The want of Practical Discipline has been thus put by a writer in
_Blackwood’s Magazine_: “What is the use of battering a man’s brains
full of Greek and Latin pothooks, that he forgets before he doffs his
last round-jacket or puts on his first long-tailed blue, if ye don’t
teach him the old Spartan virtue of obedience, hard living, early
rising, and them sort of classics? Where’s the use of instructing him in
hexameters or pentameters, if you would leave him in ignorance of the
value of a pennypiece? What height of stupidity it is to be fillin’ a
boy’s brains with the wisdom of the ancients, and then turn him out like
an _omadhaum_, to pick up his victuals among the moderns!”
With equal truth, but finer humour, has Sydney Smith, at his own
expense, exposed this neglect of the practical as a fair indication of
the mode of English education. He is writing to his publisher, whom he
tells: “I have twice endeavoured to write the word _skipping_—‘_skipping
spirit_.’ Your printer first printed it ’stripling,’ and then altered it
into _stripping_. The fault is entirely mine. I was fifteen years at
school and college—I know something about the Romans and the Athenians,
and have read a good deal about the præter-perfect tense—but I cannot do
a sum in simple addition, or _write a handwriting which any body can
read_.”
“CRAMMING.”
Cramming, which in our time was a cant term in the Universities for the
art of preparing a student to pass an examination by furnishing him
beforehand with the requisite answers, has travelled far beyond the
tether of Oxford or Cambridge. Its abuse is well described by Watts: “As
a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never
nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with
intellectual food.” It reminds one also of the Baconian saw—of those who
can pack the cards, yet know not how to play them.
A president Examiner of articled clerks at the Law Institution has
observed upon this forcing system:
I for one, and I am glad of the opportunity of expressing it, abhor
all Cramming; and I hold very cheaply the system of Competitive
Examination, which is nowadays begun almost in the nursery, and
thought so highly of in some quarters as a test. It is not to be
expected, without inverting the natural order of things, that a
youth of twenty or twenty-one should have exhausted those stores of
learning which Coke speaks of as requiring not less than the
_lucubrationes viginti annorum_; and remember that those twenty
years would begin at that period of life on which most of you are
now but entering. In this view the papers before you have been
prepared, and our aim as examiners has been to set such questions as
will prove you to possess the elements of a liberal education; and
that you have so far acquired the principles of common law, equity,
conveyancing, criminal law, and bankruptcy, that you are entitled to
enter upon the practice of your profession, leaving its complete
mastery to that experience which time alone can supply. I need not
remind you of the men who, beginning as attorneys, have attained to
high positions in the State. The portrait of Lord Chancellor Truro
hangs before you on these walls. I had the privilege of knowing him
personally; his example may well stimulate your ambition, and
animate your exertions, for never man won high place with more
unremitting labour than he did; not, however, at the expense of his
childhood or of his youth, not by the sacrifice of all else for mere
mental culture, but by the full-grown energies, by the well-directed
vigour and power of the man, for he was between thirty and forty
years of age before he was called to the bar.