“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine:
But a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
_Proverbs_ xvii., 22.
The Professors of dry bones have broken so many spirits in their machine
that they will not grudge me a laugh at their little failings. A mere
“man in the street” like myself can do little more than call attention
to some of the weaknesses of our educational system, well understanding
that the earnest Schoolmaster knows far more about the disadvantages
of education than anything he can learn from his surviving pupils. For
my part I have never made any secret of the fact that from my earliest
days I disliked education, and had a natural, and I hope not unhealthy,
distrust of schoolmasters. Let it here be understood with the greatest
respect to the sex that “schoolmaster” embraces “schoolmistress.” Most
school-boys that I remember have had that attitude of mind, but many
remained so long in scholastic cloisters that the sane belief of their
youth, that the schoolmaster was their natural enemy, became diminished
and was ultimately lost altogether. Indeed, there are few minds that
undergo the strain of years of toil among scholastic persons without
becoming dulled into the respectable belief that schoolmasters are in
themselves desirable social assets, like priests and policemen and
judges. Now no small boy with a healthy mind believes this. He knows that
the schoolmaster and the policeman are merely evidences of an imperfect
social system, that no progress is likely to be made until society is
able to dispense with their services, and though he cannot put these
ideas into words he can and does act upon that assumption, and continues
to do so until his natural alertness is destroyed and he is dragooned
into at all events an outward observance of the official belief in the
sanctity of schoolmasters.
Personally I have always regarded it as a matter of congratulation that
I escaped from school at a comparatively early age, nor can I honestly
say that I remember to-day anything that I formerly learnt at school, or
that if I did remember anything I learnt, there,—except perhaps a few
irregular French verbs—that it would be of the slightest use to me in the
everyday business of life.
If I were, for instance, to model my methods of trial in the County Court
upon the proceedings of Euclid, who spent his life in endeavouring to
prove by words, propositions that were self-evident even in his own very
rudimentary pictures, I should be justly blamed by a commercial community
for wasting their time. Yet how many of the most precious hours of the
best of my youth have been wasted for me by schoolmasters, who were so
dull as not to perceive that Euclid, like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll,
was the writer of a book of nonsense? Not nonsense that can possibly
appeal to the child of to-day, but nonsense that will always have its
place in the library of those to whom the Absurd is as precious in life
as the Beautiful.
If you believe at all in evolution and progress, and the descent of
man from more primitive types, with its wonderfully hopeful corollary,
the ascent of man to higher things, you must acknowledge at once that
education has necessarily been, and always must be, a great set back to
onward movement. A schoolmaster can only teach what he knows, and if one
generation only learns what the last generation can teach there is not
much hope of onward movement.
Schoolmasters are apt to believe that the hope of the younger generation
depends upon their assimilating the ideas of their pastors and masters,
whereas the true hope is that they will not be so long overborne by
authority, as to make their young brains incapable of rejecting at all
events some of the false teaching that each generation complacently
offers to the next.
We need not accept the new generation entirely at its own valuation,
nor need we disturb ourselves about the exaggerated under-estimate with
which one-and-twenty sets down for naught the wisdom of fifty. But
unless we pursue education as a preparation for the betterment of the
human race we are beating the air. And the responsibility is a great
one. For the mind of a child, as Roger Ascham says, is “like the newest
wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing!” But, alas! it
is equally able to receive printing of an inferior type. Every one of
us, I should imagine, half believes something to-day that he knows to
be untrue because it was impressed on the wax of his child-mind by some
well-meaning but ignorant schoolmaster.
One of the gravest disadvantages about education is the way it thwarts
progress by teaching young folk that which, to say the least of it, is
uncertain. If education were to be strictly confined by the schoolmaster
to the things he really knew, what a quantity of lumber could be trundled
out of the schoolroom to-morrow. Teaching should be kept to arts,
accomplishments and facts—opinions and theories should have no place
whatever in the schoolroom.
Open any school book of a hundred years ago and read its theories and
opinions, and remember that these were thrust down the throats of the
little ones with the same complacent conceit that our opinions and
theories of to-day are being taught in the schools. And yet we all know
that theories and opinions in the main become very dead sea-fruit in
fifty or a hundred years, whilst the multiplication table remains with us
like the Ten Commandments, a monument of everlasting truth.
This chief disadvantage of education will probably continue with us for
many generations, until it is recognised as immoral and wicked to warp a
child’s mind by teaching things to it as facts which are at the best only
conjectures, in the hope that in after life it may take some side in the
affairs of the world, which the teacher, or the committee of the school,
is interested in. The true rule should of course be to teach children,
especially in State Schools, only ascertained facts, the truth of which
all citizens, who are not in asylums, agree to be true.
My view of the ideal system of education is much the same as Mr. Weller
senior’s. You will remember that he said to Mr. Pickwick about his son
Sam, “I took a great deal of pains with his eddication, sir! I let him
run in the streets when he were very young and shift for his self. It’s
the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” I could not ask any body of
schoolmasters to adopt this principle, though it is one that seems to me
thoroughly sound. Put into other and more scholastic words, it may be
made a copy-book sentiment. Emerson says much the same thing as old Tony
Weller, when he writes, “That which each can do best only his Maker can
teach him,” and the spirit of the Maker of the Universe seems to me at
least as likely to be met with in Market Street as in a committee room of
the Manchester Town Hall, where the destinies of our national education
are so ably managed by citizens of respectability and authority.
Some such preface as this is needed if I am to make it clear to you why I
choose the disadvantages of education rather than the advantages, as the
subject matter of my essay. One should always try to speak on something
one really believes in heartily and thoroughly. The advantages of
education have been spread before us during the last fifty years by every
writer of importance—a writer of no importance may fairly give an idle
hour to the other side of the picture.
In any commercial country it should not be necessary to apologise for the
endeavour to make a rough balance-sheet describing the liabilities of
education; even if we are all convinced that the assets of education are
more than enough to meet the liabilities and that we are educationally
solvent. Nor am I really stating anything very new or startling, for all
thinkers and writers on education seem beginning at last to discover that
education is only a means to an end, and that when you have no clear idea
of what end you hope to arrive at it is not very probable that you will
choose the right means.
If a man wanted to travel to Blackpool and was so ignorant as to imagine
that Blackpool was in the neighbourhood of London, he would probably
in the length of his journey lose many beautiful hours of the sea-side
and spend them in the stuffy atmosphere of a railway train. This would
be of little importance to the community if it was only the case of an
individual man—a schoolmaster for instance. But what if the man had
taken a party of children with him? thereby losing for them wonderful
hours of digging on the sand, or seeing Punch or Judy, or listening to
a Bishop preaching—that indeed would be a serious state of things for
everyone.
One of the great disadvantages of modern education is that few of its
professors and teachers, and fewer of its elected managers, have the
least idea where they are going to. The authorities shoot out codes and
prospectuses and minutes and rules and orders, and change their systems
with the inspired regularity of a War Office.
Another of the disadvantages of education to-day is that there is too
much of it, and that what there is is in the hands of well-meaning
directors, who are either middle-aged and ignorant, or, what is worse,
middle-aged and academic. If we cannot reach the ideal of Tony Weller
and let the child shift for himself, let us at all events unshackle the
schoolmaster and allow him to shift for himself. The head master of a
great English school is a despot. He has at his back—and I use the phrase
“at his back” with deliberate care, not meaning “upon his shoulders”—he
has at his back a powerful board of citizens of position who are wise
enough and strong enough to leave the question of education to the man at
the wheel, and to remember that it is dangerous to speak to him whilst
he is steering the ship. Any system of education that is to be of any
avail at all must be a personal system in a great measure, and the
elementary head master should be in the same position as the head master
of our great public schools. The boards and committees should interfere
as little as possible with the schoolmasters they employ. A schoolmaster,
of all workmen, wants freedom and liberty to do his work his own way. And
who can teach anything, worth teaching, who is being constantly worried
and harassed by inspectors and committees? Education is not sewage, and
you cannot judge of its results by a chemical analysis of the mental
condition of the human effluent that pours out of the school gates into
the rivers of life.
I have expressed my distrust of schoolmasters quite freely, but I must
confess that my detestation of boards and committees amounts almost to
a mania, though when I notice the pleasure and delight so many good
citizens have in sitting on a committee and preventing business from
being done, I fairly admit it is quite possible I am wrong about the
matter. It may well be that there is some hidden virtue in these boards
and committees, some divine purpose in them that I cannot see. I have
sometimes thought that in the course of evolution they will arrive at a
condition of permanent session without the transaction of any business
whatever. Then possibly the golden age will have arrived, and then the
individual servant, no longer hampered by their well meant interference,
will have a chance to do his best work. But for my part, so oppressed
am I by the futility of committees that I am tempted sometimes to doubt
the personality of the Evil One, in the sure belief that the affairs
of his territory would be governed more to his liking by a large
committee elected on a universal suffrage of both sexes. Who are our
ideal schoolmasters in the history of the profession? Roger Ascham, who,
learned man that he was, impressed on youth the necessity of riding,
running, wrestling, swimming, dancing, singing and the playing of
instruments cunningly; Arnold, of Rugby, whose whole method was founded
on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy, and
who was the personal guide and friend of those of the scholars who could
appreciate the value of his friendship; Edward Thring, of Uppingham,
who thought “the most pitiful sight in the world was the slow, good
boy laboriously kneading himself into stupidity because he is good,”
and who stood firm for the individual master’s “liberty to teach.” Are
any of these schoolmasters men who could or would have tolerated any
interference in their life’s work from an unsympathetic inspector or a
prosy town councillor? The work of the committees should be devoted to
choosing a good man or woman to be head master of a school and then to
leaving him or her alone. The inspectors should be pensioned—and turned
off on the golf-links.
Having dealt with these serious disadvantages to education, let me hasten
to say a little more about that grave disadvantage to education, the
schoolmaster himself. The schoolmaster is generally a man who, having
learnt to teach, has long ago ceased to learn. It is the past education
of the schoolmaster that generally stands in his way. He believes in
education, and thinks it a good thing in itself; he believes in rules
and orders and lessons as desirable, whereas they are only the necessary
outcome of Adam’s misconduct in the Garden of Eden. I cannot quite agree
with Tolstoi’s suggestion that all rules in a school are illegitimate,
and that the child’s liberty is inviolable. I do not think anarchy in a
school is more possible to-day than anarchy in a state. But I do think
that the schoolmaster of to-day should rule as far as possible by the
creation of a healthy public opinion among his scholars and make the
largest use of that public opinion as a moral and educational force.
Looking back on my own experience, it is not what I learnt from my
schoolmasters but what I learnt from my companions that has been of any
real value to me in after life.
A child should go early to some good kindergarten presided over by some
delightfully bright and pleasant lady, merely to learn the lesson that
there are other children in the world besides itself. How important it
is in life to learn to sit cheerfully next to someone you cordially
detest without slapping him or her. And yet such a lesson, to be really
mastered, should be learnt before five or seven at the latest. After that
it can only be learned by much prayer and—dining out. At dinner parties,
and particularly public dinners, one can get the necessary practice in
this kind of self-control, but it is better to learn it whilst you are
young, when alone it is possible to master the great lessons of life
thoroughly and with comparatively little pain. Men have reached the
position of King’s Counsel without attaining this simple moral grace.
If you come to think of it, all the really important things in life must
of necessity be self-taught. I suppose schoolmasters, being experts in
education, have never given serious thought to the fact that the child
teaches itself, with the aid of a mother, all the best and necessary
lessons of life in the first few years of its being. It learns to eat,
for instance. I have watched a baby struggling to find the way to its
mouth with a rusk, with intense interest and admiration. How it jabs
itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks
and clothes with the debris, and kicks and fights in disgust and loses
the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother,
finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed
energy on its way, and at length is rewarded by success. What a smile of
victory, what a happy relapse into the dreamless sleep of the successful.
The child has learned a lesson it will never forget. It has found its
way to its mouth. One never learns anything as good as that from a
schoolmaster. And indeed if you think of it the baby is learning useful
things on its own every day of its life, and working hard at them. It
learns to talk, and that in spite of its father and mother, who insist
on cooing at it, and talking a wild baby language that must greatly
irritate and impede a conscientious self-educating baby endeavouring to
master the tongue of the land of its adoption. It learns to walk, too,
not without tumbles, and tumbles which inspire it to further effort. I
have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days
checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first
primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind
some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think
of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and
talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there
were no schoolmaster?
If you were to abolish the schoolmaster what would happen? I think the
answer is that the Burns, the Milton and the Sam Weller of a nation
would profit by the stimulus to self-education. The child whose father
was a musician or a carpenter or a ploughman who loved his art or craft,
would be found striving to become as good an artist or craftsman as
his father, and perhaps in the end bettering the paternal example. The
school and the schoolmaster can do little but hinder the evolution of any
worker in any art or craft. The real worker’s work must be the result of
self-education, and he must live from early childhood among the workers.
Read, for instance, the delightful account given by Miss Ellen Terry of
her early days in “The Story of My Life.” “At the time of my marriage,”
she writes, “I had never had the advantage—I assume it is an advantage—of
a single day’s schooling in a real school. What I have learned outside
my own profession I have learnt from environment. Perhaps it is this
that makes me think environment more valuable than a set education and a
stronger agent in forming character even than heredity.” Lives there even
the schoolmaster who believes that there was any school or schoolmistress
in Victorian days that could have done anything but hinder Miss Terry
in the triumph of her artistic career? A born actress like Miss Terry
could not be aided by Miss Melissa Wackles, with her “English grammar,
composition and geography,” even though in that day of lady’s education
it was tempered by the use of the dumb-bells.
In the same way, if we could assure to a boy or girl an apprenticeship
from early days to a craftsman or farmer, it would probably be better for
the children and the State than any other form of education they receive
to-day. It is quite unlikely the world will ever see the minor arts and
crafts ever restored to their former glory, unless it encourages parents
who are themselves good craftsmen to keep their children away from the
schoolmaster in the better atmosphere of a good workshop.
We talk largely about the melancholy increase of unemployment, but how
much of this is caused by the education of masses of people in useless
subjects. The bad boy who gets into trouble and has the good fortune to
be put in a reformatory and there learns a trade has a much better chance
of a useful and pleasurable life than the good boy who gains a County
Council prize in geography.
I came across a servant in Cumberland whose education had resulted among
other things in a knowledge of the catechism and a list of the rivers on
the East coast of England, but who did not know the name of the river she
could see from the window and who had not the least idea how to light a
fire. What is the good of learning your duty to your neighbour when you
cannot light a fire to warm him when he is wet through, without wasting
two bundles of sticks and a pint of paraffin oil?
One must not however blame the girl, nor indeed her schoolmistress, for
probably she too could not light a fire, and both regarded the lighting
of a fire as a degrading thing to do. No doubt if you had pursued your
educational researches in Cumberland to the source of things, you would
have found that the committee could not light fires, and the inspector of
schools could not light fires—it may be the Minister of Education himself
cannot light a fire—and though there is plenty of material for fires in
every board room there is nothing in the code about teaching children to
make use of it. Yet I can conceive nothing a child would like better, in
his or her early days in school, than being a fire monitor and having
charge of the fire and learning to light and look after it. I have
made much of this little incident because it is typical of the school
education of to-day.
In the old days of family life boys and girls, and especially the latter,
learnt in a good home a great deal of domestic work, and the boys could
help in their father’s shop or farm or inn as the case might be, and
learnt thereby many things that you cannot learn in schools. Mr. Squeers,
though not a moral character, was possessed of a practical mode of
teaching. “C-l-e-a-n clean, verb active to make bright, to scour. W-i-n
win, d-e-r der, winder a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book
he goes and does it.” And if you come to think of it, it is far more
important that a boy should know how to keep a window clean than that he
should know how to spell it.
The schoolmaster of an elementary school therefore should be a man
of good domestic tastes, who wishes to see his home neat and clean
and well kept and tidy, who insists on having his food well cooked,
and prefers that his wife and daughter should be well dressed at the
smallest possible cost to himself. These virtues he should be urged to
put before scholars as being the first duties of life and the chiefest
honour of a good citizen. The false notion that reading and writing are
in themselves higher attainments than carpentering, cooking and sewing
should be sternly discouraged, and only teachers should be chosen capable
of some technical excellence in the practical work of crafts. For the
same reasons teachers should never be chosen for any academic degree they
possess, for every day it becomes more certain that the man who obtains
these degrees is the man who has deliberately failed to make himself a
master of any one subject. He is a man who has wasted precious hours in
getting a smattering of many useless branches of learning, and has been
forced by the sellers of degrees to abandon all hope of having sufficient
leisure to study music or painting or the workmanship of a craft, or even
to have read widely of English literature. In the education of the young
the man who can play the piano, or better still, the fiddle, is more
important to my purpose than the man who can make Latin verses; and the
man who can model a toy boat with a pocket-knife whilst he is telling
you a fairy tale is, from the standpoint of real education, a jewel
of rare price. The schoolmaster of to-day is one of the disadvantages
of education because he is interested mainly in subjects of smaller
importance and is not really a sound man in any one real pursuit, such as
music or drawing.
Another disadvantage of English elementary education is that it places
the school course and literary things above the playing fields and
physical things. All men who have thought about education at all, and who
had any capacity for thinking wisely, have recognised that in training
a child to make and keep his body a healthy body we are proceeding upon
lines that experience tells us are right and sound lines. Here we can
teach something we know. Plato tells us that the experience of the past
in his day had discovered that right education consisted in gymnastics
for the body and music for the mind. I do not know that we can say with
certainty that we have ascertained to-day much more about education than
Plato knew. In our day I should put the arts and crafts of home life and
the practice—not preaching—of its virtues, first in the programme, and
secondly, to use Plato’s word, gymnastics. These should include cricket,
football, running, jumping, wrestling, dancing, fives, tennis, and all
manly and womanly associated games which exercise and develop the body,
and have by the public opinion of the players to be played with modesty
and self-restraint, and with a reasonable technical skill that can only
be arrived at by taking pains. All these things are far more useful
than any subjects that can be taught in a schoolroom. One of the great
advantages of middle-class public school life is that these things are
taught, and that the boys work at them in a healthy spirit of emulation
and a magnificent desire to succeed that would turn the whole nation
into a Latin-speaking race, if by any misfortune its motive power were
diverted into the schoolroom.
Elementary education and its schoolmasters have but small opportunities
to foster this natural healthy training of the body in which all
young people are willing and ready to co-operate with their teachers.
Unfortunately, the men who obtain positions on educational committees
are too often men who have amassed wealth at the expense of their
livers, and who would look askance at the ideas of Plato, Roger Ascham,
or Tolstoi. Still, I think a day is coming when playing-fields and
playgrounds will be attached to every elementary school, and used not
only by existing scholars, but by the old boys and girls, who will
thereby keep in touch with the school and its good influences.
But, you will say, nothing has been said hitherto about any lessons.
Are reading, writing, and arithmetic to be considered wholly as
disadvantages? It would be easy to take up such a position and hold it
in argument but it is not necessary. The advantages of educating the
masses in the three R’s are obvious and on the surface, but the grave
disadvantages are also there. It is no use teaching a person anything
that he is likely to make a bad use of, and experience tells us that many
people are ruined by learning to read. Since the Education Act of 1870,
a mass of low-class literature and journalism has sprung up to cater for
the tastes of a population that has undergone a compulsory training in
reading. Betting and gambling have been greatly fostered by the power
of reading and answering advertisements. In the same way quack remedies
for imaginary ailments must have done a lot of harm to the health of the
people, and the use of them is the direct result of teaching ignorant
people to read and not teaching them to disbelieve most things they
may happen to read. Writing in the same way by being made popular and
common has become debased. One seldom sees a good handwriting nowadays
and spelling is a lost art. Writing, however, must in a few years go
out in favour of machine writing. Penmanship will hardly be taught some
years hence when everyone will have a telephone and typewriter of his
own. I cannot see that the universal habit of writing has done very much
for the world. The great mass of written matter that circulates through
the post, the vast columns of newspaper reports that are contradicted
the next day—these things are the fruits of universal writing. There
is no evidence that in the past anything worth writing ever remained
unwritten. But there is strong evidence that since 1870 much has been
written that had better have remained unwritten, and would have so
remained but for State encouragement through its system of education.
As to arithmetic—if you saw the books of the small shopkeepers in the
County Court—you would recognise its small hold on the people. One chief
use of it by the simpler folk seems to be the calculations of the odds
on a horse race. In France and other more civilised countries this is
done more honestly by a machine called a totaliser, and gambling is
thereby kept within more reasonable limits. Elementary arithmetic has
been profitable to the bookmaker—but to how many besides? If you teach a
boy cooking or carpentering he is very unlikely to make an evil use of
these accomplishments in after life because they naturally minister to
the right enjoyment of life. Whereas if you teach a boy reading, writing,
and arithmetic, the surroundings of youth being what they are, he is at
least as likely to misuse these attainments as to use them to the benefit
of himself and his fellow creatures. Once recognise this and you must
admit not that the three R’s should be discontinued, but that much more
should be done to teach the young persons to whom you have imparted these
pleasant arts how to make use of them legitimately and honourably. It is
no use teaching young people any subject unless you see that in after
life they are to have opportunities of using their attainment for the
benefit of the State. Our fathers and grandfathers were all for education
as an end. We are face to face with the results of a national system of
elementary education with no system whatever of helping the educated to
make good use of their compulsory equipment. It is as though you gave a
boy a rifle and taught him to shoot and turned him out into the world to
shoot at anything he felt inclined. Such a boy would be a danger to the
community, whereas if you placed him in a cadet corps when he left school
he and his rifle might be a national asset.
That learning without a proper outlet for its use may be a grave danger
to the individual and to the community is seen in the present state of
India, and Lord Morley of Blackburn, one of the greatest supporters of
education himself, called attention to the necessity of a community
which provides an education to a certain class allowing the citizens
so educated a proper opportunity of exercising the faculties it has
developed. As he said in the House of Lords, “I agree that those who made
education what it is in India are responsible for a great deal of what
has happened since.” And what is true of India is equally true of England.
It is in providing healthy outlets and uses for the educational power
that has been created that the Boards and Committees who govern these
matters will have to turn immediate attention if they wish to justify
their existence.
I know that these detached remarks of mine on education must necessarily
appear heretical—and they are to some extent intentionally so. I do not
agree with Mr. Chesterton that the heretic of old was proud of not being
a heretic, and believed himself orthodox and all the rest of the world
heretics. If he did he was indeed a madman. But there is a place in the
world for the utterer of heresies if only to awaken the orthodox from
slumber and to make him look around and see if there is any reform that
can be made without destroying the whole edifice. Reforms come slowly and
we, for our part, shall only see the dawn of a better era whose sunshine
will gladden the lives of our grandchildren. I am not a pessimist about
the English school though I have chosen to speak of its disadvantages. I
think, to use an American phrase, it is a “live” thing.
If you go into an English village you find three great public
institutions, the Church, the Inn, and the School. Each is licensed to
some extent by the State and each is burdened by the connection. You
find as a rule that the Church has voluntarily locked its doors and put
up a notice that the key may be found at some old lady’s cottage half
a mile away. You go into the Inn and find it struggling to make itself
hospitable in spite of the mismanagement of brewers and the unsympathetic
bigotry of magistrates. But from the door of the School troop out merry
children, who some day will look back to that time of their life as the
happiest of all, and who will recognise the debt of gratitude they are
under to the schoolmaster, who in spite of the limitations of his system
and himself encourages his pupils to effort and self-reliance and teaches
them lessons of duty, reverence, and love.
I am not greatly interested in the Church or the Inn, both of which
institutions seem well able to guard themselves from the disestablishment
they are said to deserve. But I am interested in the School—and I wish
to see it housed in fairer and more ample buildings with larger playing
fields around them. And I want to see a race of schoolmasters not only
better paid—but worth more. Men and women to whom the State can fairly
give a free hand, knowing that their object in education would be to
mould their pupils into self-reliant citizens rather than to teach them
scholastic tricks. “The schoolmaster is abroad,” said Lord Brougham, “and
I trust to him armed with his primer.” For my part, a schoolmaster armed
with a primer is an abomination of desolation standing in a holy place.
I differ from a Lord Chancellor with a very natural diffidence but his
Lordship was wrong. The schoolmaster of 1828 was not abroad, he was in
the same predicament as the schoolmaster of 1911—at sea.
If I were Minister of Education, I would write over the door of every
school in the country the beautiful words, “Suffer little children and
forbid them not to come unto Me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Let us beware lest we forbid them by dogmas and creeds that lead only
to hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; let us take heed lest we
forbid them by lessons and learning dull for to-day and dangerous for
to-morrow. Let us at least teach them as our grandmothers taught children
when there were no schools in the land, the simple duties of life that
we all know the meaning of, and the Christian duty of unselfishness
which we none of us practise. And in this, as in all things, let us
strive to teach by example rather than by word. And if we are to teach
by the Christian rule, then how great, how noble, how enduring is to be
the work of the schoolmaster in continuing the greatness of our nation.
And the man or woman we shall choose shall not be a pedant, whose long
ears are decorated by degrees, but an honest, simple person of any creed
whatsoever, who will humbly and reverently teach the children of his or
her school the few simple facts of life, and add to that something of
its arts and its crafts and so much or little of its learning as can be a
service and not a hindrance to the child’s career.