“Now, Doctor! As if you weren’t tied to Mrs. Oldcastle’s apron-string every minute you’re not in school. Fanny and I follow you for encouragement when we feel our bond growing slack.”
“To order, gentlemen, to order! or we shall get neither word nor thing. We shall all want to put in an oar anent ‘my wife and I.’”
“Brenton’s right. Seer, take up thy parable, and go ahead!”
“Who would contemn a behest of the Church?” (with a bow which threatened a candle-shade, deftly saved by Hilyard.) “I go ahead; I’m not to talk about the thing, but the name. Why I call this, which has been working itself out in the last hundred years or more, an educational revolution. In the first place, what was called ‘Education’ a century since and what we call Education are essentially different things.”
“Come, come! Isn’t that rather strong? We go in for the classics and mathematics; and so did the schools of a hundred, or, for the matter of that, five hundred years ago. ’Tis true we have to work much more with modern languages, natural science, and other subjects of which we can give but a smattering, to the confusion alike of boys and masters. Give me a classical education, or, in default, a mathematical; ’tis training! And, for my part, I vote for the pre-Revolutionists, if that’s what you choose to call them,”—with a subdued snort, which epitomised much that was not civil to the reform party.
“How much clearing of the decks must take place for even a friendly discussion! Tell us, gentlemen both, what you mean by education?”
“Mean by education, Doctor? I should not have thought our united wisdoms need be called on to answer that! A boy is educated when he knows what every gentleman should know, and when he is trained to take his place in the world.”
“Dr. Oldcastle’s definition suits me as well as another. Putting aside the polite acquirements, the question turns on the training—how much it includes, and how it is to be given.”
“There you have it, Clough,” put in Dr. Brenton; “and my contention is, that you owe the incalculable advance in character which has taken place in the period we are considering entirely to us doctors. Wasn’t it we who found out for you that you were all blundering in the dark; that you hadn’t even set your feet on the scientific basis of education; that all your doings were tentative? About a hundred years ago, men spent a third of a lifetime on mathematics. Cambridge made men Senior Wranglers in those days, and perhaps the distinction was worth the work. But the world said, in that weighty way in which the world likes to talk: ‘Mathematics afford a mental discipline, a fortifying of character, which no other study gives.’ Now I’m not denying the worth of mathematics as a factor in education; but look at your mathematician; do you find him more to the fore, more his own master, than other men? Often enough he is irritable, obstinate, all the more wrongheaded the more he’s in the right. But now we (observe the we—royalty itself couldn’t make more of it) find you fumbling about blindly, snatching up now this tool, now that, natural science, languages, or what not, in order to work upon material you knew nothing about, was it mind, or morals, or what? To effect issues you had not determined on—intellectual power? Force of character? In the slough we found you—parent, schoolmaster, parson—all whose business is, more or less, the bringing up of the young; and what have we done for you? Why, we’ve discovered to you the nature of the material you have to work upon, the laws according to which it must be wrought. We have even put it into your hands as clay in the hands of a potter, and we’ve shown you what is the one possible achievement before you; that is, the elevation of character. Education which fails to effect this, effects nothing. There, that’s what we’ve done. Every man to his trade, say I; and there’s nothing like leather!”
“Well, but, but,—all this is very fine talk; but what demonstration can you give? And where in the world have I been while all this was going on? Pshaw! You delude yourselves, my dear friends. This airy talk makes flighty brains; but do you suppose I’ve been a schoolmaster these forty years while all this has been going on, and yet know nothing of it?”