“God chose me for His whisper, and I’ve found it, and it’s yours!”
Next, that knowledge, in this light, is no longer sacred and secular, great and trivial, practical and theoretical. All knowledge, dealt out to us in such portions as we are ready for, is sacred; knowledge is, perhaps, a beautiful whole, a great unity, embracing God and man and the universe, but having many parts which are not comparable with one another in the sense of less or more, because all are necessary and each has its functions. Next, we perceive that knowledge and the mind of man are to each other as are air and the lungs. The mind lives by means of knowledge; stagnates, faints, perishes, deprived of this necessary atmosphere.
That, it is not for a man to choose, “I will learn this or that, the rest is not my concern”; still less is it for parent or schoolmaster to limit a child to less than he can get at of the whole field of knowledge; for, in the domain of mind at least as much as in that of morals or religion, man is under a Divine Master; he has to know as he has to eat.
That, there is not one period of life, our school days, in which we sit down to regular meals of intellectual diet, but that we must eat every day in order to live every day.
That, knowledge and what is known as “learning” are not to be confounded; learning may still be an available store when it is not knowledge; but by knowledge one grows, becomes more of a person, and that is all that there is to show for it. We sometimes wonder at the simplicity and modesty of persons whose knowledge is matter of repute; but they are not hiding their light; they are not aware of any unusual possessions; they have nothing to show but themselves, but we feel the force of their personalities. Now, forceful personalities, persons of weight and integrity, of decision and sound judgment, are what the country is most in need of; and, if we propose to bring such persons up for the public service, the gradual inception of knowledge is one condition amongst others.
There are various delightfully “new” educational systems in favour, in all of which a grain of knowledge is presented in a gallon of warm diluent. We have the theory that it does not matter what a child learns, but only how he learns it; which is as sound as, It does not matter what a child eats, but only how he eats it, therefore feed him on sawdust! Then, we have Rousseau’s primitive man theory, that a child must get all his knowledge through his own senses and by his own wits, as if there were no knowledge waiting to be passed on by the small torch-bearer; and there is the theory which obtained in Catholic England, exemplified in more than one of the Waverley Novels, in the sports purveyed for her tenantry by ‘Lady Margaret Bellenden,’ for example. Those men and maidens had been trained as children to be “supple, active, healthy, with senses alert, ready for dance and song, with an eye and ear ready for the beautiful, intelligent, happy, capable.” (I quote from a valuable letter in The Times). What with our morris-dances, pageants, living pictures, miracle plays, and so on, we are reviving the Stuart educational ideals, and no doubt we do well to aim at increasing the general joy. But our age requires more of us; in the sort of self-activity and self-expression implied in these and in half a dozen other educational theories, knowledge plays no part, and the city gamin exhibits in perfection every quality of gaiety, alert intelligence, delight in shows, which we set ourselves to cultivate.
“With all thy getting, get understanding,” is the message for our needs, and understanding is, in one sense, the conscious act of the mind in apprehending knowledge, which is in fact relative, and does not exist for any person until that person’s mind acts upon the intellectual matter presented to it. “Why will ye not understand?” is the repeated and poignant question of the Gospels.
That is what ails us as a nation, we do not understand; not ignorant persons only, but educated men and women, employ fallacious arguments, offer prejudices for principles, and platitudes for ideas. If it be argued that these failures are due less to ignorance than to insincerity, I should reply that insincerity is an outcome of ignorance; the darkened intelligence cannot see clearly. “The day is unto them that know,” but knowledge is by no means the facile acquirement of those who, according to Ruskin, “cram to pass and not to know.”
I would not be understood as passing strictures upon the vast and excellent educational work nearly all teachers are doing; it is impossible to go into an Elementary School without being impressed by the competence of the teachers and the intelligence of the children; I have already paid a worthless tribute to Public Schools, and should like here to add a word of affectionate and hearty appreciation of the High School girl as I know her, thoughtful and well educated—a person quite undeserving of the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism too freely aimed at her. As for our new Universities, they remove the stigma under which many of us have suffered in presence of the numerous centres of intellectual life which add dignity and grace to continental cities. The new Universities are full of promise for the land.
We have, no doubt, arrived at a good starting place, but we may not consider that the journey is accomplished. I need not repeat the charges to which we have laid ourselves open because of our ignorance, but I shall endeavour to take a closer survey of the field of education as regarded from the standpoint of knowledge and the innate affinities existing in the mind with that knowledge which is proper for it. For the present the need is that “abstract knowledge” should present itself to practical persons as the crying demand of the nation; the “mandate,” let us say, pronounced by certain general failures to understand the science of relations, and that other neglected form of knowledge, “the science of the proportion of things.”