that standpoint. They were {152} scientific universities closely
resembling our own. It has become the custom to talk of them as if
they were institutions of learning that accomplished nothing, and
wasted their time over trifles. We often hear of how much time was
wasted in dialectics in the Middle-Age universities, but surely it was
not more than is wasted over technics in our modern university.
Hundreds of books were written about the quips and quiddities of
logic, but thousands of volumes are full of technics and most of our
scientific journals are crowded with it. Let us, then, if for no other
reason than our fraternity with them, begin to do justice to these old
universities. Their scholars were ardent and zealous, their professors
were enthusiastic and laborious. The tomes they issued were larger and
their writings more voluminous than those of our own professors. They
are hard reading, but no one must dare to criticise them unless he has
read them, and, above all, no one must make little of them without
knowing something about them at first hand. This is scholarship; the
secondary information that has been popular is sciolism. Let us get
back to scholarship. That is what we need just now in America.
{153}
IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION
{154}
"According to my view he who would be good at anything must practise
that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in the
particular way which the work requires: for example, he who is to be
a good builder, should play at building children's houses; and he
who is to be a good husbandman at tilling the ground; those who have
the care of their education should provide them when young with
mimic tools. And they should learn beforehand the knowledge which
they will afterwards require for their art. For example, the future
carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and the
future warrior should learn riding or some other exercise for
amusement, and the teacher should endeavor to direct the children's
inclinations and pleasures by the help of amusements to their final
aim in life. The sum of education is right training in the nursery.
The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of
excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be
perfected. Do you agree with me thus far?"--Plato, _Laws_ (Jowett),
Vol. IV, p. 173. Scribner, 1908.
"There will be gymnasia and schools in the midst of the city, and
outside the city circuses (playgrounds) and open spaces for riding
places and archery. In all of these there should be instructors of
the young."--Plato, _Laws_ (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 82. Scribner, 1902.
{155}
IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION [Footnote 12]
[Footnote 12: The material for this lecture was collected for a
course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of
Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, at St Stephen's Hall, New York City,
in January and February, 1909. The material was subsequently
developed for a similar set of lectures for the religious teachers
in the parochial schools of Philadelphia in the spring of 1910.]
We have come to realize in recent years that in many ways our
education of the masses is a failure. Teaching people to read and
write and occupying them with books till they are fifteen years of
age, when all that they will use their power to read for is to devote
themselves to three or four editions of the daily paper and the huge,
overgrown Sunday papers on their only day of leisure, with perhaps
occasional recourse to a cheap magazine or a cheaper novel, in order
to kill time, as they frankly declare, is scarcely worth while. Indeed
we have even come to realize that such education gives opportunity
rather for the development of discontent than of happiness. The
learning to write which enables a man to be a clerk, or a bookkeeper,
the occupations that are, as a rule, the least lucrative, that are so
full that there is no question of organizing them, that confine men
for long hours in dark rooms very often and furnish the least possible
opportunity to rise, is of itself not ideal. With some rather {156}
disconnected information this is practically all that our ordinary
education teaches people, and yet we spend eight years and large sums
of money on it. We are just beginning to realize that other forms of
education and not these superficial introductions to supposed
scholarship, which can mean so little, constitute realities in
education.
We have come to realize that Germany, where it is said that more than
sixty per cent. of the population has its opportunity for some
technical training, so that men are taught the rudiments of a trade or
a handicraft or some occupation other than that which shall make them
mere routine servants of some one else, does far better than this. By
contrast it is remarked that less than one per cent. of our children
have the opportunity for such training. We are very prone to think,
however, that the technical school is a modern idea. We assume that it
owes its origin to the development of mankind in the process of
evolution to a point where the recognition of the value of handiwork
and craftsmanship has at length arisen. Nothing could well be less
true than this. It is true that the eighteenth century saw practically
no education of this kind and it was only at the end of the nineteenth
century that any modern nation even began to wake up to the necessity
for it. In the older times, however, and, above all, in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, there was a magnificent training afforded
the masses of the people in all sorts of arts and {157} crafts and
trades and occupations, such as can now be obtained only in technical
schools. They did not call these teaching institutions technical
schools, but they had all the benefits that we would now derive from
such schools.
This training the people of these times owed to the gilds. These were,
of course, of many forms, the Arts Gilds, the Crafts Gilds, the
Merchants Gilds, and then the various Trades Gilds. Boys were
apprenticed to men following such an occupation as the youth had
expressed a liking for, or that he seemed to be adapted to, or that
his parents chose for him, and then began his training. It was
conducted for five or six years usually in the house of the master or
tradesman to whom he was apprenticed. The master provided him with
board and clothes, at least, after the first year, and he gradually
trained him in the trade or craft or industry, whatever it might be.
After his apprenticeship was over the young man of eighteen or so
became a journeyman workman and usually wandered from his native town
to other places, sometimes going even over seas in order to learn the
foreign secrets of his craft or art or trade, and after three years of
this, when ready to settle down, presented evidence as to his
accomplishments, and if this was accepted he became a master in his
gild. If he were a craftsman or an artisan he made a lock or a bolt or
some more artistic piece of work in the metals base or precious, and
if this sample was {158} considered worthy of them by his
fellow-gildsmen he was admitted as a master in the gild. This was the
highest rank of workman, and the men who held it were supposed to be
able to do anything that had been done by fellow-workmen up to that
time. The piece that he presented was then called a masterpiece, and
it is from this that our good old English word masterpiece was
derived.
This might seem a very inadequate training, and perhaps appeal to many
as not deserving of the name of technical training or schooling. The
only way to decide as to that, however, is to appreciate the products
turned out by these workmen. It was these graduates of the
apprentice-journeyman system of technical training who produced the
great series of marvellous art objects which adorn the English
cathedrals, the English municipal buildings, the castles and the
palaces and the monasteries of the thirteenth century. It was the
graduates of these schools, or at least of this method of schooling,
who produced the wonderful stained glass, the beautiful bells, the
finished ironwork, the surpassing woodwork, the sculpture, the
decoration,--in a word, all the artistic details of the architecture
of the wonderful Gothic periods of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries,--which we have learned to value so highly in recent years.
If we wanted to produce such work in our large cities now, we would
have to import the workmen. These wonderful {159} products were made
in cities so small that we would be apt to think them scarcely more
than insignificant towns in our time. No town in England during the
thirteenth century, with the possible exception of London, had more
than 25,000, and most of the cathedral towns were under 15,000 in
population and many of them had less than 10,000.
The extent to which this teaching went and how much it partook of the
nature of real technical training can be very well appreciated from
recent studies of these early times. There has probably never been
more beautiful handicraftsmanship nor better products of what we now
call the arts and crafts than during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, when this system of educating the masses became thoroughly
organized. Any one who knows the details of the decoration of the
great Gothic cathedrals or of the monasteries and castles and
municipal buildings of these centuries will be well acquainted with
these marvels of accomplishment, scattered everywhere throughout
England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain in this period. Something of
the story of it all I tried to tell, as far as the cathedrals are
concerned, in my book, "The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries."
Those who care to see another side of it will find it in Mr. A. Ralph
Adams Cram's "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain." [Footnote 13] Mr.
Cram, himself a {160} successful modern architect, does not hesitate
to declare some of this work as among the most beautiful that ever was
made, even including the ancient Greek and Roman productions. In his
searches into the ruins of these old abbeys he has found mutilated
fragments so consummate in their faultless art that they deserve a
place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every age.
[Footnote 13: New York, The Churchman Company, 1905.]
It was not alone, however, in the arts of sculpture and decoration,
that is in those finer accomplishments that would occupy only a few of
the workmen, but in every detail of adornment that these artistic
craftsmen excelled. The locks and bolts, the latches and hinges, the
grilles, even the very fences and gates made in wrought iron, are
beautiful in every line and in the artistic efficiency of their
designs. The carved woodwork is in many places a marvel. When a gate
has to be moved, or a hinge is no longer used, or a lock or even a key
from these early times goes out of commission, we would consider it
almost a sacrilege to throw it away; it is transported to the
museum--not alone because of its value as an antique but, as a rule,
also because of its charm as a work of art. When a bench-end is no
longer needed it, too, finds its way into the museum. As Rev. Augustus
Jessopp has shown very clearly in his studies of the old English
parishes, these marvels of iron and woodwork were made, in most cases,
respectively by the village blacksmith and the village carpenter. In
the archives of {161} some of the parishes of the Middle Ages the
accounts are found showing that these men were paid for them. When the
village blacksmith and the village carpenter becomes the artist
artisan capable of producing such good work, then indeed is there an
ideal education at work and a technical training that may be boasted
of.
The most important feature of this education remains to be spoken of,
however. It consisted of the fine development and occupation of the
mind that came from this system. Men found happiness in their work. In
a population of less than 3,000,000 of people many thousands of
workmen, engaged in building these magnificent monuments of that old
time, reaped a blessed pleasure in the doing of beautiful things.
They, too, had a share in the great monument of which their town was
worthily proud and the opportunity to make something worth while for
it. Instead of idly envying others they devoted themselves to making
whatever their contribution might be as beautiful as possible. It
might be only the hinges for the doors or the latch for the gates, it
might be only the stonework for the bases of pillars, though it might
be the beautiful decoration of their capitals; but everything was
being done beautifully and an artist hand was required everywhere. Men
must have tried over and over again to make such fine things. They
were not done at haphazard nor at one trial. There must have been many
a spoiled piece {162} rejected, not so much by the foreman as by the
critical, educated taste of the workmen themselves who were able to
make such beautiful things. Men who could make such artistic products
must have labored much and begun over and over again. This must have
made the finest occupation of mind that a great mass of people has
ever had in all the world's history.
American millionaires model the gates of their parks and the grille
doors of their palaces under the wise direction of modern architects
who fortunately know enough to follow the designs created by these
village workmen of the olden time. Modern palatial residences are glad
to have samples of the wood-carving of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries as models for their decoration, and as attractive pieces
around which present-day work may be done. We have to import our
workmen, even our large cities cannot supply all that we want of them,
and yet little towns of a few thousand inhabitants had them in
sufficient abundance in the olden time to enable them to make every
portion of their great monumental buildings, cathedrals, abbeys,
universities, castles and town halls beautiful in every way. This
represents the triumph of a technical training afforded by the gilds
of workmen of the olden time. We have to insist on this because our
present generation has been so sure that ours was the first generation
that gave any serious attention to the education of the masses, that
it is important to show by {163} contrast how much of a mistake we
have made and how well an older generation accomplished its purpose.
The chapter of the "Lost Arts" might well be told with regard to this
old time. They had secrets in glass-making which were the tradition of
the teaching of particular gilds that we have been unable to find
again in the modern time. There is a jewel-like lustre to their colors
that is sometimes simply marvellous in its depth and purity. At
Lincoln the contrast between old and new glass can be seen very well.
The old windows of the thirteenth century time were stoned out by the
Parliamentarians when they captured the town, because forsooth they
could have no such idolatry as that in their presence. The old sexton,
who as man and boy for over sixty years had lived his life under the
beautiful tints of the old glass, now saw it scattered upon the floor
in fragments. He could not part with it thus and so he gathered it up
into bags, broken to pieces though it was, and hid it away in the
crypt. In the nineteenth century when they were restoring the
cathedral they found these fragments of the old windows. They pieced
them together and they proved to be so beautiful that, though they
could not fit them as they were in the olden time, at least they
succeeded in making a beautiful patchwork of colored glass.
Over on the other side of Lincoln Cathedral they then placed some new
windows of the {164} modern time. These were made in France, I
believe. They were made about the middle of the nineteenth century,
when stained-glass making was almost at its lowest ebb. They were
considered to be very beautiful, however, and something like L20,000
sterling was paid for them. The contrast between the two sets of
windows is very striking. The old windows are so beautiful, the new
ones are so commonplace. The visitor, even though he knows nothing
about art, notices the contrast and, if he has an eye for color, views
with something of a shock this attempt of the nineteenth century to do
something that had been so well done by the gild-trained workmen of
the technical schools of the Middle Ages. Though they are represented
here only by patched fragments of their work he can scarcely repress a
smile at the effect of their work in cheapening the modern. Everywhere
it is the same way. Mr. F. Rolfe, writing from Venice, where he has
been studying thirteenth-century glass, and talking of its wonderful
beauty as compared to anything modern, says: "There are also fragments
of two windows, pieced together and the missing parts filled in with
the best which modern Murano can do. These show the celebrated
Beroviero Ruby Glass (secret lost) of marvellous depth and brilliancy
in comparison with which the modern work is merely watery. (The
ancient is just like a decanter of port wine.)"
This is the story, no matter where one goes, {165} throughout Europe.
At York they would not surrender the town to the Parliamentary army
until a guarantee had been given them that their cathedral would not
be devastated as had been the case elsewhere. Besides General Ireton
was a friend of the Yorkists and he was ready to agree to the
stipulation. The agreement was not fully carried out, fanatic soldiers
could not be entirely restrained, but some of the old glass remains.
There is probably nothing more beautiful in all the realm of artistic
glass-making than the famous Five Sisters window at York. In France
the Revolution repeated what the Puritans accomplished of ruin in
England. Notre Dame has no trace of its old glass. In some of the
cathedrals, however, there has fortunately been preserved for us
enough of it to know how wonderfully the makers of it must have been
trained, and to let us realize how much of experiment, of
investigation, of study that we would now call applied chemistry must
have gone to the making of this wonderful old glass. These technical
schools were not merely passing on arts and crafts traditions, but
each generation was adding to the secrets of the gilds by original
research of its own. We are prone to think that such work of original
investigation was reserved for our time, but that is only because of
the foolish self-complacency which blinds us to what other generations
did.
The stained glass of the cathedrals of Bourges {166} and of Chartres
shows the marvellous success of these old workers in glass and their
power to make enduring products. It is a mystery to see how their
blues have lasted while the sun has shone through them all these years
and caused no deterioration or only such as softens and adds to beauty
but not really causes to fade. Blue had to be used in great profusion
on the windows because the symbolism of color was well determined and
blue stood for the virtue of purity and was the Blessed Virgin's
color. It had to come in, therefore, on nearly all occasions. Usually
by irradiation blue causes surrounding colors to lose something of
their tint, and by contrast often spoils what would ordinarily be
expected to prove beautiful color effects. These old workmen had found
the secret of using it in such a way as not thus to spoil surrounding
colors, not to permit it to be too assertive, yet we have wonderful
enduring blues that have come down to us practically unchanged through
all these centuries. Where the workmen of the old time set themselves
producing pure color effects, their windows look like jewels and
coruscate in the light of the setting sun--for their most charming
effects were particularly obtained in the west windows--with a
glorious beauty that has appealed to every generation since.
It was not alone in the building trades, however, that these fine
things were accomplished. Bookmaking reached a degree of perfection
that {167} has never been excelled. Humphreys, the authority on
illuminated books, declares that the manuscript volumes of the
thirteenth century, illuminated as they are by the patient labor and
the finely developed taste of this time, are the most beautiful ever
made. We have one example of the thirteenth-century illuminated book
in the Lenox Library in New York for which, I believe, the museum
authorities were quite willing to pay some $18,000, and it is worth
much more than that now, for it is a wondrously beautiful example of
the illuminations of the time. Like the glassmakers, these bookmakers
had secrets that have been lost, and that we with all our knowledge of
science and of art in the modern time, or at least our fondly
complacent notion of our knowledge of art and science, are unable to
find the formulas for. They used blues in their illuminating work that
have never faded, though blues are so prone to fade on parchment. They
managed their blues in wonderful way and they still are as fresh and
as undisturbing of the harmony of other colors as in the long ago.
They could burnish gold and it stays as bright as when it was first
applied to the leaves, even after seven centuries. We have lost the
art of burnishing gold in such applied work and ours becomes dull
after a time.
Nor was this teaching of technics confined only to the men. From this
period we have the most beautiful needlework in the world. The famous
{168} Cope of Ascoli has recently attracted wide attention. Mr.
Pierpont Morgan purchased it and was willing to pay $60,000 for it,
though the jewels that had been on it originally had been removed. His
experts assured him that it was the most beautiful piece of needlework
in the world. Afterwards it was found to have been stolen, and so he
restored it to the Italian Government, who did not return it to the
little convent of Ascoli in North Central Italy, from which it had
been stolen and where it was made at the end of the thirteenth century
(1284), Elsewhere in Europe they were doing just as charming work with
the needle. In fact England, not Italy, was the acknowledged home of
it. The English Cope of Cyon is another notable example of needlework
from this time. Thirteenth-century work with the needle is famous in
the history of the art. It was the product of just the same forces
that gave us the wonderful stained glass. They, too, used colors and
applied great art principles to this unpromising mode of expression
and accomplished great results. I have had the privilege of seeing the
copy of the Cope of Ascoli that was made while in Mr. Morgan's
possession, and, like the stained glass of York or Bourges or
Chartres, it is one of the things not likely ever to be forgotten, so
beautiful a realization is it of what is best in taste and art.
The supremely interesting feature of this popular education was its
effect upon the lives, and {169} minds, and happiness of the workmen.
Men got up to their work in the morning not as to a routine occupation
in which they did the same things over and over again, until they were
so tired that they could scarcely do them any more, and then came home
to rest from fatigue in weariness of mind and of body. But they awoke
from sound sleep with the memory that ideas had been coming to them
the day before, and especially towards evening that, now with fresh
bodies, they might be able to execute better, and that it would surely
be a pleasure to work out. They came to their work with an artist's
spirit, hopeful that they would be able to express in the material
what they saw so clearly with their mind's eye. It was tiresome
working but the hours were not long, and always there was the thought
of accomplishment worthy of the cathedral or the abbey or the town
hall, worthy to be placed beside the masterpieces in the best sense of
that dear old word, that their fellow-workmen of the other gilds were
accomplishing around them. They went to bed healthily tired but not
weary, sometimes to dream of their work, not as a nightmare, but as
something that represented possibilities of accomplishment. When
technical schools can lift men up to this plane then, indeed, there is
a chance for happiness even for the workmen.