“(Plutarch) hath written the profitable story of all authors.

For all other were fain to take their matter, as the fortune of

the countries whereof they wrote fell out: But this man being

excellent in wit, learning, and experience, hath chosen the

special acts of the best persons, of the famousest nations of the

world.” (_North_).

English History is always with us, but only in the earliest years

is it studied alone. It is not, as we know, possible always to

get the ideal book, so we use the best we can find and supplement

with historical essays of literary value. Literature is hardly

a distinct subject, so closely is it associated with history,

whether general or English; and whether it be contemporary or

merely illustrative; and it is astonishing how much sound learning

children acquire when the thought of an age is made to synchronise

with its political and social developments. A point which I

should like to bring before the reader is the peculiar part which

poetry plays in making us aware of this thought of the ages,

including our own. Every age, every epoch, has its poetic aspect,

its quintessence, as it were, and happy the people who have a

Shakespeare, a Dante, a Milton, a Burns, to gather up and preserve

its meaning as a world possession.

Let me repeat that what is called ‘composition’ is an inevitable

consequence of this free yet exact use of books and requires no

special attention until the pupil is old enough to take naturally

a critical interest in the use of words. Civics takes place as a

separate subject, but it is so closely bound up with literature and

history on the one hand and with ethics, or, what we call everyday

morals, on the other, that the division of subjects is only

nominal.

We have considered in a previous chapter[47] what we do for

children as inhabitants of a world ordered by natural law. Here we

have a contention with some teachers of science who maintain that a

child can only learn what he discovers for himself _de novo_. The

theory is plausible, but the practice is disappointingly narrow and

inexpansive. The teacher has got his knowledge through books; why

then are they taboo for the children? Probably the reason is that

text-books of science are dessicated to the last degree, so the

teacher hopes to make up for their dryness by familiar talk about

the Hydra, for example, as a creature capable of close friendships,

about the sea-anemone as a ‘Granny’ of enormous longevity; that is,

the interest of the subject is made to depend upon side issues.

The French scientists know better; they perceive that as there

is an essence of history which is poetry so there is an essence

of science to be expressed in exquisite prose. We have a few

books of this character in English and we use them in the P.U.S.

in conjunction with field work and drawing--a great promoter of

enthusiasm for nature.

I have already shown[47] what we do, for example, in the way of

affording children familiar acquaintance with great music and

great pictures. An eminent art-dealer in London paid us a pretty

compliment when he said,--“Lord help the children!” were our work

to come to an end; and he had reason for he had just sold to P.U.S.

children thousands of little exquisite reproductions of certain

pictures by Velasquez which were the study of the term; no wonder

that a man who loves art and believes in it should feel that

something worth while was being done. In drawing, the scholars work

very freely in colour from natural figures and objects and draw

scenes visualised in the term’s reading. We do not teach drawing as

a means of self-expression; the scholars express, not themselves,

but what they can see and what they conceive.

I have already gone into the teaching of languages; the habit of

fixed attention and ready narration which the P.U.S. pupils acquire

should be of value in this branch of work, and I believe a new era

is opening for us and we English will at last become linguists. At

the House of Education the students narrate in French,[48]--more

readily and copiously than they do in English,--the courses of

lectures in French history and literature which form part of

their work. In German and Italian they are able to read a scene

in a play and ‘tell’ the scene in character, or a short passage

from a narrative. We rather emphasise Italian, the language is so

beautiful and the literature so rich, and I should like to suggest

that schools should do the same. Latin and Greek we learn in the

usual ways, but we apply the method of narration to the former.

I must commend any further study of the _rationale_ of our syllabus

to the reader’s own kind consideration; he will perceive that

we have a principle of correlation in things essential, but no

fatiguing practice of it in detail. But to one more statement, a

very daring one, I beg for favourable attention. The common theory

and practice of education are on trial. It is idle to ‘develop

the faculties’ if there be no faculties, but only _mind_, which,

like Wordsworth’s cloud, moves altogether when it moves at all.

Therefore, those subjects whose _raison d’être_ is to develop this

and the other faculty are practically out of court and we must seek

another basis for education. Subjects of instruction which would be

valuable if reason, judgment, imagination, had to be ‘developed’

become as meretricious, as much ‘accomplishments,’ as those early

Victorian accomplishments over which we make merry. Education must

be in touch with life. We must learn what we _desire to know_.

Nobody talks to his friend about ‘stinks,’ about the niceties of

Greek accents, nor, unless the two be mathematicians, about surds.

But, when Jupiter is regnant, how good to tell and to learn! What

a welcome companion is he who can distinguish between songs that

differ in the vespers of the birds! How grateful the company of the

reader of history who brings forward parallels to episodes in the

great War! We are apt to work for one thing in the hope that we

shall get another and a very different thing; we don’t. If we work

for public examinations, the questions in which must be of a narrow

academic cast, we get a narrow, accurate, somewhat sterile type of

mind. We reap as we have sown.

The future of England depends largely upon Secondary schools;

let the Heads of these lay out a liberal field of study and

astonishingly fair things will grow in that garden of mind in which

we are invited to sow the seeds of all knowledge. My bold proposal

is that the Heads of Secondary Schools from the least to the

greatest should adopt a scheme of work following the lines I have

indicated, _faute de mieux_, that of the Parents’ Union School, and

that they should do this for the nation’s sake.

Mr. Masefield remarks,--

“There can be no great art without great fable. Great art can

only exist where great men brood intensely on something upon

which all men brood a little. Without a popular body of fable

there can be no unselfish art in any country. Shakespeare’s art

was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the four most

popular books of his time, Holinshed, North’s Plutarch, Cinthio

and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic

has supplanted fable and subject comes to the artist untrimmed

and unlit by the vitality of many minds.”

It is this vitality of many minds that we aim at securing and

entreat educational workers and thinkers to join in forming a

common body of thought which shall make England great in art no

doubt, and also great in life.

This is the way to make great men and not by petty efforts to form

character in this direction or in that. Let us take it to ourselves

that great character comes out of great thoughts, and that great

thought must be initiated by great thinkers; then we shall have a

definite aim in education. Thinking and not doing is the source of

character.

(Here followed a set of examination answers in each form. Space

forbids their inclusion but specimen sets can be seen at the

P.N.E.U. Office.)

CHAPTER III

THE SCOPE OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS

A hundred years ago, about the close of the Napoleonic wars, there

was such another stirring among the dry bones as we are aware of

to-day. All the world knew then, as now, that war was the outcome

of the wrong thinking of ignorance, and that education was the

nostrum for minds diseased.

Prussia led the way; not the children but the young people were

the immediate concern of Statesmen, and, guided by the philosophy

of Fichte, and organised under the statesmanship of Stein, that

noble league of youth, the Tugendbund, came into being. Prussia

was miserably impoverished, but her concern was not with the arts

which should make her rich; her young people looked to philosophic

principles for precept and to history for example, and, it was well

with the land.

Not only in Prussia but throughout western Europe there was a more

or less active intellectual renaissance, but, whether because the

times were not ripe or the peoples were not worthy, the high ideals

of the early days of the century were superseded by the utilitarian

motive.

When the ‘Continuation School’ movement revived, envy of the

commercial and manufacturing successes of England actuated the new

effort; and already in 1829 a Bavarian statesman had announced

that if you would have the fruit you must sow the seed, that is,

manufacturing success is to be had only at the cost of technical

education.

We all know the result in the great Munich schools where first-rate

organisation and admirable teaching have produced an appreciable

effect upon German industries. But the best German minds have long

been aware that “an education which has powerful economic interests

behind it is apt to become too narrowly utilitarian in motive and

to lose that ideal element which gives all education its chief

power over character.” As Mr. Lecky has said concerning morals,

“the Utilitarian theory is profoundly immoral.”

The occasion brought forth the man; we know how in 1900 Dr.

Kirschensteiner chanced to see the announcement of a prize offered

for an essay on the best way of training youth. He wrote the essay,

was crowned by the Academy of his country, and that essay in

pamphlet form has influenced opinion and directed action throughout

the west: Professors Dewey and Stanley Hall in the United States,

Dr. Armstrong and Sir Philip Magnus at home, are among its leading

exponents.

And what was the note of this new gospel of education? Practically

that same note which had proceeded from England, France,

Switzerland, a century earlier: a utilitarian education should be

universal and compulsory; child and adolescent should be “saturated

with the spirit of service, provided with the instruments of

effective self-direction.” Behold, Utopia at hand! every young

person fitted, body and soul, for the uses of society; as for his

own uses, what he should be in and for himself--why, what matter?

It is not that the eminent educationalists I have referred to

would willingly sacrifice the individual youth to society; on the

contrary they would raise him, give him place and power, give him

opportunity; place his feet on the rungs of that ladder we used to

hear about; but we have all been misled by mistaken views as to

the function of education. We have believed that knowledge may be

derived from sensation, that what we have seen with our eyes and

our hands have handled affords us the nutriment our souls demand.

No doubt a boy uses his mind to some purpose when he makes, for

example, an ingenious model; and, seeing mind at work, we run away

with the notion that food and work are synonymous terms; for the

body they may be so in a certain sense, for work brings pay and pay

buys food, but no such indirect transaction is possible to mind;

a mind perpetually at heavy work is a sort of intellectual navvy,

whose food must be proportioned to his labour. Our great statesmen,

Gladstone, Lord Salisbury and others, knew this, and their wide and

deep reading in other matters than politics should not occasion

surprise.

The War has forced new ideas upon us; we begin, for instance, to

realise the avidity of the _adult_ mind for instruction; it was

startling to read of 1,500 soldier candidates for twenty vacant

places in a certain class. We begin to see that mind, the mind of

all sorts and conditions of men, requires its rations, wholesome

and regularly served. As things are we shall have to see to it

that everybody gets fed; but our hope is that henceforth we shall

bring up our young people with self-sustaining minds, as well

as self-sustaining bodies, by a due ordering of the process of

education. We hope so to awaken and direct mind hunger that every

man’s mind will look after itself.

What is the proper food of mind, has already been discussed but

we may assume that education should make our boys and girls rich

towards God (we remember the fool of the parable who failed because

he was _not_ “rich towards God”), rich towards society and rich

towards themselves. I will not press my point by urging the moral

bankruptcy which has been exposed to us during recent years as

co-existent with, if not caused by, utilitarian education; for

the catastrophe has been accelerated by the sort of moral madness

of which we too have had our seasons in the past,--witness our

_Barnaby Rudge_ and _Peveril of the Peak_ episodes; we have indeed

been carried off our feet by a fallacious notion once and again,

but our national insanity has on each occasion been short-lived

because our education hitherto has not taught us to believe a lie.

We are not worse than others, and if we think well of ourselves

as a nation, why, national pride and personal modesty do not go

ill together; in peace-time we have bitter things to say of our

British working-man, but all the same he compares favourably with

the somewhat sardonic Latin, the sullen Teuton, whom we all know.

And the better man does the better work. We have heard much of

German efficiency, and perhaps the German excels in little matters

like doors that shut, blinds that draw, springs that act, things of

domestic utility important in a country with a more extreme climate

than ours; but these are little matters and perhaps our failing is,

not to do our best except on big occasions; give us a big job or a

big war and we show our mettle.

But probably in all our considerable industries we excel. German

women will purr over the material of our dresses with “Ach,

englisches Tuch!” Well dressed men are English tailored in English

cloths. We buy, or bought, things “made in Germany” because they

were cheap, but the most costly and most desired goods in German

shops are advertised as “englisch.”

This is a point to be borne in mind in considering the education of

adolescents. We are given to depreciating ourselves and each other,

but in fact we have no lee-way to make up; as both a manufacturing

and commercial nation we are well in the van and are without

inducement to sell the people’s birthright for a mess of pottage.

Before I come to the point I desire to make, let us consider

whether the problem of Continuation Schools has been attacked

anywhere more successfully than in those countries of Middle

Europe. Some of them, Germany especially, have done all that

is to be done in response to the cry for efficiency with its

resultant big returns and high wages; but from the beginning of the

Continuation School movement in, say, 1806, the four north-western

countries have worked towards different ends. In Denmark they have,

not Continuation Schools, but People’s High Schools, a pleasanter

name for possibly a pleasanter thing.

Denmark, like Germany, was, as we know, devastated by the

Napoleonic wars, but had been vitalised by the liberation of its

serfs in 1788, and this prepared the ground for Grundtvig, that

poet, historian and enthusiast, who became the “Father of the

People’s High Schools.”

“Where there is most life, there is the victory,” said he, and

the immediate way to an access of life he saw in “A Danish High

School accessible to young people all over the land,” a school

which should inspire “admiration for what is great, love for what

is beautiful, faithfulness and affection, peace and unity, innocent

cheerfulness, pleasure and mirth.” Observe, there is no word of

‘efficiency’ in this poet’s dream, but he did assure Charles VIII

that with such a school, “a well of healing in the land,” he might

afford to smile at the newspapers, whether they chose to praise or

blame. The King gave heed, begged for a further development of his

plans than was afforded in the original pamphlet, and by 1845 the

schools he had dreamed of began to be.

We cannot follow the development of these Danish People’s Schools,

but in 1903-4 their pupils numbered over three thousand men and

rather more women, and wise men cherished the hope that “the new

Danish school for youth is to have the good fortune to blend all

classes of the people into one.”

All of these High Schools bear the mark of the genius of their

“Father”--whose pupils have known how to sum up his teaching in

three sayings,--“Spirit is might; Spirit reveals itself in spirit;

Spirit works only in freedom.” We are able to trace the source of

these sayings, and indeed this movement seems to have been from

the first profoundly Christian--Christian in no narrow sense,

but sharing the wide liberality of that _Allegoria filosofica

della Religione Cattolica_ conceived by the ‘Angelic Doctor’ and

pictured by Simone Memmi on the walls of the Spanish chapel in

Santa Maria Novella (Florence): the several teachers commemorated

were themselves illustrious pagans but not therefore the less under

Divine teaching. Here, it seems to me, is an educational _credo_

worth reviving in these utilitarian days, and some such creed seems

to have been Grundtvig’s, though probably independently conceived.

His great hope is that “above all, some acquaintance with popular

literature, especially with the poetry and history of one’s own

country, will create a brand new world of readers all over the

land.”

I cannot go into the question of the Agricultural Schools of which

it is said that “the Danish Agricultural School is the child of the

Danish Folkshöjskole, and must, like this, have Christian faith and

national life for its basis.” In the careless days before the War

we could all testify to the excellence of Danish butter, but did we

consider the “resolution and capacity” with which Danish peasants

passed over from the making of poor butter in their various small

holdings to the “manufacture in co-operative dairies of butter of

an almost uniform fineness”? This, too, says an eminent Swedish

Professor, is due to the High Schools, for, said he, “Just as the

enrichment of the soil gives the best conditions for the seeds

sown in it, so a well-grounded humanistic training provides the

surest basis for business capacity, and not the least so in the

case of the coming farmers.”[49] These are weighty words deserving

our consideration at a moment when we, too, are on the eve of a new

departure.

The three neighbouring countries watched the experiments in Denmark

with keen interest, and almost simultaneously People’s High Schools

sprang up in all four.

These northern High Schools, necessarily winter schools, were not

open at the time of my visit, but two or three things casually

observed might, I think, be traced to their influence. For

instance, Copenhagen itself, as compared with Munich, strikes one

as a city with a soul. At the Hague, again, I saw an artisan in

his working clothes shewing pictures in one of the galleries to

his boy of seven who looked earnestly and listened eagerly. The

young people in the great Delft porcelain works shewed traces of

culture and gentleness in countenance and manner. But nothing

struck me more than what I saw in the general shop of an out of

the way village in Sweden; the villagers were peasants and the one

shop sold cabbages and herrings, cheese and calico; but across the

small-paned window was a shelf closely packed with volumes in paper

covers which had not had time to get dusty; of course I could not

read all the titles, but among them were translations from French,

German and English. I noticed slim volumes of Scott, Dickens,

Thackeray, Ruskin, Carlyle and the last thing out. One felt assured

that the village was in ‘kingdom come,’ that of a long winter’s

evening, in any home, one read aloud whilst the rest worked, that

there was much to talk about when friends met and lovers walked.

(How sad, by the way, to read that ‘Tommy,’ whom we all love and

revere, is quick to form friendships but that these do not progress

for the friends have nothing to talk about.) Think of little plays

got up, of public readings given by the villagers themselves; might

such things be with us, the lure of the town would cease to draw

our village men and maids, for the village that can offer a happy

community life, sustained by the people themselves, is able to hold

its people.

Our upper and middle classes, professional and other, are

singularly stable folk, and they are so, not because of their

material but of their intellectual well-being; in this sense only

they are most of them the ‘Haves’ as compared with the ‘Have-nots.’

The reason is not far to seek. Are there not agitators abroad whose

business it is to sow seeds of discontent in the gaping minds of

the multitude? The full mind passes on, but that which is empty

seizes on _any_ new notion with avidity, and is hardly to be blamed

for doing so; a hungry mind takes what it can get, and the baker is

apt to be lenient about prosecuting the starving man who steals a

loaf. I do not hesitate to say that the constantly recurring misery

of our age, ‘Labour Unrest,’ is to be laid at the door, not of the

working man, but of the nation which has not troubled itself to

consider the natural hunger of mind and the manner of meat such

hunger demands.

I have tried to establish that the Kultur offered by the Munich

type of Continuation School has had no good effect upon morals or

manners and no conspicuously good effect upon manufactures.

That England is under no necessity to follow Germany’s lead in this

matter for Germany allows our superiority by paying a high price

for our goods.

That Denmark and the neighbouring states, on the contrary, excel in

those things in which we fall short.

That the People’s High Schools of Denmark are worthier of our

imitation than the Continuation Schools of Germany.

That they are so because character and conduct, intelligence and

initiative, are the outcome of a humanistic education in which the

knowledge of God is put first.

But we cannot take educational prescriptions designed for another

patient; the Grundtvig Schools are for students ranging from

eighteen to twenty-five, not for the more difficult ages from

fourteen to eighteen. Again, these People’s High Schools are

residential. In countries so largely agricultural it is possible

for a great part of the young adult population to spend the five

winter months year by year at one of these People’s High Schools.

Their case and ours do not go on all fours. Our problem is the

young adolescent in a country largely manufacturing.

Now, we have received our cloth, and not in ungenerous measure.

How shall we cut our coat, that is, how shall we spend those seven

or eight hours a week in which “Education” is to do her part

for the young citizen? If we take the easiest way, we shall let

the boy do what he is doing for the rest of the week,--work for

his employer, whether directly, by way of increased output, or

indirectly, by way of increased skill. This would be a betrayal. No

employer wishes to take with one hand what he gives with the other;

besides, what employer doubts the ability of his staff to train his

young employees? Again, the technique of any employment takes but

little time to understand. It is the practice that is of value,

and such practice is--work. Continuation Schools should not exist

for technical instruction; they are established definitely for the

sort of education of which such instruction forms no part; and will

not the evening hours be free as they are at present for technical

classes, gymnastic clubs, and various forms of recreative exercise?

This particular gift of _time_ must be dedicated to things of the

mind if we believe that mind too requires its rations and that to

use the mind is by no means the same thing as to feed it.

With the best will in the world to give boys and girls something

on which to chew the cud, real mind-stuff for digestion and

assimilation, we find that the flood-gates are opened; an ocean of

things good to know overwhelms us and we have--eight hours a week!

We seize on that blessed word compromise and see two possibilities:

we are in a hurry to make good citizens. Now, good citizens must

have sound opinions about law, duty, work, wages, what not; so we

pour opinions into the young people from the lips of lecturer or

teacher, his opinions, which they are intended to take as theirs.

In the next place there is so much to be learned that a selection

must needs be made; the teacher makes this selection and the young

people are “poured into like a bucket,” which, says Carlyle, “is

not exhilarating to any soul.” Some ground is covered; teachers and

Education Authorities are satisfied; and if, when the time comes,

the young people leave school discontented and uneasy, if their

work bore them and their leisure bore them, if their pleasures are

mean and meagre, and if they become men and women rather eager

than otherwise for the excitement of a strike, that is because the

Continuation, as the Elementary, School will have failed to find

them.

This is the real educational difficulty in schools for all classes,

for pupils of all ages,--the enormous field of knowledge which it

is necessary to cover in order to live with intelligence and moral

insight. Know one thing well and you have the power to apprehend

many things is the academic solution, which has not worked

altogether badly, but it cannot be stretched to fit our present

occasion,--the “Enlightenment of the Masses.” What we may call

the ‘academic’ doctrine assumes that mind like body is capable

of development in various directions by means of due exercise.

Profounder educational thought, however, reveals mind to us as of

enormous capacity, self-active, present in everyone and making but

one demand--its proper pabulum. Feed mind duly and its activities

take care of themselves. As the well-fed workman is fit for all his

labours, so the duly nourished mind knows, thinks, feels, judges

with general righteousness. The good man and magnanimous citizen is

he who has been fed with food convenient for him.

Such a view of education naturally includes religion, not only “for

his God doth instruct him and doth teach him,” but because we may

take knowledge roughly as of three sorts,--knowledge of God, to be

got first-hand through the sacred writings, knowledge of man, to be

arrived at through history, poetry, tale; through the customs of

cities and nations, civics; through the laws of self-government,

morals. One other great branch of knowledge remains. Every youth

should know something of the flowers of the field, the birds of the

air, the stars in their courses, the innumerable phenomena that

come under general observation; he should have some knowledge of

physics, though chemistry perhaps should be reserved for those who

have a vocation that way.

Here are we on the verge of that new life for our country which we

all purpose, faced with infinite possibilities on either hand,--the

vast range of knowledge and the vast educability of mind. Another

certainty presents itself, that we have not time for short cuts:

the training of muscle and sense, however necessary, does not

nourish mind; and, on the other hand, the verbiage of a lecturer is

not assimilated. There is no education but self-education and only

as the young student works with his own mind is anything effected.

But we are not without hope. An astounding field has been

opened to us; thousands of children in Council Schools are doing

incredible things with freedom and joy. They have taken in hand

their own education and are greedy of knowledge for its own sake,

knowledge in the three great fields that I have indicated.

The fact is that a great discovery has been vouchsafed to

us, greater, I think, as concerns education, than any since

the invention of the first alphabet. Let us again refer to

Coleridge[50] on the origin of great discoveries. Coleridge gives

no qualification to the minds which receive these great ideas,

they are not described as great minds, but, he says, they are

“previously prepared to receive them,” that is, the great ideas.

If the reader will forgive me for saying so I think my mind has

been so prepared--by extraordinary incapacity in one direction, the

direction, roughly, of academic attainments, and by some degree of

capacity in other directions, and it has been gradually borne in

upon me that this incapacity and this capacity are pretty general,

and perhaps afford a key to the problem of education. A further

preparation came to me in unusual opportunities for testing and

understanding the minds of children and young people. I am anxious

to bring this idea of a discovery before the reader because our

methods are so simple and obvious that people are inclined to take

them up at random and say that extensive reading is a “good idea

which we have all tried more or less” and that free narration

“is a good plan in which there is nothing new.” It is true that

we all read and that narration is as natural as breathing, its

value depending solely upon what is narrated. What we have perhaps

failed to discover hitherto is the immense hunger for knowledge

(curiosity) existing in everyone and the immeasurable power of

attention with which everyone is endowed; that everyone likes

knowledge best in a literary form: that the knowledge should be

exceedingly various concerning many things on which the mind of

man reflects; but that knowledge is acquired only by what we may

call “the _act of knowing_,” which is both encouraged and tested

by narration, and which further requires the later test and record

afforded by examinations. This is nothing new, you will say, and

possibly no natural law in action appears extraordinarily new; we

take flying already as a matter of course; but though there is

nothing surprising in the action of natural laws, the results are

exceedingly surprising, and to that test we willingly submit these

methods.

“All is not for all” was the sad conclusion of that Danish patriot

and prophet. No doubt Grundtvig thought of the impassable barriers

presented by a poor and mean vocabulary and a field of thought

without literary background. So “all is not for all” he said, even

as a prophet of our own proclaims that a worthy education is only

for the _élite_. Books are not for the people, was Grundtvig’s

conclusion; wherefore those young Danes were lectured to by men

of enthusiasm who had their country’s literature and history at

their fingers’ ends and could convey the temper of their own minds.

A great deal was effected, but minds nourished at the lips of a

teacher have not the stability of those which seek their own meat.

But what if all _were_ for all, if the great hope of Comenius--“All

knowledge for all men”--were in process of taking shape? This is

what we have established in many thousands of cases, even in those

of dull and backward children, that any person can understand any

book of the right calibre (a question to be determined mainly by

the age of the young reader); that the book must be in literary

form; that children and young persons require no elucidation

of what they read; that their attention does not flag while so

engaged; that they master a few pages at a single reading so

thoroughly that they can ‘tell it back’ at the time or months

later whether it be the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ or one of Bacon’s

Essays or Shakespeare’s plays; that they throw individuality

into this telling back so that no two tell quite the same tale;

that they learn incidentally to write and speak with vigour and

style and usually to spell well. Now this art of telling back is

_Education_ and is very enriching. We all practise it, we go over

in our minds the points of a conversation, a lecture, a sermon, an

article, and we are so made that only those ideas and arguments

which we go over are we able to retain. Desultory reading or

hearing is entertaining and refreshing, but is only educative here

and there as our attention is strongly arrested. Further, we not

only retain but realise, understand, what we thus go over. Each

incident stands out, every phrase acquires new force, each link

in the argument is riveted, in fact we have performed THE ACT OF

KNOWING, and that which we have read, or heard, becomes a part

of ourselves, it is assimilated after the due rejection of waste

matter. Like those famous men of old we have found out “knowledge

meet for the people” and to our surprise it is the best knowledge

conveyed in the best form that they demand. Is it possible that

hitherto we have all been like those other teachers of the past who

were chidden because they had taken away the key of knowledge, not

entering in themselves and hindering those who would enter in?

To-day we are in this position. We realise that there is an act of

knowing to be performed; that no one can know without this act,

that it must be self-performed, that it is as agreeable and natural

to the average child or man as singing is to the song thrush,

that “to know” is indeed a natural function. Yet we hear of the

_incuria_ which prevails in most schools, while there before us are

the young consumed with the desire to know, can we but find out

what they want to know and how they require to be taught.

Humanistic education, whether in English or Latin, affects conduct

powerfully; knowledge of this sort is very welcome to children

and young persons; a good deal of ground may be covered because a

single reading of a passage suffices; this sort of humanistic work

has been tried with good effect; and if our Continuation Schools

are to be of value they must afford an education on some such lines.

The Parents’ Union School, originally organised[51] for the benefit

of children educated at home, is worked by means of programmes

followed by examination papers sent out term by term. When the same

work, if not the whole of it, was taken up by Council Schools,[52]

the advantage of such an organisation was apparent, especially in

that it afforded a common curriculum for children of all classes.

By using this curriculum we were enabled to see that the slum child

in a poor school compares quite favourably with the child of clever

or opulent parents who had given heed to his education.

Now one of our national difficulties is the fact that we have

no common basis of thought or ground for reflection. No doubt,

by pretty copious reading, links of common interests might be

established, and the schoolroom might do at least as much for

the general life as does the cricket-pitch. The scheme works

practically without a hitch in Council Schools; this is the sort of

work that the highest class in these Schools, (in Standard VII),

are doing with great success and very great delight. They read

English, French and General History (three or four volumes), two or

three books dealing with citizenship and morals from various points

of view; Literature, contemporary with the history read (several

works); natural history, physical geography and science (three or

four books); Scripture (chiefly the Bible). Every term brings a new

programme of work, the continuation usually of books already in

reading. Children in Secondary Schools and in families remain for

one year in Form IV and that work seems adapted to the status of

Continuation Schools for the first year or two. After that the more

advanced programme (Forms V and VI) might be used in the same way.

This work would appeal to young people as being unlike the ordinary

school grind, and as giving them opportunity for consecutive

speaking and essay writing.

There is probably no better test of a liberal education than the

number of names a person is able to use accurately and familiarly

as occasion requires. We all recollect a character of Miss Austen’s

who had no opinion to offer as to whether the Bermudas should be

described as the West Indies or not, because she had never called

them anything in her life!

Now, here is an alphabetical (uncorrected) list taken from the

examination papers of a girl of thirteen, containing 213 proper

names, all of them used accurately, easily and with interest.

Amaziah, Ariel, Ayrshire, Arcot, America, Austrian Army,

Artemidorus, Antium, Aufidius, Auditors, Apotheosis, Altai

Mts., Assouan, Africa, Atbara, Annulosa, Arachnoida, Armadillo,

Albumen, Abdomen, Auricles, Angle, Arc.

Burns (Robert), Bastille, Bombay, Bengal, Burke, Black Hole

of Calcutta, British Museum, Benevolence, Basalt, Butterfly,

Beetles, Blood-vessels, Berber, Blue Nile Baghdad, Burne Jones.

Cowper, Calcutta, Clive, Canada, Colonel Luttrel, Cleopatra,

Candace, Coriolanus, Cassowary, Cormorants, Curlews, Cranes,

Calyptra, Cotton grass, Chalk, Conglomerate, Crustacea,

Cheiroptera, Carnivora, Chyle, Centre of Circle, China Proper,

Canton, Cairo, Cheops, Circe.

‘Dick Primrose,’ “Deserted Village,” Dupleix, Demotic characters,

Ducks, Despotic Government, Doctor Livingstone, Deposits, Delta,

Diaphragm, Duodenum.

England, East India Company, Economical Reform, Europe, Emperor

of Austria, Empress of Russia, Emu, Eastern Turkestan, Egypt.

France, Frederick the Great, Frederick William of Prussia,

Flightless birds, First Cataract, Foraminifera.

Gadarenes, Gizeh, Great Commoner, George III, General Warrants,

Governor General, Grace and Free-will, Greek language,

Generosity, Gulls, Granite, Grubs, Gastric juice, Globules.

Huldah, Highlands of Scotland, Herodotus, Hieroglyphics, Herons,

Hoang-ho, Hedgehog, Hydrochloric Acid, Hydrocarbons, Heart.

Isaiah, India, Influence of light.

Josiah, Judah, Jehosaphat, Jerusalem, Jonas, Jonah, Jesuits,

Jansenists, Japan.

Künersdorf, Kuen Lun Mts., Kioto, Karnac, Khartum, Kolcheng,

Kalabari.

Lord North, “Lords in Waiting” of Love, Land birds, Lamellæ,

Luxor, Lake Ngami, Loanda, Lake Nyassa.

Manasseh, Mongolia, Manchuria, Madras, Mahrattas, Member of

Parliament, Middlesex, Methodists, Mississippi Company, Maria

Theresa, Mummies, Microscopic Shells, Membrane.

Nagasaki, Nile, Nitrogenous food.

‘Olivia Primrose,’ Ostriches.

Pharisees, ‘Primrose (Mrs.),’ Philosophers Plassey, Pitt, Prime

Minister, Pragmatic Sanction, Prague, Peace of Hubertusburg,

Pity, Puffins, Penguins, Plovers, Pelicans, Plants, Polytrichum

formosum, Peristom, Porphyric, Puddingstone, Pepsin, Peptone,

Pancreas, Pulmonary artery, Pamir Plateau, Prairies, Pyramid,

Portuguese West Africa.

Quilemane.

Rome, Rossbach, Rosetta Stone, Rhea, Rodentia.

Sea of Galilee, ‘Sophia Primrose,’ Surajah Dowlah, Seven Years’

War, Silesia, Saxony, Secretary, Storks, Sandpipers, Seedlings.

“The Task,” Treaty of Dresden, Tullus, Trade Unions, Trustees,

Treasurer, Tropical countries.

Ulysses, Ungulata.

Volcanic eruptions, Vermes, Vertebrate, Villi, Ventricles, Vernæ

Cavæ, Vicar of Wakefield, Volscians, Vice President.

Wallace, Walpole, War of Independence, Wilkes, Whitfield, Wesley,

War of the Austrian Succession, Water birds, Wady Halfa.

Yang-tse-kiang.

Zonga, Zambesi, Zorndorff.

This is ‘Secondary’ work, but supposing the young people of a

Continuation School, who could not read all the books on the

programmes, got some degree of intimacy, some association, with,

say, one hundred such names in a term, we might believe that they

were receiving a liberal education. This is the sort of work we

hope to see done in Continuation Schools by pupils from fourteen

to sixteen. The young people of the future between sixteen and

eighteen should be prepared to work in Forms V and VI.

It is not the best children that answer the examination questions;

the general rule is that everybody takes every question. I have

touched only on the more humanistic subjects as whatever is done

in Mathematics, for instance, the Head of the Continuation School

will no doubt arrange; and indeed so much has been done in the

Elementary School already that probably the keeping of fictitious

account books would be a sufficient exercise for young people who

show some mathematical talent.

No cost whatever is attached to the adoption and continued working

of this method[53] except the cost of books and of these, young

wage-earners would no doubt buy their own, so that by degrees

each would form his little library of books that he has read,

understands and knows his way about. I should like to quote a few

sentences from Professor Eucken on the education of the people:--

“By education of the people it must not for a moment be supposed

that we mean a special kind of education. We do not refer to

a condensed preparation of our spiritual and intellectual

possessions, suitable for the needs and interests of the great

masses; we are not thinking of a diluted concoction of the real

draught of education which we are so kind and condescending as

to dispense to the majority. No!... There is only one education

common to us all.” “We can all unite in the construction of a

spiritual world over against that of petty human routine. Thus

there is, in truth, a possibility of a truly human education, and

therefore of a true education of the people.”

The Jena Professor sees clearly enough the task before us all; but

he sees, or sets forth, no possible way of accomplishing it, nor

is there any other way than that which we have set forth that can

afford this sort of liberal education; the electric telegraph was

not discovered twice over.

After all our protests we are in our way utilitarian for no other

study is so remunerative as that of the ‘humanities.’ Let me draw

the reader’s attention to one point. Instability, unrest, among our

wage-earners is the serious danger threatening our social life.

Now it is said that nothing can act but where it is and the class

which acts steadily where it is, at some outpost of empire, on a

home estate, in Parliament, where you will, is the class educated

at Public Schools, that is, men brought up on the ‘humanities.’

Strong language will be used about the deadness and decadence of

these men although they do much of our national work. Their defects

are obvious and manifold, but still, as I say, the public work

that is done is, for the most part, done by men whom no one could

describe as progressive. Is there not some confusion of ideas about

this fetish of progress? Do we not confound progress with movement,

action, assuming that where these are there is necessarily advance?

Whereas much of our activity is like the waves of the sea, going

always and arriving never. What we desire is the still progress

of growth that comes of root striking downwards and fruit urging

upwards. And this progress in character and conduct is not attained

through conditions of environment or influence but only through the

growth of ideas, received with conscious intellectual effort.

It will be possible to have only a little of this strong meat in

Continuation Schools, but a little goes a long way, how far, our

Public School men illustrate; for a careful analysis will bring us

to the conclusion that not Latin and Greek, Games, Athletics, or

environment, but the ‘humanities’ in English alone will bring forth

the stability and efficiency which we desire to see in all classes

of society.

I have said that we have after all a generous allowance of cloth

from which to cut our garment, seven or eight hours a week. In

that time we may get in, page for page, book for book, as full a

complement of the ‘humanities,’ poetry, history, essay, tragedy,

comedy, philosophy, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, as

our public men have imbibed at their schools. To be sure these

do it in the classic tongues while for those there is only plain

English; but however duly we magnify Greek literature we cannot

honestly say that that of England is second to any the world

has yet seen. We can give to the people the thought of the best

minds and we can secure on their part the conscious intellectual

effort, the act of knowing, which bears fruit in capability,

character and conduct. We cannot offer to the people the grace of

scholarship in the allotted time, but no doubt earnest souls will

find a way to get this surpassing excellence also; if there be

profit in ‘grinding at Grammar’ that they must forego, too, but

the inspiration and delight of entering into an intellectual world

full of associations, this they should have, a well of healing and

fountain of delight.

Now a common ground of thought is inestimable in what may be

called its cohesive value; and what we desire to afford to the

nation at large is such another background of thought, sketched in

like that of the Public School man from the books men and women

have read at school, books which made them intimate with Pitt and

Fox, ‘Dick Swiveller,’ ‘Mrs. Quickly,’ with daffodils and clouds

and nightingales as the poets have seen them, with a thousand

promiscuous and seemingly purposeless scenes and sayings which

somehow combine to serve the purpose of a background throwing the

thoughts and incidents of to-day into clear relief. For this reason

we, like the Public Schools, all read the same books, with such an

intensive single reading that for the rest of the lives of these

young people phrases or allusions they come across will kindle in

their eyes that ‘light which never was on sea or land.’ We may hope

that Public Schools will presently add this modicum of English to

their classical studies; then the candidate for election will have

something to appeal to other than the desire to better himself,

which is supposed to dominate every man. By the way, is the paucity

of literary or historical allusions, not in Latin, to be heard

in the House due to the fact that the audience cannot be counted

upon to rise to a reference not included in the well-known school

books? If so, we shall change all that; once the _masses_ read, the

_classes_ must read, too, and the Peace will be signalised by a new

bond of intellectual life in common.

“There is no more dreadful sight,” says Goethe, “than ignorance

in action,” and is not this the sight that is at the present

time dismaying us all? Demos is king to-day, and who may dispute

his right? But let us all give him the chance to become that

philosopher-king who according to an ancient dream was to be the

fit ruler, or rulers, of the people. The hopeful sign is that

Demos himself perceives his lack, and clamours for the humanistic

education in which he sees his salvation.

CHAPTER IV

THE BASIS OF NATIONAL STRENGTH[54]

A LIBERAL EDUCATION FROM A NATIONAL STANDPOINT

I

KNOWLEDGE

We have from time to time given some attention to the failure of

our attempts to educate “The Average Boy,” and it may be useful

to look into one or two fundamental principles upon which this

question and others seem to me to depend. For if our conceptions

of education are heterogeneous and incoherent, naturally, we

shall have a tangle of examination schemes evolved to test our

ill-conceived work.

Educationally, we are in a bad way. We were told some time ago,

in _Across the Bridges_, of the rapid deterioration of the bright

intelligent responsive schoolboy who has passed through the sixth

and seventh standards. Why? we ask. Industrial unrest often

reveals virtue, even heroism of a sort, in the working man, but a

lamentable want of knowledge--lack of education; he appears to have

little insight, imagination, or power of reflection. The tendency

in his class is that “dangerous tendency which we must all do our

best to resist” indicated by Mr. Burns at a public meeting some few

years ago; “the spirit of the horde,” he said, “is being developed;

and whether it is in exhibitions, sports, or legislation, the

individual is becoming less and less important and the mob more

and more so.” And again, “the tendency of the present day in all

modern movements is for great crowds to be brought together to see

other people play; and that is extending not only to play, but to

other fields of life.” Could the industrial movement of to-day be

better diagnosed? Again we ask, Why? As for those young men from

Public Schools who fail in the Dominions, enough has been said

about them; but those other Public School men who succeed in a

measure at outposts of the Empire because of the virtue that is in

them, do they not fail sometimes in an equal measure for lack of

the insight, imagination, intelligence, which come of knowledge? As

for the people who stay at home, “educated” men and women, I write

as an old woman who remembers how in the sixties and seventies

“countenance” was much talked of; “an intelligent countenance,”

“a fine countenance,” “a noble countenance,” were matters of

daily comment. The word has dropped out of use; is it because the

thing signified has dropped out of existence? Countenance is a

manifestation of thought, feeling, intelligence; and it is none of

these, but stolid indifference combined with physical well-being,

that we read in many faces to-day.

If we have these grounds for discontent, education is no doubt

the culprit at the bar, though there never was, I suppose, a

more heroic and devoted body of teachers at work. They get for

themselves the greater blessing of those who give; but the children

suffer, poor little souls; “poured into like a bucket,” they

receive without stint, and little comes of it. There is no lack

of zeal on the part of the teaching profession, but there is a

tendency amongst us to depreciate knowledge and to depreciate our

scholars. Now, knowledge is the material of education, as flour is

the material of bread; there are substitutes for knowledge, no

doubt, as there are for flour. Before the era of free meals I heard

of a little girl in East London whose mother gave her a penny, to

buy dinner for herself and her little sister, when the two set out

for school. The child confided to her teacher that a ha’porth of

aniseed drops “stays your stomach” more than a halfpenny bun. Now,

our schools are worked more or less upon aniseed drops--marks,

prizes, scholarships, blue ribbons, all of which “stay the stomach”

of the boy who does not get the knowledge that he needs. That is

the point. He needs knowledge as much as he needs bread and milk;

his appetite for knowledge is as healthy as his appetite for his

dinner; and an abundant regular supply at short intervals of

various knowledge is a constitutional necessity for the growing

youth as well as for the curious child; and yet we stay his hunger

pangs upon “aniseed drops.”

We do worse. We say, “What is the good of knowledge? Give a boy

professional instruction, whether he is to be a barrister or a

bricklayer, and strike out from his curriculum Greek or geography,

or whatever is not of utilitarian value. Teach him to play the game

and handle the ropes of his calling, and you have done the best for

him.” Now, here is a most mischievous fallacy, an assertion that

a child is to be brought up for the uses of society only and not

for his own uses. Here we get the answer to the repeated question

that suggested itself in a survey of our educational condition. We

launch children upon too arid and confined a life. Now personal

delight, joy in living, is a chief object of education; Socrates

conceived that knowledge is for pleasure, in the sense, not that

knowledge is one source, but is the source of pleasure.

It is for their own sakes that children should get knowledge.

The power to take a generous view of men and their motives, to

see where the greatness of a given character lies, to have one’s

judgment of present events illustrated and corrected by historic

and literary parallels, to have, indeed, the power of comprehensive

judgment--these are admirable assets within the power of every

one according to the measure of his mind; and these are not the

only gains which knowledge affords. The person who can live upon

his own intellectual resources and never know a dull hour (though

anxious and sad hours will come) is indeed enviable in these

days of intellectual inanition, when we depend upon spectacular

entertainments _pour passer le temps_.

If knowledge means so much to us, “What is knowledge?” the reader

asks. We can give only a negative answer. Knowledge is not

instruction, information, scholarship, a well-stored memory. It is

passed, like the light of a torch, from mind to mind, and the flame

can be kindled at original minds only. Thought, we know, breeds

thought; it is as vital thought touches our minds that our ideas

are vitalized, and out of our ideas comes our conduct of life. The

case for reform hardly needs demonstration, but now we begin to see

the way of reform. The direct and immediate impact of great minds

upon his own mind is necessary to the education of a child. Most of

us can get into touch with original minds chiefly through books;

and if we want to know how far a school provides intellectual

sustenance for its scholars, we may ask to see the list of books in

reading during the current term. If the list be short, the scholar

will not get enough mind-stuff; if the books are not various, his

will not be an all-round development; if they are not original, but

compiled at second hand, he will find no material in them for his

intellectual growth. Again, if they are too easy and too direct,

if they tell him straight away what he is to think, he will read,

but he will not appropriate. Just as a man has to eat a good dinner

in order that his physical energies may be stimulated to select

and secrete that small portion which is vital to him, so must the

intellectual energies be stimulated to extract what the individual

needs by a generous supply, and also by a way of presentation that

is not obvious. We have the highest authority for the indirect

method of teaching proper to literature, and especially to poetry.

The parables of Christ remain dark sayings; but what is there more

precious in the world’s store of knowledge?

How injurious then is our habit of depreciating children; we water

their books down and drain them of literary flavour, because we

wrongly suppose that children cannot understand what we understand

ourselves; what is worse, we explain and we question. A few

pedagogic maxims should help us, such as, “Do not explain” “Do not

question,” “Let one reading of a passage suffice,” “Require the

pupil to relate the passage he has read.” The child must read to

know; his teacher’s business is to see that he knows. All the acts

of generalization, analysis, comparison, judgment, and so on, the

mind performs for itself in the act of knowing. If we doubt this,

we have only to try the effect of putting ourselves to sleep by

relating silently and carefully, say, a chapter of Jane Austen or

a chapter of the Bible, read once before going to bed. The degree

of insight, the visualization, that comes with this sort of mental

exercise is surprising.

As I have said, a child in his seventh year will relate _The

Pilgrim’s Progress_, chapter by chapter, though he cannot read it,

and some half-dozen other books of the best we can find for him. In

his eighth or ninth year he works happily with a dozen books at a

time, books of history, adventures, travels, poems. From his tenth

to his twelfth year he reads considerable books of English and

French history, seriously written, Shakespeare’s historical plays,

North’s _Plutarch’s Lives_, and a dozen other worthy books. As he

goes up the school, his reading becomes wider and more difficult,

but every one knows the reading proper at the ages of fifteen,

seventeen, eighteen. The right books are given, but not enough

of them. The reading dietary is too meagre for the making of a

full man. A score of first-rate books should appear in the school

curriculum term by term. The point that I insist upon, however, is

that from his sixth year the child should be an “educated child”

for his age, should love his lesson books, and enjoy a terminal

examination on the books he has read. Children brought up largely

on books compare favourably with those educated on a few books and

many lectures; they have generous enthusiasms, keen sympathies, a

wide outlook and sound judgment, because they are treated from the

first as beings of “large discourse looking before and after.” They

are persons of leisure too, with time for hobbies, because their

work is easily done in the hours of morning school.

It is not necessary to speak of modern languages and mathematics,

field work in natural history, handiwork, etc. Schools are pretty

much agreed about the treatment of these subjects. As for Latin and

Greek, the teaching of these and the possibility of getting in any

work beyond these is a crucial question; but I think it is open to

Public Schoolmasters to discover that, given boys who have read

and thought, and who have maintained the habit of almost perfect

attention that a child begins with, the necessary amount of work in

the Classics may be done in a much shorter time, and that the mind

of the pupil is the more alert because it is engaged in handling

various subjects.

Perhaps, too, some enlightened Headmaster may come to distinguish

between scholarship and knowledge--a distinction which practical

men, like Napoleon, for example, have known how to draw. Probably

there never was a life on which the ‘humanities’ exercised a more

powerful influence; rarely has there been such an example of the

power of the informed mind to conquer the world. Napoleon is the

final answer to the contention that a knowledge of books has no

practical value, for there was, perhaps, no incident in his career

that was not suggested, inspired, illustrated by some historical

precedent, some literary apophthegm. He was, as we know, no

scholar, but he read diligently, even in the midst of absorbing

affairs, Homer, the Bible, the Koran, poetry, history, Plutarch.

Nations grow great upon books as truly as do individuals. We know

how that heroic young Queen, Louisa of Prussia, perceived that the

downfall of her country was not due to Napoleon alone, but also

to national ignorance, and that if Prussia were to rise it must

be through the study of history. So she set herself to work at

the history of modern Europe during that sojourn at Memel, when

she knew poverty as a peasant woman knows it. The disciples of

Kant founded a league of virtue to arouse Prussian students to the

duty of patriotism; Fichte knew how to issue a trumpet call; the

nation became a nation of students, and the son of Queen Louisa

established the German Empire! Alas, that an age should have

come when the ‘humanities’ were proscribed on German soil--and

humanity followed them into exile! A noble view of education was

as righteousness exalting a nation; but, alas, we all know what

universal havoc and disaster have proceeded from the debased and

materialised theory of education promulgated at Munich.

The Danes, again, as we all know, owe their rise out of illiteracy

to the Napoleonic impulse. After we had seized their battleships,

by way of clipping the claws of Bonaparte, they set to work to make

themselves the first farmers in Europe; this they have done in and

through their schools and their continuation schools, where they

get, not technical instruction, but a pretty wide course in history

and literature. As for the Japanese revolution of some fifty years

ago, history has little to show of a finer quality; and this,

again, was the work of a literary people.

If we would not be left behind by the East and the West we must,

as other nations have done, “add to our virtue, knowledge”; and we

are still competent, as some of these are not, to mount from the

bottom rung of the Apostolic educational ladder. It rests with us

to add to our faith, virtue, and to our virtue, knowledge. It is

an unheard of thing that the youth of a great nation should grow

up without those ideals, slow enough in maturing, which are to be

gathered for the most part from wide and wisely directed reading.

II

LETTERS, KNOWLEDGE AND VIRTUE

The following fragments of a valuable letter illustrate the

contention of the foregoing chapter:--

“There is one thing, however, one note of regret, and that is

that one paragraph, that on classical education, was not more

expanded. I am satisfied that your central view covers the whole

truth; and I am going to give you a small individual experience

illustrating this fact--viz., that an early education in the

great books of our own language, read, with enjoyment, by

children and appropriately given to them from year to year, is

the true groundwork of later expansion. Here is the story:--My

three daughters were suckled on Walter Scott and Shakespeare.

Later, about the ages of from ten to twelve, off their own, they

took up Plutarch’s Lives, Bunyan, Defoe, and in the same period

they refused to learn arithmetic and geography, the former on

the ground of its monotony, and the latter, because, although

they loved it, they held that the existing system of teaching

geography was ‘rotten,’ and that geography ought to be learnt by

going to the places. I knew better than to remonstrate. I meekly

suggested that perhaps they would substitute something else in

their curriculum, and they said at once, in an obviously prepared

sentence, ‘That’s just it, we want to learn Latin and harmony.’

Now here comes _your_ point (in that lamentably abbreviated

paragraph):--

‘Given boys (or girls) who have read and thought, and who have

maintained the habit of almost perfect attention that a child

begins with, the necessary amount of work in the classics may be

done in a much shorter time, and the mind of the pupil is the

more alert because it is engaged in handling various subjects.’

Six months later these girls knew more Latin than I learnt in

six years under distinguished scholars with very eminent names.

They could sling passages from Horace appropriately; they knew

the first two Eclogues and half the Æneid by heart; they regarded

Cicero’s Letters to Atticus as a ‘penny post’ affair, and were

quite unduly familiar with the private life of Seneca. But all

this did not interfere with their painting or their horsemanship,

and better authorities on cricket and the Turf I don’t happen to

know. That is the illustrative episode. The point, in my mind, is

that an early education from great books with the large ideas and

the large virtues is the only true foundation of knowledge--the

knowledge worth having.”

This interesting letter brings us straight to a question which I

thought had been pretty fully threshed out; and I tackle it with

diffidence, only because an outsider may see aspects overlooked by

experts. The gist of the charges brought against Public Schools

is,--Classics take up so much time that there is no opportunity for

_Litteræ Humaniores_ in any other form. It is easy to say,--Gain

time by giving up Greek; but, in the first place, Public Schools,

with our old Universities in sequence, are our educational

achievement. Other efforts are experimental, but this one thing we

know--that men are turned out from this course who are practically

unmatched for quality, culture, and power; even the average B.A.

shows up better than his compeers, and a degree in Arts signifies

more than one in any other faculty.

We return thus to my original contention--that letters, primarily,

are the content of knowledge; that if Wellington ever said how

Waterloo was won, it was not on the playing-fields only, but in the

class-rooms of Eton; that Cæsar, Thucydides, _Prometheus Bound_,

have won more battles than we know on fields civil and military.

A little strong meat goes a long way, and even the average Public

School boy turns out a capable man. But, alas, if capable, he is

also ignorant; he does not know the history and literature of

his own country or any other. He has not realised that knowledge

is, not a store, but rather a state that a person remains within

or drops out of. His degree taken, he shuts his books, reads the

newspapers a little, perhaps a magazine or two, but otherwise

occupies himself with the interests of sports, games, shows, or

his employment. What is to be done, we wonder vaguely, to secure

to this average boy some tincture of knowledge and some taste for

knowledge? The expedient of dropping Greek to make room for other

things recurs; but on reflection we say, “No”; for culture begins

with the knowledge that everything has been known and everything

has been perfectly said these two thousand years ago and more.

This knowledge, slowly drummed into a youth, should keep him from

swelled head, from joining in the “We are the people” cry of the

blatant patriot; and there is no better way of knowing a people

than to know something of their own words in their own speech.

It is well, by the way, that we should remember that we have as a

nation an enormous loss to make good; time was, and not so long

ago, when rich and poor were intimately familiar with one of the

three great classical literatures. Men’s thoughts were coloured,

their speech moulded, their conduct more or less governed, by

the pastoral idylls called “Genesis,” the impassioned poetry of

Isaiah, the divine philosophy of John, the rhetoric of Paul--all,

writings, like the rest of the Bible, in what Matthew Arnold calls

“the grand manner.” Here is the well of English undefiled from

which men have drawn the best that our literature holds, as well as

their philosophy of life, their philosophy of history, and that

principal knowledge we are practising to do without--the knowledge

of God. And we wonder that the governing classes should forget how

to rule as those who serve; and that the working man, brought up

on “Readers” in lieu of a great literature, should act with the

obstinate recklessness proper to ignorance.

But to return to the main issue. How shall we instruct the

ignorance and yet retain the classical culture of the average

Public School boy? I should like to suggest, again, with

diffidence, that he, like his more brilliant compeer, is driven

through a mill the outpour of which should be scholarship. Now,

scholarship is an exquisite distinction which it would be ill

for us as a nation to miss; but if all the men in an assemblage

were decorated, who would care to wear an order? Some things are

precious for their rarity, and to put a school in the running

for this goal is as absurd as the ambition of the little boy who

meant to be a Knight of the Garter when he grew up. The thing is

not to be done; some men are born to be scholars, as the shape

of their heads testifies. The rest of us take pleasure in their

decoration, but are not envious, for scholarship is not the best

thing, and does not necessarily imply that vital touch of mind

upon mind out of which is got knowledge. As for erudition, we may

leave that out of count, it is hardly even an aim at the present

time. The geniuses, as one to some thousands, say, of our best, do

not trouble themselves much about the regimen we offer--classics

or modern languages, or what not; an idle tale, a puppet show, the

meanest flower that blows, is enough for them. Anyway, they take

care of themselves, and we come back to the average boy.

He must learn his Greek and Latin, but there is an easier way;

the girls mentioned in the letter I cite had hit upon it. That

favourite girl pupil of Vittorino’s who spoke and wrote Greek

with “remarkable purity” at twelve, having, so to speak, done

with Latin at an earlier age--she, we may be sure, had not been

through the grammar school grind. Nor had any of the learned ladies

of the Italian and the French Renaissance, the list of whose

accomplishments leaves us breathless. While still children, we know

how early they married, their knowledge of the classics was copious

(and not too wholesome), they knew two or three modern languages,

could treat the wounded, nurse the sick, prepare simples, govern

great households, ride to chase, yes, and kill too! and do

exquisite embroidery. Our own women of the Tudor times appear

likewise to have been “infinitely informed” and to have carried

their learning gaily; Maria Theresa, by no means a learned lady,

could make speeches and converse with her Magyar nobles in Latin,

and they could respond, neither knowing the native speech of the

other. If these things were true of girls and women, how much more

was expected of boys and men!

Are we persons of less intelligence, or how did they do it all?

_Every preparatory school knows how._ Perhaps few boys enter Public

Schools who could not pass “Responsions,” that is, who are not,

as far as Greek goes, ready for Oxford. I once heard a Headmaster

say:--

“A boy does as much Latin now by the age of twelve as he will

ever need for examination purposes, and he spends the next eight

years in doing over again and again the same work! A clever boy

of twelve could easily pass Responsions.”

A headmaster in Newfoundland mentions in his school report for 1905

a boy who “began Greek in October and passed the Oxford Responsions

in January.”

There is a leakage somewhere, and there is overlapping, and both

are due to the examinations upon which scholarships are awarded.

Something must be done, because Public Schools, with all their

splendid records, are not effective in the sense that they turn

out the average boy a good all-round man. For better or for worse,

who knows? the Democracy is coming in like a flood, and our old

foundations will be tossed about in the welter unless we make haste

to strengthen our weak places. Might not a commission--consisting

of two or three headmasters, as many preparatory school masters,

University “Dons,” and public men (once public school boys and

now the fathers of such boys) look into the question and devise

examination tests which shall safeguard Letters, ancient and

modern, without putting too high a premium upon scholarship?

Once the hands of schoolmasters were united, they would no doubt

devise means by which our friend, the average boy, would get such

a knowledge of the classics as should open life-long resources

to him. Like the ‘Baron of Bradwardine’ he would go about with a

pocket Livy (as he would say, “Titus Livius,”) to be read, not

laboured at a few lines at a time: _The Seven against Thebes_,

_Iphigenia in Aulis_, the few tragedies left to us by the great

dramatists would form part of the familiar background of his

thoughts. He would know somewhat of the best that has been written

in Greek and Latin, whether through printed translations or through

the text itself rendered in the sort of running translation which

some masters know how to give. _Pari passu_, he would do his share

of gerund-grind, and construe the two or three books of his present

limited acquaintance. But his limitations would be recognised, and

he would not be required to turn out Greek and Latin verse.

Meantime his master will require him to know pretty intimately a

hundred worthy books in addition to the great novels--to be read

in class periods, in vacation, and in leisure time--his knowledge

of each to be tested by a single bit of oral description or

written work in verse or prose. “Ground he at Grammar,” sums up

every successful school boy’s record as it did that of the dead

“Grammarian”; but the ten or twelve years of school life should

yield more than this.

I say nothing now about the teaching of science, for which most

schools provide, except that for our generation, science seems

to me to be the way of intellectual advance. All the same, the

necessity incumbent upon us at the moment is to inculcate a

knowledge of _Letters_. Men and their motives, the historical

sequence of events, principles for the conduct of life, in fact,

practical philosophy, is what the emergencies of the times require

us to possess, and to be able to communicate. These things are not

to be arrived at by any short cut of economics, eugenics, and the

like, but are the gathered harvests of many seasons’ sowing of

poetry, literature, history. The nation is in sore need of wise

men, and these must be made out of educated boys.

III

KNOWLEDGE, REASON, AND REBELLION

We have been very busy about education these sixty years or

more--diligently digging, pruning, watering; but there is something

amiss with our tree of knowledge; its fruits, both good and evil,

are of a mean, crabbed sort, with so little to choose between them

that superior persons find it hard to determine which is which.

To examine the individual apples would be a long process, but let

me take one at a venture: is it not true that a conviction of

irresponsibility characterises our generation?

If this be true, seeing that we all think as we have been brought

up to think, our education is at fault. Faulty education is to

blame if private property be recklessly injured in broad day, if

working men do vital injury to their country thinking to serve

their caste, if there be people who love to have it so, as long

as their own interests are immune. The melancholy fact is that

the people who do damage to private property, to public interests,

and to that more delicate asset of a nation, public opinion, are

all by way of being educated in their several degrees. All of them

can write and speak clearly, think logically if not sincerely,

and exhibit a certain practical ability. It is true that the War

has changed much and has brought us a temporary salvation, but

education must secure to us our gains or the last state of the

nation may be worse than the first.

No doubt we are better and not worse than our forefathers; and,

where we err, it is through ignorance. “Through ignorance ye did

it,” was said of the worst crime that men have done; and that

appalling offence was wrought for no worse reason than because it

is the habit of more or less lettered ignorance to follow specious

arguments to logical conclusions. The sapient East knows all

about it. Lady Lugard tells us how “the Copts have a saying that

‘in the beginning when God created things He added to everything

its second.’ ‘I go to Syria,’ said Reason; ‘I go with you,’ said

Rebellion.” We need not follow the other pairs that went forth, but

still Reason is apt to be accompanied by Rebellion when it sets out

in search of a logical issue.

For it is a fatal error to think that reason can take the place of

knowledge, that reason is infallible, that reasonable conclusions

are of necessity right conclusions. Reason is a man’s servant,

not his master; and behaves like a good and faithful servant--a

sort of ‘Caleb Balderstone,’ ready to lie royally in his master’s

behoof--and bring logical demonstration of any premiss which the

will chooses to entertain. But the will is the man, the will

chooses; and the man must _know_, if the will is to make just

and discriminating decisions. This is what Shakespeare, as great

a philosopher as a poet, set himself to teach us, line upon

line, precept upon precept. His ‘Leontes,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Lear,’

‘Prospero,’ ‘Brutus,’ preach on the one text--that a man’s reason

brings certain infallible proofs of any notions he has wilfully

chosen to take up. There is no escape for us, no short cut; art is

long, especially the art of living.

In the days when the working man represented only the unit of

his family he picked up enough knowledge to go on with at church

and chapel, by scrutinizing his neighbour’s doings, in the

village parliament, held at pump or “public,” from the weekly

news-sheet. But we have changed all that: bodies of working men

have learned by means of union to act with a momentum which may

be paralysing or propelling _according to whether the men have

or have not knowledge_. Without knowledge, Reason carries a man

into the wilderness and Rebellion joins company. The man is not

to be blamed: it is a glorious thing to perceive your mind, your

reasoning power, acting of its own accord as it were and producing

argument after argument in support of any initial notion; how is

a man to be persuaded, when he wakes up to this tremendous power

he has of involuntary reasoning, that his conclusions are not

necessarily right, but rather that he who reasons without knowledge

is like a child playing with edged tools? Following his reason,

he acquires this and the other sort of freedom; but is it not

written:--

“Nor yet

(Grave this upon thy heart!) if spiritual things

Be lost through apathy, or scorn, or fear,

Shalt thou thy humbler franchises support,

However hardly won or justly dear.”

If, then, the manners and the destinies of men are shaped by

knowledge, it may be well to inquire further into the nature

of that evasive entity. Matthew Arnold helps us by offering a

threefold classification which appeals to common sense--knowledge

of God, knowledge of men, and knowledge of the natural world;

or, as we should say, Divinity, the Humanities, and Science.

But I think we may go further and say that Letters, if not (as

I said before) the main content of knowledge, constitute anyway

the container--the wrought salver, the exquisite vase, even the

alabaster box to hold the ointment.

If a man cannot think without words, if he who thinks with words

will certainly express his thoughts, what of the monosyllabic habit

that is falling upon men of all classes? The chatter of many women

and some men does not count, for thought is the last thing it is

meant to express. The Greeks believed that a training in the use

and power of words was the chief part of education, recognising

that if the thought fathers the word, so does the word in turn

father the thought. They concerned themselves with no language,

ancient or modern, save their own, but of that they acquired a

consummate appreciation. With the words came the great thoughts,

expressed in whatever way the emergencies of the State called

for--in wise laws, victorious battles, glorious temples, sculpture,

drama. For great thoughts anticipate great works; and these come

only to a people conversant with the great thoughts that have been

written and said. In what strength did the youngest and greatest

of our Premiers bring about the “revival of England”? He was

fortified by illimitable reading, by a present sense of a thousand

impossibilities that had been brought to pass--of a thousand

things so wisely said that wise action was a necessary outcome.

To say that we as a nation are suffering from our contemptuous

depreciation of knowledge is to say that we scorn Letters, the

proper vehicle of _all_ knowledge.

Let us glance at the three departments of knowledge to see in

regard to which of the three we are most in error. Some of us are

content with such knowledge of Divinity as is to be picked up from

the weekly sermon heard in church, but even with the qualification

of a degree in Arts I wonder do our divines lift us as much as

they might into that serener region where words fitly spoken beget

thoughts of peace and holy purpose? That worship is the main end

of our Church services is a sublime ideal, but, “The Way, without

which there is no going, the Truth, without which there is no

knowing, the Life, without which there is no living,” must needs

be set before us in “words that burn,” and we wait for preachers

like those of a bygone day, “Whose pulpit thunders shook a nation’s

soul.”

It is possible that the Church may err in keeping us underfed upon

that knowledge which is life, but she does not send us away empty.

We get some little share, too, of literature, poetry, history: a

phrase, a line, lights up a day for us; to read of Charles Fox’s

having said, “Poetry’s everything,” of that black conqueror of the

Soudan who said, “Without learning life would have neither pleasure

nor savour”--these things do us good, we cannot tell why.

But there is a region of apparent sterility in our intellectual

life. Science says of literature, “I’ll none of it,” and science is

the preoccupation of our age. Whatever we study must be divested to

the bone, and the principle of life goes with the flesh we strip

away: history expires in the process, poetry cannot come to birth,

religion faints; we sit down to the dry bones of science and say,

Here is knowledge, all the knowledge there is to know. “I think

that is very wonderful,” a little girl wrote in an examination

paper after trying to explain why a leaf is green. That little girl

had found the principle--admiration, wonder--which makes science

vital, and without wonder her highest value is, not spiritual, but

utilitarian. A man might as well collect matchboxes, like those

charming people in one of Anatole France’s novels, as search for

diatoma, unless the wonder of the world be ever fresh before his

eyes. In the eighteenth century science was alive, quick with

emotion, and therefore it found expression in literature. Still, a

Lister, a Pasteur, moves us, and we feel that in one department of

science, anyway, men stirred by the passion of humanity (“letters”

at the fountain head?) are doing monumental work.

But for the most part science as she is taught leaves us cold;

the utility of scientific discoveries does not appeal to the best

that is in us, though it makes a pretty urgent and general appeal

to our lower avidities. But the fault is not in science--that

mode of revelation which is granted to our generation, may we

reverently say?--but in our presentation of it by means of facts

and figures and demonstrations that mean no more to the general

audience than the point demonstrated, never showing the wonder and

magnificent reach of the law unfolded. The Hebrew poet who taught

us that “Breadcorn is bruised ... because his God doth instruct him

and doth teach him,” glorified life. Coleridge has revealed the

innermost secret, whether of science or literature: speaking on the

genesis of an idea, he says, “When the idea of Nature (presented

to chosen minds by a Higher Power than Nature herself),” etc. The

man who would write for us about the true inwardness of wireless

telegraphy, say, how truly it was a discovery, a revealing of that

which was there and had been there all along, might make our hearts

burn within us. No doubt there are many scientific men who are also

men of letters, and some scientific books as inspiring as great

poems--but science is waiting for its literature; and, though we

cannot live in shameful ignorance and must get what we can out of

the sources open to us, science as it is too commonly taught tends

to leave us crude in thought and hard and narrow in judgment.

We are told that in times of great upheaval it profits not to cast

blame on this or that section of the community; that we are all to

blame even for the offences of individuals; and we partly believe

it because our fathers have told us; thus did the prophets humble

themselves before God, and bemoaned each his exceeding great sin in

the sin of his people. We, too, are meek under chastisements, but

we are vague and, to that extent, insincere. Perhaps our duty is

to give serious thought to the problems of our national life; then

we may come to realise that man does not live by bread alone; we

may perceive that “bread” (or cake!) is our sole and final offer

to all persons of all classes; that we are losing our sense of any

values excepting money values; that our young men no longer see

visions, and are attracted to a career in proportion as “there’s

money in it.” Nothing can come out of nothing, and, if we bring up

the children of the nation on sordid hopes and low ambitions, need

we be surprised that every man plays for his own hand?

We recognise now and then, when the shoe pinches, that the nation

is in the threes of a revolution, but do we take trouble to find

out the cause of “industrial unrest” and the correct attitude

of the public towards that unrest? The revolution which is in

progress may, it seems to me, develop on either of two lines: the

men may get those “humbler franchises” they covet, but at the

loss of “spiritual things”--such as the character for fair play,

straight dealing, and loyalty to contract, which we like to think

of as distinctively English. But what about the warning that these

“humbler franchises” will be likewise lost? Trade unionism is no

new thing; centuries ago and for centuries, as we know, England

and Europe were under the dominion of those states within the

State--the Trades Guilds. At this distance of time we can afford

to admire these for the spiritual things to which they held fast;

their religious organisation, the thorough training they afforded

to their apprentices, and the obligation every member of a guild

was under to use just weights and measures and to turn out first

rate work of whatever kind. But, notwithstanding these moral

safeguards, the tyranny of the guilds became insupportable, and

they disappeared into the limbo of things no longer serviceable.

Could any dream of Socialism, again, offer more perfect conditions

than did the Russian village communes? But these too established a

tyranny which was felt to be more oppressive than serfdom itself:

the _Mir_ disappeared, lost in that Gehenna which engulfed the

guilds.

Wordsworth’s prophetic lines should instruct us. “However hardly

won or justly dear” those humbler franchises for which men are

standing out in their tens of thousands with unanimity, courage,

devotion to a cause justified by their REASON, they will not be

able to support those same franchises if spiritual things, the real

things of life, be lost in gaining them. Therefore we may predict

that the present movement may well issue in worse things but will

not issue in the triumph of either trade unionism or syndicalism.

Here is our opportunity. We blame the workmen for their

irresponsible action, for what seems to us the reckless way in

which the poorest are impoverished and multitudes of workers are

compelled to unwilling idleness. But those of us who are neither

miners nor owners may not allow ourselves irresponsible thought or

speech, and we may contribute our quota towards appeasement. It is

within everybody’s province to influence public opinion, if it be

only the opinion of two or three; we may raise the whole question

to a higher plane, the plane of those spiritual things--duty,

responsibility, brotherly love (towards all men)--which make the

final appeal. We could not, and we need not try to, obstruct the

revolution of which we are vaguely conscious, but we may help

to make it a turn of the wheel which shall bring us out of the

darkness of a Simplon Tunnel into the light and glory of a Lombard

plain. We may, respecting the claims of working men, perceive that

they demand too little, and that the things they demand are not

those which matter. Even the shock of a revolution is not too high

a price for an experience which should convince us that knowledge

is the basis of a nation’s strength.

IV

NEW AND OLD CONCEPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

I have so far advanced that “knowledge” is undefined and probably

indefinable; that it is a state out of which persons may pass and

into which they may return, but never a store upon which they

may draw; that knowledge-hunger is as universal as bread-hunger;

that our best provision for conveying knowledge is marvellously

successful with the best men, but rather futile with the second

best; that persons whose education has not enriched them with

knowledge store up information (statistics and other facts),

upon which they use their reasoning powers; that the attempt to

reason without knowledge is disastrous; and that, during the

present distress, England is, for various economical reasons, in

a condition of intellectual inanition consequent upon a failure

in her food supply, in this case the supply of food proper for

the mind. I have glanced at Knowledge under the three headings

suggested by one who speaks with authority, and have contended

that, even if the knowledge be divisible, the vehicle by which

it is carried is one and indivisible, and that it is generally

impossible for the mind to receive knowledge except through the

channel of letters.

But the mediæval mind had, as we know, a more satisfactory

conception of knowledge than we have arrived at. Knowledge is for

us a thing of shreds and patches, knowledge of this and of that,

with yawning gaps between.

The scholastic mediæval mind, probably working on the scattered

hints which the Scriptures offer, worked out a sublime _Filosofica

della Religione Cattolica_, pictured, for example, in the great

fresco painted by Simone Memmi and Taddeo Gaddi (which Ruskin

has taught us to know), and implied in “The Adoration of the

Lamb” painted by the two Van Eycks. In the first picture we get

a Pentecostal Descent, first, upon the cardinal virtues and the

Christian graces, then, upon prophets and apostles, and below these

upon the seven Liberal Arts represented each by its captain figure,

Cicero, Aristotle, Zoroaster, etc., none of them Christian, not

one of them a Hebrew. Here we get the magnificent idea that all

knowledge (undebased) comes from above and is conveyed to minds

which are, as Coleridge says, previously prepared to receive it;

and, further, that it comes to a mind so prepared, without question

as to whether it be the mind of pagan or Christian; a truly liberal

catholic idea, it seems to me, corresponding marvellously with the

facts of life. As sublime and even more explicit is the Promethean

fable which informed the Greek mind. With the sense of a sudden

plunge we come down to our own random and ineffectual notions, and

are tempted to cry with Wordsworth,--

“Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,”

and know that a God had brought gifts of knowledge to men at awful

cost, than to sit serene in the vague belief that knowledge arrives

in incoherent particles, no one knows how and no one knows whence;

or that it is self-generated in a man here and there who gets out

of himself new insight into the motions of mind and heart, a new

perception of the laws of life, the hint of a new amelioration in

the condition of men.

Because the notion that we entertain of knowledge as being

heterogeneous lies at the root of our heterogeneous theories of

education, it may be as well to quote a passage from Ruskin’s

description of that picture in the chapel of the Church of Santa

Maria Novella to which I have referred:--

“ ... On this side and the opposite side of the Chapel are

represented by Simon Memmi’s hand, the teaching power of the

Spirit of God and the saving power of the Christ of God in the

world according to the understanding of Florence in his time.

“We will take the side of intellect first. Beneath the pouring

forth of the Holy Spirit in the point of the arch beneath are the

three Evangelical Virtues. Without these, says Florence, you can

have no science. Without Love, Faith and Hope--no intelligence.

Under these are the four Cardinal Virtues ... Temperance,

Prudence, Justice, Fortitude. Under these are the great Prophets

and Apostles.... Under the line of Prophets, as powers summoned

by their voices are the mythic figures of the seven theological

or spiritual and the seven geological or natural sciences; and

under the feet of each of them the figure of its Captain-teacher

to the world.” (_Mornings in Florence._)

That is, the Florentines of the Middle Ages believed in “the

teaching power of the Spirit of God,” believed not only that

the seven Liberal Arts were fully under the direct outpouring

of the Holy Ghost, but that every fruitful idea, every original

conception, be it in geometry, or grammar, or music, was directly

derived from a Divine source.

Whether we receive it or not, and the Scriptures abundantly support

such a theory regarding the occurrence of knowledge, we cannot fail

to perceive that here we have a harmonious and ennobling scheme

of education and philosophy. It is a pity that the exigencies of

his immediate work prevented Ruskin from inquiring further into

the origin, the final source, of knowledge, but we may continue

the inquiry for ourselves. In “the teaching power of the Spirit

of God” we have a pregnant and inspiring phrase. Supposing that we

accept this mediæval philosophy tentatively for present relief,

what would be our gains?

First, the enormous relief afforded by a sense of unity of purpose,

of progressive evolution, in the education of the race. It induces

great ease of mind to think that knowledge is dealt out to us

according to our preparedness and according to our needs; that God

whispers in the ear of the man who is ready in order that he may be

the vehicle to carry the new knowledge to the rest of us. “God has

a few of us whom He whispers in the ear,” ‘Abt Vogler’ is made to

say; and another poet causes his Explorer to cry:--

“God chose me for His whisper, and I’ve found it, and it’s yours!”

Next, that knowledge, in this light, is no longer sacred and

secular, great and trivial, practical and theoretical. All

knowledge, dealt out to us in such portions as we are ready for, is

sacred; knowledge is, perhaps, a beautiful whole, a great unity,

embracing God and man and the universe, but having many parts

which are not comparable with one another in the sense of less or

more, because all are necessary and each has its functions. Next,

we perceive that knowledge and the mind of man are to each other

as are air and the lungs. The mind lives by means of knowledge;

stagnates, faints, perishes, deprived of this necessary atmosphere.

That, it is not for a man to choose, “I will learn this or that,

the rest is not my concern”; still less is it for parent or

schoolmaster to limit a child to less than he can get at of the

whole field of knowledge; for, in the domain of mind at least

as much as in that of morals or religion, man is under a Divine

Master; he has to know as he has to eat.

That, there is not one period of life, our school days, in which

we sit down to regular meals of intellectual diet, but that we must

eat every day in order to live every day.

That, knowledge and what is known as “learning” are not to be

confounded; learning may still be an available store when it is

not knowledge; but by knowledge one grows, becomes more of a

person, and that is all that there is to show for it. We sometimes

wonder at the simplicity and modesty of persons whose knowledge

is matter of repute; but they are not hiding their light; they

are not aware of any unusual possessions; they have nothing to

show but themselves, but we feel the force of their personalities.

Now, forceful personalities, persons of weight and integrity, of

decision and sound judgment, are what the country is most in need

of; and, if we propose to bring such persons up for the public

service, the gradual inception of knowledge is one condition

amongst others.

There are various delightfully “new” educational systems in favour,

in all of which a grain of knowledge is presented in a gallon of

warm diluent. We have the theory that it does not matter what a

child learns, but only how he learns it; which is as sound as,

It does not matter what a child eats, but only how he eats it,

therefore feed him on sawdust! Then, we have Rousseau’s primitive

man theory, that a child must get all his knowledge through his own

senses and by his own wits, as if there were no knowledge waiting

to be passed on by the small torch-bearer; and there is the theory

which obtained in Catholic England, exemplified in more than one

of the Waverley Novels, in the sports purveyed for her tenantry

by ‘Lady Margaret Bellenden,’ for example. Those men and maidens

had been trained as children to be “supple, active, healthy, with

senses alert, ready for dance and song, with an eye and ear ready

for the beautiful, intelligent, happy, capable.” (I quote from a

valuable letter in _The Times_). What with our morris-dances,

pageants, living pictures, miracle plays, and so on, we are

reviving the Stuart educational ideals, and no doubt we do well to

aim at increasing the general joy. But our age requires more of us;

in the sort of self-activity and self-expression implied in these

and in half a dozen other educational theories, knowledge plays no

part, and the city _gamin_ exhibits in perfection every quality

of gaiety, alert intelligence, delight in shows, which we set

ourselves to cultivate.

“With all thy getting, get understanding,” is the message for our

needs, and understanding is, in one sense, the conscious act of the

mind in apprehending knowledge, which is in fact relative, and does

not exist for any person until that person’s mind acts upon the

intellectual matter presented to it. “Why will ye not understand?”

is the repeated and poignant question of the Gospels.

That is what ails us as a nation, we do not understand; not

ignorant persons only, but educated men and women, employ

fallacious arguments, offer prejudices for principles, and

platitudes for ideas. If it be argued that these failures are

due less to ignorance than to insincerity, I should reply that

insincerity is an outcome of ignorance; the darkened intelligence

cannot see clearly. “The day is unto them that know,” but knowledge

is by no means the facile acquirement of those who, according to

Ruskin, “cram to pass and not to know.”

I would not be understood as passing strictures upon the vast

and excellent educational work nearly all teachers are doing;

it is impossible to go into an Elementary School without being

impressed by the competence of the teachers and the intelligence

of the children; I have already paid a worthless tribute to Public

Schools, and should like here to add a word of affectionate

and hearty appreciation of the High School girl as I know her,

thoughtful and well educated--a person quite undeserving of the

slings and arrows of outrageous criticism too freely aimed at

her. As for our new Universities, they remove the stigma under

which many of us have suffered in presence of the numerous centres

of intellectual life which add dignity and grace to continental

cities. The new Universities are full of promise for the land.

We have, no doubt, arrived at a good starting place, but we may

not consider that the journey is accomplished. I need not repeat

the charges to which we have laid ourselves open because of our

ignorance, but I shall endeavour to take a closer survey of the

field of education as regarded from the standpoint of knowledge

and the innate affinities existing in the mind with that knowledge

which is proper for it. For the present the need is that “abstract

knowledge” should present itself to practical persons as the crying

demand of the nation; the “mandate,” let us say, pronounced by

certain general failures to understand the science of relations,

and that other neglected form of knowledge, “the science of the

proportion of things.”

V

EDUCATION AND THE FULLNESS OF LIFE

“I must live my life!” said the notorious bandit who before the War

terrorized Paris; and we have heard the sort of cant often, even

before _The Doll’s House_ gave to “self-expression” the dignity of

a cult; nevertheless, the brigand Bonnot has done an ill turn to

society, for a misguiding theory neatly put is more dangerous than

an ill-example.

We are tired of the man who claims to live his life at the general

expense, of the girl who will live hers to her family’s annoyance

or distress; but there really is a great opportunity open to the

nation which will set itself to consider what the life of a man

should be and will give each individual a chance to live his life.

We are doing something; we are trying to open the book of nature

to children by the proper key--knowledge, acquaintance by look and

name, if not more, with bird and flower and tree; we see, too,

that the magic of poetry makes knowledge vital, and children and

grown-ups quote a verse which shall add blackness to the ashbud,

tender wonder to that “flower in the crannied wall,” a thrill

to the song of the lark. As for the numerous field clubs of the

northern towns, the members of which, weavers, miners, artisans,

reveal themselves as accomplished botanists, birdmen, geologists,

their Saturday rambles mean not only “life,” but splendid joy. It

is to be hoped that the opportunities afforded in the schools will

prepare women to take more part in these excursions; at present the

work done is too thorough for their endurance and for their slight

attainments.

In another direction we are doing well; we are so made that

every dynamic relation, be it leap-frog or high-flying, which we

establish with Mother Earth, is a cause of joy; we begin to see

this and are encouraging swimming, dancing, hockey, and so on, all

instruments of present joy and permanent health. Again, we know

that the human hand is a wonderful and exquisite instrument to be

used in a hundred movements exacting delicacy, direction and force;

every such movement is a cause of joy as it leads to the pleasure

of execution and the triumph of success. We begin to understand

this and make some efforts to train the young in the deft handling

of tools and the practice of handicrafts. Some day, perhaps, we

shall see apprenticeship to trades revived, and good and beautiful

work enforced. In so far, we are laying ourselves out to secure

that each shall “live his life”; and that, not at his neighbour’s

expense; because, so wonderful is the economy of the world that

when a man really lives his life he benefits his neighbour as

well as himself; we all thrive in the well-being of each. We are

perceiving, too, that a human being is endowed with an ear attuned

to harmony and melody, with a voice from which music may issue,

hands whose delicate action may draw forth sounds in enthralling

sequence. With the ancient Greeks, we begin to realise that music

is a necessary part of education. So, too, of pictorial art; at

last we understand that every one can draw, and that, because to

draw is delightful, every one should be taught how; that every one

delights in pictures, and that education is concerned to teach him

what pictures to delight in.

A person may sing and dance, enjoy music and natural beauty, sketch

what he sees, have satisfaction in his own good craftsmanship,

labour with his hands at honest work, perceiving that work is

better than wages; may live his life in various directions, the

more the merrier. A certain pleasant play of the intellect attends

the doing of all these things; his mind is agreeably exercised;

he thinks upon what he is doing, often with excitement, sometimes

with enthusiasm. He says, “I must live my life,” and he lives it

in as many of these ways as are open to him; no other life is

impoverished to supply his fullness, but, on the contrary, the sum

of general joy in well-being is increased both through sympathy and

by imitation.

This is the sort of ideal that is obtaining in our schools and

in the public mind, so that the next generation bid fair to be

provided with many ways of living their lives, ways which do not

encroach upon the lives of others. Here is the contribution of our

generation to the science of education, and it is not an unworthy

one; we perceive that a person is to be brought up in the first

place for his own uses, and after that for the uses of society;

but, as a matter of fact, the person who “lives his life” most

completely is also of most service to others because he contains

within him provision for many serviceable activities which are

employed in living his life; and, besides, there is a negative

advantage to the community in the fact that the man is able to live

on his own resources.

But a man is not made up only of eyes to see, a heart to enjoy,

limbs delightful in the using, hands satisfied with perfect

execution: life in all these kinds is open more or less to all

but the idly depraved. But what of man’s eager, hungry, restless,

insatiable mind? True, we teach him the mechanical art of reading

while he is at school, but we do not teach him to read; he has

little power of attention, a poor vocabulary, little habit of

conceiving any life but his own; to add to the gate-money at a

football match is his notion of adventure and diversion.

We are, in fact, only taking count of the purlieus of that vast

domain which pertains to every man in right of his human nature.

We neglect mind. We need not consider brain; a duly nourished and

duly exercised mind takes care of its physical organ provided that

organ also receives its proper material nourishment. But our fault,

our exceeding great fault, is that we keep our own minds and the

minds of our children shamefully underfed. The mind is a spiritual

octopus, reaching out limbs in every direction to draw in enormous

rations of that which under the action of the mind itself becomes

knowledge. Nothing can stale its infinite variety; the heavens and

the earth, the past, the present, and future, things great and

things minute, nations and men, the universe, all are within the

scope of the human intelligence. But there would appear to be, as

we have seen, an unsuspected unwritten law concerning the nature of

the “material” which is converted into knowledge during the act of

apprehension. The idea of the _Logos_ did not come by chance to the

later Greeks; “The Word” is not a meaningless title applied to the

second Person of the Trinity; it is not without significance that

every utterance which fell from Him is marked by exquisite literary

fitness; (a child’s comment on a hymn that was read to her was,

“that is not poetry; Jesus would have said it _much_ better”);

in rendering an account of His august commission Christ said:--“I

have given unto them _the words_ which Thou gavest me”; and one

disciple voiced the rest when he said, “Thou hast _the words_ of

eternal life.” The Greeks knew better than we that words are more

than things, more than events; with all primitive peoples rhetoric

appears to have been a power; the grand old sayings which we have

scorned as inventions are coming to their own again, because, what

modern is capable of such inventions? Men move the world, but the

motives which move men are conveyed by words. Now, a person is

limited by the number of things he is able to call by their names,

qualify by appropriate epithets; this is no mere pedantic ruling,

it belongs to that unfathomable mystery we call human nature; and

the modern notion of education, with its shibboleth of “things

not words,” is intrinsically demoralizing. The human intelligence

demands letters, literature, with a more than bread-hunger. It is

almost within living memory how the newly emancipated American

negroes fell upon books as the famished Israelites fell upon food

in the deserted camp of Sennacherib.

Only as he has been and is nourished upon books is a man able to

“live his life.” A great deal of mechanical labour is necessarily

performed in solitude; the miner, the farm-labourer, cannot think

all the time of the block he is hewing, the furrow he is ploughing;

how good that he should be figuring to himself the trial scene in

the _Heart of Midlothian_, the “high-jinks” in _Guy Mannering_,

that his imagination should be playing with ‘Ann Page’ or ‘Mrs.

Quickly,’ or that his labour goes the better “because his secret

soul a holy strain repeats.” People, working people, do these

things. Many a one can say out of a rich experience, “My mind to me

a kingdom is”; many a one cries with Browning’s ‘Paracelsus,’ “God!

Thou art mind! Unto the master-mind, Mind should be precious.

Spare my mind alone!” We know how “_Have mynde_” appears on the

tiles paving the choir of St. Cross; but “_mynde_” like body, must

have its meat.

Faith has grown feeble in these days, hope faints in our heavy

ways, but charity waxes strong; we would make all men millionaires

if we could, or, at any rate, take from the millionaires to give

to the multitude. No doubt some beneficent and venturous Robin

Hood of a minister will arise (has arisen?) to take steps in

that direction; but when all has been done in the way of social

amelioration we shall not have enabled men to “live their lives”

unless we have given them a literary education of such sort that

they choose to continue in the pleasant places of the mind. “That

is all very well in theory,” some one objects, “but look at the

Masses, are they able to receive Letters? When they talk it is in

journalese, and anything in the nature of a book must be watered

down and padded to suit their comprehension.” But is it not true

that working men talk in “journalese” because it is only the

newspapers that do them the grace to meet them frankly on their

own level? Neither school education nor life has put books in

their way, and their adoption of the only literary speech that

offers but proves a natural aptitude for Letters. One cannot always

avoid appeal to the authority one knows to be final, and I will

not apologise for citing the fact at which no doubt we have all

wondered that Christ should expose the profoundest philosophy to

the multitude, the “Many,” whom even Socrates contemns.

May I quote, with apologies to the writer, a letter signed “A

Working Man,” written in answer to one of mine which was honoured

by being reprinted in _The Times Weekly Edition_? (It is good, by

the way, that such a journal should be in the hands of working

men). My correspondent “thanks Heaven that there are still a few

persons left in this country who regard education as somewhat

different from a means of _keeping a shop_.” We may all thank

Heaven that there are working men who value knowledge for its own

sake and hate to have it presented to them as a means of getting on.

The fact is, Letters make a universal appeal because they respond

to certain innate affinities: young Tennysons, De Quinceys, and

the like, are, as we all know, inordinate readers, but these are

capable of foraging on their own account; it is for the average,

the dull, and the backward boy I would lay urgent claim to a

literary education; the minds of such as these respond to this

and to no other appeal, and they turn out perfectly intelligent

persons, open to knowledge by many avenues. For working men whose

intelligence is in excess of their education, Letters are the

accessible vehicle of knowledge; having learned the elements of

reading, writing, and summing, it is unnecessary to trouble them

with any other “beggarly elements”; their natural intelligence and

mature minds make them capable of dealing with difficulties as they

occur; and for further elucidation every working men’s club should

have an encyclopædia. Some men naturally take to learning, and

will struggle manfully with their Latin grammar, and Cicero, their

Euclid and trigonometry. Happy they! But the general conclusion

remains, that for men and women of all ages, all classes, and

all complexions of mind, Letters are an imperative and daily

requirement to satisfy that universal mind-hunger, the neglect of

which gives rise to emotional disturbances, and, as a consequence,

to evils that dismay us.

VI

KNOWLEDGE IN LITERARY FORM

I have so far urged that knowledge is necessary to men, and that,

in the initial stages, it must be conveyed through a literary

medium, whether it be knowledge of physics or of Letters, because

there would seem to be some inherent quality in mind which prepares

it to respond to this form of appeal and no other. I say in the

initial stages, because possibly, when the mind becomes conversant

with knowledge of a given type, it unconsciously translates the

driest formulæ into living speech; perhaps it is for some such

reason that mathematics seem to fall outside this rule of literary

presentation; mathematics, like music, is a speech in itself, a

speech irrefragably logical, of exquisite clarity, meeting the

requirements of mind.

To consider Letters as the staple of education is no new thing; nor

is the suggestion new that to turn a young person into a library

is to educate him. But here we are brought to a stand; the mind

demands method, orderly presentation, as inevitably as it demands

knowledge; and it may be that our educational misadventures are due

to the fact that we have allowed ourselves to take up any haphazard

ordering that is recommended with sufficient pertinacity.

But no one can live without a philosophy which points out the

order, means and end of effort, intellectual or other; to fail

in discovering this is to fall into melancholia, or more active

madness: so we go about picking up a maxim here, a motto there,

an idea elsewhere, and make a patchwork of the whole which we

call our principles; beggarly fragments enough we piece together

to cover our nakedness and a hundred phrases which one may hear

any day betray lives founded upon an ignoble philosophy. No doubt

people are better than their words, better than their own thoughts;

we speak of ourselves as “finite beings,” but is there any limit

to the generosity and nobility of almost any person? The hastily

spoken “It is the rule at sea,” that distressed us a while ago,

what a vista does it disclose of chivalric tenderness, entire

self-sacrifice! Human nature has not failed; what has failed us is

philosophy, and that applied philosophy which is called education.

Philosophy, all the philosophies, old and new, land us on the horns

of a dilemma; either we do well by ourselves and seek our own

perfection of nature or condition, or we do well by others to our

own loss or deterioration. If there is a mean, philosophy does not

declare it.

There are things of which we have desperate need: we want a

new scale of values: I suppose we all felt when, in those days

before the War, we read how several millionaires went down in

the “Titanic” disaster, not only that their millions did not

matter, but that they did not matter to them; that possibly they

felt themselves well quit of an incessant fatigue. We want more

life: there is not life enough for our living; we have no great

engrossing interests; we hasten from one engagement to another and

glance furtively at the clock to see how time, life, is getting

on; we triumph if a week seems to have passed quickly; who knows

but that the approach of an inevitable end might find us glad to

get it all over? We want hope: we busy ourselves excitedly about

some object of desire, but the pleasure we get is in effort,

not in attainment; and we read, before the War, of the number

of suicides among Continental schoolboys, for instance, with

secret understanding; what is there to live for? We want to be

governed: servants like to receive their “orders”; soldiers and

schoolboys enjoy discipline; there is satisfaction in stringent

Court etiquette; the fact of being “under orders” adds dignity

to character. When we revolt it is only that we may transfer our

allegiance. We want a new start: we are sick of ourselves and of

knowing in advance how we shall behave and how we shall feel on

all occasions; the change we half-unconsciously desire is to other

aims, other ways of looking at things. We feel that we are more

than there is room for; other conditions might give us room; we

don’t know; any way, we are uneasy. These are two or three of the

secret matters that oppress us, and we are in need of a philosophy

which shall deal with such things of the spirit. We believe we

should be able to rise to its demands, however exigeant, for the

failure is not in us or in human nature so much as in our limited

knowledge of conditions.

The cry of decadence is dispiriting, but is it well-founded? The

beautiful little gowns that have come down as heirlooms would

not fit the “divinely tall” daughters of many a house where

they are treasured. We have become frank, truthful, kind; our

conscientiousness and our charity are morbid; we cannot rest in

our beds for a disproportionate anxiety for the well-being of

everybody; we even exceed the generous hazard, that, peradventure

for a good man one might be found to die; almost any man will risk

his life for the perishing without question of good or bad; and we

expect no less from firemen, doctors, life-boatmen, parsons, the

general public. And what a comment on the splendid magnanimity of

men does the War afford!

An annoying inquiry concerning risks at sea almost resulted in a

ruling that no one should let himself be saved so long as others

were in danger; it is preposterous, but is what human nature

expects of itself. No, we are not decadent on the whole, and our

uneasiness is perhaps caused by growing pains. We may be poor

things, but we are ready to break forth into singing should the

chance open to us of a full life of passionate devotion. Now, all

our exigeant demands are met by words written in a Book, and by the

manifestations of a Person; and we are waiting for a Christianity

such as the world has not yet known. Hitherto, Christ has existed

for our uses; but what if a time were coming when we, also,

should taste the “orientall fragrancie” of, “My Master!” So it

shall be when the shout of a King is among us, and are there not

premonitions? But these things come not by prayer and fasting, by

good works and self-denial, alone; there is something prior to all

these upon which our Master insists with distressful urgency, “Why

will ye not know? Why will ye not understand?”

My excuse for touching upon our most intimate concerns is that this

matter, too, belongs to the domain of Letters; if we propose to

seek knowledge we must proceed in an orderly way, recognising that

the principal knowledge is of most importance; the present writer

writes and the reader reads, because we are all moved by the spirit

of our time; these things are our secret preoccupation, for we have

come out of a long alienation as persons “wearied with trifles,”

and are ready and anxious for a new age. We know the way, and we

know where to find our rule of the road; but we must bring a new

zeal and a new method to our studies; we may no longer dip here

and there or read a perfunctory chapter with a view to find some

word of counsel or comfort for our use. We are engaged in the study

of, in noting the development of, that consummate philosophy which

meets every occasion of our lives, all demands of the intellect,

every uneasiness of the soul.

The arrogance which pronounces judgment upon the written “Word”

upon so slight an acquaintance as would hardly enable us to

cover a sheet or two of paper with sayings of the Master, which

confines the Divine teaching to the great Sermon, of which we are

able to rehearse some half-dozen sentences, is as absurd as it is

blameworthy. Let us give at least as profound attention to the

teaching of Christ as the disciples of Plato, say, gave to his

words of wisdom. Let us observe, note-book in hand, the orderly and

progressive sequence, the penetrating quality, the irresistible

appeal, the unique content of the Divine teaching; (for this

purpose it might be well to use some one of the approximately

chronological arrangements of the Gospel History in the words of

the text). Let us read, not for our profiting, though that will

come, but for love of that knowledge which is better than thousands

of gold and silver. By and by we perceive that this knowledge is

the chief thing in life; the meaning of Christ’s saying, “Behold,

I make all things new,” dawns upon us; we get new ideas as to the

relative worth of things; new vigour, new joy, new hope are ours.

If we believe that knowledge is the principal thing, that knowledge

is tri-partite, and that the fundamental knowledge is the knowledge

of God, we shall bring up our children as students of Divinity and

shall pursue our own life-long studies in the same school. Then we

shall find that the weekly sermons for which we are prepared are as

bread to the hungry; and we shall perhaps understand how enormous

is the demand we make upon the clergy for living, original thought.

It is only as we are initiated that science and “Nature” come to

our aid in this chief pursuit; then, they “their great Original

proclaim”; but while we are ignorant of the principal knowledge

they remain dumb. Literature and history have always great matters

to speak of or suggest, because they deal with states or phases of

moral government and moral anarchy, and tacitly indicate to us the

sole key to all this unintelligible world; and literature not only

reveals to us the deepest things of the human spirit, but it is

profitable also “for example of life and instruction in manners.”