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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
XXII. Enterprise

A ND so we come to Goodness—and at the same time to a change in

our program. After calling on the Artist as an expert to testify in
regard to Beauty, and the Philosopher to tell us about Truth, it would
seem that we should hear about Goodness from a moralist. So, no
doubt, you expected—and so I had originally intended. But it cannot
have failed to secure your notice that our experts pursued a
somewhat unconventional line of argument. The Artist told us that
the way to teach children to love Beauty was to leave them free to
hate it if they chose. The Philosopher said that the way to inculcate in
children a love of Truth was to leave them free to hold wrong
opinions. Now it is all very well to talk that way about Beauty and
Truth. We might perhaps be persuaded to take such risks, so long as
only Beauty and Truth were involved. But Goodness is a different
matter. It simply would not do for us to hear any one who proposed a
similar course[Pg 158] in regard to conduct. Imagine any one
suggesting that the way to teach children to be good is to leave them
free to be bad! But that is just what I am afraid would happen if we
called an expert on Morals to the stand. I have observed twenty or
thirty of them shuffling their notes and their feet and waiting to be
called on. But I do not trust them. No! Goodness is not going to be
treated in so irreverent a fashion while I am running this discussion. I
am going to see that this subject is treated with becoming reverence.
And as the only way of making absolutely sure of this, I am going to
address you myself.
We want children to grow up to be good men and women; and we
want to know how the school can assist in this process. First, we
must define goodness; and I shall suggest the rough outline of such
a definition, which we must presently fill up in detail, by saying that
goodness is living a really civilized life. And as one’s conduct is not to
be measured or judged except as it affects others, we may say that
goodness is a matter of civilized relationships between persons. And
furthermore, as the two most important things in life are its
preservation and perpetuation, the two fields of conduct in which it is
most necessary to be civilized are Work and Love. Let us first deal
with Work and find out what constitutes civilized conduct in that field.
We all exist, as we are accustomed to remind ourselves, in a world
where one must work in order to live. That, in a broad sense, is true;
but there are certain classes of persons exempt from any such actual
compulsion; and with respect to almost any specific individual outside
of those classes, it is generally possible for him to escape from that
compulsion if he chooses. Take any one of us here; you, for instance.
If you really and truly did not want to work, you could find a way to
avoid it; you could get your wife or your mother to support you by
taking in washing or doing stenography—or, if they refused, you could
manage to become the victim of some accident which would disable
you from useful labor and enable you to spend your days peacefully
in an institution. But you prefer to work; and the fact is that you like
work. You are unhappy because you don’t get a chance to do the
work you could do best, or because you have not yet found the work
you can do well; but you have energies which demand expression in
work. And if you turn to the classes which are exempt from any
compulsion to work, you find the rich expending their energies either
in the same channels as everybody else, or organizing their play until
its standards of effort are as exacting as those of work; you find
women who are supported by their husbands rebelling against the
imprisonment of the idle home, and seeking in all directions for
employment of their energies; and as for the third class of those who
do not have to work in order to live, we find that even idiots are
happier when set at basket-weaving.
If we attempt to moralize upon the basis of these facts, we arrive at a
conclusion something like this: it is right to use one’s energies in
organized effort—the more highly organized the better. And if we ask
what is the impulse or trait or quality which makes people turn from
an easy to a hard life, from loafing to sport, from sport to work, and
which makes them contemptuous of each other and of themselves if
they neglect an opportunity or evade a challenge to go into
something still harder and more exacting—if we ask what it is that
despite all our pretensions of laziness pushes us up more and more
difficult paths of effort, we are obliged to call it Enterprise.
And when we face the fact that Enterprise is a love of difficulties for
their own sake, we realize that the normal human being has, within
certain limits, a pleasure in pain: for it is painful to run a race, to
learn a language, to write a sonnet, to put through a deal—and
pleasurable precisely because it is, within these limits, painful. If it is
too easy, there is no fun in it. The extremer sorts of enterprise we call
courage and heroism. But though we admire the fireman who risks
his life in a burning building, we would not admire the man who
deliberately set fire to his own bed in order to suffer the pangs of
torture by fire; nor, although we admire the airmen who come down
frozen from high altitudes, would we applaud a man who locked
himself in a refrigerator over the week-end in order to suffer the
torture of great cold. We would feel, in both these hypothetical cases,
that there was no relevancy of their action to the world of reality. But
upon this point our emotions are after all uncertain. We do not
begrudge applause to the football-star who is carried from the field
with a broken collar-bone, or to the movie-star who drives a motor-
car off a cliff into the sea, though it is quite clear that these actions
are relevant to and significant in the world of fantasy rather than the
world of reality. What it comes down to is the intelligibility of the
action. Does it relate to any world, of reality or of fantasy, which we
can understand, which has any significance for us?
When we turn to the child, we find that normally he has no lack of
enterprise. But his enterprise is relevant to a world of childish
dreaming to which we have lost the key. His activities are largely
meaningless to us—that is why we are so annoyed by them. And, in
the same way, our kinds of enterprise are largely meaningless to him.
That is why he usually objects so strongly to lessons and tasks. They
interrupt and interfere with the conduct of his own affairs. He is as
outraged at having to stop his play to put a shovelful of coal on the
furnace, as a sober business man would be at being compelled, by
some strange and tyrannical infantile despotism, to stop dictating
letters and join, at some stated hour, in a game of ring-around-the-
rosy. Most of what we object to as misconduct in children is a natural
rebellion against the intrusion of an unimaginative adult despotism
into their lives.
Nevertheless, it is our adult world that they are going to have to live
in, and they must learn to live in it. And it is true, moreover, that
much of their enterprise is capable of finding as satisfactory
employment in what we term the world of reality as in their world of
dreams. What we commonly do, however, is to convince them by
punishment and scolding that our world of reality is unpleasant. What
we ought to do is to make it more agreeable, more interesting, more
fascinating, than their world of dreams. Our friend the Artist has
already told us how this may be done, and our friend the Philosopher
has given some oblique hints on the same subject. I merely note here
that the school is the place in which the transition from the world of
dreams to the world of realities may be best effected.
But there are various kinds of enterprise in our adult world. It is
undoubtedly enterprising to hold up a pay-train, a la Jesse James. But
though when the act involves real daring, we cannot withhold an
instinctive admiration, yet we know that it is wrong. Why wrong?
Because such acts disorganize and discourage, and if unchecked
would ruin, the whole elaborate system of enterprise by which such
trains are despatched and such money earned. It is obvious that
train-robbery and wage-labor cannot fairly compete with one
another; that if train-robbery goes on long enough, nobody will do
wage-labor, and there will eventually cease to be pay-trains to rob.
The law does not take cognizance of these reasons, but punishes
train-robbery as a crime against property. Yet if we look into the
matter for a moment, we realize that loyalty to any property system
ultimately rests upon the conviction that its destruction would result
in the total frustration of the finer sorts of human enterprise; it is for
this reason that conservative people always persuade themselves that
any change in the economic arrangements of society, from a new
income-tax to communism, is a kind of train-robbery, bound to end in
universal piracy and ruin. And this moral indignation, whether in any
given instance appropriate or not—or whether, as in the case of many
piratical kinds of business enterprise, left for long in abeyance—is the
next step in our human morality. If we ask ourselves, why should not
human enterprise turn into a welter of primitive piracy, with all the
robbers robbing each other, we are compelled to answer that in the
long run it would not be interesting. For, although destruction is
temporarily more exciting, it is only construction that is permanently
interesting. And if we ask why it is more interesting, we find that it is
because it is harder. It is too easy to destroy. Destruction may be
occasionally a good thing, as a tonic, something to give to individuals
or populations a sense of power; but their most profound instinct is
toward creation.
But the child, by reason of the primitive stage of his development,
tends to engage rather more enthusiastically in destruction as a mode
of enterprise than in creation. He tires of building, and it is a question
whether or not the pleasure he takes in knocking over his houses of
blocks does not exceed his pleasure in building them. He prefers
playing at hunting and war to playing at keeping house. And his
imagination responds more readily to the robber-exploits of Robin
Hood than to the Stories of Great Inventors. This is a fact, but it need
not discourage us. What is necessary is for him to learn the
interestingness of creation. If what he builds is not a house of blocks
on the nursery floor, but a wigwam in the woods, his destructive
energies are likely to be satisfied in cutting down the saplings with
which to build it. This simply means that his destructive energies
have become subordinated to his constructive ones, as they are in
adult life. But they cannot become so subordinated until what he
constructs is wholly the result of his own wishes, and until moreover
it is more desirable as the starting-point of new creative activities
than as something to destroy. Those conditions are fulfilled whenever
a group of children play together and have free access to the
materials with which to construct. And that is what the school is for—
to provide the materials, and the freedom, and be the home of a
process by which children learn that it is more fun to create than to
destroy.
XXIII. Democracy

B UT in our adult world, there is still another moral quality

demanded of our human enterprise. It is not merely better to
create than to destroy, but it is better to create something which is
useful, or desirable, to others. Our moral attitude is a little uncertain
upon this point, for the artist knows that his coarsest and easiest
kind of enterprise is likely to be valued by others, and his finer and
more difficult enterprises neglected and scorned. And so he has the
impulse to work only for himself; nevertheless, he realizes that if he
does work only for himself he is doing wrong. For he really feels a
deep-lying moral obligation to work for others—a moral obligation
which comes, of course, from his egoistic need of the spiritual
sustenance of praise. The fact is that others are necessary to him,
and that his work must please others. So if he ignores the crowd, it
is because he wishes to compel it to take something better than
what it asked for. And this democratic quality in enterprise becomes
the third test of civilized life. Does a given action fit in everybody
else’s scheme as well as in your own: and, if it conflicts with the
outside scheme, is it with a fundamentally altruistic intention? There
are prophets and false prophets and of those who take the difficult
course of disagreeing with their fellows, the best we can
immediately demand of them is that they afflict us because they
think it good for us and not because they do not care. Yet even so
they differ from us at their peril. For we are to be the final judges of
whether we are being imposed on or not. If we do not, after full
consideration, feel that we can play our game if Napoleon or the
Kaiser plays his, we put him out of business.
Now the child has a certain natural tendency toward the Napoleon-
Kaiser attitude. He began, as we pointed out some time ago, by
being an infantile emperor. He likes it. And being deposed by his
parents does not alter his royalist convictions. For he has not merely
been deposed—he has seen another king set up in his place. And
one reason why parents are not the best persons to teach children
democracy, is that they are the authors of the whole succession of
enthronements and deposings which constitute the early history of a
family. No, the children need a change of air—a chance to forget
their Wars of the Roses and to take their places in a genuine
democracy. The place for them to learn democracy (though I believe
this has been said before) is the school. For in a properly conducted
school there is an end of jealous little princes and princesses
squabbling over prestige and appealing to the Power Behind the
Throne; in such a school, conduct in general and work in particular is
performed not with reference to such prestige as a reward, but with
reference to their individual wishes in democratic composition with
the wishes of their fellows.
But this will be true only if they find at school something different
from what they have left at home. And what they have left at home
may be described as a couple of well-meaning, bewildered and
helpless people who are half the slaves of the children and half
tyrants over them. It is unfortunate, but it is true, that the first that
children learn of human relationships, is by personal experience of a
relationship which is on both sides tyrannical and slavish. They
naturally expect all their relationships with the adult world, if not
with each other, to be conducted on this same pattern. They expect
to find father and mother over again in the school-teacher. They
hope to find the slave and fear to find the tyrant. But it is necessary
that they should face the adult world into which they must grow up,
as equals; and therefore they must begin to learn the lesson of
equality. The school, by providing a kind of association between
adults and children which is free from the emotional complexes of
the home, can teach that lesson.
There is, however, so much intellectual confusion about what
equality means that we must be quite clear on that point before we
go on. At any moment of our careers, we are the servant of others,
in the sense of being their follower, helper, disciple or right-hand
man; and the master of still others, in that we are their leader,
counsellor or teacher. We can hardly conduct an ordinary
conversation without assuming, and usually shifting several times,
these rôles. And these relationships extend far beyond the bounds of
acquaintanceship, for one can scarcely read a book or write an
article without creating such relationships for the moment with
unknown individuals. In all the critical and important moments of
one’s life one is inevitably a leader or a follower. But in adult civilized
life, these relationships are fluid; they change and exchange with
each other. And they are fluid because they are free. You and I can
choose, though perhaps not consciously, our leaders and our
helpers; we are not condemned to stand in any fixed relationship to
any other person. And this freedom to be servant of whom we
please, and master of whom we can, is equality. If I want to know
about fishing-tackle, I will sit at your feet and learn, and if you will
condescend to lead the expedition in quest of these articles I will be
your obedient follower; while if you happened to want advice about
pens, pencils, ink, or typewriter-ribbons, you would, I trust, yield a
similar deference to me. We have no shame in serving nor any
egregious pride in directing each other, because we are equals. We
are equals because we are free to become each other’s master and
each other’s servant whenever we so desire.
But the relationship of parents and children is not free. Parents
cannot choose their children, and must serve their helplessness
willy-nilly. Children cannot choose their parents, and must obey them
anyhow. It is a rare triumph of parenthood—and doubtless also of
childhood—when children and parents become friends, and serve
and obey each other not because they must but because they really
like to. But schools can easily take up the task which parents are
only with the greatest difficulty able to accomplish, and dissolve the
infantile tyrant-and-slave relationship to the grown-up world. The
grown-up people in the school can be the child’s equals. They can
become so by ceasing to encourage the notion which the child
carries with him from the home, that adults are beings of a different
caste. Once they regard an adult as a person like themselves—
which, Heaven knows, he is!—children will discover quickly enough
his admirable qualities, and his special abilities, and pay them the
tribute of admiration and emulation. There is no human reason why
a child should not admire and emulate his teacher’s ability to do
sums, rather than the village bum’s ability to whittle sticks and
smoke cigarettes; the reason why the child doesn’t is plain enough—
the bum has put himself on an equality with them and the teacher
has not.
XXIV. Responsibility

B UT there is yet another quality which civilized standards demand

of our human enterprise. People hate a quitter—and particularly
the quitter whose defection leaves other people under the obligation
to finish what he has started. We demand of a person that he should
refrain from starting what he can’t finish. This is a demand not only
for democratic intentions, but for common sense and ordinary
foresight. He shouldn’t undertake a job that involves other people’s
putting their trust in him, unless he can really carry it through. And if
he finds in the middle of it that he has, as the saying goes, “bit off
more than he can chaw,” he ought to try to stick it out at whatever
cost to himself. If other people have believed he could do it, he must
not betray their faith. This feeling is at the heart of what we
ordinarily call telling the truth, as well as the foundation of the
custom of paying one’s debts. We don’t really care how much a man
perjures his own immortal soul by lying, but we do object to his
fooling other people by it. We are all so entangled with each other,
so dependent upon each other, that none of us can plan and create
with any courage or confidence unless we can depend on others to
do what they say they will do. But our feeling goes deeper than the
spoken word—we want people to behave in accordance with the
promise of their actions. We despise the person who seems, and
who lets us believe that he is, wiser or more capable than he turns
out to be. We even resent a story that promises at the beginning to
be more interesting than it is when it gets going. And in regard to
work, the thing which we value above any incidental brilliancy in its
performance, is the certainty that it will be finished. Hence the pride
in finishing any task, however disagreeable, once started.
This is the hardest thing that children have to learn—not to drop
their work when they get tired of it. But it should be obvious that
there is only one way for children to learn this, and that it is not by
anything which may be said or done in punishment or rebuke from
the authority which imposes the task. It is not to be learned at all so
long as the task is imposed by any one outside the child himself. The
child who is sent on an errand may forget, and not be ashamed. But
the child who has volunteered to go on an errand—not as a pretty
trick to please the Authorities, but because of a sense of the
importance of the errand and of his own importance in doing it—that
child has assumed a trust, which he will not be likely to violate.
But suppose, nevertheless, that he does forget. Here we come to the
ethics of punishment—a savage ritual which we generally quite fail
to understand. Let us take a specific case. A group of boys are
building a house in the woods, and they run out of nails. Penrod
says he will go home and get some from the tool-chest in the barn.
He goes; and on the way, he meets a boy who offers to take him to
the movies, where Charlie Chaplin is on exhibition. Penrod reflects
upon his duty; but he says to himself that he will go in and see one
reel of Charlie Chaplin, and then hurry away. But the inimitable
Charles lulls him into forgetfulness of realities, and when he emerges
from the theatre it is nigh on dinner time. Penrod realizes his
predicament, and rehearses two or three fancy stories to account for
his failure to return with the nails; but he realizes that none of them
will hold. He wishes that a wagon would run over him and break his
leg, so that he would have a valid excuse. But no such lucky
accident occurs. How is he going to face the gang next day? He has
set himself apart from them, exiled himself, by his act. The question
is, how is he going to get back? Now in the psychology of children
and savages, there is happily a means for such reinstatement. This
means is the discharge of the emotions—in the offender and in the
group against which he has offended—of shame on the one hand
and anger on the other, which together constitute the barrier against
his return. That is, if they can express their anger by, let us say,
beating him up, that anger no longer exists, they are no longer
offended. While if he can by suffering such punishment pay the debt
of his offence, he thereby wipes it out of existence, and at the same
time cleanses himself from the shame of committing it. As the best
conclusion of an unpleasant incident, he is ready to offer himself for
such punishment. For children understand the barbaric ritual of
punishment when it really has the barbaric ritual significance.
But the punishment must be inflicted by the victim’s peers. There
are few adults who can with any dignity inflict punishment upon
children—for the dignity with which punishment is given depends
upon the equality of the punisher and the punished, and on the
implicit understanding that if the case had happened to be different
the rôles would have been reversed.
It will be perceived that this leaves discipline entirely a matter for
children to attend to among themselves, with no interference by
adults, and no imposition of codes of justice beyond their years and
understanding. Punishment, in this sense, cannot be meted out
unless the aggrieved parties are angry and the aggressor ashamed;
but let no adult imagine that he can tell whether an offending child
is ashamed or not. Shame is a destructive emotion which a healthy
child tries to repress. He does not say, “I am sorry.” He brazens out
his crime until he provokes the injured parties to an anger which
explodes into swift punishment, after which he is one of them again
and all is well.
But the abdication of adults from the office of judge-jury-and-
executioner of naughty children, destroys the last vestiges of the
caste system which separates children from adults. It puts an end to
superimposed authority, and to goodness as a conforming to the
mysterious commands of such authority. It places the child in exactly
such a relationship to a group of equals as he will bear in adult life,
and it builds in him the sense of responsibility for his actions which is
the final demand that civilization makes upon the individual. And the
importance of the school as a milieu for such a process is in its
opportunity to undo at once, early in life, the psychological mischief
brought about, almost inevitably, by the influences of the home.
There!—I have let the cat out of the bag. I had intended to be very
discreet, and say nothing that could possibly offend anybody. But I
have said what will offend everybody—except parents. They,
goodness knows, are fully aware that a home is no place to bring
children up. They see what it does to the children plainly enough.
But we, the children, are so full of repressed resentments against
the tyrannies inflicted upon us by our parents, and so full of
repressed shame at the slavery to which we subjected them, that we
cannot bear to hear a word said against them. The sentimentality
with which we regard the home is an exact measure of the secret
grudge we actually bear against it. Woe to the person who is so rash
as to say what we really feel!—But the mischief is done, and I may
as well go on and say in plain terms that the function of the school is
to liberate the children from the influences of parental love.
For parental love—as any parent will tell you—is a bond that
constrains too tyrannically on both sides to permit of real friendship,
which is a relationship between equals. The child goes to school in
order to cease to be a son or daughter—and incidentally in order to
permit the two harassed adults at home to cease in some measure
to be father and mother. The child must become a free human
being; and he can do so only if he finds in school, not a new flock of
parents, but adults who can help him to learn the lesson of freedom
and friendship. But that is something which I can discuss better in
dealing with the subject of Love.
XXV. Love

R EMEMBER that it is not my fault that we find ourselves

discussing so inflammable a topic! But if you insist on knowing
what education can do to bring our conduct in the realm of love up
to the standard of civilization, I can but answer your question. We
have found that in the realm of work, civilization demands of us
Enterprise, and Democracy, and Responsibility. And I think that all
the demands of civilization upon our conduct in the realm of love
might be summed up in the same terms. We despise those persons
who are afraid of adventure in love; who in devotion to some
mawkish dream-ideal, turn away from the more difficult and
poignant realities of courtship and marriage; and we are beginning
to despise those whose enterprise is too cheaply satisfied in
prostitution or in the undemocratic masculine exploitation of women
of inferior economic status; and not only the crasser offences against
sexual morality, but a thousand less definable but not less real
offences within the realm of legal marriage, may be described as
attempts to evade responsibility. I leave you to work out the
implications of this system of morals for yourself. What I particularly
want to speak of here is the effect of parental influences upon
children with respect to their later love-life, and the function of
education in dissolving those influences.
It is no secret that adults generally have not yet learned how to be
happy in love. And the reason for that, aside from the economic
obstacles to happiness which do not come within the scope of our
inquiry, is that they are still children. They are seeking to renew in
an adult relationship the bond which existed between themselves
and their parents in infancy. Or they are seeking to settle a long-
forgotten childish grudge against their parents, by assuming the
parental rôle in this new relationship. And in both efforts, they find
themselves encouraged by each other. Naturally enough! A woman
likes to discover, and enjoys “mothering,” the child in her husband;
she likes to find also in him the god and hero which her father was
to her in her infancy. And a happy marriage is one in which a man is
at any moment unashamedly her child or (let us not shrink from
using these infantile and romantic terms!) her god. But it is a bore to
have to mother a man all the time; it is in fact slavery. And it is
equally a bore to have to look up to a man all the time and think him
wise and obey him; for that also is slavery. The happy marriage has
something else—the capacity for swift and unconscious change and
interchange of these rôles. The happy lovers can vary the tenor of
their relationship because they are free to be more than one thing to
each other. And they have that freedom because they are equals.
That equality is comradeship, is friendship.
Do not imagine that friendship in love implies any absence of that
profound worship and self-surrender which is characteristic of the
types of love that are modelled upon the infantile and parental
patterns. This is as ridiculous as it would be to suppose that equality
in other fields of life means that no one shall ever lead and no one
ever follow. Equality in love means only the freedom to experience
all, instead of compulsion to experience only a part, of the emotional
possibilities of love in a single relationship.
I would gladly explicate this aspect of my theme in some detail,
were it not that it might incidentally comprise a catalogue of
domestic difficulties and misunderstandings at once too tragic and
too ridiculous—and some of you might object to my unfolding what
you would consider to be your own unique and private woes in
public.
I will, therefore, only point out that even what we term the civilized
part of mankind is far from measuring up to this demand of
civilization in the world of love, the demand for equality. It may
seem somewhat of an impertinence to blame this fact upon the early
influences of the home, when there are so many outstanding
customs and laws and economic conditions which are founded on
the theory of the inequality of men and women. But these customs
and laws and conditions are in process of change—and the home
influences of which I speak are not. Our problem is to consider if
these influences may not be dissolved by the school. For, mark you,
what happens when they are not! Wedded love, as based upon
those undissolved influences, comes into a kind of disgrace; serious-
minded men and women ask themselves whether such a bondage is
tolerable; a thousand dramas and novels expose the iniquities of the
thing; and the more intellectually adventurous in each generation
begin to wonder if the attempt at faithful and permanent love ought
not to be abandoned.
Let me relate only one widely typical—and perhaps only too-familiar
—instance. A boy grows up poisoned with mother-love—er, I mean,
petted and praised and waited upon by his mother, until he finds the
outside world, with its comparative indifference to his
wonderfulness, a very cold place indeed. Nevertheless, he adjusts
himself to it, becomes a man, and falls in love. With whom does he
fall in love? Perhaps with a girl like his mother; or perhaps with one
quite opposite to her in all respects,—for he may have conceived an
unconscious resentment against his mother, for betraying him by her
praise into expecting too much of an unfeeling world. But in any
case, he is going to experience again, in his relationship with his
sweetheart, the ancient delights of being mothered. He is going to
respond to that pleasure so unmistakably as to encourage the girl in
further demonstrations of motherliness. He is in fact going to reward
her more for motherliness than for any other trait in her possession.
And the girl, who wants a lover and a husband and a man, is going
to find herself with a child on her hands. But that is not the worst. If
the girl does not rebel against the situation, the man is likely to,
when he finds out just what it is. For he, too, despite his
unconscious infantilism, wants a girl and a sweetheart and a wife.
And when he realizes that he is being sealed up again in the over-
close, over-sweet love-nest of his infancy, that he is becoming a
baby, he revolts. He does not realize what has happened—he only
knows that he no longer cherishes a romantic love for her. Naturally.
Romantic love is a love between equals. She has become his mother
—and he flees her, and perhaps goes through life seeking and
escaping from his mother in half a hundred women. When this
happens, we call him a Don Juan or a libertine or a scoundrel or a
fool. But that does not alter his helplessness in the grip of infantile
compulsions.
I do not wish to exaggerate the ability of education to dissolve,
without the aid of a special psychic technique, any deeply-rooted
infantile dispositions of this sort; but, aside from such flagrant cases,
there are thousands of well-conducted men and women who just fail
to free themselves sufficiently from the emotions of childhood to be
happy in love. Besides their own selves, the sensible adult beings
that they believe they are, there are within them pathetic and
absurd children whose demands upon the relationship well-nigh tear
it to pieces. It is in regard to these that it seems not improbable that
a civilized education could secure their happiness for them. And it
would do so by supplanting the emotionally over-laden atmosphere
of the home with the invigorating air of equality. I refer in particular
to equality between the sexes. So long as girls and boys are to any
extent educated separately, encouraged to play separately, and
treated as different kinds of beings, the remoteness hinders the
growth of real friendship between the sexes, and leaves the mind
empty of any realistic concepts which would serve to resist the
transfer to the other sex, at the romantic age, of repressed infantile
feelings about the beloved parent. What we have to deal with in
children might without much exaggeration be described as the
disinclination of one who has been a lover to become a friend. The
emotions of the boy towards his mother are so rich and deep that he
is inclined to scorn the tamer emotions of friendship with girl-
children. (Notoriously, he falls in love first with older women in
whom he finds some idealized image of his mother.) He is
contemptuous of little girls because they are not the mother-goddess
of his infancy. What he must learn, and the sooner the better, is that
girls are interesting human beings, that they are good comrades and
jolly playfellows. He must learn to like them for what they are.
Ordinarily, the love-life of the adolescent boy is a series of more or
less shocked discoveries that the women upon whom he has set his
youthful fancy do not, in fact, correspond to his infantile dream. Half
the difficulties of marriage are involved in the painful adjustment of
the man to the human realities of his beloved; the other half being,
of course, the similarly painful adjustment of the girl to similar
human realities. He could be quite happy with her, were the other
dear charmer, his infantile ideal, away. And it is one of the functions
of education to chase this ideal away, to dissolve the early emotional
bond to the parent, by making the real world in general and the real
other sex in particular so humanly interesting that it will be preferred
to the infantile fantasy.
I may be mistaken, but I think that half of this task will be easy
enough. Girls, I am sure, are only in appearance and by way of
saving their face, scornful of the activities of boys; they will be glad
enough to join with them on terms of complete equality, and ready
to admire and like them for what they humanly are. It will not be so
easy to persuade boys to admire and like girls for what they are; and
it will be the business of the school to dramatize unmistakably for
these young masculine eyes the human interestingness of the other
sex—to give the girls a chance to show their actual ability to
compete on equal and non-romantic terms with boys in all their
common undertakings.
To make realities more interesting than dreams—that is the task of
education. And of all the realities whose values we ignore, in childish
preoccupation with our feeble dreams, the human realities of
companionship which each sex has to offer the other are among the
richest. Despite all our romantic serenadings, men and women have
only begun to discover each other. Just as, despite our solemn
sermonizings on the blessedness of work, we have only begun to
discover what creative activity can really mean to us. Work and love!
—
A Voice. “Won’t you please come back to the subject of education?”
What! Is it possible—is it credible—is it conceivable—that you have
been following this discussion thus far, and have not yet realized that
education includes everything on earth, and in the heavens above
and the waters beneath? Come back to the subject of education!
Why, it is impossible to wander away from the subject of education!
I defy you to do so. All the books that have ever been written, all
the pictures that have ever been painted, all the songs ever sung, all
the machines ever invented, all the wars and all the governments, all
the joyous and sorry loves of men and women, are but part of that
vast process, the education of mankind. When you leave this
discussion, you will not have dropped the subject; you will continue
it in your next conversation, whether it be with your employer or
your sweetheart or your milkman. You cannot get away from it. And
though you perish, and an earthquake overwhelms your city in ruins,
and the continent on which you live sinks in the sea, something that
you have done or helped to do, something which has been a part of
your life, the twisted fragments of the office building where you
went to work or the old meerschaum pipe you so patiently coloured,
will be dug up and gazed upon by future generations, and what you
can teach them by these poor relics if by nothing else, will be a part
of their education....
XXVI. Education in 1947 A. D.

B Y way of epilogue, let us be Utopian, after the fashion of Plato

and H. G. Wells. Let me, as a returned traveller from the not-
too-distant future, picture for you concretely the vaster implications
of education in, say, the year 1947, as illustrated by the public school
in the village of Pershing, N. Y.

“But which is the school-building?” I asked my guide.

He laughed. “I am surprised at you,” he said. “Surprised that you
should ask such a question!”
“Why?” I demanded innocently.
“Because,” he said, “in the files of our historical research department
I once came across a faded copy of a quaint old war-time publication
called the Liberator.[4] It attracted my attention because it appeared
to have been edited by a grizzled old fire-eater whom I recently met,
Major General Eastman, the head of our War College. In those days,
it seems, he thought he was a pacifist. Time’s changes!”
“Ah, yes—General Eastman. I remember him well,” I said. “But what
has that got to do with—”
“In that curious little magazine was an article on education. It was
signed by you. Don’t you remember what you wrote? Didn’t you
believe what you said? Or didn’t you fully realize that you were living
in a time when prophecies come true? You ask me where the school-
building is. Why, there isn’t any school-building.”
We were standing in the midst of a little park, about the size of a
large city block, bordered by a theatre, a restaurant, an office-
building, several handsome factory buildings of the newer and more
cheerful style, a library, a newspaper plant, and a church.
My companion pointed to one of the buildings. “That,” he said, “is
the children’s theatre. There they present their own plays and
pageants. In connection with the work there they learn singing and
dancing, scene painting, and costume. Of course they also learn
about plays—I suppose from your primitive point of view you would
say that we conduct a course in dramatic literature. But all those
antique phrases of early educational practice have passed out of
use. We would say that the children are learning to develop their
creative impulses. We consider our theatre very important in that
respect. It is the beginning of everything.
“Next in importance, perhaps, are those factories. They include a
carpenter shop, a pottery, and a machine shop. Here is made
everything which is used throughout the school. And there is the
power house which furnishes the electric current for the whole
establishment. You understand, of course, that the boys and girls
get a complete theoretical as well as practical grasp of the facts they
are dealing with—there is no neglect of what I suppose you would
call book-learning, here.
“Over there is the textile and garment factory, which designs and
makes the costumes for the plays and pageants. You will not be
surprised to learn that the garment-makers at any given period are
the most active supporters of the propaganda for an outdoor
theatre. It would give them a chance to do more costumes!...
“Yes, we have politics here. The question of an outdoor theatre is
being agitated very warmly just now. The pupils have complete
control of the school budget of expenditure. There is only so much
money to spend each year, you see, at present, though there is a
movement on foot to make the institution self-supporting; but I’m
afraid that will depend on the political situation. Ultimately, of
course, we expect to put the whole of industry under the
Department of Education.... But I’m afraid that’s going too deeply
into a situation you could hardly be expected to understand.
“At any rate to return to our school, the opposition to the outdoor
theatre is from the scientific groups, who want an enlargement of
their laboratories.... The architectural and building groups are
neutral—they are working on plans for both projects, and all they
want is that the question should be settled one way or the other at
once, so they can go to work. There will be a meeting tonight, at
which a preliminary vote will be taken. Yes, our politics are quite old-
fashioned—Greek, in fact.
“The shops? They are managed by shop committees of the workers.
Distribution of products to the various groups which use them is
effected through a distributing bureau, which has charge of the
book-keeping and so forth. There has been a change in distribution
recently, however. At first the shops merely made what was ordered
by the various groups, and requisitions were the medium of
exchange. But the shops became experimental and enterprising, and
produced what they liked on the chance of its being wanted. This
made a show-place necessary, and as for various reasons ordinary
money became the medium of exchange, the show-place became a
kind of department store. Then some of the groups decided to use
part of their subsidy in advertising in the school newspaper and
magazines. They are working out some very interesting principles in
their advertising, too, as you will find. They have to tell the truth....
“There is the printing establishment. No, the paper and the
magazines are not self-supporting—though the school advertising
helps. They’re subsidized. We quite believe in that.
“And there—you can get a glimpse of the greenhouses and gardens.
Botany and so forth.... The library is the centre of the research
groups. History, sociology, economics—finding out what and why.
Very informal and very earnest, as you’ll find.... The groups? Oh, the
time one stays in each group varies with the individual. But every
one likes to be able to boast quietly of an M. P.—that means a
‘masterpiece’ in the old mediaeval sense; a piece of work that shows
you’ve passed the apprentice stage—in a reasonable number of
departments. Some Admirable Crichtons go in for an M. P. in
everything!...
“The restaurant—that’s quite important. The cooking groups give a
grand dinner every little while, and everybody goes and dines quite
in state, with dancing afterward. We learn the best of bourgeois
manners—makes it quite impossible to distinguish an immigrant’s
child from the scions of our old families. The result is that the best
families are discarding their manners in order to retain their
distinction! Very amusing....
“The church? You mean that building over there, I suppose? That
isn’t a church—not in the sense you mean. It’s our meeting place.
You see, since your time churches have come to be used so much
for meetings that when our architecture group came to plan an
assembly hall it was quite natural for them to choose the
ecclesiastical style. Anyway, I understand it’s a return to their
original purpose....”
“But,” I said, “this school is just like the world outside!”
“Except,” he said, “in one particular. In the world outside we still
have certain vestiges of class privilege and exploitation—
considerably toned down from their former asperities, but still
recognizable as relics of capitalism. In the school we have play,
production and exchange as they would exist in the outside world if
these things were to be done and managed wholly with the intention
of making better and wiser and happier citizens. The difference, of
course, is simply that one is run with an educational and the other
with a productive intention.”
“The difference seems to me,” I remarked, “that your school is really
democratic and your adult world isn’t quite.”
“That is one way of putting it,” he conceded.
“And I should think,” I said warmly, “that after going to these
schools, your people would want the rest of the world run on exactly
the same plan.”
“It does rather have that effect,” he admitted cautiously. “In fact, the
Educational party, as it is called, is very rapidly rising into power.
Since you are unfamiliar with our politics, I should explain that the
Educational party was formed, after the unfortunate events of 1925,
by the amalgamation of the United Engineers, the O. G. U., and the
Farmers’ League. Its chief figure is the sainted Madame Goldman,
the organizer of the Women’s Battalion in the First Colonial War....”
“What surprises me,” I interrupted, “is that your conservatives—”
“Tut! we have no conservatives—they call themselves Moderates.”
“I am surprised, then, that your Moderates allow such schools to
exist! Of course they will revolutionize any society in which they
are!”
“Well,” said my companion, “but what could they do? Once you
begin making schools for the children, you start out on the principle
that education is learning how to live—and you end here.”
I pondered this. “Not necessarily,” I said at last. “You might have
ended with schools in which the children of the poor were taught
how to be efficient wage-slaves.”
“Ah, yes,” said my friend, “but they smashed that attempt away back
in 1924.”
“Did they? I’m very glad to hear it!” I cried.... “By the bye, how
much do these schools cost—all over the country?”
“Less per year than we spent per day on the Second Colonial War....
But this is enough of description. You shall see for yourself. Come!”
he said.
We started toward the theatre.
“Play,” he was saying, “is according to our ideas more fundamental
and more important in life than work. Consequently the theatre—”
But what he said about the theatre would take us far from anything
which we are now accustomed to consider education. It involves no
less a heresy than the calm assumption that the artist type is the
highest human type, and that the chief service which education can
perform for the future is the deliberate cultivation of the faculty of
“creative dreaming.”...
I venture to quote only one sentence:
“Mankind needs more poets.”
 APPENDIX
A DEFINITION OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

(From a bulletin issued by the Progressive Education

Association, Washington, D. C.)

“The aim of Progressive Education is the freest and fullest

development of the individual, based upon the scientific study of his
physical, mental, spiritual, and social characteristics and needs.
“Progressive Education as thus defined implies the following
conditions:

“1. Freedom To Develop Naturally

“The conduct of the pupil should be self-governed according to the
social needs of his community, rather than by arbitrary laws.... Full
opportunity for initiative and self-expression should be provided,
together with an environment rich in interesting material that is
available for the free use of every pupil.

“2. Interest the Motive of All Work

“Interest should be satisfied and developed through: (1) Direct and
indirect contact with the world and its activities, and use of the
experience thus gained. (2) Application of knowledge gained, and
correlation between different subjects. (3) The consciousness of
achievement.

“3. The Teacher a Guide, Not a Task-Master

“... Progressive teachers will encourage the use of all the senses,
training the pupils in both observation and judgment; and instead of
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