EDUCATION
EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE
I
What is education all about? What is it doing? Does anybody know? It doesn’t matter so much for people with money. For them social intercourse is an end in itself, a sort of charming game for which they need a little polish of manner, a trifle of social grace, and a certain amount of accomplishments, mental and otherwise. Even supposing they look on life as a serious affair, it only means they intend, in some way or other, to devote themselves to the service of the nation. And the service of the nation, though an important matter surely, is by now a somewhat cut-and-dried business.
The point is, the nation which is served. And what is the nation? Without attempting a high-flown definition, it is the people. And who are the people? Why, they are the proletariat. For according to the modern democratic ideal under which we still march, ideally, the upper classes exist only for the purpose of devoting themselves to the good of the people. Everything works back to the people, to the proletariat, strictly. If a man justifies his existence nowadays — and what man doesn’t? — he proclaims that he is a servant and benefactor of the people, the vast proletariat. From the King downwards, this is so.
And the people, the proletariat. What about them and their education? They are the be-all and the end-all. To them everything is ideally devoted (mind, we are only writing now of education as it exists for us as an ideal, or an idea). There is not an idealist, or a man of ideas living who does not ostensibly come forward, like the Pope in Holy Week, with a basin and a towel to bathe the feet of the poor. And the poor sit aloft while their feet are laved. And then what? What are the poor, actually?
Because, before you can educate the people, you must know what the people are. We know well enough they are the proletariat, the human implements of industry. But that, we argue, is in their utilitarian aspect only. They have a higher reality. Their proletarian or laborious nature is their mundane nature. When the Pope washes the feet of the poor men, it is not because the poor men have been shunting trucks on the railway and got their feet hot and dirty.
Not at all. He washes their feet as an act of symbolic recognition of the divine nature which is alive in each of these poor men. In this world, we are content to recognize divinity only in those that serve. The whole world screams Ich dien. Heaven knows what it serves! And yet, if we go back to the Pope, we shall realize that it is not in the service, the labour that he recognizes the divinity, but in the actual nature of the servant, the labourer, the humble individual. He washes the feet of the humble, not the feet of trades-unionistic, strike-menacing truck-shunters.
The man and his job. You’ve got to make a distinction between the two. If Louis Quatorze was content to be a State, we can’t allow (ideally, at least) our dustman Jim Shepherd to regard himself as the apotheosis of dustbins. When Louis Quatorze said that He was the State, or the State was Him, he belittled himself really. For after all, it is a much rarer and more difficult thing to be oneself than to be either a State or a dustbin. At his best, a man is himself; his job, even if it be State-swaying, comes a long way after. For almost anybody could sway a State or swing a dust tub. But no man can take on another man’s self. If you want to be unique, be yourself. And the spark of divinity in each being, however humble, is what the Pope recognizes in Holy Week.
The job is not by any means holy: and the man, in some degree, is. No doubt here we shall raise the wind of opposition from labour units and employer’s units. But we don’t care. We represent the true idealists who even now sit on the Board of Education and foggily but fervently enact their ideals. The job is not at all divine, the labour in some measure is. So let technical education remain apart.
But here comes the first dilemma. Because, however cloistral our elementary schools may be, sheltering the eternal flame of the high ideal of human existence, Jimmy Shepherd, aged twelve, and Nancy Shepherd, aged thirteen, know very well that the eternal flame of the high ideal is all my-eye. It’s all toffee, my dear sirs. What you’ve got to do is to get a job, and when you’ve got your job then you must make a decent screw. First and last, this is the state of man. So says little Jimmy Shepherd, and so says his sister Nancy. She’s got her thirteen-year-old eye on a laundry, and he’s got his twelve-year- old eye on a bottle-factory. Headmaster and headmistress and all the teachers know perfectly well that the high goal of all their endeavours is the laundry and the bottle-factory. They try to stunt a bit sometimes about the high ideal of human existence, the dignity of human life or the nobility of labour. But if they really want to put the fear of the Lord into Jimmy or Nancy they say: “You’ll break more bottles than you’ll make, my young genius,” or else “You’ll burn more shirt-fronts than you’ll brighten, my girl: and then you’ll know what you’re in for, at the week-end.” This mystic week-end is not the sacred Sabbath of Holy Communion. It is payday, and nothing else.
The high idealists up in Whitehall may preserve some illusion around themselves. But there is absolutely no illusion for the elementary school-teachers. They know what the end will be. And they know that they’ve got to keep their own job, and they’ve got to struggle for a head-ship. And between the disillusion of their scholars’ destiny, on the one hand, and the disillusion of their own mean and humiliating destiny, on the other, they haven’t much breath left for the fanning of the high flame of noble human existence.
If ever there is a poor devil on the face of the earth it is the elementary school-teacher. He is invested with a wretched idealist sort of authority over a pack of children, an authority which parents jeer at and despise. For they know the teacher is under their thumb. “I pay for you, I’ll let you know, out of the rates. I’m your employer. And therefore you’ll treat my child properly, or I’m going up to the Town Hall.” All of which Jimmy and Nancy exultingly hear, and the teacher, guardian of the high flame of human divinity, quakes because he knows his job is in danger. He is insulted from above and from below. Comes along an inspector of schools, a university man himself, with no respect for the sordid promiscuity of the elementary school. For elementary schools know no remoteness and dignity of the rostrum. The teacher is on a level with the scholars, or inferior to them. And an elementary school knows no code of honour, no esprit de corps. There is the profound cynicism of the laundry and the bottle-factory at the bottom of everything. How should a refined soul down from Oxford fail to find it a little sordid and common?
The elementary school-teacher is in a vile and false position. Set up as representative of an ideal which is all toffee, invested in an authority which has absolutely no base except in the teacher’s own isolate will, he is sneered at by the idealists above and jeered at by the materialists below, and ends by being a mongrel who is neither a wage-earner nor a professional, neither a head-worker nor a handworker, neither living by his brain nor by his physical toil, but a bit of both, and despised for both. He is caught between the upper and nether millstones of idealism and materialism, and every shred of natural pride is ground out of him, so that he has to die or to cultivate some unpleasant suffisance which makes him objectionable for ever.
Yet who dare say that the idealists are wrong? And who dare say the materialists are right? The elementary school is where the two meet, like millstones. And teacher and scholars are ground between the two.
It is absolutely fatal for the manhood of the teacher. And it is bitterly detrimental for the scholars. You can hardly keep a boy for ten years in the elementary schools, “educating him” to be himself, “educating him” up to the high ideal of human existence, with the bottle-factory outside the gate all the time, without producing a state of cynicism in the child’s soul. Children are wonderfully subtle at dodging a hateful conclusion. If they are going to live, they must keep some illusions. But alas, they know the shoddiness of their illusions. What boy of fourteen, in an elementary school, but is a subtle cynic about all ideals?
What is wrong, then? The system. But when you’ve said that you’ve said nothing.
The system, after all, is only the outcome of the human psyche, the human desires. We shout and blame the machine. But who on earth makes the machine, if we don’t? And any alterations in the system are only modifications in the machine. The system is in us, it is not something external to us. The machine is in us, or it would never come out of us. Well then, there’s nothing to blame but ourselves, and there’s nothing to change except inside ourselves.
For instance, you may exclude technical training from the elementary schools; you may prolong the school years to the age of sixteen — or to the age of twenty, if you like. And what then? At the gate of the school lies the sphinx who puts this question to every emerging scholar, boy or girl: “How are you going to make your living?” And every boy or girl must answer or die: so the poor things believe.
We call this the system. It isn’t, really. The trouble lies in us who are so afraid of this particular sphinx. “My dear sphinx, my wants are very small, my needs still smaller. I wonder you trouble yourself about so trivial a matter. I am going to get a job in a bottle- factory, where I shall have to spend a certain number of hours a day. But that is the least of my concerns. My dear sphinx, you are a kitten at riddles. If you’d asked me, now, what I’m going to do with my life, apart from the bottle-factory, you might have frightened me. As it is, really, every smoky tall chimney is an answer to you.”
Curious that when the toothless old sphinx croaks “How are you going to get your living?” our knees give way beneath us. What has happened to us, that we are so frightened by that toothless old lion of want? Do we really think we might not be able to earn our bread and butter? — bread and margarine, at the worst? Why are we so frightened? Out of fifty million people, about ten thousand can’t obtain their bread and butter without the workhouse or some such aid. But what’s the odds? The odds against your earning your living are one in five thousand. There are not so many odds against your dying of typhoid or being killed in a street-accident. Yet you don’t really care a snap about street-accidents or typhoid. Then why are you so afraid of dying of starvation? You’ll never die of starvation, anyhow. So what are you afraid of?
The fear of penury is very curious, in our age. In really poor ages, men did not fear penury. They didn’t care. But we are abjectly terrified of it. Why? It isn’t any such awful thing, if you don’t care about keeping up appearances.
There is no cure for this craven terror of poverty save in human courage and insouciance. A sphinx has you by your cravenness. CEdipus and all those before him might just have easily answered the sphinx by saying, “Oh, my dear sphinx, that’s quite easy. A Borogove, of course. What, don’t you know what a Borogove is? My dear sphinx, go to school, go to school. I knew all about Boro- goves before I was out of the cradle, and here you are, heaven knows how old, propounding silly riddles to which Borogove is the answer, and you admit you’ve never heard of one. I absolutely refuse to concern myself with your solution, if you know nothing of mine.” Exit the sphinx with its tail between its legs.
And so with the sphinx of our material existence. She’ll never go off with her tail between her legs till we simply jeer at her. “Earn my living, you crazy old bitch? Why, I’m going Jimmy-Shepherding. No, not sheep at all. Jimmishepherding. You don’t understand. Worse luck for you, old bird.”
You can set up State Aid and Old Age Pensions and Young Age Pensions till you’re black in the face. But if you can’t cure people of being frightened for their own existence, you’ll educate them in vain. You may as well let a frightened little Jimmy Shepherd go bottle-blowing at the age of four. If he’s frightened for his own existence, he’ll never do more than keep himself assertively materially alive. And that’s the end of it. So he might just as well start young, and avoid those lying years of idealistic education.
So that the first thing to be done, in the education of the people, is to cure them of the fear of not earning their own living. This won’t be easy. The fear goes deep, in our nervous age. Men will go through all the agonies of war, and come out more frightened still of not being able to earn their living. It is a mystery. They will face guns and shells and unspeakable horrors, almost with equanimity. After all, that’s merely death. It’s not life. Life is the thing to be afraid of — and having enough money to live on is the anguished soul-problem. It has become an idee fixe, the idea of earning, or not earning, a living. And we are all monomaniacs in it.
And yet, the only way to solve the whole problem is to cure mankind, from the inside, of the fear. And this is the business of our reformed education. At present, we are all in the boat because our idealists are just as terrified of not earning their living as are the materialists. Even more.
That’s the point. The idealists are more terrified than the materialists about not being able to earn their living. The materialists are brutal about it. They don’t have to excuse themselves. They handle the tools and do the graft. But the idealists, those that sit in the Olympus of Whitehall, for example? It is they who tremble. They are earning their living tooth-and-nail, by promulgating up there in the clouds. But the material world cocks its eye on them. It keeps them as a luxury, as the Greeks kept their Olympic gods. After all, the idealists butter our motives with fair words and their own parsnips. When we have at last decided that our motives are none the better for the fair-word buttering of idealism, then the idealists will have to eat their Olympic parsnips very dry. Which is what they are afraid of. So they churn fair words, up there, and the proletariat churns margarine and a little butter down below, and so far there is an exchange. But as the price of butter rises the price of fair words depreciates, till the idealists are in a fair way of doing no trade at all, up on Olympus. Which is what they are afraid of. So they churn phrases like mad, hoping to bring out something that will catch the market.
And there we are. Between the idealists and the materialists our poor “elementary” children have their education shaken into them. Which is a shame. It is a shame to treat children as we treat them in school, to a lot of highfalutin and lies, and to a lot of fear and humiliation. Instead of putting the fear of the Lord into them we put the fear of the job. After which the job rises up and gives us a nasty knock in the eye; we get strikes and Labour menaces, and idealism is in a fair way of being kicked off Olympus altogether. Materialism threatens to sit aloft. And Olympus fawns and cringes, and is terrified, because it doesn’t know how it will earn its living.
Idealism would be all right if it weren’t frightened. But it is frightened: frightened to death. It is terrified that it won’t be able to butter its parsnips. It is terrified that it won’t be able to make a living. Curious thing, but rich people are inwardly more terrified of poverty, want, destitution, even than poor people. Even the proletariat is not so agonized with fear of not being able to make a living as are millionaires and dukes. The more the money the more intense the fear.
So there we are, all living in an agony and nightmare of fear of not being able to make a living. But we actually are the living. We live, and therefore everything is ours. Whence, then, the fear? Just a sort of irrational mob-panic.
Idealism must get over its fright. It is most to blame. There it sits in a fog, promulgating ideas and ideals, and all the time in a mad panic for fear of losing its job. There it sits decreeing that our children shall be educated pure from the taint of materialism and industrialism, and all the time it is fawning and cringing before industrialism and materialism, and having throes and spasms of agony about its own salary. Certainly even idealists must have a salary. But why are they in such agonies of fear lest it be not forthcoming? After all, if they draw a salary, it is because they are not frightened. Their salary is the tithe due to their living fearlessness. And so, cadging their screw in panic, they are a swindle. And they cause our children to be educated to the tune of their swindlery.
And then no wonder that our children, the children of the people, look down their nose at ideals. It is no wonder the young workmen sneer at all idealism, all idealists, an
d at everything higher than wages and short hours. They are having their own back on the lie, and on the liars, that educated them in school. They’ve been educated in the lie, and therefore they also can spout idealism at will. But by their deeds ye shall know them: both parties.
Here’s the end, then, of the first word on Education. Idealism is no good without fearlessness. To follow a high aim, you must be fearless of the consequences. To promulgate a high aim, and to be fearful of the consequences — as our idealists today — is much worse than leaving high aims alone altogether. Teach the three R’s and leave the children to look out for their own aims. That’s the very best thing we can do at the moment, since we are all cowards.
But later, when we’ve plucked a bit of our courage up, we’ll embark on a new course of education, and vogue la galere. Those of us that are going to starve, why, we’ll take our chance. Who has wits, and guts, doesn’t starve: neither does he care about starving. Courage, mes amis.
II
Elementary Education today assumes two responsibilities. It has in its hands the moulding of the nation. And elementary schoolteachers are taught that they are to mould the young nation to two ends. They are to strive to produce in the child under their charge: (1) The perfect citizen; (2) The perfect individual.
Unfortunately the teachers are not enlightened as to what we mean by a perfect citizen and a perfect individual. When they are, during their training, instructed and lectured upon the teaching of history, they are told that the examples of history teach us the virtues of citizenship: and when drawing and painting and literary compositon are under discussion, these subjects are supposed to teach the child self-expression.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1048
