THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF RELATIONS BETWEEN SCHOOL AND REALITY
§ 1
In the previous chapter I have told how Sanderson was taught by his
laboratories and library the possibility of a new type of school with
a new spirit, and how he grew to realise that an organisation of such
new schools, a multiplication of Oundles, must necessarily produce a
new spirit in social and industrial life. Concurrently with that, the
obvious implications of applied science were also directing his mind to
the close reaction between schools and the organisation of the economic
life of the community.
It is amusing to reflect that Sanderson probably owed his appointment
at Oundle to the simple desire of various members of the Grocers'
Company for a good school of technical science. They did not want any
change in themselves, they did not want any change in the world nor in
the methods of trading and employment, but they did want to see their
sons and directors and managers equipped with the sharper, more modern
edge of a technical scientific training. Germany had frightened them.
If this new training could be technical without science and modern
without liberality, so much the better. So the business man brought his
ideas to bear upon Oundle, to produce quite beyond his expectation a
counteroffensive of the school upon business organisation and methods.
Oundle built its engines, organised itself as an efficient munitions
factory during the war, made useful chemical inquiries, extended its
work into agriculture, analysed soils and manures for the farmers of
its district, ran a farm and did much able competent technical work,
but it also set itself to find out what were the aims and processes
of business and what were the reactions of these processes upon the
life of the community. From the laboratory a boy would go to a careful
examination of labour conditions under the light of Ruskin's _Unto This
Last_; he was brought to a balanced and discriminating attitude towards
strikes and lock-outs; he was constantly reminded that the end of
industry is not profits but life--a more abundant life for men.
As one reads through the sermons and addresses that are given in
_Sanderson of Oundle_ one finds a steadily growing consciousness of the
fact that there was a considerable and increasing proportion of Oundle
boys destined to become masters, managers, and leaders in industrial
and business life, and with that growing consciousness there is a
growing determination that the school work they do shall be something
very far beyond the acquisition of money-getting dodges and devices and
commercialised views of science. More and more does he see the school
not as a training ground of smart men for the world that is, but as a
preliminary working model of the world that is to be.
Two quotations from two of Sanderson's sermons will serve to mark how
vigorously he is tugging back the English schools from the gentlemanly
aloofness of scholarship and school-games to a real relationship to
the current disorder of life, and how high he meant to carry them to
dominance over that disorder.
The first extract is from a sermon on Faraday. Under Sanderson, it has
been remarked, Faraday ousted St. Anthony from being the patron saint
of Oundle School. 'With what abundant prodigality,' Sanderson exclaims,
'has Nature given up of her secrets since his day!'
'A hundred years ago Man and Nature as we think of them to-day were
unexplored by science; to-day a new world, a new creation. Industrial
life has developed, machinery, discoveries, inventions--steam engine,
gas engine, dynamo--electrical machinery, telegraphy, radioactive
bodies, tremendous openings out of chemistry, biology, economics,
ethics. All new. These are Thy works, O God, and tell of Thee. Not now
only may we search for Thy Presence in the places where Thou wert wont
in days of old to come to man. Not there only. Not only now in the
stars of heaven; or by the seashore, or in the waters of the river,
or of the springs; among the trees, the flowers, the corn and wine,
on the mountain or in the plain; not now only dost Thou come to man
in Thy works of art, in music, in literature; but Thou, O God, dost
reveal Thyself in all the multitude of Thy works; in the workshop, the
factory, the mine, the laboratory, in industrial life. No symbolism
here, but the Divine God. A new Muse is here--
'Mightier than Egypt's tombs,
Fairer than Grecia's, Roma's temples.
Prouder than Milan's statued, spired cathedral,
More picturesque than Rhenish castle-keeps,
We plan even now to raise, beyond them all,
Thy great cathedral, sacred industry, no tomb--
A keep for Life.'
And the builders, a mighty host of men: Homeric heroes, fighting
against a foe, and yet not a foe, but an invisible, impalpable thing
wherein the combatant is the shadow of the assailant.
'Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who binds the
universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibnitz
with their wondrous mathematical harmonies; Coulomb measuring out
electricity; Oversted with the brilliant flash of insight "that the
electric conflict acts in a revolving manner"; Faraday, Ohm, Ampère,
Joule, Maxwell, Hertz, Röntgen; and in another branch of science,
Cavendish, Davy, Dalton, Dewar; and in another, Darwin, Mendel,
Pasteur, Lister, Sir Ronald Ross. All these and many others, and some
whose names have no memorial, form a great host of heroes, an army of
soldiers--fit companions of those of whom the poets have sung; all, we
may be sure, living daily in the presence of God, bending like the reed
before His will; fit companions of the knights of old of whom the poets
sing, fit companions of the men whose names are renowned in history,
fit companions of the great statesmen and warriors whose names resound
through the world.
'There is the great Newton at the head of this list comparing himself
to a child playing on the seashore gathering pebbles, whilst he could
see with prophetic vision the immense ocean of truth yet unexplored
before him. At the end is the discoverer Sir Ronald Ross, who had gone
out to India in the medical service of the Army, and employed his
leisure in investigating the ravishing diseases which had laid India
low and stemmed its development. In twenty years of labour he discovers
how malaria is transmitted and brings the disease within the hold of
man.'
The second is from a sermon called 'The Garden of Life.'
'As Canon Driver says, "Man is not made simply to enjoy life; his
end is not pleasure; nor are the things he has to do necessarily to
give pleasure or lead to what men call happiness." This is not the
biological purpose of man. His purpose or instinctive end is to develop
the capacities of the garden in the wilderness of nature; to adapt it
to his own ends, _i.e._ to the ends of the races of men. Or, as we
would now say, his aim is to take his part in the making of his kind;
and he is to "keep it," or guard it--_i.e._ he is to conquer the jungle
in it, to prevent it from roving wild again, from reverting to the
jungle, from losing law and order, from becoming unruly and disorderly,
from breaking loose and running amok. He is to bring and maintain order
out of the tangle of things, he is to diagnose diseases; he is to
co-ordinate the forces of nature; he is above all things to reveal the
spirit of God in all the works of God.
'And in all this we read the duty and service of schools. The business
of schools is through and by the use of a common service to get at the
true spiritual nature of the ordinary things we have to deal with. The
spirit of the true active life does not come to us _only_ in those
experiences we have been so accustomed to think of as beautiful and
revealing. The active spirit of life is not revealed simply by the
arts--the beautiful arts as they may be thought--of music or painting,
or literature. These indeed may be only and abundantly _material_,
and the eye and ear may be blind and deaf to the active, creative,
discovering, revealing spirit. "Painting, or art generally, as such,"
says Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_, "with all its technicalities,
difficulties, executive skills, pleasant and agreeable sensations, and
its particular ends, is nothing but an expressive language, invaluable
if we know it as we might know it as the vehicle of thought, but by
itself nothing." He who has learnt what is commonly considered as the
whole art of painting, that is the art of representing any natural
object faithfully, has as yet only learnt the language by which his
thoughts are to be expressed. One language or mode of expression may be
more difficult than another; but it is not by the mode of representing
and saying, but by the greatness, the awakening, the transmuting and
transfiguring conception and knowledge of the thought presented, that
the gift cometh, that man is created. Awkward, discordant, stammering
attempts may be the burning message of a new hope. But this "voice" of
art is too often drowned. It is drowned by executive skill--as is the
history of all art--when this skill stretches itself to present things
that are static, motionless, dead....
'It is especially our duty to reveal the spirit of God in the things
of science and of the practical life. Herein lies a new revelation, a
new language, a direct symbolism. Science, just like art and music, can
be materialistic--science can aim only at mechanical advancement and
worldly wealth, which is not wealth at all--just as art can aim only at
pleasure, desire, and drawing-room appreciation. But this need not be
so. Certainly no one in a responsible position can teach science for
long without the coming of the revelation of a new voice, a new method
of expression, a new art--revealing quite changed standards of value,
quite new significances of what we speak of as culture, beauty, love,
justice. A new voice speaks to the souls of men and women calling for a
new age with all its altered relationships and adventures of life.
'With eyes opened to this new art you can wander through the science
block and find in it all a new Bible, a new book of Genesis. So we
believe. This is our duty and our faith. Into this Paradise have you
been placed to dress it and to keep it.'
Let me turn from these two passages of talk to his boys--they are
rescued from a mass of pencil notes in his study--to a passage from an
address delivered in the Great Hall in Leeds in 1920. It shows very
plainly the quality of his conception of what I have called the return
of schools to reality.
'Schools should be miniature copies of the world. We often find that
methods adopted in school are just the methods we should like applied
in the state. We should, in fact, direct school life so that the
spirit of it may be the spirit which will tend to alleviate social and
industrial conditions. I will give an example of the kind of influence
the ideals and methods of a school can exert upon the working life. I
will take a condition of labour which is now recognised as probably the
greatest of tragedies. It is the slow decay of the faculties of crowds
of men and women, caused by the nature of their employment--the tragedy
of the unstretched faculties. So common is it, and ordinary, that
we pass it by on one side; but no one can go into a factory without
seeing workers engaged in work which is far below their capacities.
Decay sets in, and the death of talent and enthusiasm, the inspirer of
creative work. A little thought will convince us that the process of
decay of such a delicate and vital organism as the brain is bound to
set up violent, destructive, anarchic forces which go on for several
years. A recent writer in the _Times Educational Supplement_ (and
this paper cannot be called revolutionary) says that the tragedy of
undeveloped talent is being seen more and more to be a gigantic waste
of potentiality and an unpardonable cruelty. It is a tragic disease and
produces in early life startling intellectual and moral disturbances,
which are the natural sources of unrest. As years go on a mental stupor
sets in, and there is peace, but peace on a low plane of life. The loss
to the community by this waste is colossal, and it is not too much to
say that the output of man could be multiplied beyond conception.
'Schools should send boys out into the industrial world whose aim
should be to study these tragedies, and by experiments, by new
inventions, by organisation, try, we may hope, by some of their own
school experience, to alleviate the disease. To my mind this is the
supreme aim of schools in the new era.'