Shaw on Education by Louis Simon (review)

BOOK REVlEWS SHAW ON EDUCATION, by Louis Simon, New York, Columbia University Press, 1958. Price $5.00. Shaw's interest in education was a very strong one, and Louis Simon effectively exhibits Shaw's unceasing, witty attack on every aspect of English education. Shaw talks of schools as prisons. In "Biographers' Blunders Corrected" in Self Sketches he responds to charges of H. C. Duffin: ' You say I was an unschoolable boy at a bad school. ... I was probably the most teachable boy in Ireland; and if school taught me nothing except that school is a prison and not a place of teaching, the conclusion is that pedagogy is not yet a science. Shaw was sure, too, that his self-education was preferable to the education he could have found in any university, and he constantly derides universities and academic life. The basis of Shaw's critical view of schools, teachers, and teaching was not only his own unfavorable boyhood experiences. His socialism also made him believe, in theory at least, that in a capitalist society education cannot rise above its context. Simon comments (p. 44): "If with Marx the opium of the people is religion, with Shaw it is education." Interpreting the term education very broadly, Simon restates all of Shaw's general intellectual views in order to put before the reader the goals of education for Shaw. Evolution and socialism are the key ideas, but Simon's survey tends to be superficial. Simon performs his most valuable service as he brings together from Shaw's writings his views on many aspects of education: spelling and phonetics, sex education , methods of teaching fine arts, vocational education, and so on. Shaw is vigorous in his denunciation of Latin as a center of education for everyone, and seems to have anticipated some of the doctrine of progressive e.1ucation in his concern for experience and his dislike for the dry discipline of the schools. Simon suggests (p. 187) that Shaw's ideal teacher is a combination of Professor Higgins' method and Colonel Pickering's manner. With regard to the famous remark, "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches," Simon quotes C. E. M. Joad's suggestion that, just as English school boys prefer games to books and English men prefer a life of action to a life of teaching, the fact that teaching comes out second best is less a reflection upon teachers than upon society (pp.183-184). Although it is interesting to read Shaw's views on the education of women, of actors, and of doctors, brought together in an organized fashion, Louis Simon sets himseH a most difficult task. The constant juxtaposition of Shaw's witty and challenging remarks with Louis Simon's text makes an unfavorable comparison inevitable. Simon lacks a sense of humor and his style lapses occasionally into that of the educationalist : Can Shaw's ideas about education be used advantageously in a democratic society? The answer to such a question obviously requires commitment to certain criteria determinant of a free society and its education and a comparison with those established by Shaw.... It should be pointed out that in the last generation countless volumes have attempted to define the nature and function of education in democracy and that it would be beyond the scope of this book to encompass many varieties of interpretations. Nevertheless, there will be isolated in the discussion a few characteristics which are largely common to all of them. (p. 258) 203 204 MODERN DRAMA September In addition to prolix passages of this kind, there are a half dozen instances of careless editing. (pp. 70, 105, 127, 139) This study of Shaw's views on educational matters leaves a reader with no doubt as to Shaw's deep and constant concern for education and with increased understanding of the appropriateness of Shaw's references to his own plays as "drama of education ." (p. 129) GEORGE WAGGONER A GLOSSARY TO THE PLAYS OF BERNARD SHAW, by Paul Kozelka, Columbia University (New York, 1959),55 pp. Price $1.50. Mr. Kozelka's purpose is to assist the struggling undergraduate reader of Shaw by providing a glossary of difficult words and unusual references that...