Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

Some such preface as this is needed if I am to make it clear to you why I choose the disadvantages of education rather than the advantages, as the subject matter of my essay. One should always try to speak on something one really believes in heartily and thoroughly. The advantages of education have been spread before us during the last fifty years by every writer of importance—a writer of no importance may fairly give an idle hour to the other side of the picture.

In any commercial country it should not be necessary to apologise for the endeavour to make a rough balance-sheet describing the liabilities of education; even if we are all convinced that the assets of education are more than enough to meet the liabilities and that we are educationally solvent. Nor am I really stating anything very new or startling, for all thinkers and writers on education seem beginning at last to discover that education is only a means to an end, and that when you have no clear idea of what end you hope to arrive at it is not very probable that you will choose the right means.

If a man wanted to travel to Blackpool and was so ignorant as to imagine that Blackpool was in the neighbourhood of London, he would probably in the length of his journey lose many beautiful hours of the sea-side and spend them in the stuffy atmosphere of a railway train. This would be of little importance to the community if it was only the case of an individual man—a schoolmaster for instance. But what if the man had taken a party of children with him? thereby losing for them wonderful hours of digging on the sand, or seeing Punch or Judy, or listening to a Bishop preaching—that indeed would be a serious state of things for everyone.

One of the great disadvantages of modern education is that few of its professors and teachers, and fewer of its elected managers, have the least idea where they are going to. The authorities shoot out codes and prospectuses and minutes and rules and orders, and change their systems with the inspired regularity of a War Office.

Another of the disadvantages of education to-day is that there is too much of it, and that what there is is in the hands of well-meaning directors, who are either middle-aged and ignorant, or, what is worse, middle-aged and academic. If we cannot reach the ideal of Tony Weller and let the child shift for himself, let us at all events unshackle the schoolmaster and allow him to shift for himself. The head master of a great English school is a despot. He has at his back—and I use the phrase “at his back” with deliberate care, not meaning “upon his shoulders”—he has at his back a powerful board of citizens of position who are wise enough and strong enough to leave the question of education to the man at the wheel, and to remember that it is dangerous to speak to him whilst he is steering the ship. Any system of education that is to be of any avail at all must be a personal system in a great measure, and the elementary head master should be in the same position as the head master of our great public schools. The boards and committees should interfere as little as possible with the schoolmasters they employ. A schoolmaster, of all workmen, wants freedom and liberty to do his work his own way. And who can teach anything, worth teaching, who is being constantly worried and harassed by inspectors and committees? Education is not sewage, and you cannot judge of its results by a chemical analysis of the mental condition of the human effluent that pours out of the school gates into the rivers of life.

I have expressed my distrust of schoolmasters quite freely, but I must confess that my detestation of boards and committees amounts almost to a mania, though when I notice the pleasure and delight so many good citizens have in sitting on a committee and preventing business from being done, I fairly admit it is quite possible I am wrong about the matter. It may well be that there is some hidden virtue in these boards and committees, some divine purpose in them that I cannot see. I have sometimes thought that in the course of evolution they will arrive at a condition of permanent session without the transaction of any business whatever. Then possibly the golden age will have arrived, and then the individual servant, no longer hampered by their well meant interference, will have a chance to do his best work. But for my part, so oppressed am I by the futility of committees that I am tempted sometimes to doubt the personality of the Evil One, in the sure belief that the affairs of his territory would be governed more to his liking by a large committee elected on a universal suffrage of both sexes. Who are our ideal schoolmasters in the history of the profession? Roger Ascham, who, learned man that he was, impressed on youth the necessity of riding, running, wrestling, swimming, dancing, singing and the playing of instruments cunningly; Arnold, of Rugby, whose whole method was founded on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy, and who was the personal guide and friend of those of the scholars who could appreciate the value of his friendship; Edward Thring, of Uppingham, who thought “the most pitiful sight in the world was the slow, good boy laboriously kneading himself into stupidity because he is good,” and who stood firm for the individual master’s “liberty to teach.” Are any of these schoolmasters men who could or would have tolerated any interference in their life’s work from an unsympathetic inspector or a prosy town councillor? The work of the committees should be devoted to choosing a good man or woman to be head master of a school and then to leaving him or her alone. The inspectors should be pensioned—and turned off on the golf-links.

Having dealt with these serious disadvantages to education, let me hasten to say a little more about that grave disadvantage to education, the schoolmaster himself. The schoolmaster is generally a man who, having learnt to teach, has long ago ceased to learn. It is the past education of the schoolmaster that generally stands in his way. He believes in education, and thinks it a good thing in itself; he believes in rules and orders and lessons as desirable, whereas they are only the necessary outcome of Adam’s misconduct in the Garden of Eden. I cannot quite agree with Tolstoi’s suggestion that all rules in a school are illegitimate, and that the child’s liberty is inviolable. I do not think anarchy in a school is more possible to-day than anarchy in a state. But I do think that the schoolmaster of to-day should rule as far as possible by the creation of a healthy public opinion among his scholars and make the largest use of that public opinion as a moral and educational force. Looking back on my own experience, it is not what I learnt from my schoolmasters but what I learnt from my companions that has been of any real value to me in after life.

A child should go early to some good kindergarten presided over by some delightfully bright and pleasant lady, merely to learn the lesson that there are other children in the world besides itself. How important it is in life to learn to sit cheerfully next to someone you cordially detest without slapping him or her. And yet such a lesson, to be really mastered, should be learnt before five or seven at the latest. After that it can only be learned by much prayer and—dining out. At dinner parties, and particularly public dinners, one can get the necessary practice in this kind of self-control, but it is better to learn it whilst you are young, when alone it is possible to master the great lessons of life thoroughly and with comparatively little pain. Men have reached the position of King’s Counsel without attaining this simple moral grace.

If you come to think of it, all the really important things in life must of necessity be self-taught. I suppose schoolmasters, being experts in education, have never given serious thought to the fact that the child teaches itself, with the aid of a mother, all the best and necessary lessons of life in the first few years of its being. It learns to eat, for instance. I have watched a baby struggling to find the way to its mouth with a rusk, with intense interest and admiration. How it jabs itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and clothes with the debris, and kicks and fights in disgust and loses the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother, finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed energy on its way, and at length is rewarded by success. What a smile of victory, what a happy relapse into the dreamless sleep of the successful. The child has learned a lesson it will never forget. It has found its way to its mouth. One never learns anything as good as that from a schoolmaster. And indeed if you think of it the baby is learning useful things on its own every day of its life, and working hard at them. It learns to talk, and that in spite of its father and mother, who insist on cooing at it, and talking a wild baby language that must greatly irritate and impede a conscientious self-educating baby endeavouring to master the tongue of the land of its adoption. It learns to walk, too, not without tumbles, and tumbles which inspire it to further effort. I have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there were no schoolmaster?

If you were to abolish the schoolmaster what would happen? I think the answer is that the Burns, the Milton and the Sam Weller of a nation would profit by the stimulus to self-education. The child whose father was a musician or a carpenter or a ploughman who loved his art or craft, would be found striving to become as good an artist or craftsman as his father, and perhaps in the end bettering the paternal example. The school and the schoolmaster can do little but hinder the evolution of any worker in any art or craft. The real worker’s work must be the result of self-education, and he must live from early childhood among the workers. Read, for instance, the delightful account given by Miss Ellen Terry of her early days in “The Story of My Life.” “At the time of my marriage,” she writes, “I had never had the advantage—I assume it is an advantage—of a single day’s schooling in a real school. What I have learned outside my own profession I have learnt from environment. Perhaps it is this that makes me think environment more valuable than a set education and a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity.” Lives there even the schoolmaster who believes that there was any school or schoolmistress in Victorian days that could have done anything but hinder Miss Terry in the triumph of her artistic career? A born actress like Miss Terry could not be aided by Miss Melissa Wackles, with her “English grammar, composition and geography,” even though in that day of lady’s education it was tempered by the use of the dumb-bells.