Samurai and Roman had the same end in view—to train up children in the military virtues, so that they should become good soldiers. The Puritan had a religious end in view; he was imitating Jehovah; he was breaking his children’s will because St. Augustine and Calvin had taught him that that will was essentially evil. And yet, though the ends were different, the results of the Puritan’s educational system were the same as those attained by the essentially similar system devised by the Roman and the Samurai for quite another end. His children became first-rate soldiers; and when they were not called upon to go to war, they exhibited their militaristic qualities in the field of commerce and industry, becoming (as Tawney and Weber have shown) the first and almost the most ruthless of the capitalists.

The Puritans, I repeat, were strict disciplinarians within the family. But not all the population was composed of Puritans. When most children were brought up within the family, a great many experienced only kindness and consideration. In other cases spasmodic brutality alternated with spasmodic affection. In yet others, no doubt, parents would have liked to impose a strict Roman or Hebrew discipline, but were too lazy to do so systematically, so that the child came through almost unscathed. It is a highly significant fact that the members of the upper classes, who, as children had been under tutors or sent to school, were always the actively militaristic element in mediaeval and early modern society. The common people were seldom spontaneously bellicose. War and imperialistic brigandage were the preoccupation of their masters—men who had enjoyed the privilege, during boyhood, of being bullied by some sharp-tongued, hard-hitting pedagogue.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, secondary education for the middle classes was enormously extended; in the second half, primary education was made universally compulsory. For the first time, all children were subjected to strict, systematic, unremitting discipline—the kind of discipline that ‘produces a militaristic mentality, at once obedient and domineering.’ The members of the middle and upper classes still undergo, in most countries, a longer period of education than do the poor. This is why the members of the middle and upper classes are still, on the whole, more bellicose than the members of the working class. (Such organizations as the Peace Pledge Union have more adherents among the poor than among the rich.)

Even the poor, however, are now given several years of authoritarian discipline. The decline of democracy has coincided exactly with the rise to manhood and political power of the second generation of the compulsorily educated proletariat. This is no fortuitous coincidence. By 1920 all the Europeans who had escaped compulsory primary education were either dead or impotently old. The masses had gone through, first, six or seven years of drilling in school, then, in most countries, anything from one to three years of conscription, and finally the four years of the war. Enough military discipline to make them ‘at once obedient and domineering.’ The most actively domineering ones climbed to the top, the rest obeyed and were given, as a reward, the privilege of bullying those beneath them in the new political hierarchies.

The early educational reformers believed that universal primary and, if possible, secondary education would free the world from its chains and make it ‘safe for democracy.’ If it has not done so—if, on the contrary, it has merely prepared the world for dictatorship and universal war—the reason is extremely simple. You cannot reach a given historical objective by walking in the opposite direction. If your goal is liberty and democracy, then you must teach people the arts of being free and of governing themselves. If you teach them instead the arts of bullying and passive obedience, then you will not achieve the liberty and democracy at which you are aiming. Good ends cannot be achieved by inappropriate means. The truth is infinitely obvious. Nevertheless we refuse to act upon it. That is why we find ourselves in our present predicament.

The two types of education—education for freedom and responsibility, education for bullying and subordination—coexist in the democracies of the West, where nursery schools belong to the first, and most other schools to the second type. In Fascist countries, not even nursery schools may belong to the first type. Significantly enough, the Montessori Society of Germany was dissolved by the political police in 1935; and, in July 1936, Mussolini’s Minister of Education decreed the cessation of all official Montessori activities in Italy. In the days of Lenin, Russian education was based, at every stage, upon principles essentially similar to those enunciated by Dr. Montessori. In the manifestos and decrees published shortly after Lenin’s seizure of power one may read such phrases as these. ‘Utilization of a system of marks for estimating the knowledge and conduct of the pupil is abolished. . . . Distribution of medals and insignia is abolished. . . . The old form of discipline which corrupts the entire life of the school and the untrammelled development of the personality of the child, cannot be maintained in the schools of labour. The progress of labour itself develops this internal discipline without which collective and rational work is unimaginable. . . . All punishment in schools is forbidden. . . . All examinations are abolished. . . . The wearing of school uniform is abolished.’

On September 4th, 1935, a Decree on Academic Reform was issued by the Stalin Government. This decree contained, among others, the following orders: ‘Instruct a commission . . . to elaborate a draft of a ruling for every type of school. The ruling must have a categoric and absolutely obligatory character for pupils as well as for teachers. This ruling must be the fundamental document . . . which strictly establishes the regime of studies and the basis for order in the school. . . . Underlying the ruling on the conduct of pupils is to be placed a strict and conscientious application of discipline. . . . In the personal record there will be entered for the entire duration of his studies the marks of the pupil for every quarter, his prizes and his punishments. . . . A special apparatus of Communist Youth organizers is to be installed for the surveillance of the pupil inside and outside of school. They are to watch over the morality and the state of mind of the pupils. . . . Establish a single form of dress for the pupils of the primary, semi-secondary and secondary schools, this uniform to be introduced, to begin with, in 1936 in the schools of Moscow.’

This decree was followed by another, issued in February 1937, ordering that the existing organizations for giving military training to young children (from eight years old upwards) should be strengthened and extended. Such systems of infantile conscription already exist in the Fascist countries and, if the threat of war persists, will doubtless soon be imposed upon the democracies of the West.

Any change for the worse in educational methods means a change for the worse in the mentality of millions of human beings during their whole lifetime. Early conditioning, as I have pointed out, does not irrevocably and completely determine adult behaviour; but it does unquestionably make it difficult for individuals to think, feel and act otherwise than as they have been taught to do in childhood. Where social conditions are in harmony with the prevailing system of education, the task of getting outside the circle of early conditioning may be almost insuperably difficult. Stalin has made it practically certain that, for the next thirty or forty years, the prevailing Russian philosophy of life shall be essentially militaristic.

Discipline is not the only instrument of character-training. One of the major psychological discoveries of modern times was the discovery that the play, not only of small children, but (even more significantly) of adolescents and adults could be turned to educational purposes. Partly by accident, partly by subtle and profound design, English educators of the second half of the nineteenth century evolved the idea of organizing sport for the purpose of training the character of their pupils. At Rugby, during Tom Brown’s schooldays, there were no organized games. Dr. Arnold was too whole-heartedly a low-church social reformer, too serious-minded a student of Old Testament history, to pay much attention to a matter seemingly so trivial as his boys’ amusements. A generation later, cricket and football were compulsory in every English Public School, and organized sport was being used more and more consciously as a means of shaping the character of the English gentleman.

Like every other instrument that man has invented, sport can be used either for good or for evil purposes. Used well, it can teach endurance and courage, a sense of fair play and a respect for rules, co-ordinated effort and the subordination of personal interests to those of the group. Used badly, it can encourage personal vanity and group vanity, greedy desire for victory and hatred for rivals, an intolerant esprit de corps and contempt for people who are beyond a certain arbitrarily selected pale. In either case sport inculcates responsible co-operation; but when it is used badly the co-operation is for undesirable ends and the result upon the individual character is an increase of attachment; when it is used well, the character is modified in the direction of non-attachment. Sport can be either a preparation for war or, in some measure, a substitute for war; a trainer either of potential war-mongers or of potential peace-lovers; an educative influence forming either militarists or men who will be ready and able to