We left the child whose development threads through this discussion
ripe to begin a little schooling at the age of five. We have cleared the
ground since then of a great number of things that have got themselves
mixed up in an illegitimate way with the idea of school, and we can now
take him on again through his “schooling” phases. Let us begin by asking
what we require and then look to existing conditions to see how far
we may hope to get our requirements. We will assume the foundation
described in the fourth paper has been well and truly laid, that we
have a number of other similarly prepared children available to form
a school, and that we have also teachers of fair average intelligence,
conscience, and aptitude. We will ask what can be done with such
children and teachers, and then we may ask why it is not universally
done.
Even after our clarifying discussion, in which we have shown that
schooling is only a part, and by no means the major part, of the
educational process, and in which we have distinguished and separated
the home element in the boarding-school from the schooling proper, there
still remains something more than a simple theme in schooling. After all
these eliminations we remain with a mixed function and mixed traditions,
and it is necessary now to look a little into the nature of this
mixture.
The modern school is not a thing that has evolved from a simple germ, by
a mere process of expansion. It is the coalescence of several things. In
different countries and periods you will find schools taking over
this function and throwing out that, and changing not only methods but
professions and aims in the most remarkable manner. What has either been
teachable or has seemed teachable in human development has played a
part in some curriculum or other. Beyond the fact that there is class
instruction and an initial stage in which the pupil learns to read and
write, there is barely anything in common. But that initial stage is to
be noted; it is the thing the Hebrew schoolboy, the Tamil schoolboy, the
Chinese schoolboy, and the American schoolboy have in common. So much,
at any rate, of the school appears wherever there is a written language,
and its presence marks a stage in the civilizing process. As I have
already pointed out in my book “Anticipations,” the presence of a
reading and writing class of society and the existence of an organized
nation (as distinguished from a tribe) appear together. When tribes
coalesce into nations, schools appear. This first and most universal
function of the school is to initiate a smaller or greater proportion of
the population into the ampler world, the more efficient methods, of the
reading and writing man. And with the disappearance of the slave and
the mere labourer from the modern conception of what is necessary in the
state, there has now come about an extension of this initiation to the
whole of our English-speaking population. And in addition to reading
and writing the vernacular, there is also almost universally in schools
instruction in counting, and wherever there is a coinage, in the values
and simpler computation of coins.
In addition to the vernacular teaching, one finds in the schools--at
any rate the schools for males--over a large part of the world, a second
element, which is always the language of what either is or has been a
higher and usually a dominant civilization. Typically, there is a low or
imitative vernacular literature or no literature at all, and this second
language is the key to all that literature involves--general views,
general ideas, science, poetic suggestion and association. Through this
language the vernacular citizen escapes from his parochial and national
limitations to a wide commonweal of thought. Such was Greek at one time
to the Roman, such was Latin to the Bohemian, the German, the Englishman
or the Spaniard of the middle ages, and such it is to-day to the Roman
Catholic priest; such is Arabic to the Malay, written Chinese to the
Cantonese or the Corean, and English to the Zulu or the Hindoo. In
Germany and France, to a lesser degree in Great Britain, and to a still
lesser degree in the United States, we find, however, an anomalous
condition of things. In each of these countries civilization has long
since passed into an unprecedented phase, and each of these countries
has long since developed a great living mass of literature in which its
new problems are, at any rate, approached. There is scarcely a work left
in Latin or Greek that has not been translated into and assimilated and
more or less completely superseded by English, French, and German works;
but the schoolmaster, heedless of these things, still arrests the pupil
at the old portal, fumbles with the keys, and partially opens the door
into a ransacked treasure-chamber. The language of literature and of
civilized ideas is, for the English-speaking world to-day, English--not
the weak, spoken dialect of each class and locality, but the rich and
splendid language in which and with which our literature and philosophy
grow. That, however, is by the way. Our point at present is that the
exhaustive teaching of a language so that it may serve as a key to
culture is a second function in the school.
We find in a broad survey of schools in general that there has also been
a disposition to develop a special training in thought and expression
either in the mother tongue (as in the Roman schools of Latin oratory),
or in the culture tongue (as in Roman schools of Greek oratory), and we
find the same element in the mediaeval trivium. Quintilian’s conception
of education, the reader will remember, was oratory. This aspect of
school work was the traditional and logical development of the culture
language-teaching. But as in Europe the culture language has ceased to
be really a culture language but merely a reasonless survival, and
its teaching has degenerated more and more into elaborate formalities
supposed to have in some mystical way “high educational value,” and
for the most part conducted by men unable either to write or speak the
culture language with any freedom or vigour, this crown of cultivated
expression has become more and more inaccessible. It is too manifestly
stupid--even for our public schoolmasters--to think of carrying the
“classical grind” to that pitch, and, in fact, they carry no part of the
education to that pitch. There is no deliberate and professed training
at all in logical thought--except for the use of Euclid’s Elements to
that end--nor in expression in any language at all, in the great mass
of modern schools. This is a very notable point about the schools of the
present period.
But, on the other hand, the schools of the modern period have developed
masses of instruction that were not to be found in the schools of the
past. The school has reached downward and taken over, systematized, and
on the whole, I think, improved that preliminary training of the senses
and the observation that was once left to the spontaneous activity of
the child among its playmates and at home. The kindergarten department
of a school is a thing added to the old conception of schooling, a
conversion of the all too ample school hours to complete and rectify the
work of the home, to make sure of the foundation of sense impressions
and elementary capabilities upon which the edifice of schooling is
to rise. In America it has grown, as a wild flower transferred to the
unaccustomed richness of garden soil will sometimes do, rankly and in
relation to the more essential schooling, aggressively, and become
a highly vigorous and picturesque weed. One must bear in mind that
Froebel’s original thought was rather of the mother than of the
schoolmistress, a fact the kindergarten invaders of the school find it
convenient to forget. I believe we shall be carrying out his intentions
as well as the manifest dictates of common sense if we do all in our
power by means of simply and clearly written books for nurses and
mothers to shift very much of the kindergarten back to home and playroom
and out of the school altogether. Correlated with this development,
there has been a very great growth in our schools of what is called
manual training and of the teaching of drawing. Neither of these
subjects entered into the school idea of any former period, so far as my
not very extensive knowledge of educational history goes.
Modern, too, is the development of efficient mathematical teaching; so
modern that for too many schools it is still a thing of tomorrow. The
arithmetic (without Arabic numerals, be it remembered) and the geometry
of the mediaeval quadrivium were astonishingly clumsy and ineffectual
instruments in comparison with the apparatus of modern mathematical
method. And while the mathematical subjects of the quadrivium were
taught as science and for their own sakes, the new mathematics is a sort
of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and
quantity and a means of expression, more exact, compact, and ready than
ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal
of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and
political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who
have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not
be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation
as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide
states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to
compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to
be able to read and write. This development of mathematical teaching is
only another aspect of the necessity that is bringing the teaching of
drawing into schools, the necessity that is so widely, if not always
very intelligently perceived, of clearheadedness about quantity,
relative quantity, and form, that our highly mechanical, widely
extended, and still rapidly extending environments involve.
Arithmetic and geometry were taught in the mediaeval school as sciences,
in addition the quadrivium involved the science of astronomy, and now
that the necessary fertilizing inundation of our general education by
the classical languages and their literatures subsides, science of a new
sort reappears in our schools. I must confess that a lot of the science
teaching that appears in schools nowadays impresses me as being a very
undesirable encumbrance of the curriculum. The schoolman’s science came
after the training in language and expression, late in the educational
scheme, and it aimed, it pretended--whatever its final effect was--to
strengthen and enlarge the mind by a noble and spacious sort of
knowledge. But the science of the modern school pretends merely to be a
teaching of useful knowledge; the vistas, the tremendous implications of
modern science are conscientiously disregarded, and it is in effect too
often no more than a diversion of school energies to the acquisition
of imperfectly analyzed misstatements about entrails, elements, and
electricity, with a view--a quite unjustifiable view--to immediate
profitable hygienic and commercial application. Whether there is any
educational value in the school-teaching of science we may discuss
later. For the present we may note it simply as a revived and developing
element.
On the other hand, while these things expand in the modern school, there
are declining elements, once in older schemes of scholastic work much
more evident. In the culture of the mediaeval knight, for example, and
of the eighteenth-century young lady, elegant accomplishments, taught
disconnected from the general educational scheme and for themselves,
played a large part. The eighteenth-century young lady was taught
dancing, deportment, several instruments of music, how to pretend to
sketch, how to pretend to know Italian, and so on. The dancing still
survives--a comical mitigation of high school austerities--and there
is also a considerable interruption of school work achieved by the
music-master. If there is one thing that I would say with certainty has
no business whatever in schools, it is piano-teaching. The elementary
justification of the school is its organization for class-teaching and
work in unison, and there is probably no subject of instruction that
requires individual tuition quite so imperatively as piano-playing;
there is no subject so disadvantageously introduced where children
are gathered together. But to every preparatory and girls’ school
in England--I do not know if the same thing happens in America--the
music-master comes once or twice a week, and with a fine disregard of
the elementary necessities of teaching, children are called one by
one, out of whatever class they happen to be attending, to have their
music-lesson. Either the whole of the rest of the class must mark time
at some unnecessary exercise until the missing member returns, or
one child must miss some stage, some explanation that will involve a
weakness, a lameness for the rest of the course of instruction. Not
only is the actual music-lesson a nuisance in this way, but all day the
school air is loaded with the oppressive tinkling of racked and rackety
pianos. Nothing, I think, could be more indicative of the real value
the English school-proprietor sets on school-teaching than this easy
admission of the music-master to hack and riddle the curriculum into
rags. [Footnote 1: Piano playing as an accomplishment is a nuisance and
encumbrance to the school course and a specialization that surely lies
within the private Home province. To learn to play the piano properly
demands such an amount of time and toil that I do not see how we can
possibly include it in the educational scheme of the honourable citizens
of the coming world state. To half learn it, to half learn anything, is
a training in failure. But it is probable that a different sort of
music teaching altogether--a teaching that would aim, not at
instrumentalization, but at intelligent appreciation--might find a place
in a complete educational scheme. The general ignorance that pervades,
and in part inspires these papers, does, in the matter of music, become
special, profound, and distinguished. It seems to me, however, that
what the cultivated man or woman requires is the ability to read a score
intelligently rather than to play it--to distinguish the threads, the
values, of a musical composition, to have a quickened ear rather than a
disciplined hand. I owe to my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, the suggestion
that the piano is altogether too exacting an instrument to use as the
practical vehicle for such instruction, and that something simpler and
cheaper--after the fashion of the old spinet--is required. Possibly some
day a teacher of genius will devise and embody in a book a course of
class lessons, sustained by simple practice and written work, that would
attain this end. But, indeed, after all is said and done, music is
the most detached and the purest of arts, the most accessory of
attainments.] Apart from the piano work, the special teaching of elegant
accomplishments seems just at present on the wane. And on the whole I
think what one might call useful or catchpenny accomplishments are
also passing their zenith--shorthand lessons, book-keeping lessons, and
such-like impostures upon parental credulity.
There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a convenient
accomplishment, and which has--with that increase in communication which
is the salient material fact of the nineteenth century--developed in
Western Europe to the dimensions of a political necessity, and that
is the teaching of one or more modern foreign languages. The
language-teaching of all previous periods has been done with a view
to culture, artistic, as in the case of Elizabethan Italian, or
intellectual as with English Latin. But the language-teaching of to-day
is deliberately, almost conscientiously, not for culture. It would, I am
sure, be a very painful and shocking thought indeed to an English parent
to think that French was taught in school with a view to reading
French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity for purposes of vulgar
communication. The stirring together of the populations that is going
on, the fashion and facilities for travel, the production of the radii
from the trading foci, are rapidly making a commonplace knowledge of
French, German, and Italian a necessity to the merchant and tradesman,
and the ever more extensive travelling class. So that so far as Europe
goes, one may very well regard this modern modern-language teaching
as--with the modern mathematics--an extension of the _trivium_, of the
apparatus, that is, of thought and expression. [Footnote: In the United
States there is less sense of urgency about modern languages, but
sooner or later the American may wake up to the need of Spanish in
his educational schemes.] It is an extension and a very doubtful
improvement. It is a modern necessity, a rather irksome necessity, of
little or no essential educational value, an unavoidable duty the school
will have to perform. [Footnote: In one way the foreign language may be
made educationally very useful, and that is as an exercise in writing
translations into good English.]
There are two subjects in the modern English school that stand by
themselves and in contrast with anything one finds in the records
of ancient and oriental schools, as a very integral part of what is
regarded as our elementary general education. They are of very doubtful
value in training the mind, and most of the matter taught is totally
forgotten in adult life. These are history and geography. These two
subjects constitute, with English grammar and arithmetic, the four
obligatory subjects for the very lowest grade of the London College of
Preceptors’ examinations, for example. The examination papers of this
body reveal the history as an affair of dated events, a record of
certain wars and battles, and legislative and social matters quite
beyond the scope of a child’s experience and imagination. Scholastic
history ends at 1700 or 1800, always long before it throws the faintest
light upon modern political or social conditions. The geography is,
for the most part, topography, with a smattering of quantitative facts,
heights of mountains, for example, populations of countries, and lists
of obsolete manufactures and obsolete trade conditions. Any one who
will take the trouble to run through the text-books of these subjects
gathered together in the library of the London Teachers’ Guild, will
find that the history is generally taught without maps, pictures,
descriptive passages, or anything to raise it above the level of an
arid misuse of memory; and the highest levels to which ordinary school
geography has attained are to be found in the little books of the late
Professor Meiklejohn. These two subjects are essentially “information”
subjects. They differ in prestige rather than in educational quality
from school chemistry and natural history, and their development marks
the beginning of that great accumulation of mere knowledge which is so
distinctive of this present civilization.
There are, no doubt, many minor subjects, but this revision will at
least serve to indicate the scope and chief varieties of school work.
Out of some such miscellany it is that in most cases the student passes
to specialization, to a different and narrower process which aims at
a specific end, to the course of the College. In some cases this
specialized course may be correlated with a real and present practice,
as in the case of the musical, medical, and legal faculties of our
universities; it may be correlated with obsolete needs and practices
and regardless of modern requirements, as in the case of the student
of divinity who takes his orders and comes into a world full of the
ironical silences that follow great controversies, nakedly ignorant of
geology, biology, psychology, and modern biblical criticism; or it may
have no definite relation to special needs, and it may profess to be an
upward prolongation of schooling towards a sort of general wisdom and
culture, as in the case of the British “Arts” degrees. The ordinary
Oxford, Cambridge, or London B.A. has a useless smattering of Greek,
he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that
tongue; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical
literature, he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an
imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it
clearly, and none of German, he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite
useless knowledge of certain rudimentary sections of mathematics, and
an odd little bite out of history. He knows practically nothing of the
world of thought embodied in English literature, and absolutely nothing
of contemporary thought; he is totally ignorant of modern political
or social science, and if he knows anything at all about evolutionary
science and heredity it is probably matter picked up in a casual
way from the magazines. Art is a sealed book to him. Still, the
inapplicability of his higher education to any professional or practical
need in the world is sufficiently obvious, it seems, to justify the
claim that it has put him on a footing of thought and culture above the
level of a shopman. It is either that or nothing. And without deciding
between these alternatives, we may note here for our present purpose,
that the conception of a general upward prolongation of schooling beyond
adolescence, as distinguished from a specific upward prolongation into
professional training, is necessary to the complete presentation of the
school and college scheme in the modern state.
There has always been a tendency to utilize the gathering together of
children in schools for purposes irrelevant to schooling proper, but of
some real or fancied benefit. Wherever there is a priestly religion,
the lower type of religious fanatic will always look to the schools as
a means of doctrinal dissemination; will always be seeking to replace
efficiency by orthodoxy upon staff and management; and, with an
unconquerable, uncompromising persistency, will seek perpetually either
to misconduct or undermine; and the struggle to get him out and keep him
out of the school, and to hold the school against him, will be one
of the most necessary and thankless of New Republican duties. I have,
however, already adduced reasons that I think should appeal to every
religious mind, for the exclusion of religious teaching from school
work. The school gathering also affords opportunity for training in
simple unifying political conceptions; the salutation of the flag, for
example, or of the idealized effigies of King and Queen. The quality of
these conceptions we shall discuss later. The school also gives scope
for physical training and athletic exercises that are, under the
crowded conditions of a modern town, almost impossible except by its
intervention. And it would be the cheapest and easiest way of raising
the military efficiency of a country, and an excellent thing for the
moral tone and public order of a people, to impose upon the school
gathering half an hour a day of vigorous military drill. The school,
too, might very easily be linked more closely than it is at present
with the public library, and made a means of book distribution; and its
corridors may easily be utilized as a loan picture gallery, in which
good reproductions of fine pictures might bring the silent influence of
the artist mind to bear. But all these things are secondary applications
of the school gathering; at their best they are not conducted by the
school-teacher at all, and I remark upon them here merely to avoid any
confusion their omission might occasion.
Now if we dip into this miscellany of things that figure and have
figured in schools, if we turn them over and look at them, and seek to
generalize about them, we shall begin to see that the most persistently
present, and the living reality of it all, is this: to expand, to add
to and organize and supplement that apparatus of understanding and
expression the savage possesses in colloquial speech. The pressing
business of the school is _to widen the range of intercourse_.
[Footnote: This way of putting it may jar a little upon the more or less
explicit preconceptions of many readers, who are in reality in harmony
with the tone of thought of this paper. They will have decided that the
school work is to “train the mind,” to “teach the pupil to think,” or
upon some similar phrase. But I venture to think that most of these
phrases are at once too wide and too narrow. They are too wide
because they ignore the spontaneous activity of the child and the
extra-scholastic forces of mind-training, and they are too narrow
because they ignore the fact that we do not progress far with our
thoughts unless we throw them out into objective existence by means of
words, diagrams, models, trial essays. Even if we do not talk to others
we must, silently or vocally or visibly, talk to ourselves at least to
get on. To acquire the means of intercourse is to learn to think, so
far as learning goes in the matter.] It is only secondarily--so far as
schooling goes--or, at any rate, subsequently, that the idea of shaping,
or, at least, helping to shape, the expanded natural man into a citizen,
comes in. It is only as a subordinate necessity that the school is a
vehicle for the inculcation of facts. The facts come into the school not
for their own sake, but in relation to intercourse. It is only upon a
common foundation of general knowledge that the initiated citizens of an
educated community will be able to communicate freely together. With the
net of this phrase, “widening the range of intercourse,” I think it
is possible to gather together all that is essential in the deliberate
purpose of schooling. Nothing that remains outside is of sufficient
magnitude to be of any importance in the small-scale sketch of human
development we are now making:--
If we take this and hold to it as a guide, and explore a scheme of
school work, in the direction it takes us, we shall find it shaping
itself (for an English-speaking citizen) something after this fashion:
_A_. Direct means of understanding and expression.
1. Reading.
2. Writing.
3. Pronouncing English correctly.