“Teachers though they are, Mr. Gollancz and Mr. Somervell do not seem quite to realise ... what obstacles have to be overcome before the advice given in their little book is generally taken.” The Westminster Gazette.

Our account of the collapse of our experiment has to be written, as the reader will easily understand, with a good deal of reserve. “The rise” was the work of ourselves and our pupils. “The collapse” was the work of others. It is not a question of “Dora”; it is not a question of the common law of libel; there are certain older laws of courtesy and forbearance which we would fain observe, for he who has not learnt to observe these has hardly made a beginning with political education. So let it be said to begin with that no one was to blame. Things followed their predestined course, and every actor in the drama played the part that was natural and proper to him. It was natural that the movement should be destroyed by masters as that its success should be made by boys. If any one is to blame it is ourselves. It was we who chose to pour new wine into old bottles the preference for old bottles and when the custodians of the bottles awoke to the fact and hastily poured the wine out again, fearing disaster, they certainly thought they were acting for the best. Needless to say, we have often discussed the question whether, had the movement run on other lines, had we been content with rather less to begin with, had we considered principle rather less and prudence rather more, had we added the role of diplomatist to the role of missionary, had we hardened our hearts against some of the best boys in order to soften the hearts of some of the more tractable masters had we done all these things, could we have postponed or even permanently escaped the collapse? On the whole, we come to the conclusion that, much as we regret many plain mistakes of detail, in the main it is best that the bold course was taken, We rode boldly, and, in the last months, we had to ride for a fall. An experiment has been made by frontal attack, and with the slenderest of resources. Now that all that is over, the time has come to begin the slow and circuitous approach toward political education as a normal institution.

The material of our experiment was boys and boys alone. Now, at first sight, a school might seem to consist of boys, but in point of fact boys are only one element in a complex organisation embracing boys, masters, head master, bursar, governors, and parents. The boys are only there to be educated, and education is a matter about which very few people have any strongly cherished ideas. For very many, public school education is a species of “doing time,” whereby a child of fourteen is taken and simply kept out of mischief (or, at any rate, kept away from home, where he would be a nuisance), until at eighteen he is become a man. But the other constituent parts of the school have serious commercial interests at stake. For the masters the school is the means of livelihood, and the livelihood afforded them is in many cases so niggardly that they very rightly consider that the smallest financial mishap to the school might plunge them below the line of bare subsistence. From a slightly different angle, the eyes of the higher officials and the governors are fixed upon the same point. A head master once remarked to me of one of his governors, “Old X.’s only idea is that the school should pay five per cent.”

And the parents. It is an article of faith with the present writers that parents are wiser, more tolerant and more open to ideas on educational matters, than schoolmasters generally suppose. But parents live at a distance, and only make themselves felt at moments of crisis, and then the crisis is one which they probably only very imperfectly understand. That is all the fault of the schools, for the schools have never made a serious attempt to take the parents into partnership in the matter of their sons’ education. And here we are back against the root of all evil, for the reason why this has not been done is that the schools have not yet seriously faced the fact that a liberal education for the average boy is an unsolved problem, for the solution of which they need all the help they can possibly get. Of course this taking of the parent into partnership would be no easy matter. Readers of that wise and humorous tale, “The Lanchester Tradition,” will remember the comical failure of the head master’s attempt at a “Parents’ Committee.” Still, all this being so, the fact emerges that the important factor in the problem of the moment is not the real parent but the traditional parent, and the false image of the traditional parent has been created in the schoolmaster’s mind by that fussy and ill-informed individual who is always “writing to complain.” Now, he who pays the piper does not necessarily call the tune. That would be too absurd. But he has a veto on any tune he too positively dislikes, and it is well known that the unmusical generally dislike a new tune.

The opposition to political education developed along two lines. One of them makes this story a microcosm of the world history of the years 1917-1918. The other is something peculiar to the English public schools, and might have befallen at any period since Dr. Arnold inaugurated their modern history.

When we began our experiments the “party truce,” in the moral as distinct from the formal sense, still held good. Outside the circles of strict pacifism and with pacifism in any but a merely abusive sense we never had any concern English people were agreed upon the great questions of the war. Such differences of opinion as there were concerned only questions of method and expediency, not questions of principle. The “gospel” of August, 1914, had not yet become a battle-ground disputed by fiercely earnest rival sects. We were Liberals in a general sense, but we differed on a great many topics, and we were genuinely anxious, in the words of one of our pupils in the school magazine, “not so much to advocate any one particular remedy of any given problem as to lay before the class the problems themselves and the principal reforms which have been or are being suggested, so that thought and criticism may have full scope for exercise.” It would be unfair to ourselves to admit that we abandoned that ideal, but the events of 1917 brought a new spirit into the world. On the one hand, the early days of the Russian Revolution and the demand for a peace “without annexations or indemnities,” coupled with the entry of America and the war speeches of President Wilson, seemed to revive the flagging idealism of the Allies and lift it to a more universal and exalted level than ever before. On the other hand, the publication of the Secret Treaties and the many incomplete revelations that followed thereon, laid bare the fact that quite another act of motives were also at work among our leaders; that territorial greed and diplomatic hypocrisy were enemies to be fought in our own midst as well as on the battlefield. The issues of the war assumed a grander and a more terrible aspect. More than ever before perhaps in the history of the world and we do not overlook the period of the so-called religious wars religion and politics fused. To us, at any rate, the calm aloofness suggested by the quotation above became impossible. A cry seemed to have gone forth, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Who?” A great gulf opened up between those who only a year before had believed themselves to be for the time at any rate in one political camp. On one side of that gulf we found ourselves, and on the other most of our colleagues. It was not that we differed from them as to the necessity of winning the war, and of putting forward every possible military effort for that end. But everything depends on the uses to which the victory is put, and the spirit in which it is approached, and there the differences were profound.

And thus the Politics Class became a school of liberalism. It was no intolerant liberalism, for intolerant liberalism is not liberalism at all. From first to last we stood for the examination of all points of view. We were for reading the views of those we disagreed with, not for abusing them unheard or burning their books unread. In so far as some of our pupils carried liberalism to the point of intolerance, they lost the spirit of the movement they professed to support. There were not many against whom this charge could be brought. One of our most ardent democrats, I remember, sent me during the time of his military training a careful and painstaking examination of Mr. Mallock’s latest big book. The excuse of those that fell into intolerance must be, I suppose, that they were young, and that they found themselves confronted by an astonishing spectacle of intolerance in some of their “conservative” masters.

When this change was taking place, we sought to redress the balance by taking into partnership in the running of the Politics Class a strongly Conservative master. Such an arrangement would have been admirable had the genuine educational spirit been there. It was not. The overture was a failure and only added to our difficulties. To some men it seemed better to root out the Liberal masters as “traitors” than to co-operate with them as teachers.

On the eve of the final collapse, a similar experiment was tried with The School Observer. The last number bears the names of two “editors,” and contains both a Liberal and a Conservative “leader” written on the same topic. The innovation was made at the last minute, and the Conservative “leader” is not a genuine schoolboy production, but the model may be a useful one for future work on the same lines.

But there was another influence making for the collapse. We quoted in our previous book a head master who remarked at a school prize-giving that the only questions worth asking are those that cannot get a definite answer. Political education consists almost entirely of such questions. Its sheet anchor is freedom of thought; its method is controversy; its end is not in complete mastery of a box of intellectual tricks such as will win full marks in an examination, but in the modesty of realised ignorance and the enthusiastic search for fresh lights in the darkness. Socrates was put to death by the Athenians because he would not desist from asking them questions, and it is to be feared that some of our pupils would have incurred the same fate had the customs of the time permitted it. The taste for controversy on the fundamental subjects will grip a youth like the taste for drink, as many who have passed through undergraduate days at Oxford or Cambridge can remember. Suppose a boy enters into political controversy with his form master, over the| giving back of an essay, or with his house master at the luncheon table....

Now, there is a Divinity that doth hedge a schoolmaster, and the hedge must be kept in somewhat careful repair. So long as we are concerned with subjects like elementary Latin and Greek or Mathematics, we are dealing with a body of knowledge in which, to take the examinations standard, all the masters get full marks. All knowledge is contained in a set of small school books which the masters, for their sins, know more or less by heart backwards. Even history, if it is sufficiently badly taught, may be grouped among such subjects, for, strange as it may seem, it is quite possible to teach it in such a way that no boy feels impelled to ask questions either insoluble in themselves or beyond the scope of the master’s immediate memory. There are schoolmasters who definitely discourage or even forbid the asking of questions by the class. “Little boys should be seen and not heard” that worst of all educational maxims makes a larger contribution to the buttressing up of the present system than is usually supposed. A lowering diet of irregular verbs keeps the boy mind “docile,” to use a word of ironically perverted meaning, and prevents it from impinging embarrassingly upon the lightly guarded regions of the master’s intellectual entrenchments. In fact, political education set up a new intellectual standard. It was a subject in which no one, boy or master, got “full marks,” scarcely even President Wilson, perhaps, if you took his “work” as a whole! All were learners, all were fellow workers together, and before the vast scope of the task, differences of proficiency between the various workers seemed hardly to matter.

Here, then, rises a difficult question. Ought the schoolmaster to possess, or appear to possess, complete knowledge of the subject he teaches? The present writer has taught a good variety of subjects during nine years, and on the whole he has found his ignorance, not only of politics, but of far more finite matters, a very helpful educational instrument. As an emergency teacher of Latin on the modern side, for instance, he found it a positive advantage that he had forgotten more of the language than his pupils had ever learnt. His occasional quaint errors did not always pass undetected, and their detection had probably an educational stimulus for the form which outweighed the loss incurred when his mistakes passed without notice. Nor did he feel greatly the loss of intellectual stature. It was partly made good by the ingenuity with which he explained how he had come to make the mistake. And if there was loss in intellectual prestige, there was an increased sense of intellectual comradeship. But this is a trifling and not wholly serious digression.

Some masters stand for intellectual infallibility. These political discussions disturbed them. They felt that their credentials as schoolmasters were being examined and found wanting. They accused the boys of priggery. It was a most false charge, for the boys were enthusiasts, and enthusiasm is a form of self-forgetfulness as priggery is a form of self-consciousness. Still priggery was the word. The charge of “priggery” was added to the charge of “pacifism.”

On these two lines the opposition developed and ultimately triumphed. It was suggested that “the school would be empty in a couple of years,” if political education continued. Here, it would seem, our critics were trading on their false idea of the parent, and believing what they wished to believe. Take the statistics of entries, which is the only tangible evidence on the subject, and the only conclusion you can draw is that political education either had no effect at all, or that it slightly increased the commercial well-being of the school. It was not on such ground as this that political education was doomed. As we said at the beginning of the chapter, the material of our experiments was the boys and them alone. We had made a short cut. We had made no effort to convert our colleague. We trusted to results for their conversion. But, as the preceding narrative will have shown, the greater our success, the greater became their irritation, when success was labelled “pacifism” and “priggery.” Without intending it, we had played “Pied Piper” upon some of the best of the house masters’ foster children. We had envisaged a school as a single corporate society, boys and masters working together with the maximum of frankness and equality for the common end, education. We had not allowed for the fact that a school cannot become such a corporate society, unless the staff has become such at the same time. Like three-quarters of the reformers of history, we had, in our own despite, become rebels. And so all was over. There is now no Politics Class, no School Observer in the school of their foundation, though two other schools of fame have started papers on similar lines, with handsome acknowledgments to our example. There are no political societies in the Houses. Two or three of our pupils have left before their time, and we, the authors, are no longer schoolmasters, only “educationists,” it is a change for the worse.