GENERAL PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION
Establishment of Compulsory Education in England--The Religious
Controversy--Huxley Advocates the Bible without Theology--His
Compromise on the "Cowper-Temple" Clause--Influence of the New
Criticism--Science and Art Instruction--Training of
Teachers--University Education--The Baltimore Address--Technical
Education--So-called "Applied Science"--National Systems of
Education as "Capacity-Catchers."
In the last chapter, the special relation of Huxley to scientific
education was described, and, naturally enough, it is in special
connection with scientific education that his influence is best known.
But he was keenly interested in all the larger problems of general,
university, and technical education, and he played a great part in
shaping the lines upon which these problems have been solved in
England.
In the years immediately before 1870, all England was wrestling with
the great problem of elementary education, in the arrangements for
which it was far behind not only the leading European countries but
even its sister-kingdom, Scotland. In 1870 there came into operation
an Act of Parliament for the regulation of elementary education under
the supervision of locally elected school boards. Hitherto elementary
education had been controlled by the Established Church, and by other
denominational religious bodies, and the quality and quantity of the
instruction provided, for financial and various other reasons, had
been extremely unsatisfactory. But a long and furious battle had raged
around the religious question; elementary education was now to be
national, compulsory, and universal; where religious bodies maintained
schools that complied with certain fixed standards of efficiency,
attendance of children at these was to be regarded as satisfactory,
and in addition to the ordinary subjects, such theological and
religious teaching as the supporting bodies chose might be added. But
in the schools for all and sundry, under the control of boards
representing the whole population, and deriving that part of their
income represented by the subscriptions of the religious bodies in the
denominational schools from public rates, levied on the whole
population, was any definite creed to be inculcated? The extreme
Church party, perhaps naturally, held that the creed established by
law in the land should be taught in these new schools; extreme
supporters of other creeds, and a majority of ordinary people of all
creeds or of no creeds, objected to a new establishment of a sectarian
doctrine, even though that sectarian doctrine were the doctrine of the
national religion. The final result of the dispute as codified in the
Act of Parliament was what was known as the Cowper-Temple Clause: "No
religious catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of any
particular denomination shall be taught in the school." The actual
value of any clause, however it may appear to be a fair compromise,
depends on the spirit in which it is practically interpreted, and no
sooner had the Act been passed than the battle was renewed again over
the interpretation of the clause. Many of the Church controversialists
held that the liberal or more advanced party intended to exclude all
reference to the Bible or to religion, on the plea that some sect
could be found to which the most attenuated expression of religion
would appear to be against the plain meaning of the clause, and
Huxley, who had been in the forefront of the controversy, and who was
a candidate for the first London School Board, was decried as an enemy
of the Bible and of all religion and morality because he had expressed
what he called a secular interpretation of the clause. In an article
published in the _Contemporary Review_ immediately after the election,
Huxley explained precisely what he took the clause to mean, and,
afterwards, at all events during the existence of the Board to which
he was elected, succeeded in carrying out his intentions in the main.
His first general point was to deprecate the action of those
extremists of both sides who tried to make the education of children a
mere battle-ground of religious dogmas. He then laid down what he
conceived to be the lines of most general utility upon which, under
the provisions of the Act, the education of children should be
conducted. In the foreground he placed physical training and drill, as
of supreme importance to young children, especially in the case of the
poor children of large towns.
"All the conditions of the lives of such are unfavourable to
their physical well-being. They are badly lodged, badly housed,
badly fed, and live from one year's end to another in bad air,
without a chance of a change. They have no play-grounds; they
amuse themselves with marbles and chuck-farthing, instead of
cricket and hare-and-hounds; and if it were not for the
wonderful instinct which leads all poor children of tender years
to throw themselves under the feet of cab-horses whenever they
can, I know not how they would learn to use their limbs with
agility."
This, humanitarianism as it was, was not the mere emotional sentiment
of the typical humanitarian; he went on to give the soundest practical
reasons for physical development.
"Whatever doubts people may entertain about the efficacy of
natural selection, there can be none about artificial selection;
and the breeder who should attempt to make, or keep up, a fine
stock of pigs, or sheep, under the conditions to which the
children of the poor are exposed, would be the laughing stock
even of the bucolic mind. Parliament has already done something
in this direction by declining to be an accomplice in the
asphyxiation of school children. It refuses to make any grant to
a school in which the cubical contents of the school-room are
inadequate to allow of proper respiration."
He wished to see physical training put on the same system.
The second great point upon which he laid stress was the necessity of
providing training in domestic economy, cookery, and other household
accomplishments, for poor girls. These demands of Huxley seem simple
and obvious, now that by his efforts and the efforts of others they
have been accomplished, but in England, even thirty years ago, it
required more than an ordinary prevision and boldness to insist upon
them.
Huxley passed next to the burning question of the time. He treated it
in the broadest and least sectarian spirit.
"The boys and girls for whose education the School Boards have to
provide, have not merely to discharge domestic duties, but each
of them is a member of a social and political organisation of
great complexity, and has, in future life, to fit himself into
that organisation, or be crushed by it. To this end it is surely
needful, not only that they should be made acquainted with the
elementary laws of conduct, but that their affections should be
trained, so as to love with all their hearts that conduct which
tends to the attainment of the highest good for themselves and
their fellow-men, and to hate with all their hearts that opposite
course of action which is fraught with evil."
He then proceeded to point out the distinction between the affection
which is called religion, and the science which is called theology,
and, without entering into the question as to whether the latter were
or were not a true science, he insisted on the danger of a confusion
between the two.
"We are divided into two parties--the advocates of so-called
'religious' teaching on the one hand, and those of so-called
'secular' teaching on the other. And both parties seem to me to
be not only hopelessly wrong, but in such a position that if
either succeeded completely, it would discover, before many years
were over, that it had made a great mistake and done serious evil
to the cause of education. For, leaving aside the more far-seeing
minority on either side, what the religious party is crying for
is mere theology, under the name of religion; while the
secularists have unwisely and wrongfully admitted the assumption
of their opponents, and demand the abolition of all religious
teaching, when they only want to be free of theology--burning
your ship to get rid of the cockroaches." ... "If I were
compelled to choose for one of my own children, between a school
in which real religious instruction is given, and one without it,
I should prefer the former, even though the child might have to
take a good deal of theology with it. Nine-tenths of a dose of
bark is mere half-rotten wood; but one swallows it for the sake
of the particles of quinine, the beneficial effect of which may
be weakened, but is not destroyed, by the wooden dilution, unless
in the case of a few exceptionally tender stomachs. Hence, when
the great mass of the English people declare that they want to
have the children in the elementary schools taught the Bible, and
when it is plain from the terms of the Act, the debates in and
out of Parliament, and especially the emphatic declarations of
the Vice-President of the Council that it was intended that such
Bible-teaching should be permitted, unless good cause for
prohibiting it could be shewn, I do not see what reason there is
for opposing that wish."
He went on to explain that, although he had always been strongly in
favour of secular education, by that term he meant only education
without theology, and he praised the English Bible in language as
noble as has ever been applied to it by the most ardent of
theologians.
"The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even the noble
Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary
child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions
which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive
errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, if left to
himself, all that is not desirable for children to occupy
themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a
vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the
great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has
been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in
English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain,
and is as familiar to noble and simple, from Land's End to
John-o'-Groat's House, as Dante and Tasso once were to the
Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English,
and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and,
finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his
village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and
other civilisations, and of a great past, stretching back to the
furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study
of what other book could children be so much humanised and made
to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession
fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval
between two eternities; and earns the blessings and the curses of
all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even
as they also are earning their payment for their work."
Lastly, he laid down the lines of the general education to be given.
He pointed out that already in the existing schools a very
considerable burden of work was imposed on the children in the form of
catechism, lists of the kings of Israel, geography of Palestine, and
that when these fantastic modes of education had been eliminated there
was plenty of time and energy to be employed. The instruction in
physical training was more than half play; that in the domestic
subjects had an engrossing interest of its own. He proposed, first,
the necessary discipline in the means for acquiring knowledge, the
tools for employing it, that is to say, reading, writing, and
arithmetic. After that, he believed that a certain amount of
knowledge, of intellectual discipline, and of artistic training should
be conveyed in the elementary schools, and for these purposes he
proposed to teach some rudiments of physical science, drawing, and
singing.
In most respects the progress of primary education in England has been
a continuous progress along these lines suggested by Huxley, and he
may be regarded as in this fashion one of the great shapers of the
destinies of his race, for nothing can have a bearing more important
on the character and fate of a race than the manner of training
provided for the masses of individuals composing it. It is only in the
matter of the religious instruction that the course of events has been
widely different from the neutral exposition of the Bible as suggested
by him. In 1870 a great majority of the people of England who
reflected upon the matter at all, and all those who accepted current
ideas without reflection, accepted the Bible as an inspired, direct,
and simple authority on all great matters of faith and morality.
Therefore, when Huxley, as by far the most important man among those
who advocated a secular education, was an advocate and not in the
least an opponent of Bible teaching, they were well content to let the
matter rest. There were, it is true, a certain number of zealots who
entered the boards with the avowed purpose, on the one hand, of
getting as much dogmatic teaching and interpretation added as it might
be possible to smuggle in, and, on the other, to reduce the simplest
Bible teaching to a minimum. But the vast majority of persons were out
of sympathy with these fanaticisms. Since 1870, however, a gradual
change has occurred in the attitude of the majority to the Bible in
England. The growth of the new criticism and of knowledge of it has
produced the result that now only a small minority of reflecting
people in England accept the Bible in the old simple way; the majority
thinks that it requires interpretation and explanation by the
authority of the Church. And so a new battle over dogma has begun;
moderate Church people no longer accept the compromise of Huxley, but
strive for an interpretation which must be dogmatic, and there is a
new dispute as to what may be regarded as undenominational religion.
When a majority of reasonable persons accepted Huxley's suggestions of
simple Bible teaching they did so not because they believed, as he
did, that the Bible was simply great literature, great tradition, and
great morality, but because they believed it to be direct, inspired
authority. It is a curious coincidence that Huxley himself did so much
to spread knowledge of the new criticism, and that a first result of
this diffusion was to overthrow the compromise arranged largely by his
influence, and which for many years provided a middle way in which
sensible persons avoided the extremes of theological and
anti-theological zealots.
Early in the course of his career as a member of the London School
Board, Huxley crystallised his views as to the general policy of
education in a phrase which perhaps has done more than any other
phrase ever invented to bring home to men's minds the ideal of a
national system of education. "I conceive it to be our duty," he said,
"to make a ladder from the gutter to the university along which any
child may climb." We have seen the nature of his views as to the
lowest rungs of this ladder; we may now turn to his work and views as
to the higher stages. He expressed these views in occasional speeches
and articles, and he had many important opportunities in aiding to
carry them into actual practice. He was a member of a number of
important Royal Commissions: Commission on the Royal College of
Science for Ireland, 1866; Commission on Science and Art Instruction
in Ireland, 1868; Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the
Advancement of Science, 1870-75; Royal Commission to enquire into the
Universities of Scotland, 1876-78; Royal Commission on the Medical
Acts, 1881-82. From the beginning, he was closely associated with the
Science and Art Department, the operations of which threw a web of
education, intermediate between primary and university education, all
over Britain. A number of the teachers under that department were
trained by him, and as examiner to the department he took the greatest
care to reduce to a minimum the evils necessarily attendant on the
mode of payment by results. A certain number of teachers made it
their chief effort to secure the largest possible number of grants.
Huxley regarded these as poachers of the worst kind, and did all he
could to foil them. He did all he could to promote systematic
practical instruction in the classes, and to aid teachers who desired
to learn their business more thoroughly. He insisted again and again
upon the popular nature of the classes; their great advantage was that
they were accessible to all who chose to avail themselves of them
after working hours, and that they brought the means of instruction to
the doors of the factories and workshops. The subjects which he
considered of most importance were foreign languages, drawing, and
elementary sciences, and he wished them to be used first of all by
those who were handicraftsmen and who therefore left the elementary
schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen.
In a lecture given at the formal opening of the Johns Hopkins
University at Baltimore in 1876, and in a Rectorial address to the
University of Aberdeen two years earlier, Huxley laid down the general
lines of university education as he conceived it. He began by
supposing that a good primary education had already been received.
"Such an education should enable an average boy of fifteen or
sixteen to read and write his own language with ease and
accuracy, and with a sense of literary excellence derived from
the study of our classic writers; to have a general acquaintance
with the history of his own country and with the great laws of
social existence; to have acquired the rudiments of the physical
and psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of elementary
arithmetic and geometry. He should have obtained an acquaintance
with logic rather by example than by precept; while the
acquirement of the elements of music and drawing should have been
a pleasure rather than work."
He had not much to say for secondary or intermediate education, partly
because at that time, in England at least, the secondary schools were
in a hopeless state of incapacity, and differed from primary schools
not only in their greater expense, their adaptation to the
class-spirit which demanded the separation of the boys of the upper
and middle classes from those in the lower ranks of society, but
chiefly in the futility of the education given at the majority of
them. But where intermediate schools did exist, he demanded that they
should keep on the same wide track of general knowledge, not
sacrificing one branch of knowledge for another. He held that the
elementary instruction to which he had referred embraced all the real
kinds of knowledge and mental activity possible to man. The university
could add no new fields of mental activity, no new departments of
knowledge. What it could do was to intensify and specialise the
instruction in each department.
"Thus literature and philology, represented in the elementary
school by English alone, in the university will extend over the
ancient and modern languages. History, which like charity, best
begins at home, but, like charity, should not end there, will
ramify into anthropology, archæology, political history, and
geography, with the history of the growth of the human mind and
of its products, in the shape of philosophy, science, and art,
and the university will present to the student libraries, museums
of antiquities, collections of coins, and the like, which will
efficiently subserve these studies. Instruction in the elements
of political economy, a most essential but hitherto sadly
neglected part of elementary education, will develop in the
university into political economy, sociology, and law. Physical
science will have its great divisions, of physical geography,
with geology and astronomy; physics; chemistry and biology;
represented not merely by professors and their lectures, but by
laboratories in which the students, under guidance of
demonstrators, will work out facts for themselves and come into
that direct contact with reality which constitutes the
fundamental distinction of scientific education. Mathematics will
soar into its highest regions; while the high peaks of philosophy
may be scaled by those whose aptitude for abstract thought has
been awakened by elementary logic. Finally, schools of pictorial
and plastic art, of architecture, and of music will offer a
thorough discipline in the principles and practice of art to
those in whom lies nascent the rare faculty of æsthetic
representation, or the still rarer powers of creative genius."
Early in the seventies the problems connected with what is called
technical education became prominent in the minds of the most
far-seeing of this nation. It became plain that England was not
advancing with the same strides as some other nations in arts and
manufactures, and the most obvious difference between England and the
rivals whose advance was causing anxiety lay in her deficiency in
education. Science or knowledge of nature lies at the root of all the
arts and manufactures, and it was our relation to scientific teaching
and research that required investigation. Naturally enough, Huxley
took the keenest interest in this question and made large
contributions to its solution, contributions which have not yet been
put completely into operation. He insisted most strongly upon a point
that we as a nation have not yet completely grasped. There is no
difference between applied science and any other kind of science. The
chemistry of manufactures, the physics of industrial machinery, the
biology of agriculture and of fisheries, are not different from other
chemistries and physics and biologies. They are merely special cases
of the application of the same general fund of knowledge, and the same
general principles of investigation. Huxley wished that the term
"applied science" had never been invented, or that it could be
destroyed. A man cannot study the chemistry of dyeing or make advances
in it unless he be a thoroughly trained chemist in the full sense of
the word. More than that, many of the greatest discoveries, using the
word "great" as applied to commercial advantage rather than to
abstract progress in knowledge, have been made by those who were
pursuing research for its own sake rather than for any immediate
commercial advantage to be derived from it. Hence he regarded it of
vital importance, from the mere point of view of the prosperity of the
country, that there should be a sufficiently large number of
scientific men provided with the means for research in the shape of
income and appliances. The most immediately utilitarian fashion for
the nation to encourage science, was to encourage science in its
highest and most advanced aspects. This meant the endowment of
research and the support of universities and other institutions in
which research might be conducted, and Huxley strove unceasingly for
the benefit of all such great organisations. One of the last public
occasions of his life was his appearance as leader of a deputation to
urge upon the government the formation of a real university in London
which should unite the scattered institutions of that great city and
promote the highest spheres of the pursuit of knowledge. He held the
view, strongly, that a useful combination was to be made by uniting
the functions of teaching and investigation. A teacher taught better
when his mind was kept fresh by the advances he himself was making,
and an investigator, by having a moderate amount of teaching to do,
gained from the need of forcing his mind from time to time to take
broad surveys of the whole field a part of which he was engaged in
tilling. The first great object, then, in promoting science so as to
reap the most direct national advantage from it, was to encourage
science in its highest and widest forms. It cannot be said that
England has yet learned this lesson. The number of institutions in
Germany where advanced investigation is continuously pursued is
absolutely and relatively greater than the number in England.
The second part of technical education is that to which general
attention is more commonly given. It consists of the kind of training
to be given to the great army of workers in the country. In regard to
this, as in regard to research work, Huxley insisted on the absence of
distinction between technical or applied science and science without
such a limiting prefix. So far as technical instruction meant definite
teaching of a handicraft, he believed that it could be learned
satisfactorily only in the workshop itself.
"The workshop is the only real school for a handicraft. The
education which precedes that of the workshop should be entirely
devoted to the strengthening of the body, the elevation of the
moral faculties, and the cultivation of the intelligence; and,
especially, to the imbuing of the mind with a broad and clear
view of the laws of that natural world with the components of
which the handicraftsman will have to deal. And, the earlier the
period of life at which the handicraftsman has to enter into the
actual practice of his craft, the more important is it that he
should devote the precious hours of preliminary education to
things of the mind, which have no direct and immediate bearing on
his branch of industry, though they lie at the foundation of all
the realities."
He compared his own handicraft as an anatomist with the handicrafts of
artisans, and declared that the kind of preliminary training he would
choose for himself or for his pupils was precisely the training he
would provide for them. He did not wish that one who proposed to be a
biologist should learn dissection during his school-days; that would
come later, and, in the meantime, broader and deeper foundations had
to be laid. These were the ordinary subjects of a liberal education:
physical training, drawing, and a little music, French and German, the
ordinary English subjects, and the elements of physical science.
Against such costly schemes of education for the whole population of a
nation, many objections have been urged. Of these, perhaps the chief
is that the majority of human beings even in the most civilised
country are not capable of profiting by or taking an interest in, or
certainly of advancing far in, most subjects. Huxley met such
objections in a spirit of the widest statesmanship. There were two
reasons for making the general education of all what he called a
liberal education. The first was that, even in a liberal education
such as he advocated, no subject was pursued beyond the broad
elementary stages, and that during the early years of life, while the
framework and the character were forming, it was of first-rate
importance not to stunt either by lack of material. The second great
principle was that until any individual had had the opportunity, it
was impossible to say whether or no he would profit much or little,
and the gain to the whole nation by not missing any of those who were
born with unusual natural capacity was more than worth the cost of
affording opportunities to all.
"The great mass of mankind have neither the liking, nor the
aptitude, for either literary or scientific or artistic pursuits;
nor, indeed, for excellence of any sort. Their ambition is to go
through life with moderate exertion and a fair share of ease,
doing common things in a common way. And a great blessing and
comfort it is that the majority of men are of this mind; for the
majority of things to be done are common things, and are quite
well enough done when commonly done. The great end of life is not
knowledge but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they
can assimilate and organise into a basis for action; give them
more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as
heavy and stupid from undigested learning as others are from
over-fulness of meat and drink. But a small percentage of the
population is born with that most excellent quality, a desire for
excellence, or with special aptitude of some sort or another....
Now, the most important object of all educational schemes is to
catch these exceptional people, and turn them to account for the
good of society. No man can say where they will crop up; like
their opposites, the fools and the knaves, they appear sometimes
in the palace, and sometimes in the hovel; but the great thing to
be aimed at, I was almost going to say, the most important end of
all social arrangements, is to keep these glorious sports of
Nature from being either corrupted by luxury or starved by
poverty, and to put them into the position in which they can do
the work for which they are specially fitted.... I weigh my words
when I say that if the nation could purchase a potential Watt or
Davy or Faraday, at the cost of a hundred thousand pounds down,
he would be dirt cheap at the money."
The beginning and end of the whole matter was that a national system
of education was above all things a "capacity-catcher," designed to
secure against the loss of the incalculable advantages to be gained by
cultivating the best genius born in the land.