Part 3

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.”