The Limitations of the School.
by G. F. Bridge, Esq.
Volume 12, 1901, pgs. 101-106
". . . appreciation of
literature is an intellectual grace seldom acquired in schools. The
active, bustling, noisy life of a school is not a favourable soil for
the growth of such a delicate plant. Of this truth I become more and
more convinced every year that I teach--that the boy who comes to
school with no love of reading, and no appreciation of what books and
literature can tell him, will profit little by all the literary
teaching he receives in the school, and will leave the school--whether
he leaves in the fourth or the sixth form matters little-will leave the
school dead to all the pleasures and elevating influences of literature.
What I have said of the appreciation of literature applies with even
greater force to the love of the fine arts. Public school life, the
tendency of which is to keep both boys and masters in a state of
intense, and indeed somewhat feverish activity, is unfavourable to the
growth of the quiet, thoughtful spirit; it is not likely to foster any
appreciation or love of art."
The late Bishop of London in addressing an educational meeting some time ago, spoke of boarding schools as being "half barracks, half workhouse, places to which parents send their sons in order to get rid of them." In considering this utterance, we ought, no doubt, to make allowance for that spirit of mild jocularity which Bishops so often see fit to import into their episcopal utterances; but, nevertheless, it points to a real danger. There is, I believe, a legend of a machine at Chicago, into one end of which the workman drops pigs and from the other end of which emerge sausages. So possibly some parents, and perchance some schoolmasters, think that you have only to drop a child into the bottom of a school, and in due tome a fully educated man, perfectly developed in all his faculties, bodily and mental, will emerge from the top.
Coleridge, in his autobiography, tells us that when he went to Christ's Hospital, the master said to him:--"Boy, the school is your father! the school is your mother! the school is your brother, your sister, your first cousin, your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying."
Yet it is quite certain that the school cannot in this way perform its own functions and the functions of the home too. The school is the realm of law and discipline, the home of affection and freedom, and the boy--and, for that matter, every human being--needs the latter no less than the former. School life cultivates mainly the masculine virtues of obedience to law, courage, industry, public spirit, self-reliance; the home the more feminine virtues of gentleness, pity for the weak, purity and tender feeling. The man needs the feminine virtues as much as the masculine, the woman needs the masculine as much as the feminine. Boys brought up altogether in schools would be barbarians, boys brought up altogether in home would be weaklings. The school and the home are the corrective the one of the other. It is good, no doubt, to remember Wellington's saying (if he did say it) that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton; but it is good also to remember that while every citizen ought to be able to fight if the needs of his country require it, yet that fighting forms, happily, a very small part of human life.
However it is not so much of moral as of intellectual education I propose to speak to-day. But before I plunge into that subject I should just like to call your attention to what John Stuart Mill said of the parts played by the home and the school in the moral training of the child. In his Inaugural Address at St. Andrew's University, this great thinker said, "We must keep in view the inevitable limitations of what schools and universities can do. It is beyond their power to educate morally and religiously. Moral and religious education consist in training the feelings and the daily habits, and these are in the main beyond the sphere and inaccessible to the control of public education. It is the home, the family, which gives us the moral and religious education we really receive, and this is completed and modified, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, by society, and the opinions and feelings by which we are surrounded."
If there is one thing more than another which many years' teaching impresses on the teacher's mind, it is how little in many respects class-room work does for a boy. How many boys who enter a school, ignorant and stupid, go out of it only a little less ignorant and stupid than they came in. In how many cases the school seems powerless to develop mental ability, or love of knowledge, or taste for any intellectual pursuits.
The truth is that the school can only build on the foundation which nature and the home have laid. A real intellectual bent, or a love of some particular intellectual pursuit, is seldom given by the school: it is the gift of nature or it is implanted in the home in the child's earliest years; the most that the school does is to give it opportunity of development. Reading the other day the life of Shelley, I came across this remarkable utterance of the poet's: "I have no fear for the future of my children, for I believe in the omnipotence of education." That is the expression of a man who had had no practical experience of education. Had he spent a few years in a class-room, he would probably have been more inclined to believe in the powerlessness of education.
Take one point only. One object of school education--not the primary one perhaps, but still a very important one--is supposed to be to give a boy a love of knowledge and of learning. Yet he would be a rash man who would venture to assert that the school succeeds in implanting this love of knowledge in more than a few pupils. If you find a man with a strong love of literature or science or natural history, in nine cases out of ten, if you knew the history of his mind, you would find that either he owed that love to his early surroundings and his home training, or else that it was simply a natural instinct. Read the biographies of great men, of men of genius, and see if in most cases they did not owe far more to the home than to the school. How much of Shelley's poetic imagination, of Darwin's passion for natural history and power of observation, and Shaftesbury's piety and benevolence was due to school training? And if you say (what I entire agree with) that schools are not meant for geniuses, but for the average man, then take as many cases as you can find of ordinary men who have a special intellectual bent or pursuit, and see in how many cases they owe this to the school. The truth is, intellectual pursuits do not flourish in the schools of the present day.
This is no mere opinion of my own. Writing some years ago in the Nineteenth Century, the present Bishop of Calcutta, then Headmaster of Harrow, said of the public schools, "They fail in intellectuality." And Matthew Arnold told us long ago that "our school system, though properly an intellectual agency, has done and does nothing to counteract the indisposition to science, which is our chief intellectual fault." Matthew Arnold, too, was only the first of many observers of German schools who have remarked on the difference of tone with regard to the things of the mind which prevails in those schools, and who have noticed how much larger the proportion of boys who take a serious interest in literary or scientific work.
The reasons for this comparative neglect to the intellectual side of education in English schools are various. To a large extent, it is simply the reflection of a national characteristic. As a nation we are indifferent to learning, and our schools, which follow public opinion far more than they lead it, simply reflect this trait. Education in England is indeed dependent on public opinion to a greater extent probably than in any other country in Europe, and as long as the public remains indifferent to the training of the intellect and the cultivation of intellectual habits, so long, it is to be feared, will schools consider these things as little worthy of attention.
A second and even more potent reason is the conception of education which reigns in our public schools. The aim of our public schools is to make boyhood a time of practical activity. The boy is to live as the man lives: a life of business and pleasure; not a life of learning. The whole tendency of public school life is to make a boy throw the whole energies of his heart and soul into the active social life of the school, the games, the debating society, the field-club, the cadet corps, the periodical concerts and theatricals, and, in the case of older boys, the government of their juniors. And placed side by side in the boy-mind with the keen excitements and the healthy ambitions of this social life, study must indeed appear a dull and colourless thing.
Of the splendours and the glory of public school life, let one speak who was only half an Englishman, yet who seems to have felt to the full the fascination of his English boy-life. Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his earlier novels, speaks thus of Eton: "That delicious plain, studded with every creation of graceful culture; hamlet and hall and grange, garden and grove and park; that castle palace grey with glorious ages; those antique spires, hoar with faith and wisdom, the chapel and the college, that river winding through shady meads, the sunny glade and the solemn avenue; the room in the Dames' house, where we first order our own breakfast and first feel that individual mind that leads, conquers, controls; the emulation and the affection; the noble strife and the tender sentiment; the daring exploit and the dashing scrape; the passion that pervades our life and breathes in everything, from the aspiring study to the inspiring sport. Oh! what hereafter can spur the brain and touch the heart like this--can give us a world so deeply and variously interesting--a life so full of quick and bright excitement, passed in a scene so fair?" Ay, it is an invigorating and healthy life: the life of a public school. Do not imagine I think lightly of it; it is our principal contribution to the science of education; it is the admiration and the envy of foreigners. But we pay the inevitable price for it. Learning does not flourish side by side with such keen pursuit of pleasure. Class-room work comes to be looked upon as a dull and stupid interruption to real genuine life--a feeling which, I am bound to remark, is by no means confined to the boys of the school.
A third reason for the carelessness about the intellectual training of the average boy which is characteristic of so many schools, is the excessive importance at present attached to examinations. Getting boys through examinations seems to be the only part of class-room work in which the majority of parents take a lively interest. Schools are judged mainly by their successes in winning scholarships and preparing their pupils for examinations. The tendency therefore to give an undue share of attention to boys who are going in for examinations is inevitable. Examining drives true teaching into the background. In this matter, public opinion is sadly in need of education. If it would only demand thorough training for young boys, examinations could be left to take care of themselves. Unfortunately, the public and our educational authorities seem to be like a farmer who thinks he need pay no attention to the crop till the time comes for reaping it. If parents, first, and those who bear rule over our public education, secondly would only insist on the infinite importance of the first fourteen years of life, education might be a very different thing!
I have spoken in general terms of what seems to me to be a weakness in the schools of the present day and I have done so, not because I wish to criticize my professional brethren, but because I wish to hint to you where the home must supplement the efforts of the school. Let me speak now of two or three other points in which the schoolboy of to-day seems to me specially weak. The first is general information. Those who have never taught in a school will find it difficult to credit the ignorance displayed by even the best boys of a school in matters of knowledge of which everyone is inclined to take for granted. I have known, for instance, a sixth form boy [grade 10-12], a promising classical scholar, ignorant of the quarters of the heaven in which the sun rises and sets. Every general knowledge paper, of which I have looked over a good many, contains evidence of wonderful ignorance on the part of boys. No doubt what I am saying does not apply to all boys--many lads are remarkably quick at picking up knowledge and acquire an amount of information respecting butterflies, and stamps, and ships, and other boyish delights far exceeding that of their teachers. Most schoolmasters, indeed, would probably readily confess to having learnt much from their pupils. Still, the fact remains that emptiness is the mental characteristic of a good many of even the clever boys of a school. Schools might do more perhaps than they now attempt to give information about common things, but, as things are at present, if that kind of knowledge is not cultivated in the home in early childhood, the boy will probably go through life without it.
That great thinker whom I have quoted before, the late John Stuart Mill, looked upon it as an absurdity that history and geography should be taught in schools at all, and his reason for this opinion was that no one ever really learnt history and geography except by private reading. I doubt whether Mill would find many practical schoolmasters to agree with this dictum of his, for considerable information on these subjects can be acquired by class-room work, but undoubtedly, in such subjects as these there is a great opportunity for encouraging interest by reading and conversation. To understand history and geography, little technical knowledge is needed, and the interest of the subjects is such that it appeals to most intelligent human beings. Parents can do much to encourage interest in these subjects in their children by talking to them about them, by showing them pictures and by placing in their hands interesting works. Of books which are instructive without being heavy there is nowadays a vast stock. Such are biographies of national heroes, such as Macmillan's "Men of Action" series and some of Froude's works on the Elizabethans, accounts of travels and adventure in foreign lands, historical novels, especially [Sir Walter] Scott's, volumes of light science, such as Hutchinson's works on extinct animals. Of considerable help to a boy in his historical studies is an intelligent reading of the daily paper, not the mere mechanical reading of it, but such an intelligent reading as means a clear apprehension of the present condition of the world, so far, at least, as the boy can comprehend it. To take the instance which most naturally occurs to one at the present moment. How much a boy's understanding of the wars of history will be increased by an understanding of the war that is going on in South Africa to-day! Much as war has changed, there is much in war that is unchangeable--the difficulties of feeding and moving large bodies of men, the fundamental principles of strategy and tactics, the dangers, the hardships, the excitements and the dulnesses, and the boy who has digested the dispatches from correspondents and the letters from soldiers at the front will assuredly be better able to understand the wars of Wellington and Marlborough.
(To be continued.)
Proofread by LNL, May 2011