12 
Land & Water 
J"Jy 
1 1. 
1918 
does not recognise the voice of tlie self-styled educated class 
dictating to the uneducated what they are to think, to believe, 
and to practise ? And how do we answer these would-be 
German "masters" in the school of mankind? Do we not 
answer precisely in the words of my Yorkshire friend : "Yes, 
we all want education. But we are not going to take if 
from you." 
In many of its aspects our cdiKational policy hitherto 
might be compared, not imjustly, to an attempt to grow 
roses in Greenland. And the worst of it is, that we have 
based the attempt on arguments which, in their abstract 
form, are unanswerable. What flower is more lovely than 
the rose ? What country needs it more than Greenland— 
"to cheer the gloomy landscape and perfume the scentless 
air." And who would deny the beauty of the culture founded, 
as our whole educational system still remains, on the dear 
old classical tradition ? As a flower to wear in the buttonhole 
of civilisation no otlier can compare with it. And yet this 
culture is distinctly exotic to the climate. In these regions 
of sudden frost and 'long winter, it can only flourish under 
hot-house conditions, and, when one comes to reflect, never 
has flourished otherwise. And I, for one, am all in favour 
of keeping up a hot-house here and there for the devoted 
culture of this beautiful and precious plant, for I doubt if 
any flower of native growth has an equal in fragrance or love- 
liness. But it can never be acclimatised in this soil. The 
praises sung in its honour are altogether out of proportion 
to its actual value in achieving the object of education, 
which is simply that of teaching men to ^make the best of 
the life ihey have to live. 
And j'ct for generations past we have been trying to force 
this culture on a civilisation which cannot sustain it, nay, 
on a civilization which it cannot sustain — and that is what 
education ought to do. This is what I mean by growing 
roses in Greenland. The roses are good for Greenland, but 
Greenland is not good for the roses — unless indeed we cover 
the whole country in with glass and set up a heating 
apparatus of sufficient power to keep it warm. On the whole 
it is no matter for surprise that the Greenlanders are " in- 
different" to these sage proposals. And there is no method 
of " compulsion " which can make them anything else. 
Abandoning the habits of mind, and the policy, which 
make education an attempt by one class to force its culture 
on another which does not want it, can we find a better way ? 
Is it possible to foster, in the peculiar conditions of our time, 
a type of culture of which we could say " this is education 
not by compulsion but by consent." Here teachers and 
taught are at one in what they value and in wliat they 
desire. The old relation of cap and gown versus jacket and 
knickerbockers is abolished. The old idea that the one side 
are all potters, and the other side nothing but clay no longer 
rules the situation. The two sides are now co-operating 
partners in the pursuit of a common aim. Education has 
become reconciled witli democracy. 
I believe that the word "labour" gives us the right clue. 
And, lest the reader should here lay down my article in 
disgust, I will say at once that I am not going to argue that 
education should choose its tune to please the Labour Party ; 
still less that it should aim at turning us all into "economi- 
cally tifiricnt in t:uments" to please the employers. As to 
botli of these things, God forbid I I am thinking of labour 
in terms I have learnt from great teachers. I regard it as 
the very stuff or raw material of all human life and the 
" pass- word into everything that makes life worth living." 
A very few simple principles need to be firmly grasped. 
First, that every man is, essentially, what his labour makes 
him ; whence it follows at once that unless he is educated by 
his labour he is not educated at ail. If his education, con- 
ducted on the roses-in-Greenland principle, pulls him in one 
direction and his labour in the opposite direction, the man will 
be pulled in two, but not educated — a proposition which 
holds equally true of the Viceroy of India, the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the meanest liodman. 
The educated man is, before all else, the man who under- 
stands everything about his own job and e'nough about other 
peoples' jobs to enable him to co-operate with them intelli- 
gently in the social complex. Per contra, he who understands 
everything about somebody else's job — for example, tlio navi- 
gation of a Roman trireme — ami next to nothing about his 
own, may well stand as the type of the «meducated man. 
Alas, there are many such in these days on the cap-and-gown 
side of the ditch. To this we may add the further axioms — 
I call them so because they are among the most indisputable 
truths under the sun — tliat the only happy man is the man 
who enjoys his job, and the only good man is he who does it 
to the best of his ability. 
Grasping these perfectly simple principles, we come in sight 
of our ultimate objective. The aim must be not merely to 
educate labour, but to see to it that all labour becomes an educa- 
tion. No educational policy is worthy of its name wiiich 
stops short of seeking to turn the whole labour of the com- 
munity, from the Viceroy of India to the hodman, into one 
vast continuation school. Which is as much as to say that 
education is not merely a schoolmaster's problem (though it 
includes that), but a social problem of the first magnitude — 
a problem never to be solved in isolation as an affair of 
educational experts, but in intimate connection with a wise 
and broad conception of the general needs, aims, and values 
of social life. 
It is high time to have done with this Prussian tomfoolerj' 
about " the educated class " which is to " compel " the 
" uneducated " to learn its lessons. Strictly speaking, there 
is onl}' one class, that of the uneducated, to which we all 
belong. As a community we have still to learn the ABC 
of education. Let us then school ourselves to think of 
education in terms of labour, remembering that labour is the- 
common stuff of all human life, and giving to the word a 
meaning sufficiently broad to cover every man who has a- 
definite status and occupation in the fabric of scKiety. 
The labour problem and the education problem are not two. 
They are one. That surely is the A B C of the whole- 
matter. 
I have tried to think out a short formula which would 
indicate the point at which the aims of labour — xmderstood 
in the largest sense — and the aims of educat on coincide. 
The nearest I can get to it at present is this : " that every 
man shall enjoy his day's work and a good article come oat 
at the end of it." 
The Dragon in Exile : By J. O. P. Bland 
WHEN, years hence, the world at peace has 
leisijre to cast its final profit and loss account 
of the great war, this much, at least, there 
will be to set against all its burden of sorrow 
and suffering and waste, that millions of men 
from far flung lands have been taught to know each other 
better, to take from experience a broader and a clearer view 
of life than they could ever have learned from books -or 
preachers. Something has surely been accomplished, for 
nations as for individuals, to remove the barriers of class 
and creed and caste, to eradicate some of the primordial 
human instincts, bom of ages of ignorance and prejudice. You 
cannot work or fight for four years in a good cause side by 
side with your fellowman, be he white or yellow or brown, 
without discovering in him some unsuspected virtues, and 
making friendly allowance for the fact that he was born in 
a strange land. 
For example : millions of Britons from the homeland and 
overseas (besides Frenchmen and Americans), who have made 
the acquaintance of the Chinese coolie corps in France, will, 
hereafter, have a far better conception of things Chinese 
and a kindlier feeling for the sons of Hau than they hadi 
evolved in the past, from the history of our China wars- 
or lurid tales of the Boxer rising, or memories of that shame- 
less party-cry which won an election in England not so long 
ago. "East is east, and west is west, and never the twain 
shall meet," sings Kipling. It is a sweeping judgment, 
and, like all such, unjust for all its foundation of truth. For 
what more does it amount to, after all, than recognition of 
the elemental race barrier, of the eternal antagonisms of 
creed and colour, that underlie the struggle for survival on this 
perplexing planet ? Eighteen years ago, when the Allies were 
marching on Peking under the leadership of the mailed fist, what 
would have been said ,or done to the man who prophesied 
that thousands of the next generation of Boxers would cross 
the seas to serve the ca«se of the Allies in France against 
that same mailed fist ? 
Thoughts of these things werp in m.y mind one day, not long 
since, when it was given to me to witness the foregathering of 
East and West, under peculiarly interesting conditions, at , 
the Havre. To be precise, the day was Thursday, the r3th 
of June. It was a day of no particular importance in our. 
