That is the type of oral lesson which is most common at the present day. "Results" in history, geography, nature study and English are seldom asked for by the inspector; and the teacher takes but little trouble to produce them. But his distrust of the child is as firmly rooted as ever, and his unwillingness to allow the child to work by or for himself is as strong as it ever was. The consequence is that there are many schools in which the teacher now does everything during the oral lesson, while the child does as nearly as possible nothing. Formerly the child was at any rate allowed (or rather required) to be actively receptive. Now he is seldom allowed to do anything more active than to yawn. And all the time he is secretly longing to energise—to do something with himself—to use his mental, if not his physical faculties—to work, if not to play. One might have thought that in the history and geography lessons, if in no other, "Standards VI" and "VII" (where the numbers were too small to admit of these standards having a teacher to themselves) would be separated from "Standard V," and allowed to work out their own salvation by studying suitable text-books under proper supervision and guidance. But no; the force of habit is too strong for the machine-made teacher. Twenty years ago history and geography were "class subjects," and as such were taught orally to whole classes of children. And they must still be taught as "class subjects," even if this should involve the "Sixth" and "Seventh Standards" being brigaded with, and kept down for one or even two years to, the level of the "Fifth,"—kept down, it would seem, for no other purpose than that of being the passive recipients of the teacher's windy "talk," and the helpless witnesses of his futile "chalk," and of having their own activities paralysed and their own powers of expression starved into inanition.
I will deal with one more "secular" subject before I bring this sketch to a close. There are still many schools in which the hours that are set apart for Drawing are devoted in large measure to the slavish reproduction of flat copies. A picture of some familiar object—outlined, shaded, or tinted as the case may be, and not infrequently highly conventionalised—hangs in front of the class; and the children copy it, stroke by stroke, and curve by curve, and put in the shading and lay on washes of colour. As long practice at work of this kind develops a certain degree of manual dexterity, and as the free use of india-rubber is permitted and even encouraged, the child's finished work may be so neat and accurate as to become worthy of a place on the school wall. But what is the value, what is the meaning of work of this kind? When such a drawing lesson as I have described is in progress, the divorce between perception and expression is complete. And as each of these master faculties is the very life and soul of the other, their complete divorce from one another involves the complete eclipse of each. The child who copies a flat copy does not perceive anything except some other person's reproduction of a scene or object; and even this he does not necessarily grasp as a whole, his business being to reproduce it with flawless accuracy, line by line. Indeed, it may well happen that he does not even know what the picture or diagram before him is intended to represent. Nor is he expressing anything, for he has not made his model in any sense or degree his own. Thus, during the whole of a lesson in which the perceptive and expressive faculties are supposed to be receiving a special training, they are lying dormant and inert. Each of them is, for the time being, as good as dead. And each of them will assuredly die if this kind of teaching goes on for very long, die for lack of exercise, die wasted and atrophied by disuse. The extent to which the copying of copies can injure a child's power of observation exceeds belief. I have seen a bowl placed high above the line of sight of a class of fifty senior boys, each one of whom (his memory being haunted, I suppose, by some diagram which he had once copied) drew it as if he were looking into it from above. Not one of those boys could see the bowl as it really was, or rather as it really was to be seen. A child who had never drawn a stroke in his life, but whose perceptive faculties had not been deadened by education, would have sketched the bowl more correctly than any of those quasi-experts. And with the wasting of the power of observation, the executive power is gradually lost; for perception is ever interpenetrating, reinforcing, and stimulating expression; and when the eye is blind, the hand, however skilful its mere manipulation may be, necessarily falters and loses its cunning.
Four or five years ago, had one entered an elementary school while drawing was being taught, such a lesson as I have just described would have been in progress in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred. Since then a systematic warfare has been waged by the Board against the "flat copy"; and though it is still very far from extinct, there is now perhaps an actual majority of schools in which its use has been discontinued. But the number of schools in which drawing from the object is effectively taught, though increasing steadily, is still small. In those schools, indeed, the results are surprisingly good,—so good as to justify, not only the new gospel of drawing from the object, but also the whole gospel of education through self-reliance and self-expression. But elsewhere there has been but little improvement, except so far as it may be better to draw from an object without guidance, or with quite ineffective guidance, than to draw from a flat copy. In some schools the formula or "tip" is beginning to take the place of the flat copy. There is a formula for the tulip, a formula for the snowdrop, a formula for the daffodil, and so on; and the children draw from these formulæ while the actual flowers are before them and they are making believe to reproduce them. In other schools an object is placed before the class, and the teacher draws this for them on the blackboard, explaining to them in detail how it ought to be drawn; and when he has finished, the children pretend to draw the object, but really copy his blackboard copy of it. In this, as in other matters, the teacher who has become a victim of routine will give a facile but mainly "notional" assent to the suggestions that are placed before him, will promise to try them, and will make an unintelligent and half-hearted attempt to do so, but will as often as not slide back into practices which do not materially differ from those which he professes to have abandoned. The pressure of the whole system of Western education—not to speak of Western civilisation—will be too strong for him. The flat copy, with its demand for mechanical work and servile obedience, fits into that system. Drawing from the object, with its demand for initiative and self-reliance, does not. Hence the attractive force of the former,—a secret attractive force which will neutralise the efforts that the teacher consciously makes to free himself from its influence, and will arm him, as with a hidden shirt of mail, against the missionary zeal of his inspector.[13] Even the zeal of the inspector will be affected by his possible inability to harmonise his gospel of self-expression in drawing with any general system of self-education. It is because the educational reformer is fighting, in his sporadic attempts at reform, against his own deepest conviction, that he achieves so little even in the particular directions in which he sees clearly that reform is needed.
But how, it will be asked, is such a school as I have described to be kept going? The whole régime must be eminently distasteful to the healthy child, and it can scarcely be attractive to his teacher. By what motive force, then, is the school to be kept in motion,—in motion, if not along the path of progress, at any rate along the well-worn track of routine? By the only motive force which the religion and the civilisation of the West recognise as effective,—the hope of external reward, with its complement, the fear of external punishment. From highest to lowest, from the head teacher of the school to the youngest child in the bottom class, all the teachers and all the children are subjected to the pressure of this quasi-physical force. The teachers hope for advancement and increase of salary, and fear degradation and loss of salary, or at any rate loss of the hoped-for increment.[14] The children hope for medals, books, high places in their respective classes, and other rewards and distinctions, and fear corporal and other kinds of punishment. The thoroughly efficient school is one in which this motive force is duly transmitted to every part of the school by means of a well-planned and carefully-elaborated machinery, analogous to that by which water and gas are laid on at every tap in every house in a well-governed town. Only those who are intimately acquainted with the inside of the elementary school can realise to what an extent the machinery of education has in recent years encroached upon the vital interests of the school and the time and thought of the teacher. In schools which are administered by business-like and up-to-date Local Authorities, this encroachment is becoming as serious as that of drifting sands on a fertile soil. Time-tables, schemes of work, syllabuses, record books, progress books, examination result books, and the rest,—hours and hours are spent by the teachers on the clerical work which these mechanical contrivances demand. And the hours so spent are too often wholly wasted. The worst of this machinery is that, so long as it works smoothly, all who are interested in the school are satisfied. But it may all work with perfect smoothness, and yet achieve nothing that really counts. I know of hundreds of schools which are to all appearance thoroughly efficient,—schools in which the machinery of education is as well contrived as it is well oiled and cleaned,—and yet in which there is no vital movement, no growth, no life. From highest to lowest, all the inmates of those schools are cheating themselves with forms, figures, marks, and other such empty symbols.
The application of the conventional motive force to the school children goes by the name of Discipline. If the pressure at each tap is steady, constant, and otherwise effective, the discipline is good. If it is variable, intermittent, and otherwise ineffective, the discipline is bad. The life of the routine-ridden school is so irksome to the child, that if he is healthy and vigorous he will long to find a congenial outlet for his vital energies, which are as a rule either pent back (as when he sits still listening to a lecture), or forced into uninteresting and unprofitable channels. When this desire masters him during school hours, it goes by the name of "naughtiness," and is regarded as a proof of the inborn sinfulness of his "fallen" nature. To repress the desire, to keep the child in a state either of absolute inaction or of mechanically regulated activity, is the function of school discipline. Whatever in the child's life is free, natural, spontaneous, wells up from an evil source. If educational progress is to be made, that source must be carefully sealed. As an educator, the teacher must do his best to reduce the child to the level of a wire-pulled puppet. As a disciplinarian, he must overcome the child's instinctive repugnance to being subjected to such unworthy treatment. The better the "discipline" of the school, the easier it will be for the mechanical education given in it to achieve its deadly work.
In making this sketch of what is still a common type of elementary school, my object has been to provide myself with materials for answering the question: Does elementary education, as at present conducted in this country, tend to foster the growth of the child's faculties? If my sketch is even approximately faithful to its original, the answer to the question, so far at least as thousands of schools are concerned, must be an emphatic No. For in the school, as I have sketched it, the one end and aim of the teacher is to prevent the child from doing anything whatever for himself; and where independent effort is prohibited, the growth of faculty must needs be arrested, the growth of every faculty, as of every limb and organ, being dependent in large measure on its being duly and suitably exercised by its owner. If this statement is true of faculty as such, and of effort as such, still more is it true of the particular faculties which school life is supposed to train, the faculties which we speak of loosely as perceptive,—and of the particular effort by which alone the growth of the perceptive faculties is effected, the many-sided effort which we speak of loosely as self-expression. Far perception and expression are, as I have endeavoured to prove, the face and obverse of the same vital process; and the educational policy which makes self-expression, or, in other words, sincere expression, impossible, is therefore fatal to the outgrowth of the whole range of the perceptive faculties.
The education given in thousands of our elementary schools is, then, in the highest degree anti-educational. The end which education ought to aim at achieving is the very end which the teacher labours unceasingly to defeat. The teacher may, indeed, contend that his business is not to evoke faculty but to impart knowledge. The answer to this argument is that the type of education which impedes the outgrowth of faculty is necessarily fatal to the acquisition of knowledge. For the teacher can no more impart knowledge to his pupils than a nurse can impart flesh and blood to her charges. What the teacher imparts is information, just as what the nurse imparts is food; and until information has been converted into knowledge the child is as far from being educated as the infant, whose food remains unassimilated, is from being nourished. The teacher may pump information into the child in a never-ending stream; but so long as he compels the child to adopt an attitude of passive receptivity, and forbids him to react, through the medium of self-expression, on the food that he is receiving, so long will the food remain unassimilated and even undigested, and the soul and mind of the child remain uneducated and unfed.
Whether, then, we concern ourselves, as educationalists, with the growth of the child's whole nature, or with the growth of his master faculties, or again with the growth of those special "senses" which evolve themselves in response to the stimulus of special environments, we see that in each case the effect of the teacher's policy of distrust and repression is to arrest growth. When the stern supernaturalist reminds us that the child's nature is intrinsically evil, and that therefore in arresting its growth education renders him a priceless service, we answer that, in arresting the growth of the child's nature as a whole, education arrests the growth of all the master faculties of his being, and that there are some at least among these which, even in the judgment of the supernaturalist, imperatively need to be trained. When the strait-laced, result-hunting teacher reminds us that his sole business is to teach certain subjects, and that therefore he cannot concern himself with growth, we answer that, in neglecting to foster growth, he makes it impossible for the child to put forth a special "sense," a special faculty of direct perception, in response to each new environment, and so (for reasons which have already been given) incapacitates him for mastering any subject. There is always one point of view, if no more, from which my primary assumption—that the function of education is to foster growth—is seen to be a truism. And from that point of view, if from no other, the failure of the routine-ridden school to fulfil its destiny is seen to be final and complete.
Yet to say that elementary education, as it is given in such a school, tends to arrest growth, is to under-estimate its capacity for mischief. In the act of arresting growth it must needs distort growth, and in doing this it must needs deaden and even destroy the life which is ever struggling to evolve itself. It is well that from time to time we should ask ourselves what compulsory education has done for the people of England. How much it has done to civilise and humanise the masses is beginning to be known to all who are interested in social progress, and I for one am ready to second any vote of thanks that may be proposed to it for this invaluable service.[15] But when we ask ourselves what it has done to vitalise the nation, we may well hesitate for an answer. Twenty years ago, in the days of "schedules" and "percentages," elementary education was, on balance, an actively devitalising agency. The policy of the Education Department made that inevitable. But things have changed since then; and it is probable that the balance is now in favour of the elementary school. But the balance, though growing from year to year, is as yet very small compared with what it will be when the teacher, relieved from the pressure of the still prevailing demand for "results," is free to take thought for the vital interests of the child.
Whom shall we blame for the shortcomings of our elementary schools? The Board of Education? Their Inspectors? The Teachers? The Training Colleges? The Local Authorities? We will blame none of these. We will blame the spirit of Western civilisation, with its false philosophy of life and its false standard of reality.