I said that I was a public-school master for nearly twenty years; and now that it is over I sometimes sit and wonder, rather sadly, I am afraid, what we were all about.
We were a strictly classical school; that is to say, all the boys in the school were practically specialists in classics, whether they had any aptitude for them or not. We shoved and rammed in a good many other subjects into the tightly packed budget we called the curriculum. But it was not a sincere attempt to widen our education, or to give boys a real chance to work at the things they cared for; it was only a compromise with the supposed claims of the public, in order that we might try to believe that we taught things we did not really teach. We had an enormous and elaborate machine; the boys worked hard, and the masters were horribly overworked. The whole thing whizzed, banged, grumbled, and hummed like a factory; but very little education was the result. It used to go to my heart to see a sparkling stream of bright, keen, lively little boys arrive, half after half, ready to work, full of interest, ready to listen breathlessly to anything that struck their fancy, ready to ask questions—such excellent material, I used to think. At the other end used to depart a slow river of cheerful and conventional boys, well-dressed, well-mannered, thoroughly nice, reasonable, sensible, and good-humoured creatures, but knowing next to nothing, without intellectual interests, and, indeed, honestly despising them. I do not want to exaggerate; and I will frankly confess that there were always a few well-educated boys among them; but these were boys of real ability, with an aptitude for classics. And as providing a classical education, the system was effective, though cumbrous; hampered and congested by the other subjects, which were well enough taught, but which had no adequate time given to them, and intruded upon the classics without having opportunity to develop themselves. It is a melancholy picture, but the result certainly was that intellectual cynicism was the note of the place.
The pity of it is that the machinery was all there; cheerful industry among masters and boys alike; but the whole thing frozen and chilled, partly by the congestion of subjects, partly by antiquated methods.
Moreover, to provide a classical education for the best boys, everything else was sacrificed. The boys were taught classics, not on the literary method, but on the academic method, as if they were all to enter for triposes and scholarships, and to end by becoming professors. Instead of simply reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the languages. It was like setting children of six and seven to write English in the style of Milton and Carlyle.
The solution is a very obvious one; it is, at all costs to simplify, and to relieve pressure. The staple of education should be French, easy mathematics, history, geography, and popular science. I would not even begin Latin or Greek at first. Then, when the first stages were over, I would have every boy with any special gift put to a single subject, in which he should try to make real progress, but so that there would be time to keep up the simpler subjects as well. The result would be that when a boy had finished his course, he would have some one subject which he could reasonably be expected to have mastered up to a certain point. He would have learnt classics, or mathematics, or history, or modern languages, or science, thoroughly; while all might hope to have a competent knowledge of French, English, history, easy mathematics, and easy science. Boys who had obviously no special aptitude would be kept on at the simple subjects. And if the result was only that a school sent out boys who could read French easily, and write simple French grammatically, who knew something of modern history and geography, could work out sums in arithmetic, and had some conception of elementary science—well, they would, I believe, be very fairly educated boys.
The reason why intellectual cynicism sets in, is because the boys, as they go on, feel that they have mastered nothing. They have been set to compose in Greek and Latin and French; the result is that they have no power of composing in any of these languages, when they might have learnt to compose in one. Meanwhile, they have not had time to read any English to speak of, or to be practised in writing it. They know nothing of their own history or of modern geography; and the blame is not with them if they find all knowledge arid and unattractive.
I would try all sorts of experiments. I would make boys do easy precis-writing; to give a set of boys a simple printed correspondence and tell them to analyse it, would be to give them a task in which the dullest would find some amusement. I should read a story aloud, or a short episode of history, and require them to re-tell it in their own words. Or I would relate a simple incident, and make them write it in French; make them write letters in French. And it would be easy thus to make one subject play into another, because they could be made to give an account in French of something that they had done in science or history.
At present each of the roads—Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, science—leads off in a separate direction, and seems to lead nowhere in particular.
The defenders of the classical system say that it fortifies the mind and makes it a strong and vigorous instrument. Where is the proof of it? It is true that it fortifies and invigorates minds which have, to start with, plenty of grip and interest; but pure classics are, as the results abundantly prove, too hard a subject for ordinary minds, and they are taught in too abstruse and elaborate a way. If it were determined by the united good sense of educational authorities that Latin and Greek must be retained at all costs, then the only thing to do would be to sacrifice all other subjects, and to alter all the methods of teaching the classics. I do not think it would be a good solution; but it would be better than the present system of intellectual starvation.
The truth is that the present results are so poor that any experiments are justified. The one quality which you can depend upon in boys is interest, and interest is ruthlessly sacrificed. When I used to press this fact upon my sterner colleagues, they would say that I only wanted to make things amusing, and that the result would be that we should only turn out amateurs. But amateurs are at least better than barbarians; and my complaint is that the majority of the boys are not turned out even professionally equipped in the elaborate subjects they are supposed to have been taught.
The same melancholy thing goes on in the older Universities. The classics are retained as a subject in which all must qualify; and the education provided for the ordinary passman is of a contemptible, smattering kind; it is really no education at all. It gives no grip, or vigour, or stimulus. Here again no one takes any interest in the average man. If the more liberal residents try to get rid of the intolerable tyranny of compulsory classics, a band of earnest, conventional people streams up from the country and outvotes them, saying solemnly, and obviously believing, that education is in danger. The truth is that the intellectual education of the average Englishman is sacrificed to an antiquated humanist system, administered by unimaginative and pedantic people.
The saddest part of it all is that we have, most of us, so little idea of what we want to effect by education. My own theory is a simple one. I think that we ought first of all to equip boys, as, far as we can, to play a useful part in the world. Such a theory is decried by educational theorists as being utilitarian; but if education is not to be useful, we had better close our schools at once. The idealist says, "Never mind the use; get the best educational instrument for the training of the mind, and, when you have finished your work, the mind will be bright and strong, and capable of discharging any labour." That is a beautiful theory; but it is not borne out by results; and one of the reasons of the profound disbelief which is rapidly spreading in the country with regard to our public schools, is that we send out so many boys, not only without intellectual life, but not even capable of humble usefulness. These theorists continue to talk of classics as a splendid gymnastic, but in their hands it becomes a rack; instead of leaving the limbs supple and well knit, they are strained, disjointed, and feeble. Even the flower of our classical system are too often left without any original power of expression; critical, fastidious minds, admiring erudition, preferring the elucidation of second-rate authors to the study of the best. A man who reads Virgil for pleasure is a better result of a system of education than one who re-edits Tibullus. Instead of having original thoughts, and a style of their own to express them in, these high classicists are left with a profound knowledge of the style and usage of ancient authors, a thing not to be undervalued as a step in a progress, but still essentially an anteroom of the mind.
The further task that lies before us educators, when we have trained a mind to be useful, consists in the awakening, in whatever regions may be possible, of the soul. By this I do not mean the ethical soul, but the spirit of fine perception of beauty, of generous admiration for what is noble and true and high. And here I am sure that we fail, and fail miserably. For one thing, these great classicists make the mistake of thinking that only through literature, and, what is more, the austere literature of Greece and Rome, can this sense be developed. I myself have a deep admiration for Greek literature. I think it one of the brightest flowers of the human spirit, and I think it well that any boy with a real literary sense should be brought into contact with it. I do not think highly of Latin literature. There are very few writers of the first rank. Virgil is, of course, one; and Horace is a splendid craftsman, but not a high master of literature. There is hardly any prose in Latin fit for boys to read. Cicero is diffuse, and often affords little more than small-talk on abstract topics; Tacitus a brilliant but affected prosateur, Caesar a dull and uninspiring author. But to many boys the path to literary appreciation cannot lie through Latin, or even Greek, because the old language hangs like a veil between them and the thought within. To some boys the enkindling of the intellectual soul comes through English literature, to some through history, to some through a knowledge of other lands, which can be approached by geography. To some through art and music; and of these two things we trifle with the latter and hardly touch upon the former. I cannot see that a knowledge of the lives, the motives, the performances of artists is in itself a less valuable instrument of education than a knowledge of the lives, motives, and performances of writers, even though they be Greek.
What our teachers fail in—and the most enthusiastic often fail most hopelessly—is sympathy and imagination. They cannot conceive that what moves, touches, and inspires themselves may have no meaning for boys with a different type of mind.
The result of our education can be well reviewed by one who, like myself, after wrestling, often very sorrowfully, with the problems of school education, comes up to a university and gets to know something of these boys at a later stage. Many of them are fine, vigorous fellows; but they often tend to look upon their work as a disagreeable necessity, which they do conscientiously, expecting nothing in particular from it. They play games ardently, and fill their hours of leisure with talk about them. Yet one discerns in mind after mind the germs of intellectual things, undeveloped and bewildered. Many of them have an interest in something, but they are often ashamed to talk about it. They have a deep horror of being supposed to be superior; they listen politely to talk about books and pictures, conscious of ignorance, not ill-disposed to listen; but it is all an unreal world to them.
I am all for hard and strenuous work. I do not at all wish to make work slipshod and dilettante. I would raise the standards of simple education, and force boys to show that they are working honestly. I want energy and zeal above everything. But my honest belief is that you cannot get strenuous and zealous work unless you also have interest and belief in work. At present, education as conducted in our public-school and university system appears to me to be neither utilitarian nor intellectual. It aims at being intellectual first and utilitarian afterwards, and it misses both.
Whether anything can be done on a big scale to help us out of the poor tangle in which we are involved, I do not know. I fear not. I do not think that the time is ripe. I do not believe that great movements can be brought about by prophets, however enlightened their views, however vigorous their personalities, unless there is a corresponding energy below. An individual may initiate and control a great force of public opinion; I do not think he can originate it. There is certainly a vague and widespread discontent with our present results; but it is all a negative opinion, a dissatisfaction with what is being done. The movement must have a certain positive character before it can take shape. There must arise a desire and a respect for intellectual things, a certain mental tone, which is wanting. At present, public opinion only indicates that the rising generation is not well trained, and that boys, after going through an elaborate education, seem to be very little equipped for practical life. There is no complaint that boys are made unpractical; the feeling rather is that they are turned out healthy, well-drilled creatures, fond of games, manly, obedient, but with a considerable aversion to settling down to work, and with a firm resolve to extract what amusement they can out of life. All that is, I feel, perfectly true; but there is little demand on the part of parents that boys should have intellectual interests or enthusiasms for the things of the mind. What teachers ought to aim at is to communicate something of this enthusiasm, by devising a form of education which should appeal to the simpler forms of intellectual curiosity, instead of starving boys upon an ideal of inaccessible dignity. I do not for a moment deny that those who defend the old classical tradition have a high intellectual ideal. But it is an unpractical ideal, and takes no account of the plain facts of experience.
The result is that we teachers have forfeited confidence; and we must somehow or other regain it. We are tolerated, as all ancient and respectable things are tolerated. We have become a part of the social order, and we have still the prestige of wealth and dignity. But what wealthy people ever dream nowadays of building and endowing colleges on purely literary lines? All the buildings which have arisen of late in my University are either buildings for scientific purposes or clerical foundations for ecclesiastical ends. The vitality of our literary education is slowly fading out of it. This lack of vitality is not so evident until you go a little way beneath the surface. Classical proficiency is still liberally rewarded by scholarships and fellowships; and while the classical tradition remains in our schools, there are a good many men, who intend to be teachers, who enter for classical examinations. But where we fail grievously is in our provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not required. It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass degree. No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to cultivate his intelligence in any line. And yet these are our parents in the next generation. And the only way in which we stifle mental revolt is by leaving our victims in such a condition of mental abjectness and intellectual humility, that it does not even occur to them to complain of how unjustly they have been treated. After all, we have interfered with them so little that they have contrived to have a good time at the University. They have made friends, played games, and lived a healthy life enough; they resolve that their boys shall have a good time too, if possible; and so the poor educational farce is played on from generation to generation. It is melancholy to read the sonnet which Tennyson wrote, more than sixty years ago, a grave and bitter indictment of Cambridge—
"Because you do profess to teach,
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart."
That is the mistake: we do not feed the heart; we are too professional; we concern ourselves with methods and details; we swallow blindly the elaborate tradition under which we have ourselves been educated; we continue to respect the erudite mind, and to decry the appreciative spirit as amateurish and dilettante. We continue to think that a boy is well trained in history if he has a minute knowledge of the sequence of events—that is, of course, a necessary part of the equipment of a professor or a teacher; but here again lies one of the fatal fallacies of our system—that we train from the professorial point of view. Omniscience is not even desirable in the ordinary mind. A boy who has appreciated the force of a few great historical characters, who has learnt generous insight into the unselfish patriotism that wins the great victories of the world, who can see the horror of tyranny and the wrongs done to humanity in the name of authority, who has seen how a nation in earlier stages is best ruled by an enlightened despotism, until it has learnt vigour and honesty and truth, who has: learnt to perceive that political agitation only survives in virtue of the justice which underlies its demands—a boy, I say, who has been taught to perceive such things, has learnt the lesson of history in a way which a student crammed with dates and facts may have wholly missed.
The truth is that we do not know what we are aiming at. Our school and university systems aim at present at an austere standard of mental discipline, and then fail to enforce it, by making inevitable concessions to the mental weakness inherited from long generations trained upon the system of starvation. The system, indeed, too often reminds me of an old picture in Punch, of genteel poverty dining in state; in a room hung with portraits, attended by footmen, two attenuated persons sit, while a silver cover is removed from a dish containing a roasted mouse. The resources that ought to be spent on a wholesome meal are wasted in keeping up an ideal of state. Of course there is something noble in all sacrifice of personal comfort and health to a dignified ideal; but it is our business at present to fill the dish rather than to insist on the cover being of silver.
One very practical proof of the disbelief which the public has in education is that, while the charges of public schools have risen greatly in the last fifty years, the margin is all expended in the comfort of boys, and in opportunities for athletic exercises; while masters, at all but a very few public schools, are still so poorly paid that it is impossible for the best men to adopt the profession, unless they have an enthusiasm which causes them to put considerations of personal comfort aside. It is only too melancholy to observe at the University that the men of vigour and force tend to choose the Civil Service or the Bar in preference to educational work. I cannot wonder at it. The drudgery of falling in with the established system, of teaching things in which there is no interest to be communicated, of insisting on details in the value of which one does not believe, is such that few people, except unambitious men, who have no special mental bent, adopt the profession; and these only because the imparting of the slender accomplishments that they have gained is an obvious and simple method of earning a livelihood.
The blame must, I fear, fall first upon the Universities. I am not speaking of the education there provided for the honour men, which is often excellent of its kind; though it must be confessed that the keenest and best enthusiasm seems to me there to be drifting away from the literary side of education. But while an old and outworn humanist tradition is allowed to prevail, while the studies of the average passman are allowed to be diffuse, desultory, and aimless, and of a kind from which it is useless to expect either animation or precision, so long will a blight rest upon the education of the country. While boys of average abilities continue to be sent to the Universities, and while the Universities maintain the classical fence, so long will the so-called modern sides at schools continue to be collections of more or less incapable boys. And in decrying modern sides, as even headmasters of great schools have been often known to do, it is very seldom stated that the average of ability in these departments tends to be so low that even the masters who teach in them teach without faith or interest.
It may be thought of these considerations that they resemble the attitude of Carlyle, of whom FitzGerald said that he had sat for many years pretty comfortably in his study at Chelsea, scolding all the world for not being heroic, but without being very precise in telling them how. But this is a case where individual action is out of the question; and if I am asked to name a simple reform which would have an effect, I would suggest that a careful revision of the education of passmen at our Universities is the best and most practical step to take.
And, for the schools, the only solution possible is that the directors of secondary education should devise a real and simple form of curriculum. If they whole-heartedly believe in the classics as the best possible form of education, then let them realize that the classics form a large and complicated subject, which demands the WHOLE of the energies of boys. Let them resist utilitarian demands altogether, and bundle all other subjects, except classics, out of the curriculum, so that classics may, at all events, be learnt thoroughly and completely. At present they make large and reluctant concessions to utilitarian demands, and spoil the effect of the classics to which they cling, and in which they sincerely believe, by admitting modern subjects to the curriculum in deference to the clamour of utilitarians. A rigid system, faithfully administered, would be better than a slatternly compromise. Of course, one would like to teach all boys everything if it were possible! But the holding capacity of tender minds is small, and a few subjects thoroughly taught are infinitely better than a large number of subjects flabbily taught.
I say, quite honestly, that I had rather have the old system of classics pure and simple, taught with relentless accuracy, than the present hotchpotch. But I earnestly hope myself that the pressure of the demand for modern subjects is too strong to be resisted.
It seems to me that, when the whole world is expanding and thrilling with new life all around us, it is an intolerable mistake not to bring the minds of boys in touch with the modern spirit. The history of Greece and Rome may well form a part of modern education; but we want rather to bring the minds of those who are being educated into contact with the Greek and Roman spirit, as part of the spirit of the world, than to make them acquainted with the philological and syntactical peculiarities of the two languages. It may be said that we cannot come into contact with the Greek and the Roman spirit except through reading their respective literatures; but if that is the case, how can a system of teaching classics be defended which never brings the vast majority of the boys, who endure it, in contact with the literature or the national spirit of the Greeks and Romans at all? I do not think that classical teachers can sincerely maintain that the average product of a classical school has any real insight into, or familiarity with, either the language or the spirit of these two great nations.
And if that is true of average boys educated on this system, what is it that classical teachers profess to have given them? They will say grip, vigour, the fortified mind. But where is the proof of it? If I saw classically educated boys flinging themselves afterwards with energy and ardour into modern literature, history, philosophy, science, I should be the first to concur in the value of the system. But I see, instead, intellectual cynicism, intellectual apathy, an absorbing love of physical exercise, an appetite for material pleasures, a distaste for books and thought. I do not say that these tendencies would at once yield to a simpler and more enlightened system of education; but the results of the present system seem to me so negative, so unsatisfactory, as to justify, and indeed necessitate, the trying of educational experiments. It is terrible to see the patient acquiescence, the humble conscientiousness with which the present system is administered. It is pathetic to see so much labour expended upon an impossible task. There is something, of course, morally impressive about the courage and loyalty of those who stick to a sinking ship, and attempt to bale out with teacups the inrush of the overwhelming tide. But one cannot help feeling that too much is at stake; that year by year the younger generation, which ought to be sent out alive to intellectual interests of every kind, in a period which is palpitating with problems and thrilled by wonderful surprises, is being starved and cramped by an obstinate clinging to an old tradition, to a system which reveals its inadequacy to all who pass by; or, rather, our boys are being sacrificed to a weak compromise between two systems, the old and the new, which are struggling together. The new system cannot at present eject the old, and the old can only render the new futile without exercising its own complete influence.
The best statesmanship in the world is not to break rudely with old traditions, but to cause the old to run smoothly into the new. My own sincere belief is that it is not too late to attempt this; but that if the subject continues to be shelved, if our educational authorities refuse to consider the question of reform, the growing dissatisfaction will reach such a height that the old system will be swept away root and branch, and that many venerable and beautiful associations will thereby be sacrificed. And with all my heart do I deprecate this, believing, as I do, that a wise continuity, a tendency to temperate reform, is one of the best notes of the English character. We have a great and instinctive tact in England for avoiding revolutions, and for making freedom broaden slowly down; that is what, one ventures to hope, may be the issue of the present discontent. But I would rather have a revolution, with all its destructive agencies, than an unintelligent and oppressive tyranny.
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