Chapter 14

The modern school is not a thing that has evolved from a simple germ, by a mere process of expansion. It is the coalescence of several things. In different countries and periods you will find schools taking over this function and throwing out that, and changing not only methods but professions and aims in the most remarkable manner. What has either been teachable or has seemed teachable in human development has played a part in some curriculum or other. Beyond the fact that there is class instruction and an initial stage in which the pupil learns to read and write, there is barely anything in common. But that initial stage is to be noted; it is the thing the Hebrew schoolboy, the Tamil schoolboy, the Chinese schoolboy, and the American schoolboy have in common. So much, at any rate, of the school appears wherever there is a written language, and its presence marks a stage in the civilizing process. As I have already pointed out in my book “Anticipations,” the presence of a reading and writing class of society and the existence of an organized nation (as distinguished from a tribe) appear together. When tribes coalesce into nations, schools appear. This first and most universal function of the school is to initiate a smaller or greater proportion of the population into the ampler world, the more efficient methods, of the reading and writing man. And with the disappearance of the slave and the mere labourer from the modern conception of what is necessary in the state, there has now come about an extension of this initiation to the whole of our English-speaking population. And in addition to reading and writing the vernacular, there is also almost universally in schools instruction in counting, and wherever there is a coinage, in the values and simpler computation of coins.

In addition to the vernacular teaching, one finds in the schools--at any rate the schools for males--over a large part of the world, a second element, which is always the language of what either is or has been a higher and usually a dominant civilization. Typically, there is a low or imitative vernacular literature or no literature at all, and this second language is the key to all that literature involves--general views, general ideas, science, poetic suggestion and association. Through this language the vernacular citizen escapes from his parochial and national limitations to a wide commonweal of thought. Such was Greek at one time to the Roman, such was Latin to the Bohemian, the German, the Englishman or the Spaniard of the middle ages, and such it is to-day to the Roman Catholic priest; such is Arabic to the Malay, written Chinese to the Cantonese or the Corean, and English to the Zulu or the Hindoo. In Germany and France, to a lesser degree in Great Britain, and to a still lesser degree in the United States, we find, however, an anomalous condition of things. In each of these countries civilization has long since passed into an unprecedented phase, and each of these countries has long since developed a great living mass of literature in which its new problems are, at any rate, approached. There is scarcely a work left in Latin or Greek that has not been translated into and assimilated and more or less completely superseded by English, French, and German works; but the schoolmaster, heedless of these things, still arrests the pupil at the old portal, fumbles with the keys, and partially opens the door into a ransacked treasure-chamber. The language of literature and of civilized ideas is, for the English-speaking world to-day, English--not the weak, spoken dialect of each class and locality, but the rich and splendid language in which and with which our literature and philosophy grow. That, however, is by the way. Our point at present is that the exhaustive teaching of a language so that it may serve as a key to culture is a second function in the school.

We find in a broad survey of schools in general that there has also been a disposition to develop a special training in thought and expression either in the mother tongue (as in the Roman schools of Latin oratory), or in the culture tongue (as in Roman schools of Greek oratory), and we find the same element in the mediaeval trivium. Quintilian’s conception of education, the reader will remember, was oratory. This aspect of school work was the traditional and logical development of the culture language-teaching. But as in Europe the culture language has ceased to be really a culture language but merely a reasonless survival, and its teaching has degenerated more and more into elaborate formalities supposed to have in some mystical way “high educational value,” and for the most part conducted by men unable either to write or speak the culture language with any freedom or vigour, this crown of cultivated expression has become more and more inaccessible. It is too manifestly stupid--even for our public schoolmasters--to think of carrying the “classical grind” to that pitch, and, in fact, they carry no part of the education to that pitch. There is no deliberate and professed training at all in logical thought--except for the use of Euclid’s Elements to that end--nor in expression in any language at all, in the great mass of modern schools. This is a very notable point about the schools of the present period.

But, on the other hand, the schools of the modern period have developed masses of instruction that were not to be found in the schools of the past. The school has reached downward and taken over, systematized, and on the whole, I think, improved that preliminary training of the senses and the observation that was once left to the spontaneous activity of the child among its playmates and at home. The kindergarten department of a school is a thing added to the old conception of schooling, a conversion of the all too ample school hours to complete and rectify the work of the home, to make sure of the foundation of sense impressions and elementary capabilities upon which the edifice of schooling is to rise. In America it has grown, as a wild flower transferred to the unaccustomed richness of garden soil will sometimes do, rankly and in relation to the more essential schooling, aggressively, and become a highly vigorous and picturesque weed. One must bear in mind that Froebel’s original thought was rather of the mother than of the schoolmistress, a fact the kindergarten invaders of the school find it convenient to forget. I believe we shall be carrying out his intentions as well as the manifest dictates of common sense if we do all in our power by means of simply and clearly written books for nurses and mothers to shift very much of the kindergarten back to home and playroom and out of the school altogether. Correlated with this development, there has been a very great growth in our schools of what is called manual training and of the teaching of drawing. Neither of these subjects entered into the school idea of any former period, so far as my not very extensive knowledge of educational history goes.

Modern, too, is the development of efficient mathematical teaching; so modern that for too many schools it is still a thing of tomorrow. The arithmetic (without Arabic numerals, be it remembered) and the geometry of the mediaeval quadrivium were astonishingly clumsy and ineffectual instruments in comparison with the apparatus of modern mathematical method. And while the mathematical subjects of the quadrivium were taught as science and for their own sakes, the new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression, more exact, compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write. This development of mathematical teaching is only another aspect of the necessity that is bringing the teaching of drawing into schools, the necessity that is so widely, if not always very intelligently perceived, of clearheadedness about quantity, relative quantity, and form, that our highly mechanical, widely extended, and still rapidly extending environments involve.

Arithmetic and geometry were taught in the mediaeval school as sciences, in addition the quadrivium involved the science of astronomy, and now that the necessary fertilizing inundation of our general education by the classical languages and their literatures subsides, science of a new sort reappears in our schools. I must confess that a lot of the science teaching that appears in schools nowadays impresses me as being a very undesirable encumbrance of the curriculum. The schoolman’s science came after the training in language and expression, late in the educational scheme, and it aimed, it pretended--whatever its final effect was--to strengthen and enlarge the mind by a noble and spacious sort of knowledge. But the science of the modern school pretends merely to be a teaching of useful knowledge; the vistas, the tremendous implications of modern science are conscientiously disregarded, and it is in effect too often no more than a diversion of school energies to the acquisition of imperfectly analyzed misstatements about entrails, elements, and electricity, with a view--a quite unjustifiable view--to immediate profitable hygienic and commercial application. Whether there is any educational value in the school-teaching of science we may discuss later. For the present we may note it simply as a revived and developing element.

On the other hand, while these things expand in the modern school, there are declining elements, once in older schemes of scholastic work much more evident. In the culture of the mediaeval knight, for example, and of the eighteenth-century young lady, elegant accomplishments, taught disconnected from the general educational scheme and for themselves, played a large part. The eighteenth-century young lady was taught dancing, deportment, several instruments of music, how to pretend to sketch, how to pretend to know Italian, and so on. The dancing still survives--a comical mitigation of high school austerities--and there is also a considerable interruption of school work achieved by the music-master. If there is one thing that I would say with certainty has no business whatever in schools, it is piano-teaching. The elementary justification of the school is its organization for class-teaching and work in unison, and there is probably no subject of instruction that requires individual tuition quite so imperatively as piano-playing; there is no subject so disadvantageously introduced where children are gathered together. But to every preparatory and girls’ school in England--I do not know if the same thing happens in America--the music-master comes once or twice a week, and with a fine disregard of the elementary necessities of teaching, children are called one by one, out of whatever class they happen to be attending, to have their music-lesson. Either the whole of the rest of the class must mark time at some unnecessary exercise until the missing member returns, or one child must miss some stage, some explanation that will involve a weakness, a lameness for the rest of the course of instruction. Not only is the actual music-lesson a nuisance in this way, but all day the school air is loaded with the oppressive tinkling of racked and rackety pianos. Nothing, I think, could be more indicative of the real value the English school-proprietor sets on school-teaching than this easy admission of the music-master to hack and riddle the curriculum into rags. [Footnote 1: Piano playing as an accomplishment is a nuisance and encumbrance to the school course and a specialization that surely lies within the private Home province. To learn to play the piano properly demands such an amount of time and toil that I do not see how we can possibly include it in the educational scheme of the honourable citizens of the coming world state. To half learn it, to half learn anything, is a training in failure. But it is probable that a different sort of music teaching altogether--a teaching that would aim, not at instrumentalization, but at intelligent appreciation--might find a place in a complete educational scheme. The general ignorance that pervades, and in part inspires these papers, does, in the matter of music, become special, profound, and distinguished. It seems to me, however, that what the cultivated man or woman requires is the ability to read a score intelligently rather than to play it--to distinguish the threads, the values, of a musical composition, to have a quickened ear rather than a disciplined hand. I owe to my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, the suggestion that the piano is altogether too exacting an instrument to use as the practical vehicle for such instruction, and that something simpler and cheaper--after the fashion of the old spinet--is required. Possibly some day a teacher of genius will devise and embody in a book a course of class lessons, sustained by simple practice and written work, that would attain this end. But, indeed, after all is said and done, music is the most detached and the purest of arts, the most accessory of attainments.] Apart from the piano work, the special teaching of elegant accomplishments seems just at present on the wane. And on the whole I think what one might call useful or catchpenny accomplishments are also passing their zenith--shorthand lessons, book-keeping lessons, and such-like impostures upon parental credulity.

There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a convenient accomplishment, and which has--with that increase in communication which is the salient material fact of the nineteenth century--developed in Western Europe to the dimensions of a political necessity, and that is the teaching of one or more modern foreign languages. The language-teaching of all previous periods has been done with a view to culture, artistic, as in the case of Elizabethan Italian, or intellectual as with English Latin. But the language-teaching of to-day is deliberately, almost conscientiously, not for culture. It would, I am sure, be a very painful and shocking thought indeed to an English parent to think that French was taught in school with a view to reading French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity for purposes of vulgar communication. The stirring together of the populations that is going on, the fashion and facilities for travel, the production of the radii from the trading foci, are rapidly making a commonplace knowledge of French, German, and Italian a necessity to the merchant and tradesman, and the ever more extensive travelling class. So that so far as Europe goes, one may very well regard this modern modern-language teaching as--with the modern mathematics--an extension of the _trivium_, of the apparatus, that is, of thought and expression. [Footnote: In the United States there is less sense of urgency about modern languages, but sooner or later the American may wake up to the need of Spanish in his educational schemes.] It is an extension and a very doubtful improvement. It is a modern necessity, a rather irksome necessity, of little or no essential educational value, an unavoidable duty the school will have to perform. [Footnote: In one way the foreign language may be made educationally very useful, and that is as an exercise in writing translations into good English.]

There are two subjects in the modern English school that stand by themselves and in contrast with anything one finds in the records of ancient and oriental schools, as a very integral part of what is regarded as our elementary general education. They are of very doubtful value in training the mind, and most of the matter taught is totally forgotten in adult life. These are history and geography. These two subjects constitute, with English grammar and arithmetic, the four obligatory subjects for the very lowest grade of the London College of Preceptors’ examinations, for example. The examination papers of this body reveal the history as an affair of dated events, a record of certain wars and battles, and legislative and social matters quite beyond the scope of a child’s experience and imagination. Scholastic history ends at 1700 or 1800, always long before it throws the faintest light upon modern political or social conditions. The geography is, for the most part, topography, with a smattering of quantitative facts, heights of mountains, for example, populations of countries, and lists of obsolete manufactures and obsolete trade conditions. Any one who will take the trouble to run through the text-books of these subjects gathered together in the library of the London Teachers’ Guild, will find that the history is generally taught without maps, pictures, descriptive passages, or anything to raise it above the level of an arid misuse of memory; and the highest levels to which ordinary school geography has attained are to be found in the little books of the late Professor Meiklejohn. These two subjects are essentially “information” subjects. They differ in prestige rather than in educational quality from school chemistry and natural history, and their development marks the beginning of that great accumulation of mere knowledge which is so distinctive of this present civilization.

There are, no doubt, many minor subjects, but this revision will at least serve to indicate the scope and chief varieties of school work. Out of some such miscellany it is that in most cases the student passes to specialization, to a different and narrower process which aims at a specific end, to the course of the College. In some cases this specialized course may be correlated with a real and present practice, as in the case of the musical, medical, and legal faculties of our universities; it may be correlated with obsolete needs and practices and regardless of modern requirements, as in the case of the student of divinity who takes his orders and comes into a world full of the ironical silences that follow great controversies, nakedly ignorant of geology, biology, psychology, and modern biblical criticism; or it may have no definite relation to special needs, and it may profess to be an upward prolongation of schooling towards a sort of general wisdom and culture, as in the case of the British “Arts” degrees. The ordinary Oxford, Cambridge, or London B.A. has a useless smattering of Greek, he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that tongue; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical literature, he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it clearly, and none of German, he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite useless knowledge of certain rudimentary sections of mathematics, and an odd little bite out of history. He knows practically nothing of the world of thought embodied in English literature, and absolutely nothing of contemporary thought; he is totally ignorant of modern political or social science, and if he knows anything at all about evolutionary science and heredity it is probably matter picked up in a casual way from the magazines. Art is a sealed book to him. Still, the inapplicability of his higher education to any professional or practical need in the world is sufficiently obvious, it seems, to justify the claim that it has put him on a footing of thought and culture above the level of a shopman. It is either that or nothing. And without deciding between these alternatives, we may note here for our present purpose, that the conception of a general upward prolongation of schooling beyond adolescence, as distinguished from a specific upward prolongation into professional training, is necessary to the complete presentation of the school and college scheme in the modern state.

There has always been a tendency to utilize the gathering together of children in schools for purposes irrelevant to schooling proper, but of some real or fancied benefit. Wherever there is a priestly religion, the lower type of religious fanatic will always look to the schools as a means of doctrinal dissemination; will always be seeking to replace efficiency by orthodoxy upon staff and management; and, with an unconquerable, uncompromising persistency, will seek perpetually either to misconduct or undermine; and the struggle to get him out and keep him out of the school, and to hold the school against him, will be one of the most necessary and thankless of New Republican duties. I have, however, already adduced reasons that I think should appeal to every religious mind, for the exclusion of religious teaching from school work. The school gathering also affords opportunity for training in simple unifying political conceptions; the salutation of the flag, for example, or of the idealized effigies of King and Queen. The quality of these conceptions we shall discuss later. The school also gives scope for physical training and athletic exercises that are, under the crowded conditions of a modern town, almost impossible except by its intervention. And it would be the cheapest and easiest way of raising the military efficiency of a country, and an excellent thing for the moral tone and public order of a people, to impose upon the school gathering half an hour a day of vigorous military drill. The school, too, might very easily be linked more closely than it is at present with the public library, and made a means of book distribution; and its corridors may easily be utilized as a loan picture gallery, in which good reproductions of fine pictures might bring the silent influence of the artist mind to bear. But all these things are secondary applications of the school gathering; at their best they are not conducted by the school-teacher at all, and I remark upon them here merely to avoid any confusion their omission might occasion.