EMBOLDENED BY HIS BEARD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 239, 21 January 1944, Page 4

EMBOLDENED BY HIS BEARD

A Tath To Schoolboys By G. B. Shaw

READER sends us this note with a copy of the English "Listener" of June 23, 1937: "You have printed Mr. Butler's White Paper on

Education in England. Would you like to print a broadcast

bv

G. B.

Shaw

on the same subject? It dates in time, but not, I think, in form or contents." We thank our reader, and reproduce the broadcast in full.

ahd ELLO, Sixth Forms! I "have been asked to speak to you because I have become celebrated through my eminence in the Profession of Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare. Eschylus wrote in school Greek; and Shakespeare is "English Literature," which is a school subject. In French schools I am English literature. Consequently, all the sixth forms

in France shudder when they hear my name. However, do not be alarmed; I am not going to talk to you about English literature. To me there is nothing in writing a play; anyone can write one if he has the necessary natural turn for it; and if he hasn’t, he can’t; that is all there is to it. However, I have another trick for imposing on the young. I am old: over 80 in fact. Also, I have a white beard; and these two facts are somehow associated in people’s minds with wisdom. That is a mistake. If a person is a born fool, the folly wil! get worse, not better, by a long life’s practice. Having lived four times as long as you gives me only one advantage over you. I have carried small boys and zirls in my arms, and seen them® grow into sixth form scholars, then into young men and women in the flower of youth and beauty, then into brides and _ bridegrooms who think one another much better and lovelier than they really are, then into middle-aged paterfamiliases and anxious mothers with elderly spreads, and finally, I have attended their cremations, Now you may not think much of this: but just consider. Some of your schoolfellows may surprise you by getting hanged. Others, of whom you may have the lowest opinion, will turn out to be geniuses, and become one of the great

men of your time. Therefore, always be nice to young people. Some little beast who is no good at games and whose head you may possibly have clouted for indulging a sarcastic wit and a sharp tongue at your. expense, may grow into a tremendous swell, like Rudyard Kipling. You never can tell. It is no use reading about such things or being told about them by your father. You must have known the people personally as I have. That is what makes a difference between your outlook on the world and mine. When I was as young as you, the world seemed to me to be unchangeable; and a year seemed a long time. Now the years fly past before I have time to look round. I am an old man before I have quite got out of the habit of thinking of myself as a boy. You all think, don’t you, that you are nearly grown up. I thought so when I was your age; and now, after 81 years of that expectation, I have not grown up yet. The same thing will happen to you. You will escape from school only to discover that the world is a bigger school, and that you are back again in the first form. Before you can work your way up into the sixth form again you will be as old as I am. The Hardest Part of School: is fortunately the early part when you are a very small kid and have to be turned into a walking ready reckoner. You have to know up to 12 times 12, and how many shillings there are in any number of pence up to 144 without looking at a book. And you must understand a printed page just as you understand people talking to you. That is a stupendous feat of sheer learning: much the most difficult I have ever achieved: yet I have not the faintest recollection of being put through it, though I remember the governess who did it. I cannot remember any time at which a printed page was unintelligible to me nor at which*I did not know without counting that 56 pence make four and eightpence. This seems so magical to me now that I sometimes regret that she did not teach me the whole table of logarithms and binomial theorem and all the other mathematical short cuts and ready reckonings as well. Perhaps she would have if she had known them herself, It is strange that if you learn anything when you are young you remember it forever. What makes school life irksome until you get used to it, and easy when you do get used to it, is that it is a routine, You have to get up at a fixed hour, wash and dress, take your meals and do your work all at fixed hours. Now the worst of a routine is that though it is supposed to suit everybody, it really suits nobody. Sixth form scholars are like other people: they are all different. Each of you is what is called an individual case, needing individual attention. But you cannot have it at school, Nobody has time enough nor money enough to provide each of you with a

separate teacher and a special routine carefully fitted to your individual personality, like your clothes and your boots. Change is Possible: I can remember a time when English people going to live in Germany were astonished to find that German boots were not divided into rights and lefts: a boot was a boot and it did not matter which foot you put it on, your foot had to make the best of it. You may think that funny; but let me ask how many of you have your ‘socks knitted as rights and lefts? I have had mine knitted that way for the last 50 years. Some knitters of socks actually refuse my order and say that can’t be done. Just think of that! We are able to make machines that can fly round the world and instruments that can talk round the world; yet we think we cannot knit socks as rights and lefts; and I am considered a queer sort of fellow because I want it done and insist that it can be done. Well, school routines are like the socks and the old German boots: they are neither rights nor lefts, and consequently, they don’t fit any human being properly. But we have to manage with them somehow. And when we escape from school into the big adult world, we have to choose between a lot of routines: the college routine, the military routine, the naval routine, the court routine, the civil service routine, the legal routine, the clerical routine, the theatrical routine, or the parliamentary routine, which is the worst of the lot. To get properly stuck into one of these grooves you have to pass examinations; and this you must set about very clear-headedly or you will fail, You must not let yourself get interested in the subjects or be overwhelmed by the impossibility of anyone mastering them all even at the age of 500, much less 20. The scholar who knows everything is like the little child who is perfectly obedient and perfectly truthful: it doesn’t exist and never ‘will. Therefore, you must go to a crammer. Now (continued on next page)

An @¢@=-Year-old to the 18-Year«olds

(continued trom previous page) ’ what is a crammer? A crammer is a person whose whole life is devoted to doing something you have not time to do for yourself: that is, to study all the old examination papers and find out what are the questions that are actually asked, and what are the answers expected by the examiners and officially recognised as correct. You must be very careful not to suppose that these answers are always the true answers.

Your examiners will be elderly gentlemen; and their knowledge is sure to be more or less out of date. Therefore, begin by telling yourself this story. Five Hundred Years Ago: Imagine yourself q young student early in the fifteenth century being examined as to your knowledge of the movements of the ‘gun and moon, the planets and stars. Imagine also that your father happens to know Copernicus, and that you have learnt from his conversation that the planets go round not in circles but in ellipses. Imagine that you have met the painter Leonardo da Vinci, and been allowed to peep at his funny notebook, and by holding it up to a mirror read the words, "the earth is a moon of the sun." Imagine that on being examined, you have the answers of Copernicus and Leonardo, believing them to be the true answers, Instead of passing at the head of the successful list you would have been. burnt alive for heresy. Therefore, you would have taken good care to say that the stars and the sun move in perfect circles, because the circle is a perfect figure, and therefore answers to the perfection of the Creator, You would have said that the motion of the

sun round the earth was proved by the fact that Joshua saw it move in Gibeon and stopped it. All your answers would be wrong; but you would pass and be patted on the head as a young marvel of Aristotelian science. Now passing examinations to-day is just what it was in the days of Copornicus. If you at 20 years of age go up to be examined by an elderly gentleman of 50, you must find out what people were taught 30 years ago, and stuff him with that, and not with what you are taught to-day. But, you will say, how are you possibly to find out what questions are to be asked and what answers are expected? Well, you cannot; but a~good crammer can. He cannot get a peep at the papers before hand; but he can study the old examination papers until he knows all the questions that the examiners have to keep asking over and over again; for after all, their number is not infinite, If only you will swot hard enough to learn them all, you will pass with flying colours, Of course you will not be able to learn them all; but your chances will be good in proportion to the number you can learn, Beware of Originality: The danger of being plucked for giving up-to-date-answers to elderly examiners is greatest in the technical professions, you want to get, into the navy, or practice

medicine, you must get specially trained for some months in practices that are quite out-of-date, If you don’t, you will be turned down by admirals dreaming of the Nelson touch, and surgical baronets brought up on the infallibility of Jenner and Lister and Pasteur. But this does not apply to all examinations. Take the classics, for instance. Homer’s Greek and Virgil’s Latin, being dead languages, do not change as naval and medical practice changes. Suppose you want to be a clergyman. The Greek of

the New Testament does not change. The creeds do not change. The 39 Articles do not change, though they ought to; for some of them are terribly out-of-date. You can cram yourself with these subjects and save your money for lessons in elocution. Life Begins In Earnest: Once you are safely through your examinations you will begin life in earnest. You will then discover that your education has been very defective. You will find yourself uninstructed as to eating and drinking and sleeping and breathing. Your notions of keeping yourself fit will consist mostly of physical exercises which will shorten your life by 20 years or so. You may accept me as an educated man, because I have earned my living for 60 years by work which only an educated man, and even a highly educated one, could do. Yet the subjects that educated me were never taught in my schools. As far as I know, my schoolmasters were utterly and barbarously ignorant of them. School. was to me a sentence of penal servitude. You see, I was born with what people call an artistic temperament. I could read all the masterpieces of English poets, playwright, historians and scientific pioneers;

but I could not read schoolbooks, because they are written by people who do not know how to write. To me a person who knew nothing of all the great musicians from Palestrina to Edward Elgar, or of the great painters from Giotto to Burne-Jones, was a savage and an ignoramus, even if he were hung all over with gold medals for school classics, You and.Your Neighbours: As to your general conduct and prospects all I have time to say is that if you

do as everyone does and think as everyone thinks, you will get on very well with your neighbours; but you will suffer from all their illnesses and stupidities. If you think and act otherwise, you must suffer their dislike and persecution. I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice; but I found when I tried to put it in practice, not only that other people were seldom lovable, but that I was not very lovable myself. I also found that to love anyone is to take a liberty with them which is quite unbearable, unless they happen to return your affection, which you have no right to expect. What you have to learn if you are to be a good citizen of the world is that though you will certainly dislike many of your neighbours, and differ from some of them so strongly that you could not possibly live in the same house with them-that does not give you the smallest right to injure them or even to be personally uncivil to them. You must not attempt to do good to those who hate you: for they do not need your officious services, and would refuse to be under any obligation to you. Your difficulty will be how to behave to those whom you dislike, and

cannot help disliking for no reason whatever, simply because you were born with an antipathy to that sort of person. You must just keep out of their way as much as you can; and when you cannot deal as honestly and civilly with them as with your best friend, Just think what the world would be like if everyone who disliked you were to punch your head. The oddest thing about it is that you will find yourself making friends with people whose opinions are the very opposite to your own, whilst you cannot bear the sight of others who share all your beliefs. You may find yourself completely dissatisfied with all your fellow creatures as they exist at present and with all their laws and institutions. Then there is nothing to be done but to set to work to find out exactly what is wrong with them, and how to set them right. That is perhaps the best fun of all} but perhaps I think so only because I am a little in that line myself. I could tell you a lot more about this; but time is up; and I am warned that I must stop. I hope you are so (Broadcast to Sixth Forms on June 11, 1937, and printed in the Enéglish Listener)