"'Old things need not be therefore true,'
Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."
Again, the old type which trains people through their social setting is very largely co-operative in its methods. It merges the individual in his school, or his college, so that he comes quite genuinely to care more keenly for the welfare of his house and school and college than for his own progress. Nobody who has had any intercourse at all with the life of public schools or universities can doubt that. The modern method, on the whole, I suppose, trusts mainly rather to competition. It aims at assisting people to put out their best energy by pitting them against one another. I want to raise a very serious question to which I am not prepared to give an answer. I want all people interested in education to consider it. Is it worth while to get the greatest effort out of a person at the cost of teaching him that he is to make efforts in his own interest? I am very doubtful.
I heard a little while ago a distinguished schoolmaster describe the visit of the father of one of the boys in his house; the boy was being very idle, and this distinguished man said, "I wish you would speak to him as seriously as ever you can"; the father said, "I will." He saw the boy and when he came back he said, "I spoke to him very seriously, in fact I spoke to him quite religiously. I said 'You must be getting along, you know, or other people will be pushing past you.'" The religion would appeal to be of a "Darwinian" type.
Now I wish to express a purely personal conviction with regard to these two types of teaching, and it is this: while we have got to incorporate all, or at any rate, nearly all, that the more modern type of education has given us, it has got to be used in such a way as to leave the great marks of the traditional type predominant. Education, I hold, should remain primarily corporate rather than individual, primarily spiritual (that is, effective through influence, and through an appeal to sympathy and imagination), rather than primarily intellectual (that is, effective through an appeal to intelligence and memory), primarily concerned with giving people the power to pronounce judgment on any facts with which they may come in contact rather than supplying them simply with the facts. It should be primarily co-operative and not primarily competitive.
It is mainly the new democratic movements in education which have emphasised this view. Indeed, the Workers' Educational Association has understood more definitely than any other body I am aware of, that what it finds of supreme value in the great centres of education is the spirit of the place rather than the instruction; and those of us who have received the best, or at all events have been in a position to receive the best, that Oxford can give, and those who have had just a taste of her treasures at the Summer School, will agree that Oxford does more for us than any lectures do. But while we say that, we need also to insist on a greater energy and efficiency, a greater and more living contact with the world of to-day in some, at least, of the centres of the old traditional type. Yet it is the traditional type that must control, because the traditional type on the whole stands for spirit against machinery. I have no doubt it is true that the old schools and universities are amateurish in method; and I have no doubt that we ought to organise ourselves more efficiently. There is a good deal of waste that may be saved; but I shall regret the day when we become efficient at the cost of our spirit.
I believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the Workers' Educational Association you will find upon the whole the soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.
These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation. These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power shall be beneficent.
APPENDIX IV
ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY
The position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body. In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to quote the following from his article—"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu Conference," in the Church Quarterly Review for January, 1914.