WRONG THINGS TO TEACH
By CONSTANCE REAVELEY
THERE'S a lot of education resistance nowadays." So said a working man, when I suggested that factory groups should discuss education. He never spoke a truer word. Education means
to most people a host of subjects that are remote from all the real interests of adult life, and they do not want any more of it. This is to my mind a sign that we are teaching the wrong things in the wrong way. How should we teach and what? The answer to these questions depends upon another : what sort of creature are we trying to train? What is he capable of? If we knew the answer to these questions our outlook would be more hopeful than it is. But if we allow ourselves to be enlightened not only by our own miserable performance of today, but by the long history of the race, it is clear that man is at least a spiritual animal. The physical processes of our life are subject to the same necessities, we are driven by the same kind of basic impulses, as the animals. But wt have the gift of turning these necessities to glorious gain. Eating and drinking in human life are raised to the grace of fellowship, sex is transformed into love, the herd into society. The animals have the power of movement, but we can dance ; they communicate, but we have speech, language, literature. The simian trait of inquisitiveness has carried the human mind into the heart of the atom and along the flaming ramparts of the universe beyond the Milky Way. All through this troubled history man has been persistently a lover and creator of beauty.
Nothing is more important for children than that they should know these things, and understand that the highest value of life for us is found in the aspirations and achievements of the spirit. And there is more than this that the child must understand. We are uncertainly aware that the gift of spiritual creation is not unique ;n us ; there is a spiritual world to which we belong, not as masters but as children. Today we have lost direction ; nothing more dis- concerts the conduct of life than the bewilderment of our groping search after the spiritual reality which once we knew. Our supreme need is to recognise that the bankruptcy of today is not our natural state, and to find our way back to the filial relation to God which is the foundation of sanity.
Apprehension of our spiritual endowment and calling comes
mainly through literature and history. The discovery that our own experience has been endured, and interpreted in the beauty and logic of words, by the men and women of the past, who being dead vet speak, is necessary to our endeavour to see our own life in a true perspective, and with a just conception of its possibilities. There is strong comfort in the knowledge that in the life of the spirit time cannot divide us, that the past and present form a single society and that we face the incredible agonies of this present age fortified by the wisdom and suffering of our forbears, without whom we shall not be made perfect.
Not everyone is sensitive to literature or to history. Those whose range of imagination is tied to immediate experience can find their part in the spiritualising of life through the appreciation of music and art, and often most vividly through their own activity as artists. This may come to them in the grace and precision of movement, dancing, diving, skating, singing ; or through the work of their hands. Manual skill has been driven out of the market by the ingenuity of the maker of machines. It must find its place as one of the personal dignities of leisure. It has a graver significance ; the ignominy of unemployment is relieved if a man can use his skill to enhance the beauty and convenience of his own home. In actual unemployment a man is often too dejected to have the heart to acquire new skills, and his self-disgust at being out of a job is not necessarily healed by submitting to instruction like a schoolboy. His skills should be already in his possession, carpentry, decorating, boot and shoe repairing, gardening, toy-making, radio repairs, and so on. There are similar acts which can give a girl the sense of personal creative contribution to the grace of life. For men and women alike the home is the focus of the spiritual life.
But whether the sense of the supremacy of the spiritual values. comes through literature, through aesthetic experience, or again through the beauty of the natural world, life has to be lived in a diffi- cult environment. The prime fact about the actual world which the child must find his place in is the necessity of supporting vast populations by mass production. In the Atlantic region, production is competitive. This means that large numbers of people arc caught in a trap ; whether they like it or not they will have to earn a living by working arduously all their lives in factories or shops or mines.
It is through understanding why there is this intolerable pressure to produce that men can adjust to it without losing courage .ind temper. They need to see their own lives in a perspective. Every- body therefore ought to learn recent industrial history, which will disclose to them reasons for pride, and problems of intense interest, as well as preparing them for their own stormy future. And every- one who is capable of abstract argument ought to learn an outline of current economic ideas.
The boy and girl not only need to be equipped with understand- ing of the general condition of modern life, but also need handles b'y which they can get a purchase on the system which dominates them. In concrete terms, they need some acquaintance with the law by which Englishmen have tried to impose order and justice upon the chaotic struggle for existence, with Parliamentary govern- ment by which law is made (including the story of the decade before the last war, when we succeeded in using this procedure to obtain great changes without violence), and with something of local government. Coming still closer to his own life, the child needs some knowledge of the various kinds of work that are going to be available to him, sea-faring, farming, railways, building, industry, transport. Some part of this instruction can be given in books, more through films, visits and personal contacts.
One of the most powerful handles for the mastery of life is language. Many people cannot use it with confidence or precision..
A great deal of frustration, incompetenCe and failure arises from inability to express meaning in English. Accidents and inefficiency in factories, unhappiness in personal relations, countless inferiority complexes, have their origin in peoples' speechlessness when clear explanation is needed. All schools teach English: it seems that research is needed to enable us to teach it a great deal better.
In our small planet it is impossible to get away from our neigh- bours ; it is therefore necessary to understand them. For this pur-
pose geography should be taught as a humane study. In order that this subject may make its proper impression upon the imagination, and upon the picture we form of the world we live in, it should be taught not mainly from books but by means of travel, in this country and abroad, and of the film as a substitute for travel. The film needs supplementing by history and art and by the study of languages. It appears that not everybody is capable of learning a foreign language with accuracy ; but the British tommy, who is our best ambassador, has never let ignorance of language stand in his way for a moment. Such a natural linguist deserves to be helped in his school days along the line of his own purpose, which is to converse with everyone he meets.
If we were to put all these subjects into the school curriculum we should have to take some out. This could well be done. I should regard most of the mathematics that is taught for School Certificate, most of the science, some of the history, and (unless in exceptional cases) all the Latin, as special subjects to be studied after School Certificate as a preparation for the university or voca- tional courses. The factual subjects I have advocated are not easier or more enjoyable but more useful than the present ones. We should be educated not for examinations but for life.
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