_OASES_
My title is figurative, but figures are sometimes useful. Murray's
Dictionary defines an oasis as "a fertile spot in the midst of a
desert"; and no combination of words could better describe the
ideal which I wish to set before my readers.
The suggestion of this article came to me from a correspondent
in Northumberland--"an old miner, who went to work down a mine
before he was eight years old, and is working yet at seventy-two."
My friend tells me that he has "spent about forty years of his
spare time in trying to promote popular education among his fellow
working-men." His notice was attracted by a paper which I recently
wrote on "The Golden Ladder" of Education, and that paper led him
to offer some suggestions which I think too valuable to be lost.
My friend does not despise the Golden Ladder. Quite the contrary.
He sees its usefulness for such as are able to climb it, but he
holds that they are, and must be, the few, while he is concerned for
the many. I agree. When (following Matthew Arnold at a respectful
distance) I have urged the formation of a national system by which
a poor man's son may be enabled to climb from the Elementary School
to a Fellowship or a Professorship at Oxford or Cambridge, I have
always realized that I was planning a course for the exceptionally
gifted boy. That boy has often emerged in real life, and the
Universities have profited by his emergence; but he is, and always
must be, exceptional. What can be done for the mass of intelligent,
but not exceptional, boys, who, to quote my Northumbrian friend,
"must be drilled into a calling of some kind, so as to be able to
provide for themselves when they grow up to manhood"? When once
their schooling, in the narrow sense, is over, must their minds be
left to lie fallow or run wild? Can nothing be done to supplement
their elementary knowledge, to stimulate and discipline their mental
powers?
The University Extension Movement was an attempt to answer these
questions in a practical fashion, and my friend does full justice
to the spirit which initiated that movement, and to the men--such
as the late Lord Grey--who led it. But I suppose he speaks from
experience when he says: "University Extension, as it is, will
never become established in working-class villages. Forty-five to
fifty pounds is too big a sum to be raised in three months, and
is also considered too much to be paid for a man coming to lecture
once a week for twelve weeks, and then disappear for ever like a
comet." My friend uses an astronomical figure, I a geographical one;
but we mean the same thing. The idea is to establish Oases--"fertile
spots in the midst of deserts"--permanent centres of light and
culture in manufacturing districts. "The Universities teach and
train ministers of religion, and they go and live in their parishes
among their flocks all the year round. Why not send lecturers and
teachers of secular subjects in the same way? A system something
similar to the Wesleyan or Primitive Methodists' ministerial system
would answer the purpose. The country might be divided into circuits
of four or five centres each, and a University man stationed in
each circuit, to organize Students' Associations, give lectures,
hold classes, and superintend scientific experiments, as the case
may be."
This is a good illustration. The Church professes to place in each
parish an official teacher of religion and morality, and most of
the Nonconformist communities do the same. To place an official
teacher of culture (in its widest sense) in every parish is perhaps
a task beyond our national powers as at present developed; but to
place one in every industrial district is not conceivable only,
but, I believe, practicable. The lecturer who comes from Oxford
or Cambridge, delivers his course, and departs, has no doubt his
uses. He is like the "Hot Gospeller" of an earlier age, or the
"Missioner" of to-day. He delivers an awakening message, and many
are the better for it; but if culture is to get hold of the average
lads and young men of an industrial district, its exponent must be
more like the resident minister, the endowed and established priest.
That he should live among the people whom he is to instruct, know
them personally, understand their ways of thinking and speaking,
is at least as important as that he should be a competent historian
or mathematician or man of letters. If the State, or voluntary
effort, or a combination of the two, could secure the permanent
presence of such a teacher in every district where men work hard,
and yet have leisure enough to cultivate their intellects, a yawning
gap in our educational system would be filled.
It would not be polite to mention actual names; but take by way
of example such a district as Dickens's "Coketown," or Disraeli's
"Wodgate," or George Eliot's "Milby," or any of those towns which
Cobbett expressively called "Hell-Holes." Let the State establish
in each of those places a qualified and accredited teacher for
adult students. The teacher may, if necessary, be paid in part
by voluntary subscription; but it is, in my view, all-important
that he should have the sanction and authority of the State to give
him a definite place among local administrators, and to the State
he should be responsible for the due discharge of his functions.
In Coketown or Wodgate or Milby his lecture-room would be a real
Oasis--"a fertile spot in the midst of a desert." Even if it has
not been our lot to dwell in those deserts, we all have had, as
travellers, some taste of their quality. We know the hideousness
of all that meets the eye; the necessary absorption in the struggle
for subsistence; the resulting tendency to regard money as the
one subject worth serious consideration; the inadequate means of
intellectual recreation; the almost irresistible atmosphere of
materialism in which life and thought are involved. The "Oasis"
would provide a remedy for all this. It would offer to all who
cared to seek them "the fairy-tale of science," the pregnant lessons
of history, the infinitely various joys of literature, the moral
principles of personal and social action which have been thought
out "by larger minds in calmer ages."
That there may be practical difficulties in the way of such a scheme
I do not dispute. The object of this chapter is not to elaborate a
plan, but to exhibit an idea. That the amount of definite knowledge
acquired in this way might be small, and what Archbishop Benson
oddly called "unexaminable," is, I think, quite likely. A man cannot
learn in the leisure-hours left over by exhausting work as he would
learn if he had nothing to think of except his studies and his
examination. But Education has a larger function than the mere
communication of knowledge. It opens the windows of the mind; it
shows vistas which before were unsuspected; and so, as Wordsworth
said, "is efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier."