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EDITED BY A.C. BENSON, C.V.O., LL.D.
Master of Magdalene College

With an Introduction by the Right Hon. Viscount Bryce, O.M.

1919

PREFACE

The scheme of publishing a volume of essays dealing with underlying
aims and principles of education was originated by the University
Press Syndicate. It seemed to promise something both of use and
interest, and the further arrangements were entrusted to a small
Committee, with myself as secretary and acting editor.

Our idea has been this: at a time of much educational enterprise and
unrest, we believed that it would be advisable to collect the opinions
of a few experienced teachers and administrators upon certain
questions of the theory and motive of education which lie a little
beneath the surface.

To deal with current and practical problems does not seem the _first_
need at present. Just now, work is both common as well as fashionable;
most people are doing their best; and, if anything, the danger is that
organisation should outrun foresight and intelligence. Moreover a
weakening of the old compulsion of the classics has resulted, not in
perfect freedom, but in a tendency on the part of some scientific
enthusiasts simply to substitute compulsory science for compulsory
literature, when the real question rather is whether obligatory
subjects should not be diminished as far as possible, and more
sympathetic attention given to faculty and aptitude.

We have attempted to avoid mere current controversial topics, and to
encourage our contributors to define as far as possible the aim and
outlook of education, as the word is now interpreted.

We have not furthered any educational conspiracy, nor attempted any
fusion of view. Our plan has been first to select some of the most
pressing of modern problems, next to find well-equipped experts and
students to deal with each, and then to give the various writers as
free a hand as possible, desiring them to speak with the utmost
frankness and personal candour. We have not directed the plan or
treatment or scope of any essay; and my own editorial supervision has
consisted merely in making detailed suggestions on smaller points, in
exhorting contributors to be punctual and diligent, and generally
revising what the New Testament calls jots and tittles. We have been
very fortunate in meeting with but few refusals, and our contributors
readily responded to the wish which we expressed, that they should
write from the personal rather than from the judicial point of view,
and follow their own chosen method of treatment.

We take the opportunity of expressing our obligations to all who have
helped us, and to Viscount Bryce for bestowing, as few are so justly
entitled to do, an educational benediction upon our scheme and volume.

A.C. BENSON

MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
August 18, 1917

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

By the Right Hon. VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M.

I. THE AIM OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM

By JOHN LEWIS PATON, M.A., High Master of
Manchester Grammar School; formerly Fellow of
St John's College, Cambridge, Assistant Master at
Rugby School, Head Master of University College
School

II. THE TRAINING OF THE REASON

By the Very Rev. WILLIAM RALPH INGE, D.D.,
Dean of St Paul's, Honorary Fellow of Jesus College,
Cambridge, and of Hertford College, Oxford;
formerly Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity,
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, Assistant
Master at Eton College, Fellow and Tutor of
Hertford College, Oxford

III. THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION

By ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON, C.V.O.,
LL.D., Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge;
formerly Assistant Master at Eton College

IV. RELIGION AT SCHOOL

By WILLIAM WYAMAR VAUGHAN, M.A., Master
of Wellington College; formerly Assistant Master
at Clifton College, and Head Master of Giggleswick
School

V. CITIZENSHIP

By ALBERT MANSBRIDGE, M.A., Joint-Secretary
of the Cambridge University Tutorial Classes
Committee; Founder and formerly Secretary of
the Workers' Educational Association

VI. THE PLACE OF LITERATURE IN EDUCATION

By NOWELL SMITH, M.A., Head Master of
Sherborne School; formerly Fellow of Magdalen
College, Oxford, Fellow and Tutor of New College,
Oxford, Assistant Master at Winchester College

VII. THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN EDUCATION

By WILLIAM BATESON, F.R.S., Director of the
John Innes Horticultural Institution, Honorary
Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge; formerly
Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge

VIII. ATHLETICS

By FREDERIC BLAGDEN MALIM, M.A., Master
of Haileybury College; formerly Assistant Master
at Marlborough College, Head Master of Sedbergh
School

IX. THE USE OF LEISURE

By JOHN HADEN BADLEY, M.A., Head Master of
Bedales School

X. PREPARATION FOR PRACTICAL LIFE

By Sir JOHN DAVID MCCLURE, LL.D., D.MUS.,
Head Master of Mill Hill School

XI. TEACHING AS A PROFESSION

By FRANK ROSCOE, Secretary of the Teachers
Registration Council

INTRODUCTION

In times of anxiety and discontent, when discontent has engendered the
belief that great and widespread economic and social changes are
needed, there is a risk that men or States may act hastily, rushing to
new schemes which seem promising chiefly because they are new,
catching at expedients that have a superficial air of practicality,
and forgetting the general theory upon which practical plans should be
based. At such moments there is special need for the restatement and
enforcement by argument of sound principles. To such principles so far
as they relate to education it is the aim of these essays to recall
the public mind. They cover so many branches of educational theory and
deal with them so fully and clearly, being the work of skilled and
vigorous thinkers, that it would be idle for me to enter in a short
introduction upon those topics which they have discussed with special
knowledge far greater than I possess. All I shall attempt is to
present a few scattered observations on the general problems of
education as they stand to-day.

The largest of those problems, viz., how to provide elementary
instruction for the whole population, is far less urgent now than it
was fifty years ago. The Act of 1870, followed by the Act which made
school-attendance compulsory, has done its work. What is wanted now
is Quality rather than Quantity. Quantity is doubtless needed in one
respect. Children ought to stay longer at school and ought to have
more encouragement to continue education after they leave the
elementary school. But it is chiefly an improvement in the teaching
that is wanted, and that of course means the securing of higher
competence in the teacher by raising the remuneration and the status
of the teaching profession[1].

The next problem is how to find the finest minds among the children of
the country and bring them by adequate training to the highest
efficiency. The sifting out of these best minds is a matter of
educational organisation and machinery; and the process will become
the easier when the elementary teachers, who ought to bear a part in
selecting those who are most fitted to be sent on to secondary
schools, have themselves become better qualified for the task of
discrimination. The question how to train these best minds when sifted
out would lead me into the tangled controversy as to the respective
educational values of various subjects of instruction, a topic which I
must not deal with here. What I do wish to dwell upon is the supreme
importance to the progress of a nation of the best talent it
possesses. In every country there is a certain percentage of the
population who are fitted by their superior intelligence, industry,
and force of character to be the leaders in every branch of action
and thought. It is a small percentage, but it may be increased by
discovering ability in places where the conditions do not favour its
development, and setting it where it will have a better chance of
growth, just as a seedling tree brought out of the dry shade may shoot
up when planted where sun and rain can reach it freely. I am not
thinking of those exceptionally great and powerful minds, of whom
there may not be more than four or five in a generation, who make
brilliant discoveries or change the currents of thought, but rather of
persons of a capacity high, if not quite first rate, which enables
them, granted fair chances, to rise quickly into positions where they
can effectively serve the community. These men, whatever occupation
they follow, be it that of abstract thinking, or literary production,
or scientific research, or the conduct of affairs, whether commercial
or political or administrative, are the dynamic strength of the
country when they enter manhood, and its realised wealth when they are
in their fullest vigour thirty years later. We need more of them, and
more of them may be found by taking pains.

The volume of thought continuously applied to the work of life,
whether it be applied in the library or study or laboratory, or in the
workshop or factory or counting-house or council chamber, has not been
keeping pace with the growth of our population, our wealth, our
responsibilities. It is not to-day sufficient for the increasing
vastness and complexity of the problems that confront a great nation.
We in Great Britain have been too apt to rely upon our energy and
courage and practical resourcefulness in emergencies, and thus have
tended to neglect those efforts to accumulate knowledge, and consider
how it can be most usefully applied, which should precede and
accompany action. This deficiency is happily one that can be removed,
while a want of qualities which are the gift of nature is less
curable. The "efficiency" which is on every one's mouth cannot be
extemporised by rushing hastily into action, however energetic. It is
the fruit of patient and exact determination of and reflection upon
the facts to be dealt with.

The view that it was the finest minds that ought to be most cared for,
and that to them of right belonged not merely leadership, but even
control also, was carried by the ancients, and especially by Plato and
Aristotle, almost to excess. Their ideal, and indeed that of most
Greek thinkers, was the maintenance among the masses of the military
valour and discipline which the State needed for its protection, and
the cultivation among the chosen few of the highest intellectual and
moral excellence. In the Middle Ages, when power as well as rank
belonged to two classes, nobles and clergy, the ideal of education
took a religious colour, and that training was most valued which made
men loyal to the Church and to sound doctrine, with the prospect of
bliss in the world to come. In our times, educational ideals have
become not merely more earthly but more material. Modern doctrines of
equality have discredited the ancient view that the chief aim of
instruction is to prepare the few Wise and Good for the government of
the State. It is not merely upon this world but also upon the material
things of this world, power and the acquisition of territory,
industrial production, commerce, finance, wealth and prosperity in all
its forms, that the modern eye is fixed. There has been a drifting
away from that respect for learning which was strong in the Middle
Ages and lasted down into the eighteenth century. In some countries,
as in our own, that which instruction and training may accomplish has
been rated far below the standard of the ancients. Yet in our own time
we have seen two striking examples to show that their estimate was
hardly too high. Think of the power which the constant holding up,
during long centuries, of certain ideals and standards of conduct,
exerted upon the Japanese people, instilling sentiments of loyalty to
the sovereign and inspiring a certain conception of chivalric duty
which Europe did not reach even when monarchy and chivalry stood
highest. Think of that boundless devotion to the State as an
omnipotent and all-absorbing power, superseding morality and
suppressing the individual, which within the short span of two
generations has taken possession of Germany. In the latter case at
least the incessant preaching and teaching of a theory which lowers
the citizen's independence and individuality while it saps his moral
sense seems to us a misdirection of educational effort. But in it
education has at least displayed its power.

Can a fair statement of the educational ideals which we might here and
now set before ourselves be found in saying that there are three
chief aims to be sought as respects those we have called the best
minds?

One aim is to fit men to be at least explorers, even if not
discoverers, in the fields of science and learning.

A second is to fit them to be leaders in the field of action, leaders
not only by their initiative and their diligence, but also by the
power and the habit of turning a full stream of thought and knowledge
upon whatever work they have to do.

A third is to give them the taste for, and the habit of enjoying,
intellectual pleasures.

Many moralists, ancient and modern, have given pleasure a bad name,
because they saw that the most alluring and powerfully seductive
pleasures, pleasures which appeal to all men alike, were indulged to
excess, and became a source of evil. But men will have pleasure and
ought to have pleasure. The best way of drawing them off from the more
dangerous pleasures is to teach them to enjoy the better kinds.
Moreover the quieter pleasures of the intellect mean Rest, and a
greater fitness for resuming work.

The pity is that so many sources capable of affording delight are
ignored or imperfectly appreciated. May not this be partly the fault
of the lines which our education has followed? Perhaps some kinds of
study would have fared better if their defenders had dwelt more upon
the pleasure they afford and less upon their supposed utility. The
champions of Greek and Latin have dilated on the value of grammar as a
mental discipline, and argued that the best way to acquire a good
English style is to know the ancient languages, a proposition
discredited by many examples to the contrary. It is really this
insistence on grammatical minutiae that has proved repellent to young
people and suggested the dictum that "it doesn't much matter what you
teach a boy so long as he hates it." Better had it been, abandoning
the notion that every one should learn Greek, to dwell upon the
boundless pleasure which minds of imagination and literary taste
derive from carrying in memory the gems of ancient wisdom which are
more easily remembered because they are not in our own language, and
the finest passages of ancient poetry. There are plenty of
things--indeed there are far more things--in modern literature as
noble and as beautiful as the best of the ancients can give us. But
they are not the same things. The ancient poets have the freshness and
the fragrance of the springtime of the world [2]. Or take another sort
of instance. Take the pleasures which nature spreads before us with a
generous hand, hills and fields and woods and rocks, flowers and the
songs of birds, the ever-shifting aspects of clouds and of landscapes
under light and shadow. How few persons in most countries--for there
is in this respect a difference between different peoples--notice
these things. Everybody sees them few observe them or derive pleasure
from them. Is not this largely because attention has not been properly
called to them? They have not been taught to look at natural objects
closely and see the variety there is in them. Persons in whom no taste
for pictures has ever been formed by their having been taken to see,
good pictures and told what constitutes merit, are, when led into a
picture gallery, usually interested in the subjects. They like to see
a sportsman shooting wild fowl, or a battle scene, or even a prize
fight, or a mother tending a sick child, because these incidents
appeal to them. But they seldom see in a picture anything but the
subject; they do not appreciate: imaginative quality or composition,
or colour, or light and shade or indeed anything except exact
imitation of the actual. So in nature the average man is; struck by
something so exceptional as a lofty rock, like Ailsa Craig or the
Needles off the Isle of Wight, or an eclipse of the moon, or perhaps a
blood-red sunset; but he does not notice and consequently draws no
pleasure from landscapes in general, whether noble; or quietly
beautiful. The capacity for taking pleasure, in all these things may
not be absent. There is reason: to think that most children possess
it, because when they are shown how to observe they usually respond,
quickly perceiving, for instance, the differences between one flower
and another, quickly, even when quite young, learning the distinctive
characters and names of each, enjoying the process of recognising
each when they walk along the lanes, as indeed every intelligent
child enjoys the exercise of its observing powers. The disproportionate
growth of our urban population, a thing regrettable in other respects
also, has no doubt made it more difficult to give young people a
familiar knowledge of nature, but the facilities for going into the
country and the happy lengthening of summer holidays render it easier
than formerly to provide opportunities for Nature Study, which,
properly conducted, is a recreation and not a lesson. There is no
source of enjoyment which lasts so keen all through life or which fits
one better for other enjoyments, such as those of art and of travel.
Of the value of the habit of alert observation for other purposes I
say nothing, wishing here to insist only upon what it may do for
delight.

It is often alleged that in England boys and girls show less mental
curiosity, less desire for knowledge than those of most European
countries, or even than those of the three smaller countries north and
west of England in which the Celtic element is stronger than it is in
South Britain. A parallel charge has, ever since the days of Matthew
Arnold, been brought against the English upper and middle classes. He
declared that they care less for the "things of the mind" and show
less respect to eminence in science, literature and art, than is the
case elsewhere, as for instance in France, Germany, or Italy (to which
one may add the United States); and he thus explained the scanty
interest taken by these classes in educational progress.

Should this latter charge be well founded, the fact it notes would
tend to perpetuate the former evil, for the indifference of parents
reacts upon the school and upon the pupils. The love of knowledge is
so natural and awakens so early in the normal child, that even if it
be somewhat less keen among English than among French or Scottish
children, we may well believe our deficiencies to be largely due to
faulty and unstimulative methods of teaching, and may trust that they
will diminish when these methods have been improved.

If it be true that the English public generally show a want of
interest in and faint appreciation of the value of education, the
stern discipline of war will do something to remove this indifference.
The comparative poverty and reduction of luxurious habits; which this
war will bring in its train, along with a sense of the need that has
arisen for turning to the fullest account all the intellectual
resources of the country so that it may maintain its place in the
world,--these things may be expected to work a change for the better,
and lead parents to set more store upon the mental and less upon the
athletic achievements of their sons.

Be this as it may, no one to-day denies that much remains to be done
to spread a sense of the value of science for those branches of
industry to which (as especially to agriculture) it has been
imperfectly applied, to strengthen and develop the teaching of
scientific theory as the foundation of technical and practical
scientific work, and above all to equip with the largest measure of
knowledge and by the most stimulating training those on whom nature
has bestowed the most vigorous and flexible minds. To-day e see that
the heads of great businesses, industrial and financial, are looking
out for men of university distinction to be placed in responsible
posts--a thing which did not happen fifty years ago--because the
conditions of modern business have grown too intricate to be handled
by any but the best trained brains. The same need is at least equally
true of many branches of that administrative work which is now being
thrust, in growing volume, upon the State and its officials.

If we feel this as respects the internal economic life of our country,
is it not true also of the international life of the world? In the
stress and competition of our times, the future belongs to the nations
that recognise the worth of Knowledge and Thought, and best understand
how to apply the accumulated experience of the past. In the long run
it is knowledge and wisdom that rule the world, not knowledge only,
but knowledge applied with that width of view and sympathetic
comprehension of men, and of other nations, which are the essence of
statesmanship.

[Footnote 1: This has been clearly seen and admirably stated by the
present President of the Board of Education.]

[Footnote 2: Take for instance this little fragment of Alcman:

Greek: _Ou m heti, parthenikai meligaryest imerophônoi,
Gyia pherein dynatai. Bale dê Bale kêrylos eiên,
Hos t hepi kymatos hanthos ham alkyonessi potêtai
Nêleges hêtor hechôn haliporphyros eiaros hornis._

What can be more exquisite than the epithets in the first line, or
more fresh and delicate and tender in imaginative quality than the
three last? A modern poet of equal genius would treat the topic with
equal force and grace, but the charm, the untranslatable charm of
antique simplicity, would be absent.]

I

THE AIM OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM

By J. L. PATON

High Master of Manchester Grammar School

The last century, with all its brilliant achievement in scientific
discovery and increase of production, was spiritually a failure. The
sadness of that spiritual failure crushed the heart of Clough, turned
Carlyle from a thinker into a scold, and Matthew Arnold from a poet
into a writer of prose.

The secret of failure was that the great forces which move mankind
were out of touch with each other, and furnished no mutual support.
Art had no vital relation with industry; work was dissociated from
joy; political economy was at issue with humanity; science was at
daggers drawn with religion; action did not correspond to thought,
being to seeming; and finally the individual was conceived as having
claims and interests at variance with the claims and interests of the
society of which he formed a part, in fact as standing out against it,
in an opposition so sharply marked that one of the greatest thinkers
could write a book with the title "Man _versus_ the State." As a
result, nation was divided against nation, labour against capital,
town against country, sex against sex, the hearts of the children
were set against the fathers, the Church fought against the State,
and, worst of all, Church fought against Church.

The discords of the great society were reflect inevitably in the
sphere of education. The elementary schools of the nation were divided
into two conflicting groups, and both were separated by an estranging
gulf from the grammar schools and high schools as the grammar schools
in turn were shut off from the public schools on the one hand, and
from the schools of art, music, and of technology on the other There
was no cohesion, no concerted effort, no mutual support, no great plan
of advance, no homologating idea.

This fact in itself is sufficient to account for the ineffectiveness,
the despondencies, the insincerities and ceaseless unrest of Western
civilisation in the nineteenth century. The tree of human life cannot
flower and bear fruit for the healing of the nations when its great
life-forces spend themselves in making war on each other.

If the experience of the century which lies before us is to be
different, it must be made so by means of education. Education is the
science which deals with the world as it is capable of becoming. Other
sciences deal with things as they are, and formulate the laws which
they find to prevail in things as they are. The eyes of education are
fixed always upon the future, and philosophy of whatever kind,
directly adumbrates a Utopia, thinks on educational lines.

The aim of education must therefore be as wide as it is high, it must
be co-extensive with life. The advance must be along the whole front,
not on a small sector only. William Morris, when he tried his hand at
painting, used to say, that what bothered him always was the frame: he
could not conceive of art as something "framed off" and isolated from
life. Just as William Morris wanted to turn all life into art, so with
education. It cannot be "framed off" and detached from the larger
aspects of political and social well-being; it takes all life for its
province. It is not an end in itself, any more than the individuals
with whom it deals; it acts upon the individual, but through the
individual it acts upon the mass, and its aim is nothing less than the
right ordering of human society.

To cope with a task which can be stated in these terms, education must
be free. A new age postulates a new education. The traditions which
have dominated hitherto must one by one be challenged to render
account of themselves, that which is good in them must be conserved
and assimilated, that which is effete must be scrapped and rejected.
Neither can the administrative machinery, as it exists, be taken for
granted; unless it shows those powers of adaptation and growth which
show it to be alive and not dead, it too must be scrapped and
rejected; new wine is fatal to old skins. Education must regain once
more what she possessed at the time of the Renascence--the power of
direction; she must be mistress of her fate.

Further, if education is to be a force which makes for co-operation
in place of conflict, she must not be divided against herself. She
must leave behind forever the separations and snobberies, the
misunderstandings, the wordy battles beloved of pedants and
politicians. The smoke and dust of controversy obscures her vision,
and she needs all her energies to tackle the great task which
confronts her. In this regard nothing is so full of promise for the
future as the new sense of unity which is beginning both to animate
and actuate the whole teaching profession, from the University to the
Kindergarten, and has already eventuated in the formation of a
Teachers Registration Council, on which all sorts and conditions of
education are represented.

The materialists have not been slow to see their chance, to challenge
the old tradition of literary education, and to urge the claims of
science. But the aim which they place before us is frankly stated--it
is the acquisition of wealth; they are "on manna bent and mortal
ends," and their conception of the future is a world in which one
nation competes against another for the acquisition of markets and
commodities. In effect, therefore, materialism challenges the
classics, but it accepts the self-seeking ideals of the past
generations, and accepts also, as an integral part of the future, the
scramble of conflicting interests, labour against capital, nation
against nation, man against man. Now the first characteristic of the
genuine scientific mind is the power of learning by experience. Real
science never makes the same mistake twice. Obviously the repetition
of the past can only eventuate in the repetition of the present. And
that is precisely what education sets itself to counteract. The
materialist forgets three outstanding and obvious facts. Firstly,
science cannot be the whole of knowledge, because "science" (in his
limited sense of the term) deals only with what appears. Secondly,
power of insight depends not so much upon the senses as on moral
qualities, the sense of sympathy and of fairness; it needs
self-discipline as well as knowledge both of oneself and one's
fellow-man. "How can a man," says Carlyle, "without clear vision in
his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head?" "Eyes and
ears," said the ancient philosopher, "are bad witnesses for such as
have barbarian souls." Thirdly, the tragedy of the past generation was
not its failure to accumulate wealth; in that respect it was more
successful than any generation which preceded it. The tragedy of the
nineteenth century was that, when it had acquired wealth, it had no
clear idea, either individually or collectively, what to do with it.

And yet the house of humanity faces both ways; it looks out towards
the world of appearances as well as to the world of spirit, and is, in
fact, the meeting-place of both. Materialism is not wrong because it
deals with material things. It is wrong because it deals with nothing
else. It is wrong, also, in education because taking the point of view
of the adult, it makes the material product itself the all-important
thing. In every right conception of education the child is central.
The child is interested in things. It wants first to _sense_ them, or
as Froebel would say "to make the outer inner"; it wants to play with
them, to construct with them, and along the line of this inward
propulsion the educational process has to act. The "thing-studies" if
one may so term them, which have been introduced into the curriculum,
such as gardening, manual training (with cardboard, wood, metal),
cooking, painting, modelling, games and dramatisation, are it is true
later introductions, adopted mainly from utilitarian motive; and they
have been ingrafted on the original trunk, being at first regarded as
detachable extras, but they quickly showed that they were an organic
part of the real educative process; they have already reacted on the
other subjects of the curriculum, and have, in the earlier stages of
education become central. In the same way, vocation is having great
influence upon the higher terminal stages of education. All this is
part of the most important of all correlations, the correlation of
school with life.

But the child's interest in things is social. Through the primitive
occupations of mankind, he is entering step by step into the heritage
of the race and into a richer fuller personal experience. The science
which enlists a child's interest is not that which is presented from
the logical, abstract point of view. The way in which the child
acquires it is the same as that in which mankind acquired it--his
occupation presents certain difficulties, to overcome these
difficulties he has to exercise his thought, he invents and
experiments; and so thought reacts upon occupation, occupation reacts
upon thought. And out of that reciprocal action science is born. In
the same way his play is social--in his games too he enters into the
heritage of the race, and in playing them he is learning unconsciously
the greatest of all arts, the art of living with others. In his play
as well as in his school work the lines of his natural development
show how he can be trained to co-operate with the law of human
progress.

This fitness and readiness to co-operate with the great movement of
human progress, all-round fitness of body, mind and spirit, provides
the formula which fuses and reconciles two growing tendencies in
modern education.

There is in the first place the movement towards self-expression and
self-development--postulating for the scholar a larger measure of
liberty in thought and action, and self-direction than hitherto--this
movement is represented mainly by Dr Montessori, and by "What is and
what might be"; it is a movement which is spreading upwards from the
infant school to the higher standards. Side by side with it is the
movement towards the fuller development of corporate life in the
school, the movement which trains the child to put the school first in
his thoughts, to live for the society to which he belongs and find his
own personal well-being in the well-being of that society. This has
been, ever since Arnold, sedulously fostered in the games of the
public schools, and fruitful of good results in that limited sphere;
it has been applied with conspicuous success to the development of
self-government, and it has reached its fullest expression in the
little Commonwealth of Mr Homer Lane. But we are beginning to
recognise its wider applications, it is capable of transforming the
spirit of the class-room activities as well as the activities of a
playing field, it is in every way as applicable to the elementary
school as to Eton, or Rugby, or Harrow, and to girls as well as to
boys.

These two movements towards a fuller liberty of self-fulfilment, and
towards a fuller and stronger social life, are convergent, and
supplement, or rather complement, each other. Personality, after all,
is best defined as "capacity for fellowship," and only in the social
milieu can the individual find his real self-fulfilling. Unless he
functions socially, the individual develops into eccentricity,
negative criticism, and the cynical aloofness of the "superior
person." On the other hand without freedom of individual development,
the organisation of life becomes the death of the soul. Prussia has
shown how the psychology of the crowd can be skilfully manipulated for
the most sinister ends. It is a happy omen for our democracy that both
these complementary movements are combined in the new life of the
schools. To both appeals, the appeal of personal freedom, and the
appeal of the corporate life, the British child is peculiarly
responsive. Round these two health-centres the form of the new system
will take shape and grow.

And growth it must be, not building. The body is not built up on the
skeleton, the skeleton is secreted by the growing body. The hope of
education is in the living principle of hope and enthusiasm, which
stretches out towards perfection. One distrusts instinctively at the
present time anything schematic. There are men, able enough as
organisers, who will be ready to sit down and produce at two days'
notice a full cut-and-dried scheme of educational reconstruction. They
will take our present resources, and make the best of them, no doubt,
re-arranging and re-manipulating them, and making them go as far as
they can. They will shape the whole thing out in wood, and the result
will be wooden. It will be static and stratified, with no upward lift.
But that is not the way. Education is a thing of the spirit, it is
instinct with life, [Greek: thermon ti pragma] as Aristotle would
say, drawing upon resources that are not its own, "unseen yet crescive
in its faculty" and in its growth taking to itself such outward form
as it needs for the purpose of its inward life. Six years at least it
will take for the new spirit to work itself out into the definite
larger forms.

That does not mean that it will come without hard purposeful thinking
and much patient effort. Education does not "happen" any more than
"art happens,"--and just as with the arts of the middle ages, so the
well-being of education depends not on the chance appearance of a few
men of genius but on the right training and love of the ordinary
workman for his work. Education is a spiritual endeavour, and it will
come, as the things of the spirit come, through patience in
well-doing, through concentration of purpose on the highest, through
drawing continually on the inexhaustible resources of the spiritual
world. The supreme "maker" is the poet, the man of vision. For the
administrator, the task is different from what it has been. It is for
him to watch and help experiments, to prevent the abuse of freedom,
not to preserve uniformities but to select variations. But he is
handling a power which, as George Meredith says, "is a heaven-sent
steeplechaser, and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers."

To-morrow is the day of opportunity. To-day is the day of preparation.
Yesterday's ideals have become the practical politics of the present
hour. Our countrymen recognise now as they have never done before that
the problem of national reconstruction is in the main a problem of
national education: "the future welfare of the nation," to use Mr
Fisher's words, "depends upon its schools." Men make light now of the
extra millions which a few years ago seemed to bar the way of
progress. At the same time the discipline of the last three years has
hammered into us a new consciousness of national solidarity and social
obligation. As the whole energies of a united people are at this
moment concentrated on the duty of destruction which is laid upon us,
so after the war with no less urgency and no less oneness of heart the
whole energies of a united nation must be concentrated on the
upbuilding of life. That upbuilding is to be economic as well as
spiritual, but those who think out most deeply the need of the
economic situation, are most surely convinced that the problems of
industry and commerce are at the bottom human problems and cannot find
solution without a new sense of "co-operation and brotherliness[1]."

Such is the need and such the task. England is looking to her schools
as she never did before. The aim of her education must be both high
and wide, higher than lucre, wider than the nation. And the aim of our
education cannot be fulfilled until the education of other peoples is
infused with the same spirit. Education, like finance, must be planned
on international lines by international consensus with a view to world
peace. Only so can it fulfil the ultimate end which already looms on
the horizon,

Becoming when the time has birth
A lever to uplift the earth
And roll it on another course.

[Footnote 1: Mr Angus Watson in _Eclipse or Empire_, p. 88.]

II

THE TRAINING OF THE REASON

By W. R. INGE

Dean of St Paul's

The ideal object of education is that we should learn all that it
concerns us to know, in order that thereby we may become all that it
concerns us to be. In other words, the aim of education is the
knowledge not of facts but of values. Values are facts apprehended in
their relation to each other, and to ourselves. The wise man is he who
knows the relative values of things. In this knowledge, and in the use
made of it, is summed up the whole conduct of life. What are the
things which are best worth winning for their own sakes, and what
price must I pay to win them? And what are the things which, since I
cannot have everything, I must be content to let go? How can I best
choose among the various subjects of human interest, and the various
objects of human endeavour, so that my activities may help and not
hinder each other, and that my life may have a unity, or at least a
centre round which my subordinate activities may be grouped. These are
the chief questions which a man would ask, who desired to plan his
life on rational principles, and whom circumstances allowed to choose
his occupation. He would desire to know himself, and to know the
world, in order to give and receive the best value for his sojourn in
it.

We English for the most part accept this view of education, and we add
that the experience of life, or what we call knowledge of the world,
is the best school of practical wisdom. We do not however identify
practical wisdom with the life of reason but with that empirical
substitute for it which we call common sense. There is in all classes
a deep distrust of ideas, often amounting to what Plato called
_misologia_, "hatred of reason." An Englishman, as Bishop Creighton
said, not only has no ideas; he hates an idea when he meets one. We
discount the opinion of one who bases his judgment on first
principles. We think that we have observed that in high politics, for
example, the only irreparable mistakes are those which are made by
logical intellectualists. We would rather trust our fortunes to an
honest opportunist, who sees by a kind of intuition what is the next
step to be taken, and cares for no logic except the logic of facts.
Reason, as Aristotle says, "moves nothing"; it can analyse and
synthesise given data, but only after isolating them from the living
stream of time and change. It turns a concrete situation into lifeless
abstractions, and juggles with counters when it should be observing
realities. Our prejudices against logic as a principle of conduct have
been fortified by our national experience. We are not a quick-witted
race; and we have succeeded where others have failed by dint of a kind
of instinct for improvising the right course of action, a gift which
is mainly the result of certain elementary virtues which we practise
without thinking about them, justice, tolerance, and moderation. These
qualities have, we think and think truly, been often wanting in the
Latin nations, which pride themselves on lucidity of intellect and
logical consistency in obedience to general principles. Recent
philosophy has encouraged these advocates of common sense, who have
long been "pragmatists" without knowing it, to profess their faith
without shame. Intellect has been disparaged and instinct has been
exalted. Intuition is a safer guide than reason, we are told; for
intuition goes straight to the heart of a situation and has already
acted while reason is debating. Much of this new philosophy is a kind
of higher obscurantism; the man in the street applauds Bergson and
William James because he dislikes science and logic, and values will,
courage and sentiment. He used to be fond of repeating that Waterloo
was won on the playing fields of our public schools, until it was
painfully obvious that Colenso and Spion Kop were lost in the same
place. We have muddled through so often that we have come half to
believe in a providence which watches over unintelligent virtue. "Be
good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever," we have said to
Britannia. So we have acquiesced in being the worst educated people
west of the Slav frontier.

I do not wish to dwell on the disadvantages which we have thus
incurred in international competition--our inferiority to Germany in
chemistry, and to almost every continental nation in scientific
agriculture. This lesson we are learning, and are not likely to
forget. It is our spiritual loss which we need to realise more fully.
In the first place, the majority of Englishmen have no thought-out
purpose in life beyond the call of "duty," which is an empty ideal
until we know what our duty is. Confusion of means and ends is
especially common in this country, though it is certainly to be found
everywhere. The passion for irrational accumulation is one example of
the error, which causes the gravest social inconvenience. The largest
part of social injustice and suffering is caused by the unchecked
indulgence of the acquisitive instinct by those who have the
opportunity of indulging it, and who have formed a blind habit of
indulging it. No one, however selfish, who had formed any reasonable
estimate of the relative values of life, would devote his whole time
to the economical exploitation of his neighbours, in order to pile up
the instruments of a fuller life, which he will never use. To regard
business as a kind of game is, from the highest point of view, right,
and our nation gains greatly by applying the ethics of sport to all
our external activities; but we err in living for our games, whether
they happen to be commerce or football. A friend of mine expostulated
with a Yorkshire manufacturer who was spending his old age in
unnecessary toil for the benefit of a spendthrift heir. The old man
answered, "If it gives him half as much pleasure to spend my half
million as it has given me to make it, I don't grudge it him." That is
not the spirit of the real miser or Mammon-worshipper. It is the
spirit of a natural idealist who from want of education has no
rational standard of good. When such a man intervenes in educational
matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical
man, because he is blind to the higher values of life. He will wish to
make knowledge and wisdom instruments for the production of wealth, or
the improvement of the material condition of the poor. But knowledge
and wisdom refuse to be so treated. Like goodness and beauty, wisdom
is one of the absolute values, the divine ideas. As one of the
Cambridge Platonists said, we must not make our intellectual faculties
Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and
affections. Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not
find it. Another effect of our _misologia_ is the degradation of
reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the
worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly
and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes. That such
sentimentalism is often kind only to be cruel, and that it frequently
robs honest Peter to pay dishonest Paul, needs no demonstration.
Sentimentalism does not believe that prevention is better than cure,
and practical politicians know too well that a scientific treatment of
social maladies is out of the question in this country. Others become
fanatics, that is to say, worldlings who are too narrow and violent to
understand the world. The root of the evil is that a whole range of
the higher values is inaccessible to the majority, because they know
nothing of intellectual wealth. And yet the real wealth of a nation
consists in its imponderable possessions--in those things wherein one
man's gain is not another man's loss, and which are not proved
incapable of increase by any laws of thermo-dynamics. An inexhaustible
treasure is freely open to all who have passed through a good course
of mental training, a treasure which we can make our own according to
our capacities, and our share of which we would not barter for any
goods which the law of the land can give or take away. "The
intelligent man," says Plato, "will prize those studies which result
in his soul getting soberness, righteousness and wisdom, and will less
value the others." The studies which have this effect are those which
teach us to admire and understand the good, the true and the
beautiful. They are, may we not say, humanism and science, pursued in
a spirit of "admiration, hope and love." The trained reason is
disinterested and fearless. It is not afraid of public opinion,
because it "counts it a small thing that it should be judged by man's
judgment"; its interests are so much wider than the incidents of a
private career that base self-centred indulgence and selfish ambition
are impossible to it. It is saved from pettiness, from ignorance, and
from bigotry. It will not fall a victim to those undisciplined and
disproportioned enthusiasms which we call fads, and which are a
peculiar feature of English and North American civilisation. Such
reforms as are carried out in this country are usually effected not by
the reason of the many, but by the fanaticism of the few. A just
balance may on the whole be preserved, but there is not much balance
in the judgments of individuals.

Matthew Arnold, whose exhortations to his countrymen now seem almost
prophetic, drew a strong contrast between the intellectual frivolity,
or rather insensibility, of his countrymen and the earnestness of the
Germans. He saw that England was saved a hundred years ago by the high
spirit and proud resolution of a real aristocracy, which nevertheless
was, like all aristocracies, "destitute of ideas." Our great families,
he shows, could no longer save us, even if they had retained their
influence, because power is now conferred by disciplined knowledge and
applied science. It is the same warning which George Meredith
reiterated with increasing earnestness in his late poems. What England
needs, he says, is "brain."

Warn her, Bard, that Power is pressing
Hotly for his dues this hour,
Tell her that no drunken blessing
Stops the onward march of Power,
Has she ears to take forewarnings,
She will cleanse her of her stains,
Feed and speed for braver mornings
Valorously the growth of brains.
Power, the hard man knit for action
Reads each nation on the brow;
Cripple, fool, and petrifaction
Fall to him--are falling now.

And again:

She impious to the Lord of hosts
The valour of her off-spring boasts,
Mindless that now on land and main
His heeded prayer is active brain.

These faithful prophets were not heeded, and we have had to learn our
lesson in the school of experience. She is a good teacher but her fees
are very high.

The author of _Friendship's Garland_ ended with a despairing appeal to
the democracy, when his jeremiads evoked no response from the upper
class, whom he called barbarians, or from the middle class, whom he
regarded as incurably vulgar. The middle classes are apt to receive
hard measure; they have few friends and many critics. We must go back
to Euripides to find the bold statement that they are the best part of
the community and "the salvation of the State"; but it is, on the
whole, true. And our middle class is only superficially vulgar.
Vulgarity, as Mr Robert Bridges has lately said, "is blindness to
values; it is spiritual death." The middle class in Matthew Arnold's
time was no doubt deplorably blind to artistic values; its productions
survive to convict it of what he called Philistinism; but it is no
longer devoid of taste or indifferent to beauty. And it has never been
a contemptible artist in life. Mr Bridges describes the progress of
vulgarity as an inverted Platonic progress. We descend, he says, from
ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles,
till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity.
This identification of insensibility to beauty with moral baseness was
something of a paradox even in Greece, and does not fit the English
character at all. Our towns are ugly enough; our public buildings
rouse no enthusiasm; and many of our monuments and stained glass
windows seem to shout for a friendly Zeppelin to obliterate them. But
we British have not descended to ugly conduct. Pericles and Plato
would have found the bearing of this people in its supreme trial more
"beautiful" than the Parthenon itself. The nation has shaken off its
vulgarity even more easily and completely than its slackness and
self-indulgence. We have borne ourselves with a courage, restraint,
and dignity which, a Greek would say, could have only been expected of
philosophers. And we certainly are not a nation of philosophers. We
must not then be too hasty in calling all contempt for intellect
vulgar. We have sinned by undervaluing the life of reason; but we are
not really a vulgar people. Our secular faith, the real religion of
the average Englishman, has its centre in the idea of a gentleman,
which has of course no essential connection with heraldry or property
in land. The upper classes, who live by it, are not vulgar, in spite
of the absence of ideas with which Matthew Arnold twits them; the
middle classes who also respect this ideal, are further protected by
sound moral traditions; and the lower classes have a cheery sense of
humour which is a great antiseptic against vulgarity. But though the
Poet Laureate has not, in my opinion, hit the mark in calling
vulgarity our national sin, he has done well in calling attention to
the danger which may beset educational reform from what we may call
democratism, the tendency to level down all superiorities in the name
of equality and good fellowship. It is the opposite fault to the
aristocraticism which beyond all else led to the decline of Greek
culture--the assumption that the lower classes must remain excluded
from intellectual and even from moral excellence. With us there is a
tendency to condemn ideals of self-culture which can be called
"aristocratic." But we need specialists in this as in every other
field, and the populace must learn that there is such a thing as real
superiority, which has the right and duty to claim a scope for its
full exercise.

The fashionable disparagement of reason, and exaltation of will,
feeling or instinct would be more dangerous in a less scientific age.
The Italian metaphysician Aliotta has lately brought together in one
survey the numerous leaders in the great "reaction against science,"
and they are a formidable band. Pragmatists, voluntarists, activists,
subjective idealists, emotional mystics, and religious conservatives,
have all joined in assaulting the fortress of science which half a
century ago seemed impregnable. But the besieged garrison continues to
use its own methods and to trust in its own hypotheses; and the
results justify the confidence with which the assaults of the
philosophers are ignored. We are told that the scientific method is
ultimately appropriate only to the abstractions of mathematics. But
nature herself seems to have a taste for mathematical methods. A sane
idealism believes that the eternal verities are adumbrated, not
travestied, in the phenomenal world, and does not forget how much of
what we call observation of nature is demonstrably the work of mind.
The world as known to science is itself a spiritual world from which
certain valuations are, for special purposes, excluded. To deny the
authority of the discursive reason, which has its proper province in
this sphere, is to destroy the possibility of all knowledge. Nor can
we, without loss and danger, or instinct or intuition above reason.
Instinct is a faculty which belongs to unprogressive species. It is
necessarily unadaptable and unable to deal with any new situation.
Consecrated custom may keep Chinese civilisation safe in a state of
torpid immobility for five thousand years; but fifty years of Europe
will achieve more, and will at last present Cathay with the
alternative of moving on or moving off. Instinct might lead us on if
progress were an automatic law of nature, but this belief, though
widely held, is sheer superstition.

We have to convert the public mind in this country to faith in trained
and disciplined reason. We have to convince our fellow-citizens not
only that the duty of self-preservation requires us to be mentally as
well equipped as the French, Germans and Americans, but that a trained
intelligence is in itself "more precious than rubies." Blake said that
"a fool shall never get to Heaven, be he never so holy." It is at any
rate true that ignorance misses the best things in this life If
Englishmen would only believe this, the whole spirit of our education
would be changed, which is much more important than to change the
subjects taught. It does not matter very much what is taught; the
important question to ask is what is learnt. This is why the
controversy about religious education was mainly fatuous. The
"religious lesson" can hardly ever make a child religious; religion,
in point of fact, is seldom taught at all; it is caught, by contact
with someone who has it. Other subjects can be taught and can be
learnt; but the teaching will be stiff collar-work, and the learning
evanescent, if the pupil is not interested in the subject. And how
little encouragement the average boy gets at home to train his reason
and form intellectual tastes! He may probably be exhorted to "do well
in his examination," which means that he is to swallow carefully
prepared gobbets of crude information, to be presently disgorged in
the same state. The examination system flourishes best where there is
no genuine desire for mental cultivation. If there were any widespread
enthusiasm for knowledge as an integral part of life the revolt
against this mechanical and commercialised system of testing results
would be universal. As things are, a clever boy trains for an
examination as he trains for a race; and goes out of training as fast
as possible when it is over. Meanwhile the romance of his life is
centred in those more generous and less individual competitions in the
green fields, which our schools and universities have developed to
such perfection. In classes which have small opportunities for
physical exercises, vicarious athletics, with not a little betting,
are a disastrous substitute. But the soul is dyed the colour of its
leisure thoughts. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." This is
why no change in the curriculum can do much for education, as long as
the pupils imbibe no respect for intellectual values at home, and find
none among their school-fellows. And yet the capacity for real
intellectual interest is only latent in most boys. It can be kindled
in a whole class by a master who really loves and believes in his
subject. Some of the best public school teachers in the last century
were hot-tempered men whose disciplinary performances were ludicrous.
But they were enthusiastic humanists, and keen scholars passed year by
year out of their class-rooms.

The importance of a good curriculum is often exaggerated. But a bad
selection of subjects, and a bad method of teaching them, may condemn
even the best teacher to ineffectiveness. Nothing, for example, can
well be more unintelligent than the manner of teaching the classics in
our public schools. The portions of Greek and Latin authors construed
during a lesson are so short that the boys can get no idea of the book
as a whole; long before they finish it they are moved up into another
form. And over all the teaching hangs the menace of the impending
examination, the riddling Sphinx which, as Seeley said in a telling
quotation from Sophocles, forces us to attend to what is at our feet,
neglecting all else--all the imponderables in which the true value of
education consists. The tyranny of examinations has an important
influence upon the choice of subjects as well as upon the manner of
teaching them; for some subjects, which are remarkably stimulating to
the mind of the pupil, are neglected, because they are not well
adapted for examinations. Among these, unfortunately, are our own
literature and language.

It is therefore necessary, even in a short essay which professes to
deal only with generalities, to make some suggestions as to the main
subjects which our education should include. As has been indicated
already, I would divide them into main classes--science and humanism.
Every boy should be instructed in both branches up to a certain point.
We must firmly resist those who wish to make education purely
scientific, those who, in Bacon's words, "call upon men to sell their
books and build furnaces, quitting and forsaking Minerva and the Muses
and relying upon Vulcan." We want no young specialists of twelve years
old; and a youth without a tincture of humanism can never become

A man foursquare, withouten flaw ywrought.

Of the teaching of science I am not competent to speak. But as an
instrument of mind-training, and even of liberal education, it seems
to me to have a far higher value than is usually conceded to it by
humanists. To direct the imagination to the infinitely great and the
infinitely small, to vistas of time in which a thousand years are as
one day; to the tremendous forces imprisoned in minute particles of
matter; to the amazing complexity of the mechanism by which the organs
of the human body perform their work; to analyse the light which has
travelled for centuries from some distant star; to retrace the history
of the earth and the evolution of its inhabitants--such studies cannot
fail to elevate the mind, and only prejudice will disparage them. They
promote also a fine respect for truth and fact, for order and outline,
as the Greeks said, with a wholesome dislike of sophistry and
rhetoric. The air which blows about scientific studies is like the air
of a mountain top--thin, but pure and bracing. And as a subject of
education science has a further advantage which can hardly be
overestimated. It is in science that most of the new discoveries are
being made. "The rapture of the forward view" belongs to science more
than to any other study. We may take it as a well-established
principle in education that the most advanced teachers should be
researchers and discoverers as well as lecturers, and that the rank
and file should be learners as well as instructors. There is no
subject in which this ideal is so nearly attainable as in science.

And yet science, even for its own sake, must not claim to occupy the
whole of education. The mere _Naturforscher_ is apt to be a poor
philosopher himself, and his pupils may turn out very poor
philosophers indeed. The laws of psychical and spiritual life are not
the same as the laws of chemistry or biology; and the besetting sin of
the scientist is to try to explain everything in terms of its origin
instead of in terms of its full development: "by their roots," he
says, "and not by their fruits, ye shall know them." This is a
contradiction of Aristotle [Greek: (_hê physis telos hestin_)],
and of a greater than Aristotle. The training of the reason must
include the study of the human mind, "the throne of the Deity," in its
most characteristic products. Besides science, we must have humanism,
as the other main branch of our curriculum.

The advocates of the old classical education have been gallantly
fighting a losing battle for over half a century; they are now
preparing to accept inevitable defeat. But their cause is not lost, if
they will face the situation fairly. It is only lost if they persist
in identifying classical education with linguistic proficiency. The
study of foreign languages is a fairly good mental discipline for the
majority; for the minority it may be either more or less than a fair
discipline. But only a small fraction of mankind is capable of
enthusiasm for language, for its own sake. The art of expressing ideas
in appropriate and beautiful forms is one of the noblest of human
achievements, and the two classical languages contain many of the
finest examples of good writing that humanity has produced. But the
average boy is incapable of appreciating these values, and the waste
of time which might have been profitably spent is, under our present
system, most deplorable. It may also be maintained that the
conscientious editor and the conscientious tutor have between them
ruined the classics as a mental discipline. Fifty years ago, English
commentatorship was so poor that the pupil had to use his wits in
reading the classics; now if one goes into an undergraduate's room,
one finds him reading the text with the help of a translation, two
editions with notes, and a lecture note-book. No faculty is being used
except the memory, which Bishop Creighton calls "the most worthless of
our mental powers." The practice of prose and verse composition, often
ignorantly decried, has far more educational value; but it belongs to
the linguistic art which, if we are right, is not to be demanded of
all students. Are we then to restrict the study of the classics to
those who have a pretty taste for style? If so, the cause of classical
education is indeed lost. But I can see no reason why some of the
great Greek and Latin authors should not be read, _in translations_,
as part of the normal training in history, philosophy and literature.
I am well aware of the loss which a great author necessarily suffers
by translation; but I have no hesitation in saying that the average
boy would learn far more of Greek literature, and would imbibe far
more of the Greek spirit, by reading the whole of Herodotus,
Thucydides, the _Republic_ of Plato, and some of the plays in good
translations, than he now acquires by going through the classical mill
at a public school. The classics, like almost all other literature,
must be read in masses to be appreciated. Boys think them dull mainly
because of the absurd way in which they are made to study them.

I shall not make any ambitious attempt to sketch out a scheme of
literary studies. My subject is the training of the reason. But two
principles seem to me to be of primary importance. The first is that
we should study the psychology of the developing reason at different
ages, and adapt our method of teaching accordingly. The memory is at
its best from the age of ten to fifteen, or thereabouts. Facts and
dates, and even long pieces of poetry, which have been committed to
memory in early boyhood, remain with us as a possession for life. We
would most of us give a great deal in middle age to recover that
astonishingly retentive memory which we possessed as little boys. On
the other hand, ratiocination at that age is difficult and irksome. A
young boy would rather learn twenty rules than apply one principle.
Accordingly the first years of boyhood are the time for learning by
heart. Quantities of good poetry, and useful facts of all kinds should
be entrusted to the boy's memory to keep: will assimilate them
readily, and without any mental overstrain. But eight or ten years
later, "cramming" is injurious both to the health and to the
intellect. Years have brought, if not the philosophic mind, yet at any
rate a mind which can think and argue. The memory is weaker and the
process of loading it with facts is more unpleasant. At this stage the
whole system of teaching should be different. One great evil of
examinations is that they prolong the stage of mere memorising to an
age at which it is not only useless but hurtful. Another valuable
guide is furnished by observing what authors the intelligent boy likes
and dislikes. His taste ought certainly to be consulted, if our main
object is to interest him in the things of the mind. The average
intelligent boy likes Homer and does not like Virgil; he is interested
by Tacitus and bored by Cicero; he loves Shakespeare and revels in
Macaulay, who has a special affinity for the eternal schoolboy.

My other principle is that since we are training young Englishmen,
whom we hope to turn into true and loyal citizens, we shall presumably
find them most responsive to the language, literature, and history of
their own country. This would be a commonplace, not worth uttering, in
any other country; in England it is, unfortunately, far from being
generally accepted Nothing sets in a stronger light the inertia and
thoughtlessness, not to say stupidity, of the British character in all
matters outside the domain of material and moral interests, than our
neglect of the magnificent spiritual heritage which we possess in our
own history and literature. Wordsworth, in one of those noble sonnets
which are now, we are glad to hear, being read by thousands in the
trenches and by myriads at home, proclaims his faith in the victory of
his country over Napoleon because he thinks of her glorious past.

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
That Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's best blood, have titles manifold.

It is a high boast, but it is true. But what have we done to fire the
imagination of our boys and girls with the vision of our great and
ancient nation, now struggling for its existence? What have we taught
them of Shakespeare and Milton, of Elizabeth and Cromwell, of Nelson
and Wellington? Have we ever tried to make them understand that they
are called to be the temporary custodians of very glorious traditions,
and the trustees of a spiritual wealth compared with which the gold
mines of the Rand are but dross? Do we even teach them, in any
rational manner, the fine old language which has been slowly perfected
for centuries, and which is now being used up and debased by the
rubbishy newspapers which form almost the sole reading of the
majority? We have marvelled at the slowness with which the masses
realised that the country was in danger, and at the stubbornness with
which some of the working class clung to their sectional interests and
ambitions when the very life of England was at stake. In France the
whole people saw at once what was upon them; the single word _patrie_
was enough to unite them in a common enthusiasm and stern
determination. With us it was hardly so; many good judges think that
but for the "Lusitania" outrage and the Zeppelins, part of the
population would have been half-hearted about the war, and we should
have failed to give adequate support to our allies. The cause is not
selfishness but ignorance and want of imagination; and what have we
done to tap the sources of an intelligent patriotism? We are being
saved not by the reasoned conviction of the populace, but by its
native pugnacity and bull-dog courage. This is not the place to go
into details about English studies; but can anyone doubt that they
could be made the basis of a far better education than we now give in
our schools? We have especially to remember that there is a real
danger of the modern Englishman being cut off from the living past.
Scientific studies include the earlier phases of the earth, but not
the past of the human race and the British people. Christianity has
been a valuable educator in this way, especially when it includes an
intelligent knowledge the Bible. But the secular education of the
masses is now so much severed from the stream of tradition and
sentiment which unites us with the older civilisations, that the very
language of the Churches is becoming unintelligible to them, and the
influence of organised religion touches only a dwindling minority.
And yet the past lives in us all; lives inevitably in its dangers,
which the accumulated experience of civilisation, valued so slightly
by us on its spiritual side, can alone help us to surmount. A nation
like an individual, must "wish his days to be bound each to each by
natural piety." It too must strive to keep its memory green, to
remember the days of old and the years that are past. The Jews have
always had, in their sacred books, a magnificent embodiment of the
spirit of their race; and who can say how much of their incomparable
tenacity and ineradicable hopefulness has been due to the education
thus imparted to every Jewish child? We need a Bible of the English
race, which shall be hardly less sacred to each succeeding generation
of young Britons than the Old Testament is to the Jews. England ought
to be, and may be, the spiritual home of one quarter of the human
race, for ages after our task as a world-power shall have been brought
to a successful issue, and after we in this little island have
accepted the position of mother to nations greater than ourselves. But
England's future is precious only to those to whom her past is dear.

I am not suggesting that the history and literatures of other
countries should be neglected, or that foreign languages should form
no part of education. But the main object is to turn out good
Englishmen, who may continue worthily and even develop further a
glorious national tradition. To do this, we must appeal constantly to
the imagination, which Wordsworth has boldly called "reason in her
most exalted mood." We may thus bring a little poetry and romance into
the monotonous lives of our hand-workers. It may well be that their
discontent has more to do with the starving of their spiritual nature
than we suppose. For the intellectual life, like divine philosophy, is
not dull and crabbed, as fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's
lute.

Can we end with a definition of the happiness and well-being, which is
the goal of education, as of all else that we try to do? Probably we
cannot do better than accept the famous definition of Aristotle, which
however we must be careful to translate rightly. "Happiness, or
well-being, is an activity of the soul directed towards excellence, in
an unhampered life." Happiness consists in doing rather than being;
the activity must be that of the soul--the whole man acting as a
person; it must be directed towards excellence--not exclusively moral
virtue, but the best work that we can do, of whatever kind; and it
must be unhampered--we must be given the opportunity of doing the best
that is in us to do. To awaken the soul; to hold up before it the
images of whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, pure, and of good
report; and to remove the obstacles which stunt and cripple the mind;
this is the work which we have called the Training of the Reason.

III

THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION

BY A. C. BENSON

Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

It might be hastily assumed by a reader bent on critical
consideration, that the subject of my essay had a certain levity or
fancifulness about it. Works of imagination, as by a curious
juxtaposition they are called, are apt to lie under an indefinable
suspicion, as including unbusinesslike and romantic fictions, of which
the clear-cut and well-balanced mind must beware, except for the sake,
perhaps, of the frankest and least serious kind of recreation.
Considering the part which the best and noblest works of imagination
must always play in a literary education, it has often surprised me to
reflect how little scope ordinary literary exercises give for the use
of that particular faculty. The old themes and verses aimed at
producing decorous centos culled from the works of classical
rhetoricians and poets. No boy, at least in my day, was ever
encouraged to take a line of his own, and to strike out freely across
country in pursuit of imagined adventures. Even English teaching in
its earlier stages seldom aimed at more than transcriptions of actual
experience, a day spent in the country, or a walk beside the sea.
Only quite recently have boys and girls been encouraged to write poems
and stories out of their own imaginations; and even now there are
plenty of educational critics who would consider such exercises as
dilettante things lacking in practical solidity.

But I desire in this essay to go further back into the roots of the
subject, and my first position is plainly this; that imagination, pure
and simple, is a common enough faculty; not perhaps the creative
imagination which can array scenes of life, construct romantic
experiences, and embody imaginary characters in dramatic situations,
but the much simpler sort of imagination which takes pleasure in
recalling past memories, and in forecasting and anticipating
interesting events. The boy who, weary of the school-term, considers
what he will do on the first day of the holidays, or who anxiously
forebodes paternal displeasure, is exercising his imagination; and the
truth is that the faculty of imagination plays an immense part in all
human happiness and unhappiness, considering that, whenever we take
refuge from the present in memories or in anticipations, we are using
it. The first point then that I shall consider is whether this
restless and influential faculty ought not in any case to be
_trained_, so that it may not either be atrophied or become
over-dominant; and the second point will be the further consideration
as to whether the faculty of creative imagination is a thing which
should be deliberately developed.

In the first place then, it seems to me simply extraordinary that so
little heed is paid in education to the using and controlling of what
is one of the most potent instinctive forces of the mind. We take
careful thought how to strengthen and fortify the body, we go on to
spending many hours upon putting memory through its paces, and in
developing the reason and the intelligence; we pass on from that to
exercising and purifying the character and the will; we try to make
vice detestable and virtue desirable. But meanwhile, what is the
little mind doing? It submits to the drudgery imposed upon it, it
accommodates itself more or less to the conditions of its life; it
learns a certain conduct and demeanour for use in public. Yet all the
time the thought of the boy is running backwards and forwards in
secrecy, considering the memories of its experience, pleasant or
unpleasant, and comforting itself in tedious hours by framing little
plans for the future. I remember my old schoolmastering days, and the
hours I spent with a class of boys sitting in front of me; how
constantly one saw boys in the midst of their work, with pen suspended
and page unturned, look up with that expression denoting that some
vision had passed before the inward eye--which, as Wordsworth justly
observes, constitutes "the bliss of solitude"--obliterating for a
moment the surrounding scene. I do not mean that the thought was a
distant or an exalted one--probably it was some entirely trivial
reminiscence, or the anticipation of some coming amusement. But I do
not think I exaggerate when I say that probably the greater part of a
human being's unoccupied hours, and probably a considerable part of
the hours supposed to be occupied, are spent in some similar exercise
of the imagination. What a confirmation of this is to be found in the
phenomena of sleep and dreams! Then the instinct is steadily at work,
neither remembering nor anticipating, but weaving together the results
of experience into a self-taught tale.

And then if one considers later life, it is no exaggeration to say
that the greater part of human happiness and unhappiness consists in
the dwelling upon what has been, what may be, what might be, and,
alas, in our worst moments, upon what might have been "My unhappiest
experiences," said Lord Beaconsfield, "have been those which never
happened"; and again the same acute critic of life said that half the
clever people he knew were under the impression that they were hated
and envied, the other half that they were admired and loved;--and that
neither were right!

The imaginative faculty then is a species of self-representation, the
power of considering our own life and position as from the outside;
from it arise both the cheerful hopes and schemes of the sound mind,
and the shadowy anxieties and fears of the mind which lacks
robustness. It certainly does seem singular that this deep and
persistent element in human life is left so untrained and unregarded,
to range at will, to feed upon itself. All that the teacher does is to
insist as far as possible on a certain concentration of the mind on
business at particular times, and if he has ethical purposes at
heart, he may sometimes speak to a boy on the advisability of not
allowing his mind to dwell upon base or sensual thoughts; but how
little attempt is ever made to train the mind in deliberate and
continuous self-control!

The latest school of pathologists, in the treatment of obsessed or
insane persons, pay very close attention to the subjects of their
dreams, and attribute much nerve-misery to the atrophy, or suppression
by circumstances, of instincts which betray themselves in dreams. I am
inclined to think that the educators of the future must somehow
contrive to do more--indeed they cannot well do less than is actually
done--in teaching the control of that secret undercurrent of thought
in which happiness and unhappiness really reside. Those who have lived
much with boys will know what havoc suspense or disappointment or
anxiety or sensuality or unpopularity can make in an immature
character. It seems to me that we ought not to leave all this without
guidance or direction, but to make a frontal attack upon it. I do not
mean that it is necessary to probe too deeply into the imagination,
but I believe that the subject should be frankly spoken about, and
suggestions made. The point is to get the will to work, and to induce
the mind, in the first place, to realise and practise its power of
self-command; and in the second place, to show that it is possible to
evict an unwholesome thought by the deliberate welcoming and
entertaining of a wholesome one. The best of all cures is to provide
every boy with some occupation which he indubitably loves. There are
a good many boys whose work is not interesting to them, and a certain
number to whom the prescribed games are a matter of routine rather
than of active pleasure. Indeed it may be said that hardly any boys
enjoy either work or games in which they see no possibility of any
personal distinction. It is therefore of great importance that every
boy whose chances of successful performance are small should be
encouraged to have a definite hobby; for an occupation which the mind
can remember with pleasure and anticipate with delight supplies the
food for the restless imagination, which may otherwise become dreary
from inaction, or tainted by thoughts of baser pleasure. A
schoolmaster only salves his conscience by supplying a strict
time-table and regular games. A house master ought to be most careful
in the case of boys whose work is languid and proficiency in games
small, to find out what the boy really likes and enjoys, and to
encourage it by every means in his power. That is the best corrective,
to administer wholesome food for the mind to digest. But I believe
that good teachers ought to go much further, and speak quite plainly
to boys, from time to time, on the necessity of practising control of
thought. My own experience is that boys were always interested in any
talk, call it ethical or religious, which based itself directly upon
their own actual experience. I can conceive that a teacher who told a
class to sit still for three minutes and think about anything they
pleased, and added that he would then have something to tell them,
might have an admirable object-lesson in getting them to consider how
swift and far-ranging their fancies had been; or again he might
practise them in concentration of thought by asking them to think for
five minutes on a perfectly definite thing--to imagine themselves in a
wood, or by the sea, or in a chemist's shop, let us say, and then
getting them to put down on paper a list of definite objects which
they had imagined. The process could be infinitely extended; but if it
were done with some regularity, it would certainly b possible to train
boys to concentrate themselves in reflection and recollected
observation. Or again a quality might be propounded, such as
generosity or spitefulness, and the boys required to construct an
imaginary anecdote of the simplest kind to illustrate it. This would
have the effect of training the mind at all events to focus itself,
and this is just what drudgery pure and simple will not do. The aim is
not to train mere memory or logical accuracy, but to strengthen that
great faculty which we loosely call imagination, which is the power of
evoking mental images, and of migrating from the present into the past
or the future.

I believe it to be a very notable lack in our theory of education that
so little attempt is made to bring the will to bear upon what may be
called the subconscious mind. It is that strange undercurrent of
thought which is so imprudently neglected which throws up on its
banks, without any apparent purpose or aim, the ideas and images which
lurk within it. I do not say that such a training would immediately
give self-control, but most peoples' worst sufferings are caused by
what is called "having something on their mind"; and yet, so far as I
know, in the process of education, no attempt whatever is made, except
quite incidentally, to dispossess the strong man armed by the stronger
victor, or to help immature minds to hold an unpleasant or a pleasant
thought at arm's length, or to train them in the power of resolutely
substituting a current of more wholesome images. The subconscious mind
is too often treated as a thing beyond control, and yet the
pathological power of suggestion, by which a thought is implanted like
a seed in the mind, which presently appears to be rooted and
flowering, ought to show us that we have within our reach an
extraordinarily potent psychological implement.

So far then on the more negative side. I have indicated my strong
belief that much may be done to train the mind in self-control. Indeed
our whole education is built upon the faith that we can, perhaps not
implant new faculties, but develop dormant ones; and I am persuaded
that when future generations come to survey our methods and processes
of education, they will regard with deep bewilderment the amazing fact
that we applied so careful a training to other faculties, and yet left
so helplessly alone the training of the imaginative faculty, upon
which, as I have said, our happiness and unhappiness mainly depend. We
must, all of us be aware of the fact that there have been times in our
lives when all was prosperous, and when we were yet overshadowed with
dreary thoughts; or again times when in discomfort, or under the
shadow of failure, or at critical or tragic moments, we have had an
unreasonable alertness and cheerfulness. All that is due to the
subconscious mind, and we ought at least to try experiments in making
it obey us better.

I now pass on to consider a further possibility, and that is of
training and developing a higher sort of creative imagination. It is
all in reality part of the same subject, because it seems to be
certain that most human beings suffer by the suppression or the
dormancy of existing faculties. It is here, I believe, that much of
our intellectual education fails, from the tendency to direct so much
attention to purely logical and reasoning faculties, and to the
resolute subtraction from education of pure and simple enjoyment. I
used to try many experiments as a schoolmaster, and I remember at one
time bribing a slow and unintelligent class into some sort of
concentration by promising that I would tell a story for a few minutes
at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily
mastered. It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was
simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and
brisk tangible incidents. But the silence, the luxurious abandonment
of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing
light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which
I never had in teaching Latin Prose or the Greek conditional sentence.
I always told stories for an hour on Sunday evenings to the boys in my
house, and though few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are
remembered by old pupils, I never met one who did pot recollect the
stories.

Now we have here, I believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which
is consistently neglected and even despised. It is regarded as a mere
luxury; but we do not make the mistake of substituting gymnastics for
games, and removing the pleasure of personal performance. Why can we
not also do something to encourage what old Hawtrey used so
beautifully to call "the sweet pride of authorship"? The worst of it
all is that we look so much to tangible results. I do not mean that we
must try to develop Shakespeares, Shelleys, Thackerays; such airy
creatures have a way of catering for themselves! I do riot at all want
to turn out a generation of third-rate writing amateurs. But many boys
have a distinct pleasure not only in listening to imaginations, and
riding like the beetle on the engine, but in evoking and realising
some little vision and creation of their own brains. Of course there
are boys to whom mental activity is all of the nature of a cross laid
upon them for some purpose, wise or unwise. But there are also a good
many shy boys, who will not venture to make themselves conspicuous by
literary and imaginative feats, and who yet if it were a matter of
course and wont, would throw themselves with intense pleasure into
literary creation. The work done, for instance, at Shrewsbury, at the
Perse School, at Carlisle Grammar School, in this direction--I daresay
it is done elsewhere, but I have seen the work of these three schools
with my own eyes--show what quite average boys are capable of in both
English poetry and English prose.

One of the best points of such a system of literary composition is
that even if slower boys cannot effect much, it gives a most wholesome
opening to the creative faculties of boys, whose minds, if stifled and
compressed, are most likely to work in unwholesome and tormenting
directions.

My suggestion then becomes part of a larger plea, the plea for more
direct cultivation of enjoyment in education. Some of our worst
mistakes in education arise from our not basing it upon the actual
needs and faculties of human nature, but upon the supposed
constitution of a child constructed by the starved imagination of
pedants and moralists and practical men.

One of the first requisites in cultivating intellectual and artistic
pleasure is to build up taste out of the actual perceptions of the
child. That is a factor which has been most stubbornly and
unintelligently disregarded in education. Developments in character
are of the nature of living things; they cannot be superimposed they
must be rooted in the temperament and they must draw nurture and
sustenance out of the spirit, as the seed imbibes its substance from
the unseen soil and the hidden waters. But what has been constantly
done is to introduce the broadest effects and the simplest romance,
directly and suddenly to the biggest masterpieces. The absence of all
gradation and reconciliation has been characteristic of our literary
education. Of course there is an initial difficulty in the case of the
classics, that there is very little in either Greek or Latin which
really appeals to an immature taste at all; and such books as might
appeal to inquisitive and inexperienced minds, such as Homer or the
_Anabasis_ of Xenophon, are made unattractive by the method of giving
such short snippets, and insisting on what used to be called thorough
parsing. Even _Alice in Wonderland_, let me say, could only prove a
drearily bewildering book, if read at the rate of twenty lines a
lesson, and if the principal tenses of all the verbs had to be
repeated correctly. It is absolutely essential, if any love of
literature is to be superinduced, that something should be read fast
enough to give some sense of continuity and range and horizon. The
practice of dictionary-turning is sufficient by itself to destroy
intellectual pleasure, but it used to be defended as a base sort of
bribe to strengthen memory: it was argued that boys would try to
remember words to save themselves the trouble of looking them up. But
this has no origin in fact. Boys used not to be encouraged to guess at
words, but to be punished for shirking work if they had not looked
them out. It is to be hoped that English will be in the future
increasingly taught in schools; but even so there is the danger of
connecting it too much with erudition. The old _Clarendon Press
Shakespeare_ was an almost perfect example of how not to edit
Shakespeare for boys; the introductions were learned and scholarly,
the notes were crammed with philology, derivation, illustration. As a
matter of fact there is a good deal that is interesting, even to small
minds, in the connection and derivation of words, if briskly
communicated. Most boys are responsive to the pleasure of finding a
familiar word concealed under a variation of shape; but this should be
conveyed orally. What is really requisite is that boys should be
taught how to read a book intelligently. In dealing with classical
books, vocabulary must be always a difficulty, and I myself very much
doubt the advisability in the case of average boys of attempting to
teach more than one foreign language at a time, especially when in
dealing, say, with three kindred languages, such as Latin, French, and
English, the same word, such as _spiritus_, _esprit_, and _spirit_
bear very different significations. The great need is that there
should be some work going on in which the boys shoul