Church and Nation / The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

by William Temple

But education which is to have this effect, without producing mere selfishness and aggressiveness and thereby defeating its own object, must be a moralising force; and that means, if the argument of Appendix II is sound, that its processes must be largely sub-conscious. In fact, one root of the great sin of Germany is to be found in the effort to control life through the highly developed conscious intellect. The specialised training of administrators and the attempt to guide human action by scientific method is doomed to failure. If it were possible to collect all the relevant facts, it might be right merely to form an inductive conclusion and act upon it. But in regard of any human problem it is never possible to collect all the facts; they are at once too numerous and too subtly differentiated. Consequently the English method, though grotesquely deficient just where the German is strong, is yet morally preferable and politically more successful. It takes a boy and throws him into a society of boys which largely governs itself; appalling risks are taken and disasters are not unknown; boy standards are allowed to prevail, with the result that form-work is regarded as a tiresome though inevitable adjunct rather than the chief business of school life. Perhaps it is as well to mention here that the exaltation of games over work, however disastrous in its exaggeration, is yet morally sound; for the boy feels that in his games he plays for his house and school, while his work is done for himself. Wise seniors will tell him from the pulpit that he should work hard at school so as to fit himself for the service of the community in later years; and this is true enough; but the boy will be a terrible prig if he is continually conscious of its truth.

The same principle determines our University ideal. The primary test for a degree is "residence"—that is, an adequate share in a general life. Colleges may require attendance at lectures, but the University does not. It demands that a candidate for a degree should have some knowledge—not very much, it is true—but it never asks where or how he got it; it only asks if he has "kept his terms."

At the end of the process there are some failures, of course; but those who represent the system's success, and they are the great majority, though they may not have any large amount of knowledge, have acquired the instinct to act wisely in almost any emergency with which they may be confronted. Very often they could not give any theoretical ground for acting as they do, for their wisdom is largely sub-conscious or instinctive; but the action is right all the same.

In England we are at the present time witnessing the collision of two educational types, of which I have outlined the older and more traditional. But this collision is itself of such exceeding interest that, at the risk of some repetition, I would venture to sketch out the two opposing types and attempt to indicate the mode of their interaction.

The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and experience.

Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the result of the interaction between two predominant educational types, which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages, and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is that in practice—whatever its theory may have been—in practice it is corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to educate people in direct relation to their social context, your educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time, the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public school. I mean they don't learn anything there." The instruments which for the most part this education has used have been the great literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because, while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The aim of this type of education has been to bring the student's mind into closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history), with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly (in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism. This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.

The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree, though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and, consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all social divisions.

Its ideal is the educational ladder. Now there would be no objection to the educational ladder if people went down it as well as up, if, that is to say, men of small ability and character always sank in the social scale and men of great ability and character always rose. But so long as you have social classes maintained in their position, not by ability and character alone, but by the mere accident of possession, so long it will be true that to lift a man by education from one social stratum to another is to expose him to a terrible temptation—the temptation to despise his own people. And when once a man's native sympathies have been rooted up, it is hard for any more to grow. There is real danger that the more modern type of education may serve to produce a race of self-seekers. But this modern type has great advantages. It is alive and in touch with the world at the moment; and the people who receive education of this kind will probably be very vitally aware of most of the living interests of their own time. But it fails to supply standards of judgment.

Now, of course, no existing institution belongs purely and entirely to either of these types; but we can all think easily of institutions in which one or the other is the predominant characteristic. And one of our troubles is that most parents like the faults and dislike the virtues of both types. They like the aristocratic and exclusive tone of the traditional type; and they like the pushfulness and "get-on-in-the-world" tone of the modern type.

The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought by the greatest men in the history of the world. This is very liable to lead people to suppose that whatever is modern is on that account good. Now that is exactly as foolish as to suppose that whatever is ancient is therefore good. The fact its antiquity or modernity has nothing to do with its value at the present moment. Of course, it is true that any institution which has lasted through many centuries is likely to be of use again, though we may always have just reached the point at which it begins to be an incubus. Of course, it is true that an idea which arises out of the stress of life at the moment is very likely to be very well adapted to the realities of that moment in which it arises, but, also, it may be well adapted to assist a downward course. What we want is that the people shall know the facts and also have the power to judge them—to be able, as I said, to assist or resist the tendencies of their time, in the light of the best ideals and standards. There is a very strong inclination among many of us (I am personally very much aware of it in myself) to think that the new thing must be good; and yet one remembers the words of Clough:—