Chapter VI: Introduction (4)

Nearly all of the more recent experiments in regard to the school and its kindred institutions are co-operative in principle and in method, but it is probably Utopian to conceive an educational method which shall achieve the highest success without having included within it the element of competition. If competition is a method obtaining outside the school it is bound to reproduce itself within it. The only possible thing for the school to do is to restrict the influence of competition to the channels where it can be beneficial.

The method by which elementary school children pass to the secondary school is by means of competitive scholarships. In common with the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education it is necessary to accept the fact that at present "the scholarship system is too firmly rooted in the manner, habits and character of this country to be dislodged, even if it were thrice condemned by theory[2]." But, in the interests of citizenship, scholarships should be awarded as the result of non-competitive tests, if only to secure that every child shall receive the education for which he or she is fitted.

The stress and strain imposed upon many who climb the ladder of education, often occasioned by the inadequacy of the scholarship for the purposes to which it is to be applied, tend to develop characteristics which are so strongly individual as to be distinctly anti-social.

It is unfortunate that in many subjects of the curriculum it is not merely bad form to help one's neighbour but distinctly a school sin, and this makes it necessary for a balance to be struck by the introduction of subjects at which all can work for the good of the class or the school. Manual work and local surveys are subjects of this nature and should be encouraged side by side with games of which there are three essential aspects:--the individual achievement, the winning of the match or race, and "playing the game." In reference to citizenship the last of these is the only one which ultimately matters.

It is generally admitted that the great public schools are those which are most characteristic of English boy life at its best. Glorying as they do in a splendid tradition, they have always had in addition the opportunity of adapting themselves to new needs. Their reform is always under discussion and perchance they are waiting even now for some Arnold or Thring to lead them in a new England, for new it will inevitably be. Even so, the sense of responsibility they have developed has been translated into the terms of English government over half the world.

The objective of the public school boy anxious to take a part in government at home has always been parliament, or such local institutions as demand his service in accordance with the tradition of his family. The tendency to despise the homely duties of a city councillor or poor law guardian is, however, passing. There are few schools which do not welcome visitors to speak to the boys who have first-hand acquaintance with the life of the poor or who are indeed of that life themselves. In this way boys get to realise, as far as it is possible through sympathy, what it means to be out of work, what it means to be hungry for unattainable learning, what children have to suffer, and, in addition to the practical interest which many boys immediately develop, it cannot be doubted that many ideals for the conduct of social life in the future are conceived, even if dimly, for the first time. Thanks to the unremitting efforts of large-minded head masters, public school boys more and more realise that they are beneficiaries of the spirit of a past day, not only in the sense of the creation of a noble tradition but actually in regard to the material provision of buildings and the financial support of teaching.

There is likely to be an extension of university education in the near future. The ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge with their great college system will be strengthened, as will be the universities which were established at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The demand for the better training of teachers will result inevitably in the creation of more universities. The inadequate sum which this country has spent upon university education up to the present will be greatly increased.

As a direct result of the opportunity which university life gives to undergraduates for the development of self-governing institutions, there can be little doubt that the university must be regarded above all other schools and most institutions as powerful in the development of good citizenship. The public school tradition will be carried directly into the older universities and in increasing measure into the new universities as the best spirit of the public schools gradually permeates the whole system of our education even down to the elementary schools themselves. When these opportunities so lavishly provided for the development of student life in its self-governing aspects are realised and when above it all there stand great teachers in the lineage of those described by Cardinal Newman in his eulogy of Athens--"the very presence of Plato" to the student, "a stay for his mind to rest on, a burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with men like himself, ever afterwards"--little else can be desired. In every university there must be such teachers, or universities will tend to fall to the level of the life about them. "You can infuse," said Lord Rosebery at the Congress of the Universities of the Empire, "character, and morals and energy and patriotism by the tone and atmosphere of your university and your professors."

From one point of view, all the old universities of Europe--Bologna, Paris, Prague, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.--must be regarded as definite and conscious protests against the dividing and isolating--the anti-civic--forces of the periods of their institution. They represent historically the development of communities for common interest and protection in the great and holy cause of the pursuit of learning, and above all things their story is the story of the growth of European unity and citizenship.

The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world were
both alike threatened by the power that had so strangely sprung up
in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the
severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the
distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or
brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and
social position. The University, on the other hand, was a protest
against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was
European and not local[3].

The spirit which is characteristic of a university in its best aspects, linked with the spirit which is inherent in the ranks of working people, has on more occasions than one set on foot movements for the education of the people. One of the most notable instances of this unity found expression at the Oxford Co-operative Congress of 1882, when Arnold Toynbee urged co-operators to undertake the education of the citizen. By this he meant: "the education of each member of the community as regards the relation in which he stands to other individual citizens and to the community as a whole." "We have abandoned," he said further, "and rightly abandoned the attempt to realise citizenship by separating ourselves from society. We will never abandon the belief that it has yet to be won amid the stress and confusion of the ordinary world in which we move." From that day to this co-operators have always had before them an ideal of education in citizenship and have organised definite teaching year by year.

Another instance of even greater power lies in the co-operation between the pioneers of the University Extension Movement at Cambridge and the working men, particularly of Rochdale and Nottingham, to be followed later by that unprecedented revival of learning amongst working people which took place in Northumberland and Durham in the days before the great coal strike. At a later date, in 1903, the same kind of united action gave rise to the movement of the Workers' Educational Association, which has always conceived its purpose to be the development of citizenship in and through education pursued in common by university man and working man alike. The system of University Tutorial Classes originated by this Association has been based upon an ideal of citizenship, and not primarily upon a determination to acquire knowledge, although it was clearly seen that vague aspirations towards good citizenship without the harnessing of all available knowledge to its cause would be futile. After exception has been made for the body of young men and women who are determined to acquire technical education for the laudable purpose of advancing both their position in life and their utility to society, it is clear that no educational appeal to working men and women will have the least effect if it is not directed towards the purpose of enriching their life, and through them the life of the community. The proof of this lies in the fact that, after they have striven together for years in Tutorial Classes, they ask for no recognition--in fact they have declined it when it has been offered--and have devoted their powers to voluntary civic work and the work of the associations or unions to which they belong, as well as in very many instances, to the spreading of education throughout the districts in which they live. It is largely due to the leaven of educational enthusiasm which has thus been generated that there is a unanimous movement on the part of working people towards a complete educational system including within it compulsory attendance at continuation schools during the day.

The problems that hedge about continuation schools are many, but it is clear that they will be regarded by educationists and by at least some employers as above all else training for citizenship based upon the vocation to which the boy or girl may be devoting himself or herself in working hours. The narrowness of the daily occupation, divorced as it is from the whole spirit and intent of apprenticeship, will be broadened directly the consideration of daily work is placed in the continuation school both on a higher plane and in a complete setting.

The compulsory evening school will fail unless it induces a demand for recreation of a pure kind which may be associated with the voluntary evening school and continued along the lines of study into the years of adult life. And even if it is impossible for every student of capacity in the continuation school to pass into the university or technological college, it may be hoped that there need not fail to be opportunities for reaching the heights of ascertained knowledge in the University Tutorial Class. In the future, as now, only in greater degree, such classes will be regarded as an essential part of university work, and will provide opportunity for the study of those subjects which are most nearly related to citizenship.

It is one of the fundamental principles of the Workers' Educational Association that every person, when not under the power of some hostile over-mastering influence, is ready to respond to an educational appeal. Not indeed that all are ready or able to become scholars, but that all are anxious to look with understanding eyes at the things which are pure and beautiful. Tired men and women are made better citizens if they are taken, as they often are, to picture galleries and museums, to places of historic interest and of scenic beauty, and are helped to understand them by the power of a sympathetic guide. It is by the extension of work of this sort, which can be carried out almost to a limitless extent that the true purpose of social reform will be best served. It is by such means that the press may be elevated, the level of the cinema raised, the efforts of the demagogue neutralised.

The Workers' Educational Association is based upon the work of the elementary school and of the associations of working people, notably the co-operative societies and trade unions. The democratic methods obtaining in those associations have themselves proved a valuable contribution to citizenship, and have determined the democratic nature of all adult education. The right and freedom of the student to study what he wishes finds its counterpart in the reasonable demand that man shall live out his life as he wills, provided it moves in a true direction and is in harmony with the needs and aspirations of his fellows.

It has seemed in this review of the relation of schools and places of education to the development of citizenship that the fact of the operation of social influences has been implicit at every point. In any case there is, and can be, no doubt that the school, whilst instant in its effect upon the mind of the time, is always being either hindered or helped by the conditions obtaining in the society in which it is set. The relations existing between society and school are revealed in a process of action and reaction. Wilhelm von Humboldt said that "whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must first be introduced into its schools." Among other things, it is necessary to develop in the schools an appreciation of all work that is necessary for human welfare. This is the crux of all effort towards citizenship through education. In the long run there can be no full citizenship unless there is fulness of intention to discover capacity and to develop it not for the individual but for the common good. This is primarily the task of an educational system. If a man is set to work for which he is not fitted, whether it be the work of a student or a miner, he is thwarted in his innate desire to attain to the full expression of his being in and through association with his fellow-men, whereas, when a man is doing the right work, that for which he has capacity, he rejoices in his labour and strives continually to perfect it by development of all his powers. The exercise of good citizenship follows naturally as the inevitable result of a rightly developed life. It may not be the citizenship which is exercised by taking active and direct part in methods of government. The son of Sirach, meditating on the place of the craftsman, said:

All these trust to their hands: and every one is wise in his work.
Without these cannot a city be inhabited ... they will maintain the
state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their
craft[4].

The times are different and the needs of people have changed, but the true test of a citizen may be more in the healthiness of dominating purpose than in the possession and satisfaction of a variety of desires. To "maintain the state of the world" is no mean ambition.

If it is difficult for a man to become the good citizen when employed on work for which he is unfitted, it is even more difficult for the man to do so who is set to shoddy work or to work which damages the community.

The task laid upon the school is heavy, but it does not stand alone. The family and the Church are its natural allies in the modern State.

All alike will make mistakes, but, if they clearly set before them the intention to do their utmost to free the capacity of all for the accomplishment of the good of all, wisdom will increase and many tragedies in life will be averted.

Thus lofty ideals have presented themselves, but they will secure universal admission apart from the immediate practical considerations which bulk so largely and often so falsely in the minds of men, and which are frequently suggested by limitations of finance and lack of faith in the all-sufficient power of wisdom.

It is in the consecration of a people to its highest ideals that the true city and the true State become realised on earth and the measure of its consecration, in spite of all devices of teaching or training however wise, determines the true level of citizenship at any time in any place.

[Footnote 1: _Wisdom of Solomon_, vii. 24.]

[Footnote 2: _Interim Report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education on Scholarships for Higher Education_, 1916.]

[Footnote 3: J.R. Green, _A Short History of the English People_.]

[Footnote 4: _Ecclesiasticus_, xxxviii. 31-34.]

SOME BOOKS ON CITIZENSHIP

[1]American Political Science Assoc. The Teaching of Government. 1916. Macmillan. 5s. 0d. net.

[1]BAKER, J.H. Educational Aims and Civic Needs. 1913. Longmans. 3s. 6d. net.

[1]BALCH, G.T. The Method of Teaching Patriotism in Public Schools. 1890. New York: Van Nostrand.

[1]BOURNE, H.E. The Teaching of History and Civics. 1915. Longmans. 6s. 0d. net.

[1]DEWEY, JOHN. Democracy and Education. 1916. Macmillan. 6s. 0d. net.

[1]DEWEY JOHN. The School and Society. 1915. Chicago Univ. Press. 4s. 0d. net.

[1]DEWEY, JOHN and EVELYN. Schools of To-Morrow. 1915. Dent. 5s. 0d. net.

FINDLAY, J.J. The School. 1912. Williams and Norgate. 1s. 3d. net.

[1]HALL, G. STANLEY. Educational Problems. 2 vols. 1911. Appleton. 31s. 6d. net. Ch. 24. Civic Education.

[1]HENDERSON, C.H. Education and the Larger Life. 1902. Boston: Houghton. 6s. 0d.

[1]HUGHES, E.H. The Teaching of Citizenship. 1909. Boston: Wilde. 6s. 0d.

HUGHES, M.L.V. Citizens To Be. 1915. Constable. 4s. 6d. net.

[1]JENKS, J.W. Citizenship and the Schools. 1909. New York: Holt. 6s. 0d.

KERSCHENSTEINER, GEORG. Education for Citizenship. Tr. A.J. Pressland. 1915. Harrap. 2s. 0d. net. The Schools and the Nation. 1914. Macmillan. 6s. 0d. net.

[1]MONROE, PAUL. (Ed.) Cyclopedia of Education. 5 vols. Macmillan. 105s. 0d. net.

MORGAN, ALEXANDER. Education and Social Progress. 1916. Longmans. 3s. 6d. net.

Oxford and Working Class Education. Clarendon Press, 1s. net.

PATERSON, ALEXANDER. Across the Bridges. 1912. Arnold. 1s. 0d. net.

SADLER, M.E. (Ed.). Continuation Schools in England and Elsewhere. 1908. Manchester University Press. 8s. 6d. net.

SCOTT, C.A. Social Education. 1908. Ginn. 6s. 0d. net.

WALLAS, GRAHAM. The Great Society. 1914. Macmillan. 7s. 6d. net.

See also:

Board of Education. Reports.

Civics and Moral Education League Papers, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, W.C. 2.

[Footnote 1: American.]

VI

THE PLACE OF LITERATURE IN EDUCATION

By NOWELL SMITH

Head Master of Sherborne School

Education is a subject upon which everyone--or at least every parent--considers himself entitled to have opinions and to express them. But educational treatises or the considered views of educational experts have a very limited popularity, and in fact arouse little interest outside the circle of the experts themselves. Even the average teacher, who is himself, if only he realised it, inside the circle, pays little heed to the broader aspects of education, chiefly, no doubt, because in the daily practice of the art of education he cannot step aside and see it as a whole; he cannot see the wood for the trees. The indifference of laymen however is mainly due to the fact that educational theory, like other special subjects, inevitably acquires a jargon of its own, an indispensable shorthand, as it were, for experts, but far too abstract and technical for outsiders.

And his technical language too often reacts upon the actual ideas of the educational theorist, who tends to lose sight of the variety of concrete boys and girls in his abstract reasonings, necessary as these are. We are apt to forget that what is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, and still more perhaps that what is sauce for the swan may not be sauce for either of these humbler but deserving fowl. But it is certain that in discussing education we ought constantly to envisage the actual individuals to be educated. Otherwise our "average pupil of fifteen plus" is only too likely to become a mere monster of the imagination, and the intellectual _pabulum_, which we propose to offer, suited to the digestion of no human boy or girl in "this very world, which is the world of all of us."

In considering, then, the place of literature in education, I propose to keep constantly before my eyes the people with whose education I am personally familiar, namely, myself, my children, and the various types of public school boy which I have known as boy, as undergraduate, as college tutor and as schoolmaster. I say various types of public school boy; for although there still is a public school type in general which is easily recognisable by certain marked superficial characteristics, the popular notion that all public school boys are very much alike in character and outlook is a mere delusion.

Again, I propose, when I speak of literature, to mean literature, and not a compendious term for anything that is not science. The opposition that has in modern times been set up between science on the one hand and a jumble of studies labelled either literary or "humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of education. It may perhaps be held that literature in its most literal sense is a name for anything that is expressed by means of intelligible language--a use of the word which certainly admits of no comparison with the meaning of science, but which also leads to no ideas of any educational interest. But I take the word literature in its common acceptation; and, while admitting that I can give no precise and exhaustive definition, I will venture to describe it as the expression of thought or emotion in any linguistic forms which have aesthetic value. Thus the subject-matter of literature is only limited by experience: as Emile Faguet says somewhere--without claiming to have made a discovery--_la littérature est une chose qui touche à toutes choses_. And the tones of literature range from Isaiah to Wycherley, from Thucydides to Tolstoy; its forms from Pindar to a folk song, from Racine to Rudyard Kipling, from Gibbon to Herodotus or Froissart. And while no two people would agree in drawing the line of aesthetic value which should determine whether any given verbal expression of thought or emotion was literature or not--a fact which is not without importance in the choice of books for forming the taste of our pupils--yet, for the purpose of discussing the place and function of literature in education, we all know well enough what we mean by the word in the general sense which I have attempted to describe.

As this is not a tractate on education as a whole, I must risk something for the sake of brevity, and will venture to lay down dogmatically that the objects of literary studies as a part of education are (1) the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, (2) the provision of a permanent source of pure and inalienable pleasure, and (3) the immediate pleasure of the student in the process of education. None of these objects is exclusive of either of the others. They cannot in fact be separated in the concrete. But they are sufficiently different to be treated distinctly.

(1) Hardly anyone would deny that some knowledge and appreciation of literature is an indispensable part of a complete education. The full member of a civilised society must be able to subscribe to the familiar _Homo sum; nihil humanum a me alienum puto_. And literature is obviously one of the greatest, most intense, and most prolific interests of humanity. There have always been thinkers, from Plato downwards, who for moral or political reasons have viewed the power of literature with distrust: but their fear is itself evidence of that power. Thus literature is a very important part both of the past and of contemporary life, and no one can enter fully into either without some real knowledge of it. A man may be a very great man or a very good man without any literary culture; he may do his country and the world imperishable services in peace or war. But the older the world grows, the rarer must these unlettered geniuses become. Literature in one form or another--too often no doubt put to vile uses--has become so much part of the very texture of civilised life that a wide-awake mind can scarcely fail to take notice of it. And in any case we need not consider that kind of special genius which education does little either to make or mar. No one is likely seriously to deny that for taking a full and intelligent part in the normal life of a civilised community--in love and friendship, in the family and in society, in the study and practice of citizenship of all degrees--some literary culture is absolutely necessary; nor indeed that, subject to a due balance of qualities and acquirements, the wider and deeper the literary culture the more valuable a member of society the possessor will be. The lubricant of society in all its functions, whether of business or leisure, is sympathy, and a sufficient quantity, as it were, of sympathy to lubricate the complex mechanism of civilised life can only be supplied by a widespread knowledge of the best, and a great deal more than the best, of what has been and is being thought and said in the world. Personal intercourse with one another and a common apprehension of God as our Father are even more powerful sources of sympathy; but literature provides innumerable channels for the intercommunication and distribution of these sources, without which the sympathies of individuals may be strong and lively, but will almost always be narrowly circumscribed. It is very true that to know mankind only through books is no knowledge of mankind at all; but ever since man discovered how to perpetuate his utterances in writing it has been increasingly true that literature is the principal means of widening and deepening such knowledge.

This object of literary studies, the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, may be summed up in the familiar graceful words of Ovid, who was thinking almost entirely of literature when he wrote

ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.

And it is only the lack, in so many of the greatest writers, and the neglect, in so many educators and educational systems, of that due balance of qualities and acquirements of which I spoke just now, which have induced in superficial minds a distrust and often a contempt of literature as a subject of education. The good citizen or man of the world--in the best sense of the phrase--must not be the slave of literary proclivities to the ruin of his functions as father or husband or friend or man of action and affairs. The world of letters, if lived in too exclusively, is an unreal world, though without it the actual world is almost meaningless. Now the _genus irritabile vatum_, even when their thoughts, as Carlyle put it, "enrich the blood of the world," have very generally appeared to the plain man of goodwill as very defective in the art of living. If their aspirations have been above the standards of their day, their practice has often been below them in such essentially social qualities as probity, faithfulness, consideration for others. Moreover their outlook upon life, intense and inspiring though it be, is often a very partial one. Even so, it does not follow that because a poet or a philosopher is not in every respect "the compleat gentleman," a citizen _totus teres atque rotundus_, his works are not profitable for the building up of that character. If it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. Tolstoy is indeed a case in point. He is one of the giants of literature, whose masterpieces are already classics; and this position is unaffected by the various judgments that may be formed either of his critical or of his practical wisdom.

The lack then of a due balance of qualities and acquirements in so many authors, and we may add other artists, is a cause, but no justification, of that belittlement and even distrust of the literary side of education which are on the whole marked features of the English attitude to-day. But a more potent cause and a real justification of this attitude is the neglect of due balance of qualities and acquirements by so many educators and educational systems. Great educators have themselves rarely been narrow-minded men; but the traditions they have founded have gone the way of all traditions.

What begins as an inspiration hardens into a formula. The ideals of the Renascence were caricatured in their offspring of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only did the evolution of modern life with its cities, its printing press, its gunpowder, its steam engine and the rest, destroy the need of the well-to-do to be trained in the practical arts of chivalry, of the chase, of husbandry, even of music and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more and more into the fatally easy path of formal and grammatical treatment. The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it; its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique with which it was surrounded.

I do not know when the expression "the dead languages" was invented: but certainly Latin and Greek have been treated as very dead languages by the great majority of teachers for a very long time. And as "modern subjects," history, geography, modern languages and literatures, gradually thrust their way into the curriculum, each was subjected as far as possible to the same mummification. There is a theory still widely held among teachers that the value of a subject or of a method of instruction depends upon the amount of drudgery which it involves or the degree of repulsion which it excites. The theory rests upon a confusion between the ideas of discipline and punishment, which itself is probably due to the strongly Judaistic tone of our so-called Christianity. At any rate, far too many schoolmasters suffer from conscientious scruples about allowing the spirits of freedom, initiative, curiosity, enjoyment, to blow through their class-rooms.

There has been, always to some extent, but with gathering force in recent years, a natural revolt against this mixture of puritanism, scholasticism, and dilettantism, which made the intellectual side of public school education such a failure except for the few who were born with the spoon of scholarship in their mouths. The irruption of that turbulent rascal, natural science, has perhaps had most to do with humanising our humanistic studies. It was a great step when boys who could not make verses were allowed to make if it was but a smell; and even breaking a test-tube once in a while is more educative than breaking the gender-rules every day of the week. Many of my friends, who label themselves humanists, are in a panic about this, and look upon me sadly as a renegade because I, who owe almost everything to a "classical education," am ready (they think) to sell the pass of "compulsory Greek" to a horde of money-grubbing barbarians who will turn our flowery groves of Academe into mere factories of commercial efficiency. But fear is a treacherous guide. They are the victims of that abstract generalisation of which I spoke at the outset. I check their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my children, and the hundreds of boys I have known. And I see more and more plainly, as I study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments and the common stock of human nature and civilised society which unites us, that literature is a permanent and indispensable and even inevitable element in our education; and that moreover it can only have free scope and growth in the expanding personality of the young in a due and therefore a varying harmony with other interests. I and my children and my schoolboys have eyes and ears and hands--and even legs! We have, as Aristotle rightly saw, an appetite for knowledge, and that appetite cannot be satisfied, though it may be choked, by a sole diet of literature. We have desires of many kinds demanding satisfaction and requiring government. We have a sense of duty and vocation: we know that we and our families must eat to live and to carry on the race. We resent, in our inarticulate way, these sneers at our Philistinism, commercialism, athleticism, materialism, from dim-eyed pedants on the one hand and superior persons on the other, who have evidently forgotten, if they ever saw, the whole purport of that Greek literature the name of which they take in vain. No! _La littérature est une chose qui touche à toutes choses_; but if we are to shut our eyes to all the "things" which evoke it, it becomes what it is to so many, whose education has been in name predominantly literary, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

(2) The argument has already insensibly led us to treat by implication the second, and indeed the third of our assumed objects. But in our modern insistence upon social relations and citizenship--a very proper insistence, still too much warped and hampered by selfishness and prejudice--there is a real danger of our forgetting how much of our conscious existence is passed, in a true sense, at leisure and alone. It is our ideal on the one side to be "all things to all men": and for any approach to this ideal, as we have seen, the knowledge and sympathy born of literature are indispensable. But on the other side no man or woman is completely fitted out without provision for the blank spaces, the passages and waiting rooms, as it were, to say nothing of the actual "recreation rooms" of the house of life. And there is no provision so abundant, so accessible to all, so permanent, so independent of fortune, and at once so mellowing and fortifying, as literature. Our happiness or discontent depends far more, than on anything else, on the habitual occupation of our mind when it is free to choose its occupation. And, since thought is instantaneous, even the busiest of us has far more of that freedom than he knows what to do with unless he has a mental treasury from which he can at will bring forth things new and old. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of hobbies in a man's own life--and of course indirectly in his relations with his fellows. A single hobby is dangerous. You ride it to death or it becomes your master. You need at least a pair of them in the stable. What they are must depend, you say, upon the temperament, the bent of the individual. True: but our main responsibility as educators consists in our "bending of the twig." It is not temperament nor destiny which renders so many men and women unable to fill their leisure moments with anything more exhilarating than, gossip, grumbling, or perpetual bridge. Perhaps the greatest blessing which a parent or a teacher can confer on a boy or girl is discreet, unpriggish, and unpatronising, encouragement and guidance in the discovery and development of hobbies: and if I may venture on a piece of advice to anyone who needs it, I should say: "Try to secure that everyone grows up with at least two hobbies; and whatever one of them may be, let the other be literature, or some branch of literature."

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

(3) At this point I can imagine someone, who recognises the importance of literary culture in the equipment of a man or woman of the world, and perhaps feels even more strongly the truth summed up in these lines of Wordsworth, expressing the doubt whether the second at least of these objects can be secured, or will not rather be precluded, by admitting the study of literature as such into the school curriculum. This doubt, which I have heard expressed by many lovers of literature, notably by the late Canon Ainger, is not lightly to be disregarded. It is to be met, however, in my opinion, by keeping clearly before our eyes the third of the objects which we assumed to be aimed at by literary studies as a branch of education--the immediate pleasure of the student. The two objects which we have already discussed are ulterior objects, which should be part of the fundamental faith of the teacher; but while the teacher is in contact with his pupils they should be forgotten in the glowing conviction that the study of literature is, at that very moment, the most delightful thing in the world. Of course we all know, or should know, that this is the only attitude of mind for the best teaching in any subject whatever. It takes a great deal more than enthusiasm to make a competent teacher; and it is easy to prepare pupils successfully for almost any written examination without any enthusiasm for anything except success. But, cramming apart, a bored teacher is inevitably a boring one: and while unfortunately the converse is not universally true and an enthusiastic teacher may fail to communicate his enthusiasm, yet it is quite certain that you cannot communicate enthusiasm if you are not possessed of it.

But this enthusiasm, indispensable for the best teaching of anything, is, so to speak, doubly indispensable for even competent teaching of literature. On the one hand the ulterior objects of the study, of which I have tried to indicate the importance, are of an impalpable kind. I doubt if there is any subject of the curriculum which it would be so difficult to commend to an uninterested pupil by an appeal to simple utilitarian motives. On the other hand there clings to literature, and particularly to poetry, which is the quintessence of literature, an air of pleasure-seeking, of holiday, of irresponsibility and detachment from the work-a-day world, which must captivate the student, or else the study itself will seem very poor fooling compared with football or hockey. If the attitude of the teacher reflects the old question of the Latin Grammar "Why should I teach you letters?" he would better turn to some other subject which his pupils will more easily recognise as appropriate to school hours.

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her--

unless indeed he be a candidate for Responsions?

"Ah! it is just as I expected," says my friend Orbilius at this point: "this literature-lesson of yours is to be mere play, a 'soft-option' for our modern youth, who is not to be made to stand up to the tussle with Latin prose or riders in geometry." Softly, my friend! It is quite true that those twin engines of education, classics and mathematics, are adapted partly by long practice, but partly, as I too believe, by their very nature, to discipline the youthful mind to habits of intellectual honesty, of accuracy, of industry and perseverance. It is true that they accomplish some of this discipline--though at what a cost!--in the hands of indifferent teachers. It is true that every other subject of the usual curriculum is much more obviously liable than they are to the dangers of idleness, unreality, false pretence; and that the scoffs, for instance, about "playing with test-tubes," "tracing maps," "dishing up history notes," are in fact too often deserved. But in the first place, if the object to be attained is a worthy one, it is our business to face the dangers of the road, and not to give up the object. If a knowledge and love of literature is part of the birthright of our children, and a part which, as things are, very many of them will never obtain away from school, then we teachers must strive to give it them, even if the process seems shockingly frivolous to the grammarian or the geometrician. And, secondly, it is not true that the study of literature, even in the mother tongue, cannot be a discipline and a delight together. The two are very far from incompatible: indeed that discipline is most effective which is almost or quite unconsciously self-imposed in the joyous exercise of one's own faculties. The genuine footballer and the genuine scholar will both agree with Ferdinand the lover, that

There be some sports are painful, and their labour
Delight in them sets off.

And the "labour" of the boy or girl who is really wrapped up in a play of Shakespeare or is striving to express the growing sense of beauty in fitting forms of language, is no less truly spiritual discipline because it is felt not as pain but as interest and delight.

It is fortunately no part of my business to endeavour to instruct teachers in the methods of imparting the love and knowledge of literature. But the value of literary studies in education depends so much upon the spirit in which they are pursued that I may perhaps be permitted a few more words on the practical side of the subject. I have already repeated the truism that no one can impart enthusiasm who is not himself possessed of it: but even the lover of literature sometimes lacks that clear consciousness of aim, and that sympathetic understanding of the personality of his pupil; which are both essential to successful teaching. Just as the clever young graduate is tempted to dictate his own admirable history notes to a class of boys, or to puzzle them with the latest theories in archaeology or philosophy, so the literary teacher is apt to dazzle his pupils with brilliant but to them unintelligible criticism, or to surfeit them with literary history, or to impose upon them an inappropriate literary diet because it happens to suit his maturer taste or even his caprice. No one is likely to deny that such errors are possible; but I should not venture to speak so decidedly, if I were not aware of having too often fallen into them myself. And the only safeguard for the teacher is the familiar "Keep your eye on the object"--and that in a double sense. We must have a clear conception of our aim, and also a living sympathy with our pupils. I have attempted to indicate the aim, the equipment of boy or girl for civilised life and for spiritual enjoyment. It will be sympathy with our pupils which will chiefly dictate both the method and the material of our instruction. In the early stages of education this sympathy is generally to be found either in parents, if they are fond of literature, or in the teacher, who is usually of the more sympathetic sex. The stories and poetry offered to children nowadays seem to be, as a rule, sympathetically, if sometimes rather uncritically, chosen. The importance of voice and ear in receiving the due impression of literature is recognised; and the value of the child's own expression of its imaginations and its sense of rhythm and assonance is understood. Probably more teachers than Mr. Lamborn supposes would heartily subscribe to the faith which glows in his delightful little book _The Rudiments of Criticism_, though there must be very few who would not be stimulated by reading it.

It is when we come to the middle stage, at any rate of boyhood--for of girls' schools I am not qualified to speak--that there is a good deal to be done before the cultivation of literary taste, and all that this carries with it, will be successfully pursued. In the past, the Latin and Greek classics were, for the few who really absorbed them, both a potent inspiration and an unrivalled discipline in taste: but it is noteworthy how few even of the _élite_ acquired and retained that lively and generous love of literature which would have enabled them to sow seeds of the divine fire far and wide--"of joy in widest commonalty spread." Considering the intensity with which the classics have been studied in the old universities and public schools of the United Kingdom, the fine flower of scholarship achieved, the sure touch of style and criticism, one cannot help being amazed at the low standard of literary culture in the rank and file of the classes from which this _élite_ has been drawn. How rare has been the power, or even apparently the desire, of a Bradley or a Verrall or a Murray, to carry the flower of their classical culture into the fields of modern literary study! And how few and fumbling the attempts of ordinary classical teachers to train their pupils in the appreciation of our English literature!

In recent years a new type of literary teachers has been rising, who owe little, at any rate directly, to the old classical training; and although their zeal is often undisciplined and "not according to knowledge," with them lies the future hope of literary training in our schools. They bring to their task an enthusiasm which was too often lacking in the "grand old fortifying classical curriculum"; but it is to be hoped that, as the importance of their subject becomes more and more recognised, they will achieve a method which will embody all that was valuable, while discarding much that was narrow and pedantic, in classical teaching. And in particular may they all realise, as many already do, what the classical teacher, however unconsciously, held as an axiom, that in order to enter into the spirit of literature, to appreciate style, to understand in any true sense the meaning of great author's, it is not enough for pupils to listen and to read, and then perhaps to write essays about what they have heard and read. They must also _make_ something, exercise that creative, and at the same time imitative, artistic faculty, which surely is the motive power of most of our progress, at least in early life. Nothing has struck me more forcibly than the intense interest which boys will take in their own crude efforts at writing a poem or a story or essay, while they are still quite unable to appreciate with discrimination, or even to enjoy with any sustained feeling, the poetry or prose of the great masters. Not that there is anything surprising in this. I know very well that it was writing Latin verses that taught me to appreciate Virgil, and writing juvenile epics that led me up to Milton. But it is an order of progress which we schoolmasters are apt to overlook, expecting our pupils to appreciate what we know to be good work before they have that elementary, but most fruitful, experience which can only come from handling the tools of the craft. The creative and imitative impulse will die down in the great majority; and we shall not make the mistake of continuing to exact formal "composition" from maturer pupils, who no longer find it anything but a drag upon their progress along the unfolding vistas of knowledge and appreciation. Our object is not to increase the number of writers, already far too large, but to increase the number of readers, which can never be too large, to raise the standard of literary taste, and so to spread pure enjoyment and all the benefits to society which joy, and joy alone, confers. Inspired with such an aim, common sense and sympathy will enable us to overcome the difficulties and avoid the pitfalls which undoubtedly beset the teaching of that most necessary, most delightful, but most elusive and imponderable subject, the appreciation of literature.

VII

THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN EDUCATION

By W. BATESON

Director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution

That secondary education in England fails to do what it might is scarcely in dispute. The magnitude of the failure will be appreciated by those who know what other countries accomplish at a fraction of the cost. Beyond the admission that something is seriously wrong there is little agreement. We are told that the curriculum is too exclusively classical, that the classes are too large, the teaching too dull, the boys too much away from home, the examination-system too oppressive, athletics overdone. All these things are probably true. Each cause contributes in its degree to the lamentable result. Yet, as it seems to me, we may remove them all without making any great improvement. All the circumstances may be varied, but that intellectual apathy which has become so marked a characteristic of English life, especially of English public and social life, may not improbably continue. Why nations pass into these morbid phases no one can tell. The spirit of the age, that "polarisation of society" as Tarde[1] used to call it, in a definite direction, is brought about by no cause that can be named as yet. It will remain beyond volitional control at least until we get some real insight into social physiology. That the attitude or pose of the average Englishman towards education, knowledge, and learning is largely a phenomenon of infectious imitation we know. But even if we could name the original, perhaps real, perhaps fictional, person--for in all likelihood there was such an one--whom English society in its folly unconsciously selected as a model, the knowledge would advance us little. The psychology of imitation is still impenetrable and likely to remain so. The simple interpretation of our troubles as a form of sloth--a travelling along lines of least resistance--can scarcely be maintained. For first there have been times when learning and science were the fashion. Whether society benefited directly therefrom may, in passing, be doubted, but certainly learning did. Secondly there are plenty of men who under the pressure of fashion devote much effort to the improvement of their form in fatuous sports, which otherwise applied would go a considerable way in the improvement of their minds and in widening their range of interests.

Of late things have become worse. In the middle of the nineteenth century a perfunctory and superficial acquaintance with recent scientific discovery was not unusual among the upper classes, and the scientific world was occasionally visited even by the august. These slender connections have long since withered away. This decline in the public estimation of science and scientific men has coincided with a great increase both in the number of scientific students and in the provision for teaching science. It has occurred also in the period during which something of the full splendour and power of science has begun to be revealed. Great regions of knowledge have been penetrated by the human mind. The powers of man over nature have been multiplied a hundredfold. The fate of nations hangs literally on the issue of contemporary experiments in the laboratory; but those who govern the Empire are quite content to know nothing of all this. Intercommunication between government departments and scientific advisers has of course much developed. That, even in this country, was inevitable. Otherwise the Empire might have collapsed long since. Experts in the sciences are from time to time invited to confer with heads of Departments and even Cabinet Ministers, explaining to them, as best they may, the rudiments of their respective studies, but such occasional night-school talks to the great are an inadequate recognition of the position of science in a modern State. Science is not a material to be bought round the corner by the dram, but the one permanent and indispensable light in which every action and every policy must be judged.

To scientific men this is so evident that they are unable to imagine what the world looks like to other people. They cannot realise that by a majority of even the educated classes the phenomena of nature and the affairs of mankind are still seen through the old screens of mystery and superstition. The man of science regards nature as in great and ever increasing measure a soluble problem. For the layman such inquiries are either indifferent and somewhat absurd, or, if they attract his attention at all, are interesting only as possible sources of profit. I suspect that the distinction between these two classes of mind is not to any great degree a product of education.