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Title: Procrustes; or, the future of English education
Author: M. Alderton Pink
Release date: May 9, 2024 [eBook #73580]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1927
Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROCRUSTES; OR, THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION ***
PROCRUSTES
OR THE
FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION
PROCRUSTES
_or the_
FUTURE _of_ ENGLISH EDUCATION
BY
M. ALDERTON PINK, M.A.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Published, 1927
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION: THE PROCRUSTEAN BED 1
II. THE SCHOOLS: PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS AND
TENDENCIES 14
III. THE SCHOOLS: FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS 49
IV. THE UNIVERSITIES: THE ACADEMIC MIND OF
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 77
THE FUTURE
OF ENGLISH EDUCATION
PROCRUSTES
I
INTRODUCTION
The Procrustean Bed
_Andrew Undershaft._――“Every blessed foundling nowadays is
snapped up in his infancy by Barnado homes, or School Board
Officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least
ability he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win
scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with second-hand ideas;
drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good
taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but
teaching.”――(_Bernard Shaw_).
During the Debate on the last Education Estimates (1925), Lord Hugh
Cecil made a speech which most enthusiasts of education dismissed
offhand as hopelessly reactionary. In the central part of his argument
he deprecated the doctrine that education is to be equally distributed
to all sorts of people, irrespective of their real capacity. He
maintained that we must train children for the station to which, not by
birth but by natural capacity, they properly belong. He would select
the clever children and spend money liberally in giving them the
fullest possible opportunities for higher study. But to the great body
of children who are incapable of really using any higher teaching he
would give a very low standard of education confined to the three R’s:
the teaching of reading should be made the basis, for reading is the
key to knowledge.
These views are certainly extreme; but, looked at impartially, they
contain so much plain common-sense that it is rather remarkable that
they provoked such bitter opposition. Of course, Lord Hugh Cecil laid
himself open to two obvious charges: first, that he had no special
knowledge of his subject, and, secondly, that his reforms were
presumably intended for the children of masses and not those of his
own class. But his opponents must take account of the statement made
a few weeks later by the headmaster of Rugby, whose opinions cannot
be discounted on these two grounds. Speaking as President of the
Education Section of the British Association, Dr Vaughan disputed the
assumption that the State should develop to the full the intellectual
abilities of all its citizens. He considered that schooling is even
now continued too long for some boys. He would give a thrice-generous
remission after fourteen to those who had shewn no special aptitude for
book-learning or any other form of direct education, on condition that
they were kept within the spell of corporate life. Thus a distinguished
practical schoolmaster corroborates the view of Lord Hugh Cecil that
before providing unlimited educational facilities we should face the
fact that many children are not amenable to the present educational
process; and we ought therefore to consider whether we are promoting
either their efficiency as citizens or their happiness as individuals
by submitting them to a training for which they are not fitted. We
are reminded that education has of recent years become a cult whose
followers allow their zeal to blind them to stubborn realities.
The suggestion that we are on a false track in seeking to multiply
indefinitely the educational institutions of existing type naturally
provokes strong opposition, for it runs counter to one of the most
cherished democratic doctrines of to-day. Ever since the first
extension of the franchise, publicists have been preaching that the
success of democracy depends upon the diffusion of culture among the
masses who have the ultimate control of affairs. And whenever fears
have been expressed that popular government has fallen short of the
original ideal we have been assured that all will be well as soon as
the electorate is properly educated. The public has thus been taught
to believe that it is the duty of the State (so long as the financial
position permits) to increase to the utmost the facilities for training
its citizens.
The need for more education has, in fact, become a political
commonplace. It has been only too easy for statesmen who have little
real interest in the matter to talk vaguely about the educational
ladder from the elementary school to the university, because such talk
provides plausible material for the platform-speaker whose business it
is to rehabilitate a popular system which has not quite come up to
expectations. In a somewhat disillusioned democratic world education
has threatened to become a political nostrum to be unintelligently
applied and to be foolishly regarded as a panacea.
It is, in fact, the latest of a series of expedients prompted by belief
in the perfectibility of mankind. A century or so ago republican
reformers imagined that all the ills the State is heir to would be
cured if King George’s government were replaced by a government of Tom
Paine’s. Later on, the radicals thought that the millennium would be
reached when every adult had a vote. The present generation has been
too readily fooled by the equally delusive hope that the new Utopia
will be created when everybody receives a university education at
public expense.
It is therefore all to the good that our leaders should occasionally
remind us that education is not a magic weapon of unlimited power.
It is time that the public mind was disabused of the notion that a
perfect system of education would of itself prove the salvation of the
State. The fallacy lies, of course, in the assumption that everybody
is capable of being educated. Those who are personally in touch with
schools see only too clearly how unwarrantable such an assumption is.
While they realise that every child, dull or clever, benefits by being
under discipline and by taking part in the social life of a school,
they know also that a certain proportion of children undergo no mental
development commensurate with the time and labour expended on their
behalf. Thus even if we imagine a perfect educational process, carried
out by teachers who are all men and women of light and leading, the
result of that process will be ultimately conditioned by the quality of
the human beings who pass through it. Just as democracy pre-supposes
education, so education pre-supposes children who are educable. It
would seem, therefore, that political and social reformers who are
still looking for a panacea must go to the eugenists.
The public statement of considered views such as those of Lord Hugh
Cecil and the Headmaster of Rugby is one of the signs that we are
at length emerging from the mental attitude which expresses itself
in the crude demand for more and more education to be doled out
indiscriminately. It is indeed time that we got rid of the prevalent
notion that schools are factories (chiefly brain-factories) which can
pass any sort of human material through a standardised course and in
so many years turn out satisfactory finished products. And the friends
of education need not be alarmed at the new trend of opinion. All
reasonable people now admit the theoretical principle that the State
must provide adequate training for all future citizens; and the Labour
Party is flogging a dead horse when it insists so laboriously that
every child, irrespective of social status, should be given the fullest
educational opportunities. Present-day informed discussion has advanced
beyond the consideration of this almost platitudinous statement of
principle to an enquiry of a much more important character. The
question being now asked is not whether every child should be given
education to the age of sixteen or beyond, but what kinds of education
ought to be provided for the many thousands of children of varied types
who will receive advanced training through the increased facilities to
be provided in the future.
The stage of educational development upon which we are now entering
will, in fact, be marked by greater realism in the attitude of both
the authorities and the general public towards the problems to be
solved. We are gradually coming to acknowledge the fairly obvious
truth that not every child is a potential Prime Minister, or even a
capable civil servant, or a manager of a business. When we have shed
the more romantic of the democratic habits of thought we shall even
publicly admit that a certain proportion of mankind (whether the
offspring of dukes or of dustmen) are fitted by nature to be nothing
better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that to give them
more than a limited amount of ordinary schooling is to perform a work
of sentimental supererogation. We shall also realise that the course
of instruction which has now become stereotyped as secondary, however
admirable in itself, is a course for which relatively few children are
really suited. And when we have taken more account than at present of
the profound differences in individual capacities we shall cease to
think of an education as something extraneous to the person educated,
and to regard the school-curriculum as a Procrustean bed, to suit the
dimensions of which the child’s mentality can be extended or truncated
as required.
II
THE SCHOOLS
Present-Day Problems and Tendencies
A survey of present tendencies makes it clear that the next few years
will witness a general overhaul of the educational machine. Among
both the general public and the teaching profession the feeling is
becoming widespread that, quite apart from its obvious incompleteness,
our present system suffers from certain fundamental defects. Damaging
criticisms of the work of the schools are by no means infrequent in
press-articles. The proceedings of the various teachers’ organizations
are eloquent of the need for radical reforms. Business men are
giving public expression to their concern about the inadequacy of
school-training for economic requirements: the Association of British
Chambers of Commerce, for instance, has recently passed a resolution
containing a sweeping condemnation of the methods and aims of the
elementary schools. Already an official enquiry is being conducted into
the relationship between the schools and industry. These signs of an
impending revision of our educational programme derive added importance
from the consideration that for some years to come Chancellors of the
Exchequer will be very unwilling to sanction increases in public
expenditure. Education ministers will therefore have to make out a very
good case for any new developments and will have to satisfy public
opinion that they are not merely increasing material and personnel but
are also promoting increased efficiency.
The inevitable enquiry into the working of our present system will
necessarily concern itself mainly with post-primary training since it
is in this direction that development is most urgently needed. It is
almost universally admitted that the time is overdue for a largely
increased provision of further education of children beyond the age of
fourteen; for though the secondary schools, owing to faulty methods
of admission, at present contain many pupils who are unfit for the
training they receive, there are also outside these schools numbers of
children who reach the required standard of ability but who are denied
entry simply because there is no room for them.
Public educational policy during the last quarter of a century has
provided for higher education mainly by the foundation of secondary
schools of a single type, controlled by the local authorities;
and those who demand more secondary education generally mean more
schools of this kind. The secondary schools are filled partly by
scholarship-holders who represent the cream of the elementary schools,
and partly by fee-payers who, as they do not usually have to pass a
stringent entrance-examination, may represent all grades of ability.
Thus only a proportion (now up to 40 per cent.) of the pupils are
specially selected; the remainder are doing more advanced work simply
because their parents wish it and can pay part of the cost.
When the activities of these schools come under a critical review,
certain facts will be difficult to explain away. In the first place,
it will be noticed that, although the pupils are intended to remain
at school until the age of sixteen at least, a relatively large
proportion leave before that age. According to the “London Statistics”
for 1923–24, there were present at the end of 1923 in the aided and
maintained secondary schools of London, 9,118 pupils who were twelve
or thirteen years of age, 8,700 who were fourteen or fifteen, 3,280
who were sixteen or seventeen, and 342 who were eighteen or over. In
other words, only about one-third remained until the age of sixteen or
more, and this in spite of the fact that parents give undertakings to
keep their children at school until sixteen. Again, the curriculum of
these schools is largely determined by the First School Examination
(equivalent to University Matriculation), and every pupil who remains
at school sufficiently long should normally take this examination. Now
the report of the Board of Education for 1923–24 shows that in each
of the last five years an average of 78,000 children have entered
the grant-earning secondary schools of England and the highest number
that has taken the First School Examination in any one year is roughly
35,000, of whom about a third failed. That is to say, about two-thirds
of the pupils either fail to complete the school course or fail to
reach the standard of intellectual attainment necessary to pass an
external test.
When all allowance has been made for the fact that a certain number
of pupils are withdrawn at an early age purely on account of economic
circumstances, we have still to face the failure of the schools to
retain the pupils and to enable them to pass what is presumably a fair
test of the kind of training given. The conclusion can scarcely be
avoided that there are some radical defects in the aims and methods of
the schools.
It is often urged that the secondary schools are not at present getting
the best material, that owing to economic circumstances or to the
insufficient provision of secondary school accommodation many children
who are fit to profit by higher instruction are at present excluded in
favour of fee-payers who are not fit. But this is merely begging the
question. We are still confronted with the problem of what we are to
do with those pupils who do not take kindly to the secondary school
curriculum but who, by their very presence in secondary schools, show
their readiness to undergo some form of higher instruction. And what
are we to do with the many children in the primary schools who, under
a scheme of more extended financial assistance, might also remain at
school until sixteen or later, and would also be square pegs in round
holes in the ordinary secondary school?
We are forced, therefore, to ask whether the present secondary school
curriculum is adapted to the needs of the varied types of pupils who
enter or are likely to enter the schools. What are the aims? At present
the secondary school’s main function is to give sufficient training in
the humanities, in mathematics and science, to enable pupils to pass
the entrance examination of a university. (We may for the purpose of
the present argument disregard the social activities of the school.)
In other words, its business is to produce scholars of the intellectual
type fitted for university training. It is true that art, handicraft,
domestic science, and physical exercises appear in the curriculum but
they occupy more or less subordinate places. The secondary school
course, on its academic side, is directed to one main end, and any
pupil who enters such a school is regarded, irrespective of his natural
aptitudes, as a prospective candidate for matriculation. Teachers
may demur to the suggestion that their horizon is dominated by an
examination: they may talk hopefully about a test which their pupils
can take “in their stride.” But the fact remains that the work of the
upper part of the school is determined by requirements of an external
body. There is a conventional list of “subjects” which the pupil must
study, and if his individuality does not fit in with this scheme so
much the worse for him.
The secondary schools are therefore designed, in so far as they are
designed for any specific purpose, as a training-ground for university
students. But only three per cent. of the pupils ever reach the
universities. And the statistics already given indicate that a large
proportion show themselves to be unfitted for university training.
Teachers in secondary schools do not, of course, need these statistics
to bring home to them the fact that a considerable proportion of the
pupils with whom they have to deal are misfits. They realise that there
are other sorts of capacity besides those which enable pupils to pass
the usual examinations. They constantly see in their pupils special
interests and aptitudes which find little or no outlet in the ordinary
academic routine. They so often have to shake hands with old boys or
old girls who were duffers at ordinary school subjects, but who have
since achieved success in business or industry that it has become a
commonplace with them that failure at school does not necessarily
mean failure in life. But this commonplace surely implies the tragic
fact that school has not discovered what the “duffer” can do, but has
consistently tried to make him do things for which he has no aptitude.
The fact is that the ordinary secondary school is
attempting――unsuccessfully, of course――to give the same treatment to
pupils of various types who, owing to lack of sufficiently varied
provision for higher education, now find themselves herded together.
In any such school there is a certain number of pupils of good general
ability who are capable of proceeding with credit to advanced work
in the humanities or in science. These are the pupils for whom the
secondary course is really intended. At the other extreme there is
a certain number who are simply not profiting by academic training.
Between these extremes there are, no doubt, a few who have a natural
bent towards one of the arts; there are a good many of very pedestrian
abilities who can by industry just keep abreast of their studies,
though they are not attracted by academic ideals; and there are still
others who are in difficulties because they are interested not in
abstract ideas but in things. Pupils of these three classes are all,
to a greater or less degree, misfits in the ordinary secondary school.
The few intending to follow the arts and lacking wide intellectual
interests should be devoting more time than is generally available
to acquiring the technique of their art. The many of a little less
than average capacity who have no real enthusiasm for things of the
mind gain something, no doubt, from the course they pursue, but they
would gain more from a practical curriculum containing fewer subjects
and having a more direct bearing on their probable future careers.
The remaining class, which includes those who think with their hands,
is the one for which we now most conspicuously fail to make adequate
provision. In this category is to be found the boy who is bored by the
theory of electricity while being thoroughly interested in making a
piece of electrical apparatus, and who will not willingly learn any
more of the theory than is necessary to make the apparatus work. When
we consider that a large proportion of people in the world have no
bookish interests and are not attracted by pure science and yet are
capable of bringing sound intelligence to bear on practical problems
concerning concrete things, it is strange that educationists have done
so little to meet their needs.
Another question arises. What is to be the occupation of the pupils
leaving the secondary schools? Those who have remained at these schools
until sixteen or more acquire a certain social tone which causes
them to despise manual toil, and so they aim at the professions, the
Civil Service, posts in banks and stores, and, failing all else,
the perennially respectable junior clerkship in any kind of office.
Clearly, boys who have at seventeen or eighteen successfully completed
a course of literary and scientific training should be fitted for
posts of responsibility in business or the professions. But the
professions are already overcrowded, and positions are difficult
to obtain. We are taking children from the homes of artisans, small
tradespeople, and even unskilled workers, and giving them an education
which makes them unwilling to take up the same occupation as their
parents follow, but which leads to no certainty of better employment
in the end. We are thus rapidly being brought face to face with the
difficulty which confronted Germany before the War. The advantages
attaching to scholastic attainment were such that every parent who
could possibly do so gave his child a higher education so that he might
obtain the coveted passport to the professions. The result was that
the competition for the higher professional and official posts became
intolerably keen, and the universities were turning out numbers of
fully qualified men for whom they could find no suitable employment.
There would be less theoretical objection to the process of raising the
pupils out of the economic class of their families into another class,
if they were all of high capacity and suitable for administrative
posts. But, actually, many of those who at present receive higher
education are by no means fitted by native ability for important
administrative work. In fact, the investigations of the psychologists
go to show that out of the whole child population only a small
proportion have the grade of intelligence needed for the highest posts.
Dr Cyril Burt has carried out a survey of London school children,
by means of intelligence-tests, to provide evidence for use in
vocational guidance. He finds that the few children of the type who win
scholarships to secondary schools and thence to the universities, and
who are fitted to seek higher professional and Civil Service posts form
about one per thousand of the child population. About two per cent.
come into the second grade, which includes those who win scholarships
to the secondary school but not to the university, and who are suitable
for lower professional posts: they may become, for instance, elementary
teachers, clerks holding responsible posts, or successful tradespeople.
The third grade is composed of about ten per cent. of the children,
and includes those who are suited to become, say, clerks doing work
of an intelligent but moderately routine character, or manual workers
engaged in highly skilled work. Below this comes a body of children
of moderate ability forming about four-fifths of the whole. These may
enter many of the ordinary commercial posts,――they may become small
tradespeople, or shop-assistants: skilled manual-workers also belong
to this group. The remaining children have an intelligence which fits
them only for unskilled work. This classification is, admittedly, only
tentative; but if it has any validity, it is clear that the percentage
of children really fitted for professional work is relatively very
low, and account must be taken of this fact in framing secondary
courses.
Realising the difficulty of finding suitable employment for their
pupils, and sensitive about the accusation that they aim at producing
“black-coated workers” only, the Headmasters have considered the
possibility of finding openings in industry. In 1924 the Council of the
Headmasters’ Association sent a deputation to the Federation of British
Industries on the matter. The deputation was told quite plainly that
manufacturers, and particularly engineers, made a regular practice of
taking boys at fourteen: they had very little opportunity to offer to
the boy who remained at school long enough to take the First School
Examination, and still less to the boy who passed a Higher School
Examination. There is little prospect that manufacturers will be able
to alter their practice in this respect. Obviously, therefore, with our
present lack of co-ordination between our educational and industrial
systems, a boy deprives himself of many chances of employment by
staying at school beyond fourteen.
There can be little doubt that this particular aspect of the
educational problem will attract much official attention in the
near future. There is even a chance that the issue may not be
unduly obscured by political controversy, for leading politicians
of both sides agree in their diagnosis. The President of the Board
of Education, Lord Eustace Percy, has recently told a meeting that
the desire of the working man to-day is to use the school to get his
son into some black-coated job and to keep him away from skilled
manual labour. This he regarded as a most extraordinary mistake. We
should never get any real success until we re-created the pride of
skilled manual work. In another speech he said that the danger of
the secondary school system was that, when we should be using these
schools for training leaders for all the professions and industries
and businesses, we are in fact using them to train the subordinates
in a few “respectable” industries. Such remarks might pass with many
people for an expression of reactionary Toryism, if their attention
were not called to the fact that Mr. Philip Snowden has recently
written to the same effect in a Sunday newspaper――“A scholastic
education is apt to make a youth despise useful mechanical work. The
products of our secondary schools and universities are crowding the
black-coated professions and occupations. Education is a failure unless
it inculcates the idea that all useful work is honourable, and that
the working engineer, or carpenter, or weaver is a more useful member
of society than a ‘commission agent’. Society needs men and women with
the highest scholastic attainments. But the number of such will always
be small. The main part of the education problem is to fit the average
person for the work of the average person.” The practical urgency of
these views is indicated by the fact that the President of the Board
of Education and the Minister of Labour have now jointly appointed a
committee to inquire into the public system of education in relation to
the requirements of trade and industry.
Idealists of a certain sort, however, will brush aside the sordid
controversy about commercial values and will put up a hard fight for
the principle of a Liberal Education,――an All-round Training that will
provide an Outfit for Life. They will continue to maintain that the
traditional modicum of the classics, mathematics, science, and the
modern tongues, provides the best training for a lad, whether he is to
become a clerk, an engineer, a company-promoter, or a pork-butcher.
They will recoil in horror from the mere mention of “vocational
training.”
But this “liberal education” theory involves several
fallacies,――fallacies which are now being perceived in many quarters,
and which will be completely exposed in the next few years. In the
first place, an education completely divorced from the requirements
of a vocation is a luxury appropriate only to a leisured class, or a
class free from economic pressure: it is, in fact, a legacy from the
independent families of the upper classes or the well-to-do middle
classes who sent their children to the public schools and the old
grammar schools, knowing that the question of bread and butter was
not an urgent one. Now, in the changed conditions of the twentieth
century, we still complacently take boys from working-class homes,
give them a “liberal” education until they are sixteen or eighteen,
and then turn many of them adrift to become clerks or grocers’
assistants, laying the flattering unction to our soul, as we say
farewell, that they will add their figures or cut their rashers all
the better for having tasted the sweets of poetry or wrestled with the
problems of geometry. Of course, some of the boys concerned may find
their true niche in clerking or in the grocery line; in which case
their intellectual ability is such that training in the more abstruse
mathematical or linguistic processes has been wasted on them. But if we
give a boy of ability in any direction a prolonged education and then
fail to find him a position in life which gives scope for his ability,
we are surely conferring on him a very doubtful blessing. The major
portion of his time after his leaving school will be spent in earning
a livelihood; and the way in which he spends that time will have an
enormous effect on his happiness. The frustrated and disgruntled man of
culture is socially objectionable and politically dangerous. The dictum
that education should teach a man how to use his leisure is one of
those half-truths whose easy acceptance is so dangerous; in the future
we shall have to learn the complementary half-truth that education must
fit the individual for his life’s work.
The exponents of the “liberal education” theory are usually those who
are most urgent in pleading that the aim of the school should be the
formation of character. They maintain that the pupil’s personality can
be developed and modified by the influences brought to bear on him in
the school environment. Holding such views, they cannot ignore the
need for providing a suitable career for the pupil after he leaves
school. The process of forming his character does not cease as soon as
he enters business; on the contrary, the nature of his occupation――its
suitability or unsuitability to his temperament――will profoundly
influence him for good or for evil. The school cannot, therefore,
ignore the duty imposed on it of guiding its pupils as far as possible
into the vocations for which they are naturally fitted.
The theoretical considerations just mentioned are reinforced by others
of the most practical importance. For Great Britain, and indeed for
the whole of Europe, the economic struggle during the next few years
will be most intense. Conditions will be such that this country, in
particular, will have to make the most of its human as well as its
material resources. It will not be able to afford the wastage of human
ability either through failure to find out and cultivate the best
brains or through neglect to fit the man to the job. It will be forced
to adopt a system of training which will provide an education at once
liberal and adapted to economic needs. And it will be useless for the
more narrow idealist to bewail the intrusion of economics into the
domain of education. After all, literature, the arts, and the study of
pure science flourish only so long as economic conditions permit. Just
as the man who is constantly toiling for bread is debarred from purely
cultural pursuits, so the nation whose economic position is unsound can
spare its children neither the money nor the time for any education
beyond the most elementary.
Nor is there any real antagonism between the claims of culture and
those of economics. The State which seeks economic health must demand
that each citizen shall do his best work. He will do his best work in
the vocation for which he has a natural aptitude. The business of the
school is to discover and foster natural aptitudes. The business of the
State as an economic entity is to contrive by all possible means to
guide its children into suitable vocations. In a state with a proper
economic organisation there must, therefore, of necessity be a vital
connection between a child’s school-training and his future career.
But this statement of the essential relationship between aptitudes,
education, and vocation does not mean that schools should become merely
training-establishments to act as feeders to particular professions
or industries: it does not mean that the schoolmaster or a government
official should examine every pupil at the age of twelve or fourteen
and decide that he must be an engineer or a draper’s assistant and
proceed to train him for that purpose and draft him into a post in
due course. It does mean, however, that the boy, for instance, who
wants to use his hands, and may eventually become an engineer, should
not be given a bookish education which takes little or no account of
his abilities and interests; it does mean that such a boy should pass
through a course of instruction which will at once give scope for his
native powers and through them develop his whole mentality; it does
mean, also, that the school and the State should not dismiss that boy
at a given age and allow him to drift into a clerkship merely because
of some accidental financial considerations or because conditions of
entrance to the engineering trade clash with academic arrangements. In
short, it means that the school-system should be adapted to the boy and
not the boy to the system, and, further, that education authorities
should regard it as part of their function to guide into proper
channels the special abilities which the teachers have reared.
Presented in this way, the case for some sort of correlation between
education and vocation should convince even those obstinate opponents
of “vocational training” who are apt to see in such a proposal nothing
but a device of the devil (in the guise of the Federation of British
Industries) for the more efficient production of “wage-slaves.” As
ever increasing numbers of boys and girls pass into places of higher
education, teachers are realising more and more the need for reform on
the lines indicated. They see the waste of effort involved in passing
boys and girls wholesale through a system which takes little account
of individual differences or even of broad differences of type. They
see that for many children a “liberal education” is not necessarily one
which follows the traditional academic curriculum, but rather one which
suits itself to individual needs and which seeks to develop the pupil’s
powers by setting him to do what he can do, instead of forcing him to
try to do what he can never do with success.
III
THE SCHOOLS
Future Developments
From the considerations adduced and the trend of opinion indicated in
the previous chapter, we are able to give a reasonable forecast of
practical developments in the next few years. In general terms we may
say that our educational system will be made purposive where it is
now haphazard, and that it will be brought into definite connection
with the economic life of the country. Education will be regarded as
a preparation for livelihood as well as for life,――as a training
for working citizens rather than for a leisured class. Further, the
waste of human effort will be avoided as far as possible by constantly
observing the individual child and guiding him along lines which offer
him the best chance of intellectual progress, and which give the best
opportunities for a career in life. This, of course, implies that the
types of instruction available will be much more numerous and varied
than they are at present. No pupil whose schooling is provided wholly
or partly at public expense will be allowed to proceed to courses for
which, in the opinion of the competent authority, he is unfitted,
though no obstacles will be placed in the way of a transfer from
one course to another if circumstances warrant it. The individual
capacity of the pupil will be made the starting-point for the teacher:
the heresy which gives our present system the character of a Chicago
canned-meat factory will be abandoned. As a corollary we shall give
less exclusive reverence to purely bookish attainments and we shall
realise that training in craftsmanship may be as productive to one
individual, and hence to the State, as training in the differential
calculus is to another.
We may assume that in the not too remote future every child of the
required mental capacity will receive education to the age of sixteen
at least. Of course, financial stringency will delay progress for
some years. When the necessary school-accommodation is available
every pupil in an institution under public control will be tested
at a suitable age, probably at eleven plus. The results of the
carefully devised examination will be collated with the report of
his teachers and it will be decided whether he is fit to be given
further instruction of a secondary character, and, if so, what form of
training will suit his special needs. Methods of examination will be
so far improved that few serious mistakes will be made in assessing
the capacity of pupils. In any case, this regular test will not be
regarded as final and irrevocable; the boy or girl who at a later age
gives evidence of the need for a revised judgment will receive special
treatment.
Pupils of the required standard will be drafted into the secondary
schools at eleven plus. Those who remain in the primary schools until
fourteen will be of roughly two grades; those whose ability fits them
for work of some skill in trades or in the humbler ranks of business,
and those of very low intelligence who are naturally destined for
unskilled occupations. The former will pass from the elementary schools
into some form of vocational training; the latter will go straight into
industry and will receive no further teaching other than what may be
given in some kind of continuation class.
Thus the principle of excluding all children of low mentality from
secondary education in institutions under public control will be
definitely accepted. This step will not be taken, of course, without
much opposition. Political irrelevancies will come into play as soon
as it is suggested. The cry will go up that, whereas the rich child,
no matter what his capacity, will continue to be given a public school
education, the poor child of the same mental capacity will be deprived
of such an indulgence. Of course, the children of the two classes
will not receive equal treatment. But so long as the State allows the
existence of schools which it does not control, so long as it allows
parents to contract out of the educational system, it will not be able
to prevent wealthy people from spending their money on their brainless
children, if they choose to do so. Clearly, however, if the State
provides a costly system of free, or largely free, education, it will
have the right to exercise its power of excluding from some or all of
the benefits of that system, children (of whatever social position)
who will not profit by it. Moreover, by requiring the same standard of
ability from both scholarship-holders and fee-payers the authorities
will remove the present iniquity by which, owing to insufficient free
places, able children of poor parents are debarred from secondary
schools while incompetent children of parents who can afford to pay a
fraction of the cost secure admission.
Another objection likely to be put forward is that geniuses who blossom
late will be lost to the world, if such drastic methods of exclusion
are adopted. It is urged that the potentiality of a boy or girl cannot
always be finally determined at the age of fourteen. This may be true;
but it is also true that in at least ninety-nine per cent. of cases a
competent teacher who has observed a child for some years can gauge
his capacity sufficiently accurately at that age; and, in any case,
the child has by that time been given the tools of learning in the
ability to read and write. Moreover, your genius frequently does not
take kindly to academic routine, and not seldom he looks with amused
contempt at the efforts of the mediocre pedagogue to keep him in the
recognised paths of learning. The biographers have been at pains to
establish the fact that Shakespeare attended the Grammar School at
Stratford. But we cannot doubt that “Hamlet” would have been written
even if Shakespeare had never suffered the ferule and the Latin grammar
of the Stratford dominie. The knowledge of people and places which
Dickens picked up while running the streets was of more service to him
as a novelist than anything he might have learned under the eye of a
master who should have tried, with doubtful success, to instil into him
a proper respect for history and a right appreciation of poetry. In
fact, it may be reasonably doubted whether any child of latent genius,
or even talent, will be blighted for ever through failure to receive
the blessings of the academic course.
To come to details of the various types of schools in the future. With
regard to secondary education, we may anticipate that to meet varied
needs three different courses will be provided. A curriculum of roughly
the same type as the present will be retained for those boys and girls
of the highest grades of intelligence; that is to say, those who have
the ability to proceed to university studies and who, in favourable
circumstances, intend to do so. This curriculum will, however, be
relieved of some of the subjects which at present overcrowd it through
the attempt to provide an “omnibus” course by grafting the various
“modern” studies on the old classical and mathematical courses.
Side by side with instruction of this type there will be at least two
other types provided for pupils who can profit by full-time higher
training until the age of sixteen or beyond. One course will be of a
definitely practical character designed for the needs of those who are
fitted to occupy leading positions in industry. Handwork will form a
prominent feature, and a broad technical training will be given on
cultural lines. The work will not be directly vocational in intention,
nor will book-learning of the usual kind be entirely neglected: the
object will be to provide a training of the greatest educational value
for students of a certain type. The syllabus will be determined
to some extent by the nature of local industries. In the big towns
it will be a fairly simple matter to relate the technical teaching
to the dominant manufacturing processes carried on in the area. In
country districts it will be the business of these courses to foster
that interest in rural industries which is at present so disastrously
lacking. Already a certain number of secondary schools in the country
are making a definite attempt to organise their teaching on lines
intended to be of the greatest value to those pupils who intend to
take up occupations connected with agriculture or horticulture. The
fact that more has not been done in this direction is explained in a
significant sentence in a pamphlet issued by the Board of Education
on the subject.――“Hitherto the majority of parents have unfortunately
been inclined to regard entry into commerce or into some clerical
occupation as the only fitting sequel to a secondary school training,
and there has been, therefore, little or no demand on their part that
the education given to their children in the secondary school should be
related to rural life and needs.” As a preliminary to the successful
establishment of secondary schools with a technical bias it will thus
be necessary to convince parents that suitable careers exist for their
children in industry. Such schools must be recognised as the normal
stepping-stones to the higher industrial positions, either directly or
by way of the Technical or Agricultural College of university rank.
A third course will be designed for pupils who are likely to benefit
from continued education after fourteen, but who are not suited to
the purely academic studies and have no marked practical bent: they
are probably destined for the fairly skilled commercial posts. The
work in this course will be largely of a concrete character and
will be definitely connected with economic life; but again it will
not be directly vocational. The syllabus will consist in the main
of what are known as the “ordinary school subjects”; but the pupils
will concentrate on fewer subjects than is customary at present, and
emphasis will be laid on those aspects which are most within the grasp
of boys and girls who lack any great interest in ideas as such.
Pupils will be drafted into one or other of the various courses not
primarily because they intend to enter this or that profession or
business (though this might be given due consideration at the wish of
the parent), but because their previous school-history will have shown
that their all-round development can be best assured in one of these
courses rather than in the others.
Will pupils following the various curricula remain side by side in the
same school, or will they be separated into different institutions? It
is possible that in London and the larger towns separate technical
and commercial schools of secondary grade will be created to work
side by side with the secondary schools of the present type. The
anomalous Central Schools of to-day can scarcely remain a permanent
feature of our system: they might well be converted into schools of
fully secondary character with either a commercial or a technical
bias. In the smaller areas which can support only a single institution
for higher training the varied courses will be pursued in the same
building. Such an arrangement will, no doubt, present difficulties
in organisation, but it will have a considerable advantage in the
fact that free transfer of pupils from one course to another will be
possible.
What of the pupils who are judged unfit for education of a secondary
type? Those who are likely to profit by some sort of further teaching
will not be dismissed at the age of fourteen to the workshop or the
office; but it will be recognised that their interests can be best
served by giving them training of a frankly vocational character. To
meet the needs of those who propose to enter trades there will be
organised large numbers of trade schools in conjunction with local
industries. Here, for two years or more, students will be prepared for
a definite occupation, and will remain under cultural and disciplinary
influences. Junior Technical Schools of this nature have already
been firmly established during the last thirty years, and in London
trade-classes exist for silversmithing, book-production, furnishing,
dressmaking, tailoring, engineering, and so on. At present, however,
half the total number of Junior Technical School places provided by
the county boroughs throughout the country are in London: we may look
forward to a wide extension of technical school facilities in the other
industrial areas during the next few years.
The effective organisation of trade-schools will entail a solution
of the problem of apprenticeship. The apprenticeship-system has long
been obsolete: it is condemned educationally because it involves the
transference of the pupil from the school to the workshop at too early
an age, and it is ineffective industrially because under modern
factory-conditions there is no certainty that the apprentice will
even receive proper technical training. The system is already dead in
many trades, and in others it is kept alive only to enable the trade
unions to limit the number of entrants into the industry. It cannot be
long, however, before common needs force education and industry into
some sort of concordat. The industrial firms need skilled workers;
the educationists want those skilled workers to be trained in such
a way that they may derive educational benefit from their technical
pursuits. To meet the difficulty there are two obvious possibilities.
The whole apprentice-system might be abolished, and the training of
skilled workers might be carried out entirely in technical schools
organised on the lines of the _écoles professionelles_ of France, which
resemble factories in their equipment and which turn out fully-trained
workers after a three years’ course. If, on the other hand, the rule
of apprenticeship is retained, it should be possible to substitute
education in Junior Technical Schools for the first two years of
apprenticeship. Steps of this kind have already been taken in London,
where it is usual for young workers to have their apprenticeship
shortened by a period corresponding to their training in a trade
school. But, of course, further advances in this direction can be taken
only with the co-operation of the trade unions concerned. This may
cause difficulty. Somewhat strangely, the educational spokesmen of
the trade unions seem so much concerned about securing a university
education for the sons of the “workers” that they have little interest
in the matter of craft-instruction. But perhaps this attitude of the
trade union leaders is no more strange than that of the employers
who talk loudly of the need for increased efficiency if British
manufacturers are to compete in the markets of the world, and yet do
little or nothing to ensure that their young workers shall be given
adequate training for the work they are to perform.
But we have still to consider the future of boys and girls of low
mentality who, on leaving the primary school, will normally enter
unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, and who are not likely to profit
by full-time vocational training. It is these who present the most
difficult problem to the educationist. It is hard to find the right
way of approach to such children even under school-conditions; it is
far harder to exert effective teaching-influence over them when they
have been freed from disciplinary restraints. Yet it is imperative for
the health of the community that young workers of this type should
not be allowed to pass entirely out of educational control as soon as
they leave the elementary school. For them, it would seem, the aid of
Mr. Fisher’s Act will once more have to be invoked, and compulsory
Continuation Schools will be established. At these classes the object
will be not so much to teach the students any specific subjects as
to keep them under disciplinary influences and to develop in them
the sense of personal and civic responsibility. The short experience
gained from the few continuation schools established immediately
after 1918 made it clear that giving much purely cultural teaching to
workers of low type in unskilled jobs, however desirable, is actually
impracticable. Nor is it generally possible to give much direct
vocational instruction. Physical training and handwork must be made
important parts of the courses, and good work can be done through
the formation of students’ clubs. In fact, those who have charge of
Continuation classes will have to regard themselves less as teachers
than as welfare-workers.
The scheme of development which has been mapped out clearly demands the
creation of a link between education and industry such as does not at
present exist. Boys and girls who, through lack of initiative or of any
special predilection, have not found for themselves suitable employment
by the time they are due to leave school will not be allowed to drift
into the first blind-alley occupation that presents itself. The
education authorities will have made full surveys of local industrial
and business requirements and will thus be able to indicate suitable
openings. Moreover, account will be taken of the applicant’s special
abilities in recommending any particular post to him. The question
of vocational guidance has for some years attracted a good deal of
attention in America, and a considerable amount of work has been done
in this direction. In this country, many local educational authorities
(in particular, the London boroughs) are attempting to carry out
schemes of juvenile vocational guidance through the After-Care
Committees and the Juvenile Advisory Committee of the Employment
Bureaux. In London, too, the Headmasters of the Secondary Schools have
formed an Employment Committee which puts pupils in touch with firms
who have vacancies.
More important in this connection is the investigation recently
carried out by the Industrial Fatigue Research Board in conjunction
with the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Under the
direction of Dr Cyril Burt a careful study was made of all the children
(to the number of a hundred) due to leave three selected London schools
within a period of twelve months. All data obtainable from the schools
were collected, the children were subjected to mental tests, the homes
were visited, and each child was personally interviewed. In the light
of the evidence thus obtained specific vocational recommendations
were made. After an interval of two years the investigators again
interviewed the children in their homes in order to test the results
of the recommendations. It appeared that the children who had entered
the industries suggested to them had proved more efficient than
their fellows, and over 80 per cent. of them declared that they were
satisfied with their position and prospects. On the other hand, of
those who obtained employment different from the kind recommended, less
than 40 per cent. were satisfied. The value of this experiment is, of
course, limited by the smallness of its scale, but the results are
certainly encouraging. One point that has been made clear is the need
for full information as to the requirements of the various trades.
Such efforts at linking the schools with the office and the workshop
are at present tentative and sporadic; but they are significant of
future developments,――developments which will be hastened by the
growing determination during these years of trade depression to
prevent the waste and deterioration of our youths, so far as it can be
prevented by better organisation. There can be little doubt that within
the next few years we shall be forced, if not by practical wisdom, at
least by economic necessity, into creating a universal scheme which
shall relieve the employers of the need for haphazard advertisement in
recruiting their junior staffs, and which shall ensure that everything
possible is done to facilitate the entry of a youth into that
particular job in which he can do work of most value to himself and to
the community.
IV
THE UNIVERSITIES
The Academic Mind of To-Day and To-Morrow.
“’Tis not a melancholy _utinam_ of my own, but the desires of
better heads, that there were a general synod――not to unite the
incompatible difference of religion, but,――for the benefit of
learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first, in a few and solid
authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions
of rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker
judgements of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery
of typographers.”――_Sir Thomas Browne._
It will be observed that our survey of probable future developments
in the lower branches of education is hopeful. These are good reasons
for optimism: the trend of opinion which will mould the schools of
the future is already clearly in evidence; our obvious defects to-day
are defects of organisation, and these can be remedied by any capable
administrator; the seeds of the growths we have foreseen have already
been planted; and, finally, economic exigencies will provide the
drive necessary to overcome the dilatoriness inseparable from public
activity. But we must confess that we are much concerned about the
universities. There are tendencies in university life to-day that give
ample cause for misgiving,――the more so because they spring rather from
vital weakness reflecting the intellectual vices of our age than from
defective methods and organisation.
Not that our universities do not show very obvious defects in
method and organisation. (We are considering now especially the new
universities. Just as in our survey of secondary education we made no
reference to the public schools, which have their own tradition, and
which will remain outside a state-system, so we may now leave out of
account Oxford and Cambridge, which have their own teaching-methods
and which again are not likely to be amenable to state-interference.
Moreover, the inevitable extension of higher education will be seen
in the creation of more universities of the new type, as well as in
the enlargement of those already in existence, and thus Oxford and
Cambridge are likely to turn out an ever-diminishing proportion of
the total number of graduates in this country). Criticism may well be
levelled at the insufficient importance attached to social life in the
modern universities. It is much too easy for young men and women to
attend courses of lectures for three years or so and amass a certain
quantity of information on given subjects without coming in contact
with any intellectual influences outside the class room. This danger
is, of course, inevitable when the students are not resident in a
college. A remedy is being provided to some extent by the erection of
hostels, and much more may be done in this direction; but there is
still a difficulty arising from the fairly large proportion of students
who live at home in the university-town. As part of the same problem
must be mentioned the insufficient attention given to games. This is
due not merely to the frequent absence of adequate playing-fields,
which might be remedied, but to the fact that college lectures
take place during the whole of the day and are so arranged that no
considerable body of students is free for the whole of more than one
afternoon a week. In other words, college work is organised solely with
a view to academic requirements.
And then there is the teaching by means of lectures. As a method
this was rendered obsolete as soon as books were rapidly and cheaply
printed, and yet, whereas Oxford and Cambridge have long pursued a
more excellent way, the new universities have strangely revived and
perpetuated the mediaeval practice. A century-and-a-half ago Dr Johnson
was emphatic about the futility of lectures. (“People have nowadays
got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures.
Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the
books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be
best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You
may teach chymistry by lectures. You might teach making of shoes by
lectures!”). It is delightful to imagine his remarks if he could walk
through a modern college and see dozens of lecturers each droning
from his rostrum,――in these days when library shelves and publishers’
store-rooms are stuffed with reliable text-books on every conceivable
subject. Surely no system of teaching can have ever been devised with
so little regard for ordinary efficiency. Batches of students are set
to take imperfect notes of a probably imperfectly delivered lecture by
a man who has either taken his material from books that they ought to
read themselves, or is dictating what is really an original text-book,
which obviously, in the interests of economy in time and labour, to say
nothing of accuracy, ought to be printed. It is to be feared that under
present arrangements a college lecturer fulfils the whole of the duties
officially required of him if he thus turns himself into a gramophone
for so many hours per week. If university-teaching meant no more than
this, and if the lecture were its only channel, we should feel bound
to urge that the present wasteful duplication of lectures in various
university-centres should be avoided by enlisting the aid of wireless,
and that standard lectures should be broadcast to students throughout
the kingdom in their own homes.
The educational efficacy of the universities of this and other
countries is being weakened, however, by a more insidious disease,――a
disease of which the defective teaching-methods and the excessive
absorption in purely academic pursuits are merely outward symptoms.
The intellectual and moral malady of this present age has infected
our seats of learning so that they appear to be abandoning the ideal
of a liberal education and to be substituting the narrow aim of the
acquisition of specialised knowledge. The modern university must be a
centre of research: the danger is that it will neglect to be also a
centre of education.
Research is the intellectual idol of our time. The fiery zeal for
discovery which animates us resembles that which was abroad five
centuries ago in Europe. Indeed, we of to-day are borne along by the
second wave of the great tide of the Renaissance. The great awakening
of the human spirit, due, in part, to the rediscovery of ancient
literature and art, urged men to the passionate pursuit of truth
and beauty. Research and creative activity went hand in hand. The
inspiration which produced the great scholars, painters, and architects
lasted for a season. Then the vital energy was dissipated: scholarship
degenerated into gerund-grinding, literature into stylistic display,
and art into lifeless imitation. But meanwhile the newly-liberated
spirit of enquiry was turning from the past and seeking fresh objects
of study in natural phenomena. Slowly and tentatively, at first, the
human intellect explored the fringes of those vast fields of knowledge
which had lain almost untouched since the time of the Greeks. Then, in
the last century, the scattered sparks suddenly flamed into a great
outburst of scientific discovery, and the western mind was amazed
by the undreamed-of treasures spread before it. Here was a second
Renaissance, the child of the first and informed with the same spirit
of divine curiosity, but working in a new direction. The prime object
of the nineteenth century investigator was to accumulate observed facts
about the material universe, to find theories to interpret those facts,
and perhaps ultimately to lay bare the innermost secrets of Nature.
More and more wonders were discovered; and each new wonder pointed the
road to fresh territories awaiting the pioneer. There must be formed a
great army of explorers. The recruitment and the training of this army
was naturally carried on in the universities. The aims and methods of
science acquired enormous prestige. The spirit of research pervaded
every department of academic activity.
In the reorganised universities of nineteenth-century Germany, the
new spirit found its most complete expression. The professor was
given a two-fold function: he was to teach, and also to advance his
particular study or science. To-day teaching is often made subordinate
to research. A characteristic product of the German academic system is
the “seminar,” which is for the student of humanistic learning what the
laboratory is to the scientist: in the seminar the student is given
training in methods of original investigation. The course of study is
highly specialised and leads to the degree of “doctor of philosophy,”
for which he must present a dissertation contributing to the advance
of knowledge. The close association of American students with Germany
has led to the importation of German university methods and ideals into
the United States. In England, too, there has been an ever-increasing
tendency to approximate our standards to those of Germany. The Honours
courses, at any rate at the new universities, become increasingly
specialised, and more and more insistence is being laid on the
necessity for original research as the crown of an academic career.
Thus the universities are living in an intellectual atmosphere
manufactured by the scientists. The great craving is for
knowledge,――knowledge of natural processes, and knowledge of man’s
past history. This craving manifests itself at every turn. Apart from
the labours of scientists, historians, and archaeologists in what
Johnson calls the “academic bowers,” we read daily of search-parties
(many of whom are organised by European or American universities)
proceeding to the ends of the earth,――this one bringing to light
the treasures of Egyptian royal tombs, another revealing a hitherto
unknown civilisation of the ancient world, a third finding dinosaur’s
eggs, a fourth studying the characteristics and the history of a
savage tribe. A leading newspaper recently informed us proudly that
no fewer than two hundred exploring parties are setting out this year
on various quests――more than ever before in the history of the world.
The interest in these efforts is not confined to the few. Accounts of
marvellous discoveries and inventions bring romance to the millions
in our industrial civilisation. The popular press knows the appeal
of big headlines over an article giving a highly coloured account of
the latest results of research; and the bookstalls are crowded with
magazines devoted to the Wonders of Science and giving the City clerk
and typist, hungry for knowledge, an Illustrated Outline of this, that,
or the other field of information.
Whither is this enthusiasm for knowledge leading us? What benefits
will accrue to the individual or to society when, with untold labour,
we have learned a fraction more about the history of man or penetrated
a few steps further into the illimitable arcana of nature? These are
questions which those engaged in investigation and those whose delight
is to hear some new thing alike hardly pause to ask. It is assumed
that all knowledge of fact is valuable, and therefore is to be pursued
for its own sake. To many this will seem a self-evident proposition.
Such people may be reminded that curiosity about the material world
has not always been a characteristic of the western nations. For many
centuries man was not in the least interested to know whether the
earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth: he was content
to take on trust the evidence of his senses. It is even a matter for
debate whether the sum of human happiness has been increased by the
knowledge that has come from Galileo’s labours. It is a perennial human
weakness to pursue one aim to the unreasonable exclusion of others, to
mistake the means for the end. The great humanists were so possessed
by ideals which they found in the antique world that they sought to
achieve them even at the expense of personal and social morality; their
successors mistook the husk for the kernel and allowed pedantry to
displace scholarship. We of this age are being diverted from other aims
and allowing our intellectual life to be narrowed by an unreasoning
zeal for research. We are influenced too much by the delusion that the
making of “a contribution to knowledge” is the beginning of wisdom.
Will the universities rid themselves of the incubus of research, or at
least relegate it to a separate department so that the main efforts of
the professors and lecturers may be concentrated on other matters? On
the answer to this question the future of the universities depends. It
must be decided whether the primary business of the university teacher
is to teach or to carry on the investigations in which he is privately
interested; whether the business of the student is to become educated
or to become a specialist; whether, in short, there is any necessary
relationship between the two branches of university activity,――research
and education. At present there is little indication of how these
problems will be settled: as yet they are scarcely mentioned in
academic circles in this country. Criticism of university methods and
ideals is heard among people who have left professorial tutelage, and
book-reviewers are occasionally entertaining at the expense of typical
products of the academic mind; but for the most part the standards
of the dons are taken for granted. The late Sir Walter Raleigh, it
is true, did not conceal his antipathy to the “serious business of
scholarship,” but his brother professors must have considered him a sad
dog.
While English universities give no sign of interest in fundamental
problems affecting their well-being, a ray of hope comes from America.
In the recent annual report of Columbia University, the president,
Dr Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking with all the authority of his
distinguished position, faces critical issues with a frankness that is
possible, perhaps, only in America. He is concerned about the dearth
of great minds in spite of the spread of educational facilities, and
he asks whether the universities have not destroyed the ideal of a
liberal education, and with it the liberally educated man himself,
through allowing the choice of less valuable subjects and laying too
much stress on early specialisation. In spite of the efforts of two
generations to make science an instrument of education, and in spite of
the inherent excellence of the scientific method, he has grave doubts
about the results. He finds the cause of his dissatisfaction in the
methods and aims of the teachers of the sciences. “If these subjects
are to be presented only for the purpose of training specialists, and
if the methods to be followed are those that, while appropriate for
investigation, have no relation whatever to interpretation, then it
may well be that in another generation general interest in the natural
and experimental sciences and general knowledge of their meaning
and significance will have greatly declined.... The example of the
ancient classics ought to suffice. They were killed largely by those
who taught them.” On the subject of research Dr Butler is equally
outspoken. “The word research,” he says, “has come to be something
like the blessed word Mesopotamia. It is used to reduce everyone to
silence, acquiescence, and approbation. The fact of the matter is that
something between seventy-five per cent. and ninety per cent. of what
is called research in the various universities and institutes of the
land is not properly research at all, but simply the re-arrangement
or re-classification of existing data or well-known phenomena.” He
reminds his readers that “an original investigation may, and usually
does, add a good deal to the knowledge of the individual investigator
without adding anything to the knowledge of the human race.”
Dr Butler attacks the principles on which present-day science-teaching
in the universities is carried out: such an indictment applies with
equal, if not with greater force, to the teaching of the humanities,
into which scientific methods have intruded themselves with disastrous
results. It is natural that the historian of to-day should adopt the
character of the scientific investigator; but surely something is
wrong when university and other presses issue volume after volume
of historical study of a kind which, judged by any of the wider
canons, can have no conceivable value. Too often the specialists
forget that the many intriguing little puzzles that they try to solve
are intriguing little puzzles and nothing more. The researcher in
the natural sciences can always plead that his discoveries, however
insignificant at the moment, may take on great importance in connection
with work in other fields. The researcher in history can hardly put
forward the same plea. The scientific or pseudo-scientific spirit
applied to history has tended to destroy the sense of values.
Literature at the universities is in even a worse plight. The
scientific historical method applied in this field is steadily
devitalising literary study. Criticism and enjoyment of the great
masters have to give place to the study of tendencies and influences,
of historical minutiae and bibliographical irrelevancies. The academic
mind apparently fails to see any incongruity in the eagerness and
seriousness with which learned societies recently discussed the
precise circumstances of the death of Marlowe; nor is it shocked
at the regularity with which university lecturers and others write
letters to the “Times Literary Supplement,” taking leave to record
some “new fact” about a relative of a tenth-rate poet whose name lives
only in the bigger histories of literature. Immature graduates in the
American schools of English are steadily working through all our
writers who are sufficiently unimportant to have escaped attention
hitherto and producing monographs on them “in part preparation for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of ――――.” And as
money is plentiful in the American universities the theses are duly
printed. Similar so-called literary research is being carried on with
unremitting energy in this country also; happily the results of most
of it remain decently buried in the university archives. Dr Butler
foresees a probable decline in the educational importance of scientific
study through concentration on the unessentials and neglect of the
essentials: for the same reason it is to be feared that the university
departments of modern literature are already well on the road to
decadence.
The outlook for university education is therefore not hopeful. It seems
probable that the worship of the false gods of the academic world will
take an unconscionable time in dying. Universities are conservative
places: they hold themselves superior, and often rightly superior, to
the rough and tumble of the world outside, and thus they are tardy in
responding to the changing spirit of the age. Moreover, by their very
system they are cramping the free intelligence and narrowing the vision
of those who are to direct the universities of the future. Success in
university life necessarily involves obedience to the tradition.
Thus it may be assumed that present tendencies will take a generation
or two to reach their limit. With the improvement in the secondary
schools through the better selection of pupils the standard of work
there will be forced up to such a pitch that every student proceeding
to the university will immediately specialise in a narrow field. Pass
degrees will be abolished. The prestige of research-degrees will
be such that most, if not all, graduates will proceed to them. In
every university there will be a busy colony of researchers. In the
departments of science in its various branches men and women will be
labouring to discover new phenomena and to formulate fresh theories.
Much of this work will fulfil the laudable purpose of improving man’s
material lot. Much of it, on the other hand, will have the practical
result of supplying an industrialised community with a surfeit of
mechanical luxuries which the ordinary person will have neither the
desire nor the time to use. The spirit of man may find some consolation
in increased knowledge of such matters as the habits of atoms exposed
to various sorts of experimental bombardments. In the departments
of the modern languages and literatures the soil will have been so
far exhausted that students will be reduced to collating and editing
(with linguistic commentary) the dullest and most obscure mediaeval
manuscripts. Or the American example will be followed of writing
dissertations on recent or contemporary writers. We may expect doctoral
theses with such titles as――“A Bibliographical Account of the Works
of Arnold Bennett, together with a Hand-list of his Contributions to
the Periodical Press”; or “The Sussex Farm-Labourer in English Fiction
from 1900 to 1930.” In the realm of history, the evidence of the past
will, in most directions, have been sifted and re-sifted; accounts of
first-rate, second-rate, and even third-rate men and movements will
have been multiplied _ad nauseam_ on the excuse that an additional
insignificant fact or two has been added to information that was
already accessible. Students will be driven to editing the dreariest
records (if any still remain unpublished) elucidating matters of the
least possible concern to the twentieth century. They will, no doubt,
be sustained in their thankless tasks by the thought that they are
doing the Spade-work: they are doing their share, however humble,
towards providing a greater than themselves with the materials for
a new survey of a period. We can only hope that their single-minded
devotion may not be disturbed by the horrible thought that the mass of
accumulated research on any given topic will eventually be so vast that
no single human life will give sufficient time in which to read it, and
that no single human mind will be equal to the task of synthesising it.
When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the
time will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a
university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of
fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are
brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where
the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought
and action.
But that time is not yet.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
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