What Is and What Might Be | Page 4

directly
or indirectly, the education of the youth of England. We must, therefore,
widen the scope of our inquiry, and carry our search for cause a step
farther back. How did the belief that a formal examination is a worthy
end for teacher and child to aim at, and an adequate test of success in
teaching and in learning, come to establish itself in this country? And
not in this country only, but in the whole Western world? In every
Western country that is progressive and "up to date," and in every
Western country in exact proportion as it is progressive and "up to
date," the examination system controls education, and in doing so
arrests the self-development of the child, and therefore strangles his
inward growth.
What is the explanation of this significant fact? In my attempt to
account for the failure of elementary education in England to foster the
growth of the educated child, I have travelled far. But I must travel
farther yet. The Western belief in the efficacy of examinations is a
symptom of a widespread and deep-seated tendency,--the tendency to
judge according to the appearance of things, to attach supreme
importance to visible "results," to measure inward worth by outward
standards, to estimate progress in terms of what the "world" reveres as
"success." It is the Western standard of values, the Western way of
looking at things, which is in question, and which I must now attempt
to determine.
That I should have to undertake this task is a proof of the complexity of
education, of the bewildering tanglement of its root-system, of the
depths to which some of its roots descend into the subsoil of human-life.
The defect in our system of education which I am trying to diagnose is
one which the "business man," who may have had reason to complain
of the output of our elementary schools, will probably account for in

one sentence and propound a remedy for in another. But I, who know
enough about education to realise how little is or can be known about it,
find that if I am to understand why so many schools turn out helpless
and resourceless children, I must go back to the first principles of
modern civilisation, or in other words to the cardinal axioms of the
philosophy of the West.
This does not mean that I must make a systematic study of Western
metaphysics. Professional thinkers abound in the West; but the rank
and file of the people pay little heed to them. It is true that they take
themselves very seriously; but so does every clique of experts and
connoisseurs. The indirect influence of their theories has at times been
considerable; but their direct influence on human thought is, and has
always been, very slight. For the plain average man, who cannot rid
himself of the suspicion that the professional thinker is a professional
word-juggler, has a philosophy of his own which was formulated for
him by an unphilosophical people, and which, though it is now
beginning to fail him, was once sufficient for all his needs.
At the present moment there are two schools of popular thought in the
West. For many centuries there was only one. For many centuries men
were content to believe that the outward and visible world--the world of
their normal experience--was the all of Nature. But they were not
content to believe that it was the "all of Being." The latter conception
would have said "No" to certain desires of the heart which refuse to be
negatived,--desires which are as large and lofty as they are pure and
deep: and in order to provide a refuge for these, men added to their
belief in a natural world which was bounded by the horizon of
experience (as they understood the word), the complementary belief in
a world which transcended the limits of experience, and in which the
dreams and hopes for which Nature could make no provision might
somehow or other be realised and fulfilled. With the development of
physical science, the conception of the Supernatural has become
discredited, and a materialistic monism has begun to dispute the
supremacy of that dualistic philosophy which had reigned without a
rival for many hundreds of years. But antagonistic as these
philosophies are to one another, they have one conception in common.

The popular belief that the world of man's normal experience is the
Alpha and Omega of Nature, is the very platform on which their
controversies are carried on. Were any one to suggest to them that this
belief was without foundation, that there was room and to spare in
Nature for the "supernatural" as well as for the normal, that the
supernatural world (as it had long been miscalled) was nothing more
nor less than "la continuation occulte de