Teaching and Doing

Mr. R. H. Tawney, in the book from which I have already quoted, hopes that it is possible so to organize compulsory education up to sixteen or eighteen, that it will be “loved and not merely tolerated” (Secondary Education for All, p.76). That hope is based, in part, on the results which he expects from a plan of professional “self-government,” which is supported by his party, by many members of other parties, by the trade unions, and by all the organized bodies of teachers in England. He says that “the aim should be to make our educational system an organic unity, alive in every part, served by teachers united, self-governing, and free” (ibid., p. 123). At present, the English movement towards professional self-government for teachers is concentrated on an attempt to secure powers for the Teachers’ Registration Council (a body recognized by the State, and consisting of representatives elected by voluntary organizations of primary, secondary, specialist, and university teachers), similar to those possessed by the General Medical Council, as representing the medical profession, and by the Benchers of the Inns of Court and the Council of the Law Society, as representing the legal profession. At the Annual Conference of the politically powerful National Union of [mainly elementary] Teachers in 1925, which was visited by the President and the Permanent Secretary of the Board of Education, a motion was unanimously carried in favour of a list of resolutions prepared by the Teachers’ Registration Council, and based on a policy long advocated by the N.U.T. This scheme was summarized by the mover as making “the Teachers’ Registration Council the disciplinary body—the only body which could unmake a teacher,” and “the diploma-granting body—the only body which could make a teacher.’ Mr. Roscoe, the Secretary of the Teachers’ Registration Council, expressed at the same Conference the hope that “the teachers might be masters in their own house,” and said that “the British public already understood and was ready to pay tribute to the claims of a learned profession.”

In the spring of 1925, the Teachers’ Registration Council sent a circular letter to the Academic Councils of the English Universities, and to other representative bodies of teachers, asking their support for the proposal that, after January 1, 1930, no teacher (except by leave of the Teachers’ Registration Council in exceptional cases) should be legally employable in any institution receiving grants from public funds, who had not been placed on the Register after a period of pedagogic training, and who did not conform to regulations regarding the professional conduct of teachers to be drawn up from time to time by the Council. The circular justifies this proposal by saying that at present “there is nothing to mark off the teacher from any reasonably well-educated person who can obtain employment in a school or can secure private pupils.”

In a great modern industrialized state, where there may be perhaps a quarter of a million or more teachers, some system of national teachers’ registration is probably necessary. Local education authorities when engaging teachers, like local health authorities when engaging doctors, require help in ascertaining the real name of any applicant for employment, whether he has done the service and passed the examinations which he puts forward, and whether he has ever been a criminal, or has been dismissed by a public authority for disgraceful conduct. And the central government requires help in ascertaining the same facts in the case of those teachers or doctors whose salaries they help to pay. But the whole history of professional organization since the “guild” system of the late Middle Ages shows that if a monopoly of service is given to the persons on the register of any profession, and the right to admit to and remove from that register is given to a body consisting of representatives elected by the profession, the right of registration will be primarily used to secure the interests of the existing members of the profession, as producers, against the rest of the community, then living or still to be born, as consumers. In drawing up, for instance, conditions of admission, the desire to raise salaries by restricting numbers will always prove more influential with the voting majority than the desire, which will be constantly proclaimed and often sincerely felt, to increase professional efficiency. And the discipline enforced by the right to remove names from the register will, as years go on, aim mainly at the protection of members of the profession from such a competition among themselves or from outsiders as shall increase the severity of the effort needed to secure a livelihood in the profession. The terms “professional ethics” and “professional reasons” have, indeed, acquired in the legally self-governing professions, and in the voluntary organizations which in fact control many legally unregulated professions, a peculiar and unmistakable meaning.

It may be that the proposals of the Labour Party and the Teachers’ Registration Council will never be carried out in full. But it must be remembered that those proposals have extremely strong political forces behind them. The majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain are urban working men, an overwhelming majority of whom may soon decide to vote for a Labour government based on the trade unions. ‘Self-government” for the National Union of Teachers (the members of which spring from the working classes and are in sympathy with them, and who would form five-sixths of a unified teaching profession) would appeal to voters who desired to weaken the power of the old English “governing class.” Unfortunately, however, the scheme which offers the shortest and most obvious way towards happiness and self-respect for the teachers does not necessarily include all the conditions likely to provide help and stimulus for the future thinkers among their scholars; and it is in that respect that the control of compulsory education up to sixteen or eighteen by the majority of those voting in a number of stiffly professional teachers’ associations will, I am convinced, involve a serious danger to the intellectual life of the nation. I do not expect, indeed, that under such a control, the English public educational system would sink so low as did Oxford when the university was controlled by the “self-governing and free” college fellows, or would become so intolerant as the “self-governing and free’ Church of the fifteenth century, or even so closed to new ideas as are the self-governing Benchers of the Inns of Court. One imagines, a generation after the passing into law of the programme of the Teachers’ Registration Council, the existence of three or four thousand big new English secondary schools, with sunny class-rooms and ample playing fields, staffed by men and women with university degrees in pedagogy, most of whom would, at least up to the age of forty, enjoy addressing their classes, be proud of their powers of discipline, and interested in the prestige of their schools. Summer courses for teachers would be popular, where lectures on methods of memorizing would alternate with picnics and private meetings of supporters of rival candidates for the next election of the Teachers’ Registration Council, and particularly of the “forward party” who would always demand higher salaries, longer compulsion, a closer monopoly for the registered teachers and a stricter professional discipline. In the schools there would be much that was pleasant and useful for the average boy and girl. The class distinctions which are still the curse of English social life would be no more noticeable than they are in Australia, or Western Canada, or Indiana. There would be plenty of prizes for diligence and knowledge; England might regain her supremacy in all the national games; and there would be a good deal of “student self-government” controlled by popular and successful boys and girls who had the happy instinct of publicity.

But, scattered about among the schools, one or two perhaps for each big school, would be the potential thinkers of the nation, those who might have been Shelley, or Einstein, or Kelvin, or George Eliot, or William James, or Bernard Shaw, hating the compulsory attendance, the compulsory lessons, the compulsory or semi-compulsory games, and the “student activities.” One of them would occasionally pour his whole soul into a long clumsy essay, or a satirical poem, or produce an involved mathematical argument which even the most sympathetic Master of Arts among the teachers would not, when faced with the professional objection to work out of school hours, find time to understand. But, as the years went on, their hunger for thought would slowly lose its edge; and when some crisis, economic, or political, or military, or religious, came upon the nation, some of those who might have given leadership would be silent.

I believe, that is to say, that the supporters of the present claims of the Teachers’ Registration Council are often as blind to the complexity of the problem of training human beings in the use of their minds as were the makers of the “Payment by Results” Code of 1861, or those who in 1870 and 1876 introduced compulsory attendance in England without distinguishing between deaf and hearing, or mentally defective and mentally supernormal children. Part of this over-simplicity is due to the inevitable tendency of the teacher to ignore what the trade unions call the “demarcation problem” between the teaching and the practice of an art. That problem has long been recognized in the teaching of any art the practice of which is controlled by an established profession. The doctors, for instance, have always claimed that they and they only should give medical education. But as medical education has become more thorough, quarrels have arisen, all over the world, between the practising doctors and the teachers who are not doctors or not practising, as to their respective rights in the “medical,” “preliminary medical,” and “scientific” education of the future doctor; and those quarrels have led, either to gross inefficiency, or to a series of delicate adjustments involving the organized co-operation in the medical course of practising doctors, doctors who during their tenure of teaching-posts are forbidden to practise, and non-medical chemists and biologists, under the ultimate control of universities and other partly lay bodies. And similar difficulties will certainly arise as soon as any serious attempt is made to improve English legal education.

The present outcome of many such disputes seems to be an agreement that in all kinds of “technical” education the State ought to reject the old professional claim that every practitioner should be given a monopoly right of communicating his art to his successors in such spare time as he chooses to give to teaching; but, at the same time, that the teachers of any stage in the training of an art ought not to be allowed to become out of touch with the technical practice. The teaching, for instance, of the art of painting, in the school of the English Royal Academy of Arts, used to be given by the members of the Academy when they felt moved to do so. The result was unsatisfactory, and, after the Great Exhibition of 1851, Prince Albert created a National Department of Art at South Kensington, where retired officers of the Royal Engineers, who would have thought it ungentlemanly to sell or even paint a picture, organized the training of thousands of candidates for the “Art Master’s Certificate,” who were to spend their lives in teaching “art,” but who never acquired, or were intended to acquire, any experience of professional artistic creation. This, on the other hand, was found to involve too great a separation between teaching and doing, and the British Government appointed, a few years ago, a well-known artist with a gift for organization as head of the Royal School of Art, only to discover that a new demarcation problem had arisen, and that a protest, which was ignored, was made by members of the profession of “art-teacher” against the appointment, on the ground that the post ought to have been given to a “Certificated Art Master.”

Unfortunately, however, in the case of “general” education, the existence of any demarcation problem as to the relation between teachers and practitioners has not yet been recognized. “Generally educated persons” do not form an organized profession, which can claim to control wholly or in part its own training. The professional teachers, therefore, of “general education” feel no hesitation in claiming a demarcation of their function based on the principle that it is entirely separated from the practice of any art but that of teaching. And some of the theoretical advocates of a completely “functional” society make a sudden jump, from the proposal that all forms of technical education should be absolutely controlled by the Guilds of practitioners, to the proposal that “a minimum of civic education . . . might be best assured by the State charging the National Union of Teachers with the powers necessary, and the consequent responsibility to society for carrying it out.”

My whole argument, however, in this book, is that an art of thought exists, that the practice of that art is one of the most important activities of human society, that training in that art should be part of the education of the future thinker, and that in this, as in other cases, a complete separation between teaching and doing will be fatal to the art itself. The necessary solution, therefore, of the demarcation problem in training for the art of thought, as in training for the art of medicine, cannot be brought about by the simple method of giving absolute self-determination either to the teachers or to the practitioners, or even to the teachers and practitioners combined, against the public as consumers. It can only be worked out by a process of invention, in which many different factors in the problem will be considered. In the first place, teachers of general education, especially to supernormal students beyond the age of twelve, should, if possible, have some experience of intellectual production, and that experience should not cease when, before becoming teachers, they take a university degree or other form of “qualification.” Many of those who remember their own years at school under the present comparatively free system of appointing secondary teachers, can realize that even a small proportion of intellectual “doing” may give life to teaching, just as a tiny percentage of certain vitamines may give life to food. In my time, in the sixth form at Shrewsbury, the one master from whom any of us, I believe, received any real intellectual stimulus was Mr. A. H. Gilkes, afterwards Head Master of Dulwich.[1] He was a born teacher, but I am sure that a great part of his stimulating influence on boys came from the effect on himself of the fact that he wrote and published a few not very good little books. Many literature masters and mistresses would gain enormously in their powers of teaching if they tried for six months to live by literary production, or even if they once sent a poem anonymously to a provincial paper, and had it rejected or accepted. And the teacher of “science,” as part of “general” education, who has never attempted to add to the body of his science, is not likely to help a future scientist during his school years. The combination of creative experience with teaching experience might also be provided by giving certain teachers “part-time” work for all or part of their careers; or by occasionally appointing as school-teachers men and women who had already had whole-time experience of intellectual work outside; or by making it easy for a teacher to transfer to other whole-time work, either permanently or for a “sabbatical” period, when he feels “stale.”

Education in the art of thought is not, of course, the only function of a schoolmaster or schoolmistress; a teacher has to create many habits in his students which have little to do with the art of thought. And experience of intellectual creation is not the only requisite for the efficient teaching of the art of thought itself; every teacher must have sufficient pedagogic skill and tact to enable him to bring his experience to bear upon his students. Nor can we ever expect to staff our schools with teachers who are equally good as disciplinarians, as thinkers, and as expositors. The combination, therefore, of these qualities in the persons actually appointed to any post should vary with the nature of the post. Disciplinary skill, and knowledge of and sympathy with the physiological and psychological problems of typical childhood, would be most important for the teachers of very young or of subnormal children. Experience of intellectual creation, and sympathy with its methods, should have greater weight in the appointment of teachers of children likely themselves to become professional intellectual workers. A young art-student gains more in the studio of a good painter who is a second-rate teacher than in the studio of a bad painter who is a first-rate teacher.

But recognition of the fact that an art of thought exists and that “general” education has among its purposes the purpose of training in that art, should influence the position not only of the teacher but of the student. A prevalent theory for the moment among English politicians, is that all students should receive, up to sixteen or eighteen, an education which has no reference to any special way in which they will live as adults, and that at sixteen or eighteen they should all begin to be prepared for a definite and life-long career. This theory overlooks two important considerations. In the first place a large part of the essential work of the world is done by those whom the Teachers’ Registration Council would call mere “reasonably well-educated persons,” that is to say, persons whose activities are no more confined within water-tight professional compartments than were those of Plato or Goethe or Leonardo da Vinci. When Mr. Maynard Keynes, or Mr. W. H. Page, or Sir Josiah Stamp, or Hermann von Helmholtz began to live the life of thought, they did not know, and those of them who are still alive do not now know, whether their most important work would be done as explorers in this or that science, or as writers, or administrators, or teachers. At any moment such men may be offered and accept a professorship, or the presidency of a university, or an ambassadorship, or membership of a national or international commission, or the editorship of a newspaper, or may retire for a couple of years of strenuous meditation while producing a book. On such men’s work the future progress of human society largely depends, and it is not a pleasant reflection that we shall hear, during the next thirty years, increasing protests against the payment of public money for reporting on the national accounts to men who are not “qualified” accountants, or for contriving methods of fighting against plague to men who are not “qualified” physicians, or to ambassadors who are not “qualified” diplomats, or to professors who are only “reasonably well-educated persons.”

And, in the next place, an education which aims at preparing young people to earn their livelihood as adults by sitting for varying periods of five to eight hours a day at a desk or laboratory bench, and chasing, in spite of fatigue and disappointment, the elusive phantoms of their brains, should, even if it is called a “general’ education, be recognized as a preparation for a special kind of career, which most men and women are neither capable of following, nor desire to follow. The lives of the consulting chemist, the consulting accountant, the historian, the novelist, the judge, and the philosopher are in many other ways unlike each other, but they are all like each other in being instances of the specialized occupation of professed thought.

The master question, therefore, of public education, both in England and in America, is whether the community is prepared to give, as part of a publicly provided system, to those who are naturally fitted for the occupation of professed thinker, a training which is suitable for them and unsuitable for the average student; and any further extension of the age of compulsion will raise that question in its sharpest form. At present, in England, about ten per cent. of those who pass through the elementary schools go on to secondary schools, most of them after selection by examination. If this percentage is raised, as the Labour Party propose, to seventy-five per cent. or even to the twenty-eight per cent. now reached in the United States, the community will have to decide whether it shall offer to a small, highly supernormal minority of that percentage an education which will be necessarily more expensive than that which can be offered to the much larger numbers of students who are nearer the average. One can present the problem most clearly by proposing a definite experiment. Mr. Cyril Burt reports that one per cent. of the child population of England have, at ten years of age, the mental development of fifteen,’ these children being distributed through all classes of the community. A local educational authority which covered a sufficiently large population might perhaps be induced to make an attempt to discover these children, and might offer those who were selected admission to a small school, say, with a junior department from the ages of twelve to fourteen, and a senior department from fourteen to sixteen or eighteen. Half of those who received the offer might accept it. Some of them, after being admitted to the junior department at twelve, might leave, if they proved to be unsuited, without disgrace at fourteen; others would be first discovered at fourteen, and would then join the “remove” from the junior to the senior department.

From the beginning, it would be intended to give the students of such a school the kind of help for which as adult thinkers they would afterwards be grateful. Since the life of creative thought requires, more than any other life, free and constantly renewed personal volition, care would be taken to avoid as far as possible the atmosphere of compulsion. No one would be admitted except on the application of his parent and himself, and every one would be free to go at any moment, and to share the life of others at his age. As long as he stayed, “maintenance grants,” if necessary, would be given to him as they would be given to those of his age who were receiving other types of public education. If there were more suitable candidates than there were vacancies, admission would be given, as it would be given in a school of music or painting, by a strict estimate of the probability of future good work, and without any attempt at arithmetical equality in the proportion of places assigned to the different classes or sexes.

Nature, of course, draws no sharp line, even if our skill in psychological diagnosis were sufficient for us to discover it with certainty, between Mr. Cyril Burt’s one per cent. and the one or two per cent. who would just not reach his standard of selection; and therefore success in such an experimental school would influence, and would be intended to influence, as the success of Balliol College, or Winchester College, or Johns Hopkins University has done, the methods of other institutions. But those who were responsible for the school would themselves concentrate their attention on the difficult task of making its own success possible. They might, under the existing law, choose the staff of the school as the British Government chose the head of the Royal School of Art, by methods which would bring them into conflict with the professional organizations of teachers, and which the acceptance by Parliament of the Teachers’ Registration Council’s scheme would render illegal. Helped, perhaps, by a small advisory council, on which two or three literary men and scientists would sit with two or three successful teachers, they would choose the head teacher and his assistants with a constant reference to the needs of professional intellectual production. ‘Trained’ and “registered” teachers would be, of course, eligible, but they would not have a monopoly of appointment. Because the school would sometimes have to compete in the open market of intellectual producers, salaries would not necessarily correspond to the professional teachers’ scale, and the school, like a good studio, would welcome the periodical help, either as lecturers or as “visitors,” of persons who did not primarily think of themselves as teachers. The more permanent staff would be encouraged to take periodical unpaid or half-paid leave, in order to write a book, or carry out a piece of research; or some of them might, in young middle age, pass to a combination, under university conditions, of teaching and professional intellectual production, or might cease to do any teaching work. If they joined a professional body in order to protect their own interests, they might prefer an “open” form of organization on the lines of the Society of Authors rather than a “close” form of organization like that desired by the National Union of Teachers and enjoyed by the Inns of Court.

I have discussed, in Chapter X, some of the problems of teaching method which would arise in a school which consciously aimed at preparing young people to earn their livelihood by practising the art of thought. These problems would, of course, mainly be dealt with, in my imaginary experimental school, by the teaching staff; the literary student would, for instance, learn to take the sort of notes which he would use afterwards as a writer, and the young essayist or verse-maker or scientific experimenter would learn to watch his Intimations as the professional poet or critic or scientist must do. The students would be encouraged to read real books, rather than either extracts from books or the easy reflections of text-book writers about books. Since words are the means of embodying and communicating thought, they would be asked to acquire a professional conscience in the use of words. They would learn to distinguish between “fatal facility,’ even of that higher type which sometimes secures first classes at a university, and the uncertain and often slow processes of the creative thinker.[1] These considerations would also influence the arrangement of work for the individual student. His time-table would be the underpattern of the carpet, and might be allowed to look untidy, if the intellectual life which was the upper pattern were well harmonized. The advantage of regular habits during the student years is great; but the optimum point at which the curve of that advantage cuts the curve of the advantage of fresh initiative is different for those whose professional work will be intellectual origination, and for those of different powers and aims.

From the beginning, the public authority and its advisory committee would co-operate with the teaching staff in creating the “atmosphere” of the school. They would try to avoid the dangers of “institutionalism,” and to remember that the social value of the school as a corporate entity consists of its effect upon individual students, and that therefore the interest of a student should never be sacrificed to the interest of the school. Above all, they would aim at securing that the individuality of every student should be respected, as a wise editor respects the individuality of his young contributors. Charles Lamb was at “Christ’s Hospital” school from 1782 to 1789, having Coleridge and Le Grice as his school-fellows, and James Boyer as his headmaster. Life at Christ’s Hospital in the eighteenth century involved constant and severe physical hardships, and the educational organization of the school was in many ways deplorable. But the school had the immense advantage that it allowed scope for the growth of individuality. A quarter of a century after he had left school, and when the ideas started by the French and American Revolutions had produced a widespread desire in England for improvement in school organization, Lamb met a reforming schoolmaster in the coach from Edmonton to London. In his essay on “The New Schoolmaster” he says that his acquaintance, “upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes.” Lamb says, “You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould into which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.” His teachers at Christ’s Hospital must have from time to time savagely reproved him for the form of his compositions. He must later have had eager discussions with Coleridge and Lloyd and Leigh Hunt, and perhaps with the editor of the London Magazine, on literary form. But there was a subtle difference between such discussions and reproofs and the smooth-running “mass-production” methods of the New Schoolmaster, which since his time have so often in England and America baulked the individual urge of intellectual creation. Nearly forty years ago, I was one of the seven members of the Fabian Society who had just written their drafts of the Fabian Essays, and had appointed Bernard Shaw to edit the published volume. I was a schoolmaster, and Shaw was already a professional, though not yet a successful writer. One of our difficulties was that the seven of us included minds of very different types, especially, perhaps, those of Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Hubert Bland; and I, with my schoolmaster’s outlook, was greatly struck by the fact that Shaw, when discussing the kind of revision which he should urge on the essayists, said, “I’m not going to Webbulize Bland or Blandulate Webb.”

Those who provided buildings and organization would aim at giving the school itself an individuality which could be loved and could stimulate. The clever sensitive boys and girls who came to the school, either as boarders or as day students, from dull homes, might find there something answering to their vague yearnings for beauty and significance in life. It might be placed in or around an abandoned seventeenth-century country house, which the suburbs of a manufacturing town had enclosed; or a public-spirited architect might welcome an opportunity of showing that a modern building could be beautiful without being too expensive. Some artists might be glad to send copies of their best prints, and some authors their best books to a place where they might help their future fellow-craftsmen. When the school was twenty years old, the students would begin to be aware of the achievements of their own predecessors. Care would be taken to preserve specimens of the school-work of those students who seemed likely to “make good” by later service to the community; so that when some former student died, after a life’s work as writer or administrator or scientist or teacher, the students could see in the school library his early exercises, and the teachers could realize that some of their own students though younger might be abler and more important than themselves.

And the school would not, even for the students, stand as an isolated fact. The life of a creative thinker requires, from those who live it to the end, not only opportunity and innate intellectual ability, but a sustained desire for something which is not money-making. Those, therefore, who were trying to create the first emotional and intellectual traditions of such a school would have to decide whether they should stimulate a conscious relation between the school work and the work of the world outside, or rely, as the great English “public schools’ and the American schools founded on their model, often rely, on the growth of a half-conscious habit of co-operation, of a “school spirit,” within the school, which might afterwards be used for public service. A writer, for instance, who was obviously himself an experienced “public school” master, reviewed Mr. H. G. Wells’s life of ‘Sanderson of Oundle” in the London Times of January 18, 1924. Sanderson had said that “schools should be miniature copies of the world—should move on towards becoming always a microcosm of the new world.” To this The Times writer replied that “the doctrine involves the view that boys and girls are little men and women. They are nothing of the sort, and many hold that this doctrine throws upon the growing child a sense of responsibility which is too great for childhood. Childhood has its own responsibilities, but to impose upon it the altruism which belongs to the adult may be, and some think must be, educationally dangerous, and likely to defeat the end aimed at. The irresponsibility of childhood is a valuable asset.” The same idea is often expressed by the simile of the expanding circle. If a boy in his first year at school is made to feel that the athletic success of his “house” is overwhelmingly important, in his third year he will, it is claimed, desire the success of his school, and as he grows up his “school spirit” will automatically spread to the larger interests of his university, his nation, and his empire, and ultimately, perhaps, the League of Nations.

This argument, when applied, as The Times reviewer would apply it, to a school like Oundle, that is to say to boys of perhaps an average age of fifteen, well above the average intellectually, and most of whom are being prepared for a life of brain work, and even more if it were applied to the more highly supernormal students whom I am imagining, involves, I am sure, a serious psychological error. Any one who has followed the after career of those of his school and college contemporaries in whom school-spirit and college-spirit were most intense, or who has been present at the annual gathering of the “alumni” of an American college, or has watched the pleasant grey-haired, well-dressed men outside the Pall Mall Clubs on the days of the Eton and Harrow cricket-match, will realize that if it is desired to open during school years a path for wider intellectual and emotional associations, it is best to aim at that result directly, and to secure the conscious co-operation of the students in the process. A boy, for instance, is more likely to think and feel fruitfully about the League of Nations at thirty if at fourteen he writes an analysis of the “Corcyrean chapters” of Thucydides, or the policy of Castlereagh, with the day’s telegrams from Geneva or Paris in his mind, than if he hurries through his work because he is excited about the chances of his house or school in a coming match. The biographies of men and women who have done great intellectual service (of Milton, or Kelvin, or George Eliot, or Bentham, or Keats) show in fact that, long before either the leaving age, or the average age, of Oundle, most of them realized the social significance of their work. This feeling of significance will, of course, not be continuous; it may only occasionally penetrate into full consciousness after some school celebration, or when writing a long-meditated essay, or during a summer afternoon’s walk in the lanes near a school where a Mr. Hare has not filled every moment of leisure with professionalized games, or when a clever lad first hears the mysterious word “genius” used of himself.’

There is, of course, no infallible way of training human beings, however carefully selected, for creative thought. Of a hundred students who seemed at twelve or fourteen years old to be fit entrants for such a school, it would be fortunate if twenty finished, a dozen years later, an educational course at school or college, or perhaps in a foreign laboratory. Of the rest, some would have failed, some would have already undertaken of their own will the life of self-supported intellectual creation, and others would have been earning their livelihood for several years as teachers, or chemists, or journalists, or engineers, or minor government officials—perhaps in some cases to be stimulated in after life by their early memories to greater service. Out of the twenty perhaps two or three would give themselves to those forms of philosophical, scientific, social and literary thought for which our present social organization offers no early or large pecuniary reward. Some of the students when they had passed through the change, in their case less perceptible than in other cases, from service by learning to service by doing, might, one dreams, form a little society like Gokhale’s Servants of India, or, in their original intention, the Greek letter societies of the American universities, or might keep up the sort of intimacy with each other which is a tradition among those who have been members of the Society of Apostles at Cambridge.

I have striven to give my scheme of a little experimental school reality by the invention of detail; but I still feel that it will seem fantastic when it is compared by the organizers of public education with the solid facts of the thousand students of an American high school, or the ten thousand students of a Western State university, or with a great new English municipal secondary school.* But it is only after long dwelling in an imaginary world that the present world itself begins to look fantastic, and that one sees sub specie eternitatis, the tragi-comic figure of that student of a famous American university who, a year or two ago, used, on the invitation of the wife of a sympathetic professor, to slip at dusk through her garden that he might read and think for a few hours in her attic, undisturbed by those of his fellow students who represented more completely than himself the tradition of the place.

One lives, however, in the world of solid fact, and in that world it may be hopeless to expect a voting majority even of a single responsible public body in England or America to found such an experimental school. Yet the experiment must be made either by a public body or not at all. No private philanthropist could possess either the authority or the organization which would make it possible to discover, with any approximation to accuracy, the most supernormal members of a sufficiently large child population, or to offer them opportunities which their parents would be likely to accept. Therefore one must hope that it may be possible to break down, at some one point, the traditional intellectual and political obstacles which stand in the way. The first of these obstacles would be the interpretation which is generally given to the principle of equality in the distribution of public funds. A public body cannot act as a private philanthropist can act, on the half-conscious whim of the moment, or even on an unexplained series of varying conscious principles. For that reason those who propose such an experiment must, instead of pretending that they are practising arithmetical equality of treatment, make it clear that arithmetical inequality is often necessary in order to secure social justice. Inequality in the distribution of public funds may follow from inequality either in the need of the recipient for the services of the community, or in the need of the community for the services of the recipient. In some instances of the first case the most arithmetically-minded adherents of the principle of equality do not object to inequality in the treatment of children of school age. We are all prepared to spend more for the cure of a child with incipient tuberculosis than we can afford to spend on the average child. It is more difficult to defend inequality of the second kind, because it involves a valuation of potential services compared with each other; and that valuation will vary in different communities and at different times. The Commonwealth of Australia might this year, for instance, decide to incur exceptional expenditure in training the future athletic champions who will uphold the glory of their country at the Olympic Sports. The ancient Athenian Assembly might have spent exceptionally on youths and maidens who could give joy to their community by supernormal personal beauty. It is very likely that, a hundred years hence, the most valued quality in all civilized communities will be the power of handing on as adults certain “dominant” physical and intellectual Mendelian strains. At this moment, however, most communities especially need the services of those who are capable of performing with unusual efficiency the process of thought; and those who believe this should frankly say that they are prepared to spend more on books, or laboratory material, or travel, for the child of high intellectual supernormality, than for the average child.

But have mankind yet learnt to value that following of reason “whithersoever she may lead” which Socrates taught to Plato and Plato to Aristotle? Socrates died by the hemlock, and Aristotle and Plato parted in sorrow; and exactly in so far as a school for professional training in thought is successful will it be the occasion of division and strife. No one has yet invented a process which leads to unanimity on all the questions which are most worth thinking on. And if a school supported from public funds helped a Thomas Carlyle towards self-expression, it might be attacked by the Labour Party as a home of reaction; if a Ramsay MacDonald were found to have been taught there, it might be accused by the Conservative Party of Bolshevism; Fundamentalists or Anglo-Catholics might accuse it of atheism if it produced a St. Paul or Averroés. A certain kind of Labour majority on an English local authority might propose to hand over the management of the school to the trustees of the Marxist ‘Central Labour College,’ and a certain kind of Conservative majority might propose to hand it over to the trustees of the Conservative ‘Philip Stott College’; an American cinema-producer might bring a photograph of an American experimental school before an audience with Ku-Klux sympathies, and write above its gate, as Aristophanes wrote above his scene of Socrates’ house, the jeering title “Thinking done here.” All men welcome improvements in the prevention of cancer, or the growth of wheat, but not all men are prepared to welcome improvements in the art of unbiassed thought. Some day we may find that a change in our conception of the place of human consciousness in the universe has made experiments possible which are now impossible. And meanwhile causes will have their effects, and whatever may prove to be the best art of thought will continue to be the best, whether many of those who have the necessary powers are enabled to practise that art or few.

Notes

1 The Schoolmaster and Women Teachers’ Chronicle, April 17, 1925, p. 708.

1 The terms of the circular were somewhat altered in a series of long resolutions submitted by the Teachers’ Registration Council to a conference on June 13, 1925. But the policy of the two documents seems to me to be identical, and to be more clearly expressed in the circular as sent out to the Universities and approved by the National Union of Teachers.

* See the important articles on Vocational Organization by S. and B. Webb in the New Statesman during 1915, and my Our Social Heritage (1921), Chapter VI.

1The National Union of Teachers has done more than any other body to destroy the intolerable social atmosphere which resulted from that power. When, in 1925, the National Union of Teachers met at Oxford, their President quoted, with the angry and triumphant cheers of his audience, a memorandum on Training Colleges issued, as recently as 1842, by those two genuine friends of education, J. K. Shuttleworth and E. C. Tufnell. “In the formation of the character of the schoolmaster the discipline of the training college should be so devised as to prepare him for the modest respectability of his lot. Without the spirit of self-denial he is nothing. . . . When the scene of the teacher’s exertions is in a neighbourhood which brings him into association with the middle and upper classes of society his emoluments will be greater, and he will be surrounded by temptations, which, in the absence of a suitable frame of mind, might rob him of that humility and gentleness which are among the most necessary qualifications of the teacher of the common school. He should be accustomed to the performance of those parochial duties in which the schoolmaster may lighten the burden of the clergyman. For this purpose he should learn to keep the accounts of the benefit club. He should instruct and manage the village choir, and should learn to play the organ.”

1 National Guilds, by S. G. Hobson, edited by A. R. Orage (1914), pp. 268-71. See my Our Social Heritage (1921), Chap. VI.

1See Mr. H. W. Nevinson’s Changes and Chances (1904), p. 25, in a chapter giving an extraordinarily accurate description of the intellectual atmosphere of the Shrewsbury sixth at that time.

1 The recent Departmental Committee on the Training of Teachers, in their Report (1925), p. 161, proposed that “members of Training College staffs should be required to have successfully completed a course of training, and should be expected to have experience of teaching in Public Elementary Schools.” If we are to avoid both pedagogical inefficiency and intellectual inbreeding it seems equally clear that most teachers in Training Colleges should have gone through that course, and that some should not.

1 Report of Education Section of the British Association in The Times, Sept. 1, 1925.

1See Sir J. M. Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy (especially Chap. XXXVI) for a study, one supposes autobiographical, of an innate literary temperament at school.

‘The Headmaster of a London County Council secondary school, attended mainly by boys drawn at the age of 11+ from the elementary

schools, published a novel called The Day Boy (R. Gurner, 1924). As a novel the book is naught, but it contains an extraordinarily interesting first-hand description of the relation between the new administrative problems and the old “public school” traditions. He is, I think, not quite sufficiently aware of some of the considerations which I have urged above; but he is speaking of a school intended rather for the most supernormal thirty per cent. of the population than for the most supernormal one per cent.

1 I once suggested to the public-spirited head of an endowed American college that his college might help to create a new standard in American undergraduate work if it offered entrance only to the ablest students who applied. He answered, “In America we don’t do things in that way.”

1See Sir Josiah Stamp, Studies in Current Problems in Finance and Government 1924, pp. 58-67.