It is in providing healthy outlets and uses for the educational power that has been created that the Boards and Committees who govern these matters will have to turn immediate attention if they wish to justify their existence.
I know that these detached remarks of mine on education must necessarily appear heretical—and they are to some extent intentionally so. I do not agree with Mr. Chesterton that the heretic of old was proud of not being a heretic, and believed himself orthodox and all the rest of the world heretics. If he did he was indeed a madman. But there is a place in the world for the utterer of heresies if only to awaken the orthodox from slumber and to make him look around and see if there is any reform that can be made without destroying the whole edifice. Reforms come slowly and we, for our part, shall only see the dawn of a better era whose sunshine will gladden the lives of our grandchildren. I am not a pessimist about the English school though I have chosen to speak of its disadvantages. I think, to use an American phrase, it is a “live” thing.
If you go into an English village you find three great public institutions, the Church, the Inn, and the School. Each is licensed to some extent by the State and each is burdened by the connection. You find as a rule that the Church has voluntarily locked its doors and put up a notice that the key may be found at some old lady’s cottage half a mile away. You go into the Inn and find it struggling to make itself hospitable in spite of the mismanagement of brewers and the unsympathetic bigotry of magistrates. But from the door of the School troop out merry children, who some day will look back to that time of their life as the happiest of all, and who will recognise the debt of gratitude they are under to the schoolmaster, who in spite of the limitations of his system and himself encourages his pupils to effort and self-reliance and teaches them lessons of duty, reverence, and love.
I am not greatly interested in the Church or the Inn, both of which institutions seem well able to guard themselves from the disestablishment they are said to deserve. But I am interested in the School—and I wish to see it housed in fairer and more ample buildings with larger playing fields around them. And I want to see a race of schoolmasters not only better paid—but worth more. Men and women to whom the State can fairly give a free hand, knowing that their object in education would be to mould their pupils into self-reliant citizens rather than to teach them scholastic tricks. “The schoolmaster is abroad,” said Lord Brougham, “and I trust to him armed with his primer.” For my part, a schoolmaster armed with a primer is an abomination of desolation standing in a holy place. I differ from a Lord Chancellor with a very natural diffidence but his Lordship was wrong. The schoolmaster of 1828 was not abroad, he was in the same predicament as the schoolmaster of 1911—at sea.
If I were Minister of Education, I would write over the door of every school in the country the beautiful words, “Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto Me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Let us beware lest we forbid them by dogmas and creeds that lead only to hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; let us take heed lest we forbid them by lessons and learning dull for to-day and dangerous for to-morrow. Let us at least teach them as our grandmothers taught children when there were no schools in the land, the simple duties of life that we all know the meaning of, and the Christian duty of unselfishness which we none of us practise. And in this, as in all things, let us strive to teach by example rather than by word. And if we are to teach by the Christian rule, then how great, how noble, how enduring is to be the work of the schoolmaster in continuing the greatness of our nation. And the man or woman we shall choose shall not be a pedant, whose long ears are decorated by degrees, but an honest, simple person of any creed whatsoever, who will humbly and reverently teach the children of his or her school the few simple facts of life, and add to that something of its arts and its crafts and so much or little of its learning as can be a service and not a hindrance to the child’s career.
COOKERY BOOK TALK.
Arviragus. How angel-like he sings!
Guiderius. But his neat cookery! he cut our roots in characters,
And sauc’d our broths as Juno had been sick