Read Ebook: What Is and What Might Be A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular by Holmes Edmond

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fresh water that the rivers pour into the sea has to be slowly absorbed into the whole mass of salt water before it can return to the land as rain. When information which has been received and assimilated rises to the surface of the mind, it will be ready, when required to do so, to reappear as information, and perhaps to return in that form to the source from which it came. But the information which is given off will differ profoundly from that which has been received, for between the two will have intervened many stages of silent absorption and silent growth.

It may be necessary, then, in the course of education, both to supply and to demand information. But the information which is supplied must be regarded as the raw material of knowledge, into which it is to be converted by a subtle and secret process. And the information which is demanded must be regarded as an exhalation from the surface of a mind which has been saturated with study and experience, and therefore as a proof of the possession of knowledge. To assume that knowledge and information are interchangeable terms, that to impart information is therefore to generate knowledge, that to give back information is therefore to give proof of the possession of knowledge,--is one of the greatest mistakes that a teacher can make.

But the mistake is almost universally made. Information being related to knowledge, as what is outward to what is inward, it is but natural that education in the West, which on principle concerns itself with what is outward, and ignores what is inward, should have always regarded, and should still regard, the supplying of information as the main function of the teacher, and the ability of the child to retail the information which has been supplied to him as a convincing proof that the work of the teacher has been successfully done. In nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten, in nine lessons out of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin films of information on the surface of the child's mind, and then, after a brief interval, in skimming these off in order to satisfy himself that they had been duly laid. He cannot afford to do otherwise. If the child, like the man, is to be "saved" by passive obedience, his teacher must keep his every action and operation under close and constant supervision. Were the information which is supplied to him allowed to descend into the subconscious strata of his being, there to be dealt with by the secret, subtle, assimilative processes of his nature, it would escape from the teacher's supervision and therefore from his control. In other words, the teacher would have abdicated his function. He must therefore take great pains to keep the processes by which the child acquires knowledge as near to the surface of his mind as possible; in rivalry of the nurse who should take so much interest in the well-being of her charges that she would not allow them to digest the food which she had given them, but would insist on their disgorging it at intervals, in order that she might satisfy herself that it had been duly given and received. It is no doubt right that the teacher should take steps to test the industry of his pupils; but the information which the child has always to keep at the call of his memory, in order that he may give it back on demand in the form in which he has received it, is the equivalent of food which its recipient has not been allowed to digest.

That education in the West should ultimately be controlled by a system of formal examination, may be said to have been predestined by the general trend of religious thought and belief. Wherever literal obedience is regarded as the first, if not the last, condition of salvation, the tendency to measure worth and progress by the outward results that are produced will inevitably spring up and assert itself. In this tendency we have the whole examination system in embryo. When Israel, with characteristic thoroughness, had embodied in Pharisaism the logical inferences from his religious conceptions, a merciless examination system came into being, in which every one was at once examiner and examinee, and in which the whole of human life was dragged out into the fierce light of public criticism, and placed under vigilant and unintermittent supervision. When Pharisaism was revived, with many modifications but with no essential change of character, under the name of Puritanism, the tendency to arraign human life at the bar of public opinion reasserted itself, and gave rise, as in New England and covenanting Scotland, to an intolerable spiritual tyranny. In Catholic countries the believer is subjected in the Confessional to a periodical oral examination, in which he passes in review the outward aspect of his inward and spiritual life, detailing for the benefit of his confessor his sins of ceremonial omission or laxity, and such lapses from moral rectitude as admit of being formulated in words and accurately valued in terms of expiatory penance. Even in the Anglican Church, which has too great a regard for the Englishman's traditional love of personal freedom to be unduly inquisitorial, the clergyman is apt to measure the spiritual health and progress of his parishioners by the frequency with which they attend church and "Celebration," while the Bishop measures the spiritual health and progress of each parish by the number of its communicants and the frequency with which they communicate, statistics under both heads being regularly forwarded to him from all parts of his diocese.

It was inevitable, then, the relation between that sooner or later the education of the young should come under the control of a system of formal religion and education being what it was and is, examination, and that it should be as much easier to apply the system to education than to religion as it is easier to test knowledge than conduct. It is to the vulgar confusion between knowledge and information that we owe the formal examination, as it is now conducted in most Western countries. In a society which mistakes the externals for the essentials of life, it is but natural that the teacher, with the full consent of the parents of his pupils, should regard the imparting of knowledge as the end and aim of his professional life, and that the parents should demand some guarantee that knowledge has been successfully imparted to their children. If by knowledge were meant a correct attitude of mind, the teacher would realise that the idea of testing it in any way which would satisfy the average parent was chimerical; and his clients, if they continued to ask for a guarantee of successful teaching, would require something widely different from that which has hitherto contented them. But when information is regarded as the equivalent of knowledge, the testing of the teacher's work becomes a simple matter, for it is quite easy to frame an examination which will ascertain, with some approach to accuracy, the amount of information that is floating on the surface of the child's mind; and it is also easy to tabulate the results of such an examination,--to find a numerical equivalent for the work done by each examinee, and then arrange the whole class in what is known as the "order of merit," and accepted as such, without a moment's misgiving, by all concerned.

Unfortunately, however, it is equally easy to prepare children for an examination of this, the normal type. As children have receptive memories, it is easy for the teacher to lay films of information on the surface of their minds. As they have capacious and fairly retentive memories, it is easy for the teacher, especially if he is a strict disciplinarian, to make his pupils retain the greater part of what they have been taught. To skim off and give back to the teacher portions of the floating films of information, is a knack which comes with practice, and which the average child easily acquires. The teacher will, of course, demand that his school shall be examined on a clearly-defined syllabus; and the examiner, in his own interest, will gladly comply with this demand. The examiner will go further than this. If he happens to be employed by the State or by a Local Authority, and has, therefore, many schools of the same type to examine, he will, in order to save himself unnecessary trouble, prescribe the syllabus on which all the schools in his area are to be examined. This means that he will dictate to the teacher what subjects he is to teach, how much ground he is to cover in each year , in what general order he is to treat each subject, and on what general principles he is to teach it. Intentionally he will do all this. Unintentionally he will do far more than this. As he wishes his examination to be a test and not a mere formality, as he wishes to sift the examinees and not to set the seal of approval on all of them indiscriminately, he will take care that some at least of his questions are different from what the teacher might expect them to be. Also, as he is himself a rational being, he will probably endeavour to test intelligence as well as memory; and, with this end in view, he will set questions, the precise nature of which it will be difficult for the teacher to forecast. But the teacher will make a practice of studying the questions set in the periodical examinations and of preparing his pupils accordingly, equipping them with a stock of superficial intelligence as well as of information, and putting them up to whatever knacks, tricks, and dodges will enable them to show to advantage on the examination day. In his desire to outwit the teacher, the examiner will turn and double like a hare who is pursued by a greyhound. But the teacher will turn and double with equal agility, and will never allow himself to be outdistanced by his quarry.

The more successful the teacher is in keeping up with the examiner, the more fatal will his success be to his pupils and to himself. In the ardour of the chase he is being lured on into a region of treacherous quicksands; and the longer he is able to maintain the pursuit, the more certain is it that he will lose himself at last in depths and mazes of misconception and delusion. It is only by stripping himself of his own freedom and responsibility that the teacher is able to keep pace with the examiner, and each turn or double that he makes involves a fresh surrender of those prerogatives. In consenting to work on a prescribed syllabus he has given up the idea of planning out his work for himself. In attempting to adapt his teaching to the questions set by the examiner, he is allowing the latter to dictate to him, in the minutest detail, how each subject is to be taught. In other words, in order to achieve the semblance of success, he is delivering himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the examiner, and compelling the latter, perhaps against his will, to become a Providence to him and to order all his goings. This means that his distrust of himself is as complete as his distrust of the child, and that his faith in the efficacy of mechanical obedience has led him to seek salvation for himself, as well as for his pupils, by following that fatal path.

It is in this way that a formal examination reacts upon and intensifies the sinister tendencies of which it is at once a product and a symptom. The examination system is, as I have said, the keystone of the arch of Western education, crowning and completing the whole structure, and at the same time holding it together, and preventing it from falling, as it deserves to fall, into a ruinous heap. Education, as it is now interpreted and practised in the West, could not continue to exist without the support of the examination system; but the price that it pays, and will continue to pay, for this deadly preservative, is the progressive aggravation of all its own inherent defects. The plight of an organism is indeed desperate when the very poison which it ought, if healthy, to eliminate from its system, has become indispensable to the prolongation of its life.

It is notorious that the application of the examination principle to religion--the attempt to estimate spiritual health and growth in terms of outward action--generates hypocrisy, or the pretence of being more virtuous than one really is. When applied to the education of the young, the same principle generates hypocrisy of another kind,--the pretence of being cleverer than one really is, of knowing more than one really knows. So long as the hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete. In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in his fraud. The child who is being crammed for an examination, and who is being practised at the various tricks and dodges that will, it is hoped, enable him to throw dust in the examiner's eyes, may not consciously realise that he and his teacher are trying to perpetrate a fraud, but will probably have an instinctive feeling that he is being led into crooked ways. If he has not that feeling, if the crooked ways seem straight in his eyes, we may know that his sense of reality is being poisoned by the vitiated atmosphere which he has been compelled to breathe. Nor, if that is his case, will he lack companionship in his delusion. In the atmosphere of the examination system, deceit and hypocrisy are ever changing into self-deception; and all who become acclimatised to the influence of the system--pupils, teachers, examiners, parents, employers of labour, ministers of religion, members of Parliament, and the rest--fall victims, sooner or later, to the poison that infects it, and are well content to cheat themselves with outward and visible results, accepting "class-lists" and "orders of merit" as of quasi-divine authority, mistaking official regulations for laws of Nature, and the clumsy movements of over-elaborated yet ill-contrived machinery for the subtle processes of life.

Thus the hope of reward tends to demoralise the clever child by making an appeal to basely selfish motives. At the same time it is probably deluding him with the belief that he has more capacity than he really has. If the examination system is, as I have suggested, the keystone of the arch of Western education, it is by means of the prize system that the keystone has been firmly cemented into its place. An examination which had no rewards or distinctions to offer to the competitors would not be an effective stimulus to exertion. That being so, our educationalists have taken care that to every examination some external reward or rewards shall be attached. Even if there are no material prizes to appeal to the child's cupidity, there is always the class-list, with its so-called "order of merit," to appeal to his vanity. Our educationalists have also taken care that during the periods of childhood, adolescence, and even early maturity, every prize that is offered for competition shall be awarded after a formal examination and on the consideration of its tabulated results. The appointments in the Home, Colonial, and Indian Civil Services, the promotions in the Army and Navy, the fellowships and scholarships at the Universities, the scholarships at the Public Schools, the medals, books, and other prizes that are offered to school-children, are all awarded to those who have distinguished themselves in the corresponding examinations, no other qualification than that of ability to shine in an examination being looked for in the competitors. There are, no doubt, exceptions to these general statements, but they are so few that they scarcely count. We have seen that the ascendency of the examination system in our schools and colleges is largely due to the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge; and we have also seen that the examination system reacts upon that fatal confusion and tends to strengthen and perpetuate it. If, then, the effect of the prize system is to consolidate the authority of the formal examination and intensify its influence, we shall not go far wrong in assuming that in the various competitions for prizes the confusion between information and knowledge will play a vital part. And, in point of fact, the cleverness which enables the child--I ignore for the moment the adolescent and the adult student--to win prizes of various kinds is found, when carefully analysed, to resolve itself, in nine cases out of ten, into the ability to receive, retain, and retail information. As this particular, ability is but a small part of that mental capacity which education is supposed to train, it is clear that the clever child who gets to the top of his class, and wins prizes in so doing, may easily be led to over-estimate his powers, and to take himself far more seriously than it is either right or wise of him to do. His over-confidence may for a time prove an effective stimulus to exertion; but the exertion will probably be misdirected; and later on, when he finds himself confronted by the complex realities of life, and when problems have to be solved which demand the exercise of other faculties than that of memory, his belief in himself, which is the outcome of a false criterion of merit, may induce him to undertake what he cannot accomplish, and may lead at last--owing to his having lost touch with the actualities of things--to his complete undoing.

And as under the prize system the child who is high in his class is apt to over-estimate his ability, so the child who is low in his class is apt to accept the verdict of the class-list as final, and to regard himself as a failure because he lacks the superficial ability which enables a child to shine on the examination day. Again and again it happens that the dunce of his class goes to the front in the battle of life. But numerous and significant as these cases are, they are unfortunately exceptions to a general rule. For one dunce who emerges from the depths of "apparent failure," there are ten who go under after a more or less protracted struggle, and sink contentedly to the bottom. The explanation of this is that though every child has capacity , there are many kinds of capacity which a formal examination fails to discover, and which the education that is dominated by the prize system fails to develop. The child whose particular kind of capacity does not count, either in the ordinary school lesson or on the examination day, is not aware that he is capable; and as he is always low on the class-list, and is therefore regarded by his teachers as dull and stupid, he not unnaturally acquiesces in the current and apparently authoritative estimate, of his powers, and, losing heart about himself, ends by becoming the failure which he has been taught to believe himself to be. In brief, while the prize system breeds ungrounded and therefore dangerous self-esteem in the child whom it labels as bright, it breeds ungrounded but not the less fatal self-distrust in the child whom it labels as dull.

We have seen that there comes a time in the life of every man when the fear of punishment ceases to act as a stimulus to educational exertion. It is the same with the hope of reward. Examinations, and the prizes which reward success in examinations, are for the young. What will happen to the prize-winner when there are no more prizes for him to compete for? Will he continue to pursue knowledge for its own sake? Alas! he has never pursued it for its own sake. He has pursued it for the sake of the prizes and other honours which it brought him. When he has won his last prize the chances are that he will lose all interest in that branch of learning in which he achieved distinction, unless, indeed, he has to earn his livelihood by teaching it. Of the scores of young men who distinguish themselves in "Classics" at Oxford and Cambridge, how many will continue to study the classical writers when they have gained the "Firsts" for which they worked so diligently? Apart from those who are going to teach Classics in the Public Schools or Universities, a mere handful,--one in ten perhaps, though that is probably an extravagant estimate. And yet the poets, philosophers, and historians whom they have studied are amongst the greatest that the world has produced. What is it, then, that kills, in nine cases out of ten, the classical student's interest in the masterpieces of antiquity? The obvious fact that he was never interested in them for their own sakes--that he studied them, not in order to enjoy them or profit by them, but in order to pass an examination in them, of which he might be able to say in after years:

"I am named and known by that hour's feat, There took my station and degree."

How many Wranglers, other than those who have or will become schoolmasters or college tutors, continue to study mathematics? How many of the First Classmen in Science, History, Law, and other Honour "Schools" continue to study their respective subjects? In every case an utterly insignificant minority.

But if the prize system does this to the young man of twenty-two or twenty-three, if it kills his interest in learning, if it makes him register an inward vow never again to open the books which he has crammed so successfully for his examinations, what may it be expected to do to the child whose school education comes to an end when he is only thirteen or fourteen years old? When, with the fear of punishment, the complementary hope of reward is withdrawn from him, is it reasonable to expect him to continue his education, to continue to apply himself to subjects with which his acquaintance has been entirely formal and superficial, and which he has never been allowed to digest and assimilate? The utter indifference of the average ex-elementary scholar to literature, to history, to geography, to science, to music, to art, is the world-wide answer to this question.

For what is, above all, hateful in any scheme of rewards and punishments, when applied to the school life of the young, is that it wholly externalises what is really an inward and spiritual process, the evolution of the youthful mind. Just as in the sphere of religion it is postulated as a self-evident truth that righteousness is not its own reward, nor iniquity its own punishment,--so in the sphere of education it is postulated as a self-evident truth, that knowledge is not its own reward, nor ignorance its own punishment. And just as in the sphere of religion the appeal to Man's selfish hopes and ignoble fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning and purpose of righteousness, which has caused his moral and spiritual energies to be diverted into irreligious or anti-religious channels, to the detriment of his inward and spiritual growth,--so in the sphere of education the appeal to the child's selfish desires and ignoble fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning and purpose of knowledge, which has caused his mental energies to be diverted into uneducational channels, to the detriment of his mental growth. In each case the scheme of rewards and punishments, acting like an immense blister, when applied to a healthy body, draws to the surface the life-blood which ought to nourish and purify the vital organs of the soul , thereby impoverishing the vital organs, and inflaming and disfiguring the surface. For if the surface life, with its outward and visible "results," is to be happy and productive, the health of the vital organs must be carefully maintained. This is the fundamental truth which those who control education in the West have persistently ignored.

Whatever else the current system of education may do to the child, there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,--to blight his mental growth. What particular form or forms this blighting influence may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of circumstances. Experience tells us that what happens in most cases is that Western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth of others, stunts the growth of a third group, and distorts the growth of a fourth.

Is it intended that education should do all this? This question is not so paradoxical as it sounds. My primary assumption that the function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the eyes of those who agree with it; but Western orthodoxy, just so far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs repudiate it as a pestilent heresy. For if what grows is intrinsically evil, what can growth do for it but carry it towards perdition?

In the opening paragraph of this book I said that some of my readers would regard my fundamental assumption as a truism, others as a challenge, and others again as a wicked heresy. Whether it shall be regarded as a truism, a challenge, or a heresy, will depend on the way in which it is worded. To say that the function of education is to foster the growth of human nature, is to invite condemnation from those who regard human nature as ruined and corrupt. To say that the function of education is to foster the growth of the soul, is to issue a challenge to Western civilisation, which is based on the belief that the end of Man's being is not the growth of his soul, but the growth of his balance at the bank of material prosperity. To say that the function of education is to foster the growth of certain faculties, is to insist on what no one who had given his mind to the matter would care to deny. For even the orthodox, who regard Man's nature in its totality as intrinsically evil, admit without hesitation that there are faculties in Man which can be and ought to be trained; while the "man of the world," whom we may regard as the most typical product of Western civilisation, is clamorous in his demand that education shall foster the growth of certain mental faculties which will enable the child to become an efficient clerk or workman, and so contribute to the enrichment of his employer and the community to which he belongs.

The Western educationalist will admit, then, that the function of education is to foster growth; and if you ask him what it is that grows or ought to grow under education's fostering care, he will give you a long list of faculties--mental, for the most part, but also moral and physical--and then break off under the impression that he has set education an adequate and a practicable task. But he has set it an inadequate and an impracticable task. For behind all the faculties that he enumerates dwells the living reality which he cannot bring himself to believe in,--the soul. And because he cannot bring himself to believe in the soul, he deprives the faculties which he proposes to cultivate of the very qualities which make them most worthy of cultivation,--of their interrelation, their interdependence, their organic unity. In other words he devitalises each of them by cutting it off from the life which is common to all of them, and so paralyses its capacity for growing in the very act of taking thought for its growth. He forgets that every faculty which is worth cultivating both draws life from, and contributes life to, the general life of the growing child. He forgets that the child himself--"the living soul"--is growing in and through the growth of each of his opening faculties; and that unless, when a faculty seems to be growing, the life of the child is at once expressing itself in and renewing itself through the process of its growth, its semblance of growth is a pure illusion, the results that are produced being in reality as fraudulent as artificial flowers on a living rose-bush.

But the whole question may be looked at from another point of view. Let us assume, for argument's sake, that the function of education is to train, or foster the growth of, certain faculties, which are mainly though not exclusively mental, and that when those faculties have been duly trained the teacher has done his work. What, then, are the faculties which education is supposed to train? In my attempt to answer this question I will confine myself to the elementary school,--the only school which I can pretend to know well. A glance at the time-table of an ordinary elementary school might suggest to us that there were two chief groups of faculties to be trained--those which perceive and those which express, those which take in and those which give out. When such subjects as History, Geography, or Science are being taught, the child's perceptive faculties are being trained. When such subjects as Composition, Drawing or Singing are being taught, the child's expressive faculties are being trained. So at least one might be disposed to assume.

In what relation do the perceptive faculties stand to the expressive? Is it possible to cultivate either group without regard to the other? It must be admitted that the methods employed in the ordinary elementary school seem to be governed by the assumption that the perceptive and the expressive faculties are two distinct groups which admit of being separately trained. In the ordinary Drawing lesson, for example, the child is trying to express what he does not even pretend to have perceived; whereas in the ordinary History or Science lesson the process is reversed, and the child pretends to perceive what he makes no attempt to express.

The question is, then, Does the system of education which prevails in all Western countries provide for self-expression on the part of the child?

FOOTNOTES:

I mean by the words "original sin" what the plain, unsophisticated, believing Christian means by them. A modern poet, in a moment of impulsive orthodoxy, praises Christianity because it

"taught original sin, The corruption of man's heart ..."

This definition is sufficiently accurate. "Original sin," says the Ninth Article of the Anglican Church, "... is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man ... whereby man is of his own nature inclined to evil ... and therefore, in every person born into the world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." How far the popular interpretation of the doctrine of original sin coincides with the latest theological refinement of the doctrine, I cannot pretend to say. When it finds it convenient to explain things away, theology, like Voltaire's Minor Prophet, "est capable de tout"; and the need for reconciling the doctrine of original sin with the teaching of modern science has in recent years laid a heavy tax on its ingenuity.

A FAMILIAR TYPE OF SCHOOL

In this chapter I shall have in my mind a type of school which is familiar to all who are interested in elementary education. What percentage of the schools of England are of that particular type I cannot pretend to say. In the days of payment by results the percentage was unquestionably very high. The system under which we all worked made that inevitable. The days of payment by results are over, but their consequences are with us still. The pioneer is abroad in the land, but he has had, and still has, formidable difficulties to overcome. The percentage of routine-ridden schools is considerably lower than it used to be, and it is falling from year to year. Of this there can be no doubt. Each teacher in turn who reads this chapter will, I hope, be able to say that the school which is in my mind is not his. But I can assure him that there are thousands of schools in which all or most of the evils on which I am about to comment are still rampant; and I will add, for his consolation, that it would be a miracle if this were not so.

The question of religious education in elementary schools has long been the centre of a perfect whirlpool of controversial talk. The greater part of this talk is, to speak plainly, blatant cant. Every candidate for a seat in the House of Commons thinks it incumbent upon him to say something about religious education, but not one in a hundred of them has ever been present in an elementary school while religious instruction was being given. The Bishops of the Established Church wax eloquent in the House of Lords over the wickedness of a "godless education" and the virtue of "definite dogmatic teaching," but it may be doubted if there is a Bishop in the House who has in recent years sat out a Scripture lesson in a Church of England school. It would be well if all who talked publicly about religious education could be sentenced to devote a month to the personal study of religious instruction as it is ordinarily given in elementary schools. At the end of the month they would be wiser and sadder men, and in future they would probably talk less about religious education and think more.

The Scripture lesson, as it is familiarly called, is supposed to make the children of England religious, in the special sense which each church or sect attaches to that word,--to make them good Catholics, good Churchmen, good Wesleyans, good Bible Christians, good Jews. But as those who are most in earnest about religion, and most sincere in their religious convictions, unite in assuring us that England is relapsing into paganism, it may be doubted if the religious education of the elementary school child--a process which has been going on for half a century or more--has been entirely successful. While the fact that the English parent, who must himself have attended from 1,500 to 2,000 Scripture lessons in His schooldays, is not under any circumstances to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own children, shows that those who control the religious education of the youthful "masses" have but little confidence in the effect of their system on the religious life and faith of the English people.

The gulf between memorised information and real knowledge becomes deep and wide in proportion as the subject matter is one which demands for its effective apprehension either intellectual effort or emotional insight. When both these variables are demanded, the gulf widens and deepens at a ratio which is "geometrical" rather than "arithmetical"; and when a high degree of each is demanded, the separation between knowledge and information is complete.

The Art Master who should try to train the aesthetic sense of his pupils by making them learn by heart a string of propositions in which he had set out the artistic merits of sundry masterpieces of painting and sculpture, would expose himself to well-merited ridicule. So would the teacher who should try to train the scientific sense of his pupils by no other method than that of making them learn scientific formulae by heart. What shall we say, then, of the teacher who tries to train the religious sense of his pupils by supplying them with rations of theological and theologico-historical information? Whatever else we may mean by the word God, we mean what is infinitely great, and therefore beyond the reach of human thought, and we mean what is "most high," and therefore beyond the reach of the heart's desire. It follows that for knowledge of God the maximum of intellectual effort is needed, in conjunction with the maximum of emotional insight; and it follows further that the gulf between knowledge of God and information about God is unimaginably wide and deep,--so wide and so deep that out of our very attempts to span or fathom it the doubt at last arises whether the idea of acquiring information about God may not, after all, be the idlest of dreams.

To one who has convinced himself, as I have, that a right attitude towards the thing known is of the essence of knowledge, and that reverence and devotion--to go no further--are of the essence of a right attitude towards God, the idea of holding a formal examination in religious knowledge seems scarcely less ridiculous than the idea of holding a formal examination in unselfishness or brotherly love. The phrase "to examine in religious knowledge" has no meaning for me. The verb is out of all relation to its indirect object. What the Diocesan Inspector attempts to do cannot possibly be done. The test of religious knowledge is necessarily practical and vital, not formal and mechanical. Even if I were to admit, for argument's sake, that the information with which we cram the elementary school child between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m. had been supernaturally communicated by God to Man, my general position would remain unaffected. For experience has amply proved that a child--or, for the matter of that, a man--may know much theology and even be "mighty in the Scriptures," and yet show by his conduct that his religious sense has not been awakened, and that therefore he has no knowledge of God; just as we have seen that a child may know by heart all arithmetical rules and tables, and yet show, by his helplessness in the face of a simple problem, that his arithmetical sense has not been awakened, and that therefore he has no knowledge of arithmetic.

In most elementary schools religion is taught on an elaborate syllabus which is imposed on the teacher by an external authority, and which therefore tends to destroy his freedom and his interest in the work. It is not his business to take thought for the religious training of his pupils, to consider how the religious instinct may best be awakened in them, how their latent knowledge of God may best be evolved. His business is to prepare them for their yearly examination, to cram them with catechisms, hymns, texts, and collects, and with stories of various kinds,--stories from the folk-lore of Israel, from the history of the Jews, from the Gospel narratives. To appeal to the reasoning powers of his pupils would be foreign to his aim, and foreign, let me say in passing, to the whole tradition of religious teaching in the West. The burden of preparing for an examination, whatever the examination may be, falls mainly on the faculty of memory. This is a rule to which there are very few exceptions. When the examination is one in "religious knowledge," the burden of preparing for it falls wholly on the faculty of memory. To appeal to the reasoning powers of the scholars might conceivably provoke them to ask inconvenient questions, and might even give rise to a spirit of rationalism in the school,--the spirit which "orthodoxy" has always regarded as the very antipole to religious faith.

I do not wish to suggest that the religious instruction given in our elementary schools is always formal and mechanical. There are teachers who can break through the toils of any system, however deadly, and give life to their teaching in defiance of conditions which would paralyse the energies of lesser men. As I write, I recall two teachers of elementary schools, who, in spite of having to prepare their pupils for diocesan inspection, succeeded in quickening their religious instincts into vital activity. The first was a schoolmaster,--a "strong Churchman," and a sincerely religious man. The second was a woman of genius, whose extraordinary sympathy with and insight into the soul of the child, enabled her to give free play to all his expansive instincts, and in and through the evolution of these to foster the growth of his religious sense. I can never feel quite sure that this teacher fully realised how deeply, and yet healthily, religious her children were. If she did not, I can but apply to her what Diderot said to David the painter, when the latter confessed that he had not intended to produce some artistic effect which the former had discovered in one of his pictures: "Quoi! c'est ? votre insu? C'est encore mieux." To make children religious without intending to do so is a profoundly significant achievement, for it means that the fatal distinction between religious and secular education has been "utterly abolished and destroyed."

The schoolmistress always had a horror of formal teaching, and a special horror of cramming young children for formal examinations; and I can only wonder that her downfall was so long delayed. Sooner or later, if she was to remain true to her own first principles, her work was bound to incur the condemnation of the Diocesan Inspector.

Nevertheless, having read hundreds of diocesan reports, and realised how lavish of praise and chary of blame the Diocesan Inspector usually is, I am inclined to suspect that the comparative failure of the children on the examination day was not the sole or even the chief cause of the severe censure which these two schools received. I am inclined to think that in each case the inspector recognised in the exceptional religious vitality of a school which was deficient, from his point of view, in religious knowledge, an implicit challenge to his own preconceived notions, and that, without for a moment intending to be unfair, he responded to this challenge by giving the school a strongly adverse report. Immorality and irreligiousness as such are comparatively venial offences in the eyes of religious orthodoxy. What it cannot tolerate is that men should be moral and religious in any but the "orthodox" ways.

Apart from these two exceptional cases, there are of course hundreds and even thousands of teachers whose personal influence is a partial antidote to the numbing poison which is being distilled but surely, from the daily Scripture lesson. But the net result of giving formal and mechanical instruction on the greatest of all "great matters" is to depress the spiritual vitality of the children of England to a point which threatens the extinction of the spiritual life of the nation. My schoolmaster friend, who, besides being deeply religious , is a man of sound judgment and wide and varied experience, has more than once assured me that religious instruction, as given in the normal Church of England school , is paganising the people of England,--paganising them because it presents religion to them in a form which they instinctively reject, accepting it at first under compulsion, but turning away from it at last with deep-seated weariness and permanent distaste.

The boy who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to himself when he leaves school: "If this is religion, I will have no more of it," is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to be honoured rather than blamed for having realised at last that the chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands.

That England is relapsing into paganism is, as we have seen, the sincere conviction of many earnest Christians. Why this should be so, they cannot understand. In their desire to account for so distressing a phenomenon, they will have recourse to any explanation, however far-fetched and fantastic, rather than acknowledge that it is the Scripture lesson in the elementary school which is paganising the masses. If the Churches could have their way, they would doubtless try to mend matters by doubling the hours that are given to religious instruction, by making the Diocesan Inspector's visit a half-yearly instead of a yearly function, and by cramming the children for it with redoubled energy. In their refusal to reckon with human nature, they are true to the first principles of their religion and their philosophy. But it is possible to buy consistency at too high a price. The laws and tendencies of Nature are what they are; and it is madness, not heroism, to ignore them. To those who refuse to reckon with human nature, the day will surely come when human nature, evolving itself under the stress of its own forces and in obedience to its own laws, will cease to take account of them.

When the hands of the clock point to a quarter to ten, the religious education of the child is over for the day, and his secular instruction has begun. That the religious education of the child should be supposed to end when the Scripture lesson is over, is the last and strongest proof of the fundamental falsity of that conception of religion on which, as on a quicksand, his education, religious and secular, has been based.

After Scripture comes as a rule Arithmetic. During the former lesson the teacher, acting under compulsion, does his best, as we have seen, to deaden the child's spiritual faculties. During the latter, he not infrequently does his best to deaden the child's mental faculties. In each case he is to be pitied rather than blamed. The conditions under which he works, and has long worked, are too strong for him. If we are to understand why secular instruction, as given in our elementary schools, is what it is, we must go back for half a century or so and trace the steps by which the "Education Department" forced elementary education in England into the grooves in which, in many schools, it is still moving, and from which even the most enlightened and enterprising teachers find it difficult to escape.

But it was also a hive of misdirected energy. The State, in prescribing a syllabus which was to be followed, in all the subjects of instruction, by all the schools in the country, without regard to local or personal considerations, was guilty of one capital offence. It did all his thinking for the teacher. It told him in precise detail what he was to do each year in each "Standard," how he was to handle each subject, and how far he was to go in it; what width of ground he was to cover; what amount of knowledge, what degree of accuracy was required for a "pass," In other words it provided him with his ideals, his general conceptions, his more immediate aims, his schemes of work; and if it did not control his methods in all their details, it gave him hints and suggestions with regard to these on which he was not slow to act; for it told him that the work done in each class and each subject would be tested at the end of each year by a careful examination of each individual child; and it was inevitable that in his endeavour to adapt his teaching to the type of question which his experience of the yearly examination led him to expect, he should gradually deliver himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the officials of the Department,--the officials at Whitehall who framed the yearly syllabus, and the officials in the various districts who examined on it.

What the Department did to the teacher, it compelled him to do to the child. The teacher who is the slave of another's will cannot carry out his instructions except by making his pupils the slaves of his own will. The teacher who has been deprived by his superiors of freedom, initiative, and responsibility, cannot carry out his instructions except by depriving his pupils of the same vital qualities. The teacher who, in response to the deadly pressure of a cast-iron system, has become a creature of habit and routine, cannot carry out his instructions except by making his pupils as helpless and as puppet-like as himself.

Of the evils that are inherent in the examination system as such--of its tendency to arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher faculties, to externalise what is inward, to materialise what is spiritual, to involve education in an atmosphere of unreality and self-deception--I have already spoken at some length. In the days of payment by results various circumstances conspired to raise those evil tendencies to the highest imaginable "power." When inspectors ceased to examine they realised what infinite mischief the yearly examination had done. The children, the majority of whom were examined in reading and dictation out of their own reading-books , were drilled in the contents of those books until they knew them almost by heart. In arithmetic they worked abstract sums, in obedience to formal rules, day after day, and month after month; and they were put up to various tricks and dodges which would, it was hoped, enable them to know by what precise rules the various questions on the arithmetic cards were to be answered. They learned a few lines of poetry by heart, and committed all the "meanings and allusions" to memory, with the probable result--so sickening must the process have been--that they hated poetry for the rest of their lives. In geography, history, and grammar they were the victims of unintelligent oral cram, which they were compelled, under pains and penalties, to take in and retain till the examination day was over, their ability to disgorge it on occasion being periodically tested by the teacher. And so with the other subjects. Not a thought was given, except in a small minority of the schools, to the real training of the child, to the fostering of his mental growth. To get him through the yearly examination by hook or by crook was the one concern of the teacher. As profound distrust of the teacher was the basis of the policy of the Department, so profound distrust of the child was the basis of the policy of the teacher. To leave the child to find out anything for himself, to work out anything for himself, to think out anything for himself, would have been regarded as a proof of incapacity, not to say insanity, on the part of the teacher, and would have led to results which, from the "percentage" point of view, would probably have been disastrous.

There were few inspectors who were not duly impressed from 1895 onwards by the gravity of the evils that inspection, as distinguished from mere examination, revealed to them; but it may be doubted if there were many inspectors who realised then, what some among them see clearly now, that the evils which distressed them were significant as symptoms even more than as sources of mischief,--as symptoms of a deep-seated and insidious malady, of the gradual ossification of the spiritual and mental muscles of both the teacher and the child, of the gradual substitution in the elementary school of machinery for life.

"When we in our viciousness grow hard, the wise gods seal our eyes In our own filth; drop our clear judgments: make us Adore our errors";

and the multiform discontent with education in its present stage of development, which is characteristic of our own generation, and which is in some ways so confusing and disconcerting, and so unfavourable to the smooth working of our educational machinery, has the merit of being a healthy and hopeful symptom.

Having for thirty-three years deprived the teachers of almost every vestige of freedom, the Department suddenly reversed its policy and gave them in generous measure the boon which it had so long withheld. Whether it was wise to give so much at so short a notice may be doubted. What is beyond dispute is that it was unwise to expect so great and so unexpected a gift to be used at once to full advantage. A man who had grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad daylight. This is what was done in 1895 to the teachers of England, and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind ever since. For thirty-three years they had been treated as machines, and they were suddenly asked to act as intelligent beings. For thirty-three years they had been practically compelled to do everything for the child, and they were suddenly expected to give him freedom and responsibility,--words which for many of them had well-nigh lost their meaning. To comply with these unreasonable demands was beyond their power. The grooves into which they had been forced were far too deep for them. The routine to which they had become accustomed had far too strong a hold on them. The one change which they could make was to relax their own severe pressure on the child. This they did, perhaps without intending to do it. Indeed, now that there was no external examination to look forward to, the pressure on the child may be said to have automatically relaxed itself. What happened--I will not say in all schools, but in far too many--was that the teaching remained as mechanical and unintelligent as ever, that the teacher continued to distrust the child and to do everything for him, but that the child gradually became slacker and less industrious. Not that his teacher wished him to "slack," but that the stimulus of the yearly examination had been withdrawn at a time when there was nothing to take its place. Exercise is in itself a delightful thing when it is wholesome, natural, and rational; but when it is unwholesome, unnatural, and irrational, it will not be taken in sufficient measure except in response to some strong external stimulus. Under the old examination system an adequate stimulus had been supplied by the combined influence of competition and fear . When the examination system was abolished, that stimulus necessarily lost its point. Had it then been possible for the teacher to make the exercise which his pupils were asked to take wholesome, natural, and rational, a new stimulus--that of interest in their work--would have been applied to the pupils, and they would have exerted themselves as they had never done before. But it was not possible for the average teacher to execute at a moment's notice a complete change of front, and it was unwise of the Department to expect him to do so. Apart from an honourable minority, who had always been in secret revolt against the despotism of the Code, the old teachers were helpless and hopeless. The younger ones had been through the mill themselves, first in the Elementary School, then in the Pupil-Teacher Centre, and then in the Training College ; and when they went back to work under a head teacher who was wedded to the old order of things, they found no difficulty in falling in with his ways and carrying out his wishes. If a young teacher, fresh from an exceptionally enlightened Training College, became an assistant under an old-fashioned head teacher, he soon had the "nonsense knocked out of him," and was compelled to toe the line with the rest of the staff.

But it was not only because the teachers of England had got accustomed to the Land of Bondage, that they shrank from entering the Promised Land. There was, and still is, another and a stronger reason. Wherever the teacher looks, he sees that the examination system, with its demand for machine-made results, controls education; and he feels that it is only by an accident that his school has been exempted from its pressure. The Board of Education still examine for labour certificates, for admission as uncertificated assistants, for the teacher's certificate. They expect head teachers to hold terminal examinations of all the classes in their schools. They allow Local Authorities to examine children in their schools as formally and as stringently as they please, and to hold examinations for County Scholarships, for which children from elementary schools are eligible. Admission to secondary schools of all grades depends on success in passing entrance examinations. So does admission to the various Colleges and Universities. In the schools which prepare little boys for the "Great Public Schools," the whole scheme of education Is dominated by the headmaster's desire to win as many entrance scholarships as possible. In the "Great Public Schools" the scheme of education is similarly dominated by the headmaster's desire to win as many scholarships as possible at the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. In the Universities all the undergraduates without exception are reading for examinations of various kinds,--pass "schools," honour "schools," Civil Service examinations, and the like. Officers in the Army and Navy have never done with examinations; and there is not a single profession which can be entered through any door but that of a public examination. Wherever the teacher looks he sees that examinations are held in high honour, and that the main business of teachers of all grades is to produce results which an outside examiner would accept as satisfactory; and he naturally takes for granted that the production of such results is the true function of the teacher, whether his success in producing them is to be tested by a formal examination or not. The air that he breathes is charged with ideas--ideas about life in general and education in particular--which belong to the order of things that he is supposed to have left behind him, and are fiercely antagonistic to those as yet unrecognised ideas which give the new order of things its meaning, its purpose, and its value.

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