Civics: as Applied Sociology/Part 2/H—Town and School Compared

by Patrick Geddes

[1]

We may now summarise and tabulate our comparison of Town and School,[10] and on the schema it will be seen that each element of the second is printed in the position of a mirror-reflection of the first. This gives but the merest outline, which is ready, however, to be applied in various ways and filled up accordingly. A step towards this is made in the next and fuller version of the scheme. It will be noted in this that the lower portion of the diagram, that of School, is more fully filled up than is the upper. This is partly for clearness, but partly also to suggest that main elements in the origins of natural sciences and geography, of economics and social science, are not always so clearly realised as they might be. The preceding diagram, elaborating that of Place, Work, Folk, however, at once suggests these. Other features of the scheme will appear on inspection; and the reader will find it of interest and suggestiveness to prepare a blank schedule and fill it up for himself.

These two forms of the same diagram, the simple and the more developed, thus suggest comparison with the scheme previously outlined, that of People, Affairs, Places (p. 68), and is now more easily reconciled with this; the greater prominence popularly given to People and Affairs being expressed upon the present geographic and evolutionary scheme by the ascending position and more emphatic printing (or by viewing the diagram as a transparency from the opposite side of the leaf).

In the column of People, the deepening of custom into morals is indicated. Emphasis is also placed upon the development of law in connection with the rise of governing classes, and its tendency to dominate the standards previously taken as morals—in fact, that tendency of moral law to become static law, a process of which history is full.

[2]

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In the present as in the past, we may also note upon the scheme the different lines of Place, Work and Folk on which respectively develop the natural sciences, the applied or technical sciences, and finally the social sciences, and the generalising of these respectively.

Thus, as we see the popular survey of regions, geography in its literal and initial sense, deepening into the various analyses of this and that aspect or element of the environment which we call the natural sciences—but which we might with advantage also recognise as what they really are, each a geolysis—so these sciences or geolyses, again, are tending to reunite into a higher geography considered as an account of the evolution of the cosmos.

Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic process which specialist men of science and their public are alike apt to overlook, but which is none the less vitally important. For we cannot really understand, say Pasteur, save primarily as a thinking peasant; or Lister and his antiseptic surgery better than as the shepherd, with his tar-box by his side; or Kelvin or any other electrician, as the thinking smith, and so on. The old story of geometry, as "ars metrike," and of its origin from land-surveying, for which the Egyptian hieroglyph is said to be that of "rope stretching," in fact, applies far more fully than most realise, and the history of every science, of course already thus partially written, will bear a far fuller application of this principle. In short, the self-taught man, who is ever the most fertile discoverer, is made in the true and fundamental school—that of experience.

The need of abbreviating the recapitulation of this, however, sooner or later develops the school in the pedagogic sense, and its many achievements, its many failures in accomplishing this, might here be more fully analysed.

Still more evident is this process in the column of Folk. From the mother's knee and the dame's school of the smallest folk-place, the townlet or hamlet, ton or home, up to the royal and priestly school of the law of ancient capitals, or from the "humanities" of a mediaeval university to the "Ecole de Droit" of a modern metropolis, the series of essential evolutionary stages may be set down. Or in our everyday present, the rise of schools of all kinds, primary, secondary, higher up to the current movement towards university colleges, and from these to civic and regional universities, might again be traced. The municipalisation of education is thus in fact expressed, and so on.

Leaving the schools in the main to speak for themselves of their advancing and incipient uses, a word may be said upon the present lines.

As a first and obvious application of this mode of geographic study of cities appears the criticism, and; when possible, the amendment of the city's plan, the monotonous rectangularity of the American city, and the petty irregularity more common in our own, being alike uneconomic and inartistic because ungeographic, irrational because irregional. With the improvement of communications, the physicist's point of view thus introduced—that of the economy of the energies of the community—is only beginning; the economy of fuel, the limitation of smoke and fogs being symptoms of this and pointing to a more economic organisation of industrial activities generally. But this next carries with it the improved efficiency of the producers themselves, with whom, however, the standpoint changes from the mere economisation of physical energies to the higher economy of organic evolution. The convention of traditional economics, that the productive capacity of the actual labourer is the sole concern of his science, thus gives place to what is at once the original conception of economics and the evolutionist one, viz., that the success of industry is ultimately measured neither by its return in wealth of the capitalist nor in money wages of the labourer, nor even by both put together, but in the results of industry upon the concrete environment, the family budget, the home, and the corresponding state of development of the family—its deterioration or progress. The organisation of industrial groups or of representative institutions found conducive to the well-being and progress of these prime civic units, the families, may now be traced into its highest outcome in city government. The method of analysis and graphic statement thus outlined may be shown to be even capable of useful application towards the statement of the best arguments of both progressive and moderate parties in city politics.

Passing from Politics to Culture. Culture, the needs of this also become clearer; each community developing a similar general series of culture institutions, from the simplest presentation of its geography, landscape and architecture, to the complex development of industrial, technical and scientific instruction; and for provision also for the institutions of custom and ethic in school, law, and church. Just as place, occupation, and family are intimately connected in the practical world, so their respective culture institutions must more and more be viewed as a whole. Civic improvers will find their ideals more realisable as they recognise the complex unity of the city as a social development of which all the departments of action and thought are in organic relation, be it of health or disease. The view of theoretic civics as concrete sociology, and of practical civics as applied sociology may be more simply expressed as the co-adjustment of social survey and social service, now becoming recognised as rational, indeed in many cities being begun.