“While a formidable strife between masters of different creeds might be engendered, it is arguable that the finest political spirit might be fostered by approaching the problems under the conditions of fairness and courtesy on which the public schools pride themselves." Manchester Guardian.

“Tolerance, to be more than a pale and negative virtue, needs to be based on an understanding of these different points of view, which means, again, bringing an educated mind to bear on them.” Westminster Gazette.

“Boys always will be boys” they say, and the saying can be interpreted in many ways. “Masters always will be masters” is a more sobering reflection. The reputation of schoolmasters for sweet reasonableness has never stood, perhaps, particularly high. Even supposing that, with a staff of angels, such a scheme of teaching as that sketched in the preceding chapter were desirable, will not the actual result be something very different? Will not “a formidable strife between masters of different creeds be engendered,” and will not the spectacle of that strife, and a possible participation in it, be the very worst possible training for the new generation?

The difficulty is one that has got to be faced, and the present writers, at any rate, are not at all likely to overlook it. As was shown in Chapter II., our experiments collapsed not because our colleagues differed from us in political opinion, but because, differing from us in political opinion, they also differed from us in educational theory. Had the experiment collapsed simply because they differed from us in political opinion, it would be no use pursuing the subject of political education further; for a staff in which all the masters held the same political views would be unlikely to exist, and in any case altogether undesirable. We may take it for granted that the staff will consist of men of diverse political opinions. Indeed we may go further and take it for granted that in a school in which political education flourishes, those diversities, though certainly less bitter, will be more clearly marked than at present. In such a school the masters, for the most part, will be keenly interested in politics, for the school must be a single society of men and boys in real intellectual co-operation. What is good for the boys will be good for the masters. Perverse metaphors comparing masters and boys to hounds and hares will be seen as the symptom of a radically false educational philosophy.

If political education becomes not merely an experiment but an integral part of the timetable, the staff as a whole, not necessarily all the masters, but all those concerned with what are at present ironically called “the humanities,” will be taking a part in it. But how can this be worked? We are here faced with a problem such as none of the ordinary school subjects has ever raised, at any rate in this acute form. Everything depends upon the educational philosophy of the staff. Everything depends upon the extent of their belief in freedom of opinion.

The case for freedom of opinion, like the case for self-government, has suffered from the fact that we take the theory so completely for granted that we do not notice how far we are removed from the practice of it. Freedom is supposed to be an Englishman’s speciality. “Britons never shall be slaves,” we say, and suppose that settles the matter. Very likely Thomson, when he wrote his feeble verses (they have been redeemed by an excellent tune), never paused to reflect that the sailors he was glorifying were mostly victims of the press-gang. It is but a step from a press-gang to a Press Bureau. Most Englishmen are not very anxious to tolerate any opinions but their own, if the subject be one that they deem of vital importance. Very few have the faith of the great apostles of freedom, the conviction that right opinion can only triumph through fair and open conflict with the wrong.

The cause of freedom, then, fares badly enough in the world outside, when we are only concerned with its application to those who have reached “years of discretion.” Inside the school the difficulties are admittedly greater, and freedom has hitherto had a poor chance. Yet without freedom, though there may be instruction, there can hardly be education.

In so far then as the staff fall short in this vital matter of toleration, they must themselves go to school and learn; and he is probably a poor teacher who is not himself ever learning something more. Here perhaps the head master might find one of his finest opportunities. The conscientious modern head master often finds it hard to rise above the mass of administrative work attached to his office. He resembles Philip II. of Spain, of whom it was said that he was always trying to be his own private secretary. Meanwhile his assistants go their own ways, each narrowing into his own little intellectual groove. The result, at any rate in the more remote and less distinguished schools that is to say, the vast majority is a society far from idyllic. Even if politics were to engender “a formidable strife,” the discords would not be breaking in upon any very beautiful harmonies. Two novels have recently been written by schoolmasters about their profession, and even if “Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill” may be discounted as the ill-natured revenge of a clever man who had mistaken his profession, “The Lanchester Tradition” has, we believe, been generally hailed as a truthful record. Masters at many schools have exclaimed, “How on earth does this Rugby man come to know all about us?” Teaching is spiritual work or it is nothing, and the head master ought to be, as the greatest head masters have been, a true leader of his staff in spiritual things.

Our profession is the most insanely individualistic in the world. Probably the teaching of every subject would be improved by the establishment of a really organised co-operation between the various masters teaching it, and “politics,” with its strong human appeal would, with a leader worthy of his position, be the best place to begin. Masters would meet for a genuine educational purpose and the last thing ever discussed at the masters’ meetings we have attended has been educational principles they would learn to see into each others’ minds and methods, enlarge their intellectual sympathies and understand their differences. Thus a real corporate intellectual life of the staff might begin. Often at present this does not exist, and its absence is fatal to the school as a seriously intellectual institution.

And surely the need for the tolerant staff can hardly be exaggerated. And here we are thinking not so much of the war and its controversies as of the days that will follow. After the war a baser motive than even the crudest jingo patriotism will claim a monopoly over the political thought of public schoolboys for the defence not of “country,” but of property. The unorthodox will be denounced not as “pacifists,” but as “socialists,” and the enemy will be not the Kaiser, but perhaps the Prime Minister of a Labour Government. But just as the only hope for the world after the war seems to lie in a League of Nations, so the only hope for England lies in the co-operation of all classes in a common search for industrial justice. The public schools are “class preserves” of the rich, and their opportunity for good, as for harm, will be almost boundless. “To turn out the young of the capitalist class with all their capitalist prejudices intact will be sheer dereliction of duty on the part of public schoolmasters.” So wrote a great teacher of the older generation. The obvious way of destroying those prejudices as prejudices is by an enthusiastic and capable exposition of various forms of socialism. This can best be done by socialist masters. But, supposing the socialist teaching is false, why should those who are not Socialists fear for the result? It is a necessary part of the scheme that they on their side should make a reasoned defence of a reformed capitalism. If this is done “the young of the capitalist class” may be turned out Socialists or anti-Socialists, but at least they will go out into the world men of some economic understanding, with views based on reasoning, and by further reasoning or experience liable to be changed, not men with inherited prejudice intact.

If we assume in our staff a general inclination towards freedom of opinion, everything becomes possible. A hundred questions of organisation arise, essentially practical questions, and more easily solved by concrete experiment than by literary methods. It may, however, be worthy while to glance at a few of these.

Masters will always be human; and political education must be so organised as to suggest in every way that the masters of divergent views are co-operating in a general scheme of political education such as no one of them alone could impart, not competing for the political allegiance of the boys. A school is not a bye-election in permanent session. Thus, though a controversial element is bound to come into political education, we would mitigate this element by not allowing any one form to go to more than one master for political work. The boy will pass from form to form, and thus the conservatism of a summer term will be tempered by the radicalism of the following winter. But these political compartments will not be particularly air-tight in any case. The house master will be a permanent influence, and when a keen-witted boy has just got out of the form of a sympathetic master, it is unlikely that they will altogether lose touch with one another.

At the top of the school, however, the controversial element should be more frankly accepted. We believe in the permanent institution of a voluntary Politics Class in which the best boys will hear again the best of the masters who have taught them on their way up the school. Between such a Politics Class and a really efficient school Debating Society it might be hard to draw a precise line. One would play into the hands of the other.

The judicial teacher, the man who from an Olympian elevation surveys the political strivings of past and present alike, and analyses, catalogues, and defines, creating all the while an impression of luminous impartiality, may, of course, do much good work. The present writer would be the last man to deny it when he remembers his own debt to a teacher of that kind. None the less, we believe that it is the other kind of teaching that is really needed in the schools of the well-to-do to-day. The political problems of our time are of intense and terrible importance: on their solution this way or that depends the happiness or the misery of uncounted millions; and it is so largely on the way that the young of the privileged classes learn to look at them that their solution depends. “Judicial” teaching creates the impression that so long as you “know the case” for or against a policy, it does not matter whether you believe it, and as for acting upon it, or making sacrifices for it, there is no question of doing anything so “extreme.” Education must create enthusiasm.

It must also make for many-sidedness, and so we arrive at the function of the staff, the many-sided staff of enthusiasts. Let each one believe himself, if he is young enough to do so, the monopolist of political truth. Let each one differ from all his colleagues on every subject under the sun, except two, the infinite possibilities of the boys he teaches, and the infinite importance of freedom of opinion.