makes the teacher. Teachers are born and not made. Good teaching
requires a peculiar temperament and distinctive aptitudes. I doubt very
much, even if you could secure the services of every human being who had
the natural gifts needed in a good teacher, if you could disregard every
question of cost and payment, I doubt whether even then you would
command the services of more than one passable teacher for a hundred
children and of more than one really inspired and inspiring teacher for
five hundred children. No doubt you could get _a sort of teacher_ for
every score or even for every dozen children, a commonplace person who
could be trained to do a few simple educational things, but I am
speaking now of good teachers who have the mental subtlety, the sympathy
and the devotion necessary for efficient teaching by the individualistic
methods in use to-day. And since, _using the methods that are used
to-day_, you can only hope to secure fully satisfactory results with one
teacher to every score of pupils, or fewer, and since it is unlikely we
shall ever be able to command the services of more than a tithe of the
people who could teach well, it seems that we come up here against an
insurmountable obstacle to an educated population.
Now I want to press home the idea of that difficulty. I am an old and
seasoned educationist; most of my earliest writings are concealed in the
anonymity of the London educational papers of a quarter of a century
ago, and my knowledge of educational literature is fairly extensive. I
know in particular the literature of educational reform. And I do not
recall that I have ever encountered any recognition of this fundamental
difficulty in the way of educational development. The literature of
educational reform is always assuming parents of limitless intelligence,
sympathy and means, employing teachers of limitless energy and capacity.
And that to an extreme degree is what we haven't got and what we can
never hope to have.
Educational reformers seem always to be looking at education from the
point of view of the individual scholastic enterprise and of the
individual pupil, and hardly ever from the point of view of a public
task dealing with the community as a whole. For all practical purposes
this makes waste paper of a considerable proportion of educational
literature. This literature, the reader will find, is pervaded by
certain fixed ideas. There is a sort of standing objection to any
_machining_ of education. There is, we are constantly told, to be no
syllabus of instruction, no examinations and no controls, no prescribed
text-books or diagrams because these things limit the genius of the
teacher. And this goes on with a blissful invincible disregard of the
fact that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand the
genius of the teacher isn't and can't be there. And also of the fact
that this affair of elementary education has in its essentials been done
over and over and over again for thousands of millions of times. There
ought to be as much scope left for genius and originality in ordinary
teaching as there is for genius and originality in a hen laying an
ordinary egg.
These educational idealists are always disregarding the fundamental
problem of educational organization altogether, the problem of economy,
economy of the most precious thing of all, _teaching power_. It is the
problem of stretching the competent teacher over the maximum number of
pupils, and that can be done only by the same methods of economy that
are practised in every other large-scale production--by the
standardization of everything that can be standardized, and by the use
of every possible time and labour-saving device and every possible
replacement of human effort, not in order to dispense with originality
and initiative but in order to conserve them for application at their
points of maximum efficiency.
I have said that a disregard of the possibilities of wide organization
and its associated economy of effort is characteristic of most
"advanced" educational literature. You will, if you will examine them,
find that disregard working out to its natural consequences in what are
called the "advanced" schools that appeal to educationally anxious
parents nowadays. You will find that these places, often very
picturesque and pleasing-looking places, are rarely prosperous enough to
maintain more than one or two good teachers. The rest of the staff
shrinks from scrutiny. You will find these schools adorned with
attractive diagrams drawn by the teachers, and strikingly original
models and apparatus made by the teachers, and if you look closely into
the matter or consult an intelligent pupil, you will find there are
never enough diagrams and apparatus to see a course through. If you
press that matter you will find that they haven't had time to make them
so far. And they will never get so far. No school, however rich and
prosperous and however enthusiastically run, can hope to make for itself
all the plant and diagrams and apparatus needed for a fully efficient
modern education such as we have sketched out. As well might a busy man
hope to array himself, by his own efforts, with hats, suits and boots
made by himself out of wool and raw hides.
But now I think you will begin to see what I am driving at. It is this:
that if the general level of education is to be raised in our modern
community, and if that better education is to be spread over most of our
community, it is necessary to reorganize education in the world upon
entirely bolder, more efficient, and more economical lines. We are
inexorably limited as to the number of good teachers we can get into the
educational organization, and we are limited as inexorably as to the
quality of the rank and file of our teaching profession; but we are not
limited in the equipment and systematic organization of teaching methods
and apparatus. That is what I want particularly to enlarge upon now.
Think of the ordinary schoolhouse--a mere empty brick building with a
few hat-pegs, a stale map or so, half a dozen plaster casts, a few
hundred tattered books, a blackboard, and some broken chemical
apparatus: think of it as the dingy insufficiency it is! In such a place
the best teacher must needs waste three-fourths of his energies. In such
a place staff and pupils meet chiefly to waste each other's time. This
is the first and principal point at which we can stanch the wastage of
teaching energy that now goes on. Everywhere about the world nowadays,
the schoolhouse is set up and equipped by a private person or a local
authority in more or less complete ignorance of educational
possibilities, in more or less complete disconnectedness, without any of
the help or any of the economy that comes from a centralized mass
production. Let us now consider what we might have in the place of this
typical schoolhouse of to-day.
Let me first suggest that every school should have a complete library
of very full and explicit lesson notes, properly sorted and classified.
All the ordinary subjects in schools have been taught over and over
again millions and millions of times. Few people, I think, realize that,
and fewer still realize the reasonable consequences of that. Human minds
are very much the same everywhere, and the best way of teaching every
ordinary school subject, the best possible lesson and the best possible
succession of lessons, ought to have been worked out to the last point,
and the courses ought to have been stereotyped long ago. Yet if you go
into any school to-day, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred you will
find an inexpert and ill-prepared young teacher giving a clumsy,
vamped-up lesson as though it had never been given before. He or she
will have no proper notes and no proper diagrams, and a halting and
faulty discourse will be eked out by feeble scratchings with chalk on a
blackboard, by querulous questioning of the pupils, and irrelevancies.
The thing is preposterous.
And linked up with this complete equipment of proper lesson notes upon
which the teacher will give the lessons, there should be a thing which
does not exist at present in any school and which ought to exist in
every school, a collection of some hundreds of thousands of pictures and
diagrams, properly and compactly filed; a copious supply of maps, views
of scenery, pictures of towns, and so forth for teaching geography,
diagrams and tables for scientific subjects, and so on and so on. You
must remember that if the schools of the world were thought of as a
whole and dealt with as a whole, these things could be produced
wholesale at a cost out of comparison cheaper than they are made to-day.
There is no reason whatever why school equipment should not be a world
market. A lesson upon the geography of Sweden needs precisely the same
maps, the same pictures of scenery, types of people, animals, cities,
and so forth, whether that lesson is given in China or Peru or Morocco
or London. There is no reason why these pictures and maps should not be
printed from the same blocks and distributed from the same centre for
the schools of all mankind. If the government of any large country had
the vigour and intelligence to go right ahead and manufacture a proper
equipment of notes and diagrams for its own use in all its own schools,
it would probably be able to recoup itself for most of the outlay by
dominating the map and diagram markets of the rest of the world.
And next to this full and manageable collection of pictures and
diagrams, which the teacher would whip out, with the appropriate notes,
five minutes before his lesson began, the modern school would have quite
a considerable number of gramophones. These would be used not only to
supply music for drill and so forth, and for the analytical study of
music, but for the language teaching. Instead of the teacher having to
pretend, as he usually pretends now, to a complete knowledge of the
foreign language he can really only smatter, he would become the honest
assistant of the real teaching instrument--the gramophone. Here, again,
it is a case for big methods or none--a case for mass production. A mass
production of gramophone records for language teaching throughout the
world would so reduce the cost that every school could quite easily be
equipped with a big repertory of language records. For the first year of
any language study, at any rate, the work would go always to the
accompaniment of the proper accent and intonation. And all over the
world each language would be taught with the same accent and quantities
and idioms--a very desirable thing indeed.
And now let me pass on to another requirement for an efficient school
that our educational organization has still to discover--the method of
using the cinematograph. I ask for half a dozen projectors or so in
every school, and for a well-stocked storehouse of films. The
possibilities of certain branches of teaching have been altogether
revolutionized by the cinematograph. In nearly every school nowadays you
will find a lot of more or less worn and damaged scientific apparatus
which is supposed to be used for demonstrating the elementary facts of
chemistry, physics and the like. There is a belief that the science
teachers--and they do their best with the time and skill and material at
their disposal--rig up experimental displays of the more illuminating
experimental facts with this damaged litter. Many of us can recall the
realities of the sort of demonstration I mean. The performance took two
or three hours to prepare, an hour to deliver and an hour or so to clear
away; it was difficult to follow, impossible to repeat, it usually went
wrong, and almost invariably the teacher lost his temper. These
practical demonstrations occurred usually in the opening enthusiasm of
the term. As the weeks wore on, the pretence of practical teaching was
quietly dropped, and we crammed our science out of the text-book.
Now that is the sort of thing that still goes on. But it ought to be
entirely out of date. All that scientific bric-a-brac in the cupboard
had far better be thrown away. All the demonstration experiments that
science teachers will require in the future can be performed once for
all--before a cinematograph. They can be done _finally_; they need never
be done again. You can get the best and most dexterous teacher in the
world--he can do what has to be done with the best apparatus, in the
best light; anything that is very minute or subtle you can magnify or
repeat from another point of view; anything that is intricate you can
record with extreme slowness; you can show the facts a mile off or six
inches off, and all that your actual class teacher need do now is to
spend five minutes on getting out the films he wants, ten minutes in
reading over the corresponding lecture notes, and then he can run the
film, give the lesson, question his class upon it, note what they miss
and how they take it, run the film again for a second scrutiny, and get
out for the subsequent study of the class the ample supply of diagrams
and pictures needed to fix the lesson. Can there be any comparison
between the educational efficiency of the two methods?
So I put it to you, that it is possible now to make--and that the world
needs badly that we should make--a new sort of school, a standardized
school, a school richly equipped with modern apparatus and economizing
the labour of teaching to an extent at present undreamt of, in which,
all over the world, the same stereotyped lessons, leading the youth of
the whole world through a parallel course of schooling, can be
delivered.
I know that in putting this before you I challenge some of the most
popular affectations of cultivated people. I know that many people will
be already writhing with a genteel horror at the idea of the same lesson
being given in identical terms to everybody in turn throughout the
world. It sounds monotonous. It will rob the world of variety--and so on
and so on. But indeed it will not be monotonous at all. That lesson will
be new and fresh and good to every pupil who receives it. And remember
it is by our hypothesis the best possible form and arrangement of that
lesson. It is to take the place of a sham lesson or no lesson at all.
There is an eternal freshness in learning as in all the other main
things in life. It will be no more monotonous than having one's seventh
birthday or falling in love for the first time.
And as for variety, I for one do not care how soon every possible
variety of ignorance and misconception is banished from the world. The
sun shines on the whole world and it is the same sun. I have still to be
persuaded that our planet would be more various and interesting if it
were lit by two or three thousand uncertain, spasmodic and differently
coloured searchlights directed upon it from every direction. I am
pleading for a clear white light of education that shall go like the sun
round the whole world.
You see that in all this I am driving at--what shall I call
it?--syndicated schools, syndicated lesson notes, and, so far as
equipment goes, mass production. I want to see the sort of thing
happening to schools that has already happened to many sorts of retail
shops. In the place of little ill-equipped schools, each run by its own
teacher and buying its own books and diagrams and material and so forth
in small quantities at high prices, I want to see a great central
organization, employing teachers of genius, working in consultation and
co-operation and producing lesson notes, diagrams, films, phonograph
records, cheaply, abundantly, on a big scale for a nation, or a group of
nations, or, if you like, for all the world, just as America produces
watches and alarum clocks and cheap automobiles for all the world. And I
want to see the schools of the world being run, so far as the
intellectual training goes, not by local committees but by that _central
organization_.
It is only by this reorganization of schooling upon the lines of big
production that we can hope to get a civilized community in the world at
an educational level very markedly higher than the existing educational
level.
But if we could so economize teaching energy--if we made our really
great teachers, by the use of modern appliances, teachers not of
handfuls but of millions; if we insisted upon a universal application of
the best and most effective methods of teaching, just as we insist upon
the best and most effective methods of street traction and town
lighting--then I believe it would be possible to build the civilization
of the years to come on a foundation of mental preparation incomparably
sounder and higher than anything we know of to-day.
VII
COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK
And now let us go on to the next stages of education.
The schooling process is a natural phase in human development--it is our
elaboration of the natural learning of boyhood and girlhood and of
adolescence. There was schooling before schools; there was schooling
before humanity. I have watched a cat schooling her kittens. Schooling
is a part of being young. And we grow up. So there comes a time when
schooling is over, when the process of equipment gives place to an
increasing share in the activities and decisions of adult life.
Nevertheless for us education must still go on.
I suppose that the savage or the barbarian or the peasant in any part of
the world or the uneducated man anywhere would laugh if you told him
that the adult must still learn. But in our modern world--I mean the
more or less civilized world of the last twenty-five centuries or
so--there has grown up a new idea--new, I mean, in the sense that it
runs counter to the life scheme of primitive humanity and of most other
living things--and that is _the idea that one can go on learning right
up to the end of life_. It marks off modern man from all animals, that
in his adult life he can display a sense that there remains something
still to be investigated and wisdom still to be acquired.
I do not know enough history to tell you with any confidence when adult
men, instead of just going about the business of life after they had
grown up, continued to devote themselves to learning, to a deliberate
prolongation of what is for all other animals an adolescent phase. But
by the time of Buddha in India and Confucius in China and the schools of
the philosophers in the Greek world the thing was in full progress. That
was twenty-six centuries ago or more.
Something of the sort may have been going on in the temples of Egypt or
Samaria a score of centuries before. I do not know. You must ask some
such great authority as Professor Breasted about that. It may be fifty
or a hundred centuries since men, although they were fully grown up,
still went on trying to learn.
The idea of adult learning has spread ever since. To-day I suppose most
educated people would agree that so long as we live we learn and ought
to learn--that we ought to develop our ideas and enlarge, correct and
change our ideas.
But even to-day you will find people who have not yet acquired this
view. You will find even teachers and doctors and business men who are
persuaded that they had learnt all that there was to learn by
twenty-five or thirty. It is only quite recently that this idea has
passed beyond a special class and pervaded the world generally--the idea
of everyone being a life-long student and of the whole world becoming,
as it were, a university for those who have passed beyond the schooling
stage.
It has spread recently because in recent years the world has changed so
rapidly that the idea of settling down for life has passed out of our
minds, has given place to a new realization of the need of continuous
adaptation to the very end of our days. It is no good settling down in a
world that, on its part, refuses to do anything of the sort.
But hitherto, before these new ideas began to spread in our community,
the mass of men and women definitely _settled down_. At twelve, or
fifteen, or sixteen, or twenty it was decided that they should stop
learning. It has only been a rare and exceptional class hitherto that
has gone on learning throughout life. The scene and field of that
learning hitherto has been, in our Western communities, the University.
Essentially the University is and has been an organization of adult
learning as distinguished from preparatory and adolescent learning.
But between the phase of schooling and the phase of adult learning there
is an intermediate stage.
In Scotland and America that is distinguished and thought of clearly as
the _college stage_. But in England, where we do not think so clearly,
this college stage is mixed up with and done partly at school and partly
in the University. It is not marked off so definitely from the stage of
general preparation that precedes it or from the stage of free
intellectual enterprise that follows it.
Now what should college give the young citizen, male or female, upon the
foundation of schooling we have already sketched out? In practice we
find a good deal of technical study comes into the college stage. The
budding lawyer begins to read law, the doctor starts his professional
studies, the future engineer becomes technical, and the young merchant
sets to work, or should do, to study the great movements of commerce and
business method and organization.
As the college stage of those who do not, as a matter of fact, go to
college, we have now in every civilized country the evening continuation
school, the evening technical school and the works school.
But important as these things are from the point of view of service,
they are not the _soul_--not the real meaning of the college stage.
The soul of the college stage, the most important value about it, is
that in it is a sort of preparatory pause and inspection of the whole
arena of life. It is the educational concomitant of the stage of
adolescence.
The young man and the young woman begin to think for themselves, and the
college education is essentially the supply of stimulus and material
for that process.
It was in the college stage that most of us made out our religion and
made it real for ourselves. It was then we really took hold of social
and political ideas, when we became alive to literature and art, when we
began the delightful and distressful enterprise of finding ourselves.
And I think most of us will agree when we look back that the most real
thing in our college life was not the lecturing and the lessons--very
much of that stuff could very well have been done in the schooling
stage--but the arguments of the debating society, the discussions that
broke out in the classroom or laboratory, the talks in one's rooms about
God and religion, about the state and freedom, about art, about every
possible and impossible social relationship.
Now in addition to that I had something else in my own college
course--something of the same sort of thing but better.
I have spoken of myself as under-educated. My schooling was shocking
but, as a blessed compensation, my college stage was rather
exceptionally good. My schooling ended when I was thirteen. My father,
who was a professional cricketer, was smashed up by an accident, and I
had three horrible years in employment in shops. Then my luck changed
and I found myself under one of the very greatest teachers of his time,
Professor Huxley. I worked at the Royal College of Science in London
for one year under him in his great course in zoology, and for a year
and a half under a very good but rather uninspiring teacher, Professor
Judd, the geologist. I did also physics and astronomy. Altogether I had
three full years of science study. And the teaching of biology at that
time, as Huxley had planned it, was a continuing, systematic,
illuminating study of life, of the forms and appearances of life, of the
way of life, of the interplay of life, of the past of life and the
present prospect of life. It was a tremendous training in the sifting of
evidence and the examination of appearances.
Every man is likely to be biassed, I suppose, in favour of his own
educational course. Yet it seems to me that those three years of work
were educational--that they gave a vision of the universe as a whole and
a discipline and a power such as no other course, no classical or
mathematical course I have ever had a chance of testing, could do.
I am so far a believer in a biological backbone for the college phase of
education that I have secured it for my sons and I have done all I can
to extend it in England. Nevertheless, important as that formal college
work was to me, it still seems to me that the informal part of our
college life--the talk, the debates, the discussion, the scampering
about London to attend great political meetings, to hear William Morris
on Socialism, Auberon Herbert on Individualism, Gladstone on Home Rule,
or Bradlaugh on Atheism--for those were the lights of my remote student
days--was about equally important.