HOW WE MAKE USE OF MIND
“_We hold that the child’s mind is no mere sac to hold ideas but
is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a ‘spiritual organism’
with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet with
which it is prepared to deal and what it is able to digest and
assimilate as the body does food-stuffs._
“_Such a doctrine as the Herbartian, that the mind is a
receptacle, lays the stress of education, the preparation of food
in enticing morsels, duly ordered, upon the teacher. Children
taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching
but little knowledge; the teacher’s axiom being ‘what a child
learns matters less than how he learns it.’_”
I cannot resist presenting the Herbartian Psychology in the dry
light of Scottish humour.[21]
“We have failed to explain ideas by the mind, how about
explaining the mind by ideas? You are not to suppose that this is
exactly how Herbart puts it, Herbart is a philosopher, a German
philosopher. It is true that he starts with the mind or, as he
prefers to call it, a soul: but do not fear that the sport of
the hunt is to be spoiled for that ... the ‘given’ soul is no
more a real soul than it is a real crater of a volcano. It has
absolutely no content: it is not even an idea trap. Ideas can
slip in and out of it as they please, or, rather, as other ideas
please but the soul has no power either to call, make, keep,
or recall, an idea. The ideas arrange all these matters among
themselves. The mind can make no objection.”
“‘The soul has no capacity nor faculty whatever either to
receive or produce anything: it is therefore no _tabula rasa_
in the sense that impressions, foreign to its nature, may be
made on it. Also it is no substance in Leibnitz’s sense, which
includes original self-activity. It has originally neither ideas,
nor feelings, nor desires. Further, within it lie no forms of
intuition and thought, no laws of willing and acting, nor any
sort of predisposition however remote towards these. The simple
nature of the soul is totally unknown and for ever remains so.
It is as little a subject for speculative as for empirical
psychology.’ (_Lehrbuch zur Psychologie_, by Herbart: Part III:
pp. 152, 153.) Thus, a vigorous _vis inertiæ_ is the only power
of the mind. Still it is subject to the action of certain forces.
Nothing but ideas (_Vorstellung_) can attack the soul so that the
ideas really make up the mind.”
We are familiar with the struggle of ideas on the threshold, with
the good luck of those that get in and especially of those that
get in first and mount to high places; with the behaviour of
ideas, very much like that of persons who fall into groups in an
anarchical state. This behaviour is described as the formation of
‘apperception masses’ and the mass that is sufficiently strong has
it all its own way and dominates the mind. Our business is not to
examine the psychology of Herbart, a very serious and suggestive
contribution to our knowledge of educational principles, but
rather to consider how it works out practically in education. But
before we examine how Herbartian psychology bears this test of
experiment, let us consider what Professor William James has to say
of psychology in general.
“When we talk of psychology as a natural science,” he tells us,
“we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that
stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse. It
means a psychology particularly fragile and into which the waters
of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint, a psychology all
of whose elementary assumptions and data must be reconsidered
in wider connections and translated into other terms. It is,
in short, a phrase of diffidence and not of arrogance; and it
is indeed strange to hear people talk triumphantly of the ‘New
Psychology’ and write Histories of Psychology when into the
real elements and forces which the word covers not the first
glimpse of clear insight exists. A string of raw facts, a little
gossip and wrangle about opinions, a little classification and
generalisation on the mere descriptive level ... but not a single
law ... not a single proposition from which any consequence can
casually be deduced.”
But Professor James went on and wrote his extraordinarily
interesting book on psychology, and we must do the same though our
basis is no more than the common experience of mankind so far as
one mind can express the experience common to us all.
Herbart’s psychology is extraordinarily gratifying and attractive
to teachers who are, like other people, eager to magnify their
office; and here is a scheme which shows how every child is a new
creation as he comes forth from the hands of his teacher. The
teacher learns how to do it; he has but to draw together a mass
of those ideas which themselves will combine in the mind into
which they effect an entrance, and, behold, the thing is done:
the teacher has done it; he has selected the ideas, shewn the
correlation of each with the other and the work is complete! The
ideas establish themselves, the most potent rule and gather force,
and if these be good, the man is made.
Here, for example, is a single week’s ‘Correlation of Subjects’
worked out by a highly qualified teacher. “_Arithmetic_ (_Decimal
Fractions_), _Mathematics_ (_Simple Equations_, _Parallelograms_),
_Science_ (_Latent Heat_), _Housecraft_ (_Nerves_, _Thought_,
_Habits_), _Geography_ (_Scotland_, _General Industries_); or,
again, for another week,--under the same headings,--_Metric
problems_, _Symbols_ (_four rules_), _Triangles_ (_sum angles_),
_Machinery_, _Circulation_, _Sculpture of the British Isles_.”
The ideas, no doubt, have an agility and ability which we do not
possess and know how to jump at each other and form the desired
‘apperception masses.’
A successful and able modern educationalist gives us a valuable
introduction to Herbartian Principles, and, by way of example, “_A
Robinson Crusoe Concentration Scheme_,” a series of lessons given
to children in Standard I in an Elementary School. First we have
nine lessons in literature and language, the subjects being such
as ‘_Robinson climbs a hill and finds he is on an island_.’ Then,
ten object lessons of which the first is,--_The Sea_, the second,
_A Ship from Foreign Parts_, the sixth, _A Life-Boat_, the seventh,
_Shell-Fish_, the tenth, _A Cave_. How these ‘objects’ are to be
produced one does not see. The third series are drawing lessons,
probably as many, a boat, a ship, an oar, an anchor and so on. Then
follows a series on manual training, still built upon ‘Robinson’;
the first, a model of the sea-shore; then, models of Robinson’s
island, of Robinson’s house and Robinson’s pottery. The next course
consists of reading, an indefinite number of lessons,--‘passages
from _The Child’s Robinson Crusoe_ and from a general Reader on
the matters discussed in object lessons.’ Then follows a series
of writing lessons, “simple composition on the subject of the
lessons ... the children framed the sentences which the teacher
wrote on the blackboard and the class copied afterwards.” Here is
one composition,--“Robinson spent his first night in a tree. In
the morning he was hungry but he saw nothing round him but grass
and trees without fruit. On the sea-shore he found some shell-fish
which he ate.” Compare this with the voluminous output of children
of six or seven working on the P.U.S. scheme upon any subject
that they know; with, indeed, the pages they will dictate after a
single reading of a chapter of _Robinson Crusoe_, _not_ a ‘child’s
edition.’
Arithmetic follows with, no doubt, as many lessons, “many mental
examples and simple problems dealt with Robinson”; the eighth and
last course was in singing and recitation,--‘I am monarch of all I
survey,’ etc. “The lessons lasted about forty-five minutes each....
Under ordinary conditions the story of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ would be
the leading feature in the work of a whole year ... in comparing
the English classes with the German classes I have seen studying
‘Robinson Crusoe’ I was convinced that the eagerness and interest
was as keen among the children here as in the German schools....
One easily sees what a wealth of material there is in the further
development of the story.” One does indeed! The whole thing must
be highly amusing to the teacher, as ingenious amplifications
self-produced always are: that the children too were entertained,
one does not doubt. The teacher was probably at her best in getting
by sheer force much out of little: she was, in fact, acting a part
and the children were entertained as at a show, cinema or other;
but of one thing we may be sure, an utter distaste, a loathing,
on the part of the children ever after, not only for ‘Robinson
Crusoe’ but for every one of the subjects lugged in to illustrate
his adventures. We read elsewhere of an apple affording a text for
a hundred lessons, including the making of a ladder, (in paper),
to gather the apples; but, alas, the eating of the worn-out apple
is not suggested! The author whom we quote for ‘Robinson Crusoe’
and whom we refrain from naming because, as a Greek Chorus might
say, ‘we cannot praise,’ follows the ‘Robinson’ series with another
interminable series on the Armada.
The conscientious, ingenious and laborious teachers who produce
these ‘concentration series’ are little aware that each such lesson
is an act of _lèse majesté_. The children who are capable of and
eager for a wide range of knowledge and literary expression are
reduced to inanities; a life-long _ennui_ is set up; every approach
to knowledge suggests avenues for boredom, and the children’s
minds sicken and perish long before their school-days come to
an end. I have pursued this subject at some length because we,
too, believe in ideas as the proper and only diet upon which
children’s minds grow. We are more in the dark about Mind than
about Mars! We can but judge by effects, and these appear to point
to the conclusion that mind is a ‘spiritual organism.’ (I need
not apologise for speaking of that which has no substance as an
‘organism,’--no greater a contradiction in terms than Herbart’s
‘apperception masses.’) By an analogy with Body we conclude that
Mind requires regular and sufficient sustenance; and that this
sustenance is afforded by ideas we may gather from the insatiable
eagerness with which these are appropriated, and the evident growth
and development manifested under such pabulum. That children like
feeble and tedious oral lessons, feeble and tedious story books,
does not at all prove that these are wholesome food; they like
lollipops but cannot live upon them; yet there is a serious attempt
in certain schools to supply the intellectual, moral, and religious
needs of children by appropriate ‘sweetmeats.’
As I have said elsewhere, the ideas required for the sustenance of
children are to be found mainly in books of literary quality; given
these the mind does for itself the sorting, arranging, selecting,
rejecting, classifying, which Herbart leaves to the struggle of
the promiscuous ideas which manage to cross the threshold. Nor
is this merely a nominal distinction; Herbart was a philosopher
and therefore his thought embraced the universal. Probably few
schools of the day are consciously following the theories of
this philosopher; but in most schools, in England and elsewhere,
so far as any intelligent _rationale_ is followed it is that of
Herbart. There are many reasons for this fact. A scheme which
throws the whole burden of education on the teacher, which exalts
the personality of the teacher as the chief agent in education,
which affords ingenious, interesting, and more or less creative
work to a vast number of highly intelligent and devoted persons,
whose passionate hope is to leave the world a little better than
they found it by means of those children whom they have raised
to a higher level, must needs make a wide and successful appeal.
It appeals equally to Education Committees and school managers.
Consider the saving involved in the notion that teachers are
compendiums of all knowledge, that they have but, as it were,
to turn on the tap and the necessary knowledge flows forth. All
responsibility is shifted, and the relief is very great. Not only
so but lessons are delightful to watch and to hear; the success
of jig-saw puzzles illustrates a tendency in human nature to
delight in the ingenious putting together of unlikely things, as,
for example, a lifebuoy and Robinson Crusoe. There is a series of
small triumphs to be observed any day of the week, and these same
triumphs are brought about by dramatic display,--so ingenious,
pleasing, fascinating, are the ways in which the teacher chooses
to arrive at her point. I say ‘her’ point because women excel in
this kind of teaching, but men do not come far short. What of the
children themselves? They, too, are amused and entertained, they
enjoy the puzzle-element and greatly enjoy the teacher who lays
herself out to attract them. There is no flaw in the practical
working of the method while it is being carried out. Later, it
gives rise to dismay and anxiety among thoughtful people.
Much water has run under the bridge since several years ago Mr. A.
Paterson startled us out of self-complacency with his _Across the
Bridges_. We as a nation were well pleased at the time with the
result of our efforts; nothing could be more intelligent, alert,
brighter, than the seventh standard boy about to leave school
and take up his life work. Conditions were unpropitious. We know
the old story of inviting blind alleys, present success and then
unemployment, with resulting depreciation in character. What is to
be done? The question of after conditions is now being taken up
seriously. We have Continuation Classes which even if a boy be
out of work will help him to the Chinese art of ‘saving his face.’
But Mr. Paterson condemns the schools for the rapidity with which
their best boys run to seed. He does not quote the case of the boy
who gets work, earns fair wages, conducts himself respectably,
goes to a ‘Polytechnic,’ the sort of boy with whom Mr. Pett Ridge
makes us familiar, who is so much less than he might be, so crude
in his notions, so unmoral in his principles, so poor in interests,
so meagre if not coarse in his choice of pleasures and after all
such a good fellow at bottom. He might have been taught in school
to utilise his powers, to come into the enjoyment of the fine mind
that is in him; but in schools,--
“There is too much learning and too little work. The teacher
ready to use the powers that his training and experience have
given him works too hard while the boy’s share in the struggle
is too light. It is possible to make education too easy for
children and to rob learning of the mental discipline which often
wearies but in the end produces concentration and the capacity
to work alone.... He is rarely left to himself with the book in
his hands, forced to concentrate all his mind on the dull words
before him with no one at hand to explain or make the memory work
easier by little tricks of repetition and association.... The boy
who reaches the seventh standard with every promise and enters
the service of a railway company is first required to sit down by
himself and master the symbols of the telegraphic code. This he
finds extremely irksome for the only work he has ever done alone
before is the learning of racy poetry which is the very mildest
form of mental discipline.” “‘Silent reading’ is occasionally
allowed in odd half-hours ... it might well be a regular subject
for reading aloud is but a poor gift compared with the practice
of reading in private.”[22]
What does his curriculum do for the boy? Let us again hear Mr.
Paterson:--[23]
“What is the educational ideal set before the average boy
whose school-days are to end at fourteen? What type is it that
the authorities seek to produce? A glance at the syllabus
will reassure the ordinary cynic who still labours under the
quaint delusion that French and Algebra and violin-playing
are taught in every London Elementary School at the expense
of the ratepayer.... The syllabus was designed to leave a boy
at fourteen with a thoroughly sound and practical knowledge
of reading, writing and arithmetic and with such grounding in
English, geography and history, as may enable him to read a
newspaper or give a vote with some idea of what he is doing....
But these are all subsidiary to teaching the three ‘R’s’ which
between them occupy more than half the twenty-four hours of
teaching in the week.... It is certain that the present object in
view is dispiriting to master and boy alike for a knowledge of
reading, writing and arithmetic is no education and no training
but merely the elementary condition of further knowledge. In many
schools the boy is labouring on with these mere rudiments for
two or more years after all reasonable requirements have been
satisfied. The intelligent visitor looking at the note-books
of an average class will be amazed at the high standard of the
neatness and accuracy but he will find the excellence of a very
visible order. The handwriting is admirable, sixteen boys out
of thirty can write compositions without a flaw in grammar or
spelling. Yet it will occur to him that the powers of voluntary
thought and reason, of spontaneous enquiry and imagination,
have not been stirred. This very perfection of form makes
him suspicious as to the fundamental principles of our State
curriculum. In Public Schools boys are not trained to be lawyers,
or parsons, or doctors, but to be men. If they have learned to
work systematically and think independently they are then fit to
be trained for such life and profession as taste or necessity
may dictate. But at our Elementary Schools we seem to aim at
producing a nation of clerks for it is only to a clerk that this
perfection of writing and spelling is a necessary training.”
The very faults of his qualities nullify the work of the teacher.
His failing is that he does too much. Once more we quote our
authority:--
“With the average boy there is a marked waste of mental capital
between the ages of ten and thirteen and the aggregate of this
loss to the country is heavy indeed. Ten years at school conquer
many of the drawbacks of home and discover a quick, receptive
mind in the normal child.... Many opportunities have been lost
in these years of school but after fourteen there is a more
disastrous relapse. The brain is not taxed again and shrivels
into a mere centre of limited formulæ acting automatically in
response to appetite or sensation. The boy’s general education
fails utterly. Asia is but a name that it is difficult to
spell though at school he spoke of its rivers and ports.... It
is probable that the vocabulary of a working man at forty is
actually smaller than it was at fourteen so shrunk is the power
of the mind to feed upon the growing experience of life.... Of
the majority of boys it is true to say that only half their
ability is ever used in the work they find to do on leaving
school, the other half curls up and sleeps for ever.”
Here we have a depressing prospect of grievous waste in the future.
We all applaud the Education Act of 1918, are convinced that every
boy and girl will receive education until the end of his sixteenth,
possibly eighteenth, year. A wave of generous feeling passed over
the nation and employers were willing to support the law; and
if the eight hours conceded be spent in making the young people
more reliable, intelligent and responsible persons no doubt the
employers will be rewarded for their generosity.
But there are rocks ahead. The only way to take advantage of this
provision is to make this an eight hours’ University course. Now
as Mr. Paterson happily remarks the Universities do not undertake
to prepare barristers, parsons, stockbrokers, bankers, or even
soldiers and sailors, with a specialised knowledge proper for each
profession. Their implicit contention is, given a well-educated
man with cultivated imagination, trained judgment, wide interests,
and he is prepared to master the intricacies of any profession;
while he knows at the same time how to make use of himself, of
the powers with which nature and education have endowed him for
his own happiness; the delightful employment of his leisure; for
the increased happiness of his neighbours and the well-being of
the community; that is, such a man is able, not only to earn his
living, but to _live_.
The Universities fulfil this claim; the various professions
abound with men who, in newspaper phrase, are ‘ornaments to
their professions,’ and who gave up leisure and means to serve
their fellow-citizens as magistrates, churchwardens, members of
committees, special constables when needed, until lately, members
of Parliament, holding service as an honour, and as proud as was
‘Godfrey Bertram,’ that unhappy laird in _Guy Mannering_, to write
‘J.P.’ after their names. The enormous amount of voluntary service
rendered in such ways throughout the Empire as well as that of
insufficiently, or duly, paid service justifies the Universities in
their reading of their peculiar function. But not only so, generous
disinterested work can never be paid for, and our great statesmen,
churchmen, soldiers and civil servants, as well as the members of
County, Municipal, and Urban District Councils, have done their
_devoir_ over and above the bond.
To secure this same splendidly devoted voluntary service from all
classes is the task set before us as a nation, a task the more
easy because we have all seen it fulfilled in the War when every
man was a potential hero. Now is it not the fact that the Army
proved itself an unequalled University for our men, offering them
increased knowledge, broad views, lofty aims, duty and discipline,
along with the finest physical culture? So much so, that instead of
going on from where the War left off, we have to be on the watch
against retrograde movements, physical, moral, intellectual. The
downward grade is always at hand and we know how easy it is. We
cannot afford another great war for the education of our people
but we must in some way supply the ‘University’ element and Mr.
Fisher’s great Act points out such a way. The young people are for
four years (a proper academic period) to be under influences that
make for ‘sweetness and light.’ But we must keep to the academic
ideal: all preparation for specialised industries should be taboo.
Special teaching towards engineering, cotton-spinning, and the
rest, is quite unnecessary for every manufacturer knows that given
a ‘likely’ lad he will soon be turned into a good workman in the
works themselves. The splendid record of women workers in the war
supports our contention. The efforts of Technical Schools and the
like are not greatly prized by the heads of firms so far as the
technical knowledge they afford goes. Boys from them are employed
rather on the off chance that they may turn out intelligent and apt
than for what they know beforehand of the business. Here is one
more reason for treating the Continuation School as the People’s
University and absolutely eschewing all money-making arts and
crafts. Denmark and Scandinavia have tried this generous policy of
educating young people, not according to the requirements of their
trade but according to their natural capacity to know and their
natural desire for knowledge, that desire to know history, poetry,
science, art, which is natural to every man; and the success of the
experiment now a century old is an object lesson for the rest of
the world.
Germany has pursued a different ideal. Her efforts, too, have
been great, unified by the idea of utility; and, if we will
only remember the lesson, the war has shown us how futile is an
education which affords no moral or intellectual uplift, no motive
higher than the learner’s peculiar advantage and that of the State.
Germany became morally bankrupt (for a season only, let us hope)
not solely because of the war but as the result of an education
which ignored the things of the spirit or gave these a nominal
place and a poor rendering in a utilitarian syllabus. We are
encouraged to face the fact boldly that it is a People’s University
we should aim at, a University with its thousands of Colleges up
and down the land, each of them the Continuation School (the name
is not inviting) for some one neighbourhood.
But, it will be argued, the subject matter of a University
education is conveyed for the most part through the channel of
dead languages, Latin and Greek. Our contention is that, however
ennobling the literature in these tongues, we cannot honestly
allow our English literature to take a second place to any other,
and that therefore whatever Sophocles, Thucydides, Virgil, have
it in them to do towards a higher education, may be effected more
readily by Milton, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Bacon, and a multitude of
great thinkers who are therefore great writers. Learning conveyed
in our common speech is easier come by than that secreted in a dead
language and this fact will help us to deal with the inadequacy of
the period allowed. Given absolute attention, and we can do much
with four hundred hours a year (1,600 hours in our four years’
course) but only if we go to work with a certainty that the young
students crave knowledge of what we call the ‘humanities,’ that
they read with absolute attention and that, having read, they
_know_. They will welcome the preparation for public speaking, an
effort for which everyone must qualify in these days, which the act
of narration offers.
The alternative is some such concentration scheme as that indicated
in _Robinson Crusoe_,--a year’s work on soap, its manufacture,
ingredients, the Soap Trade, Soap Transport, the Uses of Soap,
how to make out a Soap invoice, the Sorts of Soap, and so on _ad
infinitum_. Each process in the iron, cotton, nail, pin, engine,
button,--each process in our thousand and one manufactures--will
offer its own ingenious Concentration Scheme. The advocates of
utilitarian education will be delighted, the young students will be
kept busy and will to some extent use their wits all the time. With
what result? Some two centuries ago when a movement for adolescent
education agitated Europe, devastated by the Napoleonic wars, we
English took our part. The current early divided into two streams,
the material and the spiritual, the useful and the educative, and
England, already great in manufactures, was carried along by the
first of these streams, followed by Germany, France, Switzerland;
while the Scandinavian group of countries learned at the lips of
that ‘Father of the People’s High Schools’ that “spirit is might,
spirit reveals itself in spirit, spirit works only in freedom.” We
see the apotheosis of utilitarian education in the Munich schools
on the one hand and in the _morale_ of the German army on the
other. But we are slow to learn because we have set up a little tin
god of efficiency in that niche within our private pantheon which
should be occupied by personality. We trouble ourselves about the
uses of the young person to society. As for his own use, what he
should be in and for himself, why, what matter? Because, say we,
if we fit him to earn his living we fit him also to be of service
to the world and what better can we do for him personally? We
forget that it is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but
by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall man
live,--whether it be spoken in the way of some truth of religion,
poem, picture, scientific discovery, or literary expression; by
these things men live and in all such is the life of the spirit.
The spiritual life requires the food of ideas for its daily bread.
We shall find, in the words of a well-known Swedish professor,
that, “just as enrichment of the soil gives the best conditions for
the seed sown in it so a well-grounded humanistic training provides
the surest basis for a business capacity, and not the least so in
the case of the coming farmer.” But we need not go so far afield,
we have a prophet of our own, and I will close this part of my
subject by quoting certain of Mr. Fisher’s words of wisdom:--
“Now let me say something about the content of education, about
the things which should be actually taught in the schools, and
I am only going to talk in the very broadest possible way. In my
afternoon’s reading I came upon another very apposite remark in
the letters of John Stuart Mill. Let me read it to you:--
‘What the poor, as well as the rich, require is not to be
taught other people’s opinions, but to be induced and enabled
to think for themselves. It is not physical science that will
do this, even if they could learn it much more thoroughly than
they are able to do.’
“The young people of this country are not to be regenerated by
economic doctrine or economic history or physical science; they
can only be elevated by ideas which act upon the imagination and
act upon the character and influence the soul, and it is the
function of all good teachers to bring those ideas before them.
“I have sometimes heard it said that you should not teach
patriotism in the school. I dissent from that doctrine. I think
that patriotism should be taught in the schools. I will tell you
what I mean by patriotism. By patriotism I do not mean Jingoism,
but what I mean by patriotism is an intelligent appreciation of
all things noble in the romances, in the literature and in the
history of one’s own country. Young people should be taught to
admire what is great while they are at school. And remember that
for the poor of this country the school is a far more important
factor than it is for the rich people of this country....
“I say that I want patriotism in the larger sense of the term
taught in the schools. Of course there is a great deal to
criticise in any country, and I should be the last person to
suggest that the critical faculty should not be exercised and
trained at school. But before we teach children to criticise
the institutions of their country, before we teach them to be
critical of what is bad, let us teach them to recognize and
admire what is good. After all life is very short; we all of us
have only one life to live, and during that life let us get into
ourselves as much love, as much admiration, as much elevating
pleasure as we can, and if we view education merely as discipline
in critical bitterness, then we shall lose all the sweets of life
and we shall make ourselves unnecessarily miserable. There is
quite enough sorrow and hardship in this world as it is without
introducing it prematurely to young people.” ...
N.B.--Probably some educational authorities may decide to give
one hour or two weekly to physical training and handicrafts,
in which case the time-table must allow for so much the less
reading. But I should like to urge that, with the long evening
leisure of which there is promise, Club life will become an
important feature in every village and district. Classes will
certainly be arranged for military and other drills, gymnastics,
dancing, singing, swimming, carpentry, cooking, nursing,
dress-making, weaving, pottery, acting,--in fact, whatever the
quickened intelligence of the community demands. No compulsion
would be necessary to enforce attendance at classes, for which
the machinery is already in existence in most places, and which,
associated with Club life, would have certain social attractions
in the way of public displays, prize givings and so on. The
intellectual life of the Continuation School should give zest to
these evening occupations as well as to the Saturday Field Club
which no neighbourhood should be without.
I have put the case for Continuation Schools as strongly as may be,
but there is a more excellent way. In these days of high wages it
may well happen that parents will be willing to let their children
remain at school until the end of their seventeenth year, in which
case they will be able to go on with the ‘secondary education’
which they have begun at the age of six and we shall see a new
thing in the world. Every man and woman will have received a
liberal education; life will no longer discount the ideas and
aims of the schoolroom, and, if according to the Platonic saying,
“Knowledge is virtue,” knowledge informed by religion, we shall see
even in our own day how righteousness exalteth a nation.