That which they receive in more advanced schools is generally bad. In spite of the Jesuits and Freud, the bad conditioning during adolescence effectively neutralizes the results of good conditioning during childhood. In his Anatomy of Frustration, Mr. H. G. Wells makes his hero comment upon the distressing difference between ‘the charm, the alert intelligence, the fearless freedom of the modern child of six or seven and the slouching mental futility of the ordinary youth in his later teens.’ The first is the product of the nursery school; the second of the elementary and secondary, the preparatory and public school. We educate young children for freedom, intelligence, responsibility and voluntary co-operation; we educate older children for passive acceptance of tradition and for either dominance or subordination. This fact is symptomatic of the uncertainty of purpose which prevails in the Western democracies.
The old patriarchal tradition co-exists in our minds with a newer and quite incompatible hankering for freedom and democracy. In our enthusiasm for the second, we train up our young children to be free, self-governing individuals; having done which, we take fright and, remembering that our society is still hierarchical, still in great measure authoritarian, we devote all our energies to teaching them to be rulers on the one hand and, on the other, acquiescent subordinates.
Here, in passing, it may be remarked that ‘modern’ schools maybe too ‘modern’ by half. There is a danger that children may be given more freedom than they can profitably deal with, more responsibility than they desire or know how to take. To give children too much freedom and responsibility is to impose a strain which many of them find distressing and even exhausting. Exceptional cases apart, children like to have security, like to feel the support of a firm framework of moral laws and even of rules of polite conduct. Within such a firmly established framework there is plenty of room for a training in independence, responsibility and co-operation. The important thing is to avoid extremes—the extreme of too much liberty and responsibility on the one hand and, on the other, of too much restriction, above all too much restriction of the wrong sort. For the fixed framework may just as well be a bad code as a good one. Children may derive just as comforting a sense of security from the moral code, say, of militarism as from that of non-attachment. But the results of an upbringing within a framework of militaristic morality will be quite different from the results of an upbringing in the ethic of non-attachment.
Coming back to the world as we know it, we have to ask ourselves an important question. Even if we were to prolong the nursery-school type of training—training, that is to say, for self-government and responsible co-operation—if we were to continue it far into adolescence, would we, in the existing world, succeed in making any conspicuous change for the better in society or the individuals composing it? Practical life is the most efficient of all teachers. Take adolescents trained for self-government and co-operation and turn them loose into a hierarchical, competitive, success-worshipping society: what will happen? Will the effects of the conditioning received in school survive? Probably not. Most likely, there will be a period of bewilderment and distress; then, in the majority of cases, readjustment to the circumstances of life. Which shows, yet once more, that life is a whole and that desirable changes in one department will not produce the results anticipated from them, unless they are accompanied by desirable changes in all other departments.
In the preceding paragraph I have suggested that a good education is not that infallible cure of all our ills which some enthusiasts have supposed it to be. Or rather that it can become such a cure only when it is associated with good conditions in other departments of life. As usual it is not a question of simple cause and effect, but of complex interrelationship, of action and reaction. Good education will be fully effective only when there are good social conditions and, among individuals, good beliefs and feelings; but social conditions, and the beliefs and feelings of individuals will not be altogether satisfactory until there is good education. The problem of reform is the problem of breaking out of a vicious circle and of building up a virtuous one in its place.
The time has now come when we must ask ourselves in what precisely a good education consists. In the first years and months of infancy education is mainly physiological; the child, to use the language of the kennel, is house-trained. In the past this seemed a trivial and unsavoury matter which it was at once unnecessary and indelicate to discuss. In the words of Uncle Toby Shandy, one wiped it up and said no more about it. Modern psychologists have discovered that the subject is by no means a trivial one and that, for the infant at least, excretion and the process of house-training are matters of the deepest concern. In this context I need mention only the work of the late Dr. Suttie, whose book, The Origins of Love and Hatred, contains an interesting chapter on the effects of early house-training upon the emotional life of human beings. These effects, it would seem, are generally bad; and he gives reasons for supposing that our emotional life would be much more serene if our training in cleanliness had not started so early. Messy children are a nuisance; but if, by allowing them to make their messes, we can guarantee that they shall grow up into gentle, unquarrelsome adults, free from what Suttie calls our ‘taboo on tenderness,’ the nuisance will be very bearable.
So much for the physiological education of infancy. We now come to the moral and intellectual education of later childhood. The two are, of course, inseparable; but it will be convenient to consider them one at a time. Let us begin by asking in what a desirable moral education consists. Our aim, let us recall, is to train up human beings for freedom, for justice, for peace. How shall it be done? In his recent book, Which Way to Peace? Bertrand Russell has written a significant paragraph on this subject. ‘Schools,’ he says, ‘have very greatly improved during the present century, at any rate in the countries which have remained democratic. In the countries which have military dictatorships, including Russia, there has been a great retrogression during the last ten years, involving a revival of strict discipline, implicit obedience, a ridiculously subservient behaviour towards teachers and passive rather than active methods of acquiring knowledge. All this is rightly held by the governments concerned to be a method of producing a militaristic mentality, at once obedient and domineering, cowardly and brutal. . . . From the practice of the despots, we can see that they agree with the advocates of “modern” education as regards the connection between discipline in schools and the love of war in later life.’
Dr. Maria Montessori has developed the same theme in a recent pamphlet: ‘The child who has never learned to act alone, to direct his own actions, to govern his own will, grows into an adult who is easily led and must always lean upon others. The school child, being continually discouraged and scolded, ends by acquiring that mixture of distrust of his own powers and of fear, which is called shyness and which later, in the grown man, takes the form of discouragement and submissiveness, of incapacity to put up the slightest moral resistance. The obedience which is expected of a child both in the home and in the school—an obedience admitting neither of reason nor of justice—prepares the man to be docile to blind forces.
The punishment, so common in schools, which consists in subjecting the culprit to public reprimand and is almost tantamount to the torture of the pillory, fills the soul with a crazy, unreasoning fear of public opinion, even an opinion manifestly unjust and false. In the midst of these adaptations and many others which set up a permanent inferiority complex, is born the spirit of devotion—not to say of idolatry—to the condottieri, the leaders.’ Dr. Montessori might have added that the inferiority complex often finds expression in compensatory brutality and cruelty. The traditional education is a training for life in a hierarchical, militaristic society, in which people are abjectly obedient to their superiors and inhuman to their inferiors. Each slave ‘takes it out of’ the slave below.
In the light of these two citations, we are able to understand more clearly why history should have taken the course it actually has taken in recent years. The intensification of militarism and nationalism, the rise of dictatorships, the spread of authoritarian rule at the expense of democratic government—these are phenomena which, like all other events in human history, have a variety of interacting causes. Most conspicuous among these, of course, are the economic and political causes. But these do not stand alone. There are also educational and psychological causes. Among these must be reckoned the fact that, for the last sixty years, all children have been subjected to the strict, authoritarian discipline of state schools. In recent European history, such a thing has never happened before. At certain periods, it is true, and in certain classes of society, the discipline imposed within the family was exceedingly strict. For example, the seventeenth-century Puritan family was governed almost as arbitrarily and as harshly as the family of the Roman farmer or the Japanese
