Knowledge and Character bound with The Modern Teacher(RLE Edu K)

William Archer, A Bain

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136495090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written before, but published after The First World War, this volume's plea for a national system of education which will produce a nation of prosperous, morally fulfilled people able to live at peace with other nations is doubly poignant given the sacrifice of the 'lost generation'. However, the author also sees the horror of the War as an opportunity to change human destiny through education, an opportunity to abandon the narrow system of education in favour of one which will 'bring education in touch with life' and provide Britain with the intellectual and moral efficiency necessary to steer her through the following turbulent years of the twentieth century.

Covering the core subjects of the English school curriculum in the early twentieth century the chapters in The Modern Teacher, if somewhat utopian, describe best practice in teaching of the particular subject and suggest possible improvements. One chapter also discusses the importance of the relatively new subject of citizenship, as well as the moral education of pupils.

THE MODERN TEACHER

THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

BY E. A. GREENING LAMBORN

“ That ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly ”

SOME time ago a Government inspector, retiring after many years of activity in the schools, wrote a book on “ What Might Have Been ”. He began it with the question : What is all this doing for the child ? And he declared this to be a question which few teachers ever asked, and which fewer still could satisfactorily answer. No worse reproach could be brought against the school inspectors than is implied in this criticism of the teachers. For the state of mind of most teachers since inspection was substituted for examination may be best expressed in the mute appeal: “ Sir, we know not whither thou goest, and how shall we know the way ? ” There is the mistake the teachers have made : instead of asking what have we to do for the child ? they have asked what have we to do for the inspector ? Now that the Board of Education is so greatly widening its sphere of influence, it is necessary to state plainly that the former question alone concerns us, and that solicitude for the other will inevitably produce in the secondary schools the mischief it has caused in the primary.¹

The quotation at the head of this chapter sums up in a phrase the essential purpose of all education—physical, technical, or intellectual; elementary or advanced ; utilitarian or liberal: for even an industrial training is designed to secure the means of life. But the special reference, in the text as in the chapter, is to that life of the spirit which is the supreme characteristic of man. We are concerned with literature as the realm in which alone the true life of man is lived. When Dr. Johnson said that there was less difference between the living and the dead than between the lettered and the illiterate, he was speaking no more than the truth, however startling it may sound.

Life in the material world is but mechanical existence shared with the animals; in the world of pure thought it is a vain attempt to find reason and purpose in an unintelligible chaos of stupidity and injustice, which ends in the paralysis of Hamlet, or the frozen life-force of Rodin's “ Le Penseur,” or the insanity of Dürer's “ Melancholia ”.

“Is there no life but these alone,

Madman or slave, must man be one ?”

And the answer is that the mind is its own place; man, essentially, is a dreamer, and his true life is in a world of his own creation, where by the exercise of his characteristic power to “ submit the shews of things to the desires of the mind ” he remoulds them nearer to his heart's desire so that he is no longer a bewildered spectator of a monstrous confusion but a maker and shaper of an ordered and significant cosmos from his spirit.

“In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world

Is lifted ”

“Where there is no vision the people perish”: men descend again to the animal level when they lose the perception which raises them above it—that the material is not the real.

Human progress depends on the growth of this perception: Scientific “ advance ” represents progress only so far as it raises man above materialism, first by giving him power over nature, and so freeing his mind from the obsession of his material needs; and secondly by confirming his intuitive belief that matter is not an ultimate reality. Progress means “the breaking of the prison house of matter, that the spirit may be set free to create its own world ”.²

That, conscious or subconscious, is the aspiration which is behind the growing demand of our people for more leisure and a larger share in the wealth produced by the national industry. Mr. Barnes has warned us that “ the great danger of the present day is to regard the Labour question as a bread and butter question. It is nothing of the kind : it is an educational question; it is a religious question, a question of a man's proper place in life, and not only as a wage-earner.” The worst mistake we could commit would be to continue to regard education as a “ bread and butter question ”; most of our present discontents and difficulties are the results, direct or indirect, of the commercialized system of elementary instruction which grew out of Victorian industrialism. To carry conviction here is so important for my present purpose that I would ask the reader at this point to take down “ Hard Times ” and the “ History of Mr. Polly ” and read the first chapter in those books of revelation. . . .

The hard facts demanded by Mr. Gradgrind have produced the hard-headed business men admired by the “ Morning Post”; but they have also produced hard hearts unmoved by any but selfish motives. And the “ practical” education which almost killed the poet in Mr. Polly shows its results in those very practical methods of direct action which are endangering the foundations of civilized society. That must inevitably be the outcome of a system of education which appeals for its motive force to a desire for material advantage ; and its effects on the individual will be equally fatal— discontent; for material wealth satisfies no one; dislike of the toil whose only recompense is material gain; the restless unhappiness that is the unfailing retribution for selfish gratification. But the fruits of true education, which is spiritual, are those of the spirit—love, without which men cannot bear to be together; joy in the effort to attain truth and beauty; peace, in the possession of those things which, as the world cannot give them, neither can it take them away.

The only true education is spiritual, for “ man is a spirit”; the system by which teachers, driven by inspectors and examiners, drove knowledge into children for utilitarian purposes is as much opposed to psychology as it is to religion; it meant “ for most people, a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living, whether he liked it or not; and which had been chewed and digested over and over again, by people who didn't care about it in order to serve out to other people who didn't want it”.

But, as Ruskin reminded us, you do not educate a man by telling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was not; the only education that makes a man a better workman is that which endeavours to make the workman a better man.

Judged even on utilitarian grounds, the system by which the child exchanged a wonder-world of experience for a bagful of information, was robbed of the earth to be taught geography and of romance to be crammed with historical facts, has utterly failed to make life a better thing for anyone.

The wealth of the state is not yet the prosperity of the people; for wealth is only wealth when it has been transformed into happy human life—“ there is no wealth but life, life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration”.

Our mistake has been to forget the essential powers of man in our effort to develop those lower faculties which in the struggle for animal existence have given him the pre-eminence over his brother brutes, in order that he may gain material advantage in the struggle with his own species.³ We have boasted of our material progress as if physical gratification were the highest good; and we have glorified intellectual achievement as if reason were the noblest faculty of man. Christianity, which might have saved us from the error by insisting on the question “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his higher self?” was rationalized almost at the outset; and though the poets have never lacked inspiration to assure us “we live by admiration, hope and love” and that “the world of dreams is better far,” it remained for the psychologists of our own day to discover that if the poets and prophets are dreamers and visionaries it is because the real life of man is lived in that world of the spirit which he himself creates, in “ the region where we are freed from all necessity—above the needs both of body and mind, above the expedient and useful”.

I know very well how unpractical all this will sound to our modern Gradgrinds. I have some practical methods to suggest later on, but I believe with Jean Paul that the end must be known before the means and that aims are even more important than methods. Of methods Nietzsche has the wise word: “ Here is now my way; where is thine ? As for the way—it doth not exist.”

There are disquieting signs that much of the present interest in education implies a demand for more efficient methods rather than a change in ideals. A friend of mine lately sent me the scheme of instruction drawn up by a great firm for the Continuation Schools they proposed to set up under the new Act. It provided for instruction in arithmetic, mechanics, chemistry, business correspondence, commercial French, and other subjects designed to make an employe a more profitable servant; but there was not a word to show that the firm regarded their young people as developing human beings ; and in returning the scheme to my friend I wrote at the foot of it—

“ Come to school and you shall learn

Extra bobs a week to earn—

(One for you and two for me).”

An excellent scheme—for Bounderby.

The benefits of industrial efficiency are desirable enough, but it is a profound mistake to suppose that they can be secured by an education designed directly to secure them. To suppose so is, as Lord Robert Cecil recently said, to regard men as animated machinery, specialized for certain limited tasks. The great lesson we have to learn in regard to industrial and in regard to political and social problems is that taught by the older universities, that only the completely developed individual can be completely efficient in any capacity. The under-bred employer becomes the over-reaching profiteer, and the over-specialized workman becomes the class-conscious syndicalist. The highest function of education in this generation is to act as an antidote to the evils of industrialism. And the greatest of those evils is the sacrifice of personality inevitably demanded of the workman by the extreme specialization of modern production. Industrialism, like slavery and the feudal system, may have been a necessary stage towards the civilization of man; but we make a profound mistake when we speak as if civilization already existed ; for “civilization is the humanization of man in society: man is civilized when the whole body of society comes to live with a life worthy to be called human,” which cannot yet be said of great masses of our people. Indeed, though the material standard of life has probably been raised, it is beyond all doubt that human life in our day is gloomier and less interesting than it was to our forefathers—

“ For most men in a brazen prison live

Where in the sun's hot eye,

With heads bent o'er their toil they languidly

Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,

Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall;

And as year after year

Fresh products of their barren labour fall

From their tired hands, and rest

Never yet comes more near,

Gloom settles slowly down over the breast;

And as they try to stem

The waves of mournful thought by which they are pressed,

Death in their prison reaches them

Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.”

The cause of our sickness is the over-emphasis, alike in industry and education, of the material and intellectual aspects of man and the resulting neglect of his emotional and spiritual life. Industrialism has taken art out of our lives, and our people are sick in their souls for the need of beauty.

The great creative impulse which gives man his affinity with his Maker, which makes him a creator instead of only a creature, is stultified and distorted, so that art, “the expression of the workman's joy in his labour” has become almost a meaningless term among us; and the term artist, which means the human being in all of us, has been prostituted to the music-hall stage. The vital problem we have to solve is how to make life a richer and more beautiful thing for the mass of men— which means, how to bring back art into the workers’ lives.

It is not possible, even if it were desirable, to put back the clock to the time when the ordinary workman could find scope for the expression of his higher self in the employment by which he got the means to satisfy the lower. All art is the expression of individuality, of a personal taste, and it is irreconcilable with machine-made productions. Unless we abandon machinery, which is surely a vain dream, we cannot bring back art into industry; only for a few fortunate people is the work itself the wage. But—

“ Because a man has a shop to mind

In time and place, since flesh must live,

Need spirit lack all life behind,

All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive,

All joy except what shop can give ? ”

The answer to Browning's question is that “ shop ” will soon become a rapidly-diminishing factor in the workman's existence. A few hours daily of necessary drudgery at more or less mechanical tasks, unde...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Knowledge and Character
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. The Teaching of English Literature
• II. The Teaching of English Composition
• III. The teaching of Modern Languages
• IV. The Teaching of Classics
• V. The Teaching of Mathematics
• VI. The Teaching of Science
• VII. The Teaching of Geography
• VIII. The Teaching of History
• IX. The Teaching of Citizenship
• X. The Teaching of Religion and Morals