💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › freedom-press-london-education-by-force.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:16:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Education by Force Author: Freedom Press Date: November 1, 1886 Language: en Topics: Freedom Press, Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, education Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 1 -- No. 2, retrieved on September 3, 2019, from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=2981. Notes: Freedom Press, London
The London School Board have for years past been making themselves
generally odious to the people whom they nominally exist to serve, the
working classes. When a family can barely scrape together enough to buy
food and clothes, and too little of those, it seems hard that the bigger
children should be carried off forcibly to school just when they could
be earning a shilling or two and so getting something better than bread
and tea every day for dinner, something more to nourish their bodies.
For after all, in these days of machinery and unskilled labor, it is
bodies that count more than minds in getting a job-bodily strength, and
that sort of sharpness which does not come from book-learning so much as
from knocking about at home and in the streets, from having to shift for
one's self and go early to work. This is what the poor learn from their
experience, and it is hard on them when they are forced not only to act
in contradiction to it-to lose the children's earnings and the chance of
starting them betimes in life-but to pay school fees as well. It is very
hard on them, for, like all compulsion, it outrages their sense of
justice.
"Hard on individuals," admits your social reformer (one of those
,excellent persons who are always doing other people good against their
will), "bard, perhaps; but every one must be educated, and as no -other
means avail, we must educate them by force."
Where is the necessity? Knowledge must be free. Yes; who has a right to
conceal or forbid it I To know, to understand, is one of the ,deepest
and most universal of human cravings; hardly a child is born without it,
and in each and all it must be satisfied. Yes; who has a right to thwart
the desire I Large numbers of thin era are filled with -an eager longing
to impart their Ideas, to explain the facts they have understood, and
enjoy the intense pleasure of feeding growing human minds with the great
world treasure of the generalized results of human experience; such men
and women must be unshackled in their self-chosen social labor. Yes;
what better could their fellows demand of their energies? The "must" of
all this appeals to no external force; it justifies itself by the
immediate response of the inmost sense of what is just and fitting
within each one of us. In this sense we must have education; and in the
future we shall have it, because it is a pressing need of human nature,
a need which we have the means to satisfy when we so choose. We shall
necessarily have free education when we choose to be free.
But what of the "must" of education by force? It is immediately
expedient, says the practical man. Parents are too degraded to see that
their children ought to be fed with knowledge as well as bread.
Employers are too brutal in their chase of cheap labor to withstand the
temptation to increase profits by preying upon the life energy of little
children. Parents are too selfish and too desperate in their misery not
to yield to the capitalists' offers. And so, says our practical man, the
great, good, wise government must step in and coerce all these foolish
people for their good; must force the capitalists to employ older hands,
the parents to send the children to school, the children to go and
everybody who has money to pay for the whole process, education and
coercion both.
So the -rest, good, wise government, which knows what every one really
needs before he knows himself, and can give it like the fairy godmother
in the stories, has interfered. It has interfered, through its local
agent the London School Board, a little too much during the last few
weeks; and the spirit of the workmen who have any spirit left, has
rebelled, and the wire-pullers are beginning to talk about "free"
education. Now this talk is at bottom simply a wrangle as to who shall
pay the piper, the middle-class people whose representatives passed the
Education Act, or that other set of people who are theoretically
supposed to benefit by it. As the coercers have some money and the
coerced have next to none, the first will probably have to pay the cost
of their experiment, and quite right too. But in fact the very poor do
not pay school fees as it is, and to the well-to-do workman they are the
lightest of his many burdens. So what this sort of "Socialism"-and-water
has to do with freedom may be left to social reformers to determine.
Turn we to inquire what it is that stands in the way of the really free
education we have spoken of above. What but the great, good, wise
government itself, the government whose interference is supposed so
necessary?
The government after all is merely a collection of more or less
dunder-headed individuals, guilty of the supreme impertinence of trying
to manage other people's business. It is not wholly their own fault, but
we will not here say anything of the wisdom of those who helped to put
them in such a position. Well, the government's idea of managing this
business is to strictly maintain the right of lucky and clever people to
keep for themselves all the social wealth they can extract from other
men's labor, so long as they extract it according to rule, and pay the
government for making the rules and protecting the right. One of these
payments is the education rate.
The government, representing the interests of property, is forced by the
growth of human feeling in society to do something for the children of
the poor, or conscientious people would be discontented, and all
discontent is dangerous to property. Of course ceasing to protect the
monopoly of the few, which is the cause of the misery and degradation of
the many, is not to be thought of, though that alone could set the
people free with regard to education as well as everything else. No, the
monopoly of property must be protected at all costs, even that of
levying a tax on the monopolists. And then the money can be used to
instruct the children carefully in the sacredness of property and the
goodness, wisdom, and might of governments. Fortunately life is
educating them energetically in another direction, or our children might
grow up more abject than their fathers. As it is, they are crammed in
flocks like geese, without any regard to individual capacity, with a
mass of useless, isolated facts, which stultify the brains of as many as
they develop. Further, children are encouraged to compete with one
another until the weak and stupid are overstrained, or crushed mind and
body, and the strong and intelligent are made conceited and overbearing,
ready to seize every opportunity of climbing to selfish prosperity on
the shoulders of their fellows. As for the teachers, the very love of
teaching is worried out of them with over-work, red-tape officialism,
and inspections, and the children feel the natural consequences. They
feel them in the hurried, impatient, perfunctory, dry or inappropriate
teaching they get, and still more in the bright, loving, patient,
interesting, individually appropriate teaching they lose.
All this is a heavy price to pay for an imperfect knowledge of the three
R.s, which is all the valuable information most children pick up at a
Board School. And after all, the vast majority would pick up so much if
no Board Schools were in existence. The School Board has failed as yet
in reaching the waifs and strays, and it has checked voluntary efforts
to do so. No doubt a much larger number of children go to school now
than ten years ago, but that cannot be entirely credited to forcible
education. The Education Act was merely a concession to the growth of
social feeling and the sense of the importance of knowledge. It was
effect, not cause; and the same causes, if that outlet had not been
found for them, would necessarily have found other and probably more
effective channels of operation.
No; education by force is only a necessity in the eyes of those who
consider private property and the economic slavery of the people also a
necessity. The government in this matter is like a cruel cab-driver who
reins in his horse and flogs him at the same time; it holds the people
down in the condition of wage-slaves, and then attempts to whip them
into the energy and virtue of free citizens.
And you, fellow countrymen, how long will you be contented to play the
part of cab-horse?