Before I come to the point I desire to make, let us consider whether the problem of Continuation Schools has been attacked anywhere more successfully than in those countries of Middle Europe. Some of them, Germany especially, have done all that is to be done in response to the cry for efficiency with its resultant big returns and high wages; but from the beginning of the Continuation School movement in, say, 1806, the four north-western countries have worked towards different ends. In Denmark they have, not Continuation Schools, but People’s High Schools, a pleasanter name for possibly a pleasanter thing.
Denmark, like Germany, was, as we know, devastated by the Napoleonic wars, but had been vitalised by the liberation of its serfs in 1788, and this prepared the ground for Grundtvig, that poet, historian and enthusiast, who became the “Father of the People’s High Schools.”
“Where there is most life, there is the victory,” said he, and the immediate way to an access of life he saw in “A Danish High School accessible to young people all over the land,” a school which should inspire “admiration for what is great, love for what is beautiful, faithfulness and affection, peace and unity, innocent cheerfulness, pleasure and mirth.” Observe, there is no word of ‘efficiency’ in this poet’s dream, but he did assure Charles VIII that with such a school, “a well of healing in the land,” he might afford to smile at the newspapers, whether they chose to praise or blame. The King gave heed, begged for a further development of his plans than was afforded in the original pamphlet, and by 1845 the schools he had dreamed of began to be.
We cannot follow the development of these Danish People’s Schools, but in 1903-4 their pupils numbered over three thousand men and rather more women, and wise men cherished the hope that “the new Danish school for youth is to have the good fortune to blend all classes of the people into one.”
All of these High Schools bear the mark of the genius of their “Father”—whose pupils have known how to sum up his teaching in three sayings,—“Spirit is might; Spirit reveals itself in spirit; Spirit works only in freedom.” We are able to trace the source of these sayings, and indeed this movement seems to have been from the first profoundly Christian—Christian in no narrow sense, but sharing the wide liberality of that Allegoria filosofica della Religione Cattolica conceived by the ‘Angelic Doctor’ and pictured by Simone Memmi on the walls of the Spanish chapel in Santa Maria Novella (Florence): the several teachers commemorated were themselves illustrious pagans but not therefore the less under Divine teaching. Here, it seems to me, is an educational credo worth reviving in these utilitarian days, and some such creed seems to have been Grundtvig’s, though probably independently conceived. His great hope is that “above all, some acquaintance with popular literature, especially with the poetry and history of one’s own country, will create a brand new world of readers all over the land.”
I cannot go into the question of the Agricultural Schools of which it is said that “the Danish Agricultural School is the child of the Danish Folkshöjskole, and must, like this, have Christian faith and national life for its basis.” In the careless days before the War we could all testify to the excellence of Danish butter, but did we consider the “resolution and capacity” with which Danish peasants passed over from the making of poor butter in their various small holdings to the “manufacture in co-operative dairies of butter of an almost uniform fineness”? This, too, says an eminent Swedish Professor, is due to the High Schools, for, said he, “Just as the enrichment of the soil gives the best conditions for the seeds sown in it, so a well-grounded humanistic training provides the surest basis for business capacity, and not the least so in the case of the coming farmers.”[49] These are weighty words deserving our consideration at a moment when we, too, are on the eve of a new departure.
The three neighbouring countries watched the experiments in Denmark with keen interest, and almost simultaneously People’s High Schools sprang up in all four.
These northern High Schools, necessarily winter schools, were not open at the time of my visit, but two or three things casually observed might, I think, be traced to their influence. For instance, Copenhagen itself, as compared with Munich, strikes one as a city with a soul. At the Hague, again, I saw an artisan in his working clothes shewing pictures in one of the galleries to his boy of seven who looked earnestly and listened eagerly. The young people in the great Delft porcelain works shewed traces of culture and gentleness in countenance and manner. But nothing struck me more than what I saw in the general shop of an out of the way village in Sweden; the villagers were peasants and the one shop sold cabbages and herrings, cheese and calico; but across the small-paned window was a shelf closely packed with volumes in paper covers which had not had time to get dusty; of course I could not read all the titles, but among them were translations from French, German and English. I noticed slim volumes of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, Carlyle and the last thing out. One felt assured that the village was in ‘kingdom come,’ that of a long winter’s evening, in any home, one read aloud whilst the rest worked, that there was much to talk about when friends met and lovers walked. (How sad, by the way, to read that ‘Tommy,’ whom we all love and revere, is quick to form friendships but that these do not progress for the friends have nothing to talk about.) Think of little plays got up, of public readings given by the villagers themselves; might such things be with us, the lure of the town would cease to draw our village men and maids, for the village that can offer a happy community life, sustained by the people themselves, is able to hold its people.
Our upper and middle classes, professional and other, are singularly stable folk, and they are so, not because of their material but of their intellectual well-being; in this sense only they are most of them the ‘Haves’ as compared with the ‘Have-nots.’ The reason is not far to seek. Are there not agitators abroad whose business it is to sow seeds of discontent in the gaping minds of the multitude? The full mind passes on, but that which is empty seizes on any new notion with avidity, and is hardly to be blamed for doing so; a hungry mind takes what it can get, and the baker is apt to be lenient about prosecuting the starving man who steals a loaf. I do not hesitate to say that the constantly recurring misery of our age, ‘Labour Unrest,’ is to be laid at the door, not of the working man, but of the nation which has not troubled itself to consider the natural hunger of mind and the manner of meat such hunger demands.
I have tried to establish that the Kultur offered by the Munich type of Continuation School has had no good effect upon morals or manners and no conspicuously good effect upon manufactures.