between the pioneers of the University Extension Movement at Cambridge
and the working men, particularly of Rochdale and Nottingham, to be
followed later by that unprecedented revival of learning amongst
working people which took place in Northumberland and Durham in the
days before the great coal strike. At a later date, in 1903, the same
kind of united action gave rise to the movement of the Workers'
Educational Association, which has always conceived its purpose to be
the development of citizenship in and through education pursued in
common by university man and working man alike. The system of
University Tutorial Classes originated by this Association has been
based upon an ideal of citizenship, and not primarily upon a
determination to acquire knowledge, although it was clearly seen that
vague aspirations towards good citizenship without the harnessing of
all available knowledge to its cause would be futile. After exception
has been made for the body of young men and women who are determined
to acquire technical education for the laudable purpose of advancing
both their position in life and their utility to society, it is clear
that no educational appeal to working men and women will have the
least effect if it is not directed towards the purpose of enriching
their life, and through them the life of the community. The proof of
this lies in the fact that, after they have striven together for years
in Tutorial Classes, they ask for no recognition--in fact they have
declined it when it has been offered--and have devoted their powers to
voluntary civic work and the work of the associations or unions to
which they belong, as well as in very many instances, to the spreading
of education throughout the districts in which they live. It is
largely due to the leaven of educational enthusiasm which has thus
been generated that there is a unanimous movement on the part of
working people towards a complete educational system including within
it compulsory attendance at continuation schools during the day.
The problems that hedge about continuation schools are many, but it is
clear that they will be regarded by educationists and by at least some
employers as above all else training for citizenship based upon the
vocation to which the boy or girl may be devoting himself or herself
in working hours. The narrowness of the daily occupation, divorced as
it is from the whole spirit and intent of apprenticeship, will be
broadened directly the consideration of daily work is placed in the
continuation school both on a higher plane and in a complete setting.
The compulsory evening school will fail unless it induces a demand for
recreation of a pure kind which may be associated with the voluntary
evening school and continued along the lines of study into the years
of adult life. And even if it is impossible for every student of
capacity in the continuation school to pass into the university or
technological college, it may be hoped that there need not fail to be
opportunities for reaching the heights of ascertained knowledge in the
University Tutorial Class. In the future, as now, only in greater
degree, such classes will be regarded as an essential part of
university work, and will provide opportunity for the study of those
subjects which are most nearly related to citizenship.
It is one of the fundamental principles of the Workers' Educational
Association that every person, when not under the power of some
hostile over-mastering influence, is ready to respond to an
educational appeal. Not indeed that all are ready or able to become
scholars, but that all are anxious to look with understanding eyes at
the things which are pure and beautiful. Tired men and women are made
better citizens if they are taken, as they often are, to picture
galleries and museums, to places of historic interest and of scenic
beauty, and are helped to understand them by the power of a
sympathetic guide. It is by the extension of work of this sort, which
can be carried out almost to a limitless extent that the true purpose
of social reform will be best served. It is by such means that the
press may be elevated, the level of the cinema raised, the efforts of
the demagogue neutralised.
The Workers' Educational Association is based upon the work of the
elementary school and of the associations of working people, notably
the co-operative societies and trade unions. The democratic methods
obtaining in those associations have themselves proved a valuable
contribution to citizenship, and have determined the democratic nature
of all adult education. The right and freedom of the student to study
what he wishes finds its counterpart in the reasonable demand that man
shall live out his life as he wills, provided it moves in a true
direction and is in harmony with the needs and aspirations of his
fellows.
It has seemed in this review of the relation of schools and places of
education to the development of citizenship that the fact of the
operation of social influences has been implicit at every point. In
any case there is, and can be, no doubt that the school, whilst
instant in its effect upon the mind of the time, is always being
either hindered or helped by the conditions obtaining in the society
in which it is set. The relations existing between society and school
are revealed in a process of action and reaction. Wilhelm von
Humboldt said that "whatever we wish to see introduced into the life
of a nation must first be introduced into its schools." Among other
things, it is necessary to develop in the schools an appreciation of
all work that is necessary for human welfare. This is the crux of all
effort towards citizenship through education. In the long run there
can be no full citizenship unless there is fulness of intention to
discover capacity and to develop it not for the individual but for the
common good. This is primarily the task of an educational system. If a
man is set to work for which he is not fitted, whether it be the work
of a student or a miner, he is thwarted in his innate desire to attain
to the full expression of his being in and through association with
his fellow-men, whereas, when a man is doing the right work, that for
which he has capacity, he rejoices in his labour and strives
continually to perfect it by development of all his powers. The
exercise of good citizenship follows naturally as the inevitable
result of a rightly developed life. It may not be the citizenship
which is exercised by taking active and direct part in methods of
government. The son of Sirach, meditating on the place of the
craftsman, said:
All these trust to their hands: and every one is wise in his work.
Without these cannot a city be inhabited ... they will maintain the
state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their
craft[4].
The times are different and the needs of people have changed, but the
true test of a citizen may be more in the healthiness of dominating
purpose than in the possession and satisfaction of a variety of
desires. To "maintain the state of the world" is no mean ambition.
If it is difficult for a man to become the good citizen when employed
on work for which he is unfitted, it is even more difficult for the
man to do so who is set to shoddy work or to work which damages the
community.
The task laid upon the school is heavy, but it does not stand alone.
The family and the Church are its natural allies in the modern State.
All alike will make mistakes, but, if they clearly set before them the
intention to do their utmost to free the capacity of all for the
accomplishment of the good of all, wisdom will increase and many
tragedies in life will be averted.
Thus lofty ideals have presented themselves, but they will secure
universal admission apart from the immediate practical considerations
which bulk so largely and often so falsely in the minds of men, and
which are frequently suggested by limitations of finance and lack of
faith in the all-sufficient power of wisdom.
It is in the consecration of a people to its highest ideals that the
true city and the true State become realised on earth and the measure
of its consecration, in spite of all devices of teaching or training
however wise, determines the true level of citizenship at any time in
any place.
[Footnote 1: _Wisdom of Solomon_, vii. 24.]
[Footnote 2: _Interim Report of the Consultative Committee of the
Board of Education on Scholarships for Higher Education_, 1916.]
[Footnote 3: J.R. Green, _A Short History of the English People_.]
[Footnote 4: _Ecclesiasticus_, xxxviii. 31-34.]
SOME BOOKS ON CITIZENSHIP
[1]American Political Science Assoc. The Teaching of Government. 1916.
Macmillan. 5s. 0d. net.
[1]BAKER, J.H. Educational Aims and Civic Needs. 1913. Longmans. 3s.
6d. net.
[1]BALCH, G.T. The Method of Teaching Patriotism in Public Schools.
1890. New York: Van Nostrand.
[1]BOURNE, H.E. The Teaching of History and Civics. 1915. Longmans.
6s. 0d. net.
[1]DEWEY, JOHN. Democracy and Education. 1916. Macmillan. 6s. 0d. net.
[1]DEWEY JOHN. The School and Society. 1915. Chicago Univ. Press. 4s.
0d. net.
[1]DEWEY, JOHN and EVELYN. Schools of To-Morrow. 1915. Dent. 5s. 0d.
net.
FINDLAY, J.J. The School. 1912. Williams and Norgate. 1s. 3d. net.
[1]HALL, G. STANLEY. Educational Problems. 2 vols. 1911. Appleton.
31s. 6d. net. Ch. 24. Civic Education.
[1]HENDERSON, C.H. Education and the Larger Life. 1902. Boston:
Houghton. 6s. 0d.
[1]HUGHES, E.H. The Teaching of Citizenship. 1909. Boston: Wilde. 6s.
0d.
HUGHES, M.L.V. Citizens To Be. 1915. Constable. 4s. 6d. net.
[1]JENKS, J.W. Citizenship and the Schools. 1909. New York: Holt. 6s.
0d.
KERSCHENSTEINER, GEORG. Education for Citizenship. Tr. A.J. Pressland.
1915. Harrap. 2s. 0d. net. The Schools and the Nation. 1914.
Macmillan. 6s. 0d. net.
[1]MONROE, PAUL. (Ed.) Cyclopedia of Education. 5 vols. Macmillan.
105s. 0d. net.
MORGAN, ALEXANDER. Education and Social Progress. 1916. Longmans. 3s.
6d. net.
Oxford and Working Class Education. Clarendon Press, 1s. net.
PATERSON, ALEXANDER. Across the Bridges. 1912. Arnold. 1s. 0d. net.
SADLER, M.E. (Ed.). Continuation Schools in England and Elsewhere.
1908. Manchester University Press. 8s. 6d. net.
SCOTT, C.A. Social Education. 1908. Ginn. 6s. 0d. net.
WALLAS, GRAHAM. The Great Society. 1914. Macmillan. 7s. 6d. net.
See also:
Board of Education. Reports.
Civics and Moral Education League Papers, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi,
W.C. 2.
[Footnote 1: American.]
VI
THE PLACE OF LITERATURE IN EDUCATION
By NOWELL SMITH
Head Master of Sherborne School
Education is a subject upon which everyone--or at least every
parent--considers himself entitled to have opinions and to express
them. But educational treatises or the considered views of educational
experts have a very limited popularity, and in fact arouse little
interest outside the circle of the experts themselves. Even the
average teacher, who is himself, if only he realised it, inside the
circle, pays little heed to the broader aspects of education, chiefly,
no doubt, because in the daily practice of the art of education he
cannot step aside and see it as a whole; he cannot see the wood for
the trees. The indifference of laymen however is mainly due to the
fact that educational theory, like other special subjects, inevitably
acquires a jargon of its own, an indispensable shorthand, as it were,
for experts, but far too abstract and technical for outsiders.
And his technical language too often reacts upon the actual ideas of
the educational theorist, who tends to lose sight of the variety of
concrete boys and girls in his abstract reasonings, necessary as these
are. We are apt to forget that what is sauce for the goose may not be
sauce for the gander, and still more perhaps that what is sauce for
the swan may not be sauce for either of these humbler but deserving
fowl. But it is certain that in discussing education we ought
constantly to envisage the actual individuals to be educated.
Otherwise our "average pupil of fifteen plus" is only too likely to
become a mere monster of the imagination, and the intellectual
_pabulum_, which we propose to offer, suited to the digestion of no
human boy or girl in "this very world, which is the world of all of
us."
In considering, then, the place of literature in education, I propose
to keep constantly before my eyes the people with whose education I am
personally familiar, namely, myself, my children, and the various
types of public school boy which I have known as boy, as
undergraduate, as college tutor and as schoolmaster. I say various
types of public school boy; for although there still is a public
school type in general which is easily recognisable by certain marked
superficial characteristics, the popular notion that all public school
boys are very much alike in character and outlook is a mere delusion.
Again, I propose, when I speak of literature, to mean literature, and
not a compendious term for anything that is not science. The
opposition that has in modern times been set up between science on the
one hand and a jumble of studies labelled either literary or
"humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in
the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of
education. It may perhaps be held that literature in its most literal
sense is a name for anything that is expressed by means of
intelligible language--a use of the word which certainly admits of no
comparison with the meaning of science, but which also leads to no
ideas of any educational interest. But I take the word literature in
its common acceptation; and, while admitting that I can give no
precise and exhaustive definition, I will venture to describe it as
the expression of thought or emotion in any linguistic forms which
have aesthetic value. Thus the subject-matter of literature is only
limited by experience: as Emile Faguet says somewhere--without
claiming to have made a discovery--_la littérature est une chose qui
touche à toutes choses_. And the tones of literature range from Isaiah
to Wycherley, from Thucydides to Tolstoy; its forms from Pindar to a
folk song, from Racine to Rudyard Kipling, from Gibbon to Herodotus or
Froissart. And while no two people would agree in drawing the line of
aesthetic value which should determine whether any given verbal
expression of thought or emotion was literature or not--a fact which
is not without importance in the choice of books for forming the taste
of our pupils--yet, for the purpose of discussing the place and
function of literature in education, we all know well enough what we
mean by the word in the general sense which I have attempted to
describe.
As this is not a tractate on education as a whole, I must risk
something for the sake of brevity, and will venture to lay down
dogmatically that the objects of literary studies as a part of
education are (1) the formation of a personality fitted for civilised
life, (2) the provision of a permanent source of pure and inalienable
pleasure, and (3) the immediate pleasure of the student in the process
of education. None of these objects is exclusive of either of the
others. They cannot in fact be separated in the concrete. But they are
sufficiently different to be treated distinctly.
(1) Hardly anyone would deny that some knowledge and appreciation of
literature is an indispensable part of a complete education. The full
member of a civilised society must be able to subscribe to the
familiar _Homo sum; nihil humanum a me alienum puto_. And literature
is obviously one of the greatest, most intense, and most prolific
interests of humanity. There have always been thinkers, from Plato
downwards, who for moral or political reasons have viewed the power of
literature with distrust: but their fear is itself evidence of that
power. Thus literature is a very important part both of the past and
of contemporary life, and no one can enter fully into either without
some real knowledge of it. A man may be a very great man or a very
good man without any literary culture; he may do his country and the
world imperishable services in peace or war. But the older the world
grows, the rarer must these unlettered geniuses become. Literature in
one form or another--too often no doubt put to vile uses--has become
so much part of the very texture of civilised life that a wide-awake
mind can scarcely fail to take notice of it. And in any case we need
not consider that kind of special genius which education does little
either to make or mar. No one is likely seriously to deny that for
taking a full and intelligent part in the normal life of a civilised
community--in love and friendship, in the family and in society, in
the study and practice of citizenship of all degrees--some literary
culture is absolutely necessary; nor indeed that, subject to a due
balance of qualities and acquirements, the wider and deeper the
literary culture the more valuable a member of society the possessor
will be. The lubricant of society in all its functions, whether of
business or leisure, is sympathy, and a sufficient quantity, as it
were, of sympathy to lubricate the complex mechanism of civilised life
can only be supplied by a widespread knowledge of the best, and a
great deal more than the best, of what has been and is being thought
and said in the world. Personal intercourse with one another and a
common apprehension of God as our Father are even more powerful
sources of sympathy; but literature provides innumerable channels for
the intercommunication and distribution of these sources, without
which the sympathies of individuals may be strong and lively, but will
almost always be narrowly circumscribed. It is very true that to know
mankind only through books is no knowledge of mankind at all; but ever
since man discovered how to perpetuate his utterances in writing it
has been increasingly true that literature is the principal means of
widening and deepening such knowledge.
This object of literary studies, the formation of a personality
fitted for civilised life, may be summed up in the familiar graceful
words of Ovid, who was thinking almost entirely of literature when he
wrote
ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.
And it is only the lack, in so many of the greatest writers, and the
neglect, in so many educators and educational systems, of that due
balance of qualities and acquirements of which I spoke just now, which
have induced in superficial minds a distrust and often a contempt of
literature as a subject of education. The good citizen or man of the
world--in the best sense of the phrase--must not be the slave of
literary proclivities to the ruin of his functions as father or
husband or friend or man of action and affairs. The world of letters,
if lived in too exclusively, is an unreal world, though without it the
actual world is almost meaningless. Now the _genus irritabile vatum_,
even when their thoughts, as Carlyle put it, "enrich the blood of the
world," have very generally appeared to the plain man of goodwill as
very defective in the art of living. If their aspirations have been
above the standards of their day, their practice has often been below
them in such essentially social qualities as probity, faithfulness,
consideration for others. Moreover their outlook upon life, intense
and inspiring though it be, is often a very partial one. Even so, it
does not follow that because a poet or a philosopher is not in every
respect "the compleat gentleman," a citizen _totus teres atque
rotundus_, his works are not profitable for the building up of that
character. If it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the
discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous
chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for
what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that
ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with
Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. Tolstoy is indeed a case in point.
He is one of the giants of literature, whose masterpieces are already
classics; and this position is unaffected by the various judgments
that may be formed either of his critical or of his practical wisdom.
The lack then of a due balance of qualities and acquirements in so
many authors, and we may add other artists, is a cause, but no
justification, of that belittlement and even distrust of the literary
side of education which are on the whole marked features of the
English attitude to-day. But a more potent cause and a real
justification of this attitude is the neglect of due balance of
qualities and acquirements by so many educators and educational
systems. Great educators have themselves rarely been narrow-minded
men; but the traditions they have founded have gone the way of all
traditions.
What begins as an inspiration hardens into a formula. The ideals of
the Renascence were caricatured in their offspring of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Not only did the evolution of modern life
with its cities, its printing press, its gunpowder, its steam engine
and the rest, destroy the need of the well-to-do to be trained in the
practical arts of chivalry, of the chase, of husbandry, even of music
and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to
the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and
more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more
and more into the fatally easy path of formal and grammatical
treatment. The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and
the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but
there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it;
its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could
surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique
with which it was surrounded.
I do not know when the expression "the dead languages" was invented:
but certainly Latin and Greek have been treated as very dead languages
by the great majority of teachers for a very long time. And as "modern
subjects," history, geography, modern languages and literatures,
gradually thrust their way into the curriculum, each was subjected as
far as possible to the same mummification. There is a theory still
widely held among teachers that the value of a subject or of a method
of instruction depends upon the amount of drudgery which it involves
or the degree of repulsion which it excites. The theory rests upon a
confusion between the ideas of discipline and punishment, which itself
is probably due to the strongly Judaistic tone of our so-called
Christianity. At any rate, far too many schoolmasters suffer from
conscientious scruples about allowing the spirits of freedom,
initiative, curiosity, enjoyment, to blow through their class-rooms.
There has been, always to some extent, but with gathering force in
recent years, a natural revolt against this mixture of puritanism,
scholasticism, and dilettantism, which made the intellectual side of
public school education such a failure except for the few who were
born with the spoon of scholarship in their mouths. The irruption of
that turbulent rascal, natural science, has perhaps had most to do
with humanising our humanistic studies. It was a great step when boys
who could not make verses were allowed to make if it was but a smell;
and even breaking a test-tube once in a while is more educative than
breaking the gender-rules every day of the week. Many of my friends,
who label themselves humanists, are in a panic about this, and look
upon me sadly as a renegade because I, who owe almost everything to a
"classical education," am ready (they think) to sell the pass of
"compulsory Greek" to a horde of money-grubbing barbarians who will
turn our flowery groves of Academe into mere factories of commercial
efficiency. But fear is a treacherous guide. They are the victims of
that abstract generalisation of which I spoke at the outset. I check
their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my
children, and the hundreds of boys I have known. And I see more and
more plainly, as I study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments
and the common stock of human nature and civilised society which
unites us, that literature is a permanent and indispensable and even
inevitable element in our education; and that moreover it can only
have free scope and growth in the expanding personality of the young
in a due and therefore a varying harmony with other interests. I and
my children and my schoolboys have eyes and ears and hands--and even
legs! We have, as Aristotle rightly saw, an appetite for knowledge,
and that appetite cannot be satisfied, though it may be choked, by a
sole diet of literature. We have desires of many kinds demanding
satisfaction and requiring government. We have a sense of duty and
vocation: we know that we and our families must eat to live and to
carry on the race. We resent, in our inarticulate way, these sneers at
our Philistinism, commercialism, athleticism, materialism, from
dim-eyed pedants on the one hand and superior persons on the other,
who have evidently forgotten, if they ever saw, the whole purport of
that Greek literature the name of which they take in vain. No! _La
littérature est une chose qui touche à toutes choses_; but if we are
to shut our eyes to all the "things" which evoke it, it becomes what
it is to so many, whose education has been in name predominantly
literary, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing."