VI. The Caste System of Education

NOW what has Caste to do with Education? Quite as much as Magic. You shall see.

From the point of view of the student of education, the Caste system appears as a method of simplifying the hereditary transmission of knowledge—in short, as a primitive method of education. This will be the more readily apparent if we glance for a moment at its prehistoric origins.

Before man was man, he was an animal. He relied, like the rest of the animals, on a psychically easy—and lazy—mode of adaptation to reality. He had a specific set of “instinctive” reactions to familiar stimuli. Doubt had not entered his soul. He had no conflicting impulses to torment him. His bag of instinctive animal tricks sufficed.

But something happened to mar the easy perfection of his state. Some change in environmental[Pg 54] conditions, perhaps, made his set of definite reactions inadequate. For the first time he didn’t know exactly how to meet the situation. Conflicting impulses shook his mind; doubt entered his soul—and Thought was born. Man thought because he had to think. But he hated to, because it was the hardest thing he had ever done! He learned—unwillingly—more and more about how to live; he increased the number and the complexity of his adaptations; but he sought always to codify these adaptations into something resembling the bag of tricks which he had had to leave behind. And when it came to passing on the knowledge of these new adaptations to the younger generation—when it came, in short, to education—he did the job in as easy a way as he conscientiously could.

You have seen a cat teaching her kittens how to catch mice, or a pair of birds teaching their young ones to fly. It is so simple! The thing to be learned is easy—easy, because the cat is formed to catch mice and the bird to fly. And, once mastered, these tricks and a few others as simple constitute the sum of animal education. There is no more to learn; these equip the animal to deal successfully with reality. How a human parent must envy Tabby the simplicity and certainty[Pg 55] of her task! She has only to go on the theory that a cat is an animal which lives by catching mice in order to fulfil her whole educational duty. And human parents did desire (as indeed, consciously or unconsciously, they do yet) such a simplification of their task. Primitive mankind wanted to pass on to the new generation a simple bag of tricks. Of course, there is no specific bag of tricks which suffices Man to live by; he is what he is precisely by virtue of a capacity for unlimited adaptation to environment. If the bag of monkey-tricks had sufficed, about all we know now would be how to climb trees and pick cocoanuts. Our ancestors learned because they must; and they passed on what they had learned to their successors—but in a form dictated by their wish to keep human behaviour as near as possible to the simple and easy character of animal life. They put on the brakes.

Because mankind already knew more than it thought one animal species ought to have to know, it started to divide itself into sub-species. The division into the male and female sub-species came first—and has lasted longest. The young men were educated for war and the chase, and the young women for domestic duties. And this is essentially a division not of physical but rather of[Pg 56] intellectual labour. It was a separation of the burden of knowing how to behave in life’s emergencies—a separation which by its simplicity gave such satisfaction to the primitive mind that he hated and feared any disturbance of it.

To this day a man is not so much ashamed of doing “woman’s work” as of seeming to know how to do it. It is no disgrace for a man to sew on a button—provided he does it clumsily; and the laugh with which men and women greet each other’s awkward intrusions into each other’s “spheres of effort” is a reassurance to the effect that the real taboo against knowing how has not been violated. It is for this reason that women had so much harder a time to fight their way into the “masculine” professions to which a preliminary education was necessary than to enter the factories, where only strength was supposed to be required; and why (aside from the economic reasons) they have so much difficulty in entering trades which must be learned by apprenticeship. An interesting echo of this primitive taboo is to be found in New York City, where a telephone girl who wants to study the science which underlies her labours would find in certain public schools that the electricity classes are for boys exclusively.

The other social and economic groups into[Pg 57] which mankind divided itself tended to perpetuate themselves as simulated sub-species by the transmission of special knowledge along strict hereditary lines. Crafts of every sort—whether metal-working or magic, architecture or agriculture, seafaring or sheep-breeding, even poetry and prostitution—came more and more to be inherited, until among some of the great ancient peoples the caste system became the foundation of society.

Ultimately the caste system per se was shattered by the demand of the process which we call civilization for a more variously adaptable creature—for human beings. But it survives almost intact in certain class educational institutions, such as the finishing schools for girls—institutions devoted to teaching the particular bag of tricks which will enable those who learn them to occupy successfully and without further adaptation a hereditary (or quasi-hereditary) position in society—to be a “finished” and perfect member of a definite and unchanging human sub-species.

The most potent harm which the caste theory of education has effected, however, is in its stultification of the true magic of the written word. Let us see how that came about.