Socialism and Superior Brains: the Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw by Griffith Gareth;

Author:Griffith, Gareth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

EDUCATION

To hive off one facet of Shaw’s argument to consider under the rubric of ‘education’ is an artificial exercise. Everything he wrote and said was infused with a passion to inform. His life’s work was dedicated to the cause of enlightenment—‘I exist to be used’, he said. He was for so many the archetypal prophet and teacher of his generation, a disseminator of knowledge in the grand tradition of Socrates and Voltaire. Modesty did not prevent him from seeing himself as belonging to that elect group of people ‘who are building up the intellectual consciousness of the race’. All his activities were transformed into educational programmes. The theatre was for him, not a place of amusement, but a house of correction—‘a temple of the Ascent of Man’ (Shaw 1932m:vii) he called it, a place where a new and higher conception of citizenship might be glimpsed. Such was the tenor of his argument for an endowed theatre at national and local levels, with that argument forming only one part of his general advocacy of moral and intellectual reform. Shaw was all to do with education. Yet, being Shaw, he certainly held strong views on educational matters in the narrower sense of the term. The critique of the education system was among his favourite themes. Added to which, he was scathing in his attacks on what he perceived to be conventional family life: ‘I do not want any human child to be brought up as I was brought up, nor as any child I have known was brought up’ (Shaw 1949a:490). He took the view that a child was an experiment on the part of the life force, ‘a fresh attempt’, as he put it in 1928, ‘to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine’. To date, the species had proved a dismal failure. Instead of heading for the divine goal, it had been diverted along the by-ways of corruption, aided and abetted by the morality of gangsterism, masquerading behind the frippery of romance. A child was so full of potential, almost all of which was stifled or perverted by the conventions and institutions of the adult world. Shaw was at his most fundamentalist here. The education system was a tyrannical sham, simply a means of keeping children out of the way of their parents for part or all the day, a system organized on the basis of rote learning and policed by the inhuman practices of corporal punishment. Of his own education, he declared: ‘It was simply dragging a child’s soul through the dirt’. Incompetent teachers teaching an unnatural curriculum, that was the sum of it. And for once there was no question of exaggeration. The school system made progress impossible. It destroyed responsibility, producing nothing but a lump of docile wage slaves, without self-respect or any regard for authority, wholly unsuited for citizenship in a modern state: ‘the voters from the elementary schools and the governing classes from the public schools and universities have between them half-wrecked civilization’ (Shaw 1922:219).

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