IX
POPULAR EDUCATION
These lectures to working men, no less than his profound interest and exhausting work on behalf of popular education, illustrate his intense belief that science is not solely a thing of the laboratory, but a vital factor in right living. It was still true that the people perish for want of knowledge. And as he said when talking of posthumous fame: "If I am to be remembered at all, I should like to be remembered as one who did his best to help the people."
Nor did he lack appreciation among those whom he tried thus to aid.
Professor Mivart tells the following story:—
I recollect going [in 1874] with him and Mr. John Westlake, Q.C., to a meeting of artisans in the Blackfriars Road, to whom he gave a friendly address. He felt a strong interest in working men, and was much beloved by them. On one occasion, having taken a cab home, on his arrival there, when he held out his fare to the cabman, the latter replied: "Oh no, Professor; I have had too much pleasure and profit from hearing you lecture to take any money from your pocket; proud to have driven you, Sir!"
Another story is told by Mr. Raymond Blaythwayt:—
Only to-day I had a most striking instance of sentiment come beneath my notice. I was about to enter my house, when a plain, simply dressed working man came up to me with a note in his hand, and, touching his hat, he said: "I think this is for you, Sir"; and then he added: "Will you give me the envelope, Sir, as a great favour?" I looked at it, and, seeing it bore the signature of Professor Huxley, I replied: "Certainly I will; but why do you ask for it?" "Well," said he; "it's got Professor Huxley's signature, and it will be something for me to show my mates and keep for my children. He has done me and my like a lot of good; no man more."
In these special lectures of his very best and in his other essays, which, however far-reaching, were always intelligible to plain readers, may be seen one side of his desire to spread clear thinking among the less instructed masses; another was his work on the first School Board. By 1870 his health was already shaken by the heavy work which filled his days and nights; nevertheless, whatever the cost in time and labour and health, he felt it imperative to try, with all his power, to give rational shape to the new lines of universal education, and to revivify it with the fresh breath of the new renascence in aim and method. Science must be represented in the new Parliament of Education, and there was no one else ready to undertake the part. Moreover, he had already enjoyed some practical experience of the workings of elementary education while examiner under the Science and Art Department, the establishment of which he considered
a measure which came into existence unnoticed, but which will, I believe, turn out to be of more importance to the welfare of the people than many political changes over which the noise of battle has rent the air.
On the proper working of the new Act depended the physical, moral, and intellectual betterment of the nation; in particular, "book-learning" needed to be tempered with not merely handcraft, but with something of the direct knowledge of nature; for in itself, if properly applied, this is an admirable instrument of education, and by its method promotes an attitude of mind capable of understanding the reasons for the vast changes at work in human thought.
Accordingly, he stood as a candidate for Marylebone, and, without canvassing, for which he had neither time nor inclination, he was elected second on the list. He had addressed several meetings, and, as an amplification of his election address, he included extracts from his forthcoming article, "The School Boards: What They Can Do, and What They May Do," which were sent to the papers by the editor of the Contemporary Review. (See Coll. Ess., iii, 374.) Here was his programme, a great part of which he saw carried out:—Physical training, for health and as a basis for further training; Domestic training, especially for girls; Moral training, in a knowledge of moral and social laws, and an engaging of the affections for what is good instead of what is evil; Intellectual training, in knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge, alike for practical purposes and for recreation.
The opponents of popular education raised their still familiar outcry about "cramming children full of nonsense" and "unfitting them for the state of life to which they were called." But one cannot say what state of life they may be called to without opportunity of testing their capacities, and as for cramming them with nonsense, such a scheme, if properly carried out, ought rather to expel nonsense. Above all, it set the interests of humanity above the mere development of skill, which would simply turn the child of man into the subtlest beast of the field.
True education, he declared, was impossible without "religion," the unchanging essence of which lies in the love of some ethical ideal to govern and guide conduct, "together with the awe and reverence which have no kinship with base fear, but rise whenever one tries to pierce below the surface of things, whether they be material or spiritual."
It was in this sense that he advocated Bible-reading in schools—simple Bible-reading, without theological gloss. On the one hand, this was the only workable plan under existing circumstances. True, that he would not have employed the Bible as the agency for introducing the religious and ethical idea in a system that could begin with a clean slate. He believed that the principle of strict secularity in State education is sound and must ultimately prevail. But moral instruction must not be too rudely divorced from the system of belief current among the generality; and the Bible had been the instrument of the clergy of all denominations, to whose efforts the mass of half-instructed people owed such redemption from ignorance and barbarism as they possessed. Make all needful deductions, and there remains a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur, interwoven with three centuries of our history. The Bible, as English literature, as old-world history, as moral teaching, as the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed, the most democratic book in the world, could not be spared. The mass of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them; not shut out from the perception of their relations with the whole past history of civilized mankind, nor from an unpriestly view of Judaism and Jesus of Nazareth, purged of the accretions of centuries. Accordingly, he supported Mr. W.H. Smith's motion for Bible-reading, even against the champions of immediate secularization; but for Bible-reading under such regulations as would carry out for the children the intention of Mr. W.E. Forster, the originator of the Education Act, that "in the reading and explanation of the Bible… no efforts will be made to cram into their poor little minds theological dogmas which their tender age prevents them from understanding."
But the compromise was not permanently satisfactory. In 1893-94 the clerical party on the School Board "denounced" the treaty agreed to in 1871, and up till then undisputed, in the expectation of securing a new one more favourable to themselves; and the Times, hurrying to their support, did not hesitate to declare in a leading article that "the persons who framed the rule" respecting religious instruction intended to include definite teaching of such theological dogmas as the Incarnation.
In a letter to the Times Huxley replied (April 29, 1893):—
I cannot say what may have been in the minds of the framers of the rule; but, assuredly, if I had dreamed that any such interpretation could fairly be put upon it, I should have opposed the arrangement to the best of my ability.
In fact, a year before the rule was framed I wrote an article in the Contemporary Review, entitled "The School Boards—what they can do and what they may do," in which I argued that the terms of the Education Act excluded such teaching as it is now proposed to include.
And this contention he supported by the quotation from Mr. W.E.
Forster, given above.
Further, in October, 1894, he replied as follows to a correspondent who had asked him whether flat adhesion to the compromise had not made nonsense of a certain Bible lesson, which was the subject of much comment:—
I am at one with you in hating "hush up" as I do all other forms of lying; but I venture to submit that the compromise of 1871 was not a "hush up." If I had taken it to be such, I should have refused to have anything to do with it….
There has never been the slightest ambiguity about my position in the matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the School Board written by me before my election in 1870, I think you will find that I anticipated the pith of the present discussion.
The persons who agreed to the compromise did exactly what all sincere men who agree to compromise do. For the sake of the enormous advantage of giving the rudiments of a decent education to several generations of the people, they accepted what was practically an armistice in respect of certain matters about which the contending parties were absolutely irreconcilable.
To return to his activity on the School Board. His vigorous work as chairman of the committee appointed to frame an educational scheme was marked by great breadth of view. He desired the elementary schools to be linked at the one end with infant schools; at the other with continuation schools and some scheme for technical education. A perfect scheme would provide what he first called a ladder from the gutter to the university, whereby children of exceptional capacity might reach the places for which nature had fitted them. His sense of fitness would have welcomed even more warmly some system whereby the incompetent born into the higher strata of the social organism should be automatically graded down to the positions more appropriate to their wits and character. But this is an ideal only possible in Plato's State, where philosophers are kings and possess superhuman power of intuition.
Sincerity is sometimes impracticable. But here sincerity was combined with common-sense practicality, and even an opponent like Lord Shaftesbury was impelled to write in his journal:—"Professor Huxley has this definition of morality and religion: 'Teach a child what is wise: that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful: that is religion!' Let no one henceforth despair of making things clear and of giving explanations!"
He did not, however, disguise his fundamental opposition to Ultramontanism, that intellectual and social imperium in imperio, with its basic hostility to the free scientific spirit. This he had already expressed in his "Scientific Education" (Coll. Ess., iii, 111), an address of 1869, and he repeated it towards the end of his service on the School Board when opposing a bye-law that the Board should pay over direct to denominational schools the fees for poor children—to schools, that is, outside the Board's control. He opposed it partly because it would assuredly lead to repeated contests on the Board; partly because it would give a handle to that party whose system, as set forth in the syllabus, of securing complete possession of the minds of their flock, was destructive of all that was highest in the nature of mankind and inconsistent with intellectual and political liberty.
The committee did excellent work in systematizing important matters and leaving minor arrangements to the local managers; in apportioning essential and discretionary subjects, and—what was of special interest to its chairman—the teaching of elementary geography and elementary social economy, and in particular the systematized object-lessons, embracing a course of elementary construction in physical science, and serving as an introduction to the courses for the examinations under the Science and Art Department. Science, as he declared, was assuming such a position alike in practical life and in thought that any one totally ignorant of it would be at a disadvantage in both spheres. Moreover, the proposed technical schools—for applied science, that is—must suffer if they had to deal with pupils who had no preliminary grounding in the principles of physical science. His early advocacy of music and drawing, not to produce artists, but to develop personality, also bore some fruit. The man of science, too, was found defending Latin as a discretionary subject, alternatively with a modern language. Latin was the gate to many things, and, apart from the question of overloading the curriculum, there was great danger if educational possibilities were not thrown open to all without restriction. There is no more frightful "sitting on the safety valve" than in denying men of ability the means of rising to the positions for which their talents and industry might qualify them.
As for the compulsory element in education and the justification for levying rates and taxes for what objectors called "educating other people's children," his answer was: "Every ignorant person tends to become a burden upon, and, so far, an infringer of the liberty of, his fellows, and an obstacle to their success. Under such circumstances an education rate is, in fact, a war tax, levied for purposes of defence."
In all this it was his attitude towards the child which deeply impressed his colleagues in whom child-sympathy was strongest. As the Rev. Benjamin Waugh put it, he was on the Board to establish schools for the children. He wanted to turn them into sound men and women, and resented the idea that schools were to train either congregations for churches or hands for factories. "What he sought to do for the child was for the child's sake, that it might live a fuller, truer, worthier life."
After fifteen months of service on the School Board superadded to the heavy strain of his ordinary work, his health broke down utterly, and he resigned. But after his retirement his successors found that their duty was "to put into practice the scheme of instruction which Huxley was mainly instrumental in settling. We were thus able indirectly to improve both the means and methods of teaching…. The most important developments and additions have been in the direction of educating the hand and eye…. Thus the impulse given by Huxley in the first months of the Board's existence has been carried forward by others." So wrote Dr. J. H. Gladstone in 1896. The tide of education has swelled since then and is still swelling, but its main direction is the same.