Thomas Arnold was born in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-five, and died in
Eighteen Hundred Forty-two. His life was short, as men count time, but
he lived long enough to make for himself a name and a fame that are both
lasting and luminous. Though he was neither a great writer nor a great
preacher, yet there were times when he thought he was both. He was only
a schoolteacher. However, he was an artist in schoolteaching, and art is
not a thing--it is a way. It is the beautiful way--the effective way.
Schoolteachers have no means of proving their prowess by conspicuous
waste, and no time to convince the world of their excellence through
conspicuous leisure; consequently, for histrionic purposes, a
schoolteacher's cosmos is a plain, slaty gray. Schoolteachers do not
wallow in wealth nor feed fat at the public trough. No one ever accuses
them of belonging to the class known as the predatory rich, nor of being
millionaire malefactors. They have to do their work every day at certain
hours and dedicate its results to time.
For many years Thomas Arnold has been known as the father of his son.
Several great men have been thus overshadowed. The father of Disraeli,
for instance, was favored by fame and fortune, until his gifted son
moved into the limelight, and after that Pater shone mostly in a
reflected glory. Jacopo Bellini was the greatest painter in Venice until
his two sons, Gian and Gentile, surpassed him, and history writes him
down as the father of the Bellinis. Lyman Beecher was regarded as
America's greatest preacher until Henry Ward moved the mark up a few
notches. The elder Pitt was looked upon as a genuine statesman until his
son graduated into the Cabinet, and then "the terrible cornet of horse"
became known as the father of Pitt. Now that both are dust, and we are
getting the proper perspective, we see that "the great commoner" was
indeed a great man, and so they move down the corridors of time
together, arm in arm, this father and son. That excellent person who
carried the gripsacks of greatness so long that he thought the luggage
was his own, Major James B. Pond, launched at least one good thing. It
was this: "Matthew Arnold gave fifty lectures in America, and nobody
ever heard one of them; those in his audience who could no longer endure
the silence slipped quietly out."
Matthew Arnold was a critic and writer who, having secured a tuppence
worth of success through being the son of his father, and thus securing
the speaker's eye, finally got an oratorical bee in his bonnet and went
a-barnstorming. He cultivated reserve and indifference, both of which he
was told were necessary factors of success in a public speaker.
And this is true. But they will not make an orator, any more than long
hair, a peculiar necktie, and a queer hat will float a poet on the tide
of time safely into the Hall of Fame.
Matthew Arnold cultivated repose, but instead of convincing the audience
that he had power, he only made them think he was sleepy. Major Pond,
having lived much with orators, and thinking the trick easy, tried
oratory on his own account, and succeeded as well as did Matthew Arnold.
No one ever heard Major Pond: his voice fell over the footlights, dead,
into the orchestra; only those with opera-glasses knew he was talking.
But to be unintelligible is not a special recommendation. Men may be
moderate for two reasons--through excess of feeling and because they are
actually dull.
Matthew Arnold has slipped back into his true position--that of a man of
letters. The genius is a man of affairs. Humanity is the theme, not
books. Books are usually written about the thoughts of men who wrote
books. Books die and disintegrate, but humanity is an endless
procession, and the souls that go marching on are those who fought for
freedom, not those who speculate on abstrusities.
The credential of Thomas Arnold to immortality is not that he was the
father of Matthew and eight other little Arnolds, but it lies in the
fact that he fought for a wider horizon in life through education. He
lifted his voice for liberty. He believed in the divinity of the child,
not in its depravity. Arnold of Rugby was a teacher of teachers, as
every great teacher is. The pedagogic world is now going back to his
philosophy, just as in statesmanship we are reverting to Thomas
Jefferson. These men who spoke classic truth, not transient--truth that
fits in spite of fashion, time and place--are the true prophets of
mankind. Such was Thomas Arnold!
* * * * *
If Thomas Arnold had been just a little bigger, the world probably would
never have heard of him, for an interdict would have been placed upon
his work. The miracle is that, as it was, the Church and the State did
not snuff him out.
He stood for sweet reasonableness, but unintentionally created much
opposition. His life was a warfare. Yet he managed to make himself
acceptable to a few; so for fourteen years this head master of a
preparatory school for boys lived his life and did his work. He sent out
his radiating gleams, and grew straight in the strength of his spirit,
and lived out his life in the light.
His sudden death sanctified and sealed his work before he was subdued
and ironed out by the conventions.
Happy Arnold! If he had lived, he might have met the fate of Arnold of
Brescia, who was also a great teacher. Arnold of Brescia was a pupil of
Abelard, and was condemned by the Church as a disturber of the peace for
speaking in eulogy of his master. Later, he attacked the profligacy of
the idle prelates, as did Luther, Savonarola and all the other great
church-reformers. When ordered into exile and silence, he still
protested his right to speak. He was strangled on order of the Pope, his
body burned, and the ashes thrown into the Tiber. The Baptists, I
believe, claim Arnold of Brescia as the forerunner of their sect, and
certain it is that he was of the true Roger Williams type.
Thomas Arnold, too, was filled with a passion for righteousness. His
zeal for the upright, manly life constituted his strength. Of course he
would not have been executed, as was Arnold of Brescia--the times had
changed--he would simply have been shelved, pooh-poohed, deprived of his
living and socially Crapseyized. Death saved him--aged forty-seven--and
his soul goes marching on!
* * * * *
The parents of Thomas Arnold belonged to the great Middle Class--that
class which Disraeli said never did any thinking on its own account, but
to the best of its ability deferred to and imitated the idle rich in
matters of religion, education and politics.
Doctor Johnson maintained that if members of the Middle Class worked
hard and economized, it was in the hope that they might leave money and
name for their children and make them exempt from all useful effort.
"To indict a class," said Burke, "is neither reasonable nor right." But
certain it is that a vast number of fairly intelligent people in England
and elsewhere regard the life of the "aristocracy" as very desirable and
beautiful.
To this end they want their boys to become clergymen, lawyers, doctors
or army officers.
"Only two avenues of honor are open to aspiring youth in England," said
Gladstone--"the Army and the Church."
The father of Thomas Arnold was Collector of Customs at Cowes, Isle of
Wight. Holding this petty office under the Government, with a half-dozen
men at his command, we can easily guess his caliber, habits, belief and
mode of life. He was respectable; and to be respectable, a Collector of
Customs must be punctilious in Church matters, in order to be acceptable
to Church people, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The parents of
Thomas Arnold very naturally centered their ambitions for him on the
Church, as he was not very strong.
When the child was only six years old, the father died from "spasm of
the heart." At this time the boy had begun to take Latin, and his
education was being looked after by a worthy governess, who daily
drilled his mental processes and took him walking, leading him by the
hand. On Sundays he wore a wide, white collar, shiny boots and a stiff
hat. The governess cautioned him not to soil his collar, nor to get mud
on his boots.
In later years he told how he looked covetously at the boys who wore
neither hats nor boots, and who did not have a governess.
His mother had a fair income, and so this prim, precise, exact and
crystallized mode of education was continued. Out of her great love for
her child, the mother sent him away from home when he was eight years
old. Of course there were tears on both sides; but now a male man must
educate him, and women were to be dropped out of the equation--this that
the evil in the child should be curbed, his spirit chastened, and his
mind disciplined.
The fact that a child rather liked to be fondled by his mother, or that
his mother cared to fondle him, was proof of total depravity on the part
of both.
The Reverend Doctor Griffiths, who took charge of the boy for two years,
was certainly not cruel, but at the same time he was not exactly human.
In Nature we never hear of a she-lion sending her cubs away to be looked
after by a denatured lion. It is really doubtful whether you could ever
raise a lion to lionhood by this method. Some goat would come along and
butt the life out of him, even after he had evolved whiskers and a mane.
After two years with Doctor Griffiths, young Arnold was sent to
Manchester, where he remained in a boys' boarding-house from his tenth
to his fourteenth year. To the teachers here--all men--he often paid
tribute, but uttered a few heretical doubts as to whether discipline as
a substitute for mother-love was not an error of pious but overzealous
educators.
At sixteen years of age he was transferred to Corpus Christi College at
Oxford. In Eighteen Hundred Fifteen, being then twenty years of age, he
was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, and there he resided until he was
twenty-four.
He was a prizeman in Latin, Greek and English, and was considered a star
scholar--both by himself and by others. Ten years afterwards he took a
backward glance, and said: "At twenty-two I was proud, precise, stiff,
formal, uncomfortable, unhappy, and unintentionally made everybody else
unhappy with whom I came in contact. The only people I really mixed with
were those whose lives were dedicated to the ablative."
When twenty-four he was made a deacon and used to read prayers at
neighboring chapels, for which service he was paid five shillings. Being
now thrown on his own resources, he did the thing a prizeman always
does: he showed others how. As a tutor he was a success: more scholars
came to him than he could really take care of. But he did not like the
work, since all the pupil desired, and all the parents desired, was that
he should help the backward one get his marks, and glide through the eye
of a needle into pedagogic paradise.
At twenty-six he was preaching, teaching and writing learned essays
about things he did not understand.
From this brief sketch it will be seen that the early education of
Thomas Arnold was of the kind and type that any fond parent of the
well-to-do Middle Class would most desire. He had been shielded from all
temptations of the world; he could do no useful thing with his hands;
his knowledge of economics--ways and means--was that of a child; of the
living present he knew little, but of the dead past he assumed and
believed he knew much.
It was purely priestly, institutional education. It was the kind of
education that every well-to-do Briton would like to have his sons
receive. It was, in short, England's Ideal.
* * * * *
Rugby Grammar School was endowed in Sixteen Hundred Fifty-three by one
Laurence Sherif, a worthy grocer. The original gift was comparatively
small, but the investment being in London real estate, has increased in
value until it yields now an income of about thirty-five thousand
dollars a year.
In the time of Arnold there were about three hundred pupils. It is not a
large school now; there are high schools in a hundred cities of America
that surpass it in many ways.
Rugby's claim to special notice lies in its traditions--the great men
who were once Rugby boys, and the great men who were Rugby teachers.
Also, in the fact that Thomas Hughes wrote a famous story called, "Tom
Brown at Rugby."
Rugby Grammar School was one hundred twenty-five years old when Sir
Joshua Reynolds commissioned Lord Cornwallis to go to America and fetch
George Washington to England, that Sir Joshua might paint his portrait.
For a hundred years prior to the time of Arnold, there had not been a
perceptible change in the methods of teaching. The boys were herded
together. They fought, quarreled, divided into cliques; the big boys
bullied the little ones. Fagging was the law; so the upper forms
enslaved the lower ones. There was no home life, and the studies were
made irksome and severe, purposely, as it was thought that pleasant
things were sinful.
If any better plan could have been devised to make study absolutely
repulsive, so the student would shun it as soon as he was out of school,
we can not guess it.
The system was probably born of inertia on the part of the teachers. The
pastor who pushes through his prescribed services, with mind on other
things, and thus absolves his conscience for letting his congregation go
drifting straight to Gehenna, was duplicated in the teacher. He did his
duty--and nothing more.
Selfishness, heartlessness and brutality manipulated the birch. Head was
all; heart and hand nothing. This was schoolteaching. As a punishment
for failure to memorize lessons, there were various plans to disgrace
and discourage the luckless ones. Standing in the corner with face to
the wall, and the dunce-cap, had given place to a system of fines,
whereby "ten lines of Vergil for failure to attend prayers," and ten
more for failure to get the first, often placed the boy in hopeless
bankruptcy. If he was a fag, or slave of a higher-form boy, cleaning the
other's boots, scrubbing stairs, running on foolish and needless
errands, getting cuffs and kicks by way of encouragement, he saw his
fines piling up and no way ever to clear them off and gain freedom by
promotion.
Viewed from our standpoint, the thing has a ludicrous bouffe air that
makes us smile. But to the boy caught in the toils it was tragic. To
work and evolve in an environment of such brutality was impossible to
certain temperaments. Success lay in becoming calloused and indifferent.
If the boy of gentle habits and slight physical force did not sink into
mental nothingness, he was in danger of being bowled over by disease and
death.
Indeed, the physical condition of the pupils was very bad: smallpox,
fevers, consumption, and breaking out with sores and boils, were common.
Thomas Arnold was thirty-three years old when he was called as head
master to Rugby. He was married, and babies were coming along with
astonishing regularity. He had taken priestly orders and was passing
rich on one hundred pounds a year. Poverty and responsibility had given
him ballast, and love for his own little brood had softened his heart
and vitalized his soul.
As a writer and speaker he had made his presence felt at various college
commencements and clergymen's meetings. He had challenged the brutal,
indifferent, lazy and so-called disciplinary methods of teaching.
And so far as we know, he is the first man in England to declare that
the teacher should be the foster-parent of the child, and that all
successful teaching must be born of love.
The well-upholstered conservatives twiddled their thumbs, coughed, and
asked: "How about the doctrine of total depravity? Do you mean to say
that the child should not be disciplined? What does Solomon say about
the use of the rod? Does the Bible say that the child is good by
nature?"
But Thomas Arnold could not explain all he knew. Moreover, he did not
wish to fight the Church--he believed in the Church--to him it was a
divine institution. But there were methods and practises in the Church
that he would have liked to forget.
"My sympathies go out to inferiority," he said. The weakling often
needed encouragement, not discipline. The bad boy must be won, not
suppressed.
In one of these conferences of clergymen, Arnold said:
"I once chided a pupil, a little, pale, stupid boy--undersized and
seemingly half-sick--for not being able to recite his very simple
lesson. He looked up at me and said with a touch of spirit: 'Sir, why do
you get angry with me? Do you not know I am doing the best I can?'"
One of the clergymen present asked Arnold how he punished the boy for
his impudence.
And Arnold replied: "I did not punish him--he had properly punished me.
I begged his pardon."
The idea of a teacher begging the pardon of a pupil was a brand-new
thing.
Several clergymen present laughed--one scowled--two sneezed. But a
Bishop, shortly after this, urged the name of Thomas Arnold as master of
Rugby, and added to his recommendation this line: "If elected to the
office he will change the methods of schoolteaching in every public
school in England."
The ayes had it, and Arnold was called to Rugby. The salary was so-so,
the pupils between two and three hundred in number--many were home on
sick-leave--the Sixth Form was in charge.
The genius of Arnold was made manifest, almost as soon as he went to
Rugby, by the way in which he managed the boys who bullied the whole
school, and what is worse, did it legally.
Fagging was official.
The Sixth Form was composed of thirty boys who stood at the top, and
these boys ran the school. They were boys who, by reason of their size,
strength, aggressiveness and mental ability, got the markings that gave
them this autocratic power. They were now immune from authority--they
were free. In a year they would gravitate to the University.
We can hardly understand now how a bully could get markings through his
bullying propensities; but a rudimentary survival of the idea may yet be
seen in big football-players, who are given good marks, and very gentle
mental massage in class. If the same scholars were small and skinny,
they would certainly be plucked.
The faculty found freedom in shifting responsibility for discipline to
the Sixth Form.
Read the diary of Arnold, and you will be amazed on seeing how he fought
against taking from the Sixth Form the right to bodily chastise any
scholar in the school that the king of the Sixth Form declared deserved
it.
If a teacher thought a pupil needed punishment, he turned the luckless
one over to the Sixth Form. Can we now conceive of a system where the
duty of certain scholars was to whip other scholars? Not only to whip
them, but to beat them into insensibility if they fought back?
Such was schoolteaching in the public schools of England in Eighteen
Hundred Thirty.
Against this brutality there was now a growing sentiment--a piping voice
bidding the tide to stay!
But now that Arnold was in charge of Rugby, he got the ill-will of his
directors by declaring that he did not intend to curtail the powers of
the Sixth Form--he proposed to civilize it. To try out the new master,
the Sixth Form, proud in their prowess, sent him word that if he
interfered with them in any way, they would first "bust up the school,"
and then resign in a body. Moreover, they gave it out that if any pupil
complained to the master concerning the Sixth Form, the one so
complaining would be taken out by night and drowned in the classic Avon.
There were legends among the younger boys of strange disappearances, and
these were attributed to the swift vengeance of "The Bloody Sixth."
Above the Sixth Form there was no law.
Every scholar took off his hat to a "Sixth." A Sixth uncovered to
nobody, and touched his cap only to a teacher.
And custom had become so rooted that the Sixth Form was regarded as a
sort of police necessity--a caste which served the school just as the
Army served the Church. To reach the Sixth Form were paradise--it meant
liberty and power--liberty to do as you pleased, and power to punish all
who questioned your authority.
To uproot the power of the Sixth Form was the intent of a few reformers
in pedagogics.
There were two ways to deal with the boys of the Sixth--fight them or
educate them.
Arnold called the Rugby Sixth together and assured them that he could
not do without their help. He needed them: he wanted to make Rugby a
model school, a school that would influence all England--would they help
him?
The dogged faces before him showed signs of interest. He continued,
without waiting for their reply, to set before them his ideal of an
English Gentleman. He persuaded them, melted them by his glowing
personality, shook hands with each, and sent them away.
The next day he again met them in the same intimate way, and one of the
boys made bold to assure him that if he wanted anybody licked--pupils or
teachers--they stood ready to do his bidding.
He thanked the boy, but assured him that he was of the opinion that it
would not be necessary to do violence to any one; he was going to unfold
to them another way--a new way, which was very old, but which as yet
England had not tried.
* * * * *
The great teacher is not the one who imparts the most facts--he is the
one who inspires by supplying a nobler ideal.
Men are superior or inferior just in the ratio that they possess certain
qualities. Truth, honor, frankness, health, system, industry,
kindliness, good-cheer and a spirit of helpfulness are so far beyond any
mental acquisition that comparisons are not only odious, but absurd.
Arnold inspired qualities, and in this respect his work at Rugby forms a
white milestone on the path of progress in pedagogy.
To an applicant for a position as teacher, Arnold wrote:
What I want is a man who is a Christian and a gentleman, an active
man, and one who has commonsense, and understands boys. I do not so
much care about scholarship, as he will have immediately under him
the lowest forms in the school, but yet, on second thought, I do
care about it very much, because his pupils may be in the highest
forms; and besides, I think that even the elements are best taught
by a man who has a thorough knowledge of the matter. However, if
one must give way, I prefer activity of mind and an interest in his
work to high scholarship; for the one may be acquired far more
easily than the other. I should wish it also to be understood that
the new master may be called upon to take boarders in his house, it
being my intention for the future to require this of all masters as
I see occasion, that so in time the school-barracks may die a
natural death. With this to offer, I think I have a right to look
rather high for the man whom I fix upon, and it is my great object
to get here a society of intelligent, gentlemanly and active men,
who may permanently keep up the character of the school, and if I
were to break my neck tomorrow, carry it on.
Ideas are in the air, and great inventions are worked out in different
parts of the world at the same time. Rousseau had written his "Emile,"
but we are not aware that Arnold ever read it.
And if he had, he probably would have been shocked, not inspired, by its
almost brutal frankness. The French might read it--the English could
not.
Pestalozzi was working out his ideas in Switzerland, and Froebel, an
awkward farmer lad in Germany, was dreaming dreams that were to come
true. But Thomas Arnold caught up the threads of feeling in England and
expressed them in the fabric of his life.
His plans were scientific, but his reasons, unlike those of Pestalozzi,
will not always stand the test of close analysis. Arnold was true to the
Church, but he found it convenient to forget much for which the Church
stood. He went back to a source nearer the fountainhead. All reforms in
organized religion lie in returning to the primitive type. The religion
of Jesus was very simple; that of a modern church dignitary is very
complex. One can be understood; the other has to be explained and
expounded, and usually several languages are required.
Arnold would have his boys evolve into Christian gentlemen. And his
type of English gentleman he did not get out of books on theology--it
was his own composite idea. But having once evolved it, he cast around
to justify it by passages of Scripture. This was beautiful, too, but
from our standpoint it wasn't necessary.
From his it was.
A gentleman to him was a man who looked for the best in other people,
and not for their faults; who overlooked slights; who forgot the good he
had done; who was courteous, kind, cheerful, industrious and clean
inside and out; who was slow to wrath, fervent in spirit, serving the
Lord. And the "Lord" to Arnold was embodied in Church and State.
Arnold used to say that schoolteaching should not be based upon
religion, but it should be religion. And to him religion and conduct
were one.
That he reformed Rugby through the Sixth Form is a fact. He infused into
the big boys the thought that they must help the little ones; that for a
first offense a lad must never be punished; that he should have the
matter fully explained to him, and be shown that he should do right
because it is right, and not for fear of punishment.
The Sixth Form was taught to unbend its dignity and enter into
fellowship with its so-called inferiors. To this end Arnold set the
example of playing cricket with the "scrubs."
He never laughed at a poor player nor at a poor scholar. He took dull
pupils into his own house, and insisted that his helpers, the other
teachers, should do the same. He showed the Sixth Form how much better
it was to take the part of the weak, and stop bullying the lower forms,
than to set the example of it in the highest. Before Arnold had been at
Rugby a year, the Sixth Form had resolved itself into a Reception
Committee that greeted all newcomers, got them located, introduced them
to the other boys, showed them the sights, and looked after their wants
like big brothers or foster-fathers.
Christianity to Arnold was human service. In his zeal to serve, to
benefit, to bless, to inspire, he never tired.
Such a disposition as this is contagious. In every big business or
school, there is one man's mental attitude that animates the whole
institution. Everybody partakes of it. When the leader gets melancholia,
the shop has it--the whole place becomes tinted with ultra-marine. The
best helpers begin to get out, and the honeycombing process of
dissolution is on.
A school must have a soul, just as surely as a shop, a bank, a hotel, a
store, a home, or a church has to have. When an institution grows so
great that it has no soul--simply a financial head and a board of
directors--dry-rot sets in and disintegration in a loose wrapper is at
the door.
This explains why the small colleges are the best, when they are: there
is a personality about them, an animating spirit that is pervasive and
preservative.
Thomas Arnold was not a man of vast learning, nor could one truthfully
say he had a surplus of intellect; but he had soul, plus. He never
sought to save himself. He gave himself to the boys of Rugby. His heart
went out to them, he believed in them--and he believed them even when
they lied, and he knew they lied. He knew that humanity was sound at
heart; he believed in the divinity of mankind, and tried hard to forget
the foolish theology that taught otherwise.
Like Thomas Jefferson, who installed the honor system in the University
of Virginia, he trusted young men. He made his appeal to that germ of
goodness which is in every human soul. In some ways he anticipated Ben
Lindsey in his love for the boy, and might have conjured forth from his
teeming brain the Juvenile Court, and thus stopped the creation of
criminals, had his life not been consumed in a struggle with stupidity
and pedantry gone to seed that cried to him, "Oh, who ever heard of such
a thing as that!"
The Kindergarten utilizes the propensity to play; and Arnold utilizes
the thirst for authority. Altruism is flavored with a desire for
approbation.
The plan of self-government by means of utilizing the Sixth Form was
quite on the order of our own "George Junior Republic." "A school," he
said, "should be self-governing and cleanse itself from that which is
harmful." And again he says: "If a pupil can gratify his natural desire
for approbation by doing that which is right, proper and best, he will
work to this end instead of being a hero by playing the rowdy. It is for
the scholars to set the seal of their approval on character, and they
will do so if we as teachers speak the word. If I find a room in a
tumult, I blame myself, not the scholars. It is I who have failed, not
they. Were I what I should be, every one of my pupils would reflect my
worth. I key the situation, I set the pace, and if my soul is in
disorder, the school will be in confusion."
Nothing is done without enthusiasm. It is heart that wins, not head, the
round world over. And yet head must systematize the promptings of the
heart. Arnold had a way of putting soul into a hand-clasp. His pupils
never forgot him. Wherever they went, no matter how long they lived,
they proclaimed the praises of Arnold of Rugby. How much this earnest,
enthusiastic, loving and sincere teacher has influenced civilization, no
man can say. But this we know, that since his day there has come about a
new science of teaching. The birch has gone with the dunce-cap. The
particular cat-o'-nine-tails that was burned in the house of Thomas
Arnold as a solemn ceremony, when the declaration was made, "Henceforth
I know my children will do right!" has found its example in every home
of Christendom.
We no longer whip children. Schools are no longer places of dread, pain
and suffering, and we as teachers are repeating with Friedrich Froebel
the words of the Nazarene, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and
forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Also, we say with Thomas Arnold: "The boy is father to the man. A race
of gentlemen can only be produced by fostering in the boy the qualities
that make for health, strength and a manly desire to bless, benefit and
serve the race."
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH FROEBEL]