[PF:168309] Our schools teach the morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism

Back to Methuselah  Author: George Bernard Shaw

Excerpts: 

COWARDICE OF THE IRRELIGIOUS

Another observation I had made was that goodnatured unambitious men are

cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and exploited not

only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will

do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the more childish and

selfish uses of money, but by able and sound administrators who can do

nothing else with them than dominate and exploit them. Government and

exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world

is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards.

Those who refuse to stand in with them are persecuted and occasionally

executed when they give any trouble to the exploiters. They fall into

poverty when they lack lucrative specific talents. At the present moment

one half of Europe, having knocked the other half down, is trying to

kick it to death, and may succeed: a procedure which is, logically,

sound Neo-Darwinism. And the goodnatured majority are looking on

in helpless horror, or allowing themselves to be persuaded by the

newspapers of their exploiters that the kicking is not only a sound

commercial investment, but an act of divine justice of which they are

the ardent instruments.

But if Man is really incapable of organizing a big civilization, and

cannot organize even a village or a tribe any too well, what is the use

of giving him a religion? A religion may make him hunger and thirst for

righteousness; but will it endow him with the practical capacity to

satisfy that appetite? Good intentions do not carry with them a grain of

political science, which is a very complicated one. The most devoted and

indefatigable, the most able and disinterested students of this science

in England, as far as I know, are my friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

It has taken them forty years of preliminary work, in the course of

which they have published several treatises comparable to Adam Smith's

Wealth of Nations, to formulate a political constitution adequate to

existing needs. If this is the measure of what can be done in a

lifetime by extraordinary ability, keen natural aptitude, exceptional

opportunities, and freedom from the preoccupations of bread-winning,

what are we to expect from the parliament man to whom political science

is as remote and distasteful as the differential calculus, and to whom

such an elementary but vital point as the law of economic rent is a

_pons asinorum_ never to be approached, much less crossed? Or from the

common voter who is mostly so hard at work all day earning a living that

he cannot keep awake for five minutes over a book?

IS THERE ANY HOPE IN EDUCATION?

The usual answer is that we must educate our masters: that is,

ourselves. We must teach citizenship and political science at school.

But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must

_not_ teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster

who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets

without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded

indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the

morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the

military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of

the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see

through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals

whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new

generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the

fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending

the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them

the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance

than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the

educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion,

children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act

as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that

save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of

drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out

through the schoolmaster.

THE DIABOLICAL EFFICIENCY OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

But meanwhile--and here comes the horror of it--our technical

instruction is honest and efficient. The public schoolboy who is

carefully blinded, duped, and corrupted as to the nature of a society

based on profiteering, and is taught to honor parasitic idleness and

luxury, learns to shoot and ride and keep fit with all the assistance

and guidance that can be procured for him by the most anxiously sincere

desire that he may do these things well, and if possible superlatively

well. In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns

to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is

rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons,

battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied

destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business,

and really mean the learners to succeed. The result is that powers

of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to

infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of

romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by

education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a

religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless

under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic

terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools,

commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own

industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the

money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely

because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple

purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of

public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting

ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune

because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford

to pay the piper. Neither the rulers nor the ruled understand high

politics. They do not even know that there is such a branch of knowledge

as political science; but between them they can coerce and enslave

with the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization,

because their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly

carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is

nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible

powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and

compel the rest to submit, because they have been taught to do so as

an article of religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural

enlightenment has reacted against artificial education submit because

they are compelled; but they would resist, and finally resist

effectively, if they were not cowards. And they are cowards because they

have neither an officially accredited and established religion nor a

generally recognized point of honor, and are all at sixes and sevens

with their various private speculations, sending their children perforce

to the schools where they will be corrupted for want of any other

schools. The rulers are equally intimidated by the immense extension

and cheapening of the means of slaughter and destruction. The British

Government is more afraid of Ireland now that submarines, bombs, and

poison gas are cheap and easily made than it was of the German Empire

before the war; consequently the old British custom which maintained a

balance of power through command of the sea is intensified into a terror

that sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the

entire globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible

in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians.

FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION

This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result

of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the

secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying

'Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,' and the poor, 'How long, O

Lord, how long?' But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those

who help themselves. This does not mean that if Man cannot find the

remedy no remedy will be found. The power that produced Man when the

monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if

Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man is to be

saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he

should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present

best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in

polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain

is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must

stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try

another experiment.

What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the

Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement

can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the

statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other

equally senseless accident.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION

But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the

impulse that produces evolution is creative. They have observed the

simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain

pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and

organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no

means played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus

of an athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable

to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put

up a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution

shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: providing

the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at

all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the

sea; enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the

fowl to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of

any sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our

resources.

Read the complete book @ http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13084/pg13084.txt

May Allah bless you with true success of this world as well as of the hereafter!

----
PS: Actions may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action, so act we MUST.
---------
Wishing you and all your loved ones greatest of times ahead!
Aspiring 2 c u happy!

Shakeel Ahmad
B.Tech (IT-BHU), MBA (XLRI), PMP
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Recommended website for PMP exam preparation: http://www.passPM.com/

Remember, growing older is mandatory. Growing up is optional.
 
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