A headmaster in Newfoundland mentions in his school report for 1905 a boy who “began Greek in October and passed the Oxford Responsions in January.”
There is a leakage somewhere, and there is overlapping, and both are due to the examinations upon which scholarships are awarded. Something must be done, because Public Schools, with all their splendid records, are not effective in the sense that they turn out the average boy a good all-round man. For better or for worse, who knows? the Democracy is coming in like a flood, and our old foundations will be tossed about in the welter unless we make haste to strengthen our weak places. Might not a commission—consisting of two or three headmasters, as many preparatory school masters, University “Dons,” and public men (once public school boys and now the fathers of such boys) look into the question and devise examination tests which shall safeguard Letters, ancient and modern, without putting too high a premium upon scholarship?
Once the hands of schoolmasters were united, they would no doubt devise means by which our friend, the average boy, would get such a knowledge of the classics as should open life-long resources to him. Like the ‘Baron of Bradwardine’ he would go about with a pocket Livy (as he would say, “Titus Livius,”) to be read, not laboured at a few lines at a time: The Seven against Thebes, Iphigenia in Aulis, the few tragedies left to us by the great dramatists would form part of the familiar background of his thoughts. He would know somewhat of the best that has been written in Greek and Latin, whether through printed translations or through the text itself rendered in the sort of running translation which some masters know how to give. Pari passu, he would do his share of gerund-grind, and construe the two or three books of his present limited acquaintance. But his limitations would be recognised, and he would not be required to turn out Greek and Latin verse.
Meantime his master will require him to know pretty intimately a hundred worthy books in addition to the great novels—to be read in class periods, in vacation, and in leisure time—his knowledge of each to be tested by a single bit of oral description or written work in verse or prose. “Ground he at Grammar,” sums up every successful school boy’s record as it did that of the dead “Grammarian”; but the ten or twelve years of school life should yield more than this.
I say nothing now about the teaching of science, for which most schools provide, except that for our generation, science seems to me to be the way of intellectual advance. All the same, the necessity incumbent upon us at the moment is to inculcate a knowledge of Letters. Men and their motives, the historical sequence of events, principles for the conduct of life, in fact, practical philosophy, is what the emergencies of the times require us to possess, and to be able to communicate. These things are not to be arrived at by any short cut of economics, eugenics, and the like, but are the gathered harvests of many seasons’ sowing of poetry, literature, history. The nation is in sore need of wise men, and these must be made out of educated boys.
III
KNOWLEDGE, REASON, AND REBELLION
We have been very busy about education these sixty years or more—diligently digging, pruning, watering; but there is something amiss with our tree of knowledge; its fruits, both good and evil, are of a mean, crabbed sort, with so little to choose between them that superior persons find it hard to determine which is which. To examine the individual apples would be a long process, but let me take one at a venture: is it not true that a conviction of irresponsibility characterises our generation?
If this be true, seeing that we all think as we have been brought up to think, our education is at fault. Faulty education is to blame if private property be recklessly injured in broad day, if working men do vital injury to their country thinking to serve their caste, if there be people who love to have it so, as long as their own interests are immune. The melancholy fact is that the people who do damage to private property, to public interests, and to that more delicate asset of a nation, public opinion, are all by way of being educated in their several degrees. All of them can write and speak clearly, think logically if not sincerely, and exhibit a certain practical ability. It is true that the War has changed much and has brought us a temporary salvation, but education must secure to us our gains or the last state of the nation may be worse than the first.
No doubt we are better and not worse than our forefathers; and, where we err, it is through ignorance. “Through ignorance ye did it,” was said of the worst crime that men have done; and that appalling offence was wrought for no worse reason than because it is the habit of more or less lettered ignorance to follow specious arguments to logical conclusions. The sapient East knows all about it. Lady Lugard tells us how “the Copts have a saying that ‘in the beginning when God created things He added to everything its second.’ ‘I go to Syria,’ said Reason; ‘I go with you,’ said Rebellion.” We need not follow the other pairs that went forth, but still Reason is apt to be accompanied by Rebellion when it sets out in search of a logical issue.
For it is a fatal error to think that reason can take the place of knowledge, that reason is infallible, that reasonable conclusions are of necessity right conclusions. Reason is a man’s servant, not his master; and behaves like a good and faithful servant—a sort of ‘Caleb Balderstone,’ ready to lie royally in his master’s behoof—and bring logical demonstration of any premiss which the will chooses to entertain. But the will is the man, the will chooses; and the man must know, if the will is to make just and discriminating decisions. This is what Shakespeare, as great a philosopher as a poet, set himself to teach us, line upon line, precept upon precept. His ‘Leontes,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Lear,’ ‘Prospero,’ ‘Brutus,’ preach on the one text—that a man’s reason brings certain infallible proofs of any notions he has wilfully chosen to take up. There is no escape for us, no short cut; art is long, especially the art of living.