EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
Allowing, as every competent thinker must allow, a full measure of
validity to the contention that social developments are matters of slow
growth and gradual attainment rather than of sudden and catastrophic
change; admitting that even in the sphere of scientific discovery and
mechanical invention changes occur much more gradually than a cursory
glance at individual achievements would suggest; recognising that many
of the most remarkable changes whose arrival in the past is the only
possible valid guide to anticipation of similar or kindred changes in
the future; it is still a condition of such anticipation that we should
take account of causes likely to be operative in altering the rate at
which the world will move. To allow that social improvements generally
have the air of occurring almost automatically is not to conceive that
they are without cause. Neither can it be believed by anyone who has
studied the history of such movements in the past, or watched them in
current progress, that the rate of development is everywhere and at
all periods the same. There have been eras of almost complete moral,
and even of almost complete mechanical, stagnation in the history of
the world. There have been other eras of almost violent reformation
and reconstruction. To reason as if these characteristics were
arbitrarily or miraculously imposed upon the physiognomy of society,
to be content with laboriously unintelligent estimation of the facts
without attempting to learn anything from them of their causes, is to
neglect the only important lesson which either history or observation
is capable of teaching. When, therefore, an enormous acceleration in
a rate of progress already unprecedented in the records of society
has been predicted for the next hundred years of human history, it is
evident that this anticipation must have been based upon some estimate
of forces calculated to be operative in producing acceleration.
So far as scientific or material progress is concerned, it is obvious
enough that we shall move forward with increasing momentum, because
every discovery and every invention tends automatically to facilitate
fresh attainment, and the very growth of population must act in
the same way, as must also the struggle for existence. As there are
every year more men and women working on scientific research and on
mechanical invention, the results must be progressively greater every
year; and as the rewards of success are increased by the growing
demand resulting from a growing population, it is evident that the
incentives to industry in this respect are proportionately liable
to increase. But the ethical progress of the world is actuated by
forces entirely different, and what makes for mechanical improvement
may very easily be conceived--in fact has actually been conceived by
one rather conspicuous prophet--to operate adversely upon the moral
future of the race.
No secret, however, has been made of the present writer's belief
that our descendants a hundred years hence will have made moral
progress quite as remarkable as the mechanical progress of which the
anticipation is likely to be contested by no reasonably imaginative
observer. This ethical improvement, gradual, and momentarily
imperceptible as it may be, necessarily has causes which must now,
however tentatively and however cursorily, be examined.
That these causes will be powerful, continuous in action and based
upon the fundamentals of human character, is evident. That in their
operation they will be opposed by other influences not less easy to
foresee is equally manifest. What we have to precognise are the net
results likely to be achieved by the interaction of opposing forces,
of which those tending to improvement are confidently believed the
stronger.
The most powerful of all moral influences in the future will
undoubtedly be the reform of education, not merely by the improvement
of its methods in various departments, but also, and with much more
importance, in the general spirit with which its objects will be
conceived. But in order to affirm that this reform will occur, we
must first demonstrate that the grounds upon which it is anticipated
are adequate. We must, in the terms of the formula above proposed,
be satisfied that they are in harmony with the fundamentals of human
character.
If there be any human motive of which something approaching
universality can be predicted--quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab
omnibus--it is that of parental solicitude. No progenitor of children,
however little amenable to high aspirations, is wholly free from
the wish that his offspring shall grow up to be wiser, stronger,
better, more prosperous than himself. The innate hopefulness of the
race expressed in the arid comment that, in his own estimation, "man
never is, but always to be blest," is often discouraged by the time
a man's children are beginning to grow up, especially in these days
of late marriage and deferred parenthood. Realising, as most of us
have realised only too acutely by the time we are forty, that we have
more or less failed in the ambitions which seemed so easy of future
attainment when we were twenty-five, aspiration begins to cast a golden
light upon the career of our children, and it is to the successes and
the fame of our first-born that we look for consolation in the failure
which, for ourselves, we no longer hope to evade. Romance, celebrity,
even perhaps worldly reward, we can no longer expect for ourselves;
but these dear hands that a little time ago we held while the first
tottering steps of babyhood were being tried, shall return to us
hereafter with the laurel in them that we have never plucked. Perhaps
we shall not live to see it on our child's brow, but what of that? Our
confident prevision of this glory is what we console ourselves withal:
this, though we hardly know it, is our True Romance:--
"The comfortress of unsuccess,
To bid the dead good-night."
Neither in the material and the intellectual spheres alone do we aspire
more nobly for our children than for ourselves. Not success and not
fame limit our demand of Fate, that she repair in our children the
injustice of which we ourselves cease to complain. We want them to be
better men and women than we have been. To put the thing on its lowest
ground (and nothing but the lowest motives ever seem to be accorded the
smallest validity by the more conspicuous among recent vaticinators of
human action) it behoves us to make the best we can of our children's
morals, if we are presently in old age likely to be dependant upon
them. But for those who, like Malvolio, "think nobly of the soul,"
it is sufficient to rely upon the manifested predilection of every
parent in order to be convinced that the education of the future will
be moralised as well as rationalised through the natural emotions
of man. Only the dullest and most turgid imagination will consent to
believe that the horrible conditions of competitive struggle will be
permitted to foster only the lower faculties, as greed, selfishness,
unscrupulous cunning and subtle evasiveness, at the expense of
all the finer characteristics of man. There is no cynic so base as
would deliberately seek the fortune of his sons in the inculcation
of chicane. Struggle must sharpen all our intellects as life grows
yearly more difficult, but one by-product of this attrition will be
the increased morality with which the education of each generation
successively arising will be conceived.
Pausing for a moment to remark, in regard to the methods in detail
by which the improvement of education will most likely be sought,
that to foresee what is probable is not necessarily to endorse it as
ideal, and that the object of this book is not to formulate Utopia,
but to predict the consequences implied by existing forces after the
latter have been during a stated time in operation; and admitting
that no reform ever practised within the recorded history of man has
been without drawbacks inherent in its own constitution, it may be
said at once that the work of instruction is capable of mechanical
and instrumental improvement not less considerable than any other
labour to be undertaken by ourselves and our successors. Even within a
lifetime's limits all sorts of appliances for assisting the mind of the
learner to apprehend the facts sought to be learnt have been invented,
and our children, as we all know, are much more easily taught than we
were ourselves. The laudator temporis acti is always pretty ready to
depreciate the value of these improvements, and perhaps it is natural
enough in most of us to find it difficult to believe that any plan of
teaching can be better for our children than the one which produced
results so pleasingly exemplified by ourselves. But at all events,
it will be generally, if a little grudgingly, admitted that any form
of apparatus capable of saving time and trouble in teaching is capable
of being ranked as an improvement. Unquestionably appliances having
this object will be constantly invented and used during the present
century. For instance, it is hardly conceivable that something less
than perfection in the teaching of a foreign pronunciation by the mouth
of the best teacher who can be hired for the work will content us, when
perfected talking-machines presently enable us to give examples of the
still better speech. Evidently a boy would learn to speak French with a
purer accent by listening to a phonograph which, freed of the present
tin-trumpet timbre and whirring, repeated the speech of the Comédie
Française, than by hearing an ordinary master read aloud. To say this
is not to suggest that professors of languages will be dispensed with;
but their teaching can be thus supplemented. Similarly the use of
magic-lanterns and kinetoscopic pictures is capable of improving
greatly upon the blackboard and chalk still used. But the plan of
education in itself is so greatly more important to be foreseen than
the mechanism by which the details can be worked out, and the latter
can with so very little difficulty be imagined by anyone interested
in them, that the reader shall not be troubled with any discussion of
this branch of the subject, but will rather be asked to concentrate
his attention upon the moral and intellectual aspects of it.
Conceiving, what I have all along endeavoured to show is reasonable
to conceive, that all social institutions will be governed with
ever-increasing intelligence and rationality as time goes on, and
that they could not possibly be tolerated otherwise, it is easy
to see that education as hitherto and at present practised would
never do for our grandchildren, let alone for our more advanced
descendants a hundred years hence. To begin with, parents in that
era would certainly consider it hopelessly and criminally unethical,
if not actively immoral. Projects of reform, especially in morals,
are often dismissed as visionary, because it is pointed out that no
changes can take place in the social order which do not appeal directly
to the self-interest of the individual. In other words, there is no
mainspring of social action except aggregated selfishness. Without
delaying to examine the validity of the belief, it may be said at
once that its full acceptance is no obstacle to the admission of
the whole case on which is founded the belief that education will be
conducted chiefly with a view to its moral effect at the period I am
attempting to describe. The very circumstances on which writers rely,
who predict the ethical deterioration of man, are those which make
the ethical reform of education inevitable. Precisely in proportion
as competition tends to harden and debase, there will arise the
unavoidable necessity for deliberate counter-action of this tendency,
resulting, as the effect of the measures necessitated becomes felt,
in the changes of commercial and political conditions already [20]
predicted. If we consider at all thoughtfully the necessities of
a hundred years hence, it is not difficult to foresee the general
lines upon which they are likely to be met--lines not necessary to
be accepted as representing a perfect or ideal state, but broadly
indicating the methods which the effect of visible tendencies will
by that time demand of a practical people.
Here, as everywhere else, the only safe guidance as to the practice
of the future must be sought in the tendencies of the present. The
tendency most forcibly in evidence during recent times is that in
favour of softening the former acerbities of education. Whereas the
schoolhouse of half a century ago was something like a penitentiary
in the way it was conducted, the schoolhouse of to-day is managed
as much like a place of recreation as it possibly can be. At all
events, recreation is at least as assiduously cultivated as study,
and the candidate for an under-mastership who has a good cricket
record will find employment a good deal more easily than one
with a double-first. If there be any complaint of public and other
upper-class schools at the present time--and there is room for plenty
of complaint--it is more often that games are too much insisted upon
than that brains are overtaxed. There is a visible reaction in regard
to this; but it is not to be regarded as a reaction in favour of the
old draconic methods. On the contrary, "the growing sentimentality
of the age" steadily demands amenity of treatment for the fortunate
offspring of the twentieth century. The late James Payn, sanest
and kindliest of men, was never tired of denouncing what he called
the barbarous and indecent corporal punishments of Eton. He used to
say that if a picture of an Eton boy being birched were published
in the Illustrated London News no boy would ever be birched again,
and I believe that he tried to get either Mr Latey or Mr Shorter to
insert such a picture. Be this as it may, what he said was perfectly
true. I shall have something to say presently on this same question of
school discipline: meantime it may with perfect safety be predicted
of the master's cane a hundred years hence that it will be found
only in museums, and (whether rightly or wrongly) be regarded as
a relic of degrading barbarism. One reason why corporal punishment
will have to be abolished is that boys and girls will certainly be
educated together instead of apart. As we could hardly cane girls
(and it would be of very little use if we could) we shall assuredly
have to get on without caning their masculine schoolmates.
I suppose that few will contest the statement that the religious
teaching practised in schools at the present time not only has very
little to do with the question of morality but tends distinctly, except
in Roman Catholic seminaries and some few non-conforming colleges
where a special kind of education is given, to have less and less
connection therewith. Whatever moral effect "schooling" has upon the
adolescent is recognisably and recognisedly due to the "tone" of the
school itself, that is, to public opinion among the taught, and only
indirectly to anything which emanates from the teachers. Assuredly a
proficient knowledge of Biblical history has no ethical effect greater
than a proficient knowledge of Greek mythology (at least of so much
of it as is properly selected for school use), and we have it on the
authority of Mr E. H. Cooper, a very entertaining if not particularly
sound writer on children, that even "Confirmation" classes are by no
means uniform in promoting a religious sentiment in boys. [21]
The moral advantages of education, therefore, tend to be found in
the effect of public opinion and the general "tone" of a school. It
is discovered in practice that direct moral inculcation is not very
successful. It is to be assumed that the ingenuity of future pædagogues
will be devoted to the discovery of the best ways in which indirect
moral influence can be cultivated. In view of the high importance
which will evidently be attached to such influence, we may take it
for granted that it is not in connection with any single branch of
tuition that it will be sought for, but that it will be root and
branch of the whole scheme of educational work. One very powerful
assistance will be rendered to this by the system of co-education.
It is quite certain that boys and girls will always be educated
together a hundred years hence. The tendency of the sexes to become
less different intellectually is a known fact of sociology. [22]
It carries with it an inevitable tendency to dispense with the
separation of the sexes in education. Wherever co-education has
been tried its effects have been excellent. The presence of female
students in medical colleges has had a markedly reformative influence
on the manners and moral tone of medical student life, not long ago
the opprobrium of civilisation. The advantages to a parent of being
able to send his sons and his daughters to one place of instruction,
and to the children themselves of the companionship and maintenance
of family relations thus afforded, are equally obvious. In one other
respect, which can only be touched upon lightly here, the system of
joint education must be enormously beneficial, at all events to boys,
and greatly beneficial to their sisters. Every competent schoolmaster
is acquainted with special difficulties liable to arise about the
age of puberty. The monastic seclusion of the schoolboy (like that
of the single men in barracks who, according to Mr Kipling, "don't
grow into plaster saints"), and the glamorous mystery surrounding
the opposite sex, tend to accentuate these difficulties. The habit
of constant association with girls who are not his sisters relieves a
boy of the exaggerated sense of sexual isolation. A boy always brought
up with girls is not liable to be constantly thinking about girlhood:
and in practical experience many people are aware that boys who have
had the opportunity of frequent association with the girl friends of
their sisters grow into purer-minded and more chivalrous men, than
those who have lacked this advantage; and the thoughtful future will
assuredly cultivate the system which affords it. It is quite evident,
in addition, that the fatuous and unreasonable mystery with which for
centuries the natural facts most liable to be important in adult life
have been made inevitable subjects of unholy curiosity, will be swept
away, to the great enhancement of sane and clean thought in girls as
well as in boys, in young women even more than in young men: while
the tragedies which knowledge can avert, hidden horrors of our own
day that we are too sentimental to envisage, but that everyone must
now and then have met with a hint of, will happily exist no more,
or occur but rarely.
Among the indirect considerations which will assist us to the
conclusion that co-education is the best, will be the endeavour,
everywhere apparent, to make the work of teaching agreeable to the
taught. This is the keynote of the tendencies whose fruition we may
look for at the end of this century. It will have been recognised
that to conceive of education as a process of forcing knowledge
into unwilling memories is to place the greatest possible obstacle
in the way of success. Even the child whose natural faculties are
joyously receptive is bound to resist more or less unconsciously
teaching that is conducted on the assumption that he won't learn if
he can possibly help it. The worst child in the class sets the tone
of the rest. The boy who can most successfully evade real learning,
and trick his instructors well enough to escape punishment, is the
hero of the place. Nothing could be much worse for morality. Public
opinion in schools, useful as it is in other respects, is everywhere
harmful in this particular. The pædagogue of the future will proceed
on a method far more rational.
In its essence it is quite easy to see what method the tendency
of thought is likely to develop. Here, as in so many other places,
etymology can help us. If we could think, whenever we talk or make
plans concerning the subject, of what education really means--a
drawing-out of the natural faculties of the instructed--we should
always conceive more rationally of the work. There is no animal whose
greatest pleasures are derived from anything else than the exercise of
its faculties. Our dog, whether he jumps and tears about in glee as
we take him for a walk, or sits happily by our side, his head on our
knees, his wistful eyes scrutinising our face, sympathetic with every
emotion, illustrates this fact. In the one case he is exercising the
natural faculties of speed and vigorous agility; in the latter, the
acquired and inherited faculties of mental comprehension. Shut him up
in a room alone, or with an unfriendly person, and he is miserable or
goes to sleep, providently accumulating energy for the next opportunity
of exercise. What I am not afraid to call his mental pleasures are
not less keen, if I know anything at all of dogs (who have loved
many of them) than his physical pleasures; and I never had a dog in
my life who would not cheerfully neglect his food to come indoors
and sit with me in my library. Are children's brains less energetic,
less capable of yielding pleasure to their small proprietors than the
brains of a dog? One of the mistakes that we are already beginning to
find out (and consequently one of those which we may expect to have
amended long before this time next century) is the tacit assumption
that games are richer in pleasure than study. It isn't the boys and
girls themselves that give this tincture to school-government. Plenty
of them really prefer books before balls, until they go to school;
where we at once proceed to show them that we regard cricket as a
sort of alleviation of their hard lot, and with football console them
for their French lessons, and redress arithmetic by "rounders." There
is no reason why this should lead to any neglect of athletics. Only,
athletics will be properly treated as only one of the joys of a school
life that will be fulfilled of other pleasures equally absorbing.
The method which will make education agreeable instead of repulsive is
part and parcel of the system on which education will be conducted,
and it is only incidentally that it will subserve the concurrent
sentimental tenderness which finds expression to-day in unwise use
of games in themselves highly beneficial, just as elsewhere it finds
expression by cultivating gluttony. [23]
The true object of instruction being to show children how to think,
the intellectual exercise of thinking will be always found, as it has
already long ago been found where this highly unusual method has been
experimented with, to give keen pleasure to the instructed. [24]
A great deal that has been said both in regard to the excessive and
in part exclusive training of memory, and in regard to the propriety
of reversing the general order of tuition by proceeding from concrete
facts to generalised theories instead of beginning with generalisations
and illustrating these by specific instances, is, for practical
reasons, hardly likely to be acted upon by our descendants. To begin
with, the culture of memory is not in itself an abuse; on the contrary,
it is a highly necessary feature of education. What is an abuse is the
substitution of remembrance for ratiocination. Teachers in the future
will be more anxious to develop the mind from within than to graft
information upon it from without. But they certainly will foster the
faculty called memory--or to speak more exactly, they will refrain
from destroying that faculty in the way that present-day education
destroys it. For as a matter of fact, the memory of a young child who
has never been taught anything is invariably good, being both copious
and retentive. One often hears it said that children quickly forget;
but it is also the case that they very quickly remember again. An
Anglo-Indian friend told me a somewhat pleasing anecdote which (though
of course it does not prove) illustrates a general fact of which
anyone can find proofs for himself by a little observation. Having
taken home for a year's leave his children, reared, like all other
English children in India, amid native servants, and speaking quite
correct Urdu instead of the barbarous dog-Hindustani which suffices
for their elders, he was under the impression, when the "wicked day
of destiny" arrived, and the family had to return from refreshment
in England to labour in India, that they had completely forgotten
the soft vernacular speech which formerly came much more easily from
them than English. And his belief was confirmed when, the children
having been promptly carried off by the adoring servants, an aged
bearer came to him almost in tears, complaining that "Baba Sahib"
could not understand him. But the next day all the little people were
chattering Urdu as easily as ever. The fact is that a child's mind
concentrates itself intensely upon whatever subject interests at a
given moment, and neglects everything else. By our present method of
education we do all that the most malignant ingenuity could devise
to destroy both this invaluable gift of mental concentration and the
accompanying faculty of memory. The new teaching will industriously
cultivate both. There is no doubt that the premature and unskilful use
of books as implements of instruction is extremely bad for the memory;
and the employment of distasteful and inconsiderate methods of teaching
is equally destructive of concentration. A hundred years hence,
when it has been recognised that the easiest way to teach anything
is to find out how a child can be made to want to learn about it,
there will be no difficulty in securing attention. Children's minds
do not, as most people suppose, tire very easily. On the contrary,
they are with great difficulty fatigued. Anyone who has been so
imprudent as to embark on a course of tale-telling near bedtime or
near a meal hour, knows that the little people are almost incapable
of being satiated. And the descendants of these little people will
be just as insatiable of being taught, because we shall have found
out how to make them want to be taught.
Herein is the whole keynote of the education of the future, moral as
well as intellectual. We shall no longer treat good behaviour as if
it were an artificial and unnatural abstinence from the true desires
of the child or of man. We shall arrange that people, young and old,
may wish to act rightly. The point of reform will be shifted. At
present, all kinds of morality are approached on the assumption that
it is requisite to persuade to an unwilling abstinence from vice, and
that when the desires of the wicked have been curbed into a sort of
ascetic abstemiousness prompted by fear of punishment, whether overt
or implicit, a moral feat has been performed. The new morality will
only be content when the subject of it would not sin if you asked him
to. His moral sense will have been stoically cultivated. Obedience and
the law of Thou-shalt-not will be dethroned. This law represents in
the education of to-day the highest form of youthful virtue. Yet mere
obedience, even where it has always been considered most valuable,
namely, where it takes the shape of military discipline, has proved
an utter failure; the last two great wars proved the fact. If the
lamentable doggerel which enshrines the applauded self-immolation of
Casabianca have not fortunately been forgotten altogether a hundred
years hence, it will assuredly be quoted only as a monumental example
of old-fashioned fat-headedness, even more offensive to the sense
of reason than the verses themselves are to the sense of poetical
taste. The Casabiancas of the next century will have been allowed--I do
not say taught, because children don't need to be taught this--to think
for themselves. And no great exertion will have been required. On the
contrary, it is impossible to listen for many hours to what goes on in
a modern school without being impressed with the ingenious arrangements
that are required in order to prevent boys and girls from thinking
for themselves. The notion of their doing so seems as offensive to
the present race of schoolmasters as, to Mr W. S. Gilbert's sentinel,--
... "the prospect of a lot
Of dull M.P.s in close proximity
All thinking for themselves."
However, the purpose of this dissertation is not so much to point
out the errors of the present as to indicate the improvements
of the future: and we may be sure that the prime virtues of the
scholar a hundred years hence will be reasonableness and ingenuity,
not dull obedience. Thus right conduct will be inculcated, not as an
expression of obedience but as the only reasonable way of behaving,
and the incentive to right action will be that it is also sensible
action. The test of all conduct will be its results. Whatever does
harm to self and others will be obviously wrong; what does good or
is indifferent will be right. The standard of these things that has
to be accepted all through life will be set up from the first, an
enormous improvement upon the vicious system of exacting irrational
obedience for the first eighteen or twenty-one years of life, and
expecting this to produce reasonable self-government thereafter,
which is so fruitful in the wild-oats of early adulthood. The latter
could hardly be more ingeniously cultivated.
It would be extremely rash to conclude that books will not be employed
as implements of instruction: but it is quite certain that they will
not be employed as they now are, chiefly for the purpose of saving a
schoolmaster the trouble of making his pupils think for themselves:
and incidentally the abolition of this mistake will react most
usefully upon memory, itself, with the exception of reasoning power,
the most valuable of mental faculties. Oral teaching, accompanied in
every possible place by practical illustration, will store and build
up memory (as it always does when we employ it now) far more rapidly
than anything else. The delight which this method of teaching confers
upon the taught is enhanced by the avidity with which such subjects
as chemistry, practical mechanics, and even geometry when taught
with apparatus instead of with figures, are received by children of
every growth.
To imagine that children can ever invariably be controlled without
some sort of punishments would, no doubt, be thought ridiculous
Utopianism. But the greatest part of the necessity for correction
will have disappeared automatically when the greatest source of
youthful misbehaviour--restless superfluous activity--has been
deviated into channels which will utilise it. Children whisper,
fidget, or make a noise in class, simply because they are bored by
the dulness of mechanical processes which we persistently use in
seeking to cram information into their minds from without instead of
exercising the reason that dwells within. As the education of future
generations will assuredly have to be a great deal more copious than
what we are content with now, it is fortunate that this reform will
also be a great economiser of time. Every schoolmaster knows that
an interested class progresses far more rapidly than one that is
bored and consequently inattentive; and the same boy who is alive
to the subtlest implications of the highly complex law of cricket,
will often be found utterly incapable of applying the very simple
definitions at the beginning of Euclid I., for the simple reason that
cricket interests him, while Euclid doesn't. This is not because the
latter is "harder" than cricket, nor yet because cricket is an outdoor
pleasure, while Euclid is (or rather should be) an indoor one. It is
because in cricket we get him into the habit of reasoning for himself,
while in geometry we only too frequently fail to do what Euclid is
supposed to help us to do.
Nevertheless, after making every allowance for reduced temptations
to misbehaviour resulting from the absorption of redundant mental
activity, it is still to be feared that disciplinary punishment
will sometimes be required. This will certainly not be corporal. The
uncivilised and degrading expedient of purposely-inflicted pain is
visibly on its last legs. There are still reactionary people who
write to the papers in order to explain that the use of scholastic
torture makes for manliness; they must be presumed to think that it
would be on the whole rather good for boys to be birched at intervals,
like Charles Lamb, not as a punishment, but to keep them humble. But
the next century will have outgrown such ideas. The commonest
of present-day alternatives--"lines"--is equally obsolescent,
the evil effect of this upon handwriting and health being already
recognised. "Keeping-in" is probably the most injurious of all
forms of correction, but it is only too consistent with our present
plans of education to treat extra tuition as a punishment--the best
possible way to make all teaching hated. It is much more likely that
the schoolmaster of a hundred years hence will punish refractory and
inattentive pupils by keeping-out instead of keeping-in. The most
detested of all chastisements will be exclusion from the pleasant
exercise of learning. During the Russo-Japanese War newspaper readers
noted with saturnine amusement that the artillery regiment which in
St Petersburg had the maladroitness to fire a salute with a shotted
gun and very nearly kill the Czar thereby, was punished by being sent
to the front; while at the beginning of hostilities the exemplary
conduct of the enormous Japanese army crowded in Tokio for transport
was accounted for by the threat that any soldier who misbehaved himself
would be left at home. It is the Japanese and not the Russian ideal
of discipline that will animate the schools of the future. We shall
no doubt emulate the reserve of the Confessor in the Bab Ballads; old
heads upon young shoulders we shall not expect to find; and we shall
punish when punish we must. Future advantage, even for oneself, is
seldom a very powerful motive with the young of any age. But present
deprivation is a chastisement easily and keenly comprehended: and
the loss of intellectual status involved in exclusion from a lesson
will no doubt supplement the immediate boredom very distasteful to an
agile mind, which is the more immediate effect. I imagine that the
naughty child of the future will be punished by being shut up in a
well-ventilated and well-lighted but perfectly empty room, with pockets
equally empty. At the same time, by treating deprivation of it as an
evident chastisement, the desirable nature of instruction will be in
a very useful manner impressed upon the infant mind. Young persons
much more easily believe what they find to be treated as a matter
of course than what is laboriously impressed upon them by explicit
inculcation. Thus the effect of rationalised education will not be,
as one critic has rather rashly supposed, to make children little
prigs. On the contrary, its effect will be to make them naturally
and happily interested little learners--a very different thing. One
of the very greatest improvements in the rationalised education will
precisely be that it cannot possibly foster the awful priggishness
which is a very common result of our own methods.
It has been said already that the education of the happy future will
have to be much more copious than anything that is at all common
nowadays. The nature of its extensions will next be discussed.
One of the most important and most moral objects of education is
to impress upon the mind, as a principle not to be evaded by any
contrivance whatever, the fact that fixed causes (among which are
personal acts of any kind) produce fixed effects--that there is no
circumstance which, with sufficient knowledge, could not be traced back
to pre-existing causative circumstance. No department of knowledge
tends so intimately to give to the mind the impress of this fact in
the course of its acquisition as physical science. And as a proficient
acquaintance with physical science will be necessary to a great many
occupations, when work of all kinds is performed in the intelligent
manner in which we have seen reason to be convinced that it will be
performed a hundred years hence, there will be a greater practical
need for scientific instruction than there is now, though science is
disgracefully neglected even with regard to our present necessities. As
education is to be given with the object of fitting children for
life as well as developing their minds, the science of health will
certainly be taught; but all physical sciences will have their place
on the curriculum even at the early stages, because it will have been
recognised that the habit of mind which is formed by studies of this
kind is not only very necessary to an efficient working life, but also
very helpful as a basis of practical culture. It may be conceived that
a thorough "grounding" in physical science will be thought as much an
essential of all education in the future as a really good training in
Latin and Greek used to be considered in the past, and as many of us
would like it to be considered now. Fifty years ago we believed that
no true education could be given in preparation for ordinary life
without as much Latin as was necessary in order to be able to write
a fair copy of elegiacs, and as much Greek as was necessary in order
to read Homer with comfort. A hundred years hence we shall think it
necessary to be able to read a scientific thesis comprehendingly.
At a later period of school life, but still early in it, specialised
instruction will no doubt be begun; and subjects connected with
the evident tendency of a boy's or a girl's mind, and with the
opportunities likely to be presented to either in forming a career,
will be developed to the exclusion of subjects less immediately
subservient to the object of making a useful citizen of him or
her in some particular profession or branch of industry. Practical
demonstrations of science, instead of being reserved for the more
advanced stages of tuition, will, on the contrary, form the groundwork;
and children will be required to work practically themselves
instead of merely sitting still to watch the performances (in this
case apt to be regarded with little more respect than scholastic
conjuring tricks) of a teacher. They will be invited to deduce laws
for themselves from what occurs in practice, and where they deduce
wrong ones they will not be arbitrarily corrected, but assisted to
make further experiments which will show where the mistake occurs,
until at last the correct generalisation is reached. Only after a
considerable course of practical work will they be entrusted with
books in which great generalisations are to be found ready made,
and these books will always be regarded as a sort of pis aller--a
time-saving contrivance to be employed as a regrettable alternative,
because it would take too long to work everything out by the golden
implement of individual observation. The habit of mind thus cultivated,
and the manual dexterity thus obtained, will be of priceless practical
worth in after-life; and with what rapturous enjoyment will our
descendants acquire knowledge which at present we force upon our
children with stripes!
Along with the physical sciences mathematics will have to be greatly
cultivated. But mathematics, when perceived to be ancillary to
the more immediately delightful work of concrete and experimental
science, will lose much terror. Many mathematical operations can
moreover be demonstrated experimentally, and no opportunity of thus
demonstrating them will be lost. Rightly treated, mathematics need
never be dull. According to my own experience and all that I have
been able to gather from the recollections of others, algebra (for
instance) is never abhorred when a proper care is taken to make use
of its call upon the reasoning faculties; and the art of evoking this
use will have been carefully developed by the educational specialists
who alone will be permitted to direct so delicate and important a task
as the training of the young. For school teachers will not be merely
more or less erudite people employed to dispense their learning: they
will be men and women who have undergone long and careful instruction
in the art of pædagogy studied as a specialised faculty in itself.
After mathematics, no doubt languages occupy chief place in
the righteous abhorrence of present-day school-children. I say
righteous abhorrence with intention, because this department of
useful learning always has the air of being purposely planned in
order to secure the maximum of execration accompanied by the minimum
of advantage. What languages will be taught a hundred years hence,
and in what manner will they be instilled into the children of our
great-great-grand-children? Any opinions upon a controversy so recent
as that which a few months ago raged about the question of compulsory
Greek must be more or less untrustworthy. Every man will take the
view of the future of the dead languages (so called, as someone [25]
sanguinely remarked, because they can never die) determined by his
own view as to whether proficiency in the tongues of Hellas and of
Rome ought to be maintained in his own day. But for a reason probably
admitting of very little controversy, it is at all events permissible
to believe that the classical languages will at least not have to meet
the urgent competition of a variety of current languages as subjects of
useful learning. This reason is to be found in the evident tendency of
a paramount tongue to extrude other tongues from practical employment
in commerce; and commerce, more than anything else, will of course
always determine the question of modern language study. Provided that
the race which becomes paramount in the markets of the world during the
course of this century possesses a reasonably philosophical, copious,
precise language, and one fairly easy to acquire, it is likely that
for commercial purposes it will become (to use an incorrect, but not
conveniently replaceable term) universal. To the facile remark that
every nation considers its own speech easy enough for foreigners to
acquire, and much more satisfactory in the other respects named than
any tongue which it is invited to give itself the trouble of learning,
may be opposed the reply that peoples do in fact recognise, where it
exists, the unsatisfactory nature of their own speech. For example,
nearly every Russian whom one meets in polite or commercial circles
speaks at least French, and often speaks it admirably; while in Norway,
though the Scandinavian languages are none of them anything like so
difficult to learn as Russian, practically everyone speaks English. The
case of Japan is even more illustrative; for apart from the fact that
enough of some European language to enable one to travel with perfect
comfort is always to be found current in the Mikado's empire, it is the
case that even for domestic use the Japanese have a popular language,
printed in newspapers and in some books alongside of the more literary
Chinese idæographs, and frequently used to elucidate the latter. [26]
Thus it is quite easy to believe that the paramount language of
commerce will impose itself upon at least the business population
of the whole world. As the substitution of modern languages for
the dead languages is advocated solely on utilitarian grounds, which
practically means that it is advocated because to know a couple or more
foreign languages is useful in trade; and as no one has ever seriously
pretended that French, German or any other modern language can compare
with Greek and Latin as intellectual gymnastics and as training in
the precise expression of one's thoughts; it may be assumed that,
on the ground of competitive usefulness, the latter will not need to
be dispensed with. Whether the study of them will be abandoned on the
ground that the time they require can be better employed in some study
other than that of languages is another and more difficult question,
the resolution of which depends upon the view we take of the literary
tendencies probably existing after another century. If we believe
that our descendants will have effected so many improvements in the
shape of labour-saving contrivances as to afford a large increase of
leisure for everyone, as compared with what the present time enjoys,
we shall probably expect the languages which enshrine the greatest
literature of the world to remain a subject of study. If we believe in
the growing intellectuality of man, we shall be strengthened in the
same expectation. If, on the other hand, we think that the progress
of our race will exhibit itself in the shape of greedy utilitarianism
and of idiotic and self-destructive immorality, we shall naturally
conclude that no one will be fool enough to trouble himself with Homer
or the Oresteian trilogy, the laments of Sappho or the philosophy
of Plato. Seeing what great men have taken this somewhat despondent
view of the future, it would perhaps be immodest to express any other
opinion on the subject.
In any event, we may safely believe that whatever languages are taught
will not be handled in the manner now current. Mr Andrew Lang has,
in more than one place, described his own "floundering" into Homer--a
plunge certainly attended with the happiest results. A method of
teaching alien languages which founds itself upon an imitation of the
natural picking-up of the mother tongue by babies has been suggested,
perhaps without sufficient consideration of the vast expenditure
of time necessary to the process, and certainly without sufficient
allowance for the fact that it would be impossible to afford the
same incessant practice which enables children to learn the language
of their fathers and mothers so easily. But there is no reason why
we should perpetuate the discouraging preponderance of grammatical
and etymological study which caused the late H. D. Traill to say of
certain professors that
"They heard with a smile of the flowers of style
For they recognised nothing but roots!"
In fact, here as elsewhere, the persistent demand that schooling be
made agreeable will have the best possible effect in facilitating
instruction. It is as literature that all languages--including the
native language of the scholars--will be taught; and they will
be taught far more easily than we have any example to assist us
in imagining. Where a foreign language pronounced with a different
accent and intonation from that of the learner is studied, no doubt (as
already mentioned) talking machines will be employed: and in addition,
pupils will be required to read and speak the language aloud on all
possible occasions, in order to exercise the organs of speech in the
alien manner. [27]
It is a trite saying, and one that need not be dwelt upon here,
that history ought not to be taught as if its sole purpose were
to store the memory with the deeds and misdeeds of kings and the
progress of various wars. It will certainly be studied hereafter as
a vast lesson in sociology and politics, as an illustration of the
science of human dynamics. It is perhaps not superfluous to remark
that brilliant examples of the new historiography have shown that the
difference is not, in its result, so great as some critics imagine. But
the deductions from the facts of history are the important matter:
and the way in which history will be used a hundred years hence will
be in instructing the future governors of the world how to use their
citizenship wisely. Among other things expected of the schoolmaster of
the future will be that he implant in his scholars an ardent desire
to do their part in determining the polity of the state they live
in, and the sacred duty of the ballot will certainly be taught with
relation to whatever methods of utilising the popular vote may by
that time have become current.
Moreover, history, like languages, is capable of being taught as
literature; and the protest against the prevalent notion that high
civilisation involves the decadence of beauty in any form implies
belief in all the arts as subjects of cultivation in the schools
of the future. It need not be supposed that the unreasonable waste
of time entailed by the present method of teaching such a subject
as drawing, and our curious neglect of sculpture and modelling,
will be perpetuated. As we can already see the dawn of new ideas on
both these subjects the tendency of the future in regard to them is
not difficult to conceive, nor need space be consumed in discussing
them in detail. Literature and poetry (the latter, I need hardly say,
no longer made merely hateful as the subject of the fatuous torture
called "learning by heart") with belles-lettres, drawing, painting,
and sculpture, will no doubt be taught in an elementary way to all
children, and the study of them developed further where a natural
appetite demands it. In reply to the very natural question, "How can
an art be taught?" it is only needful to say that minds exercised by
being made to think about such subjects, are quite certain to exhibit
special predilections in one place and special aversions in another,
and that the ascertainment of these predilections and aversions will
everywhere be made the subject of painstaking thought. While nobody
seriously pretends nowadays that a taste for literature or the arts
can be inoculated upon a child's understanding, I imagine that few
will question the belief that a natural bent for any one of them can
be assisted in its development, and that taste, while it is incapable
of being artificially implanted, certainly is susceptible of being
guided and assisted. The defect of routine teaching in æsthetics at
present is the defect of all our systems of education. We try to do
a scholar's thinking for him. We laboriously show him how to use a
pencil and how to copy drawings and pictures; and sometimes (though
this kind of instruction is usually retailed by the ingenious writers
who endeavour to instruct the adult public through the Press) we even
go to the trouble of telling him the kind of pictures he ought to
admire (usually forgetting that in the house of Art there are many
mansions, and that a disgust for the early Dutch masters does not
necessarily imply an incapacity for appreciating Velasquez); but,
whether in adolescence or maturity, we never seem to arrive at the
point of trying to get people to think critically for themselves. We
shall reform altogether the processes of artistic education in the
course of this century.
The training of eye and hand will certainly not be neglected. If only
because learning any kind of handicraft gives the keenest enjoyment
to children, we may be sure that manual instruction will be given,
and that the effect of it will be of great value, not only recreative
but also practical. Our mechanics will not have to inaugurate the
wage-earning period of their lives by the elementary acquisition of
the use of tools. Their future occupation will have been foreseen,
and both by scientific understanding of the processes they are to
subserve, and by manual practice of the exact work they are to perform,
they will be prepared for intelligent craftsmanship; the glorious fact
that real anxiety to find out the best possible method of attaining
the best possible results makes every craft, however humble, not merely
delightful but also noble, being automatically grasped, so that work,
like learning, will be a thing of joy and a source, to the worker,
of lifelong self-respect.
Thus in every department of education the result of the training
administered intelligently, and with almost infinite long-sightedness
and subtlety during school-days, will be to form character, not by
repression of any natural predilection, but by cultivation of mental
and moral impulses to good. We shall never be content with an obedient
abstention from misconduct, but shall unrestingly contrive that the
desire to act rightly as well as wisely be implanted in the mind,
until wisdom, righteousness and forethought have been stamped upon
the character with so indelible an imprint that it would do violence
to the whole contour of the mind to act in defiance of them. A people
thus trained will be capable of all the reforms predicted of society
a hundred years hence. Not by any of the unimaginable cataclysms by
which dreamers have expected Utopia to be established, ready-made,
on a basis of unreformed obedience to the will of fantastic lawgivers,
but by the steady growth of national morality will progress,
"Moving as beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man,"
establish, on the basis of a perfect harmony between the nature
of the units and the institutions of society, the rationalised,
moralised, and still progressive state of the world looked for by all
who contemplate logically and with ordered faith the capabilities of
their kind a hundred years hence.