Thinking of human beings ‘scientifically,’ as parts of the material universe, he doesn’t see why they shouldn’t be handled as other parts of the material universe are handled—dumped here, like coal or sand, made to flow there, like water, ‘liquidated’ (the Russians preserve the vocabulary of the intellectuals who prepared and made their revolution), like so much ice over a fire.
Technical education is without a principle of integration; academic education makes use of a principle that integrates only on the cognitive plane, only in terms of a natural science preoccupied with the laws of the material universe. What is needed is another principle of integration—a principle which the technicians and the unsuccessful academics will be congenitally capable of using; a principle that will co-ordinate the scattered fragments, the island universes of specialized or merely professional knowledge; a principle that will supplement the scientifico-historical frame of reference at present used by intellectuals, that will help, perhaps, to transform them from mere spectators of the human scene into intelligent participants.
What should be the nature of this new principle of integration? The answer seems clear enough, at any rate in its main outlines: it should be psychological and ethical. Within the new frame of reference, co-ordination of knowledge and experience would be made in human terms; the network of significant relations would be, not material, but psychological; not indifferent to values, but moral; not merely cognitive, but also affective and conative.
A concrete example will make my meaning clear. Here is a young man in process of being trained in engineering and practical mechanics. Under the existing dispensation, the chances are that he will come out into the world profoundly ignorant of everything but his speciality. His education will have failed to equip him with any principle by means of which he can integrate his future experiences and accessions of knowledge. Educationists trained up in the existing academic schools believe that it will be possible to liberalize his education by somehow leading him from the practical and the particular to general scientific theory. Give him, they say, a mastery of general scientific theory, and he will have a principle by means of which he will be able to integrate all his knowledge and experience. In the abstract this scheme seems good enough; but in practice it just doesn’t work. For the probability is that the young man will not be interested in general scientific theory, that he will have neither the wish nor the ability to integrate his experience and his knowledge in terms of the laws of the material universe.
As a matter of brute historical fact, the great advances in scientific theory have very seldom been made by skilled artisans. The practical man who knows his job is interested in the job and perhaps in just as much of the theory underlying his practice as will enable him to do the job better. Very rarely does he develop into the scientist, and few indeed are the fruitful generalizations which we owe to such men. In general, the advances in scientific theory have been made by men of another type—men who did not concern themselves professionally with technical problems, but who merely looked at them as outsiders and then proceeded to generalize and rationalize what was merely particular and empirical. Between the practical man and the man who is interested in scientific theories of the universe at large a gulf is fixed. They belong to different types. The attempt to liberalize technical education by means of the principle which intellectuals use to integrate their experience is foredoomed to failure.
Man is the only subject in which, whatever their type or the degree of their ability, all men are interested. The future engineer may be unable and unwilling to go far in the study of the laws of the material universe. There will be no difficulty, however, in getting him to take an interest in human affairs. It is, therefore, in terms of human affairs that his technical education can best be liberalized. There would be no difficulty in integrating any technical subject into a comprehensive scheme of relations within our human, ethico-psychological framework. The technical course would be accompanied by a course explaining the effects, as measured in terms of good and evil, well-being and suffering, of the technique in question. Our hypothetical young man would learn, not only to be a mechanician, but also to understand the ways in which machinery affects, has affected and is likely to affect, the lives of men and women. He could begin with the effects of machinery upon the individual—such effects as are discussed, for example, in Stuart Chase’s essay in contemporary history, Men and Machines, or in the Hammonds’ account of the industrial revolution.
Next, the broader social effects could be studied—the transformation of technically backward countries, the destruction of old-established trades, the creation of new industries. In these and similar ways a complete network of relationships could be created in the student’s mind, a network binding together things seemingly as irrelevant to one another as down-draught carburetters and the education of children in New Mexico, aluminium alloys and the slaughter of Abyssinians and Spaniards, viscose fibres and the ruin of peasants in Japan and the Rhône Valley. A similar frame of psychological, sociological and ethical reference could be used, not indeed to replace, but to supplement the frame of scientific reference used in academic education. The technician would integrate his experience and special knowledge in human terms only; the intellectual would integrate in terms of the non-human material universe as well as of the human world. Both educations would thus be made genuinely liberal—liberal in the academic sense, because even the technical student would be given a wide range of knowledge and a principle of integration; liberal also in the political sense, because it would be hard indeed to receive such an education and not emerge with a wider range of sympathy, a keener desire to act.
It would be impossible, in the space at my disposal, to give an account of all the hopeful experiments in education undertaken in recent years. The most I can do is to mention a few of the more outstanding essays in the liberalization of our existing system. Of Dr. Montessori’s work for young children and of the reasons why we have hesitated to apply her methods to the teaching of adolescents, I have already spoken. It is true, as Mr. Russell points out in the passage I have quoted above, that, in the democratic countries, our hesitation has not amounted to a complete refusal to apply the Montessori principles. But the applications have been partial and have almost always been made in an intrinsically un-Montessorian context. Consider, by way of example, the English Public Schools. Within a fixed framework, their pupils are in a measure self-governing. Unhappily the rules, customs and loyalties which constitute the supporting framework are the rules, customs and loyalties of a hierarchical, competitive, imperialistic society.
Such training in self-government and self-teaching as the young people receive serves merely to make them more efficient and enterprising members of this intrinsically undesirable society. Something similar takes place in an army preparing for war in modern conditions. The old-fashioned drill, by means of which soldiers were conditioned to overcome fear, cultivate rage and blindly obey their superiors, is an inadequate training for men who are to fight with modern weapons. The mechanization of war has made necessary a new kind of training. The soldier has to be educated to co-operate with small groups of his fellows, to make quick decisions, to use his judgment. Tennyson’s advice to soldiers was good enough in the eighteen-fifties. But for the crew of a tank or a motorized machine-gun unit, doing and dying is not sufficient; they are also required to reason why.
Within the framework of the rules, customs and loyalties of militarism, soldiers are taught to use their intelligence and act upon their own initiative. To this extent Montessori principles have been adopted even in the army. But, under the present dispensation, the partially self-governing and self-teaching soldier is not being trained for freedom and justice any more than is his younger brother, the partially self-governing and self-teaching schoolboy.
A particularly hopeful attempt to enlarge the scope and humanize the character of academic education was made, in the years immediately following the War, by Dr. A. E. Morgan (subsequently director of the Tennessee Valley Authority) at Antioch College. Under the educational dispensation developed by Dr. Morgan, periods of study, as has been noted earlier, are alternated with periods of labour in the factory, the office, the farm—even the prison and the asylum. Three months of theory are supplemented and illustrated by three months of practice. The intellectual is taught to make use of a frame of human reference as well as a frame of natural-scientific and historical reference—and taught, what is more, in the most effective of all possible ways, in terms of physical contact with actual samples of human reality. His principle of integration is not
