Simple City  

A.   B-san, may I aks you a question?

B.   Please do.

A.   Thank you. Are you an idiot?

B.   That question is hardly of the intellectual calibre that I have come to expect from you, but I shall answer it nevertheless. No, A-san, I am not an idiot.

A.   Are you entirely sure? I believe that I can demonstrate that you are indeed an idiot.

B.   Are my trousers unbuttoned? Have I forgotten your birthday? If I have made some careless mistake you could tell me kindly rather than with insults.

A.   Other than being somewhat old and ill-fitting, your trousers are fine. And my birthday is not for 3 months, as I believe you know. I do not have any such mistake in mind. Rather, I claim that I can demonstrate that you are an idiot using only this pen and paper. What is more, you will be forced by your own words to accept it. May I try?

B.   I suppose so.

A.   Very well. I shall write a sentence on this paper, and you must tell me whether or not you believe it.

B.   What if I don’t know?

A.   If you don’t know, then say you don’t believe it.

B.   Hmm. It’s going to be one of those sentences which asserts its own falsity, isn’t it? Like that Cretan who said “all Cretans always lie”. Utterances like that can’t sensibly be called either true or false.

A.   A good point, but my sentence is fully capable of supporting a truth value. Indeed, I shall attempt to persuade you that the sentence is true. And very likely I shall succeed. Nevertheless you will continue to insist that you do not believe it.

B.   What? You say I will be convinced of your sentence’s truth, but at the same time I will refuse to believe it? That would indeed make me a supreme idiot.

A.   Exactly! [Writes something down and hands it to B.]

B.   [Reads] “Only idiots believe this sentence.”

A.   So, do you believe it?

B.   If I believe it, then I must be an idiot.

A.   Precisely!

B.   But I maintain that I am not an idiot. So, no, A-san, I do not believe this sentence.

A.   That’s what I said when I first read it. And that’s what C-san and D-san said too. In fact, I expect your reaction is the same as that of any intelligent person.

B.   I agree. Anyone who read that sentence and declared that they believed it would be a self-admitted idiot.

A.   In other words, B-san, you are saying that only idiots believe that sentence.

B.   Yes!

A.   Ok! Now read it again.

B.   [Reads it again. Thinks.] Bollocks.

A.   And B-san?

B.   Yes?

A.   Your trousers are undone.

Everyone is familiar with George Bernard Shaw’s line: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

Apparently it isn’t universally popular in educational circles.

But what did Shaw actually mean? I’d always taken it in the same way as everyone else: as a nasty swipe at the teaching profession. But my contact in the Shaw Society suggested an alternative explanation.

The quote comes from Shaw’s slightly odd 1903 work Maxims for Revolutionists: just a categorised list of aphorisms, which includes others of his most famous lines^[1].

Interpreted as such a maxim, the quote takes on another meaning altogether: it’s a description of how revolutionary societies should organise themselves. Everyone who can should get involved in the fighting, cooking, carrying, building, etc: doing. And those who cannot (on account of being too old, wounded, or whatever) should teach the others.

So, I believed this interpretation for a little while. But now I’m not so, erm, sure.

If you look at Maxims for Revolutionists, it’s quite short on practical advice for organising uprisings, and despite its title it does seem like a depository for his thoughts on various topics. Advice on “How to Beat Children”, for example, strikes me as being of limited use to people actively preparing for revolution. In particular the section on Education (line 31) does contain general snarking at teachers, or at least teachers of certain types: “When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.”

So now I don’t know. At any rate it doesn’t seem plausible that Shaw would have failed to notice the more obvious reading, and that interpretation doesn’t exactly run contrary to his attitude to the education system of his time (I’m told he described his own school in Dublin as a “futile boy prison” where he learnt “dishonourable submission to tyranny”). So it’s difficult to conclude that he didn’t intend it, at least as an overtone.

In any case, we can perhaps agree that teaching, as it should happen, was better summed up by Aristotle: “Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.”

Sorry for the feeble pun in the title, by the way, but it’s a sort of unwritten rule when discussing Shaw.

[1] Though not my favourite: “I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads and keep them in bowls of water around the house.”