“Education teaches in what social welfare consists. It is of first importance to you that your sons should be taught what are the ruling principles and beliefs which guide the lives of their fellowmen in their own times and in their own country; what the moral, social and political programme of their nation is; what the spirit of the legislation by which their deeds will have to be judged; what degree of progress Humanity has already attained and that which it has yet to attain. And it is important to you that they should feel themselves from their earliest years, united in the spirit of equality and of love for a common aim, with the millions of brothers that God has given them.”—Mazzini.

I

“IT was,” says Mr. Benjamin Kidd, “with a well-founded instinct that William II. of Germany, on his accession turned to the elementary school teachers of his country when he aimed to impose the elements of a new social heredity on the whole German people.” It is impossible at this time of day not to go far in agreement with Mr. Kidd when he tells us that it is not so much what is born in a man as what he is born into that shapes his life. The most powerful formative influence in the shaping of character and outlook is “social heredity,” “imposed on the young at an early age and under conditions of emotion.”^[55] This judgment is no longer a matter of speculation. Dr. Stanley Hall’s work upon the phenomena of adolescence has made it clear that the plastic and absorbent stuff of youth will inevitably take its abiding shape and colour from the cultural setting in which it finds itself. The advocates of sectarian education in the famous English controversy about the Balfour Acts were, from their own point of view, speaking within the universe of the soundest possible psychology when they insisted that in religious education “atmosphere” was paramount. It was a piece of very astute observation on the part of the ancient Jews that led to the practice of bringing their twelve-year-old boys to Jerusalem for the Passover ceremonies. All the early training was crystallised into a definite direction of life by the induction of the youth at his most sensitive moment into the highly charged emotional atmosphere of the Holy City at the great festival of national remembrance and hope. He went there a boy; he returned home a Jew.

Again and again in the course of this examination of the conditions of democratic evolution, we have had reason to look to education for a solution of many fundamental matters. It is indeed no longer possible to overlook the absolute primacy of the school in any progressive democratic polity; and if the foundations of the coming democratic commonwealth are to be well and truly laid, they must be laid around about the child. Our present purpose does not require that we should consider the actual machinery of the education proper to democratic development—that is a matter for the educator. Our business here and now is to consider the broad general characters of such an education.

It is a commonplace that needs no labouring that modern education suffers many things from the “dead hand.” The tradition of the “grammar school” which aimed at opening the field of knowledge by a training in letters is still with us, despite the fact that we have become familiarised in recent years with a rounder and fuller conception of education. We have been told again and again that the business of education is to produce good citizens, to promote the growth of moral character, and so forth; and slowly this emphasis has made some headway in the minds of educational officials. But the whole implication of this conception of education is far from being realised, even by those who are actively engaged in the work of education. A disproportionate pre-occupation with “letters” and knowledge still remains to betray our bondage to traditional ideas; and this in spite of the fact that popular education has in recent years received a very definite orientation through the demand for industrial efficiency. But as yet there has not been—save in the region of what is called “technical education”—any serious and sustained effort to co-ordinate the whole subject matter of education to this particular end. “Technical” education appears in the scheme not as an integral or organic part of the process as a whole, but as a somewhat arbitrary and unrelated annex to the last stage of the process.

To this demand that education should minister to industrial efficiency we shall have reason to return presently. Here we are concerned only with the fact that though this demand has been fairly general and insistent, it has not succeeded in shaking the hold of tradition upon the method of the educational process. Popular education still consists in the main of variations upon and extensions of the three R’s; and though the experts have discussed widely and in detail the ways and means of directing the educational processes to given ends, the solutions have not yet arrived in any very substantial way in the schools.

Roughly, our popular education is still governed by the idea of equipping the young person with such a quantum of knowledge as he may be supposed to require in order to make a living and gain some sort of settled place in life. It has become more and more possible in recent times for boys and girls who show unusual aptitudes to proceed to the higher branches of learning; but in the main our thought of popular education has been coloured by a pernicious doctrine of “minimums.” We have asked how little education can be given consistently with the need of the individual and the society in which he lives; and the opposition which meets any endeavour to raise the “school leaving age” proves quite conclusively that we have not generally advanced beyond the stage of regarding that education as best which is soonest done with. For this the economic strain of life is partly accountable; it is desirable that the boys and girls should be wage-earning as speedily as possible; but even more responsible for this state of things is a general ignorance concerning the meaning and purpose of education. Indeed, few of those who are now parents have reason to recall with any profound interest or gratitude the days when they were receiving an alleged education. Something in the nature of a systematic campaign of education in the interests of education would seem to be necessary if the popular indifference is to be removed to any good purpose.

It has indeed to be remembered that popular education is still in its infancy; and the prejudice it has to overcome is the result of the inevitable failures of its experimental stages. When it is recalled that elementary education in England was until 1870 in the hands of voluntary agencies, and that only since that date has education become universally accessible, it is perhaps remarkable that education should have made as much headway as it has made; and much of our criticism of current educational methods tends to overlook what is under the circumstances the real magnitude of the achievement in education. At the same time it is plain that our educational methods are in need of much sustained radical criticism if our purposes in education are to be saved from mis-carriage.

II

But most of all do we require to clear our minds concerning the goal we are seeking through education. It is true, as Professor Dewey has pointed out, that it is not possible to define an end for education; for in a profound sense, education has no end. A true education will be that which fits an individual to go on learning to the end of his life. The aim of education is more education. At the same time this education will not be for its own sake, or for the learning it helps the scholar to acquire. Here again Dr. Dewey helps us by reminding us that one aim of education is social efficiency. Plainly and beyond peradventure no education will serve a democracy which does not produce socially efficient persons.

But this word efficiency has become discredited by its recent use. We have heard something of efficiency engineers who have tried to reduce human faculty into mathematical formulÆ for the purpose of speeding up and suitably supplementing the mechanical processes of industry. It amounts to no more than a systematic endeavour to fit the human agent to the machine so as to get more out of the machine. The result for the life of the human agent as a whole is hardly taken into account. And even if this myth of efficiency engineering has met the fate it deserved, its very appearance and name are symptomatic of the general direction of popular thought upon the main business of a community. Nor is this confined to the classes that are interested in getting the utmost out of the worker, or to the unreflecting public. The British National Union of Teachers at its Annual Conference in 1916 declared that “this great war, with its terrible wastage of human life and material has brought into bold relief the economic potentialities of the child. As never before, the nation now realises that efficient men and women are the best permanent capital the state possesses.”^[56] So that the business of education is to develop the economic potentialities of the child in order to provide capital for the state. It does not appear that the child has any rights in the matter at all. He is to be trained in order to become “the best permanent capital” of the state. It is to be hoped that two more years of war have brought a more fruitful vision to the National Union of Teachers.

Yet the word efficiency is worth keeping, for it embodies the true conception of educational aim so long as it is rightly interpreted; and industrial efficiency must be allowed to enter into our interpretation of it. Industrial efficiency gains its preponderant emphasis in recent discussion because we are still in the toils of the disastrous illusion that the national ideal is national wealth. We think of the nation’s well-being in terms of its financial prosperity; and naturally we tend to subordinate all our social processes to this end. But the result of this tendency will be to create not a society, but a wealth-producing machine; and those human possibilities in which the final wealth of life lies, will have to fight a doubtful battle for their very existence, and at best can gain no more than a precarious foothold in the interstices of the money-making organisation.

From this bias education must be delivered—at whatever cost; and a doctrine of social efficiency enunciated which will be comprehensive enough to satisfy the requirements of the single mind and the social whole at the same time. In point of fact, these requirements are virtually identical, for that which makes a full man makes also for a full fellowship. The individual is to find himself in precisely those things which enable him to contribute his due to society. We need, therefore, to enquire somewhat broadly into the nature of the things in which the individual shall render his due to the commonality. We shall then be in a position to state in general terms what we should look to the educational process to provide.

Professor Dewey has laid down in this connection a principle of the utmost importance. He affirms that “we may produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like to realise.”^[57] If we are to train the young for social life, the proper method is to surround them in childhood, so far as that may be, with the conditions of the ideal social life toward which we look. The school should be the societas perfecta in miniature. This naturally requires a very considerable departure in tone from the conditions which still prevail. The pontifical and authoritarian tradition of the mediÆval school is still with us; and an attention is devoted to problems of discipline and order which is disproportionate to the real business of preparing for life in a democratic commonwealth, and is to a great extent from an angle and in a spirit alien to the purpose in hand. A considerable breach in this system has already been made by the new emphasis upon the value of self-determination in education from the earliest stages; but the relaxation of the traditional canons of discipline does not carry us far enough. Self-determination must be recognised not only as an individual right but as a group responsibility; and the practice of popular self-government should begin in the schools. It is symptomatic of the present tendency among educators of a liberal and radical type that in the prospectus of a school soon to be established, it is laid down that the internal government “shall be increasingly democratic, scholars and teachers sharing both legislation and administration,” and that the external government shall be vested in a council, representing the trustees, the faculty and the scholars. This is a sane and fruitful method of initiating boys and girls into the larger responsibilities of social life. Already the plan has been adopted in some existing schools with a considerable measure of success; and if the school is to be the organ of a genuine training in social efficiency, we need a wide extension of this method.

But beyond this discipline in self-government, the school has to undertake the fitting of the child for other kinds of social contribution.

(a) He must be trained to contribute his share to the supply of the physical needs of the community. Obviously, in a school, the direct and complete application of this principle is impossible. It is laid down in the prospectus before referred to that “all must share, teacher and scholar alike, in the labour that lies at the basis of human life and unites all men through their common need”; and it is ordained that “the kitchen, the crafts-room and the garden shall rank equally with the classroom.” It is proposed to give the scholars “direct experience of agricultural processes and the preparation of the main articles of food, spinning, weaving, dyeing, sewing, carpentry, building, pottery, printing and any other crafts directly contributing to the life of the community.” Naturally, no child is required to become expert in all these occupations; but his training in them will presently serve to reveal his special aptitudes and to determine his own personal choice.

It is not contemplated in this particular experiment that machinery will be introduced to any considerable extent; and while it is stated that machinery will not be excluded, it is obvious that it is regarded with some dubiety, if not hostility. But it is necessary to accept the position that the machine industry is here with us and is here to stay; and a proper perception of its true function will save us from assuming a fallacious attitude in regard to it. While the incentive to the development and improvement of large scale mechanical processes has been the pursuit of profit, the real office of these processes is to diminish the purely mechanical and menial operations which are necessary to life, and consequently to release a larger volume of human energy for tasks of a more independent and creative nature. There are certain necessities of life concerning which our requirements are that they should be good in quality and abundant in quantity—and as no question but of utility arises in relation to them, they may be assigned to the large-scale machine industry. This, however, does not in the least absolve us from including in our school curriculum a provision for the habituation of children to mechanical processes of this kind. But because these processes are necessarily monotonous and irksome, every effort should be made to introduce into them what elements of interest may be attached to them; and to reduce to the lowest possible point the current tendency to make the worker a mere accessory of the machine.

Miss Helen Marot has recently described proposals for an educational experiment which aims at the association of discipline in industrial production with the educational process. This particular experiment takes the form of producing wooden toys; and while, as Miss Marot sees, the production of toys has anyhow an intrinsic interest, the details which are given show how radically the atmosphere of the machine industry might be changed by giving it a place in the school curriculum. Miss Marot’s assumption that the machine industry can be so transformed by democratic control as to satisfy the creative instinct has already been adversely criticised in these pages; but the present discussion is not affected by criticism of that particular point. What it is to our purpose to observe is that mechanical processes may be relieved of some of their present irksomeness by supplying them with their appropriate background. First of all, it is necessary that the worker should be acquainted with the whole process of manufacture in order that he may participate in his own special task with a measure of intelligent interest; and this will involve a degree of familiarity with the technical problems of management, with accounting and costing, with the internal conditions of the industry and the plant, and with the larger economics of the enterprise. But in addition to all this more immediate business of habituation to routine, provision is made for the development of artistic judgment and execution and for the acquisition of knowledge relating to the craft itself—consisting in this case of “authentic accounts and inspirational stories of industrial life, especially of the lumber, wood-working and the toy industry.”

Obviously not all trades command the interest which can be created around toy-making. In the manufacture of articles of utility which are produced by processes of a highly standardised kind, it would be less easy to introduce elements of romance and sentiment. Still much can and should be done in every trade; and admission to any particular trade should be preceded by some discipline of this kind. If ever industry is organised on the basis of national Guilds, surely one function of the Guilds will be to establish national trade schools in which a generous training of this kind can be given and which shall be closely co-ordinated to the entire scheme of public education.

III

But it cannot be too frequently emphasised that we are not to accept the present subordination of social life to the exigencies of the machine industry. That the machine industry is here to stay need not be argued; and we may dismiss as impracticable the suggestion of a return to the handicraft system. The machine industry must be retained for the production of utilities where no question of beauty or ornament arises; and it should be so ordered as to reduce the purely mechanical operations entailed in the manufacture of the staple commodities to a minimum. Consequently care should always be had to prevent an exaggerated emphasis upon the place of the machine industry in education. It is not to be pretended that mechanical processes can ever in themselves minister substantially to the joy of life. The best that can be said is that their present disadvantages can be materially reduced; but not even the sense of partnership and democratic control, the shortening of hours and the addition of intellectual interest, taken all together, can turn factory life into “a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.”

Some emphasis has already been laid upon the difference between productive and creative activity. Creation is not merely production, but reproduction, that is to say, the activity in which we express ourselves for the joy of the thing itself. The present writer was brought up in a slate-quarrying town in North Wales. The workers spent their time in mining and dressing roofing-slates—an industry which involves no special skill save only in the department of slate-splitting. This is handwork and no satisfactory mechanical substitute for it has yet been contrived; and there is much emulation among the workers in this process. Apart from this there is nothing note-worthy about the industry except the very considerable extent of partnership which prevails (or used to prevail) in the work itself and of fellowship in the dressing shops. But after the day’s work was done there was a somewhat remarkable activity of another kind. Sometimes a worker would take a piece of raw slate home with him and spend his spare time in turning it into candlesticks or some other article by means of a lathe or by direct manual work. The result from an artistic standpoint was doubtless very crude; but it was interesting and instructive to observe the almost instinctive way in which men, released from necessary toil, turned to the production of things of beauty. This free self-expression took other forms in other men. Welsh quarrymen have always been well-known for their literary tastes; and the town contained a considerable number of quite capable writers of both prose and verse in the Welsh language. Others there were—and these were a large number—whose dispositions were musical; and since the purchase of musical instruments was as a rule beyond these men’s pockets, they devoted themselves to vocal music. The congregational singing in the churches was famous throughout the country; and while there were many individual vocalists and composers of considerable merit, the development of choral singing reached an extremely high point. It was an intensely religious community and was full of religious activities of many kinds. It was perfectly plain that the real business and joy of life lay not in the production of roofing-slates but in the exercises of creative self-expression to which the men appeared to turn naturally and instinctively when the business of making a livelihood was over.

This is a parable for the educator. While the business of producing the necessities of life should be so conceived and ordered as to make participation in it as much a pleasure as a duty, it is not to be gainsaid that the joy and the ultimate wealth of life lies in the free and self-directed activity of self-expression whether by the individual himself or in some free concert with his neighbours. Education for life will necessarily take account of this circumstance—not only because it provides a means of personal satisfaction but also because it might, and properly developed would, become the chief and the most characteristic contribution of the individual to the life and growth of the community. The school must therefore provide opportunity of independent personal self-expression—in every manner of medium—in order that the peculiar creative aptitude of each child may be discovered and encouraged. Whether it be wood-carving or verse-writing, pattern-designing or violin-playing, any education that pretends to fit a child for a vital social service must make room for it.

It is in this region that we are to look for the differentiation of future social function according to particular aptitudes. To-day, education reproduces the traditional social schism between the privileged and the disinherited classes. On the one hand, we have schools and universities which aim to provide a culture appropriate to those who have to assume the business of leadership and government in the community; on the other we have a popular education which appears in the main to aim at providing a docile mass amenable to leadership and government. There is virtually no attempt to sift out of the mass those who have aptitudes for special social tasks or genius for any form of artistic production. Its methods—mitigated only by the vagaries of the personal equation—are calculated to turn out human products having the uniformity of a sheet of postage stamps. This method can have no result but that of producing and perpetuating a general spiritual poverty. In a democratic community it should be intolerable that schools for children should exist other than the common school. The common school being what it is, it is not surprising that there should be a demand for schools that give a better chance to the human material of boys and girls. This, however, tends to stereotype a class-distinction; and for that reason to limit the field in which the talent for public leadership and artistic and political genius might be discovered. In the common school there should be provision and encouragement for the exercise of free and original self-expression in every possible way so that each child may be enabled to discover its own peculiar vocation in the commonwealth. Not every child will reveal a faculty for creative self-expression of a high order; but every child should have the chance of doing so. And it is the only safe assumption on which to proceed that every child has in it the latent capacity for making a unique and original personal contribution to the total life and wealth and beauty of the community. The common school should become the mine out of which we dig the raw material of our poets, whether minor or major, our singers, our sculptors, our fabricators of beautiful garments, our painters of pictures, our orators, our thinkers and our house-decorators; and there is an untold wealth of this raw material which is lost to society all the time under the conditions of our present preoccupation with the making of money. It would be stupid to suppose that every child can become a great artist; but some kind of artist in some kind of medium every child should have the opportunity of becoming, on the assumption that here—in this region of creative self-expression—lies the richest contribution he can make to the common life.

IV

But the democratic principle further requires the intelligent co-operation of persons in the conduct of affairs; and it is the part of the common school to furnish the necessary equipment of this partnership. In this equipment there are two main elements. The first is the provision of adequate capital of information for the stimulation and direction of thought; the second is the encouragement of independent and original thought.

There is a certain body of knowledge which it is essential that the child should have if he is to think rightly and to order his conduct accordingly. This body of knowledge may be roughly described as knowledge of the world in which we live; and its two chief parts have reference to the world as it now is, and to the story of how it came to be what it is. The former involves observation and interpretation of the actual conditions of the life in which the child lives; and the process should begin where the child stands. In the modern teaching of geography, the beginning is made in school-yard or the precinct and from this centre it broadens out to cover one’s city, one’s county, one’s state or province, one’s country, until at last it embraces the round earth. This is as it should be. In the past the teaching of geography has been a mere imparting of a mass of facts, which have seemed to possess no direct relation to life; by making the child’s own location a focus round about which the available and necessary knowledge of the world can be gathered in a more or less coherent fashion, the relation of facts, which in themselves might seem remote and irrelevant to the business of life, becomes more evident, and the entire study gains a new vitality. This discussion is now trenching dangerously upon the province of educational theory; but it is needful to emphasise how indispensable it is that knowledge should not be, as it has so often been, allowed to appear unconnected with the actual business of living in this world. Even yet one may hear children asking in a bewildered way—“What on earth is the use of my learning the height of Popocatapetl?” Or “what good is it to know the length of the Yang-Tse-Kiang?” Information of this kind has no doubt a certain fascination for some types of mind; but it may be left for those minds to seek it out for themselves. The business of the school is to make possible the acquisition of the knowledge which bears upon the contribution which the pupil is expected to make to the community. This is not to say that there is not knowledge which is desirable for its own sake, or that the love of knowledge should not be encouraged for what it brings. Moreover, soon or late all knowledge will possess a social value. But the knowledge which is most valuable is that which the individual acquires for himself; and the responsibility of the school in this matter is to release and quicken the capacity for independent and continuous acquisition of knowledge. But this desideratum is not in the least compromised or neglected by ordering the acquisition of knowledge in the first instance with reference to the actual business of social life.

It is the business of the educator to determine what the subject-matter of the curriculum must be in order to give the pupil adequate knowledge of the world in which he has to live; it is our business here simply to stress the point that this knowledge shall be of a relevant and vital kind. It should have to do not only with the physical features of the world, but with social and political institutions and the like; and indeed throughout it should have more to say about the ways than about the places in which people live. But chiefly this aspect of the educational process should aim to equip the pupil with the necessary knowledge to enable him to acquire more knowledge through his own direct experience of the world.

But this knowledge of the world as it is would be hopelessly inadequate were it not connected with some knowledge of how the world came to be what it is. Here again the subject-matter must be defined by the experience of the educator. The business of this writing is to emphasise the requirement that this knowledge of the past shall be ordered conformably to the ultimate social fruitfulness of the pupil. In his boyhood the present writer was required to study geology—at first sight a somewhat irrelevant subject for a lad in his early teens. But he happened to live in a district where slate-quarrying was the only industry; and when he learnt that his bread and butter came from the “Llandeilo Beds”; and that these same “beds” occupied a specific place in a more or less orderly process of world-making, the study of geology assumed a new interest. But its most important action was the awakening of a dim sense of being an “heir of all the ages.” This feeling received a very powerful reinforcement from another side. The writer well remembers his first reading of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers. Hitherto history had seemed to consist mainly of the puerile and discreditable exploits of a succession of royal persons of whom none were better than they should be; and he had wondered what on earth all this had to do with a boy living among the Welsh mountains in the nineteenth century. But the Pilgrims Fathers were different; here at last was something that seemed to have a meaning, and it is easy to see what that meaning would be to a lad whose upbringing had been in a Strong Nonconformist tradition. It took long years to fill with a connected content the interval between the sailing of the Mayflower and the campaign for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales; but from henceforth the lad knew that he stood in the succession of a tradition that had made a difference to the world and that he owed a very great deal to it.

The story of how we have come by our inheritance of freedom, of the age-long upward struggle of mankind, this above all should furnish the inspiration and the guidance for our service of the present. For this reason, emphasis should be laid upon the history of peoples rather than of states, upon the movement of social life rather than upon historical biography. It seems hardly credible but it is strictly true that the present writer left school without ever having heard of the Craft Guilds of the Middle ages; or of the great tradition of ecclesiastical architecture which enters so organically into the story of social development in England. He had heard in a somewhat casual manner of Wat Tyler and John Ball, and of other incidents which disturbed the normal flow of royal intrigue and adventure; but of the story of the common people he knew virtually nothing at all. Yet after all that is the history that chiefly matters; and much has yet to be done to give it its proper place in the school curriculum.

Whatever the subject-matter, its arrangement and presentation should be so ordered as to inspire and enable the child to make a willing and worthy contribution to the life of his community. But the social emphasis in education, if it is to be true to itself and indeed to the general history of mankind, must define society in wider terms than that of the immediate community. Mr. Wells has told us that mankind has been forever “pursuing the frontiers of its possible community.” Whether by revolution within the commonwealth, by imperial expansion or by fusion with other commonwealths, there has been an abiding impulse—erratic and often perverse in its operations—to broaden the basis of human fellowship. And in the present position of the world, there is nothing so urgent as to quicken a social sympathy wide enough to embrace the world. It is peculiarly the function of geography and history to serve this purpose. Geography should assume that frontiers are the lines at which peoples meet rather than part; and history should lay stress upon the forces that have made for human unity rather than for national power. If the writer may be permitted to indulge in a last personal reminiscence, the tendency in the teaching of history in the past may be illustrated by the fact that the outstanding impression left upon him by the school history was that the French were the hereditary enemies of the British; and it is something to the point to observe that the text books of American history have in the past failed to lay proper emphasis upon the circumstance that during the Revolutionary War the best mind of England was on the side of the colonists. The gratuitous and unhistorical prejudice which the traditional attitude in school history has bred is not a little accountable for the divisive tempers that have led to wars. To-day the shrinkage of the world has made this attitude more than ever disastrous; and in view of our hope of a League of Nations it is essential that geography and history in particular should be treated as the opportunity for a general expansion of social sympathy.

V

It is hardly necessary to point out that the conception of history which is pleaded for here includes the history of thought, of art, and of religion; and that so far as is possible, this history should be learnt by direct recourse to its sources in the classic literature and art of the past. But generous and comprehensive as the provision for acquiring knowledge should be, the educational process has not finished its business until it has habituated the youth to the task of using this knowledge as the basis and material of independent thought. Democracy faces no greater danger than the inability of the people to exercise a critical judgment upon the voices that clamour for their suffrages; and the experiences of war-time have shown that freedom is not inconsistent with a very dangerous unreflective docility on the part of the public. This danger is the greater when the staple of a people’s reading is the daily press, which envelops men in the tumult and the clangour of passing events without providing them with the longer perspective necessary to a valid judgment. The power of the demagogue and the tyranny of the press are to be mitigated only by an educational process which does two things—first of all, provides a background of general knowledge and interest, and second, turns out individuals able and accustomed to think for themselves. And just because the life of democracy requires free discussion, the school curriculum should contain stated provision for the discussion of current matters, which would turn out to be a powerful stimulant of independent thought, especially in its critical aspects. The more constructive and sustained elements in independent thought may be encouraged by a careful development of the time-honoured method of the essay. But whatever the precise methods may be, the aim must be the systematic encouragement of the habit of independent thought; and in this connection, with proper safeguards against putting a premium on “cussedness,” it is important that dissenting and minority opinions, which whether right or wrong contain some guarantee of independence, should be welcomed and valued as the promise of ultimate social usefulness.

VI

Important as the materials and methods of education are, we cannot afford to forget that there are two other elements of our problem, closely related to one another, which are in the end of greater importance. The first of these is the teacher. It is not a gratuitous slander upon the general body of teachers to say that the whole method of recruiting teachers and the conditions of the teaching profession tend to degrade teaching into a trade. A great deal needs to be done to exalt the teacher’s office in the public mind; and the teaching profession should be so honoured as to give it the first call upon the human material in the community. As things are, it is far too much regarded as a means of livelihood, comparatively easily qualified for, and tolerably well remunerated; and the training required for admission into the profession is quite inadequate. If only teaching were rightly esteemed and its practitioners held in such honour as even judges, who do a much inferior work, are held, it would be possible to exercise a far more careful selection of persons suited by their temperamental and moral characters for the work. For we have to look for something infinitely greater than the successful communication of knowledge, or the training of mental faculties. Robert Owen followed an essentially sound instinct when, having established a school for infants in New Lanark he put at the head of it a man who could neither read or write, but who was familiar with birds and flowers and had “a way with him.” Robert Louis Stevenson, writing of Wordsworth, says, “I do not know that you learn a lesson. You need not agree with any of his beliefs; and yet a spell is cast. Such are the best teachers. A dogma learned is only a new error, the old one was perhaps as good. But a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves and what is best in themselves that they communicate.” It was said during the education controversy in England that some teachers taught more religion in an hour’s arithmetic lesson than others did in a year of “religious instruction,” and the saying is true. It is the spirit communicated that makes the difference between a real and a spurious education.

Especially is this the case when we consider the business of education from the point of view of social efficiency. For the prerequisite of social efficiency is social vision, social passion; and this is supremely a matter of contagion. For this reason, the true type of teacher will be devoid of the pontifical, ex-cathedra temper and will rather seek out a relation of comradeship with his pupils. The form of a democratic education will be essentially co-operative; and its spirit will be that of fellowship. This brings us to the second outstanding point of our discussion, namely, the question of “atmosphere.” Upon this subject there is little more to be said than what is contained in Professor Dewey’s dictum that the school should so far as possible be a miniature of the society we desire to create. The creation of “atmosphere” is of course specifically the task of the faculty; and the eagerness and the enthusiasm of their participation in the more informal amenities of school life is an important factor in the process. But most of all is a genuine social passion in themselves the surest guarantee that they will help in the making of socially creative and effective persons.

Much is being said at the present time concerning the introduction of military training into schools. It is worth notice in passing that Mr. Fisher, the British Minister of Education, recently informed a deputation of miners that the government had canvassed the question and had decided that the innovation had neither educational nor military value and would not be adopted. It is no doubt true that military training would have a beneficial effect upon the physique of the boys; but, quite apart from its dubious value for education and any subsequent purpose, it must be observed that the genius of the military business is intrinsically hostile to the development of the democratic ideals. For the military organisation is a regimentation of men for power; it entails the mechanisation of the human material and imposes a discipline of uniformity upon those who are subject to it. Democratic education has to do with life, and its genius moves in the direction of the largest possible spontaneity and variation in the individuals with whom it has to do. Moreover, military discipline introduces the authoritarian temper into the atmosphere; and this is a temper altogether at variance with the spirit of frank comradeship in which a democratic education should be pursued. What advantages may accrue to the future in the shape of improved physical health and strength in the community is more than counter-balanced by the injection of an undemocratic virus into the minds of those who are called to sustain the democracy of the future.

Nor is it impossible to compensate ourselves for the loss of physical training consequent upon the rejection of military training. For there are other ways of providing for physical efficiency; and those other ways are more consistent with the aim of a democratic education. In the sports field, for instance, you have at once an instrument of physical training as well as a definite education in a team work, which does not depend upon uniform and synchronous movements commanded from without, but upon the intelligence and dexterity of the players themselves. Moreover, the sports field affords an illustration of the proper use of the competitive spirit. The military discipline has its eye upon potential enemies to be destroyed; the sports discipline has its eye upon rival teams of friends and thus always a cheer for the beaten team in the end. It has been observed that the difference in temper between the behaviour of the German and the English soldier was to be traced to the fact that the football field had played a large part in the training of the latter; and it is not unlikely that even the superior military efficiency of the English soldier in the latter stages of the war has to be attributed to the same circumstance. In any case, sportsmanship is nearer akin to the spirit of democracy than the military discipline.

A plea has been made for military training on the ground that the rhythm of its movements has a certain psychological value. That the place of rhythm in education has been neglected is indeed true; and there is little doubt that a more sustained attention to it would add much to physical grace and the joy and beauty of life. The question, however, remains whether the military rhythm which rests upon a principle of regularity is likely to have the psychological effects proper to such education as these pages contemplate. The rhythm of the folk-dance like the rhythm of the ballad is a far more accurate version of the rhythm which is natural to men and women; and the rhythm of Walt Whitman, which is of the same order, reflects the genuine rhythm of democracy. The Eurhythmics of Dalcroze, because they encourage a spontaneous self-expression through the free rhythmical movement of the body promise more for the future grace and beauty of democratic life than a military discipline can from its very nature do.

VII

The sum of the matter then is this, that the test of a true democratic education lies in the quality and power of the social vision it evokes in the growing child, in the measure of power and capacity it gives to the child to share in the realisation of the vision, and in this sharing to give to the child the inspiring and joyous promise of personal self-fulfilment. Here we have tried only to sketch in very rough and fragmentary outline what would appear to be the temper and the general configuration of such an educational process; and much has been omitted which naturally belongs to a full discussion of the subject. Of the place of dramatic and symbolic activities in education, generous notice should be taken in any extended treatment, for it is obvious, first of all that the dramatic and the symbolic make a peculiar appeal to the child, and second, that the social enthusiasm which it is our desire to quicken can be quickened more effectively in no other way. There is one point, however, upon which it might serve an immediate purpose to dwell. The graduation ceremony in an American school provides a fitting close to a school career; it rounds it off with dignity and solemnity. But something more than this should be done—whether on leaving school or college or trade school—in order to impress upon the individual that he is passing into another world demanding other and more responsible service. Some solemn ceremonial of initiation into the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, accompanied by every circumstance of gravity and reverence, should furnish the fitting close to the period of training. At present we slip out into the business of life in a ragged insignificant way. Our entry upon responsible citizenship should be signalised by a great public observance which should serve the purpose not only of launching the youth upon his course in life, but also of reminding the rest of the community of its vows and its obligations to the common life.^[58]