 The Higher Anarchy. But there is a further fact—forgotten also, because we moderns forget that there is a female point of view. The woman's wisdom stands partly, not only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a wholesome hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine and perversely true in that phrase of wilds—that people should not be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man, the remark was little effeminate. For wild did lack the masculine power of dogma, and of democratic cooperation. But if a woman had said it, it would have been simply true. A woman does treat each person as a peculiar person—in other words, she stands for anarchy, a very ancient and arguable philosophy, not anarchy in the sense of having no customs in one's life, which is inconceivable, but anarchy in the sense of having no rules for one's mind. To her, almost certainly, are due all those working traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those of education. It was she who first gave a child the stuffed stocking for being good, or stood him in the corner for being naughty. This unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes mother-wit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none ever called it father-wit. Now anarchy is only tacked when it works badly. And we ought to realize that in one half of the world, the private house, it does work well. We modern men are perpetually forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude penalties is not self-evident, that there is a great deal to be said for the benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on a small scale. In short, that government is only one side of life. The other half is called society, in which women are admittedly dominant, and they have always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is better governed than ours, because, in the logical and legal sense, it is not governed at all. Whenever you have a real difficulty, they say, when a boy is bumptuous or an aunt is stingy, when a silly girl will marry somebody or a wicked man won't marry somebody, all your lumbering Roman law and British constitution come to a standstill. A snub from a duchess or a slanging from a fish-wife are much more likely to put things straight. So at least rang the ancient female challenge down the ages until the recent female capitulation. So streamed the red standard of the higher anarchy until Miss Pankhurst hoisted the white flag. It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to the eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic alternation for the medieval freedom of the soul seeking truth. All modern thinkers are reactionaries, for their thought is always a reaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man, he is always coming from a place, not going to it. Thus mankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly as there is a sun and a moon. But because a narrow Protestant sect called materialists declared for a short time that there was no soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian science is now maintaining that there is no body. Now just in the same way, the unreasonable neglect of government by the Manchester School has produced not a reasonable regard for government, but an unreasonable neglect of everything else. So that to hear people talk today, one would fancy that every important human function must be organized and avenged by law, that all education must be state education, and all employment state employment, that everybody and everything must be brought to the foot of the Auguste and prehistoric gibbet. But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory, and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge fundamental function upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex and childbirth, has never been inside the political state, but always outside of it. The state concerned itself with the trivial question of killing people, but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them born. A eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is born. A eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is an absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself with providing for the old age of people who have never been infants. I will not deal here in any detail with the fact that some eugenists have in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought to control marriage and birth as they control labor and death, except for this inhuman handful, with whom I regret to say I shall have to deal with later. All the eugenists I know divide themselves into two sections, ingenious people who once meant this, and rather bewildered people who swear they never meant it or anything else. But if it be conceded by a breezier estimate of men, that they do mostly desire marriage to remain free from government, it does not follow that they desire it to remain free from everything. If a man does not control the marriage market by law, is it controlled at all? Surely the answer is, broadly, that man does not control the marriage market by law, but the woman does control it by sympathy and prejudice. There was, until lately, a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. Yet the thing happened constantly. There was no law forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's scullery maid. Yet it did not happen nearly so often. It did not happen because the marriage market is managed in the spirit and by the authority of women, and women are generally conservative where classes are concerned. It is the same with the system of exclusiveness, by which ladies have so often contrived, as by a process of elimination, to prevent marriages that they did not want, and even sometimes, procure those they did. There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur de lice, the turnkey's chains, or the hangman's halter. You need not strangle a man if you can silence him. The branded shoulder is less effective and final than the cold shoulder, and you need not trouble to lock a man in when you can lock him out. The same, of course, is true with the colossal architecture which we call infant education, an architecture reared by women. Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring at the frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of the sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tomboy, but every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of femininity surround him from the first, like the four walls of a house. And even the vaguest, or most brutal man, has been womanized by being born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery, but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a monster as man that was born of a man. End of the Higher Anarchy The Queen and the Suffragettes This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton Part 3 Chapter 11 The Queen and the Suffragettes But indeed with this educational matter I must of necessity embroil myself later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be about the child, but I think it will be mostly about the mother. In this place I have systematically insisted on the large part of life that is governed, not by man with his vote, but by woman with her voice or more often with her horrible silence. Only one thing remains to be added. In a sprawling and explanatory style has been traced out the idea that government is ultimately coercion. That coercion must mean cold definitions as well as cruel consequences and that therefore there is something to be said for the old human habit of keeping one half of humanity out of so harsh and dirty a business. But the case is stronger still. Voting is not only coercion, but collective coercion. I think Queen Victoria would have been yet more popular and satisfying if she had never signed a death warrant. I think Queen Elizabeth would have stood out as more solid and splendid in history than she had not earned, among those who happened to know her history, the nickname of Bloody Bess. I think, in short, that the great historic woman is more herself when she is persuasive rather than coercive. But I feel all mankind behind me when I say that if a woman has this power it should be despotic power, not democratic power. There is a much stronger historic argument for giving Miss Pankhurst a throne than for giving her a vote. She might have a crown or at least a coronet like so many of her supporters. For these old powers are purely personal and therefore female. Miss Pankhurst, as a despot, might be as virtuous as Queen Victoria and she certainly would find it difficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess. But the point is that good or bad she would be irresponsible. She would not be governed by a rule and by a ruler. There are only two ways of governing, by a rule and by a ruler. And it is seriously true to say of a woman in education and domesticity that the freedom of the autocrat appears to be necessary to her. She is never responsible until she is irresponsible. In case this sounds like an idle contradiction I confidently appeal to the cold facts of history. Almost every despotic or oligarchic state has admitted women to its privileges. Scarcely one democratic state has ever admitted them to its rights. The reason is very simple. That something female is endangered much more by the violence of the crowd. In short, one Pankhurst is an exception, but a thousand Pankhursts are a nightmare, a Bacchic orgy, a witch's Sabbath. For in all the legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd. End of The Queen and the Suffragettes The Modern Slave This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton Part 3 Chapter 12 The Modern Slave Now, I have only taken the test case of female suffrage because it is topical and concrete. It is not of great moment for me as a political proposal. I can quite imagine anyone substantially agreeing with my view of woman as universalist and autocrat in a limited area and still thinking that she would be none the worse for a ballot paper. The real question is whether this old ideal of woman as the great amateur is admitted or not. There are many modern things which threaten it much more than suffragism. Notably the increase of self-supporting women even in the most severe or the most squalid employments. If there be something against nature in the idea of a horde of wild women governing there is something truly intolerable in the idea of a herd of tame women being governed. And there are elements in human psychology that make this situation particularly poignant and ignominious. The ugly exactitudes of business, the bells and clocks, the fixed hours and rigid departments were all meant for the male, who, as a rule, can only do one thing and can only, with the greatest difficulty, be induced to do that. If clerks do not try to shirk their work our whole great commercial system breaks down. It is breaking down under the inroad of women who are adapting the unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system seriously and doing it well. Their very efficiency is the definition of their slavery. It is generally a bad sign when one is trusted very much by one's employers. And if the evasive clerks have a look of being black guards the earnest ladies are often something like blacklegs. But the more immediate point is that the modern working woman bears a double burden for she endures both the grinding officialism of the new office and the distracting scrupulosity of the old home. Few men understand what conscientiousness is. They understand duty, which generally means one duty, but conscientiousness is the duty of the universalist. It is limited by no workdays or holidays. It is a lawless, limitless, devouring decorum If women are to be subjected to the dull rule of commerce we must find some way of emancipating them from the wild rule of conscience. But I rather fancy you will find it easier to leave the conscience and knock off the commerce. As it is, the modern clerk or secretary exhausts herself to put one thing straight in the ledger and then goes home to put everything straight in the house. This condition, described by some as emancipated, is at least the reverse of my ideal. I would give women not more rights but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories I would design specifically a house in which she can be free. And with that we come to the last point of all. The point at which we can perceive the needs of women like the rights of men stopped and falsified by something which is the object of this book to expose. The feminist, which means, I think, one who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics has heard my loose monologue bursting all the time with one pent-up protest. At this point he will break out and say but what are we to do? There is modern commerce and its clerics. There is the modern family with its unmarried daughters. Specialism is expected everywhere. Female thrift and conscientiousness are demanded and supplied. What does it matter whether we should in the abstract prefer the old human and housekeeping woman? We might prefer the Garden of Eden. But since women have trades they ought to have trade unions. Since women work in factories they ought to vote on factory acts. If they are unmarried they must be commercial. If they are commercial they must be political. We have new rules for a new world, even if it be not a better one. I said to a feminist once, the question is not whether women are good enough for votes. It is whether votes are good enough for women. He only answered, ah, you go and say that to the women chain-makers at Cradley Heath. Now, this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it. That because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards. That because we have lost our way we must lose our map also. And because we have missed our ideal we must forget it. There are numbers of excellent people who do not think votes unfeminine. And there may be enthusiasts for our beautiful modern industry who do not think factories unfeminine. But if these things are unfeminine it is no answer to say that they fit into each other. I am not satisfied with the statement that my daughter must have unwombly powers because she has unwombly wrongs. Industrial soot and political printers ink are two blacks which do not make a white. Most of the feminists would probably agree with me that womenhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy the tyranny. They want to destroy womanhood. That is the only difference. Whether we can recover the clear vision of women as a tower with many windows the fixed eternal feminine from which her sons the specialists go forth. Whether we can preserve the tradition of a central thing which is even more human than democracy and even more practical than politics. Whether, in a word, it is possible to re-establish the family freed from the filthy cynicism and cruelty of the commercial epic. I shall discuss in the last section of this book. But meanwhile do not talk to me about the poor chain-makers and cradly heath. I know all about them and what they are doing. They are engaged in a very widespread and flourishing industry of the present age. They are making chains. End of the modern slave. When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw it is needless to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer and to criticize the book from the same disinterested and impartial standpoint from which Mr. Shaw had criticized the subject of it. I was not withheld by any feeling that the joke was getting a little obvious or an obvious joke is only a successful joke. It is only the unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves with being subtle. The real reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw's amusing attack was this, that one simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I have ever wanted or could want from him to all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw, in substance, that he was a charming and clever fellow but a common Calvinist. He admitted that this was true and there, so far as I am concerned, is an end to the matter. He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding that if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him. That is the fundamental and subterranean secret that is the last lie in hell. The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about whether any word or gesture is significant and sacred. To the Catholic every other daily act is dramatic dedication to the service of good or of evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity because the person doing it has been dedicated from eternity and is merely filling up his time until a crack of doom. The difference is something subtler than plum puddings or private theatricals. The difference is that to a Christian of my kind this sort of earthly life is intensely thrilling and precious. To a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these three score-years and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist by his own confession they are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the vanquished in chains. To me earthly life is the drama. To him it is the epilogue. Chavians think about the embryo. Spiritualists think about the ghost. Christians about the man. It is well to have these things clear. Now all our sociology and eugenics and all the rest of it are not so much materialist as confusedly Calvinist. They are chiefly occupied in educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of singular depression about what one can do with the populace combined with a strange disembodied gaiety about what may be done with posterity. The essential Calvinists have indeed abolished some of the more liberal and universal parts of Calvinism such as the belief in an intellectual design or an everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it is a superstition that a man is judged after death they stick to their central doctrine that he is judged before he is born. In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world of today it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal. All I shall have to say however on heredity will be very brief because I shall confine myself to what is known about it and that is very nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evident but it is a current modern dogma that nothing actually enters the body at birth except a life derived and compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as much to be said for the Christian theory that an element comes from God or the Buddhist theory that such an element comes from previous existences. But this is not a religious work and I must admit to those very narrow intellectual limits which the absence of theology always imposes. Leaving the soul on one side let us suppose for the sake of argument that the human character in the first case comes wholly from parents and then let us curtly state our knowledge rather than our ignorance. Popular science, like that of Mr. Blanchford, is in this matter as mild as old wives' tales. Mr. Blanchford, with colossal simplicity, explained to millions of clerks and working men that the mother is like a bottle of blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads and so the child is like a bottle of mixed blue and yellow. He might just as well have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two legs the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question of simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached qualities, like beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation of the most mysterious sort so that even if the result is unavoidable it will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow beads. It is like blue mixed with yellow, the result of which is green, a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live in a complete cosmos of blue and yellow like the Edinburgh Review. A man might never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire sky and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. If you paid a sovereign for a blue bell, if you spilled the mustard on the blue books, if you married a canary to a blue baboon there is nothing in any of these wild weddings that contains even a hint of green. Green is not a mental combination, like addition. It is a physical result, like a birth. So apart from the fact that nobody ever really understands parents or children either, yet even if we could understand the parents we could not make any conjecture about the children. Each time the force works in a different way. Each time the constituent colors combine into a different spectacle. A girl may actually inherit her ugliness from her mother's good looks. A boy may actually get his weakness from his father's strength. Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it must remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists and materialists may be right or wrong. We leave them to their dreary debate. But considered in regard to its result there is no doubt about it. The thing is always a new color, a strange star. Every birth is as lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity. On such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent ignorance. And nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense. That is, that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases, say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character as his grandfather. Or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps sixty. But there are not two cases. There is not one case. There are no cases at all of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short we deal with heredity as we deal with omens, affinities, and the fulfillment of dreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record them. But not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams and omens, is a barbaric notion. That is, not necessarily an untrue, but a dim, groping, and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself a little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales of tribal doom occupied the savage north, and since the Reformation and the revolt against Christianity, which is the religion of a civilized freedom, savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic novels and problem plays. The curse of Rogan Marquardt is as heathen and superstitious as the curse of Ravensward, only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not irrational, and may be allowed, like a hundred other half-emotions, to make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should take it lightly. But even when the barbaric deluge rose to its highest in the matter novels of Zola, such as that called the human beast, a gross libel on beasts as well as humanity, even then the applications of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The students of heredity are savages in the vital sense that they stare back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical inheritance, and even the language of the thing is rarely used except for special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or the oppression of the poor. End of The Tribal Terror The Tricks of Environment This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in a public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Breathe What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton Part 4, Chapter 3 The Tricks of Environment After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore it is only with the born child that anybody dares to deal. And the question is not eugenics, but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome terminology of popular science, it is not a question of heredity, but of environment. I will not needlessly complicate this question by urging at length that environment also is open to some of the objections and hesitations which paralyze the employment of heredity. I will merely suggest, in passing, about the effect of environment, modern people talk much to cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundings will mold a man is always mixed up with a totally different idea that they will mold him in one particular way. To take the broadest case, landscape, no doubt, affects the soul. But how it affects it is quite another matter. To be born among pine trees might mean loving pine trees. It might mean loathing pine trees. It might quite seriously mean never having seen a pine tree. Or it might mean any mixture of these. Or any degree of any of them. So that the scientific method here lacks a little in precision. I am not speaking without the book. On the contrary, I am speaking with the blue book, with the guidebook, and the atlas. It may be that the highlanders are poetical because they inhabit mountains, but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It may be the Swiss have fought for freedom because they had hills. Did a Dutch fight for freedom because they hadn't? Personally, I should think it quite likely. Women might work negatively as well as positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild skyline, but because of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of it. I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters admittedly within its range, popular science goes a great deal too fast and drops enormous lengths of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working reality that what we have to deal with in the case of children is, for all practical purposes, environment, or to use the older word, education. When all such deductions are made, education is at least a form of will-worship, not the cowardly fact-worship. It deals with the department that we can control. It is not merely darkness with the barbarian pessimism of Zola and heredity hunt. We shall certainly make fools of ourselves that is what is meant by philosophy, but we shall not merely make beasts of ourselves, which is the nearest popular definition for merely following the laws of nature and cowering under the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine, but not of the sort that makes mere moon-calfs and idiots the slaves of a silver magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena, there are fads, but not frenzies. Doubtless, we shall often find a mare's nest, but it will not always be the nightmares and of the tricks of environment, recording by Breathe, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Truth About Education This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Breathe What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton, Part 4, Chapter 4 The Truth About Education When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened of secret words and worried of theology, if this largely unreasoning irritation against dogma did arise out of some ridiculous access of such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up a fine crop of cut for our descendants to go tired of. Probably the word education will someday seem honestly as old and objectless as the word justification now seems in a Puritan folio. Given thought at frightfully funny, that people should have thought about the difference between the homusion and the homo-eusion. The time will come when somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered on education and also against secular education, that men of prominence and position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in gibbon look rather alike, but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do not look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to be the Latin for faith. Having read numberless newspaper articles on education and even written a good many of them and having heard deafening and indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I was born about whether religion was part of education, about whether hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on its recurring substantive that it was comparatively late in life that I saw the main fact about it. Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing. It does not exist as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering. These sciences may be healthy or not as hobbies, but they deal with stone and kettles with definite things. Education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like transmission or inheritance. It is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views or qualities to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities, but if they are handed on from one generation to another, they are education. Education is not a thing like theology. It is not an inferior or superior thing. It is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other like a love letter to the general post office. Mr. Fagan was quite as educational as Dr. Strong and practiced probably more educational. It is giving something, perhaps poison. Education is tradition and tradition, as its name implies, can be treason. This first truth is frankly banal, but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house sound of a little tradesman is taught to eat his breakfast to take his medicine, to love his country, to eat his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously, Fagan, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt, the vegetarian, would abolish the boy's breakfast, Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine, Count Tolstoy would rebuke him for loving his country, Mr. Blatchford would stop his prayers and publicly denounce Sunday clothes and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of these advanced views, not even Fagan's, but I do ask between the lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is not, as commonly supposed, that a tradesman teaches education plus Christianity, Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism, Fagan, education plus crime. The truth is that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike, the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. End of the truth about education. Recording by Breathe, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. An evil cry. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. What's Wrong with the World? by G.K. Chesterton An Evil Cry The fashionable policy is that, by education, we can give people something that we have not got. To hear people talk, one would think it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hodgepodge of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air, and free hand growing, we can produce something splendid by accident. We can create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no other general purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything good until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people who, in the matter of heredity, are so suddenly attached to the law, in the matter of environment, seem almost to believe in miracle. They insist that nothing but what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of the children. But they seem somehow to think that things can get into the heads of children which were not in the heads of the parents, or indeed anywhere else. There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of the confusion. I mean the cry save the children. It is, of course, part of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the state which is the home of man as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic. This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the socialist and other schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers as men do in a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This cry of save the children has in it the hateful implication that it is impossible to save the fathers. In other words that many millions of grown up saying responsible and self-supporting Indians are to be treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion called dipsomania because they drink in public houses instead of private houses called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work called dollars if they still adhere to conventions and called loafers if they still love liberty. Now I am concerned first and last that unless you can save the fathers you cannot save the children that at present we cannot save others for we cannot save ourselves we cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom education is only truth in a state of transmission and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand thus we find that education is of all the cases the clearest for our general purpose it is vain to save children for they cannot remain children by hypothesis we are teaching them to be men and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all does not teach by authority at all they present the process as coming not from the outside from the teacher but entirely from inside the boy education they say is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the dormant faculties of each person somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul it is a primordial yearning to learn greek accents or to wear clean collars and the school master only gently and tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of bannock burn the educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of long division only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milk pudding to tarts I am not sure that I believe in the derivation I have heard a disgraceful suggestion that educator if implied to roman school master did not mean leading our young functions into freedom but only meant taking out little boys for a walk but I am much more certain that I do not agree with the doctrine I think it would be about a saying to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the baby's educational merits do there is indeed in each living creature a collection of forces and functions but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes or it means nothing at all speaking is the most practical instance of the whole situation you may indeed draw out squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pulling him about a pleasant but cruel pastime to which many psychologists are addicted but you will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him that you have got to put into him and there is an end of the matter end of an evil cry recording by Breathe Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Authority the unavoidable this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org what's wrong with the world by G.K. Chesterton part 4 education or the mistake about the child chapter 6 Authority the unavoidable but the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of authority in education it is not so much, as poor conservatives say that parental authority ought to be preserved as that it cannot be destroyed Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming a child's mind in that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself for he hates something inseparable from human life I only mentioned a juicier and the drawing out of the faculties in order to point out that even this mental trick does not avoid the inevitable idea of parental or scholastic authority the educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and coercive as the instructor pouring in for he draws out what he chooses he decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be developed he does not, I suppose draw out the neglected faculty of forgery he does not, so far at least lead out with timid steps a shy talent for torture the only result of all this pompous and precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled now we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence education is violent because it is creative it is creative because it is human it is as reckless as playing on the fiddle as dogmatic as drawing a picture as brutal as building a house in short it is what all human action is it is an interference with life and growth after that it is a trifling and even a jicular question whether we say of this tremendous tormentor the artist man that he puts things into us like an apothecary or draws things out of us like a dentist the point is that man does what he likes he claims the right to take his mother nature under his control he claims the right to make his child the superman in his image once flinched from this creative authority of man and the whole courageous raid which we call civilization wavers and falls to pieces now most modern freedom is at root fear it is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities and Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority an unshaken voice that is the one eternal education to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child from this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side and the only excuse for them is of course that their modern philosophies are so half baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe this of course is connected with the decay of democracy and is somewhat of a separate subject suffice it to say here that when I say that we should instruct our children I mean that we should do it not that Mr. or Professor Earl Barnes should do it the trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the state being controlled so especially by the few allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the school room when they have never passed through the parliament the public house the private house the church or the marketplace obviously it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people the assured and experienced truth that are put first to the baby but in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself the flopping infant of four actually has more experience and has weathered the world longer than the dogma to which he is made to submit many a school both of having the last ideas in education when it has not even the first idea for the first idea is that even innocence divine as it is may learn something from experience but this as I say is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children today we all use popular education as meaning education of the people I wish I could use it as meaning education by the people the urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do not avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old school masters nay it might be maintained that they even avoid it less the old village school master beat a boy for not learning grammar and sent him out into the playground to play anything he liked or at nothing if he liked that better the modern scientific school master pursues him into the playground and makes him play it cricket because exercise is so good for the health the modern doctor busby is a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of divinity he may say that the good of exercise is self evident but he must say it it cannot really be self evident or it never could have been compulsory but this is in modern practice a very mild case in modern practice the free educationists forbid far more things than the old fashioned educationists the person with a taste for paradox if any such shameless creature should exist might with some plausibility maintain concerning all our expansion since the failure of luthers for paganism and its replacement by kelvin's puritanism that all this expansion has not been an expansion but the closing in of a prison so that less and less beautiful and humane things have been permitted the puritans destroyed images the rationalists forbade fairy tales count Tolstoy practically issued one of his popular encyclicals against music and I have heard of modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers I remember a meek little madman who came up to me at some socialist swary and asked me to use my influence have I any influence against adventure stories for boys it seems they breed an appetite for blood but never mind that one must keep one's temper at least madhouse I need only insist here that these things even if a just deprivation are a deprivation I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments were often idiotic and cruel though they are much more so in a country like England where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment and only a poor man receives it then in countries with a clearer in Russia flogging is often inflicted by peasants in modern England flogging can only in practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man thus only a few days ago as I write a small boy a son of the poor of course was sentenced to flogging an imprisonment for five years for having picked up a small piece of coal which the experts value at five pence entirely on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against this almost bestial ignorance about boys but I do think at a little unfair that these humanitarians who excuse boys for being robbers should denounce them for playing at robbers I do think that those who understand a guttersknit playing with a piece of coal might by a sudden spurt of imagination understand him playing with a tin soldier to sum it up in one sentence I think my meek little madman might have understood that there is many a boy who would rather be flogged and unjustly flogged than have his adventure story taken away and of authority the unavoidable recorded by Craig Campbell Johnson in 2009 it is a high the freest fad as much as the strictest formula is stiff with authority it is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they are forbidden there is no pretense that the boy would think so the average boy's impression would certainly be simply this if your father is a methodist you must not play with soldiers on Sunday if your father is a socialist even on weekdays all educationists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian you cannot have free education for if you left a child free you would not educate him at all is there then no distinction or difference between the most hide bound conventionalists and the most brilliant and bizarre innovators is there no difference between the heaviest heavy father and the most reckless maiden aunt yes there is the difference is that the heavy father in his heavy way is a democrat he does not urge a thing merely because to his fancy it should be done but because in his own admirable republican formula everybody does it the conventional authority does claim some popular mandate the unconventional authority does not the puritan who forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least expressing a puritan opinion not merely his own opinion he is not a despot he is a democracy a tyrannical democracy a dingy and local democracy perhaps but one that could do and has done the two ultimate viral virile things fight and appeal to God but the veto of the new educationist is like the veto of the house of lords it does not pretend to be representative these innovators are always talking about the washing modesty of Mrs. Grundy I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more modest than they are but I am sure she is more humble but there is a further complication the most anarchic modern may again attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be an enlargement of the mind an opening of all the organs of receptivity light, he says should be brought into darkness blinded and thwarted existences should merely be permitted to perceive and expand in short, enlightenment should be shared over darkest London now here is just the trouble that, in so far as this is involved there is no darkest London London is not dark at all not even at night we have said that if education is a solid substance then there is none of it we may now say that if education is an abstract expansion there is no lack of it there are too much of it in fact, there is nothing else there are no uneducated people everybody in England is educated only most people are educated wrong the state schools are not the first schools but among the last schools to be established and London had been educating Londoners long before the London school board the error is a highly practical one it is persistently assumed that unless a child is civilized by the established schools then I wish he did every child in London becomes a highly civilized person but here are so many different civilizations most of them born tired anyone will tell you that the trouble with the poor is not so much that the old are still foolish but rather that the young are already wise without going to school at all the gutter boy would be educated without going to school at all he would be overeducated the real object of our school should be not so much to suggest complexity as solely to restore simplicity you will hear venerable idealists declare we must make war on the ignorance of the poor but, indeed we have rather to make war on their knowledge real educationists have to resist a kind of roaring cataract of culture the truant is being taught all day if the children do not look at the large letters in the spelling book if they do not walk outside and look at the large letters on the poster if they do not care for the colored maps provided by the school they can gape at the colored maps provided by the daily mail if they tire of electricity they can take to electric trams if they are unmoved by music they can take to drink if they will not work so as to get a prize from their school they may work to get a prize if they cannot learn enough about law they will not allow them to avoid the policeman if they will not learn history forwards from the right end in the history books they will learn it backwards from the wrong end in the party newspapers and this is the tragedy of the whole affair that the London poor a particularly quick-witted and civilized class learn everything tale for most learn even what is right in the way of what is wrong they do not see the first principles of law in a log book they only see its last results in the police news they do not see the truths of politics in a general survey they only see the lies of politics at a general election but whatever be the pathos of the London poor it has nothing to do with being uneducated so far from being without guidance they are guided constantly earnestly, excitedly only guided wrong the people are not at all neglected they are merely oppressed nay, rather they are persecuted the people in London who are not appealed to by the rich the appeals of the rich shriek from every hoarding and shout from every hustings for it should always be remembered that the queer, abrupt ugliness of our streets and costumes are not the creation of democracy but of aristocracy the House of Lords objected to the embankment being disfigured by trams but most of the rich men who disfigure the street walls with their wares are actually in the House of Lords the peers make the country seats beautiful by making the town streets hideous this however is parenthetical the point is that the poor in London are not left alone but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and despotic advice they are not like sheep without a shepherd they are more like one sheep whom 27 shepherds are shouting at all the newspapers, all the new advertisements all the new medicines and new theologies all the glare and blare of the gas and brass of modern times it is against these that the national school must bear up if it can I will not question that our elementary education is better than barbaric ignorance but there is no barbaric ignorance I do not doubt that our schools would be good for uninstructed boys but there are no uninstructed boys a modern London school ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid than ignorance and darkness it must also be clearer than a picture postcard cleverer than a limerick competition quicker than the tram and kindlier than the tavern the school in fact has the responsibility of universal rivalry we need not deny that everywhere there is a light that must conquer darkness but here we demand a light that can conquer light end of the Humility of Mrs. Grundy recording by Vaughn Ulman V-O-N-S-T-A-K-E-S dot blogspot.com this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org what's wrong with the world by GK Chesterton part 4 chapter 8 the broken rainbow I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example the case of colour we hear the realists those sentimental fellows talking about the grey streets and the grey lives of the poor but whatever the poor streets are they are not grey but motley striped spotted, piebald and patched like a quilt hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be monochrome there is nothing of the Celtic to light about it as a matter of fact a London gutter boy walks unscathed among furnaces of colour watching walk along a line of hoardings and you will see him now against glowing green like a traveller in a tropic forest now black like a bird against the burning blue of the midi now passant across a field like the golden leopards of england he ought to understand the irrational rapture of that cry of mr stefan phillips about that blue are blue that green are green there is no blue much bluer than racquets blue and no blacking blacker than deon martins no more emphatic yellow than that of colman's mustard if despite the scours of colour like a shattered rainbow the spirit of the small boy is not exactly intoxicated with art and culture because certainly does not lie in universal greyness or the mere starving of his senses it lies in the fact that the colours are presented in the wrong connection on the wrong scale and above all from the wrong motive it is not colours he lacks but a philosophy of colours in short there is nothing wrong with racquets blue except that it is not racquets blue does not belong to racquets but to the sky black does not belong to deon martin but to the abyss the finest posters are only very little things on a very large scale there is something specially irritant in this way about the iteration of advertisements of mustard a condiment a small luxury a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity there is a special irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to such very little meat yellow is a bright pigment mustard is a pungent pleasure but to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who should swallow gallons of mustard he would either die or lose the taste of mustard altogether now suppose we compare this gigantic trivialities on the hoardings with those tiny entremendous pictures in which the medivals recorded their dreams little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire and the fires of judgement only a pygmy patch of gold the difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more hasty than illumination art it is not even merely that ancient artist was serving the lord while the modern artist is serving the lords it is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression that colours really were significant in precious things like jewels and talismanic stones the colour was often arbitrary but it was always authoritative if a bird was blue if a tree was golden if a fish was silver if a cloud was scarlet the artist managed to convey that these colours were important and almost painfully intense all the red red hot and all the gold tried in the fire now that is the spirit touching colour which the schools must recover and protect if they are really to give the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing it is not so much an indulgence in colour it is rather if anything a sort of theory thrift it fenced in a green field in heraldy as straightly as a green field in peasant proprietorship it would not fling away gold leaf any more than gold coin it would not heedlessly pour out purple or crimson any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood that is the hard task before educationists in this special matter they have to teach people to relish colours like liquors they have the heavy business of turning drunkards into wine tasters if even 20th century succeeds in doing these things it will almost catch up with the 12th the principle covers however the whole of modern life Morris and the merely aesthetic medievalists always indicated that a crowd in the time of Joshua would have been brightly clad and glittering compared with a crowd in the time of Queen Victoria I am not so sure that the real distinction is here there would be brown frocks of friars in the first scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second there would be purple plumes of factory girls in the second scene as well as purple lent investments in the first there would be waste coats against white or mine against gold lions the real difference is here that the brown earth colour of the monks coat was instinctively chosen to express labour and humility whereas the brown colour of the clerks hat was not chosen to express anything the monk did mean to say that he robbed himself in dust I am sure the clerk does not mean to say that he robbed himself with clay is not putting dust on his head as the only diadem of man purple at once rich and somber does suggest a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy but the factory girl does not intend her hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy far from it white or mine was meant to express moral purity white waste coats were not gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity gold watch chains do not the point is not that we have lost the material use but that we have lost the trick of turning them to the best advantage we are not like children who have lost their paint box and are left alone with a gray lead pencil we are like children who have mixed all the colors in the paint box together and lost the paper of instructions even then I do not deny one has some fun now this abundance of colors and the loss of a color scheme is a pretty perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and especially with our modern education the same with ethical education economic education every sort of education the growing London child will find no lack of highly controversial teachers who will teach him that geography means painting the map red that economics means taxing the foreigner that patriotism means the peculiarly un-English habit of flying a flag on empire day in mentioning these examples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similar crudities and popular fallacies upon the other political side I mention them because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of the situation I mean this that there were always radical revolutionists but now there are Tory revolutionists also the modern conservative no longer conserves he is avowedly an innovator does all the current defenses of the house of lots which describe it as a bull walk against the mob are intellectually done for the bottom has fallen out of them because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day the house of the lords is a mob itself exceedingly likely to behave like one end of the broken rainbow chapter seven the need for narrowness through all this chaos then we come back once more to our main conclusion the true task of culture today is not a task of expansion but very decidedly of selection and rejection the educationist must find a creed and teach it even it be not a theological creed it must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology it must be orthodox the teacher may think it antiquated to have decided precisely between the faith of Calvin and of Lord the faith of Aquinas of Swedenberg but he still has to choose between the faith of Kipling and of Shaw between the world of Blatchford and of General Booth call it if you will a narrow question whether your child should be brought up by the vicar or the minister or the popish priest you have still to face that larger more liberal more highly civilized question whether he shall be brought up by Harmsworth or by Pearson or by Mr. Eustis Miles with his simple life or Mr. Peter Keery with his strenuous life whether he shall most eagerly read Miss Annie S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy in short whether he shall end up in the mere violence of the SDF or in the mere vulgarity of the Primrose League they say that nowadays the creeds are crumbling I doubt it the effects are increasing an education must now be a sectarian education merely for practical purposes out of all this throng of theories it must somehow select a theory out of all these thundering voices it must manage to hear a voice out of all this awful and aching battle of blinding lights without one shadow to give shape to them it must manage somehow to trace and track a star I have spoken so far of popular education which began too vague and vast and which therefore has accomplished little but as it happens there is in England something to compare it with there is an institution or class of institutions which began with the same popular object which has since followed a much narrower object but which had the great advantage that it did follow some object unlike our modern elementary schools in all these problems I should urge the solution which is positive I should set my face, that is against most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist most educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the poor man not to drink I should be quite content if they teach him to drink for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink that is accountable for most of his tragedies I do not propose, like some of my revolutionary friends that we should abolish the public schools I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public I do not wish to make parliament stop working but rather to make it work not to shut up churches but rather to open them not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper in many cases let it be remembered such action is not merely going back to the old ideal but is even going back to the old reality it would be a great step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn it is incontrovertible a true that to medievalize the public schools would be to democratize the public schools parliament did once really mean as its name seems to imply a place where people were allowed to talk it is only lately that the general increase of efficiency that is of the speaker has made it mostly a place where people are prevented from talking the poor do not go to the modern church but they went to the ancient church all right and if the common man in the past had a great respect for property it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own I therefore can claim that I have no vulgar itch of innovation in anything I say about any of these institutions certainly I have none in that particular one which I am now obliged to pick out of the list a type of institution to which I have genuine and personal reasons for being friendly and grateful I mean the great tutor foundations the public schools of England they have been praised for great many things mostly I'm sorry to say praised by themselves and their children and yet for some reason no one has ever praised them the one really convincing reason end of the need for narrowness recording by Vaughan Ollman V-O-N-S-T-A-K-E-S dot blogspot dot com for more information or to volunteer please visit laborbox.org what's wrong with the world by G.K. Chesterton part 4 chapter 10 the case for the public schools the word success can of course be used in two senses it may be used with reference to a thing serving its immediate and peculiar purpose as of a wheel going around or it can be used with reference to a thing adding to the general welfare as of a wheel being a useful discovery it is one thing to say that smith's flying machine is a failure and quite another to say that smith has failed to make a flying machine now this is very broadly the difference between the old English public schools and the new democratic schools perhaps the old public schools are as I personally think they are ultimately weakening the country rather than strengthening it and are therefore in that ultimate sense inefficient but there is such a thing as being efficiently inefficient you can make your flying ship that it flies even if you also make it so that it kills you now the public school system may not work satisfactorily but it works the public schools may not achieve what we want but they achieve what they want the popular elementary schools do not in that sense achieve anything at all it is very difficult to any gutter snipe in the street and say that he embodies the ideal for which popular education has been working in the sense that the fresh faced foolish boy in Athens does embody the ideal for which the headmasters of Harrow and Winchester have been working the aristocratic educationists have the positive purpose of turning out gentlemen and they do turn out gentlemen even when they expel them the popular educationists would say that they had the far nobler idea of turning out citizens I concede that it is a much nobler idea but where are the citizens I know that the boy in Athens is stiff with the rather silly and sentimental strikeism called being a man of the world I cannot fancy that the errant boy is rigid with that republican strikeism that is called being a citizen the school boy will readily say with fresh and innocent hotter I am an English gentleman I cannot so easily picture the errant boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering Romani's service sum let it be granted that our elementary teachers are teaching the very broadest code of morals while our great head masters are teaching only the narrowest code of manners let it be granted that both things are being taught but only one of them is being learned it is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage to bring about specific and practical reforms but that they never fulfill the expectations or satisfy their souls I believe there is a real sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue by a strange inversion the political ideist often does not get what he asks for but does get what he wants the silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer and reshapes the world much more than the actualities they attempted to suggest it what perishes is the letter which he thought so practical what endures is the spirit which he felt to be unattainable and even unutterable it is exactly his schemes that are not fulfilled it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled does the 10 or 12 paper constitutions of the French revolution which seemed so business like to the farmers of them seemed to us to have flown away on the wind as the wildest fancies what has not flown away what is a fixed fact in Europe is the ideal and vision the republic the idea of a land full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners and minimum of wealth the 18th century the reality of the 20th so I think it will generally be with the creator of social things desirable or undesirable all his schemes will fail all his tools break in his hands his compromises will collapse his concessions will be useless he must brace himself to bear his fate without nothing but his heart's desire now if one may compare very small things with very great one may say that the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same sort of success and solid splendor as the French democratic politics at least they can claim the same sort of superiority over the distracted and fumbling attempts of modern England to establish democratic education such success as has attended the public school boy throughout the empire a success exaggerated indeed by himself but still positive and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and size has been due to the central and supreme circumstance that the managers of public schools did know what sort of boy they liked they wanted something and they got something instead of going to work in the broad-minded manner and wanting everything and getting nothing the only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got there is something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern people attack an institution that really does demand reform they always attack it for the wrong reasons thus many opponents of our public schools imagining themselves to be very democratic have exhausted themselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek I can understand how Greek may be regarded as useless especially by those thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce which is the negation of citizenship I do not understand how it can be considered undemocratic I quite understand why Mr. Karnage has a hatred of Greek it is obscurely founded on the firm and sound impression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have been killed but I cannot comprehend why any chance democrat say Mr. Quelch or Mr. Crooks I or Mr. John M. Robertson should be opposed to people learning the Greek alphabet which was the alphabet of liberty why should radicals dislike Greek in that language is written all the earliest and heaven knows the most heroic history of the radical party why should greek discuss to democrat when the very word democrat is greek a similar mistake though a less serious one is merely attacking the athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and brutality now brutality in the only immoral sense is not a vice of the English public schools there is much moral bullying owing to the general lack of moral courage in the public school atmosphere these schools do upon the whole encourage physical courage but they do not merely discourage moral courage they forbid it the ultimate result of the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even endure to wear a bright uniform except when it is blurred and hidden in the smoke of battle this like all the affectations of our present plutocracy is an entirely different thing it was unknown to the old aristocrats the black prince would certainly have asked that any knight who had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies should also have the courage to lift it among his friends as regards moral courage then it is not so much that the public schools supported feebly as that they suppress it firmly but physical courage they do on the whole support and physical courage is a magnificent fundamental the one great wise Englishman of the 18th century said truly that if a man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other now it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is connected with cruelty the Tolstoyan and Kipling guide are nowhere more at one than in maintaining this they have I believe some small sectarian quarrel with each other the one saying that courage must be abandoned because it is connected with cruelty and the other maintaining that cruelty is charming because it is part of courage and we all thank God alive and energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry but it does not make him spiteful and we may admit heartily without joining in that perpetual praise which public school men are always pouring upon themselves that this does double cruelty in the public schools English public school life is extremely like English public life for which it is the preparatory school it is like it's special in this that things are either very open, common and conventional or else are very secret indeed now there is cruelty in public schools just as there is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices without a name but these things do not flourish in the full daylight and common consciousness of the school and no more does cruelty a tiny trial of silent-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly business always it may be indecent literature it may be the beginning of drunk it may occasionally be cruel to little boys but on this stage the bully the proverb says that bullies are always cowardly but these bullies are more than cowardly they are shy as the third instance of the wrong form of revolt against the public schools I may mention the habit of using the word aristocracy with a double implication to put the plain truth as briefly as possible if aristocracy means ruled by a rich king England has aristocracy and the English public schools support it if it means ruled by ancient families of flawless blood England has not got aristocracy and the public schools systematically destroy it in these circles real aristocracy like real democracy has become bad form a modern fashionable host dare not praise his ancestry it would so often be an insult to half the other oligarchs at table who have no ancestry we have said he has not the moral courage to wear his uniform still as has he the moral courage to wear his coat of arms the whole thing now is only a vague hot pot of nice and nasty gentlemen the nice gentleman never refers to anyone else's father the nasty gentleman never refers to his own that is the only difference the rest is the public school manner but Etton and Harrow have to be aristocratic because they consist so largely of power venues the public school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats like an asylum a place where they go in and never come out it is a factory for aristocrats they come out without ever having perceptively gone in the poor little private schools in their old world sentimental feudal style used to stick up a notice for the sons of gentlemen only if the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be inscribed for the fathers of gentlemen only in two generations they can do the trick end of the case for the public schools the school for hypocrites this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org what's wrong with the world by GK Chesterton part 4 education or the mistake about the child chapter 11 the school for hypocrites these are the false accusations the accusations of classicism the accusation of cruelty and the accusation of an exclusiveness based on perfection of pedigree English public school boys are not pedants they are not torturers and they are not in the vast majority of cases people fiercely proud of their ancestry or even people with any ancestry to be proud of they are taught to be courteous to be good tempered to be brave in a bodily sense to be clean in a bodily sense they are generally kind to animals generally civil to servants and to anyone in any sense they are equal the jolliest companions is there then anything wrong in the public school ideal I think we all feel there is something very wrong in it but a blind network of newspaper phraseology obscures and entangles us so it is hard to trace to its beginning beyond all words and phrases the faults in this great English achievement surely when all is said the ultimate objection to the English public school which is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of telling the truth I know there does still linger among maiden ladies in remote country houses a notion that English school boys are taught to tell the truth but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment very occasionally very vaguely English school boys are told not to tell lies which is a totally different thing I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe without once telling a lie I may wear another man's coat steal another man's wit apostatize to another man's creed or poison another man's coffee all without ever telling a lie but no English school boy is ever taught to tell the truth for the very simple reason that he has never taught to desire the truth from the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his side when he is engaged in playing the game he takes sides in his union debating society to settle whether Charles the first ought to have been killed with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with which he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether rugby or Westminster shall win he is never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth that the match is a matter of what may happen but that Charles the first is a matter of what did happen or did not he is liberal or Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race he knows what sport deals with the unknown he has not even a notion of what politics should deal with the known if anyone really doubts this self-evident proposition that the public schools definitely discourage the love of truth there is one fact which I should think would settle him England is a country of the party system it has always been chiefly run by public school men is there anyone out of Hanwell who will maintain that the party system whatever its conveniences or inconveniences have been created by people particularly fond of truth the very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy when a man really tells a truth the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar David said in his haste that is in his honesty that all men are liars it was afterwards in some leisurely official explanation that he said the kings of Israel at least told the truth when Lord Curzon was viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians on their reputed indifference to veracity to actuality and intellectual honor a great many people indignantly discussed whether orientals deserve to receive this rebuke whether Indians were indeed in a position to receive such severe admonition no one seemed to ask whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give it he is an ordinary party politician a party politician means a politician who might have belonged to either party being such a person he must again and again at every twist and turn of party strategy either have deceived others or grossly deceived himself I do not know the east nor do I like what I know I am quite ready to believe that when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false atmosphere I only say it must have been something startingly and chokingly false if it was false or that the English atmosphere from which he came the English parliament actually cares for everything except veracity public school man is kind courageous, polite, clean, companionable sense of the words the truth is not in him this weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools in the English political system and to some extent in the English character is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of superstitions of lying legends of evident delusions clung to through low spiritual self indulgence there are so many of these public schools superstitions that I have here only space for one of them which may be called the superstition of soul it appears to have been shared by the ablutionary Pharisees who resemble the English public school aristocrats in so many respects in their care about club rules and traditions, in their offensive optimism at the expense of other people, and above all imaginative plodding patriotism in the worst interests of their country now the old human sense about washing is that it is a great pleasure water applied externally is a splendid thing like wine Siberites bathe in wine and non-conformists drink water but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions washing being a pleasure it stands to reason that rich people afford it more than poor people and as long as this was recognized all was well and it was very right that rich people should offer baths to poor people as they might offer any other agreeable thing a drink or a donkey ride but one dreadful day somewhere about the middle of the 19th century somebody discovered somebody pretty well out the two great modern truths that washing is a virtue in the rich and therefore a duty in the poor for a duty is a virtue that one can't do and a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily like the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes but in the public school tradition of public life soap has become credit to ball simply because it is pleasant baths are represented as a part of the decay of the roman empire but the same baths are represented as part of the energy and rejuvenation of the British empire there are distinguished public school men, bishops, dons headmasters and high politicians who in the course of the eulogies which from time to time they pass upon themselves have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral purity they say if I remember rightly that a public school man is clean inside and out as if everyone did not know that while saints can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean as if everyone did not know that the harlot must be clean because it is her business to captivate while the good wife may be dirty because it is her business to clean as if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracks above us it is very likely indeed that the simplest man in a muckard and the most complex blackard in a bath there are other instances of course of this oily trick of turning the pleasures of a gentleman into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon sport, like soap is an admirable thing but like soap it is an agreeable thing and it does not sum up all mortal merits to be a sportsman playing the game in a world often necessary to be a workman doing the work by all means let a gentleman congratulate himself that he has not lost his natural love of pleasure as against a blasé and on childlike but when one has the childlike joy it is best to have also the childlike unconsciousness and I do not think we should have special affection for the little boy whoever lastingly explains that it was his duty to play hide and seek and one of his family virtues to be prominent and puts in the corner another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards mendacity as against organized charity here again as in the case of cleanliness and of athletics the attitude would be perfectly human and intelligible if it were not maintained as a merit just as the obvious thing about soap is that it is a convenience so the obvious thing about beggars is that they are an inconvenience the rich would deserve very little blame if they simply said that they never dealt directly with beggars because in modern urban civilization it is impossible to deal directly with beggars or if not impossible at least very difficult but these people do not refuse money to beggars on the ground that such charity is difficult to keep a critical ground that such charity is easy they say with the most grotesque gravity anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man a penny but we philanthropists go home and brood and travail over the poor man's troubles until we have discovered exactly what jail, reformatory work halls or lunatic asylum it will really be best for him to go to this is all sheer lying they do not brood about the man when they get home and if they did it would not alter the original fact that their motive for discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that beggars are a father a man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act of charity especially when the question is as genuinely difficult as is the case of mendacity but there is something quite testulently peck sniffing about shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough if any man will really try talking to the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really so much easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital end of The School for Hippocrates recorded by Craig Campbell in Appleton, Wisconsin in 2009 The Stainless of the New Schools This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Jeannie What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton Part 4, Chapter 12 The Stainless of the New Schools For this deep and disabling reason, therefore it is cynical and abandoned indifference to the truth that public school does not provide us with the ideal that we require we can only ask its modern critics to remember that right or wrong the thing can be done the factory is working the wheels are going around the gentlemen are being produced with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete and in this, as we have said before the public school really has an advantage over all the other educational schemes of our time we can only ask the Chinese into which they stray from a Chinese opium den to a German Jewish dinner party but I doubt if you could tell which little match girl had been brought up by undenominational religion and which by secular education this great English aristocracy which has ruled us since the Reformation is really in this sense a model to the moderns it did have an ideal and therefore it has produced a reality we may repeat here it was mainly to show one thing that progress ought to be based on principle while our modern progress is mostly based on precedent we go not by what may be affirmed in theory but by what has already been admitted in practice that is why the Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited person can have much sympathy they wanted a specific thing they were ready to go forward with it and so they were also ready to go back for it but modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they have not had the excitement of creating revolutionists make a reform conservatives only conserve the reform they never reform the reform which is often very much wanted just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance men have votes so women must soon have votes poor children are taught by force they must soon be fed by force the police shut public houses by 12 o'clock so soon they must shut them by 11 o'clock children stop at school till they are 14 so soon they will stop till they are 40 no gleam of reason no momentary return to first principles no abstract asking of any obvious question can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent it is a good way to prevent real revolution by this logic of events gets as much into a rut as the conservative we meet one hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather told him to stand by one style we meet another hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather told him only to walk along one lane I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument because we have just now come to the place where it is most startlingly and strongly shown the final proof that our elementary schools have no definite ideal of their own is the fact that they so openly imitate the ideals of the public schools in the elementary schools we have all the ethical prejudices and exaggerations of Eaton and Harrow carefully copied for people to whom they do not even roughly apply we have the same wildly disproportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanliness on moral character educators and educational politicians declare amid warm cheers that cleanliness is far more important than all the squabbles about moral and religious training it would really seem that so long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether he is washing off his mother's jam or his brother's gore we have the same grossly insincere pretense that sport always encourages a sense of honor when we know that it often ruins it above all we have the same great upper-class assumption that things are done best by large institutions handling large sums of money and ordering everybody about and that trivial and impulsive charity is in some way contemptible as Mr. Blatchford says the world does not want piety but soap and socialism piety is one of the popular virtues whereas soap and socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class these healthy ideals as they are called which our politicians and school masters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied to the democratic are by no means particularly appropriate to an impoverished democracy a vague admiration for organized government and a vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all into the lives of people among whom kindness means lending a saucepan and honor means keeping out of the workhouse it resolves itself either into discouraging that system of prompt and patchwork generosity which is a daily glory of the poor or else into hazy advice to people who have no money not to give it recklessly away nor is the exaggerated glory of athletics defensible defensible enough in dealing with the rich who if they did not romp and race would eat and drink unwholesomely by any means so much to the point when applied to people most of whom will take a great deal of exercise anyhow with spade or hammer, pickaxe or saw and for the third case of washing it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric about corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental class cannot merely as it stands be applicable to a dustman a gentleman is expected to be substantially spotless all the time but it is no more discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep sea-diver to be wet a sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with soot than Michelangelo when he is covered with clay or Bayard when he is covered with blood nor have these extenders of the public school tradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for the present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impossible to the poor I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast-off clothes of the rich one man moves into another man's clothes as he moves into another man's house no wonder that our educationists are not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrats second-hand trousers when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrats second-hand ideas end of the staleness of the new schools