Education

Why the General Principles of Our School System Have a False Foundation

ALDOUS HUXLEY

EDITOR'S NOTE:—This is the first in a series of articles on the general subject of education by Aldous Huxley, the well known English novelist and critic. Beginning with a general survey of the present day educational system, particularly as to its theory, Mr. Huxley will turn in subsequent articles to a discussion of modern education in its more practical aspects. The purpose of this series is to state the true aims of education, and to suggest how these aims may be attained without necessarily revolutionizing the existing methods of the schools.

PART ONE

EDUCATION is applied to the mind and to the body. The body is visible and our ideas about it are, in consequence, tolerably correct. Wc are unable, on the other hand, to sec the mind, and find it difficult in consequence to understand its nature. That is the main reason why our systems of mental education are so full of mistakes. We do not and wc cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, for that matter, what anything really is. Still, wc can get along very well for all practical purposes without knowing. We have no conception as to the real nature of electricity; but we ride in tram cars, we listen in, we make use of klaxons, electric cigar lighters and permanent waving machines. Without knowing anything about the real and intimate nature of mind, wc ought to be able to form quite adequate working hypotheses about it—good enough at any rate to serve as foundations for a system of practical education.

Men have talked in a loose metaphorical way about "the contents of the minds," "the storehouse of memory," "the threshold of consciousness." Incidents, for them, are "imprinted on the memory" and they have "explored the recesses of their minds" in search of hidden motives or mislaid knowledge. Such phrases and many others as vividly picturesque and no less inaccurate arc constantly repeated until, finally, those who use them begin to take them seriously and come to regard the mind as though it really were a sort of house with rooms, or a box divided up into compartments into which things can be put. This pretty conceit is systematized and becomes a scientific hypothesis.

THE compartments are labelled, their occupants are given names. There are, besides the pigeon-hole of the intellect, an affective compartment, full of emotions, and a conative compartment in which the will resides. And of recent years the psycho-analysts have added a sort of basement, in whose almost unrelieved darkness the vermin of the unconscious crawl and pullulate. "On the threshold," says Dr. Freud, "there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them and denies them admittance to the reception room (of consciousness), when he disapproves of them." The net result of the combined activities of all these sensations, associating ideas, emotions, conations, censors and the like is an individual—is you or I.

Now the mind, whatever the language we may use to describe it, is obviously not a box with compartments. The mind, like the body, with which it is associated to form an individual whole, is a living organism, composed of interdependent parts, which wc may for convenience of description name and classify as separate entities, but which have in reality no separate existence apart from the whole to which they belong. The first mistake cf the psychologists was to reduce the living mind to a mere receptacle. The next was to endow their system of classification with a real objective existence. The catalogue has been treated as though it were the reality which it summarily describes. Thus, ideas have become independent entities capable of associating with similar ideas, much as birds of the same species mate together in the spring. The Freudian censor is a real person with lodgings inside the skull. The emotions arc so many allegorical figures, like the Virtues, Muses and Deadly Sins in old pictures.

The most superficial consideration of the nature of living things should have preserved psychologists from these fallacies. We do not treat the body of an animal as though it were merely the sum of its parts. We do not say, for example, "I sec a tail, and four legs, and a pair cf eyes, and two ears, and a lot of teeth and fur coming down the street." Wc say first, "I see a dog," and then proceed to classify its parts. The whole organism is the fundamental thing and gives sense to the parts. The parts co-operate to make the whole, are interdependent and have no significance, cannot even exist, except in relation to the whole organism.

IT is the same with the mind. The mind of an individual is a fore-ordained pattern varying in detail from the norm of his species. The whole mind in all its aspects, intellectual, affective, ccnative, is involved in the absorption of experience from the outside world. Ideas do not associate themselves inside the box which is called the mind; they are associated by a living organism, whose dominating intellectual passion is a passion for meaning and significance. Sensations, however frequently repeated, do not automatically imprint themselves on the memory; the living organism receives them only if they seem significant and therefore worthy of attention. The mind is not a receptacle that can be mechanically filled. It is alive and must be nourished. Nourishment is best absorbed by the organism that feeds with appetite. If we treat the stomach as though it were a bucket and pump food into it, it will in all probability reject the nourishment in a paroxysm of nausea. So will the mind.

The crude hypothesis, which regards the intellect as a compartment in the mind, inhabited -by autonomous ideas whose numbers can be increased by the simple process of introducing new ideas into the box, seems still to dominate the Education Offices of the Western World. Most of our official systems of education are mere systems for pumping knowledge into the mind under pressure. There seems to be a belief among official educationists—a belief that would be pathetic and ludicrous, if it were not disastrous—that mere repetition (even if it nauseates the victim) is sufficient by itself to form good moral and intellectual habits in the childish mind, and that facts forced upon an appetiteless intellect will be retained and profitably absorbed—not promptly vomited forth. Even officials admit that the body must be regarded as a living organism. But the mind is still treated as a mere thing. Hence our extraordinary systems of education. These systems will survive, until the mind is universally regarded as a living organism, analogous with the body.

With the defects of the current official systems and the reforms devised to remedy them I shall deal at length later on. For the present I am concerned, not with practical details, but with the fundamentals underlying the whole theory of education.

HAVING decided on a satisfactory working hypothesis about the nature of the thing wc propose to educate—the mind—we must now consider how far the mind is educable, what can be achieved by training and what cannot. The questions have received a variety of answers. The extreme optimists have believed that education can achieve everything. Children, according to the optimists, come into the world with minds that arc practically blank and formless. Mould these virgin minds in the right way, and you can turn every brat into a great man. At the opposite extreme wc find the pessimists who believe that heredity is everything and that nurture can do nothing to alter mental dispositions predetermined by nature. Observation of one's fellows and the study of history lead one to believe that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes.

That people start life differently endowed with talents is a fact so obvious, that one

wonders how anyone could have been foolish enough ever to doubt it. Wc cannot manufacture Newtons and Napoleons out of little Browns and Joneses; nor, we may feel

perfectly certain, shall we ever succeed in doing so, however perfect the system of education we may finally evolve. No less obvious is the fact that we can train little Browns and Joneses to use such abilities as they possess in almost any way wc choose to impose on them. Eighty years ago the Japanese were still being trained to use their abilities in a purely oriental way. They have changed their zceltarischauung and with it their system of education. Today they arc trained to use their

abilities in a manner which is predominantly western. Similarly, the mentality of the average German in 1914 was profoundly different from that of the average German of only fifty years before. The old idealistic, domesticated German had been deliberately educated out of existence.

Wc may not be able to improve men's abilities by education; but we can certainly teach them to employ those abilities efficiently in almost any way and toward the achievement of almost any purpose. In the sphere of scientific research this fact is of the highest importance. For one of the cardinal discoveries of the nineteenth century was the discovery of a technique of scientific invention. A method was evolved by which men of average, second-rate abilities, organized in co-operating teams, could achieve many of the things which had seemed possible, in the past, only to the man of genius. Men of genius appear but rarely; average men can be trained in any numbers. The process of continuous and progressive invention can be carried on smoothly and uninterruptedly by means of the team work of suitably educated Browns and Joneses. True, the Browns and the Joneses, however numerous, well trained and well organized, can never produce those significant generalizations, which give direction to the scientific thought of a whole epoch. These illuminating syntheses are the peculiar creation of exceptional minds. What the well trained second-rates can do is to save the great man the trouble of preparing the material from which he starts to generalize. They also do valuable work in carrying the great man's ideas into practice. The theory belongs to the man of genius; the documents on which it is based and the practical applications of it are provided by the trained and regimented little men. Headlong material progress may be a desirable thing, or it may not. That is a matter of opinion. In any case, the rapidity of such progress in recent times is almost entirely due to the labours of the well trained second-rates. For good or for evil, education has altered the world.

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One final question must be asked and provisionally answered, before we proceed from general principles to practical details. What is the purpose of education, and to what end are our children sent to schools and universities?

In a previous paragraph I hinted that the aim of education was to enable every individual to achieve the maximum efficiency attainable by a person of his particular endowments. In other words, the end of education is to assist every human being to become fully and completely himself. But this statement requires certain qualifications. The individual human being is a part of a larger organism and cannot be considered except in relation to the society of which he is a member. Just as the liver and the heart cannot survive and have no meaning except in relation to the whole body, just as the intellect cannot be thought of apart from the psychological and physiological whole to which it belongs, so the human being exists and is significant only in relation to society. Education is not, and cannot be, a mere training of the isolated individual. Its aim is to help the individual to achieve his maximum efficiency within and in relation to the social organism of which he forms a part. Human beings are not by nature so highly socialized as bees or ants. We are all richly endowed with anti-social as well as with social instincts. To man's anti-social tendencies the old theologians gave the name of Original Sin. It is the business of education to encourage the social tendencies in children and to suppress, or preferably find a socially harmless outlet for, the tendencies classified under the name of Original Sin.

Such, in their most general form, are the aims of education. But it must be clearly borne in mind that there is no such thing as Education with a large E; there is no one sovereign type of training suitable to the children of any people at any period of history. Each culture has its own world-view, its own particular solution of the problem of life. Thus, the Indians lay special stress on the virtues of asceticism and quietistic resignation; they see the universe as a spatially boundless and everlasting mechanism of recurrent cycles, working according to an impersonal moral law; matter, for them, is more or less illusory and the present moment seems unimportant by comparison with the eternity of future lives; misfortune is accepted as inevitable and deserved. The education evolved by the Indians would not be suitable for the children of our contemporary West, where the unit of time is the human life, not the almost endless cycle of recurrent existences; where the active virtues are regarded as the highest, and where reaction to misfortune and a determined refusal to accept the inclement facts of nature are moral duties; where the material world is felt to be intensely, almost uniquely real, and excites a boundless curiosity; where metaphysics and a speculation that is divorced from experiment are discouraged as a waste of precious time. Take another case: the Greeks and our own mediaeval ancestors almost completely lacked the modern sense of history, the modern feeling for perspectives in time. Greek and mediaeval systems of education consequently ignored history. In our modern education the idea of historical development in time is a root idea. Again, how remote is the purely rationalistic outlook of the mediaeval schoolman from our own scientific empiricism! And with what different eyes do we and did the ancient Athenians look on beauty! For the Athenians it was the highest of spiritual values; to live beautifully was the ultimate and all-sufficient ideal. Beauty with us is, unfortunately, a matter of secondary consideration. The education of the Athenians was a training in the art of achieving beauty in life. That is most certainly not the avowed purpose of our contemporary systems of education.

Cultures vary and education is, mathematically speaking, a function of culture. It is also, to some extent, a function of state policy. The State, it is obvious, has certain rights in regard to the education of its subjects. But it would be very difficult to say how far these rights extend, or to decide a priori and theoretically the exact point at which State interference with education should stop. The historical fact remains that States have dictated and are still dictating the sort of education that their subjects are to receive. Thus, the Spartans bred up their children to be soldiers. The Jews inculcated a fanatical hatred of all who were not Jews, the Moslems of all who were not Moslems. The Catholic States of the Reformation period taught their children to hate the Protestants and the Protestants brought up theirs to detest the Papists. Contemporary French education has a decidedly anticlerical bias and education in Tennessee is officially anti-evolutionary. All modern States tinge their education, more or less consciously, with chauvinism and militarism. And all agree in insisting that the schoolmaster shall be an apostle of the Existing Order. Those who in State schools fail to preach that "whatever is, is right" are promptly shown the door. Of this I shall have more to say at a later stage. For the present I need only observe that this preaching of the Established Order makes for educational variety. For in any state the Established Order is perpetually changing; the conservative of one generation is never conserving the things his father conserved, and his sons in their turn will live to conserve something entirely new. Moreover, the things which are, and are therefore right in one country, are not the things which are, and are right in another.

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The aim of education is to assist the individual in achieving his maximum efficiency within society. No doubt. But societies alter. No two cultures have the same world-view or the same preferences among the moral virtues. Nor are the political needs of any two states ever the same. It therefore follows that the ideal of maximum individual efficiency will vary in different places and at different times, and that the methods and immediate aims of education will vary correspondingly. We must be tolerant of those whose ways are different from our own; we must be un-arrogant, ready to admit that we may be mistaken, ready to learn. In any case, however, we belong to the West. We have a western world-view and a western morality. Our education, in so far as it is not mediaeval, is modern western. It is not necessarily better than other and older systems; but it is necessarily different. Our education will develop as our whole culture develops, moulding, ever more consciously, and being moulded by, the world in which it finds itself part of a world system.