The reactions of the School upon the Town are observed in practice to be
of very different values;--how are these differences to be explained?
From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress
of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and
impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and
memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers.
The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention,
is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the
general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the
fixation of habit and custom, so that at length "custom lies upon us
with a weight heavy as death, and deep [Page 81] almost as life." This
continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral ones is thus a
prime explanation of each reformer's difficulty in making his moral
standard the fashionable one, and also, when his doctrine has succeeded,
of the loss of life and mummification of form which it so speedily
undergoes.
Of conventional "education," considered as the memorisation of past
records, however authoritative and classic, the decay is thus
intelligible and plain, and the repetition of criticisms already
adequately made need not therefore detain us here.
For this process is there no remedy? Science here offers herself--with
senses open to observe, and intellect awake to interpret. Starting with
Place, she explores and surveys it, from descriptive travel books at
very various levels of accuracy, she works on to atlas and gazetteer,
and beyond these to world-globe and "Geographie Universelle." With her
charts and descriptions we are now more ready for a journey; with her
maps and plans we may know our own place as never before; nay, rectify
it, making the rough places plain and the crooked straight; even
restoration may come within our powers.
Similarly as regards Work. Though mere empiric craft-mastery dies with
the individual, and fails with his successors, may we not perpetuate the
best of this? A museum of art treasures, a collection of the choicest
examples of all times and lands, will surely raise us from our low level
of mechanical toil; nay, with these carefully observed, copied,
memorised, and duly examined upon, we shall be able to imitate them, to
reproduce their excellencies, even to adapt them to our everyday work.
To the art museum we have thus but to add a "School of Design," to have
an output of more and less skilled copyists. The smooth and polished
successes of this new dual institution, responding as they do to the
mechanical elements of modern work and of the mechanical worker-mind,
admitting also of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide
extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing
patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a
definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards
from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and
certificated art-mastery. Our School of Design thus becomes a School of
Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction of the nation, to
the satisfaction not only of its promoters, but of the general public
and their representatives, so that annual votes justly increase. Lurking
discontent may now and then express itself, but is for practical
purposes negligible.
[Page: 82] The example of art accumulation and art instruction is thus
naturally followed in other respects. For the commercial information of
the public, varied representative exhibitions--primarily, therefore,
international ones--naturally suggest themselves; while so soon as
expansion of imperial and colonial interests comes upon the first plane,
a corresponding permanent Exhibition is naturally instituted. But when
thus advancing commercial instruction, we must also recognise the claims
of industry in all its crafts and guilds, and in fact the technical
instruction of the community generally. Hence the past, present, and
promised rise of technical institutes upon increasing scales of
completeness.
In the rise of such a truly encylopædic system of schools, the
university cannot permanently be forgotten. Since from the outset we
have recognised the prime elements of the school in observation and
memory, the testing of these by examinations--written, oral, and
practical--however improvable in detail, must be fairly recognised, and
the examining body or university has therefore to be adopted as the
normal crown of our comprehensive educational system. Teaching, however
is found to be increasingly necessary, especially to examination, and
for this the main field left open is in our last column, that of People.
Their lore of the past, whether of sacred or classical learning, their
history, literature, and criticism, are already actively promoted, or at
any rate adequately endowed at older seats of learning; while the
materials, resources, conditions and atmosphere are here of other kinds.
Hence the accessibility of the new University of London to the study of
sociology, as yet alone among its peers.
Hence, beside the great London, maritime, commercial and industrial,
residential and governmental, there has been growing up, tardily indeed,
as compared with smaller cities, yet now all the more massively and
completely, a correspondingly comprehensive system of schools; so that
the historic development of South Kensington within the last half
century, from International Exhibitions of Work, Natural History Museums
of Place onwards to its present and its contemplated magnitude, affords
a striking exemplification of the present view and its classification,
which is all the more satisfactory since this development has been a
gradual accretion.
Enough then has been said to show that the rise of schools, their
qualities and their defects, are all capable of treatment upon the
present lines; but if so, may we not go farther, and ask by what means
does thought and life cope with their defects, especially that fixation
of memory, even at its best, that evil side of examination and the like,
which we often call Chinese in the bad sense, but which we see arises so
naturally everywhere?
[Page: 83] J--FROM "SCHOOL" TO "CLOISTER"
The preceding view is, as yet, too purely determinist. The due place of
ideals, individual and corporate, in their reaction upon the function
and the structure of the city, and even upon its material environment,
has next to be recognised. For where the town merely makes and fixes its
industry and makes its corresponding schools, where its habits and
customs become its laws, even its morality, the community, as we have
just seen, sinks into routine, and therefore decay. To prevent this a
twofold process of thought is ever necessary, critical and constructive.
What are these? On the one hand, a continual and critical selection
among the ideas derived from experience, and the formulation of these as
Ideals: and further, the organisation of these into a larger and larger
whole of thought; in fact, a Synthesis of a new kind. This critical
spirit it is which produced the prophets of Israel, the questioning of
Socrates, and so on, to the journalistic and other criticism of life
to-day. The corresponding constructive endeavour is now no mere School
of traditional learning or of useful information. It is one of science
in a new and reorganised sense; one of philosophy also, one of ideals
above all.
As from the Schools of the Law, as over against these, arise the
prophets, so from the technical and applied sciences, the descriptive
natural sciences, should arise the scientific thinkers, reinterpreting
each his field of knowledge and giving us the pure sciences--pure
geometry henceforth contrasted with mere land surveying, morphology with
mere anatomy, and so on; while instead of the mere concrete encyclopædia
from Pliny or Gesner to Diderot or Chambers, vast subjective
reorganisations of knowledge, philosophic systems, now appear.
Similarly, the mere observations of the senses and their records in
memory become transformed into the images of the poet, the imagery too
of the artist, for art proper is only thus born. That mere imitation of
nature, which so commonly in the graphic arts (though happily but rarely
in music) has been mistaken for [Page: 84] art, thus modestly returns to
its proper place--that of the iconography of descriptive science.
Thus from the Schools of all kinds of knowledge, past and present, we
pass into the no less varied Cloisters of contemplation, meditation,
imagination. With the historian we might explore the Cloisters of the
past, built at one time from the current ideals of the Good, at another
of the True, at another of the Beautiful; indeed, in widely varying
measures and proportions from all of these. How far each of these now
expresses the present, how far it may yet serve the future, is
obviously a question of questions, yet for that very reason one
exceeding our present limits. Enough if in city life the historic place
of what is here generalised under this antique name of Cloister be here
recognised; and in some measure the actual need, the potential place be
recognised also. Here is the need and use, beyond the fundamental claims
of the material life of the Town, and the everyday sanity of the
Schools, with all their observations and information, their commonsense
and experience, their customs and conventions, even their morals and
their law, for a deeper ethical insight than any rule or precedent can
afford, for a fuller and freer intellectual outlook than that which has
been derived from any technical experience or empiric skill, for an
imagery which is no mere review of the phantasmagoria of the senses. In
our age of the multiplication and expansion of towns, of their
enrichment and their impoverishment, of the multiplication and
enrichment of schools also, it is well for the sociologist to read from
history, as he then may more fully see also around him that it is ever
some fresh combination of these threefold products of the
Cloister--ideal theory, and imagery--emotional, intellectual,
sensuous--which transforms the thought-world of its time.
The philosopher of old in his academic grove, his porch, the mediaeval
monk within his studious cloister's pale, are thus more akin to the
modern scientific thinker than he commonly realises--perhaps because he
is still, for the most part, of the solitary individualism of the hermit
of the Thebaid, of Diogenes in his tub. Assuredly, they are less removed
in essential psychology than their derived fraternities, their [Page:
85] respective novices and scholars, have often thought. It is thus no
mere play of language which hands on from the one to the other the
"travail de Bénédictin," though even here the phrase is inadequate
savouring too much of the school, into which each cloister of every sort
declines sooner or later, unless even worse befall.
The decay of the cloister, though thus on the one hand into and with the
school, may also take place within itself, since imagination and ideal
may be evil, and theory false. That examples of all these decays abound
in the history of religion, of philosophy, of art also, is a commonplace
needing no illustration. Nor should the modern investigator think his
science or himself immune to the same or kindred germs in turn.