THE GUILDFORD FARMERS ON THE BLISS OF IGNORANCE.
THERE is a want of feeling in the daily newspapers for what is typical in provincial speech-making. We can understand why the Standard should prefer to keep the open hatred for education evinced by Conservative farmers out of its instructive columns; but why does the Daily Telegraph, in commenting on these interesting utterances, and care- fully picking out the plums for its readers, refuse them the substantial advantage of judging for themselves of the whole mind of the Guildford Farmers on so import- ant a subject as Education? And why do the Daily News and the Times neglect to give IN so very important a piece of information as a confession ty tenant-farmers of their exact state of feeling in reference to this Education about which, as they say, England is going stark mad ? Surely it is far more instructive for us to listen to the candid dis- closures of a great and influential class like the tenant-farmers on such a subject, than to hear every detail of the irrelevant remarks made by the various witnesses examined in the inquest on the Shipton railway accident, or the minutest characteristics of those various London pantomimes with which the papers this week have been deluged. However, we are obliged to content ourselves with such fragmentary quotations of the Guildford farmers' views on education as the Daily Telegraph on Wednes- day chose to transfer to its own leading article from its private report of the meeting on Monday, since we have been unable to find any other ; and even these fragmentary utterances are im- pressive and instructive enough. Mr. Goodman declared that England was "education-mad," and thought the Education Act suitable only to "the dense ignorance" of the great towns, not to the impressive world of country life and labour. He held that education had made the Prussians into "human butchers." The House of Commons, in patronising book- education as it did, only showed its own "desperate ignorance of farming." It had taken Mr. Goodman himself all the years of his life "to know by size the weight of a bullock," and if children were to be diverted from an early apprenticeship to improving studies of that kind, into sheer book-learning, they would only become less really educated by the change. Mr. Chandler denounced especially "fancy geography and elemen- tary science." Mr. W. Baker thought the education provided "worse than useless." The servant-girls were not taught to dress plainly ; on the contrary, their dress grows gaudier than
ever. What was wanted was practical education,which shall teach the labourer how to be more useful to his master. In a word, the tenant-farmers are kicking very hard against the pricks of
the new educational policy. They see that "fancy geography," at all events, tends to raise the wages of labour, to say
nothing of the new chance which the power of reading, writing, and calculating, gives sharp lads of finding employ- ment in towns. They see that this kind of acquisition is of no particular use for the special purpose of the species of labour they at present require. They see that a little know- ledge often unsettles men, and, as Mr. Baker says, "creates ambitions" which are apt to make the class less steady in its drudgery. And so they denounce the whole process, as various other similarly injured classes of employers have done before them, and take up the old and not altogether false, but per- fectly selfish and fruitless cry, that it is a better education to teach a man to do one kind of thing,—which he is wanted to do,—well, even though he be ignorant of everything else, rather than to teach him many things, some of which he may never be wanted to do, less efficiently, at the cost of his skill for the one pursuit.
Now, though it is in a certain sense silly, and even impotent for the Farmers thus to kick against the pricks which they will not succeed in kicking away, we do not doubt that there is a narrow kind of sagacity in their view which the world in general, in its hasty indignation at such selfish
sympathy with the bliss of ignorance, will not see. We think it is hardly open to doubt that a man may be changed by a general education from a very good machine into a very poor machine, and that to those who want a machine and not a man, the change may be one altogether for the worse. No doubt such education as it is easiest to give to the labouring class will create ambition and discontent. No doubt it may interfere with the sort of torpid experience re- quisite to mature a man's power of judging of "the weight of a bullock by its size." Men who have come to know what life is like elsewhere, to fellow-creatures of equal means and powers, will not be content till they either find their own mode of life as good, or change it for a better. And such restlessness will not in all probability make them better ploughmen, or thatchers, or shepherds. What a child learns in even the best schools, in schools where there are good 'object-lessons' as well as book- lessons to educate the practical intelligence and observation of the pupils, though it will help him to learn to be useful sooner, will also help him to speedy dissatisfaction with his first manual calling, so long at least as he sees any chance of getting a better ; and the most finished labourers are not made by frequent changes of occupation and the constant anticipa- tion of such changes. The Farmers are partly right. They will get a more intelligent and alert class out of the new education, but not always such adequate machines. Until you call self-interest of a high order into play, education does not make the workman perfect in his calling, but rather competent to forsake his calling for some other. No doubt so soon as a man sees that he cannot hope for anything better in life than a complete mastery of a particular craft, then educa- tion will all tell on the side of the motives which impel him to devote his whole energy to the mastery of that craft. But till that time arrives, education will rather tend to make him restless, pliant, and superficially useful for many things, than perfect in any one. And it is very dif- ficult indeed to say that such a time has arrived for a mere hedger and ditcher in any English county. In fact, we think the Farmers may fairly anticipate that, so far as the agricultural labourer is concerned, education will do more to unsettle them and, fit them for frequent changes of ex- periments in living, than to make them first-rate " hands " on a favm.
What the Farmers fail to see, is that what may very likely unsettle the labouring "hands," and may even render those " hands " somewhat less expert, so far as regards tasks which require long and unremitting experience, is yet most essential for the heads which move the hands, and that the Farmers, as a class, have no right,—nay, are, in a large sense, very silly even to wish,—to keep as superior hedging-and-ditching machines what are capable of being made into men with all men's various capacities and anxieties. They may treat restlessness and ambition and love for gaudy dress, and the rest, as pure evils, and so in one sense—relatively to the quiet-mindedness, and humility, and good taste by which, in properly cultivated minds, these qualities are superseded,—they are. But these qualities are not evils at all, they are positive good, relatively to the state of brutish apathy, dumb helplessness, and utter caw' _:.ess of self-respect with which they ought really to be compared. It is simply a gross and even crass selfishness which disgusts the farmer with the imperfect first-fruits of education ; and like most selfishness, it is, in the long run,—we do not say for the individual, but certainly for the class,—folly also. For even grant, if you will, that the first effect of education may be to diminish the number of the highest class agricultural tools,—human tools,—now in use in farming operations, and to make it difficult to find even in- different labour except at high wages, still the effect of all this must almost immediately be to raise the type of the rural class, to diminish greatly the pressure on the rates, to intro-. duce a much greater economy of labour in farming, a larger and more thoroughly scientific mode of farming, and ultimately, no doubt, some application of the co-operative principle which will lake it as much the labourer's highest interest to become a first-rate workman, as it already is the highest interest of the skilled artisan. No doubt the Farmers may say, and will say, if they are acute enough to see all this,—' That is very well, but that is all for our posterity, not for us. As far as we are concerned, we shall lose the cheap and practised labourer, without gaining any of these advantages, unless perhaps it may be a slightly diminished pressure on the rates.' Well, there is no denying that that may be so. But even so, what is the use of crying out against the results of a process which is just as inevitable as the rising of a cork from the bottom to the top of the water ? Besides, is there not some- thing a little unmanly in howling at a process which, even if it does unfavourably affect a small class, is just as essential to the regeneration of a much larger class, as the abolition of Protection, which injured the traders in protected articles here and there, was to the prosperity of the whole people of England ? There are few movements essential to general improvement which do not introduce a certain amount of class or local inconvenience. We are quite willing to admit that for a short time the mere spread of know- ledge amongst labourers' children will make farming more or less difficult to persons working on the old system, and with only the old resources. So Railways did a great deal to injure coach-proprietors and innkeepers, and the cheap Press to dis- comfort the proprietors of "Ladies' Annuals." It is the fate of every calling which prospers by the scarcity or inaccessi- bility of improved conditions of life to another class, that it must for a time suffer inconvenience and alter its base of operations, if that scarcity or inacessi- bility be removed. It was a great trouble to the West Indian planters when slavery was abol;shed ; and no doubt it will be a temporary inconvenience to the Farmers when rural ignorance and apathy are seriously diminished. Still, it is the part of men not only to recognise the inevitable, but to try to rejoice even in movements vexatious to themselves so far as they are blessings to their neighbours ; and the Guildford Farmers may be sure of this, that they can only gain the full political influence to which they aspire, and which in Cambridgeshire and South Norfolk they have already achieved, by showing that they are not a mere class, shut up in the narrowest class-interests, but able to enter cordially into the hopes and fears of the rest of the nation.
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