Prime Ministers and Some Others Part 16

II

_THE GOLDEN LADDER_

Education is an excellent thing, but the word has a deterrent sound.

It breathes pedantry and dogmatism, and "all that is at enmity with joy." To people of my age it recalls the dread spirits of Pinnock and Colenso and Hamblin Smith, and that even more terrible Smith who edited Dictionaries of everything. So, though this chapter is to be concerned with the substance, I eschew the word, and choose for my t.i.tle a figurative phrase. I might, with perfect justice, have chosen another figure, and have headed my paper "The Peg and the Hole"; for, after nearly a century of patient expectation, we have at last got a Square Peg in the Square Hole of Public Instruction. In simpler speech, England has at length got a Minister of Education who has a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge, and will do his appointed work with a single eye to the intellectual advancement of the country, neither giving heed to the pribbles and prabbles of theological disputants, nor modifying his plans to suit the convenience of the manufacturer or the squire. He is, in my judgment, exactly the right man for the office which he fills; and is therefore strikingly differentiated not only from some Ministers of Education whom we have known, but also from the swarm of Controllers and Directors and salaried busybodies who have so long been misdirecting us and contradicting one another.

When I say that Mr. Fisher will not give heed to theological disputants, I by no means ignore the grievance under which some of those disputants have suffered. The ever-memorable majority of 1906 was won, not wholly by Tariff Reform or Chinese Labour, but to a great extent by the righteous indignation of Nonconformity at the injury which had been inflicted on it by the Tory Education Acts. There were Pa.s.sive Resisters in those days, as there are Conscientious Objectors now; and they made their grievance felt when the time for voting came. The Liberal Government, in spite of its immense victory at the polls, scored a fourfold failure in its attempts to redress that grievance, and it remains unredressed to this hour. Not that I admired the Liberal Education Bills. My own doctrine on the matter was expressed by my friend Arthur Stanton, who said in 1906: "I think National and Compulsory Education must be secular, and with facilities for the denominations to add their particular tenets. My objection to this Bill" (Mr. Birrell's Bill) "is that it subsidizes undenominationalism." And again in 1909, when another of our Liberal pract.i.tioners was handling the subject: "I object altogether to the State teaching religion. I would have it teach secular matters only, and leave the religious teaching entirely to the clergy, who should undertake it at their own expense. This is the only fair plan--fair to all. The State gives, and pays for, religious teaching which I do not regard as being worth anything at all. It is worse than useless. Real religious teaching can only be given by the Church, and when Christ told us to go and teach, He did not mean mathematics and geography."

That was, and is, my doctrine on religious education; but in politics we must take things as they are, and must not postpone practicable reforms because we cannot as yet attain an ideal system. So Mr.

Fisher, wisely as I think, has left the religious question on one side, and has proposed a series of reforms which will fit equally well the one-sided system which still oppresses Nonconformists and the simply equitable plan to which I, as a lover of religious freedom, aspire.

I see that some of Mr. Fisher's critics say: "This is not a great Bill." Perhaps not, but it is a good Bill; and, as Lord Morley observes, "that fatal French saying about small reforms being the worst enemies of great reforms is, in the sense in which it is commonly used, a formula of social ruin." Enlarging on this theme, Lord Morley points out that the essential virtue of a small reform--the quality which makes it not an evil, but a good--is that it should be made "on the lines and in the direction" of the greater reform which is desiderated.

Now, this condition Mr. Fisher's Bill exactly fulfils. I suppose that the "greater reform" of education which we all wish to see--the ideal of national instruction--is that the State should provide for every boy and girl the opportunity of cultivating his or her natural gifts to the highest perfection which they are capable of attaining. When I speak of "natural gifts" I refer not only to the intellect, but also to the other parts of our nature, the body and the moral sense. This ideal involves a system which, by a natural and orderly development, should conduct the capable child from the Elementary School, through all the intermediate stages, to the highest honours of the Universities.

The word "capable" occurs in Mr. Fisher's Bill, and rightly, because our mental and physical capacities are infinitely varied. A good many children may be unable to profit by any instruction higher than that provided by the Elementary School. A good many more will be able to profit by intermediate education. Comparatively few--the best--will make their way to really high attainment, and will become, at and through the Universities, great philosophers, or scholars, or scientists, or historians, or mathematicians.

At that point--and it ought to be reached at a much earlier age than is now usual--the State's, concern in the matter ends. The child has become, a man, and henceforth must work out his own intellectual salvation; but in the earlier stages the State can and must exercise a potent influence. The earliest stage must be compulsory--that was secured by the Act of 1870. In the succeeding stages, the State, while it does not compel, must stimulate and encourage; and above all must ensure that no supposed exigencies of money-making, no selfish tyranny of the employing cla.s.ses, shall be allowed to interfere with mental or physical development, or to divert the boy or the girl from any course of instruction by which he or she is capable of profiting. This ideal Mr. Fisher's Bill, with its plain enactment that education shall be free; with its precaution against "half-time"; with its ample provision for Continuation Schools, goes far to realize. Even if it is a "small" reform--and I should dispute the epithet--it is certainly "on the lines and in the direction" of that larger reform which the enthusiasts of education have symbolized by the t.i.tle of "The Golden Ladder."[*]

[Footnote *: Happily for Education, Mr. Fisher's Bill is now an Act.]

III

_OASES_

My t.i.tle is figurative, but figures are sometimes useful. Murray's Dictionary defines an oasis as "a fertile spot in the midst of a desert"; and no combination of words could better describe the ideal which I wish to set before my readers.

The suggestion of this article came to me from a correspondent in Northumberland--"an old miner, who went to work down a mine before he was eight years old, and is working yet at seventy-two."

My friend tells me that he has "spent about forty years of his spare time in trying to promote popular education among his fellow working-men." His notice was attracted by a paper which I recently wrote on "The Golden Ladder" of Education, and that paper led him to offer some suggestions which I think too valuable to be lost.

My friend does not despise the Golden Ladder. Quite the contrary.

He sees its usefulness for such as are able to climb it, but he holds that they are, and must be, the few, while he is concerned for the many. I agree. When (following Matthew Arnold at a respectful distance) I have urged the formation of a national system by which a poor man's son may be enabled to climb from the Elementary School to a Fellowship or a Professorship at Oxford or Cambridge, I have always realized that I was planning a course for the exceptionally gifted boy. That boy has often emerged in real life, and the Universities have profited by his emergence; but he is, and always must be, exceptional. What can be done for the ma.s.s of intelligent, but not exceptional, boys, who, to quote my Northumbrian friend, "must be drilled into a calling of some kind, so as to be able to provide for themselves when they grow up to manhood"? When once their schooling, in the narrow sense, is over, must their minds be left to lie fallow or run wild? Can nothing be done to supplement their elementary knowledge, to stimulate and discipline their mental powers?

The University Extension Movement was an attempt to answer these questions in a practical fashion, and my friend does full justice to the spirit which initiated that movement, and to the men--such as the late Lord Grey--who led it. But I suppose he speaks from experience when he says: "University Extension, as it is, will never become established in working-cla.s.s villages. Forty-five to fifty pounds is too big a sum to be raised in three months, and is also considered too much to be paid for a man coming to lecture once a week for twelve weeks, and then disappear for ever like a comet." My friend uses an astronomical figure, I a geographical one; but we mean the same thing. The idea is to establish Oases--"fertile spots in the midst of deserts"--permanent centres of light and culture in manufacturing districts. "The Universities teach and train ministers of religion, and they go and live in their parishes among their flocks all the year round. Why not send lecturers and teachers of secular subjects in the same way? A system something similar to the Wesleyan or Primitive Methodists' ministerial system would answer the purpose. The country might be divided into circuits of four or five centres each, and a University man stationed in each circuit, to organize Students' a.s.sociations, give lectures, hold cla.s.ses, and superintend scientific experiments, as the case may be."

This is a good ill.u.s.tration. The Church professes to place in each parish an official teacher of religion and morality, and most of the Nonconformist communities do the same. To place an official teacher of culture (in its widest sense) in every parish is perhaps a task beyond our national powers as at present developed; but to place one in every industrial district is not conceivable only, but, I believe, practicable. The lecturer who comes from Oxford or Cambridge, delivers his course, and departs, has no doubt his uses. He is like the "Hot Gospeller" of an earlier age, or the "Missioner" of to-day. He delivers an awakening message, and many are the better for it; but if culture is to get hold of the average lads and young men of an industrial district, its exponent must be more like the resident minister, the endowed and established priest.

That he should live among the people whom he is to instruct, know them personally, understand their ways of thinking and speaking, is at least as important as that he should be a competent historian or mathematician or man of letters. If the State, or voluntary effort, or a combination of the two, could secure the permanent presence of such a teacher in every district where men work hard, and yet have leisure enough to cultivate their intellects, a yawning gap in our educational system would be filled.

It would not be polite to mention actual names; but take by way of example such a district as d.i.c.kens's "c.o.ketown," or Disraeli's "Wodgate," or George Eliot's "Milby," or any of those towns which Cobbett expressively called "h.e.l.l-Holes." Let the State establish in each of those places a qualified and accredited teacher for adult students. The teacher may, if necessary, be paid in part by voluntary subscription; but it is, in my view, all-important that he should have the sanction and authority of the State to give him a definite place among local administrators, and to the State he should be responsible for the due discharge of his functions.

In c.o.ketown or Wodgate or Milby his lecture-room would be a real Oasis--"a fertile spot in the midst of a desert." Even if it has not been our lot to dwell in those deserts, we all have had, as travellers, some taste of their quality. We know the hideousness of all that meets the eye; the necessary absorption in the struggle for subsistence; the resulting tendency to regard money as the one subject worth serious consideration; the inadequate means of intellectual recreation; the almost irresistible atmosphere of materialism in which life and thought are involved. The "Oasis"

would provide a remedy for all this. It would offer to all who cared to seek them "the fairy-tale of science," the pregnant lessons of history, the infinitely various joys of literature, the moral principles of personal and social action which have been thought out "by larger minds in calmer ages."

That there may be practical difficulties in the way of such a scheme I do not dispute. The object of this chapter is not to elaborate a plan, but to exhibit an idea. That the amount of definite knowledge acquired in this way might be small, and what Archbishop Benson oddly called "unexaminable," is, I think, quite likely. A man cannot learn in the leisure-hours left over by exhausting work as he would learn if he had nothing to think of except his studies and his examination. But Education has a larger function than the mere communication of knowledge. It opens the windows of the mind; it shows vistas which before were unsuspected; and so, as Wordsworth said, "is efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier."

IV

_LIFE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE_

When an article in a newspaper produces a reply, the modest writer is gratified; for he knows that he has had at any rate one reader.

If the reply comes to him privately, he is even better pleased, for then he feels that his reader thinks the matter worthy of personal discussion and of freely exchanged opinion. I have lately written an article on "Life and Liberty" as proposed by some earnest clergymen for the English Church, and an article on Mr. Fisher's Education Bill, in which I avowed my dislike to all attempts on the part of the State to teach religion. Both these articles have brought me a good deal of correspondence, both friendly and hostile. The term allotted to human life does not allow one to enter into private controversy with every correspondent, so I take this method of making a general reply. "Life and Liberty" are glorious ideals, but, to make the combination, perfect, we must add Justice. Hence my t.i.tle.

The State consists of persons who profess all sorts of religion, and none. If the State compels its citizens to pay for religious teaching in which they do not believe, it commits, in my opinion, a palpable injustice. This is not merely a question between one sect and another sect. It is, indeed, unjust to make a Quaker pay for teaching the doctrine of the Sacraments, or a Unitarian for teaching the Deity of Christ; but it is equally unjust to make an Atheist pay for teaching the existence of G.o.d, or a Churchman for teaching that curious kind of implied Socinianism which is called "undenominational religion."

The only way out of these inequities is what is commonly called "Secularism." The word has some unfortunate a.s.sociations. It has been connected in the past with a blatant form of negation, and also with a social doctrine which all decent people repudiate. But, strictly considered, it means no more than "temporal" or "worldly"; and when I say that I recommend the "Secular" system of education, I mean that the State should confine itself to the temporal or worldly work with which alone it is competent to deal, and should leave religion (which it cannot touch without inflicting injustice on someone) to those whose proper function is to instil it.

Who are they? Speaking generally, parents, ministers of religion, and teachers who are themselves convinced of what they teach; but I must narrow my ground. To-day I am writing as a Churchman for those Churchmen whom my previous articles disturbed; and I have only s.p.a.ce to set forth some of the grounds on which we Churchmen should support the "secular solution."

A Churchman is bound by his baptismal vows to "believe all the articles of the Christian Faith." These, according to his catechism, are summed up in the Apostles' Creed. He cannot, therefore, be satisfied with any religious instruction which is not based on that formula; and yet such instruction cannot rightly be enforced in schools which belong as much to unbelievers as to Christians.

A Churchman's religious faith is not derived primarily from the Bible, but from the teaching of the Christian Church, who is older than the oldest of her doc.u.ments. There was a Church before the New Testament was written, and that Church transmitted the faith by oral tradition. "From the very first the rule has been, as a matter of fact, that the Church should teach the truth, and then should appeal to Scripture in vindication of its own teaching."

For a Churchman, religious instruction must be the teaching of the Church, tested by the Bible. The two cannot be separated. Hence it follows that, while the State is bound to respect the convictions of those who adhere to all manner of beliefs and disbeliefs, the Churchman cannot recognize religious teaching imparted under such conditions as being that which his own conscience demands.

And, further, supposing that some contrivance could be discovered whereby the State might authorize the teaching of the Church's doctrine, the Churchman could not conscientiously be a party to it; for, according to his theory, there is only one Body divinely commissioned to decide what is to be taught--and that Body is not the State, but the Church; and there is only one set of persons qualified to teach it--viz., those who are duly authorized by the Church, and are fully persuaded as to the truth of what they teach.

It is sometimes asked how the Church is to fulfil this obligation without being subsidized in some way by the State. The princ.i.p.al requisite is greater faith in its Divine mission. If the Bishops and clergy had a stronger conviction that what they are divinely commissioned to undertake they will be divinely a.s.sisted to fulfil, this question need not be suggested. The first teachers of the Christian religion performed their task without either "Rate-aid"

or "State-aid" and the result of their labour is still to be seen; whereas now the object of leaders of religion seems to be to get done for them what they ought to do for themselves. It may be well to quote an utterance of the Bishop of Oxford at the time when the Liberal Government was dealing with education. "We are now, more or less, in the middle of a crisis. We are always in the middle of a crisis. This crisis is about the religious question in our day-schools. I would ask you, then, to get at the root of our difficulty. What is it? The heart of our difficulty is partly that we have _shifted on to the wrong shoulders_ the central function of teaching children; secondly, that we have so lost the idea of what the teaching of the Church is, and _the meaning of religious education_, that we are considered by the public to be unreasonable and uncompromising people if we are not disposed to admit that the County Councils can settle the standard of sufficient religious knowledge for everybody."

The difficulty as to means might be overcome if the Church would mind its own business, and leave to the State what the State can do so much more effectively. Let me quote the words of a great Christian and a great Churchman--Mr. Gladstone--written in 1894: "Foul fall the day when the persons of this world shall, on whatever pretext, take into their uncommissioned hands the manipulation of the religion of our Lord and Saviour."

Surely Churchmen will best serve the religion which they profess by joining with other "men of goodwill," though of different faiths, who desire the secular solution. In that way only, as far as I can see, can the interests of Education be reconciled with the higher interests of Justice.

V

_THE STATE AND THE BOY_

When Mr. A. J. Balfour was a very young man he published _A Defence of Philosophic Doubt_. n.o.body read it, but a great many talked about it; and serious people went about with long faces, murmuring, "How sad that Lord Salisbury's nephew should be an Agnostic!" When Mr. Balfour had become a conspicuous figure in politics, the serious people began to read the book which, so far, they had only denounced, and then they found, to their surprise and joy, that it was an essay in orthodox apologetic. Thenceforward Mr. Balfour ranked in their eyes as a "Defender of the Faith" second only to Henry VIII.

To compare small things with great, I have had a similar experience.

Not long ago I wrote a paper designed to set forth the pretty obvious truth that increase in knowledge is not in itself a good. It evoked much criticism, and the critics once again exemplified our truly English habit of denouncing what we have not read. If these quaint people were to be believed, I was an enemy of education in general and of elementary education in particular. I hope that they will be as much relieved as were Mr. Balfour's critics when they discover that I am, and all my life have been, a zealous supporter of education, and, to some extent, an expert in it.

If the world could be exhaustively divided into two cla.s.ses-the Educated and the Uneducated--I suppose that I should be included in the former, though I antic.i.p.ate an inevitable sarcasm by allowing that I should find myself perilously near the dividing-line. It is more to the purpose to say that, whatever my own educational deficiencies, I have always been keenly interested in the education of other people, and have preached incessantly that the State has a sacred duty to its boys. If I leave the education of girls on one side, I do so, not because I consider it unimportant, but because I know nothing about it.

Information, as the great Butler said, is the least part of education.

The greatest is the development of the child's natural power to its utmost extent and capacity; and the duty of so developing it must be admitted by everyone who ponders our Lord's teaching about the Buried Talent and the Pound laid up in the Napkin. Unless we enable and encourage every boy in England to bring whatever mental gifts he has to the highest point of their possible perfection, we are shamefully and culpably squandering the treasure which G.o.d has given us to be traded with and accounted for. We shall have no one but ourselves to blame if, as a Nemesis on our neglect, we lose our present standing among the educated peoples of the world.

I always get back to the ideal of the "Golden Ladder," reaching from the Elementary Schools, by Scholarships or "free places," to the Secondary Schools, and from them again to the Universities.

This ideal is, unlike some ideals, attainable, and has in repeated instances been attained. Again and again the highest mathematical honours of Cambridge have been won by Elementary Schoolboys, and what is true of mathematics might also be true of every branch of knowledge. I say advisedly that it "might" be true: whether or not it will be depends on our handling of quite young boys.