E-text prepared by Al Haines
by
VICTOR GOLLANCZ and DAVID SOMERVELL
Authors of "Political Education in a Public School"
LondonChapman & Hall, Ltd.1919
In December, 1917, the present writers wrote a little book entitled"Political Education in a Public School," in which they put forwardtheir views as to what the aims and methods of a modern liberaleducation should be. They also described certain experiments whichthey had been permitted to make in one of our old English PublicSchools, experiments which both illustrated the authors' principles andtested their value. In July, 1918, that book was published.
But in the intervening seven months several things had happened. Onthe one hand, "Political Education" had produced further strikingevidence of its power over boys' intellects and characters, evidencealtogether more striking than anything that had occurred up to the timeof writing the book. On the other hand, the movement in the full tideof its success ran upon rocks and has been, for the time being at anyrate, utterly and completely destroyed. The authors have left theschool in which their experiments were made.
When the book was published, its reviewers in the press raised one byone a series of problems which we had already encountered in apractical shape in the course of our work, problems hardly touched on,however, in our book, which was devoted to exposition rather thanargument. Such problems were: How far is political propagandainseparable from political education, and in what respects is suchpropaganda desirable or undesirable? How can political differencesamong the masters themselves be made to play a helpful rather than aninjurious part? Does the introduction of politics into the curriculumopen a way, as the very able reviewer in The Westminster Gazettesuggested, for Prussianism in its most insidious form, the conscriptionof educated opinion? Are the old Public Schools the best medium forpolitical education, or should the new wine be poured into new bottles?and lastly—for educational "subjects" are or should be but aspects ofa single whole—what of political education in relation to morality,and to religion?
The present volume, therefore, essays a twofold task. The first twochapters briefly recapitulate and continue the history of our work downto its abrupt end. The latter chapters deal with such questions asthose mentioned above. One feature of the earlier volume survives inits successor. The Appendix to that volume contained a selection ofarticles written by boys for our political paper, The SchoolObserver. As an Appendix to this volume we print a few more articlesby boys whose work did not then appear. We are under no delusions asto there being anything very extraordinary about these articles andthose printed in the previous volume. Abler work has been done byabler boys in various schools at various times. They are interestingas the combined effort of a group rather than as the work ofindividuals. We reproduce them as the only concrete evidence availableof the character of one aspect of our experiment.
In the former volume we suppressed the name of the school out ofdeference to the wishes of the Head Master, and though our own judgmentwas against the concealment as a wholly superfluous piece ofmystifica