Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

In the same way, if we could assure to a boy or girl an apprenticeship from early days to a craftsman or farmer, it would probably be better for the children and the State than any other form of education they receive to-day. It is quite unlikely the world will ever see the minor arts and crafts ever restored to their former glory, unless it encourages parents who are themselves good craftsmen to keep their children away from the schoolmaster in the better atmosphere of a good workshop.

We talk largely about the melancholy increase of unemployment, but how much of this is caused by the education of masses of people in useless subjects. The bad boy who gets into trouble and has the good fortune to be put in a reformatory and there learns a trade has a much better chance of a useful and pleasurable life than the good boy who gains a County Council prize in geography.

I came across a servant in Cumberland whose education had resulted among other things in a knowledge of the catechism and a list of the rivers on the East coast of England, but who did not know the name of the river she could see from the window and who had not the least idea how to light a fire. What is the good of learning your duty to your neighbour when you cannot light a fire to warm him when he is wet through, without wasting two bundles of sticks and a pint of paraffin oil?

One must not however blame the girl, nor indeed her schoolmistress, for probably she too could not light a fire, and both regarded the lighting of a fire as a degrading thing to do. No doubt if you had pursued your educational researches in Cumberland to the source of things, you would have found that the committee could not light fires, and the inspector of schools could not light fires—it may be the Minister of Education himself cannot light a fire—and though there is plenty of material for fires in every board room there is nothing in the code about teaching children to make use of it. Yet I can conceive nothing a child would like better, in his or her early days in school, than being a fire monitor and having charge of the fire and learning to light and look after it. I have made much of this little incident because it is typical of the school education of to-day.

In the old days of family life boys and girls, and especially the latter, learnt in a good home a great deal of domestic work, and the boys could help in their father’s shop or farm or inn as the case might be, and learnt thereby many things that you cannot learn in schools. Mr. Squeers, though not a moral character, was possessed of a practical mode of teaching. “C-l-e-a-n clean, verb active to make bright, to scour. W-i-n win, d-e-r der, winder a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book he goes and does it.” And if you come to think of it, it is far more important that a boy should know how to keep a window clean than that he should know how to spell it.

The schoolmaster of an elementary school therefore should be a man of good domestic tastes, who wishes to see his home neat and clean and well kept and tidy, who insists on having his food well cooked, and prefers that his wife and daughter should be well dressed at the smallest possible cost to himself. These virtues he should be urged to put before scholars as being the first duties of life and the chiefest honour of a good citizen. The false notion that reading and writing are in themselves higher attainments than carpentering, cooking and sewing should be sternly discouraged, and only teachers should be chosen capable of some technical excellence in the practical work of crafts. For the same reasons teachers should never be chosen for any academic degree they possess, for every day it becomes more certain that the man who obtains these degrees is the man who has deliberately failed to make himself a master of any one subject. He is a man who has wasted precious hours in getting a smattering of many useless branches of learning, and has been forced by the sellers of degrees to abandon all hope of having sufficient leisure to study music or painting or the workmanship of a craft, or even to have read widely of English literature. In the education of the young the man who can play the piano, or better still, the fiddle, is more important to my purpose than the man who can make Latin verses; and the man who can model a toy boat with a pocket-knife whilst he is telling you a fairy tale is, from the standpoint of real education, a jewel of rare price. The schoolmaster of to-day is one of the disadvantages of education because he is interested mainly in subjects of smaller importance and is not really a sound man in any one real pursuit, such as music or drawing.

Another disadvantage of English elementary education is that it places the school course and literary things above the playing fields and physical things. All men who have thought about education at all, and who had any capacity for thinking wisely, have recognised that in training a child to make and keep his body a healthy body we are proceeding upon lines that experience tells us are right and sound lines. Here we can teach something we know. Plato tells us that the experience of the past in his day had discovered that right education consisted in gymnastics for the body and music for the mind. I do not know that we can say with certainty that we have ascertained to-day much more about education than Plato knew. In our day I should put the arts and crafts of home life and the practice—not preaching—of its virtues, first in the programme, and secondly, to use Plato’s word, gymnastics. These should include cricket, football, running, jumping, wrestling, dancing, fives, tennis, and all manly and womanly associated games which exercise and develop the body, and have by the public opinion of the players to be played with modesty and self-restraint, and with a reasonable technical skill that can only be arrived at by taking pains. All these things are far more useful than any subjects that can be taught in a schoolroom. One of the great advantages of middle-class public school life is that these things are taught, and that the boys work at them in a healthy spirit of emulation and a magnificent desire to succeed that would turn the whole nation into a Latin-speaking race, if by any misfortune its motive power were diverted into the schoolroom.

Elementary education and its schoolmasters have but small opportunities to foster this natural healthy training of the body in which all young people are willing and ready to co-operate with their teachers. Unfortunately, the men who obtain positions on educational committees are too often men who have amassed wealth at the expense of their livers, and who would look askance at the ideas of Plato, Roger Ascham, or Tolstoi. Still, I think a day is coming when playing-fields and playgrounds will be attached to every elementary school, and used not only by existing scholars, but by the old boys and girls, who will thereby keep in touch with the school and its good influences.

But, you will say, nothing has been said hitherto about any lessons. Are reading, writing, and arithmetic to be considered wholly as disadvantages? It would be easy to take up such a position and hold it in argument but it is not necessary. The advantages of educating the masses in the three R’s are obvious and on the surface, but the grave disadvantages are also there. It is no use teaching a person anything that he is likely to make a bad use of, and experience tells us that many people are ruined by learning to read. Since the Education Act of 1870, a mass of low-class literature and journalism has sprung up to cater for the tastes of a population that has undergone a compulsory training in reading. Betting and gambling have been greatly fostered by the power of reading and answering advertisements. In the same way quack remedies for imaginary ailments must have done a lot of harm to the health of the people, and the use of them is the direct result of teaching ignorant people to read and not teaching them to disbelieve most things they may happen to read. Writing in the same way by being made popular and common has become debased. One seldom sees a good handwriting nowadays and spelling is a lost art. Writing, however, must in a few years go out in favour of machine writing. Penmanship will hardly be taught some years hence when everyone will have a telephone and typewriter of his own. I cannot see that the universal habit of writing has done very much for the world. The great mass of written matter that circulates through the post, the vast columns of newspaper reports that are contradicted the next day—these things are the fruits of universal writing. There is no evidence that in the past anything worth writing ever remained unwritten. But there is strong evidence that since 1870 much has been written that had better have remained unwritten, and would have so remained but for State encouragement through its system of education. As to arithmetic—if you saw the books of the small shopkeepers in the County Court—you would recognise its small hold on the people. One chief use of it by the simpler folk seems to be the calculations of the odds on a horse race. In France and other more civilised countries this is done more honestly by a machine called a totaliser, and gambling is thereby kept within more reasonable limits. Elementary arithmetic has been profitable to the bookmaker—but to how many besides? If you teach a boy cooking or carpentering he is very unlikely to make an evil use of these accomplishments in after life because they naturally minister to the right enjoyment of life. Whereas if you teach a boy reading, writing, and arithmetic, the surroundings of youth being what they are, he is at least as likely to misuse these attainments as to use them to the benefit of himself and his fellow creatures. Once recognise this and you must admit not that the three R’s should be discontinued, but that much more should be done to teach the young persons to whom you have imparted these pleasant arts how to make use of them legitimately and honourably. It is no use teaching young people any subject unless you see that in after life they are to have opportunities of using their attainment for the benefit of the State. Our fathers and grandfathers were all for education as an end. We are face to face with the results of a national system of elementary education with no system whatever of helping the educated to make good use of their compulsory equipment. It is as though you gave a boy a rifle and taught him to shoot and turned him out into the world to shoot at anything he felt inclined. Such a boy would be a danger to the community, whereas if you placed him in a cadet corps when he left school he and his rifle might be a national asset.

That learning without a proper outlet for its use may be a grave danger to the individual and to the community is seen in the present state of India, and Lord Morley of Blackburn, one of the greatest supporters of education himself, called attention to the necessity of a community which provides an education to a certain class allowing the citizens so educated a proper opportunity of exercising the faculties it has developed. As he said in the House of Lords, “I agree that those who made education what it is in India are responsible for a great deal of what has happened since.” And what is true of India is equally true of England.