The Upton Letters

by Arthur Christopher Benson

UPTON,
July 16, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,—I declare that the greatest sin there is in the world is stupidity. The character that does more harm in the world than any other is the character in which stupidity and virtue are combined. I grow every day more despondent about the education we give at our so-called classical schools. Here, you know, we are severely classical; and to have to administer such a system is often more than I can bear with dignity or philosophy. One sees arrive here every year a lot of brisk, healthy boys, with fair intelligence, and quite disposed to work; and at the other end one sees depart a corresponding set of young gentlemen who know nothing, and can do nothing, and are profoundly cynical about all intellectual things. And this is the result of the meal of chaff we serve out to them week after week; we collect it, we chop it up, we tie it up in packets; we spend hours administering it in teaspoons, and this is the end. I am myself the victim of this kind of education; I began Latin at seven and Greek at nine, and, when I left Cambridge, I did not know either of them well. I could not sit in an arm-chair and read either a Greek or a Latin book, and I had no desire to do it. I knew a very little French, a very little mathematics, a very little science; I knew no history, no German, no Italian. I knew nothing of art or music; my ideas of geography were childish. And yet I am decidedly literary in my tastes, and had read a lot of English for myself. It is nothing short of infamous that any one should, after an elaborate education, have been so grossly uneducated. My only accomplishment was the writing of rather pretty Latin verse.

And yet this preposterous system continues year after year. I had an animated argument with some of the best of my colleagues the other day about it. I cannot tell you how profoundly irritating these wiseacres were. They said all the stock things—that one must lay a foundation, and that it could only be laid by using the best literatures; that Latin was essential because it lay at the root of so many other languages; and Greek, because there the human intellect had reached its high-water mark,—"and it has such a noble grammar," one enthusiastic Grecian said; that an active-minded person could do all the rest for himself. It was in vain to urge that in many cases the whole foundation was insecure; and that all desire to raise a superstructure was eliminated. My own belief is that Greek and Latin are things to be led up to, not begun with; that they are hard, high literatures, which require an initiation to comprehend; and that one ought to go backwards in education, beginning with what one knows.

It seems to me, to use a similitude, that the case is thus. If one lives in a plain and wishes to reach a point upon a hill, one must make a road from the plain upwards. It will be a road at the base, it will be a track higher up, and a path at last, used only by those who have business there. But the classical theorists seem to me to make an elaborate section of macadamised road high in the hills, and, having made it, to say that the people who like can make their own road in between.

How would I mend all this? Well, I would change methods in the first place. If one wanted to teach a boy French or German effectively, so that he would read and appreciate, one would dispense with much of the grammar, except what was absolutely necessary. In the case of classics it is all done the other way; grammar is a subject in itself; boys have to commit to memory long lists of words and forms which they never encounter; they have to acquire elaborate analyses of different kinds of usages, which are of no assistance in dealing with the language itself. It is beginning with the wrong end of the stick. Grammar is the scientific or philosophical theory of language; it may be an interesting and valuable study for a mind of strong calibre, but it does not help one to understand an author or to appreciate a style.

Then, too, I would sweep away for all but boys of special classical ability most kinds of composition. Fancy teaching a boy side by side with the elements of German or French to compose German and French verse, heroic, Alexandrine, or lyrical! The idea has only to be stated to show its fatuity. I would teach boys to write Latin prose, because it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of disentangling the real sense of the English copy. But I would abolish all Latin verse composition, and all Greek composition of every kind for mediocre boys. Not only would they learn the languages much faster, but there would be a great deal of time saved as well. Then I would abolish the absurd little lessons, with the parsing, and I would at all hazards push on till they could read fluently.

Of course the above improvement of methods is sketched on the hypothesis that both Greek and Latin are retained. Personally I would retain Latin for most, but give up Greek altogether in the majority of cases. I would teach all boys French thoroughly. I would try to make them read and write it easily, and that should be the linguistic staple of their education. Then I would teach them history, mainly modern English history, and modern geography; a very little mathematics and elementary science. Such boys would be, in my belief, well-educated; and they would never be tempted to disbelieve in the usefulness of their education.

When I propound these ideas, my colleagues talk of soft options, and of education without muscle or nerve. My retort is that the majority of boys educated on classical lines are models of intellectual debility as it is. They are uninterested, cynical, and they cannot even read or write the languages which they have been so carefully taught.

What I want is experiment of every kind; but my cautious friends say that one would only get something a great deal worse. That I deny. I maintain that it is impossible to have anything worse, and that the majority of the boys we turn out are intellectually in so negative a condition that any change would be an improvement.

But I effect nothing; nothing is attempted, nothing done. I do my best—fortunately our system admits of that—to teach my private pupils a little history, and I make them write essays. The results are decidedly encouraging; but meanwhile my colleagues go on in the old ways, quite contented, pathetically conscientious, laboriously slaving away, and apparently not disquieted by results.