M. Alderton Pink

“ Somewhat strangely, the educational spokesmen of the trade unions seem so much concerned about securing a university education for the sons of the “workers” that they have little interest in the matter of craft-instruction. But perhaps this attitude of the trade union leaders is no more strange than that of the employers who talk loudly of the need for increased efficiency if British manufacturers are to compete in the markets of the world, and yet do little or nothing to ensure that their young workers shall be given adequate training for the work they are to perform. ”

“ The present generation has been too readily fooled by the equally delusive [8] hope that the new Utopia will be created when everybody receives a university education at public expense.
It is therefore all to the good that our leaders should occasionally remind us that education is not a magic weapon of unlimited power. It is time that the public mind was disabused of the notion that a perfect system of education would of itself prove the salvation of the State. The fallacy lies, of course, in the assumption that everybody is capable of being educated. ”

“ Just as the man who is constantly toiling for bread is debarred from purely cultural pursuits, so the nation whose economic position is unsound can spare its children neither the money nor the time for any education beyond the most elementary. ”

“ A scholastic education is apt to make a youth despise useful mechanical work. The products of our secondary schools and universities are crowding the black-coated professions and occupations. Education is a failure unless it inculcates the idea that all useful work is honourable, and that the working engineer, or carpenter, or weaver is a more useful member of society than a ‘commission agent’. Society needs men and women with the highest scholastic attainments. ”

“ It seems probable that the worship of the false gods of the academic world will take an unconscionable time in dying. Universities are conservative places: they hold themselves superior, and often rightly superior, to the rough and tumble of the world outside, and thus they are tardy in responding to the changing spirit of the age. Moreover, by their very system they are cramping the free intelligence and narrowing the vision of those who are to direct the universities of the future. Success in university life necessarily involves obedience to the tradition. ”

“ Thus even if we imagine a perfect educational process, carried out by teachers who are all men and women of light and leading, the result of that process will be ultimately conditioned by the quality of the human beings who pass through it. Just as democracy pre-supposes education, so education pre-supposes children who are educable. ”

“ The cry will go up that, whereas the rich child, no matter what his capacity, will continue to be given a public school education, the poor child of the same mental capacity will be deprived of such an indulgence. Of course, the children of the two classes will not receive equal treatment. But so long as the State allows the existence of schools which it does not control, so long as it allows parents to contract out of the educational system, it will not be able to prevent wealthy people from spending their money on their brainless children, if they choose to do so. ”

“ In the first place, an education completely divorced from the requirements of a vocation is a luxury appropriate only to a leisured class, or a class free from economic pressure: it is, in fact, a legacy from the independent families of the upper classes or the well-to-do middle classes who sent their children to the public schools and the old grammar schools, knowing that the question of bread and butter was not an urgent one. ”

“ We are gradually coming to acknowledge the fairly obvious truth that not every child is a potential Prime Minister, or even a capable civil servant, or a manager of a business. When we have shed the more romantic of the democratic habits of thought we shall even publicly admit that a certain proportion of mankind (whether the offspring of dukes or of dustmen) are fitted by nature to be nothing better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that to give them more than a limited amount of ordinary schooling is to perform a work of sentimental supererogation. ”

“ They see that for many children a “liberal education” is not necessarily one which follows the traditional academic curriculum, but rather one which suits itself to individual needs and which seeks to develop the pupil’s powers by setting him to do what he can do, instead of forcing him to try to do what he can never do with success. ”

“ In general terms we may say that our educational system will be made purposive where it is now haphazard, and that it will be brought into definite connection with the economic life of the country. Education will be regarded as a preparation for livelihood as well as for life,—as a training [50] for working citizens rather than for a leisured class. ”

“ It is indeed time that we got rid of the prevalent notion that schools are factories (chiefly brain-factories) which can pass any sort of human material through a standardised course and in so many years turn out satisfactory finished products. And the friends of education need not be alarmed at the new trend of opinion. All reasonable people now admit the theoretical principle that the State must provide adequate training for all future citizens ”

“ It will not be able to afford the wastage of human ability either through failure to find out and cultivate the best brains or through neglect to fit the man to the job. It will be forced to adopt a system of training which will provide an education at [44] once liberal and adapted to economic needs. And it will be useless for the more narrow idealist to bewail the intrusion of economics into the domain of education. After all, literature, the arts, and the study of pure science flourish only so long as economic conditions permit. ”

“ It is a perennial human weakness to pursue one aim to the unreasonable exclusion of others, to mistake the means for the end. The great humanists were so possessed by ideals which they found in the antique world that they sought to achieve them even at the expense of personal and social morality; their successors mistook the husk for the kernel and allowed pedantry to displace scholarship. We of this age are being diverted from other aims and [94] allowing our intellectual life to be narrowed by an unreasoning zeal for research. ”

“ The State which seeks economic health must demand that each citizen shall do his best [45] work. He will do his best work in the vocation for which he has a natural aptitude. The business of the school is to discover and foster natural aptitudes. The business of the State as an economic entity is to contrive by all possible means to guide its children into suitable vocations. In a state with a proper economic organisation there must, therefore, of necessity be a vital connection between a child’s school-training and his future career. ”

“ The scheme of development which has been mapped out clearly demands the creation of a link between education and industry such as does not at present exist. Boys and girls who, through lack of initiative or of any special predilection, have not found for themselves suitable employment by the time they are due to leave school will not be allowed to drift into the first blind-alley occupation that presents itself. The education authorities will have made full surveys of local industrial and business requirements and will thus be able to indicate suitable openings. ”

“ What are the aims? At present the secondary school’s main function is to give sufficient training in the humanities, in mathematics and science, to enable pupils to pass the entrance examination of a university. (We may for the purpose of the present [23] argument disregard the social activities of the school.) In other words, its business is to produce scholars of the intellectual type fitted for university training. It is true that art, handicraft, domestic science, and physical exercises appear in the curriculum but they occupy more or less subordinate places. ”

“ Thus a distinguished practical schoolmaster corroborates the view of Lord Hugh Cecil that before providing unlimited educational facilities we should face the fact that many children are not amenable to the present educational process; and we ought therefore to consider whether we are promoting either their efficiency as [5] citizens or their happiness as individuals by submitting them to a training for which they are not fitted. We are reminded that education has of recent years become a cult whose followers allow their zeal to blind them to stubborn realities. ”

“ When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the time [108] will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought and action. ”

“ The individual capacity of the pupil will be made the starting-point for the teacher: the heresy which gives our present system the character of a Chicago canned-meat factory will be abandoned. As a corollary we shall give less exclusive reverence to purely bookish attainments and we shall realise that training in craftsmanship may be as productive to one individual, and hence to the State, as training in the differential calculus is to another.
We may assume that in the not too remote future every child of the required mental capacity will receive education to the age of sixteen at least. ”

“ In spite of the efforts of two generations to make science an instrument of education, and in spite of the inherent excellence of the scientific method, he has grave doubts about the results. He finds the cause of his dissatisfaction in the methods and aims of the teachers of the sciences. ”

“ And when we have taken more account than at present of the profound differences in individual capacities we shall cease to think of an education as something extraneous to the person educated, and to regard the school-curriculum as a Procrustean bed, to suit the dimensions of which the child’s mentality can be extended or truncated as required. ”

“ Public educational policy during the last quarter of a century has provided for higher education mainly by the foundation of secondary schools of a single type, controlled by the local authorities; and those who demand more secondary education generally mean more schools of this kind. The secondary schools are filled partly by scholarship-holders who represent the cream of the elementary schools, and partly by fee-payers who, as they do not usually have to pass a stringent [18] entrance-examination, may represent all grades of ability. ”

“ They will, no doubt, be sustained in their thankless tasks by the thought that they are doing the Spade-work: they are doing their share, however humble, towards providing a greater than themselves with the materials for a new survey of a period. We can only hope that their single-minded devotion may not be disturbed by the horrible thought that the mass of accumulated research on any given topic will eventually be so vast that no single human life will give sufficient time in which to read it, and that no single human mind will be equal to the task of synthesising it. ”

“ Of course, some of the boys concerned may find their true niche in clerking or in the grocery line; in which case their intellectual ability is such that training in the more abstruse mathematical or linguistic processes has been wasted on them. But if we give a boy of ability [41] in any direction a prolonged education and then fail to find him a position in life which gives scope for his ability, we are surely conferring on him a very doubtful blessing. The major portion of his time after his leaving school will be spent in earning a livelihood ”