“A point hardly touched on in the book is the difficulty of teaching politics without the disadvantages of partisanship. It is worth discussion.” Manchester Guardian.

“If ’politics’ even politics as an art culled from the classics, from pro-German economists and historians, from poets such as Shelley, and from German higher critics of the Bible were taught to fifth form boys with crude impressionable minds, the result would be Bolshevism. We agree that under careful guidance much of ultimate political value can be taught from history and literature. But it must be done with infinite care, and opinions must be excluded from the teaching. That is the difficulty.” Contemporary Review.

“Clever boys will learn their politics for themselves.” Saturday Review.

“The public schools have for years past covered their quiet infiltration of Conservative principles with a camouflage of strict neutrality. Teachers though they are, the authors do not seem quite to realise what a formidable protective device this banning of the modern history which we call politics has been, and what obstacles have to be overcome before the advice given in their little book is generally taken.” Westminster Gazette.

Two great objections have to be met if Politics is to become the central subject in our public school education. The desirability of such a change may be urged from many points of view; and the practical results obtained during the course of our recent experiment seemed to us even more valuable than preliminary theorising had led us to expect. Once make a boy think about the life of his own time and the great principles whose fight for mastery he is witnessing; once make him wonder about the actual machinery by which his world is moved; once set him speculating about the meaning of the universe and of his own existence; and you have created such a spirit of eager enthusiasm and inquiry, that at last that development of the individual personality is achieved which, as every great educationist since Plato has told us, must be the aim of all who desire to be more than mere teachers. Modern History, Politics, Sociology, Economics, Ethics, even Metaphysics we may class all these under the broad heading of Politics, for one and all they deal with the life and destiny of the individual as a member of human society and a part of the Universe. There is no human being who, at least while he is young, does not feel a keen interest in such things; the deepest waters are stirred and the classroom becomes the meeting-place of minds engaged in an exciting adventure instead of being, as is so often now the case, a prison cell in which all a boy’s spontaneity and joy of life are crushed out beyond recall.

Yet the two objections remain, and to one of them we address ourselves in this chapter. When the possibility of political teaching is considered, the first thought that leaps to the mind is: Can the subject be taught without the introduction of propaganda? and is not Politics just the one subject in which propaganda is above everything undesirable? Now it may be pointed out that the present system of public school education is itself a form of political propaganda none the less effective for being concealed. A boy is sent to a public school with a set of political notions imbibed from his parents and the circle in which he moves, and during the whole period of his boyhood, no genuine effort is made to develop his powers of independent thought and so to enable him to revise his inherited opinions. A certain stimulus no doubt is given to his mental activity by setting him mathematical problems to solve and passages in the classical authors to construe; but his thought on political and social questions remains a thing apart, unstirred, atrophied. What else is this but political propaganda? And when it is reinforced by a thousand subtle hints in and out of the classroom, hints suggesting that, of course, there can be no two opinions about so-and-so and his supporters, it becomes one of the most potent instruments of mental darkness that has ever been allowed to function in a rational community.

But the objection to propaganda is not to be met by a “Tu quoque.” It is one which raises the most fundamental issues of educational theory. To develop, we are told, and not to mould, is the aim of education; and every genuine educationist will eagerly agree. Yet you cannot develop in a vacuum. You must impart some background for the young mind, give it some material on which to work. How, then, can the compromise be effected? How can we inculcate and yet at the same time aim above every thing at the development of an individuality, which may and indeed must, be so very different from our own? The answer is not really hard to find. What we inculcate, the background we give, must be considered by us as merely a stop-gap, a poor temporary support which the child may fling away when he can support himself. And even while we are giving the support, we must at every moment be developing the power which will as soon as possible dispense with it.

If this caveat is borne in mind and honestly observed, propaganda, whether in political, philosophical, or religious teaching, becomes not only defensible but actually desirable. Nothing can be more fatal than to give the impression that it does not very much matter which of several conflicting principles or policies a boy adopts; that there are after all equally strong arguments on both sides, and that the adhesion of the world to one philosophy of life and code of conduct rather than another will make no very vital difference to anybody. Yet if the teacher presents his subject in a perfectly balanced and passionless manner such a result will inevitably follow. The boy will notice his master’s lack of enthusiasm, and consequently remain unenthusiastic himself; and not only will that intellectual eagerness remain undeveloped, which is as a spark to set his whole nature ablaze, but also he will feel none of that moral passion for principles which is the crying need of the world to-day. A master in another school, which had adopted the idea of a Politics Class, heard of the excitement and controversy which ours was occasioning, and remarked adversely on our methods. “We teach Politics too,” he said, “but we are careful that the boys should never be able to discover on which side our own sympathies lie. Consequently there is no excitement and no controversy. Politics are thought of in just the same way as any other school subject.” We can well believe it. Our whole idea, of course, is that they should not be so thought of; that they should be regarded rather as a matter of most vital interest and importance both for the boy himself and for the world as a whole. We would have a boy feel an attachment to principles as romantic and absorbing as his affections for his dearest friend, not coldly cancel one principle against the other as if he were doing a sum in mathematics.

But it is time that we explained exactly what we mean when we say that a master should not shrink from propaganda in political teaching. We do not by any means intend that he should state only his own point of view, and pass over the arguments that may be urged against it. That would be the merest parody of education. Rather do we mean that he should adopt a threefold method. He should put forward his own view with all the enthusiasm that he feels for it (we have been called “missionaries” by way of abuse, but find nothing but honour in the word); simultaneously, he should impress on his pupils the fact that it after all is only his view, and urge them not merely to accept but to examine and criticise; and finally, he should explain with complete honesty every point that has been, or possibly could be, raised against it. We call this method “propaganda,” because a fire is imparted to the statement of one side which cannot, from the nature of the case, be imparted to that of the other; but it is propaganda in which there is no touch of dishonesty or obscurantism.

We have said that, while he is presenting his case, the master should be urging his pupils to examine and criticise it. But he should do more than this; if he is a Liberal, he should spend much of his time in a direct propaganda of the great Liberal principles freedom of thought and discussion; the sanctity of the individual conscience; the paramount importance of moral and intellectual independence. In this way he will be creating a habit of mind which will naturally criticise; and so by his propaganda of general liberalism he will annihilate the vantage-point he would otherwise occupy in his propaganda of particular principles and policies.

We speak of “liberal education,” and surely the epithet is meaningless unless it be taken to imply that conversion to those general principles is the very bed-rock of education. But others think otherwise, and so we would point out the broad distinction which must be drawn between propaganda of the simple liberal and propaganda of the simple reactionary principle on the one hand freedom of thought, on the other acceptance of ideas not one’s own. Our liberal propaganda carries with it the instrument of its own overthrow. If you can inspire a boy with a desire to put all things to the test of his own free conscience, you are empowering him to criticise everything you teach even that very liberty of opinion, a belief in which you have been so anxious to create. But with reactionary propaganda it is quite otherwise. By it a static habit of mind is produced a habit of mind which, except by way of a mercifully not uncommon revolt, is a pawn in the hands of its present teacher, and that public opinion which in time to come will take its teacher’s place.

A word may be added on the means best calculated to produce the free mind at which we are aiming. Use, of course, can and should be always made of the fundamental arguments (all to be found in Mill) in favour of liberty of opinion. But there is one case in which the employment of a subsidiary method may give even more valuable results. Where a boy holds tenaciously to an opinion which you think to be evil, argue against it unceasingly; show him the errors of it; point out passionately the beauty of its alternative. The stronger his conviction, the better; indeed, deliberately choose his deepest-seated prejudice attack him in the very heart of what you regard as his error. Then, when at last he sees that the opinion which he had thought of as the only possible one is in reality wrong, and that another which he had loathed is in reality right, a tremendous intellectual conversion will have taken place; his own case will constantly act as a warning to him whenever he is again tempted to prejudice or narrowness of outlook.