_B._ To speak the ordinary speech, read with fair intelligence,
and write in a passably intelligible manner the foreign language
or languages, the social, political, and intellectual necessities
of the time require.
And _C._ A division arising out of A and expanding in the later
stages of the school course to continue and replace A: the
acquisition of the knowledge (and of the art of acquiring
further knowledge from books and facts) necessary to participate
in contemporary thought and life.
Now this project is at once more modest in form and more ambitious in
substance than almost any school scheme or prospectus the reader is
likely to encounter. Let us (on the assumption of our opening paragraph)
inquire what is needed to carry it into execution. So far as 1 and 2
in this table go, we have to recognize that since the development of
elementary schools in England introduced a spirit of endeavour into
teaching, there has been a steady progress in the art of education.
Reading and writing are taught somehow or other to most people nowadays,
they are frequently taught quickly and well, especially well, I think,
in view of the raw material, in many urban Board Schools in England, and
there is nothing to do here but to inquire if anything can be done to
make this teaching, which is so exceptional in attaining its goal, still
quicker and easier, and in bringing the average up to the level of the
present best. We have already suggested as the work of an imaginary
English Language Society, how much might be done in providing
everywhere, cheaply and unavoidably, the best possible reading-books,
and it is manifest that the standard of copy-books for writing might
also be pressed upward by similar methods. In addition, we have to
consider--what is to me a most uncongenial subject--the possible
rationalization of English spelling. I will frankly confess I know
English as much by sight as by sound, and that any extensive or striking
alteration, indeed that almost any alteration, in the printed appearance
of English, worries me extremely. Even such little things as Mr. Bernard
Shaw’s weakness for printing “I’ve” as “Ive,” and the American “favor,”
“thro,” and “catalog” catch at my attention as it travels along the lane
of meaning, like trailing briars. But I have to admit this habit of the
old spelling, which I am sure most people over four-and-twenty share
with me, will trouble neither me nor any one else who reads books now,
in the year 1990. I have to admit that the thing is an accident of my
circumstances. I have learnt to read and write in a certain way, and I
am concerned with the thing said and not with the vehicle, and so it
is that it distresses me when the medium behaves in an unusual way and
distracts my attention from the thing it conveys. But if it is true--and
I think it must be true--that the extremely arbitrary spelling of
English--and more especially of the more familiar English words--greatly
increases the trouble of learning to read and write, I do not think
the mental comfort of one or two generations of grown-up people must be
allowed to stand in the way of a permanent economy in the educational
process. I believe even that such a reader as I might come to be
very easy in the new way. But whatever is done must be done widely,
simultaneously, all over the English-speaking community, and after
the fullest consideration. The local “spelling reform” of a few
half-educated faddists here and there, helps not at all, is a mere
nuisance. This is a thing to be worked out in a scientific way by the
students of phonetics; they must have a complete alphabet settled for
good, a dictionary ready, reading-books well tested, the whole system
polished and near perfection before the thing passes out of the
specialists’ hands. The really practical spelling-reformer will devote
his guineas to endowing chairs of phonetics and supporting publication
in phonetic science, and his time to study and open-minded discussion.
Such organisations as the _Association Phonétique Internationale_, may
be instanced. Systems concocted in a hurry, in a half-commercial or
wholly commercial and in a wholly presumptuous manner, pushed like
religious panaceas and advertised like soap--Pitman’s System, Barnum’s
System, Quackbosh the Gifted Postman’s System, and all that sort of
thing--do nothing but vulgarize, discredit, and retard this work.
Before a system of phonetic spelling can be established, it is advisable
that a standard pronunciation of English should exist. With that
question also these papers have already dealt. But for the sake of
emphasis I would repeat here the astonishment that has grown upon me as
I have given my mind to these things, that, save for local exceptions,
there should be no pressure even upon those who desire to become
teachers in our schools or preachers in our pulpits, to attain a
qualifying minimum of correct pronunciation.
Now directly we pass beyond these first three elementary matters,
reading, writing, and pronunciation, and come to the fourth and fifth
items of our scheme, to the complete mastery of English that is, we come
upon a difficulty that is all too completely disregarded in educational
discussions--always by those who have had no real scholastic experience,
and often by those who ought to know better. It is extremely easy for
a political speaker or a city magnate or a military reformer or an
irresponsible writer, to proclaim that the schoolmaster must mend his
ways forthwith, give up this pointless Latin of his, and teach his
pupils the English language “_thoroughly_”--with much emphasis on the
“thoroughly,” but it is quite another thing for the schoolmaster to obey
our magnificent directions. For the plain, simple, insurmountable fact
is this, that no one knows how to teach English as in our vague way
we critics imagine it taught; that no working schoolmaster alive can
possibly give the thing the concentrated attention, the experimental
years necessary for its development, that it is worth nobody’s while,
and that (except in a vein of exalted self-sacrifice) it will probably
not be worth any one’s while to do so for many years unless some New
Republicans conspire to make it so. The teaching of English requires its
Sturm, its energetic modern renascence schoolmasters, its set of school
books, its branches and grades, before it can become a discipline,
even to compare with the only subject taught with any shadow of orderly
progressive thoroughness in secondary schools, namely, Latin. At present
our method in English is a foolish caricature of the Latin method; we
spend a certain amount of time teaching children classificatory bosh
about the eight sorts of Nominative Case, a certain amount of time
teaching them the “derivation” of words they do not understand,
glance shyly at Anglo-Saxon and at Grimm’s Law, indulge in a specific
reminiscence of the Latin method called parsing, supplement with a more
modern development called the analysis of sentences, give a course of
exercises in paraphrasing (for the most part the conversion of good
English into bad), and wind up with lessons in “Composition” that must
be seen to be believed. Essays are produced, and the teacher noses
blindly through the product for false concords, prepositions at the end
of sentences, and, if a person of peculiarly fine literary quality, for
the word “reliable” and the split infinitive. These various exercises
are so little parts of an articulate whole that they may be taken in
almost any order and any relative quantity. And in the result, if
some pupil should, by a happy knack of apprehension, win through this
confusion to a sense of literary quality, to the enterprise of even
trying to write, the thing is so rare and wonderful that almost
inevitably he or she, in a fine outburst of discovered genius, takes to
the literary life. For the rest, they will understand nothing but
the flattest prose; they will be deaf to everything but the crudest
meanings; they will be the easy victims of the boom, and terribly shy
of a pen. They will revere the dead Great and respect the new Academic,
read the living quack, miss and neglect the living promise, and
become just a fresh volume of that atmosphere of _azote_, in which our
literature stifles.
Now the schoolmaster is not to blame for this any more than he is to
blame for sticking to Latin. It is no more possible for schoolmasters
and schoolmistresses, whose lives are encumbered with a voluminous mass
of low-grade mental toil and worries and reasonable and unreasonable
responsibilities, to find the energy and mental freedom necessary to
make any vital changes in the methods that text-books, traditions,
and examinations force upon them, than it is for a general medical
practitioner to invent and make out of the native ore the steel
implements some operation of frequent occurrence in his practice
may demand. If they are made, and accessible by purchase and not too
expensive, he will get them; if they are not he will have to fumble
along with the next best thing; and if nothing that is any good can be
got, then there is nothing for it, though he be the noblest character,
the finest intelligence that ever lived behind a brass plate, but either
to shirk that operation altogether or to run the chance of making a
disastrous mess of it.
Scolding the schoolmaster, gibing at the schoolmaster, guying,
afflicting and exasperating the schoolmaster in every conceivable way,
is an amusement so entirely congenial to my temperament that I do not
for one moment propose to abandon it. It is a devil I have, and I admit
it. He insults schoolmasters and bishops in particular, and I do not
cast him out, but at the same time I would most earnestly insist that
all that sort of thing does nothing whatever to advance education, that
it is a mere outbreak of personal grace-notes so far as this discussion
goes. The real practical needs in the matter are a properly worked-out
method, a proper set of school books, and then a progressive alteration
of examinations in English, to render that method and that set of school
books imperative. These are needs the schoolmaster and schoolmistress
can do amazingly little to satisfy. Of course, when these things are
ready and the pressure to enforce them begins to tell on the schools,
schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, having that almost instinctive dread
of any sort of change that all hard-worked and rather worried people
acquire, will obstruct and have to be reckoned with, but that is a
detail in the struggle and not a question of general objective. And to
satisfy those real practical needs, what is wanted is in the first place
an organizer, a reasonable sum of money, say ten thousand pounds for
ten years, and access for experimental purposes to a variety of schools.
This organizer would set himself to secure the whole time and energy and
interest of a dozen or so of good men; they would include several expert
teachers, a clear-headed pedagogic expert or so, a keen psychologist
perhaps with a penetrating mind--for example, one might try and
kidnap Professor William James in his next Sabbatical year--one or two
industrious young students, a literary critic perhaps, a philologist,
a grammarian, and set them all, according to their several gifts and
faculties, towards this end. At the end of the first year this organizer
would print and publish for the derision of the world in general and
the bitter attacks of the men he had omitted from the enterprise in
particular, for review in the newspapers and for trial in enterprising
schools, a “course” in the English language and composition. His team of
collaborators, revised perhaps, probably weeded by a quarrel or so and
supplemented by the ablest of the hostile critics, would then, working
with all their time and energy, revise the course for the second year.
And you would repeat the process for ten years. In the end at the cost
of £100,000--really a quite trivial sum for the object in view--there
would exist the scheme, the method, the primers and text-books, the
School Dictionary, the examination syllabus, and all that is now needed
for the proper teaching of English. You would have, moreover, in the
copyrights of the course an asset that might go far to recoup those who
financed the enterprise.
It is precisely this difficulty about text-books and a general
scheme that is the real obstacle to any material improvement in our
mathematical teaching. Professor Perry, in his opening address to the
Engineering Section of the British Association at Belfast, expressed
an opinion that the average boy of fifteen might be got to the
infinitesimal calculus. As a matter of fact the average English boy of
fifteen has only just looked at elementary algebra. But every one
who knows anything of educational science knows, that by the simple
expedient of throwing overboard all that non-educational, mind-sickening
and complex rubbish about money and weights and measures, practice,
interest, “rule of three,” and all the rest of the solemn clap-trap
invented by the masters of the old Academy for Young Gentlemen to fool
the foolish predecessors of those who clamour for commercial education
to-day, and by setting aside the pretence in teaching geometry, that
algebraic formulae and the decimal notation are not yet invented, little
boys of nine may be got to apply quadratic equations to problems, plot
endless problems upon squared paper, and master and apply the geometry
covered by the earlier books of Euclid with the utmost ease. But to do
this with a class of boys at present demands so much special thought,
so much private planning, so much sheer toil on the part of the teacher,
that it becomes practically impossible. The teacher must arrange the
whole course himself, invent his examples, or hunt them laboriously
through a dozen books; he must be not only teacher, but text-book. I
know of no School Arithmetic which does not groan under a weight of sham
practical work, and that does not, with an absurd priggishness, exclude
the use of algebraic symbols. Except for one little volume, I know of no
sane book which deals with arithmetic and elementary algebra under
one cover or gives any helpful exercises or examples in squared
paper calculations. Such books, I am told, exist in the seclusion of
publishers’ stock-rooms, but if I, enjoying as I do much more leisure
and opportunity of inquiry than the average mathematical master, cannot
get at them, how can we expect him to do so? And the thing to do now is
obviously to discover or create these books, and force them kindly but
firmly into the teachers’ hands.
The problem is much simpler in the case of mathematical teaching than in
the case of English, because the educational theory and method have
been more thoroughly discussed. There is no need for the ten years of
experiment and trial I have suggested for the organization of English
teaching. The mathematical reformer may begin now at a point the English
language reformer will not reach for some years. Suppose now a suitably
authenticated committee were to work out--on the basis of Professor
Perry’s syllabus perhaps--a syllabus of school mathematics, and then
make a thorough review of all the mathematical textbooks on sale
throughout the English-speaking world, admitting some perhaps as of real
permanent value for teaching of the new type, provisionally recognizing
others as endurable, but with clear recommendations for their revision
and improvement, and condemning the others specifically _by name_. Let
them make it clear that this syllabus and report will be respected by
all public examining bodies; let them spend a hundred pounds or so
in the intelligent distribution of their report, and the scholastic
profession will not be long before it is equipped with the recommended
books. Meanwhile, the English and American scholastic publishers will
become extremely active, the warned books will be revised, and new books
will be written in competition for the enormous prize of the committee’s
final approval, an activity that a second review, after an interval of
five or six years, will recognize and reward.
Such measures as these will be worth reams of essays in educational
papers and Parents’ Reviews, worth thousands of inspiring and suggestive
lectures at pedagogic conferences. If, indeed, such essays and such
lectures do any good at all. The more one looks into scholastic affairs
the more one is struck not only by the futility but the positive
mischievousness of much of what passes for educational liberalism. The
schoolmaster is criticised vehemently for teaching the one or two poor
useless subjects he can in a sort of way teach, and practically nothing
is done to help or equip him to teach anything else. By reason of this
uproar, the world is full now of anxious muddled parents, their poor
brains buzzing with echoes of Froebel, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin,
Herbart, Colonel Parker, Mr. Harris, Matthew Arnold, and the _Morning
Post_, trying to find something better. They know nothing of what is
right, they only know very, very clearly that the ordinary school is
extremely wrong. They are quite clear they don’t want “cram” (though
they haven’t the remotest idea what cram is), and they have a pretty
general persuasion that failure at examination is a good test of a sound
education. And in response to their bleating demand there grows a
fine crop of Quack Schools; schools organized on lines of fantastic
extravagance, in which bee-keeping takes the place of Latin, and
gardening supersedes mathematics, in which boys play tennis naked to be
cured of False Shame, and the numerical exercises called bookkeeping and
commercial correspondence are taught to the sons of parents (who can pay
a hundred guineas a year), as Commercial Science. The subjects of study
in these schools come and go like the ravings of a disordered mind;
“Greek History” (in an hour or so a week for a term) is followed by
“Italian Literature,” and this gives place to the production of a
Shakesperian play that ultimately overpowers and disorganizes the whole
curriculum. Ethical lessons and the school pulpit flourish, of course.
A triennial walk to a chalk-pit is Field Geology, and vague half-holiday
wanderings are Botany Rambles. “Art” of the copper punching variety
replaces any decent attempt to draw, and an extreme expressiveness in
music compensates for an almost deliberate slovenliness of technique.
Even the ladies’ seminaries of the Georgian days could scarcely have
produced a parallel to the miscellaneous incapacity of the victim of
these “modern” schools, and it becomes daily more necessary for those
who have the interests of education at heart to disavow with the most
unmistakable emphasis these catch-parent impostures.
With the other subjects under the headings of _A_ and _B_, it is not
necessary to deal at any length here. Drawing begins at home, and a
child should have begun to sketch freely before the formal schooling
commences. It is the business of the school to teach drawing and not
to teach “art,” which, indeed, is always an individual and spontaneous
thing, and it need only concern itself directly with those aspects of
drawing that require direction. Of course, an hour set aside from the
school time in which boys or girls may do whatever they please with
paper, ink, pens, pencils, compasses, and water-colour would be a most
excellent and profitable thing, but that scarcely counts (except in the
Quack Schools) as teaching. As a matter of fact, teaching absolutely
spoils all that sort of thing. A course in model drawing and in
perspective, however, is really a training in seeing things, it demands
rigorous instruction and it must be the backbone of school drawing, and,
in addition, studies may be made from flowers that would not be made
without direction: topography (and much else) may be learnt by copying
good explicit maps; chronology (to supplement the child’s private
reading of history) by the construction of time charts; and much history
also by drawing and colouring historical maps. With geometrical drawing
one passes insensibly into mathematics. And so much has been done not
only to revolutionize the teaching of modern languages, but also to
popularize the results, that I may content myself with a mere mention of
the names of Rippmann, S. Alge, Hölzel, and Gouin as typical of the new
ways.
There remains the question of _C_, the amount of Information that is to
take a place in schooling. Now there is one “subject” that it would be
convenient to include, were it only for the sake of the mass of exercise
and illustration it supplies to the mathematical course, and that is
the science of Physics. In addition, the science of physics, since it
culminates in a clear understanding and use of the terminology of
the aspects of energy and a clear sense of adequate causation, is
fundamentally necessary to modern thought. Practical work is, no doubt,
required for the proper understanding of physical science, and so far it
must enter into schooling, but it may be pointed out here that in many
cases the educational faddist is overdoing the manual side of science
study to a ridiculous extent. Things have altered very much at the Royal
College of Science, no doubt, since my student days, but fifteen years
ago the courses in elementary physics and in elementary geology were
quite childishly silly in this respect. Both these courses seemed to
have been inspired by that eminent educationist, Mr. Squeers, and
the sequel to spelling “window” was always to “go and clean one.” The
science in each course in those days could have been acquired just as
well in a fortnight as in half a year. One muddled away three or four
days etching a millimetre scale with hydrofluoric acid on glass--to no
earthly end that I could discover--and a week or so in making a needless
barometer. In the course in geology, days and days were spent in drawing
ideal crystalline forms and colouring them in water-colours, apparently
in order to get a totally false idea of a crystal, and weeks in the
patient copying of microscopic rock sections in water-colours. Effectual
measures of police were taken to prevent the flight of the intelligent
student from these tiresome duties. The mischief done in this way is
very great. It deadens the average students and exasperates and
maddens the eager ones. I am inclined to think that a very considerable
proportion of what passes as “practical” science work, for which costly
laboratories are built and expensive benches fitted, consists of
very similar solemnities, and it cannot be too strongly urged that
“practical” work that does not illuminate is mere waste of the student’s
time.
This physics course would cover an experimental quantitative treatment
of the electric current, it would glance in an explanatory way at many
of the phenomena of physical geography, and it would be correlated with
a study of the general principles of chemistry. A detailed knowledge of
chemical compounds is not a part of general education, it keeps better
in reference books than in the non-specialized head, and it is only the
broad conceptions of analysis and combination, and of the relation of
energy to chemical changes, that have to be attained. Beyond this, and
the application of map drawing to give accurate ideas and to awaken
interest in geography and history, it is open to discussion whether
any Fact subject need be taught as schooling at all. Ensure the full
development of a man’s mental capacity, and he will get his Fact as he
needs it. And if his mind is undeveloped he can make no use of any fact
he has. The subject called “Human Physiology” may be at once dismissed
as absurdly unsuitable for school use. One is always meeting worthy
people who “don’t see why children should not know something about
their own bodies,” and who are not apparently aware that the medical
profession after some generations of fairly systematic inquiry knows
remarkably little. Save for some general anatomy, it is impossible to
teach school-children anything true about the human body, because the
explanation of almost any physiological process demands a knowledge of
physical and chemical laws much sounder and subtler than the average
child can possibly attain. And as for botany, geology, history, and
geography (beyond the range already specified), these are far better
relegated to the school library and the initiative of each child.
Every child has its specific range of interest, and its specific way of
regarding things. In geology, for example, one boy may be fascinated
by the fossil hunting, another will find his interest in the effects of
structure in scenery, and a third, with more imagination, will give his
whole mind to the reconstruction of the past, and will pore over maps of
Pleistocene Europe and pictures of Silurian landscape with the keenest
appreciation. Each will be bored, or at least not greatly interested,
by what attracts the others. Let the children have an easily accessible
library--that is the crying need of nine hundred and ninety-nine out
of a thousand schools to-day, a need every school-seeking parent may do
something to remedy--and in that library let there be one or two good
densely illustrated histories, illustrated travels, bound volumes
of such a publication as Newnes’ _Wide World Magazine_ (I name these
publications haphazard--there are probably others as good or better),
Hutchinson and Co.’s _Living Animals of the World_, the Rev. H. N.
Hutchinson’s _Extinct Monsters_, the Badminton volumes on big game
shooting, mountaineering, and yachting, Kerner’s “Botany,” collections
of “The Hundred Best Pictures” sort, collections of views of towns and
of scenery in different parts of the world, and the like. Then let the
schoolmaster set aside five hours a week as the minimum for reading, and
let the pupils read during that time just whatever they like,
provided only that they keep silence and read. If the schoolmaster
or schoolmistress comes in at all here, it should be to stimulate
systematic reading occasionally by setting a group of five or six pupils
to “get up” some particular subject--a report on “animals that
might still be domesticated,” for example--and by showing them
conversationally how to read with a slip of paper at hand, gathering
facts. This sort of thing it is impossible to reduce to method and
system, and, consequently, it is the proper field for the teacher’s
initiative. It is largely in order to leave time and energy for this
that I am anxious to reduce the more rigorous elements in schooling to
standard and text-book.
Now all this schooling need not take more than twenty hours a week for
its backbone or hard-work portion, its English, mathematics, science,
and exact drawing, and twelve hours a week for its easier, more
individual employments of sketching, painting, and reading, and this
leaves a large margin of time for military drill and for physical
exercises. If we are to get the best result from the child’s
individuality, we must leave a large portion of that margin at the
child’s own disposal, it must be free to go for walks, to “muck about,”
as schoolboys say, to play games, and (within limits) to consort with
companions of its own choosing--to follow its interests in short. It
is in this direction that British middle-class education fails most
signally at the present time. The English schoolboy and schoolgirl are
positively hunted through their days. They do not play--using the word
to indicate a spontaneous employment into which imagination enters--at
all. They have games, but they are so regulated that the imagination is
eliminated; they have exercises of various stereotyped sorts. They are
taken to and fro to these things in the care of persons one would call
ushers unhesitatingly were it not that they also pretended to teach.
The rest of their waking time is preparation or supervised reading
or walking under supervision. Their friendships are watched. They are
never, never left alone. The avowed ideal of many boarding schoolmasters
is to “send them to bed tired out.” Largely this is due to a natural
dread of accidents and scrapes, that will make trouble for the school,
but there is also another cause. If I may speak frankly and entirely as
an unauthoritative observer, I would say it is a regrettable thing that
so large a proportion of British secondary schoolmasters and mistresses
are unmarried. The normal condition of a healthy adult is marriage, and
for all those who are not defective upon this side (and that means an
incapacity to understand many things) celibacy is a state of unstable
equilibrium and too often a quite unwholesome condition. Wherever
there are celibate teachers I am inclined to suspect a fussiness, an
unreasonable watchfulness, a disposition to pry, an exaggeration of what
are called “Dangers,” a painful idealization of “Purity.” It is a
part of the normal development of the human being to observe with some
particularity certain phenomena, to entertain certain curiosities,
to talk of them to trusted equals--_never_, be it noted, except by
perversion to parents or teachers--and there is not the slightest harm
in these quite natural things, unless they are forced back into an
abashed solitude or associated by suggestion with conceptions of shame
and disgust. That is what happens in too many of our girls’ schools and
preparatory schools to-day, and it is to that end mainly that youthful
intimacies are discouraged, youthful freedom is restricted, and
imagination and individuality warped and crippled. It is astonishing how
much of their adolescence grown-up people will contrive to forget.
So much for schooling and what may be done to better it in this New
Republican scheme of things. The upward continuation of it into a
general College course is an integral part of a larger question that
we shall discuss at a later stage, the larger question of the general
progressive thought of the community as a whole.