When we digressed to the general question of the political, social, and
moral atmosphere in which the English-speaking citizen develops, we left
the formal education of the average child, whose development threads
through these papers and holds them together, at about the age of
fifteen and at the end of the process of Schooling. We have now to carry
on that development to adult citizenship. It is integral in the New
Republican idea that the process of Schooling, which is the common
atrium to all public service, should be fairly uniform throughout the
social body, that although the average upper-class child may have all
the advantages his conceivably better mental inheritance, his better
home conditions, and his better paid and less overworked teachers may
give him, there shall be no disadvantages imposed upon the child of any
class, there shall be no burking of the intellectual education for
any purpose whatever. To keep poor wretches in serfdom on the land by
depriving them of all but the most rudimentary literary education, as
a very considerable element in the new Nature Study Movement certainly
intends, is altogether antagonistic to New Republican ideas, and there
must be no weeding out of capable and high-minded teachers by filtering
them through grotesque and dishonouring religious tests--dishonouring
because compulsory, whatever the real faith of the teacher may be. And
at the end of the Schooling period there must begin a process of sorting
in the mass of the national youth--as far as possible, regardless
of their social origins--that will go on throughout life. For the
competition of public service must constitute the Battle for Existence
in the civilized state. All-round inferiority in school life--failure
not simply at this or that or at the total result (which, indeed, may be
due very often to the lopsidedness of exceptional gifts) but failure all
along the line--is a mark of essential inferiority. A certain proportion
of boys and girls will have shown this inferiority, will have done
little with any of their chances in or out of school during their
school life, and these--when they are poorer-class children--will very
naturally drop out of the educational process at this stage and pass
into employment suited to their capacity, employment which should not
carry with it any considerable possibility of prolific marriage.
A really well-contrived leaving-school examination--and it must be
remembered that the theory and science of examinations scarcely exists
as yet--an examination which would take account of athletic development
and moral influence (let us say provisionally by the vote of
fellow-pupils) and which would be so contrived as to make specially high
quality in one department as good as all-round worth--could effect this
first classification. It would throw out the worst of the duffers and
fools and louts all along the social scale. What is to become of the
rejected of the upper and wealthy class is, I admit, a difficult problem
as things are to-day. At present they carry a loutish ingredient to the
public schools, to the Army, to Oxford and Cambridge, and it is open to
question whether it would not be well to set aside one public school,
one especially costly university, and one gentlemen’s regiment of an
attractively smart type, into which this mass of expensive slackness
might be drained along a channel of specially high fees, low standards,
and agreeable social conditions. That, however, is a quite subsidiary
question in this discussion. A day may come, as I have already
suggested, when it will be considered as reasonable to insist upon a
minimum mental qualification for the administration of property as
for any other form of power in the state. Pride and their many
advantages--of which one is quite conceivably an average essential
superiority--will probably ensure a satisfactory result from the
Schooling process in the case of a much greater proportion of
better-class than of lower-class boys and girls. [Footnote: In most big
public schools, I am told, there is a system of superannuation about
sixteen, but I know nothing of the provision for those who are weeded
out.]
From the mass who show a satisfactory result at the end of the Schooling
process, the functional manhood and womanhood of our peoples have to be
developed, and we have now to discuss the nature of the second phase
of education, the phase that should be the mental parallel and
accompaniment of physical adolescence in all the citizens who are
to count for strength in the state. There is a break in the whole
development of the human being at this age, and it may very well be
paralleled by a break in methods and subjects of instruction. In Great
Britain, in the case of the wealthier classes, schooling and puerile
discipline is prolonged altogether too far, largely through the gross
incapacity of our secondary teachers. These men are unable, boring away
day after day, week after week, year after year, with vain repetitions,
imbecile breaks and new beginnings, through all the vast period from
eleven or twelve until twenty, to achieve that mastery of Latin and
Greek which was once the necessary preliminary to education, and which
has become at last, through the secular decline in scholastic energy
and capacity due to the withdrawal of interest in these studies, the
unattainable educational ideal. These classical pedagogues,
however, carry the thing up to three or four and twenty in the
Universities--though it is inconceivable that any language spoken
since the antediluvian age of leisure, can need more than ten years to
learn--and if they could keep the men until forty or fifty they would
still be fumbling away at the keys to the room that was ransacked long
ago. But with educated men as teachers and practical handbooks to help,
and practical examiners to guide them, there is no reason whatever why
the great mass of the linguistic training of the citizen, in the use of
his own and any other necessary language, should not be done for good
and all by fourteen, why he should not have a fairly complete mastery of
form and quantity through mathematical training and drawing, and why the
way should not be clear and immediate for the development of that adult
mental edifice of which this is the foundation.
By fourteen the power of abstract reasoning and of an analytical
treatment of things is in existence, the learner is now less to be
moulded and more to be guided than he was. We want now to give this mind
we have established, the most stimulating and invigorating training we
can, we want to give it a sane coherent view of our knowledge of the
universe in relation to itself, and we want to equip it for its own
special work in the world. How, on the basis of the Schooling we have
predicated, are these ends to be attained?
Now let us first have it perfectly clear that this second stage in
development lies no more completely within the idea of College than
the former lay completely within the idea of School. In the general
discussion of these things we are constantly faced by the parallel error
to that we have tried to dissipate in regard to schools, the error that
the Professor and his Lecture and (in the case of experimental sciences)
his Laboratory make, or can make, the man, just precisely in the same
way that the Schoolmaster or Schoolmistress is supposed to be omnipotent
in the education of the boy or girl. And, unhappily, the Professor,
unless he is a man of quite exceptional mental power for a Professor,
shares this groundless opinion. The Schoolmaster is under-educated in
regard to his work, and incapable of doing it neatly; the Professor
is too often over-specialized and incapable of forming an intelligent,
modest idea of his place in education; and the same consequence flows
from the defect of either, an attempt to use an improperly large portion
of the learner’s time and energy. Over-direction, and what one may call
intellectual sectarianism, are faults from which few College courses
are free to-day. The Professor stands between his students and books,
he says in lectures in his own way what had far better be left for other
men’s books to tell, he teaches his beliefs without a court of appeal.
Students are kept writing up their notes of his not very brilliant
impromptus, and familiarizing themselves with his mental constitution
instead of the subject of study. They get no training in the use of
books as sources of knowledge and ideas, albeit such a training is one
of the most necessary of all acquisitions for an efficient citizen,
and whatever discussion the modern student indulges in is all too
often treated rather as presumption to be discouraged than as the most
necessary and hopeful of mental processes. Our Universities and Colleges
are still but imperfectly aware of the recent invention of the Printed
Book; and its intelligent use in this stage of education has made little
or no headway against their venerable traditions. That things are only
understood by being turned over in the mind and looked at from various
points of view is, of course, altogether too modern a conception for
our educationists. At the London Royal College of Science, for example,
which is an exceptionally new and efficient College, there is no
properly organized escape from the orthodoxy of the lecture-theatre, no
circulating library whatever available to the students, no library, that
is, which will ensure a copious supply and exchange of the best books on
each subject, and, consequently, even to look up an original paper that
has been quoted or discussed, involves an expenditure of time that is
practically prohibitive of the thing as a general practice. [Footnote:
There are three very fine libraries in the adjacent South Kensington
Museum, especially available to students, but, like almost all existing
libraries, they are managed in most respects on lines conceived when
a copy of a book was an almost unique thing made specially by the
copyist’s hand. However much a book is in demand, however cheap its
price of publication may be, no library in England, unless it is a
modern subscription library, ever gets duplicate copies. This is the
cause of the dearness of serious books; they are bought as rarities, and
have to be sold in the same spirit. But when libraries learn to buy by
the dozen and the hundred, there is no reason why the sort of book
now published at 10s. 6d. should not be sold at a shilling from the
beginning.] The Professors, being busy and important men, lecture from
their particular standpoints, and having lectured, bolt; there is no
provision whatever for the intelligent discussion of knotty points, and
the only way to get it is to buttonhole a demonstrator and induce him to
neglect his task of supervising prescribed “practical” work in favour of
educational talk. Let us, therefore, in view of this state of affairs,
deal with the general question how a branch of thought and knowledge may
be most beneficially studied under modern conditions, before discussing
the more particular question what subjects should or should not be
undertaken.
Now the full statement not only of what is known of a subject, but
of its difficulties, dark places, and conflicting aspects should be
luminously set forth in the College text-books, large, well-written,
well-illustrated books by one or several hands, continually revised and
kept abreast of the advance of knowledge by capable and critical-minded
young men. Such books are essential and cardinal in proper modern
teaching. The country may be speckled with universities until they are
as thick as public-houses, and each may be provided with its score or so
of little lecturers, and if it does not possess one or more good general
text-books in each principal subject then all this simply means that
a great number of inadequate, infertile little text-books are being
dictated, one by each of these lecturers. Not the course of lectures,
but the sound, full text-book should be the basis of College
instruction, and this should be supplemented by a greater or lesser
number of more or less controversial pamphlets or books, criticising,
expanding or correcting its matter or putting things in a different
and profitable way. This text-book should be paralleled in the case
of experimental science by a hand-book of illustrative and explanatory
laboratory work. Portions of the book could be set for preparation at
each stage in the course with appropriate experiments, students could
submit difficulties in writing to be dealt with by the Professor in
conversational lectures, and the reading of the students could be
checked by periodic examinations upon cardinal parts, and supplemented,
if these examinations showed it to be necessary, by dissertations upon
special issues of difficulty. Upon the matters that were distinctively
his “subject,” or upon his points of disagreement with the general
issues of the book, the Professor might lecture in the accepted way.
This is surely the proper method of work for adolescent students in any
subject, in philology just as much as in comparative anatomy, and in
history just as much as in economics. The cheapening of printing, paper,
and, above all, of illustration has done away with the last excuse for
the vocal course of instruction and the lecturer’s diagrams. But it has
not done away with them.
It is one of the most curious of human phenomena, this persistence of
tradition against what one might have imagined the most destructive
facts, and in no connection is this aspect more remarkable than in
all that concerns the higher stages of education. One might think that
somewhere in the seventeenth century it would have been recognized
at the Seats of Learning that thought and knowledge were progressive
things, and that a periodic revision of courses and syllabuses, a
periodic recasting of work and scope, a re-arrangement of chairs and
of the appliances of the faculties, was as necessary to the continued
healthy existence of a University as periodic meals and sleep and
exercise are necessary to a man. But even today we are founding
Universities without any provision for this necessary change, and the
chances are that in a century or so they will present just as much
backwardness and illiteracy as do the ordinary graduation organizations
of Oxford and Cambridge today, that a hundred years from now the past
graduates of ripe old Birmingham, full of spite against newfangled
things “no fellow can understand,” will be crowding up to vote against
the substitution of some more modern subject for “Huxley”--“Huxley”
they will call the subject, and not Comparative Anatomy, on the model
of “Euclid”--or for the retention of compulsory “Commercial Geography
of the Nineteenth Century,” or “Longhand Bookkeeping” in the Little
Go. (And should any germinating noble founder read these pages I would
implore him with all the earnestness that is possible in printed
matter, to provide that every fifty years, let us say, the whole of his
prospective foundation shall go into solution, shall re-apportion its
funds and reorganize the entire mechanism of its work.)
The idea that a text-book should be regularly reset and reprinted is
still quite foreign to the Professorial mind, as, indeed, is the idea
that the care of text-books and publications is a University function at
all. No one is startled by a proposal to apply £800 or £1000 a year to
a new chair in any subject, but to apply that sum yearly as a standing
charge to the revision and perfection of a specific text-book would
seem, even today, quite fantastically extravagant to most University
men. Yet what could be more obviously helpful to sound and thorough
teaching than for a University, or a group of Universities, to sustain
a Professor in each of the chief subjects of instruction, whose business
would be neither teaching as it is now understood, nor research, but the
critical and exhaustive editing of the College textbook of his subject,
a text-book which would stand in type at the University Press, which
would be revised annually and reprinted annually, primarily for the
use of the matriculated students of the University and incidentally for
publication. His business would be not only to bring the work up to date
and parallel with all the newest published research and to invite and
consider proposals of contributions and footnotes from men with new
views and new matter, but also to substitute for obscure passages fuller
and more lucid expositions, to cut down or relegate to smaller type
passages of diminishing importance and to introduce fresh and
more efficient illustrations, and his work would be carried on in
consultation with the General Editor of the University Press who would
also be a specialist in modern printing and book-making, and who
would be constantly taking up, trying, and adopting fresh devices of
arrangement, and newer, better, and cheaper methods of printing and
illustration. It would not merely raise the general efficiency of
the College work of adolescents very greatly to have this series of
textbooks living and growing in each subject at one or (better) at
several Universities or grouped Universities, but in each subject the
periodic change in these books would afford a most valuable corrective
to the influence of specialized work by keeping the specialist worker
easily in touch with the current presentation of his science as a whole.
The text-book, however good, and the lecturer, however able, are only
one of two necessary factors in College work, the reciprocal element
is the students’ activity. Unless the students are actively engaged not
simply in taking in what they are told, but in rearranging it, turning
it over, trying and testing it, they are doing little good. We recognize
this quite abundantly in the laboratory nowadays, but we neglect it
enormously in the more theoretical study of a subject. The facts of a
subject if it is a science may be got at in the most thorough way by
handling in the laboratory, but the ideas of a subject must be handled
in discussion, reproduction and dispute. Examinations, examinations
by teachers who understand this very fine art, in which the student is
obliged to restate, apply, and use the principles of his subject, are
of the utmost value in keeping the mind active and not simply receptive.
They are just as good and as vitally necessary as examination papers
which merely demand definitions and lists and bald facts are bad. And
then there might be discussions--if the Professor were clever enough
to conduct them. If the students of a class could be induced to submit
propositions for discussion, from which a topic could be selected, and
could then be made to prepare for a disputation to which all would have
to contribute, with the Professor as a controlling influence in the
chair to check facts and logic and to conclude, it would have the value
of a dozen lectures. But Professors who are under the burthen of perhaps
ninety or a hundred lectures a year cannot be expected to do anything
of this sort. Directed reading, conferences on knotty points, special
lectures followed by the questioning of the lecturer, discussions upon
matters of opinion, laboratory work when needful, fairly frequent
test examinations, and a final examination for places, are the proper
ingredients of a good modern College course, and in the necessity of
leaving the Professor’s energies free for the direction of all this
really educational work, lies another reason for that complete,
explicit, well-arranged text-book upon which I am insisting.
Coming back now from these general propositions about books and teaching
to our mass of young people about fifteen years old, our adolescent
nation, who have accomplished their Schooling and are ready for the
College phase, we have to consider what subjects they are to be taught,
and how far they are to go with these subjects. Whether they are to give
all or part of their time to these College studies, whether they are
going to pursue them in evening classes or before breakfast in
the morning or during the livelong day is a question of secondary
conveniences that may very well be disregarded here. We are concerned
with the general architecture now, and not with the tactical necessities
of the clerk of the works. [Footnote: But I may perhaps point out here
how integral to a sane man-making scheme is the raising of the minimum
age at which children may work. A day will come, I hope, when even the
partial employment of children under fifteen will be prohibited, and
when, as Mr. Sidney Webb suggested some time ago, employment up to the
age of twenty-one will be limited to so few hours a week--his suggestion
was thirty--as to leave a broad margin for the more or less compulsory
college work and physical training that are becoming essential to the
modern citizen.]
We need waste little time nowadays, I submit, in disposing of
Encyclopaedic conceptions of College Education, conceptions that
played a part in almost all educational schemes--Bentham’s stupendous
Chrestomathia is the fearful example--before the middle nineteenth
century. We are all agreed in theory, at any rate, that to know one
subject or group of subjects exhaustively is far better than a universal
smattering, that the ideal of education is more particularly “all about
something” with “something about everything” in a very subordinate
place. The fact remains that the normal curriculum of our higher schools
and colleges is a pointless non-educational miscellany, and the
average graduate in Arts knows something, but not enough, of science,
mathematics, Latin, Greek, literature, and history; he has paid tribute
to several conflicting schemes of education, and is a credit to none. We
have to get rid of this state of affairs, and we have to provide (i)
a substantial mental training which shall lead at last to a broad
and comprehensive view of things, and which shall be a training
in generalization, abstraction, and the examination of evidence,
stimulating and disciplining the imagination and developing the habit of
patient, sustained, enterprising and thorough work, and (ii) we have
to add a general culture, a circle of ideas about moral, aesthetic,
and social matters that shall form a common basis for the social and
intellectual life of the community. The former of these two elements
must at some stage develop--after two or five or seven or some such
period of years, which may be different in different cases--into the
special training for the definite function of the individual in the
social body, whether as engineer, business manager, doctor, priest,
journalist, public administrator, professional soldier, or what not.
And before we ask what must constitute (i) it may be well to define the
relation between the first and the second section of the College stage
of education.
It is (i) that will constitute the essential _work_ of the College,
which will be the especial concern of the Professorial staff, which will
“count” in examinations, and I conceive it as occupying typically four
full working days in the week, four good, hard-driving days, and no
more, of the students’ time. The remaining three, so far as they are
not engaged by physical exercise, military training, and mere amusement,
must be given to (ii), which I imagine an altogether more general,
discursive, various, and spontaneous series of activities. To put the
thing briefly, with the use of a convenient slang word (i), is “grind,”
and (ii) is general culture, elements that are altogether too greatly
confused in adolescent education. A large number of people will consider
it right and proper that (ii) on the seventh day of the week should
become devotional exercise or religious thought and discussion. I would
submit that under (ii) there should be formally recognized certain
extremely valuable educational influences that are at present too often
regarded as irregular or improper invasions of school and college
work, the collegiate debating society, for example, private reading,
experimental science outside the curriculum, and essays in various arts.
It should be possible to provide a certain definite number of hours
weekly in which the student should be required merely to show that he
was doing something of a developmental kind, he would have his choice
between the Library--every College ought to have a good and not too
priggishly conceived Library, in which he might either read or write--or
the music master, the debating society, the museum, the art studio,
the dramatic society, or any concern of the sort that the College
authorities had satisfactory reason for supposing to be alive and
efficient. In addition (ii) should include certain minor but necessary
studies not included in (i), but pursued for all that with a certain
insistence, taught or directed, and controlled perhaps by examinations.
If, for example, the acquisition of a foreign language was a part of the
preliminary schooling, it could be kept alive by a more fastidious study
in the higher grade. For the making of the good, all-round, average
citizen (i) will be the essential educational factor, but for the boy or
girl with a dash of genius (ii) will rise from the level of culture to
that of a great opportunity.
What subject or group of subjects is to constitute (i)? There are at
least three, and quite probably beyond the very limited range of my
knowledge there are other, arrangements of studies that can be contrived
to supply this essential substantial part of the College course. Each
suffices completely, and I would hesitate to express any preference for
one or the other. Each has its special direction towards certain sorts
of adult function, and for that reason it may be suggested that the
secondary education of an English-speaking country might very well
afford all three (or more) types of secondary course. The small schools
might specialize upon the type locally most desirable, the larger might
group its triplicate (or quadruplicate) system of sustained and serious
courses about a common Library and the common arrangements for Section
ii. of the College scheme.
The first of these possible College courses, and the one most likely to
be useful and fruitful for the mass of the male population in a modern
community, is an expansion of the Physics of the Schooling stage. It may
be very conveniently spoken of as the Natural Philosophy, course. Its
backbone will be an interlocking arrangement of Mathematics, Physics,
and the principles of Chemistry, and it will take up as illustrative and
mind-expanding exercises, Astronomy, Geography, and Geology conceived as
a general history of the Earth. Holding the whole together will be the
theory of the Conservation of Energy in its countless aspects and a
speculative discussion of the constitution of matter. A certain minimum
of Historical and Political reading and of general “Library” would
be insisted upon in Section ii. This could be made a quite noble and
spacious course of instruction extending over from three to five years,
from fourteen or fifteen up to eighteen or twenty-one (or even longer
in the case of those partially employed); its less successful products
would drop out--it might be before completion--to take up the work
of more or less skilled artisans and technical workers, and its more
successful ones would pass some of them into the technical colleges for
special industries with a view to business direction, into special study
for the engineering trades, for the profession of soldiering, [Footnote:
I may perhaps explain that my conception of military organization is a
universal service of citizens--non-professional soldiers--who will be
trained--possibly in boyhood and youth, to shoot very well indeed,
to ride either horses or bicycles, and to take up positions and move
quickly and easily in organized bodies, and, in addition, a special
graduated profession of soldiers who will be in their various ranks
engineers, gunners, special-force men of various sorts, and, in the
higher ranks, masters of all the organization and methods necessary for
the rapid and effective utilization of the non-professional manhood of
the country, of volunteers, militia, or short-service enlistment
levies, drawn from this general supply, and of all the machinery of
communication, provisioning, and so forth. They will not be necessarily
the “social superiors” of their commands, but they will naturally
exercise the same authoritative command in warfare that a doctor does in
a sick-room.] or for the naval and mercantile services, or into research
and the literature of science. Some also would pass on to study for
the profession of medicine through more special work in Chemistry and
Physiology, and some with a proclivity for drawing and design would
become architects, designers of appliances, and the like. The idea of
the ordinary development of this course is not so very remote from what
already exists in Great Britain as the Organized Science School, but,
as with all these courses, it would be done in varying degrees of
thoroughness and extension under varying conditions. This is the first
of my three alternative College courses.
The second course will probably seem less acceptable to many readers,
but all who are qualified to speak will testify to its enormous
educational value. It is what one may speak of as the Biological Course.
Just as the conception of Energy will be the central idea of the Natural
Philosophy course, so the conception of Organic Evolution will be the
central idea of the Biological Course. A general review of the whole
field of Biology--not only of the Natural History of the present but
of the geological record--in relation to the known laws and the various
main theories of the evolutionary process will be taken, and in
addition some special department, either the Comparative Anatomy of
the Vertebrata chiefly, or of the plants chiefly, or of several
Invertebrated groups chiefly, will be exhaustively worked out in
relation to these speculations. The first of these alternatives is not
only probably the most invigorating mental exercise of the three but
bears also more directly upon the practical concerns of life. Physiology
will be taken up in relation to this special exhaustive study, and the
“Elementary Physics of the Schooling” stage will be prolonged up into a
treatment of Chemistry with especial reference to biological problems.
Through such a course as this students might pass to the study of
medicine just as well as through Natural Philosophy, and the medical
profession would profit by the clash of the two types of student. The
biological course, with its insistence upon heredity and physiological
facts, would also give the very best and gravest preparation in the
world for the practical concerns of motherhood. From it students would
pass on illuminated to the study of psychology, philosophical science,
and educational method. The training in the discussion of broad
generalization, and much of the fact involved, would be a most excellent
preliminary to special theological study and also to the advanced study
of economics and political science. From this course also artists of
various sorts would escape through the avenue of Section ii. which, by
the by, would have to involve Historical Reading. So much for my second
suggested College course.
The third of these three alternative courses is the History course, done
extensively in relation to general geography, economic theory, and the
general evolution of the world, and intensively in relation to British
or American history, and perhaps to some particular period. Out of it
would spring a thorough study of the development of English literature
and also of the legal systems of the English-speaking peoples. This
course also would be a way of approach to philosophical science, to
theology, to the thorough study of economic and political science, and
possibly it would contribute a larger proportion of its students to
imaginative literature than either of the two preceding courses. It
would also be the natural preliminary course to the special study of
law and so a source of politicians. In the Section ii. of this course a
light but lucid treatment of the great generalizations of physical and
biological science would be desirable. And from this course also the
artist would break away.
Conceivably there are other courses. The course in Mathematics as
one sees it given to the Cambridge Tripos men, and what is called the
Classical course, will occur to the reader. Few people, however, are to
be found who will defend the exclusively mathematical “grind” as a sound
intellectual training, and so it need not be discussed here. The case,
however, is different with the classical course. It is alleged by those
who have had the experience that to learn Latin and Greek more or
less thoroughly and then to stumble through one or two Latin and Greek
authors “in the original” has an educational value surpassing any
conceivable alternative. There is a mysterious benefit from one’s
private translation however bad that no other translation however good
can impart. Plato, for example, who has certainly in the very best
translations, quite perceptibly no greater mind than Lord Bacon, Newton,
Darwin, or Adam Smith, becomes god-like to all who pass beyond the
Little-Go. The controversy is as old as the Battle of the Books, a quite
interminable wrangle, which I will not even attempt to summarize here.
For my own part I believe all this defence of the classics on the part
of men with classical education is but one more example of that human
weakness that splashes Oxford metaphysical writings with needless tags
and shreds of Greek and set Demetrius the silversmith bawling in the
streets. If the reader is of another opinion there is no need to convert
him in this present argument, provided only that he will admit the
uselessness of his high mystery for the training of the larger mass of
modern men. By his standards they are beneath it. A convention upon this
issue between the two parties therefore is attainable. Let us admit the
classical course for the parents who like and can afford this sort of
thing for their sons and daughters. Let us withdraw all objections to
its endowment, unless it is quite excessive endowment. Let the classical
be the senior service, and the classical professor, to use his own queer
way of putting things, _primus inter pares_. That will make four courses
altogether, the Classical, the Historical, the Biological, and the
Physical, for one or more of which all the secondary schools and
colleges in that great English-speaking community at which the New
Republic aims should be organized. [Footnote: One may, however, suggest
one other course as possible under special conditions. There is one sort
of art that requires not only a very rigorous and exhaustive training,
but also an early commencement, and that is music, at once the most
isolated and the most universal of arts. Exceptional gifts in the
direction of music will have appeared in the schooling stage, and it is
quite conceivable that the college phase for those who are destined for
a musical career should have as its backbone a “grind” in the theory
and practice of music, with languages and general culture relegated to a
Section ii.]
It may be objected that this is an idealized proposal, and that
existing conditions, which are, of course, the material out of which new
conditions are to be made do not present anything like this form. As a
matter of fact, if only the reader will allow for a certain difference
in terminology, they do. What I have here called Schooling is, so far as
the age of the pupils go, typically presented in Great Britain by what
is called the elementary school, and in America by the public school,
and certain schools that unanalytical people in England, mistaking
a social for an educational difference, seem disposed to class with
secondary schools, the inferior Grammar Schools, the cheaper private
schools, and what are called Preparatory Schools, [Footnote: As things
are, there is no doubt a considerable advantage in the child from a good
home going on to a good preparatory school instead of entering a public
elementary school, and the passage above must not be misread as
a sweeping condemnation of such establishments.] are really also
elementary schools. The latter have more social pretension and sometimes
far less efficiency than a Government Elementary School, but that is all
the difference. All these schools admit of a gradual approximation to
the ideal of schooling already set forth in the sixth of these papers.
Some are already within a measureable distance of that ideal. And above
these elementary schools, above the School grade proper, and answering
to what is here called College, there is a great variety of day and
evening schools of the most varied description which agree all of
them in the presentation of a second phase in the educational process
beginning about the age of thirteen to sixteen and going on to nineteen
and twenty. In Great Britain such institutions are sometimes called
secondary schools and sometimes colleges, and they have no distinct
boundary line to separate them from the University proper, on the
one hand, or the organized Science Schools and the Higher Grade Board
Schools and evening classes of the poorer sort. The Universities and
medical schools are, indeed, hampered with work quite similar to that of
secondary schools and which the secondary schools have failed to do,
the Cambridge undergraduate before his Little-Go, the London University
medical student before his Preliminary Scientific Examination, are
simply doing the belated work of this second stage. And there is, I
doubt not, a similar vague complexity in America. But through the fog
something very like the boundary line here placed about fourteen
is again and again made out; not only the general requirements for
efficient education, but the trend of present tendency seems to be
towards a scheme of three stages in which a first stage of nine or ten
years of increasingly serious Schooling (Primary Education), from a very
light beginning about five up to about fourteen, is to be followed by a
second stage of College education (Secondary Education), from fourteen
or sixteen to an upward boundary determined by class and various
facilities, and this is to be succeeded by a third stage, which we will
now proceed to consider in detail.
Let us make it clear at once that this third stage is a much ampler
thing than the graduation or post graduation work of a university. It
may or it may not include that as an ingredient. But the intention is to
express all those agencies (other than political, social, and economic
forces, and the suggestions that arise from them), that go to increase
and build up the mental structure of the man or woman. This includes the
pulpit, so far as it is still a vehicle for the importation of ideas
and emotions, the stage, books that do anything more than pass the time,
newspapers, the Grove and the Agora. These all, in greater or lesser
degrees, work powerfully together to make the citizen. They work most
powerfully, of course, in those plastic unsettled years that last from
adolescence to the middle twenties, but often in very slowly diminishing
intensity right into the closing decades of middle age. However things
may have been in the quieter past when newspapers did not exist, when
creeds were rigid, plays mere spectacles to be seen only “in Town,” and
books rare, the fact remains that to-day everybody goes much further and
learns far more than any of the professedly educational agencies can be
held accountable for. There was a time, perhaps, when a man really did
“settle down” intellectually, at the end of his days of learning, when
the only way--outside the libraries and households of a few princely
personages--to go on thinking and to participate in the secular
development of ideas, was to go to a University and hear and dispute.
But those days have gone for a hundred years at least. They have gone
by, and the strange thing is that a very large proportion of those who
write and talk about education have not discovered they have gone by,
and still think and talk of Universities as though they were the only
sources and repositories of wisdom. They conjure up a vision in my mind
of an absent-minded water-seller, bearing his precious jars and crying
his wares knee-deep, and going deeper into a rising stream. Or if
that does not seem just to the University in the past, an image of a
gardener, who long ago developed a novel variety of some great flower
which has now scattered its wind-borne seed everywhere, but who still
proffers you for sale in a confidential, condescending manner a very
little, very dear packet of that universal commodity. Until the advent
of Mr. Ewart (with his Public Libraries’ Act), Mr. Passmore Edwards, and
Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the stream of endowment for research and teaching
flowed just as exclusively to the Universities as it did in Tudor times.
Let us deal, then, first with the finally less important and more formal
portion of the third stage in the educational process; that is to say,
with the University Course. One may conceive that so far as positive
teaching and learning go, a considerable proportion of the population
will never pass beyond the second stage at all. They will fail to keep
up in the course of that stage, or they will branch off into the special
development of some special aptitude. The failures will gravitate into
positions a little better perhaps, but analogous to those taken up
by the failures of the Schooling phase. The common clerks and common
shop-hands, for example, would come out here. The others, who fall out
without completing their College course, but who may not be College
failures at all, will be all sorts of artists and specializing persons
of that type. A great many girls, for economic and other reasons, will
probably never get beyond the College stage. They will pass from the
Biological and Historical courses into employment, or marry, or enter
domestic life. But what may finally become a much larger proportion
of New Republican citizens will either from the beginning, taking the
College course in the evening, or after a year or so of full attendance
at the College course, start also upon the third-grade work, the
preparation for the upper ranks of some technical and commercial
employment, for the systematic and liberal instruction that will replace
the old rule-of-thumb apprenticeship. One can imagine a great variety of
methods of combining the apprenticeship phase of serious occupation with
the College course. Many waking up to the demands of life may do better
for themselves with a desperately clutched College course of evening
classes than others who will have progressed comfortably in day
Colleges. There should be opportunity by means of scholarship openings
for such cases of a late awakening to struggle back into the higher
education. There may be every gradation from such students to those who
will go completely and exhaustively through the College and who will
then go on at one and twenty or two and twenty to equally complete and
exhaustive work in the third grade. One imagines the third grade in its
completeness as a most varied choice of thorough studies carried on for
three or four years after eighteen or twenty-one, special schools
of medicine, law, engineering, psychology, and educational science,
economics and political science, economics and commercial science,
philosophy and theology, and physical science. Quite apart from the
obvious personal limitation, the discussion of the method of dealing
specifically with each of these subjects would be too diversified and
special a theme to occupy me now. The larger fact to which attention has
to be given is this: that all these studies and all the technical study
and such like preparation at lower levels of the third stage must be
as it were floating in a common body of Thought, which is the unifying
principle, the common initiative, the real common life of the truly
civilized state, and that this body of Thought is no longer to be
contained within the form of a University. It is the larger of the two
things. And the last question, therefore, in these speculations is
the general organization of that body of Thought, that is to say of
contemporary literature, using the word in its widest sense to cover all
that is good in journalism, all untechnical speculative, philosophical
writing, all that is true and new in the drama, in poetry, fiction or
any other distinctly literary form, and all scientific publication
that is not purely a matter of recording or technical working out, all
scientific publication that is, that deals with general ideas.
There was a time when the higher education was conceived of as entirely
a matter of learning. To endow chairs and teachers, and to enable
promising scholars to come and hear the latter was the complete
organization of the higher education. It is within quite recent years
that the conception of endowing research for its own sake, leaving the
Research Professor free altogether from direct teaching or with only a
few good pupils whose work consisted chiefly in assimilating his ideas
and helping with his researches, has become at all widely acceptable.
Indirectly, of course, the Research Professor is just as much a teacher
as the Teaching Professor, because his results become accessible as he
writes them. Our work now is to broaden both the conception of research
and of teaching, to recognize that whatever imports fresh and valid
ideas, fresh and valid aspects--not simply of chemical and physical
matters, but of aesthetic, social, and political matters, partakes of
the honour and claims of research--and that whatever conveys ideas and
aspects vividly and clearly and invigoratingly, not simply by word of
mouth but by book or picture or article, is teaching. The publication
of books, the whole business of bringing the contemporary book most
efficiently home to the general reader, the business of contemporary
criticism, the encouragement and support of contemporary writers, _is
just as vitally important in the modern state as the organisation of
Colleges and Schools_, and just as little to be left to the enterprise
of isolated individuals working primarily upon commercial lines for
gain.
There are two aspects of this question. There is the simpler one of
getting an abundance of good books, classical and contemporary, and of
good publications distributed everywhere through the English-speaking
world, and there is the more subtle and complex problem of getting,
stimulating, and sustaining the original writers and the original
critics and investigators upon whom the general development of
contemporary thought, upon whom indeed the progress of the world finally
depends. The latter problem may be reserved for the next paper, and here
we will deal simply with the question of access and distribution.
For the present we must assume the quality of the books; all that sort
of question must be deferred for our final discussion. We will simply
speak of good books, serious books, on the one hand, and of light and
merely amusing books on the other, in an intentionally vague way.
The former sort of books is our present concern; pleasure as an end,
pleasure except as necessary recuperation, is no affair for the state.
Books are either bought or borrowed for reading, and we have to consider
what can be done to secure the utmost efficiency in the announcement,
lending and selling of books. We have also to consider the best possible
means of distributing periodicals. We have particularly to consider how
books specifically “good,” or “thorough,” or “serious,” and periodicals
that are “sound” and “stimulating” are to be made as widely and
invitingly accessible as possible. The machinery we have in hand are
the booksellers and the newsvendors, the circulating libraries,
the post-office, and the free public libraries that are now being
energetically spread throughout the land [by men who, in this aspect,
answer very closely to the conception of New Republicans as it is here
unfolded], and to bring and keep all this machinery to the very
highest level of efficiency is integral to the New Republican scheme of
activity.
It may be objected that the organization of bookselling and publishing
is the discussion of trivial details in the intellectual life of a
people, but indeed that is not so. It is a constant trouble, a perpetual
drain upon the time and energy of every man who participates in that
life, to get the books that are necessary to the development of his
thoughts. The high price of books, burthensome as it is, is the lesser
evil, the great trouble is the trouble of access. There are a great
number of people now who read nothing at all, or only promiscuous
fiction, who would certainly become real readers were books of any other
sort attractively available. These things are not trivial. The question
of book distribution is as vitally important to the intellectual health
of a modern people as are open windows in cases of phthisis. No nation
can live under modern conditions unless its whole population is mentally
aerated with books.
That allusion to the predominance of fiction brings one round to the
question of the Public Library. One is constantly reading attacks on
these new and most promising institutions, and always these attacks base
themselves on the fact that the number of novels taken out was so many
times, so many hundred times greater than the number of “serious books.”
Follows nonsense about “scrappy” reading, shallowness of the public
mind, and so forth. In Great Britain public pomposities take up the
strain and deliver large vague, foolish discourses on our intellectual
decline. It occurs to none of these people--nothing, indeed, ever does
seem to occur to this sort of people--to inquire if a man or woman _can_
get serious reading from a public library. An inspection of a Public
Library Catalogue reveals, no doubt, a certain proportion of “serious”
books available, but, as a rule, that “serious side” is a quite
higgledy-piggledy heap of fragments. Suppose, for example, an
intelligent mechanic has a proclivity for economic questions, he will
find no book whatever to guide him to what literature there may be upon
those questions. He will plunge into the catalogue, and discover perhaps
a few publications of the Cobden Club, Henry George’s _Progress and
Poverty_, J. S. Mill’s _Autobiography_, Ruskin’s _Unto This Last, The
Statesman’s Year Book for 1895_, and a text-book specially adapted
to such and such an examination by the tutors of some Correspondence
College. What can you expect from such a supply but a pitiful mental
hash? What is the most intelligent of mechanics likely to secure for
himself from this bran pie? Serious subjects are not to be read in this
wild disorderly way. But fiction can be. A novel is fairly complete in
itself, and in sticking to novels, the Public Library readers show, I
submit, a better literary sense and a finer intellectual feeling than
the muddle-headed, review-inspired, pretentious people who blame them.
But manifestly the Public Libraries ought to be equipped for serious
reading. Too many of them are covers without meat, or, at least, with
nothing to satisfy a respectable mind hunger. And the obvious direct
method to equip them is to organize an Association, to work, if
possible, with the Librarians, and get this “serious” side of the
Libraries, this vitally important side, into better order. A few men
with a little money to spend could do what is wanted for the whole
English-speaking world. The first business of such an Association would
be to get “Guides” to various fields of human interest written, guides
that should be clear, explicit Bibliographies, putting all the various
writers into their relationships one to another, advising what books
should be first taken by the beginner in the field, indicating their
trend, pointing out the less technical ones and those written obscurely.
Differential type might stamp the more or less important works. These
Guides ought to go to every Public Library, and I think also that all
sorts of people would be eager to buy them if they were known to be
comprehensive, intelligent, and inclusive. They might even “pay.” Then I
would suggest this Association should make up lists of books to present
an outline course or a full course corresponding to each Guide. Where
books were already published in a cheap edition, the Association would
merely negotiate with the publisher for the special supply of a
few thousand copies of each. Where books were modern and dear the
Association would negotiate with publisher and author, for the printing
of a special Public Library Edition. They would then distribute these
sets of books either freely or at special rates, three or four sets or
more to each Library. In many cases the Association would probably
find it preferable to print its editions afresh, with specially written
introductions, defining the relationship of each book to the general
literature of the subject. [Footnote: In America Mr. George Iles is
already organizing the general appraisement of books for the public
library reader in a most promising manner. _The Bibliography of the
Literature of American History_, with an appraisal of each book, which
has appeared under his direction, is edited by Mr. Larned, and is a most
efficient performance; it is to be kept up to date by Mr. P. P. Wells,
librarian of the Yale Law School. It includes an appendix by Professor
Channing, of Harvard, which is on the lines of the “Guides” I suggest,
though scarcely so full as I should like them. This appendix is
reprinted separately for five cents, and it is almost all English public
librarians and libraries need so far as American history goes. The
English Fabian Society, I may note, publishes a sixpenny bibliography of
social and economic science, but it is a mere list for local librarians,
and of little use to the uninitiated reader.]
Such an Association in the present state of publishing would become--in
Great Britain, at any rate--quite inevitably a Publishing Association.
A succession of vigorous, well-endowed Voluntary Publishing Associations
is a quite vital necessity in the modern state. A succession is needed
because each age has its unexpected new needs and new methods, and it
would not be a bad idea to endow such associations with a winding-up
clause that would plump them, stock, unspent capital, and everything
except perhaps a pension fund for the older employés, into the funds of
some great Public Library at the end of thirty or forty years. Several
such Associations have played, or are still playing a useful part in
British affairs, but most of them have lost the elasticity of youth.
Lord Brougham’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was one
of the earliest, and we have today, for example, the Society for the
Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the Catholic Truth Society, the
Rationalist Press Association, and the Fabian Society. There is a
real need to-day for one--indeed there is room for several--Publishing
Associations that would set themselves to put bright modern lights into
these too often empty lanterns, the Public Libraries. So lit, Great
Britain and America would have in them an instrument of public
education unparalleled in the world, infinitely better adapted to the
individualistic idiosyncracy of our peoples than any imitation of German
colleges can possibly be. Propaganda of all sorts could be diverted to
this purpose. Persons of imperialistic tendencies might well consider
the advisability of Guides to good geographical and historical reading
and sets of travel books, and of geographical and historical works.
Americanisers might consider the possibility of sets that would help
the common British to a clearer idea of America, and Americans to a
realization that the British Islands are something more than three
obscure patches of land entirely covered by a haughty peerage and
a slightly absurd but historically interesting Crown. . . . Indeed,
whatever you want thought or believed, I would say, _give books!_
But the good New Republican would have a wider scope for his Publishing
Association than to subdue it to this specific doctrine or that. It is
not the opinion makes the man; it is not the conclusion makes the
book. We live not in the truth, but in the promise of the truth. Sound
thinking, clearly and honestly set forth, that is the sole and simple
food of human greatness, the real substance and the real wealth of
nations; the key that will at last unlock the door to all we can dream
of or desire.