V. The Magic Theory of Education

BUT these are not the only superstitions which have muddled the educational process. You have heard that favourite speech of the condemned criminal: “I never had no education.”

He does not refer to moral education; he is not complaining that he was never instructed as to the sacredness of life and private property. He means that he never studied arithmetic and geography and spelling—or not enough to mention. He means that geography, etc., would have saved him from a life of crime and a finish behind the bars.

And you have heard some unlettered parent, come from a foreign shore, repeat over and over:

“My boy, he get education. I no have education. But my boy—he get education.” Or words to that effect.

True; his boy will have a better chance than he[Pg 48] himself had; he may become President of the United States or of a Fruit Trust. And it is equally true of the other man, that if he had learned arithmetic in school instead of sneak-thievery from the Carmine street gang, he would probably now be making shoes in a factory instead of in Sing Sing. There is much plain common sense in both these views of education. But there is more of plain folk-mysticism.

Both speakers think of themselves as having had to struggle along in the ordinary natural way, in the one case by day-labour and in the other by petty larceny; and they contrast their lot with that of the fortunate ones who by means of an esoteric kind of knowledge have found an easy way of life. This knowledge, they believe, is reposed exclusively in certain difficult and officially designated books, which can be made to yield their secrets only through a process called going-to-school, and by the aid of a kind of public functionary called a teacher.

This mysterious and beneficent procedure is the popular conception of education. The school building and the teacher are the later and more external elements of the cult. It is at heart a belief in the magic—one might call it the black-and-white magic—of books.

[Pg 49]Now the essence of the belief in magic is the wish of the weak person to be strong—magic being the short straight line in the wish-world from weakness to strength.

Think for a moment of some childhood fairy tale. The Hero is not the strong man. It is the wicked Giant who is strong. The r?le of brute force is always played by malevolent powers. The Hero, stripped of his magical appurtenances, is not much to look at. Almost invariably he is the youngest of the family, and is often represented as diminutive in size or stature. And the older the fairy tale, the more physically insignificant he is. It is only later, when the motif of romantic love enters into folk-fiction, that the hero must be tall and handsome. At the earlier period he is frankly a weakling, as Man in primitive times no doubt felt himself to be, in comparison with the mastodon and the aurochs; and frequently he is regarded at the outset by the rest of the family with contempt, as no doubt was Man by the other animals when his great Adventure began. Like Man, the fairy-tale hero is confronted with an impossible task—sometimes by a whole series of such tasks, which he must somehow perform successfully if he wishes to survive; and, by no superior strength, but by some blessed help from[Pg 50] outside, a singing bush, a talking bird, by the aid of some supernatural weapon, and, above all, by the use of some talismanic Word, he achieves his exploits. Thus does the weakling, the youngest child, the harassed prey of hateful powers, become the Giant-Killer, the Dragon-Slayer, the Conquering Hero!

It is very human, this pathetic assertion that weakness must turn into strength. And, if it had not been for such a confidence, primitive Man might very well have given up the game, surrendered the field to his contemporaries of the animal kingdom. And this confidence might, somewhat fancifully, be described as a previsionary sense in early Man of the larger destinies of his race. In very truth, the weakness from which it sprang was the thing which made possible these larger destinies. For the unlimited adaptations of mankind are due precisely to his weakness. It is because Man lacked the horns of the bull and the teeth of the tiger that he was forced to invent the club, the spear, the sword, the bow-and-arrow; it was because he lacked the fleetness of the deer that he had to tame and teach the horse to carry him; because he felt himself to be intolerably inferior to bird and fish that he could not rest content until he had invented the airplane and the submarine.[Pg 51] In short, because he was the weakest of all the creatures on earth, he had to take refuge from the terrible truth in a childish but dynamic wish-dream of becoming—by some mysterious help from outside—the lord of creation.

Fairy lore may be read as a record of the ancient awe and gratitude of mankind to the miracles of human adaptation which served that childish wish. The all-powerful fairy wand is simply that unnatural and hence supernatural thing, the stick, broken from a magically helping tree and made to serve a human purpose; the sceptre of royalty is that same magic stick preserved to us in the lingering fairy-tale of monarchy. But more potent even than the magic of wand or sword in fairy lore is the magic of words. And truly enough it was the miracle of language which made the weakest creature on earth the strongest. Writing, that mysterious silent speech, holding in leash the unknown powers of the magic word until it met the initiate eye, must have had for mankind a special awe and fascination, a quality of ultimate beauty and terror....

This flavour of magical potency still clings to the Book. It is the greatest of the mysterious helps by which Man makes his dream of power come true. Who can blame the poor jailbird[Pg 52] who thinks that there was, in the dull, incompetent pages of the text-books which you and I carried so unwillingly to school, an Open Sesame to a realm of achievement beyond his unaided power to reach! And who can blame the poor immigrant parent if he regards the officially designated Books which his children bring home from school as a talisman against those harsh evils of the world which he in his ignorance has had to suffer!

But the magic theory is not the only popular superstition about education. There is another, even more deeply and stubbornly rooted in the human mind.