Part 10

In England we are at the present time witnessing the collision of two educational types, of which I have outlined the older and more traditional. But this collision is itself of such exceeding interest that, at the risk of some repetition, I would venture to sketch out the two opposing types and attempt to indicate the mode of their interaction.

The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and experience.

Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the result of the interaction between two predominant educational types, which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages, and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is that in practice--whatever its theory may have been--in practice it is corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to educate people in direct relation to their social context, your educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time, the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public school. I mean they don't learn anything there." The instruments which for the most part this education has used have been the great literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because, while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The aim of this type of education has been to bring the student's mind into closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history), with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly (in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism. This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.

The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree, though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and, consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all social divisions.

Its ideal is the educational ladder. Now there would be no objection to the educational ladder if people went down it as well as up, if, that is to say, men of small ability and character always sank in the social scale and men of great ability and character always rose. But so long as you have social classes maintained in their position, not by ability and character alone, but by the mere accident of possession, so long it will be true that to lift a man by education from one social stratum to another is to expose him to a terrible temptation--the temptation to despise his own people. And when once a man's native sympathies have been rooted up, it is hard for any more to grow. There is real danger that the more modern type of education may serve to produce a race of self-seekers. But this modern type has great advantages. It is alive and in touch with the world at the moment; and the people who receive education of this kind will probably be very vitally aware of most of the living interests of their own time. But it fails to supply standards of judgment.

Now, of course, no existing institution belongs purely and entirely to either of these types; but we can all think easily of institutions in which one or the other is the predominant characteristic. And one of our troubles is that most parents like the faults and dislike the virtues of both types. They like the aristocratic and exclusive tone of the traditional type; and they like the pushfulness and "get-on-in-the-world" tone of the modern type.

The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought by the greatest men in the history of the world. This is very liable to lead people to suppose that whatever is modern is on that account good. Now that is exactly as foolish as to suppose that whatever is ancient is therefore good. The fact its antiquity or modernity has nothing to do with its value at the present moment. Of course, it is true that any institution which has lasted through many centuries is likely to be of use again, though we may always have just reached the point at which it begins to be an incubus. Of course, it is true that an idea which arises out of the stress of life at the moment is very likely to be very well adapted to the realities of that moment in which it arises, but, also, it may be well adapted to assist a downward course. What we want is that the people shall know the facts and also have the power to judge them--to be able, as I said, to assist or resist the tendencies of their time, in the light of the best ideals and standards. There is a very strong inclination among many of us (I am personally very much aware of it in myself) to think that the new thing must be good; and yet one remembers the words of Clough:--

"'Old things need not be therefore true,' Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."

Again, the old type which trains people through their social setting is very largely co-operative in its methods. It merges the individual in his school, or his college, so that he comes quite genuinely to care more keenly for the welfare of his house and school and college than for his own progress. Nobody who has had any intercourse at all with the life of public schools or universities can doubt that. The modern method, on the whole, I suppose, trusts mainly rather to competition. It aims at assisting people to put out their best energy by pitting them against one another. I want to raise a very serious question to which I am not prepared to give an answer. I want all people interested in education to consider it. Is it worth while to get the greatest effort out of a person at the cost of teaching him that he is to make efforts in his own interest? I am very doubtful.

I heard a little while ago a distinguished schoolmaster describe the visit of the father of one of the boys in his house; the boy was being very idle, and this distinguished man said, "I wish you would speak to him as seriously as ever you can"; the father said, "I will." He saw the boy and when he came back he said, "I spoke to him very seriously, in fact I spoke to him quite religiously. I said 'You must be getting along, you know, or other people will be pushing past you.'" The religion would appeal to be of a "Darwinian" type.

Now I wish to express a purely personal conviction with regard to these two types of teaching, and it is this: while we have got to incorporate all, or at any rate, nearly all, that the more modern type of education has given us, it has got to be used in such a way as to leave the great marks of the traditional type predominant. Education, I hold, should remain primarily corporate rather than individual, primarily spiritual (that is, effective through influence, and through an appeal to sympathy and imagination), rather than primarily intellectual (that is, effective through an appeal to intelligence and memory), primarily concerned with giving people the power to pronounce judgment on any facts with which they may come in contact rather than supplying them simply with the facts. It should be primarily co-operative and not primarily competitive.

It is mainly the new democratic movements in education which have emphasised this view. Indeed, the Workers' Educational Association has understood more definitely than any other body I am aware of, that what it finds of supreme value in the great centres of education is the spirit of the place rather than the instruction; and those of us who have received the best, or at all events have been in a position to receive the best, that Oxford can give, and those who have had just a taste of her treasures at the Summer School, will agree that Oxford does more for us than any lectures do. But while we say that, we need also to insist on a greater energy and efficiency, a greater and more living contact with the world of to-day in some, at least, of the centres of the old traditional type. Yet it is the traditional type that must control, because the traditional type on the whole stands for spirit against machinery. I have no doubt it is true that the old schools and universities are amateurish in method; and I have no doubt that we ought to organise ourselves more efficiently. There is a good deal of waste that may be saved; but I shall regret the day when we become efficient at the cost of our spirit.

I believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the Workers' Educational Association you will find upon the whole the soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.

These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation. These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power shall be beneficent.

*APPENDIX IV*

*ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY*

The position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body. In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to quote the following from his article--"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu Conference," in the _Church Quarterly Review_ for January, 1914.

"On December 20th, 1912, the Bishop of Madras delivered an informal speech to the members of the National Conference of Missionaries, at Calcutta. This created in India and elsewhere a considerable amount of sensation. As in that speech he referred to something which the present writer had written and to an article in the _Church Quarterly Review_ by Dr. Frere,[#] and as his speech has been very widely misunderstood, I think I may be allowed to refer briefly to the points he raised. The views which he propounded were those which I had put forward in the 'Prayer Book Dictionary,' and I should like to be allowed to quote them again:

[#] "The Reorganisation of Worship," by W. H. Frere, D.D., Superior of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield (_Church Quarterly Review_, October, 1912).

"If we combine the Patristic theory of Orders with the rule of ordination, we shall be able to put the idea of Apostolic Succession into its right place. It is really a deduction from the right theory of Orders, and the mistake has been to make Orders depend upon Apostolic Succession and transmission.

"The authority to consecrate and ordain, or to perform all spiritual offices, resides in and comes from the Church to which God gives His Holy Spirit. From the beginning this work of the Church has been exercised by those who have received a commission for it, and the rule of the Church has been that that commission should always be given by those who have received authority from others with a similar commission. The historical fact, therefore, of Apostolic Succession has resulted from the rule of the Church being always regularly carried out. If this be correct, the following further deductions may be made:

"1. The idea of 'transmission' is an additional and late conception which, instead of expressing the idea of Succession, has, by its exaggeration of it led to a rigid and mechanical theory of the Ministry.

"2. As the grace of Orders depends upon the authority of the Church and not upon mechanical transmission, all objections from supposed irregularities of ordination are beside the point, and the opinions of churchmen and others who have maintained that in certain circumstances a presbyter may ordain are explained. Ordination depends upon the authority of the Church, and not the Church upon ordination.

"3. The idea of Succession, which results from the Church's rule of ordination, is an historical fact, and not a doctrine. It represents an external connection with the first beginnings of Christianity of infinite value for the Church; and nothing should be done to break such a connection, as it acts like a link for binding together the Churches as parts of a living whole.

"4. One part of the work of Christian reunion should be to restore and secure the links of Succession throughout the whole Christian world; but no rigidity or mechanical theory of Orders need compel us to deny divine grace to those separated from us.[#]

[#] _The Prayer Book Dictionary_ (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, Ltd., 1912), p. 42.

"The particular point that I wish to emphasise is that there are two things to be separated--the one the rule of the Church, the other the theory of that rule. I do not believe that it would be possible on any Catholic principle to depart from the rule of the Church with regard to Orders; I should go further and say that I believe that no real reunion would ultimately be possible except on the basis of that rule. At the present time, however, continuous emphasis is laid on the theory of Orders, and that theory is often put as an extreme form of a mechanical conception of the Apostolic Succession. Now it is quite true that from the beginning Bishops have been looked upon as 'the successors' of the Apostles, but I can find no authoritative interpretation of that phrase other than that they perform at the present day those functions of the Apostles which were not miraculous or extraordinary.[#] Neither the formularies of the Church of England nor, so far as I am aware, those of any other Church, lay down any theory of ministry, and to impose, therefore, any such theory on the Church is to depart from Catholic tradition.

[#] See, for example, Van Espen, i. 16, 1. Council of Trent, Sessio xxiii., Cap. iv.

"An incidental result of this is that our attitude towards Sacraments of Nonconformist bodies will not partake of that rigid character which is so characteristic of some in the present day. We are glad to see that Dr. Sanday takes exception to these. 'It seems to me to be a very delicate matter, and, indeed, scarcely admissible for one Christian body to take upon itself to pronounce upon the validity or otherwise of the ministrations of another. I think that at least the question ought not to be put in that bald and sweeping form.' It is interesting to note that Dr. Pusey would have been equally averse to such language. He of course accepts the doctrine of Apostolic Succession in very definite form, but he writes as follows:

"'But while maintaining that they only are commissioned to administer the Sacraments who have received that commission from those appointed in succession to bestow it, we have never denied that God may make His own sacraments efficacious even when irregularly administered; we should trust it might be so.'

"It would be of great advantage if we were to speak of non-episcopal orders and sacraments as 'irregular,' which we know they are, not as 'invalid,' about which we know nothing."

With these words of Dr. Headlam I am in profound agreement. But there is another quite different matter to which I would allude. If the Church is indeed to be the vehicle of the power of Christ in its plenitude, it must be Catholic not only in principle and right, but in actual fact. Deeper than all divisions of "Catholic" and "Protestant" is the division of the great human family--European, Indian, Chinese, and so forth. These great civilisations must each bring its own gift, consecrated by the Spirit of Christ, to the life of the whole Body before that Body reveals the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ. A merely European Church cannot be fully Catholic, nor can it ever do, even for Europe, what the Catholic Church is called by God to do for the nations which become its provinces.

*APPENDIX V*

*ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY*

The most outstanding facts in the history known to us, which plainly reveal the providential guidance of its course, are the careers of Alexander the Great and Napoleon. There had developed in Greece the whole spirit of civilisation in reference to the small problems of the city-state; the whole principle of civilisation which had been thus worked out was now established; Greek civilisation was so perfectly developed that it had even a perfect theory of itself in Plato and Aristotle. Just at this moment there appears upon the scene the absolutely amazing figure--Alexander of Macedon, himself the pupil of the man in whom the Greek spirit reached its final formulation. He carries that spirit in his astounding triumphs through Asia Minor and Syria to the Western Provinces of India. As a military achievement the mere leading of his troops to the banks of the Indus is one of the supreme wonders of the world. No doubt he was conscious of a mission to spread the gifts which Greece held in trust for humanity; but also no doubt he was very much concerned with the political fabric which his conquests set up. The moment his work is finished, he himself dies. Politically his Empire was not established and it immediately fell to pieces. Spiritually it remained. It supplied the inspiration of Chandra gupta, and the career of Asoka is unintelligible apart from Alexander. The arrival of the Greeks in India is, I am assured, the beginning of all that we now understand by Indian art. Far more important to the history of the world was the bringing of Greek culture into Palestine; this culture in itself was no doubt decadent, and the Chasidim and Pharisees were right enough to resist it: yet the leaven of this humanising influence is an essential part of the preparation for the Incarnation in the soil of Judaism. It is to be noticed that Galilee was a region particularly affected by the Greek influence and the settlement of Decapolis was still mainly Greek in the Gospel period. Asoka and St. Paul are not at all the kind of successors that Alexander would have anticipated or desired, but his conscious desires were utilised by Providence to serve an end of which he never dreamed. His early death before his Empire could be consolidated in a political sense is as markedly providential as his emergence at the precise moment of history when he appears upon the scene.