which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial
education--is to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to
prepare the child to receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor
ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience; and to understand the
preliminary symptoms of her pleasure, without waiting for the box on
the ear. In short, all artificial education ought to be an anticipation
of natural education. And a liberal education is an artificial education
which has not only prepared a man to escape the great evils
of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained him to appreciate and
to seize upon the rewards, which Nature scatters with as free a hand as
her penalties.
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam
engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as
well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a
knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws
of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and
fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous
will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all
beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to
respect others as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely:
she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.
Where is such an education as this to be had? Where is there any
approximation to it? Has any one tried to found such an education?
Looking over the length and breadth of these islands, I am afraid that
all these questions must receive a negative answer. Consider our
primary schools and what is taught in them. A child learns:--
1. To read, write, and cipher, more or less well; but in a very large
proportion of cases not so well as to take pleasure in reading, or to
be able to write the commonest letter properly.
2. A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which the child, nine times out
of ten, understands next to nothing.
3. Mixed up with this, so as to seem to stand or fall with it, a few of
the broadest and simplest principles of morality. This, to my mind, is
much as if a man of science should make the story of the fall of the
apple in Newton's garden an integral part of the doctrine of
gravitation, and teach it as of equal authority with the law of the
inverse squares.
4. A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian geography, and perhaps a
little something about English history and the geography of the child's
own country. But I doubt if there is a primary school in England in
which hangs a map of the hundred in which the village lies, so that the
children may be practically taught by it what a map means.
5. A certain amount of regularity, attentive obedience, respect for
others: obtained by fear, if the master be incompetent or foolish; by
love and reverence, if he be wise.
So far as this school course embraces a training in the theory and
practice of obedience to the moral laws of Nature, I gladly admit, not
only that it contains a valuable educational element, but that, so far,
it deals with the most valuable and important part of all education.
Yet, contrast what is done in this direction with what might be done;
with the time given to matters of comparatively no importance; with the
absence of any attention to things of the highest moment; and one is
tempted to think of Falstaff's bill and "the halfpenny worth of bread
to all that quantity of sack."
Let us consider what a child thus "educated" knows, and what it does
not know. Begin with the most important topic of all--morality, as the
guide of conduct. The child knows well enough that some acts meet with
approbation and some with disapprobation. But it has never heard that
there lies in the nature of things a reason for every moral law, as
cogent and as well defined as that which underlies every physical law;
that stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed by evil
consequences, as putting your hand in the fire, or jumping out of a
garret window. Again, though the scholar may have been made acquainted,
in dogmatic fashion, with the broad laws of morality, he has had no
training in the application of those laws to the difficult problems
which result from the complex conditions of modern civilisation. Would
it not be very hard to expect any one to solve a problem in conic
sections who had merely been taught the axioms and definitions of
mathematical science?
A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, while he sees
others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs with what would keep
his children from starvation. Would it not be well to have helped that
man to calm the natural promptings of discontent by showing him, in his
youth, the necessary connection of the moral law which prohibits
stealing with the stability of society--by proving to him, once for
all, that it is better for his own people, better for himself, better
for future generations, that he should starve than steal? If you have
no foundation of knowledge, or habit of thought, to work upon, what
chance have you of persuading a hungry man that a capitalist is not a
thief "with a circumbendibus?" And if he honestly believes that, of
what avail is it to quote the commandment against stealing, when he
proposes to make the capitalist disgorge?
Again, the child learns absolutely nothing of the history or the
political organisation of his own country. His general impression is,
that everything of much importance happened a very long while ago; and
that the Queen and the gentlefolks govern the country much after the
fashion of King David and the elders and nobles of Israel--his sole
models. Will you give a man with this much information a vote? In easy
times he sells it for a pot of beer. Why should he not? It is of about
as much use to him as a chignon, and he knows as much what to do with
it, for any other purpose. In bad times, on the contrary, he applies
his simple theory of government, and believes that his rulers are the
cause of his sufferings--a belief which sometimes bears remarkable
practical fruits.
Least of all, does the child gather from this primary "education" of
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 its 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, Shakespeare, 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
schoolboys, 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 organisation of your country; the meaning of the controversy
between free-traders 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 palaeontology of man; and I have the same double respect for it as
for other kinds of palaeontology--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 palaeontology 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 palaeontology 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 schoolboy 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? [1] 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 Organisation 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.