A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

To imagine that children can ever invariably be controlled without some sort of punishments would, no doubt, be thought ridiculous Utopianism. But the greatest part of the necessity for correction will have disappeared automatically when the greatest source of youthful misbehaviour—restless superfluous activity—has been deviated into channels which will utilise it. Children whisper, fidget, or make a noise in class, simply because they are bored by the dulness of mechanical processes which we persistently use in seeking to cram information into their minds from without instead of exercising the reason that dwells within. As the education of future generations will assuredly have to be a great deal more copious than what we are content with now, it is fortunate that this reform will also be a great economiser of time. Every schoolmaster knows that an interested class progresses far more rapidly than one that is bored and consequently inattentive; and the same boy who is alive to the subtlest implications of the highly complex law of cricket, will often be found utterly incapable of applying the very simple definitions at the beginning of Euclid I., for the simple reason that cricket interests him, while Euclid doesn’t. This is not because the latter is “harder” than cricket, nor yet because cricket is an outdoor pleasure, while Euclid is (or rather should be) an indoor one. It is because in cricket we get him into the habit of reasoning for himself, while in geometry we only too frequently fail to do what Euclid is supposed to help us to do.

Nevertheless, after making every allowance for reduced temptations to misbehaviour resulting from the absorption of redundant mental activity, it is still to be feared that disciplinary punishment will sometimes be required. This will certainly not be corporal. The uncivilised and degrading expedient of purposely-inflicted pain is visibly on its last legs. There are still reactionary people who write to the papers in order to explain that the use of scholastic torture makes for manliness; they must be presumed to think that it would be on the whole rather good for boys to be birched at intervals, like Charles Lamb, not as a punishment, but to keep them humble. But the next century will have outgrown such ideas. The commonest of present-day alternatives—“lines”—is equally obsolescent, the evil effect of this upon handwriting and health being already recognised. “Keeping-in” is probably the most injurious of all forms of correction, but it is only too consistent with our present plans of education to treat extra tuition as a punishment—the best possible way to make all teaching hated. It is much more likely that the schoolmaster of a hundred years hence will punish refractory and inattentive pupils by keeping-out instead of keeping-in. The most detested of all chastisements will be exclusion from the pleasant exercise of learning. During the Russo-Japanese War newspaper readers noted with saturnine amusement that the artillery regiment which in St Petersburg had the maladroitness to fire a salute with a shotted gun and very nearly kill the Czar thereby, was punished by being sent to the front; while at the beginning of hostilities the exemplary conduct of the enormous Japanese army crowded in Tokio for transport was accounted for by the threat that any soldier who misbehaved himself would be left at home. It is the Japanese and not the Russian ideal of discipline that will animate the schools of the future. We shall no doubt emulate the reserve of the Confessor in the Bab Ballads; old heads upon young shoulders we shall not expect to find; and we shall punish when punish we must. Future advantage, even for oneself, is seldom a very powerful motive with the young of any age. But present deprivation is a chastisement easily and keenly comprehended: and the loss of intellectual status involved in exclusion from a lesson will no doubt supplement the immediate boredom very distasteful to an agile mind, which is the more immediate effect. I imagine that the naughty child of the future will be punished by being shut up in a well-ventilated and well-lighted but perfectly empty room, with pockets equally empty. At the same time, by treating deprivation of it as an evident chastisement, the desirable nature of instruction will be in a very useful manner impressed upon the infant mind. Young persons much more easily believe what they find to be treated as a matter of course than what is laboriously impressed upon them by explicit inculcation. Thus the effect of rationalised education will not be, as one critic has rather rashly supposed, to make children little prigs. On the contrary, its effect will be to make them naturally and happily interested little learners—a very different thing. One of the very greatest improvements in the rationalised education will precisely be that it cannot possibly foster the awful priggishness which is a very common result of our own methods.

It has been said already that the education of the happy future will have to be much more copious than anything that is at all common nowadays. The nature of its extensions will next be discussed.

One of the most important and most moral objects of education is to impress upon the mind, as a principle not to be evaded by any contrivance whatever, the fact that fixed causes (among which are personal acts of any kind) produce fixed effects—that there is no circumstance which, with sufficient knowledge, could not be traced back to pre-existing causative circumstance. No department of knowledge tends so intimately to give to the mind the impress of this fact in the course of its acquisition as physical science. And as a proficient acquaintance with physical science will be necessary to a great many occupations, when work of all kinds is performed in the intelligent manner in which we have seen reason to be convinced that it will be performed a hundred years hence, there will be a greater practical need for scientific instruction than there is now, though science is disgracefully neglected even with regard to our present necessities. As education is to be given with the object of fitting children for life as well as developing their minds, the science of health will certainly be taught; but all physical sciences will have their place on the curriculum even at the early stages, because it will have been recognised that the habit of mind which is formed by studies of this kind is not only very necessary to an efficient working life, but also very helpful as a basis of practical culture. It may be conceived that a thorough “grounding” in physical science will be thought as much an essential of all education in the future as a really good training in Latin and Greek used to be considered in the past, and as many of us would like it to be considered now. Fifty years ago we believed that no true education could be given in preparation for ordinary life without as much Latin as was necessary in order to be able to write a fair copy of elegiacs, and as much Greek as was necessary in order to read Homer with comfort. A hundred years hence we shall think it necessary to be able to read a scientific thesis comprehendingly.

At a later period of school life, but still early in it, specialised instruction will no doubt be begun; and subjects connected with the evident tendency of a boy’s or a girl’s mind, and with the opportunities likely to be presented to either in forming a career, will be developed to the exclusion of subjects less immediately subservient to the object of making a useful citizen of him or her in some particular profession or branch of industry. Practical demonstrations of science, instead of being reserved for the more advanced stages of tuition, will, on the contrary, form the groundwork; and children will be required to work practically themselves instead of merely sitting still to watch the performances (in this case apt to be regarded with little more respect than scholastic conjuring tricks) of a teacher. They will be invited to deduce laws for themselves from what occurs in practice, and where they deduce wrong ones they will not be arbitrarily corrected, but assisted to make further experiments which will show where the mistake occurs, until at last the correct generalisation is reached. Only after a considerable course of practical work will they be entrusted with books in which great generalisations are to be found ready made, and these books will always be regarded as a sort of pis aller—a time-saving contrivance to be employed as a regrettable alternative, because it would take too long to work everything out by the golden implement of individual observation. The habit of mind thus cultivated, and the manual dexterity thus obtained, will be of priceless practical worth in after-life; and with what rapturous enjoyment will our descendants acquire knowledge which at present we force upon our children with stripes!

Along with the physical sciences mathematics will have to be greatly cultivated. But mathematics, when perceived to be ancillary to the more immediately delightful work of concrete and experimental science, will lose much terror. Many mathematical operations can moreover be demonstrated experimentally, and no opportunity of thus demonstrating them will be lost. Rightly treated, mathematics need never be dull. According to my own experience and all that I have been able to gather from the recollections of others, algebra (for instance) is never abhorred when a proper care is taken to make use of its call upon the reasoning faculties; and the art of evoking this use will have been carefully developed by the educational specialists who alone will be permitted to direct so delicate and important a task as the training of the young. For school teachers will not be merely more or less erudite people employed to dispense their learning: they will be men and women who have undergone long and careful instruction in the art of pædagogy studied as a specialised faculty in itself.

After mathematics, no doubt languages occupy chief place in the righteous abhorrence of present-day school-children. I say righteous abhorrence with intention, because this department of useful learning always has the air of being purposely planned in order to secure the maximum of execration accompanied by the minimum of advantage. What languages will be taught a hundred years hence, and in what manner will they be instilled into the children of our great-great-grand-children? Any opinions upon a controversy so recent as that which a few months ago raged about the question of compulsory Greek must be more or less untrustworthy. Every man will take the view of the future of the dead languages (so called, as someone[6] sanguinely remarked, because they can never die) determined by his own view as to whether proficiency in the tongues of Hellas and of Rome ought to be maintained in his own day. But for a reason probably admitting of very little controversy, it is at all events permissible to believe that the classical languages will at least not have to meet the urgent competition of a variety of current languages as subjects of useful learning. This reason is to be found in the evident tendency of a paramount tongue to extrude other tongues from practical employment in commerce; and commerce, more than anything else, will of course always determine the question of modern language study. Provided that the race which becomes paramount in the markets of the world during the course of this century possesses a reasonably philosophical, copious, precise language, and one fairly easy to acquire, it is likely that for commercial purposes it will become (to use an incorrect, but not conveniently replaceable term) universal. To the facile remark that every nation considers its own speech easy enough for foreigners to acquire, and much more satisfactory in the other respects named than any tongue which it is invited to give itself the trouble of learning, may be opposed the reply that peoples do in fact recognise, where it exists, the unsatisfactory nature of their own speech. For example, nearly every Russian whom one meets in polite or commercial circles speaks at least French, and often speaks it admirably; while in Norway, though the Scandinavian languages are none of them anything like so difficult to learn as Russian, practically everyone speaks English. The case of Japan is even more illustrative; for apart from the fact that enough of some European language to enable one to travel with perfect comfort is always to be found current in the Mikado’s empire, it is the case that even for domestic use the Japanese have a popular language, printed in newspapers and in some books alongside of the more literary Chinese idæographs, and frequently used to elucidate the latter.[7]

Thus it is quite easy to believe that the paramount language of commerce will impose itself upon at least the business population of the whole world. As the substitution of modern languages for the dead languages is advocated solely on utilitarian grounds, which practically means that it is advocated because to know a couple or more foreign languages is useful in trade; and as no one has ever seriously pretended that French, German or any other modern language can compare with Greek and Latin as intellectual gymnastics and as training in the precise expression of one’s thoughts; it may be assumed that, on the ground of competitive usefulness, the latter will not need to be dispensed with. Whether the study of them will be abandoned on the ground that the time they require can be better employed in some study other than that of languages is another and more difficult question, the resolution of which depends upon the view we take of the literary tendencies probably existing after another century. If we believe that our descendants will have effected so many improvements in the shape of labour-saving contrivances as to afford a large increase of leisure for everyone, as compared with what the present time enjoys, we shall probably expect the languages which enshrine the greatest literature of the world to remain a subject of study. If we believe in the growing intellectuality of man, we shall be strengthened in the same expectation. If, on the other hand, we think that the progress of our race will exhibit itself in the shape of greedy utilitarianism and of idiotic and self-destructive immorality, we shall naturally conclude that no one will be fool enough to trouble himself with Homer or the Oresteian trilogy, the laments of Sappho or the philosophy of Plato. Seeing what great men have taken this somewhat despondent view of the future, it would perhaps be immodest to express any other opinion on the subject.

In any event, we may safely believe that whatever languages are taught will not be handled in the manner now current. Mr Andrew Lang has, in more than one place, described his own “floundering” into Homer—a plunge certainly attended with the happiest results. A method of teaching alien languages which founds itself upon an imitation of the natural picking-up of the mother tongue by babies has been suggested, perhaps without sufficient consideration of the vast expenditure of time necessary to the process, and certainly without sufficient allowance for the fact that it would be impossible to afford the same incessant practice which enables children to learn the language of their fathers and mothers so easily. But there is no reason why we should perpetuate the discouraging preponderance of grammatical and etymological study which caused the late H. D. Traill to say of certain professors that

“They heard with a smile of the flowers of style