Part 20

It is perhaps idle to expect any equalisation of opportunities by postponing every kind of specialism to a period beyond the elementary stage, until there is a more general agreement as to what constitutes a liberal education. If we apply the touchstone of Mulcaster’s conception, how much of the traditional lumber which is now obstructing our progress would have to be cleared away! We are the bond-slaves of two tyrants--the spirit of an outworn classicism and the spirit of a utilitarianism falsely so-called. Under the domination of the former we distort the curriculum of our higher-class schools, preparatory as well as secondary, by projecting into the elementary period and practically imposing on every scholar linguistic studies that should form a specialism only for a very few during the later years of school life. Misguided by the latter we debase our public primary education by filling up the time with subjects of mere information that neither arouse the interests of the learner nor afford a genuine mental discipline. It would indeed astound the Elizabethan schoolmaster who tolerated pre-occupation with the learned tongues only until his native English should reach a high enough point of cultivation to become a worthy receptacle of learning, and who lamented the temporary need for a medium which kept the student “one degree further off from knowledge” to find that after more than 300 years the shackles had not yet been cast aside. Nor would he be less dismayed to discover that the sole alternative offered to those who were excluded from what professed to be a liberal culture, consisted only to a very small extent of that direct knowledge of the facts and laws of Nature which he conceived to be the proper food during “our best learning time,” but mainly of the dry bones of second-hand experience. Mulcaster’s ideal will not be attained until we have devised a course of study up to the age of at least 14 or 15 years, which shall form a preparation for life that is applicable to all pupils alike--to boys and girls, to rich and poor, to those who can pursue their systematic education further, and to those who must discontinue it then to enter into the world of affairs.

Enough perhaps has been already said, though it would be an easy task to continue the catalogue of reforms suggested by Mulcaster, which have been approved by the consensus of judgment among thinkers on education, but have not yet been fully carried out in this country. When we remember the over-pressure and cramming that have resulted from the abuse of examinations in the treatment of learning as a marketable commodity subject to the severest struggles of competition; or the widespread neglect of the arts and sciences as instruments of general training; or the unholy separation of parents and children during the most critical years of mutual influence, through the acceptance of the boarding-school system as a normal institution; or the anomalous position of teachers, left as they are without recognition as members of an acknowledged profession, and having to depend for their training on the voluntary provision made by religious sects,--when we reflect that on these and on many kindred matters of high urgency the wisest guidance was offered to us more than three centuries ago, we shall have little hesitation in admitting the claim of Richard Mulcaster to be considered the Father of English Pedagogy.