SOME BOOKS ON CITIZENSHIP

"We believe," runs the report of the Committee of Eight of the American Historical Association, "that elementary civics should permeate the entire school life of the child. In the early grades the most effective features of this instruction will be directly connected with the teaching of regular subjects in the course of study. Through story, poem and song there is the quickening of those emotions which influence civic life. The works and biographies of great men furnish many opportunities for incidental instruction in civics. The elements of geography serve to emphasise the interdependence of men—the very earliest lesson in civic instruction. A study of pictures and architecture arouses the desire for civic beauty and orderliness[3]."

A recent inquiry by a Committee of the American Political Science Association makes it quite clear that the subject is actually taught in the bulk of the elementary and secondary schools of the various States and that generally the results are satisfactory, or indicate clearly necessary reforms. The difficulty of providing suitable text-books is partly met by the addition of supplementary local information.

There are very few colleges and universities which do not provide courses in political science.

No claim is made that the teaching of civics makes of necessity good citizens, but merely that it makes the good citizen into a better one. The justification of the subject lies in its own content.

It is a study of an important phase of human society and, for this reason the same value as elementary science or history[4].

There is, moreover, throughout the various American reports, an insistence on the power of the community ideal in the school and the necessity for discipline in the performance of school duties and a due appreciation of the importance of individual action in relation to the class and to the school.

In England there has been much general and uncoordinated advocacy of the direct teaching of citizenship, but, for various reasons, it does not appear to have been introduced generally into the schools, nor does there appear to be any immediate likelihood of development in the existing schools.

The Civic and Moral Education League made definite inquiry, in 1915, of teachers and schools. They pronounced the results to be disappointing, though they comforted themselves with the incontrovertible dictum that "the people who are doing most have least time to talk about it." As the result of their inquiry, they drew up a statement of the aims of civics which in general and in detail differed little from the ideas accepted in America.

If compulsory continued education is introduced,for boys and girls who now have no school education after the elementary school, it is of the utmost importance that the direct study should be included in some form or other before the age of eighteen is reached, and it is in connection with this type of school rather than in connection with the elementary or secondary school that constructive efforts should be made.

It must be remembered that Mr. Acland, when Minister for Education, introduced the subject into the Elementary Code of 1895 and provided a detailed syllabus. This was generally approved not only as the action of a progressive administrator but as an evidence of the new spirit of freedom beginning to reveal itself in the educational system.

There are some education authorities, like the County of Chester, which enact that the study of citizenship shall proceed side by side with religious education, but the majority leave it to the teachers to do all that is necessary by the adaptation of other subjects and the development of school spirit.

The elaborate nature of Mr. Acland's syllabus tended to defeat its object, and some held it to bepsychologically unsound, but there has also been lack of suitable text-books. In general, however, the whole subject depends peculiarly upon the personality of the teacher who feels no lack of text-books if he is alive to the interest of his lesson.

InStudies in Board Schools[5], there is a delightful study of a lesson on "Rates" to young citizens with the altruistic text, "All for Each, Each for All." "Citizen Carrots," a tired newspaper boy up every morning at five, is revealed as responding with great enthusiasm to this interesting lesson which commences with a drawing on a blackboard of a "regulation workhouse, a board school, a free library, a lamp post, a water-cart, a dustman, a policeman, a steam roller, a navvy or two, and a long-handled shovel stuck in a heap of soil." A hypothetical payer of rates, "Mrs Smith," is revealed as getting a great deal for her rates:

She is protected from any harm; her property is safe; she can walk about the streets with comfort by day or night; her drains are seen to; her rubbish is taken away for her; she has books and newspapers to read; if she has ten children, she can have them well taught for nothing—so that if they are willing to learn, and attend school regularly, they can very easily make their own living when they grow up; if she is ill, she can go to the infirmary for medicine; and if, when she grows old, she is unable to pay rent or buy food or clothes, these things are provided for her."And please, sir, the Parks," interjected the eager Carrots.

"And please, sir, the Parks," interjected the eager Carrots.

If the definition of a good citizen propounded by Professor Masterman is true—that he is one who pays his rates without grumbling—"Citizen Carrots," whatever his disadvantages, is intellectually anyhow on the way to become such a citizen, and certainly in the sketch, "Citizen Carrots" is determined that the rates shall be expended properly because he himself will have a vote in later days.

It is probable that lessons such as these are more frequent than the time-tables would indicate. There are few head masters of elementary schools who would disclaim the adequate teaching of citizenship in their schools. They would explain that the treatment of history and geography proceeding from local standpoints was effective in this direction, and it is the rule rather than otherwise for visits to be paid to places of historic interest within reach of the schools. Advantage is also taken of such days as Empire Day tostimulate interest in the State, as well as to impart knowledge concerning its organisation. All this is reinforced by the use of appropriate reading books which are instruments of indirect, but not necessarily less effective, instruction.

The larger opportunities which secondary schools offer have not been taken advantage of to induce the specific study of civics to any greater extent that in the elementary schools, although many schools are able to devote at least a period each week to the consideration of current events, and, naturally, the teaching of history and geography includes much more completely the consideration of institutions both at home and abroad.

The idea of the regional or local survey is gaining ground and in some respects it will prove to serve the same purpose as the "Community Civics" of the American high school.

There have been attempts to introduce economics into the secondary school curriculum, but they have not persisted to any extent. In theMemorandum of Curricula of Secondary Schoolsissued by the Board of Education in 1913, it is suggested that "it will sometimes be desirable to provide, for those who propose on leaving school to enter business, a special commercial course with special study of the more technical side of economic theory and some study of political and constitutional history." For the rest there is no mention of the subjects intimately connected with government. It is clear that the Board expects that out of the subjects of the ordinary curriculum, with such special efforts suggested by public interest as may from time to time occur, the student will gain a general knowledge of the affairs of the community round about, some knowledge of the principles of politics, clear ideas concerning movements for social reform, and some acquaintance with international problems. If he does so, he will have secured a useful introduction to the studies associated with adult life.

An intelligent study of languages will help materially in this direction and, whilst this is specially true in the cases of Greek and Latin, there is no reason why modern languages should not serve the same purpose. It is, however, often the case that the study of the history and institutions of modern countries is not associated sufficiently with the study of their language.

The public and grammar schools of England, as contrasted with the newer secondary schools, are more especially the homes of classical studies, and it is through the working of these schools that the knowledge of institutions in ancient Greece and Rome will have its greatest effect on citizenship.

The study of political science as a specific subject is gaining ground in universities, whilst the study of the Empire and its institutions has naturally made rapid progress during the last few years. There may also be noted distinct tendencies, arising out of the experience of the war, towards the foundation of schools destined to deal with the institutions and the thought of foreign countries. In the schools of economics and history there is fulness of attempt to study all that can be included under the generic title of civics which, after all, may be defined as political and social science interpreted in immediate and practical ways.

[1]

Peabody,The Religion of an Educated Man.

[2]

Haines,The Teaching of Government.

[3]

Haines,The Teaching of Government.

[4]

Bourne,The Teaching of History and Civics in the Elementary and the Secondary School.

[5]

Charles Morley, 1897.

After all is said and done the ideal training for citizenship in the schools depends more upon the wisdom engendered in the pupil than upon the direct study of civics. If the spirits of men and women are set in a right direction they will reach out for knowledge as for hidtreasure. "Wisdom is more moving than any motion; she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness[1]."

It happens also in natural sequence that the spirit developed in a school will lead to the construction of institutions in connection with school life calculated to secure its adequate expression.

Elementary schools, however, are much handicapped in this way. If it comes about that work other than educational or recreative is forbidden to children during the years of attendance at school, and also that the period of school life is lengthened, there will be opportunity for the development of games on a self-governing basis. Elementary school children have a large measure of initiative; all they need is a real chance to exercise it. They would willingly make their schools real centres of child life. Many children at present have little else than narrow tenements and the streets, out of which influences arise which war continually against the social influences of the school.

The opportunity afforded by well-ordered leisure would be accentuated by the more complete operation of movements such as boys' brigades, boy scouts, girl guides, and Church lads' brigades, which are in their several ways doing much to develop citizenship. Such bodies are now in effect educational authorities, and classes are organised by them in connection with the Board of Education.

There have been many attempts to introduce self-governing experiments into elementary schools and, whilst they have often been defeated by reason of the immaturity of the children, yet some of them have met with great success. The election of monitors on the lines of a general election is an instance of success in this direction. The ideas which have arisen from the advocacy of the Montessori system have induced methods of greater freedom in connection with many aspects of elementary school life. The Caldecott Community, dealing with working-class children in the neighbourhood of St. Pancras, has tried many interesting experiments. That, however, of the introduction of children's courts of justice had to be abandoned, but not until many valuable lessons in child psychology had been learnt.

Side by side with the elementary school, there are rising in England experiments similar to those undertaken by such organisations as the School City andthe George Junior Republics of America. The most notable among them is the Little Commonwealth, Dorchester, which has achieved astonishing results through the process of taking delinquent children and allowing them self-government. But, hopeful as the prospects are, their ultimate effect will be best estimated when their pupils, restored in youth to the honourable service of the community, are taking their full share in life as adult citizens, and naturally every care is taken in the organisation of these institutions to ensure that the transition from their sheltered citizenship to the outside world shall not be of so abrupt a nature as to tend to render unreal and remote the life in which the children have taken part.

Nearly all of the more recent experiments in regard to the school and its kindred institutions are co-operative in principle and in method, but it is probably Utopian to conceive an educational method which shall achieve the highest success without having included within it the element of competition. If competition is a method obtaining outside the school it is bound to reproduce itself within it. The only possible thing for the school to do is to restrict the influence of competition to the channels where it can be beneficial.

The method by which elementary school childrenpass to the secondary school is by means of competitive scholarships. In common with the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education it is necessary to accept the fact that at present "the scholarship system is too firmly rooted in the manner, habits and character of this country to be dislodged, even if it were thrice condemned by theory[2]." But, in the interests of citizenship, scholarships should be awarded as the result of non-competitive tests, if only to secure that every child shall receive the education for which he or she is fitted.

The stress and strain imposed upon many who climb the ladder of education, often occasioned by the inadequacy of the scholarship for the purposes to which it is to be applied, tend to develop characteristics which are so strongly individual as to be distinctly anti-social.

It is unfortunate that in many subjects of the curriculum it is not merely bad form to help one's neighbour but distinctly a school sin, and this makes it necessary for a balance to be struck by the introduction of subjects at which all can work for the good of the class or the school. Manual work and local surveys are subjects of this nature and should be encouraged side by side with games of which there are three essential aspects:—the individual achievement, the winning of the match or race, and "playing the game." In reference to citizenship the last of these is the only one which ultimately matters.

It is generally admitted that the great public schools are those which are most characteristic of English boy life at its best. Glorying as they do in a splendid tradition, they have always had in addition the opportunity of adapting themselves to new needs. Their reform is always under discussion and perchance they are waiting even now for some Arnold or Thring to lead them in a new England, for new it will inevitably be. Even so, the sense of responsibility they have developed has been translated into the terms of English government over half the world.

The objective of the public school boy anxious to take a part in government at home has always been parliament, or such local institutions as demand his service in accordance with the tradition of his family. The tendency to despise the homely duties of a city councillor or poor law guardian is, however, passing. There are few schools which do not welcome visitors to speak to the boys who have first-hand acquaintance with the life of the poor or who are indeed of that life themselves. In this way boys get to realise, as far as it is possible through sympathy, what it means to be out of work, what it means to be hungry for unattainable learning, what children have to suffer, and, in addition to the practical interest which many boys immediately develop, it cannot be doubted that many ideals for the conduct of social life in the future are conceived, even if dimly, for the first time. Thanks to the unremitting efforts of large-minded head masters, public school boys more and more realise that they are beneficiaries of the spirit of a past day, not only in the sense of the creation of a noble tradition but actually in regard to the material provision of buildings and the financial support of teaching.

There is likely to be an extension of university education in the near future. The ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge with their great college system will be strengthened, as will be the universities which were established at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The demand for the better training of teachers will result inevitably in the creation of more universities. The inadequate sum which this country has spent uponuniversity education up to the present will be greatly increased.

As a direct result of the opportunity which university life gives to undergraduates for the development of self-governing institutions, there can be little doubt that the university must be regarded above all other schools and most institutions as powerful in the development of good citizenship. The public school tradition will be carried directly into the older universities and in increasing measure into the new universities as the best spirit of the public schools gradually permeates the whole system of our education even down to the elementary schools themselves. When these opportunities so lavishly provided for the development of student life in its self-governing aspects are realised and when above it all there stand great teachers in the lineage of those described by Cardinal Newman in his eulogy of Athens—"the very presence of Plato" to the student, "a stay for his mind to rest on, a burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with men like himself, ever afterwards"—little else can be desired. In every university there must be such teachers, or universities will tend to fallto the level of the life about them. "You can infuse," said Lord Rosebery at the Congress of the Universities of the Empire, "character, and morals and energy and patriotism by the tone and atmosphere of your university and your professors."

From one point of view, all the old universities of Europe—Bologna, Paris, Prague, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.—must be regarded as definite and conscious protests against the dividing and isolating—the anti-civic—forces of the periods of their institution. They represent historically the development of communities for common interest and protection in the great and holy cause of the pursuit of learning, and above all things their story is the story of the growth of European unity and citizenship.

The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world were both alike threatened by the power that had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on theseverance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and social position. The University, on the other hand, was a protest against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was European and not local[3].

The spirit which is characteristic of a university in its best aspects, linked with the spirit which is inherent in the ranks of working people, has on more occasions than one set on foot movements for the education of the people. One of the most notable instances of this unity found expression at the Oxford Co-operative Congress of 1882, when Arnold Toynbee urged co-operators to undertake the education of the citizen. By this he meant: "the education of each member of the community as regards the relation in which he stands to other individual citizens and to the community as a whole." "We have abandoned," he said further, "and rightly abandoned the attempt to realise citizenship by separating ourselves from society. We will never abandon the belief that it has yet to be won amid the stress and confusion of the ordinary world in which we move." From that day to this co-operators have always had before them an ideal of education in citizenship and have organised definite teaching year by year.

Another instance of even greater power lies in the co-operation between the pioneers of the University Extension Movement at Cambridge and the working men, particularly of Rochdale and Nottingham, to be followed later by that unprecedented revival of learning amongst working people which took place in Northumberland and Durham in the days before the great coal strike. At a later date, in 1903, the same kind of united action gave rise to the movement of the Workers' Educational Association, which has always conceived its purpose to be the development of citizenship in and through education pursued in common by university man and working man alike. The system of University Tutorial Classes originated by this Association has been based upon an ideal of citizenship, and not primarily upon a determination to acquire knowledge, although it was clearly seen that vague aspirations towards good citizenship without the harnessing of all available knowledge to its causewould be futile. After exception has been made for the body of young men and women who are determined to acquire technical education for the laudable purpose of advancing both their position in life and their utility to society, it is clear that no educational appeal to working men and women will have the least effect if it is not directed towards the purpose of enriching their life, and through them the life of the community. The proof of this lies in the fact that, after they have striven together for years in Tutorial Classes, they ask for no recognition—in fact they have declined it when it has been offered—and have devoted their powers to voluntary civic work and the work of the associations or unions to which they belong, as well as in very many instances, to the spreading of education throughout the districts in which they live. It is largely due to the leaven of educational enthusiasm which has thus been generated that there is a unanimous movement on the part of working people towards a complete educational system including within it compulsory attendance at continuation schools during the day.

The problems that hedge about continuation schools are many, but it is clear that they will beregarded by educationists and by at least some employers as above all else training for citizenship based upon the vocation to which the boy or girl may be devoting himself or herself in working hours. The narrowness of the daily occupation, divorced as it is from the whole spirit and intent of apprenticeship, will be broadened directly the consideration of daily work is placed in the continuation school both on a higher plane and in a complete setting.

The compulsory evening school will fail unless it induces a demand for recreation of a pure kind which may be associated with the voluntary evening school and continued along the lines of study into the years of adult life. And even if it is impossible for every student of capacity in the continuation school to pass into the university or technological college, it may be hoped that there need not fail to be opportunities for reaching the heights of ascertained knowledge in the University Tutorial Class. In the future, as now, only in greater degree, such classes will be regarded as an essential part of university work, and will provide opportunity for the study of those subjects which are most nearly related to citizenship.

It is one ofthe fundamental principles of the Workers' Educational Association that every person, when not under the power of some hostile over-mastering influence, is ready to respond to an educational appeal. Not indeed that all are ready or able to become scholars, but that all are anxious to look with understanding eyes at the things which are pure and beautiful. Tired men and women are made better citizens if they are taken, as they often are, to picture galleries and museums, to places of historic interest and of scenic beauty, and are helped to understand them by the power of a sympathetic guide. It is by the extension of work of this sort, which can be carried out almost to a limitless extent that the true purpose of social reform will be best served. It is by such means that the press may be elevated, the level of the cinema raised, the efforts of the demagogue neutralised.

The Workers' Educational Association is based upon the work of the elementary school and of the associations of working people, notably the co-operative societies and trade unions. The democratic methods obtaining in those associations have themselves proved a valuable contribution to citizenship, and have determined the democratic nature of all adult education. The right and freedom of the student to study what he wishes finds its counterpart in the reasonable demand that man shall live out his life as he wills, provided it moves in a true direction and is in harmony with the needs and aspirations of his fellows.

It has seemed in this review of the relation of schools and places of education to the development of citizenship that the fact of the operation of social influences has been implicit at every point. In any case there is, and can be, no doubt that the school, whilst instant in its effect upon the mind of the time, is always being either hindered or helped by the conditions obtaining in the society in which it is set. The relations existing between society and school are revealed in a process of action and reaction. Wilhelm von Humboldt said that "whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must first be introduced into its schools." Among other things, it is necessary to develop in the schools an appreciation of all work that is necessary for human welfare. This is the crux of all effort towards citizenship through education. In the long run there can be no full citizenship unless there is fulness of intention to discover capacity and to develop it not for the individual but for the common good. This is primarily the task of an educational system. If a man is set to work for which he is not fitted, whether it be the work of a student or a miner, he is thwarted in his innate desire to attain to the full expression of his being in and through association with his fellow-men, whereas, when a man is doing the right work, that for which he has capacity, he rejoices in his labour and strives continually to perfect it by development of all his powers. The exercise of good citizenship follows naturally as the inevitable result of a rightly developed life. It may not be the citizenship which is exercised by taking active and direct part in methods of government. The son of Sirach, meditating on the place of the craftsman, said:

All these trust to their hands: and every one is wise in his work. Without these cannot a city be inhabited ... they will maintain the state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their craft[4].

The times are different and the needs of people have changed, butthe true test of a citizen may be more in the healthiness of dominating purpose than in the possession and satisfaction of a variety of desires. To "maintain the state of the world" is no mean ambition.

If it is difficult for a man to become the good citizen when employed on work for which he is unfitted, it is even more difficult for the man to do so who is set to shoddy work or to work which damages the community.

The task laid upon the school is heavy, but it does not stand alone. The family and the Church are its natural allies in the modern State.

All alike will make mistakes, but, if they clearly set before them the intention to do their utmost to free the capacity of all for the accomplishment of the good of all, wisdom will increase and many tragedies in life will be averted.

Thus lofty ideals have presented themselves, but they will secure universal admission apart from the immediate practical considerations which bulk so largely and often so falsely in the minds ofmen, and which are frequently suggested by limitations of finance and lack of faith in the all-sufficient power of wisdom.

It is in the consecration of a people to its highest ideals that the true city and the true State become realised on earth and the measure of its consecration, in spite of all devices of teaching or training however wise, determines the true level of citizenship at any time in any place.

[1]

Wisdom of Solomon, vii. 24.

[2]

Interim Report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education on Scholarships for Higher Education, 1916.

[3]

J.R. Green,A Short History of the English People.

[4]

Ecclesiasticus, xxxviii. 31-34.

[1]American Political Science Assoc. The Teaching of Government. 1916. Macmillan. 5s. 0d. net.

[1]BAKER, J.H. Educational Aims and Civic Needs. 1913. Longmans. 3s. 6d. net.

[1]BALCH, G.T. The Method of Teaching Patriotism in Public Schools. 1890. New York: Van Nostrand.

[1]BOURNE, H.E. The Teaching of History and Civics. 1915. Longmans. 6s. 0d. net.

[1]DEWEY, JOHN. Democracy and Education. 1916. Macmillan. 6s. 0d. net.

[1]DEWEY JOHN. The School and Society. 1915. Chicago Univ. Press. 4s. 0d. net.

[1]DEWEY, JOHN and EVELYN. Schools of To-Morrow. 1915. Dent. 5s. 0d. net.

FINDLAY, J.J. The School. 1912. Williams and Norgate. 1s. 3d. net.

[1]HALL, G. STANLEY. Educational Problems. 2 vols. 1911. Appleton. 31s. 6d. net. Ch. 24. Civic Education.

[1]HENDERSON, C.H. Education and the Larger Life. 1902. Boston: Houghton. 6s. 0d.

[1]HUGHES, E.H. The Teaching of Citizenship. 1909. Boston: Wilde. 6s. 0d.

HUGHES, M.L.V. Citizens To Be. 1915. Constable. 4s. 6d. net.

[1]JENKS, J.W. Citizenship and the Schools. 1909. New York: Holt. 6s. 0d.

KERSCHENSTEINER, GEORG. Education for Citizenship. Tr. A.J. Pressland. 1915. Harrap. 2s. 0d. net. The Schools and the Nation. 1914. Macmillan. 6s. 0d. net.

[1]MONROE, PAUL. (Ed.) Cyclopedia of Education. 5 vols. Macmillan. 105s. 0d. net.

MORGAN, ALEXANDER. Education and Social Progress. 1916. Longmans. 3s. 6d. net.

Oxford and Working Class Education. Clarendon Press, 1s. net.

PATERSON, ALEXANDER. Across the Bridges. 1912. Arnold. 1s. 0d. net.

SADLER, M.E. (Ed.). Continuation Schools in England and Elsewhere. 1908. Manchester University Press. 8s. 6d. net.

SCOTT, C.A. Social Education. 1908. Ginn. 6s. 0d. net.

WALLAS, GRAHAM. The Great Society. 1914. Macmillan. 7s. 6d. net.

See also:

Board of Education. Reports.

Civics and Moral Education League Papers, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, W.C. 2.

[1]

American.

Education is a subject upon which everyone—or at least every parent—considers himself entitled to have opinions and to express them. But educational treatises or the considered views of educational experts have a very limited popularity, and in fact arouse little interest outside the circle of the experts themselves. Even the average teacher, who is himself, if only he realised it, inside the circle, pays little heed to the broader aspects of education, chiefly, no doubt, because in the daily practice of the art of education he cannot step aside and see it as a whole; he cannot see the wood for the trees. The indifference of laymen however is mainly due to the fact that educational theory, like other special subjects, inevitably acquires a jargon of its own, an indispensable shorthand, as it were, for experts, but far too abstract and technical for outsiders.

And his technical language too often reacts upon the actual ideas of the educational theorist, who tends to lose sight of the variety of concrete boys and girls in his abstract reasonings, necessary as these are. We are apt to forget that what is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, and still more perhaps that what is sauce for the swan may not be sauce for either of these humbler but deserving fowl. But it is certain that in discussing education we ought constantly to envisage the actual individuals to be educated. Otherwise our "average pupil of fifteen plus" is only too likely to become a mere monster of the imagination, and the intellectualpabulum, which we propose to offer, suited to the digestion of no human boy or girl in "this very world, which is the world of all of us."

In considering, then, the place of literature in education, I propose to keep constantly before my eyes the people with whose education I am personally familiar, namely, myself, my children, and the various types of public school boy which I have known as boy, as undergraduate, as college tutor and as schoolmaster. I say various types of public school boy; for although there still is a public school type in general which is easily recognisable by certain marked superficial characteristics, the popular notion that all public school boys are very much alike in character and outlook is a mere delusion

Again, I propose, when I speak of literature, to mean literature, and not a compendious term for anything that is not science. The opposition that has in modern times been set up between science on the one hand and a jumble of studies labelled either literary or "humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of education. It may perhaps be held that literature in its most literal sense is a name for anything that is expressed by means of intelligible language—a use of the word which certainly admits of no comparison with the meaning of science, but which also leads to no ideas of any educational interest. But I take the word literature in its common acceptation; and, while admitting that I can give no precise and exhaustive definition, I will venture to describe it as the expression of thought or emotion in any linguistic forms which have aesthetic value. Thus the subject-matter of literature is only limited by experience: as Emile Faguet says somewhere—without claiming to have made a discovery—la littérature est une chose qui touche à toutes choses. And the tones of literature range from Isaiah to Wycherley, from Thucydides to Tolstoy; its forms from Pindar to a folk song, from Racine to Rudyard Kipling, from Gibbon to Herodotus or Froissart. And while no two people would agree in drawing the line of aesthetic value which should determine whether any given verbal expression of thought or emotion was literature or not—a fact which is not without importance in the choice of books for forming the taste of our pupils—yet, for the purpose of discussing the place and function of literature in education, we all know well enough what we mean by the word in the general sense which I have attempted to describe.

As this is not a tractate on education as a whole, I must risk something for the sake of brevity, and will venture to lay down dogmatically that the objects of literary studies as a part of education are (1) the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, (2) the provision of a permanent source of pure and inalienable pleasure, and (3) the immediate pleasure of the student in the process of education. None of these objects is exclusive of either of the others. They cannot in fact be separated in the concrete. But they are sufficiently different to be treated distinctly.

(1) Hardly anyone would deny that some knowledge and appreciation of literature is an indispensable part of a complete education. The full member of a civilised society must be able to subscribe to the familiarHomo sum; nihil humanum a me alienum puto. And literature is obviously one of the greatest, most intense, and most prolific interests of humanity. There have always been thinkers, from Plato downwards, who for moral or political reasons have viewed the power of literature with distrust: but their fear is itself evidence of that power. Thus literature is a very important part both of the past and of contemporary life, and no one can enter fully into either without some real knowledge of it. A man may be a very great man or a very good man without any literary culture; he may do his country and the world imperishable services in peace or war. But the older the world grows, the rarer must these unlettered geniuses become. Literature in one form or another—too often no doubt put to vile uses—has become so much part of the very texture of civilised life that a wide-awake mind can scarcely fail to take notice of it. And in any case we need not consider that kind of special genius which education does little either to make or mar. No one is likely seriously to deny that for taking a full and intelligent part in thenormal life of a civilised community—in love and friendship, in the family and in society, in the study and practice of citizenship of all degrees—some literary culture is absolutely necessary; nor indeed that, subject to a due balance of qualities and acquirements, the wider and deeper the literary culture the more valuable a member of society the possessor will be. The lubricant of society in all its functions, whether of business or leisure, is sympathy, and a sufficient quantity, as it were, of sympathy to lubricate the complex mechanism of civilised life can only be supplied by a widespread knowledge of the best, and a great deal more than the best, of what has been and is being thought and said in the world. Personal intercourse with one another and a common apprehension of God as our Father are even more powerful sources of sympathy; but literature provides innumerable channels for the intercommunication and distribution of these sources, without which the sympathies of individuals may be strong and lively, but will almost always be narrowly circumscribed. It is very true that to know mankind only through books is no knowledge of mankind at all; but ever since man discovered how to perpetuate his utterances in writing it has been increasingly truethat literature is the principal means of widening and deepening such knowledge.

This object of literary studies, the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, may be summed up in the familiar graceful words of Ovid, who was thinking almost entirely of literature when he wrote

ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes

Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.

And it is only the lack, in so many of the greatest writers, and the neglect, in so many educators and educational systems, of that due balance of qualities and acquirements of which I spoke just now, which have induced in superficial minds a distrust and often a contempt of literature as a subject of education. The good citizen or man of the world—in the best sense of the phrase—must not be the slave of literary proclivities to the ruin of his functions as father or husband or friend or man of action and affairs. The world of letters, if lived in too exclusively, is an unreal world, though without it the actual world is almost meaningless. Now thegenus irritabile vatum, even when their thoughts, as Carlyle put it, "enrich the blood of the world," have very generally appeared to the plain man of goodwill as very defective in the art of living. If their aspirations have been above the standards of their day, their practice has often been below them in such essentially social qualities as probity, faithfulness, consideration for others. Moreover their outlook upon life, intense and inspiring though it be, is often a very partial one. Even so, it does not follow that because a poet or a philosopher is not in every respect "the compleat gentleman," a citizentotus teres atque rotundus, his works are not profitable for the building up of that character. If it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. Tolstoy is indeed a case in point. He is one of the giants of literature, whose masterpieces are already classics; and this position is unaffected by the various judgments that may be formed either of his critical or of his practical wisdom.

The lack then of a due balance of qualities and acquirements in so many authors, and we may add other artists, is a cause, but no justification, of that belittlement and even distrust of the literary side of education which are on the whole marked features of the English attitude to-day. But a more potent cause and a real justification of this attitude is the neglect of due balance of qualities and acquirements by so many educators and educational systems. Great educators have themselves rarely been narrow-minded men; but the traditions they have founded have gone the way of all traditions.

What begins as an inspiration hardens into a formula. The ideals of the Renascence were caricatured in their offspring of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only did the evolution of modern life with its cities, its printing press, its gunpowder, its steam engine and the rest, destroy the need of the well-to-do to be trained in the practical arts of chivalry, of the chase, of husbandry, even of music and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more and more intothe fatally easy path of formal and grammatical treatment. The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it; its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique with which it was surrounded.

I do not know when the expression "the dead languages" was invented: but certainly Latin and Greek have been treated as very dead languages by the great majority of teachers for a very long time. And as "modern subjects," history, geography, modern languages and literatures, gradually thrust their way into the curriculum, each was subjected as far as possible to the same mummification. There is a theory still widely held among teachers that the value of a subject or of a method of instruction depends upon the amount of drudgery which it involves or the degree of repulsion which it excites. The theory rests upon a confusion between the ideas of discipline and punishment, which itself is probably due to the strongly Judaistic tone of our so-called Christianity. At any rate, far too many schoolmasters suffer from conscientious scruples aboutallowing the spirits of freedom, initiative, curiosity, enjoyment, to blow through their class-rooms.

There has been, always to some extent, but with gathering force in recent years, a natural revolt against this mixture of puritanism, scholasticism, and dilettantism, which made the intellectual side of public school education such a failure except for the few who were born with the spoon of scholarship in their mouths. The irruption of that turbulent rascal, natural science, has perhaps had most to do with humanising our humanistic studies. It was a great step when boys who could not make verses were allowed to make if it was but a smell; and even breaking a test-tube once in a while is more educative than breaking the gender-rules every day of the week. Many of my friends, who label themselves humanists, are in a panic about this, and look upon me sadly as a renegade because I, who owe almost everything to a "classical education," am ready (they think) to sell the pass of "compulsory Greek" to a horde of money-grubbing barbarians who will turn our flowery groves of Academe into mere factories of commercial efficiency. But fear is a treacherous guide. They are the victims of that abstract generalisation of which I spoke at the outset. I check their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my children, and the hundreds of boys I have known. And I see more and more plainly, as I study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments and the common stock of human nature and civilised society which unites us, that literature is a permanent and indispensable and even inevitable element in our education; and that moreover it can only have free scope and growth in the expanding personality of the young in a due and therefore a varying harmony with other interests. I and my children and my schoolboys have eyes and ears and hands—and even legs! We have, as Aristotle rightly saw, an appetite for knowledge, and that appetite cannot be satisfied, though it may be choked, by a sole diet of literature. We have desires of many kinds demanding satisfaction and requiring government. We have a sense of duty and vocation: we know that we and our families must eat to live and to carry on the race. We resent, in our inarticulate way, these sneers at our Philistinism, commercialism, athleticism, materialism, from dim-eyed pedants on the one hand and superior persons on the other, who have evidently forgotten, if they ever saw, the whole purport of that Greek literature the name of which they take in vain. No!La littérature est une chose qui touche à toutes choses; but if we are to shut our eyes to all the "things"which evoke it, it becomes what it is to so many, whose education has been in name predominantly literary, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

(2) The argument has already insensibly led us to treat by implication the second, and indeed the third of our assumed objects. But in our modern insistence upon social relations and citizenship—a very proper insistence, still too much warped and hampered by selfishness and prejudice—there is a real danger of our forgetting how much of our conscious existence is passed, in a true sense, at leisure and alone. It is our ideal on the one side to be "all things to all men": and for any approach to this ideal, as we have seen, the knowledge and sympathy born of literature are indispensable. But on the other side no man or woman is completely fitted out without provision for the blank spaces, the passages and waiting rooms, as it were, to say nothing of the actual "recreation rooms" of the house of life. And there is no provision so abundant, so accessible to all, so permanent, so independent of fortune, and at once so mellowing and fortifying, as literature. Our happiness or discontent dependsfar more, than on anything else, on the habitual occupation of our mind when it is free to choose its occupation. And, since thought is instantaneous, even the busiest of us has far more of that freedom than he knows what to do with unless he has a mental treasury from which he can at will bring forth things new and old. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of hobbies in a man's own life—and of course indirectly in his relations with his fellows. A single hobby is dangerous. You ride it to death or it becomes your master. You need at least a pair of them in the stable. What they are must depend, you say, upon the temperament, the bent of the individual. True: but our main responsibility as educators consists in our "bending of the twig." It is not temperament nor destiny which renders so many men and women unable to fill their leisure moments with anything more exhilarating than, gossip, grumbling, or perpetual bridge. Perhaps the greatest blessing which a parent or a teacher can confer on a boy or girl is discreet, unpriggish, and unpatronising, encouragement and guidance in the discovery and development of hobbies: and if I may venture on a piece of advice to anyone who needs it, I should say: "Try to secure that everyone grows up with at least two hobbies; and whatever one of themmay be, let the other be literature, or some branch of literature."

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