EDWARD ERNEST BOWEN[53]
Ever since the publication of Stanley’s Life of Dr. Arnold that eminent headmaster has been taken as the model of a great teacher and ruler of boys, the man who, while stimulating the intelligence of his pupils, was even more concerned to discipline and mould their moral natures. Arnold has become the type of what Carlyle might have called “The Hero as Schoolmaster.” Though there have been many able men at the head of large schools since his time, including three who afterwards rose to be Archbishops of Canterbury, as well as a good many who have become bishops, his fame remains unrivalled, and the type created by his career, or rather perhaps by his biographer’s account of it, still holds the field. Moreover, during the sixty years that have passed since Arnold’s death scarcely a word has been said regarding any other masters than the head. During those years the English universities have sent into the great schools a large proportion of 344 their most capable graduates as assistant teachers; and some of the strongest men among these graduates have never, from various causes, and often because they preferred to remain laymen, been raised to the headships of the schools. Every one knows that a school depends for its wellbeing and success more largely on the assistants taken together than it does on the headmaster. Most people also know that individual assistant masters are not unfrequently better scholars, better teachers, and more influential with the boys than is their official superior. Yet the assistant masters have remained unhonoured and unsung in the general chorus of praise of the great schools which has been resounding over England for nearly two generations.
Edward Bowen was all his life an assistant master, and never cared to be anything else. As he had determined not to take orders in the Church of England, he was virtually debarred from many of the chief headmasterships, which are, some few of them by law, many more by custom, confined to Anglican clergymen. But even when other headships to which this condition was not attached were known to be practically open to his acceptance, were, indeed, in one or two instances almost tendered to him, he refused to become a candidate, preferring his own simple and easy way of life to the pomp and circumstance which convention requires a headmaster to maintain. This 345 abstention, however, did not prevent his eminence from becoming known to those who had opportunities of judging. In his later years he would, I think, have been generally recognised by the teaching profession as the most brilliant, and in his own peculiar line the most successful, man among the schoolmasters of Britain.
He was born on 30th March 1836, of an Irish family (originally from Wales) holding property in the county of Mayo. His father was a clergyman of the Church of England; his mother, who survived him a few months (dying at the age of ninety-four) and whom he tended with watchful care during her years of widowhood, was partly of Irish, partly of French extraction. Like his more famous but perhaps not more remarkable elder brother, Charles Bowen, who became Lord Bowen, and is remembered as one of the most acute and subtle judges as well as one of the most winning personalities of our time, he had a gaiety, wit, and versatility which suggested the presence of Celtic blood. He was educated at Blackheath School, and afterwards at King’s College in London, whence he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1860, after a career at the University, distinguished both in the way of honours and in respect of the reputation he won among his contemporaries, he became a master at Harrow, and thenceforth remained there, leading an 346 uneventful and externally a monotonous life, but one full of unceasing and untiring activity in play and work. He died on Easter Monday 1901.
Nothing could be less like the traditional Arnoldine methods of teaching and ruling boys than Bowen’s method was. The note of those methods was what used to be called moral earnestness. Arnold was grave and serious, distant and awe-inspiring, except perhaps to a few specially favoured pupils. Bowen was light, cheerful, vivacious, humorous, familiar, and, above all things, ingenious and full of variety. His leading principles were two—that the boy must at all hazards be interested in the lessons and that he should be at ease with the teacher.
A Harrow boy once said to his master, “I don’t know how it is, sir, but if Mr. Bowen takes a lesson he makes you work twice as hard as other masters, but you like it twice as much and you learn far more.” He was the most unexpected man in conversation that could be imagined, always giving a new turn to talk by saying something that seemed remote from the matter in hand until he presently showed the connection. So his teaching kept the boys alert, because its variety was inexhaustible. He seemed to think that it did not greatly matter what the lesson was so long as the pupil could be got to enjoy it. The rules of the school and the 347 requirements of the examinations for which boys had to be prepared would not have permitted him to try to any great extent the experiment of varying subjects to suit individual tastes; but he was fond of giving lessons in topics outside the regular course, on astronomy for instance, of which he had acquired a fair knowledge, and on recent military history, which he knew wonderfully well, better probably than any man in England outside the military profession. When the so-called “modern side” was established at Harrow, in 1869, he became head of it, having taken this post, not from any want of classical taste and learning, for he was an admirable scholar, and to the end of his life wrote charming Latin verses, but because he felt that this line of teaching needed to be developed in a school which had been formerly almost wholly classical. For grammatical minutiæ, for learning rules by heart, and indeed for the old style of grammar-teaching generally, he had an unconcealed contempt. He thought it unkind and wasteful to let a boy go on puzzling over difficulties of language in an author, and permitted, under restrictions, the use of English translations, or (as boys call them) “cribs.” Teaching was in his view a special gift of the individual, which depended on the aptitude for getting hold of the pupil’s mind, and enlisting his interest in the subject. He had accordingly no faith in the doctrine that 348 teaching is a science which can be systematically studied, or an art in which the apprentice ought to be systematically trained. When he was summoned as a witness before the Secondary Education Commission in 1894 he adhered, under cross-examination, to this view (so far as it affected schools like Harrow or Eton), refusing to be moved by the arguments of those among the Commissioners who cited the practice of Germany, where Pädagogik, as they call it, is elaborately taught in the universities. “I am unable,” he said, “to conceive any machinery by which the art of teaching can be given practically to masters. That art is so much a matter of personal power and experience, and of various social and moral gifts, that I cannot conceive a good person made a good master by merely seeing a class of boys taught, unless he was allowed to take a real and serious part in it himself, unless he became a teacher himself. I can understand that at a primary school you can learn by going in and hearing a good teacher at work; but the teaching of a class of older boys is so different, and has so much of the social element in it, and it may vary so much, that I should despair of teaching a young man how to take a class unless he was a long time with me.... A master at a large public school is chiefly a moral and social force; a master is this to a much less extent at a primary school or in the ordinary day-schools, the grammar-schools of the country. To 349 deal with boys when you have them completely under your control for the whole of every day is an altogether different thing, and requires different virtues in the teacher from those that are required in the case of day-schools.”
Bowen may possibly have been mistaken, even as regards the teachers in the great public boarding schools. His view seems to overlook or disregard that large class of persons who have no marked natural aptitude for teaching, but are capable of being, by special instruction and supervised practice, kneaded and moulded into better teachers than they would otherwise have grown to be. He felt so strongly that no one ought to teach without having a real gift and fondness for teaching that he thought such difference as training could make insignificant in comparison with the inborn talent. Perhaps he generalised too boldly from himself, for he had an enjoyment of his work, and a conscientiousness in always putting the very best of himself into it—how much was conscientiousness and how much was enjoyment, no one could tell—as well as a quickness and vivacity which no study of methods could have improved. As one of his most eminent colleagues,[54] who was also his life-long friend, observes: “The humdrum and routine which must form so large a part of a teacher’s life were never humdrum or routine to him, for he put the whole of his abounding 350 energies into his work, and round its driest details there played and flickered, as with a lambent flame, his joyous spirit, finding expression now perhaps in a striking parallel, now in a startling paradox, now in a touch of humour, and once again in a note of pathos.”
The personal influence he exerted on the boys who lived in his House was quite as remarkable as his “form-teaching.” Stoicism and honour were the qualities it was mainly directed to form. Every boy was expected to show manliness and endurance, and to utter no complaint. Where physical health was concerned he was indulgent; his House was the first which gave the boys meat at breakfast in addition to tea with bread and butter. But otherwise the discipline was Spartan, though not more Spartan than that he prescribed to himself, and the House was trained to scorn the slightest approach to luxury. Arm-chairs were forbidden except to sixth-form boys. A pupil relates that when Bowen found he was in the habit of taking two hot baths a week the transgression was reproved with the words: “Oh boy, that’s like the later Romans, boy.” His maxims were: “Take sweet and bitter as sweet and bitter come” and “Always play the game.” He never preached to the boys or lectured them; and if he had to convey a reproof, conveyed it in a single sentence. But he dwelt upon honour as the foundation of character, and made every boy feel that he was 351 expected to reach the highest standard of truthfulness, courage, and duty to the little community of the House, or the cricket eleven, or the football team.