Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

Personally I have always regarded it as a matter of congratulation that I escaped from school at a comparatively early age, nor can I honestly say that I remember to-day anything that I formerly learnt at school, or that if I did remember anything I learnt, there,—except perhaps a few irregular French verbs—that it would be of the slightest use to me in the everyday business of life.

If I were, for instance, to model my methods of trial in the County Court upon the proceedings of Euclid, who spent his life in endeavouring to prove by words, propositions that were self-evident even in his own very rudimentary pictures, I should be justly blamed by a commercial community for wasting their time. Yet how many of the most precious hours of the best of my youth have been wasted for me by schoolmasters, who were so dull as not to perceive that Euclid, like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, was the writer of a book of nonsense? Not nonsense that can possibly appeal to the child of to-day, but nonsense that will always have its place in the library of those to whom the Absurd is as precious in life as the Beautiful.

If you believe at all in evolution and progress, and the descent of man from more primitive types, with its wonderfully hopeful corollary, the ascent of man to higher things, you must acknowledge at once that education has necessarily been, and always must be, a great set back to onward movement. A schoolmaster can only teach what he knows, and if one generation only learns what the last generation can teach there is not much hope of onward movement.

Schoolmasters are apt to believe that the hope of the younger generation depends upon their assimilating the ideas of their pastors and masters, whereas the true hope is that they will not be so long overborne by authority, as to make their young brains incapable of rejecting at all events some of the false teaching that each generation complacently offers to the next.

We need not accept the new generation entirely at its own valuation, nor need we disturb ourselves about the exaggerated under-estimate with which one-and-twenty sets down for naught the wisdom of fifty. But unless we pursue education as a preparation for the betterment of the human race we are beating the air. And the responsibility is a great one. For the mind of a child, as Roger Ascham says, is “like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing!” But, alas! it is equally able to receive printing of an inferior type. Every one of us, I should imagine, half believes something to-day that he knows to be untrue because it was impressed on the wax of his child-mind by some well-meaning but ignorant schoolmaster.

One of the gravest disadvantages about education is the way it thwarts progress by teaching young folk that which, to say the least of it, is uncertain. If education were to be strictly confined by the schoolmaster to the things he really knew, what a quantity of lumber could be trundled out of the schoolroom to-morrow. Teaching should be kept to arts, accomplishments and facts—opinions and theories should have no place whatever in the schoolroom.

Open any school book of a hundred years ago and read its theories and opinions, and remember that these were thrust down the throats of the little ones with the same complacent conceit that our opinions and theories of to-day are being taught in the schools. And yet we all know that theories and opinions in the main become very dead sea-fruit in fifty or a hundred years, whilst the multiplication table remains with us like the Ten Commandments, a monument of everlasting truth.

This chief disadvantage of education will probably continue with us for many generations, until it is recognised as immoral and wicked to warp a child’s mind by teaching things to it as facts which are at the best only conjectures, in the hope that in after life it may take some side in the affairs of the world, which the teacher, or the committee of the school, is interested in. The true rule should of course be to teach children, especially in State Schools, only ascertained facts, the truth of which all citizens, who are not in asylums, agree to be true.

My view of the ideal system of education is much the same as Mr. Weller senior’s. You will remember that he said to Mr. Pickwick about his son Sam, “I took a great deal of pains with his eddication, sir! I let him run in the streets when he were very young and shift for his self. It’s the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” I could not ask any body of schoolmasters to adopt this principle, though it is one that seems to me thoroughly sound. Put into other and more scholastic words, it may be made a copy-book sentiment. Emerson says much the same thing as old Tony Weller, when he writes, “That which each can do best only his Maker can teach him,” and the spirit of the Maker of the Universe seems to me at least as likely to be met with in Market Street as in a committee room of the Manchester Town Hall, where the destinies of our national education are so ably managed by citizens of respectability and authority.