LASKI ON EDUCATION
The education of the citizen is the heart of the modern State. Most of the disgust which even the adherents
of democratic government have felt with its working is due to the fact that it
has never been trained to the understanding of its functions; most, also, of
the difficulties which social theorists have sought to meet by changes in the
machinery itself, than to the fact that it is seeking to cope with a population
which often passes through life without even the knowledge of its
existence. Children who are herded into
industry at the age of fourteen, when the problem of knowledge has scarcely
begun to exert its fascination, can hardly be expected, under the conditions of
modern industrial life, to understand, much less to work, the complicated
technique upon which their well-being depends.
The defects of democracy are most largely to the ignorance of democracy;
and to strike at that ignorance is to attack the foundation upon which those
defects are built. In the presence of
that ignorance, it is inevitable that those who can afford the luxury of
knowledge will alone be likely, or even
able, to make their desires effective.
A State which fails to offer an equal level of educational opportunity
to its citizens is penalizing the poor for the benefit of the rich. There cannot be a responsible State until
there is an educated electorate.
….
For political liberty to be real, two
conditions are essential. I must be
educated to the point where I can express what I want in a way that is
intelligible to others. Anyone who has
seen the dumb inarticulateness of the poor will reealise the urgency of
education in this regard. Nothing is
more striking than the way in which our educational systems train the children
of rich or well-born men to habits of authority while the children of the poor
are trained to habits of deference. Such
a division of attitude can never produce political freedom, because a class
trained to govern will exert its power because it is conscious of it, while a
class trained to deference will not fulfil its wants because it does not know
how to formulate its demands.
….
Children who are brought up in an
atmosphere where things of the mind are accounted highly are bound to start the
race of life with advantages no legislation can secure. Parental character will inevitably affect profoundly
the quality of the children whom it touches.
So long, therefore, as the family endures --- and there seems little
reason to anticipate or to desire its disappearance --- the varying
environments it will create make the notion of equal opportunities a fantastic
one.
Children who come hungry to school cannot,
on the average, profit by education in like degree to those who are well
fed. The student who is trying to do his
work in a room which serves for the various tasks of life cannot find that
essential isolation without which the habit of thought can rarely be
cultivated. The boy or girl who has to
assume that at fourteen they are bound to pass into industrial world rarely
acquires that frame of mind which searches with eagerness for the cultivation
of intelligence. In the modern world,
broadly speaking, opportunity is a matter of parent circumstance. Boys of a certain social status may assume
that they will pass from the secondary school to the university. Boys whose parents are, broadly, manual
workers will in the vast majority of cases be inevitably destined to manual
work also. There is no reason to decry
either the value or the dignity of manual work; but there is every reason to
examine the social adequacy of a system which does not at every point associate
the best training available with those qualities most fit them to benefit by
that training. We do not want ---
unduly. But no State has established
conditions of reasonable adequacy until the period of education is sufficiently
long, first, to ensure that the citizen knows how to use his mind, and training
which prevents the wastage of their talent.
No one can deny that this wastage today is
enormous. Any student of the results of
adult education in Europe will have realized how great is the reservoir of
talent we leave unused until it is too late.
The sacrifices today involved when the average manual worker seeks the
adequate education of his children are sacrifices we have no right to demand.
Often enough, the training of one child is
built upon the conviction of others to a life of unremitting toil. The circumstances which those who live by
intellectual work know to be essential to its performance are, as a matter of
definition almost, denied to the vast majority of the population. And since citizenship is largely a matter of
the use of trained intelligence, it is obvious, accordingly, that its substance
is denied to all save a fraction of the community.
Our business, therefore, is to assure such
an education to all as will make every vocation, however humble, one that does
not debar those who follow it from the life of intelligence. That certainly means an extension of the
period within which the earning of one’s living is impossible. It means also that even after the earning
period has commenced there are full opportunities for the devotion of leisure
to intellectual ends. It means, thirdly,
that those who devote themselves to the business of teaching represent the best
minds at the service of the community.
In the modern State the teacher has a responsibility far greater than
that which devolves upon any other citizen; and unless he teaches from a full
mind and a full heart he cannot release the forces which education has in
leash.
Nothing in all this denies the probability
that mental qualities are inherited and that, other things being equal, the
children of able parents will be abler than the children of average parents.
But it does deny the equation, characteristic of the modern State, between
ability and material position. The
average trade-union leader cannot afford to send his sons to the university;
but the ability of the average trade-union leader is probably not inferior to
that of the average banker or the average bishop. Where, that is to say, the
inequalities of our system are not due to natural causes, there is a clear case
for their remedy. Nor can we hope to
discover the existence of capacity unless our system provides for its
discovery. It may do so today in the
case of the rich; assuredly it does not do so in the case of the poor. And it is urgent to remember that, important
as nature may be, it requires an adequate nurture if it is to function
satisfactorily. The present inequalities
are not referable to principle.
We have therefore to define the outlines of
such a system as build the inequalities we admit upon the needs of
society. At present they most largely
arise from the impact of the property system upon the structure of the State. But what is reflected by the property system
is less ability to serve the community than ability to gain economic power
without reference to the quality of wants supplied.
The provision of adequate opportunity is,
therefore, one of the basic conditions of equality, and it is mainly founded
upon the training we offer to citizens.
For the power that ultimately counts in society is the power to utilize
knowledge; and disparities of education result, above all, in disparities in
the ability to use that power. I am not
pleading for equality of function. I am
pleading only for the obvious truth that without education a man is not so
circumstanced that he knows how to make the best of himself and that therefore,
for him, the purpose of society is, ab initio, frustrated. Once men are in that situation where they can
know themselves, the use they make of their opportunities becomes subject to
principles of which equality is only one.
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