For they recognised nothing but roots!”
In fact, here as elsewhere, the persistent demand that schooling be made agreeable will have the best possible effect in facilitating instruction. It is as literature that all languages—including the native language of the scholars—will be taught; and they will be taught far more easily than we have any example to assist us in imagining. Where a foreign language pronounced with a different accent and intonation from that of the learner is studied, no doubt (as already mentioned) talking machines will be employed: and in addition, pupils will be required to read and speak the language aloud on all possible occasions, in order to exercise the organs of speech in the alien manner.[8]
It is a trite saying, and one that need not be dwelt upon here, that history ought not to be taught as if its sole purpose were to store the memory with the deeds and misdeeds of kings and the progress of various wars. It will certainly be studied hereafter as a vast lesson in sociology and politics, as an illustration of the science of human dynamics. It is perhaps not superfluous to remark that brilliant examples of the new historiography have shown that the difference is not, in its result, so great as some critics imagine. But the deductions from the facts of history are the important matter: and the way in which history will be used a hundred years hence will be in instructing the future governors of the world how to use their citizenship wisely. Among other things expected of the schoolmaster of the future will be that he implant in his scholars an ardent desire to do their part in determining the polity of the state they live in, and the sacred duty of the ballot will certainly be taught with relation to whatever methods of utilising the popular vote may by that time have become current.
Moreover, history, like languages, is capable of being taught as literature; and the protest against the prevalent notion that high civilisation involves the decadence of beauty in any form implies belief in all the arts as subjects of cultivation in the schools of the future. It need not be supposed that the unreasonable waste of time entailed by the present method of teaching such a subject as drawing, and our curious neglect of sculpture and modelling, will be perpetuated. As we can already see the dawn of new ideas on both these subjects the tendency of the future in regard to them is not difficult to conceive, nor need space be consumed in discussing them in detail. Literature and poetry (the latter, I need hardly say, no longer made merely hateful as the subject of the fatuous torture called “learning by heart”) with belles-lettres, drawing, painting, and sculpture, will no doubt be taught in an elementary way to all children, and the study of them developed further where a natural appetite demands it. In reply to the very natural question, “How can an art be taught?” it is only needful to say that minds exercised by being made to think about such subjects, are quite certain to exhibit special predilections in one place and special aversions in another, and that the ascertainment of these predilections and aversions will everywhere be made the subject of painstaking thought. While nobody seriously pretends nowadays that a taste for literature or the arts can be inoculated upon a child’s understanding, I imagine that few will question the belief that a natural bent for any one of them can be assisted in its development, and that taste, while it is incapable of being artificially implanted, certainly is susceptible of being guided and assisted. The defect of routine teaching in æsthetics at present is the defect of all our systems of education. We try to do a scholar’s thinking for him. We laboriously show him how to use a pencil and how to copy drawings and pictures; and sometimes (though this kind of instruction is usually retailed by the ingenious writers who endeavour to instruct the adult public through the Press) we even go to the trouble of telling him the kind of pictures he ought to admire (usually forgetting that in the house of Art there are many mansions, and that a disgust for the early Dutch masters does not necessarily imply an incapacity for appreciating Velasquez); but, whether in adolescence or maturity, we never seem to arrive at the point of trying to get people to think critically for themselves. We shall reform altogether the processes of artistic education in the course of this century.
The training of eye and hand will certainly not be neglected. If only because learning any kind of handicraft gives the keenest enjoyment to children, we may be sure that manual instruction will be given, and that the effect of it will be of great value, not only recreative but also practical. Our mechanics will not have to inaugurate the wage-earning period of their lives by the elementary acquisition of the use of tools. Their future occupation will have been foreseen, and both by scientific understanding of the processes they are to subserve, and by manual practice of the exact work they are to perform, they will be prepared for intelligent craftsmanship; the glorious fact that real anxiety to find out the best possible method of attaining the best possible results makes every craft, however humble, not merely delightful but also noble, being automatically grasped, so that work, like learning, will be a thing of joy and a source, to the worker, of lifelong self-respect.
Thus in every department of education the result of the training administered intelligently, and with almost infinite long-sightedness and subtlety during school-days, will be to form character, not by repression of any natural predilection, but by cultivation of mental and moral impulses to good. We shall never be content with an obedient abstention from misconduct, but shall unrestingly contrive that the desire to act rightly as well as wisely be implanted in the mind, until wisdom, righteousness and forethought have been stamped upon the character with so indelible an imprint that it would do violence to the whole contour of the mind to act in defiance of them. A people thus trained will be capable of all the reforms predicted of society a hundred years hence. Not by any of the unimaginable cataclysms by which dreamers have expected Utopia to be established, ready-made, on a basis of unreformed obedience to the will of fantastic lawgivers, but by the steady growth of national morality will progress,
“Moving as beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man,”
establish, on the basis of a perfect harmony between the nature of the units and the institutions of society, the rationalised, moralised, and still progressive state of the world looked for by all who contemplate logically and with ordered faith the capabilities of their kind a hundred years hence.