What Is and What Might Be Part 4

Of the evils that are inherent in the examination system as such--of its tendency to arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher faculties, to externalise what is inward, to materialise what is spiritual, to involve education in an atmosphere of unreality and self-deception--I have already spoken at some length. In the days of payment by results various circ.u.mstances conspired to raise those evil tendencies to the highest imaginable "power." When inspectors ceased to examine (in the stricter sense of the word) they realised what infinite mischief the yearly examination had done. The children, the majority of whom were examined in reading and dictation out of their own reading-books (two or three in number, as the case might be), were drilled in the contents of those books until they knew them almost by heart. In arithmetic they worked abstract sums, in obedience to formal rules, day after day, and month after month; and they were put up to various tricks and dodges which would, it was hoped, enable them to know by what precise rules the various questions on the arithmetic cards were to be answered. They learned a few lines of poetry by heart, and committed all the "meanings and allusions" to memory, with the probable result--so sickening must the process have been--that they hated poetry for the rest of their lives. In geography, history, and grammar they were the victims of unintelligent oral cram, which they were compelled, under pains and penalties, to take in and retain till the examination day was over, their ability to disgorge it on occasion being periodically tested by the teacher. And so with the other subjects. Not a thought was given, except in a small minority of the schools, to the real training of the child, to the fostering of his mental (and other) growth. To get him through the yearly examination by hook or by crook was the one concern of the teacher. As profound distrust of the teacher was the basis of the policy of the Department, so profound distrust of the child was the basis of the policy of the teacher. To leave the child to find out anything for himself, to work out anything for himself, to think out anything for himself, would have been regarded as a proof of incapacity, not to say insanity, on the part of the teacher, and would have led to results which, from the "percentage" point of view, would probably have been disastrous.

There were few inspectors who were not duly impressed from 1895 onwards by the gravity of the evils that inspection, as distinguished from mere examination, revealed to them; but it may be doubted if there were many inspectors who realised then, what some among them see clearly now, that the evils which distressed them were significant as symptoms even more than as sources of mischief,--as symptoms of a deep-seated and insidious malady, of the gradual ossification of the spiritual and mental muscles of both the teacher and the child, of the gradual subst.i.tution in the elementary school of machinery for life.

For us of the Twentieth Century who know enough about education to be aware of the shallowness of our knowledge of it, and of the imperfection of the existing educational systems of our country, it may be difficult to realise that in the years when things were at their worst, at any rate in the field of elementary education, the Nation in general and the "Department" in particular were well content that things should remain as they were,--well content that the elementary school should be, not a nursery of growing seedlings and saplings, but a decently efficient mill, and that year after year this mill should keep on grinding out its dreary and meaningless "results." But in truth that ignorant optimism, that cheap content with the actual, was a sure proof that things _were_ at their worst;--for

"When we in our viciousness grow hard, (O misery on't) the wise G.o.ds seal our eyes In our own filth; drop our clear judgments: make us Adore our errors";

and the multiform discontent with education in its present stage of development, which is characteristic of our own generation, and which is in some ways so confusing and disconcerting, and so unfavourable to the smooth working of our educational machinery, has the merit of being a healthy and hopeful symptom.

But bad as things were in those days, there was at least one redeeming feature. The children were compelled to _work_, to exert themselves, to "put their backs into it." The need for this was obvious. The industry of the child meant so much professional reputation and, in the last resort, so much bread and b.u.t.ter to his teacher. It is true that the child was not allowed to do anything by or for himself; but it is equally true that he had to do pretty strenuously whatever task was set him. He had to get up his two (or three) "Readers" so thoroughly that he could be depended upon to pa.s.s both the reading and the dictation test with success. He had to work his abstract sums in arithmetic correctly. He had to take in and remember the historical and geographical information with which he had been crammed. And so forth. There must be no shirking, no slacking on his part. His teachers worked hard, though "not according to knowledge"; and he must do the same. Active, in the higher sense of the word, he was never allowed to be; but he had to be actively receptive, strenuously automatic, or his teacher would know the reason why.

Such was the old _regime_. Its defects were so grave and so vital that, now that it has become discredited (in theory, if not in practice), we can but wonder how it endured for so long. As an ingenious instrument for arresting the mental growth of the child, and deadening all his higher faculties, it has never had, and I hope will never have, a rival. Far from fostering the growth of those great expansive instincts--sympathetic, aesthetic, and scientific--which Nature has implanted in every child, it set itself to extirpate them, one and all, with ruthless pertinacity. As a partial compensation for this work of wanton destruction, it made the child blindly obedient, mechanically industrious, and (within very narrow limits) accurate and thorough. I have described it at some length because I see clearly that no one who does not realise what the elementary school used to be, in the days of its sojourn in the Land of Bondage, can even begin to understand why it is what it is to-day.

Having for thirty-three years deprived the teachers of almost every vestige of freedom, the Department suddenly reversed its policy and gave them in generous measure the boon which it had so long withheld.

Whether it was wise to give so much at so short a notice may be doubted. What is beyond dispute is that it was unwise to expect so great and so unexpected a gift to be used at once to full advantage.

A man who had grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad daylight. This is what was done in 1895 to the teachers of England, and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind ever since. For thirty-three years they had been treated as machines, and they were suddenly asked to act as intelligent beings. For thirty-three years they had been practically compelled to do everything for the child, and they were suddenly expected to give him freedom and responsibility,--words which for many of them had well-nigh lost their meaning. To comply with these unreasonable demands was beyond their power. The grooves into which they had been forced were far too deep for them. The routine to which they had become accustomed had far too strong a hold on them. The one change which they could make was to relax their own severe pressure on the child. This they did, perhaps without intending to do it. Indeed, now that there was no external examination to look forward to, the pressure on the child may be said to have automatically relaxed itself. What happened--I will not say in all schools, but in far too many--was that the teaching remained as mechanical and unintelligent as ever, that the teacher continued to distrust the child and to do everything for him, but that the child gradually became slacker and less industrious. Not that his teacher wished him to "slack," but that the stimulus of the yearly examination had been withdrawn at a time when there was nothing to take its place. Exercise is in itself a delightful thing when it is wholesome, natural, and rational; but when it is unwholesome, unnatural, and irrational, it will not be taken in sufficient measure except in response to some strong external stimulus. Under the old examination system an adequate stimulus had been supplied by the combined influence of compet.i.tion and fear (chiefly the latter). When the examination system was abolished, that stimulus necessarily lost its point. Had it then been possible for the teacher to make the exercise which his pupils were asked to take wholesome, natural, and rational, a new stimulus--that of interest in their work--would have been applied to the pupils, and they would have exerted themselves as they had never done before.

But it was not possible for the average teacher to execute at a moment's notice a complete change of front, and it was unwise of the Department to expect him to do so. Apart from an honourable minority, who had always been in secret revolt against the despotism of the Code, the old teachers were helpless and hopeless. The younger ones had been through the mill themselves, first in the Elementary School, then in the Pupil-Teacher Centre, and then in the Training College (both the latter having been in too many cases cramming establishments like the Elementary School); and when they went back to work under a head teacher who was wedded to the old order of things, they found no difficulty in falling in with his ways and carrying out his wishes. If a young teacher, fresh from an exceptionally enlightened Training College, became an a.s.sistant under an old-fashioned head teacher, he soon had the "nonsense knocked out of him," and was compelled to toe the line with the rest of the staff.

But it was not only because the teachers of England had got accustomed to the Land of Bondage, that they shrank from entering the Promised Land. There was, and still is, another and a stronger reason. Wherever the teacher looks, he sees that the examination system, with its demand for machine-made results, controls education; and he feels that it is only by an accident that his school has been exempted (in part at least) from its pressure. The Board of Education still examine for labour certificates, for admission as uncertificated a.s.sistants, for the teacher's certificate. They expect head teachers to hold terminal examinations of all the cla.s.ses in their schools. They allow Local Authorities to examine children in their schools as formally and as stringently as they please, and to hold examinations for County Scholarships, for which children from elementary schools are eligible. Admission to secondary schools of all grades depends on success in pa.s.sing entrance examinations. So does admission to the various Colleges and Universities. In the schools which prepare little boys for the "Great Public Schools,"

the whole scheme of education Is dominated by the headmaster's desire to win as many entrance scholarships as possible. In the "Great Public Schools" the scheme of education is similarly dominated by the headmaster's desire to win as many scholarships as possible at the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. In the Universities all the undergraduates without exception are reading for examinations of various kinds,--pa.s.s "schools," honour "schools," Civil Service examinations, and the like. Officers in the Army and Navy have never done with examinations; and there is not a single profession which can be entered through any door but that of a public examination.

Wherever the teacher looks he sees that examinations are held in high honour, and that the main business of teachers of all grades is to produce results which an outside examiner would accept as satisfactory; and he naturally takes for granted that the production of such results is the true function of the teacher, whether his success in producing them is to be tested by a formal examination or not. The air that he breathes is charged with ideas--ideas about life in general and education in particular--which belong to the order of things that he is supposed to have left behind him, and are fiercely antagonistic to those as yet unrecognised ideas which give the new order of things its meaning, its purpose, and its value.

How can we expect the teacher to look inward when all the conditions of his existence, not as a teacher only but also as a citizen and a man, conspire to make him look outward? But if the Fates are against his looking inward, to what purpose has he been emanc.i.p.ated from the direct control of a system which had at least the merit of being in line with all the central tendencies of Western civilisation? How does it profit him to be free if, under the pressure of those tendencies, the chief use that he makes of his freedom is to grind out from his pupils results akin to those which were asked for in the days of schedules and percentages? Freedom was given him in order that he might be free to take thought for the vital welfare of his pupils. Or, if freedom was not given to him for that purpose, it were better that it had been withheld from him until those who were able to give or withhold it had formed a juster conception of its meaning.

The truth is that the exemption of the elementary school, and of it alone among schools, from the direct pressure of the examination system, is an isolated and audacious experiment, which is carried on under conditions so unfavourable to its success that nothing but a high degree of intelligence and moral courage (not to speak of originality) on the part of the teacher can make it succeed. Can we wonder that in many cases the experiment has proved a failure?

At the end of the previous chapter I asked myself whether the education that was given in the ordinary elementary school tended to foster self-expression on the part of the child. We can now see what the answer to this question is likely to be. For a third of a century--from 1862 to 1895--self-expression on the part of the child may be said to have been formally prohibited by all who were responsible for the elementary education of the children of England, and also to have been prohibited _de facto_ by all the unformulated conditions under which the elementary school was conducted. In 1895 the formal prohibition of self-expression ceased, but the _de facto_ prohibition of it in the ordinary school is scarcely less effective to-day than it was in the darkest days of the old _regime_. For

"The evil that men do lives after them,"

and the old _regime_, though nominally abrogated, overshadows us still. When I say this I do not merely mean that many teachers who were brought up under the old _regime_ have been unable to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from its influence. I mean that the old _regime_ was itself the outcome and expression of traditional tendencies which are of the essence of Western civilisation, of ways of thinking and acting to which we are all habituated from our earliest days, and that these tendencies and these ways of thinking and acting overshadow us still. The formal abrogation of the old _regime_ counts for little so long as the examination system, with its demand for visible and measurable results and its implicit invitation to cram and cheat, is allowed to cast its deadly shadow on education as such,--and so long as the whole system on which the young of all cla.s.ses and grades are educated is favourable to self-deception on the part of the teacher and fatal to sincerity on the part of the child. Constrained by every influence that is brought to bear upon him to judge according to the appearance of things, the teacher can ill afford to judge righteous judgment,--can ill afford to regard what is outward and visible as the symbol of what is inward and spiritual, can ill afford to think of the work done by the child except as a thing to be weighed in an examiner's balance or measured by an examiner's rule.

Things being as they are in the various grades of education and in the various strata of social life, it is inevitable that the education given in many of our elementary schools should be based, in the main, on complete distrust of the child. In such schools, whatever else the child may be allowed to do, he must not be allowed to do anything by or for himself. He must not express what he really feels and sees; for if he does, the results will probably fall short of the standard of neatness, cleanness, and correctness which an examiner might expect the school to reach. At any rate, the experiment is much too risky to be tried. In the lower cla.s.ses the results produced would certainly be rough, imperfect, untidy.

Therefore self-expression must not be permitted in that part of the school. And if not there, it must not be permitted anywhere, for the longer it is delayed the greater will be the difficulty of starting it and the greater the attendant risk. The child must not express what he really perceives; and as genuine perception forces for itself the outlet of genuine expression, he must not be allowed to exercise his perceptive faculties. Instead of seeing things for himself, he must see what his teacher directs him to see, he must feel what his teacher directs him to feel, he must think what his teacher directs him to think, and so on. But to forbid a child to use his own perceptive faculties is to arrest the whole process of his growth.

I will now go back to the _Arithmetic_ lesson. During the years in which the children in elementary schools were examined individually in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the one virtue which was inculcated while the arithmetic lesson was in progress was that of obedience to the formulated rule. On the yearly examination day it was customary to give each child four questions in arithmetic, of which only one was a "problem." Two sums correctly worked secured a "pa.s.s"; and it was therefore possible for the child to achieve salvation in arithmetic by blindly obeying the various rules with which his teacher had equipped him. He had, indeed, to decide for himself in each case which rule was to be followed; but he did this (in most schools), not by thinking the matter out, but by following certain by-rules given him by his teacher, which were based on a careful study of the wording of the questions set by the inspector, and which held good as long as that wording remained unchanged. For example, if a subtraction sum was to be dictated to "Standard II,"

the child was taught that the number which was given out first was to be placed in the upper line, and that the number which came next was to be subtracted from this. He was not taught that the lesser of the two numbers was always to be subtracted from the larger; for in order to apply that principle he would have had to decide for himself which was the larger of the two numbers, and the consequent mental effort was one which his teacher could not trust him to make. It is true that in his desire to save the child from the dire necessity of thinking, the teacher ran the risk of being discomfited by a sudden change of procedure on the part of an inspector. The inspector, for example, who, having been accustomed to say "From 95 take 57," chose to say, for a change, "Take 57 from 95," would cause widespread havoc in the first two or three schools that were the victims of his unlooked-for experiment. But the risks which the teacher ran who taught his pupils to rely on trickery rather than thought were worth running; for the inspectors, like the teachers and the children, were ever tending to become creatures of routine, and the vagaries of those who had the reputation of being tiresomely versatile could be provided against--largely, if not wholly--by increased ingenuity on the part of the teacher, and increased attention to tricky by-rules on the part of the child.

The number of schools in which arithmetic is intelligently and even practically taught is undoubtedly much larger than it was in the days of payment by results; but there are still thousands of schools in which obedience to the rule for its own sake is the basis of all instruction in arithmetic. Now to live habitually by rule instead of by thought is necessarily fatal, in every field of action, to the development of that _sense_ or perceptive faculty, on which right action ultimately depends. Following his reputed guide blindly, mechanically, and with whole-hearted devotion, the votary of the rule never allows his intuition, his faculty of direct perception and subconscious judgment, to play even for a moment round the matters on which he is engaged; and the result is that the faculty in question is not merely prevented from growing, but is at last actually blighted in the bud. This is but another way of saying what I have already insisted upon,--that to forbid self-expression on the part of the child is to starve his perceptive faculties into non-existence.

There is no folly perpetrated in the elementary school of to-day for which there are not authoritative precedents to be found in the conduct of one or other of the two great schools which the G.o.d of Western theology is supposed to have opened for the education of Man.

And it is in that special development of the Legal School which is known as Pharisaism that we shall look for a precedent for the conventional teaching of arithmetic in our elementary schools. The ultra-legalism of the Pharisee in the days of Christ finds its exact counterpart in the ultra-legalism of the child who has been taught arithmetic by the methods which the yearly examination fostered, and which are still widely prevalent. In the one case there was, in the other case there is, an entire inability on the part of the zealous votary of the rule to estimate the intrinsic value of the results of his blind and unintelligent action. The sense of humour, which is a necessary element in every other healthy sense, and which so often keeps us from going astray, by suddenly revealing to us the inherent absurdity of our proposed action, is one of the first faculties to succ.u.mb to the blighting influence of an ultra-legal conception of life. As an example of the unwavering seriousness of the Pharisee in the presence of what was intrinsically ridiculous, let us take his att.i.tude towards the problem of keeping food warm for the Sabbath day. "According to Exodus xvi. 23, it was forbidden to bake and to boil on the Sabbath. Hence the food, which it was desired to eat hot on the Sabbath, was to be prepared before its commencement, and kept warm by artificial means. In doing this, however, care must be taken that the existing heat was not increased, which would have been 'boiling.' Hence the food must be put only into such substances as would maintain its heat, not into such as might possibly increase it.

'Food to be kept warm for the Sabbath must not be put into oil-dregs, manure, salt, chalk, or sand, whether moist or dry, nor into straw, grape-skins, flock, or vegetables, if these are damp, though it may if they are dry. It may, however, be put into clothes, amidst fruits, pigeons' feathers, and flax tow. R. Jehudah declares flax tow unallowable and permits only coa.r.s.e tow.'"[10] Following his rule out, step by step, with unflinching loyalty, into these ridiculous consequences, the Pharisee had entirely lost the power of seeing that they were ridiculous, and was well content to believe, with Jehudah, that the difference between keeping food warm in coa.r.s.e tow and in flax tow was the difference between life and death. This _reductio ad absurdum_ of legalism is exactly paralleled, in many of our elementary schools, in the answers to arithmetical questions given by the children. The "Fifth Standard" boys who told their inspector, as an answer to an easy problem, that a given room was five shillings and sixpence wide, had followed out their rule--they had unfortunately got hold of a wrong rule--step by step, till it led them to a conclusion, the intrinsic absurdity of which they were one and all unable to see.[11] There are many elementary schools in England in which a majority of the answers given to quite easy problems would certainly be wrong, and a respectable minority of them ludicrously wrong. Nor is this to be wondered at; for though the types of problems that can be set in elementary schools are not numerous, to provide his pupils with the by-rules which shall enable them in all, or even in most cases, to determine which of the recognised rules are appropriate to the given situation, pa.s.ses the wit of the teacher. But if the helplessness of so many elementary scholars in the face of an arithmetical problem is lamentable, still more lamentable is the fact that the scholar is seldom met with who, having given an entirely wrong answer to an easy problem, is able to see for himself that, whatever the right answer may be, the answer given is and must be wrong. So fatal to the development of the arithmetical sense is the current worship of the rule for its own sake, and so deadly a narcotic is the conventional arithmetic lesson to all who take part in it!

It is not in the arithmetic lesson, then, that provision is ordinarily made for the development of a sense, or perceptive faculty, through the medium of self-expression on the part of the child. On the contrary, the very _raison d'etre_ of the arithmetic lesson, as it is still given in many schools, is to destroy the arithmetical sense, and make the child an inefficient calculating machine, which, even when working, is too often inaccurate and clumsy, and which the slightest change of environment throws at once and completely out of gear.

After the arithmetical lesson come, as a rule, lessons in "_Reading_"

and "_Writing_"--in reading in some cla.s.ses, in writing in others.

The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress, is that the children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word.

They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the book, not a.s.similating the mental and spiritual nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up, one by one, even in the highest cla.s.s of all, and reading aloud to their teacher.

Why are they doing this? Is it in order that their teacher may show them how to master the more difficult words in their reading lesson?

This may be the reason, in some schools; but there are others, perhaps a majority, in which the teacher tells his pupils the words that puzzle them instead of helping them to make them out for themselves. Besides, if reading were properly taught in the lower cla.s.ses, the children in the upper cla.s.ses would surely be able to master unaided the difficulties that might confront them.

Or is it in order that elocution may be cultivated? But elocution is seldom, if ever, cultivated in the ordinary elementary school, the veriest mumbling on the part of the child being accepted by his teacher (who follows him with an open book in his hand), provided that he can read correctly and with some attempt at "phrasing."

Indeed, the indistinct utterance of so many school children may be attributed to the fact that they have read aloud to their teachers for many years, and that during the whole of that time a very low standard of distinctness has been accepted as satisfactory.

Or is it in order that the teacher may help his pupils to understand what they are reading? This may be one of his reasons for hearing them read aloud; but so far as the higher cla.s.ses are concerned it is a bad reason, for the older the child the more imperative is it that he should try to make out for himself the meaning of what he reads; and the teacher who spoon-feeds his pupils during the reading lesson is doing his best to make them incapable of digesting the contents of books for themselves.

No, there are two chief reasons why the teacher makes children of eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen years of age read aloud to him as if they were children of six or seven. The first reason is that the unemanc.i.p.ated teacher instinctively does to-day what he did twenty years ago, and that twenty years ago, when children were examined in reading from their own books, the teacher heard them read aloud, day after day in order that he might make sure that they knew their books well enough to pa.s.s the inspector's test. The second reason, which is wider than the first, and may be said to include and account for it, is that the reading-aloud lesson fits in with the whole system of Western education, being the outcome and expression of that complete distrust of the child which is, and always has been, characteristic of the popular religion and philosophy of the West. If you ask the teacher why the children, even in the highest cla.s.ses, are never allowed to work at such subjects as history and geography by themselves, he will tell you frankly that he cannot trust them to do so, that they do not know how to use a book. And he cannot see that in giving this excuse he is condemning himself, and making open confession of the worthlessness of the training that he has given to his pupils.

Whatever else the reading-aloud lesson may be, it is a dismal waste of time. Child after child stands up, reads for a minute or so, and then sits down, remaining idle and inert (except when an occasional question is addressed to him) for the rest of the time occupied by the so-called lesson. In this, as in most oral lessons, the elementary school child pa.s.ses much of his time in a state which is neither activity nor rest,--a state of enforced inertness combined with unnatural and unceasing strain. Activity is good for the child, and rest, which, is the complement of activity, is good for the child; but the combination of inertness with strain is good for neither his body nor his mind. Indeed, it may be doubted if there is any state of mind and body which is so uneducational as this, or so unfavourable to healthy growth.

But the main objection to the reading-aloud lesson is, I repeat, that while it is going on the children are not reading at all, in the proper sense of the word, not attacking the book, not enjoying it, not extracting the honey from it. And the consequences of the inability to read which is thus engendered are far-reaching and disastrous. The power to read is a key which unlocks many doors. One of the most important of these doors--perhaps, from the strictly scholastic point of view, _the_ most important--is the door of study.

The child who cannot read to himself cannot study a book, cannot master its contents. It is because the elementary school child cannot be trusted to do any independent study, that the oral lesson, or lecture, with its futile expenditure of "chalk and talk," is so prominent a feature in the work of the elementary school. And it is because the oral lesson necessarily counts for so much, that the over-grouping of cla.s.ses, with all its attendant evils, is so widely practised. The grouping together of "Standards" V, VI, and VII, with the result that the children who go through all those Standards are compelled to waste the last two years of their school life, is a practice which is almost universal in elementary schools of a certain size. And there are few schools of that size in which those Standards could not be broken up into two, if not three, independent cla.s.ses, if the children, whose ages range as a rule between eleven and fourteen, could be trusted to work by themselves. In many cases this over-grouping is wholly inexcusable, the headmaster having no cla.s.s of his own to teach, and being therefore free to do what obviously ought to be done,--to separate the older and more advanced children from the rest of the top cla.s.s, and form them into a separate cla.s.s (a real top cla.s.s) for independent study and self-education under his direction and supervision. But so strong is the force of habit, and so deeply rooted in the mind of the teacher is distrust of the child, that it is rare to find the head teacher to whom the idea of breaking up an over-grouped top cla.s.s has suggested itself as practicable, or even as intrinsically desirable.

We owe it, then, to the reading-aloud fetich that in many of our schools the children are compelled to spend the last two (or even three) years of their school life--the most important years of all from the point of view of their preparation for the battle of life--in marking time, in staying where they were. It is to those years of enforced stagnation that the reluctance of the ex-elementary scholar to go on with his education is largely due; for no one can keep on moving who is not already on the move, and the desire to continue education is scarcely to be looked for in one who has been given to understand that his education has come to an end. But there is another and a shorter cut from the conventional reading lesson to the early extinction of the child's educational career. The child who leaves school without having learned how to use a book, will find that the one door through which access is gained to most of the halls of learning--the door of independent study--is for ever slammed in his face. Not that he will seriously try to open it; for with the ability to read the desire to read will have aborted. The distrust of the child, on which Western education is based, is a bottomless gulf in which educational effort, whatever form it may take or in whatever quarter it may originate, is for the most part swallowed up and made as though it had not been. The child who leaves school at the age of fourteen will have attended some 2,000 or 3,000 reading lessons in the course of his school life. From these, in far too many cases, he will have carried nothing away but the ability to stumble with tolerable correctness through printed matter of moderate difficulty.

He will not have carried away from them either the power or the desire to read.

In the days of percentages, instruction in "_Writing_" below Standard V was entirely confined to handwriting and spelling; and even in the higher Standards the teacher thought more about handwriting and spelling than any other aspect of this composite subject. Now handwriting and spelling are merely means to an end,--the end of making clear to the reader the words that have been committed to paper by the writer. But it is the choice rather than the setting out of words that really matters, and the name that we give to the choosing of words is Composition. The excessive regard that has always been paid in our elementary schools to neat handwriting and correct spelling is characteristic of the whole Western att.i.tude towards education. No "results" are more easily or more accurately appraised than these, and it follows that no "results" are more highly esteemed by the unenlightened teacher. For wherever the outward standard of reality has established itself at the expense of the inward, the ease with which worth (or what pa.s.ses for such) can be measured is ever tending to become in itself the chief, if not the sole, measure of worth. And in proportion as we tend to value the results of education for their measureableness, so we tend to undervalue and at last to ignore those results which are too intrinsically valuable to be measured.

Hence the neglect of _Composition_ in so many elementary schools. I mean by composition the sincere expression in language of the child's genuine thoughts and feelings. The effort to "compose," whether orally or on paper, is one of the most educational of all efforts; for language is at once the most readily available and the most subtle and sympathetic of all media of expression; and the effort to express himself in it tends, in proportion as it is sincere and strong, to give breadth, depth, and complexity to the child's thoughts and feelings, and through the development of these to weave his experiences into the tissue of his life. But sincerity of expression is not easily measured, and the true value of the thoughts and feelings that are struggling to express themselves in a child's composition is beyond the reach of any rule or scale; whereas neatness of handwriting and correctness of spelling are, as we have seen, features which appeal even to the carelessly observant eye.

Knowing this, the teacher takes care that the exercise-books of his pupils shall be filled with neat and accurate composition exercises, and that some of the neatest and most accurate of these shall be exhibited on the walls of his school. The visitor whose eye ranges over these exercises and goes no further may be excused if he forms a highly favourable opinion of the school which can produce such seemingly excellent work. But let him spend a morning in the school, and see how these "results" have been produced. He will probably change his mind as to their value. The teaching of composition in the ordinary elementary school is too often fraudulent and futile.

Indeed, there is no lesson in which the teacher's traditional distrust of the child goes further than in this. In the lower cla.s.ses the child is taught how to construct simple sentences (as if he had never made one in the previous course of his life), and he is not trusted to do more than this. He listens to a so-called object lesson, and when it is over he is told to write a few simple sentences about the Cow or the Horse, or whatever the subject of the lesson may have been; and lest his memory (the only faculty which he is allowed to exercise) should fail him, the chief landmarks of the lesson are placed before him on the blackboard. This string of simple sentences reproduced from memory pa.s.ses muster as composition. And yet that child began to practise oral composition at the age of eighteen months, and at the age of three was able to use complex sentences with freedom and skill. In the upper cla.s.ses the composition is too often as mechanical, as unreal, and as insincere as in the lower. Sometimes a given subject is worked out by the teacher with the cla.s.s, the children, one by one, suggesting sentences, which are shaped and corrected by the teacher and then written up on the blackboard, until there are enough of them to fill one page of an ordinary exercise book. Then the whole essay (if one must dignify it with that name) is copied out, very neatly and carefully, by every child in the cla.s.s; and the result is shown to the inspector as original composition. At other times or in other schools the cla.s.s teacher does not go quite so far as this. He contents himself with talking the subject over with the cla.s.s, and then writing a series of headings[12] on the blackboard. Or, again, trusting to the child's red-hot memory, he will allow him to write out what he remembers of an object-lesson, or a history lesson, or whatever it may be. Composition exercises which are the genuine expression of genuine perception, which have behind them what the child has experienced, what he has felt or thought, what he has read, what he has studied, are the exception rather than the rule; for in such exercises there would probably be faults of spelling, faults of grammar, colloquialisms, careless writing (due to the child's eagerness), and so forth; and the work would therefore be unsatisfactory from the showman's point of view. The child's natural capacity for expressing himself in language is systematically starved in order that outward and visible results, results which will win approval from those who judge according to the appearance of things, may be duly produced.

The case of oral composition in the unemanc.i.p.ated elementary school is even more hopeless than that of written composition. The latter has a time set apart for it on the time-table, and is at any rate supposed to be taught. The former is wholly ignored. Many teachers seem to have entirely forgotten that the desire and the ability to talk are part of the normal equipment of every healthy child. There was, indeed, a time when children were taught to answer questions in complete sentences even when one-word answers would have amply sufficed. For example, when a child was asked how many pence there were in a shilling, he was expected to answer, "There are twelve pence in a shilling"; when he was asked what was the colour of snow, he was expected to answer, "The colour of snow is white "; and so on.

And both he and his teacher flattered themselves that this waste of words was oral composition! In point of fact the sentence in each of these cases was worth no more, as an effort of self-expression, than its one important word--_twelve_, _white_, or whatever it might be; and the child, who was allowed to think that he had produced a real sentence, had in effect done no more than envelop one real word in a hollow formula. There are still many schools in which this ridiculous practice lingers, and in which it const.i.tutes the only attempt at oral composition that the child is allowed to make. Where it has died out the idea of teaching oral composition has too often died with it.

Young children are, as a rule, voluble talkers, with a considerable command of language. But it not infrequently happens that at the close of his school life the once talkative child has lapsed into a state of sullen taciturnity. In common with other vital faculties, his power of expressing himself in speech has withered in the repressive atmosphere to which he has so long been exposed.

It is in the oral lesson that one would expect oral composition to be taught or at any rate practised. In such subjects as _History_, _Geography_, _English_, _Elementary Science_, the teaching in most elementary schools is mainly, if not wholly, oral. In the days of payment by results separate and variable grants were given for these subjects; and which, if either, of two grants should be recommended depended in each case on the result of an oral examination conducted by H.M. Inspector, the employment of a written test in any cla.s.s being strictly forbidden by "My Lords." In this examination proof of the possession of information was all that the inspector could demand; and the quickest and easiest way of obtaining such proof was to ask the cla.s.s questions which could be briefly answered by the children individually. Questions which were designed to test intelligence might, of course, have been asked, and in some districts were freely asked; but to have reduced the grant because the children failed to answer these would have provoked an outcry; while, had the inspector asked questions which demanded long answers, he would, in the limited time at his command, have given but few children the chance of showing that they had been duly prepared for the examination. The consequence was that the oral lesson on a "cla.s.s subject" usually took the form of stuffing the children with pellets of appropriate information, some of which they would, in all probability, have the opportunity of disgorging when they were questioned by the inspector on the yearly "parade day."

Not only, then, did the official examination in history, geography and elementary science direct the teaching of these subjects into channels in which the golden opportunities that they offer for the practice of written composition were perforce thrown away, but also the examination was so framed that even the practice of oral composition, in preparation for it, was actively discouraged. And the neglect of composition acted disastrously on the teaching of the subjects in question; for wherever self-expression on the part of the child is forbidden, the appropriate "sense," or perceptive faculty, cannot possibly evolve itself,--perception and expression being, as we have elsewhere seen, the very life and soul of each other; and in the absence (to take pertinent examples) of the historical or the geographical sense, the possession of historical or geographical information cannot possibly be converted into knowledge of history or geography. The prompt, accurate, and general answering which was rewarded by the award of the higher grants for "cla.s.s subjects" was, in nine cases out of ten, the outcome of a.s.siduous and unintelligent cram,--a mode of preparation for which the policy of the Education Department was mainly responsible.

But when separate grants ceased to be paid for cla.s.s subjects, were not the teachers free to teach them by rational methods? No doubt they were--in theory. In point of fact they were in bondage to the strongest of all constraining influences,--the force of inveterate habit. For twenty years they had taught the cla.s.s subjects by the one safe method of vigorous oral cram. This method had answered their purpose, and it was but natural that they should continue to teach by it. What happened, when separate grants ceased to be paid, was that the need for responsiveness on the part of the scholar gradually lessened. The pellets of information were still imparted, but it became less and less inc.u.mbent upon the teacher to see that his pupils were ready to disgorge them at a moment's notice. And so the cramming lesson gradually transformed itself into a _lecture_, in which the teacher did all or nearly all the talking, while the children sat still and listened or pretended to listen, an occasional yawn giving open proof of the boredom from which most of them were suffering.

That is the type of oral lesson which is most common at the present day. "Results" in history, geography, nature study and English are seldom asked for by the inspector; and the teacher takes but little trouble to produce them. But his distrust of the child is as firmly rooted as ever, and his unwillingness to allow the child to work by or for himself is as strong as it ever was. The consequence is that there are many schools in which the teacher now does everything during the oral lesson, while the child does as nearly as possible nothing. Formerly the child was at any rate allowed (or rather required) to be actively receptive. Now he is seldom allowed to do anything more active than to yawn. And all the time he is secretly longing to energise--to do something with himself--to use his mental, if not his physical faculties--to work, if not to play. One might have thought that in the history and geography lessons, if in no other, "Standards VI" and "VII" (where the numbers were too small to admit of these standards having a teacher to themselves) would be separated from "Standard V," and allowed to work out their own salvation by studying suitable text-books under proper supervision and guidance. But no; the force of habit is too strong for the machine-made teacher. Twenty years ago history and geography were "cla.s.s subjects," and as such were taught orally to whole cla.s.ses of children. And they must still be taught as "cla.s.s subjects," even if this should involve the "Sixth" and "Seventh Standards" being brigaded with, and kept down for one or even two years to, the level of the "Fifth,"--kept down, it would seem, for no other purpose than that of being the pa.s.sive recipients of the teacher's windy "talk,"

and the helpless witnesses of his futile "chalk," and of having their own activities paralysed and their own powers of expression starved into inanition.

I will deal with one more "secular" subject before I bring this sketch to a close. There are still many schools in which the hours that are set apart for _Drawing_ are devoted in large measure to the slavish reproduction of flat copies. A picture of some familiar object--outlined, shaded, or tinted as the case may be, and not infrequently highly conventionalised--hangs in front of the cla.s.s; and the children copy it, stroke by stroke, and curve by curve, and put in the shading and lay on washes of colour. As long practice at work of this kind develops a certain degree of manual dexterity, and as the free use of india-rubber is permitted and even encouraged, the child's finished work may be so neat and accurate as to become worthy of a place on the school wall. But what is the value, what is the meaning of work of this kind? When such a drawing lesson as I have described is in progress, the divorce between perception and expression is complete. And as each of these master faculties is the very life and soul of the other, their complete divorce from one another involves the complete eclipse of each. The child who copies a flat copy does not perceive anything except some other person's reproduction of a scene or object; and even this he does not necessarily grasp as a whole, his business being to reproduce it with flawless accuracy, line by line. Indeed, it may well happen that he does not even know what the picture or diagram before him is intended to represent. Nor is he expressing anything, for he has not made his model in any sense or degree his own. Thus, during the whole of a lesson in which the perceptive and expressive faculties are supposed to be receiving a special training, they are lying dormant and inert.

Each of them is, for the time being, as good as dead. And each of them will a.s.suredly die if this kind of teaching goes on for very long, die for lack of exercise, die wasted and atrophied by disuse.

The extent to which the copying of copies can injure a child's power of observation exceeds belief. I have seen a bowl placed high above the line of sight of a cla.s.s of fifty senior boys, each one of whom (his memory being haunted, I suppose, by some diagram which he had once copied) drew it as if he were looking into it from above. Not one of those boys could see the bowl as it really was, or rather as it really was to be seen. A child who had never drawn a stroke in his life, but whose perceptive faculties had not been deadened by education, would have sketched the bowl more correctly than any of those quasi-experts. And with the wasting of the power of observation, the executive power is gradually lost; for perception is ever interpenetrating, reinforcing, and stimulating expression; and when the eye is blind, the hand, however skilful its mere manipulation may be, necessarily falters and loses its cunning.

Four or five years ago, had one entered an elementary school while drawing was being taught, such a lesson as I have just described would have been in progress in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred. Since then a systematic warfare has been waged by the Board against the "flat copy"; and though it is still very far from extinct, there is now perhaps an actual majority of schools in which its use has been discontinued. But the number of schools in which drawing from the object is effectively taught, though increasing steadily, is still small. In those schools, indeed, the results are surprisingly good,--so good as to justify, not only the new gospel of drawing from the object, but also the whole gospel of education through self-reliance and self-expression. But elsewhere there has been but little improvement, except so far as it may be better to draw from an object without guidance, or with quite ineffective guidance, than to draw from a flat copy. In some schools the formula or "tip" is beginning to take the place of the flat copy. There is a formula for the tulip, a formula for the snowdrop, a formula for the daffodil, and so on; and the children draw from these formulae while the actual flowers are before them and they are making believe to reproduce them. In other schools an object is placed before the cla.s.s, and the teacher draws this for them on the blackboard, explaining to them in detail how it ought to be drawn; and when he has finished, the children pretend to draw the object, but really copy his blackboard copy of it. In this, as in other matters, the teacher who has become a victim of routine will give a facile but mainly "notional" a.s.sent to the suggestions that are placed before him, will promise to try them, and will make an unintelligent and half-hearted attempt to do so, but will as often as not slide back into practices which do not materially differ from those which he professes to have abandoned. The pressure of the whole system of Western education--not to speak of Western civilisation--will be too strong for him. The flat copy, with its demand for mechanical work and servile obedience, fits into that system. Drawing from the object, with its demand for initiative and self-reliance, does not.

Hence the attractive force of the former,--a secret attractive force which will neutralise the efforts that the teacher consciously makes to free himself from its influence, and will arm him, as with a hidden shirt of mail, against the missionary zeal of his inspector.[13] Even the zeal of the inspector will be affected by his possible inability to harmonise his gospel of self-expression in drawing with any general system of self-education. It is because the educational reformer is fighting, in his sporadic attempts at reform, against his own deepest conviction, that he achieves so little even in the particular directions in which he sees clearly that reform is needed.

But how, it will be asked, is such a school as I have described to be kept going? The whole _regime_ must be eminently distasteful to the healthy child, and it can scarcely be attractive to his teacher. By what motive force, then, is the school to be kept in motion,--in motion, if not along the path of progress, at any rate along the well-worn track of routine? By the only motive force which the religion and the civilisation of the West recognise as effective,--the hope of external reward, with its complement, the fear of external punishment. From highest to lowest, from the head teacher of the school to the youngest child in the bottom cla.s.s, all the teachers and all the children are subjected to the pressure of this quasi-physical force. The teachers hope for advancement and increase of salary, and fear degradation and loss of salary, or at any rate loss of the hoped-for increment.[14] The children hope for medals, books, high places in their respective cla.s.ses, and other rewards and distinctions, and fear corporal and other kinds of punishment. The thoroughly efficient school is one in which this motive force is duly transmitted to every part of the school by means of a well-planned and carefully-elaborated machinery, a.n.a.logous to that by which water and gas are laid on at every tap in every house in a well-governed town. Only those who are intimately acquainted with the inside of the elementary school can realise to what an extent the machinery of education has in recent years encroached upon the vital interests of the school and the time and thought of the teacher. In schools which are administered by business-like and up-to-date Local Authorities, this encroachment is becoming as serious as that of drifting sands on a fertile soil.