CHAPTER VIII

EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

Allowing, as every competent thinker must allow, a full measure of validity to the contention that social developments are matters of slow growth and gradual attainment rather than of sudden and catastrophic change; admitting that even in the sphere of scientific discovery and mechanical invention changes occur much more gradually than a cursory glance at individual achievements would suggest; recognising that many of the most remarkable changes whose arrival in the past is the only possible valid guide to anticipation of similar or kindred changes in the future; it is still a condition of such anticipation that we should take account of causes likely to be operative in altering the rate at which the world will move. To allow that social improvements generally have the air of occurring almost automatically is not to conceive that they are without cause. Neither can it be believed by anyone who has studied the history of such movements in the past, or watched them in current progress, that the rate of development is everywhere and at all periods the same. There have been eras of almost complete moral, and even of almost complete mechanical, stagnation in the history of the world. There have been other eras of almost violent reformation and reconstruction. To reason as if these characteristics were arbitrarily or miraculously imposed upon the physiognomy of society, to be content with laboriously unintelligent estimation of the facts without attempting to learn anything from them of their causes, is to neglect the only important lesson which either history or observation is capable of teaching. When, therefore, an enormous acceleration in a rate of progress already unprecedented in the records of society has been predicted for the next hundred years of human history, it is evident that this anticipation must have been based upon some estimate of forces calculated to be operative in producing acceleration.

So far as scientific or material progress is concerned, it is obvious enough that we shall move forward with increasing momentum, because every discovery and every invention tends automatically to facilitate fresh attainment, and the very growth of population must act in the same way, as must also the struggle for existence. As there are every year more men and women working on scientific research and on mechanical invention, the results must be progressively greater every year; and as the rewards of success are increased by the growing demand resulting from a growing population, it is evident that the incentives to industry in this respect are proportionately liable to increase. But the ethical progress of the world is actuated by forces entirely different, and what makes for mechanical improvement may very easily be conceived--in fact has actually been conceived by one rather conspicuous prophet--to operate adversely upon the moral future of the race.

No secret, however, has been made of the present writer's belief that our descendants a hundred years hence will have made moral progress quite as remarkable as the mechanical progress of which the anticipation is likely to be contested by no reasonably imaginative observer. This ethical improvement, gradual, and momentarily imperceptible as it may be, necessarily has causes which must now, however tentatively and however cursorily, be examined.

That these causes will be powerful, continuous in action and based upon the fundamentals of human character, is evident. That in their operation they will be opposed by other influences not less easy to foresee is equally manifest. What we have to precognise are the net results likely to be achieved by the interaction of opposing forces, of which those tending to improvement are confidently believed the stronger.

The most powerful of all moral influences in the future will undoubtedly be the reform of education, not merely by the improvement of its methods in various departments, but also, and with much more importance, in the general spirit with which its objects will be conceived. But in order to affirm that this reform will occur, we must first demonstrate that the grounds upon which it is anticipated are adequate. We must, in the terms of the formula above proposed, be satisfied that they are in harmony with the fundamentals of human character.

If there be any human motive of which something approaching universality can be predicted--quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus--it is that of parental solicitude. No progenitor of children, however little amenable to high aspirations, is wholly free from the wish that his offspring shall grow up to be wiser, stronger, better, more prosperous than himself. The innate hopefulness of the race expressed in the arid comment that, in his own estimation, "man never is, but always to be blest," is often discouraged by the time a man's children are beginning to grow up, especially in these days of late marriage and deferred parenthood. Realising, as most of us have realised only too acutely by the time we are forty, that we have more or less failed in the ambitions which seemed so easy of future attainment when we were twenty-five, aspiration begins to cast a golden light upon the career of our children, and it is to the successes and the fame of our first-born that we look for consolation in the failure which, for ourselves, we no longer hope to evade. Romance, celebrity, even perhaps worldly reward, we can no longer expect for ourselves; but these dear hands that a little time ago we held while the first tottering steps of babyhood were being tried, shall return to us hereafter with the laurel in them that we have never plucked. Perhaps we shall not live to see it on our child's brow, but what of that? Our confident prevision of this glory is what we console ourselves withal: this, though we hardly know it, is our True Romance:--

"The comfortress of unsuccess, To bid the dead good-night."

Neither in the material and the intellectual spheres alone do we aspire more nobly for our children than for ourselves. Not success and not fame limit our demand of Fate, that she repair in our children the injustice of which we ourselves cease to complain. We want them to be better men and women than we have been. To put the thing on its lowest ground (and nothing but the lowest motives ever seem to be accorded the smallest validity by the more conspicuous among recent vaticinators of human action) it behoves us to make the best we can of our children's morals, if we are presently in old age likely to be dependant upon them. But for those who, like Malvolio, "think nobly of the soul," it is sufficient to rely upon the manifested predilection of every parent in order to be convinced that the education of the future will be moralised as well as rationalised through the natural emotions of man. Only the dullest and most turgid imagination will consent to believe that the horrible conditions of competitive struggle will be permitted to foster only the lower faculties, as greed, selfishness, unscrupulous cunning and subtle evasiveness, at the expense of all the finer characteristics of man. There is no cynic so base as would deliberately seek the fortune of his sons in the inculcation of chicane. Struggle must sharpen all our intellects as life grows yearly more difficult, but one by-product of this attrition will be the increased morality with which the education of each generation successively arising will be conceived.

Pausing for a moment to remark, in regard to the methods in detail by which the improvement of education will most likely be sought, that to foresee what is probable is not necessarily to endorse it as ideal, and that the object of this book is not to formulate Utopia, but to predict the consequences implied by existing forces after the latter have been during a stated time in operation; and admitting that no reform ever practised within the recorded history of man has been without drawbacks inherent in its own constitution, it may be said at once that the work of instruction is capable of mechanical and instrumental improvement not less considerable than any other labour to be undertaken by ourselves and our successors. Even within a lifetime's limits all sorts of appliances for assisting the mind of the learner to apprehend the facts sought to be learnt have been invented, and our children, as we all know, are much more easily taught than we were ourselves. The laudator temporis acti is always pretty ready to depreciate the value of these improvements, and perhaps it is natural enough in most of us to find it difficult to believe that any plan of teaching can be better for our children than the one which produced results so pleasingly exemplified by ourselves. But at all events, it will be generally, if a little grudgingly, admitted that any form of apparatus capable of saving time and trouble in teaching is capable of being ranked as an improvement. Unquestionably appliances having this object will be constantly invented and used during the present century. For instance, it is hardly conceivable that something less than perfection in the teaching of a foreign pronunciation by the mouth of the best teacher who can be hired for the work will content us, when perfected talking-machines presently enable us to give examples of the still better speech. Evidently a boy would learn to speak French with a purer accent by listening to a phonograph which, freed of the present tin-trumpet timbre and whirring, repeated the speech of the Comédie Française, than by hearing an ordinary master read aloud. To say this is not to suggest that professors of languages will be dispensed with; but their teaching can be thus supplemented. Similarly the use of magic-lanterns and kinetoscopic pictures is capable of improving greatly upon the blackboard and chalk still used. But the plan of education in itself is so greatly more important to be foreseen than the mechanism by which the details can be worked out, and the latter can with so very little difficulty be imagined by anyone interested in them, that the reader shall not be troubled with any discussion of this branch of the subject, but will rather be asked to concentrate his attention upon the moral and intellectual aspects of it.

Conceiving, what I have all along endeavoured to show is reasonable to conceive, that all social institutions will be governed with ever-increasing intelligence and rationality as time goes on, and that they could not possibly be tolerated otherwise, it is easy to see that education as hitherto and at present practised would never do for our grandchildren, let alone for our more advanced descendants a hundred years hence. To begin with, parents in that era would certainly consider it hopelessly and criminally unethical, if not actively immoral. Projects of reform, especially in morals, are often dismissed as visionary, because it is pointed out that no changes can take place in the social order which do not appeal directly to the self-interest of the individual. In other words, there is no mainspring of social action except aggregated selfishness. Without delaying to examine the validity of the belief, it may be said at once that its full acceptance is no obstacle to the admission of the whole case on which is founded the belief that education will be conducted chiefly with a view to its moral effect at the period I am attempting to describe. The very circumstances on which writers rely, who predict the ethical deterioration of man, are those which make the ethical reform of education inevitable. Precisely in proportion as competition tends to harden and debase, there will arise the unavoidable necessity for deliberate counter-action of this tendency, resulting, as the effect of the measures necessitated becomes felt, in the changes of commercial and political conditions already [20] predicted. If we consider at all thoughtfully the necessities of a hundred years hence, it is not difficult to foresee the general lines upon which they are likely to be met--lines not necessary to be accepted as representing a perfect or ideal state, but broadly indicating the methods which the effect of visible tendencies will by that time demand of a practical people.

Here, as everywhere else, the only safe guidance as to the practice of the future must be sought in the tendencies of the present. The tendency most forcibly in evidence during recent times is that in favour of softening the former acerbities of education. Whereas the schoolhouse of half a century ago was something like a penitentiary in the way it was conducted, the schoolhouse of to-day is managed as much like a place of recreation as it possibly can be. At all events, recreation is at least as assiduously cultivated as study, and the candidate for an under-mastership who has a good cricket record will find employment a good deal more easily than one with a double-first. If there be any complaint of public and other upper-class schools at the present time--and there is room for plenty of complaint--it is more often that games are too much insisted upon than that brains are overtaxed. There is a visible reaction in regard to this; but it is not to be regarded as a reaction in favour of the old draconic methods. On the contrary, "the growing sentimentality of the age" steadily demands amenity of treatment for the fortunate offspring of the twentieth century. The late James Payn, sanest and kindliest of men, was never tired of denouncing what he called the barbarous and indecent corporal punishments of Eton. He used to say that if a picture of an Eton boy being birched were published in the Illustrated London News no boy would ever be birched again, and I believe that he tried to get either Mr Latey or Mr Shorter to insert such a picture. Be this as it may, what he said was perfectly true. I shall have something to say presently on this same question of school discipline: meantime it may with perfect safety be predicted of the master's cane a hundred years hence that it will be found only in museums, and (whether rightly or wrongly) be regarded as a relic of degrading barbarism. One reason why corporal punishment will have to be abolished is that boys and girls will certainly be educated together instead of apart. As we could hardly cane girls (and it would be of very little use if we could) we shall assuredly have to get on without caning their masculine schoolmates.

I suppose that few will contest the statement that the religious teaching practised in schools at the present time not only has very little to do with the question of morality but tends distinctly, except in Roman Catholic seminaries and some few non-conforming colleges where a special kind of education is given, to have less and less connection therewith. Whatever moral effect "schooling" has upon the adolescent is recognisably and recognisedly due to the "tone" of the school itself, that is, to public opinion among the taught, and only indirectly to anything which emanates from the teachers. Assuredly a proficient knowledge of Biblical history has no ethical effect greater than a proficient knowledge of Greek mythology (at least of so much of it as is properly selected for school use), and we have it on the authority of Mr E. H. Cooper, a very entertaining if not particularly sound writer on children, that even "Confirmation" classes are by no means uniform in promoting a religious sentiment in boys. [21]

The moral advantages of education, therefore, tend to be found in the effect of public opinion and the general "tone" of a school. It is discovered in practice that direct moral inculcation is not very successful. It is to be assumed that the ingenuity of future pædagogues will be devoted to the discovery of the best ways in which indirect moral influence can be cultivated. In view of the high importance which will evidently be attached to such influence, we may take it for granted that it is not in connection with any single branch of tuition that it will be sought for, but that it will be root and branch of the whole scheme of educational work. One very powerful assistance will be rendered to this by the system of co-education.

It is quite certain that boys and girls will always be educated together a hundred years hence. The tendency of the sexes to become less different intellectually is a known fact of sociology. [22] It carries with it an inevitable tendency to dispense with the separation of the sexes in education. Wherever co-education has been tried its effects have been excellent. The presence of female students in medical colleges has had a markedly reformative influence on the manners and moral tone of medical student life, not long ago the opprobrium of civilisation. The advantages to a parent of being able to send his sons and his daughters to one place of instruction, and to the children themselves of the companionship and maintenance of family relations thus afforded, are equally obvious. In one other respect, which can only be touched upon lightly here, the system of joint education must be enormously beneficial, at all events to boys, and greatly beneficial to their sisters. Every competent schoolmaster is acquainted with special difficulties liable to arise about the age of puberty. The monastic seclusion of the schoolboy (like that of the single men in barracks who, according to Mr Kipling, "don't grow into plaster saints"), and the glamorous mystery surrounding the opposite sex, tend to accentuate these difficulties. The habit of constant association with girls who are not his sisters relieves a boy of the exaggerated sense of sexual isolation. A boy always brought up with girls is not liable to be constantly thinking about girlhood: and in practical experience many people are aware that boys who have had the opportunity of frequent association with the girl friends of their sisters grow into purer-minded and more chivalrous men, than those who have lacked this advantage; and the thoughtful future will assuredly cultivate the system which affords it. It is quite evident, in addition, that the fatuous and unreasonable mystery with which for centuries the natural facts most liable to be important in adult life have been made inevitable subjects of unholy curiosity, will be swept away, to the great enhancement of sane and clean thought in girls as well as in boys, in young women even more than in young men: while the tragedies which knowledge can avert, hidden horrors of our own day that we are too sentimental to envisage, but that everyone must now and then have met with a hint of, will happily exist no more, or occur but rarely.

Among the indirect considerations which will assist us to the conclusion that co-education is the best, will be the endeavour, everywhere apparent, to make the work of teaching agreeable to the taught. This is the keynote of the tendencies whose fruition we may look for at the end of this century. It will have been recognised that to conceive of education as a process of forcing knowledge into unwilling memories is to place the greatest possible obstacle in the way of success. Even the child whose natural faculties are joyously receptive is bound to resist more or less unconsciously teaching that is conducted on the assumption that he won't learn if he can possibly help it. The worst child in the class sets the tone of the rest. The boy who can most successfully evade real learning, and trick his instructors well enough to escape punishment, is the hero of the place. Nothing could be much worse for morality. Public opinion in schools, useful as it is in other respects, is everywhere harmful in this particular. The pædagogue of the future will proceed on a method far more rational.

In its essence it is quite easy to see what method the tendency of thought is likely to develop. Here, as in so many other places, etymology can help us. If we could think, whenever we talk or make plans concerning the subject, of what education really means--a drawing-out of the natural faculties of the instructed--we should always conceive more rationally of the work. There is no animal whose greatest pleasures are derived from anything else than the exercise of its faculties. Our dog, whether he jumps and tears about in glee as we take him for a walk, or sits happily by our side, his head on our knees, his wistful eyes scrutinising our face, sympathetic with every emotion, illustrates this fact. In the one case he is exercising the natural faculties of speed and vigorous agility; in the latter, the acquired and inherited faculties of mental comprehension. Shut him up in a room alone, or with an unfriendly person, and he is miserable or goes to sleep, providently accumulating energy for the next opportunity of exercise. What I am not afraid to call his mental pleasures are not less keen, if I know anything at all of dogs (who have loved many of them) than his physical pleasures; and I never had a dog in my life who would not cheerfully neglect his food to come indoors and sit with me in my library. Are children's brains less energetic, less capable of yielding pleasure to their small proprietors than the brains of a dog? One of the mistakes that we are already beginning to find out (and consequently one of those which we may expect to have amended long before this time next century) is the tacit assumption that games are richer in pleasure than study. It isn't the boys and girls themselves that give this tincture to school-government. Plenty of them really prefer books before balls, until they go to school; where we at once proceed to show them that we regard cricket as a sort of alleviation of their hard lot, and with football console them for their French lessons, and redress arithmetic by "rounders." There is no reason why this should lead to any neglect of athletics. Only, athletics will be properly treated as only one of the joys of a school life that will be fulfilled of other pleasures equally absorbing.

The method which will make education agreeable instead of repulsive is part and parcel of the system on which education will be conducted, and it is only incidentally that it will subserve the concurrent sentimental tenderness which finds expression to-day in unwise use of games in themselves highly beneficial, just as elsewhere it finds expression by cultivating gluttony. [23]

The true object of instruction being to show children how to think, the intellectual exercise of thinking will be always found, as it has already long ago been found where this highly unusual method has been experimented with, to give keen pleasure to the instructed. [24]

A great deal that has been said both in regard to the excessive and in part exclusive training of memory, and in regard to the propriety of reversing the general order of tuition by proceeding from concrete facts to generalised theories instead of beginning with generalisations and illustrating these by specific instances, is, for practical reasons, hardly likely to be acted upon by our descendants. To begin with, the culture of memory is not in itself an abuse; on the contrary, it is a highly necessary feature of education. What is an abuse is the substitution of remembrance for ratiocination. Teachers in the future will be more anxious to develop the mind from within than to graft information upon it from without. But they certainly will foster the faculty called memory--or to speak more exactly, they will refrain from destroying that faculty in the way that present-day education destroys it. For as a matter of fact, the memory of a young child who has never been taught anything is invariably good, being both copious and retentive. One often hears it said that children quickly forget; but it is also the case that they very quickly remember again. An Anglo-Indian friend told me a somewhat pleasing anecdote which (though of course it does not prove) illustrates a general fact of which anyone can find proofs for himself by a little observation. Having taken home for a year's leave his children, reared, like all other English children in India, amid native servants, and speaking quite correct Urdu instead of the barbarous dog-Hindustani which suffices for their elders, he was under the impression, when the "wicked day of destiny" arrived, and the family had to return from refreshment in England to labour in India, that they had completely forgotten the soft vernacular speech which formerly came much more easily from them than English. And his belief was confirmed when, the children having been promptly carried off by the adoring servants, an aged bearer came to him almost in tears, complaining that "Baba Sahib" could not understand him. But the next day all the little people were chattering Urdu as easily as ever. The fact is that a child's mind concentrates itself intensely upon whatever subject interests at a given moment, and neglects everything else. By our present method of education we do all that the most malignant ingenuity could devise to destroy both this invaluable gift of mental concentration and the accompanying faculty of memory. The new teaching will industriously cultivate both. There is no doubt that the premature and unskilful use of books as implements of instruction is extremely bad for the memory; and the employment of distasteful and inconsiderate methods of teaching is equally destructive of concentration. A hundred years hence, when it has been recognised that the easiest way to teach anything is to find out how a child can be made to want to learn about it, there will be no difficulty in securing attention. Children's minds do not, as most people suppose, tire very easily. On the contrary, they are with great difficulty fatigued. Anyone who has been so imprudent as to embark on a course of tale-telling near bedtime or near a meal hour, knows that the little people are almost incapable of being satiated. And the descendants of these little people will be just as insatiable of being taught, because we shall have found out how to make them want to be taught.

Herein is the whole keynote of the education of the future, moral as well as intellectual. We shall no longer treat good behaviour as if it were an artificial and unnatural abstinence from the true desires of the child or of man. We shall arrange that people, young and old, may wish to act rightly. The point of reform will be shifted. At present, all kinds of morality are approached on the assumption that it is requisite to persuade to an unwilling abstinence from vice, and that when the desires of the wicked have been curbed into a sort of ascetic abstemiousness prompted by fear of punishment, whether overt or implicit, a moral feat has been performed. The new morality will only be content when the subject of it would not sin if you asked him to. His moral sense will have been stoically cultivated. Obedience and the law of Thou-shalt-not will be dethroned. This law represents in the education of to-day the highest form of youthful virtue. Yet mere obedience, even where it has always been considered most valuable, namely, where it takes the shape of military discipline, has proved an utter failure; the last two great wars proved the fact. If the lamentable doggerel which enshrines the applauded self-immolation of Casabianca have not fortunately been forgotten altogether a hundred years hence, it will assuredly be quoted only as a monumental example of old-fashioned fat-headedness, even more offensive to the sense of reason than the verses themselves are to the sense of poetical taste. The Casabiancas of the next century will have been allowed--I do not say taught, because children don't need to be taught this--to think for themselves. And no great exertion will have been required. On the contrary, it is impossible to listen for many hours to what goes on in a modern school without being impressed with the ingenious arrangements that are required in order to prevent boys and girls from thinking for themselves. The notion of their doing so seems as offensive to the present race of schoolmasters as, to Mr W. S. Gilbert's sentinel,--

... "the prospect of a lot Of dull M.P.s in close proximity All thinking for themselves."

However, the purpose of this dissertation is not so much to point out the errors of the present as to indicate the improvements of the future: and we may be sure that the prime virtues of the scholar a hundred years hence will be reasonableness and ingenuity, not dull obedience. Thus right conduct will be inculcated, not as an expression of obedience but as the only reasonable way of behaving, and the incentive to right action will be that it is also sensible action. The test of all conduct will be its results. Whatever does harm to self and others will be obviously wrong; what does good or is indifferent will be right. The standard of these things that has to be accepted all through life will be set up from the first, an enormous improvement upon the vicious system of exacting irrational obedience for the first eighteen or twenty-one years of life, and expecting this to produce reasonable self-government thereafter, which is so fruitful in the wild-oats of early adulthood. The latter could hardly be more ingeniously cultivated.

It would be extremely rash to conclude that books will not be employed as implements of instruction: but it is quite certain that they will not be employed as they now are, chiefly for the purpose of saving a schoolmaster the trouble of making his pupils think for themselves: and incidentally the abolition of this mistake will react most usefully upon memory, itself, with the exception of reasoning power, the most valuable of mental faculties. Oral teaching, accompanied in every possible place by practical illustration, will store and build up memory (as it always does when we employ it now) far more rapidly than anything else. The delight which this method of teaching confers upon the taught is enhanced by the avidity with which such subjects as chemistry, practical mechanics, and even geometry when taught with apparatus instead of with figures, are received by children of every growth.

To imagine that children can ever invariably be controlled without some sort of punishments would, no doubt, be thought ridiculous Utopianism. But the greatest part of the necessity for correction will have disappeared automatically when the greatest source of youthful misbehaviour--restless superfluous activity--has been deviated into channels which will utilise it. Children whisper, fidget, or make a noise in class, simply because they are bored by the dulness of mechanical processes which we persistently use in seeking to cram information into their minds from without instead of exercising the reason that dwells within. As the education of future generations will assuredly have to be a great deal more copious than what we are content with now, it is fortunate that this reform will also be a great economiser of time. Every schoolmaster knows that an interested class progresses far more rapidly than one that is bored and consequently inattentive; and the same boy who is alive to the subtlest implications of the highly complex law of cricket, will often be found utterly incapable of applying the very simple definitions at the beginning of Euclid I., for the simple reason that cricket interests him, while Euclid doesn't. This is not because the latter is "harder" than cricket, nor yet because cricket is an outdoor pleasure, while Euclid is (or rather should be) an indoor one. It is because in cricket we get him into the habit of reasoning for himself, while in geometry we only too frequently fail to do what Euclid is supposed to help us to do.

Nevertheless, after making every allowance for reduced temptations to misbehaviour resulting from the absorption of redundant mental activity, it is still to be feared that disciplinary punishment will sometimes be required. This will certainly not be corporal. The uncivilised and degrading expedient of purposely-inflicted pain is visibly on its last legs. There are still reactionary people who write to the papers in order to explain that the use of scholastic torture makes for manliness; they must be presumed to think that it would be on the whole rather good for boys to be birched at intervals, like Charles Lamb, not as a punishment, but to keep them humble. But the next century will have outgrown such ideas. The commonest of present-day alternatives--"lines"--is equally obsolescent, the evil effect of this upon handwriting and health being already recognised. "Keeping-in" is probably the most injurious of all forms of correction, but it is only too consistent with our present plans of education to treat extra tuition as a punishment--the best possible way to make all teaching hated. It is much more likely that the schoolmaster of a hundred years hence will punish refractory and inattentive pupils by keeping-out instead of keeping-in. The most detested of all chastisements will be exclusion from the pleasant exercise of learning. During the Russo-Japanese War newspaper readers noted with saturnine amusement that the artillery regiment which in St Petersburg had the maladroitness to fire a salute with a shotted gun and very nearly kill the Czar thereby, was punished by being sent to the front; while at the beginning of hostilities the exemplary conduct of the enormous Japanese army crowded in Tokio for transport was accounted for by the threat that any soldier who misbehaved himself would be left at home. It is the Japanese and not the Russian ideal of discipline that will animate the schools of the future. We shall no doubt emulate the reserve of the Confessor in the Bab Ballads; old heads upon young shoulders we shall not expect to find; and we shall punish when punish we must. Future advantage, even for oneself, is seldom a very powerful motive with the young of any age. But present deprivation is a chastisement easily and keenly comprehended: and the loss of intellectual status involved in exclusion from a lesson will no doubt supplement the immediate boredom very distasteful to an agile mind, which is the more immediate effect. I imagine that the naughty child of the future will be punished by being shut up in a well-ventilated and well-lighted but perfectly empty room, with pockets equally empty. At the same time, by treating deprivation of it as an evident chastisement, the desirable nature of instruction will be in a very useful manner impressed upon the infant mind. Young persons much more easily believe what they find to be treated as a matter of course than what is laboriously impressed upon them by explicit inculcation. Thus the effect of rationalised education will not be, as one critic has rather rashly supposed, to make children little prigs. On the contrary, its effect will be to make them naturally and happily interested little learners--a very different thing. One of the very greatest improvements in the rationalised education will precisely be that it cannot possibly foster the awful priggishness which is a very common result of our own methods.

It has been said already that the education of the happy future will have to be much more copious than anything that is at all common nowadays. The nature of its extensions will next be discussed.

One of the most important and most moral objects of education is to impress upon the mind, as a principle not to be evaded by any contrivance whatever, the fact that fixed causes (among which are personal acts of any kind) produce fixed effects--that there is no circumstance which, with sufficient knowledge, could not be traced back to pre-existing causative circumstance. No department of knowledge tends so intimately to give to the mind the impress of this fact in the course of its acquisition as physical science. And as a proficient acquaintance with physical science will be necessary to a great many occupations, when work of all kinds is performed in the intelligent manner in which we have seen reason to be convinced that it will be performed a hundred years hence, there will be a greater practical need for scientific instruction than there is now, though science is disgracefully neglected even with regard to our present necessities. As education is to be given with the object of fitting children for life as well as developing their minds, the science of health will certainly be taught; but all physical sciences will have their place on the curriculum even at the early stages, because it will have been recognised that the habit of mind which is formed by studies of this kind is not only very necessary to an efficient working life, but also very helpful as a basis of practical culture. It may be conceived that a thorough "grounding" in physical science will be thought as much an essential of all education in the future as a really good training in Latin and Greek used to be considered in the past, and as many of us would like it to be considered now. Fifty years ago we believed that no true education could be given in preparation for ordinary life without as much Latin as was necessary in order to be able to write a fair copy of elegiacs, and as much Greek as was necessary in order to read Homer with comfort. A hundred years hence we shall think it necessary to be able to read a scientific thesis comprehendingly.

At a later period of school life, but still early in it, specialised instruction will no doubt be begun; and subjects connected with the evident tendency of a boy's or a girl's mind, and with the opportunities likely to be presented to either in forming a career, will be developed to the exclusion of subjects less immediately subservient to the object of making a useful citizen of him or her in some particular profession or branch of industry. Practical demonstrations of science, instead of being reserved for the more advanced stages of tuition, will, on the contrary, form the groundwork; and children will be required to work practically themselves instead of merely sitting still to watch the performances (in this case apt to be regarded with little more respect than scholastic conjuring tricks) of a teacher. They will be invited to deduce laws for themselves from what occurs in practice, and where they deduce wrong ones they will not be arbitrarily corrected, but assisted to make further experiments which will show where the mistake occurs, until at last the correct generalisation is reached. Only after a considerable course of practical work will they be entrusted with books in which great generalisations are to be found ready made, and these books will always be regarded as a sort of pis aller--a time-saving contrivance to be employed as a regrettable alternative, because it would take too long to work everything out by the golden implement of individual observation. The habit of mind thus cultivated, and the manual dexterity thus obtained, will be of priceless practical worth in after-life; and with what rapturous enjoyment will our descendants acquire knowledge which at present we force upon our children with stripes!

Along with the physical sciences mathematics will have to be greatly cultivated. But mathematics, when perceived to be ancillary to the more immediately delightful work of concrete and experimental science, will lose much terror. Many mathematical operations can moreover be demonstrated experimentally, and no opportunity of thus demonstrating them will be lost. Rightly treated, mathematics need never be dull. According to my own experience and all that I have been able to gather from the recollections of others, algebra (for instance) is never abhorred when a proper care is taken to make use of its call upon the reasoning faculties; and the art of evoking this use will have been carefully developed by the educational specialists who alone will be permitted to direct so delicate and important a task as the training of the young. For school teachers will not be merely more or less erudite people employed to dispense their learning: they will be men and women who have undergone long and careful instruction in the art of pædagogy studied as a specialised faculty in itself.

After mathematics, no doubt languages occupy chief place in the righteous abhorrence of present-day school-children. I say righteous abhorrence with intention, because this department of useful learning always has the air of being purposely planned in order to secure the maximum of execration accompanied by the minimum of advantage. What languages will be taught a hundred years hence, and in what manner will they be instilled into the children of our great-great-grand-children? Any opinions upon a controversy so recent as that which a few months ago raged about the question of compulsory Greek must be more or less untrustworthy. Every man will take the view of the future of the dead languages (so called, as someone [25] sanguinely remarked, because they can never die) determined by his own view as to whether proficiency in the tongues of Hellas and of Rome ought to be maintained in his own day. But for a reason probably admitting of very little controversy, it is at all events permissible to believe that the classical languages will at least not have to meet the urgent competition of a variety of current languages as subjects of useful learning. This reason is to be found in the evident tendency of a paramount tongue to extrude other tongues from practical employment in commerce; and commerce, more than anything else, will of course always determine the question of modern language study. Provided that the race which becomes paramount in the markets of the world during the course of this century possesses a reasonably philosophical, copious, precise language, and one fairly easy to acquire, it is likely that for commercial purposes it will become (to use an incorrect, but not conveniently replaceable term) universal. To the facile remark that every nation considers its own speech easy enough for foreigners to acquire, and much more satisfactory in the other respects named than any tongue which it is invited to give itself the trouble of learning, may be opposed the reply that peoples do in fact recognise, where it exists, the unsatisfactory nature of their own speech. For example, nearly every Russian whom one meets in polite or commercial circles speaks at least French, and often speaks it admirably; while in Norway, though the Scandinavian languages are none of them anything like so difficult to learn as Russian, practically everyone speaks English. The case of Japan is even more illustrative; for apart from the fact that enough of some European language to enable one to travel with perfect comfort is always to be found current in the Mikado's empire, it is the case that even for domestic use the Japanese have a popular language, printed in newspapers and in some books alongside of the more literary Chinese idæographs, and frequently used to elucidate the latter. [26]

Thus it is quite easy to believe that the paramount language of commerce will impose itself upon at least the business population of the whole world. As the substitution of modern languages for the dead languages is advocated solely on utilitarian grounds, which practically means that it is advocated because to know a couple or more foreign languages is useful in trade; and as no one has ever seriously pretended that French, German or any other modern language can compare with Greek and Latin as intellectual gymnastics and as training in the precise expression of one's thoughts; it may be assumed that, on the ground of competitive usefulness, the latter will not need to be dispensed with. Whether the study of them will be abandoned on the ground that the time they require can be better employed in some study other than that of languages is another and more difficult question, the resolution of which depends upon the view we take of the literary tendencies probably existing after another century. If we believe that our descendants will have effected so many improvements in the shape of labour-saving contrivances as to afford a large increase of leisure for everyone, as compared with what the present time enjoys, we shall probably expect the languages which enshrine the greatest literature of the world to remain a subject of study. If we believe in the growing intellectuality of man, we shall be strengthened in the same expectation. If, on the other hand, we think that the progress of our race will exhibit itself in the shape of greedy utilitarianism and of idiotic and self-destructive immorality, we shall naturally conclude that no one will be fool enough to trouble himself with Homer or the Oresteian trilogy, the laments of Sappho or the philosophy of Plato. Seeing what great men have taken this somewhat despondent view of the future, it would perhaps be immodest to express any other opinion on the subject.

In any event, we may safely believe that whatever languages are taught will not be handled in the manner now current. Mr Andrew Lang has, in more than one place, described his own "floundering" into Homer--a plunge certainly attended with the happiest results. A method of teaching alien languages which founds itself upon an imitation of the natural picking-up of the mother tongue by babies has been suggested, perhaps without sufficient consideration of the vast expenditure of time necessary to the process, and certainly without sufficient allowance for the fact that it would be impossible to afford the same incessant practice which enables children to learn the language of their fathers and mothers so easily. But there is no reason why we should perpetuate the discouraging preponderance of grammatical and etymological study which caused the late H. D. Traill to say of certain professors that

"They heard with a smile of the flowers of style For they recognised nothing but roots!"

In fact, here as elsewhere, the persistent demand that schooling be made agreeable will have the best possible effect in facilitating instruction. It is as literature that all languages--including the native language of the scholars--will be taught; and they will be taught far more easily than we have any example to assist us in imagining. Where a foreign language pronounced with a different accent and intonation from that of the learner is studied, no doubt (as already mentioned) talking machines will be employed: and in addition, pupils will be required to read and speak the language aloud on all possible occasions, in order to exercise the organs of speech in the alien manner. [27]

It is a trite saying, and one that need not be dwelt upon here, that history ought not to be taught as if its sole purpose were to store the memory with the deeds and misdeeds of kings and the progress of various wars. It will certainly be studied hereafter as a vast lesson in sociology and politics, as an illustration of the science of human dynamics. It is perhaps not superfluous to remark that brilliant examples of the new historiography have shown that the difference is not, in its result, so great as some critics imagine. But the deductions from the facts of history are the important matter: and the way in which history will be used a hundred years hence will be in instructing the future governors of the world how to use their citizenship wisely. Among other things expected of the schoolmaster of the future will be that he implant in his scholars an ardent desire to do their part in determining the polity of the state they live in, and the sacred duty of the ballot will certainly be taught with relation to whatever methods of utilising the popular vote may by that time have become current.

Moreover, history, like languages, is capable of being taught as literature; and the protest against the prevalent notion that high civilisation involves the decadence of beauty in any form implies belief in all the arts as subjects of cultivation in the schools of the future. It need not be supposed that the unreasonable waste of time entailed by the present method of teaching such a subject as drawing, and our curious neglect of sculpture and modelling, will be perpetuated. As we can already see the dawn of new ideas on both these subjects the tendency of the future in regard to them is not difficult to conceive, nor need space be consumed in discussing them in detail. Literature and poetry (the latter, I need hardly say, no longer made merely hateful as the subject of the fatuous torture called "learning by heart") with belles-lettres, drawing, painting, and sculpture, will no doubt be taught in an elementary way to all children, and the study of them developed further where a natural appetite demands it. In reply to the very natural question, "How can an art be taught?" it is only needful to say that minds exercised by being made to think about such subjects, are quite certain to exhibit special predilections in one place and special aversions in another, and that the ascertainment of these predilections and aversions will everywhere be made the subject of painstaking thought. While nobody seriously pretends nowadays that a taste for literature or the arts can be inoculated upon a child's understanding, I imagine that few will question the belief that a natural bent for any one of them can be assisted in its development, and that taste, while it is incapable of being artificially implanted, certainly is susceptible of being guided and assisted. The defect of routine teaching in æsthetics at present is the defect of all our systems of education. We try to do a scholar's thinking for him. We laboriously show him how to use a pencil and how to copy drawings and pictures; and sometimes (though this kind of instruction is usually retailed by the ingenious writers who endeavour to instruct the adult public through the Press) we even go to the trouble of telling him the kind of pictures he ought to admire (usually forgetting that in the house of Art there are many mansions, and that a disgust for the early Dutch masters does not necessarily imply an incapacity for appreciating Velasquez); but, whether in adolescence or maturity, we never seem to arrive at the point of trying to get people to think critically for themselves. We shall reform altogether the processes of artistic education in the course of this century.

The training of eye and hand will certainly not be neglected. If only because learning any kind of handicraft gives the keenest enjoyment to children, we may be sure that manual instruction will be given, and that the effect of it will be of great value, not only recreative but also practical. Our mechanics will not have to inaugurate the wage-earning period of their lives by the elementary acquisition of the use of tools. Their future occupation will have been foreseen, and both by scientific understanding of the processes they are to subserve, and by manual practice of the exact work they are to perform, they will be prepared for intelligent craftsmanship; the glorious fact that real anxiety to find out the best possible method of attaining the best possible results makes every craft, however humble, not merely delightful but also noble, being automatically grasped, so that work, like learning, will be a thing of joy and a source, to the worker, of lifelong self-respect.

Thus in every department of education the result of the training administered intelligently, and with almost infinite long-sightedness and subtlety during school-days, will be to form character, not by repression of any natural predilection, but by cultivation of mental and moral impulses to good. We shall never be content with an obedient abstention from misconduct, but shall unrestingly contrive that the desire to act rightly as well as wisely be implanted in the mind, until wisdom, righteousness and forethought have been stamped upon the character with so indelible an imprint that it would do violence to the whole contour of the mind to act in defiance of them. A people thus trained will be capable of all the reforms predicted of society a hundred years hence. Not by any of the unimaginable cataclysms by which dreamers have expected Utopia to be established, ready-made, on a basis of unreformed obedience to the will of fantastic lawgivers, but by the steady growth of national morality will progress,

"Moving as beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man,"

establish, on the basis of a perfect harmony between the nature of the units and the institutions of society, the rationalised, moralised, and still progressive state of the world looked for by all who contemplate logically and with ordered faith the capabilities of their kind a hundred years hence.