From earliest childhood, let us have independence, independence, self-dependence. Every child to do all it can for itself, wash and dress itself, clean its own boots, brush and fold its own clothes, fetch and carry for itself, mend its own stockings, boy or girl alike, patch its own garments, and as soon as possible make as well as mend for itself. Man and woman are happy when they are busy, and children the same. But there must be the right motive behind the work. It must not always, for a child, be “Help mother” or “Help father” or “Help somebody.” This altruism becomes tiresome, and causes disagreeable reaction. Neither must the motive be the ideal of work. “Work is service, hence work is noble. Laborare est orare.” Never was a more grovelling motto than this, that work is prayer. Work is not prayer at all: not in the same category. Work is a practical business, prayer is the soul’s yearning and desire. Work is not an ideal, save for slaves. But work is quite a pleasant occupation for a human creature, a natural activity.
And the aim of work is neither the emotional helping of mother and father, nor the ethical-religious service of mankind. Nor is it the greedy piling-up of stupid possessions. An individual works for his own pleasure and independence: but chiefly in the happy pride of personal independence, personal liberty. No man is free who depends on servants. Man can never be quite free. Indeed he doesn’t want to be. But in his personal immediate life he can be vastly freer than he is.
How? By doing things for himself. Once we wake the quick of personal pride, there is a pleasure in performing our own personal service, every man sweeping his own room, making his own bed, washing his own dishes — or in proportion: just as a soldier does. We have got a mistaken notion of ourselves. We conceive of ourselves as ideal beings, nothing but consciousness, and therefore actual work has become degrading, menial to us. But let us change our notion of ourselves. We are only in part ideal beings. For the rest we are lively physical creatures whose life consists in motion and action. We have two feet which need tending, and which need socks and shoes. This is our own personal affair, and it behoves us to see to it. Let me look after my own socks and shoes, since these are private to me. Let me tend to my own apparel and my own personal service. Every bird builds its own nest and preens its own feathers: save perhaps a cuckoo or a filthy little sparrow which likes to oust a swallow, or a crazy ostrich which squats in the sand. Proud personal privacy, personal liberty, gay individual self-dependence. Awake in a child the gay, proud sense of its own aloof individuality, and it will busy itself about its own affairs happily. It all depends what centre you try to drive from, what motive is at the back of all your movement. It is just as irksome to have a servant as to be a servant: particularly a personal servant. A servant moving about me, or even anybody moving about me, doing things for me, is a horrible drag on my freedom. I feel it as a sort of prostitution. Noli me tangere. It is our motto as it is the motto of a wild wolf or deer. I want about me a clear, cool space across which nobody trespasses. I want to remain intact within my own natural isolation, save at those moments when I am drawn to a rare and significant intimacy. The horrible personal promiscuity of our life is extremely ugly and distasteful. As far as possible, let nobody do anything for me,, personally, save those who are near and dear to me: and even then as little as possible. Let me be by myself, and leave me my native distance. Sono io — and not a thing of public convenience.
Self-dependence is independence. To be free one must be self- sufficient, particularly in small, material, personal matters. In the great business of love, or friendship, or living human intercourse one meets and communes with another free individual; there is no service. Service is degrading, both to the servant and the one served: a promiscuity, a sort of prostitution. No one should do for me that which I can reasonably do for myself. Two individuals may be intimately interdependent on one another, as man and wife, for example. But even in this relation each should be as self- dependent, as self-supporting as ever possible. We should be each as single in our independence as the wild animals are. That is the only true pride. To have a dozen servants is to be twelve times prostituted in human relationship, sold and bought and automatized, divested of individual singleness and privacy.
The actual doing things is in itself a joy. If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it. the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts. Nimble faculties hover and play along my nerves, the primal consciousness is alert in me. Apart from all the moral or practical satisfaction derived from a thing well done, I have the mindless motor activity and reaction in primal consciousness, which is a pure satisfaction. If I am to be well and satisfied, as a human being, a large part of my life must pass in mindless motion, quick, busy activity in which I am neither bought nor sold, but acting alone and free from the centre of my own active isolation. Not self-consciously, however. Not watching my own reactions. If I wash dishes, I wash them to get them clean. Nothing else.
Every man must learn to be proud and single and alone, and after that, he will be worth knowing. Mankind has degenerated into a conglomerate mass, where everybody strives to look and to be as much as possible an impersonal, non-individual, abstracted unit, a standard. A high standard of perfection: that’s what we talk about. As if there could be any standard among living people, all of whom are separate and single, each one natively distinguished from every other one. Yet we all wear boots made for the abstract “perfect” or standard foot, and coats made as near as possible for the abstract shoulders of Mr. Everyman.
I object to the abstract Mr. Everyman being clapped over me like an extinguisher. I object to wearing his coat and his boots and his hat. Me, in a pair of “Lotus” boots, and a “Burberry,” and “Oxonian” hat, why, I might just as well be anybody else. And 1 strenuously object. I am myself, and I don’t want to be rigged out as a poor specimen of Mr. Everyman. I don’t want to be standardized, or even idealized.
If I could, I would make my own boots and my own trousers and coats. I suppose even now I could if I would. But in Rome one must do as Rome does: the bourgeois is not worth my while, I can’t demean myself to epater him, and I am much too sensitive to my own isolation to want to draw his attention.
Although in Rome one must do as Rome does; and although all the world is Rome today, yet even Rome falls. Rome fell, and Rome will fall again. That is the point.
And it is to prepare for this fall of Rome that we conjure up a new system of education. When I say that every boy shall be taught cobbling and boot-making, it is in the hopes that before long a man will make his own boots to his own fancy. If he likes to have Maltese sandals, why, he’ll have Maltese sandals; and if he likes better high- laced buskins, why, he can stalk like an Athenian tragedian. Anyhow he’ll sit happily devising his own covering for his own feet, and machine-made boots be hanged. They even hurt him, and give him callosities. And yet, so far, he thinks their machine-made standardized nullity is perfection. But wait till we have dealt with him. He’ll be gay-shod to the happiness and vanity of his own toes and to the satisfaction of his own desire. And the same with his trousers. If he fancies his legs, and likes to flutter on his own elegant stem, like an Elizabethan, here’s to him. And if he has a hankering after scarlet trunk-hose, I say hurray. Chacun a son gout: or ought to have. Unfortunately nowadays nobody has his own taste; everybody is trying to turn himself into a eunuch Mr. Everyman, standardized to his collar-stud. A woman is a little different. She wants to look ultra-smart and chic beyond words. And so she knows that if she can set all women bitterly asking “Isn’t her dress Paquin?” or “Surely it’s Poiret,” or Lucile, or Cheruit, or somebody very Parisian, why, she’s done it. She wants to create an effect: not the effect of being just herself, her one and only self, as a flower in all its spots and frills is its own candid self. Not at all. A modern woman wants to hit you in the eye with her get-up. She wants to be a picture. She wants to derive her own nature from her accoutrements. Put her in a khaki uniform and she’s a man shrilly whistling K-K-K-Katie. Let her wear no bodice at all, but just a row of emeralds and an aigrette, and she’s a cocotte before she’s eaten her hors-d’oeuvre, even though she was a Bible worker all her life. She lays it all on from the outside, powders her very soul.
But of course, when the little girls from our schools grow up they will really consider the lily, and put forth their flowers from their own roots. See them, the darlings, the women of the future, silent and rapt, spinning their own fabric out of their own instinctive souls — and cotton and linen and silk and wool into the bargain, of course — and delicately unfolding the skirts and bodices, or the loose Turkish trousers and little vests, or whatever else they like to wear, evolving and unfurling them in sensitive form, according to their own instinctive desire. She puts on her clothes as a flower unfolds its petals, as an utterance from her own nature, instinctive and individual.
Oh, if only people can learn to do as they like and to have what they like, instead of madly aspiring to do what everybody likes and to look as everybody would like to look. Fancy everybody looking as everybody else likes, and nobody looking like anybody. It sounds like Alice in Wonderland. A well-dressed woman before her mirror says to herself, if she is satisfied: “Every woman would like to look as I look now. Every woman will envy me.”
Which is absurd. Fancy a petunia leaning over to a geranium and saying: “Ah, miss, wouldn’t you just love to be in mauve and white, like me, instead of that common turkey-red!” To which the geranium: “You! In your cheap material! You don’t look more than one-and-a-ha’penny a yard. You’d thank your lucky stars if you had an inch of chiffon velvet to your name.”
Of course, a petunia is a petunia, and a geranium is a geranium. And I’ll bet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Why? Because he was trying to cut a dash and look like something beyond nature, overloading himself. Without doubt Solomon in all his nakedness was a lovely thing. But one has a terrible misgiving about Solomon in all his glory. David probably unfolded his nakedness into clothes that came naturally from him. But that Jewish glory of Solomon’s suggests diamonds in lumps. Though we may be wrong, and Solomon in all his glory may have moved in fabrics that rippled naturally from him as his own hair, and his jewels may have glowed as his soul glowed, intrinsic. Let us hope so, in the name of wisdom.
All of which may seem a long way from the education of the people. But it isn’t really. It only means to say, don’t set up standards and regulation patterns for people. Don’t have criteria. Let every individual be single and self-expressive: not self-expressive in the self-conscious, smirking fashion, but busy making something he needs and wants to have just so, according to his own soul’s desire. Everyone individually and spontaneously busy, like a bird that builds its own nest and preens its own feathers, busy about its own business, alone and unaware.
The fingers must almost live and think by themselves. It is no good working from the idea, from the fancy: the creation must evolve itself from the vital activity of the fingers. Here’s the difference between living evolving work and that ideal mental business we call “handicraft instruction” or “handwork” in school today.
Dozens of high-souled idealists sit today at hand-looms and spiritually weave coarse fabrics. It is a high-brow performance. As a rule it comes to an end. But sometimes it achieves another effect. Sometimes actually the mind is lulled, by the steady repetition of mechanical, productive labour, into a kind of swoon. Gradually the idealism moults away, the high-brow resolves into a busy, unconscious worker, perhaps even a night-and-day slogger, absorbed in the process of work.
One should go to the extremity of any experience. But that one should stay there, and make a habit of the extreme, is another matter. A great part of the life of every human creature should pass in mindless, active occupation. But not all the days. There is a time to work, and a time to be still, a time to think, and a time to forget. And they are all different times.
The point about any handwork is that it should not be mind- work. Supposing we are to learn to solder a kettle. The theory is told in a dozen words. But it is not a question of applying a theory. It is a question of knowing, by direct physical contact, your kettle- substance, your kettle-curves, your solder, your soldering-iron, your fire, your resin, and all the fusing, slipping interaction of all these. A question of direct knowing by contact, not a question of understanding. The mental understanding of what is happening is quite unimportant to the job. If you are of an inquiring turn of mind, you can inquire afterwards. But while you are at the job, know what you’re doing, and don’t bother about understanding. Know by immediate sensual contact. Know by the tension and reaction of the muscles, know, know profoundly but for ever untellably, at the spontaneous primary centres. Give yourself in an intense, mindless attention, almost as deep as sleep, but not charged with random dreams, charged with potent effectiveness. Busy, intent, absorbed work, forgetfulness, this is one of the joys of life. Thoughts may be straying through the mind all the time. But there is no attention to them. They stream on like dreams, irrelevant. The soul is attending with joy and active purpose to the kettle and the soldering- iron; the mindless psyche concentrates intent on the unwilling little rivulet of solder which runs grudgingly under the nose of the hot tool. To be or not to be. Being isn’t a conscious effort, anyhow.
So we realize that there must be a deep gulf, an oblivion, between pedagogy and handwork. Don’t let a pedagogue come fussing about in a workshop. He will only muddle up the instincts.
Not that a schoolmaster is necessarily a pedagogue. Poor devil, he starts by being a man, and it isn’t always easy to turn a man into that thing. And therefore many a schoolmaster is a thousand times happier turning a lathe or soldering a kettle than expounding long division. But the two activities are incompatible. Not incompatible in the same individual, but incompatible with each other. So, separate the two activities. Let the pedagogue of the morning disappear in the afternoon. If he appears in a workshop, let it be before children who have not known him as a school-teacher.
And in the workshop, let real jobs be done. Workshops may be mere tin sheds, or wooden sheds. Let the parents send the household kettles, broken chairs, boots and shoes, simple tailoring and sewing and darning and even cooking, to the workshop. Let the family business of this sort be given to the children, who will set off to the work-shed and get the job done, under supervision, in the hours of occupation. A good deal can be done that way, instead of the silly theoretic fussing making fancy knickknacks or specimen parts, such as goes on at present.
What we want is for every child to be handy: physically adaptable, and handy. If a boy shows any desire to go forward in any craft, he will have his opportunity. He can go on till he becomes an expert. But he must start by being, like Jack at sea, just a handy man. The same with a girl.
Let the handwork be a part of the family and communal life, an extension of family life. Don’t muddle it up with the mindwork. Mindwork at its best is theoretic. Our present attempts to make mindwork “objective” and physical, and to instil theoretic mathematics through carpentry and joinery is silly. If we are teaching arithmetic, let us teach pure arithmetic, without bothering with piles of sham pennies and shillings and pounds of sham sugar. In actual life, when we do our shopping, every one of our calculations is made quickly in abstraction: a pure mental act, everything abstracted. And let our mental acts be pure mental acts, not adulterated with “objects.” What ails modern education is that it is trying to cram primal physical experience into mental activity — with the result of mere muddledness. Pure physical experience takes place at the great affective centres, and is de facto pre-mental, non-mental. Mental experience on the other hand is pure and different, a process of abstraction, and therefore de facto not physical.
If our consciousness is dual, and active in duality; if our human activity is of two incompatible sorts, why try to make a mushy oneness of it? The rapport between the mental consciousness and the affective or physical consciousness is always a polarity of contradistinction. The two are never one save in their incomprehensible duality. Leave the two modes of activity separate. What connexion is necessary will be effected spontaneously.