Chapter 12

This is not in accordance with the practice or the theory of recent times, and in this fact lies one of the prime causes of failure. The one thing man exists to accomplish is character; not worldly success and eminence in any line, not the conquest of nature (though some have held otherwise), not even "adaptation to environment" in the _argot_ of last century science, but _character;_ the assimilation and fixing in personality of high and noble qualities of thought and deed, the furtherance, in a word, of the eternal sacramental process of redemption of matter through the operation of spiritual forces. Without this, social and political systems, imperial dominion, wealth and power, a favourable balance of trade avail nothing; with it, forms and methods and the enginery of living will look out for themselves. And yet this thing which comprises "the whole duty of man" has, of late, fallen into a singular disregard, while the constructive forces that count have either been discredited and largely abandoned, as in the case of religion, or, like education, turned into other channels or reversed altogether, as has happened with the idea and practice of obedience, discipline, self-denial, duty, honour and unselfishness; surely the most fantastic issue of the era of enlightenment, of liberty and of freedom of conscience.

As a matter of fact character, as the chief end of man and the sole guaranty of a decent society, has been neglected; it was not disregarded by any conscious process, but the headlong events that have followed since the fifteenth century have steadily distorted our judgment and confused our standards of value even to reversal. By an imperceptible process other matters have come to engage our interest and control our action, until at last we are confronted by the nemesis of our own unwisdom, and we entertain the threat of a dissolving civilization just because the forces we have engendered or set loose have not been curbed or directed by that vigorous and potent personal character informing a people and a society, that we had forgot in our haste and that alone could give us safety.

Formal education is but one of the factors that may be employed towards the development of character; you cannot so easily separate one force in life from another, assigning a specific duty here, a definite task there. That is one of the weaknesses of our time, the water-tight compartment plan of high specialization, the cellular theory of efficiency. Life must be seen as a whole, organized as a whole, lived as a whole. Every thought, every emotion, every action, works for the building or the unbuilding of character, and this synthesis of living must be reestablished before we can hope for social regeneration. Nevertheless formal education may be made a powerful factor, even now, and not only in this one specific direction, but through this, for the accomplishing of that unification of life that already is indicated as the next great task that is set before us; and this brings me to a consideration of the last of the questions I have proposed for answer, viz.: is our present system of education adequate to the sufficient development of character, and if not, how should it be modified?

I do not think it adequate, and experience seems to me to prove the point. It has not maintained the sturdy if sometimes acutely unpleasant character of the New England stock, or the strong and handsome character of the race that dwelt in the thirteen original colonies as this manifested itself well into the last century, and it has, in general, bred no new thing in the millions of immigrants and their descendants who have flooded the country since 1840 and from whom the public schools and some of the colleges are largely recruited. It is not a question of expanded brain power or applied aptitude, but of character, and here there is a larger measure of failure than we had a right to expect. And yet, had we this right? The avowed object of formal education is mental and vocational training, and by no stretch of the imagination can we hold these to be synonymous with character. We have dealt with and through one thing alone, and that is the intellect, whereas character is rather the product of emotions judiciously stimulated, balanced (not controlled) by intellect, and applied through active and varied experience. Deliberately have we cut out every emotional and spiritual factor; not only religion and the fine arts, but also the studies, and the methods of study, and the type of text-books, that might have helped in the process of spiritual and emotional development. We have eliminated Latin and Greek, or taught them as a branch of philology; we have made English a technical exercise in analysis and composition, disregarding the moral and spiritual significance of the works of the great masters of English; we minimize ancient history and concentrate on European history since the French Revolution, and on the history of the United States, and because of the sensitiveness of our endless variety of religionists (pro forma) text books are written which leave religion out of history altogether--and frequently economics and politics as well when these cannot be made to square with popular convictions; philosophy and logic are already pretty well discarded, except for special electives and post-graduate courses, and as for art in its multifarious forms we know it not, unless it be in the rudimentary and devitalized form of free-hand drawing and occasional concerted singing. The only thing that is left in the line of emotional stimulus is competitive athletics, and for this reason I sometimes think it one of the most valuable factors in public education. It has, however, another function, and that is the coordination of training and life; it is in a sense an _école d'application,_ and through it the student, for once in a way, tries out his acquired mental equipment and his expanding character--as well as his physical prowess--against the circumstances of active vitality. It is just this sort of thing that for so long made the "public schools" of England, however limited or defective may have been the curriculum, a vital force in the development of British character.

At best, however, this seems to me but an indifferent substitute, an inadequate "extra," doing limitedly the real work of education by indirection. What we need (granting my assumption of character as the _terminus ad quem_) is an educational system so recast that the formal studies and the collateral influences and the school life shall be more coordinated in themselves and with life, and that the resulting stimulus shall be equally operative along intellectual, emotional and creative lines.

It is sufficiently easy to make suggestions as to how this is to be accomplished, to lay out programmes and lay down curricula, but here as elsewhere this does not amount to much; the change must come and the institutions develop as the result of the operations of life. If we can change our view of the object of education, the very force of life, working through experience, will adequately determine the forms. It is not therefore as a meticulous and mechanical system that I make the following suggestions as to certain desirable changes, but rather to indicate more exactly what I mean by a scheme of education that will work primarily towards the development of character.

Now in the first place, I must hold that there can be no education which works primarily for character building, that is not interpenetrated at every point by definite, concrete religion and the practice of religion. As I shall try to show in my last two lectures, religion is the force or factor that links action with life. It is the only power available to man that makes possible a sound standard of comparative values, and with philosophy teaching man how to put things in their right order, it enters to show him how to control them well, while it offers the great constructive energy that makes the world an orderly unity rather than a type of chaos. Until the Reformation there was no question as to this, and even after, in the nations that accepted the great revolution, the point was for a time maintained; thereafter the centrifugal tendency in Protestantism resulted in such a wealth of mutually antagonistic sects that the application of the principle became impracticable, and for this, as well as for more fundamental reasons, it fell into desuetude. The condition is as difficult today for the process of denominational fission has gone steadily forward, and as this energy of the religious influence weakens the strenuosity of maintenance strengthens. With our 157 varieties of Protestantism confronting Catholicism, Hebraism, and a mass of frank rationalism and infidelity as large in amount as all others combined, it would seem at first sight impossible to harmonize free public education with concrete religion in any intimate way. So it is; but if the principle is recognized and accepted, ways and means will offer themselves, and ultimately the principle will be embodied in a workable scheme.

For example; there is one thing that can be done anywhere, and whenever enough votes can be assembled to carry through the necessary legislation. At present the law regards with an austere disapproval that reflects a popular opinion (now happily tending towards decay), what are known as "denominational schools" and other institutions of learning. Those that maintain the necessity of an intimate union between religion and education, as for example the great majority of Roman Catholics and an increasing number of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are taxed for the support of secular public schools which they do not use, while they must maintain at additional, and very great, expense, parochial and other private schools where their children may be taught after a fashion which they hold to be necessary from their own point of view. Again, state support is refused to such schools or colleges as may be under specific religious control, while pension funds for the teachers, established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate themselves from any religious influence. I maintain that this is both unjust and against public policy. Under our present system of religious individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from the public funds must maintain, and then, this condition being carried out, distribute the funds received from general taxation to public and private schools alike. This would enable Episcopalians, let us say, or Roman Catholics, or Jews, when in any community they are numerous enough to provide a sufficiency of scholars for any primary, grammar, or high school, to establish such a school in as close a relationship to their own religion as they desired, and have this school maintained out of the funds of the city. This is not a purely theoretical proposition; after an agitation lasting nearly half a century, Holland has this year put such a law in force. From every point of view we should do well to recognize this plan as both just and expedient. One virtue it would have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most mechanistic manifestation in France.

Of course this need for the fortifying of education by religion is recognized even now, but the only plan devised for putting it into effect is one whereby various ministers of religion are allowed a certain brief period each week in which they may enter the public schools and give denominational instruction to those who desire their particular ministrations. This is one of the compromises, like the older method of Bible reading without commentary or exposition, which avails nothing and is apt to be worse than frank and avowed secularism. It is putting religion on exactly the same plane as analytical chemistry, psychoanalysis or salesmanship, (the latter I am told is about to be introduced in the Massachusetts high schools) or any other "elective," whereas if it is to have any value whatever it must be an ever-present force permeating the curriculum, the minds of the teachers, and the school life from end to end, and there is no way in which this can be accomplished except by a policy that will permit the maintenance of schools under religious domination at the expense of the state, provided they comply with certain purely educational requirements established and enforced by the state.

I have already pointed out what seems to me the desirability of a considerable variation between the curriculum of one school and another. This would be possible and probably certain under the scheme proposed, but barring this, it is surely an open question whether the pretty thoroughly standardized curriculum now in operation would not be considerably modified to advantage if it is recognized that the prime object of education is character rather than mental training and the fitting of a pupil to obtain a paying job on graduation. From my own point of view the answer is in a vociferous affirmative. I suggest the drastic reduction of the very superficial science courses in all schools up to and including the high school, certainly in chemistry, physics and biology, but perhaps with some added emphasis on astronomy, geology and botany. History should become one of the fundamental subjects, and English, both being taught for their humanistic value and not as exercises in memory or for the purpose of making a student a sort of dictionary of dates. This would require a considerable rewriting of history text books, as well as a corresponding change in the methods of teaching, but after all, are not these both consummations devoutly to be wished. There are few histories like Mr. Chesterton's "Short History of England," unfortunately. One would, perhaps, hardly commend this stimulating book as a sufficient statement of English history for general use in schools, but its approach is wholly right and it possesses the singular virtue of interest. Another thing that commends it is the fact that while it runs from Caesar to Mr. Lloyd George, it contains, I believe, only seven specific dates, three of which are possibly wrong. This is as it should be--not the inaccuracies but the commendable frugality in point of number. Dates, apart from a few key years, are of small historical importance; so are the details of palace intrigues and military campaigns. History is, or should be, life expressed in terms of romance, and it is of little moment whether the narrated incidents are established by documentary evidence or whether they are contemporary legend quite unsubstantiated by what are known (and overestimated) as "facts." There is more of the real Middle Ages in Mallory's "Mort d'Arthur" than there is in all Hallam, and the same antithesis can be established for nearly all other periods of history.

The history of man is one great dramatic romance, and so used it may be made perhaps the most stimulating agency in education as character development. I do not mean romance in the sense in which Mr. Wells takes it, that is to say, the dramatic assembling and clever coördination of unsubstantiated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any other art at communicating from one person to another something of the inner and essential quality of life as it has been lived, even if the material used is textually doubtful or even probably apocryphal. The deadly enemy of good, sound history is scientific historical criticism. The true history is romantic tradition; the stimulating thing, the tale that makes the blood leap, the pictorial incident that raises up in an instant the luminous vision of some great thing that once was.

I would not exchange Kit Marlowe's

_"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"_

for all the critical commentaries of Teutonic pedants on the character and attributes of Helen of Troy as these have (to them) been revealed by archaeological investigations. I dare say that Bishop St. Remi of Reims never said in so many words "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian; destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed," and that the Meroving monarch did not go thence to issue an "order of the day" that the army should forthwith march down to the river and be baptized by battalions; but _there_ is the clear, unforgettable picture of the times and the men, and it will remain after the world has forgotten that some one has proved that St. Remi never met Clovis, and that he himself was probably only a variant of the great and original "sun-myth."

Closely allied with the teaching of history and forming a link as it were with the teaching of English, is a branch of study at present unformulated and unknown, but, I am convinced, of great importance in education as a method of character development. Life has always focused in great personalities, and formal history has recognized the fact while showing little discretion, and sometimes very defective judgment, in the choices it has made. A past period becomes our own in so far as we translate it through its personalities and its art; the original documents matter little, except when they become misleading, as they frequently do, when read through contemporary spectacles. Now the great figures of a time are not only princes and politicians, conquerors and conspirators, they are quite as apt to be the knights and heroes and brave gentlemen who held no conspicuous position in Church or state. I think we need what might be called "The Golden Book of Knighthood"--or a series of text books adapted to elementary and advanced schools--made up of the lives and deeds (whether attested by "original documents," or legendary or even fabulous does not matter) of those in all times, and amongst all peoples, who were the glory of knighthood; the "parfait gentyl Knyghtes" "without fear and without reproach." Such for example, to go no farther back than the Christian Era, as St. George and St. Martin, King Arthur and Launcelot and Galahad, Charles Martel and Roland, St. Louis, Godfrey de Bouillon and Saladin, the Earl of Strafford, Montrose and Claverhouse, the Chevalier Bayard, Don John of Austria, Washington and Robert Lee and George Wyndham. These are but a few names, remembered at random; there are scores besides, and I think that they should be held up to honour and emulation throughout the formative period of youth. After all, they became, during the years when these qualities were exalted, the personification of the ideals of honour and chivalry, of compassion and generosity, of service and self-sacrifice and courtesy, and these, the qualifications of a gentleman and a man or honour, are, with the religion that fostered them, and the practice of that religion, the just objective of education.

Much of all this can even now be taught through a judicious use of the opportunities offered instructors in English, whether this is through the graded "readers" of elementary education, or the more extended courses in colleges and universities. Very frequently these opportunities are ignored, and will be until we achieve something of a new orientation in the matter of teaching English.

Now it may be I hold a vain and untenable view of this subject, but I am willing to confess that I believe the object of teaching English is the unlocking of the treasures of thought, character and emotion preserved in the written records of the tongue, and the arousing of a desire to know and assimilate these treasures on the part of the pupil. I am very sure that English should not be taught as a thing ending in "ology," not as an intricate science with all sorts of laws and rules and exceptions; not as a system whereby the little children of the Ghetto, and the offspring of Pittsburgh millionaires, and the spectacled infant elect of Beacon Hill may all be raised to the point where they can write with acceptable fluency the chiseled phrases of Matthew Arnold, the cadenced Latinity of Sir Thomas Browne, the sonorous measures of Bolingbroke or the distinguished and resonant periods of the King James Bible. Such an aim as this will always result in failure.

The English language is the great storehouse of the rich thought and the burning emotion of the English race, and all this, as it has issued out of character, works towards the development of character, when it is made operative in new generations. There is no other language but Latin that has preserved so great a wealth of invaluable things, and English is taught in order that it all may be more available through that appreciation that comes from familiarity. There is no nobler record in the world: from Chaucer down to the moderns is one splendid sequence of character-revelations through a perfect but varied art, for literature is also a fine art, and one of the greatest of all. Is it not fair to say that the chief duty of the teacher of English is to lead the student to like great literature, to find it and enjoy it for himself, and through it to come to the liking of great ideas?

In the old days there was an historical, or rather archaeological, method that was popular; also an analytical and grammarian method. There was also the philological method which was quite the worst of all and had almost as devastating results as in the case of Latin. It almost seems as though English were being taught for the production of a community of highly specialized teachers. No one would now go back to any of those quaint and archaic ways digged up out of the dim and remote past of the XIXth century. We should all agree, I think, that for general education, specialized technical knowledge is unimportant and scientific intensive methods unjustifiable. For one student who will turn out a teacher there are five hundred that will be just simple voters, wage-earners, readers of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Republic, members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church or the Ethical Society, and respectable heads of families. The School of Pedagogy has its own methods (I am given to understand), but under correction I submit they are not those of general education. Shall I put the whole thing in a phrase and say that the object of teaching English is to get young people to like good things?

You may say this is English Literature, not English. Are the two so very far apart? English as a language is taught to make literature available. "Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive _"distinguo."_ Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English composition possible. The "daily theme" may be overdone; it is of little use unless _thought_ keeps ahead of the pen.