UPTON,
Nov. 15, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--A controversy, a contest! How they poison all one's
thoughts! I am at present wading, as Ruskin says, in a sad marsh or
pool of thought. Let me indicate to you without excessive detail the
kind of thing that is going on.
We have been discussing the introduction here of certain important
educational reforms, in the direction of modernising and simplifying
our curriculum.
Now we are all one body here, no doubt, like the Christian Church in
the hymn; but unhappily, and unlike the hymn, we ARE very much divided.
We are in two camps. There is a conservative section who, doubtless for
very good reasons, want to keep things as they are; they see strongly
all the blessings of the old order; they like the old ways and believe
in them; they think, for instance, that the old classical lines of
education are the best, that the system fortifies the mind, and that,
when you have been through it, you have got a good instrument which
enables you to tackle anything else; a very coherent position, and, in
the case of our conservatives, very conscientiously administered.
Then there is a strong Progressive party numerically rather stronger,
to which I myself belong. We believe that things might be a good deal
better. We are dissatisfied with our results. We think, to take the
same instance, that classics are a very hard subject, and that a great
many boys are not adapted to profit by them; we believe that the
consequence of boys being kept at a hard subject, which they cannot
penetrate or master, leads to a certain cynicism about intellectual
things, and that the results of a classical education on many boys are
so negative that at all events some experiments ought to be tried.
Well, if all discussions could be conducted patiently, good-humouredly,
and philosophically, no harm would be done; but they can't! Men will
lose their temper, indulge in personalities, and import bitterness into
the question. Moreover, a number of my fiercest opponents are among my
best friends here, and that is naturally very painful. Indeed, I feel
how entirely unfitted I am for these kinds of controversy. This
disgusting business deprives me of sleep, makes me unable to
concentrate my mind upon my work, destroys both my tranquillity and my
philosophy.
It is a relief to write to you on the subject. Yet I don't see my way
out. One must have an opinion about one's life-work. My business is
education, and I have tried to use my eyes and see things as they are.
I am quite prepared to admit that I may be wrong; but if everybody who
formed opinions abstained from expressing them out of deference to the
people who were not prepared to admit that they themselves could be
mistaken, there would be an end of all progress. Minds of the sturdy,
unconvinced order are generally found to range themselves on the side
of things as they are; and that is at all events a good guarantee that
things won't move too fast, and against the trying of rash experiments.
But I don't want to be rash; I think that for a great many boys our
type of education is a failure, and I want to see if something cannot
be devised to meet their needs. But my opponents won't admit any
failure. They say that the boys who, I think, end by being hopelessly
uneducated would be worse off if they had not been grounded in the
classics. They say that my theory is only to make things easier for
boys; and they add that, if any boy's education is an entire failure
(they admit a few incapables are to be found), it is the boy's own
fault; he has been idle and listless; if he had worked properly it
would have been all right; he would have been fortified; and anyhow,
they say, it doesn't matter what you teach such boys--they would have
been hopeless anyhow.
Of course the difficulty of proving my case is great. You can't, in
education, get two exactly parallel boys and try the effect of
different types of education on the two. A chemist can put exactly the
same quantity of some salt in two vessels, and, by treating them in
different ways, produce a demonstration which is irrefragable. But no
two boys are exactly alike, and, while classics are demanded at the
university, boys of ability will tend to keep on the classical side; so
that the admitted failure of modern sides in many places to produce
boys of high intellectual ability results from the fact that boys of
ability do not tend to join the modern sides.
So one hammers on, and, as it is always easier to leave an object at
rest than to set it moving, we remain very much where we were.
The cynical solution is to say, let us have peace at any cost; let the
thing alone; let us teach what we have to teach, and not bother about
results. But that appears to me to be a cowardly attitude. If one
expresses dissatisfaction to one of the cheerful stationary party, they
reply, "Oh, take our word for it, it is all right; do your best; you
don't teach at all badly, though you lack conviction; leave it to us,
and never mind the discontent expressed by parents, and the cynical
contempt felt by boys for intellectual things."
"Meanwhile, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play."
They do indeed! they find work so dispiriting a business that they put
it out of their thoughts as much as they can. And when they grow up,
conscious of intellectual feebleness, they have no idea of expressing
their resentment at the way they have been used--if they are modest,
they think that it is their own fault; if they are complacent, they
think that intellectual things don't matter.
While I write there comes in one of my cheerful opponents to discuss
the situation. We plunge into the subject of classics. I say that, to
boys without aptitude, they are dreary and hopelessly difficult. "There
you go again," he says, "always wanting to make things EASIER: the
thing to do is to keep boys at hard, solid work; it is an advantage
that they can't understand what they are working at; it is a better
gymnastic." The subject of mathematics is mentioned, and my friend
incidentally confesses that he never had the least idea what higher
Algebra was all about.
I refrain from saying what comes into my mind. Supposing that he,
without any taste for Mathematics, had been kept year after year at
them, surely that would have been acting on his principle, viz. to find
out what boys can't do and make them do it. No doubt he would say that
his mind had been fortified, as it was, by classics. But, if a rigid
mathematical training had been employed, his mind might have been
fortified into an enviable condition of inaccessibility. But I don't
say this; he would only think I was making fun of the whole thing.
Fun, indeed! There is very little amusement to be derived from the
situation. My opponents have a strong sense of what they call
liberty--which means that every one should have a vote, and that every
one should register it in their favour. Or they are like the
old-fashioned Whigs, who had a strong belief in popular liberty, and an
equally unshaken belief in their own personal superiority.--Ever yours,