so vast and various, while the capacities of boys are so small, and
the time to be spent on their education so short, that we quail before
the attempt to grapple with the problem. We have moreover a vague idea
that the well-informed man ought to have a general notion of the world
as it is, the course of history, the literature of the ages; and at
the same time the scientists are maintaining that a general knowledge
of the laws and processes of nature is even more urgently needed. I
cannot treat of science here, but I fully subscribe to the belief that
a general knowledge of science is essential. But the result of our
believing that it is advisable to know so much, is that we attempt to
spread the thinnest and driest paste of knowledge over the mind, and
all the vivid life of it evaporates in the process. The thing is,
frankly, far too big to attempt; and, we must henceforth set our faces
against the attainment; of mere knowledge as either advisable or
possible. What we must try to do is to educate the faculties of
curiosity, interest, imagination and sympathy; we must begin from the
boy himself, and conduct him away from himself. What we really ought
to aim at is to give him the sense that he is surrounded by strange
and beautiful mysteries of nature, of which he can himself observe
certain phenomena; that human history, as well as the great world
about him, is crowded with interesting and animating figures who have
laboured, toiled, loved, acted, suffered, sinned, have felt the
impulse both of base and selfish desires, but no less of beautiful,
exalted, and inspiring hopes. We want to convince the young that it is
not well to be narrow, close-fisted, insolent, suspicious, petty,
self-satisfied. _Imaginative sympathy_, that is to be the end of all
our efforts. If we aim only at producing sympathy, we may get a vague
sentimentalism which is just distressed by apparent suffering, and
anxious to relieve it momentarily, without reflecting whether it is
not the outcome of perfectly curable faults of system and habit. If we
aim only at imagination, then we get a barren artistic pleasure in
dramatic situations and romantic effects. What we ought to aim at is
the sympathy which pities and feels for others, as well as admires and
imitates them; and this must be reinforced by the imagination which
can concern itself with the causes of what otherwise are but vague
emotions. We want to make boys on the one hand detest tyranny and
high-handedness and bigotry and ruthless exercise of power, and on the
other hand mistrust stupidity and ignorance and baseness and
selfishness and suspiciousness. The study of high literature is
valuable not as a mere exercise in erudition and linguistic nicety and
critical taste, but because the great books mirror best the highest
hopes and visions of human nature. The precise extent of the
intellectual range matters very little, compared with the
perceptiveness and emotion by which the realisation of other lives,
other needs, other activities, other problems are accompanied.
I must not be supposed, in saying this, to be leaving out of sight the
virile exercise of logical and rational faculties; but that is another
side of education; and the grave deficiency which I detect in the old
theory was that practically all the powers and devices of education
were devoted to what was called fortifying the mind and making it into
a perfect instrument, while there were left out of sight the motives
which were to guide the use of that instrument, and the boy was led to
suppose that he was to fortify his mind solely for his own advantage.
This individualist theory must somehow be modified. The aim of the
process I have described is not simply to indicate to the boy the
amount of selfish pleasure which he can obtain from literary
masterpieces; it is rather to show the boy that he is not alone and
isolated, in a world where it is advisable for him to take and keep
all that he can; but that he is one of a great fellowship of emotions
and interests, and that his happiness depends upon his becoming aware
of this, while his usefulness and nobleness must depend upon his
disinterestedness, and upon the extent to which he is willing to share
his advantages. The teaching of civics, as it is called, may be of
some use in this direction, as showing a boy his points of contact
with society. But no instruction in the constitution of society is
profitable, unless somehow or other the dutiful motive is kindled,
and the heroic virtue of service made beautiful.
When then I speak of the training of the imagination, I really mean
the kindling of motive; and here again I claim that this must be based
on a boy's own experience. He understands well enough the possibility
of feeling emotion in relation to a small circle, his home and his
immediate friends. But he is probably, like most young creatures, and
indeed like a good many elderly ones, inclined to be suspicious of all
that is strange and foreign, and to anticipate hostility or
indifference. What he would willingly share with a relation or friend,
he eagerly withholds from an outsider. To cultivate his imaginative
sympathy, to give him an insight into the ways and thoughts of other
men, to show to him that the same qualities which evoke his trust and
love are not the monopoly of his own small circle--this is just what
must be taught, because it is exactly what is not instinctively
evolved.
The training of the imagination then is a deliberate effort to
persuade the young to believe in the real nobility and beauty of life,
in the great ideas which are moulding society and welding communities
together. It cannot be done in a year or a decade; but it ought to be
the first aim of education to initiate the imagination of the young
into the idea of fellowship, and to make the thought of selfish
individualism intolerable. It is not perhaps the only end of
education, but I can hardly believe that it has any nobler or more
sacred end.
IV
RELIGION AT SCHOOL
By W. W. VAUGHAN
The Master of Wellington College
"After all, how seldom does a Christian education teach one anything
worth knowing about Christianity." These are the words of a man whom
the public schools are proud to claim, a man who has seen Christian
education, whether given in the elementary or in the secondary schools
tested by the slow fires of peace, and by the quick devouring furnace
of war. They seem at first sight to be a verdict of "guilty" against
the teachers or the system in which they play a part. That verdict
will not be accepted without protest by those incriminated, but even
the protesters will feel some compunction, and now that they can no
longer question the heroic "student" as to what he means, and go to
him for advice as to the remedies for this failure, they should search
their hearts and their experience for the help he might have given,
had he not laid down his arms and his life on the Somme last autumn.
For long the need of help has been felt. The teaching of religion may
have been less talked and written about, and less organised by
societies and associations, than have been other subjects dealt with
at school, but the problem of how best to make it a living force in
youth and an enduring force throughout the whole of life is often
wrestled with at conferences of schoolmasters which do not publish
their proceedings, and by little groups of men who feel the need of
one another's help. It is certainly always present in the minds, if
not in the hearts, of every head master, boarding-house master and
tutor in England. These know well what the difficulties are; these
know that a short cut to any subject is often a long way round: that a
short cut to religion leads too often either to a slough of doubt or
else to a pharisaical hilltop, from which there is no path to the
great mountains where the Holy Spirit really dwells.
It is never well to insist too much on difficulties, but a bare
statement of those that surround this subject is needed. There are the
difficulties of course common to every subject; the difficulty of
attracting the real teacher, keeping him as a teacher, improving him
as a teacher when he has been attracted. Even those who start out on
their career with a determination that the teaching of religion at all
events should have its full share of their time and thought, find that
as their teaching life goes on and fresh duties crowd in to usurp more
and more all their energies, that the time they can spare, and the
thought they can give, either to the preparation of their divinity
lessons, or to the enriching and cultivation of their own souls,
shrink. Now and then they are cruelly disappointed at the result of
their efforts as some conspicuous failure seems to prove their
teaching vain; they are often depressed by the apparent apathy of the
leaders of the Church, by their manifest reluctance even to allow
others to make the new bottles which can alone hold the new wine.
Schoolmasters belong to a devoted and to a comparatively learned
profession. They should belong, especially those who feel the
needs--and all must to some extent--of the religious life of the
school, also to a learning profession; and their learning should go
beyond the experience of boyish failings, and boyish tragedies, and
boyish virtues with which they are almost daily brought into contact;
beyond the dictionaries and handbooks that enable the Bible lesson to
be well prepared; it should go out into the books that deal with the
philosophy and the history of religion--the books of Harnack and
Illingworth, Hort and Inge, Bevan and Glover, and of others who make
us feel how narrow our outlook on our religion is. It would of course
be foolish to drag our pupils with us exactly to the point to which
these books may have brought us after many years' experience, but it
is essential that we should know of the existence of such a distant
point if we are to give to those we teach any idea of there being
beyond the limits that they can reach at school a great and wonderful
and inspiring region which they, with the help of such leaders as have
been mentioned can, nay must, explore for themselves if religion is to
be something more than mere emotion, fitful in its working, liable to
succumb to all the stronger emotions with which life attacks the
citadel of the soul.
Another difficulty is that the teacher of religion is being more
continuously and searchingly tested than the teacher of any other
subject. The man who expatiates in the form-room on the beauties of
literature, and is suspected of never reading a book is looked upon as
merely a harmless fraud by those he teaches. The man who preaches,
whether officially in the pulpit or unofficially in the class-room or
study, a high standard of conduct, and is unsuccessful in his own
efforts to attain it, depreciates for all the value of religion.
Patience and industry and long-suffering and charitableness are
virtues that bear the hall mark of Christianity, but they are virtues
in which the best men fail continually, are conscious of their own
failure and would plead for merciful judgment. If the parish priest is
exposed to the criticism of those among whom he lives, a still fiercer
light beats upon the pulpit or the desk of the schoolmaster. His
consciousness of this sometimes leads him to reduce his teaching to
the limits of his practice, instead of extending the former and having
faith in his power to bring the latter up to this level. Indeed, when
teachers and those who are taught are living so close together, both,
from a not unworthy fear of insincerity, are liable to make themselves
and their ideals out to be worse than they are. It is sympathy alone
that can overcome this difficulty. Indeed, it is safe to say that
without sympathy--sympathy that understands difficulties, working
equally in those who are old and those who are young--religion at
school must be a very cautious and probably a very barren power.
Again, the schoolmaster is tempted, and even when he is not tempted
the boys credit him with yielding to the temptation to treat religion
as a super-policeman: something to make discipline easy and
consequently to make his own life smooth. It is no good explaining too
often that the aim is to get at religion through discipline, but this
aim should ever be before us. Man cannot too early in life realise
that discipline of itself is valueless. Its inestimable value in war,
as in all the activities of life, is due to its being the necessary
preliminary preparation for courageous action, noble thought, wise
self-control and unselfish self-surrender. But above all these
difficulties, dominating them all, affecting them all, perhaps
poisoning them all, is the fact, not to be escaped though it is often
ignored, that so many of the traditions of school life, as of national
life, seem founded on a basis opposed to Christ's teaching. It is very
hard to go through a day of our lives, or even a short railway
journey, and not offend against the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.
Older people have never been able to solve this dilemma: the rulers
find it more difficult than the ruled. The whole of school life is
stimulated by the principle of competition, and kept together by a
healthy and, on the whole, a kindly self-assertion which is hard to
reconcile with the ideals that are upheld in the New Testament. Yet at
school, quite as much as in the World, competition and self-assertion
are tempered by abundant friendliness and generosity; and at school
if not in the world, there are an increasing number of individuals who
have so much spiritual power that they never need to exercise the more
worldly power that clashes with the Beatitudes. Of this power boys
seldom talk, except to some specially sympathetic ear at some
specially heart-opening moment, but many are dumbly aware of it and
they cultivate it, often unconsciously but to the great gain of those
around them, by prayer and faithful worship. But even these richer
natures are uncomfortably conscious that there is a conflict between
what Christ commands and what the world advises. That conflict will
not cease until faith has more power over our lives. It cannot grow
naturally at school among boys, when it does not live in the nation
among men; but it would indeed be faithless to miss, through fear of
the world's withering power, any opportunity of quickening pure
religion among the young. Though these opportunities vary very much in
the day and the boarding school, they may be said to occur:
(1) In the scripture lesson;
(2) In the services whether held in chapel or, as is often the case
especially in day schools, in the hall;
(3) In the preparation for confirmation;
(4) In all lessons in and out of school.
There is a great difference of opinion as to what should be taught in
the scripture lesson, and who should teach it. It is easy enough to
quote instances of extraordinary ignorance, to argue that, because a
man who is in the trenches shocks his chaplain by his real or
affected neglect of the facts of Bible history or the dogmas of the
Church, therefore he has never had an opportunity of learning them;
that same man would probably not give a much more impressive account
of the profane subjects in the school curriculum. There is, too, the
fact that a man may have forgotten everything of a subject and yet may
have learnt much from it. Every teacher knows this, if every schoolboy
does not. No one shrinks so much from revealing what he knows as the
boy who is conscious that he has learnt a thing and is not sure that
he can show his knowledge accurately. No subject has been left so free
from what is supposed to be the sterilising influence of examinations
as divinity. In many schools there have been one or two inspiring
teachers of this subject who justify this system, but on the whole the
result does not confirm the opinion that all would be well if we could
have complete freedom from examinations. If in the future the harvest
in religion is to be more worthy of the seed that is sown and the
trouble of cultivation, we must face with more frankness, especially
in the later years of a boy's life, all the difficulties that are
presented by the problems of the Bible and Church History. We must
have more courage in going beyond the syllabuses that are drawn up by
universities and ecclesiastical societies. Both have to play for
safety, but they are dull cards that this stake requires.
Teachers have overcome their timidity in dealing with the difficulties
presented by the Old Testament. Very few now hesitate to take the book
of Genesis, and, at all events if they are dealing with a high form,
they let the boys see that the conflict between science and religion
is only apparent, and that the victory of science does not mean the
defeat of religion. If they have been lucky enough to use Driver's
book on Genesis they will have felt on sure ground and any learner who
has half understood it will have a shield against some of the weapons
that assailed and defeated his father's generation. No teacher now
would be afraid of making clear the problems presented by the book of
Daniel or the book of Job, but when the New Testament is approached
much more diffidence is felt, and indeed ought to be felt. Diffidence
ought not however to involve silence.
A wise teacher has said that it is not the miracles of Christ but his
standard that keeps men away from his Church, and therefore outside
the influence for which the Church stands. True though this may be of
men as life goes on, of the young it is not the whole truth. In those
critical years of a man's religion--between eighteen and
twenty-five--it is the sudden or the slow-growing doubt about the
miracles of the New Testament, as much as the lofty standard that the
"Follow me" of Christ requires, that makes the profession and even the
holding of a religious faith so hard. More and more are the schools
trying to prepare those in their charge for the perils that threaten
the physical health and the character of the young; but it is tragic
that they should be so unwilling to face frankly the perils that will
sap the man's faith, and so expose his soul to the assaults of the
world and the devil. It is very hard to put oneself in another's
place; perhaps harder for the schoolmaster than for any other man, but
when we are teaching such a subject as religion--a subject whose roots
must perish if they cannot draw moisture from the springs of
sincerity, we should try to imagine what must be the feelings of the
thoughtful boy when he first discovers that the lessons which he has
so often learnt and the Creeds that he has so often repeated were
taken by his teachers in a sense which they carefully concealed from
him. More harm is done by the economy of truth than by the suggestion
of doubt.
It may be extraordinarily difficult to treat these problems of the New
Testament with becoming reverence; but is it not true to say that the
day when it becomes easy to any man to do so will be the day when he
ought to stop dealing with them? The real irreverence, the only
irreverence, is the glib confidence of the ignorant or the cynical
concealment of one who knows but dare not tell. What idea of the New
Testament does the average boy who leaves, say in the fifth form,
carry away with him from his public school? He may know that certain
facts are told in one Gospel and not in another; that there are
certain inconsistencies in the accounts given by the different
Synoptic Gospels of the same miracle, or what is apparently the same
miracle. He may be able to explain the parables more fully than their
author ever meant them to be explained; he may have at his fingers'
ends St Paul's journeys and even have been thrilled by St Paul's
shipwreck, but he will probably have missed the meaning of the good
news for himself and the power to treasure it for his life's strength.
This failure to appreciate and to accept the challenge of religion--a
failure shown later on in life in a certain diffidence about foreign
missions, and in the toleration of social conditions that deny Christ
as flatly as ever Peter did--is not the fault of the schools alone.
The schools only reflect the world outside and the homes from which
they are recruited. In neither is there as much light as there should
be. The difficulty of the vicious circle dominates this as so many
other problems. School reacts on the world, the world on the home[1]
and the home on school, the blame cannot be apportioned, need not be
apportioned; how the circle can be broken it is much more important to
determine. From time to time it has been broken, so decisively too
that for a while the riddle seems solved, at all events the old way is
abandoned for ever. Arnold's work at Rugby must have involved such a
breach. His work has never had to be done all over again and there
have been many to keep it in repair, but it needs to be extended now
in the light of new problems, scientific, social and international.
For this, as for all other extensions, courage is needed. The courage
to face the difficulties that modern research and modern thought
involve and the courage to point out that our Lord, though in his
short career he changed the bias of men's lives, never claimed to
leave man a detailed guide for conduct or for happiness. It was to a
simple society that he taught the laws of purity and love, he did not
extend the range of their application beyond the needs of the
Pharisee, the Sadducee, the Scribe, the peasant and the dweller in the
little towns through which he shed the light of his presence. These
laws sanctify the whole of life because they dominate the heart, from
which all life must spring, but they do not answer all questions about
all the subordinate provinces of life. The arts in their narrow sense,
philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by. Man will not neglect the one
or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of Christ,
but at times the urgency of his Master's business will seem to shut
them out of his life.
All this needs learning by the old, and explaining to the young, for
otherwise life will be one-sided, and when the day comes, as come it
must to those who think, when a choice must be made, and there seems
no alternative to following literally in Christ's footsteps and
turning the back on much of the beauty and the thrill of the world,
bewilderment will seize the chooser and at the best he will dedicate
himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself
to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life. Religion at school
must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and
intellectual, that become powerful in late boyhood and early manhood.
If, as so often is the case, it ignores their existence, or endeavours
to starve them, they may well assert themselves with fatal power, to
coarsen and degrade the whole of life.
The scripture lesson will indeed miss its opportunity if it does not,
in the later stages of a boy's career, set him thinking on these
subjects, and help him to a wise appreciation of the holiness of
beauty as well as of the beauty of holiness. To accomplish this task
the language of the Bible itself gives noble help. All the qualities
of great literature shine forth from it and it should put to shame and
flight the tawdry and the melodramatic. It is an ill service not to
make all familiar with the actual words of Holy Writ. Commentaries and
Bible histories may be at times convenient tools, but they are only
tools, and accurate knowledge of what they teach is no compensation
for a want of respectful familiarity with the text itself.
Hardly less important for good and evil are the chapel services. They
are much attacked. It has been argued that public worship is
distasteful in later life because of the compulsory chapels of
boyhood. If this were really so, evidence should be forthcoming that
those who come from schools where there is no compulsory attendance at
chapel, because there is no chapel to attend, are more eager to avail
themselves of the opportunities offered by college chapels than are
their more chapel ridden contemporaries. No one, however, can be quite
satisfied that chapel services are as helpful as they might be. The
difficulty is how to improve them. The suggestion that they should all
be voluntary is at first sight attractive but there are two
insuperable difficulties. The one is the power of fashion, for it
might well become fashionable in a certain house not to attend chapel.
Those who know anything of the inside of schools know how such a
fashion would deter many of the best boys from going, and martyrdom
ought not to be part of the training of school life. The other
difficulty is more subtle, but none the less real it originates in the
boys' quite healthy fear of claiming merit. Those in authority, if
wise, would not count attendance at chapel for righteousness, but some
of the most sensitive boys might think that they would do so, and
might stay away in consequence, and thus deprive themselves of
something they really valued. Two or three, not many, might come from
a wrong motive, and perhaps these would stay to pray, but they would
be no compensation for the loss of the others.