Wars have become fanatical crusades, waged with millions of soldiers, millions of money and million fold multiplied means of destruction and slaughter.
Now these and many cognate nuisances are the result of an educational system, which instead of guiding the natural change from childhood to adolescence and maturity, arrests juvenile development at its most mischievous stage and forces the experienced statesmen to treat the country as an orphanage in which the age limit is fourteen, and the orphans are its mentally defective inmates.
Of course this system, like all other out-of-date systems, does not enjoy complete immunity from change in practice. When the schools are invaded by the successful men of business and the professions they are forced to develop, however reluctantly and contemptuously at first, a scientific side and then a business side and these new sides encroach on the classic routine until it, too becomes only a side and a losing one. Rugby for instance is not what it was a hundred years ago. But the older schooling still prevails enough to make sure that the class enriched by our property system is the one which commands the ruling majority in Parliament, in Upper Division of the civil service in diplomacy; and except when there is a world war on, in commissioned ranks of the fighting services.
The worst of it is that our sincere educationists are unanimous in pressing everybody to be kept at schools until they are eighteen. This will satisfy the parents who wish their children to be ladies and gentlemen with the manners and speech and class prejudices proper to that condition. But the object for a sane State is to make good citizens of its children, that is to make them productive or serviceable members of the community. The two objects are opposite and incompatible, for there is no advantage in wearing an old school tie if you have to share the social burden of labour and service. If there are no schools available except schools for the poor in which a slave mentality is inculcated and schools for the rich in which children are trained for a life of leisure, luxury and privilege, or at best a monopoly of commercial, professional and political opportunity which is politely called leadership, then the hasty conclusion is that children had better be kept out of school at all costs and Eton and its like razed to the ground, and their foundations sown with salt.
But untutored ignorance does not make for good citizenship, any system of instruction and training is better than none at all. Old system must go on until we provide a better one. Meanwhile, however, it is clearly no remedy for our present bad citizenship to impose Etonian education on the multitudinous proletariat, including its poor middle-class section by scholarships entitling the holders to 'places' at the expensive schools with extension of the age for compulsory schooling to eighteen, and the rest of the ladder to the university. Our Etonian system must in fact die a natural death through the expropriation of its present plutocratic patrons and the competition of a new organisation of the young.
That new system is beyond my powers of planning. It will I fancy develop from the middle class schools in which the pupils are mostly day boys and day girls, dividing their daily lives between the schools and the home. I was a day boy in a school at which there were both day boys and boarders, the day boys, being more numerous, despised the boarders and spoke of them as the skinnies. The boarders were equally contemptuous and scornful.
Now in Ireland a day boy was really only a half day boy, he did not return to school in the afternoon. The school was not inspected nor kept up to the mark in any way by the education authorities: in fact, there was no mark to be kept up to. Lessons were set for me which I had to learn on pain of punishment. But the punishment was not cruel enough to effect its purpose with boys who like me were free enough at home to have something more interesting to do than pouring over unreadable school books; however I was not taught manners, nor class loyalties nor held to any standards of dress or care of my appearance. Discipline was confined to silence and sitting still, which did not prevent me from carrying on furtive conversations or fights with the boy sitting next, who might be a friend or a foe. I hated school and learnt there nothing of what it professed to teach. All the work of educating, disciplining and forming myself which should have been done for me when I was child I had to do for myself as an adult.
My educational history except for the liberty gift and the musical home is common to the main body of prolaterian upstarts and genteel younger sons who, being at least literate, have to conduct the business and politics of this country and its colonies.
Still the day-boy system unlike the Etonian is improvable, the division of a child's life between home and school can be changed, and as the changes take the child more and more from home into school life successive points are reached at which the school takes the place of the family and the teachers of the parents. School welfare work develops until children are secured against poverty, exploitation, domestic tyranny or neglect, and so on, bit by bit, until the school instead of being an infectious penitentiary in to which children are driven to have the three Rs whacked into them, becomes a community in which parents can see enough of their children and children of their parents, to sustain family ties without perpetuating their very serious deficiencies and provides an organized child life that does not now exist at all except in embryo in the Boy Scouts, Girls Guides etc.
