XI. Education as a Vital Force

CHAPTER XI EDUCATION AS A VITAL FORCE WHEN discussion is concerned with industry or property like mines, or railways, or land, there is always plenty of material for the quarrel between Individualism and Socialism. In these cases there are conflicting personal interests, and champions will therefore always be found for different points of view. When, however, we come to subjects like education and health the case is different. These are helpless, abstract, intangible things which offer unlimited scope for the practice of Collectivist folly, almost entirely free from criticism or even examina tion. Education must always be recognised as a public service, and must therefore be nationalised or socialised. Private interests in education are now in the minority, and whatever one does with it no great questions, such as divide men into classes and parties, are like!y to arise. In education Collectivism has a real chance to show what it can do, because we have long ago accepted compulsory education, and everybody agrees that public authority in some form or another must undertake the administration of the educa tional machine. This being the accepted view, money has been showered into education in the most liberal and extravagant way. Every politician, at some time or another, pays lip service to the cause of economy, but few politicians of any party at any time dare to suggest that there should be any economising when the question is education.

Thus it comes about that while in 1914 our bill 126 Education as a Vital Force 127 for education was £19,169,647, we are to-day spending, nationally and locally and privately, in various forms of education, well over five times that sum. Collectivism never had such a chance as in this field. Nobody dares to breathe a word about saving money; there is not a suggestion anywhere of the use of private enterprise; there is no syllable of profit in the whole of the literature of education; it does not contain a vestig.e of Capitalism, and, of course, there is, in its administration, no trace of that modern horror which is labelled "competi tion." Education, therefore, is fair ground for testing and analysing Collectivist methods and ideas, studying their weaknesses and judging the results which accrue from them. Whitaker's i\lmanack, the most congested and condensed work of reference we have, contains no fewer than forty-one pages of lists of educational authorities and institutions.

For fifty years public enthusiasm has been given whole-heartedly to the cause of education, and now we have 43,000,000 people upon whom the bless ings of Socialism, as applied to education, have been freely bestowed. What are the results? What have we secured? How far have our aims and objects been attained? Are our people edu cated people? Can we notice qualities and charac teristics in them which were lacking in their .grand fathers who had no such education? These surely are not unfair questions to ask at this stage. In my business capacity I receive from time to time applications for employment, and these appli128 The Return to Laisser F aire cations set out as a rule.a list of qualifications which will fit the applicant for the post applied for. It is very noticeable that if a man or woman has been fortunate enough to escape the public education machine he or she makes a great song about it when applying for a situation. Not only the universities and the great public schools, but all the minor private educational institutions are set out in large type with emphasis as evidence of the applicant's quality and abilities. But in thirty-five years as an employer I have never known a boy or girl claim employment on the grounds that they were edu cated by the London County Council, or the public authority of their locality, wherever it may be.

There are, of course, exceptions. I know of several secondary schools which have been able, in spite of the weight of officialdom under which they labour, to develop a certain amount of school esprit de corps. This is, perhaps, more noticeable in the case of girls' than of boys' schools, probably because the teaching profession seems to be more attractive to the b'est type of woman than to the best type of man. But on the whole it must be confessed that public enthusiasm for spending money on edu cation produces in the educated none of that sense of pride and possession which Socialists blather about, which we are assured would alter the whole spirit of the coal industry or any other trade to which it was applied. I feel that to .marty working-class families the seven years of compulsory education appear something like a period of conscription, if Education asa Vital Force 129 not a period of imprisonment, which has to be suffered and ended as soon as possible.

But what have we got in the way of education? And here I disclaim any desire to debate the vexed and difficult problem as to what is education. I am simply concerned to know how far this huge machine does produce the goods set out in the catalogue. We have drifted so far away from the old threeR's that there are 4°,000,000 of us who, taken as a whole, certainly cannot spell, whose caligraphy for the most part would pass no examina tion at all, and who find some mental compensation for arithmetical incompetence in a cynical boast that we have minds above such sordid detail. All that mayor may not be good, but nobody can deny that if our £100,000,000 a year is spent in respect of reading, writing and arithmetic we are wasting most of our money. We can certainly dance, but not one in five hundred of us can speak the King's English. As a publisher I may be prejudiced, but I always think I am entitled to complain that our. educational expenditure has not produced a book-loving public.

We are the worst-read nation in the civilised world. We produce and buy far fewer books per head than either America, France, or Germany; and are even left beaten by Czechoslovakia. It is, perhaps, hardly fair to go too low in the social scale in this business of testing the efficiency of our educational machine, but vast masses of us pass through that machine without receiving any benefit whatever. As president of the East End 9 130 The Return to Laisser Faire Hostels Association it is my privilege to be in some sense responsible for a number of boys who lack a decent home, and when I talk to these boys I can not escape a sense of astonishment that public money should have been squandered upon them for seven years or more without, so far as I can dis cover, in most cases a trace of effect. They are not bad boys; they possess all the characteristics and wonderful qualities which are to be found in almost every boy. We in our Association discover the raw material. for all sorts of useful activities, and yet the socialised education machine has left them un touched.

Similar reflections must occur in the mind of any one who is closely acquainted with the personnel of a large factory. Whatever our educational lavish ness may do for the bright exception here and there, it seems to leave the mass with a more or less pleasant recollection of a wasted period of life and nothing else. The educational institutions of this country are, as I have said, on a perfect Socialist model. We have small local bodies responsible to larger local bodies, who in their turn have to give account to one great central authority. There is the Socialist ideal of central finance and central control, a curse which, to the Individualist, is enough to murder any institution however heavenly its purpose. This central control has been developed, as central control is always developed, through finance. We are at the moment in grave danger of an extension of this abuse from the proposal to Education as a Vital Force 131 relieve rates from the Exchequer, thus taking more large slices of responsibility out of the localities and opening wide the flood gates of extravagance and waste. Three-quarters of all the money for county education is supplied from taxes, and doled out through the Exchequer, while one-quarter only comes from local rates.

Thus we have achieved in education an almost complete absence of a sense of personal interest or local responsibility. It is pure folly that it should be so, because the localities pay the taxes just as much as the rates, but the effect of the central fund is to give to every locality the feeling that the money spent is not really a direct burden upon it. We can be thankful that education, for its own sake, is so worth while that it will always attract wise and good men and women. Thousands of these wonderful people, merely for the joy they get out of the life of service in education, are prepared to face the ignominy and oblivion which are insepar able from a huge governmental socialised machine. There are no careers in education; Socialism has wiped all that out. There is still, of course, a headmastership of Eton, with a few dozen positions of similar importance and possessing similar attrac tions, but the headmaster of a secondary school has about the same social status and importance as that of the local police inspector.

This is not because the public like to look upon the headmaster in that sort of way, but because the educational Frankenstein so envelops him that he cannot be picked out and treated with the dignity 132 The Return to Laisser Faire and consideration that would be his in any more sensible educational arrangement. If in a general knowledge paper students were asked to name six great men in education to-day I doubt whether such a question would be answered by one per cent. of the examinees. The word" education " really means, in modern language, "money for bureaucrats." If this may be thought to be an exaggeration, I refer the reader to the literature of education. Three-quarters of all the print and of all the speeches that are made in the name of education is concerned with the in terests of teachers, their salaries, their status, their conditions of employment, their pensions, and so on. It is our old friend, the same trouble which we have noted in considering industrial problems, the public habit of getting the picture upside down.

The teaching profession is .brought 'down to the level of.the bricklayer or the dock labourer. Most of our discussions are concerned with the interests of the producers, to the exclusion of the well-being of the consumers. The cause of the teachers is a good cause. In many cases they are underpaid and cannot give us what we want in the conditions in which they have to work. But they;· are going the wrong way to achieve their ideals. They are acting just as the miners or the bricklayers or the railwaymen act, ~uite forgetting that the only excuse for their existence is the pupils whose interests they are there to serve. If they will concentrate their thoughts on him or her and, in the language of comEducation as a Vital Force 133 merce, "produce the goods," they will be taking the quick road to the achievement of their own per sonal ends. It is all a misunderstanding of the doctrine of service, or the deep and inevitable work ings of economic purpose. Collectivist power ap plied to education is dissolved in money, and that, of course, is what always happens to Collectivist power . We are standardising and stereotyping inefficiency and failing altogether in our pursuit of educational ideals.

What a different picture we get if we turn to America. It is not usual to look to America for light and leading in the matter of education. The Americans are not considered to be an educated people, but we find in America a determined en thusiasm for real education which is sadly .lacking here. Perhaps it may be that the Americans are more conscious of their want of education, but no one can deny their unparalleled desire as a people to develop and improve themselves. "The latest figures available," I quote from Colombus Undergraduate, "give the number of students enrolled· in the universities, professional schools, and similar institutions as 726,000. More than 500,000 are members of the universities and colleges pro"per, of which there are 644 out of the 913 institutions that report to the U. S. Bureau of Education. On a geographical basis, 172 univer sities are situated in New England and the middle Atlantic States, while the southern States contain 139. Throughout the central and western States the universities number 333, of which 34 are dis134 The Return to Laisser Faire tributed on the Pacific coast. At least one, and on an average three, institutions in each State are under public control, and in 1926 more than $150,000,000 (£30,000,000) was provided out of the taxes towards their upkeep. Private endow ments are said to total about $550,000,000 (£I IO,OOO,OOO) , Harvard University alone commanding about $70,000,000 (£I4,000,ooo). By way of comparison with England, it has been com puted by one observer that the students in America number twenty times as many, among a population between twice and three times as great. In Iowa alone there are as many university institutions as in England, though the population' of this State is only 2,000,000: the largest of these has more students than either Oxford or Cambridge."

The method of approaching the educational problem in America is, as might be expected, quite different from ours. The U.S. Federal Govern ment has nothing, or practically nothing, to do with education. It runs a bureau, collects and distri butes a few statistics, but leaves the main respon sibility for the education of its people to the forty eight States which constitute the great American confederation. These forty-eight States enjoy educational autonomy; they all adopt the principle of compulsory education, but none of them de pends on assistance· or hindrance from central authority. There is fierce competition amongst them for the honour of doing better than the rest in connection with education. The result is that the country is swarming with universities, some of Education as a Vital Force 135 them public but most of them private, all fighting for the premier position, and education in that won derful land enjoys the blessing which is denied to us, the greatest of all human blessings, the blessing of competition.

I wonder if it would be possible to shift the Socialist and Individualist controversy over to edu cation? Such a procedure might be for the good of both Socialists and Individualists. We could get a clearer issue in connection with education than we can with coal mines. The argument would be free of vested interest, and there would be no cause for mistrust or misunderstanding . We could discuss the relative merits of the two systems without heat and with serious intellectual intent on both sides. I should argue that the first step in· the cure for our educational shortcomings is to shut up White hall and to let the counties assume complete respon sibility for the education of their own people. Let the spirit of competition enter into this great cause. If the counties were conscious of their personal responsibility and understood what they don't understand to-day, that in any case they are spend ing their own money, the result would be not a set back-that would never happen-but an out pouring of wealth and enthusiasm which has never yet occurred in this country.

Let us give to the local lights of places like Dorset and Essex a chance to shine without the shadow of the great panjandrum from Whitehall to dim them. We have an enormous asset, a vitally powerful force of which we make little or no use, 136 The Return to l.,aisser Faire in local patriotism. The pride of citizenship, which is the most precious thing. to be found in most of our small cities, gets little chance to apply itself to education. It does wonders with hospitals, and would do greater wonders with education. It can not be denied that every county is interested in the quality of its boys and its girls, and yet that interest has to-day no encouragement and no opportunity to find a practical outlet. The life of a teacher would be a very different thing if the county enthusiasm were behind his work. Would it not, for instance, be possible to link up county education with county sport? The divorce of sport from public education, a divorce which is inevitable in any national scheme, is one of .the greatest of the tragedies in our great educa tional hIunder.

The subject is a big one and I can do no more than touch upon it in a single chapter . It is, strange to say, a. new subject, because we have allowed the education monster to develop almost without discussion. But it isa useful subject to help us with this bigger problem of Individualism versus Socialism. If it is even suspected, and I think it is proved, that educational endeavours are failing in their purpose because of the lack of the vital force of competition, then we shall indeed have moved a long way forward towards a better understanding of most of our economic difficulties CHAPTER XII HOUSING THE building trade and housing market· furnish per haps the best field in which to study the evils of Collectivism. Ever since Mr. Lloyd George intro duced his People's Budget and the famous Form IV. there has been no room for a vestige of Indi vidualism, and the speculative builder and the small house-owner, who between them provided most of the.·houses we have, are practical! y things of the past.