Arthurs Thanksgiving

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Arthurs Thanksgiving

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.
kitchen-garden in its back yard as having any relation to itself. You
can well understand that if it has these familiar adjuncts of everyday
life, it will seem just like part of the ordinary world; and so it tries its
hardest to keep them out, and generally succeeds pretty well.
But since what we started out to do was to teach children what the
world of reality is like, it is necessary that they should be in and of
the real world. And since the real world outside is not, unfortunately,
fully available for educational purposes, it is necessary to provide
them with the real world on a smaller scale—a world in which they
can, without danger, familiarize themselves with their environment in
its essential aspects—a world which is theirs to observe, touch,
handle, take apart and put back together again, play with, work
with, and become master of; a world in which they have no cause to
feel helpless or weak or useless or unimportant; a world from which
they can go into the great world outside without any abrupt
transition—a world, in short, in which they can learn to be efficient
and happy human beings.
The School Building, imposing upon our credulity and pretending to
be too sacred for these purposes, needs to be taken down from its
pedestal. It may be permitted to have a share in the education of
our youth if it will but remember that it is no more important in that
process than a garden, a swimming tank, a playground, the library
around the corner, the woods where the botany class goes, or the
sky overhead that exhibits its constellations gladly at the request of
the science teacher. Let it humble itself while there is yet time, and
not expect its little guests to keep silence within its walls as if they
were in a church, for it may even yet be overthrown—and replaced
by a combination theatre-gymnasium-studio-office-and-model-
factory building. And then it will be sorry!
III. The Teacher

S HALL the Teacher be abolished?...

What’s that you say?—Oh, but surely not before she has had a
hearing!—the worst criminal deserves that much consideration. I beg
of you to let me speak one moment in her behalf.—Ah, thank you,
my friends.
(Sister, you had a tight squeak just then! If it hadn’t been for my
presence of mind and my habitual coolness in the presence of
infuriated mobs, I hate to think what would have happened.—And
now let me see: what can I say in your behalf? H’m.... H’m....)
My friends, this unhappy woman (for we shall centre our attention
on the female of the species) is more sinned against than sinning.
Reflect! The status of women in the United States has changed in
the last fifty years. Modern industry has almost utterly destroyed the
old pioneer home with its partnership-marriage; ambitious young
men no longer have an economic need for capable women-partners;
women have lost their wonted economic value as potential helpers,
and their capacity for motherhood appears to the largest section of
young manhood in the aspect of a danger rather than a blessing.
Women have, to be sure, acquired a new value, in the eyes of a
smaller class of economically “arrived” men, as a sign of their
“arrival”—that is, they are desired as advertisements of their
husbands’ economic status. In one sense, the task of demonstrating
the extent of a husband’s income is easier than the pioneer task of
helping take care of a farm and raising a houseful of babies; but,
after all, such a career does require either natural talent or a high
degree of training in the graceful habits of conspicuous idleness and
honorific extravagance. And, whether it is that the vast majority of
women spurned such a career as an essentially immoral one, or
whether they were not really up to its requirements, or whether the
demand was found to be more than met by the hordes of candidates
turned out yearly by the boarding-schools—whatever the reason, the
fact remains that a large number of women began to see the
necessity and to conceive the desirability of some career other than
marriage. But industrial evolution, which had destroyed their former
opportunities, had failed to make any considerable or at least any
decent room for them in the industrial scheme. Most particularly was
this true for the young women of the middle class. They were unable
to go into the professions or the respectable trades, and unwilling
(for excellent reasons) to enter the factories; they were given no
opportunity to learn how to do anything—they were (quite against
their will, but inevitably) condemned to profound ignorance of the
most important things in the world—work and love; and so,
naturally, they became Teachers.
The world did not want them, and so they stayed out of the world,
in that drab, quasi-religious edifice, the School Building, and
prepared others to go into the world....
Good Heavens! do you suppose for a minute, if this unfortunate
woman had known enough about Anything in Particular to get a
respectable job outside, that she would have stayed in there to
teach Everything in General?[1] Do you suppose she wants to be a
Teacher? Do you suppose she likes pretending to be adept in a
dozen difficult subjects at once, inflicting an impossible ideal of
“order” upon the forty restless children whom her weary, amateur,
underpaid efforts at instruction have failed to interest, spending her
days in the confronting of an impossible task and her nights in the
“correcting” of an endless series of written proofs of her failure—
and, on top of that, being denied most of her human rights? The
munition-factory girls at least had their fling when the day’s work
was over; but she is expected to be a Vestal. In some places she
can’t get married without losing her job; in New York, if she is
married, she can’t have a baby! No—it is her misfortune, not her
fault, that she is what she is.
In fact, I think that if we could have managed to keep the war going
a little longer, she would have pretty much abolished herself.
Abdication is becoming popular, and she among all the monarchs is
not the least uncomfortable and restricted and hedged in by useless
divinity. Her abdication will be as disturbing an event as the Russian
Revolution. The Russians were accustomed to their Czar; but they
just had to learn to get along without him. And perhaps a similar
lesson is in store for us....
You find it a little difficult to imagine what School would be like
without Teachers? Well, for one thing, it would be more like the rest
of the world than it is now—and that, we agreed, was what we
wanted. Where else, indeed, except in School, do you find Teachers?
The rest of the world manages to get along without them very well.
Perhaps it is merely a superstition that they are needed in School!
Let us inquire into the matter.
What do people in the outside world do when they want to learn
something? They go to somebody who knows about it, and ask him.
They do not go to somebody who is reputed to know about
everything—except, when they are very young, to their parents: and
they speedily become disillusioned about that variety of omniscience.
They go to somebody who might reasonably be expected to know
about the particular thing they are interested in. When a man buys a
motor-car, he does not say to himself: “Where can I find somebody
who can teach me how to run a motor-car and dance the tango and
predict a rise on the stock-market?” He does not look in the
telephone directory under T. He just gets an experienced driver to
teach him. And when the driver tells him that this is the self-starter,
and proceeds to start the car with it, a confidence is established
which makes him inclined to believe all he can understand of what
he is presently told about the mysterious functions of the carburetor.
He does not even inquire if the man has taken vows of celibacy. He
just pays attention and asks questions and tries to do the thing
himself, until he learns.
But this case, of course, assumes an interest of the pupil in the
subject, a willingness and even a desire to learn about it, a feeling
that the matter is of some importance to himself. And come to think
of it, these motives are generally present in the learning that goes
on in the outside world. It is only in School that the pupil is expected
to be unwilling to learn.
When you were a child, and passed the door of the village
blacksmith shop, and looked in, day after day, you saw the
blacksmith heating a piece of iron red hot in the furnace, or twisting
it deftly with his pincers, or dropping it sizzling into a tub of water, or
paring a horse’s hoofs, or hammering in the silvery nails with swift
blows; you admired his skill, and stood in awe of his strength; and if
he had offered to let you blow the bellows for him and shown you
how to twist a red-hot penny, that would have been a proud
moment. It would also have been an educational one. But suppose
there had been a new shop set up in the town, and when you looked
in at the open door you saw a man at work painting a picture; and
suppose a bell rang just then, and the man stopped painting right in
the middle of a brush-stroke, and commenced to read aloud “How
They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”; and suppose when
he was half way through, the bell rang again, and he said, “We will
go on with that tomorrow,” and commenced to chisel the surface of
a piece of marble; and then, after a little, somewhat exhaustedly,
started in to play “The Rock of Ages” on a flute, interrupting the
tune to order you to stand up straight and not whisper to the little
boy beside you. There’s no doubt what you would think of him; you
would know perfectly well that he was crazy; people don’t do things
in that way anywhere in the world, except in school. And even if he
had assured you that painting and poetry, sculpture and music, were
later in your life going to be matters of the deepest importance and
interest, and that you should start in now with the determination of
becoming proficient in the arts, it would not have helped much. Not
very much.
It’s nonsense that children do not want to learn. Everybody wants to
learn. And everybody wants to teach. And the process is going on all
the time. All that is necessary is to put a person who knows
something—really knows it—within the curiosity-range of some one
who doesn’t know it: the process commences at once. It is almost
irresistible. In the interest of previous engagements one has to tear
one’s self away from all sorts of opportunities to learn things which
may never be of the slightest use but which nevertheless are alluring
precisely because one does not know them.
People talk about children being hard to teach, and in the next
breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the “vices.” That
seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful
application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn
mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than
equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers
who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or
seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic States?
And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable
that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody
take a tablespoonful once a day.
I think that if there were no teachers—no hastily and superficially
trained Vestals who were supposed to know everything—but just
ordinary human beings who knew passionately and thoroughly one
thing (but you’d be surprised to find what a lot of other knowledge
that would incidentally comprise!) and who had the patience to show
little boys and girls how to do that thing—we might get along
without Immaculate Omniscience pretty well. Of course, we’d have
to pay them more, because they could get other jobs out in the
larger world; and besides, you couldn’t expect to get somebody who
knows how to do something, for the price you are accustomed to
pay those who only know how to teach everything.
Nor need the change necessarily be abrupt. It could probably be
effected with considerable success by firing all the teachers at the
beginning of the summer vacations, and engaging their services as
human beings for the next year. Many of them would find no
difficulty at all in readjusting themselves....
IV. The Book

O F the ingredients of the educational catastrophe, the only one

remaining to be discussed is the Book. Is it to blame for the
failure of the process which has brought us to our present state of
elaborate ignorance, and ought it to be abolished?
What have books got to do with education, anyway?
Not half as much as most people think! If education is learning to be
a civilized human being, books have their place in it. But civilized life
is composed of a number of things besides books—it contains
machinery, art, political organization, handicraft, flowers and birds,
and other things too numerous to mention, all of which are
notoriously capable of being learned about in the great world outside
without the use of books. If in the great world outside the school,
then why not in the little world inside the school?
Not that the use of books should be ever avoided anywhere for the
sake of the avoidance. Books are a convenience—or an
inconvenience, as the case may be. Like other valuable human
utilities, they are frequently a nuisance if obtruded in the place of
better things. Every intelligent person has the same attitude toward
books that he has toward his sweetheart’s photograph: if she is out
of reach, if the picture furnishes him his only way of seeing her, he
values it profoundly; but if she is in the next room, he does not
linger with the image. True, he may fall in love with the picture first
—the picture may reveal to him the girl whom otherwise he might
never have appreciated; and books do make us appreciate aspects
of reality which we have neglected. But in education books are not
an adequate substitute for direct contact with the realities with
which they deal, precisely because they do not give the sense of
power which only comes from direct contact with reality. It is the
function of books to assist in that educational contact—not to take
the place of it.
There is, indeed, a sense in which books are the most egregious
fraud ever perpetrated upon a world hungry for the knowledge
which is power. I am reminded of the scene in “The Wild Duck,”
when the father returns home from a grand dinner party. He has
promised to bring his little daughter some sweetmeats or cake—and
he has forgotten to do so. But—he grandly draws from his pocket a
piece of printed matter—“Here, my child, is the menu: you can sit
down and read about the whole dinner!” Poor little Hedvig knew that
she wasn’t getting anything to eat; but some of us don’t realize that
for years and years; we dutifully masticate the innutritious contents
of text-books while we are starving for a taste of reality.
Take geography, for instance. I know quite well that it was not the
intention of the author of the text-book which I studied that I should
conceive the state of Illinois as yellow and the neighbouring state of
Indiana as pale green: but I do to this day. They were not realities
to me, but pictures in a book; and they were not realities because
they had no relation whatever to real experience. If I had been
asked to draw a map of the school grounds, with the boys’ side
distinguished by one colour and the girls’ by another, that convention
would thereafter have seemed only what it was. If I had drawn a
map of the town I lived in, I would have been thenceforth unable, I
am sure, to see a map without feeling the realities of stream and
wood and hill and house and farm of which it is a conventional
abstraction. I would, in short, have learned something about
geography. The very word would have acquired a fascinating
significance—the depiction of the surface of the earth! whereas all
the word geography actually means to me now is—a large flat book.
And if an aviator should stop me and ask which is the way to Illinois,
I couldn’t for my life tell him: but if you brought me that old
geography book and opened it to the map of the United States, I
could put my finger on Illinois in the dark! You see, Illinois is for me
not a part of the real world—it is a yellow picture in a large flat
book.
In the same way, I have the impression that the American
Revolution happened in a certain thick book bound in red cloth—not
by any chance in the New York and New England whose streets I
have walked in. (And, for that matter, as I have later discovered,
much of the American Revolution of the school histories—such as
the Boston Tea-Party as described—did not happen anywhere except
in the pages of such text-books). The only thing I know about the
crossing of the Delaware, for example, is that it is a Leading Fact of
American History, and occurred on the right hand page, a little below
and to the left of a picture. And this conception of historical events
as a series of sentences occurring in a certain order on a certain
page, seems to me the inevitable consequence of learning history
from a text-book.
There are other objections to the use of text-books. One is their
frequent perversion or suppression of truth for moral, patriotic or
sentimental reasons: in this respect they are like practically all books
intended for children. They are generally pot-boilers written by men
of no standing in the intellectual or even in the scholastic world. But
even when a text-book is written by a man of real learning, the
absence of a critical audience of his equals seems often to deprive
him of a stimulus necessary to good writing, and leave him free to
indulge in long-repressed childishnesses of his own which he would
never dare exhibit to a mature public. And even when text-books are
neither grossly incompetent nor palpably dishonest, there is
nevertheless almost invariably something cheap and trashy about
their composition which repels the student who can choose his own
books. Why should they be inflicted upon helpless children?
Even if all text-books were miracles of accuracy and order, even if
they all showed literary talent of a high degree, their usefulness
would still be in question. If children are to be given a sense of the
reality of the events which they study, they must get some feeling of
contact with the facts. And to this project the use of a text-book is
fatal. Let us turn to history once more. I take it that a text-book of
history, as intended and as used, is a book which tells everything
which it is believed necessary for the pupil to know. Right there it
divorces itself, completely and irrevocably, from the historical
category. History is not a statement of what people ought to know.
History is an inquiry into the nature and relationship and significance
of past events. Not a pronouncement upon these things, but a
searching into them. Now the outstanding fact about past events is
that they happened some time ago. The historian does not, to begin
with, know what happened, let alone how and why it happened. He
is dependent upon other people’s reports. His chief task is often to
determine the comparative accuracy of these various reports. And
when we read the writings of a real historian, the sense of contact
we have with the events under discussion comes from our feeling
that we have listened to a crowd of contrary witnesses, and, with
our author’s assistance, got at the truth behind their words. More
than that, the historian himself is addressing you, not as if he
thought you had never read anything on the subject before and
never would again, but with implicit or explicit reference to the
opinions of other historians. He is himself only one of a crowd of
witnesses, from all of whose testimony he expects you to form your
own opinion of those past events which none of you will ever meet
face to face.
Compare this with the school text-book. It was evidently written by
Omniscience Itself, for it does not talk as if the facts were in the
slightest doubt, as if there were any two opinions about them, as if
it were necessary to inquire into the past to find out something
about it. It does not condescend to offer an opinion in agreement or
in controversy with the views of others. It does not confess any
difficulty in arriving at a just conclusion. No—it says This happened
and That happened. Perhaps it is all true as gospel. But facts so
presented are abstractions, devoid of the warmth and colour of
reality. Even the schools have learned how uninteresting dates are.
But they do not realize that dates are uninteresting because, since
nobody can possibly doubt them, it does no good whatever to
believe in them. It is only those truths which need the assistance of
our belief that engage our interest. It is only then that they concern
us. We are interested in politics because it is the process of making
up our minds about the future; and we are interested in history,
when we are interested, because it is the process of making up our
minds about the past.
By eliminating the text-book, or by using it simply as a convenient
syllabus and chronological guide to an inquiry into the significance
and relationship of the events of the past, with the aid of every good
historical work available for reference, the study of history would
become a matter of concern to the pupil; and the past, looked at
from several angles, and down a felt perspective of time, would
become real.
I am aware that this is done in the higher flights of the educational
system. But why is it that the easy and profitable methods of
learning are put off so long and the hardest and most profitless
forced upon children? Is it that easier learning means harder
teaching? I am not sure of that; the only difficulty about such a
method as I have described would be in the mere change from the
old to the new. No, I think the real trouble lies in the superstition of
the Book.
This may be seen in the teaching of mathematics. Before they come
to school, children have usually learned to count, and learned easily
because they were counting real objects. The objective aspect of
mathematics is almost immediately lost sight of in school. Even the
blackboard affords no release from the book, for who ever saw a
blackboard outside a schoolroom? Mathematics comes to seem
something horribly useless. The child simply does not believe that
people ever go through these tortures when they grow up. Even the
suggestive fables into which the “examples” are sometimes cast, fail
to convince him. “If a carpenter—” “A salesman has—” But he is
neither a carpenter nor a salesman. He is a weary child, and he is
not going to pretend to be a carpenter or a salesman unless he gets
some fun out of it. The thing about a carpenter or a salesman which
appeals to the child’s imagination is something other than
mathematics. No, the printed word does not suffice. But let him be a
carpenter or salesman for the nonce, let him with saw or sugar-
scoop in hand find it to be necessary to add, subtract, multiply,
divide and deal in fractions, and he will rise undaunted to the
occasion. And, having found in actual practice just what his
difficulties are, he will cheerfully use book and blackboard. Where
there’s a will there’s a way, and mathematics has only to come to
seem a desirable acquisition to become an easily mastered one. I
should say that the ideal way of teaching a boy of eight mathematics
—including, if necessary, trigonometry—is as a part of the delightful
task of constructing a motorcycle. I remember that I gained in
twenty-four hours an insight into the mysteries of English grammar
which I had failed to get in the 1200 odd lessons previously inflicted
on me in school—and I gained that insight in writing my first short
story. When an effect that you yourself want to achieve depends on
a preposition or a fraction, then, and only then, are such things
humanly worth knowing.
If you want to see the most terrific and damning criticism of text-
books, open one of them which has been used by a child, and see it
written there on the margins in fretful and meandering curleques,
which say as plainly as the handwriting on Belshazzar’s wall, “I have
weighed this book in the balance and found it wanting. It does not
interest me. It leaves my spirit vexed and impatient.” I have
estimated that the scrawl-work in a single average schoolbook, if
unwound and placed end to end, would extend along the Lincoln
Highway from Weehawken, N. J., to Davenport, Ia.; while the total
energy which goes into the making of these scrawls each day in the
public schools of New York City alone, would be sufficient to hoist a
grand piano to the top of the Woolworth building. The grand total
for the United States of the soul-power that dribbles out into these
ugly pencilings, amounts to a huge Niagara of wasted energy.
The Book, as the centre of our educational process, must be
demoted. It is a good servant, but a bad master. And only as a
servant can it be tolerated—as an adjunct to the gardens and
workshops and laboratories and kitchens and studios and
playgrounds of the school-world.
V. The Magic Theory of Education

B UT these are not the only superstitions which have muddled the
educational process. You have heard that favourite speech of
the condemned criminal: “I never had no education.”
He does not refer to moral education; he is not complaining that he
was never instructed as to the sacredness of life and private
property. He means that he never studied arithmetic and geography
and spelling—or not enough to mention. He means that geography,
etc., would have saved him from a life of crime and a finish behind
the bars.
And you have heard some unlettered parent, come from a foreign
shore, repeat over and over:
“My boy, he get education. I no have education. But my boy—he get
education.” Or words to that effect.
True; his boy will have a better chance than he himself had; he may
become President of the United States or of a Fruit Trust. And it is
equally true of the other man, that if he had learned arithmetic in
school instead of sneak-thievery from the Carmine street gang, he
would probably now be making shoes in a factory instead of in Sing
Sing. There is much plain common sense in both these views of
education. But there is more of plain folk-mysticism.
Both speakers think of themselves as having had to struggle along in
the ordinary natural way, in the one case by day-labour and in the
other by petty larceny; and they contrast their lot with that of the
fortunate ones who by means of an esoteric kind of knowledge have
found an easy way of life. This knowledge, they believe, is reposed
exclusively in certain difficult and officially designated books, which
can be made to yield their secrets only through a process called
going-to-school, and by the aid of a kind of public functionary called
a teacher.
This mysterious and beneficent procedure is the popular conception
of education. The school building and the teacher are the later and
more external elements of the cult. It is at heart a belief in the
magic—one might call it the black-and-white magic—of books.
Now the essence of the belief in magic is the wish of the weak
person to be strong—magic being the short straight line in the wish-
world from weakness to strength.
Think for a moment of some childhood fairy tale. The Hero is not the
strong man. It is the wicked Giant who is strong. The rôle of brute
force is always played by malevolent powers. The Hero, stripped of
his magical appurtenances, is not much to look at. Almost invariably
he is the youngest of the family, and is often represented as
diminutive in size or stature. And the older the fairy tale, the more
physically insignificant he is. It is only later, when the motif of
romantic love enters into folk-fiction, that the hero must be tall and
handsome. At the earlier period he is frankly a weakling, as Man in
primitive times no doubt felt himself to be, in comparison with the
mastodon and the aurochs; and frequently he is regarded at the
outset by the rest of the family with contempt, as no doubt was Man
by the other animals when his great Adventure began. Like Man, the
fairy-tale hero is confronted with an impossible task—sometimes by
a whole series of such tasks, which he must somehow perform
successfully if he wishes to survive; and, by no superior strength,
but by some blessed help from outside, a singing bush, a talking
bird, by the aid of some supernatural weapon, and, above all, by the
use of some talismanic Word, he achieves his exploits. Thus does
the weakling, the youngest child, the harassed prey of hateful
powers, become the Giant-Killer, the Dragon-Slayer, the Conquering
Hero!
It is very human, this pathetic assertion that weakness must turn
into strength. And, if it had not been for such a confidence, primitive
Man might very well have given up the game, surrendered the field
to his contemporaries of the animal kingdom. And this confidence
might, somewhat fancifully, be described as a previsionary sense in
early Man of the larger destinies of his race. In very truth, the
weakness from which it sprang was the thing which made possible
these larger destinies. For the unlimited adaptations of mankind are
due precisely to his weakness. It is because Man lacked the horns of
the bull and the teeth of the tiger that he was forced to invent the
club, the spear, the sword, the bow-and-arrow; it was because he
lacked the fleetness of the deer that he had to tame and teach the
horse to carry him; because he felt himself to be intolerably inferior
to bird and fish that he could not rest content until he had invented
the airplane and the submarine. In short, because he was the
weakest of all the creatures on earth, he had to take refuge from the
terrible truth in a childish but dynamic wish-dream of becoming—by
some mysterious help from outside—the lord of creation.
Fairy lore may be read as a record of the ancient awe and gratitude
of mankind to the miracles of human adaptation which served that
childish wish. The all-powerful fairy wand is simply that unnatural
and hence supernatural thing, the stick, broken from a magically
helping tree and made to serve a human purpose; the sceptre of
royalty is that same magic stick preserved to us in the lingering fairy-
tale of monarchy. But more potent even than the magic of wand or
sword in fairy lore is the magic of words. And truly enough it was
the miracle of language which made the weakest creature on earth
the strongest. Writing, that mysterious silent speech, holding in
leash the unknown powers of the magic word until it met the initiate
eye, must have had for mankind a special awe and fascination, a
quality of ultimate beauty and terror....
This flavour of magical potency still clings to the Book. It is the
greatest of the mysterious helps by which Man makes his dream of
power come true. Who can blame the poor jailbird who thinks that
there was, in the dull, incompetent pages of the text-books which
you and I carried so unwillingly to school, an Open Sesame to a
realm of achievement beyond his unaided power to reach! And who
can blame the poor immigrant parent if he regards the officially
designated Books which his children bring home from school as a
talisman against those harsh evils of the world which he in his
ignorance has had to suffer!
But the magic theory is not the only popular superstition about
education. There is another, even more deeply and stubbornly
rooted in the human mind.
VI. The Caste System of Education

N OW what has Caste to do with Education? Quite as much as

Magic. You shall see.
From the point of view of the student of education, the Caste system
appears as a method of simplifying the hereditary transmission of
knowledge—in short, as a primitive method of education. This will be
the more readily apparent if we glance for a moment at its
prehistoric origins.
Before man was man, he was an animal. He relied, like the rest of
the animals, on a psychically easy—and lazy—mode of adaptation to
reality. He had a specific set of “instinctive” reactions to familiar
stimuli. Doubt had not entered his soul. He had no conflicting
impulses to torment him. His bag of instinctive animal tricks sufficed.
But something happened to mar the easy perfection of his state.
Some change in environmental conditions, perhaps, made his set of
definite reactions inadequate. For the first time he didn’t know
exactly how to meet the situation. Conflicting impulses shook his
mind; doubt entered his soul—and Thought was born. Man thought
because he had to think. But he hated to, because it was the
hardest thing he had ever done! He learned—unwillingly—more and
more about how to live; he increased the number and the
complexity of his adaptations; but he sought always to codify these
adaptations into something resembling the bag of tricks which he
had had to leave behind. And when it came to passing on the
knowledge of these new adaptations to the younger generation—
when it came, in short, to education—he did the job in as easy a
way as he conscientiously could.
You have seen a cat teaching her kittens how to catch mice, or a
pair of birds teaching their young ones to fly. It is so simple! The
thing to be learned is easy—easy, because the cat is formed to catch
mice and the bird to fly. And, once mastered, these tricks and a few
others as simple constitute the sum of animal education. There is no
more to learn; these equip the animal to deal successfully with
reality. How a human parent must envy Tabby the simplicity and
certainty of her task! She has only to go on the theory that a cat is
an animal which lives by catching mice in order to fulfil her whole
educational duty. And human parents did desire (as indeed,
consciously or unconsciously, they do yet) such a simplification of
their task. Primitive mankind wanted to pass on to the new
generation a simple bag of tricks. Of course, there is no specific bag
of tricks which suffices Man to live by; he is what he is precisely by
virtue of a capacity for unlimited adaptation to environment. If the
bag of monkey-tricks had sufficed, about all we know now would be
how to climb trees and pick cocoanuts. Our ancestors learned
because they must; and they passed on what they had learned to
their successors—but in a form dictated by their wish to keep human
behaviour as near as possible to the simple and easy character of
animal life. They put on the brakes.
Because mankind already knew more than it thought one animal
species ought to have to know, it started to divide itself into sub-
species. The division into the male and female sub-species came first
—and has lasted longest. The young men were educated for war
and the chase, and the young women for domestic duties. And this
is essentially a division not of physical but rather of intellectual
labour. It was a separation of the burden of knowing how to behave
in life’s emergencies—a separation which by its simplicity gave such
satisfaction to the primitive mind that he hated and feared any
disturbance of it.
To this day a man is not so much ashamed of doing “woman’s work”
as of seeming to know how to do it. It is no disgrace for a man to
sew on a button—provided he does it clumsily; and the laugh with
which men and women greet each other’s awkward intrusions into
each other’s “spheres of effort” is a reassurance to the effect that
the real taboo against knowing how has not been violated. It is for
this reason that women had so much harder a time to fight their
way into the “masculine” professions to which a preliminary
education was necessary than to enter the factories, where only
strength was supposed to be required; and why (aside from the
economic reasons) they have so much difficulty in entering trades
which must be learned by apprenticeship. An interesting echo of this
primitive taboo is to be found in New York City, where a telephone
girl who wants to study the science which underlies her labours
would find in certain public schools that the electricity classes are for
boys exclusively.
The other social and economic groups into which mankind divided
itself tended to perpetuate themselves as simulated sub-species by
the transmission of special knowledge along strict hereditary lines.
Crafts of every sort—whether metal-working or magic, architecture
or agriculture, seafaring or sheep-breeding, even poetry and
prostitution—came more and more to be inherited, until among
some of the great ancient peoples the caste system became the
foundation of society.
Ultimately the caste system per se was shattered by the demand of
the process which we call civilization for a more variously adaptable
creature—for human beings. But it survives almost intact in certain
class educational institutions, such as the finishing schools for girls—
institutions devoted to teaching the particular bag of tricks which will
enable those who learn them to occupy successfully and without
further adaptation a hereditary (or quasi-hereditary) position in
society—to be a “finished” and perfect member of a definite and
unchanging human sub-species.
The most potent harm which the caste theory of education has
effected, however, is in its stultification of the true magic of the
written word. Let us see how that came about.
VII. The Canonization of Book-
Magic

I T was inevitable that the particular kind of knowledge which is

represented by books should become the property of a certain
caste; and it was inevitable that this caste should confine the
hereditary transmission of that knowledge chiefly to such works as
had been transmitted from the previous generation.
Fortunately, the literate caste could not extinguish literature. For the
presumptively less sacred writings which had been denied entrance
to the canon because they were new were, so to speak, allowed to
lie around loose where everybody could get at them. Thus the true
magic of book-knowledge was released from the boundaries of
caste, and became more and more a universal property.
But nobody had any great respect for this growing body of “profane”
literature. Popular awe was reserved for the body of sacred literature
in the possession of the specifically literate caste. Frequently the
distinction was marked by a deliberate difference in the languages or
characters in which the two kinds of literature were written—sacred
literature being written in the older, hieratic writing which nobody
not of the literate caste could read.
Note the result at this stage of the process: it is precisely those
books which are, on the whole, least likely to be of present value to
mankind, which are regarded with superstitious reverence. The most
striking example is found in pre-revolutionary China, where the relics
of an age utterly out of touch with the newer achievements in
human adaptation were learned by heart in the schools and made
the basis of civil-service examinations.
At this point of our ideal but not at all fanciful sketch, a new factor
enters—class jealousy. The literate caste is found to be associated
and partly identified with the leisure class. Sacred literature has
become leisure class literature, and the aspirations of the less
fortunate classes toward leisure class prerogatives include a special
desire, tinged with the old superstitious reverence, for the forbidden
books. These were more or less unconsciously supposed to be, if not
actually responsible for, at least bound up with, leisure class power.
And finally the great democratizing movements in which some
enterprising lower class wrests from some moribund leisure class its
possessions, seizes triumphant hold on its “classics” and makes them
a general possession.
This sketch is so pieced together from all times and places that it
may decidedly seem to need the reinforcement of evidence. Let us
therefore call to the stand that young man over there who looks like
an Intelligent Young Immigrant. He comes unabashed, and we
proceed to question him:
Q. Do you buy books?
A. Yes, of course.
Q. Admirable! You need a new pair of shoes, and yet you buy books!
Well, what books do you buy?
A. Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Zola, Nietzsche—
Q. See here, you must be a Socialist!
A. Yes. What of it?
Q. What of it! Why, I’m talking about Reverence, and you haven’t
got any. You’re not looking for the noblest utterances of mankind,
you’re looking for weapons with which to cut your way through the
jungle of contemporary hypocrisies!
A. Of course.
Q. Well, how do you expect me to prove my theory by you? You are
excused!
We’ll have to try again. There’s another one. Eager Young
Immigrant, thirsting for the treasures locked in our English tongue.
Come here, my lad.
Q. What books do you read? Shaw and Veblen, by any chance?
A. No, sir. I’m going to the English Literature class at the social
settlement, and I’m reading the “Idylls of the King.” I’ve read
Addison’s Essays and Shakespeare, and I’m going to take up the
Iliad.
Q. The classics, eh?
A. Yes, sir. All the things they study at college!
Q. H’m. Ever hear of Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf?
A. Yes, sir—I own it.
Q. How much do you make a week?
A. Eighteen dollars.
Q. Thank you. That’s all!
And there you are!
But please don’t misunderstand me. Disparagement of the classics
as such is far from being the point of my remarks! One may regard
the piano as a noble instrument, and yet point out the
unprecedented sale of pianos during the war as an example of the
influence of class jealousy in interior decoration. For observe that it
is not the intrinsic merit of book or piano which wins the regard of
the class long envious of its “betters” and now able by a stroke of
luck to parade its class paraphernalia; it is the stamp of caste that
makes it desirable: an accordion, which merely makes music, would
not serve the purpose! That boy who owns Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf
does not want mere vulgar enlightenment; he wants an
acquaintance with such books as have an aura of hereditary
academic approval.
And it is for the same reason that Latin and Greek have so
apparently fixed a place in our public education. They were part of
the system of educating gentlemen’s sons in England; and what was
good enough to be threshed into the hides of gentlemen’s sons is
good enough for us!
VIII. The Conquest of Culture in
America

T HE first organized schools in America were theological

seminaries. This was due to the fact that the New England
colonies were theocracies, church-states. No one not a member of
the church had any political rights. And the heads of the church
were the heads of the state. In this special kind of class government
it naturally followed that theology was the prime study of ambitious
youth. But as the colonies grew more prosperous and the rule of the
more godly became as a matter of fact the rule of the more rich, the
theological seminaries of New England changed by degrees into
more easily recognizable imitations of the great gentlemen’s sons’
schools in old England. Such, in particular, was the theo-aristocratic
genesis of Harvard and Yale.
The gentlemen’s sons’ school was thus our first, and for a long time
our only, educational achievement. The humble theocratic
beginnings of these institutions did indeed leave a quasi-democratic
tradition which made it possible for not only the sons of the well-to-
do, but for the ambitious son of poor parents, to secure the
knowledge of Latin and Greek necessary to fit them to exploit and
rule a virgin continent. But beneath this cultural perfection, to meet
the needs of the great mass of the people, there was no organized
or public education whatever.[2] The result was a vast illiteracy such
as still exists in many parts of the South today. The private and
pitiful efforts of the lower classes to secure an education took the
form of paying some old woman to teach their children “the three
R’s.”
Of these three R’s the last has a significance of its own. It is there by
virtue of a realistic conviction, born of harsh experience. A man may
not be able to “figure,” and yet know that he is being cheated. And
so far as getting along in a buying-and-selling age is concerned,
’Rithmetic has an importance even more fundamental than Readin’
and ’Ritin’. Yet in the list it stands modestly last—for it is a late and
vulgar intruder into sacred company. Even in a young commercial
nation, the old belief in the rescuing magic of the Word still holds its
place in the aspiring mind.
But why, you ask, quarrel with this wholesome reverence for books?
Well—suppose the working class acquired such a reverence for
books that it refused to believe it was being Educated unless it was
being taught something out of a book! Suppose it worshipped books
so much that when you offered its children flowers and stars and
machinery and carpenters’ tools and a cook-stove to play with in
order to learn how to live—suppose it eyed you darkly and said:
“Now, what are you trying to put over on me?” But that is to
anticipate.
It was due to the organized effort of the working class that public
education was at last provided for American children. Our free public
school system came into existence in the thirties as a result of trade
union agitation.[3] Its coming into existence is a great good upon
which we need not dwell. But its subsequent history needs to be
somewhat elucidated.
The public school system was founded firmly upon the three R’s. But
these were plainly not enough. It had to be enlarged to meet our
needs—and to satisfy our genuine democratic pride in it. So wings
were thrown out into the fields of history and geography. And then?
There was still an earth-full of room for expansion. But no, it was
builded up—Up! And why? The metaphor is a little troublesome, but
you are to conceive, pinnacled dim in the intense inane, or
suspended from heaven itself, the gentlemen’s sons’ school. And this
was what our public school system was striving to make connections
with. And lo! at last it succeeded! The structure beneath was rickety
—fantastic—jerry-built—everything sacrificed to the purpose of
providing a way to climb Up There; but the purpose was fulfilled.
The democratic enthusiasm which created the public school had in
fact been unaccompanied by any far-seeing theory of what
education ought to be. And so that splendid enthusiasm, after its
initial conquest of the three R’s, proceeded to a conquest of Greek
and Latin and the whole traditional paraphernalia of aristocratic
education. Every other purpose of public education was, for the time
being lost sight of, forgotten, ignored, in the proud attempt to create
a series of stairs which led straight up to the colleges. The high
school became a preparatory school for college, and the courses
were arranged, rearranged and deranged, with that intent. Final
examinations were systematized, supervised and regulated to secure
the proper penultimate degree of academic achievement—as for
instance by the famous Regents’ examinations. The public school
lost its independence—which was worth nothing; and its opportunity
—which was worth everything. It remains a monument to the caste
ideal of education.
For the theory which underlay the scheme was that every American
boy and girl who wanted an education should have the whole thing
in bang-up style. What was good enough for gentlemen’s sons was
none too good for us. That there might be no mistake about it, the
states erected their own colleges, with plenty of free scholarships to
rob ignorance of its last excuse. These state colleges, while
furnished with various realistic and technical adjuncts, and lacking in
the authentic hereditary aura of their great Eastern predecessors,
were still echoes, sometimes spirited and more often forlorn, of the
aristocratic tradition of centuries agone. With the reluctant addition
of a kindly scheme for keeping very young children in school, the
system now stretched from infancy to full manhood, and embraced—
in theory—the whole educable population of the United States.
In its utter thoroughness of beneficent intention, the system was
truly sublime.
The only trouble was that it didn’t work.
IX. Smith, Jones and Robinson

AT this point there seems to be an interruption from somebody at the

back of the hall.—Louder, please! What’s that you say?
“I thought,” says the voice, “that this was to be a discussion of
education. It sounds to me more like a monologue. When do we get
a chance to talk?”
Oh, very well! If you think you can do this thing better than I can, go
ahead. Suppose you tell us why the American public school system
failed to work!—One at a time, please. Mr.—er—Smith has the floor.
He will be followed in due order by Mr. Jones and Mr. Robinson. And
then I hope everybody will be satisfied. Yes, Mr. Smith?
Mr. Smith: “I am one of the so-called victims of our American public
school system. I went to grammar school, to high school, and then to
college. You say that is what the system is for—to lead up to college.
Well, it worked in my case. My parents were poor, but I studied hard
and got a free scholarship, and I worked my way through college by
tending furnaces in the morning and tutoring at night. You say
college is designed to impart a gentleman’s sons’ education. Well, I
got that kind of education. And what I want to know is, what’s wrong
with me? I can’t say I feel particularly stultified by my educational
career!”
No, no, Mr. Smith, don’t stop. Go right on!
Mr. Smith (continuing): “I will admit that I have sometimes wished I
had taken some kind of technical course instead of the straight
classical. But I didn’t want to be an engineer or chemist, so why
should I? In fact I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to be.... I
suppose my education might not unreasonably have been expected
to help me understand myself better. And I confess that when I came
out into the world with my A.B. I did feel a bit helpless. But I
managed to find a place for myself, and I get along very well. I can’t
say that I make any definite use of my college education, but I rather
think it’s been an advantage.”
Thank you for being so explicit. Mr. Jones next. Mr. Jones, you have
just heard Mr. Smith’s splendid testimonial to the value of a college
education—how it has unlocked for him the ages’ accumulated wealth
of literature, of science, of art—how it has put him in vivid touch with
the world in which he lives—how it has made him realize his own
powers, and given him a serene confidence in his ability to use them
wisely—how fully it has equipped him to live in this complex and
difficult age—in a word, how it has helped him to become all that a
twentieth century American citizen should be! Have you, Mr. Jones,
anything to add to his account of these benefits?
Mr. Jones: “Your coarse sarcasm, if aimed at me, is misdirected. I
never went to college. I didn’t want to tend furnaces, so when I
finished high school I got a job. But there’s something to this
gentleman’s sons’ stuff. I had four years’ start of Smith, but I feel that
he’s got a certain advantage over me just because he is a college
man. Now why is that, I’d like to know? I could have gone to college
too, if I had cared enough about it. But studying didn’t interest me. I
was bored with high school.”
Exactly, Mr. Jones. And some hundreds of thousands of others were
also so bored with high school that even the prestige which a college
education confers, could not tempt them to further meaningless
efforts. You have explained a large part of the breakdown of our
public school system. In theory—but Mr. Robinson wishes to speak.
Mr. Robinson: “Theory—theory—theory! I think it’s about time a few
facts were injected into this alleged discussion! The fact I’m
interested in is just this: I quit school when I was twelve years old. I
had just finished grammar school. I couldn’t go to high school. I had
to go to work. What have your theories of education got to do with
me?”
Everything, Mr. Robinson! You smashed one theory to pieces, you
were about to be condemned to a peculiar kind of slavery by another