IV
But the democratic principle further requires the intelligent co-operation of persons in the conduct of affairs; and it is the part of the common school to furnish the necessary equipment of this partnership. In this equipment there are two main elements. The first is the provision of adequate capital of information for the stimulation and direction of thought; the second is the encouragement of independent and original thought.
There is a certain body of knowledge which it is essential that the child should have if he is to think rightly and to order his conduct accordingly. This body of knowledge may be roughly described as knowledge of the world in which we live; and its two chief parts have reference to the world as it now is, and to the story of how it came to be what it is. The former involves observation and interpretation of the actual conditions of the life in which the child lives; and the process should begin where the child stands. In the modern teaching of geography, the beginning is made in school-yard or the precinct and from this centre it broadens out to cover one’s city, one’s county, one’s state or province, one’s country, until at last it embraces the round earth. This is as it should be. In the past the teaching of geography has been a mere imparting of a mass of facts, which have seemed to possess no direct relation to life; by making the child’s own location a focus round about which the available and necessary knowledge of the world can be gathered in a more or less coherent fashion, the relation of facts, which in themselves might seem remote and irrelevant to the business of life, becomes more evident, and the entire study gains a new vitality. This discussion is now trenching dangerously upon the province of educational theory; but it is needful to emphasise how indispensable it is that knowledge should not be, as it has so often been, allowed to appear unconnected with the actual business of living in this world. Even yet one may hear children asking in a bewildered way—“What on earth is the use of my learning the height of Popocatapetl?” Or “what good is it to know the length of the Yang-Tse-Kiang?” Information of this kind has no doubt a certain fascination for some types of mind; but it may be left for those minds to seek it out for themselves. The business of the school is to make possible the acquisition of the knowledge which bears upon the contribution which the pupil is expected to make to the community. This is not to say that there is not knowledge which is desirable for its own sake, or that the love of knowledge should not be encouraged for what it brings. Moreover, soon or late all knowledge will possess a social value. But the knowledge which is most valuable is that which the individual acquires for himself; and the responsibility of the school in this matter is to release and quicken the capacity for independent and continuous acquisition of knowledge. But this desideratum is not in the least compromised or neglected by ordering the acquisition of knowledge in the first instance with reference to the actual business of social life.
It is the business of the educator to determine what the subject-matter of the curriculum must be in order to give the pupil adequate knowledge of the world in which he has to live; it is our business here simply to stress the point that this knowledge shall be of a relevant and vital kind. It should have to do not only with the physical features of the world, but with social and political institutions and the like; and indeed throughout it should have more to say about the ways than about the places in which people live. But chiefly this aspect of the educational process should aim to equip the pupil with the necessary knowledge to enable him to acquire more knowledge through his own direct experience of the world.
But this knowledge of the world as it is would be hopelessly inadequate were it not connected with some knowledge of how the world came to be what it is. Here again the subject-matter must be defined by the experience of the educator. The business of this writing is to emphasise the requirement that this knowledge of the past shall be ordered conformably to the ultimate social fruitfulness of the pupil. In his boyhood the present writer was required to study geology—at first sight a somewhat irrelevant subject for a lad in his early teens. But he happened to live in a district where slate-quarrying was the only industry; and when he learnt that his bread and butter came from the “Llandeilo Beds”; and that these same “beds” occupied a specific place in a more or less orderly process of world-making, the study of geology assumed a new interest. But its most important action was the awakening of a dim sense of being an “heir of all the ages.” This feeling received a very powerful reinforcement from another side. The writer well remembers his first reading of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers. Hitherto history had seemed to consist mainly of the puerile and discreditable exploits of a succession of royal persons of whom none were better than they should be; and he had wondered what on earth all this had to do with a boy living among the Welsh mountains in the nineteenth century. But the Pilgrims Fathers were different; here at last was something that seemed to have a meaning, and it is easy to see what that meaning would be to a lad whose upbringing had been in a Strong Nonconformist tradition. It took long years to fill with a connected content the interval between the sailing of the Mayflower and the campaign for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales; but from henceforth the lad knew that he stood in the succession of a tradition that had made a difference to the world and that he owed a very great deal to it.
The story of how we have come by our inheritance of freedom, of the age-long upward struggle of mankind, this above all should furnish the inspiration and the guidance for our service of the present. For this reason, emphasis should be laid upon the history of peoples rather than of states, upon the movement of social life rather than upon historical biography. It seems hardly credible but it is strictly true that the present writer left school without ever having heard of the Craft Guilds of the Middle ages; or of the great tradition of ecclesiastical architecture which enters so organically into the story of social development in England. He had heard in a somewhat casual manner of Wat Tyler and John Ball, and of other incidents which disturbed the normal flow of royal intrigue and adventure; but of the story of the common people he knew virtually nothing at all. Yet after all that is the history that chiefly matters; and much has yet to be done to give it its proper place in the school curriculum.
Whatever the subject-matter, its arrangement and presentation should be so ordered as to inspire and enable the child to make a willing and worthy contribution to the life of his community. But the social emphasis in education, if it is to be true to itself and indeed to the general history of mankind, must define society in wider terms than that of the immediate community. Mr. Wells has told us that mankind has been forever “pursuing the frontiers of its possible community.” Whether by revolution within the commonwealth, by imperial expansion or by fusion with other commonwealths, there has been an abiding impulse—erratic and often perverse in its operations—to broaden the basis of human fellowship. And in the present position of the world, there is nothing so urgent as to quicken a social sympathy wide enough to embrace the world. It is peculiarly the function of geography and history to serve this purpose. Geography should assume that frontiers are the lines at which peoples meet rather than part; and history should lay stress upon the forces that have made for human unity rather than for national power. If the writer may be permitted to indulge in a last personal reminiscence, the tendency in the teaching of history in the past may be illustrated by the fact that the outstanding impression left upon him by the school history was that the French were the hereditary enemies of the British; and it is something to the point to observe that the text books of American history have in the past failed to lay proper emphasis upon the circumstance that during the Revolutionary War the best mind of England was on the side of the colonists. The gratuitous and unhistorical prejudice which the traditional attitude in school history has bred is not a little accountable for the divisive tempers that have led to wars. To-day the shrinkage of the world has made this attitude more than ever disastrous; and in view of our hope of a League of Nations it is essential that geography and history in particular should be treated as the opportunity for a general expansion of social sympathy.