generally possible for him to escape from that
+compulsion if he chooses. Take any one of us here; you, for instance.
+If you really and truly did not want to work, you could find a way to
+avoid it; you could get your wife or your mother to support you by
+taking in washing or doing stenography--or, if they refused, you could
+manage to become the victim of some accident which would disable you
+from useful labor and enable you to spend your days peacefully in an
+institution. But you prefer to work; and the fact is that you like
+work. You are unhappy because you don’t get a chance to do the work you
+could do best, or because you have not yet found the work you can do
+well; but you have energies which demand expression in work. And if you
+turn to the classes which are exempt from any compulsion to work, you
+find the rich expending their energies either in the same channels as
+everybody else, or organizing their play until its standards of effort
+are as exacting as those of work; you find women who are supported by
+their husbands rebelling against the imprisonment of the idle home, and
+seeking in all directions for employment of their energies; and as for
+the third class of those who do not have to work in order to live, we
+find that even idiots are happier when set at basket-weaving.
+
+If we attempt to moralize upon the basis of these facts, we arrive at
+a conclusion something like this: it is right to use one’s energies in
+organized effort--the more highly organized the better. And if we ask
+what is the impulse or trait or quality which makes people turn from
+an easy to a hard life, from loafing to sport, from sport to work, and
+which makes them contemptuous of each other and of themselves if they
+neglect an opportunity or evade a challenge to go into something still
+harder and more exacting--if we ask what it is that despite all our
+pretensions of laziness pushes us up more and more difficult paths of
+effort, we are obliged to call it Enterprise.
+
+And when we face the fact that Enterprise is a love of difficulties
+for their own sake, we realize that the normal human being has, within
+certain limits, a pleasure in pain: for it is painful to run a race,
+to learn a language, to write a sonnet, to put through a deal--and
+pleasurable precisely because it is, within these limits, painful. If
+it is too easy, there is no fun in it. The extremer sorts of enterprise
+we call courage and heroism. But though we admire the fireman who
+risks his life in a burning building, we would not admire the man who
+deliberately set fire to his own bed in order to suffer the pangs of
+torture by fire; nor, although we admire the airmen who come down
+frozen from high altitudes, would we applaud a man who locked himself
+in a refrigerator over the week-end in order to suffer the torture of
+great cold. We would feel, in both these hypothetical cases, that there
+was no relevancy of their action to the world of reality. But upon this
+point our emotions are after all uncertain. We do not begrudge applause
+to the football-star who is carried from the field with a broken
+collar-bone, or to the movie-star who drives a motor-car off a cliff
+into the sea, though it is quite clear that these actions are relevant
+to and significant in the world of fantasy rather than the world of
+reality. What it comes down to is the intelligibility of the action.
+Does it relate to any world, of reality or of fantasy, which we can
+understand, which has any significance for us?
+
+When we turn to the child, we find that normally he has no lack of
+enterprise. But his enterprise is relevant to a world of childish
+dreaming to which we have lost the key. His activities are largely
+meaningless to us--that is why we are so annoyed by them. And, in the
+same way, our kinds of enterprise are largely meaningless to him.
+That is why he usually objects so strongly to lessons and tasks. They
+interrupt and interfere with the conduct of his own affairs. He is as
+outraged at having to stop his play to put a shovelful of coal on the
+furnace, as a sober business man would be at being compelled, by some
+strange and tyrannical infantile despotism, to stop dictating letters
+and join, at some stated hour, in a game of ring-around-the-rosy. Most
+of what we object to as misconduct in children is a natural rebellion
+against the intrusion of an unimaginative adult despotism into their
+lives.
+
+Nevertheless, it is our adult world that they are going to have to
+live in, and they must learn to live in it. And it is true, moreover,
+that much of their enterprise is capable of finding as satisfactory
+employment in what we term the world of reality as in their world of
+dreams. What we commonly do, however, is to convince them by punishment
+and scolding that our world of reality is unpleasant. What we ought to
+do is to make it more agreeable, more interesting, more fascinating,
+than their world of dreams. Our friend the Artist has already told us
+how this may be done, and our friend the Philosopher has given some
+oblique hints on the same subject. I merely note here that the school
+is the place in which the transition from the world of dreams to the
+world of realities may be best effected.
+
+But there are various kinds of enterprise in our adult world. It is
+undoubtedly enterprising to hold up a pay-train, a la Jesse James.
+But though when the act involves real daring, we cannot withhold an
+instinctive admiration, yet we know that it is wrong. Why wrong?
+Because such acts disorganize and discourage, and if unchecked would
+ruin, the whole elaborate system of enterprise by which such trains
+are despatched and such money earned. It is obvious that train-robbery
+and wage-labor cannot fairly compete with one another; that if
+train-robbery goes on long enough, nobody will do wage-labor, and there
+will eventually cease to be pay-trains to rob. The law does not take
+cognizance of these reasons, but punishes train-robbery as a crime
+against property. Yet if we look into the matter for a moment, we
+realize that loyalty to any property system ultimately rests upon the
+conviction that its destruction would result in the total frustration
+of the finer sorts of human enterprise; it is for this reason that
+conservative people always persuade themselves that any change in the
+economic arrangements of society, from a new income-tax to communism,
+is a kind of train-robbery, bound to end in universal piracy and ruin.
+And this moral indignation, whether in any given instance appropriate
+or not--or whether, as in the case of many piratical kinds of business
+enterprise, left for long in abeyance--is the next step in our human
+morality. If we ask ourselves, why should not human enterprise turn
+into a welter of primitive piracy, with all the robbers robbing each
+other, we are compelled to answer that in the long run it would not be
+interesting. For, although destruction is temporarily more exciting,
+it is only construction that is permanently interesting. And if we ask
+why it is more interesting, we find that it is because it is harder. It
+is too easy to destroy. Destruction may be occasionally a good thing,
+as a tonic, something to give to individuals or populations a sense of
+power; but their most profound instinct is toward creation.
+
+But the child, by reason of the primitive stage of his development,
+tends to engage rather more enthusiastically in destruction as a
+mode of enterprise than in creation. He tires of building, and it
+is a question whether or not the pleasure he takes in knocking over
+his houses of blocks does not exceed his pleasure in building them.
+He prefers playing at hunting and war to playing at keeping house.
+And his imagination responds more readily to the robber-exploits of
+Robin Hood than to the Stories of Great Inventors. This is a fact,
+but it need not discourage us. What is necessary is for him to learn
+the interestingness of creation. If what he builds is not a house of
+blocks on the nursery floor, but a wigwam in the woods, his destructive
+energies are likely to be satisfied in cutting down the saplings with
+which to build it. This simply means that his destructive energies have
+become subordinated to his constructive ones, as they are in adult
+life. But they cannot become so subordinated until what he constructs
+is wholly the result of his own wishes, and until moreover it is more
+desirable as the starting-point of new creative activities than as
+something to destroy. Those conditions are fulfilled whenever a group
+of children play together and have free access to the materials with
+which to construct. And that is what the school is for--to provide
+the materials, and the freedom, and be the home of a process by which
+children learn that it is more fun to create than to destroy.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII. Democracy
+
+
+But in our adult world, there is still another moral quality demanded
+of our human enterprise. It is not merely better to create than to
+destroy, but it is better to create something which is useful, or
+desirable, to others. Our moral attitude is a little uncertain upon
+this point, for the artist knows that his coarsest and easiest kind
+of enterprise is likely to be valued by others, and his finer and
+more difficult enterprises neglected and scorned. And so he has the
+impulse to work only for himself; nevertheless, he realizes that if
+he does work only for himself he is doing wrong. For he really feels
+a deep-lying moral obligation to work for others--a moral obligation
+which comes, of course, from his egoistic need of the spiritual
+sustenance of praise. The fact is that others are necessary to him,
+and that his work must please others. So if he ignores the crowd, it
+is because he wishes to compel it to take something better than what
+it asked for. And this democratic quality in enterprise becomes the
+third test of civilized life. Does a given action fit in everybody
+else’s scheme as well as in your own: and, if it conflicts with the
+outside scheme, is it with a fundamentally altruistic intention? There
+are prophets and false prophets and of those who take the difficult
+course of disagreeing with their fellows, the best we can immediately
+demand of them is that they afflict us because they think it good for
+us and not because they do not care. Yet even so they differ from us at
+their peril. For we are to be the final judges of whether we are being
+imposed on or not. If we do not, after full consideration, feel that we
+can play our game if Napoleon or the Kaiser plays his, we put him out
+of business.
+
+Now the child has a certain natural tendency toward the Napoleon-Kaiser
+attitude. He began, as we pointed out some time ago, by being an
+infantile emperor. He likes it. And being deposed by his parents
+does not alter his royalist convictions. For he has not merely been
+deposed--he has seen another king set up in his place. And one reason
+why parents are not the best persons to teach children democracy, is
+that they are the authors of the whole succession of enthronements and
+deposings which constitute the early history of a family. No, the
+children need a change of air--a chance to forget their Wars of the
+Roses and to take their places in a genuine democracy. The place for
+them to learn democracy (though I believe this has been said before)
+is the school. For in a properly conducted school there is an end of
+jealous little princes and princesses squabbling over prestige and
+appealing to the Power Behind the Throne; in such a school, conduct in
+general and work in particular is performed not with reference to such
+prestige as a reward, but with reference to their individual wishes in
+democratic composition with the wishes of their fellows.
+
+But this will be true only if they find at school something different
+from what they have left at home. And what they have left at home may
+be described as a couple of well-meaning, bewildered and helpless
+people who are half the slaves of the children and half tyrants
+over them. It is unfortunate, but it is true, that the first that
+children learn of human relationships, is by personal experience of
+a relationship which is on both sides tyrannical and slavish. They
+naturally expect all their relationships with the adult world, if not
+with each other, to be conducted on this same pattern. They expect to
+find father and mother over again in the school-teacher. They hope
+to find the slave and fear to find the tyrant. But it is necessary
+that they should face the adult world into which they must grow up, as
+equals; and therefore they must begin to learn the lesson of equality.
+The school, by providing a kind of association between adults and
+children which is free from the emotional complexes of the home, can
+teach that lesson.
+
+There is, however, so much intellectual confusion about what equality
+means that we must be quite clear on that point before we go on. At
+any moment of our careers, we are the servant of others, in the sense
+of being their follower, helper, disciple or right-hand man; and
+the master of still others, in that we are their leader, counsellor
+or teacher. We can hardly conduct an ordinary conversation without
+assuming, and usually shifting several times, these rôles. And these
+relationships extend far beyond the bounds of acquaintanceship, for
+one can scarcely read a book or write an article without creating
+such relationships for the moment with unknown individuals. In all
+the critical and important moments of one’s life one is inevitably a
+leader or a follower. But in adult civilized life, these relationships
+are fluid; they change and exchange with each other. And they are
+fluid because they are free. You and I can choose, though perhaps not
+consciously, our leaders and our helpers; we are not condemned to stand
+in any fixed relationship to any other person. And this freedom to be
+servant of whom we please, and master of whom we can, is equality. If I
+want to know about fishing-tackle, I will sit at your feet and learn,
+and if you will condescend to lead the expedition in quest of these
+articles I will be your obedient follower; while if you happened to
+want advice about pens, pencils, ink, or typewriter-ribbons, you would,
+I trust, yield a similar deference to me. We have no shame in serving
+nor any egregious pride in directing each other, because we are equals.
+We are equals because we are free to become each other’s master and
+each other’s servant whenever we so desire.
+
+But the relationship of parents and children is not free. Parents
+cannot choose their children, and must serve their helplessness
+willy-nilly. Children cannot choose their parents, and must obey them
+anyhow. It is a rare triumph of parenthood--and doubtless also of
+childhood--when children and parents become friends, and serve and
+obey each other not because they must but because they really like to.
+But schools can easily take up the task which parents are only with
+the greatest difficulty able to accomplish, and dissolve the infantile
+tyrant-and-slave relationship to the grown-up world. The grown-up
+people in the school can be the child’s equals. They can become so
+by ceasing to encourage the notion which the child carries with him
+from the home, that adults are beings of a different caste. Once they
+regard an adult as a person like themselves--which, Heaven knows, he
+is!--children will discover quickly enough his admirable qualities,
+and his special abilities, and pay them the tribute of admiration and
+emulation. There is no human reason why a child should not admire and
+emulate his teacher’s ability to do sums, rather than the village bum’s
+ability to whittle sticks and smoke cigarettes; the reason why the
+child doesn’t is plain enough--the bum has put himself on an equality
+with them and the teacher has not.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV. Responsibility
+
+
+But there is yet another quality which civilized standards demand of
+our human enterprise. People hate a quitter--and particularly the
+quitter whose defection leaves other people under the obligation to
+finish what he has started. We demand of a person that he should
+refrain from starting what he can’t finish. This is a demand not only
+for democratic intentions, but for common sense and ordinary foresight.
+He shouldn’t undertake a job that involves other people’s putting their
+trust in him, unless he can really carry it through. And if he finds in
+the middle of it that he has, as the saying goes, “bit off more than he
+can chaw,” he ought to try to stick it out at whatever cost to himself.
+If other people have believed he could do it, he must not betray their
+faith. This feeling is at the heart of what we ordinarily call telling
+the truth, as well as the foundation of the custom of paying one’s
+debts. We don’t really care how much a man perjures his own immortal
+soul by lying, but we do object to his fooling other people by it. We
+are all so entangled with each other, so dependent upon each other,
+that none of us can plan and create with any courage or confidence
+unless we can depend on others to do what they say they will do. But
+our feeling goes deeper than the spoken word--we want people to behave
+in accordance with the promise of their actions. We despise the person
+who seems, and who lets us believe that he is, wiser or more capable
+than he turns out to be. We even resent a story that promises at the
+beginning to be more interesting than it is when it gets going. And
+in regard to work, the thing which we value above any incidental
+brilliancy in its performance, is the certainty that it will be
+finished. Hence the pride in finishing any task, however disagreeable,
+once started.
+
+This is the hardest thing that children have to learn--not to drop
+their work when they get tired of it. But it should be obvious that
+there is only one way for children to learn this, and that it is not
+by anything which may be said or done in punishment or rebuke from the
+authority which imposes the task. It is not to be learned at all so
+long as the task is imposed by any one outside the child himself. The
+child who is sent on an errand may forget, and not be ashamed. But the
+child who has volunteered to go on an errand--not as a pretty trick to
+please the Authorities, but because of a sense of the importance of the
+errand and of his own importance in doing it--that child has assumed a
+trust, which he will not be likely to violate.
+
+But suppose, nevertheless, that he does forget. Here we come to the
+ethics of punishment--a savage ritual which we generally quite fail to
+understand. Let us take a specific case. A group of boys are building
+a house in the woods, and they run out of nails. Penrod says he will
+go home and get some from the tool-chest in the barn. He goes; and on
+the way, he meets a boy who offers to take him to the movies, where
+Charlie Chaplin is on exhibition. Penrod reflects upon his duty; but
+he says to himself that he will go in and see one reel of Charlie
+Chaplin, and then hurry away. But the inimitable Charles lulls him into
+forgetfulness of realities, and when he emerges from the theatre it is
+nigh on dinner time. Penrod realizes his predicament, and rehearses
+two or three fancy stories to account for his failure to return with
+the nails; but he realizes that none of them will hold. He wishes that
+a wagon would run over him and break his leg, so that he would have
+a valid excuse. But no such lucky accident occurs. How is he going to
+face the gang next day? He has set himself apart from them, exiled
+himself, by his act. The question is, how is he going to get back? Now
+in the psychology of children and savages, there is happily a means for
+such reinstatement. This means is the discharge of the emotions--in
+the offender and in the group against which he has offended--of shame
+on the one hand and anger on the other, which together constitute the
+barrier against his return. That is, if they can express their anger
+by, let us say, beating him up, that anger no longer exists, they are
+no longer offended. While if he can by suffering such punishment pay
+the debt of his offence, he thereby wipes it out of existence, and at
+the same time cleanses himself from the shame of committing it. As the
+best conclusion of an unpleasant incident, he is ready to offer himself
+for such punishment. For children understand the barbaric ritual of
+punishment when it really has the barbaric ritual significance.
+
+But the punishment must be inflicted by the victim’s peers. There
+are few adults who can with any dignity inflict punishment upon
+children--for the dignity with which punishment is given depends upon
+the equality of the punisher and the punished, and on the implicit
+understanding that if the case had happened to be different the rôles
+would have been reversed.
+
+It will be perceived that this leaves discipline entirely a matter
+for children to attend to among themselves, with no interference by
+adults, and no imposition of codes of justice beyond their years and
+understanding. Punishment, in this sense, cannot be meted out unless
+the aggrieved parties are angry and the aggressor ashamed; but let no
+adult imagine that he can tell whether an offending child is ashamed
+or not. Shame is a destructive emotion which a healthy child tries to
+repress. He does not say, “I am sorry.” He brazens out his crime until
+he provokes the injured parties to an anger which explodes into swift
+punishment, after which he is one of them again and all is well.
+
+But the abdication of adults from the office of
+judge-jury-and-executioner of naughty children, destroys the last
+vestiges of the caste system which separates children from adults. It
+puts an end to superimposed authority, and to goodness as a conforming
+to the mysterious commands of such authority. It places the child in
+exactly such a relationship to a group of equals as he will bear
+in adult life, and it builds in him the sense of responsibility for
+his actions which is the final demand that civilization makes upon
+the individual. And the importance of the school as a milieu for
+such a process is in its opportunity to undo at once, early in life,
+the psychological mischief brought about, almost inevitably, by the
+influences of the home.
+
+There!--I have let the cat out of the bag. I had intended to be very
+discreet, and say nothing that could possibly offend anybody. But I
+have said what will offend everybody--except parents. They, goodness
+knows, are fully aware that a home is no place to bring children up.
+They see what it does to the children plainly enough. But we, the
+children, are so full of repressed resentments against the tyrannies
+inflicted upon us by our parents, and so full of repressed shame at the
+slavery to which we subjected them, that we cannot bear to hear a word
+said against them. The sentimentality with which we regard the home
+is an exact measure of the secret grudge we actually bear against it.
+Woe to the person who is so rash as to say what we really feel!--But
+the mischief is done, and I may as well go on and say in plain terms
+that the function of the school is to liberate the children from the
+influences of parental love.
+
+For parental love--as any parent will tell you--is a bond that
+constrains too tyrannically on both sides to permit of real friendship,
+which is a relationship between equals. The child goes to school in
+order to cease to be a son or daughter--and incidentally in order to
+permit the two harassed adults at home to cease in some measure to be
+father and mother. The child must become a free human being; and he
+can do so only if he finds in school, not a new flock of parents, but
+adults who can help him to learn the lesson of freedom and friendship.
+But that is something which I can discuss better in dealing with the
+subject of Love.
+
+
+
+
+XXV. Love
+
+
+Remember that it is not my fault that we find ourselves discussing so
+inflammable a topic! But if you insist on knowing what education can
+do to bring our conduct in the realm of love up to the standard of
+civilization, I can but answer your question. We have found that in the
+realm of work, civilization demands of us Enterprise, and Democracy,
+and Responsibility. And I think that all the demands of civilization
+upon our conduct in the realm of love might be summed up in the same
+terms. We despise those persons who are afraid of adventure in love;
+who in devotion to some mawkish dream-ideal, turn away from the more
+difficult and poignant realities of courtship and marriage; and we are
+beginning to despise those whose enterprise is too cheaply satisfied
+in prostitution or in the undemocratic masculine exploitation of
+women of inferior economic status; and not only the crasser offences
+against sexual morality, but a thousand less definable but not less
+real offences within the realm of legal marriage, may be described
+as attempts to evade responsibility. I leave you to work out the
+implications of this system of morals for yourself. What I particularly
+want to speak of here is the effect of parental influences upon
+children with respect to their later love-life, and the function of
+education in dissolving those influences.
+
+It is no secret that adults generally have not yet learned how to
+be happy in love. And the reason for that, aside from the economic
+obstacles to happiness which do not come within the scope of our
+inquiry, is that they are still children. They are seeking to renew
+in an adult relationship the bond which existed between themselves
+and their parents in infancy. Or they are seeking to settle a
+long-forgotten childish grudge against their parents, by assuming the
+parental rôle in this new relationship. And in both efforts, they find
+themselves encouraged by each other. Naturally enough! A woman likes
+to discover, and enjoys “mothering,” the child in her husband; she
+likes to find also in him the god and hero which her father was to her
+in her infancy. And a happy marriage is one in which a man is at any
+moment unashamedly her child or (let us not shrink from using these
+infantile and romantic terms!) her god. But it is a bore to have to
+mother a man all the time; it is in fact slavery. And it is equally a
+bore to have to look up to a man all the time and think him wise and
+obey him; for that also is slavery. The happy marriage has something
+else--the capacity for swift and unconscious change and interchange of
+these rôles. The happy lovers can vary the tenor of their relationship
+because they are free to be more than one thing to each other. And
+they have that freedom because they are equals. That equality is
+comradeship, is friendship.
+
+Do not imagine that friendship in love implies any absence of that
+profound worship and self-surrender which is characteristic of the
+types of love that are modelled upon the infantile and parental
+patterns. This is as ridiculous as it would be to suppose that equality
+in other fields of life means that no one shall ever lead and no one
+ever follow. Equality in love means only the freedom to experience
+all, instead of compulsion to experience only a part, of the emotional
+possibilities of love in a single relationship.
+
+I would gladly explicate this aspect of my theme in some detail, were
+it not that it might incidentally comprise a catalogue of domestic
+difficulties and misunderstandings at once too tragic and too
+ridiculous--and some of you might object to my unfolding what you would
+consider to be your own unique and private woes in public.
+
+I will, therefore, only point out that even what we term the civilized
+part of mankind is far from measuring up to this demand of civilization
+in the world of love, the demand for equality. It may seem somewhat of
+an impertinence to blame this fact upon the early influences of the
+home, when there are so many outstanding customs and laws and economic
+conditions which are founded on the theory of the inequality of men
+and women. But these customs and laws and conditions are in process of
+change--and the home influences of which I speak are not. Our problem
+is to consider if these influences may not be dissolved by the school.
+For, mark you, what happens when they are not! Wedded love, as based
+upon those undissolved influences, comes into a kind of disgrace;
+serious-minded men and women ask themselves whether such a bondage is
+tolerable; a thousand dramas and novels expose the iniquities of the
+thing; and the more intellectually adventurous in each generation begin
+to wonder if the attempt at faithful and permanent love ought not to be
+abandoned.
+
+Let me relate only one widely typical--and perhaps only
+too-familiar--instance. A boy grows up poisoned with mother-love--er,
+I mean, petted and praised and waited upon by his mother, until he
+finds the outside world, with its comparative indifference to his
+wonderfulness, a very cold place indeed. Nevertheless, he adjusts
+himself to it, becomes a man, and falls in love. With whom does he
+fall in love? Perhaps with a girl like his mother; or perhaps with
+one quite opposite to her in all respects,--for he may have conceived
+an unconscious resentment against his mother, for betraying him by
+her praise into expecting too much of an unfeeling world. But in any
+case, he is going to experience again, in his relationship with his
+sweetheart, the ancient delights of being mothered. He is going to
+respond to that pleasure so unmistakably as to encourage the girl in
+further demonstrations of motherliness. He is in fact going to reward
+her more for motherliness than for any other trait in her possession.
+And the girl, who wants a lover and a husband and a man, is going to
+find herself with a child on her hands. But that is not the worst. If
+the girl does not rebel against the situation, the man is likely to,
+when he finds out just what it is. For he, too, despite his unconscious
+infantilism, wants a girl and a sweetheart and a wife. And when he
+realizes that he is being sealed up again in the over-close, over-sweet
+love-nest of his infancy, that he is becoming a baby, he revolts. He
+does not realize what has happened--he only knows that he no longer
+cherishes a romantic love for her. Naturally. Romantic love is a
+love between equals. She has become his mother--and he flees her,
+and perhaps goes through life seeking and escaping from his mother
+in half a hundred women. When this happens, we call him a Don Juan
+or a libertine or a scoundrel or a fool. But that does not alter his
+helplessness in the grip of infantile compulsions.
+
+I do not wish to exaggerate the ability of education to dissolve,
+without the aid of a special psychic technique, any deeply-rooted
+infantile dispositions of this sort; but, aside from such flagrant
+cases, there are thousands of well-conducted men and women who just
+fail to free themselves sufficiently from the emotions of childhood
+to be happy in love. Besides their own selves, the sensible adult
+beings that they believe they are, there are within them pathetic and
+absurd children whose demands upon the relationship well-nigh tear it
+to pieces. It is in regard to these that it seems not improbable that
+a civilized education could secure their happiness for them. And it
+would do so by supplanting the emotionally over-laden atmosphere of
+the home with the invigorating air of equality. I refer in particular
+to equality between the sexes. So long as girls and boys are to any
+extent educated separately, encouraged to play separately, and treated
+as different kinds of beings, the remoteness hinders the growth of
+real friendship between the sexes, and leaves the mind empty of any
+realistic concepts which would serve to resist the transfer to the
+other sex, at the romantic age, of repressed infantile feelings about
+the beloved parent. What we have to deal with in children might without
+much exaggeration be described as the disinclination of one who has
+been a lover to become a friend. The emotions of the boy towards his
+mother are so rich and deep that he is inclined to scorn the tamer
+emotions of friendship with girl-children. (Notoriously, he falls in
+love first with older women in whom he finds some idealized image of
+his mother.) He is contemptuous of little girls because they are not
+the mother-goddess of his infancy. What he must learn, and the sooner
+the better, is that girls are interesting human beings, that they are
+good comrades and jolly playfellows. He must learn to like them for
+what they are. Ordinarily, the love-life of the adolescent boy is a
+series of more or less shocked discoveries that the women upon whom he
+has set his youthful fancy do not, in fact, correspond to his infantile
+dream. Half the difficulties of marriage are involved in the painful
+adjustment of the man to the human realities of his beloved; the other
+half being, of course, the similarly painful adjustment of the girl to
+similar human realities. He could be quite happy with her, were the
+other dear charmer, his infantile ideal, away. And it is one of the
+functions of education to chase this ideal away, to dissolve the early
+emotional bond to the parent, by making the real world in general and
+the real other sex in particular so _humanly_ interesting that it will
+be preferred to the infantile fantasy.
+
+I may be mistaken, but I think that half of this task will be easy
+enough. Girls, I am sure, are only in appearance and by way of saving
+their face, scornful of the activities of boys; they will be glad
+enough to join with them on terms of complete equality, and ready to
+admire and like them for what they humanly are. It will not be so easy
+to persuade boys to admire and like girls for what they are; and it
+will be the business of the school to dramatize unmistakably for these
+young masculine eyes the human interestingness of the other sex--to
+give the girls a chance to show their actual ability to compete on
+equal and non-romantic terms with boys in all their common undertakings.
+
+To make realities more interesting than dreams--that is the task
+of education. And of all the realities whose values we ignore, in
+childish preoccupation with our feeble dreams, the human realities
+of companionship which each sex has to offer the other are among the
+richest. Despite all our romantic serenadings, men and women have only
+begun to discover each other. Just as, despite our solemn sermonizings
+on the blessedness of work, we have only begun to discover what
+creative activity can really mean to us. Work and love!--
+
+A VOICE. “Won’t you please come back to the subject of education?”
+
+What! Is it possible--is it credible--is it conceivable--that you have
+been following this discussion thus far, and have not yet realized
+that education includes everything on earth, and in the heavens above
+and the waters beneath? Come back to the subject of education! Why,
+it is impossible to wander away from the subject of education! I defy
+you to do so. All the books that have ever been written, all the
+pictures that have ever been painted, all the songs ever sung, all the
+machines ever invented, all the wars and all the governments, all the
+joyous and sorry loves of men and women, are but part of that vast
+process, the education of mankind. When you leave this discussion, you
+will not have dropped the subject; you will continue it in your next
+conversation, whether it be with your employer or your sweetheart or
+your milkman. You cannot get away from it. And though you perish, and
+an earthquake overwhelms your city in ruins, and the continent on which
+you live sinks in the sea, something that you have done or helped to
+do, something which has been a part of your life, the twisted fragments
+of the office building where you went to work or the old meerschaum
+pipe you so patiently coloured, will be dug up and gazed upon by future
+generations, and what you can teach them by these poor relics if by
+nothing else, will be a part of their education....
+
+
+
+
+XXVI. Education in 1947 A. D.
+
+
+By way of epilogue, let us be Utopian, after the fashion of Plato and
+H. G. Wells. Let me, as a returned traveller from the not-too-distant
+future, picture for you concretely the vaster implications of education
+in, say, the year 1947, as illustrated by the public school in the
+village of Pershing, N. Y.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+“But which is the school-building?” I asked my guide.
+
+He laughed. “I am surprised at you,” he said. “Surprised that you
+should ask such a question!”
+
+“Why?” I demanded innocently.
+
+“Because,” he said, “in the files of our historical research
+department I once came across a faded copy of a quaint old war-time
+publication called the _Liberator_.[4] It attracted my attention
+because it appeared to have been edited by a grizzled old fire-eater
+whom I recently met, Major General Eastman, the head of our War
+College. In those days, it seems, he thought he was a pacifist. Time’s
+changes!”
+
+“Ah, yes--General Eastman. I remember him well,” I said. “But what has
+that got to do with--”
+
+“In that curious little magazine was an article on education. It was
+signed by you. Don’t you remember what you wrote? Didn’t you believe
+what you said? Or didn’t you fully realize that you were living in a
+time when prophecies come true? You ask me where the school-building
+is. Why, there isn’t any school-building.”
+
+We were standing in the midst of a little park, about the size
+of a large city block, bordered by a theatre, a restaurant, an
+office-building, several handsome factory buildings of the newer and
+more cheerful style, a library, a newspaper plant, and a church.
+
+My companion pointed to one of the buildings. “That,” he said, “is the
+children’s theatre. There they present their own plays and pageants. In
+connection with the work there they learn singing and dancing, scene
+painting, and costume. Of course they also learn about plays--I suppose
+from your primitive point of view you would say that we conduct a
+course in dramatic literature. But all those antique phrases of early
+educational practice have passed out of use. We would say that the
+children are learning to develop their creative impulses. We consider
+our theatre very important in that respect. It is the beginning of
+everything.
+
+“Next in importance, perhaps, are those factories. They include a
+carpenter shop, a pottery, and a machine shop. Here is made everything
+which is used throughout the school. And there is the power house
+which furnishes the electric current for the whole establishment.
+You understand, of course, that the boys and girls get a complete
+theoretical as well as practical grasp of the facts they are
+dealing with--there is no neglect of what I suppose you would call
+book-learning, here.
+
+“Over there is the textile and garment factory, which designs and makes
+the costumes for the plays and pageants. You will not be surprised to
+learn that the garment-makers at any given period are the most active
+supporters of the propaganda for an outdoor theatre. It would give them
+a chance to do more costumes!...
+
+“Yes, we have politics here. The question of an outdoor theatre is
+being agitated very warmly just now. The pupils have complete control
+of the school budget of expenditure. There is only so much money to
+spend each year, you see, at present, though there is a movement on
+foot to make the institution self-supporting; but I’m afraid that will
+depend on the political situation. Ultimately, of course, we expect to
+put the whole of industry under the Department of Education.... But I’m
+afraid that’s going too deeply into a situation you could hardly be
+expected to understand.
+
+“At any rate to return to our school, the opposition to the outdoor
+theatre is from the scientific groups, who want an enlargement of
+their laboratories.... The architectural and building groups are
+neutral--they are working on plans for both projects, and all they
+want is that the question should be settled one way or the other at
+once, so they can go to work. There will be a meeting tonight, at
+which a preliminary vote will be taken. Yes, our politics are quite
+old-fashioned--Greek, in fact.
+
+“The shops? They are managed by shop committees of the workers.
+Distribution of products to the various groups which use them is
+effected through a distributing bureau, which has charge of the
+book-keeping and so forth. There has been a change in distribution
+recently, however. At first the shops merely made what was ordered
+by the various groups, and requisitions were the medium of exchange.
+But the shops became experimental and enterprising, and produced what
+they liked on the chance of its being wanted. This made a show-place
+necessary, and as for various reasons ordinary money became the medium
+of exchange, the show-place became a kind of department store. Then
+some of the groups decided to use part of their subsidy in advertising
+in the school newspaper and magazines. They are working out some very
+interesting principles in their advertising, too, as you will find.
+They have to tell the truth....
+
+“There is the printing establishment. No, the paper and the magazines
+are not self-supporting--though the school advertising helps. They’re
+subsidized. We quite believe in that.
+
+“And there--you can get a glimpse of the greenhouses and gardens.
+Botany and so forth.... The library is the centre of the research
+groups. History, sociology, economics--finding out what and why. Very
+informal and very earnest, as you’ll find.... The groups? Oh, the time
+one stays in each group varies with the individual. But every one likes
+to be able to boast quietly of an M. P.--that means a ‘masterpiece’ in
+the old mediaeval sense; a piece of work that shows you’ve passed the
+apprentice stage--in a reasonable number of departments. Some Admirable
+Crichtons go in for an M. P. in everything!...
+
+“The restaurant--that’s quite important. The cooking groups give a
+grand dinner every little while, and everybody goes and dines quite
+in state, with dancing afterward. We learn the best of bourgeois
+manners--makes it _quite_ impossible to distinguish an immigrant’s
+child from the scions of our old families. The result is that the
+best families are discarding their manners in order to retain their
+distinction! Very amusing....
+
+“The church? You mean that building over there, I suppose? That isn’t
+a church--not in the sense you mean. It’s our meeting place. You see,
+since your time churches have come to be used so much for meetings
+that when our architecture group came to plan an assembly hall it was
+quite natural for them to choose the ecclesiastical style. Anyway, I
+understand it’s a return to their original purpose....”
+
+“But,” I said, “this school is just like the world outside!”
+
+“Except,” he said, “in one particular. In the world outside we still
+have certain vestiges of class privilege and exploitation--considerably
+toned down from their former asperities, but still recognizable as
+relics of capitalism. In the school we have play, production and
+exchange as they would exist in the outside world if these things were
+to be done and managed wholly with the intention of making better
+and wiser and happier citizens. The difference, of course, is simply
+that one is run with an educational and the other with a productive
+intention.”
+
+“The difference seems to me,” I remarked, “that your school is really
+democratic and your adult world isn’t quite.”
+
+“That is one way of putting it,” he conceded.
+
+“And I should think,” I said warmly, “that after going to these
+schools, your people would want the rest of the world run on exactly
+the same plan.”
+
+“It does rather have that effect,” he admitted cautiously. “In fact,
+the Educational party, as it is called, is very rapidly rising into
+power. Since you are unfamiliar with our politics, I should explain
+that the Educational party was formed, after the unfortunate events of
+1925, by the amalgamation of the United Engineers, the O. G. U., and
+the Farmers’ League. Its chief figure is the sainted Madame Goldman,
+the organizer of the Women’s Battalion in the First Colonial War....”
+
+“What surprises me,” I interrupted, “is that your conservatives--”
+
+“Tut! we have no conservatives--they call themselves Moderates.”
+
+“I am surprised, then, that your Moderates allow such schools to exist!
+Of course they will revolutionize any society in which they are!”
+
+“Well,” said my companion, “but what could they do? Once you begin
+making schools _for_ the children, you start out on the principle that
+education is learning how to live--and you end here.”
+
+I pondered this. “Not necessarily,” I said at last. “You might have
+ended with schools in which the children of the poor were taught how to
+be efficient wage-slaves.”
+
+“Ah, yes,” said my friend, “but they smashed that attempt away back in
+1924.”
+
+“Did they? I’m very glad to hear it!” I cried.... “By the bye, how much
+do these schools cost--all over the country?”
+
+“Less per year than we spent per day on the Second Colonial War.... But
+this is enough of description. You shall see for yourself. Come!” he
+said.
+
+We started toward the theatre.
+
+“Play,” he was saying, “is according to our ideas more fundamental and
+more important in life than work. Consequently the theatre--”
+
+But what he said about the theatre would take us far from anything
+which we are now accustomed to consider education. It involves no less
+a heresy than the calm assumption that the artist type is the highest
+human type, and that the chief service which education can perform for
+the future is the deliberate cultivation of the faculty of “creative
+dreaming.”...
+
+I venture to quote only one sentence:
+
+“_Mankind needs more poets._”
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+A DEFINITION OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
+
+ (From a bulletin issued by the Progressive Education Association,
+ Washington, D. C.)
+
+
+“The aim of Progressive Education is the freest and fullest development
+of the individual, based upon the scientific study of his physical,
+mental, spiritual, and social characteristics and needs.
+
+“Progressive Education as thus defined implies the following conditions:
+
+
+“1. FREEDOM TO DEVELOP NATURALLY
+
+“The conduct of the pupil should be self-governed according to the
+social needs of his community, rather than by arbitrary laws.... Full
+opportunity for initiative and self-expression should be provided,
+together with an environment rich in interesting material that is
+available for the free use of every pupil.
+
+
+“2. INTEREST THE MOTIVE OF ALL WORK
+
+“Interest should be satisfied and developed through: (1) Direct and
+indirect contact with the world and its activities, and use of the
+experience thus gained. (2) Application of knowledge gained, and
+correlation between different subjects. (3) The consciousness of
+achievement.
+
+
+“3. THE TEACHER A GUIDE, NOT A TASK-MASTER
+
+“... Progressive teachers will encourage the use of all the senses,
+training the pupils in both observation and judgment; and instead of
+hearing recitations only, will spend most of the time teaching how to
+use various sources of information, including life activities as well
+as books; how to reason about the information thus acquired; and how
+to express forcefully and logically the conclusions reached. Teachers
+will inspire a desire for knowledge, and will serve as guides in the
+investigations undertaken, rather than as task-masters. To be a proper
+inspiration to their pupils, teachers must have ample opportunity and
+encouragement for self-improvement and for the development of broad
+interests.
+
+
+“4. SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF PUPIL DEVELOPMENT
+
+“School records should ... include both objective and subjective
+reports on those physical, mental, moral, and social characteristics
+which affect both school and adult life, and which can be influenced by
+the school and the home. Such records should be used as a guide for the
+treatment of each pupil, and should also serve to focus the attention
+of the teacher on the all-important work of development, rather than
+on simply teaching subject matter.
+
+
+“5. GREATER ATTENTION TO ALL THAT AFFECTS THE CHILD’S PHYSICAL
+DEVELOPMENT
+
+“One of the first considerations of Progressive Education is the health
+of the pupils. Much more room in which to move about, better light and
+air, clean and well ventilated buildings, easier access to the out
+of doors and greater use of it, are all necessary. There should be
+frequent use of adequate playgrounds....
+
+
+“6. CO-OPERATION BETWEEN SCHOOL AND HOME TO MEET THE NEEDS OF CHILD-LIFE
+
+“The school should provide, with the home, as much as possible of
+all that the natural interests and activities of the child demand,
+especially during the elementary school years. It should give
+opportunity for manual experience for both boys and girls, for
+home-making, and for healthful recreation of various kinds.... These
+conditions can come about only through intelligent co-operation between
+parents and teachers. It is the duty of the parents to know what the
+school is doing and why....
+
+
+“7. THE PROGRESSIVE SCHOOL A LEADER IN EDUCATIONAL MOVEMENTS
+
+“The Progressive School should be ... a laboratory where new ideas if
+worthy meet encouragement; where tradition alone does not rule, but
+the best of the past is leavened with the discoveries of today, and the
+result is freely added to the sum of educational knowledge.
+
+“(_The Association is not committed, and never can be, to any
+particular method or system of education. In regard to such matters it
+is simply a medium through which improvements and developments worked
+out by various agencies can be presented to the public._)”
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+
+[1] It will, I hope, be clear that these remarks apply specifically to
+the grammar school teacher who does have to teach everything. The case
+is less desperate in the higher reaches of our school system.
+
+[2] Except in _Dutch_ New York, and in Massachusetts.
+
+[3] “The one dominant feature of this labour movement [1824-1836]
+was the almost fanatical insistence upon the paramount importance of
+education. In political platforms, in resolutions of public meetings,
+and in the labour press, the statement is repeated over and over,
+that the fundamental demand of labour is for an adequate system of
+education....
+
+“To this movement, more than to any other single cause, if not more
+than to all other causes combined, is due the common school system
+of the United States.... When the movement died out in 1835 to 1837
+... Horace Mann was leading the ‘educational revival,’ and the common
+school was an established institution in nearly every state.”--A. M.
+Simons: “Social Forces in American History.”
+
+[4] In which some of these chapters originally appeared, and to which
+my thanks are due for the privilege of republication.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
+
+
+ Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
+
+ Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+ Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Were You Ever a Child?, by Floyd Dell
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Were You Ever a Child?, by Floyd Dell
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+
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+Title: Were You Ever a Child?
+
+Author: Floyd Dell
+
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+
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+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<h1>Were You Ever<br />
+a Child?</h1>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+MOON-CALF, a <span class="smcap">Novel</span><br />
+THE BRIARY-BUSH, a <span class="smcap">Novel</span></p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+<p class="ph1"> Were You Ever<br />
+a Child?</p>
+
+<p>by</p>
+
+<p class="ph2">Floyd Dell</p>
+
+<p>Second Edition, with a New Preface</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_titlelogo.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+
+<p>New York<br />
+<span class="xlarge">Alfred A Knopf</span><br />
+1921</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1921, BY<br />
+ALFRED A. KNOPF, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+<p class="center">TO<br />
+THE SCHOOL TEACHERS<br />
+OF MY CHILDHOOD<br />
+IN TOKEN OF FORGIVENESS</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">Preface</h2></div>
+
+
+<p>This book is intended as an explanation of the
+new educational ideals and methods now being
+fostered and developed, under great difficulties,
+by courageous educators, in various schools for
+the most part outside the public school system.
+These schools are “experimental” in the sense that
+they are demonstrating upon a small scale the vast
+possibilities of a modern kind of education. The
+importance of these schools consists not so much
+in the advantages which they are now able to
+give to a few of our children, but rather in the
+prophetic vision they afford of all youth growing
+up with the same advantages.</p>
+
+<p>Before that can happen, the public must discover
+what the new education signifies, and why
+the old educational system is unable to keep up
+with the demands of modern civilization.</p>
+
+<p>This book attempts only a small part of such
+a tremendous task of enlightenment. But it does
+undertake a brief review of the educational situation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>
+in the light of our present scientific knowledge
+of human nature—and more especially, of
+the human nature of the child.</p>
+
+<p>Education may be said to be, essentially, an adjustment
+between the child and the age in which
+he lives. That adjustment can be a painless and
+happy one; at present it is a sort of civil war.
+This book deals precisely with the special problems
+involved in the difficult process of reconciling
+the nature of the child with the nature of
+our twentieth-century machine-culture.</p>
+
+<p>The method chosen in these pages for the exposition
+of this situation is one which many readers
+will consider unduly flippant, particularly in
+those passages which deal with the failure of the
+old educational system. But one might as well
+laugh at that failure as cry over it; for it is a
+ridiculous as well as a pathetic failure. The important
+thing is to recognize that it is a failure,
+and to lend a hand if we can in the creating of a
+better kind of education.</p>
+
+<p class="right">F. D.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">Contents</h2></div>
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">I</td><td> The Child <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">II</td><td> The School Building <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">III</td><td> The Teacher <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">IV</td><td> The Book <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">V</td><td> The Magic Theory of Education <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VI</td><td> The Caste System of Education <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VII</td><td> The Canonization of Book-Magic <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VIII</td><td> The Conquest of Culture in America <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">IX</td><td> Smith, Jones and Robinson <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_69">69</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">X</td><td> Employer vs. Trade Unionist <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XI</td><td> The Goose-Step <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XII</td><td> The Gary Plan <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIII</td><td> Learning to Work <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIV</td><td> Learning to Play <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XV</td><td> First and Last Things <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVI</td><td> The Child as Artist <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVII</td><td> The Artist as a Child <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVIII</td><td> The Drama of Education <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span> </td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIX</td><td> The Drama of Life <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_132">132</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XX</td><td> Curiosity <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXI</td><td> The Right to be Wrong <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXII</td><td> Enterprise <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIII</td><td> Democracy <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIV</td><td> Responsibility <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXV</td><td> Love <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXVI</td><td> Education in 1947 <small>A. D.</small> <span class="gap"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></span></td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">Were You Ever a Child?</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">WERE you ever a child?...</p>
+
+<p>I ask out of no indecent curiosity as
+to your past. But I wish to address
+only those who would naturally be interested in
+the subject of Education. Those who haven’t
+been children themselves are in many respects
+fortunate beings; but they lack the background of
+bitter experience which makes this, to the rest of
+us, an acutely interesting theme—and they might
+just as well stop reading right here. I pause to
+allow them to put the book aside....</p>
+
+<p>With my remaining audience, fit though few, I
+feel that I can get down at once to the brass tacks
+of the situation. <i>We have all been educated</i>—and
+just look at us!</p>
+
+<p>We ourselves, as products of an educational
+system, are sufficiently damning evidence against
+it. If we think of what we happily might have
+been, and then of what we are, we cannot but concede
+the total failure or the helpless inadequacy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+of our education to educe those possibilities of
+ours into actuality.</p>
+
+<p>Looking back on those years upon years which
+we spent in school, we know that something was
+wrong. In this respect our adult convictions find
+impressive support in our earlier views on the
+subject. If we will remember, we did not, at
+the time, exactly approve of the school system.
+Many of us, in fact, went in for I. W. W. tactics—especially
+sabotage. Our favourite brand of
+sabotage was the “withdrawal of efficiency”—in
+our case a kind of instinctive passive resistance.
+Amiable onlookers, such as our parents or the
+board of education, might have thought that we
+were learning something all the while; but that’s
+just where we fooled ’em! There were, of course,
+a few of us who really learned and remembered
+everything—who could state off-hand, right now,
+if anybody asked us, in what year Norman the
+Conqueror landed in England. But the trouble
+is that so few people ask us!</p>
+
+<p>There was one bit of candour in our schooling—at
+its very end. They called that ending a
+Commencement. And so indeed we found it.
+Bewildered, unprepared, out of touch with the
+realities, we commenced then and there to learn
+what life is like. We found it discouraging or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+inspiriting in a thousand ways; but the thing which
+struck us at the time most forcibly was that it was
+in every respect quite unlike school. The values
+which had obtained there, did not exist outside.
+One could not cram for a job as if it were an
+examination; one could not get in the good graces
+of a machine as if it were a teacher; the docility
+which won high “marks” in school was called
+lack of enterprise in the business world, dulness
+in social life, stupidity in the realm of love. The
+values of real life were new and different. We
+had been quite carefully prepared to go on studying
+and attending classes and taking examinations;
+but the real world was not like that. It was full
+of adventure and agony and beauty; its politics
+were not in the least like the pages of the Civics
+Text-Book; its journalism and literature had purposes
+and methods undreamed of by the professor
+who compiled (from other text-books compiled
+by other professors) the English Composition
+Book; going on the road for a wholesale house
+was a geographical emprise into whose fearful
+darknesses even the Advanced Geography Course
+threw no assisting light; the economics of courtship
+and marriage and parenthood had somehow
+been overlooked by the man who Lectured upon
+that Subject.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>Whether we had studied our lessons or not;
+whether we had passed our examinations triumphantly,
+or just got through by the skin of our
+teeth—what difference did it make, to us or to
+the world? And what to us now are those triumphs
+and humiliations, the failure or success of
+school, except a matter of occasional humorous
+reminiscence?</p>
+
+<p>What would we think of a long and painful and
+expensive surgical operation of which it could be
+said afterward that it made not the slightest difference
+to the patient whether it succeeded or
+failed? Yet, judged by results in later life, the
+difference between failing and succeeding in school
+is merely the difference between a railroad collision
+and a steamboat explosion, as described by
+Uncle Tom:</p>
+
+<p>“If you’s in a railroad smash-up, why—thar
+yo’ is! But if yo’s in a steamboat bus’-up, why—whar
+is yo’?”</p>
+
+<p>It is our task, however, to investigate this confused
+catastrophe, and fix the responsibility for
+its casualties.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">I. The Child</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">EDUCATION, as popularly conceived, includes
+as its chief ingredients a Child, a
+Building, Text-Books, and a Teacher.
+Obviously, one of them must be to blame for its
+going wrong. Let us see if it is the Child. We
+will put him on the witness stand:</p>
+
+<p>Q. Who are you?</p>
+
+<p>A. I am a foreigner in a strange land.</p>
+
+<p>Q. What!</p>
+
+<p>A. Please, sir, that’s what everybody says.
+Sometimes they call me a little angel; the poet
+Wordsworth says that I come trailing clouds of
+glory from Heaven which is my home. On the
+other hand, I am often called a little devil; and
+when you see the sort of things I do in the comic
+supplements, you will perhaps be inclined to accept
+that description. I really don’t know which is
+right, but both opinions seem to agree that I am
+an immigrant.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Speak up so that the jury can hear. Have
+you any friends in this country?</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>A. No, sir—not exactly. But there are two
+people, a woman and a man, natives of this land,
+who for some reason take an interest in me. It
+was they who taught me to speak the language.
+They also taught me many of the customs of the
+country, which at first I could not understand.
+For instance, my preoccupation with certain natural—[the
+rest of the sentence stricken from the
+record].</p>
+
+<p>Q. You need not go into such matters. I
+fear you still have many things to learn about the
+customs of the country. One of them is not to
+allude to that side of life in public.</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes, sir; so those two people tell me. I’m
+sure I don’t see why. It seems to me a very
+interesting and important—</p>
+
+<p>Q. That will do. Now as to those people
+who are looking after you: Are your relations
+with them agreeable?</p>
+
+<p>A. Nominally, yes. But I must say that they
+have treated me in a very peculiar way, which
+has aroused in me a deep resentment. You see,
+at first they treated me like a king—in fact, like
+a Kaiser. I had only to wave my hand and they
+came running to know what it was I wanted. I
+uttered certain magic syllables in my own language,
+and they prostrated themselves before me,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+offering me gifts. When they brought the wrong
+gifts, I doubled up my fists and twisted my face,
+and gave vent to loud cries—and they became
+still more abject, until at last I was placated.</p>
+
+<p>Q. That is what is called parental love.
+What then?</p>
+
+<p>A. I naturally regarded them as my slaves.
+But presently they rebelled. One of them, of
+whom I had been particularly fond, commenced
+to make me drink milk from a bottle instead of
+from—</p>
+
+<p>Q. Yes, yes, we understand. And you resented
+that?</p>
+
+<p>A. I withdrew the light of my favour from
+her for a long time. I expressed my disappointment
+in her. I offered freely to pardon her delinquency
+if she would acknowledge her fault and
+resume her familiar duties. But perhaps I did
+not succeed in conveying my meaning clearly, for
+at this time I had no command of her language.
+At any rate, my efforts were useless. And her
+reprehensible conduct was only the first of a series
+of what seemed to me indignities and insults. I
+was no longer a king. I was compelled to obey
+my own slaves. In vain I made the old magic
+gestures, uttered the old talismanic commands—in
+vain even my doubling up of fists and twisting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+of face and loud outcries; the power was gone
+from these things. Yet not quite all the power—for
+my crying was at least a sort of punishment
+to them, and as such I often inflicted it upon them.</p>
+
+<p>Q. You were a naughty child.</p>
+
+<p>A. So they told me. But I only felt aggrieved
+at my new helplessness, and wished to recover
+somewhat of my old sense of power over them.
+But as I gradually acquired new powers I lost
+in part my feeling of helplessness. I also
+found that there were other beings like myself,
+and we conducted magic ceremonies together in
+which we transformed ourselves and our surroundings
+at will. These delightful enterprises
+were continually being interrupted by those other
+people, our parents, who insisted on our learning
+ever more and more of their own customs. They
+wished us to be interested in their activities, and
+they were pleased when we asked questions about
+things we did not understand. Yet there were
+some questions which they would not answer, or
+which they rebuked us for asking, or to which
+they returned replies that, after consultation
+among ourselves, we decided were fabulous. So
+we were compelled to form our own theories about
+these things. We asked, for instance—</p>
+
+<p>Q. Please confine your answers to the questions.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+That is another matter not spoken of in
+public; though to be quite frank with you, public
+taste seems to be changing somewhat in this respect.</p>
+
+<p>A. I am very glad to hear it. I would like
+to know—</p>
+
+<p>Q. Not now, not now.—You say you have
+learned by this time many of the customs of the
+country?</p>
+
+<p>A. Oh, yes, sir! I can dress myself, and wash
+my face (though perhaps not in a manner quite
+above criticism), count the change which the
+grocer gives me, tell the time by a clock, say
+“Yes, ma’am” and “Thank you”—and I am
+beginning to be adept in the great national game
+of baseball.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Have you decided what you would do if
+you were permitted to take part in our adult activities?</p>
+
+<p>A. I would like to be a truck-driver.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Why?</p>
+
+<p>A. Because he can whip the big horses.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Do you know anything about machinery?</p>
+
+<p>A. No, sir; I knew a boy who had a steam-engine,
+but he moved away before I got a chance
+to see how it worked.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>Q. You spoke of truck-driving just now. Do
+you know where the truck-driver is going with his
+load?</p>
+
+<p>A. No, sir.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Do you know where he came from?</p>
+
+<p>A. No, sir.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Do you know what a factory is?</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes, sir; Jim’s father got three fingers cut
+off in a factory.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Do you know where the sun rises and sets?</p>
+
+<p>A. It rises in the East and sets in the West.</p>
+
+<p>Q. How does it get from the West back to
+the East during the night?</p>
+
+<p>A. It goes under the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Q. How?</p>
+
+<p>A. It digs a tunnel!</p>
+
+<p>Q. What does it dig the tunnel with?</p>
+
+<p>A. With its claws.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Who was George Washington?</p>
+
+<p>A. He was the Father of his country, and he
+never told a lie.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Would you like to be a soldier?</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes.</p>
+
+<p>Q. If we let you take part in the government
+of our country, what ticket would you vote?</p>
+
+<p>A. The Republican ticket. My father is a
+Republican.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>Q. What would you do if you had ten cents?</p>
+
+<p>A. I’d go to see Charley Chaplin in the moving-picture
+show.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Thank you. You can step down.</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes, sir. Where is my ten cents?</p>
+
+<p>And now, gentlemen, you have heard the witness.
+He has told the truth—and nothing but
+the truth—and he would have told the whole
+truth if I had not been vigilant in defence of your
+modesty. He is, as he says, a foreigner, incompletely
+naturalized. In certain directions his development
+has proceeded rapidly. He shows a
+patriotism and a sense of political principles which
+are quite as mature as most of ours. But in
+other directions there is much to be desired. He
+does not know what kind of world it is he lives
+in, nor has he any knowledge of how he could
+best take his place, with the most satisfaction to
+himself and his fellow-men, in that world—whether
+as farmer or engineer, poet or policeman,
+or in the humbler but none the less necessary
+capacities of dustman or dramatic critic.</p>
+
+<p>It would be idle for us to pretend that we think
+it will be easy for him to learn all this. But
+without this knowledge he is going to be a nuisance—not
+without a certain charm (indeed, I know
+several individuals who have remained children<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+all their lives, and they are the most delightful
+of companions for an idle hour), but still, by
+reason of incapacity and irresponsibility, an undesirable
+burden upon the community: unable to
+support himself, and simply not to be trusted in
+the responsible relations of marriage and parenthood.
+We simply can’t let him remain in his
+present state of ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, how is he ever going to be taught?
+You have seen just about how far private enterprise
+is likely to help him. That man and woman
+of whom he told us have other things to do besides
+teach him. And if he is turned over to
+special private institutions, we have no guarantee
+that they will not take advantage of his helplessness,
+keep him under their control and rob him of
+freedom of movement for a long term of years,
+set him to learning a mass of fabulous or irrelevant
+information, instil in him a fictitious sense of its
+value by a system of prizes and punishments, and
+finally turn him out into our world no better prepared
+to take his proper part in it than he was
+before; and thus, having wasted his own time, he
+would have to waste ours by compelling us to
+teach him all over again.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, the difficulty of dealing with him appears
+so great that I am moved to make the statesmanlike<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+proposal—never before, I believe, presented
+to the public—of passing a law which will
+prevent this kind of undesirable immigration altogether.</p>
+
+<p>Shall we abolish the Child?</p>
+
+<p>The only other reasonable alternative is for us
+to undertake this difficult and delicate business of
+education ourselves—assume as a public responsibility
+the provision of a full opportunity for this
+helpless, wistful, stubborn little barbarian to find
+out about the world and about himself. Well,
+shall we do that?</p>
+
+<p>Let us not allow any false sentimentality to affect
+our decision....</p>
+
+<p>The vote seems to be in favour of giving him
+his chance. Very well!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">II. The School Building</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">IT is clear that what is most of all the matter
+with the child is his sense of helplessness....
+He told us how he lost inevitably his
+position of King in the magic realm of infancy—a
+kingship only to be recovered fragmentarily in
+dreams and in the fantasies of play—how he discovered
+himself to be little and weak and clumsy
+and ignorant of the ways of the strange real
+world. It is clear too that the chief difference
+which separates us from childhood is the acquisition
+of a few powers, physical and intellectual,
+which make us feel to some extent masters of our
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Does not education, then, first of all consist in
+giving to children a progressive sense of power,
+through a physical and intellectual mastery of
+their environment? And would not the acquisition
+of an adequately increasing mastership deprive
+the child of any need for those outbursts
+of rage and malice and mischief which are today<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+the most characteristic trait of childhood, and
+which are only his attempt to deny his shameful
+helplessness? Shall we not try at the outset to
+make the child feel that he is a useful and important
+part of our world?</p>
+
+<p>The answer to these questions being “Yes,”
+we now turn to the building in which what now
+passes for education is conducted, and inquire
+whether it answers this primary requirement.</p>
+
+<p>But first of all, let us free our minds from any
+lingering superstitions we may cherish with reference
+to school buildings. Let us get over the
+notion that school-buildings are sacrosanct, like
+churches. I am inclined to think that we have
+transferred to the school building some of our
+traditional respect for churches. We feel that it
+is a desecration to allow dances and political meetings
+to be held there. We seem to regard with
+jealous pride the utter emptiness and uselessness
+of our school buildings after hours; it is a kind of
+ceremonial wastefulness which appeals to some
+deep-seated ridiculous barbaric sense of religious
+taboo in us. Well, we must get over it if we are
+to give the children a square deal. If it should
+turn out that the school building is wrong, we must
+be prepared to abolish it.</p>
+
+<p>And we must get over our notion that a school<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+building is necessary in order for a school to exist.
+The most famous school in the world had no building
+at all—only a stretch of outdoors, with some
+grass and a few plane trees. Of course, the
+Greeks were fonder of the open air than we are,
+and their winters were less severe. And then, too,
+the Greek idea of education was simpler than ours.
+It comprised simply athletics and philosophy and
+one or two other aristocratic subjects which I forget
+at the moment—art being regarded as manual
+labour, just as the drama was considered a
+religious function, and government a kind of communal
+festivity! And, of course, the Persian
+theory of education—to be able to ride, shoot,
+and tell the truth—could be carried out under
+the open sky better than anywhere else. But our
+aims are more elaborate, and it may very well be
+true—in fact, I have been convinced of it all
+along—that much of our educational process
+should be carried on indoors.</p>
+
+<p>But let us not be too hasty in conceding the
+School Building’s right to existence. There is another
+side to the question.</p>
+
+<p>The trouble is, once you give a School Building
+permission to exist, it straightway commences to
+put on semi-sacerdotal airs—as if it were a kind
+of outcast but repentant church. It arranges itself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+into dingy little secular chapels, with a kind
+of furtive pulpit in front for the teacher, and a lot
+of individual pews for the mourners. It makes
+the chemistry laboratory, which it regards as a
+profane intruder, feel cramped and uncomfortable;
+it puts inconveniences in the way of the
+gymnasium; and it is dreadfully afraid some one
+will think that the assembly hall will look like a
+theatre; while as for carpentry and printing shops,
+ateliers for sculpture groups, and a furnace for
+the pottery class, it feels that it has lost caste utterly
+if it is forced to admit them; nor will it condescend
+to acknowledge such a thing as a kitchen-garden
+in its back yard as having any relation to
+itself. You can well understand that if it has
+these familiar adjuncts of everyday life, it will
+seem just like part of the ordinary world; and so
+it tries its hardest to keep them out, and generally
+succeeds pretty well.</p>
+
+<p>But since what we started out to do was to
+teach children what the world of reality is like,
+it is necessary that they should be in and of the
+real world. And since the real world outside is
+not, unfortunately, fully available for educational
+purposes, it is necessary to provide them with the
+real world on a smaller scale—a world in which
+they can, without danger, familiarize themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+with their environment in its essential aspects—a
+world which is theirs to observe, touch, handle,
+take apart and put back together again, play with,
+work with, and become master of; a world in
+which they have no cause to feel helpless or weak
+or useless or unimportant; a world from which
+they can go into the great world outside without
+any abrupt transition—a world, in short, in
+which they can learn to be efficient and happy human
+beings.</p>
+
+<p>The School Building, imposing upon our credulity
+and pretending to be too sacred for these
+purposes, needs to be taken down from its pedestal.
+It may be permitted to have a share in the
+education of our youth if it will but remember that
+it is no more important in that process than a
+garden, a swimming tank, a playground, the
+library around the corner, the woods where the
+botany class goes, or the sky overhead that exhibits
+its constellations gladly at the request of the
+science teacher. Let it humble itself while there
+is yet time, and not expect its little guests to keep
+silence within its walls as if they were in a church,
+for it may even yet be overthrown—and replaced
+by a combination theatre-gymnasium-studio-office-and-model-factory
+building. And <i>then</i> it will be
+sorry!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">III. The Teacher</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">SHALL the Teacher be abolished?...</p>
+
+<p>What’s that you say?—Oh, but surely
+not before she has had a hearing!—the
+worst criminal deserves that much consideration.
+I beg of you to let me speak one moment in her
+behalf.—Ah, thank you, my friends.</p>
+
+<p>(Sister, you had a tight squeak just then! If
+it hadn’t been for my presence of mind and my
+habitual coolness in the presence of infuriated
+mobs, I hate to think what would have happened.—And
+now let me see: what <i>can</i> I say in your
+behalf? H’m.... H’m....)</p>
+
+<p>My friends, this unhappy woman (for we shall
+centre our attention on the female of the species)
+is more sinned against than sinning. Reflect!
+The status of women in the United States has
+changed in the last fifty years. Modern industry
+has almost utterly destroyed the old pioneer home
+with its partnership-marriage; ambitious young
+men no longer have an economic need for capable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+women-partners; women have lost their wonted
+economic value as potential helpers, and their capacity
+for motherhood appears to the largest section
+of young manhood in the aspect of a danger
+rather than a blessing. Women have, to be sure,
+acquired a new value, in the eyes of a smaller class
+of economically “arrived” men, as a sign of their
+“arrival”—that is, they are desired as advertisements
+of their husbands’ economic status. In
+one sense, the task of demonstrating the extent of
+a husband’s income is easier than the pioneer task
+of helping take care of a farm and raising a houseful
+of babies; but, after all, such a career does require
+either natural talent or a high degree of
+training in the graceful habits of conspicuous idleness
+and honorific extravagance. And, whether
+it is that the vast majority of women spurned such
+a career as an essentially immoral one, or whether
+they were not really up to its requirements, or
+whether the demand was found to be more than
+met by the hordes of candidates turned out yearly
+by the boarding-schools—whatever the reason,
+the fact remains that a large number of women
+began to see the necessity and to conceive the desirability
+of some career other than marriage.
+But industrial evolution, which had destroyed their
+former opportunities, had failed to make any considerable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+or at least any decent room for them in
+the industrial scheme. Most particularly was
+this true for the young women of the middle class.
+They were unable to go into the professions or
+the respectable trades, and unwilling (for excellent
+reasons) to enter the factories; they were
+given no opportunity to learn how to do anything—they
+were (quite against their will, but inevitably)
+condemned to profound ignorance of the
+most important things in the world—work and
+love; and so, naturally, they became Teachers.</p>
+
+<p>The world did not want them, and so they
+stayed out of the world, in that drab, quasi-religious
+edifice, the School Building, and prepared
+others to go into the world....</p>
+
+<p>Good Heavens! do you suppose for a minute,
+if this unfortunate woman had known enough
+about Anything in Particular to get a respectable
+job outside, that she would have stayed in there
+to teach Everything in General?<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Do you suppose
+she <i>wants</i> to be a Teacher? Do you suppose
+she likes pretending to be adept in a dozen difficult
+subjects at once, inflicting an impossible ideal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+of “order” upon the forty restless children whom
+her weary, amateur, underpaid efforts at instruction
+have failed to interest, spending her days in
+the confronting of an impossible task and her
+nights in the “correcting” of an endless series of
+written proofs of her failure—and, on top of
+that, being denied most of her human rights?
+The munition-factory girls at least had their fling
+when the day’s work was over; but she is expected
+to be a Vestal. In some places she can’t
+get married without losing her job; in New York,
+if she is married, she can’t have a baby! No—it
+is her misfortune, not her fault, that she is what
+she is.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, I think that if we could have managed
+to keep the war going a little longer, she would
+have pretty much abolished herself. Abdication
+is becoming popular, and she among all the monarchs
+is not the least uncomfortable and restricted
+and hedged in by useless divinity. Her
+abdication will be as disturbing an event as the
+Russian Revolution. The Russians were accustomed
+to their Czar; but they just had to learn to
+get along without him. And perhaps a similar
+lesson is in store for us....</p>
+
+<p>You find it a little difficult to imagine what
+School would be like without Teachers? Well,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+for one thing, it would be more like the rest of
+the world than it is now—and that, we agreed,
+was what we wanted. Where else, indeed, except
+in School, do you find Teachers? The rest
+of the world manages to get along without them
+very well. Perhaps it is merely a superstition
+that they are needed in School! Let us inquire
+into the matter.</p>
+
+<p>What do people in the outside world do when
+they want to learn something? They go to somebody
+who knows about it, and ask him. They do
+not go to somebody who is reputed to know about
+everything—except, when they are very young,
+to their parents: and they speedily become disillusioned
+about <i>that</i> variety of omniscience.
+They go to somebody who might reasonably be
+expected to know about the particular thing they
+are interested in. When a man buys a motor-car,
+he does not say to himself: “Where can I find
+somebody who can teach me how to run a motor-car
+and dance the tango and predict a rise on the
+stock-market?” He does not look in the telephone
+directory under T. He just gets an experienced
+driver to teach him. And when the
+driver tells him that this is the self-starter, and
+proceeds to start the car with it, a confidence is
+established which makes him inclined to believe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+all he can understand of what he is presently told
+about the mysterious functions of the carburetor.
+He does not even inquire if the man has taken
+vows of celibacy. He just pays attention and
+asks questions and tries to do the thing himself,
+until he learns.</p>
+
+<p>But this case, of course, assumes an interest of
+the pupil in the subject, a willingness and even a
+desire to learn about it, a feeling that the matter
+is of some importance to himself. And come to
+think of it, these motives are generally present
+in the learning that goes on in the outside world.
+It is only in School that the pupil is expected to be
+unwilling to learn.</p>
+
+<p>When you were a child, and passed the door of
+the village blacksmith shop, and looked in, day
+after day, you saw the blacksmith heating a
+piece of iron red hot in the furnace, or twisting
+it deftly with his pincers, or dropping it
+sizzling into a tub of water, or paring a
+horse’s hoofs, or hammering in the silvery
+nails with swift blows; you admired his skill,
+and stood in awe of his strength; and if he
+had offered to let you blow the bellows for him
+and shown you how to twist a red-hot penny, that
+would have been a proud moment. It would also
+have been an educational one. But suppose there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+had been a new shop set up in the town, and when
+you looked in at the open door you saw a man at
+work painting a picture; and suppose a bell rang
+just then, and the man stopped painting right in
+the middle of a brush-stroke, and commenced to
+read aloud “How They Brought the Good News
+from Ghent to Aix”; and suppose when he was
+half way through, the bell rang again, and he
+said, “We will go on with that tomorrow,” and
+commenced to chisel the surface of a piece of
+marble; and then, after a little, somewhat exhaustedly,
+started in to play “The Rock of Ages”
+on a flute, interrupting the tune to order you to
+stand up straight and not whisper to the little
+boy beside you. There’s no doubt what you
+would think of him; you would know perfectly
+well that he was crazy; people don’t do things in
+that way anywhere in the world, except in school.
+And even if he <i>had</i> assured you that painting and
+poetry, sculpture and music, were later in your
+life going to be matters of the deepest importance
+and interest, and that you should start in now with
+the determination of becoming proficient in the
+arts, it would not have helped much. Not very
+much.</p>
+
+<p>It’s nonsense that children do not want to learn.
+Everybody wants to learn. And everybody wants<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+to teach. And the process is going on all the
+time. All that is necessary is to put a person
+who knows something—really knows it—within
+the curiosity-range of some one who doesn’t
+know it: the process commences at once. It is
+almost irresistible. In the interest of previous
+engagements one has to tear one’s self away from
+all sorts of opportunities to learn things which
+may never be of the slightest use but which nevertheless
+are alluring precisely because one does
+not know them.</p>
+
+<p>People talk about children being hard to teach,
+and in the next breath deplore the facility with
+which they acquire the “vices.” That seems
+strange. It takes as much patience, energy and
+faithful application to become proficient in a vice
+as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider
+how much more popular poker is than equations!
+But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of
+teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say,
+a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could
+draw the best map of the North Atlantic States?
+And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely
+improbable that any little boy ever learned
+to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful
+once a day.</p>
+
+<p>I think that if there were no teachers—no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+hastily and superficially trained Vestals who were
+supposed to know everything—but just ordinary
+human beings who knew passionately and thoroughly
+one thing (but you’d be surprised to find
+what a lot of other knowledge that would incidentally
+comprise!) and who had the patience to
+show little boys and girls how to do that thing—we
+might get along without Immaculate Omniscience
+pretty well. Of course, we’d have to pay
+them more, because they could get other jobs out
+in the larger world; and besides, you couldn’t expect
+to get somebody who knows how to do something,
+for the price you are accustomed to pay
+those who only know how to teach everything.</p>
+
+<p>Nor need the change necessarily be abrupt. It
+could probably be effected with considerable success
+by firing all the teachers at the beginning of
+the summer vacations, and engaging their services
+as human beings for the next year. Many of
+them would find no difficulty at all in readjusting
+themselves....</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">IV. The Book</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">OF the ingredients of the educational catastrophe,
+the only one remaining to be discussed
+is the Book. Is it to blame for
+the failure of the process which has brought us
+to our present state of elaborate ignorance, and
+ought it to be abolished?</p>
+
+<p>What have books got to do with education,
+anyway?</p>
+
+<p>Not half as much as most people think! If
+education is learning to be a civilized human being,
+books have their place in it. But civilized
+life is composed of a number of things besides
+books—it contains machinery, art, political organization,
+handicraft, flowers and birds, and
+other things too numerous to mention, all of
+which are notoriously capable of being learned
+about in the great world outside without the use
+of books. If in the great world outside the
+school, then why not in the little world inside the
+school?</p>
+
+<p>Not that the use of books should be ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+avoided anywhere for the sake of the avoidance.
+Books are a convenience—or an inconvenience,
+as the case may be. Like other valuable human
+utilities, they are frequently a nuisance if obtruded
+in the place of better things. Every intelligent
+person has the same attitude toward books that he
+has toward his sweetheart’s photograph: if she is
+out of reach, if the picture furnishes him his only
+way of seeing her, he values it profoundly; but
+if she is in the next room, he does not linger with
+the image. True, he may fall in love with the
+picture first—the picture may reveal to him the
+girl whom otherwise he might never have appreciated;
+and books do make us appreciate aspects
+of reality which we have neglected. But in education
+books are not an adequate substitute for direct
+contact with the realities with which they deal,
+precisely because they do not give the sense of
+power which only comes from direct contact with
+reality. It is the function of books to assist in
+that educational contact—not to take the place
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>There is, indeed, a sense in which books are
+the most egregious fraud ever perpetrated upon
+a world hungry for the knowledge which <i>is</i> power.
+I am reminded of the scene in “The Wild Duck,”
+when the father returns home from a grand dinner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+party. He has promised to bring his little
+daughter some sweetmeats or cake—and he has
+forgotten to do so. But—he grandly draws
+from his pocket a piece of printed matter—“Here,
+my child, is the menu: you can sit down
+and read about the whole dinner!” Poor little
+Hedvig knew that she wasn’t getting anything to
+eat; but some of us don’t realize that for years
+and years; we dutifully masticate the innutritious
+contents of text-books while we are starving for a
+taste of reality.</p>
+
+<p>Take geography, for instance. I know quite
+well that it was not the intention of the author of
+the text-book which I studied that I should conceive
+the state of Illinois as yellow and the neighbouring
+state of Indiana as pale green: but I do
+to this day. They were not realities to me, but
+pictures in a book; and they were not realities because
+they had no relation whatever to real experience.
+If I had been asked to draw a map of
+the school grounds, with the boys’ side distinguished
+by one colour and the girls’ by another,
+that convention would thereafter have seemed
+only what it was. If I had drawn a map of the
+town I lived in, I would have been thenceforth
+unable, I am sure, to see a map without feeling
+the realities of stream and wood and hill and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+house and farm of which it is a conventional abstraction.
+I would, in short, have learned something
+about geography. The very word would
+have acquired a fascinating significance—the depiction
+of the surface of the earth! whereas all the
+word geography actually means to me now is—a
+large flat book. And if an aviator should stop
+me and ask which is the way to Illinois, I couldn’t
+for my life tell him: but if you brought me that
+old geography book and opened it to the map of
+the United States, I could put my finger on Illinois
+in the dark! You see, Illinois is for me
+not a part of the real world—it is a yellow picture
+in a large flat book.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way, I have the impression that the
+American Revolution happened in a certain thick
+book bound in red cloth—not by any chance in
+the New York and New England whose streets
+I have walked in. (And, for that matter, as I
+have later discovered, much of the American Revolution
+of the school histories—such as the
+Boston Tea-Party as described—did not happen
+anywhere except in the pages of such text-books).
+The only thing I know about the crossing of the
+Delaware, for example, is that it is a Leading
+Fact of American History, and occurred on the
+right hand page, a little below and to the left of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+a picture. And this conception of historical
+events as a series of sentences occurring in a certain
+order on a certain page, seems to me the inevitable
+consequence of learning history from a
+text-book.</p>
+
+<p>There are other objections to the use of text-books.
+One is their frequent perversion or suppression
+of truth for moral, patriotic or sentimental
+reasons: in this respect they are like practically
+all books intended for children. They are
+generally pot-boilers written by men of no standing
+in the intellectual or even in the scholastic
+world. But even when a text-book is written by
+a man of real learning, the absence of a critical
+audience of his equals seems often to deprive him
+of a stimulus necessary to good writing, and leave
+him free to indulge in long-repressed childishnesses
+of his own which he would never dare exhibit
+to a mature public. And even when text-books
+are neither grossly incompetent nor palpably
+dishonest, there is nevertheless almost invariably
+something cheap and trashy about their
+composition which repels the student who can
+choose his own books. Why should they be inflicted
+upon helpless children?</p>
+
+<p>Even if all text-books were miracles of accuracy
+and order, even if they all showed literary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+talent of a high degree, their usefulness would
+still be in question. If children are to be given a
+sense of the reality of the events which they study,
+they must get some feeling of contact with the
+facts. And to this project the use of a text-book
+is fatal. Let us turn to history once more. I
+take it that a text-book of history, as intended and
+as used, is a book which tells everything which it
+is believed necessary for the pupil to know.
+Right there it divorces itself, completely and irrevocably,
+from the historical category. History
+is <i>not</i> a statement of what people ought to
+know. History is an <i>inquiry</i> into the nature and
+relationship and significance of past events. Not
+a pronouncement upon these things, but a searching
+into them. Now the outstanding fact about
+past events is that they happened some time ago.
+The historian does not, to begin with, know what
+happened, let alone how and why it happened.
+He is dependent upon other people’s reports. His
+chief task is often to determine the comparative
+accuracy of these various reports. And when we
+read the writings of a real historian, the sense of
+contact we have with the events under discussion
+comes from our feeling that we have listened to
+a crowd of contrary witnesses, and, with our
+author’s assistance, got at the truth behind their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+words. More than that, the historian himself is
+addressing you, not as if he thought you had never
+read anything on the subject before and never
+would again, but with implicit or explicit reference
+to the opinions of other historians. He is
+himself only one of a crowd of witnesses, from all
+of whose testimony he expects you to form your
+own opinion of those past events which none of
+you will ever meet face to face.</p>
+
+<p>Compare this with the school text-book. It
+was evidently written by Omniscience Itself, for
+it does not talk as if the facts were in the slightest
+doubt, as if there were any two opinions about
+them, as if it were necessary to inquire into the
+past to find out something about it. It does not
+condescend to offer an opinion in agreement or in
+controversy with the views of others. It does
+not confess any difficulty in arriving at a just conclusion.
+No—it says <i>This happened</i> and <i>That
+happened</i>. Perhaps it is all true as gospel. But
+facts so presented are abstractions, devoid of the
+warmth and colour of reality. Even the schools
+have learned how uninteresting dates are. But
+they do not realize that dates are uninteresting
+because, since nobody can possibly doubt them,
+it does no good whatever to believe in them. It
+is only those truths which need the assistance of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+our belief that engage our interest. It is only
+then that they concern us. We are interested
+in politics because it is the process of making up
+our minds about the future; and we are interested
+in history, when we <i>are</i> interested, because it is
+the process of making up our minds about the past.</p>
+
+<p>By eliminating the text-book, or by using it
+simply as a convenient syllabus and chronological
+guide to an inquiry into the significance and relationship
+of the events of the past, with the aid
+of every good historical work available for reference,
+the study of history would become a matter
+of concern to the pupil; and the past, looked at
+from several angles, and down a felt perspective
+of time, would become real.</p>
+
+<p>I am aware that this is done in the higher
+flights of the educational system. But why is it
+that the easy and profitable methods of learning
+are put off so long and the hardest and most profitless
+forced upon children? Is it that easier learning
+means harder teaching? I am not sure of
+that; the only difficulty about such a method as
+I have described would be in the mere change
+from the old to the new. No, I think the real
+trouble lies in the superstition of the Book.</p>
+
+<p>This may be seen in the teaching of mathematics.
+Before they come to school, children<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+have usually learned to count, and learned easily
+because they were counting real objects. The
+objective aspect of mathematics is almost immediately
+lost sight of in school. Even the blackboard
+affords no release from the book, for who
+ever saw a blackboard outside a schoolroom?
+Mathematics comes to seem something horribly
+useless. The child simply does <i>not believe</i> that
+people ever go through these tortures when they
+grow up. Even the suggestive fables into which
+the “examples” are sometimes cast, fail to convince
+him. “If a carpenter—” “A salesman
+has—” But he is neither a carpenter nor a salesman.
+He is a weary child, and he is not going to
+pretend to be a carpenter or a salesman unless he
+gets some fun out of it. The thing about a carpenter
+or a salesman which appeals to the child’s
+imagination is something other than mathematics.
+No, the printed word does not suffice. But let
+him <i>be</i> a carpenter or salesman for the nonce, let
+him with saw or sugar-scoop in hand find it to be
+necessary to add, subtract, multiply, divide and
+deal in fractions, and he will rise undaunted to
+the occasion. And, having found in actual practice
+just what his difficulties are, he will cheerfully
+use book and blackboard. Where there’s
+a will there’s a way, and mathematics has only to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+come to seem a desirable acquisition to become an
+easily mastered one. I should say that the ideal
+way of teaching a boy of eight mathematics—including,
+if necessary, trigonometry—is as a
+part of the delightful task of constructing a motorcycle.
+I remember that I gained in twenty-four
+hours an insight into the mysteries of English
+grammar which I had failed to get in the 1200
+odd lessons previously inflicted on me in school—and
+I gained that insight in writing my first short
+story. When an effect that you yourself want to
+achieve depends on a preposition or a fraction,
+then, and only then, are such things humanly worth
+knowing.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to see the most terrific and damning
+criticism of text-books, open one of them which
+has been used by a child, and see it written there
+on the margins in fretful and meandering curleques,
+which say as plainly as the handwriting on
+Belshazzar’s wall, “I have weighed this book
+in the balance and found it wanting. It does not
+interest me. It leaves my spirit vexed and impatient.”
+I have estimated that the scrawl-work
+in a single average schoolbook, if unwound and
+placed end to end, would extend along the Lincoln
+Highway from Weehawken, N. J., to Davenport,
+Ia.; while the total energy which goes into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+making of these scrawls each day in the public
+schools of New York City alone, would be sufficient
+to hoist a grand piano to the top of the
+Woolworth building. The grand total for the
+United States of the soul-power that dribbles out
+into these ugly pencilings, amounts to a huge Niagara
+of wasted energy.</p>
+
+<p>The Book, as the centre of our educational
+process, must be demoted. It is a good servant,
+but a bad master. And only as a servant can it be
+tolerated—as an adjunct to the gardens and
+workshops and laboratories and kitchens and
+studios and playgrounds of the school-world.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">V. The Magic Theory of Education</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">BUT these are not the only superstitions
+which have muddled the educational process.
+You have heard that favourite
+speech of the condemned criminal: “I never
+had no education.”</p>
+
+<p>He does not refer to moral education; he is not
+complaining that he was never instructed as to
+the sacredness of life and private property. He
+means that he never studied arithmetic and
+geography and spelling—or not enough to mention.
+He means that geography, etc., would have
+saved him from a life of crime and a finish behind
+the bars.</p>
+
+<p>And you have heard some unlettered parent,
+come from a foreign shore, repeat over and over:</p>
+
+<p>“My boy, <i>he</i> get education. I no have education.
+But my boy—he get education.” Or
+words to that effect.</p>
+
+<p>True; his boy will have a better chance than he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+himself had; he may become President of the
+United States or of a Fruit Trust. And it is
+equally true of the other man, that if he had
+learned arithmetic in school instead of sneak-thievery
+from the Carmine street gang, he would
+probably now be making shoes in a factory instead
+of in Sing Sing. There is much plain common
+sense in both these views of education. But
+there is more of plain folk-mysticism.</p>
+
+<p>Both speakers think of themselves as having
+had to struggle along in the ordinary natural way,
+in the one case by day-labour and in the other by
+petty larceny; and they contrast their lot with that
+of the fortunate ones who by means of an esoteric
+kind of knowledge have found an easy way of life.
+This knowledge, they believe, is reposed exclusively
+in certain difficult and officially designated
+books, which can be made to yield their secrets
+only through a process called going-to-school, and
+by the aid of a kind of public functionary called
+a teacher.</p>
+
+<p>This mysterious and beneficent procedure is the
+popular conception of education. The school
+building and the teacher are the later and more
+external elements of the cult. It is at heart a belief
+in the magic—one might call it the black-and-white
+magic—of books.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>Now the essence of the belief in magic is the
+wish of the weak person to be strong—magic
+being the short straight line in the wish-world
+from weakness to strength.</p>
+
+<p>Think for a moment of some childhood fairy
+tale. The Hero is not the strong man. It is
+the wicked Giant who is strong. The rle of
+brute force is always played by malevolent powers.
+The Hero, stripped of his magical appurtenances,
+is not much to look at. Almost invariably
+he is the youngest of the family, and is often represented
+as diminutive in size or stature. And the
+older the fairy tale, the more physically insignificant
+he is. It is only later, when the motif of
+romantic love enters into folk-fiction, that the hero
+must be tall and handsome. At the earlier period
+he is frankly a weakling, as Man in primitive times
+no doubt felt himself to be, in comparison with
+the mastodon and the aurochs; and frequently he
+is regarded at the outset by the rest of the family
+with contempt, as no doubt was Man by the other
+animals when his great Adventure began. Like
+Man, the fairy-tale hero is confronted with an
+impossible task—sometimes by a whole series
+of such tasks, which he must somehow perform
+successfully if he wishes to survive; and, by no
+superior strength, but by some blessed help from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+outside, a singing bush, a talking bird, by the aid
+of some supernatural weapon, and, above all, by
+the use of some talismanic Word, he achieves his
+exploits. Thus does the weakling, the youngest
+child, the harassed prey of hateful powers, become
+the Giant-Killer, the Dragon-Slayer, the
+Conquering Hero!</p>
+
+<p>It is very human, this pathetic assertion that
+weakness <i>must</i> turn into strength. And, if it had
+not been for such a confidence, primitive Man
+might very well have given up the game, surrendered
+the field to his contemporaries of the
+animal kingdom. And this confidence might,
+somewhat fancifully, be described as a previsionary
+sense in early Man of the larger destinies of
+his race. In very truth, the weakness from which
+it sprang was the thing which made possible these
+larger destinies. For the unlimited adaptations
+of mankind are due precisely to his weakness.
+It is because Man lacked the horns of the bull and
+the teeth of the tiger that he was forced to invent
+the club, the spear, the sword, the bow-and-arrow;
+it was because he lacked the fleetness of the deer
+that he had to tame and teach the horse to carry
+him; because he felt himself to be intolerably inferior
+to bird and fish that he could not rest content
+until he had invented the airplane and the submarine.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+In short, because he was the weakest of
+all the creatures on earth, he had to take refuge
+from the terrible truth in a childish but dynamic
+wish-dream of becoming—by some mysterious
+help from outside—the lord of creation.</p>
+
+<p>Fairy lore may be read as a record of the ancient
+awe and gratitude of mankind to the miracles
+of human adaptation which served that childish
+wish. The all-powerful fairy wand is simply that
+unnatural and hence supernatural thing, the stick,
+broken from a magically helping tree and made
+to serve a human purpose; the sceptre of royalty
+is that same magic stick preserved to us in the
+lingering fairy-tale of monarchy. But more potent
+even than the magic of wand or sword in fairy
+lore is the magic of words. And truly enough it
+was the miracle of language which made the weakest
+creature on earth the strongest. <i>Writing</i>,
+that mysterious silent speech, holding in leash the
+unknown powers of the magic word until it met
+the initiate eye, must have had for mankind a
+special awe and fascination, a quality of ultimate
+beauty and terror....</p>
+
+<p>This flavour of magical potency still clings to
+the Book. It is the greatest of the mysterious
+helps by which Man makes his dream of power
+come true. Who can blame the poor jailbird<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+who thinks that there was, in the dull, incompetent
+pages of the text-books which you and I carried
+so unwillingly to school, an Open Sesame to a
+realm of achievement beyond his unaided power
+to reach! And who can blame the poor immigrant
+parent if he regards the officially designated
+Books which his children bring home from school
+as a talisman against those harsh evils of the
+world which he in his ignorance has had to suffer!</p>
+
+<p>But the magic theory is not the only popular
+superstition about education. There is another,
+even more deeply and stubbornly rooted in the
+human mind.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">VI. The Caste System of Education</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">NOW what has Caste to do with Education?
+Quite as much as Magic. You
+shall see.</p>
+
+<p>From the point of view of the student of education,
+the Caste system appears as <i>a method of
+simplifying the hereditary transmission of knowledge</i>—in
+short, as a primitive method of education.
+This will be the more readily apparent
+if we glance for a moment at its prehistoric origins.</p>
+
+<p>Before man was man, he was an animal. He
+relied, like the rest of the animals, on a psychically
+easy—and lazy—mode of adaptation to reality.
+He had a specific set of “instinctive” reactions to
+familiar stimuli. Doubt had not entered his soul.
+He had no conflicting impulses to torment him.
+His bag of instinctive animal tricks sufficed.</p>
+
+<p>But something happened to mar the easy perfection
+of his state. Some change in environmental<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+conditions, perhaps, made his set of definite
+reactions inadequate. For the first time he didn’t
+know exactly how to meet the situation. Conflicting
+impulses shook his mind; doubt entered
+his soul—and Thought was born. Man thought
+because he <i>had</i> to think. But he hated to, because
+it was the hardest thing he had ever done!
+He learned—unwillingly—more and more about
+how to live; he increased the number and the complexity
+of his adaptations; but he sought always
+to codify these adaptations into something resembling
+the bag of tricks which he had had to
+leave behind. And when it came to passing on
+the knowledge of these new adaptations to the
+younger generation—when it came, in short, to
+education—he did the job in as easy a way as he
+conscientiously could.</p>
+
+<p>You have seen a cat teaching her kittens how
+to catch mice, or a pair of birds teaching their
+young ones to fly. It is so simple! The thing to
+be learned is easy—easy, because the cat is
+formed to catch mice and the bird to fly. And,
+once mastered, these tricks and a few others as
+simple constitute the sum of animal education.
+There is no more to learn; these equip the animal
+to deal successfully with reality. How a human
+parent must envy Tabby the simplicity and certainty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+of her task! She has only to go on the
+theory that a cat is an animal which lives by catching
+mice in order to fulfil her whole educational
+duty. And human parents did desire (as indeed,
+consciously or unconsciously, they do yet) such a
+simplification of their task. Primitive mankind
+wanted to pass on to the new generation a simple
+bag of tricks. Of course, there is no specific bag
+of tricks which suffices Man to live by; he is what
+he is precisely by virtue of a capacity for unlimited
+adaptation to environment. If the bag of
+monkey-tricks had sufficed, about all we know now
+would be how to climb trees and pick cocoanuts.
+Our ancestors learned because they must; and they
+passed on what they had learned to their successors—but
+in a form dictated by their wish to
+keep human behaviour as near as possible to the
+simple and easy character of animal life. They
+put on the brakes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Because mankind already knew more than it
+thought one animal species ought to have to know,
+it started to divide itself into sub-species.</i> The
+division into the male and female sub-species came
+first—and has lasted longest. The young men
+were educated for war and the chase, and the
+young women for domestic duties. And this is
+essentially a division not of physical but rather of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+intellectual labour. It was a separation of the
+burden of <i>knowing</i> how to behave in life’s emergencies—a
+separation which by its simplicity gave
+such satisfaction to the primitive mind that he
+hated and feared any disturbance of it.</p>
+
+<p>To this day a man is not so much ashamed of
+doing “woman’s work” as of seeming to <i>know
+how</i> to do it. It is no disgrace for a man to sew
+on a button—provided he does it clumsily; and
+the laugh with which men and women greet each
+other’s awkward intrusions into each other’s
+“spheres of effort” is a reassurance to the effect
+that the real taboo against <i>knowing how</i> has not
+been violated. It is for this reason that women
+had so much harder a time to fight their way into
+the “masculine” professions to which a preliminary
+education was necessary than to enter the
+factories, where only strength was supposed to be
+required; and why (aside from the economic reasons)
+they have so much difficulty in entering
+trades which must be <i>learned</i> by apprenticeship.
+An interesting echo of this primitive taboo is to
+be found in New York City, where a telephone
+girl who wants to study the science which underlies
+her labours would find in certain public schools
+that the electricity classes are for <i>boys</i> exclusively.</p>
+
+<p>The other social and economic groups into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+which mankind divided itself tended to perpetuate
+themselves as simulated sub-species by the transmission
+of special knowledge along strict hereditary
+lines. Crafts of every sort—whether
+metal-working or magic, architecture or agriculture,
+seafaring or sheep-breeding, even poetry and
+prostitution—came more and more to be inherited,
+until among some of the great ancient peoples
+the caste system became the foundation of
+society.</p>
+
+<p>Ultimately the caste system <i>per se</i> was shattered
+by the demand of the process which we call
+civilization for a more variously adaptable creature—for
+human beings. But it survives almost
+intact in certain class educational institutions, such
+as the finishing schools for girls—institutions devoted
+to teaching the particular bag of tricks
+which will enable those who learn them to occupy
+successfully and without further adaptation a
+hereditary (or quasi-hereditary) position in society—to
+be a “finished” and perfect member
+of a definite and unchanging human sub-species.</p>
+
+<p>The most potent harm which the caste theory
+of education has effected, however, is in its stultification
+of the true magic of the written word.
+Let us see how that came about.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">VII. The Canonization of Book-Magic</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">IT was inevitable that the particular kind of
+knowledge which is represented by books
+should become the property of a certain
+caste; and it was inevitable that this caste should
+confine the hereditary transmission of that knowledge
+chiefly to such works as had been transmitted
+from the previous generation.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, the literate caste could not extinguish
+literature. For the presumptively less sacred
+writings which had been denied entrance to
+the canon because they were <i>new</i> were, so to speak,
+allowed to lie around loose where everybody
+could get at them. Thus the true magic of book-knowledge
+was released from the boundaries of
+caste, and became more and more a universal property.</p>
+
+<p>But nobody had any great respect for this growing
+body of “profane” literature. Popular awe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+was reserved for the body of sacred literature in
+the possession of the specifically literate caste.
+Frequently the distinction was marked by a deliberate
+difference in the languages or characters
+in which the two kinds of literature were written—sacred
+literature being written in the older,
+hieratic writing which nobody not of the literate
+caste could read.</p>
+
+<p>Note the result at this stage of the process:
+it is precisely those books which are, on the whole,
+least likely to be of present value to mankind,
+which are regarded with superstitious reverence.
+The most striking example is found in pre-revolutionary
+China, where the relics of an age utterly
+out of touch with the newer achievements in human
+adaptation were learned by heart in the
+schools and made the basis of civil-service examinations.</p>
+
+<p>At this point of our ideal but not at all fanciful
+sketch, a new factor enters—class jealousy.
+The literate caste is found to be associated and
+partly identified with the leisure class. Sacred
+literature has become leisure class literature, and
+the aspirations of the less fortunate classes toward
+leisure class prerogatives include a special
+desire, tinged with the old superstitious reverence,
+for the forbidden books. These were more or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+less unconsciously supposed to be, if not actually
+responsible for, at least bound up with, leisure
+class power. And finally the great democratizing
+movements in which some enterprising lower class
+wrests from some moribund leisure class its possessions,
+seizes triumphant hold on its “classics”
+and makes them a general possession.</p>
+
+<p>This sketch is so pieced together from all times
+and places that it may decidedly seem to need the
+reinforcement of evidence. Let us therefore
+call to the stand that young man over there who
+looks like an Intelligent Young Immigrant. He
+comes unabashed, and we proceed to question
+him:</p>
+
+<p>Q. Do you buy books?</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes, of course.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Admirable! You need a new pair of
+shoes, and yet you buy books! Well, what books
+do you buy?</p>
+
+<p>A. Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Zola,
+Nietzsche—</p>
+
+<p>Q. See here, you must be a Socialist!</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes. What of it?</p>
+
+<p>Q. What of it! Why, I’m talking about
+Reverence, and you haven’t got any. You’re not
+looking for the noblest utterances of mankind,
+you’re looking for weapons with which to cut<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+your way through the jungle of contemporary
+hypocrisies!</p>
+
+<p>A. Of course.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Well, how do you expect me to prove my
+theory by you? You are excused!</p>
+
+<p>We’ll have to try again. There’s another one.
+Eager Young Immigrant, thirsting for the treasures
+locked in our English tongue. Come here,
+my lad.</p>
+
+<p>Q. What books do <i>you</i> read? Shaw and
+Veblen, by any chance?</p>
+
+<p>A. No, sir. I’m going to the English Literature
+class at the social settlement, and I’m reading
+the “Idylls of the King.” I’ve read Addison’s
+Essays and Shakespeare, and I’m going to take
+up the Iliad.</p>
+
+<p>Q. The classics, eh?</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes, sir. All the things they study at college!</p>
+
+<p>Q. H’m. Ever hear of Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot
+Shelf?</p>
+
+<p>A. Yes, sir—I own it.</p>
+
+<p>Q. How much do you make a week?</p>
+
+<p>A. Eighteen dollars.</p>
+
+<p>Q. Thank you. That’s all!</p>
+
+<p>And there you are!</p>
+
+<p>But please don’t misunderstand me. Disparagement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+of the classics as such is far from being
+the point of my remarks! One may regard the
+piano as a noble instrument, and yet point out
+the unprecedented sale of pianos during the war
+as an example of the influence of class jealousy in
+interior decoration. For observe that it is not
+the intrinsic merit of book or piano which wins the
+regard of the class long envious of its “betters”
+and now able by a stroke of luck to parade its
+class paraphernalia; it is the stamp of caste that
+makes it desirable: an accordion, which merely
+makes music, would not serve the purpose! That
+boy who owns Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf does
+not want mere vulgar enlightenment; he wants an
+acquaintance with such books as have an aura of
+hereditary academic approval.</p>
+
+<p>And it is for the same reason that Latin and
+Greek have so apparently fixed a place in our public
+education. They were part of the system of
+educating gentlemen’s sons in England; and what
+was good enough to be threshed into the hides of
+gentlemen’s sons is good enough for us!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">VIII. The Conquest of Culture in America</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">THE first organized schools in America
+were theological seminaries. This was
+due to the fact that the New England
+colonies were theocracies, church-states. No one
+not a member of the church had any political
+rights. And the heads of the church were the
+heads of the state. In this special kind of class
+government it naturally followed that theology
+was the prime study of ambitious youth. But as
+the colonies grew more prosperous and the rule
+of the more godly became as a matter of fact the
+rule of the more rich, the theological seminaries
+of New England changed by degrees into more
+easily recognizable imitations of the great gentlemen’s
+sons’ schools in old England. Such, in
+particular, was the theo-aristocratic genesis of
+Harvard and Yale.</p>
+
+<p>The gentlemen’s sons’ school was thus our first,
+and for a long time our only, educational achievement.
+The humble theocratic beginnings of these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+institutions did indeed leave a quasi-democratic
+tradition which made it possible for not only the
+sons of the well-to-do, but for the ambitious son
+of poor parents, to secure the knowledge of Latin
+and Greek necessary to fit them to exploit and rule
+a virgin continent. But beneath this cultural perfection,
+to meet the needs of the great mass of the
+people, there was no organized or public education
+whatever.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> The result was a vast illiteracy such
+as still exists in many parts of the South today.
+The private and pitiful efforts of the lower classes
+to secure an education took the form of paying
+some old woman to teach their children “the three
+R’s.”</p>
+
+<p>Of these three R’s the last has a significance of
+its own. It is there by virtue of a realistic conviction,
+born of harsh experience. A man may
+not be able to “figure,” and yet know that he is
+being cheated. And so far as getting along in a
+buying-and-selling age is concerned, ’Rithmetic
+has an importance even more fundamental than
+Readin’ and ’Ritin’. Yet in the list it stands modestly
+last—for it is a late and vulgar intruder
+into sacred company. Even in a young commercial
+nation, the old belief in the rescuing magic of
+the Word still holds its place in the aspiring mind.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>But why, you ask, quarrel with this wholesome
+reverence for books? Well—suppose the working
+class acquired such a reverence for books that
+it refused to believe it was being Educated unless
+it was being taught something out of a book!
+Suppose it worshipped books so much that when
+you offered its children flowers and stars and machinery
+and carpenters’ tools and a cook-stove to
+play with in order to learn how to live—suppose
+it eyed you darkly and said: “Now, what are
+you trying to put over on me?” But that is to
+anticipate.</p>
+
+<p>It was due to the organized effort of the working
+class that public education was at last provided
+for American children. Our free public
+school system came into existence in the thirties
+as a result of trade union agitation.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Its coming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+into existence is a great good upon which we need
+not dwell. But its subsequent history needs to be
+somewhat elucidated.</p>
+
+<p>The public school system was founded firmly
+upon the three R’s. But these were plainly not
+enough. It had to be enlarged to meet our needs—and
+to satisfy our genuine democratic pride in
+it. So wings were thrown out into the fields of
+history and geography. And then? There was
+still an earth-full of room for expansion. But no,
+it was builded up—Up! And why? The
+metaphor is a little troublesome, but you are to
+conceive, pinnacled dim in the intense inane, or
+suspended from heaven itself, the gentlemen’s
+sons’ school. And this was what our public school
+system was striving to make connections with.
+And lo! at last it succeeded! The structure beneath
+was rickety—fantastic—jerry-built—everything
+sacrificed to the purpose of providing
+a way to climb Up There; but the purpose was
+fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>The democratic enthusiasm which created the
+public school had in fact been unaccompanied by
+any far-seeing theory of what education ought to
+be. And so that splendid enthusiasm, after its
+initial conquest of the three R’s, proceeded to a
+conquest of Greek and Latin and the whole traditional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+paraphernalia of aristocratic education.
+Every other purpose of public education was, for
+the time being lost sight of, forgotten, ignored, in
+the proud attempt to create a series of stairs which
+led straight up to the colleges. The high school
+became a preparatory school for college, and the
+courses were arranged, rearranged and deranged,
+with that intent. Final examinations were systematized,
+supervised and regulated to secure the
+proper penultimate degree of academic achievement—as
+for instance by the famous Regents’
+examinations. The public school lost its independence—which
+was worth nothing; and its opportunity—which
+was worth everything. It remains
+a monument to the caste ideal of education.</p>
+
+<p>For the theory which underlay the scheme was
+that every American boy and girl who wanted an
+education should have the whole thing in bang-up
+style. What was good enough for gentlemen’s
+sons was none too good for us. That there might
+be no mistake about it, the states erected their own
+colleges, with plenty of free scholarships to rob
+ignorance of its last excuse. These state colleges,
+while furnished with various realistic and technical
+adjuncts, and lacking in the authentic hereditary
+aura of their great Eastern predecessors, were
+still echoes, sometimes spirited and more often<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+forlorn, of the aristocratic tradition of centuries
+agone. With the reluctant addition of a kindly
+scheme for keeping very young children in school,
+the system now stretched from infancy to full
+manhood, and embraced—in theory—the
+whole educable population of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>In its utter thoroughness of beneficent intention,
+the system was truly sublime.</p>
+
+<p>The only trouble was that it didn’t work.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">IX. Smith, Jones and Robinson</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">AT this point there seems to be an interruption
+from somebody at the back of the hall.—Louder,
+please! What’s that you
+say?</p>
+
+<p>“I thought,” says the voice, “that this was to
+be a <i>discussion</i> of education. It sounds to me
+more like a monologue. When do we get a
+chance to talk?”</p>
+
+<p>Oh, very well! If you think you can do this
+thing better than I can, go ahead. Suppose <i>you</i>
+tell us why the American public school system
+failed to work!—One at a time, please. Mr.—er—Smith
+has the floor. He will be followed
+in due order by Mr. Jones and Mr. Robinson.
+And then I hope everybody will be satisfied. Yes,
+Mr. Smith?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Smith</span>: “I am one of the so-called victims
+of our American public school system. I
+went to grammar school, to high school, and then<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+to college. You say that is what the system is
+for—to lead up to college. Well, it worked in
+my case. My parents were poor, but I studied
+hard and got a free scholarship, and I worked my
+way through college by tending furnaces in the
+morning and tutoring at night. You say college
+is designed to impart a gentleman’s sons’ education.
+Well, I got that kind of education. And
+what I want to know is, what’s wrong with me?
+I can’t say I feel particularly stultified by my educational
+career!”</p>
+
+<p>No, no, Mr. Smith, don’t stop. Go right on!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Smith</span> (continuing): “I will admit that
+I have sometimes wished I had taken some kind
+of technical course instead of the straight classical.
+But I didn’t want to be an engineer or chemist, so
+why should I? In fact I didn’t know exactly <i>what</i>
+I wanted to be.... I suppose my education
+might not unreasonably have been expected to
+help me understand myself better. And I confess
+that when I came out into the world with
+my A.B. I did feel a bit helpless. But I managed
+to find a place for myself, and I get along very
+well. I can’t say that I make any definite use of
+my college education, but I rather think it’s been
+an advantage.”</p>
+
+<p>Thank you for being so explicit. Mr. Jones<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+next. Mr. Jones, you have just heard Mr.
+Smith’s splendid testimonial to the value of a college
+education—how it has unlocked for him
+the ages’ accumulated wealth of literature, of
+science, of art—how it has put him in vivid touch
+with the world in which he lives—how it has
+made him realize his own powers, and given him
+a serene confidence in his ability to use them wisely—how
+fully it has equipped him to live in this
+complex and difficult age—in a word, how it has
+helped him to become all that a twentieth century
+American citizen should be! Have you, Mr.
+Jones, anything to add to his account of these
+benefits?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Jones</span>: “Your coarse sarcasm, if aimed
+at me, is misdirected. I never went to college.
+I didn’t want to tend furnaces, so when I finished
+high school I got a job. But there’s something
+to this gentleman’s sons’ stuff. I had four years’
+start of Smith, but I feel that he’s got a certain
+advantage over me just because he <i>is</i> a college
+man. Now why is that, I’d like to know? I
+could have gone to college too, if I had cared
+enough about it. But studying didn’t interest me.
+I was bored with high school.”</p>
+
+<p>Exactly, Mr. Jones. And some hundreds of
+thousands of others were also so bored with high<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+school that even the prestige which a college education
+confers, could not tempt them to further
+meaningless efforts. You have explained a large
+part of the breakdown of our public school system.
+In theory—but Mr. Robinson wishes to
+speak.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Robinson</span>: “Theory—theory—theory!
+I think it’s about time a few facts were injected
+into this alleged discussion! The fact I’m
+interested in is just this: I quit school when I
+was twelve years old. I had just finished grammar
+school. I <i>couldn’t</i> go to high school. I <i>had</i>
+to go to work. What have your theories of education
+got to do with me?”</p>
+
+<p>Everything, Mr. Robinson! You smashed one
+theory to pieces, you were about to be condemned
+to a peculiar kind of slavery by another theory,
+and you were rescued after a fashion by a third
+theory. You are, to begin with, the rock upon
+which the good ship Education foundered. As
+I was about to say when I was interrupted: the
+grandiose ideal of a gentleman’s sons’ education
+for every American boy failed—because there
+were some millions of American boys like you
+who <i>could not</i> go to college, and some hundreds of
+thousands of others like Mr. Jones here, who
+<i>would not</i>—who did not feel that it was worth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+the necessary effort. And these vast hordes of
+you going out into the world at the age of twelve
+to sixteen with only the precarious beginning of a
+leisure class culture, became the educational problem
+which the last generation has been trying to
+solve.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">X. Employer vs. Trade Unionist</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">IT was the American Business Man who proposed
+the first “practical” reform; and if
+you have any doubt of the validity of the
+Caste theory, note what happened. The American
+Business Man knew that these millions of
+youths were going to enter his shops and factories;
+they were not going to be members of a leisure
+class, they were going to be wage-slaves; and so he
+proposed to educate them to be efficient wage-slaves.</p>
+
+<p>And he might have succeeded in imposing his
+capitalistic version of the Caste theory of education
+upon our public schools, had it not been for
+the trade unions, who perceived in these capitalist
+plans a means of breaking down their own apprentice
+system. “What! turn the schools into training-schools
+for strikebreakers? No!” they said—and
+they bitterly opposed every attempt to introduce
+industrial training into the schools, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+mustered to their aid the old notions of the Magic
+of Books. “Let the children have an <i>education</i>”—meaning
+book-learning; “it will be time
+enough for them to learn to <i>work</i> when they leave
+school,” was the general verdict. And so in this
+clash of economic interests, one theory warred
+with another, and the theory of Education as a
+mysterious communion with the Magic of Books
+happily won.</p>
+
+<p>Happily—for though the controversy had its
+unfortunate results, in the fixing of a prejudice in
+the minds of the working people against industrial
+education, we should not fail to realize that in that
+controversy the trade unions were right. We do
+not want to educate the children of the poor in
+this twentieth century to be a human sub-species;
+it would be better to give them fragments of a
+leisure class education than fix them into the wage-slave
+mould; it would be better that they learned
+Greek and Latin (or, for that matter, Sanscrit!)
+than merely a trade. It would be better to turn
+them out as they came in, helpless and ignorant,
+than to make them into efficient machines.</p>
+
+<p>But such a choice is not necessary. It is possible
+to have an education which produces human
+beings who are neither out of touch with their age
+nor hopelessly confined within it—a generation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+which will be the masters and not the slaves of its
+environment.</p>
+
+<p>The outlines of such an educational system were
+already being drawn, in theory and even experimentally
+in fact. But these radical proposals
+threatened to cost more money than governments
+are accustomed to expend on peaceful and constructive
+enterprises. Yet something had to be
+done in response to a popular sense of the imperfections
+of our system.</p>
+
+<p>Something was done accordingly.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XI. The Goose-Step</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">BEAR in mind that the necessities of the
+case required something which would not
+cost any money, which would leave the system
+really intact, and yet which would impress beholders
+with the fact of Progress.</p>
+
+<p>The device which answered to this description
+was copied from Prussia and informed with the
+essence of the Prussian spirit—a quasi-military
+Uniformity. There is nothing, indeed, so impressive
+to the observer as the sight of everybody
+doing exactly the same thing at the same time.
+And when that thing is totally unnecessary and
+very difficult, the effect is to stun the mind into a
+bewildered admiration. Hence the preposterously
+military aspect of the schools of yesterday—the
+marching in line out to recess and back
+again. Hence the drillmaster airs of the teaching
+force—as, for instance, the New York
+teacher who boasted, “I said to my pupils, ‘All
+who live on Blank street raise their hands,’ and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+then I turned to talk to the superintendent, forgetting
+to say ‘Hands down’—and five minutes
+later, when I looked around, those Blank street
+children still had their hands up. That’s what
+I call discipline!” And hence the reprimand to
+the other New York teacher because, when she
+came back from a visit to Italy, she told the
+geography class about her journey and passed
+around picture postcards, instead of hearing the
+children recite the appointed Lesson from the appointed
+Book at the appointed Hour. Think how
+it sounds for a city superintendent to be able to
+pull out his watch and say to a visitor: “At this
+moment every sixth grade pupil, in every school in
+the whole city, is opening his geography!” That
+is System, and it must not be deranged in order
+to <i>interest</i> a mere roomful of children in the
+realities of geography for half an hour!</p>
+
+<p>I experienced some of the benefits of the Goose-Step
+System myself, back in Illinois—and I
+know just how a child feels about it. He feels
+just as you would feel if at the conclusion of a
+theatrical performance you were commanded to
+“Rise! Turn! Pass!” He feels humiliated and
+ridiculous. He feels that he is being made a fool
+of. The Goose-Step System is not intended to
+make its little victims feel happy; it is only intended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+to impress beholders with the fact of
+Progress.</p>
+
+<p><i>And this kind of Systematization, this fake reform,
+has been the only serious contribution to
+American educational practice in the public
+schools during the life of the generation to which
+you and I belong—until within the last few
+years.</i></p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, another crisis arose. In every
+large city the attendance at the public schools outgrew
+the school capacities, and it became necessary
+to put many children on a “half-time”
+basis. And this scandal demanded relief. It
+still demands relief. And at present we are faced
+with a choice between two methods of relief.</p>
+
+<p>One method is familiar—to turn the grammar
+schools into adjuncts of capitalist shops and
+factories. It is the system now approved by the
+educational authorities of most of the large cities,
+including New York. The other is a sane and
+democratic proposal for education on scientific
+principles, for the benefit of the child and of the
+race.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XII. The Gary Plan</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">IT was in the nature of a happy accident that
+this sane and democratic proposal came before
+the public as a practical alternative to
+the scheme of turning the grammar schools into
+adjuncts of capitalist shops and factories.</p>
+
+<p>It happened that a man named Wirt solved in
+the schools of Gary, Indiana, the problem of accommodating
+two pupils with a desk built for one.
+He did this by the simple means of abolishing
+the private and exclusive character of the desks.
+By having one-half the pupils come a little later
+and leave a little later than the other half, and
+use the desks which the others had just vacated
+for the gymnasium or workshop or assembly
+room, it was found that there were desks enough
+for all. And because this plan made it unnecessary
+to spend some millions of dollars on
+new school-buildings, he was invited to come to
+New York and put his plan in practice there.</p>
+
+<p>If that had been all there was to the Gary system,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+it might have been adopted peacefully
+enough. But the Gary system was a real and
+hence a revolutionary kind of education, and so
+it met with immediate and bitter hostility.</p>
+
+<p>It made the child and his needs the center of
+the whole process of education. It undertook to
+give him a chance to learn how to live. It made
+the school to a large extent a replica of the world
+outside. It gave him machinery and gardens and
+printing presses to play with and learn from.
+And right there it aroused the suspicions of working
+class parents, who were afraid their children
+were not going to get enough Book-learning. It
+demanded something of teachers besides routine
+and discipline and stoic patience; and though they
+came with experience to be its most enthusiastic
+advocates, they were in prospect roused to angry
+opposition. It abolished the semi-sacerdotal dignities
+of the school-building, and thus offended a
+deep-lying superstitious reverence in a public
+which regarded education as something set apart
+from life. It clashed with the bureaucratic fads
+of the higher educational authorities, and provoked
+them to financial sabotage. And finally it
+was dragged into politics, where as the pet project<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+of an administration of bureaucratic reform
+officials it was held up to popular scorn.</p>
+
+<p>But the ideal of education which was implicit
+in the Gary plan is still up for judgment.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XIII. Learning to Work</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">HERE, then, is the situation as it stands.
+Our education is out of relation to the
+time in which we live. It is breaking
+down under the pressure of economic forces which
+demands that it turn out people who do not have
+to be <i>re-educated</i> by modern industry. It cannot
+remain as it is. It will either be made the instrument
+of a democratic culture which accepts the
+present but foresees the future; or it will fall into
+the hands of those who are planning to make it
+a training school for wage-slaves. Here is the
+latter program, as described by the superintendent
+of schools in a great American city:</p>
+
+<p>“Three years ago the elimination of pupils
+from the upper grades of our elementary schools
+and the demands of industry led us to experiment
+with industrial education in the grades....
+Our controlling idea was that adolescent boys and
+girls standing on the threshold of industrial life
+should be grouped in prevocational schools in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+which they would receive, in addition to instruction
+in formal subjects, such instruction and training
+in constructive activities as would develop
+aptitudes and abilities of distinct economic value.
+At present the opportunity to <i>rotate term by term
+through various shops</i> is afforded in seven schools
+to approximately 3,000 boys and girls in the 7th,
+8th and 9th years.”</p>
+
+<p>Between these two programs you must choose.
+Either efficient democratic education, or efficient
+capitalistic education.</p>
+
+<p>“But,” asks some one, “what is there to choose
+between them? Democratic education and capitalistic
+education both seem to me to consist in
+turning the school into a workshop.”</p>
+
+<p>Not at all! The democratic plan is rather to
+turn the workshop into a school. That may seem
+like a large order, but I may as well confess to
+you at once that the democratic scheme proposes
+ultimately to bring the whole of industry within
+the scope of the educational system: nothing less!
+But the benevolent assimilation of industry by education
+in the interest of human progress and happiness,
+is one thing; and the swallowing of the
+public school system by industry in the interest
+of the employing class, is quite another.</p>
+
+<p>For the present, however, democratic education<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+merely brings the workshop into the school, so
+that the processes of industry may be the more
+readily mastered; while capitalist education merely
+sends the school-child into its workshops, in order
+that he may become more effectively exploitable.
+The difference should be sufficiently obvious: in
+the school-workshops of capitalism the child is
+taught how to work for somebody else, how to
+conduct mechanical operations in an industrial process
+over which he has no control; in the democratic
+workshops of the school he learns to use
+those processes to serve his own creative
+wishes. In the one he is taught to be a wage-slave—and
+bear in mind that this refers to the children
+of the poor—for the rich have their own
+private schools for their own children. In the
+other, the child learns to be a free man.</p>
+
+<p>That is just what irritates the capitalist reformers
+of our public school system. Since the
+children of the poor are going to be factory hands,
+what is the use of their having learned to be
+free men? They might as well have learned
+Greek and Latin, for all the use it is going to be
+to them!</p>
+
+<p>And that is why you must exercise your choice.
+The merits are not quite all on one side of the
+question. There are disadvantages in the democratic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+plan of education. These disadvantages
+have nowhere been made more clear than by H. G.
+Wells in his fantastic scientific parable, “The
+First Men in the Moon.” You will remember
+that his explorers visited the Moon in a queer
+sort of air-craft, and found there a people with
+institutions quite unlike our own. They too,
+however, had classes, and they had solved the
+problem of the education of these classes in a
+forthright manner which is utterly unlike our
+timid human compromises. One of the visitors
+from Earth thus describes the Lunar System:</p>
+
+<p>“In the Moon ... every citizen knows his
+place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate
+discipline of training and education and surgery
+he undergoes fits him at last so completely
+to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any
+purpose beyond it. ‘Why should he?’ Phi-oo
+would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined
+to be a mathematician, his teachers and trainers
+set out at once to that end. They check the incipient
+disposition to other pursuits, they encourage
+his mathematical bias with a perfect physiological
+skill. His brain grows, or at least the
+mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and the
+rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain
+this essential part of him. At last, save for rest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+and food, his one delight lies in the exercise and
+display of his faculty, his one interest in its application,
+his sole society with other specialists in his
+own line. His brain grows continually larger, at
+least so far as the portions engaging in mathematics
+are concerned; they bulge ever larger and
+seem to suck all life and vigour from the rest of
+his frame; his limbs shrivel, his heart and digestive
+organs diminish, his insect face is hidden under its
+bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere
+stridulation for the stating of formulae; he seems
+dead to all but properly enunciated problems....
+And so he attains his end....</p>
+
+<p>“The bulk of these insects, however, ... are,
+I gather, of the operative [working] class.
+‘Machine hands,’ indeed, some of these are in
+actual nature—it is no figure of speech; the single
+tentacle of the mooncalf-herdsman is profoundly
+modified for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of
+them no more than necessary subordinate appendages
+to these important parts ... others again
+have flat feet for treadles, with ankylosed joints;
+and others—who I have been told are glass-blowers—seem
+mere lung-bellows. But every
+one of these common Selenites I have seen at
+work is exquisitely adapted to the social need it
+meets....</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>“The making of these various sorts of operatives
+must be a very curious and interesting process....
+Quite recently I came upon a number
+of young Selenites confined in jars from which
+only the fore limbs protruded, who were being
+compressed to become machine minders of a special
+sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly
+developed system of technical education is stimulated
+by irritants and nourished by injections, while
+the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo, unless I
+misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier
+stages these queer little creatures are apt to display
+signs of suffering in their various cramped
+situations, but they easily become indurated to
+their lot; and he took me on to where a number
+of flexible-limbed messengers were being drawn
+out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I
+know, but such glimpses of the educational methods
+of these beings affect me disagreeably. I
+hope, however, that may pass off, and I may be
+able to see more of this aspect of their wonderful
+social order. That wretched looking hand-tentacle
+sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort
+of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me
+still, although, of course, it is really in the end a
+far more humane proceeding than our earthly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+method of leaving children to grow into human
+beings and then making machines of them.”</p>
+
+<p>The Lunar system has indeed much to be said
+for it; and the capitalist plan of wage-slave education
+has at least the merit of being a definite step
+in that direction.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XIV. Learning to Play</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">“BUT in either case,” exclaims an indignant
+mother, “the child ceases to be a
+child—under either the democratic or
+the capitalistic plan—”</p>
+
+<p>No, madam! The object of a genuine democratic
+education is to enable him to remain always
+a child.</p>
+
+<p>“Then,” says another interlocutor, “I must
+have misunderstood you. I thought you conceived
+of education as <i>growing-up</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>Growing up, yes—out of the helplessness, the
+fear, the misery of childhood, which come only
+from weakness and ignorance: growing up into
+knowledge and power.</p>
+
+<p>“But putting aside forever his toys and games,”
+protests the mother. “Forgetting how to play!”</p>
+
+<p>No, madam. Learning rather to take realities
+for his toys, and entering blithely into the fascinating
+and delightful game of life. Forget how to
+play? That is what he is condemned to now. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+is a pity. And that is precisely what we want to
+change.</p>
+
+<p>“By setting him to work?”</p>
+
+<p>What! are we to quibble over words? Tell
+me, then, what is the difference between work and
+play?</p>
+
+<p>Or rather, to shorten the argument, let me tell
+you. Play is effort which embodies one’s own
+creative wishes, one’s own dreams. Work is any
+kind of effort which fails to embody such wishes
+and such dreams.... When you were first married,
+and began to keep house—under difficulties,
+it may be—was that work or play, madam? Do
+not be afraid of being sentimental—we are
+among friends. Is it not true that at first, while
+it was a part of the dream of companionship, while
+it seemed to you to be making that dream come
+true, it was play—no matter how much effort it
+took? And is it not true that when it came to
+seem to you merely something that had to be
+done, it was work, no matter how easily performed?—And
+you, my friend, who built a little
+house in the country with your own hands for
+pleasure, and worked far beyond union hours in
+doing it—was not that play?</p>
+
+<p>It was <i>your own house</i>, you say. Just so; and
+it is the child’s own house, that cave in the woods<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+which he toils so cheerfully to create. And it
+was their own house, the cathedral which the artisans
+and craftsmen of the middle ages created so
+joyously—the realization of a collective wish to
+which the creative fancy of every worker might
+make its private contribution.</p>
+
+<p>You know, do you not, why we cannot build
+cathedrals now? Because craftsmen are no
+longer children at play—that is to say, no longer
+free men. They toil at something which is no
+affair of theirs, because they must. They have
+become the more or less unwilling slaves of a system
+of machine production, which they have not
+yet gained the knowledge and power to take and
+use to serve their own creative dreams.</p>
+
+<p>But men do not like to work; they like to play.
+They want to be the masters and not the slaves of
+the machine-system. That is why they have
+struggled so fiercely to climb out of the class of
+slaves into the class of masters; it has been that
+hope which has sustained them in what would
+otherwise have seemed an intolerable condition.
+And that is why, as such a hope goes glimmering,
+they join together to wrest from their employers
+some control over the conditions under which they
+work; and also why their employers so often prefer
+to lose money in strikes rather than concede<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+such control—for the sense of mastery is dearer
+even than profits. That is, incidentally, why so
+many workers prefer a white collar job to a decent
+union wage—because it permits them to
+fancy themselves a part of the master class. And
+finally, that is why the industrial system is now
+at the point of breakdown—because a class of
+workers who have no sense of mastery over their
+jobs cannot and will not take enough interest in
+their work to meet the new and stupendous demands
+upon production. When pressure is put
+upon them, they revolt—and hell is raised, but
+not the production-rate.</p>
+
+<p>Every production manager knows that even our
+most efficient industries are producing far less than
+their maximum; and he knows why. The psychology
+of slavery does not make for efficiency.
+There was a time when inefficiency didn’t matter—when
+infants in agony from lack of sleep and
+girls terrorized by brutal foremen could produce
+more than could be sold, and were preferable to
+workers who had to be bargained with. Capitalism
+denied the worker the right to dare to think
+his job his own. But the wiseacres of capitalism
+now encourage the worker to believe his interests
+identical with those of his employer; they take
+out some of his wages and give it back to him in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+a separate envelope and call it “profit-sharing.”
+But the production manager knows that such a
+mess of doubtful pottage will scarcely take the
+place of their birthright. He knows that he has
+got out of the workers the utmost that their slave
+psychology will permit. He knows that there is
+no use to go on telling them that the business is
+their affair. He knows that the only thing left
+to be done is to make it their affair—to put into
+their collective control not only wages and hours,
+but what they create and how they create it. The
+job must be theirs before they can put into it
+the energy of free men. Their creative wish
+alone can bring production to its maximum. But
+that is not what he is paid to do. He, too, is
+denied the right to shape industry to his dream;
+he may not make it efficient; he must try to make
+it more profitable. He, too, is a slave ... a
+slave who wishes his master would set him free
+to play for a while with this great beautiful toy.
+He would show us how to increase production by
+100 per cent on four hours work a day. He
+would show us how work could be made a joy to
+everybody. He would—but what is the use?
+He sits and looks out the window and wishes that
+something would happen. Perhaps these young
+men and women who have learned to play with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+machinery, who know it as a splendid toy and not
+as a hateful tyrant, who want to use it to make
+themselves and the world happier—perhaps a
+generation of such workers, the products of a
+democratic and efficient educational system, will
+have the knowledge and the power to take and
+use this machinery to serve their own creative
+dream of a useful and happy new society....</p>
+
+<p>Madam, have I answered your question?</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XV. First and Last Things</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">“BUT is there nothing in the world of any
+importance except machinery?”</p>
+
+<p>Thank you for reminding me! We
+are all inclined to be too much preoccupied with
+the importance of machinery. I confess that I
+have been so ever since, as a child, I took my
+father’s watch apart and found myself unable to
+cope with the problem of putting it back together
+again. But note for a moment the pragmatic significance
+of such an infantile predicament. Of
+what use would it have been for some infinitely
+wise person to say to me: “Child, do not attach
+so much importance to those wheels and springs!
+They are interesting, in a way; but how much less
+interesting than the birds, the flowers and the
+stars!”—what good, I ask you, would such counsel
+have been to me at that moment? I wanted
+to get that watch put back together before something
+terrible happened to me. And mankind as
+a whole seems to me to be in much the same situation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+For the best of reasons, it <i>has</i> to master
+the problem presented by a machine civilization—lest
+something terrible happen. Its preoccupation
+is born of fear. The flowers and stars (it
+thinks) can wait: they are not so dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the infinitely wise person would have
+been right. Machinery must be ranked among
+(so to speak) the minor poetry of the universe.
+The astronomic epic, the botanical lyric, the biological
+drama, are, from any point of view not
+prejudiced by our fears, more important. It is
+only because we are so acutely conscious, all of us,
+of the failure of our educational system in the
+matter of preparing us to exist unbewilderedly in
+the midst of a machine civilization, that I have put
+such emphasis on the adequacy of the new education
+in dealing with that problem. It is of importance
+only as food is important to a starving
+man—merely so. And if you have heard enough
+about the place of machinery in education—</p>
+
+<p>I see that you have. Very well, then we will
+go on to the matters of real importance.</p>
+
+<p>What are they?</p>
+
+<p>(My rhetorical questions, it seems, are always
+being taken literally! I was about to tell you
+myself, but I suppose we shall have to listen to
+that elderly gentleman over there, who evidently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+has the answer ready.) Very well, sir. What
+<i>are</i> they?</p>
+
+<p>“I am glad to hear that you have disposed at
+last of the crassly materialistic aspect of your
+theme, and are about to deal with its spiritual aspects.
+For these are naturally its more important
+aspects. And if you ask me to specify more particularly
+what these are, I can only reply in old-fashioned
+language, and say that the important
+things in life, and hence in education, are Beauty,
+Truth and Goodness. I trust that you agree with
+me?”</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, sir. Beauty and Truth and Goodness—or,
+if you will permit me to translate these
+eighteenth century abstractions into our contemporary
+terminology—the cultivation of the creative
+faculties, of disinterested curiosity, and of
+personal relationships, undoubtedly constitute the
+chief ends of democratic cultural endeavor.
+These, indeed, together with what you would call
+Usefulness and what we would call technical efficiency,
+comprise pretty much of the whole of existence.
+Not all of it—but quite enough to take
+as the subject of our new inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>How can education encourage and develop, not
+in a few individuals, but in the masses of the people,
+the creative faculties which are the source<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+of beauty?—for it must conceive its task in these
+broad terms if it is to be a democratic education.
+How can it foster in these same masses that rare
+growth, disinterested curiosity, from which come
+the fruits of philosophy and science? And how
+can education deal effectively with the dangerous
+emotions of personal relationship?</p>
+
+<p>The task seems at first glance so difficult that
+it will be well for us to ask at the outset whether
+it can be accomplished at all!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XVI. The Child as Artist</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">IN this matter, most decidedly, we need expert
+advice. Let us start with Beauty. The one
+who best understands Beauty is undoubtedly
+the Artist. Let us call in the Artist.... Will
+you question him, or shall I? You prefer to do
+it yourself, I see. Very well, then—but please
+try to get to the point as soon as possible!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> What we want to know is
+this: is it possible to teach the child to become an
+artist?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> He is an artist already.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> What do you mean!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Just what I say. The child is
+an artist; and the artist is always a child. The
+greatest periods of art have always been those in
+which artists had the direct, nave, unspoiled
+vision of the child. The aim of our best artists
+today is to recover that vision. They are trying
+to see the world as children see it, and to record
+their vision of it as a child would do. Have you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+ever looked at children’s drawings—not the sort
+of things they are taught to do by mistaken and
+mischievous adults, but the pictures that are the
+natural expressions of their creative impulses?
+And haven’t you observed that modern paintings
+are coming to be more and more like such pictures?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Well—er, yes, I had noticed
+something of the kind! But is that sort of
+thing necessarily art? I mean—well, I don’t
+want to attempt to argue with you on a subject
+in which you are an expert, but—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Oh, that’s all right! The modern
+artist is ready to discuss art with anybody—the
+more ignorant of the subject, the better!
+You see, we want art to cease to be the possession
+of a caste—we want it to belong to everybody.
+As a member of the human race, your opinions are
+important to us.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> That is very kind of you.
+I fear it is rather in the nature of a digression,
+but, since I may ask without fear of seeming presumptuous,—<i>are</i>
+those horrid misshapen green
+nudes of Matisse, and those cubical blocks of paint
+by I-forget-his-name, and all that sort of thing—are
+they your notion of what art should be?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Mine? Oh, not at all! They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+are merely two out of a thousand contemporary attempts
+to recover the nave childlike vision of
+which I spoke. If you will compare them with a
+child’s drawing, or with a picture by a Navajo Indian,
+or with the sketch of an aurochs traced on
+the wall of his cave by one of our remote ancestors,
+you will note an essential difference. Those
+artists were not trying to be nave and childlike;
+they <i>were</i> nave and childlike. The chief merit
+of our modern efforts, in my personal opinion, is
+in their quality as a challenge to traditional and
+mistaken notions of what art should be—an advertisement,
+startling enough, and sometimes maliciously
+startling, of the artist’s belief that he has
+the right to be first of all an artist.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Now we are coming to
+the point. What <i>is</i> an artist?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> I told you, a child. And by
+that, I mean one who <i>plays</i> with his materials—not
+one who performs a set and perhaps useful
+task with them. A creator—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> But a creator of what?
+Not of Beauty, by any chance?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Incidentally of Beauty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> There we seem to disagree.
+If those horrid pictures—</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Suppose <i>you</i> tell me what
+Beauty is.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> It seems to me quite simple.
+Beauty is—well—a thing is either beautiful,
+or it isn’t. And—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Just so; the only trouble is that
+so few of us are able to agree whether it is or
+isn’t. You yourself have doubtless changed your
+opinions about what is beautiful many times in the
+course of your career as an art-lover; and the
+time may come when you will cherish some horrid
+nude of Matisse’s as your dearest possession.
+Let us admit, like the wise old poet, that Beauty is
+not a thing which can be argued about. It can
+only be produced.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> But if we don’t know what
+Beauty is, how can we produce it?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> I have already told you—as
+the incidental result of creative effort.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Effort to create <i>what</i>?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Oh, anything.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Are you joking?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> I never was more serious in my
+life. And I should really inform you that I am
+merely repeating the familiar commonplaces of
+modern esthetics. Beauty is the incidental result
+of the effort to create a house, a sword,—</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Or a shoe?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Yes. I have some peasant
+shoes from Russia which are very beautiful. You
+can see shoes which are works of art in any good
+museum.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> But hardly in any boot-shop
+window!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Those shoes were not created—they
+were done as a set task. They were not
+made by peasants or craftsmen for pleasure—they
+were made by wage-slaves who did them only
+because they must. Do not for a moment imagine
+that it is the difference in materials or shape
+that matters—it is the difference in the spirit with
+which they are made. I have seen modern shoes
+which are works of art—because they were made
+by a bootmaker who is an artist and does what
+pleases himself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Do they please anybody
+else?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Eh?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Would you be seen wearing
+them?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Would I be seen drinking
+my coffee from a cup that had been turned on a
+wheel by a man who loved the feel of the clay
+under his fingers and who knew just the right<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+touch to give the brim? Was Richard Coeur du
+Lion’s sword less a sword because it had been
+made by an artist who dreamed over the steel
+instead of by a tired man in a hurry? I cannot afford
+to wear shoes made by my bootmaker-artist
+friend—but I wish I could, for they <i>fit</i>!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Will you give me his address?—I
+beg your pardon—Please go on.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> I was about to say, you wrong
+the artist if you think that he is not interested in
+utility. It is only because utility has become
+bound up with slavery that artists and people with
+artistic impulses revolt against it and in defiance
+produce utterly and fantastically useless things.
+This will be so, as long as being useful means being
+a slave. But art is not an end in itself; it
+had its origin, and will find its destiny, in the
+production of useful things. For example—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Yes, do let us get down to
+the concrete!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Suppose you are out walking in
+a hilly country, and decide to whittle yourself a
+stick. Your wish is to make something useful.
+But you can’t help making it more than useful.
+You can’t help it, because, if you are not in a
+hurry, and nobody else is bossing the job, you
+find other impulses besides the utilitarian one coming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+in to elaborate your task. Shall I name those
+impulses?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> If you will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> I am not a psychologist, but I
+would call them the impulse to command and the
+impulse to obey.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> To command and obey
+<i>what</i>?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Your material, whatever it is—paint
+and canvas, words, sounds, clay, marble, iron.
+In this case, the stick of wood.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> I’m afraid I do not
+quite—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> The impulse to command comes
+first—the impulse to just show that stick who is
+master! the desire to impose your imperial will
+upon it. I suppose you might call it Vanity.
+And that impulse alone would result in your making
+something fantastic and grotesque or strikingly
+absurd—and yet beautiful in its way. But it
+is met and checked by the other impulse—the impulse
+to obey. No man that ever whittled wood
+but has felt that impulse. He feels that he must
+not do simply what he wants to do, but also what
+the wood <i>wants done</i> to it. The real artist does
+not care to treat marble as if it were soft, nor
+paint and canvas as though they were three-dimensional.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+He could if he wanted to—but he
+respects his medium. There is an instinctive
+pleasure in letting it have its way. I suppose you
+might call it Reverence. And this Vanity and
+this Reverence, the desire to command and the
+desire to obey, when they are set free in the
+dream and effort of creation, produce something
+which is more than useful. That <i>something more</i>
+is what we call Beauty.—Do you care to have me
+go further into the mechanics of beauty?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Well—er—I suppose
+now that we have got this far into the subject, we
+might as well get to the end of it. Go on!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> What I am about to tell you is
+the only really important thing about art. Unfortunately,
+the facts at issue have never been
+studied by first-class scientific minds, and so they
+lack a proper terminology to make them clear.
+In default of such a scientific terminology, we are
+forced to use the word “rhythm” in the special
+sense in which artists understand it. You speak
+of the movements of a dance as being rhythmic.
+The artist understands the word to refer to the
+relation of these movements to each other and
+above all to the emotion which they express.
+And to him the whole world is a dance, full of
+rhythmic gestures. The gesture of standing still,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+or of being asleep, is also rhythmic; the body is
+itself a gesture—he will speak of the rhythm
+of the line of a lifted arm or a bent knee. Trees
+that lift their branches to the sky, and rocks that
+sleep on the ground have their rhythms—every
+tree and every rock its own special rhythm. The
+rhythm of a pine tree is different from that of a
+palm—the rhythm of granitic rocks different
+from that of limestone. So far the matter is
+simple enough. But the relations of these rhythms
+to each other are also rhythmic. These relations
+are in fact so manifold that they constitute a
+chaos. But in this chaos each person feels a different
+rhythm; and, according as he has the power,
+transmits his sense of it to us through a rhythmic
+treatment of his medium. In the presence of his
+work, we feel what he has felt about the world;
+but we feel something more than that—we feel
+also the rhythm of the struggle in the artist
+between his impulse to command and his impulse
+to obey. Our own impulses of vanity and of
+reverence go out to welcome his power and his
+faithfulness. And just as there are gay rhythms
+and sad rhythms in the gesture of movement, so
+there are magnificent rhythms and trivial rhythms
+in the gesture of a soul facing the chaos of the
+world. What has he found worth while to play<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+with, and how has he played with it? What kind
+of creator is he? Ability to feel and express
+significant rhythm—that is nine-tenths of art.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> But my dear fellow, how
+are we to teach all this to children?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Very simply: by giving them a
+knife and a piece of wood.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Well, really!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> And crayons and clay and singing-games
+and so forth.—But perhaps you prefer
+to show them pictures of alleged masterpieces,
+and tell them, “This is great art!” They will
+believe you, of course; and they will hate great
+art ever afterwards—just as they hate great
+poetry, and for the same excellent reason: because,
+presented to them in that way, it is nothing
+but a damned nuisance. Yet the child who enjoys
+hearing and telling a story has in him the
+capacity to appreciate and perhaps to create the
+greatest of stories; and the child who enjoys whittling
+a block of wood has in him the capacity to
+appreciate and perhaps to create the greatest art!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Then you do not think
+children can be taught to appreciate art by looking
+at photographic reproductions of it?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> I would hardly expect a Fiji
+Islander to become an appreciator of civilized<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+music by letting him look at my phonograph records.
+The dingy-brownish photograph of a gloriously
+colored painting has even less educational
+value—for it lies about the original. Do you
+know that there are thousands and thousands of
+American school children who think that the great
+masterpieces of the world’s painting are the color
+of axle-grease? They are never told that their
+own free efforts with colored crayons are more like
+Botticelli in every sense than any photograph
+could possibly be; but it is true.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> But don’t you want them
+to <i>respect</i> Botticelli?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> No. I want them to look at
+Botticelli’s pictures as they look at those of another
+child—free to criticize, free to dislike, free
+to scorn. For only when you are free to despise,
+are you free to admire. After all, who was
+Botticelli? Another child. Perhaps they may
+prefer Goya—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Or the Sunday comic supplement!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> A healthy taste. And if they
+know what drawing is, though having used a pencil
+themselves, they will prefer the better comic
+pictures to the worse, and be ready to appreciate
+Goya and Daumier—who were the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+super-Sunday-supplement comic artists of their
+day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Left to themselves they
+may come to like Goya, as you say; but will they
+ever come to appreciate such a masterpiece as
+Leonardo’s Last Supper without some more formal
+teaching?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Do you call it “teaching” to
+talk solemnly to children in language they cannot
+understand? If they are making pictures
+themselves, and being assisted in their enthusiastic
+experiments by a real artist instead of a
+teacher, they will naturally wonder why their
+friend should have the photograph of the Last
+Supper in the portfolio from which he is always
+taking out some picture in order to illustrate his
+answers to their questions. And having wondered,
+they will ask why, and their friend will
+tell them; and perhaps they will get some of their
+friends enthusiasm, and perhaps not. But they
+will know that the real human being who is like
+themselves <i>does</i> like that picture.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> But it makes no difference
+whether <i>they</i> like it or not?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> You can’t compel them to like
+it, can you? You can only compel them to pretend
+that they do.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Can’t you teach them
+what is called “good taste”?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Only too easily. And their
+“good taste” will lead them infallibly to prefer
+the imitations of what they have been taught to
+praise, and quite as infallibly to reject the great
+new art of their generation. They will think
+some new Whistler a pot of paint flung in the public’s
+face, and the next Cezanne a dauber.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Then you don’t approve
+of good taste!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Every artist despises it, and
+the people who have it. We know quite well
+that the people who pretend to like Titian and
+Turner, because they have been carefully taught
+that it is the thing to do, would have turned up
+their noses at Titian and Turner in their own
+day—because they were not on the list of dead
+artists whom it was the fashion to call great;
+they know moreover that these same people of
+good taste are generally incapable of distinguishing
+between a beautiful and an ugly wall-paper,
+between a beautiful and an ugly plate, or even between
+a beautiful and an ugly necktie! Outside
+the bounds of their memorized list, they have no
+taste whatever.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Cannot good taste be
+taught so as to include the whole of life?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> It would take too much time.
+And thank God for that! For good taste is
+simply a polite pretense by which we cover up our
+lack of that real sense of beauty which comes
+only from intimate acquaintance with creative processes.
+The most cultivated people in the world
+cannot produce beauty by merely having notions
+about it. But the most uncultivated people in the
+world cannot help producing beauty if only they
+have time to dream as they work—if only they
+have freedom to let their work become something
+besides utilitarian.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> You think, then, that education
+should not concern itself with good taste,
+but rather with creative effort?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> Exactly.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> You say that children are
+artists already?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> And that artists are children.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> Then the task of education
+in respect to them would seem to be easy!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> No—on the contrary, infinitely
+hard!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> What do you mean?</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>The Artist. I have said that children are
+artists and that artists are children. The task
+of education is to help them to <i>grow up</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Questioner.</span> New difficulties!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> And tremendous ones! But if
+I am to discuss them, you must keep still for a
+while and let me talk in my own fashion.</p>
+
+<p>—Very well, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we
+adjourn for lunch, and when we reassemble here
+give the Artist the platform for half an hour?
+What is the sentiment of the meeting? The Ayes
+have it.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XVII. The Artist as a Child</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">WITHOUT any further delay, the Artist
+shall now address you.—Please take
+the platform, sir!</p>
+
+<p>“My friends! We are gathered here today
+to consider how to implant in the youthful and
+innocent minds which are entrusted to our care
+the beneficent and holy influences of that transcendent
+miracle which we know as Art. Sacred
+and mysterious subject that it is, we approach it
+with bated—”</p>
+
+<p>Wait! wait! There is some mistake here, I
+am sure. Just a moment!—</p>
+
+<p>“We approach with bated breath these austere
+and sacred—”</p>
+
+<p>Stop, I say!</p>
+
+<p>“Austere and sacred regions—”</p>
+
+<p>Usher, will you please throw this fellow out!
+He is not the man we were listening to this morning—he
+is a rank impostor, who has disguised
+himself as an artist in order to befuddle our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+deliberations with mystagogical cant. If you
+will pull off that false beard, I think you will find
+that he is a well-known Chautauqua lecturer....
+Aha, I thought so!—Shame on you! And now
+get out of here as quickly as you can!—Ah,
+there comes the real Artist—late, as usual.
+What have you to say for yourself?</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry—I got to thinking of something
+else, and nearly forgot to come back here.
+Which brings me at once to the heart of what I
+want to say. Artists, as I have said, are children—and,
+children that they are, they forget
+the errands upon which the world sends them.
+They forget, because these errands are not part
+of their own life. You reproach us with being
+careless and irresponsible—but if you will study
+the child at play or the artist at work, you will discover
+that he is not careless or irresponsible in
+regard to his own concerns. But this deep divorce
+between the concerns of the artist and the
+child and the concerns of the world is the tragic
+problem for which we now seek a solution. The
+world has been unable to solve it. It has only
+made the breach deeper.</p>
+
+<p>“For the world does not know that its work
+can be play, that adult life can be a game like
+the games of children, only with more desperate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+and magnificent issues. It does not reflect that
+we gather sticks in the wood with infinite happy
+patience and labour to build our bonfires because
+those bonfires are our own dream creatively realized;
+and it cannot think of any better way to
+get us to bring in the wood for the kitchen stove
+than to say, ‘Johnny, I’ve told you three times
+to bring in that wood, and if you can’t mind I’ll
+have your father interview you in the woodshed.’
+In brief, it presents our participation in adult life
+as meaningless toil performed at the bidding of
+another under coercion. And the whole of adult
+life gradually takes on this same aspect. We are
+to do the bidding of another in office or factory
+because otherwise we will starve.</p>
+
+<p>“So the child-artist unwillingly becomes a slave.
+But there are some children who rebel against
+slavery. They prefer to keep their dreams.
+They are regarded with disapproval and anxiety
+by their families, who tell them that they must
+grow up. But they do not want to grow up into
+slavery. They want to remain free. They want
+to make their dreams come true.</p>
+
+<p>“‘But who will pay for your dreams?’ the
+world asks. And it is not pleasant to face the
+possibility of starving to death. And so they
+comfort themselves with the illusion of fame and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+wealth. Sometimes their families are cajoled
+into investing in this rather doubtful speculative
+enterprise, and the child-artist becomes an artist-child,
+supported through life by his parents, and
+playing busily at his art. Sometimes the speculation
+turns out well financially, the illusion of
+success becomes a reality; but this, however
+gratifying to the artist as a justification of his
+career, is not his own reason for being an artist.
+The ‘successful’ artist has a childlike pleasure in
+the awe of really grown-up people at the material
+proofs of his importance; and if he has given
+hostages to fortune, if he must support a family
+of his own, he may ploddingly reproduce the
+happy accidents of his creative effort which
+gained him these rewards; but he feels that in so
+doing he has ceased to be a free man and become
+a slave—and all too often, as we know from the
+shocked comment of the world, he renounces these
+rewards, becomes a child at play again, and lets
+his wife and children get along as best they may.
+He yearns, perhaps, for fame—as a sort of
+public consent to his going on being a child. But
+whether he starves in the garret or bows from his
+limousine to admiring crowds, what he really
+wants of the world is just permission to play.
+He is not interested in the affairs of the world.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>“There are exceptions, of course. There are
+poets and musicians and painters who take an interest
+in the destinies of mankind; but this is regarded
+by their fellow-artists as a kind of heresy
+or disloyalty—much as school children (or college
+boys) regard the behaviour of one who really
+takes his school work seriously. The public also
+is accustomed to regard the artist as a child; they
+laugh at his ‘ideas’ about practical affairs—though
+often enough they adopt his ideas in dead
+earnest later. Shelley, for instance, proposed to
+conduct campaigns of education by dropping leaflets
+from balloons. ‘A quaint idea, characteristic
+of his visionary and impractical mind,’ said his
+biographers; and then, having laughed at the idea,
+the world in its Great War proceeds to adopt that
+idea and carry it out on a tremendous scale....</p>
+
+<p>“When the child refuses to be a slave, he is
+thenceforth excluded by common consent from the
+affairs of the grown-up world. And as the breach
+widens between the artist and the world, as the
+world becomes more and more committed to slavery,
+the artist is more consciously and wilfully a
+child. He is forbidden by the growing public
+opinion of his group to write or sing about human
+destinies. ‘The artist must not be a propagandist,’
+it is declared indignantly. And finally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+it comes to such a pass that it is not artistic good-form
+for the artist to tell stories which the public
+can understand—the painter is prohibited from
+making images which the common man is able
+to recognize—the musician scorns to compose
+tunes which anybody could dance to or whistle!
+And all this is simply the child’s defiance to the
+world—his games are his own, and the grown-ups
+can keep their hands off! If adult life
+is slavery (which it is), he will be damned before
+he will have anything to do with it.</p>
+
+<p>“And he is damned—damned to a childishness
+which contains only the stubborn wilfulness of the
+child’s playing, but has forgotten its motive.
+That motive is different from his. He has
+changed from the child who played at being a
+man, to a man who plays at being a child. The
+child’s dreams were large, and his are small.
+The child took all life for his province—was by
+turns a warrior, a blacksmith, a circus-rider, a
+husband, a store-keeper, a fireman, a savage, an
+undertaker. The child-artist wanted to play at
+everything. The artist-child has renounced these
+magnificent ambitions. The world may conscript
+him to fight in its wars, but he refuses to
+bother his head as to what they are about; if he
+finds that he has to walk up-town because there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+is a street-car strike, he is mildly annoyed, but (I
+am describing an extreme but not infrequent
+type) he declines to interest himself in the labour
+movement; he escapes from the responsibilities
+of a serious love-affair on the ground that ‘an
+artist should never marry’; he pays his grocery
+bills, or leaves them unpaid, but the co-operative
+movement bores him; and so on! He is content
+to live in that little corner of life in which he can
+play undisturbed by worldly interests. This type,
+I have said, is not infrequent; its perfect
+exemplars, the artists who were so completely
+children that they did not even know of the existence
+of the outside world, are revered as the
+saints of art, and often as its martyrs, which in
+truth they were; and they are admired by
+thousands of young artists who only aspire to
+such perfection, while shamefacedly admitting
+that they themselves are tainted with ordinary
+human interests.</p>
+
+<p>“This is what the world has done to us; it has
+made us choose between being children in a tiny
+sphere all our lives, or going into the larger world
+of reality as slaves. And I think we have made
+the right choice. For we have kept alive in our
+childish folly the flame of a sacred revolt against
+slavery. We have succeeded in making the world<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+envious of our freedom. We have shown it the
+only way to be happy.</p>
+
+<p>“But the artist cannot get along without the
+world. His art springs from the commonest impulses
+of the human race, and those impulses are
+utilitarian at root; the savage who scratched the
+aurochs on the wall of his cave was hungry for
+meat and desirous of luck in the hunting tomorrow;
+the primitive Greeks who danced their seasonal
+dances from which sprang the glory of
+dramatic art, wanted the crops to grow; and that
+which we call great art everywhere is great only
+because it springs from a communal hunger and
+fulfils a communal wish. When art becomes divorced
+from the aspirations of the common man,
+all its technical perfection will not keep it alive;
+it revolts against its own technical perfection,
+and goes off into quaint and austere quests for new
+truths upon which to nourish itself; and only when
+it discovers the common man and fulfils his unfulfilled
+desires, does it flourish again. Art must
+concern itself with the world, or perish.</p>
+
+<p>“Nor can the world get along without the
+artist. Slavery cannot keep it going—it needs
+the free impulses of the creative spirit. It needs
+the artist, not as a being to scorn and worship by
+turns, but as the worker-director of its activities.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+It needs the artist as blacksmith, husband, and
+store-keeper—as teacher, priest, and statesman.
+Only so can it endure and fulfil its destinies.</p>
+
+<p>“But if the artist is to be all these things, if
+he is to enter into the activities of the real world
+instead of running away from them, he must grow
+up. And that is the task of education: to make a
+man of him without killing the artist. We must
+begin, then, before the artist in him is killed; we
+must begin with the child. So far as I can see,
+the school as it exists at present is utterly and
+hopelessly inadequate to the task. It requires a
+special mechanism, which happily exists in the outside
+world, and need only be incorporated into the
+educational system, in order to provide a medium
+of transition between the dream-creations of childhood
+and the realistic creativity of adult life.
+This mechanism is the Theatre.”</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XVIII. The Drama of Education</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">“BUT why—in the name of all that is
+beautiful!—<i>why</i> the Theatre?”</p>
+
+<p>Ah! Who uttered that agonized cry
+of protest?</p>
+
+<p>He comes forward.</p>
+
+<p>“It was I who spoke. Do not, I beg of you, as
+you love Beauty, have any truck with the Theatre.
+Leave it alone—avoid it—flee it as you would
+the pestilence! I know what I am talking
+about!”</p>
+
+<p>And who, pray, are you?</p>
+
+<p>“I am an Actor!”</p>
+
+<p>Well, well!—this is rather curious.</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all! Who should know better than
+the Actor the dreadful truth about the Theatre—that
+it is the home of a base triviality, the citadel
+of insincerity, the last refuge of everything that is
+banal in thought and action!”</p>
+
+<p>Really, the Theatre seems to have no friends<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+nowadays except the professors who teach play-writing
+in the colleges! But I think we should
+hear what our friend the Artist has to say in its
+defence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “There is nothing wrong with
+the Theatre except what is wrong with the whole
+of modern life. Our newspapers are base and
+trivial, our politics are insincere, and the products
+of our slave-system of production have a banality
+which Broadway could scarcely surpass. In all
+these fields of effort, as in the Theatre, the creative
+spirit has surrendered to the slave-system.
+But in the Theatre, and in no place else in the
+world, we find the modes of child-life, of primitive
+creative activity, surviving intact into adult life.
+What is costume but the ‘dressing-up’ of childhood,
+the program with its cast of characters
+but a way of saying ‘Let’s pretend!’—what, in
+short, is the Playhouse but a house of Play? It
+is all there—the singing and dancing, the make-believe,
+the whole paraphernalia of child creativity:
+it is true that the game is played by children
+who are not free to create their own dreams, who
+must play always at some one else’s bidding, half
+children and half slaves! But—and this is its
+importance to us—the Theatre is the place where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+the interests of the child meet and merge into
+those of the adult. It is the natural transition between
+dreams and realities. And it is thereby
+the bridge across the gulf that separates art from
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>“Let me explain. When I use the phrase
+‘The Theatre,’ I am not thinking of the dramatic
+arts in any restricted and special sense. For the
+Theatre, as the original source of all the arts, the
+spring from which half a hundred streams have
+poured, into the separate arts of music, dancing,
+singing, poetry, pageantry, and what not—the
+Theatre in its historic aspect as the spirit of communal
+festivity—is significant to us not as the
+vehicle of a so-called dramatic art, separate and
+distinct from the arts which go to make it up,
+but rather as the institution which preserves the
+memory of the common origin of all these arts and
+which still has the power to unite them in the
+service of a common purpose. In the Theatre,
+as in the child’s playing, they are not things alien
+from each other and isolate from life, but parts
+of each other and of a greater thing—the expressing
+of a common emotion.</p>
+
+<p>“So when I speak of making the Theatre a
+part of the educational system in the interest of
+art and artists, I mean to suggest a union of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+the arts in the expression of communal purposes
+and emotions through a psychological device of
+which the Theatre, even in its contemporary form,
+stands as a ready-to-hand example.</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Theatre
+for continuing to exist, in however trivial or base
+a form. Suppose it had perished for ever from
+the earth! Who would be so daring a theorist
+as to conceive the project of bringing together the
+story-teller, the poet, the musician, the singer, the
+dancer, the pantomimist, the painter, in the co-operative
+enterprise of creating ‘one common
+wave of thought and joy lifting mankind again’?
+Who, if such a thing were proposed, would have
+any idea what was being talked about? As it is,
+however, I can point to any musical comedy on
+Broadway and say, ‘What I mean is something
+like that, only quite different!’</p>
+
+<p>“Different, because the communal emotions
+which these artists would have joined themselves
+together to express would hardly be, if they were
+left free to decide the question themselves, the
+mere emotions of mob-anxiety, mob-lasciviousness
+and mob-humour which are the three motifs of
+commercial drama. No, you have to pay people
+to get them to take part in that dull and tawdry
+game! When they do things to suit themselves,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+as they sometimes adventurously do even now, it
+is something that it is more fun to play at. As
+free men and women they cannot help being
+artists, they must needs choose that their play
+shall be a ‘work of art whose rhythms fulfil some
+deep wish of the human soul.—’”</p>
+
+<p>“Just a moment! Some one, I think, wants
+to ask a question.—Louder, please!”</p>
+
+<p>“I said—this is all very well as a plea for a
+Free Theatre, but what has it to do with Education?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “Evidently I have not made
+myself clear. The problem of Education with
+respect to Art is to keep alive the child’s creative
+impulses, and use them in the real world of adult
+life. We don’t want to kill the artist in him;
+nor do we want to keep him a child all his life
+in some tiny corner of the world, apart from its
+serious activities. We don’t want the slave who
+has forgotten how to play, nor the dreamer who
+is afraid of realities. We want an education
+which will merge the child’s play into the man’s
+life, the artist’s dreams into the citizen’s labours.
+The Theatre—”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>“Excuse me, but what I can’t see is how a
+Children’s Theatre is going to do all that! Even
+if you put a theatre in every school-building—”</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “You quite mistake my meaning.
+I would rather confiscate the theatres and
+put a school into each of them; and so, for that
+matter, would I do with the factories! But, unfortunately,
+I am not Minister of Public Education.
+In default of that, what I propose is small
+enough—but it is not so small as you suppose
+when you think that I want to set children to rehearsing
+plays and making scenery for a school
+play. I propose rather that the spirit of the
+Theatre—the spirit of creative play—should
+enter into every branch of the school work, until
+the school itself becomes a Theatre—a gorgeous,
+joyous, dramatic festival of learning-to-live.</p>
+
+<p>“Think how real History would become if it
+were dramatized by the children themselves! I
+do not mean its merely picturesque moments, but
+its real meanings, acted out—the whole drama
+of human progress—a group of cave-men talking
+of the days before men knew how to make
+fire—Chaldean traders, Babylonian princes,
+Egyptian slaves, each with his story to tell—Greek
+citizens discussing politics just before the
+election—a wounded London artisan hiding
+from the King’s soldiers in a garret, and telling
+his shelterer the true story of Wat Tyler’s rebellion—a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+French peasant just before the Revolution,
+and his son who has been reading a strange
+book by that man Rousseau in which it is declared
+that there is no such thing as the Divine Right of
+Kings....</p>
+
+<p>“Mathematics as an organized creative effort
+centering around real planning and building and
+measuring and calculating....</p>
+
+<p>“Geography—a magnificent voyaging in play
+all round the world and in reality all round the
+town and surrounding countryside.... A scientific
+investigation of the natural resources of the
+community, its manufactures, exports and imports,
+discussed round bonfires in the woods by
+the committee at the end of a long day’s tramp,
+and the final drawing up of their report, to be
+illustrated on the screen by photographs taken by
+themselves.... The adventure of map-making....</p>
+
+<p>“(You get the idea, don’t you? You see <i>why</i>
+it is more real than ordinary education—<i>because</i>
+it is all play!)</p>
+
+<p>“And all these delightful games brought together
+in grand pageants—instead of examinations!—every
+half year....</p>
+
+<p>“That is what I mean.</p>
+
+<p>“Making whatever teaching of art there may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+be, part and parcel with these activities—and
+using the school-theatre, if one exists, <i>not</i> to produce
+Sheridan’s ‘Rivals’ in, but as a convenience
+to the presentation of the drama of their own education;
+but in any case making all their world a
+stage, not forgetting that first and best stage of all,
+God’s green outdoors!</p>
+
+<p>“No, I say, I do not want to put a theatre into
+every school—I want every school to be a
+Theatre in which a Guild of Young Artists will
+learn to do the work of the world without ceasing
+to be free and happy.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope I have succeeded in making myself
+clear?”</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XIX. The Drama of Life</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">AS to his immediate proposals, I think the
+Artist has made himself quite clear. But
+he opened up an interesting vista of possibilities
+when he spoke of being Minister of
+Public Education. He said he couldn’t do certain
+things because he wasn’t Minister of Public
+Education. What we would like very much to
+know is what he would do if he were!—Do you
+mind telling us?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “In the first place I would set
+fire to—But you are sure I am not taking up
+your time unduly?”</p>
+
+<p>No, no! Go on!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “I would set fire to the coat-tails
+of all the present boards of education who are
+now running our educational system in complete
+indifference to the interests of the child. I would
+institute democratic control: turn the school system
+over to the National Guild of Young Artists.
+My career as an educational autocrat would necessarily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+stop right there, so far as the internal revolutionizing
+of education is concerned—for what
+I have been telling you is simply what I think
+the children themselves would do with the schools
+if they were allowed to run them.</p>
+
+<p>“But Education, as I understand it, does not
+stop short with the school—it extends throughout
+all life. It is what I would call the civilizing
+process. And there is much to be done to
+many departments of life before they can become
+part of a real civilizing process. I will describe
+only one, but not the least fundamental of these
+changes—the democratizing of the Theatre.
+Or rather, as I should say, turning it into a school.</p>
+
+<p>“A school of what? you will ask. A school
+of life, of aspiration, of progress, of civilization.
+It can be all these things if it becomes the People’s
+Theatre. Therefore, as Minister of Public
+Education, I propose to confiscate the Theatres
+and turn them over to the People.</p>
+
+<p>“But again, when I speak of ‘The Theatre,’
+I do not mean merely the buildings in which plays
+are given. I mean all those arts which are part
+of communal creativity. I propose to unite them
+all in communal festivals of human progress. I
+do not propose that we shall begin by holding
+classes in the Hippodrome—though that will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+come. I propose to begin with solemn and magnificent
+national holiday pageants similar to those
+which were so frequently and gorgeously celebrated
+during the days of the great French Revolution—”</p>
+
+<p>At this moment a policeman approaches the
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish to warn the speaker that everything
+he says is being taken down in shorthand by one
+of our men, and if he wants to finish his speech
+the less he says about Revolution the better.
+That’s all.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “Thank you! I should have
+said, during the days of a certain great political
+and social upheaval which laid the foundations
+of modern life in general, and of our gallant ally,
+the French Republic, in particular. The historic
+festivals of which I speak were in charge of the
+great artists and composers of the nation, and
+their art and music were used to express the common
+emotion and purpose of the People. So it
+will be with ours. Our artists will unite to express
+the new ideals of mankind, and together
+with each other and with the People, will lay the
+foundations of a new and democratic art.</p>
+
+<p>“It is here that the theatres, which will already
+be in charge of the guilds of artists, will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+come into play. For the new art must have a
+solid basis in popular emotions such as only the
+theatre can give. They will therefore present
+plays which criticize the old slave-system, satirize
+its manners, its traditional heroes, its ideals;
+plays which invest with tragic dignity the age-long
+struggle of the People against oppressive
+institutions and customs; plays which creatively
+foreshadow a new popular culture and morality;
+and plays which celebrate the final victory of the
+People in their revolutionary strug—”</p>
+
+<p>Another policeman:</p>
+
+<p>“Are ye making an address on education, or
+trying to incite to riot? L’ave that word Revolution
+alone.—This is the second time we’re warning
+ye.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “I’m sorry. I had hoped to
+show the influence of the national aspirations of
+a great Celtic people upon their artistic life, and
+the final flowering of their dreams in a certain
+political and social upheaval—”</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Policeman.</span> “Oh, ye mean the Irish
+Revolution? That’s different! Ye’re all right.
+Go on!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Artist.</span> “My time, however, is short.
+I shall leave to your imagination the means to
+be used in furthering these aims by the democratization<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+of technical artistic culture. I shall
+speak only of its spiritual aspects. The Theatre,
+as I have said, will take the lead in preparing for
+the new day by presenting plays which will teach
+the People courage and confidence in their destiny,
+teach them to scorn the ideals of the traditional
+past, deepen their sense of community with the
+People in all lands in their world-wide struggle
+for freedom, and make them face the future with
+a clear and unshakable resolution, an indomitable
+will to victory.</p>
+
+<p>“If I had time, I should like to tell you how
+this educational program is already being carried
+out, in spite of the greatest difficulties, by
+a certain Slavic nation—”</p>
+
+<p>Another interruption!—by a red-faced, dictatorial,
+imperatorial personage who has been
+sitting there all this time, swelling with rage and
+awaiting his opportunity. He speaks:</p>
+
+<p>“Officer! I am a member of the Board of
+Education, and I demand that you arrest that
+man as a Bolshevik agitator!”</p>
+
+<p>(Tumultuous scenes.)</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XX. Curiosity</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">LET us, my friends, pass over this unfortunate
+incident, and get on to the next
+thing as quickly as possible. The next
+thing on our program is Truth. The one who
+best understands Truth is undoubtedly the Philosopher.—Here
+he is, and we shall commence
+without delay. Will some one volunteer to conduct
+the examination? Thank you, madam.
+Go right ahead.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> We wish to ask you a few questions.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Certainly, madam. What
+about?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> About Truth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Dear, dear!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Whom are you addressing?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> I beg your pardon!—It
+was only an exclamation of surprise. It has
+been so long since anybody has talked to me about
+Truth. How quaint and refreshing!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Please do not be frivolous.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> I am sorry—but really,
+it <i>is</i> amusing. Tell me, to which school do you
+belong?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> To the Julia Richmond High
+School, if you must know—though I don’t see
+what that has to do with Truth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Oh! You mean you are
+a school-teacher!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Certainly. Doesn’t that suit
+you?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> It delights me. I
+feared at first you might be a Hegelian, or even a
+Platonist. Now that I find you are a Pragmatist
+like myself—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Pragmatist? Yes, I have heard
+of Pragmatism. William James—summer
+course in Philosophy. But why do you think I
+am a Pragmatist?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> A school-teacher <i>must</i> be
+a pragmatist, madam, or go mad. If you really
+believed the human brain to be an instrument
+capable of accurate thinking, your experiences
+with your pupils and your principal, not to speak
+of your boards of education, would furnish you
+a spectacle of human wickedness and folly too
+horrible to be endured. But you realize that the
+poor things were never intended to think.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> That’s true; they’re doing the
+best they can, aren’t they? They just <i>can’t</i> believe
+anything they don’t want to believe!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> That is to say, man is not
+primarily a thinking animal—he is a creature of
+emotion and action.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Especially action. They are always
+in such a hurry to get something done that
+they really can’t stop to think about it! But I’m
+afraid all this is really beside the point. What
+we want to know is why the school fails so miserably
+in its attempt to teach children to think?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Perhaps it is in too much
+of a hurry. But are you sure you really want
+children to learn to think?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Of course we do!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> The greatest part of life,
+you know, can be lived without thought. We do
+not think about where we put our feet as we walk
+along an accustomed road. We leave that to
+habit. We do not think about how to eat, once
+we have learned to do it in a mannerly way.
+The accountant does not think about how to add
+a column of figures—he has his mind trained
+to the task. And there is little that cannot be
+done by the formation of proper habits, to the
+complete elimination of thought. The habits<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+will even take care of the regulation of the emotions.
+For all practical purposes, don’t you
+agree with me that thinking might be dispensed
+with?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I hardly know whether to take
+you seriously or not—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Can you deny what I
+say?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> But—but life isn’t all habit.
+We must think—in order to make—decisions.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> It is not customary.
+We let our wishes fight it out, and the strongest
+has its way. But I once knew a man who did
+think in order to make his decisions. The result
+was that he always made them too late. And
+what was worse, the habit grew upon him. He
+got to thinking about everything he wanted to do,
+with the result that he couldn’t do anything. I
+told him that he’d have to stop thinking—that
+it wasn’t healthy. Finally he went to a doctor,
+and sure enough the doctor told him that it was
+a well known disease—a neurosis. Its distinguishing
+mark was that the patient always saw
+two courses open to him everywhere he turned—two
+alternatives, two different ways of doing
+something, two women between whom he must
+choose, two different theories of life, and so on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+to distraction. The reason for it, the doctor
+said, was that the patient’s will, that is to say
+the functioning of his emotional wish-apparatus,
+had become deranged, and the burden of decision
+was being put upon a part of the mind incapable
+of bearing it—the logical faculty. He
+cured my friend’s neurosis, and now he thinks
+no more about the practical affairs of life than
+you or I or anybody else. So you see thinking
+is abnormal—even dangerous. Why do you
+want to teach children to think?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Well—it is rather taken for
+granted that the object of education is learning
+to think.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> But is that true? If it
+is, why do you teach your children the multiplication
+table, or the rule that the square of the
+hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum
+of the squares of the other two sides—unless
+in order to save them the trouble of thinking?
+By the way, what is the capital of Tennessee, and
+when did Columbus discover America?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Nashville, 1492. Why?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher</span> You didn’t have to stop
+to think, did you? Your memory has been well
+trained. But if you will forgive the comparison,
+so has my dog’s been well trained; when I say,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+‘Towser, show the lady your tricks,’ he goes
+through an elaborate performance that would
+gladden your heart, for he is an apt pupil; but I
+don’t for a moment imagine that I have taught
+him to think.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Then you don’t want children
+taught the multiplication table?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span>. I? Most certainly I do.
+And so far as I am concerned, I would gladly see
+a great many other short cuts in mathematics
+taught, so as to save our weary human brains the
+trouble of thinking about such things. I am in
+fact one of the Honorary Vice-Presidents of the
+Society for the Elimination of Useless Thinking.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I am afraid you are indulging in
+a jest.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span>. I am afraid I am. But
+if you knew Philosophers better you would realize
+that it is a habit of ours to jest about serious matters.
+It is one of our short-cuts to wisdom.
+Read your Plato and William James again. Delightful
+humorists, both of them, I assure you.
+I fear you went to them too soberly, and in too
+much of a hurry.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Doubtless your jokes have a historic
+sanctity, since you say so, but I do not feel
+that they have advanced our inquiry very much.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> I abhor myself and repent
+in dust and ashes. What do you want to
+know?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I want to know what is the use
+of thinking?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Ah, my jest was not in
+vain, if it provoked you to that. I should call
+that question the evidence of a real thought.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Well, what is the answer?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Oh, please don’t stop,
+now that you have made such a good start!
+Think again, and answer your own question.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Hm....</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Yes?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I was thinking of Newton and the
+apple. If it hadn’t been for Newton’s ability to
+think, he would never have formulated the law of
+gravitation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> And what a pity that
+would have been—wouldn’t it?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> You mean that it makes very
+little practical difference to us?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> It would if the town were
+being bombarded. The Newtonian calculations
+are considered useful by the artillery schools.
+But it is true that it was Newton and not an artillery
+officer who made them.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> You mean that the artillery captain
+would have been too intent on practical matters?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> And in too much of a
+hurry. Then there’s the steam-engine. Useful
+invention—the very soul of hurry. Who invented
+it—some anxious postilion who thought
+horses were too slow? Or somebody whose
+mind was so empty of practical concerns that it
+could be intrigued by a tea-kettle? And by the
+way, it was Stephenson, wasn’t it, who applied the
+steam-principle to locomotion? I’ve a very poor
+memory, but I think Watt’s engine was just a toy.
+No practical use whatever. Other people found
+out the practical uses for it. Arkwright. Fulton.
+Hoe. Et cetera.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I see. The results of thinking
+may be put to use afterward, but the motive for
+thinking is not the desire to produce such results.
+I wonder if that is true?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> What is the common reproach
+against philosophers and scientists?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> That they are impractical. But
+inventors—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Did you ever know an
+inventor?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Yes....</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Was he rich?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> He starved to death.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Why?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Because every one said that his invention
+was very wonderful, but not of the
+slightest use to anybody.... Yes, it’s true.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> That the results of thinking
+do not provide the motive for thinking?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Yes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Then what is the motive
+for thinking?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Just—curiosity, I suppose!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Disinterested curiosity?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Yes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Then in the interests of
+scientific truth we should cultivate disinterested
+curiosity?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Doubtless.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> How would you go
+about doing so?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I don’t know.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> By hurriedly thrusting
+upon the minds of the children in your charge so
+great a multitude of interests as to leave them no
+time to wonder about anything?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> That would hardly seem to be
+the way to do it. But—</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> When Newton looked at
+his famous apple, was there anyone there who
+said, “Now, Newton, look at this apple. Look
+at this apple, I say! Consider the apple. First,
+it is round. Second, it is red. Third, it is sweet.
+This is the Truth about apples. Now let me see
+if you have grasped what I have told you. What
+are the three leading facts about apples? What!
+Don’t you remember? Shame on you! I fear
+I will have to report you to the mayor!”—did
+anything like that happen?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Newton was not a child.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> You should have talked
+to Newton’s family about him. That is just
+what they said he was! I will admit that if you
+left children free to wonder about things instead
+of forcing the traditional aspects of those things
+upon their attention, they might not all become
+great scientists. But are you a great archaeologist?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> No!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Did you ever go on a
+personally conducted tour of the ruins of Rome,
+and have the things you were to see and think
+pointed out to you by a guide?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Yes, and I hated it!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> You are not a great archaeologist<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+and you never expect to be one, and yet
+you thought you could get more out of those ruins
+yourself than with the assistance of that pesky
+guide. You preferred to be free—to see or
+not to see, to wonder and ponder and look again
+or pass by. And don’t you think the children in
+your charge might enjoy their trip a little more
+if they didn’t have to listen to the mechanically
+unctuous clatter of a guide?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> If one could only be sure they
+wouldn’t just waste their time!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Madam, are you quite
+sure that you, as a teacher, are not wasting <i>your</i>
+time?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> You make me wonder whether
+that may not be possible. But sheer idleness—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> Was Newton busy when
+he lay down under that tree? Did he have an
+appointment with the apple? Did he say he
+would give it ten minutes, and come again next
+day if it seemed worth while? What is disinterested
+curiosity, in plain English?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> Idle curiosity—I fear.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> I fear you are right.
+Then you would say that the way to approach
+Truth, in school and out, is to cultivate idle curiosity?</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I did not intend to say anything
+of the kind. But you compel me to say it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> I compel you? Deny
+it if you wish!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Lady.</span> I thought you were going to answer
+my questions, and you have been making
+me answer yours!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> That is also an ancient
+habit of our profession. But since you have now
+arrived, of your own free will, at an inescapable
+if uncomfortable conclusion, you can now have
+no further need for my services, and I bid you all
+good day!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXI. The Right to be Wrong</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">ONE moment!—I take it, my friends,
+we are agreed in demanding of the Philosopher
+that he condescend to some concrete
+and practical suggestions in regard to education.—Briefly,
+please!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosopher.</span> “You must draw your
+own conclusions. Traditional education is based
+on the assumption that knowledge is a mass of
+information which can be given to the child in
+little dabs at regular intervals. We know, however,
+that the education based on this assumption
+is a failure. It kills rather than stimulates curiosity;
+and without curiosity, information is useless.
+We are thus forced to realize that knowledge
+does not reside outside the child, but in the
+contact of the child with the world through the
+medium of curiosity. And thus the whole emphasis
+of education is changed. We no longer
+seek to educate the child—we only attempt to
+give him the opportunity to educate himself. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+alone has the formula of his own specific needs;
+none of us is wise enough to arrange for him the
+mysterious series of beautiful and poignant contacts
+with reality by which alone he can ‘learn.’
+This means that he must choose his own lessons.
+And if you think that, left to choose, he would prefer
+no lessons at all, you are quite mistaken.
+Let me remind you that children are notoriously
+curious about everything—everything except,
+as you will very justly point out, the things people
+want them to know. It then remains for us
+to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge
+upon them, and they will be curious about everything.
+You may imagine that they will prefer
+only the less complex kinds of knowledge; but
+do you regard children’s games as simple?
+They are in fact exceedingly complex. And they
+are all the more interesting because they are complex.
+We ourselves with our adult minds, penetrate
+cheerfully into the complexities of baseball,
+or embroidery, or the stock-market, following the
+lead of some natural curiosity; and if our minds
+less often penetrate into the complexities of music,
+or science, it is because these things have associations
+which bring them within the realm of the
+dutiful. Evolutionary biology is far more interesting
+than stamp-collecting; but it is, unfortunately,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+made to seem not so delightfully useless,
+and hence it is shunned by adolescent boys and
+girls. But postage-stamp collecting can be made
+as much a bore as biology; it needs only to be
+put into the schools as a formal course.</p>
+
+<p>“Consider for a moment the boy stamp-collector.
+His interest in his collection is in the
+nature of a passion. Does it astonish you that
+passionateness should be the fruit of idle curiosity?
+Then you need to face the facts of human
+psychology. The boy’s passion for his collection
+of stamps is akin to the passion of the scientist
+and the poet. Do you desire of children that
+they should have a similar passion for arithmetic,
+for geography, for history? Then you must
+leave them free to find out the interestingness of
+these things. There is no way to passionate interest
+save through the gate of curiosity; and
+curiosity is born of idleness. But doubtless you
+have a quite wrong notion of what idleness means.
+Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is <i>being
+free to do anything</i>. To be forced to do nothing
+is not idleness, it is the worst kind of imprisonment.
+Being made to stand in the corner with
+one’s face to the wall is not idleness—it is punishment.
+But getting up on Saturday morning
+with a wonderful day ahead in which one may do<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+what one likes—that is idleness. And it leads
+straight into tremendous expenditures of energy.
+There is a saying, ‘The devil finds some mischief
+still for idle hands to do.’ Yes, but why should
+the devil have no competition? And that, as I
+understand it, is the function of education—to
+provide for idle and happy children fascinating
+contacts with reality—through games, tools,
+books, scientific instruments, gardens, and older
+persons with passionate interests in science and
+art and handicraft.</p>
+
+<p>“Such a place would in a few respects resemble
+the schools we know; but the spirit would be utterly
+different from the spirit of traditional education.
+The apparatus for arousing the child’s
+curiosity would be infinitely greater than the
+meagre appliances of our public schools; but however
+great, the child would be the centre of it all—not
+as the object of a process, but as the possessor
+of the emotions by force of which all these
+outward things become Education.</p>
+
+<p>“But, you may ask, what has all this to do
+with truth? Simply this. We have been forcing
+children to memorize alleged facts. A fact so
+memorized cannot be distinguished from a falsehood
+similarly memorized. And so we may very
+well say that we have failed to bring truth into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+education. For truth is reality brought into vital
+contact with the mind. It makes no difference
+whether we teach children that the earth is round
+or flat, if it means nothing to them either way.
+For truth does not reside in something outside
+the child’s mind; reality becomes truth only when
+it is made a part of his living.</p>
+
+<p>“But, you will protest—and you will protest
+the more loudly the more you know of children—that
+their processes of thought are illogical, fantastic
+and wayward. And you will ask, Do I
+mean that we must respect the child’s error in
+order to cultivate in him a love of truth? Yes,
+I do mean just that! Do I mean that we must
+respect the child’s belief that the earth is flat, you
+ask? More than that, we must respect a thousand
+obscure and pervasive childish notions, such
+as the notion that a hair from a horse’s tail will
+turn into a pollywog if left in the rainbarrel, or
+the notion that the way to find a lost ball is to
+spit on the back of the hand, repeat an incantation
+couched in such words as ‘Spit, Spit, tell me where
+the ball is!’ and then strike it with the palm of
+the other hand. You can doubtless supply a thousand
+instances of the kind of childhood thinking
+to which I refer. But for simplicity’s sake, let
+us use the childish notion that the earth is flat as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+a convenient symbol for them all. And I say
+that if we do not respect the error, we shall not
+have any real success in convincing the child of
+the truth. We shall easily persuade him that the
+globe in the schoolroom is round—that the picture
+of the earth in the geography-book is round—but
+not that the familiar earth upon which he
+walks is anything but flat! At best, we shall
+teach him a secondary, literary, schoolroom conception
+to put beside his workaday one. And,
+in the long run, we shall place a scientific conception
+of things in general beside his primitive
+childish superstitions—but we shall scarcely displace
+them; and when it comes to a show-down
+in his adult life, we shall find him acting in accordance
+with childish superstitions rather than
+with scientific knowledge. Most of us, as adults,
+are full of such superstitions, and we act accordingly,
+and live feebly and fearfully; for we have
+never yielded to the childish magical conception
+of the world the respect that is due to it as a
+worthy opponent of scientific truth—we have assumed
+that we were persuaded of truth, while in
+reality truth has never yet met error in fair fight
+in our minds.</p>
+
+<p>“If you wish to convince a friend of something,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+do you not first seek to find out what he
+really thinks about it, and make him weigh your
+truth and his error in the same balance? But
+in dealing with children, we fail to take account of
+their opinions at all. We say, ‘You must believe
+this because it is so.’ If they do believe it,
+they have only added one more superstition to
+their collection. Truths are <i>not</i> true because
+somebody says so; nor even because everybody
+says so; they are true only because they fit in
+better with all the rest of life than what
+we call errors—because they bear the test
+of living—because they work out. And this
+way of discovering truth is within the capacity
+of the youngest school-child. If you can get
+him to state candidly and without shame
+his doubtless erroneous ideas about the world,
+and give him leave to prove their correctness to
+you, you will have set in motion a process which
+is worthy to be called education; for it will constitute
+a genuine matching of theory with theory
+in his mind, a real training in inductive logic, and
+what conclusions he reaches will be truly his.
+When he sees in a familiar sunset, as he will see
+with a newly fascinated eye, the edge of the earth
+swinging up past the sun—then astronomy will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+be real to him, and full of meaning—and not a
+collection of dull facts that must be remembered
+against examination-day.</p>
+
+<p>“This means that we must treat children as
+our equals. Education must embody a democratic
+relationship between adults and children.
+Children must be granted freedom of opinion—and
+freedom of opinion means nothing except the
+freedom to believe a wrong opinion until you are
+persuaded of a right one. They, moreover,
+must be the judges of what constitutes persuasion.
+You have asked me for practical and concrete suggestions
+in regard to education. I will make this
+one before I go: when I find an astronomy class
+in the first grade engaged in earnest debate as to
+whether the earth is round or flat, I will know
+that our school system has begun to be concerned
+for the first time with the inculcation of a love of
+truth. For, like Milton, I can not praise a fugitive
+and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,
+that never sallies out and sees her adversary,
+but slinks out of the race, where that immortal
+garland is to be run for, not without dust
+and heat.—I thank you for your attention!”</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXII. Enterprise</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">AND so we come to Goodness—and at
+the same time to a change in our program.
+After calling on the Artist as an
+expert to testify in regard to Beauty, and the
+Philosopher to tell us about Truth, it would seem
+that we should hear about Goodness from a
+moralist. So, no doubt, you expected—and so
+I had originally intended. But it cannot have
+failed to secure your notice that our experts pursued
+a somewhat unconventional line of argument.
+The Artist told us that the way to teach children
+to love Beauty was to leave them free to hate it
+if they chose. The Philosopher said that the
+way to inculcate in children a love of Truth was
+to leave them free to hold wrong opinions. Now
+it is all very well to talk that way about Beauty
+and Truth. We might perhaps be persuaded
+to take such risks, so long as only Beauty and
+Truth were involved. But Goodness is a different
+matter. It simply would not do for us
+to hear any one who proposed a similar course<span class="pagenum2"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+in regard to conduct. Imagine any one suggesting
+that the way to teach children to be good is to
+leave them free to be bad! But that is just
+what I am afraid would happen if we called an
+expert on Morals to the stand. I have observed
+twenty or thirty of them shuffling their notes and
+their feet and waiting to be called on. But I
+do not trust them. No! Goodness is not going
+to be treated in so irreverent a fashion while I
+am running this discussion. I am going to see
+that this subject is treated with becoming reverence.
+And as the only way of making absolutely
+sure of this, I am going to address you myself.</p>
+
+<p>We want children to grow up to be good men
+and women; and we want to know how the school
+can assist in this process. First, we must define
+goodness; and I shall suggest the rough outline
+of such a definition, which we must presently fill
+up in detail, by saying that goodness is living a
+really civilized life. And as one’s conduct is not
+to be measured or judged except as it affects
+others, we may say that goodness is a matter of
+civilized relationships between persons. And
+furthermore, as the two most important things in
+life are its preservation and perpetuation, the
+two fields of conduct in which it is most necessary
+to be civilized are Work and Love. Let us first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+deal with Work and find out what constitutes
+civilized conduct in that field.</p>
+
+<p>We all exist, as we are accustomed to remind
+ourselves, in a world where one must work in
+order to live. That, in a broad sense, is true;
+but there are certain classes of persons exempt
+from any such actual compulsion; and with respect
+to almost any specific individual outside of
+those classes, it is generally possible for him to
+escape from that compulsion if he chooses. Take
+any one of us here; you, for instance. If you
+really and truly did not want to work, you could
+find a way to avoid it; you could get your wife or
+your mother to support you by taking in washing
+or doing stenography—or, if they refused, you
+could manage to become the victim of some accident
+which would disable you from useful labor
+and enable you to spend your days peacefully in
+an institution. But you prefer to work; and the
+fact is that you like work. You are unhappy because
+you don’t get a chance to do the work you
+could do best, or because you have not yet found
+the work you can do well; but you have energies
+which demand expression in work. And if you
+turn to the classes which are exempt from any
+compulsion to work, you find the rich expending
+their energies either in the same channels as everybody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+else, or organizing their play until its standards
+of effort are as exacting as those of work;
+you find women who are supported by their husbands
+rebelling against the imprisonment of the
+idle home, and seeking in all directions for employment
+of their energies; and as for the third
+class of those who do not have to work in order to
+live, we find that even idiots are happier when set
+at basket-weaving.</p>
+
+<p>If we attempt to moralize upon the basis of
+these facts, we arrive at a conclusion something
+like this: it is right to use one’s energies in organized
+effort—the more highly organized the
+better. And if we ask what is the impulse or trait
+or quality which makes people turn from an easy
+to a hard life, from loafing to sport, from sport to
+work, and which makes them contemptuous of
+each other and of themselves if they neglect an
+opportunity or evade a challenge to go into something
+still harder and more exacting—if we ask
+what it is that despite all our pretensions of laziness
+pushes us up more and more difficult paths
+of effort, we are obliged to call it Enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>And when we face the fact that Enterprise is
+a love of difficulties for their own sake, we realize
+that the normal human being has, within certain
+limits, a pleasure in pain: for it is painful to run<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+a race, to learn a language, to write a sonnet, to
+put through a deal—and pleasurable precisely
+because it is, within these limits, painful. If it
+is too easy, there is no fun in it. The extremer
+sorts of enterprise we call courage and heroism.
+But though we admire the fireman who risks his
+life in a burning building, we would not admire
+the man who deliberately set fire to his own bed
+in order to suffer the pangs of torture by fire;
+nor, although we admire the airmen who come
+down frozen from high altitudes, would we applaud
+a man who locked himself in a refrigerator
+over the week-end in order to suffer the torture
+of great cold. We would feel, in both these
+hypothetical cases, that there was no relevancy of
+their action to the world of reality. But upon this
+point our emotions are after all uncertain. We
+do not begrudge applause to the football-star who
+is carried from the field with a broken collar-bone,
+or to the movie-star who drives a motor-car off a
+cliff into the sea, though it is quite clear that these
+actions are relevant to and significant in the world
+of fantasy rather than the world of reality.
+What it comes down to is the intelligibility of the
+action. Does it relate to any world, of reality
+or of fantasy, which we can understand, which
+has any significance for us?</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>When we turn to the child, we find that normally
+he has no lack of enterprise. But his enterprise
+is relevant to a world of childish dreaming
+to which we have lost the key. His activities are
+largely meaningless to us—that is why we are
+so annoyed by them. And, in the same way, our
+kinds of enterprise are largely meaningless to him.
+That is why he usually objects so strongly to lessons
+and tasks. They interrupt and interfere with
+the conduct of his own affairs. He is as outraged
+at having to stop his play to put a shovelful
+of coal on the furnace, as a sober business man
+would be at being compelled, by some strange and
+tyrannical infantile despotism, to stop dictating
+letters and join, at some stated hour, in a game of
+ring-around-the-rosy. Most of what we object to
+as misconduct in children is a natural rebellion
+against the intrusion of an unimaginative adult
+despotism into their lives.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it is our adult world that they
+are going to have to live in, and they must learn
+to live in it. And it is true, moreover, that much
+of their enterprise is capable of finding as satisfactory
+employment in what we term the world of
+reality as in their world of dreams. What we
+commonly do, however, is to convince them by
+punishment and scolding that our world of reality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+is unpleasant. What we ought to do is to make
+it more agreeable, more interesting, more fascinating,
+than their world of dreams. Our friend
+the Artist has already told us how this may be
+done, and our friend the Philosopher has given
+some oblique hints on the same subject. I merely
+note here that the school is the place in which
+the transition from the world of dreams to the
+world of realities may be best effected.</p>
+
+<p>But there are various kinds of enterprise in
+our adult world. It is undoubtedly enterprising
+to hold up a pay-train, a la Jesse James. But
+though when the act involves real daring, we cannot
+withhold an instinctive admiration, yet we
+know that it is wrong. Why wrong? Because
+such acts disorganize and discourage, and if unchecked
+would ruin, the whole elaborate system
+of enterprise by which such trains are despatched
+and such money earned. It is obvious that train-robbery
+and wage-labor cannot fairly compete
+with one another; that if train-robbery goes on
+long enough, nobody will do wage-labor, and there
+will eventually cease to be pay-trains to rob. The
+law does not take cognizance of these reasons,
+but punishes train-robbery as a crime against property.
+Yet if we look into the matter for a moment,
+we realize that loyalty to any property<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+system ultimately rests upon the conviction that
+its destruction would result in the total frustration
+of the finer sorts of human enterprise; it is for
+this reason that conservative people always persuade
+themselves that any change in the economic
+arrangements of society, from a new income-tax
+to communism, is a kind of train-robbery, bound
+to end in universal piracy and ruin. And this
+moral indignation, whether in any given instance
+appropriate or not—or whether, as in the case
+of many piratical kinds of business enterprise,
+left for long in abeyance—is the next step in our
+human morality. If we ask ourselves, why should
+not human enterprise turn into a welter of primitive
+piracy, with all the robbers robbing each
+other, we are compelled to answer that in the long
+run it would not be interesting. For, although
+destruction is temporarily more exciting, it is only
+construction that is permanently interesting.
+And if we ask why it is more interesting, we find
+that it is because it is harder. It is too easy to
+destroy. Destruction may be occasionally a good
+thing, as a tonic, something to give to individuals
+or populations a sense of power; but their most
+profound instinct is toward creation.</p>
+
+<p>But the child, by reason of the primitive stage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+of his development, tends to engage rather more
+enthusiastically in destruction as a mode of enterprise
+than in creation. He tires of building, and
+it is a question whether or not the pleasure he
+takes in knocking over his houses of blocks does
+not exceed his pleasure in building them. He
+prefers playing at hunting and war to playing at
+keeping house. And his imagination responds
+more readily to the robber-exploits of Robin
+Hood than to the Stories of Great Inventors.
+This is a fact, but it need not discourage us.
+What is necessary is for him to learn the interestingness
+of creation. If what he builds is not
+a house of blocks on the nursery floor, but a wigwam
+in the woods, his destructive energies are
+likely to be satisfied in cutting down the saplings
+with which to build it. This simply means that
+his destructive energies have become subordinated
+to his constructive ones, as they are in adult life.
+But they cannot become so subordinated until what
+he constructs is wholly the result of his own wishes,
+and until moreover it is more desirable as the
+starting-point of new creative activities than as
+something to destroy. Those conditions are fulfilled
+whenever a group of children play together
+and have free access to the materials with which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+to construct. And that is what the school is for—to
+provide the materials, and the freedom, and
+be the home of a process by which children learn
+that it is more fun to create than to destroy.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXIII. Democracy</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">BUT in our adult world, there is still another
+moral quality demanded of our human enterprise.
+It is not merely better to create
+than to destroy, but it is better to create something
+which is useful, or desirable, to others. Our
+moral attitude is a little uncertain upon this point,
+for the artist knows that his coarsest and easiest
+kind of enterprise is likely to be valued by others,
+and his finer and more difficult enterprises neglected
+and scorned. And so he has the impulse
+to work only for himself; nevertheless, he realizes
+that if he does work only for himself he is
+doing wrong. For he really feels a deep-lying
+moral obligation to work for others—a moral
+obligation which comes, of course, from his egoistic
+need of the spiritual sustenance of praise.
+The fact is that others are necessary to him, and
+that his work must please others. So if he ignores
+the crowd, it is because he wishes to compel
+it to take something better than what it asked for.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+And this democratic quality in enterprise becomes
+the third test of civilized life. Does a given action
+fit in everybody else’s scheme as well as in
+your own: and, if it conflicts with the outside
+scheme, is it with a fundamentally altruistic intention?
+There are prophets and false prophets
+and of those who take the difficult course of disagreeing
+with their fellows, the best we can immediately
+demand of them is that they afflict us
+because they think it good for us and not because
+they do not care. Yet even so they differ from
+us at their peril. For we are to be the final judges
+of whether we are being imposed on or not. If
+we do not, after full consideration, feel that we
+can play our game if Napoleon or the Kaiser
+plays his, we put him out of business.</p>
+
+<p>Now the child has a certain natural tendency
+toward the Napoleon-Kaiser attitude. He began,
+as we pointed out some time ago, by being
+an infantile emperor. He likes it. And being
+deposed by his parents does not alter his royalist
+convictions. For he has not merely been deposed—he
+has seen another king set up in his
+place. And one reason why parents are not the
+best persons to teach children democracy, is that
+they are the authors of the whole succession of enthronements
+and deposings which constitute the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+early history of a family. No, the children need
+a change of air—a chance to forget their Wars
+of the Roses and to take their places in a genuine
+democracy. The place for them to learn democracy
+(though I believe this has been said before)
+is the school. For in a properly conducted school
+there is an end of jealous little princes and princesses
+squabbling over prestige and appealing to
+the Power Behind the Throne; in such a school,
+conduct in general and work in particular is performed
+not with reference to such prestige as a
+reward, but with reference to their individual
+wishes in democratic composition with the wishes
+of their fellows.</p>
+
+<p>But this will be true only if they find at school
+something different from what they have left at
+home. And what they have left at home may be
+described as a couple of well-meaning, bewildered
+and helpless people who are half the slaves of the
+children and half tyrants over them. It is unfortunate,
+but it is true, that the first that children
+learn of human relationships, is by personal experience
+of a relationship which is on both sides
+tyrannical and slavish. They naturally expect all
+their relationships with the adult world, if not
+with each other, to be conducted on this same pattern.
+They expect to find father and mother<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+over again in the school-teacher. They hope to
+find the slave and fear to find the tyrant. But
+it is necessary that they should face the adult
+world into which they must grow up, as equals;
+and therefore they must begin to learn the lesson
+of equality. The school, by providing a kind of
+association between adults and children which is
+free from the emotional complexes of the home,
+can teach that lesson.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, so much intellectual confusion
+about what equality means that we must be
+quite clear on that point before we go on. At
+any moment of our careers, we are the servant of
+others, in the sense of being their follower, helper,
+disciple or right-hand man; and the master of
+still others, in that we are their leader, counsellor
+or teacher. We can hardly conduct an ordinary
+conversation without assuming, and usually shifting
+several times, these rles. And these relationships
+extend far beyond the bounds of acquaintanceship,
+for one can scarcely read a book or
+write an article without creating such relationships
+for the moment with unknown individuals. In
+all the critical and important moments of one’s
+life one is inevitably a leader or a follower. But
+in adult civilized life, these relationships are
+fluid; they change and exchange with each other.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+And they are fluid because they are free. You
+and I can choose, though perhaps not consciously,
+our leaders and our helpers; we are not condemned
+to stand in any fixed relationship to any
+other person. And this freedom to be servant
+of whom we please, and master of whom we can,
+is equality. If I want to know about fishing-tackle,
+I will sit at your feet and learn, and if
+you will condescend to lead the expedition in
+quest of these articles I will be your obedient
+follower; while if you happened to want advice
+about pens, pencils, ink, or typewriter-ribbons,
+you would, I trust, yield a similar deference to me.
+We have no shame in serving nor any egregious
+pride in directing each other, because we are
+equals. We are equals because we are free to
+become each other’s master and each other’s servant
+whenever we so desire.</p>
+
+<p>But the relationship of parents and children
+is not free. Parents cannot choose their children,
+and must serve their helplessness willy-nilly.
+Children cannot choose their parents, and must
+obey them anyhow. It is a rare triumph of
+parenthood—and doubtless also of childhood—when
+children and parents become friends, and
+serve and obey each other not because they must
+but because they really like to. But schools can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+easily take up the task which parents are only
+with the greatest difficulty able to accomplish, and
+dissolve the infantile tyrant-and-slave relationship
+to the grown-up world. The grown-up people in
+the school can be the child’s equals. They can
+become so by ceasing to encourage the notion
+which the child carries with him from the home,
+that adults are beings of a different caste. Once
+they regard an adult as a person like themselves—which,
+Heaven knows, he is!—children will
+discover quickly enough his admirable qualities,
+and his special abilities, and pay them the tribute
+of admiration and emulation. There is no human
+reason why a child should not admire and emulate
+his teacher’s ability to do sums, rather than
+the village bum’s ability to whittle sticks and
+smoke cigarettes; the reason why the child doesn’t
+is plain enough—the bum has put himself on an
+equality with them and the teacher has not.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXIV. Responsibility</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">BUT there is yet another quality which civilized
+standards demand of our human
+enterprise. People hate a quitter—and
+particularly the quitter whose defection leaves
+other people under the obligation to finish what
+he has started. We demand of a person that he
+should refrain from starting what he can’t finish.
+This is a demand not only for democratic intentions,
+but for common sense and ordinary foresight.
+He shouldn’t undertake a job that involves
+other people’s putting their trust in him, unless
+he can really carry it through. And if he finds
+in the middle of it that he has, as the saying
+goes, “bit off more than he can chaw,” he ought
+to try to stick it out at whatever cost to himself.
+If other people have believed he could do it, he
+must not betray their faith. This feeling is at the
+heart of what we ordinarily call telling the truth,
+as well as the foundation of the custom of paying
+one’s debts. We don’t really care how much<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+a man perjures his own immortal soul by lying,
+but we do object to his fooling other people by
+it. We are all so entangled with each other, so
+dependent upon each other, that none of us can
+plan and create with any courage or confidence
+unless we can depend on others to do what they
+say they will do. But our feeling goes deeper
+than the spoken word—we want people to behave
+in accordance with the promise of their actions.
+We despise the person who seems, and
+who lets us believe that he is, wiser or more
+capable than he turns out to be. We even resent
+a story that promises at the beginning to be more
+interesting than it is when it gets going. And in
+regard to work, the thing which we value above
+any incidental brilliancy in its performance, is the
+certainty that it will be finished. Hence the pride
+in finishing any task, however disagreeable, once
+started.</p>
+
+<p>This is the hardest thing that children have to
+learn—not to drop their work when they get
+tired of it. But it should be obvious that there
+is only one way for children to learn this, and
+that it is not by anything which may be said or
+done in punishment or rebuke from the authority
+which imposes the task. It is not to be learned
+at all so long as the task is imposed by any one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+outside the child himself. The child who is sent
+on an errand may forget, and not be ashamed.
+But the child who has volunteered to go on an errand—not
+as a pretty trick to please the Authorities,
+but because of a sense of the importance of
+the errand and of his own importance in doing it—that
+child has assumed a trust, which he will
+not be likely to violate.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose, nevertheless, that he does forget.
+Here we come to the ethics of punishment—a
+savage ritual which we generally quite fail to
+understand. Let us take a specific case. A
+group of boys are building a house in the woods,
+and they run out of nails. Penrod says he will
+go home and get some from the tool-chest in the
+barn. He goes; and on the way, he meets a boy
+who offers to take him to the movies, where
+Charlie Chaplin is on exhibition. Penrod reflects
+upon his duty; but he says to himself that he will
+go in and see one reel of Charlie Chaplin, and
+then hurry away. But the inimitable Charles lulls
+him into forgetfulness of realities, and when he
+emerges from the theatre it is nigh on dinner time.
+Penrod realizes his predicament, and rehearses
+two or three fancy stories to account for his failure
+to return with the nails; but he realizes that none
+of them will hold. He wishes that a wagon would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+run over him and break his leg, so that he would
+have a valid excuse. But no such lucky accident
+occurs. How is he going to face the gang next
+day? He has set himself apart from them,
+exiled himself, by his act. The question is, how
+is he going to get back? Now in the psychology
+of children and savages, there is happily a means
+for such reinstatement. This means is the discharge
+of the emotions—in the offender and in
+the group against which he has offended—of
+shame on the one hand and anger on the other,
+which together constitute the barrier against his
+return. That is, if they can express their anger
+by, let us say, beating him up, that anger no longer
+exists, they are no longer offended. While if he
+can by suffering such punishment pay the debt of
+his offence, he thereby wipes it out of existence,
+and at the same time cleanses himself from the
+shame of committing it. As the best conclusion
+of an unpleasant incident, he is ready to offer himself
+for such punishment. For children understand
+the barbaric ritual of punishment when it
+really has the barbaric ritual significance.</p>
+
+<p>But the punishment must be inflicted by the
+victim’s peers. There are few adults who can
+with any dignity inflict punishment upon children—for
+the dignity with which punishment is given<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+depends upon the equality of the punisher and the
+punished, and on the implicit understanding that
+if the case had happened to be different the rles
+would have been reversed.</p>
+
+<p>It will be perceived that this leaves discipline
+entirely a matter for children to attend to among
+themselves, with no interference by adults, and no
+imposition of codes of justice beyond their years
+and understanding. Punishment, in this sense,
+cannot be meted out unless the aggrieved parties
+are angry and the aggressor ashamed; but let no
+adult imagine that he can tell whether an offending
+child is ashamed or not. Shame is a destructive
+emotion which a healthy child tries to repress.
+He does not say, “I am sorry.” He brazens
+out his crime until he provokes the injured parties
+to an anger which explodes into swift punishment,
+after which he is one of them again and all is
+well.</p>
+
+<p>But the abdication of adults from the office of
+judge-jury-and-executioner of naughty children,
+destroys the last vestiges of the caste system which
+separates children from adults. It puts an end
+to superimposed authority, and to goodness as a
+conforming to the mysterious commands of such
+authority. It places the child in exactly such a
+relationship to a group of equals as he will bear<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+in adult life, and it builds in him the sense of
+responsibility for his actions which is the final
+demand that civilization makes upon the individual.
+And the importance of the school as a
+milieu for such a process is in its opportunity to
+undo at once, early in life, the psychological mischief
+brought about, almost inevitably, by the influences
+of the home.</p>
+
+<p>There!—I have let the cat out of the bag. I
+had intended to be very discreet, and say nothing
+that could possibly offend anybody. But I have
+said what will offend everybody—except parents.
+They, goodness knows, are fully aware that a
+home is no place to bring children up. They see
+what it does to the children plainly enough.
+But we, the children, are so full of repressed resentments
+against the tyrannies inflicted upon us
+by our parents, and so full of repressed shame
+at the slavery to which we subjected them, that
+we cannot bear to hear a word said against them.
+The sentimentality with which we regard the home
+is an exact measure of the secret grudge we
+actually bear against it. Woe to the person who
+is so rash as to say what we really feel!—But
+the mischief is done, and I may as well go on and
+say in plain terms that the function of the school<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+is to liberate the children from the influences of
+parental love.</p>
+
+<p>For parental love—as any parent will tell you—is
+a bond that constrains too tyrannically
+on both sides to permit of real friendship, which
+is a relationship between equals. The child goes
+to school in order to cease to be a son or daughter—and
+incidentally in order to permit the two
+harassed adults at home to cease in some measure
+to be father and mother. The child must become
+a free human being; and he can do so only if he
+finds in school, not a new flock of parents, but
+adults who can help him to learn the lesson of freedom
+and friendship. But that is something which
+I can discuss better in dealing with the subject of
+Love.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXV. Love</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">REMEMBER that it is not my fault that
+we find ourselves discussing so inflammable
+a topic! But if you insist on knowing
+what education can do to bring our conduct
+in the realm of love up to the standard of civilization,
+I can but answer your question. We
+have found that in the realm of work, civilization
+demands of us Enterprise, and Democracy, and
+Responsibility. And I think that all the demands
+of civilization upon our conduct in the realm of
+love might be summed up in the same terms. We
+despise those persons who are afraid of adventure
+in love; who in devotion to some mawkish dream-ideal,
+turn away from the more difficult and
+poignant realities of courtship and marriage; and
+we are beginning to despise those whose enterprise
+is too cheaply satisfied in prostitution or in
+the undemocratic masculine exploitation of women
+of inferior economic status; and not only the
+crasser offences against sexual morality, but a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+thousand less definable but not less real offences
+within the realm of legal marriage, may be described
+as attempts to evade responsibility. I
+leave you to work out the implications of this
+system of morals for yourself. What I particularly
+want to speak of here is the effect of parental
+influences upon children with respect to their later
+love-life, and the function of education in dissolving
+those influences.</p>
+
+<p>It is no secret that adults generally have not yet
+learned how to be happy in love. And the reason
+for that, aside from the economic obstacles to
+happiness which do not come within the scope of
+our inquiry, is that they are still children. They
+are seeking to renew in an adult relationship the
+bond which existed between themselves and their
+parents in infancy. Or they are seeking to settle
+a long-forgotten childish grudge against their
+parents, by assuming the parental rle in this new
+relationship. And in both efforts, they find themselves
+encouraged by each other. Naturally
+enough! A woman likes to discover, and enjoys
+“mothering,” the child in her husband; she likes
+to find also in him the god and hero which her
+father was to her in her infancy. And a happy
+marriage is one in which a man is at any moment
+unashamedly her child or (let us not shrink from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+using these infantile and romantic terms!) her
+god. But it is a bore to have to mother a man
+all the time; it is in fact slavery. And it is equally
+a bore to have to look up to a man all the time
+and think him wise and obey him; for that also
+is slavery. The happy marriage has something
+else—the capacity for swift and unconscious
+change and interchange of these rles. The
+happy lovers can vary the tenor of their relationship
+because they are free to be more than one
+thing to each other. And they have that freedom
+because they are equals. That equality is
+comradeship, is friendship.</p>
+
+<p>Do not imagine that friendship in love implies
+any absence of that profound worship and self-surrender
+which is characteristic of the types of
+love that are modelled upon the infantile and
+parental patterns. This is as ridiculous as it
+would be to suppose that equality in other fields
+of life means that no one shall ever lead and no
+one ever follow. Equality in love means only the
+freedom to experience all, instead of compulsion
+to experience only a part, of the emotional possibilities
+of love in a single relationship.</p>
+
+<p>I would gladly explicate this aspect of my theme
+in some detail, were it not that it might incidentally
+comprise a catalogue of domestic difficulties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+and misunderstandings at once too tragic and too
+ridiculous—and some of you might object to my
+unfolding what you would consider to be your own
+unique and private woes in public.</p>
+
+<p>I will, therefore, only point out that even what
+we term the civilized part of mankind is far from
+measuring up to this demand of civilization in
+the world of love, the demand for equality. It
+may seem somewhat of an impertinence to blame
+this fact upon the early influences of the home,
+when there are so many outstanding customs and
+laws and economic conditions which are founded
+on the theory of the inequality of men and women.
+But these customs and laws and conditions are in
+process of change—and the home influences of
+which I speak are not. Our problem is to consider
+if these influences may not be dissolved by
+the school. For, mark you, what happens when
+they are not! Wedded love, as based upon those
+undissolved influences, comes into a kind of disgrace;
+serious-minded men and women ask themselves
+whether such a bondage is tolerable; a
+thousand dramas and novels expose the iniquities
+of the thing; and the more intellectually adventurous
+in each generation begin to wonder if the
+attempt at faithful and permanent love ought not
+to be abandoned.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>Let me relate only one widely typical—and
+perhaps only too-familiar—instance. A boy
+grows up poisoned with mother-love—er, I
+mean, petted and praised and waited upon by his
+mother, until he finds the outside world, with its
+comparative indifference to his wonderfulness, a
+very cold place indeed. Nevertheless, he adjusts
+himself to it, becomes a man, and falls in love.
+With whom does he fall in love? Perhaps with
+a girl like his mother; or perhaps with one quite
+opposite to her in all respects,—for he may have
+conceived an unconscious resentment against his
+mother, for betraying him by her praise into expecting
+too much of an unfeeling world. But
+in any case, he is going to experience again, in his
+relationship with his sweetheart, the ancient delights
+of being mothered. He is going to respond
+to that pleasure so unmistakably as to encourage
+the girl in further demonstrations of motherliness.
+He is in fact going to reward her more for
+motherliness than for any other trait in her possession.
+And the girl, who wants a lover and a
+husband and a man, is going to find herself with
+a child on her hands. But that is not the worst.
+If the girl does not rebel against the situation,
+the man is likely to, when he finds out just what
+it is. For he, too, despite his unconscious infantilism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+wants a girl and a sweetheart and a wife.
+And when he realizes that he is being sealed up
+again in the over-close, over-sweet love-nest of his
+infancy, that he is becoming a baby, he revolts.
+He does not realize what has happened—he only
+knows that he no longer cherishes a romantic love
+for her. Naturally. Romantic love is a love
+between equals. She has become his mother—and
+he flees her, and perhaps goes through life
+seeking and escaping from his mother in half a
+hundred women. When this happens, we call him
+a Don Juan or a libertine or a scoundrel or a fool.
+But that does not alter his helplessness in the grip
+of infantile compulsions.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to exaggerate the ability of education
+to dissolve, without the aid of a special
+psychic technique, any deeply-rooted infantile dispositions
+of this sort; but, aside from such flagrant
+cases, there are thousands of well-conducted men
+and women who just fail to free themselves sufficiently
+from the emotions of childhood to be
+happy in love. Besides their own selves, the sensible
+adult beings that they believe they are, there
+are within them pathetic and absurd children
+whose demands upon the relationship well-nigh
+tear it to pieces. It is in regard to these that it
+seems not improbable that a civilized education<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+could secure their happiness for them. And it
+would do so by supplanting the emotionally over-laden
+atmosphere of the home with the invigorating
+air of equality. I refer in particular to
+equality between the sexes. So long as girls and
+boys are to any extent educated separately, encouraged
+to play separately, and treated as different
+kinds of beings, the remoteness hinders the
+growth of real friendship between the sexes, and
+leaves the mind empty of any realistic concepts
+which would serve to resist the transfer to the
+other sex, at the romantic age, of repressed infantile
+feelings about the beloved parent. What
+we have to deal with in children might without
+much exaggeration be described as the disinclination
+of one who has been a lover to become a
+friend. The emotions of the boy towards his
+mother are so rich and deep that he is inclined
+to scorn the tamer emotions of friendship with
+girl-children. (Notoriously, he falls in love first
+with older women in whom he finds some idealized
+image of his mother.) He is contemptuous
+of little girls because they are not the mother-goddess
+of his infancy. What he must learn,
+and the sooner the better, is that girls are interesting
+human beings, that they are good comrades
+and jolly playfellows. He must learn to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+like them for what they are. Ordinarily, the love-life
+of the adolescent boy is a series of more or
+less shocked discoveries that the women upon
+whom he has set his youthful fancy do not, in fact,
+correspond to his infantile dream. Half the difficulties
+of marriage are involved in the painful
+adjustment of the man to the human realities of
+his beloved; the other half being, of course, the
+similarly painful adjustment of the girl to similar
+human realities. He could be quite happy with
+her, were the other dear charmer, his infantile
+ideal, away. And it is one of the functions of
+education to chase this ideal away, to dissolve the
+early emotional bond to the parent, by making
+the real world in general and the real other sex
+in particular so <i>humanly</i> interesting that it will be
+preferred to the infantile fantasy.</p>
+
+<p>I may be mistaken, but I think that half of
+this task will be easy enough. Girls, I am sure,
+are only in appearance and by way of saving their
+face, scornful of the activities of boys; they will
+be glad enough to join with them on terms of
+complete equality, and ready to admire and like
+them for what they humanly are. It will not be
+so easy to persuade boys to admire and like girls
+for what they are; and it will be the business of
+the school to dramatize unmistakably for these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+young masculine eyes the human interestingness
+of the other sex—to give the girls a chance to
+show their actual ability to compete on equal and
+non-romantic terms with boys in all their common
+undertakings.</p>
+
+<p>To make realities more interesting than dreams—that
+is the task of education. And of all the
+realities whose values we ignore, in childish preoccupation
+with our feeble dreams, the human
+realities of companionship which each sex has to
+offer the other are among the richest. Despite
+all our romantic serenadings, men and women
+have only begun to discover each other. Just
+as, despite our solemn sermonizings on the blessedness
+of work, we have only begun to discover
+what creative activity can really mean to us.
+Work and love!—</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Voice.</span> “Won’t you please come back to the
+subject of education?”</p>
+
+<p>What! Is it possible—is it credible—is it
+conceivable—that you have been following this
+discussion thus far, and have not yet realized that
+education includes everything on earth, and in the
+heavens above and the waters beneath? Come
+back to the subject of education! Why, it is impossible
+to wander away from the subject of education!
+I defy you to do so. All the books that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+have ever been written, all the pictures that have
+ever been painted, all the songs ever sung, all the
+machines ever invented, all the wars and all the
+governments, all the joyous and sorry loves of
+men and women, are but part of that vast process,
+the education of mankind. When you leave this
+discussion, you will not have dropped the subject;
+you will continue it in your next conversation,
+whether it be with your employer or your sweetheart
+or your milkman. You cannot get away
+from it. And though you perish, and an earthquake
+overwhelms your city in ruins, and the continent
+on which you live sinks in the sea, something
+that you have done or helped to do, something
+which has been a part of your life, the
+twisted fragments of the office building where
+you went to work or the old meerschaum pipe you
+so patiently coloured, will be dug up and gazed
+upon by future generations, and what you can
+teach them by these poor relics if by nothing else,
+will be a part of their education....</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXVI. Education in 1947 A. D.</h2></div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">BY way of epilogue, let us be Utopian, after
+the fashion of Plato and H. G. Wells.
+Let me, as a returned traveller from the
+not-too-distant future, picture for you concretely
+the vaster implications of education in, say, the
+year 1947, as illustrated by the public school in
+the village of Pershing, N. Y.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>“But which is the school-building?” I asked
+my guide.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed. “I am surprised at you,” he said.
+“Surprised that you should ask such a question!”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?” I demanded innocently.</p>
+
+<p>“Because,” he said, “in the files of our historical
+research department I once came across a
+faded copy of a quaint old war-time publication
+called the <i>Liberator</i>.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> It attracted my attention
+because it appeared to have been edited by a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+grizzled old fire-eater whom I recently met, Major
+General Eastman, the head of our War College.
+In those days, it seems, he thought he was a
+pacifist. Time’s changes!”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes—General Eastman. I remember
+him well,” I said. “But what has that got to
+do with—”</p>
+
+<p>“In that curious little magazine was an article
+on education. It was signed by you. Don’t you
+remember what you wrote? Didn’t you believe
+what you said? Or didn’t you fully realize that
+you were living in a time when prophecies come
+true? You ask me where the school-building is.
+Why, there isn’t any school-building.”</p>
+
+<p>We were standing in the midst of a little park,
+about the size of a large city block, bordered by
+a theatre, a restaurant, an office-building, several
+handsome factory buildings of the newer and more
+cheerful style, a library, a newspaper plant, and a
+church.</p>
+
+<p>My companion pointed to one of the buildings.
+“That,” he said, “is the children’s theatre.
+There they present their own plays and pageants.
+In connection with the work there they learn singing
+and dancing, scene painting, and costume. Of
+course they also learn about plays—I suppose
+from your primitive point of view you would say<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+that we conduct a course in dramatic literature.
+But all those antique phrases of early educational
+practice have passed out of use. We would say
+that the children are learning to develop their
+creative impulses. We consider our theatre very
+important in that respect. It is the beginning of
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>“Next in importance, perhaps, are those factories.
+They include a carpenter shop, a pottery,
+and a machine shop. Here is made everything
+which is used throughout the school. And there
+is the power house which furnishes the electric
+current for the whole establishment. You understand,
+of course, that the boys and girls get a
+complete theoretical as well as practical grasp of
+the facts they are dealing with—there is no
+neglect of what I suppose you would call book-learning,
+here.</p>
+
+<p>“Over there is the textile and garment factory,
+which designs and makes the costumes for the
+plays and pageants. You will not be surprised
+to learn that the garment-makers at any given
+period are the most active supporters of the
+propaganda for an outdoor theatre. It would
+give them a chance to do more costumes!...</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, we have politics here. The question of
+an outdoor theatre is being agitated very warmly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+just now. The pupils have complete control of
+the school budget of expenditure. There is only
+so much money to spend each year, you see, at
+present, though there is a movement on foot to
+make the institution self-supporting; but I’m afraid
+that will depend on the political situation. Ultimately,
+of course, we expect to put the whole of
+industry under the Department of Education....
+But I’m afraid that’s going too deeply into a
+situation you could hardly be expected to understand.</p>
+
+<p>“At any rate to return to our school, the opposition
+to the outdoor theatre is from the scientific
+groups, who want an enlargement of their
+laboratories.... The architectural and building
+groups are neutral—they are working on plans
+for both projects, and all they want is that the
+question should be settled one way or the other
+at once, so they can go to work. There will be
+a meeting tonight, at which a preliminary vote will
+be taken. Yes, our politics are quite old-fashioned—Greek,
+in fact.</p>
+
+<p>“The shops? They are managed by shop
+committees of the workers. Distribution of
+products to the various groups which use them
+is effected through a distributing bureau, which has
+charge of the book-keeping and so forth. There<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+has been a change in distribution recently, however.
+At first the shops merely made what was
+ordered by the various groups, and requisitions
+were the medium of exchange. But the shops became
+experimental and enterprising, and produced
+what they liked on the chance of its being wanted.
+This made a show-place necessary, and as for
+various reasons ordinary money became the
+medium of exchange, the show-place became a
+kind of department store. Then some of the
+groups decided to use part of their subsidy in
+advertising in the school newspaper and magazines.
+They are working out some very interesting
+principles in their advertising, too, as you will
+find. They have to tell the truth....</p>
+
+<p>“There is the printing establishment. No, the
+paper and the magazines are not self-supporting—though
+the school advertising helps. They’re
+subsidized. We quite believe in that.</p>
+
+<p>“And there—you can get a glimpse of the
+greenhouses and gardens. Botany and so forth....
+The library is the centre of the research
+groups. History, sociology, economics—finding
+out what and why. Very informal and very
+earnest, as you’ll find.... The groups? Oh,
+the time one stays in each group varies with the
+individual. But every one likes to be able to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+boast quietly of an M. P.—that means a ‘masterpiece’
+in the old mediaeval sense; a piece of
+work that shows you’ve passed the apprentice
+stage—in a reasonable number of departments.
+Some Admirable Crichtons go in for an M. P. in
+everything!...</p>
+
+<p>“The restaurant—that’s quite important.
+The cooking groups give a grand dinner every
+little while, and everybody goes and dines quite
+in state, with dancing afterward. We learn the
+best of bourgeois manners—makes it <i>quite</i> impossible
+to distinguish an immigrant’s child from
+the scions of our old families. The result is that
+the best families are discarding their manners in
+order to retain their distinction! Very amusing....</p>
+
+<p>“The church? You mean that building over
+there, I suppose? That isn’t a church—not in
+the sense you mean. It’s our meeting place.
+You see, since your time churches have come to be
+used so much for meetings that when our architecture
+group came to plan an assembly hall it was
+quite natural for them to choose the ecclesiastical
+style. Anyway, I understand it’s a return to their
+original purpose....”</p>
+
+<p>“But,” I said, “this school is just like the
+world outside!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>“Except,” he said, “in one particular. In the
+world outside we still have certain vestiges
+of class privilege and exploitation—considerably
+toned down from their former asperities,
+but still recognizable as relics of capitalism.
+In the school we have play, production
+and exchange as they would exist in the
+outside world if these things were to be done and
+managed wholly with the intention of making better
+and wiser and happier citizens. The difference,
+of course, is simply that one is run with an
+educational and the other with a productive intention.”</p>
+
+<p>“The difference seems to me,” I remarked,
+“that your school is really democratic and your
+adult world isn’t quite.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is one way of putting it,” he conceded.</p>
+
+<p>“And I should think,” I said warmly, “that
+after going to these schools, your people would
+want the rest of the world run on exactly the same
+plan.”</p>
+
+<p>“It does rather have that effect,” he admitted
+cautiously. “In fact, the Educational party, as
+it is called, is very rapidly rising into power.
+Since you are unfamiliar with our politics, I should
+explain that the Educational party was formed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+after the unfortunate events of 1925, by the amalgamation
+of the United Engineers, the O. G. U.,
+and the Farmers’ League. Its chief figure is the
+sainted Madame Goldman, the organizer of the
+Women’s Battalion in the First Colonial War....”</p>
+
+<p>“What surprises me,” I interrupted, “is that
+your conservatives—”</p>
+
+<p>“Tut! we have no conservatives—they call
+themselves Moderates.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am surprised, then, that your Moderates
+allow such schools to exist! Of course they will
+revolutionize any society in which they are!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said my companion, “but what could
+they do? Once you begin making schools <i>for</i> the
+children, you start out on the principle that education
+is learning how to live—and you end here.”</p>
+
+<p>I pondered this. “Not necessarily,” I said
+at last. “You might have ended with schools
+in which the children of the poor were taught
+how to be efficient wage-slaves.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes,” said my friend, “but they smashed
+that attempt away back in 1924.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did they? I’m very glad to hear it!” I
+cried.... “By the bye, how much do these
+schools cost—all over the country?”</p>
+
+<p>“Less per year than we spent per day on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+Second Colonial War.... But this is enough of
+description. You shall see for yourself.
+Come!” he said.</p>
+
+<p>We started toward the theatre.</p>
+
+<p>“Play,” he was saying, “is according to our
+ideas more fundamental and more important in
+life than work. Consequently the theatre—”</p>
+
+<p>But what he said about the theatre would take
+us far from anything which we are now accustomed
+to consider education. It involves no less
+a heresy than the calm assumption that the artist
+type is the highest human type, and that the chief
+service which education can perform for the future
+is the deliberate cultivation of the faculty of
+“creative dreaming.”...</p>
+
+<p>I venture to quote only one sentence:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Mankind needs more poets.</i>”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+<h3 class="nobreak">APPENDIX</h3></div>
+
+<p class="center">A DEFINITION OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">(From a bulletin issued by the Progressive Education
+Association, Washington, D. C.)</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>“The aim of Progressive Education is the freest and
+fullest development of the individual, based upon the scientific
+study of his physical, mental, spiritual, and social
+characteristics and needs.</p>
+
+<p>“Progressive Education as thus defined implies the following
+conditions:</p>
+
+<p> </p>
+
+<p>“1. <span class="smcap">Freedom To Develop Naturally</span></p>
+
+<p>“The conduct of the pupil should be self-governed according
+to the social needs of his community, rather than
+by arbitrary laws.... Full opportunity for initiative and
+self-expression should be provided, together with an environment
+rich in interesting material that is available for
+the free use of every pupil.</p>
+
+<p> </p>
+
+<p>“2. <span class="smcap">Interest the Motive of All Work</span></p>
+
+<p>“Interest should be satisfied and developed through:
+(1) Direct and indirect contact with the world and its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+activities, and use of the experience thus gained. (2)
+Application of knowledge gained, and correlation between
+different subjects. (3) The consciousness of achievement.</p>
+
+<p> </p>
+
+<p>“3. <span class="smcap">The Teacher a Guide, Not a Task-Master</span></p>
+
+<p>“... Progressive teachers will encourage the use of
+all the senses, training the pupils in both observation and
+judgment; and instead of hearing recitations only, will
+spend most of the time teaching how to use various sources
+of information, including life activities as well as books;
+how to reason about the information thus acquired; and
+how to express forcefully and logically the conclusions
+reached. Teachers will inspire a desire for knowledge,
+and will serve as guides in the investigations undertaken,
+rather than as task-masters. To be a proper inspiration
+to their pupils, teachers must have ample opportunity and
+encouragement for self-improvement and for the development
+of broad interests.</p>
+
+<p> </p>
+
+<p>“4. <span class="smcap">Scientific Study of Pupil Development</span></p>
+
+<p>“School records should ... include both objective and
+subjective reports on those physical, mental, moral, and
+social characteristics which affect both school and adult
+life, and which can be influenced by the school and the
+home. Such records should be used as a guide for the
+treatment of each pupil, and should also serve to focus the
+attention of the teacher on the all-important work of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+development, rather than on simply teaching subject
+matter.</p>
+
+<p> </p>
+
+<p>“5. <span class="smcap">Greater Attention to All that Affects the
+Child’s Physical Development</span></p>
+
+<p>“One of the first considerations of Progressive Education
+is the health of the pupils. Much more room in
+which to move about, better light and air, clean and well
+ventilated buildings, easier access to the out of doors and
+greater use of it, are all necessary. There should be frequent
+use of adequate playgrounds....</p>
+
+
+<p> </p>
+
+<p>“6. <span class="smcap">Co-operation Between School and Home to
+Meet the Needs of Child-Life</span></p>
+
+<p>“The school should provide, with the home, as much as
+possible of all that the natural interests and activities of
+the child demand, especially during the elementary school
+years. It should give opportunity for manual experience
+for both boys and girls, for home-making, and for healthful
+recreation of various kinds.... These conditions can
+come about only through intelligent co-operation between
+parents and teachers. It is the duty of the parents to
+know what the school is doing and why....</p>
+
+<p> </p>
+
+<p>“7. <span class="smcap">The Progressive School a Leader in
+Educational Movements</span></p>
+
+<p>“The Progressive School should be ... a laboratory
+where new ideas if worthy meet encouragement; where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+tradition alone does not rule, but the best of the past is
+leavened with the discoveries of today, and the result is
+freely added to the sum of educational knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>“(<i>The Association is not committed, and never can be,
+to any particular method or system of education. In regard
+to such matters it is simply a medium through which
+improvements and developments worked out by various
+agencies can be presented to the public.</i>)”</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<p class="ph2">FOOTNOTES:</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> It will, I hope, be clear that these remarks apply specifically
+to the grammar school teacher who does have to teach
+everything. The case is less desperate in the higher reaches
+of our school system.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Except in <i>Dutch</i> New York, and in Massachusetts.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> “The one dominant feature of this labour movement [1824-1836]
+was the almost fanatical insistence upon the paramount
+importance of education. In political platforms, in resolutions
+of public meetings, and in the labour press, the statement is repeated
+over and over, that the fundamental demand of labour is
+for an adequate system of education....
+</p>
+<p>
+“To this movement, more than to any other single cause, if
+not more than to all other causes combined, is due the common
+school system of the United States.... When the movement
+died out in 1835 to 1837 ... Horace Mann was leading the
+‘educational revival,’ and the common school was an established
+institution in nearly every state.”—A. M. Simons:
+“Social Forces in American History.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> In which some of these chapters originally appeared, and
+to which my thanks are due for the privilege of republication.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<div class="transnote">
+
+<p class="ph3">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
+
+<p>Page numbering of text portion was not changed when front matter Roman numeral pagination (preface, etc.) was changed in this new edition.</p>
+
+<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Were You Ever a Child?, by Floyd Dell
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