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 THE TRAGEDY OF 
 EDUCATION 
 
 BY 
 
 E D M O X I) H O L ]M E S 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CONSTABLE cV COMPANY LTD. 
 
 101 a
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 A SHORTENED versioii of this book was 
 recently given as an address to a gathering 
 of London teachers, and one or two other 
 audiences. The first chapter of it appeared 
 as an article in the January number of the 
 " Quest." And some of the ideas which are 
 developed in it have been touched upon in 
 my Introduction to the English edition of 
 Mrs. Fisher's book, " A Montessori Mother." 
 As the address, the article, and the Intro- 
 duction have all excited a certain amount of 
 interest, I have decided to offer the book to 
 the public in the hope that it may help to 
 focus attention on the great problems with 
 which it deals. 
 
 The title of the book may need a few words 
 of explanation. 
 
 We call that drama a tragedy in which 
 
 861100
 
 vi FOREWORD 
 
 tlie loiiding actors, who are neither samts 
 nor scoundrels, but, in the main (according 
 to their Hghts), good, honest, upright, well- 
 meaning men and women, so play their parts, 
 in their blindness, ignorance, and self-will, 
 as to bring great calamities on themselves 
 and those who are near and dear to them, — 
 calamities so great and so far-reaching that 
 the immediate authors of them may be 
 pardoned for ascribing them, in the last 
 resort, to the agency of that mysterious 
 power to which they give the name of Fate 
 or Destin}^ and of which they regard them- 
 selves as the almost irresponsible instruments. 
 In this sense of the word, the drama of 
 Education, as I read it, is a veritable tragedy. 
 For, with the best intentions, the leading 
 actors in it, the parents and teachers of each 
 successive generation, so bear themselves 
 towards their children and pupils as to 
 entail never-ending calamities on the whole 
 human race — not the sensational calamities 
 which dramatists love to depict, but inward
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 calamities which are the deadUer for their very 
 unobtrusiveness, for our being so famihar 
 with them that we accept them at last as 
 om' appointed lot — such calamities as per- 
 verted ideals, debased standards, contracted 
 horizons, externalised aims, self-centred 
 activities, weakened will-power, lowered 
 vitality, restricted and distorted growth, 
 and (crowning and summarising the rest) a 
 profound misconception of the meaning and 
 value of life. And all the while the actors 
 in this unhappy drama are the blind and 
 almost helpless victims of a deadening tradi- 
 tion, which is not the less deadening because 
 their own action helps to perpetuate it, and 
 of a social pressure (generated, in part at 
 least, by man's instinctive effort to evolve 
 order out of chaos) which, if they dared to 
 resist it, might well prove as tyrannous 
 and inexorable as Fate.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAOE 
 
 FOREWORD V 
 
 I. THE rOISOX OF DOGMATISM 
 
 II. THE MALAUV 36 
 
 III. THE REMEDY G7 
 
 I.E.
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF 
 EDUCATION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 
 
 That great educator, Dr. Maria Montessori, 
 in a book which has recently been translated 
 into English, tells the following story : " Once 
 in our public park in Rome, the Pincian 
 Gardens, I saw a baby of about a year and a 
 half, a beautiful, smiling child, who was 
 working away trying to till a little pail by 
 shovelling gravel into it. Beside him was a 
 smartly-dressed nurse, evidently very fond 
 of him, the sort of nurse who would consider 
 that she gave the child the most affectionate 
 and intelligent care. It was time to go home, 
 and the nm'se was patiently exhorting the 
 baby to leave his work and let her put him 
 
 T.E. B
 
 2 THE THAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 into the baby-carriage. Seeing that her 
 exhortations made no impression on the little 
 fellow's firmness, she herself filled the pail 
 with gravel and set the pail and baby into 
 the carriage, with the fixed conviction that 
 she had given him what he wanted. I was 
 struck by the loud cries of the child and by 
 the expression of protest against violence 
 and injustice which wrote itself on his little 
 face. What an accumulation of wrongs 
 weighed down that nascent intelligence ! 
 The little boy did not wish to have the pail 
 full of gravel ; he wanted to go through the 
 motions necessary to fill it, thus satisfying 
 a need of his vigorous organism . . . ; he 
 wished to co-ordinate his voluntary actions; 
 to exercise his muscles by lifting ; to train 
 his eye to estimate distances ; to exercise 
 his intelligence in the reasoning connected 
 with his undertaking ; to stimulate his w^U 
 power by deciding his ovm actions. . . . His 
 unconscious aim was his own self-develop- 
 ment ; not the external fact of a pail full of
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 3 
 
 little stones. The vivid attractions of the 
 external world were only empty apparitions ; 
 the need of his life was a reality. As a matter 
 of fact, if he had filled his pail he would 
 probably have emptied it out again in order 
 to keep on filling it up until his inner self was 
 satisfied. It was the feeling of working to- 
 wards this satisfaction which, a few moments 
 before, had made his face so rosy and smihng 
 . . . and she who loved him, believing that 
 his aim was to possess some pebbles, made 
 him wretched." 
 
 This simple story is pregnant with mean- 
 ing. The little tragedy which it describes 
 is symbolical of the great tragedy of educa- 
 tion, and may even be regarded as the first 
 scene of its first act. In his dealings with 
 the child the adult makes at the outset one 
 fundamental mistake. Himself the victim 
 of a misdirected education, which has given 
 him a false outlook on life, he is apt to assume, 
 in proportion as he is kindly and sympathetic, 
 
 that the child shares that outlook ; that he, 
 
 u 2
 
 4 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 too, is an externalist, a lover of outward 
 things for their own sakes ; that he, too, 
 wants playthings of various kinds, toys, 
 gauds, prizes, possessions, distinctions, and 
 the like. But, in very truth, the child, 
 before he has been corrupted by education, 
 wants none of these things. He wants to 
 energise and to grow. 
 
 The adult in Madame Montessori's story 
 was a favourable specimen of her kind. 
 More often than not, the adult's misunder- 
 standing of the child goes deeper than hers. 
 More often than not, he abandons, in part 
 at least, his initial assumption as to the 
 child's outlook on life, and straightway falls 
 into a gi'aver error. For, having been con- 
 vinced by experience that, after all, the child's 
 outlook differs in many ways from his own, 
 he assumes offliand that his outlook is 
 entirely right, and the child's entirely wrong. 
 He assumes, in other words, that the child 
 ought to desii-e and aim at the ends w^hich 
 he — the adult — desires and aims at, and that
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 5 
 
 the child's failure to do this is proof of some 
 defect in his nature (due no doubt to his 
 immaturity) which education must correct. 
 But all the while the child's outlook on life, 
 before it has been perverted by education, 
 is fundamentally right, wliile the adult's is 
 fundamentally ^vrong. 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, though more rarely 
 now than in former days, the adult's mis- 
 understanding of" the child goes deeper still, 
 goes to the very roots of human nature. In 
 such cases the child's inability to share the 
 adult's outlook on life is regarded as proof 
 of the innate corruption, the original sinful- 
 ness, of liis fallen nature ; and the task 
 assigned to education is that of eradicating, 
 or at least of starving, this corrupt nature, 
 by bringing the life of the child under the 
 control of a set of formulated command- 
 ments, which are to take the place of Nature's 
 tendencies and laws. The kindly nurse of 
 the Pincian Gardens thought in her innocence 
 that her baby wanted to possess a pailful of
 
 6 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 gravel ; and so she carried him off, in spite 
 of his tears and protests, — baby, pail, gravel 
 and all. Had she been sterner and less 
 sympathetic she might have ascribed his 
 reluctance to come with her to the inborn 
 stubbornness of his rebellious soul, and the 
 tears with which he requited her well-inten- 
 tioned blunder, to the inborn ingratitude of 
 his hardened heart. 
 
 Why does the adult misunderstand the 
 child ? For the obvious reason that, on 
 principle and with the best of intentions, he 
 persistently imposes himself on the child, 
 and so does his best to prevent the child's real 
 nature from unfolding itself. When I say 
 that he imposes himself on the child, I mean 
 that he adopts towards him an attitude of 
 dogmatic direction to which he expects the 
 child to respond with an attitude of passive 
 and mechanical obedience. In adopting this 
 attitude of dogmatic direction the adult is 
 true, not only to his own false philosophy of 
 education, but also to the tradition of
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 7 
 
 thousands 'and tens of thousands of years, — 
 a tradition which has affected education, 
 but only as one of many aspects of human 
 hfe. What that tradition is we are learning 
 to-day in and tlirough the very efforts that 
 we are making to emancipate ourselves from 
 its mfluence. The desolating waves of dis- 
 content and unrest which are sweeping over 
 the whole civihsed world and threatening to 
 bury its civihsation under the primal mud 
 of social chaos, are symptomatic, as it seems 
 to me, of an immense and far-reaching 
 change. An old order of things is passing 
 slowly away, and a new order is still " power- 
 less to be born." The old order of things is 
 the regime of dogmatism ; the regime of 
 dogmatic direction on the part of A., and of 
 mechanical obedience on the part of B. 
 This regivie has had its work to do, and has 
 done it— and will, no doubt, long continue 
 to do it. It has kept order— of a kind, and has 
 thus enabled social life to evolve itself — after 
 a fashion. But a heavy price has been paid
 
 8 THE TEAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 for this service. For everywhere, and at all 
 times, dogmatism tends to deaden life. 
 
 The dogmatist is one who says to another, 
 or to others : " Such and such a thing seems 
 good to me ; therefore it must seem good to 
 you ; in other words, you must practise it. 
 Such and such a thing seems true to me ; 
 therefore it must seem true to you ; in other 
 words, you must believe it. Such and such 
 a thing seems beautiful to me ; therefore it 
 must seem beautiful to you ; in other words, 
 you must admire it. Such and such a thing 
 seems desirable to me ; therefore it must 
 seem desirable to you ; in other words, you 
 must pm'sue it. Such and such a thing 
 seems right to me ; therefore it must seem 
 right to you ; in other words, you must do it." 
 Stated more briefly, the dogmatic attitude 
 amounts to this : " My part is to lay down 
 the law and issue orders and directions. Your 
 part is to obey these and carry them out." 
 
 Dogmatic pressure emanates sometimes 
 from an individual, sometimes from a .cor-
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 9 
 
 poration, sometimes from a community, 
 sometimes from a class or social stratum, 
 sometimes from a stream of tendency, some- 
 times from a mob. As a rule the few dog- 
 matise and the many obey. But this is not 
 always so. A society, such as a church, or 
 a profession, or a trade union, may find it 
 necessary to subject each of its members to 
 strong dogmatic pressure. And there are 
 times when the individual has to confront 
 the dogmatism of an overwhelming majority 
 of his fellow-men, as expressed in public 
 opinion, or in established custom, or even in 
 the fashion or convention of the day. 
 
 There are three things which dogmatism 
 does, or tends to do, to him who yields to its 
 pressure : 
 
 (1) By externalising his aims and interests, 
 it tends to secularise, to despiritualise, and, 
 at last, to devitalise his life. 
 
 (2) By forbidding his higher faculties ^ to 
 
 1 Let me explain, for the benefit of Herbartian 
 critics, that here and elsewhere I use the word
 
 10 THE TKAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 energise, and so arresting their growth, it 
 tends to narrow his hfe, to vulgarise it, to 
 centre it in his petty, undeveloped, uneman- 
 cipated self. 
 
 (3) By substituting drill for self-discipline, 
 it tends to demoralise his life. 
 
 These three tendencies are, in the last 
 resort, not three but one. For they all arrest 
 growth and depress vitality ; and they all 
 lower the plane and contract the sphere 
 of life. 
 
 When I say that dogmatism externalises 
 man's life, I mean that it draws him away 
 from the main business of life, the business 
 of hving and growing, and makes him devote 
 himself to matters of minor importance, to 
 
 faculty as it is used by the plain, unsophisticated 
 persons ^vith whom I am in the habit of conversing, 
 and by the unpedantic men of letters whose books 
 I am in the habit of reading. They use the word, 
 as far as I can gather, without any metaphysical or 
 psychological arriere-pensee. And so do I. Such a 
 word as faculty is the property, not of a clique of 
 "experts," but of the whole EngUsh-speaking 
 world.
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 11 
 
 doing (in the sense of producing outward and 
 visible results), to seeming (in the sense of 
 making an outward show and being valued 
 accordingly), to acquiring, possessing, using, 
 spending. 
 
 The reason why it produces this effect is 
 not far to seek. Outward action is the only 
 kind of action which the dogmatist can con- 
 trol and appraise. His business is, first, to 
 give directions ; next, to see that they are 
 carried out. To give directions is easy 
 enough. To see that they are carried out is 
 not so easy. By bringing pressure of various 
 kinds to bear on his victim, the dogmatist 
 may be able to secure the semblance of 
 obedience to his directions. But he cannot 
 go beyond this. He may be able to regulate 
 and even control the outward action of those 
 who are dependent on him ; but, though 
 he may indirectly influence their inward 
 activities, he can neither regulate nor control 
 them. For example, he may direct the 
 faithful to believe such and such a dogma ;
 
 12 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 he may compel them to profess beUef in it, 
 and even to give ceremonial expression to 
 their professed belief ; but he cannot compel 
 them to believe it. If he is an ofi&cer — naval 
 or military — of the martinet type, he may 
 compel his subordinates to obey all his orders 
 with due precision, but he cannot command 
 their loyalty. Even while they are carrying 
 out his directions, they may, for aught that 
 he knows, have rebellion and hatred in their 
 hearts. In other words, the dogmatist is 
 doomed by the very conditions under which 
 he works to look outward instead of inward, 
 and to exact mechanical obedience to the 
 letter of his commands instead of vital 
 obedience to the spii'it of them. And the 
 more insistent is his demand for obedience, 
 the more does he tend to devitahse the direc- 
 tions that he gives, and to externahse his 
 victims' whole outlook on life. For, if he is 
 to test the degree of obedience, he must see 
 that " results " — things which can be accur- 
 ately weighed and measured — are duly pro-
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 13 
 
 duced, and he must, therefore, so formulate 
 his directions that measurable results can be 
 produced in response to them. And to this 
 vicious inter-action between dogmatic direc- 
 tion and literal obedience there are no limits. 
 The greater the demand for literal obedience, 
 the greater the need for dogmatic direction ; 
 and the greater the need for dogmatic direc- 
 tion, the greater the need for accurate for- 
 mulation, and, therefore, the greater the 
 demand for literal obedience. In fine, the 
 stronger and more thorough the pressure to 
 which the victim of dogmatism is subjected, 
 the more does he tend to look outside himself 
 for success, for well-doing, for well-being, for 
 prosperity, for happiness ; and the more 
 formal and mechanical and the less vital does 
 his conduct of life tend to become. 
 
 The externalisation of life tends to make 
 worldlings of us all. The attractive force of 
 " the world " — by which I mean the super- 
 ficial side of our social life — grows steadily 
 stronger in proportion as outward results
 
 14 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 come to be valued for their own sakes, and, 
 therefore, cease to symbohse those inward 
 processes, apart from which they have neither 
 meaning nor lasting worth. And the day 
 comes at last when " the world " claims us 
 as its willing subjects, and imprisons us, with 
 our full consent, within the barriers of its 
 false standards and false ideals. 
 
 This is one way in which dogmatic 
 pressure tends to arrest growth. By for- 
 bidding man's higher faculties to energise, it 
 takes a shorter, a more obvious, and a surer 
 path to the same goal. Our faculties, one 
 and all, grow by being exercised. To this 
 rule there are no exceptions. We learn to 
 walk by walking. We learn to talk by talk- 
 ing. Our digestive organs would become 
 atrophied and enfeebled if we were habitually 
 fed on semi-digested food. Whatever be our 
 trade, or profession, or craft, or art, or game, 
 or sport, we evolve the appropriate faculty, 
 or set of faculties, by exercise, by practice, 
 by constantly trying to do things by and for
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 15 
 
 ourselves. Thus we learn to row by rowing, 
 to ride by riding, to draw by drawing, to 
 model by modelling, to make chairs and 
 tables by making them, to talk French by 
 talking it, and so on. And the higher the 
 faculties the more essential it is that we 
 om'selves should exercise them if they are to 
 make any growth. Our reasoning faculties 
 would not grow if we were never allowed to 
 puzzle things out for ourselves. Our specu- 
 lative faculties would not grow if we were 
 never allowed to think things out for our- 
 selves. Our imagination would not grow if 
 we were never allowed to picture things to 
 ourselves. Our moral sense would not grow 
 if we were forbidden by spiritual directors to 
 solve our moral problems for ourselves. Our 
 aesthetic sense would not grow if we allowed 
 all our tastes and preferences to be dictated 
 to us by art critics or other " experts." Our 
 religious sense would not grow if our instinc- 
 tive feeling for reality, our spontaneous 
 " intuition of totality," were blighted before
 
 16 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 it began to open by the chilling breath of 
 formal system or despotic creed. 
 
 Now it is of the essence of dogmatism to 
 encroach more and more on personal free- 
 dom, and, in doing so, to prevent om- higher 
 faculties — mental, moral, aesthetic, and 
 spiritual — from being exercised. It is of the 
 essence of dogmatism to tell us in the fullest 
 detail, not merely what we are to do, in the 
 narrower sense of the word, but also what 
 we are to see, to feel, to think, to believe, to 
 admire, to aim at. So far as it allows us to 
 exercise our higher faculties, it makes that 
 exercise almost wholly mechanical. In every 
 case, and at every turn, it gives us isolated 
 commands and minute directions, which save 
 us the trouble of working out the problem, 
 whatever it may be, for ourselves. But just 
 so far as we exercise our higher faculties 
 mechanically, we do not really exercise them 
 at all. If we believe what we are told to 
 believe, because we are told to believe it, we 
 are not really beUeving. If we think what
 
 THE POISON OF DOGxMATISM 17 
 
 we are told to think, we are not really 
 thinking. If we conclude what we are 
 told to conclude, we have not really 
 reasoned. If we admire what we are told to 
 admire, we have not really responded to the 
 supposed appeal. Whenever one's higher 
 faculties are being exercised, the source of 
 the activity is in oneself. If it is not in 
 oneself, if some other person's self is the real 
 agent, then, however outwardly busy a man 
 may be, he is not really exercising his higher 
 faculties, he is energising as a machine, not 
 as a " hving soul." 
 
 With arrested growth comes egoism. This 
 statement is true, whatever be the source of 
 arrested growth. There is a healthy egoism 
 which accompanies the earlier stages of 
 healthy growth, and may, therefore, be said 
 to provide for its own ultimate extinction. 
 But the egoism which comes with arrested 
 growth — especially when growth has been 
 arrested by the atrophying of faculty — is an 
 unhealthy, and may even become a malig- 
 
 T.E. C
 
 18 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 nant, type. The true self evolves itself in 
 and through the exercise of the higher 
 faculties ; and, when these are forbidden to 
 energise, the growth of the man is arrested, 
 and the outgrowth of the true self comes to 
 an end. The word " arrested " is, perhaps, too 
 strong. "In no respect to grow is to cease 
 to live." The growth of the man is not 
 actually stopped ; but it is perverted, dis- 
 torted, stunted, confined within the narrow 
 limits which his individuality, as he calls it, 
 prescribes. For the individual self is now 
 given its fatal chance. The true self — the 
 " true manhood " of Froebel's noble philo- 
 sophy — is the same for all men, in the sense 
 in which true oakhood, the perfection of 
 oak-nature, is the same for all acorns and 
 saplings. But when the higher faculties 
 cease to energise, and the higher nature 
 ceases to grow out, the forces which make for 
 growth, and which are still struggling to 
 ojierate, come under the control of the 
 individual self, — the provisional self (for such
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 19 
 
 it really is) which first distinguishes, and then 
 tends to separate, each of us from all his 
 fellows ; and this self, with its hard lines and 
 ugly angles, begins to prescribe the limits 
 within which such growth as is henceforth 
 possible is to be made. 
 
 This is egoism, and it is the source of most 
 of the evil and misery that disfigure human 
 life. At all times it is a bhght and a poison ; 
 and, when it is alhed, as it often is, with 
 worldhness, its malignant influence is raised 
 to a higher power. With its ways and works 
 we are only too familiar. In the early days 
 of his adult life the average man arrives, as 
 he fondly imagines, at the maturity, not of 
 his physique only, but also of all his mental, 
 moral, and spiritual powers. This prema- 
 turely ripened, and therefore stunted and 
 distorted, nature he regards as his real self ; 
 and, in obedience to a natural instinct, he 
 spends the rest of his days in trying to 
 aggrandise it, to make it great. But, as the 
 path of inward aggrandisement, the path of 
 
 o2
 
 20 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 growth (and outgrowth), is closed to him, he 
 must needs take the outward path, — the path 
 of competition, of ambition, of selfishness, 
 of greed ; the path of dishonesty, of hypo- 
 crisy, of self-deception ; the path of envy, of 
 jealousy, of hatred, of all uncharitableness. 
 He must take this path in order that he may 
 minister to the supposed desires of the 
 individual self, in order that he may enrich 
 it with " results " of various kinds, with 
 wealth and all that wealth can buy, with 
 pleasures, possessions, honours, distinctions, 
 and the like ; in order that he may labour 
 unceasingly for its material advancement, 
 for its outward prosperity, for what " the 
 world," or his own petty section of " the 
 world," will applaud as its success. 
 
 Yet we all condemn the flagrantly selfish 
 man ; and many of us bemoan our thraldom 
 to self and sigh for deliverance. If we sigh 
 to no purpose, the reason is that the solution 
 of our problem — the greatest of all practical 
 problems — is too obvious to be readily dis-
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 21 
 
 cerned. There is but one way of escape from 
 self, — the way of growth, a way which leads 
 at last to outgrowth, to the suppression of a 
 lower type by the evolution of a higher. 
 When this way of escape is barred by the 
 deadening pressure of dogmatism, the doors 
 of the prison-house close on us automatically ; 
 and externalism finds its natural counterpart 
 in egoism of mind and heart and soul. 
 
 No prison door is so strongly barred 
 and bolted as that of the petty, ordinary, 
 undeveloped, unemancipated self. " The 
 world " may lose its attraction for us ; and 
 we may take refuge from it in cloistered 
 seclusion, or in the cult of " Nature," or in 
 religious devotion, or in some form of " good 
 works." But more often than not it is 
 disappointed egoism which disgusts us with 
 the world ; and it may well be that, even in 
 the cloister, or the garden, or the church, or 
 the slum, " self " is still with us — as petty, 
 as insatiable, as tyrannous as it has ever 
 been, and more insidious because of the
 
 22 THE TliAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 disguise which it now wears. The thraldom 
 of the lower self, of which I am about to 
 speak, is sometimes weakened by advancing 
 years ; but we are never too old to be self- 
 centred ; or rather, the older we grow, when 
 " self " has once mastered us, the more 
 self-centred we become. 
 
 The constant tendency of dogmatism is to 
 arrest growth and devitalise life. I have 
 dwelt on two aspects of this tendency. The 
 third is of almost equal importance. The 
 raison d'etre of dogmatism is to keep order ; 
 and the dogmatist and his victim — both of 
 whom live in an atmosphere of delusion and 
 make-believe — may be excused for confound- 
 ing discipline, which is the only true and unfail- 
 ing source of order, w^ith drill. But, in point 
 of fact, drill is the negation of discipline. For 
 discipline, in the real sense of the word, is 
 imposed by a man on himself, whereas drill, 
 in proportion as it is systematic and success- 
 ful, makes the man a machine, and so in- 
 capacitates him for imposing anything, except
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 23 
 
 the chains of habit, on his numbed and 
 devitahsed self. The disciphne, if we must 
 call it so, of forced obedience differs by the 
 whole diameter of man's being from the 
 discipline of self-control. The former may 
 generate a habit or set of habits, and may do 
 this so thoroughly that action at last becomes 
 automatic and the man becomes a puppet, 
 whose movements are controlled by wires 
 which are worked by another man's words 
 of command. When this point has been 
 reached, the source of the man's activity has 
 been transferred from his own will to the will 
 of another, and he has lost the power of con- 
 trolling himself. This is the discipline which 
 is imposed on slaves and domestic animals, a 
 disciphne which is enforced by a system of 
 external rewards and punishments, and the 
 object of which, when applied to free 
 agents, is to make a whole group of human 
 beings — a school, an army, a body of 
 employes, a church, or whatever it may 
 be — dependent on the will of a master, be
 
 24 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 that master an individual, a board, or a 
 clique. 
 
 Discipline of this kind may not affect the 
 whole or even the larger part of a man's life ; 
 but so far as it does affect it, and so far as it 
 is strong, thorough, and successful, to that 
 extent it substitutes the will of another for 
 the will of the man himself, and in doing so 
 weakens his power of self-control. To this 
 general conclusion there are two corollaries. 
 The first is that the discipline of forced 
 obedience acts injuriously on all or most of 
 the higher faculties, and not on the will 
 alone. For the will is but a vital aspect — 
 one of many — of the man's higher self. The 
 government of a country has many branches 
 — deliberative, legislative, executive, judicial, 
 and so forth. At their highest level these are 
 not separate entities, but sides or aspects of 
 an organic whole. It is the same with the 
 government of a man — by himself. The 
 man who wills to do a thing, must summon 
 reason, thought, forethought, imagination, and
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 25 
 
 other vital faculties to his aid. If he is forbid- 
 den to use his will, he is to that extent forbidden 
 to use those higher faculties, which, therefore, 
 tend to share in the enfeeblement of his will 
 and of his self. One sometimes meets with 
 a stern parent or teacher who boasts of 
 having broken a child's will. He might as 
 well boast of having broken the child's 
 heart, which indeed he has probably gone 
 some way towards doing. He might almost 
 as well boast of having broken the child's 
 soul, or at least of having wounded it to the 
 verge of death. 
 
 The second corollary is that, in weakening 
 a man's power of self-control, the discipline 
 of forced obedience tends to demoralise his 
 life. If malignant egoism, especially when 
 allied with worldliness, is the source of most 
 of our evil and misery, the sensual passions 
 are the source of nearly all that remains. I 
 am using the word " sensual " in its widest 
 sense. The sexual desires, the quasi-animal 
 passion of anger, intemperance in eating and
 
 26 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 drinking, the craving for intoxicants and 
 drugs, are sensual passions, which, if not 
 controlled, may easily wreck a man's life. 
 For the control of the passions a strong will 
 is needed, and for the strengthening of the 
 will a long course of self-discipline is indis- 
 pensable. The discipline of drill, the disci- 
 pline which is imposed on a man from without, 
 though it forms habits and may, in some 
 cases, form good habits, tends, as we have 
 seen, to incapacitate the man for self- 
 discipHne, and to that extent to make him a 
 prey to the passions that are waiting to 
 assail him. It happens, again and again, 
 that a boy who has been over-strictly brought 
 up plunges, when he becomes his own master, 
 into a vortex of dissipation and folly. That 
 he should do this is due, partly to curiosity, 
 partly to the fact that the pressure which 
 arrested the growth of his higher natm^e 
 indirectly fostered the growth of the lower, 
 partly to a not-unnatural reaction against the 
 rigidity and narrowness of his early life. But
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 27 
 
 that, having plunged into the vortex, and 
 reaHsed that it is a quicksand of shame and 
 horror, he should be unable to extricate him- 
 self from it, that he should — too often — be 
 sucked down into its deadly depths, is due 
 to the fact that the discipline of forced 
 obedience, which dogmatism had imposed 
 upon him, has fatally weakened his will. 
 
 The third of the prisons which dogmatism 
 builds for the growing soul, is that of the lower 
 or more animal self. The soul that is shut 
 up in that prison may almost be said to have 
 given up the business of growling. Witliin 
 the limits of " the world's " ideals there is 
 room for much activity and much apparent 
 progress. The tremendous despotism of the 
 petty self is due, in part, to the fact that the 
 impulse to grow, when thwarted by dogmatic 
 pressure, directs its baffled energies into the 
 channel of self-aggrandisement. But when 
 the lower self has fully monopolised the 
 rising sap of a man's life, even ambition loses 
 its hold on him, and he sinks contentedly, or
 
 28 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 perhaps despairingly, into a slough of sensual 
 mire. The spectacle of a man who is " un- 
 worldly," and in many ways kindly and 
 unselfish, and who is yet unable to free him- 
 self from the tightening chains of a deadly 
 habit, is by no means rare. And the con- 
 clusion to which it points is that no influence 
 is so demoralising or so wasteful of natural 
 goodness and capacity, as that of the dog- 
 matic pressure which, in the supposed interest 
 of a spurious " order," substitutes the 
 discipline of drill for the discipline of self- 
 control. 
 
 The evils on which I have dwelt are evils 
 which dogmatism, as such, tends to produce 
 whenever it encroaches, and just so far as it 
 encroaches, on a man's higher life. To what 
 extent does dogmatism, in the age to which 
 we belong, encroach on the higher life of the 
 adult man ? Not, I think, to any very 
 serious extent, if we limit our inquiry to the 
 direct pressure which the man has had to 
 endure since he arrived at what are called
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 29 
 
 " years of discretion." But if we look back 
 to his childhood and ask ourselves what 
 dogmatism did to him then, we shall have 
 to give a widely different answer to our 
 question. 
 
 I have said that the tumultuous unrest of 
 the present age is sj^mptomatic of a growing 
 reaction against dogmatic pressui'e. This 
 reaction has been long in progress ; but it is 
 only in recent years that Man has become 
 conscious, however dimly and doubtfully, 
 that his arch-enemy is his own dogmatic self. 
 Little by little, first in this direction, and 
 then in that, he has emancipated himself, or 
 is emancipating himself, from what was most 
 galling, if not most hurtful, in the dogmatic 
 pressure which had so long retarded the 
 growth of his soul. The movement towards 
 democracy, which has made so much head- 
 way in our time, is in its essence a struggle on 
 the part of those who, being poor and depen- 
 dent, fall easy victims to dogmatic pressure, 
 to make good their demand for access to the
 
 30 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 air and the sunshine, for freedom to breathe, 
 to Hve, and to grow. And much of the 
 pressure which Man still endures is the 
 pressure of a dogmatism which he has 
 voluntarily and with good cause imposed on 
 himself, and which, for this and for other 
 reasons, in no way encroaches on his higher 
 life. When I take a ticket on an Atlantic 
 liner I voluntarily submit myself to the 
 dogmatic direction of the captain. When 
 I take my seat in a train I voluntarily submit 
 myself to the dogmatic direction of the 
 railway company and the guard. When I 
 become an employe in a factory or a house of 
 business I voluntarily submit myself to the 
 dogmatic direction of my employer and his 
 deputies. Dogmatism of this harmless and 
 necessary kind confronts me wherever I go, 
 and I cheerfully submit to its pressure. I 
 also submit, though not in all cases quite so 
 cheerfully, to the legislative and adminis- 
 trative pressure of what is called " the State." 
 Some of the laws of the State and some of its
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 31 
 
 dealings with me I may perhaps regard as 
 despotic and unjust ; but I submit to them, 
 partly in the interest of pubhc order and 
 partly because it is open to me as a citizen to 
 take action to have them changed. In the 
 sphere of religion the official pressure which 
 would once have sent me as a heretic to the 
 stake, has -ceased ; and though — apart from 
 the dogmatic direction of creed or church, to 
 which, if I am a believer, I voluntarily submit 
 myself — there is still much informal pressure 
 exercised by religious opinion, the force of 
 this pressure is lessening from year to year, 
 and in any case it is open to me to disregard 
 it. The pressure exercised by ethical opinion 
 is considerable ; and on the whole it is well 
 that I should submit to it ; and I do so the 
 more readily because ethical opinion admits 
 of being modified — the past thirty years, for 
 example, have seen considerable changes in 
 it — and because it is open to me, in my 
 small way, to try to modify it. The only 
 pressure on me which is really serious is that
 
 32 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 of the externalised and materialised society 
 in which I live, — a pressure which controls or 
 tends to control my ideals, my aims, and my 
 standards, and which, being transmitted to 
 me by the whole of my social environment, 
 meets me, I might almost say, at every turn. 
 Yet even this pressure, though intrinsically 
 sinister and even fatal, will not necessarily 
 do me much serious injury, for in the first 
 place I can to some extent evade its influence, 
 and in the second place I am (so to speak) 
 " past praying for," being an externahst, a 
 materialist — an egoist, in a word — myself. 
 And if I am asked why I am now past praying 
 for, and to that extent past being harmed 
 by the dogmatic pressure of false ideals 
 and false standards, I can but answer 
 that my education, in the widest sense of 
 the word, that my upbringing during the 
 earlier years of my life, arrested my spiritual 
 growth. 
 
 Here we come to the root of the whole 
 matter. The tragedy of human life — the fact
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 33 
 
 that in his very efforts to secui'e the externals 
 of progress Man makes progress itself (in the 
 true sense of the word) impossible — centres 
 in, and is almost absorbed into, the yet darker 
 tragedy of education. It is difficult, and 
 perhaps impossible, to compare one's own 
 with other ages ; and the age in which we 
 Hve, the age of the Congo and Putumaj^o 
 atrocities, has such a very high opinion of its 
 own humanity, as well as enlightenment, that 
 it would be impatient of any attempt that 
 might be made to compare it with any bj'gone 
 age. But if we go back to the middle of the 
 eighteenth centmy — to the year, let us say, 
 when the rank and fashion of Paris flocked to 
 see an unsuccessful assassin tortm'ed to death 
 — and then go back from this yesterday of 
 our to-day, to the historic dawn of civilisation 
 in Eg}'pt, India, and China, we shall probably 
 conclude that in the intervening ages little or 
 no progress, other than material, was made. 
 Morally, spiritually, and even (in the larger 
 and deeper sense of the word) intellectuall}^, 
 
 T.E. D
 
 34 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 Man stood in the eighteenth century where he 
 had stood I know not how many thousands of 
 years before, his advance in some directions 
 having been balanced by retrogression in 
 others. Such sayings as " Man is the same 
 in all ages," " You cannot change human 
 nature," are the outcome of a wide and pro- 
 longed experience ; and though the cynicism 
 which underlies these sayings is unf athomably 
 false, it must be admitted that the sayings 
 themselves are superficially true. And the 
 reason why the spiritual progress of the 
 human race has lagged so far behind its 
 material progress — the gap between the two 
 being perhaps at this moment wider than it 
 has ever been — is that in each successive age 
 a fresh generation of externalists and egoists, 
 overdrilled and therefore underdisciplined, 
 is turned out upon the world, — turned out by 
 the well-meaning dogmatists who control the 
 bringing up of the young, and who are for ever 
 stamping the impress of their own generation, 
 with all its defects and limitations, on the
 
 THE POISON OF DOGMATISM 35 
 
 plastic ^ soul of its successor. It is in child- 
 hood and adolescence that dogmatism, for 
 obvious reasons into which I need not now 
 enter, exerts its strongest pressure, and does 
 its deadliest work. And this systematic 
 application of dogmatic pressure to the child 
 and the adolescent, is what we call education. 
 
 1 Nature makes the soul of the child pliable rather 
 than plastic. Education, of the conventional type, 
 by gradually dcioriving it of the elasticity which is 
 the proof and product of healthy growth, makes it 
 first plastic, and therefore over-responsive to the 
 moulding pressure of dogmatic direction, and then 
 rigid, and therefore over-retentive of whatever has 
 been stamped upon it. 
 
 D 2
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE MALADY 
 
 In this and the next chapter, the words 
 education and teacher will often be met with. 
 As a rule, when I use the word education, I 
 am thinking of the whole bringing up of the 
 child, from infancy to the very threshold of 
 adult life ; and when I use the word teacher, 
 I am thinking of all who are responsible for 
 the bringing up of the child, — parents, guar- 
 dians, nurses, governesses, schoolmasters, 
 schoolmistresses, college tutors, and the rest. 
 (If I happen to use either word in a narrower 
 sense, the context will, I hope, make my 
 meaning clear.) I am careful to say this, 
 because it is possible that my criticism of what 
 I have called dogmatic education might be 
 construed into an indictment of the whole 
 teaching profession. Nothing could be further
 
 THE MALADY 37 
 
 from my thought than to frame so mif air and 
 futile an indictment. I have no quarrel with 
 the teaching profession, which, as a whole, is 
 scarcely more responsible for the follies and 
 failures of education than the sister profes- 
 sions, which we call the Army and the Navy, 
 are responsible for the horrors and miseries of 
 war. I have a quarrel with the social system 
 which has long held the teaching profession 
 in its grip and made it the instrument of its 
 iron will. And I have a deeper quarrel with the 
 world-wide tendencies which have shaped and 
 elaborated that system, — tendencies so large, 
 so potent, and so deeply rooted, that, in 
 criticising them, I may seem to be running a 
 tilt against Destiny itself. Whether I am 
 fighting with or against Destiny remains to be 
 seen. Revolutions themselves come in the 
 order of Destiny ; and the visionary who, in 
 the name of the ideal, wages war against 
 what is and has long been, may perhaps be 
 working, under the prophetic control of 
 Destiny, to clear the ground for what is to be.
 
 38 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 What is the function of education ? What 
 is it supposed to do for those who come under 
 its influence ? We seldom ask ourselves this 
 question. Yet it well deserves to be asked 
 and answered. 
 
 I have elsewhere told the story of the Train- 
 ing College tutor, who led on his pupils by 
 Socratic methods to the conclusion that the 
 linal end of education is to enable the well- 
 educated pupil to become the possessor of a 
 motor-car. The formula which he and they 
 used as their " base," was their own answer 
 to the question : Why do we educate ? " In 
 order to help children to get on in the world," 
 were the words which almost invariably rose 
 to their lips when my friend propounded his 
 searching question ; and from this starting- 
 point it was easy for him to steer them to 
 the ludicrous conclusion which he foresaw 
 that they would reach. 
 
 What was there ^\Tong with their answer ? 
 Nothing, I think, except that it was too long 
 by exactly three words. Had it ended with
 
 THE MALADY 39 
 
 the word " on," it would have been correct 
 as far as it went. It was the addition of the 
 clause " in the world," with its suggestion of 
 outward aims, outward standards, outward 
 results, which misled the students. The 
 function of education is to help the child 
 to " get on." But what does " getting on " 
 mean ? In what direction is the child to get 
 on ? What goal has his teacher set before 
 him ? What goal ought he to set before 
 himself ? 
 
 I doubt if a better answer will ever be 
 given to this question than that which Plato 
 gave, when he said that the " chief director- 
 ship of the education of boys and girls " was 
 the most important of all the chief offices of 
 state, '* because, whatever the creature — be 
 it plant or animal, tame or wild — if its earliest 
 growth makes a good start, that is the most 
 important stage towards the happy con- 
 summation of the excellence of which its 
 nature is capable." 
 
 The function of education, as Plato inter-
 
 40 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 prets it, is to help the child to get on in the 
 direction of his own ultimate perfection, or, 
 in other words, to help the " earliest growth " 
 of the man to " make a good start." All the 
 philosophy of education is in this sentence. 
 Does the nature of man, like the nature of 
 every other living thing, come under the 
 master law of growth ? Surely it does. To 
 say that it does not, is to rend human nature 
 asunder. For the human body unquestion- 
 ably does come under the law of growth ; 
 and if the higher nature — soul, mind, spirit, 
 call it what you will — does not, we are com- 
 mitted to the crudest, the most irrational, 
 and the most unworkable dualism that 
 thought has ever devised. The chief diffi- 
 culty in the way of defending Plato's thesis 
 is that one cannot conceive its being seriously 
 questioned. One is reluctant to argue on 
 behalf of what most persons, when the pro- 
 position was faii'ly placed before them, would 
 regard as an obvious truism. The critics of 
 education are much in evidence nowadays.
 
 THE MALADY 41 
 
 What do they say ? One of them blames 
 education for its failure to develop physique ; 
 another, for its failure to develop intelligence ; 
 a third, for its failure to develop interest ; a 
 fourth, for its failure to develop initiative ; a 
 fifth, for its failure to develop character ; and 
 so on. What these critics all agree in, is in 
 blaming education for its failure to develop 
 capacity, — in other words, to foster growth. 
 They may not be able to realise the inner 
 meaning or logical consequences of their 
 imphcit philosophy of education ; but the fact 
 that their grasp of it is in the main instinctive 
 and sub-conscious, is a further proof of its 
 intrinsic soundness. 
 
 There is, however, one point on which I 
 must not be misunderstood. When I say 
 growth, I mean growth, I mean the growth 
 — for there is only one — which is the necessary 
 counterpart of life, " so that in no respect to 
 grow is to cease to live." As life, in spite of 
 its innumerable forms and its many types 
 and grades, is one and indivisible, so there
 
 42 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 is one law of growth for all living things. 
 Within the limits of its own essential unity, 
 the law of growth admits, I need hardly say, 
 of endless variety. We may say, if we please, 
 that there is one law of growth for the tiger, 
 and another for the earthworm ; and we may 
 also say, if we please, that in that sense of the 
 word there is one law of growth for plants 
 and animals and another for men. But to 
 contend, as some educationists do, that there 
 is one law of growth for plants and animals, 
 and another — fundamentally different — for 
 human beings, is to imply that there is one 
 law of growth for the human body, in respect 
 of which Man takes rank as an ** animal," and 
 another — fundamentally different — for the 
 human soul. And the dualism of this hypoth- 
 esis is scarcely less crude or impracticable, and 
 is certainly less intelligible and less straight- 
 forward, than the dualism (on which I have 
 already commented) of those who say frankly 
 that human nature, other than physical, does 
 not come under the law of growth. The
 
 THE MALADY 43 
 
 educationist who holds that the function of 
 education is to foster growth, and yet con- 
 tends that the teacher — as an instructor, a 
 purveyor of information — " builds up " the 
 soul of the child, instead of helping the child 
 to build up his soul for himself, denies by 
 implication what he starts by affirming ; for 
 nowhere in the whole range of physical nature 
 do we find an organism being built up from 
 without, instead of from within. An outsider 
 can indeed supply the building materials that 
 are needed — or some of them — in the form of 
 suitable food. Or rather, he can supply cer- 
 tain relatively crude materials, which the 
 organism, by an occult chemistry of its own, 
 will transmute into the more subtle building 
 materials which it needs. But Nature forbids 
 him to play the part of the mason or the brick- 
 layer ; and he must therefore leave it to the 
 organism itself to build up the fabric of its 
 being, by working up its own building 
 materials, when the process of transmutation 
 is over, into flesh, and bones, and blood, or
 
 44 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 their psychical equivalents. I shall, perhaps, 
 be told that the analogies of physical nature 
 are in no way applicable to human life ; but 
 this argument carries with it the obligation to 
 give up the use of words, such as growth and 
 nature, which have been deliberately emptied 
 of their normal meaning. The whole question 
 is large and complex, and my chief object in 
 raising it is to make my own position clear. 
 I will, therefore, content myself with pointing 
 out, in reply to those who reject in toto the 
 analogy of physical growth, that the whole 
 trend of modern thought, philosophical and 
 scientific, is to bring Man more and more into 
 line with the rest of living things ; and with 
 expressing my own conviction, that if we are 
 ever to rise to the level of our divine possi- 
 bilities, we must first humble ourselves to the 
 level of the plant and the animal, and so begin 
 to realise our oneness with the one all- 
 embracing Life.^ 
 
 1 I ought perhaps to add, for the benefit of 
 Herbartian critics, that I do not attach the slightest
 
 THE MALADY 45 
 
 If the life of Man does come under the law 
 of growth, the master-law which dominates 
 the whole world of animate Natm:e, the infer- 
 ence is irresistible that the function of educa- 
 tion is to foster growth, — to help the growing 
 child to advance towards the " happy con- 
 summation of the excellence of which his 
 nature is capable." With this conception as 
 our foundation, the construction of a science 
 of education becomes something more than 
 an idle dream. Of all practical sciences, the 
 largest, the most complex, and the most 
 important is that which deals with the 
 fostering of growth. It is difficult to find a 
 name for it. The word " farming " is 
 
 importance to Ilerbart's rejection of the plant-growth 
 theory of education. Herbart was a pre-Darwinian, 
 and his reasons for rejecting the theory are, there- 
 fore, all out of date. For, whatever else the Origin 
 of Species may have done, it has unquestionably 
 saturated our mental atmosphere with the idea of 
 evolution, and in doing so has revolutionized biology 
 and profoundly modified our attitude — popular, 
 philosophical, and scientific — towards the sister con- 
 cepts of nature, life, and growth.
 
 46 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 scarcely wide enough, for " planting," in 
 all its branches, forestry, pisci-culture, horti- 
 culture, and other growth-fostering pursuits, 
 seem to lie beyond the limits of its normal 
 meaning. I do not know whether the New 
 English Dictionary contains such a word as 
 " growth-craft." If it does, it is the word 
 which we are in search of. 
 
 To this great practical science, by whatever 
 name we are to call it, we must now affiliate 
 the science (and art) of education. There is, 
 as we shall presently see, one vital featm^e in 
 respect of which education differs from all 
 other branches of growth-craft ; but for the 
 present we must be content to think of it as 
 a branch of that greatest of all crafts ; and 
 we must remind ourselves at the outset, that 
 it is of all branches incomparably the most 
 important, incomparably the most complex 
 and difficult, and incomparably the most 
 neglected and backward. 
 
 The function of education, then, is, in 
 brief, to foster growth. Now, if growth is
 
 THE MALADY 47 
 
 to be fostered, two things must be liberally 
 provided — nutritious food and opportunities 
 for exercise. To provide these is the business 
 of the teacher ; and when he has provided 
 them (which, of course, he will never have 
 fully done), and when he has given the child 
 such guidance and stimulus as he may need, 
 he will have done what was required of him, 
 and he may then stand aside and let the 
 child do the rest. For the business of grow- 
 ing must be done by the growing child, and 
 if not done by him, must be left undone. On 
 this point it is impossible to insist too strongly. 
 The child himself must take in and assimilate 
 the nourishment that is provided for him. 
 The child himself must exercise his organs 
 and faculties. The forces that make for the 
 child's growth, come from within himself; 
 and it is for him, and him alone, to feed them, 
 use them, evolve them. 
 
 But the teacher, whoever he or she may 
 be — father or schoolmaster, mother or nurse, 
 or governess — is seldom able to realise this
 
 48 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 vital truth. The influence of the atmosphere 
 in which he Hves and works is too strong for 
 him. Subjected as he himself is to dogmatic 
 pressure of various kinds, it is but natural 
 that his first instinct should be to apply the 
 same pressure to the child. For the child, 
 with his obvious ignorance and helplessness, 
 and his naive belief in the omnipotence and 
 omniscience of his seniors, seems to be waiting 
 for dogmatic direction. In reality, he is 
 waiting for something quite different from 
 this. He is waiting for guidance into the 
 path of self-realisation. But even if he 
 should rebel in his heart against the dogmatic 
 pressure that is applied to him, he has no 
 choice but to yield to it. It is hard for 
 him to kick against the pricks. His state of 
 entire dependence on his parents and other 
 teachers makes open rebellion on his part 
 impossible. It is so easy for his seniors to 
 apply dogmatic pressure to him that they 
 may be pardoned for thinking that it is right 
 and reasonable for them to do nothing but
 
 THE MALADY 49 
 
 dogmatise, and for him to do nothing but 
 obey. 
 
 But the naturalness, the inevitableness, one 
 might almost say, of the introduction of the 
 dogmatic spirit into education, does not make 
 its influence on the growing child the less 
 pernicious. Even if the dogmatic regime 
 were applied to children with no more 
 thoroughness than to adults it would do 
 infinitely more harm to them, and the harm 
 done would be more far-reaching in its con- 
 sequences. The adult, who has himself been 
 dogmatically educated, has had the mischief 
 done to him in his childhood. The iron has 
 entered into his soul. His nature is now so 
 warped and hardened that the further appli- 
 cation of dogmatic pressure to it will not do 
 it much fui'ther harm, and may even be 
 needed by it, just as crutches, which, if used 
 habitually by a growing child, would end by 
 laming him, are obviously needed by one 
 who has been lamed. But the child, with 
 his fresh, growing, sappy, pliable nature, has 
 
 T.E. £
 
 50 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 everything to lose by dogmatic pressure. 
 And that he will lose much by it, is made 
 certain by the fact that the dogmatic regime, 
 if applied to him at all, is sure to be applied 
 with a systematic thoroughness from which 
 no part of his life will wholly escape, and with 
 an intensity of pressure which, unless he has 
 abnormal vitality, he will be powerless to 
 resist. 
 
 The salient features of Western education 
 are as familiar to my readers as to me. But 
 perhaps it is well that I should look at 
 them from my present point of view. Based, 
 as it is, on complete distrust of the child's 
 nature, education, as we know it, makes it 
 its business to encroach, persistently and 
 systematically, on the freedom which is 
 indispensable to healthy growth. Instead 
 of waiting, " in reverent expectancy," (to 
 use the apt words of a friend of mine) for the 
 hidden life of the child to unfold itself, the 
 teacher sets himself to interpret the child's 
 nature, with all its needs and desires, with
 
 THE MALADY 51 
 
 all its powers and possibilities, through the 
 medium of the adult's prematurely ripened 
 personality. " True manhood," the ideal 
 nature of man, is present in embryo in the 
 normal new-born babe, as surely as natural 
 perfection — the perfection of each type or 
 kind — " lies intreasur^d " in the " seeds and 
 weak beginnings " of all Hving things. In- 
 stead of helping the child to realise this ideal, 
 the teacher — who may, for aught I know, 
 be the most modest man alive — proceeds to 
 put himself forward, as an average specimen 
 of adult humanity, in its place. " I am your 
 ideal," he says by imphcation to the child, 
 *' and you are to model yourself, or rather I 
 will model you, on me. What I do, you are 
 to learn to do. What I think, you are to 
 learn to think. What I believe, you are to 
 learn to believe. What I admire, you are to 
 learn to admire. What I aim at, you are to 
 learn to aim at. What I am, you are to learn 
 to be." 
 With this wholesale substitution of the 
 
 E 2
 
 52 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 actual for the ideal as his starting point, the 
 path of the teacher is plain before him. As 
 he is going to spend his days in directing and 
 dictating, he must require the child to assume 
 at the outset an attitude of " reverent expect- 
 ancy " (of what he, the teacher, will say or do 
 next) and passive obedience. Instead of the 
 rdle of vigorous and many-sided activity 
 which Nature has assigned to the child, as to 
 the young of all animals, a rdle of passivity 
 and immobility is assigned to him by his 
 teacher. This damming back of the whole 
 stream of the child's natm-al energies is the 
 beginning and end of discipline and order. 
 When it has been done to the teacher's satis- 
 faction, the work of instruction, of education 
 proper, can be begun. But as passivity 
 and immobility are hateful to the healthy 
 child, he must be alternately coerced and 
 bribed into sitting still in body and mind. 
 His teacher must approach him with rewards 
 in one hand, and punishments in the other, 
 and bid him choose between these. And this
 
 THE MALADY 
 
 system of rewards and punishments will 
 dominate the whole of his education. His 
 baser desires and baser fears will be system- 
 atically appealed to. Instead of learning to 
 do things for the pleasure of doing them, for 
 the pleasure of exercising his organs and 
 faculties, for the pleasure of following the 
 laws and realising the potencies of his nature, 
 he is to learn to do things in order that he 
 may enjoy a sugar-plum, or escape the lash 
 of a whip. From first to last it is taken for 
 granted that his education will be uncon- 
 genial to him, that his nature will revolt 
 against it ; and the inference to be drawn 
 from this is that the lines which Nature seems 
 to have marked out for his development are 
 entirely wrong, that the true lines are known 
 only to the teacher, and that the function of 
 education is to correct the blunders of Nature 
 and make the child as different as possible 
 from what the mysterious forces which are 
 unfolding themselves in him, and working in 
 and through his life, seem to have intended 
 him to be.
 
 54 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 When order, or what passes for order, has 
 been secured, education, in the technical 
 sense of the word, begins. What form does 
 it take ? Instead of studying the child's 
 nature, which, in virtue of its organic unity, 
 is a hierarchy of organs and instincts and 
 tendencies ; instead of trying to determine 
 the order of precedence, of natural superiority, 
 which obtains among these ; instead of help- 
 ing them to realise themselves in that order 
 of precedence, the higher to establish them- 
 selves as higher, and the lower to take their 
 places contentedly as lower ; instead of 
 encouraging every expansive instinct, every 
 emancipative tendency to affirm itself as 
 fully as possible, — the teacher selects certain 
 *' subjects " as suitable for the child to study, 
 finds places for these on an elaborate time- 
 table, and proceeds to teach them in the way 
 which his profound distrust of the child's 
 nature suggests to him. Henceforth the 
 teacher, not the child, is the leading actor 
 in the drama of the child's upbringing. The
 
 THE MALADY 55 
 
 child is told in the fullest detail what he is to 
 do and how he is to do it. He is told more 
 than this. He is told what he is to see, what 
 he is to feel, what he is to believe, what he is 
 to conclude, what he is to think. Nothing 
 is left to his initiative, and as little as possible 
 to his independent action. He is to do 
 nothing for himself which his teacher can do 
 for him. His blindness, his helplessness, his 
 all-round incapacity are postulated at every 
 turn. Instead of being helped to win his way 
 to knowledge, he is overburdened with highly- 
 peptonised rations of " information." In- 
 stead of being helped to reason and think 
 things out for himself, he is equipped with 
 rules, with formulae, with " tips " of various 
 kinds, which will, it is hoped, make it un- 
 necessary for him to reason and think. The 
 directions given to him are so full and explicit 
 that his response to them is largely, if not 
 wholly, mechanical, — a response in which his 
 higher faculties (which have his personality, 
 his living self, behind them, and which there-
 
 56 THE. TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 fore cannot energise, except in an atmosphere 
 of freedom) take no part. Not his reasoning 
 faculties only, but also the whole range of his 
 perceptive faculties — his imagination, his 
 sympathy, his feehng for beauty, his sense 
 of rhythm, his quasi-scientific curiosity, his 
 constructive instinct — are starved by being 
 forbidden to exercise themselves, except 
 within the narrowest possible limits, by being 
 deprived of freedom and initiative, by being 
 treated as parts of a machinery which can 
 be controlled in all its details by its driver, 
 instead of as the organs of a living soul. 
 
 Apart from the teacher's traditional dis- 
 trust of the child, and apart from the general 
 pressure on his own personality of the whole 
 dogmatic regime, there is a special reason 
 why he should be compelled, one might almost 
 say, to think more of drill than of discipline, 
 more of routine than of free activity, more 
 of machinery than of hfe. " The world," 
 which, alas ! is as distrustful of the teacher 
 as he is of the child, is urgent and insistent
 
 THE MALADY 57 
 
 in its demand for what it calls " results," — 
 for proofs, that is, of the teacher's industry 
 and the child's progress, proofs which it — 
 ** the world " — with its false ideals and false 
 standards, will be able to weigh and measure, 
 and by which the teacher and the child shall 
 stand or fall. Hence comes the examination 
 system, which has long lain like an incubus 
 on Western education, compelHng the child, 
 as well as the teacher, to care more for show 
 than for reality, and involving the child, as 
 well as the teacher, in an atmosphere of make- 
 believe, of insincerity, of trickery, of sub- 
 conscious fraud. Hence comes the narrow- 
 ing of education in all its gi'ades, and the 
 progressive narrowing of it as the grade 
 becomes higher, the work more advanced, 
 and the test more searching, — for the teacher, 
 who is to stand or fall by a test which " the 
 world " imposes, has the right to insist that 
 his work shall be tested on a definite and 
 limited programme. Hence comes the sub- 
 ordination, in the teacher's mind, and in the
 
 58 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 child's personality, of expansive instincts 
 and ripening faculties to cut-and-dried " sub- 
 jects," — for who can measure, with the direct- 
 ness and accuracy which " the world " 
 demands, the development of an instinct 
 or a faculty, the actual vital progress of the 
 growing child ? Hence comes the super- 
 ficiality of education, the keeping of things 
 at the surface of the child's mind, — for if they 
 are allowed to sink into the inner depths, 
 they will escape from the teacher's control, — 
 the substitution of cram for training, of the 
 laying on of veneers for the fostering of 
 growth from within. Hence comes the pro- 
 gressive aggravation of the teacher's instinc- 
 tive tendency to do for the child what he 
 ought to do for himself, — for if he is allowed 
 to do much for himself, there is no saying 
 what strange and unexpected results he may 
 not produce when the time comes for his 
 work to be formally tested. And hence 
 comes — last but not least — the teacher's un- 
 avoidable neglect of the child's individuahty.
 
 TPIE MALADY 59 
 
 — for the teacher will have to send his 
 pupils, not singly, but in battalions, to the 
 examination room, there to pass a test which 
 will be imposed on all alike, by an examiner 
 who is not personally acquainted with any 
 of them. ^ 
 
 These evils are forced upon the teacher by 
 his taskmaster, " the world." And there is 
 another evil forced upon him, which is perhaps 
 graver than any of these. There is one point 
 on which he has never deceived himself. In 
 the use that he makes of rewards and 
 punishments he expresses his latent con- 
 viction that he is working against the grain 
 of the child's nature. But the stimulus of 
 rewards and punishments is not always 
 sufficient ; and beyond a certain point in the 
 (so-called) progress of the child, it necessarily 
 
 ^ It is scarcely necessary for me to add that 
 nothing is so conducive to the employment of drill- 
 sergeant methods by teachers as to place them in 
 charge of iinwicldily large classes and expect them to 
 bring all the children in each class up to a certain 
 minimum of " cfticiency."
 
 60 THE TEAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 fails to act. If the teacher would rouse his 
 pupils to extra exertion, he must appeal to 
 some other motive. He must pit them 
 against one another. He must bid the 
 child work hard in order that he may surpass 
 his fellows. He must appeal to his com- 
 petitive instinct. The competitive instinct 
 is, I admit, a natural instinct : and the teacher 
 who appeals to it, who makes his pupils 
 rehearse beforehand that drama of " com- 
 petitive selfishness," in which they will 
 presently be expected to play their several 
 parts, is wise in his generation. But he is 
 not wise with the wisdom of the children of 
 light. For the competitive instinct belongs 
 to the child's lower nature ; and if his higher 
 nature were encouraged or even allowed to 
 grow out and assert itself, the lower instinct 
 would be suppressed — robbed of its venom, 
 if not wholly eradicated — by the outgrowth 
 of the higher instinct of sympathy and com- 
 radeship. This I have seen happen again 
 and again. To invite the child to reojard his
 
 THE MALADY 61 
 
 classmates as rivals instead of as comrades 
 is to do him a great and far-reaching wrong. 
 It is to dam back the pure current of un- 
 selfish sympathy at or near its source. It is 
 to unseal the turbid fountain of vanity, of 
 selfishness, of envy, of jealousy, of strife. It 
 is to make the child an egoist, without his 
 consent and almost against his will. 
 
 When the time comes for the child, a child 
 no longer, to go out into the world, what will 
 he be worth, and what part will he play ? 
 In other words, what manner of man is the 
 product — the average product, let us say — 
 of the conventional type of education likely 
 to be ? There are three things which his 
 education will certainly have done to him, 
 the three things which dogmatism is always 
 tending to do to those who yield to its pres- 
 sure. It will have made him, or begun to 
 make him, an externalist, — because from his 
 earliest days it will have compelled him to 
 fix his mind on what is outward and visible ; 
 to think more of show than of reality ; to
 
 62 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 value himself as he is valued by those who 
 judge according to the appearance of things, 
 and cannot, if they would, judge righteous 
 judgment ; to accept as final a test, or series 
 of tests, which is in the nature of things 
 inadequate, if not fraudulent and illusory ; 
 to live, and move, and have his being in the 
 opinion of others — opinion which has been 
 moulded by false ideals and false standards 
 — instead of in the inward processes of a 
 healthily expanding life. In other words, it 
 will have begun to familiarise him with the 
 prison- walls of " the world." It will have 
 made him, or begun to make him, an egoist, — 
 partly because it will have closed to him the 
 one way of escape from self, the way of 
 growth and outgrowth ; partly because the 
 dogmatic pressure which has thwarted the 
 growth of his higher faculties will have 
 forced him into premature maturity, and so 
 built up in him a stunted, hardened, and 
 deformed personality which he will readily 
 mistake for his true self ; partly because the
 
 THE MALADY 63 
 
 spirit of competitive selfishness will have 
 been deliberately fostered in him by men who 
 could not stimulate his energies in any other 
 way. In other words, it will have begun to 
 familiarise him with the prison-walls of his 
 petty self. And it will have made him, or 
 begun to make him, a sensualist (in the 
 widest meaning of the word), — because, by 
 thwarting the outgrowth of his higher in- 
 stincts and interest, it will have allowed his 
 lower desires and passions to draw to them- 
 selves too much of the rising sap of his hfe ; 
 and also, because it will have incapacitated 
 him for controlling those desires and passions, 
 by imposing on him the discipline of drill 
 instead of helping him to discipline himself. 
 In other words, it will have begun to 
 familiarise him with the prison-walls of his 
 lower self. 
 
 In other directions its influence on him 
 will have been equally disastrous. Its one- 
 sidedness will have woefully narrowed his 
 interest in life. There are whole sides of his
 
 64 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 being which he will not have been allowed to 
 cultivate ; and on those sides he will be out 
 of touch with the world in which he lives. 
 Its superficiality will be reflected in the 
 shallowness of his interest in life. Even on 
 the higher levels of his education he will 
 have come to regard the subjects of his study 
 as matters in which he is to satisfy an exam- 
 iner, and which he is then to forget as speedily 
 as possible. Lacking interest in life, he will 
 fall an easy victim to ennui, and to the low 
 and frivolous distractions to which the suf- 
 ferer from ennui is apt to resort. The two 
 great groups of perceptive faculties, which 
 are covered by the words imagination and 
 intelligence, will have been atrophied to the 
 verge of helplessness by the education which 
 deliberately cultivated the more receptive 
 and more mechanical faculties at their ex- 
 pense, and which so restricted the sphere of 
 their operations that their possessor was 
 (probably) never allowed to discover the 
 field which was most congenial to his idio-
 
 THE MALADY 65 
 
 syncrasy, and in which, if in no other, they 
 might have waked up to active w^ork. And 
 his initiative, the mainspring of ah his higher 
 activities, will have been fatally paralysed by 
 the policy which dehberately repressed his 
 every spontaneous movement in the interest, 
 first of " order " and then of " results." 
 
 A poor creature this typical product of 
 modern education will certainly be, at any 
 rate as compared wath what he had it in him 
 to become ; and a poor creature he will 
 remain, unless, in the rough-and-tumble work 
 of the world, some regenerative influence 
 should be unexpectedly unloosed which will 
 open a new vista to him, and so quicken into 
 activity the nearly suspended and largely 
 depleted cmrent of his hfe. But no regenera- 
 tive influence will ever give back to him the 
 whole, or even the half, of what he lost in 
 childhood and youth. 
 
 This chapter contains many sweeping state- 
 ments which need to be liberally discounted 
 
 T.E. F
 
 66 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 They are statements of tendency only, and do 
 not pretend to be literally true. No one 
 knows better than I do that the deadly ten- 
 dencies of dogmatic pressure are liable to be 
 counteracted, in part at least, by various 
 opposing forces. In the school, as in the 
 home, emancipative influences, emanating as 
 a rule from personal sources, are or may be 
 at work. And in the school, as in the home, 
 it sometimes happens that these emancipa- 
 tive influences are strong enough to cancel 
 the constrictive pressure of dogmatic educa- 
 tion, and leave a balance over in favour of 
 freedom and life. But this does not alter the 
 fact that the constant tendency of dogmatic 
 pressure is to paralyse activity, to lower 
 vitality, to arrest or distort growth.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE REMEDY 
 
 The tragedy of education has now widened 
 
 out into the tragedy of human hfe. If Man 
 
 has made a mess of hfe, if he is a worldhng, 
 
 an egoist, and a sensuahst, if he is stupid and 
 
 foohsh and ignorant, a reason for this seems 
 
 to be forthcoming. For he has made, and is 
 
 stin making, a mess of his own upbringing I 
 
 and 
 
 " The child is father to the man." 
 
 But has Man made a mess of hfe ? Is he 
 still making a mess of life ? That for thou- 
 sands of years his progress, other than 
 material, has been, on balance, inappreciable, 
 the impartial student of history will find it 
 difficult to deny. But at what average level 
 has he moved through all the ups and downs 
 of those years ? What does he himself tlimk 
 of his own ways and works ? 
 
 F 2
 
 68 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 Those to whom we instinctively turn for an 
 answer to this question can say but httle to 
 console us. The journalists, the novelists and 
 dramatists, the historians, the prophets, the 
 preachers, the poets, agree in painting human 
 hfe in gloomy colours, agree in telling us that 
 sin and sorrow are all around us, and that 
 much of what we reap as sorrow we om^selves 
 had sown as sin. There is some exaggeration 
 — perhaps there is much exaggeration — in 
 what these witnesses .say. Sin and sorrow 
 catch the eye of the onlooker, whereas good- 
 ness and happiness are well content to be 
 ignored. The journahst is always on the 
 look-out for what is sensational. So are 
 certain novehsts and dramatists ; while others 
 are cynics by temperament, and others again 
 are obsessed by a physico-fatalistic philosophy 
 which darkens their view of life. Great 
 crimes, great calamities, bloody wars, civil 
 strifes, dynastic struggles, pohtical intrigues, 
 arrest the attention of the historian. The 
 prophet, who is always a rebel and a revolu-
 
 THE REMEDY 69 
 
 tionary, must needs overdo his censure of the 
 age in which he hves. The preacher is a 
 pessimist by profession. Self-abasement on 
 behalf of humanity is a part of his spiritual 
 equipment. The poet is apt to dwell on the 
 dark side of life because, as one of om- sweetest 
 singers has reminded us, 
 
 " Our sweetest songs are those that tell of 
 saddest thought." 
 
 (Why this should be so I must not pause to 
 inquire.) 
 
 Nevertheless, the united testimony of these 
 typical witnesses is not to be ignored. When 
 every allowance has been made for inevitable 
 exaggeration it will be found that there is a 
 solid residuum of truth in what they say. 
 And our own experience bears them out. We 
 have but to open our eyes and look around 
 us in order to convince ourselves that sensu- 
 ality, drunkenness, ill-temper, selfishness, 
 vanity, greed, dishonesty, class jealousy and 
 hatred, national jealousy and hatred, are
 
 70 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 widespread and persistent evils which are 
 responsible for much of the misery that 
 afflicts mankind. 
 
 Why is this so ? Has it always been so ? 
 Will it always be so ? Does it admit of a 
 remedy ? Or is it rooted in the nature of 
 things ? We have been authoritatively 
 taught to regard ourselves as miserable 
 sinners, and to lay the blame of our short- 
 comings on Nature. We have been taught, 
 in other Avords, that we were born bad. It 
 would be strange if this were so. It would 
 be strange if Man, alone among living things, 
 were born bad, seeing that every other animal 
 and every plant is born good, in the sense 
 that it has in itself all the potencies of ultimate 
 perfection — the perfection of its own type or 
 kind. So universal is this rule that, in the 
 absence of evidence to the contrary, I must 
 assume that it applies to Man. And whatever 
 theology may say, no evidence to the contrary 
 is forthcoming. To say that because grown- 
 up men and women behave badly, therefore
 
 THE REMEDY 71 
 
 Man is born bad, is as though one were to 
 blame Nature for the impurity of a polluted 
 river, forgetting that it had flowed pure, and 
 would always flow pure, from its fountain- 
 head. If we would know what we are by 
 nature, we must get nearer to the fountain- 
 head, we must study the child. 
 
 To do this, things being as they are, is very 
 difficult. There are, I believe, many Child- 
 study Societies in this country, but the work 
 that they seek to promote is carried on under 
 conditions which may almost be said to 
 preclude its success. If child-study is to be 
 effective, we must, for obvious reasons, give 
 the child the maximum of freedom, instead 
 of the minimum, as now. For there is little 
 or nothing to be gained by studying the 
 child's ways and work, so long as these are 
 ours rather than his, so long as we control, 
 or try to control, his actions, his motives, his 
 feelings, his thoughts. To study the ways 
 and work of a caged skylark would mislead, 
 rather than instruct, the student of skylark
 
 72 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 nature ; but it would mislead him less than 
 child-study misleads the psychologist, when 
 the child who is studied is the victim of 
 dogmatic pressure and restraint. 
 
 Yet there are schools in which child-study 
 is possible ; and, wherever it is possible, the 
 evidence that it yields points to the conclu- 
 sion that the current of human life runs pure, 
 not turbid, as it descends, in each individual 
 channel, from its fountain-head. An Ameri- 
 can lady who had spent many weeks in Eome 
 studying intensively the Montessori system 
 of education — a system in which freedom is 
 given with both hands to children of the 
 tenderest years— confessed, on the eve of her 
 departure, that her experience in the Montes- 
 sori schools had led her to abandon the 
 traditional estimate of child-nature to which 
 her " orthodox " bringing up had accustomed 
 her. Having been taught to believe in the 
 original sinfulness and the original stupidity 
 of the child, she found to her surprise that, 
 when he was allowed to develop himself
 
 THE EEMEDY 73 
 
 freely in happy surroundings, his nature, as 
 it unfolded itself, proved to be neither stupid 
 nor sinful, but (in her own words) " inteUigent 
 and good." I had made the same discovery 
 in that school in " Utopia," which I have else- 
 where tried to describe. There, as in the 
 Montessori schools in Kome, the children, 
 when relieved from dogmatic pressure, and 
 allowed (with suitable and sympathetic guid- 
 ance) to work out their own salvation, showed 
 that they were hy Nature " children of grace," 
 — grace of body, grace of mind, grace of 
 manner, grace of heart, grace of soul. 
 
 The inference to be drawn from the experi- 
 ences of the American lady (and her fellow- 
 visitors) in the Montessori schools ^ in Rome, 
 and of myself (and my fellow-visitors) in 
 " Egeria's " school in " Utopia," is that the 
 child is born good, in the widest and deepest 
 sense of the word, and that his frequent 
 failures to grow up good are due to his being 
 
 ^ The genuine Montessori schools. There are 
 some shams.
 
 74 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 subjected to some malign influence during 
 the tenderer years of his hfe. That he is 
 exposed to many mahgn influences goes 
 without saying. But there is one influence 
 which, owing to its strength, persistence, and 
 ubiquity, affects him, for good or for evil, 
 more than all others put together, — the pres- 
 sure of dogmatic education ; and I have given 
 my reasons for thinking that dogmatic educa- 
 tion is, in the main, an evil influence in his 
 life. He grows up a worldling. Why blame 
 Nature for this, when dogmatic pressure, by 
 externalising life, is ever tending to make 
 worldlings of us all ? He grows up an egoist. 
 Why blame Nature for this, when dogmatic 
 pressure, by arresting growth, is ever tending 
 to make egoists of us all ? He grows up a 
 sensualist. Why blame Nature for this, when 
 dogmatic pressure, by substituting drill for 
 discipline, is ever tending to make sensualists 
 of us all ? 
 
 What is happening now in all parts of the 
 civihsed world is that a type of adult person-
 
 THE REMEDY 75 
 
 ality, which has been prematurely developed 
 — and therefore stunted, distorted, and hard- 
 ened — by dogmatic pressure, imposes itself 
 dogmatically on the rising generation, the 
 result being that this type, unlovely, 
 unsymmetrical, inexpansive, externalised, 
 materiahsed, self-centred, a paradoxical blend 
 of natural goodness and unnatural badness — 
 that this type, varying immensely from man 
 to man, yet exhibiting its main characteristics 
 (as the human face exhibits its typical fea- 
 tures) in all but a few exceptional men — that 
 this familiar type passes on unchanged (or 
 with only slight modifications) from century 
 to century, till we get to know it so well, that 
 at last we speak of it, without misgiving, as 
 '* human nature." And all the while we 
 have not the least notion what human nature 
 — the ideal type, the iSea of our race — really 
 is. So far, indeed, are we from knowing this, 
 that when the ISea does appear on earth, as 
 in the person of the Christ, and flash on us 
 for a moment, and command the homage of
 
 70 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 our hearts, we are unable to recognise it a? 
 genuinely human, and insist that it is super- 
 naturally divine. 
 
 Yet there is a potential Christ in every new- 
 born babe. The central doctrine of Chris- 
 tianity means this or it means nothing. 
 Christhood, " true manhood," the ideal per- 
 fection of human nature, is Divinity itself. 
 This is the final answer to those who account 
 for Man's shortcomings by teaching us that 
 we are all born bad. Whatever is born 
 carries with it in embryo the perfection of 
 its own generic nature. And the perfection 
 of human nature — perfect in its mastery of 
 itself, perfect in its emancipation from self — 
 is, in a word, divine. Therefore, instead of 
 being born bad, man is at birth— 
 
 " a god, though in the germ." 
 
 If this were not so, how could Man know 
 that he was bad ? From what high stand- 
 point does he look down, with shame and 
 sorrow, on his ow^n doings ? By reference 
 to what high standard does he condemn him-
 
 THE REMEDY 77 
 
 self for having sinned and done amiss '? The 
 standpoint and the standard are his very own. 
 It is the tSea of his type, it is his own real 
 nature, which reveals to him his imperfection 
 and convicts him of failure. " II est miser- 
 able puisqu'il Test ; mais il est bien grand 
 puisqu'il le connait." 
 
 If education has so far made Man miss his 
 divine destiny, it must now help him to 
 achieve it. If it has so far hindered his 
 growth, it must now try to foster it. Man 
 is great because he knows himself to be 
 miserable. Why should he not outgrow his 
 " misery " by realising his potential " great- 
 ness " ? For he must outgrow his misery, if 
 he is to escape from it. No other way of 
 deliverance is open to him. His nature, if 
 allowed to grow to the full stature of its 
 potential " greatness," will spontaneously 
 close the main sources of his " misery " by 
 placing the egoism of his ordinary self and 
 the desires and impulses of his lower self 
 under due control.
 
 78 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 But if the nature of Man is to be allowed 
 to evolve itself, the child must be given free- 
 dom. The business of growing, as I have 
 already said, must be done by the growing 
 child, and cannot be done for him by his 
 parent or teacher. This means that he must, 
 as far as possible, be relieved from dogmatic 
 pressure. Can this be done ? Is the idea 
 of educating the child in an atmosphere of 
 freedom an idle dream ? I happen to know 
 that it is no dream. But my experiences 
 have been exceptional, and some of those 
 who have not shared them will doubtless 
 regard them as inconclusive, and wdll decide 
 on a priori grounds against the possibihty 
 of giving freedom to children of any age. 
 Even so enhghtened and open-minded an 
 educationist as Professor Adams, must 
 needs dismiss the Tolstoyan experiments in 
 " free education " wdth a sneer. The Tol- 
 stoyan schools were forcibly closed by the 
 pohce ; but while the experiment lasted it 
 proved that there are immense stores of
 
 THE REMEDY 79 
 
 latent vitality and great reserves of un- 
 developed capacity even in peasant children, 
 and that freedom tends to vitalise the child's 
 powers, as surely as dogmatism tends to 
 depress them. For this reason, and because 
 Tolstoi's bold assertion that " education as 
 a deliberate moulding of people into set forms 
 is sterile, illegitimate and impossible," is an 
 open challenge to the whole civilised world, 
 his experiment deserves a more sympathetic 
 study than Professor Adams has given it. 
 If the discipline of the Tolstoyan schools was 
 defective, at any rate as judged by Eussian 
 standards, it is surely worth our while to ask 
 why the schools failed in this respect. There 
 is an obvious answer to this question. Tol- 
 stoi, with his large-hearted faith in human 
 nature, gave complete freedom to children 
 who had been subjected to dogmatic pressure 
 for some eight or ten years, and had thereby 
 been rendered incapable, largely, if not wholly, 
 of self-control. If you lame a child you must 
 provide him with crutches ; and, having pro-
 
 80 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 vided him with crutches, you must not sud- 
 denly take these from him and expect him 
 to walk. If you keep a child in the dark for 
 eight or ten years you must not suddenly 
 take him out into the hght and expect him to 
 see. Experience has proved that freedom 
 can safely be given to very young children, 
 provided that there is plenty of suitable work 
 for them to do ; and it has also proved that, 
 with the same proviso, freedom can safely be 
 given to older children by a tactful and sym- 
 pathetic teacher, who introduces it gradually 
 and cautiously into his school. But to give 
 freedom suddenly and in full measure to 
 children who have been kept for years under 
 strict control, is to court disaster. From the 
 point of view of discipline, Tolstoi's experi- 
 ment was almost predestined to fail ; and its 
 failure (if it did fail) in no way discredits the 
 great principle of freedom in whose interest 
 it was conceived and carried out. 
 
 The upholders of the regime of dogmatic 
 direction are apt to assume that, if freedom
 
 THE REMEDY 81 
 
 is given to the child, there will be nothing for 
 the teacher to do but stand aside and let 
 Nature take its course. Professor Adams, for 
 example, takes for granted that in the Froe- 
 belian system, " the teacher is but a benevo- 
 lent superintendent of the process of develop- 
 ment which he allows to take its course." I 
 have never heard of any advocate for freedom, 
 with the exception of Rousseau, who assigned 
 to the teacher a rdle of complete passivity. 
 And I have yet to meet the Froebelian 
 teacher who is content to be a mere super- 
 intendent of the process of development, or 
 of any other process. As far as my experi- 
 ence goes, the Froebehans, like their master, 
 do too much, rather than too little, for thejr 
 pupils. They seem to think, as he seems to 
 have thought, that the function of education 
 is dogmatically to foster growth. This no 
 man can do : but the true fosterer of growth 
 — be he gardener, planter, stock-raiser, or 
 teacher — has as little in common with the 
 mere looker-on at the " process of develop- 
 
 T.E. • G
 
 82 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 ment " as with the dogmatic director of it ; 
 and the teacher who tries to give freedom 
 and aid development will find, as we shall 
 presently see, that his role is by no means 
 negative and passive, that on the contrary 
 there is much work for him to do, work which 
 is more difficult, more exacting, and of a 
 higher order than the work which is done by 
 teachers in schools of the conventional type. 
 Indeed, the chief practical objection to the 
 rSginie of freedom is that it makes demands 
 on the teacher which, unless he happens to 
 be exceptionally gifted, or to have had an 
 exceptional training, he cannot be expected 
 to meet. 
 
 The experiment of giving freedom to chil- 
 dren has been tried by others than Tolstoi, 
 and, where tried under favourable conditions, 
 has proved a splendid success. One such 
 experiment, which has unhappily come to an 
 end, I have elsewhere tried to describe. The 
 teacher who made that experiment, and who 
 had to deal for the most part with what the
 
 THE REMEDY 83 
 
 Board of Education call " older children," 
 introduced freedom slowly, cautiously, and 
 tactfully into her school ; but she found that 
 the more freedom she gave her pupils, the 
 worthier did they prove themselves of the 
 boon that she dispensed ; for, as time went 
 on, her school became more and more auto- 
 nomous, the burden of directing their own 
 education, both as a whole and in its details, 
 being gradually transferred to the children, 
 who welcomed each fresh responsibility as a 
 further proof of their teacher's confidence and 
 goodwill, and requited with ever-increasing 
 loyalty and love the fresh demands that she 
 made on their capacity and their self-control. 
 The experiments of Dr. Maria Montessori in 
 Eome, which are now arresting the attention 
 of the whole educational world, have proved 
 that freedom can safely be given, in fullest 
 measure, to children of the very tenderest 
 years ; and that where freedom is given 
 under judicious and sympathetic guidance 
 to young children, the consequent develop- 
 
 G 2
 
 84 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 ment of their nature carries with it, in due 
 season, the outgrowth of all those qualities 
 which distinguished the older children of 
 " Utopia " — patience, perseverance, resource- 
 fulness, self-reliance, self-control, self-forget- 
 fulness, sweetness of temper, good fellowship, 
 charm of manner, joy of heart — all inter- 
 penetrated by loving devotion to the teacher, 
 whose self-effacement is rewarded by an 
 ascendency over her pupils, which the dog- 
 matic teacher can never hope to acquire. 
 And the still more daring experiments of Mr. 
 George and Mr. Lane, of " Junior Kepublic " 
 fame, in America, have proved that freedom 
 can safely be given to children and 
 adolescents even of the " wastrel " and 
 " criminal " types ; and that where given, by 
 those who know how to give it, its power to 
 redeem the fallen, to restrain the lawless, to 
 vitalise the listless, is so great as to seem 
 miraculous to those whose experiences of the 
 treatment of youthful criminality have been 
 limited to reformatories of the repressive type.
 
 THE REMEDY 85 
 
 In any case, the experiment of giving free- 
 dom to the child must be made if education 
 is not to remain eternahy sterile. For in no 
 other way can growth be stimulated and 
 development aided. The child himself must 
 digest the food that is provided for him. The 
 child himself must exercise his limbs, and 
 organs, and powers, and faculties. The 
 attempt of the dogmatist to do these things 
 for him, on any plane of his being, must needs 
 end in failure ; and one thing only could be 
 more disastrous than its failure, its incon- 
 ceivable success. 
 
 And this is not the only reason why the 
 child should be set free. I have said that 
 education is a branch of the great science 
 (and art) of " growth-craft." There is, how- 
 ever, one vital difference between education 
 and all other branches of the science. The 
 farmer, the forester, the planter, the stock- 
 raiser, are all engaged in guiding the current 
 of life into channels which have been defined 
 for them by their own conceptions of utility.
 
 86 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 When the forester, for example, plants beech- 
 trees so close together that they can make 
 no lateral growth, his aim is to produce, not 
 perfect specimens of beech wood, but the 
 maximum amount of timber per acre. The 
 teacher, on the other hand, is, or ought to be, 
 a pure idealist. His function is to guide the 
 current of life into the channel or system of 
 channels which leads towards " true man- 
 hood." But if he is to do this, he must have 
 some knowledge of what " true manhood " 
 is ; he must know which tendencies are 
 central in human nature and which deriva- 
 tive, which are dominant and which sub- 
 ordinate, which are permanent and which 
 provisional, which are high and to be en- 
 couraged, and which are low and to be con- 
 trolled. If he is to acquire this necessary 
 knowledge, he must study the child's opening 
 nature under conditions which are favourable 
 to its healthy and harmonious development. 
 The system of education which is not based 
 on child-study is a house built on the sands.
 
 THE REMEDY 87 
 
 But child-study is, as we have seen, impractic- 
 able so long as education remains dogmatic, 
 so long as the sayings and doings of the child 
 are his teacher's rather than his own. It 
 follows that if the teacher is to give effective 
 guidance to the child he must first set him 
 free. " The conception of freedom which 
 must inspire pedagogy," says Dr. Montessori, 
 ** is that which the biological scientists of the 
 nineteenth century have show^n us in their 
 methods of studying life. The old-time 
 pedagogy was incompetent and vague, 
 because it did not understand the principle 
 of studying the pupil before educating him, 
 and of leaving him free for spontaneous 
 manifestations." The plain truth is that 
 the child, and the child alone, can point out 
 to the teacher the goal which the teacher is 
 to help him to reach. ^ 
 
 ^ Mr. Homer Lnnc, of the Ford Junior Hepiililie, 
 whieli reeei\-es " iiicurrigihle" boys only, between tlie 
 ages of 10 and IG, had been a teacher for many years 
 before he bcfjan to interest himself in juNcnile 
 dehnquency, and had previously gone through
 
 88 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 There is one more reason why the child 
 should be uncaged, — a reason which, if not 
 so weighty as the others, is perhaps more 
 insistent and less patient of delay. I have 
 already spoken of the reaction against dog- 
 matic pressure which has long been in pro- 
 gress, and the cumulative effects of which we 
 are now beginning to witness. When did 
 this reaction begin ? We cannot say. The 
 search for its origin would take us back to 
 the beginnings of history. For there are few 
 chapters in the history of mankind in which 
 the struggle for freedom does not claim one 
 or more pages. " The struggle for freedom." 
 What do these words mean ? The word 
 " freedom " has a magic and an inspiration 
 
 University courses in psychology and pedagogy. 
 His experiences in a " community of free children " 
 convinced him that the knowledge of child-nature 
 which he had acquired in the University lecture- 
 rooms and in the schools where he had taught, was of 
 little or no value, and that his psychology was so 
 defective that there was nothing to be done to it but 
 to rebuild it from its very foundations.
 
 THE REMEDY 89 
 
 of its own. Poets have glorified freedom. 
 Heroes have fought and died for it. Yet for 
 most men, inckiding even the poets and the 
 heroes, the struggle for freedom has meant 
 nothing more than the attempt to throw off 
 the yoke of a despot, or a conquering people. 
 But the real meaning of the words lies deeper 
 than this. The struggle for freedom is in its 
 essence a struggle against the deadening 
 pressure of dogmatism, a struggle for the 
 right to live one's own life, to grow along the 
 lines of one's own being. Yet the struggle, 
 as history describes it, has in the main been 
 a blind and chaotic " battle in the mist," in 
 the course of which men have again and 
 again exchanged one tyranny for another, 
 the liberator having often become a harsh 
 oppressor, while the liberated people have 
 often denied freedom to those who came under 
 their rule. Why has this been so ? Wh}^ has 
 dogmatism controlled and perverted the very 
 efforts that Man has made to free himself from 
 its yoke ? May it not be because Man has
 
 90 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 forgotten to call to his aid the one ally who 
 could have turned defeat into victory, and 
 victory into lasting victory — an ally who is 
 strong in his very weakness — the helpless 
 child ? Clamorous in his demands for free- 
 dom for himself, he has never thought of 
 giving freedom to the child ; and the result 
 of this has been that generation after genera- 
 tion has grown up, and still grows up, 
 hardened, narrowed, and materialised by 
 dogmatic pressure, dominated by false ideals, 
 incapable of self-discipline, unworthy of free- 
 dom, and unfit to enjoy it. 
 
 In our own age, the struggle against dog- 
 matism is being waged with a thoroughness 
 and a whole-heartedness for which history 
 has no precedent. In every department of 
 human life — religion, morals, manners, 
 domestic and social habits, art, letters, 
 poetry, music — tradition and authority are 
 systematically set at nought. The mere 
 fact that a belief, opinion, rule, or custom, is 
 of old standing, suffices to discredit it. There
 
 THE REMEDY 91 
 
 is nothing that our iconoclasts regard as 
 sacred. Even the deep-laid foundations of 
 home life are being undermined by their 
 rebellious criticism. Such a struggle, waged 
 on a large scale, by a generation of egoists 
 and sensualists, threatens disaster to the 
 whole fabric of our social hfe. The one 
 merit of dogmatism has been its maintenance 
 of order ; and when the reaction against it 
 is carried so far — owing to the materialism, 
 individualism, and indiscipline of the rebels 
 — that the banner of freedom has to give 
 place to the black flag of license, the danger 
 is pressing that for the deadly despotism of 
 dogmatic direction will be substituted the 
 still deadlier despotism of anarchy and chaos. 
 If this catastrophe is to be avoided, we must 
 rear a generation of men who will prove them- 
 selves worthy of freedom ; in other words, 
 we must transfer the struggle against dog- 
 matism to the arena of the nursery and the 
 school. 
 
 This is what pioneers, like the " Egeria "
 
 92 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 of my " Utopian " school, Dr. Maria Montes- 
 sori of Kome, and Mr. George and Mr. Lane, 
 of "Junior Republic" fame, are doing; and 
 the striking results which they have achieved 
 might well encourage other teachers to join 
 their slender band. But they are " results " 
 of another order than those which " the 
 world " demands and applauds. In the Junior 
 Republics it is found that self-government 
 often transforms the worst delinquents into 
 the best citizens. This experience is pro- 
 foundly significant. The vigorous life which 
 enables the youthful delinquent to resist 
 the deadening pressure of a dogmatic 
 education, finding that all legitimate 
 channels are closed against it, forces an out- 
 let for itself into the channel of lawlessness 
 and crime. In the regime of freedom, the 
 same life returns spontaneously, with un- 
 abated energy, to the channel of law and 
 order and welldoing. To a less vigorous 
 nature, freedom might have come too late. 
 But the young criminal, in and through his
 
 THE REMEDY 93 
 
 very criminality, has kept open his com- 
 munication with the springs of his hfe. 
 Could stronger proof be given of the waste of 
 energy and capacity which goes on under the 
 existing regime ? Dogmatism too often turns 
 the best into the worst. Freedom can recon- 
 vert the worst into the best. It is between 
 these alternatives that the teacher must make 
 his choice. 
 
 Which path will he take ? Will he continue 
 to impose on the young that travesty of " true 
 manhood " which we mis-call human nature ? 
 Or will he help " true manhood " — the reality 
 of human nature — to evolve itself in the 
 young ? An almost irresistible pressure will 
 be put upon him to take the former path. 
 And should he choose the latter, the way of 
 effacement for himself, and emancipation and 
 growth for the child, he will find that he has 
 set himself a task of almost insuperable 
 difficulty. 
 
 Almost insuperable, but not quite. At the 
 outset he will find that he is again and again
 
 94 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 involved in a " vicious circle," not of thought, 
 but of practice. Here is one such circle : 
 " The egoism of the adult makes him a 
 dogmatist ; and his dogmatic treatment of 
 the child makes the latter an egoist, ready 
 to dogmatise and mis-educate ^Yhen his turn 
 comes." Here is another : "If we would 
 reform education, we must first reform 
 Society ; and if we would reform Society, 
 we must first reform education." Here is 
 a third : " If we would educate the child in 
 an atmosphere of freedom, we must know 
 what are the central tendencies of his nature ; 
 and if we would know what are the central 
 tendencies of his nature, we must educate 
 him in an atmosphere of freedom." The 
 teacher might well be pardoned for regard- 
 ing these and similar circles as impassable. 
 But there is no circle, however seemingly 
 impassable, which that blend of imagination, 
 intelligence, and patience, which we call 
 genius, cannot break tlirough ; and if genius, 
 as such, cannot be cultivated, it is no paradox
 
 THE KKMEDY Uo 
 
 to say that the quahties which combine to 
 produce it can. The teacher will of course 
 have much to unlearn and much to learn. 
 Nor will it be easy for him to find appropriate 
 help and guidance. There will be things for 
 him to do, directions for which are given in 
 no manual of pedagogy. Here are some of 
 them : To efface himself as much as possible, 
 to realise that not he, but the child, plays the 
 leading part in the drama of school life. To 
 put unbounded faith in the child's nature, in 
 spite of its early weaknesses, crudities, and 
 other shortcomings, feeling sure that its 
 higher tendencies, if allowed to unfold them- 
 selves in due season, will gradually master 
 and control the lower. To give the child as 
 much freedom as is compatible with the main- 
 tenance of the reahty rather than the sem- 
 blance of order. To relieve him from the 
 deadening pressure of the discipline of drill, 
 and to help him to subject himself to the 
 disciphne of self-control. To provide outlets 
 for all his healthy activities, taking care that
 
 90 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 these shape their own channels, as far as may- 
 be possible, and are not merely directed into 
 ready-made canals. To place at his disposal 
 such materials as will provide him both with 
 mental and spiritual food, and with oppor- 
 tunities for the exercise of his mental and 
 spiritual faculties. To give him such guid- 
 ance as his expanding nature may seem to 
 need, taking care that the guidance given is 
 the outcome of sympathetic study of his 
 instinctive tendencies, and interferes as little 
 as possible with his freedom of choice. To 
 do nothing for him which he can reasonably 
 be expected to do for himself. To abstain 
 from that excessive fault-finding which the 
 dogmatic spirit (always prone to mistake 
 correctness for goodness) is apt to engender, 
 and which paralyses the child's initiative, 
 and makes him morbidly self-conscious and 
 self-distrustful. To help him to think more 
 of overcoming difficulties, and doing things 
 well, than of producing plausible and possibly 
 deceptive results. To foster his natural sin-
 
 TilE RKMEDY S»7 
 
 cerity, and keep far away from him whatever 
 savom's of make-beheve, self-deception, and 
 fraud. To study and take thought for his 
 individuahty, so that he may reahse and 
 outgrow himself, and at last transcend his 
 individuality, in his own particular way — 
 the way which Nature seems to have marked 
 out as best for him. To help him to develop 
 all his expansive instincts, so that his growth 
 may be as many-sided and therefore as 
 healthy and harmonious as possible. To 
 realise, and help him to reahse (should this 
 be necessary), that healthy and harmonious 
 growth is its own reward, and so relieve him 
 from the false and demoralising stimulus of 
 external rewards and punishments. To dis- 
 courage competition between child and child, 
 with the vanity and selfishness which this 
 necessarily tends to breed. To foster the 
 child's communal instinct, his spirit of com- 
 radeship, his latent capacity for sympathy 
 and love. 
 
 I could easily make this list longer, but I 
 
 T.F. 11
 
 98 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 think I have made it long enough. Perhaps 
 I have made it too long, for after all it is an 
 idea that I am setting before the teacher, 
 not a theory, still less a fully elaborated 
 system. If the idea commends itself to him 
 in any respect or degree, he must interpret 
 it (both in theory and practice) in his own 
 individual way. I should be false to my own 
 first principles if I tried to do for him what, 
 if it is to have any lasting value, he must do 
 for himself. 
 
 He may perhaps tell me that I am setting 
 before him an unattainable goal. I know 
 that I am. If the ideal nature could evolve 
 itself in the school life of the child it would 
 be unworthy of the teacher's devotion. How 
 long it may need for its final evolution — how 
 many years or lives or cosmic eras — is no 
 immediate concern of ours. The bastard 
 self evolves itself in twenty or thirty or 
 iorty yesiYB, and then grows old and decrepit. 
 If the real self is in a sense an unapproachable 
 ideal, it will keep the soul that strives to
 
 THE REMEDY 99 
 
 realise it everlastingly young. Education 
 can but help the evolving life to make a 
 happy start ; but a happy start, as Plato 
 says, is the most important stage towards 
 ultimate perfection. 
 
 We hear much nowadaj^s about eugenics ; 
 and a society has, I beheve, been formed to 
 improve the breed of men. If the members 
 of that society propose to achieve their end 
 by skilful breeding, I do not think they will 
 go verj^ far. But if they will try to achieve 
 it by skilful groumg, the}' will lind that a 
 boundless field of useful action lies before 
 them. For though we may be good growers 
 of wheat and barley, sheep and oxen, we are 
 bad growers of men. 
 
 To improve the breed of men by skilful 
 '* growing," would, I think, go a long way 
 towards solving many weighty problems. 
 Indeed, I sometimes think that all the master 
 problems of life will have to be solved in the 
 nursery and the schoolroom ; that if we wait 
 for their solution till the child has grown to
 
 100 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 
 manhood and hardened into what we call 
 maturity, we shall have waited too long. At 
 any rate, an initial solution will have to be 
 given in the nursery and the schoolroom, 
 which will make possible a later and fuller 
 solution in the world of adult human life. 
 When I throw out such suggestions as these, 
 the horizon of the teacher's work begins to 
 recede indefinitely ; and he may well wonder 
 when and where his responsibilities (which 
 are of course commensurate with his oppor- 
 tunities) will end. But I, for my part, will 
 do nothing to make him undervalue his high 
 calling ; for I know well that if the spii'it of 
 the pioneer is in him, he will be stimulated 
 rather than daunted by the magnitude of his 
 mighty task. 
 
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