In the dictatorial countries the choice has been made, consciously and without compromise. Sport there is definitely a preparation for war—doubly a preparation. It is used, first of all, to prepare children for the term of military slavery which they will have to serve when they come of age—to train them in habits of endurance, courage, and co-ordinated effort, and to cultivate that esprit de corps, that group-vanity and group-pride which are the very foundations of the character of a good soldier. In the second place, it is used as an instrument of nationalistic propaganda. Football matches with teams belonging to foreign countries are treated as matters of national prestige; victory is hailed as a triumph over an enemy, a sign of racial or national superiority; a defeat is put down to foul play and treated almost as a casus belli.
Optimistic theorists count sport as a bond between nations. In the present state of nationalistic feeling it is only another cause of international misunderstanding. The battles waged on the football field and the race-track are merely preliminaries to, and even contributory causes of, more serious contests. In a world that has no common religion or philosophy of life, but where every national group practises its own private idolatry, international football matches and athletic contests can do almost nothing but harm.
The choice of the dictators has been, as I have said, definite and uncompromising. They have decided that sport shall be used above all as a preparation for war. In the democratic countries we are, as usual, of two minds. The idea of using sport solely as a preparation for war seems to us shocking; at the same time we cannot bring ourselves to use it, consciously and consistently, as an instrument for training active peace-lovers. To some extent we still use sport as a training for militarists. ‘The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,’ and it was on these and a score or two of other school playgrounds that the Indian Empire was conquered and held down. The Amritsar massacre is a genuine, hall-marked product of the prefectorial system and compulsory cricket.
‘His captain’s hand on his shoulder smote: “Play up, and play the game.” ’ The game was played in that high-walled Jalianwallabagh to the tune of I forget how many hundreds of dead and wounded. But if India was conquered and is now held down on the playing fields of the English Public Schools, it is also administered there, and administered with a considerable degree of justice and incorruptibility. It is even in process (very gradually and reluctantly, it is true) of being liberated on those same fields. In the half-democracy of modern England, sport is not used solely as a preparation for war and the fostering of group-vanity and group-pride; it is also used for teaching boys to behave with genuine decency—in other words, as a training in non-attachment. In the world as it is at present, we cannot afford to be of two minds. Either we must make use of sport (and in general the whole educational system) as a device for training up non-attached, non-militaristic men and women; or else, under the urgent threat of war, we must make up our minds to out-Prussianize the Nazis and, on the playing fields of Eton and the other schools, prepare for the winning of future Waterloos.
The first alternative involves great risk, but may lead, not only the English, but the whole world besides, out of the valley of destruction in which the human race is now precariously living. The second alternative can lead only to the worsening of international relations and ultimately to general catastrophe. Unhappily, it is towards the second alternative that the rulers of England now seem to be inclining.
I have spoken hitherto as though there were only one type of sound education. But we have seen, in the chapter on Inequality, that human beings are of several different types. This being so, is it not a mistake to prescribe one system of character-training? Should there not be several systems? The answer to these questions is at once yes and no. It is not a mistake to prescribe only one system of character-training, because (to repeat the words used in an earlier chapter) it is always in men’s power to move away from the territories in which psychological divisions exist, because it is always possible for them, if they so desire, to find in the common world of action the site for a broad, substantial bridge connecting even the most completely incommensurable of psychological universes. Character-training through self-government, through responsible co-operation, through the voluntarily accepted discipline of games, is something which goes on in that common world of action, in which alone it is possible for individuals of different psychological types to come together. To prescribe one fundamental technique of character-training is therefore no mistake. On the other hand it would obviously be foolish not to adapt the one fundamental technique to the different types of individual. To discuss the nature of these variations would take a long time and, since the matter is not one of fundamental importance, I will proceed at once to a consideration of my next topic, which is education as instruction.
In most of the civilized countries of the West primary education has been universal and compulsory for sixty years and more. Secondary and higher education have also been made available—less freely in England than in America, in France and Italy than in Germany, but everywhere to very considerable numbers of young people and adults. When we compare the high hopes entertained by the early advocates of universal education with the results actually achieved after two generations of intensive and extensive teaching, we cannot fail to be somewhat discouraged.
Millions of children have passed thousands of millions of hours under schoolroom discipline, reading the Bible, listening to pi-jaws—and the peoples of the world are preparing for mutual slaughter more busily and more scientifically than ever before; humanitarianism is visibly declining; the idolatrous worship of strong men is on the increase; international politics are conducted with a degree of brutal cynicism unknown since the days of Pope Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia. From moral we pass to intellectual education. The best that has been thought and said has been bawled by millions of pedagogues, millions of times, into millions of little ears—and the yellow press, the tabloids, the grands journaux d’information circulate by scores of millions every morning and evening of the year; each month the pulp magazines offer to millions of readers their quota of true confessions, film fun, spicy detective stories, hot mysteries; all day long in the movie palaces millions of feet of imbecile and morally squalid film are unrolled before a succession of audiences; from a thousand transmitting stations streams of music (mostly bad) and political propaganda (mostly false and malevolent) are poured out, for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, into the contaminated ether.
Instruments of marvellous ingenuity and power on the one hand; and, on the other, ways of using those instruments which are either idiotic, or criminal, or both together. Such are the moral and intellectual fruits of our system of education. It is time that something was done to change the nature of the tree that bears these fruits.
In earlier paragraphs I have indicated what must be done if we wish to breed up a race of non-attached, actively peace-loving men and women. We now have to consider the best methods for fostering intelligence and imparting knowledge.
At the present time education-as-instruction assumes one of two forms—academic (or liberal) education and technical education. Academic education is supposed to do two things for those who are subjected to it; it is supposed, first of all, to be a gymnastic, by means of which they will be able to develop all the faculties of their minds, from the power of logical analysis to that of aesthetic appreciation; and, in the second place, it is supposed to provide young people with a framework of historical, logical and physico-chemico-biological relationships, within which any particular piece of information acquired in later life may find its proper and significant place. Technical education, on the other hand, aims merely at practical results and is supposed to give young people proficiency in some particular trade or profession.
Recent investigations (for example, that which was earned out a few years ago by the Scottish education authorities) have given statistical form and content to the conclusions which personal experience had long since forced upon the practising teacher: namely, that academic education (although grudgingly dispensed, at any rate in its secondary and higher forms) is given to large numbers of boys and girls who are unable to derive much profit from it. To some extent; no doubt, this failure to profit by academic education is due to the defects of our teaching system or to the shortcomings of individual teachers. (Teaching is an art, not a science; bad artists have always greatly outnumbered the good.)
However, when all allowances have been made, it seems perfectly clear that very many young people—probably an absolute majority of them—are congenitally incapable of receiving what academic education has to offer. At the same time it is no less clear that many of those who are able to stay the course of an academic education emerge from the ordeal either as parrots, gabbling remembered formulas which they do not really understand; or, if they do understand,
