the country, those who would enter that sanctuary, must not come with
unwashed hands. If the good seed is to yield its hundredfold harvest,
it must not be scattered amidst the stones of ignorance, or the tares
of undisciplined indolence and wantonness. On the contrary, the soil
must have been carefully prepared, and the Professor should find that
the operations of clod-crushing, draining, and weeding, and even a good
deal of planting, have been done by the Schoolmaster.
That is exactly what the Professor does not find in any University in
the three Kingdoms that I can hear of—the reason of which state of
things lies in the extremely faulty organisation of the majority of
secondary Schools. Students come to the Universities ill-prepared in
classics and mathematics, not at all prepared in anything else; and
half their time is spent in learning that which they ought to have
known when they came.
I sometimes hear it said that the Scottish Universities differ from
the English, in being to a much greater extent places of comparatively
elementary education for a younger class of students. But it would seem
doubtful if any great difference of this kind really exists; for a high
authority, himself Head of an English College, has solemnly affirmed
that: “Elementary teaching of youths under twenty is now the only
function performed by the University;” and that Colleges are “boarding
schools in which the elements of the learned languages are taught to
youths.”[6]
This is not the first time that I have quoted those remarkable
assertions. I should like to engrave them in public view, for they
have not been refuted; and I am convinced that if their import is once
clearly apprehended, they will play no mean part when the question of
University reorganisation, with a view to practical measures, comes
on for discussion. You are not responsible for this anomalous state
of affairs now; but, as you pass into active life and acquire the
political influence to which your education and your position should
entitle you, you will become responsible for it, unless each in his
sphere does his best to alter it, by insisting on the improvement of
secondary Schools.
Your present responsibility is of another, though not less serious,
kind. Institutions do not make men, any more than organisation makes
life; and even the ideal University we have been dreaming about will be
but a superior piece of mechanism, unless each student strive after the
ideal of the Scholar. And that ideal, it seems to me, has never been
better embodied than by the great Poet, who, though lapped in luxury,
the favourite of a Court, and the idol of his countrymen, remained
through all the length of his honoured years a Scholar in Art, in
Science, and in Life.
“Would’st shape a noble life? Then cast
No backward glances towards the past:
And though somewhat be lost and gone,
Yet do thou act as one new-born.
What each day needs, that shalt thou ask;
Each day will set its proper task.
Give other’s work just share of praise;
Not of thine own the merits raise.
Beware no fellow man thou hate:
And so in God’s hands leave thy fate.”[7]
III.
TECHNICAL EDUCATION.
Any candid observer of the phenomena of modern society will readily
admit that bores must be classed among the enemies of the human race;
and a little consideration will probably lead him to the further
admission, that no species of that extensive genus of noxious creatures
is more objectionable than the educational bore. Convinced as I am of
the truth of this great social generalisation, it is not without a
certain trepidation that I venture to address you on an educational
topic. For, in the course of the last ten years, to go back no farther,
I am afraid to say how often I have ventured to speak of education,
from that given in the primary schools to that which is to be had in
the universities and medical colleges; indeed, the only part of this
wide region into which, as yet, I have not adventured is that into
which I propose to intrude to-day.
Thus, I cannot but be aware that I am dangerously near becoming the
thing which all men fear and fly. But I have deliberately elected to
run the risk. For when you did me the honour to ask me to address you,
an unexpected circumstance had led me to occupy myself seriously with
the question of technical education; and I had acquired the conviction
that there are few subjects respecting which it is more important for
all classes of the community to have clear and just ideas than this;
while, certainly, there is none which is more deserving of attention by
the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union.
It is not for me to express an opinion whether the considerations,
which I am about to submit to you, will be proved by experience to be
just or not; but I will do my best to make them clear. Among the many
good things to be found in Lord Bacon’s works, none is more full of
wisdom than the saying that “truth more easily comes out of error than
out of confusion.” Clear and consecutive wrong-thinking is the next
best thing to right-thinking; so that, if I succeed in clearing your
ideas on this topic, I shall have wasted neither your time nor my own.
“Technical education,” in the sense in which the term is ordinarily
used, and in which I am now employing it, means that sort of education
which is specially adapted to the needs of men whose business in
life it is to pursue some kind of handicraft; it is, in fact, a fine
Greco-Latin equivalent for what in good vernacular English would be
called “the teaching of handicrafts.” And probably, at this stage of
our progress, it may occur to many of you to think of the story of the
cobbler and his last, and to say to yourselves, though you will be too
polite to put the question openly to me, What does the speaker know
practically about this matter? What is his handicraft? I think the
question is a very proper one, and unless I were prepared to answer it,
I hope satisfactorily, I should have chosen some other theme.
The fact is, I am, and have been, any time these thirty years, a man
who works with his hands—a handicraftsman. I do not say this in the
broadly metaphorical sense in which fine gentlemen, with all the
delicacy of Agag about them, trip to the hustings about election time,
and protest that they too are working men. I really mean my words to be
taken in their direct, literal, and straightforward sense. In fact, if
the most nimble-fingered watchmaker among you will come to my workshop,
he may set me to put a watch together, and I will set him to dissect,
say, a blackbeetle’s nerves. I do not wish to vaunt, but I am inclined
to think that I shall manage my job to his satisfaction sooner than he
will do his piece of work to mine.
In truth, anatomy, which is my handicraft, is one of the most difficult
kinds of mechanical labour, involving, as it does, not only lightness
and dexterity of hand, but sharp eyes and endless patience. And you
must not suppose that my particular branch of science is especially
distinguished for the demand it makes upon skill in manipulation. A
similar requirement is made upon all students of physical science.
The astronomer, the electrician, the chemist, the mineralogist, the
botanist, are constantly called upon to perform manual operations of
exceeding delicacy. The progress of all branches of physical science
depends upon observation, or on that artificial observation which is
termed experiment, of one kind or another; and, the farther we advance,
the more practical difficulties surround the investigation of the
conditions of the problems offered to us; so that mobile and yet steady
hands, guided by clear vision, are more and more in request in the
workshops of science.
Indeed, it has struck me that one of the grounds of that sympathy
between the handicraftsmen of this country and the men of science, by
which it has so often been my good fortune to profit, may, perhaps, lie
here. You feel and we feel that, among the so-called learned folks, we
alone are brought into contact with tangible facts in the way that you
are. You know well enough that it is one thing to write a history of
chairs in general, or to address a poem to a throne, or to speculate
about the occult powers of the chair of St. Peter; and quite another
thing to make with your own hands a veritable chair, that will stand
fair and square, and afford a safe and satisfactory resting-place to a
frame of sensitiveness and solidity.
So it is with us, when we look out from our scientific handicrafts
upon the doings of our learned brethren, whose work is untrammelled
by anything “base and mechanical,” as handicrafts used to be called
when the world was younger, and, in some respects, less wise than
now. We take the greatest interest in their pursuits; we are edified
by their histories and are charmed with their poems, which sometimes
illustrate so remarkably the powers of man’s imagination; some of us
admire and even humbly try to follow them in their high philosophical
excursions, though we know the risk of being snubbed by the inquiry
whether grovelling dissectors of monkeys and blackbeetles can hope
to enter into the empyreal kingdom of speculation. But still we feel
that our business is different; humbler if you will, though the
diminution of dignity is, perhaps, compensated by the increase of
reality; and that we, like you, have to get our work done in a region
where little avails, if the power of dealing with practical tangible
facts is wanting. You know that clever talk touching joinery will not
make a chair; and I know that it is of about as much value in the
physical sciences. Mother Nature is serenely obdurate to honeyed words;
only those who understand the ways of things, and can silently and
effectually handle them, get any good out of her.
And now, having, as I hope, justified my assumption of a place among
handicraftsmen, and put myself right with you as to my qualification,
from practical knowledge, to speak about technical education, I will
proceed to lay before you the results of my experience as a teacher of
a handicraft, and tell you what sort of education I should think best
adapted for a boy whom one wanted to make a professional anatomist.
I should say, in the first place, let him have a good English
elementary education. I do not mean that he shall be able to pass
in such and such a standard—that may or may not be an equivalent
expression—but that his teaching shall have been such as to have given
him command of the common implements of learning and to have created a
desire for the things of the understanding.
Further, I should like him to know the elements of physical science,
and especially of physics and chemistry, and I should take care that
this elementary knowledge was real. I should like my aspirant to
be able to read a scientific treatise in Latin, French, or German,
because an enormous amount of anatomical knowledge is locked up in
those languages. And especially, I should require some ability to
draw—I do not mean artistically, for that is a gift which may be
cultivated but cannot be learned, but with fair accuracy. I will not
say that everybody can learn even this; for the negative development
of the faculty of drawing in some people is almost miraculous. Still
everybody, or almost everybody, can learn to write; and, as writing is
a kind of drawing, I suppose that the majority of the people who say
they cannot draw, and give copious evidence of the accuracy of their
assertion, could draw, after a fashion, if they tried. And that “after
a fashion” would be better than nothing for my purposes.
Above all things, let my imaginary pupil have preserved the freshness
and vigour of youth in his mind as well as his body. The educational
abomination of desolation of the present day is the stimulation
of young people to work at high pressure by incessant competitive
examinations. Some wise man (who probably was not an early riser)
has said of early risers in general, that they are conceited all the
forenoon and stupid all the afternoon. Now whether this is true of
early risers in the common acceptation of the word or not, I will not
pretend to say; but it is too often true of the unhappy children who
are forced to rise too early in their classes. They are conceited all
the forenoon of life, and stupid all its afternoon. The vigour and
freshness, which should have been stored up for the purposes of the
hard struggle for existence in practical life, have been washed out
of them by precocious mental debauchery—by book gluttony and lesson
bibbing. Their faculties are worn out by the strain put upon their
callow brains, and they are demoralised by worthless childish triumphs
before the real work of life begins. I have no compassion for sloth,
but youth has more need for intellectual rest than age; and the
cheerfulness, the tenacity of purpose, the power of work which make
many a successful man what he is, must often be placed to the credit,
not of his hours of industry, but to that of his hours of idleness,
in boyhood. Even the hardest worker of us all, if he has to deal with
anything above mere details, will do well, now and again, to let his
brain lie fallow for a space. The next crop of thought will certainly
be all the fuller in the ear and the weeds fewer.
This is the sort of education which I should like any one who was
going to devote himself to my handicraft to undergo. As to knowing
anything about anatomy itself, on the whole I would rather he left that
alone until he took it up seriously in my laboratory. It is hard work
enough to teach, and I should not like to have superadded to that the
possible need of unteaching.
Well, but, you will say, this is Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left
out; your “technical education” is simply a good education, with more
attention to physical science, to drawing, and to modern languages,
than is common, and there is nothing specially technical about it.
Exactly so; that remark takes us straight to the heart of what I have
to say; which is, that, in my judgment, the preparatory education
of the handicraftsman ought to have nothing of what is ordinarily
understood by “technical” about it.
The workshop is the only real school for a handicraft. The education
which precedes that of the workshop should be entirely devoted to the
strengthening of the body, the elevation of the moral faculties, and
the cultivation of the intelligence; and, especially, to the imbuing
the mind with a broad and clear view of the laws of that natural world
with the components of which the handicraftsman will have to deal. And,
the earlier the period of life at which the handicraftsman has to enter
into actual practice of his craft, the more important is it that he
should devote the precious hours of preliminary education to things of
the mind, which have no direct and immediate bearing on his branch of
industry, though they lie at the foundation of all realities.
Now let me apply the lessons I have learned from my handicraft to
yours. If any of you were obliged to take an apprentice, I suppose
you would like to get a good healthy lad, ready and willing to learn,
handy, and with his fingers not all thumbs, as the saying goes. You
would like that he should read, write, and cipher well; and, if you
were an intelligent master, and your trade involved the application of
scientific principles, as so many trades do, you would like him to know
enough of the elementary principles of science to understand what was
going on. I suppose that, in nine trades out of ten, it would be useful
if he could draw; and many of you must have lamented your inability
to find out for yourselves what foreigners are doing or have done. So
that some knowledge of French and German might, in many cases, be very
desirable.
So it appears to me that what you want is pretty much what I want; and
the practical question is, How you are to get what you need, under the
actual limitations and conditions of life of handicraftsmen in this
country?
I think I shall have the assent both of the employers of labour and of
the employed as to one of these limitations; which is, that no scheme
of technical education is likely to be seriously entertained which will
delay the entrance of boys into working life, or prevent them from
contributing towards their own support, as early as they do at present.
Not only do I believe that any such scheme could not be carried out,
but I doubt its desirableness, even if it were practicable.
The period between childhood and manhood is full of difficulties and
dangers, under the most favourable circumstances; and, even among the
well-to-do, who can afford to surround their children with the most
favourable conditions, examples of a career ruined, before it has well
begun, are but too frequent. Moreover, those who have to live by labour
must be shaped to labour early. The colt that is left at grass too
long makes but a sorry draught-horse, though his way of life does not
bring him within the reach of artificial temptations. Perhaps the most
valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the
thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it
or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and, however
early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he
learns thoroughly.
There is another reason, to which I have already adverted, and which
I would reiterate, why any extension of the time devoted to ordinary
school-work is undesirable. In the newly awakened zeal for education,
we run some risk of forgetting the truth that while under-instruction
is a bad thing, over-instruction may possibly be a worse.
Success in any kind of practical life is not dependent solely, or
indeed chiefly, upon knowledge. Even in the learned professions,
knowledge, alone, is of less consequence than people are apt to
suppose. And, if much expenditure of bodily energy is involved in the
day’s work, mere knowledge is of still less importance when weighed
against the probable cost of its acquirement. To do a fair day’s work
with his hands, a man needs, above all things, health, strength, and
the patience and cheerfulness which, if they do not always accompany
these blessings, can hardly in the nature of things exist without them;
to which we must add honesty of purpose and a pride in doing what is
done well.
A good handicraftsman can get on very well without genius, but he will
fare badly without a reasonable share of that which is a more useful
possession for workaday life, namely, mother-wit; and he will be all
the better for a real knowledge, however limited, of the ordinary laws
of nature, and especially of those which apply to his own business.
Instruction carried so far as to help the scholar to turn his store of
mother-wit to account, to acquire a fair amount of sound elementary
knowledge, and to use his hands and eyes; while leaving him fresh,
vigorous, and with a sense of the dignity of his own calling, whatever
it may be, if fairly and honestly pursued, cannot fail to be of
invaluable service to all those who come under its influence.
But, on the other hand, if school instruction is carried so far as to
encourage bookishness; if the ambition of the scholar is directed, not
to the gaining of knowledge, but to the being able to pass examinations
successfully; especially if encouragement is given to the mischievous
delusion that brainwork is, in itself, and apart from its quality, a
nobler or more respectable thing than handiwork—such education may be
a deadly mischief to the workman, and lead to the rapid ruin of the
industries it is intended to serve.
I know that I am expressing the opinion of some of the largest as well
as the most enlightened employers of labour, when I say that there is
a real danger that, from the extreme of no education, we may run to
the other extreme of over-education of handicraftsmen. And I apprehend
that what is true for the ordinary hand-worker is true for the foreman.
Activity, probity, knowledge of men, ready mother-wit, supplemented by
a good knowledge of the general principles involved in his business,
are the making of a good foreman. If he possess these qualities, no
amount of learning will fit him better for his position; while the
course of life and the habit of mind required for the attainment of
such learning may, in various direct and indirect ways, act as direct
disqualifications for it.
Keeping in mind, then, that the two things to be avoided are, the delay
of the entrance of boys into practical life, and the substitution
of exhausted book-worms for shrewd, handy men, in our works and
factories, let us consider what may be wisely and safely attempted in
the way of improving the education of the handicraftsman.
First, I look to the elementary schools now happily established all
over the country. I am not going to criticise or find fault with
them; on the contrary, their establishment seems to me to be the most
important and the most beneficial result of the corporate action of the
people in our day. A great deal is said of British interests just now,
but, depend upon it, that no Eastern difficulty needs our intervention
as a nation so seriously, as the putting down both the Bashi-Bazouks
of ignorance and the Cossacks of sectarianism at home. What has already
been achieved in these directions is a great thing; you must have lived
some time to know how great. An education, better in its processes,
better in its substance, than that which was accessible to the great
majority of well-to-do Britons a quarter of a century ago, is now
obtainable by every child in the land. Let any man of my age go into
an ordinary elementary school, and, unless he was unusually fortunate
in his youth, he will tell you that the educational method, the
intelligence, patience, and good temper on the teacher’s part, which
are now at the disposal of the veriest waifs and wastrels of society,
are things of which he had no experience in those costly middle-class
schools, which were so ingeniously contrived as to combine all the
evils and shortcomings of the great public schools with none of their
advantages. Many a man, whose so-called education cost a good deal of
valuable money and occupied many a year of invaluable time, leaves the
inspection of a well-ordered elementary school devoutly wishing that,
in his young days, he had had the chance of being as well taught as
these boys and girls are.
But while, in view of such an advance in general education, I willingly
obey the natural impulse to be thankful, I am not willing altogether
to rest. I want to see instruction in elementary science and in art
more thoroughly incorporated in the educational system. At present, it
is being administered by driblets, as if it were a potent medicine,
“a few drops to be taken occasionally in a teaspoon.” Every year I
notice that that earnest and untiring friend of yours and of mine,
Sir John Lubbock, stirs up the Government of the day in the House of
Commons on this subject; and also that, every year, he, and the few
members of the House of Commons, such as Mr. Playfair, who sympathise
with him, are met with expressions of warm admiration for science in
general, and reasons at large for doing nothing in particular. But now
that Mr. Forster, to whom the education of the country owes so much,
has announced his conversion to the right faith, I begin to hope that,
sooner or later, things will mend.
I have given what I believe to be a good reason for the assumption,
that the keeping at school of boys, who are to be handicraftsmen,
beyond the age of thirteen or fourteen is neither practicable nor
desirable; and, as it is quite certain, that, with justice to other
and no less important branches of education, nothing more than the
rudiments of science and art teaching can be introduced into elementary
schools, we must seek elsewhere for a supplementary training in these
subjects, and, if need be, in foreign languages, which may go on after
the workman’s life has begun.