ours a conception of the laws of the physical world, or of the relations
of cause and effect therein. And this is the more to be lamented, as the
poor are especially exposed to physical evils, and are more interested
in removing them than any other class of the community. If any one is
concerned in knowing the ordinary laws of mechanics one would think it
is the hand-labourer, whose daily toil lies among levers and pulleys; or
among the other implements of artisan work. And if any one is interested
in the laws of health, it is the poor workman, whose strength is wasted
by ill-prepared food, whose health is sapped by bad ventilation and bad
drainage, and half whose children are massacred by disorders which might
be prevented. Not only does our present primary education carefully
abstain from hinting to the workman that some of his greatest evils are
traceable to mere physical agencies, which could be removed by energy,
patience, and frugality; but it does worse--it renders him, so far as it
can, deaf to those who could help him, and tries to substitute an
Oriental submission to what is falsely declared to be the will of God,
for his natural tendency to strive after a better condition.
What wonder then, if very recently, an appeal has been made to
statistics for the profoundly foolish purpose of showing that education
is of no good--that it diminishes neither misery, nor crime, among the
masses of mankind? I reply, why should the thing which has been called
education do either the one or the other? If I am a knave or a fool,
teaching me to read and write won't make me less of either one or the
other--unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing to
wise and good purposes.
Suppose any one were to argue that medicine is of no use, because it
could be proved statistically, that the percentage of deaths was just
the same, among people who had been taught how to open a medicine chest,
and among those who did not so much as know the key by sight. The
argument is absurd; but it is not more preposterous than that against
which I am contending. The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all
the other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and
you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is
quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not. And he is as
likely to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he swallows
the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may as well be
purblind, as unable to read--lame, as unable to write. But I protest
that, if I thought the alternative were a necessary one, I would rather
that the children of the poor should grow up ignorant of both these
mighty arts, than that they should remain ignorant of that knowledge to
which these arts are means.
It may be said that all these animadversions may apply to primary
schools, but that the higher schools, at any rate, must be allowed to
give a liberal education. In fact, they professedly sacrifice everything
else to this object.
Let us inquire into this matter. What do the higher schools, those to
which the great middle class of the country sends it children, teach,
over and above the instruction given in the primary schools? There is a
little more reading and writing of English. But, for all that, every
one knows that it is a rare thing to find a boy of the middle or upper
classes who can read aloud decently, or who can put his thoughts on
paper in clear and grammatical (to say nothing of good or elegant)
language. The "ciphering" of the lower schools expands into elementary
mathematics in the higher; into arithmetic, with a little algebra, a
little Euclid. But I doubt if one boy in five hundred has ever heard the
explanation of a rule of arithmetic, or knows his Euclid otherwise than
by rote.
Of theology, the middle class schoolboy gets rather less than poorer
children, less absolutely and less relatively, because there are so many
other claims upon his attention. I venture to say that, in the great
majority of cases, his ideas on this subject when he leaves school are
of the most shadowy and vague description, and associated with painful
impressions of the weary hours spent in learning collects and catechism
by heart.
Modern geography, modern history, modern literature; the English
language as a language; the whole circle of the sciences, physical,
moral, and social, are even more completely ignored in the higher than
in the lower schools. Up till within a few years back, a boy might have
passed through any one of the great public schools with the greatest
distinction and credit, and might never so much as have heard of one of
the subjects I have just mentioned. He might never have heard that the
earth goes round the sun; that England underwent a great revolution in
1688, and France another in 1789; that there once lived certain notable
men called Chaucer, Shakspeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller. The
first might be a German and the last an Englishman for anything he
could tell you to the contrary. And as for science, the only idea the
word would suggest to his mind would be dexterity in boxing.
I have said that this was the state of things a few years back, for the
sake of the few righteous who are to be found among the educational
cities of the plain. But I would not have you too sanguine about the
result, if you sound the minds of the existing generation of public
school-boys, on such topics as those I have mentioned.
Now let us pause to consider this wonderful state of affairs; for the
time will come when Englishmen will quote it as the stock example of the
stolid stupidity of their ancestors in the nineteenth century. The most
thoroughly commercial people, the greatest voluntary wanderers and
colonists the world has ever seen, are precisely the middle classes of
this country. If there be a people which has been busy making history on
the great scale for the last three hundred years--and the most
profoundly interesting history--history which, if it happened to be that
of Greece or Rome, we should study with avidity--it is the English. If
there be a people which, during the same period, has developed a
remarkable literature, it is our own. If there be a nation whose
prosperity depends absolutely and wholly upon their mastery over the
forces of Nature, upon their intelligent apprehension of, and obedience
to, the laws of the creation and distribution of wealth, and of the
stable equilibrium of the forces of society, it is precisely this
nation. And yet this is what these wonderful people tell their
sons:--"At the cost of from one to two thousand pounds of our hard
earned money, we devote twelve of the most precious years of your lives
to school. There you shall toil, or be supposed to toil; but there you
shall not learn one single thing of all those you will most want to
know, directly you leave school and enter upon the practical business of
life. You will in all probability go into business, but you shall not
know where, or how, any article of commerce is produced, or the
difference between an export or an import, or the meaning of the word
'capital.' You will very likely settle in a colony, but you shall not
know whether Tasmania is part of New South Wales, or _vice versâ_.
"Very probably you may become a manufacturer, but you shall not be
provided with the means of understanding the working of one of your own
steam-engines, or the nature of the raw products you employ; and, when
you are asked to buy a patent, you shall not have the slightest means of
judging whether the inventor is an impostor who is contravening the
elementary principles of science, or a man who will make you as rich as
Croesus.
"You will very likely get into the House of Commons. You will have to
take your share in making laws which may prove a blessing or a curse to
millions of men. But you shall not hear one word respecting the
political organization of your country; the meaning of the controversy
between freetraders and protectionists shall never have been mentioned
to you: you shall not so much as know that there are such things as
economical laws.
"The mental power which will be of most importance in your daily life
will be the power of seeing things as they are without regard to
authority; and of drawing accurate general conclusions from particular
facts. But at school and at college you shall know of no source of truth
but authority; nor exercise your reasoning faculty upon anything but
deduction from that which is laid down by authority.
"You will have to weary your soul with work, and many a time eat your
bread in sorrow and in bitterness, and you shall not have learned to
take refuge in the great source of pleasure without alloy, the serene
resting-place for worn human nature,--the world of art."
Said I not rightly that we are a wonderful people? I am quite prepared
to allow, that education entirely devoted to these omitted subjects
might not be a completely liberal education. But is an education which
ignores them all, a liberal education? Nay, is it too much to say that
the education which should embrace these subjects and no others, would
be a real education, though an incomplete one; while an education which
omits them is really not an education at all, but a more or less useful
course of intellectual gymnastics?
For what does the middle-class school put in the place of all these
things which are left out? It substitutes what is usually comprised
under the compendious title of the "classics"--that is to say, the
languages, the literature, and the history of the ancient Greeks and
Romans, and the geography of so much of the world as was known to these
two great nations of antiquity. Now, do not expect me to depreciate the
earnest and enlightened pursuit of classical learning. I have not the
least desire to speak ill of such occupations, nor any sympathy with
those who run them down. On the contrary, if my opportunities had lain
in that direction, there is no investigation into which I could have
thrown myself with greater delight than that of antiquity.
What science can present greater attractions than philology? How can a
lover of literary excellence fail to rejoice in the ancient
masterpieces? And with what consistency could I, whose business lies so
much in the attempt to decipher the past, and to build up intelligible
forms out of the scattered fragments of long-extinct beings, fail to
take a sympathetic, though an unlearned, interest in the labours of a
Niebuhr, a Gibbon, or a Grote? Classical history is a great section of
the palæontology of man; and I have the same double respect for it as
for other kinds of palæontology--that is to say, a respect for the facts
which it establishes as for all facts, and a still greater respect for
it as a preparation for the discovery of a law of progress.
But if the classics were taught as they might be taught--if boys and
girls were instructed in Greek and Latin, not merely as languages, but
as illustrations of philological science; if a vivid picture of life on
the shores of the Mediterranean, two thousand years ago, were imprinted
on the minds of scholars; if ancient history were taught, not as a weary
series of feuds and fights, but traced to its causes in such men placed
under such conditions; if, lastly, the study of the classical books were
followed in such a manner as to impress boys with their beauties, and
with the grand simplicity of their statement of the everlasting problems
of human life, instead of with their verbal and grammatical
peculiarities; I still think it as little proper that they should form
the basis of a liberal education for our contemporaries, as I should
think it fitting to make that sort of palæontology with which I am
familiar, the back-bone of modern education.
It is wonderful how close a parallel to classical training could be made
out of that palæontology to which I refer. In the first place I could
get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology,
so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent
famous production of the head-masters out of the field in all these
excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring
out all their powers of memory and all their ingenuity in the
application of my osteo-grammatical rules to the interpretation, or
construing, of those fragments. To those who had reached the higher
classes, I might supply odd bones to be built up into animals, giving
great honour and reward to him who succeeded in fabricating monsters
most entirely in accordance with the rules. That would answer to
verse-making and essay-writing in the dead languages.
To be sure, if a great comparative anatomist were to look at these
fabrications he might shake his head, or laugh. But what then? Would
such a catastrophe destroy the parallel? What think you would Cicero, or
Horace, say to the production of the best sixth form going? And would
not Terence stop his ears and run out if he could be present at an
English performance of his own plays? Would Hamlet, in the mouths of a
set of French actors, who should insist on pronouncing English after the
fashion of their own tongue, be more hideously ridiculous?
But it will be said that I am forgetting the beauty, and the human
interest, which appertain to classical studies. To this I reply that it
is only a very strong man who can appreciate the charms of a landscape,
as he is toiling up a steep hill, along a bad road. What with
short-windedness, stones, ruts, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of
rest and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the
beautiful under these circumstances. The ordinary school-boy is
precisely in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there
is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him
till he gets to the top. And nine times out of ten he does not get to
the top.
But if this be a fair picture of the results of classical teaching at
its best--and I gather from those who have authority to speak on such
matters that it is so--what is to be said of classical teaching at its
worst, or in other words, of the classics of our ordinary middle-class
schools[2]? I will tell you. It means getting up endless forms and rules
by heart. It means turning Latin and Greek into English, for the mere
sake of being able to do it, and without the smallest regard to the
worth, or worthlessness, of the author read. It means the learning of
innumerable, not always decent, fables in such a shape that the meaning
they once had is dried up into utter trash; and the only impression left
upon a boy's mind is, that the people who believed such things must have
been the greatest idiots the world ever saw. And it means, finally, that
after a dozen years spent at this kind of work, the sufferer shall be
incompetent to interpret a passage in an author he has not already got
up; that he shall loathe the sight of a Greek or Latin book; and that he
shall never open, or think of, a classical writer again, until,
wonderful to relate, he insists upon submitting his sons to the same
process.
These be your gods, O Israel! For the sake of this net result (and
respectability) the British father denies his children all the knowledge
they might turn to account in life, not merely for the achievement of
vulgar success, but for guidance in the great crises of human existence.
This is the stone he offers to those whom he is bound by the strongest
and tenderest ties to feed with bread.
If primary and secondary education are in this unsatisfactory state,
what is to be said to the universities? This is an awful subject, and
one I almost fear to touch with my unhallowed hands; but I can tell you
what those say who have authority to speak.
The Rector of Lincoln College, in his lately published, valuable
"Suggestions for Academical Organization with especial reference to
Oxford," tells us (p. 127):--
"The colleges were, in their origin, endowments, not for the elements of
a general liberal education, but for the prolonged study of special and
professional faculties by men of riper age. The universities embraced
both these objects. The colleges, while they incidentally aided in
elementary education, were specially devoted to the highest learning....
"This was the theory of the middle-age university and the design of
collegiate foundations in their origin. Time and circumstances have
brought about a total change. The colleges no longer promote the
researches of science, or direct professional study. Here and there
college walls may shelter an occasional student, but not in larger
proportions than may be found in private life. Elementary teaching of
youths under twenty is now the only function performed by the
university, and almost the only object of college endowments. Colleges
were homes for the life-study of the highest and most abstruse parts of
knowledge. They have become boarding schools in which the elements of
the learned languages are taught to youths."
If Mr. Pattison's high position, and his obvious love and respect for
his university, be insufficient to convince the outside world that
language so severe is yet no more than just, the authority of the
Commissioners who reported on the University of Oxford in 1850 is open
to no challenge. Yet they write:--
"It is generally acknowledged that both Oxford and the country at large
suffer greatly from the absence of a body of learned men devoting their
lives to the cultivation of science, and to the direction of academical
education.
"The fact that so few books of profound research emanate from the
University of Oxford, materially impairs its character as a seat of
learning, and consequently its hold on the respect of the nation."
Cambridge can claim no exemption from the reproaches addressed to
Oxford. And thus there seems no escape from the admission that what we
fondly call our great seats of learning are simply "boarding schools"
for bigger boys; that learned men are not more numerous in them than out
of them; that the advancement of knowledge is not the object of fellows
of colleges; that, in the philosophic calm and meditative stillness of
their greenswarded courts, philosophy does not thrive, and meditation
bears few fruits.
It is my great good fortune to reckon amongst my friends resident
members of both universities, who are men of learning and research,
zealous cultivators of science, keeping before their minds a noble ideal
of a university, and doing their best to make that ideal a reality; and,
to me, they would necessarily typify the universities, did not the
authoritative statements I have quoted compel me to believe that they
are exceptional, and not representative men. Indeed, upon calm
consideration, several circumstances lead me to think that the Rector of
Lincoln College and the Commissioners cannot be far wrong.
I believe there can be no doubt that the foreigner who should wish to
become acquainted with the scientific, or the literary, activity of
modern England, would simply lose his time and his pains if he visited
our universities with that object.
And, as for works of profound research on any subject, and, above all,
in that classical lore for which the universities profess to sacrifice
almost everything else, why, a third-rate, poverty-stricken German
university turns out more produce of that kind in one year, than our
vast and wealthy foundations elaborate in ten.
Ask the man who is investigating any question, profoundly and
thoroughly--be it historical, philosophical, philological, physical,
literary, or theological; who is trying to make himself master of any
abstract subject (except, perhaps, political economy and geology, both
of which are intensely Anglican sciences) whether he is not compelled
to read half a dozen times as many German, as English, books? And
whether, of these English books, more than one in ten is the work of a
fellow of a college, or a professor of an English university?
Is this from any lack of power in the English as compared with the
German mind? The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Robert
Brown, of Lyell, and of Darwin, to go no further back than the
contemporaries of men of middle age, can afford to smile at such a
suggestion. England can show now, as she has been able to show in every
generation since civilization spread over the West, individual men who
hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of
her intellectual eminence.
But, in the majority of cases, these men are what they are in virtue of
their native intellectual force, and of a strength of character which
will not recognise impediments. They are not trained in the courts of
the Temple of Science, but storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts
of irregular ways, and with much loss of time and power, in order to
obtain their legitimate positions.
Our universities not only do not encourage such men; do not offer them
positions, in which it should be their highest duty to do, thoroughly,
that which they are most capable of doing; but, as far as possible,
university training shuts out of the minds of those among them, who are
subjected to it, the prospect that there is anything in the world for
which they are specially fitted. Imagine the success of the attempt to
still the intellectual hunger any of the men I have mentioned, by
putting before him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry
of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose! Imagine
how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such
men, that the education which leads to perfection in such elegancies is
alone to be called culture; while the facts of history, the process of
thought, the conditions of moral and social existence, and the laws of
physical nature, are left to be dealt with as they may, by outside
barbarians!
It is not thus that the German universities, from being beneath notice a
century ago, have become what they are now--the most intensely
cultivated and the most productive intellectual corporations the world
has ever seen.
The student who repairs to them sees in the list of classes and of
professors a fair picture of the world of knowledge. Whatever he needs
to know there is some one ready to teach him, some one competent to
discipline him in the way of learning; whatever his special bent, let
him but be able and diligent, and in due time he shall find distinction
and a career. Among his professors, he sees men whose names are known
and revered throughout the civilized world; and their living example
infects him with a noble ambition, and a love for the spirit of work.
The Germans dominate the intellectual world by virtue of the same simple
secret as that which made Napoleon the master of old Europe. They have
declared _la carrière ouverte aux talents_, and every Bursch marches
with a professor's gown in his knapsack. Let him become a great scholar,
or man of science, and ministers will compete for his services. In
Germany, they do not leave the chance of his holding the office he
would render illustrious to the tender mercies of a hot canvass, and the
final wisdom of a mob of country parsons.
In short, in Germany, the universities are exactly what the Rector of
Lincoln and the Commissioners tell us the English universities are not;
that is to say, corporations "of learned men devoting their lives to the
cultivation of science, and the direction of academical education." They
are not "boarding schools for youths," nor clerical seminaries; but
institutions for the higher culture of men, in which the theological
faculty is of no more importance, or prominence, than the rest; and
which are truly "universities," since they strive to represent and
embody the totality of human knowledge, and to find room for all forms
of intellectual activity.
May zealous and clear-headed reformers like Mr. Pattison succeed in
their noble endeavours to shape our universities towards some such ideal
as this, without losing what is valuable and distinctive in their social
tone! But until they have succeeded, a liberal education will be no more
obtainable in our Oxford and Cambridge Universities than in our public
schools.
If I am justified in my conception of the ideal of a liberal education;
and if what I have said about the existing educational institutions of
the country is also true, it is clear that the two have no sort of
relation to one another; that the best of our schools and the most
complete of our university trainings give but a narrow, one-sided, and
essentially illiberal education--while the worst give what is really
next to no education at all. The South London Working-Men's College
could not copy any of these institutions if it would. I am bold enough
to express the conviction that it ought not if it could.