§ 5. It is, then, the duty of the teacher to resist gravitating into this state, no less for his pupils’ sake than for his own. The ways and means of doing this I am by no means competent to point out; so I will merely insist on the importance of teachers not being overworked—a matter which has not, I think, hitherto received due attention.
We cannot expect intellectual activity of men whose minds are compelled “with pack-horse constancy to keep the road” hour after hour, till they are too jaded for exertion of any kind. The man himself suffers, and his work, even his easiest work, suffers also. It may be laid down as a general rule, that no one can teach long and teach well. All satisfactory teaching and management of boys absolutely requires that the master should be in good spirits. When the “genial spirits fail,” as they must from an overdose of monotonous work, everything goes wrong directly. The master has no longer the power of keeping the boys’ attention, and has to resort to punishments even to preserve order. His gloom quenches their interest and mental activity, just as fire goes out before carbonic acid; and in the end teacher and taught acquire, not without cause, a feeling of mutual aversion.
§ 6. And another reason why the master should not spend the greater part of his time in formal teaching is this—his doing so compels him to neglect the informal but very important teaching he may both give and receive by making his pupils his companions.
§ 7. I fear I shall be met here by an objection which has only too much force in it. Most Englishmen are at a loss how to make any use of leisure. If a man has no turn for thinking, no fondness for reading, and is without a hobby, what good shall his leisure do him? he will only pass it in insipid gossip, from which any easy work would be a relief. That this is so in many cases, is a proof to my mind of the utter failure of our ordinary education: and perhaps an improved education may some day alter what now seems a national peculiarity. Meantime the mind, even of Englishmen, is more than a “succedaneum for salt;”[205] and its tendency to bury its sight, ostrich-fashion, under a heap of routine work must be strenuously resisted, if it is to escape its deadly enemies, stupidity and ignorance.
§ 8. I have elsewhere expressed what I believe is the common conviction of those who have seen something both of large schools and of small, viz., that the moral atmosphere of the former is, as a rule, by far the more wholesome;[206] and also that each boy is more influenced by his companions than by his master. More than this, I believe that in many, perhaps in most, schools, one or two boys affect the tone of the whole body more than any master.[207] What are called Preparatory Schools labour under this immense disadvantage, that their ruling spirits are mere children without reflection or sense of responsibility.[208] But where the leading boys are virtually young men, these may be made a medium through which the mind of the master may act upon the whole school. They can enter into the thoughts, feelings, and aims of the master on the one hand, and they know what is said and done among the boys on the other. The master must, therefore, know the elder boys intimately, and they must know him. This consummation, however, will not be arrived at without great tact and self-denial on the part of the master. The youth who is “neither man nor boy” is apt to be shy and awkward, and is not by any means so easy to entertain as the lad who chatters freely of the school’s cricket or football, past, present, and to come. But the master who feels how all-important is the tone of the school, will not grudge any pains to influence those on whom it chiefly depends.
§ 9. But, allowing the value of all these indirect influences, can we afford to neglect direct formal religious instruction? We have most of us the greatest horror of what we call a secular education, meaning thereby an education without formal religious teaching. But this horror seems to affect our theory more than our practice. Few parents ever enquire what religious instruction their sons get at Eton, Harrow, or Westminster. At Harrow when I was in the Fourth Form there (nearly fifty years ago by the way) we had no religious instruction except a weekly lesson in Watts’s Scripture History; and when I was a master some twenty years ago my form had only a Sunday lesson in a portion of the Old Testament, and a lesson in French Testament at “First School” on Monday. Even in some “Voluntary Schools” we do not find “religious instruction” made so much of as the arithmetic.
§ 10. In this matter we differ very widely from the Germans. All their classes have a “religion-lesson” (Religionstunde) nearly every day, the younger children in the German Bible, the elder in the Greek Testament or Church History; and in all cases the teacher is careful to instruct his pupils in the tenets of Luther or Calvin. The Germans may urge that if we believe a set of doctrines to be a fitting expression of Divine revelation, it is our first duty to make the young familiar with those doctrines. I cannot say, however, that I have been favourably impressed by the religion-lessons I have heard given in German schools. I do not deny that dogmatic teaching is necessary, but the first thing to cultivate in the young is reverence; and reverence is surely in danger if you take a class in “religion” just as you take a class in grammar. Emerson says somewhere, that to the poet, the saint, and the philosopher, all distinction of sacred and profane ceases to exist, all things become alike sacred. As the schoolboy, however, does not as yet come under any one of these denominations, if the distinction ceases to exist for him, all things will become alike profane.
§ 11. I believe that religious instruction is conveyed in the most impressive way when it is connected with worship. Where the prayers are joined with the reading of Scripture and with occasional simple addresses, and where the congregation have responses to repeat, and psalms and hymns to sing, there is reason to hope that boys will increase, not only in knowledge, but in wisdom and reverence too. Without asserting that the Church of England service is the best possible for the young, I hold that any form for them should at least resemble it in its main features, should be as varied as possible, should require frequent change of posture, and should give the congregation much to say and sing. Much use might be made as in the Church of Rome, of litanies. The service, whatever its form, should be conducted with great solemnity, and the boys should not sit or kneel so close together that the badly disposed may disturb their neighbours who try to join in the act of worship. If good hymns are sung, these may be taken occasionally as the subject of an address, so that attention may be drawn to their meaning. Music should be carefully attended to, and the danger of irreverence at practices guarded against by never using sacred words more than is necessary, and by impressing on the singers the sacredness of everything connected with Divine worship. Questions combined with instruction may sometimes keep up boys’ attention better than a formal sermon. Though common prayer should be frequent, this should not be supposed to take the place of private prayer. In many schools boys have hardly an opportunity for private prayer. They kneel down, perhaps, with all the talk and play of their schoolfellows going on around them, and sometimes fear of public opinion prevents their kneeling down at all. A schoolmaster cannot teach private prayer, but he can at least see that there is opportunity for it.
Education to goodness and piety, as far as it lies in human hands, must consist almost entirely in the influence of the good and pious superior over his inferiors, and as this influence is independent of rules, these remarks of mine cannot do more than touch the surface of this most important subject.[209]
§ 12. In conclusion, I wish to say a word on the education of opinion. Sir Arthur Helps lays great stress on preparing the way to moderation and open-mindedness by teaching boys that all good men are not of the same way of thinking. It is indeed a miserable error to lead a young person to suppose that his small ideas are a measure of the universe, and that all who do not accept his formularies are less enlightened than himself. If a young man is so brought up, he either carries intellectual blinkers all his life, or, what is far more probable, he finds that something he has been taught is false, and forthwith begins to doubt everything. On the other hand, it is a necessity with the young to believe, and we could not, even if we would, bring a youth into such a state of mind as to regard everything about which there is any variety of opinion as an open question. But he may be taught reverence and humility; he may be taught to reflect how infinitely greater the facts of the universe must be than our poor thoughts about them, and how inadequate are words to express even our imperfect thoughts. Then he will not suppose that all truth has been taught him in his formularies, nor that he understands even all the truth of which those formularies are the imperfect expression.[210]