Proof-Reading
From this closing paragraph and the article onPrinting, the student is referred to the articleProof-Reading(Vol. 22, p. 438) which is by John A. Black, head press reader of the 10th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and John Randall, sub-editor of theAthenaeumand ofNotes and Queriesand former secretary of the London Association of Correctors of the Press, so that this article, like all the other articles on the subject of book-making, is written by eminent practical authorities on the subject.
Bookbinding
The same is true of the articleBookbinding(Vol. 4, p. 216), which naturally follows in a systematic course of study. This is by Cyril J. H. Davenport, assistant keeper of books in the British Museum and author ofHistory of the Book, etc. This article is illustrated with 14 figures, including 8 in halftone, showing typical fine bindings. The other illustrations show machines and processes used in binding. Besides a historical sketch of book-binding the article treats of the following topics:
Modern methods and modern binding designers; machine binding, machine sewing, rounding and backing, casing, wiring, and blocking. A case-making machine, a casing-in machine and a blocking machine are shown in the illustrations.
A bookbinder or a student of the subject will find a great deal of very valuable information elsewhere in the book, particularly in the articleLeather(Vol. 16, p. 330) by Dr. J. Gordon Parker, principal of the Leathersellers Technical College, London, and author ofLeather for Libraries, etc. The article occupies the equivalent of 55 pages of this Guide; and the possessor of the Britannica will be interested to know that the leather bindings used for its volumes were all made according to specifications drawnup by Dr. Parker, the greatest authority in the world on tanning, curing and dyeing leather for book-bindings.
Publishing and Book-Selling
The last stages in getting the author’s raw material “from him to the ultimate consumer” are those in which the publisher and bookseller play their part; and for a description of their functions the student should refer to the articles on publishing and book-selling in the Britannica. The articlePublishing(Vol. 22, p. 628) explains that publishing and book-selling were for a long time carried on together since “booksellers were the first publishers of printed books, as they had previously been the agents for the production and exchange of authentic manuscript copies.” The separation of publishing from book-selling is due to “the tendency of every composite business to break up, as it expands, into specialized departments.” As publishers became a separate class the work of their literary assistants also broke up into specialized departments—proof-reading and the reading of manuscripts submitted by authors—or the work ofprinters’readers andpublishers’readers.
The importance of the work of the publisher’s reader is dwelt upon in this article which sketches besides the growth of the Society of Authors in England and of the formation there of the Publishers’ Association and the Booksellers’ Association. The article also outlines the methods of publishing in the United States and gives particular prominence to the effect on the British market of the introduction of American books and of American book-selling methods.
Historical and Miscellaneous Articles
Among other articles of interest to the manufacturer of books are the following:Book(Vol. 4, p. 214) by Alfred William Pollard, assistant keeper of books in the British Museum, gives a general historical description of books and in particular calls attention to the great change in book-prices in the last thirty years. “About 1894 the number of medium-priced books was greatly increased in England by the substitution of single-volume novels at 6s. each (subject to discount) for the three-volume editions at 31s. 6d.... The preposterous price of 10s. 6d. a volume had been adopted during the first popularity of the Waverley Novels and had continued in force for the greater part of the century.” To-day, well printed copies of these novels sell for 1s. in England and for 35 cents in the United States.
It may be added that one of the most striking lessons to be learned from the Britannica, in relation to the improvements and economies effected by the application of the most modern processes to the manufacture of books, is supplied by the consideration of the Britannica itself. The extent of the composition and machinery involved, the accuracy of the proof-reading, the novel employment—upon a large scale—of India paper and flexible bindings, the beauty of the illustrations, and, above all, the low price at which the product is sold, form a combination of the very latest perfections of every department of the industry.
Read tooBook-collecting(Vol. 4, p. 221) also by A. W. Pollard; the articleBook Plates(Vol. 4, p. 230) by Egerton Castle, illustrated with ten cuts of book plates (which are so well chosen that book plate collectors have not infrequently asked the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for extra copies so that they might include them in their collections); the articleBookcase(Vol. 4, p. 221) from which the reader may be surprised to learn that “the whole construction and arrangement of bookcases was learnedly discussed in the light of experience by W. E. Gladstone in theNineteenth Centuryfor March 1890;” and the articleBibliography and BibliOLOGY(Vol. 3, p. 908) by A. W. Pollard, supplemented by the articleIncunabula(Vol. 14, p. 369).
The following alphabetical list of articles and sections of articles, although it does not profess to be complete, will give the student some idea of the large number of topics connected with the general subject of the manufacture of books:
CHAPTER XXIIFOR JOURNALISTS AND AUTHORS
The Development of Style
No writer can consider the use he will make of the tools of his trade—and the Britannica is certainly the chief among them—unless he has very definite views as to the particular kind of work he is trying to do. Where writing is regarded as a business, the art of writing is the art of being read, and the art of being read lies, nowadays, in convincing the reader that you have something fresh to say, rather than in arousing his admiration of your way of saying it. Writing is none the less one of the fine arts: the modern writer must form his style with the utmost care, and always guard himself against the temptation to relax his standards. But the juggling with words, the “rhythmical sequences of recurring consonants,” the musical prose in which sounds are adjusted as artfully as in verse, presuppose readers to whom these elaborations are delightful. Such readers are rare, to-day. Thirty or forty years ago it was a matter of course, in thousands of homes, for some one member of the household to read aloud to the others. The custom has almost disappeared, and there has been a change in public taste, due, perhaps, in great measure to a change in thepaceat which people read. A book does not “last” as it did. Newspaper reading has trained the eye and the mind to swifter consumption. The modern professional writer adapts himself to the existing conditions. He knows that those who ride in automobiles do not peer under tufts of leaves to look for roadside violets. But he also knows that they want a straight, smooth road. He endeavors to write as concisely as possible, yet to write so clearly that every point he makes is made once for all; and he can work fully as hard, and apply talents fully as great, in forming a style that pleases by its simple directness—or, better, that pleases because the reader does not think of it as “style,”—as if he were aiming at the most elaborate ornament.
“Vitalized Observation”
In developing the power of clear and concise statement, the first essential is to form the habit of getting your “something to say” absolutely plain to your own mind before you attempt to say it. A writer deliberately strives to be wordy and vague when he is trying to misrepresent facts, and it is impossible, when he is groping for his facts, that he should avoid wordiness and vagueness. The Britannica article on Rudyard Kipling speaks of his “powers of observation vitalized by imagination.” It would be difficult to find a phrase more tersely describing the ideal equipment of a writer, and Kipling’s observation is rapid observationamplified by deliberate investigation. He gets a swift impression of the complex framework of a ship or of the intricate machinery of a locomotive, and then, before he writes “The Ship that Found Herself” or “.007,” he makes as elaborate a technical study as if he were writing an engineering article instead of a story. His imagination so vitalizes the result that when you read the story, although it describes beams and valves you never saw, you recognize the accuracy of his technical description as you recognize, in an art gallery, the fidelity of a portrait, although you never saw the person portrayed. In using the Britannica, the investigation by which you amplifyyour personal observation helps you in four ways.First, you correct your facts if they need correction. Whatever your subject may be, you find information so authoritative that you cannot question it.Second, you amplify your own observations; you discover the underlying causes and relations of the events or opinions you are about to discuss.Third, the reading by which you have, consciously or unconsciously, been influenced in forming your style, is rendered more profitable and stimulating by your study of the Britannica articles in which the work of all the world’s great writers, past and present, is analyzed by the most brilliant critics.|Models of Style|Fourth, you have in the Britannica itself such examples of scholarly, forcible, compacted English as cannot often be found in contemporary books. It is not within the province of this Guide to institute detailed comparisons between these articles by the leading literary men of the day and other writings from the same pens. But the reader will discover for himself that the editorial policy which demanded rigorous concision has stimulated, not hampered, the distinguished writers whose Britannica articles are, in case after case, the best of their productions.
Practical Tests
The foregoing summary of the uses of the Britannica to writers is based upon reviews of the work which have appeared in the daily and weekly press; and it may be supplemented by brief extracts from one or two letters to the publishers, written by men whose reputations give their opinions great weight. In one of these Horace White, formerly editor of theEvening Postof New York, spoke highly of the practical utility of the Britannica. Joseph Pulitzer, of the New YorkWorld, shortly before his death wrote: “I want to thank you for the intellectual pleasure I enjoyed this winter in examining this extraordinary production. I have already distributed a dozen sets in America as presents amongeditorsand my children. [He afterwards ordered six more sets.] The work is a liberal education.” John Habberton wrote: “The new edition of the Britannica has already cost me hundreds of hours that I should have given to my work, but I do not regret the outlay, for I have been richly repaid. There never was a handier book for a desk or a more readable one.”
It is not only true that no ordinary library would supply the information to be found in the Britannica, but it is as true, and as relevant, that no ordinary library presents information in a form as stimulating to the writer who uses books as the tools of his trade. The editor-in-chief of the Britannica had all the world’s greatest experts in all fields of human knowledge and endeavour to choose from. He chose in each instance the expert whose knowledge was so thorough, and whose correlation of his special knowledge with related branches was so complete, that his articles are not merely “last word” information but interesting and alive. You may remember the new interest you felt in natural science when you first read an essay by Huxley, because he had the power of creating enthusiasm. It is a justifiable figure of speech to say that, in this sense, the Britannica has been written by Huxleys. Perhaps you have ransacked a public library for some out-of-the-way fact and finally found it, in skeleton form, and in crabbed German, inMeyerorBrockhausor some other German encyclopaedia. Or did your search end by finding the fact inLarousseorLa Grande Encyclopédie, in some clever phrase, so brilliantly written, so strikingly put, that it was the phrase and not the fact that you had got—and you felt that the Frenchman had hidden the fact, if he ever had had it, in his epigram? You may have wished, then, for a third type of encyclopaedia which should be “German-thorough” and“French-interesting.” Such a combination is the Britannica,—more authoritative, more up-to-date, more interesting, than any other book.
The Journalist’s Needs
A newspaper man, reporter or editor, must be informed at a moment’s notice on any one of so large a number and so wide a range of topics that the best library of reference obtainable can be none too good for him. This is especially true of the man on the smaller newspaper which does not have the luxury of specialists on its editorial staff, or of many reporters dividing among them the work of gathering news on such lines that each may work in a field with which he is intimately acquainted and in which he is particularly versed. And the rural newspaper is, besides, further from good public libraries and financially less able to have a large office library. The authority, the scope, the interest and the convenience of the Britannica make it just the book to fill these varied needs of the newspaper man. If he has to write a “murder story” in which some unusual poison has been used, he can find a full description of the origin, the use, the action and the tests of the drug by turning to the Britannica—instead of hunting for (and then through) a text book on medicine. And if, on the same day, or the next, he must write an editorial on the tariff, he will find in the articleTariff, in the articlesFree TradeandProtection, and in that part of the articleUnited Stateswhich deals with the country’s economic history, the information that he wants; and he can get it quickly, and can be sure of its being authoritative.
If the Britannica is evidentlythework of reference for the writer, how is he to use it?
It has already been suggested that he will find authoritative and recent information on any topic connected with the subject on which he is writing. It would be interesting to see—or at least to imagine—how largely the Britannica might be used as a source for fiction. A novelist with an appetite for human documents like Balzac’s or like that of Charles Reade—with his many albums full of newspaper clippings,—could satisfy himself with the Britannica, taking his characters “from life” in its biographical and historical articles and his setting from its geographical articles.
Literary Criticism
It has already been suggested that the writer will find in the Britannica the clearness and conciseness of style which he cannot but wish to attain in his own work. Here he has the writings of great masters of English. He may remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of how he played “the sedulous ape” to the great stylists; and in the Britannica he can read not only an excellent sketch of Stevenson by Edmund Gosse, his friend and a well-known essayist, but Stevenson’s own article on Béranger. He may read Matthew Arnold on Sainte-Beuve; Walter Besant on Froissart and on Richard Jefferies; John Burroughs on Walt Whitman; G. W. Cable on William Cullen Bryant; Edmund Kerchever Chambers on Shakespeare: Ernest Hartley Coleridge on Byron; Sidney Colvin on Giotto, Leonardo, etc.; Austin Dobson on Fielding, Hogarth, Richardson, etc.; Henry van Dyke on Emerson; John Fiske on Francis Parkman; Richard Garnett on T. L. Peacock and on Satire; Israel Gollancz on “The Pearl”; Edmund Gosse on many literarygenres, on Ibsen, etc.; Edward Everett Hale on James Freeman Clarke and on Edward Everett; Frederic Harrison on Ruskin; W. E. Henley on James Fenimore Cooper; William Price James on Barrie, Henley and Kipling; Prince Karageorgevitch on Marie Bashkirtseff; Stanley Lane-Poole on Richard Burton; Andrew Lang on Ballads, Molière, etc.; Henry Cabot Lodge on Albert Gallatin; E. V. Lucas on Jane Austen and Charles Lamb; Lord Macaulay on Bunyan, Goldsmith,Johnson and Pitt; David Masson on Milton; Brander Matthews on Mark Twain; Alice Meynell on Mrs. Browning; William Minto on Dryden, Pope, Spenser and Wordsworth; John Nichol on Robert Burns; Charles Eliot Norton on George William Curtis; Mark Pattison on Casaubon, Erasmus, Macaulay and Thomas More; W. H. Pollock on Thackeray and de Musset; Quiller-Couch on Thomas Edward Brown; Whitelaw Reid on Greeley; C. F. Richardson on Bronson Alcott and John Fiske; W. M. Rossetti on Shelley; Viscount St. Cyres on Fénelon and Madame Guyon; Saintsbury on French literature, Balzac, Montaigne, Rabelais, etc.; Carl Schurz on Henry Clay; H. E. Scudder on Lowell and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Thomas Seccombe on Boswell, Dickens, Charles Lever, etc.; William Sharp (“Fiona McLeod”) on Thoreau; Clement Shorter on the Brontës, Crabbe, Cowper and Mrs. Gaskell; W. W. Skeat on Layamon; E. C. Stedman on Whittier; Sir Leslie Stephen on Browning and Carlyle; Richard Henry Stoddard on Hawthorne; Swinburne on Beaumont and Fletcher, Congreve, Hugo, Landor, Marlowe, Mary, Queen of Scots; John Addington Symonds on the Renaissance, Machiavelli, Tasso, etc.; Arthur Symons on Hardy, Mallarmé, Verlaine; W. P. Trent on Sidney Lanier; A. W. Ward on Drama; Mrs. Humphry Ward on Lyly; Theodore Watts-Dunton on Poetry, Sonnet, Borrow, Wycherley, Matthew Arnold; Arthur Waugh on William Morris, Walter Pater; and G. E. Woodberry on American Literature.
The more you know of the subjects or authors in this list the more likely you will be to say what a Western professor of theology said, in reviewing the articles in the Britannica dealing with the Bible: “They are the very authorities that I would have chosen to write these articles!”
But the Britannica will serve the professional author in other ways than by giving him information in special fields and by keeping before him admirable models of style. He might well follow any of the courses suggested in the chapter onLiteraturein this Guide; and if he will read the articles on great authors written by great authors, already mentioned, he will have a doubly valuable course in biographical criticism by the ablest of literary critics.
Any newspaper writer or contributor to the periodical press should read such articles as:
Newspapers and Magazines
Newspapers(Vol. 19, p. 544; equivalent to 125 pages of this Guide), by Hugh Chisholm, editor-in-chief of the Britannica, with sections on the price of newspapers by Lord Northcliffe, on illustrated papers by Clement Shorter, general information on American newspapers, and an elaborate historical account of British, American and foreign newspapers.
Periodicals(Vol. 21, p. 151; equivalent to 40 pages in this Guide), by Henry Richard Tedder, librarian of the Athenaeum Club of London, treats the subject under the heads:British,United States,Canada,South Africa,Australia and New Zealand,West Indies and British Crown Colonies,India and Ceylon,France,Germany,Austria,Italy,Belgium,Holland,Denmark,Norway,Sweden,Spain,Portugal,Greece,Russia, andother Countries.
Societies, Learned(Vol. 25, p. 309), also by H. R. Tedder, deals with the publications of such societies and classifies them (with geographical sub-classification for each head) underScience Generally,Mathematics,Astronomy,Physics,Chemistry,Geology,MineralogyandPalaeontology,Meteorology,Microscopy,Botany and Horticulture,Zoology,Anthropology,Sociology,Medicine and Surgery,Engineering and Architecture,Naval and Military Science,Agriculture and Trades,Literature,History and Archaeology, andGeography.
Local information in regard to newspapers and journalism will be found inseparate local articles. Thus under Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, New Orleans, San Francisco, etc., there is valuable information in regard to these cities as literary centers and about their principal periodical publications, including newspapers; and in the articles on smaller cities, such as Albany and Springfield, Mass., there are valuable historical sketches of the local press of each.
Literary Biographies
The newspaper man should read the biographies of great American printers and editors:William Bradford(Vol. 4, p. 370);Benjamin Franklin(Vol. 11, p. 24; equivalent to 20 pages of this Guide);Isaiah Thomas(Vol. 26, p. 867);Noah Webster(Vol. 28, p. 463);William Cullen Bryant(Vol. 4, p. 698);James G. Birney(Vol. 3, p. 988);Gamaliel Bailey(Vol. 3, p. 217);W. L. Garrison(Vol. 11, p. 477);James Gordon Bennett(Vol. 3, p. 740);Thurlow Weed(Vol. 28, p. 466);Gideon Welles(Vol. 28, p. 506);John Bigelow(Vol. 3, p. 922);Horace Greeley(Vol. 12, p. 531);Henry J. Raymond(Vol. 22, p. 933);George Ripley(Vol. 23, p. 363);C. A. Dana(Vol. 7, p. 791);George William Curtis(Vol. 7, p. 652);Carl Schurz(Vol. 24, p. 386);Samuel Bowles(Vol. 4, p. 344);Joseph R. Hawley(Vol. 13, p. 101);Whitelaw Reid(Vol. 23, p. 52);George W. Childs(Vol. 6, p. 141);E. L. Godkin(Vol. 12, p. 174); andHenry Watterson(Vol. 28, p. 418).
The reading of these biographies will give the student many interesting starting-points for studies in American politics, economics, literature, reform movements as widely separated as abolition and the introduction of the merit system into the civil service. The author should also read the articleAmerican Literature(Vol. 1, p. 831; equivalent to 35 pages of this Guide), by Professor G. E. Woodberry, and, if his field is that of the publicist, he should read the article on the history of theUnited States(Vol. 27, p. 663), equivalent to 225 pages of this Guide; and the allied articles to which he is referred from that.
The advertising writer will find a valuable and stimulating article onAdvertisement(Vol. 1, p. 235, equivalent to 20 pages in this Guide), which gives a history of the subject, deals with posters and signs, circulars, periodical advertising, and legal regulation and taxation. For a full list of articles of particular usefulness for the author, see the chapterLiteraturein this Guide. The following brief list may serve as the basis for a preliminary course of reading.
CHAPTER XXIIIFOR TEACHERS
The Teacher’s “Factor of Safety”
Every teacher has one pupil who tries harder than any of the others to absorb knowledge, and yet is never content with the progress made, who knows how hard the teacher works, and yet is never satisfied with the teacher—and that pupil is the teacher’s self. For every other learner there is a limit to the amount of knowledge to be acquired, but in the case of the teacher a “standard” is supposed to indicate no more than an indispensable minimum. When you are trying to make your pupils master a text-book, the volume seems to contain a most stupendous mass of learning, and when one of them asks you a question about the subject with which the text-book deals, that particular point is sure to be one that the text-book does not cover. What engineers call the “factor of safety,” the margin by which the strength of materials must exceed the stress it is expected to encounter, is, for the teacher, incalculable. It is, of course, a favorite pastime of parents to send a child to school primed with some question “to ask Teacher,” selecting an enigma that has been for centuries a battle-ground for scholars or scientists. And, apart from these malicious pitfalls, children themselves seem, quite innocently, to hit upon questions of extraordinary difficulty. A rebuff, a careless response, or, worst of all, an ingenious evasion of the issue, is fatal to the teacher’s authority and influence. “Ask me that again, to-morrow morning,” is the phrase with which a conscientious teacher often meets such a contingency. And then how a fagged brain is tormented that evening, how the few books available (and they are likely to be a very few if there is no public library at hand) are searched in vain! That is not all. If it be true that the teacher is the most diligent, yet always the least satisfied, of all the teacher’s pupils, it is equally true that many of the most puzzling questions with which the teacher is confronted arise in the teacher’s own mind.
Answers to All Questions
The question-answering power of the Britannica is therefore of cardinal importance to the teacher, and is to be considered not only in connection with the use of the work for reference, but also in the selection of such courses of reading as may be expected to supply information of the kind that questions most often demand. And this question-answering power lies in three characteristics of the work, and may be measured by the extent to which the three are found in it: broad scope, unimpeachable authority and convenient arrangement. Its scope covers the whole range of human knowledge, everything that mankind has achieved, attempted, believed or studied. Its authority is doubly vouchsafed. The fact that the Britannica is published by the University of Cambridge (England), one of the world’s oldest and most famous seats of learning, in itself gives such aguarantee as no other Encyclopaedia has ever offered, and the assurance thus given may be regarded as showing, chiefly, that there are no errors of omission, for against the existence of the errors of commission there is a further guarantee. The articles are signed by 1,500 contributors, including the foremost specialists in every department of knowledge. Among this army of collaborators, chosen from twenty countries, there are no less than 704 members of the staffs of 146 universities and colleges. This means that by means of the Britannica the youngest teacher in the most isolated village is brought into stimulating contact with the great leaders of the teaching profession. Its arrangement gives it the advantages of a universal library, providing the varied courses of reading outlined in this Guide, and those also of a work of reference which yields an immediate answer to every conceivable question. The index of 500,000 entries instantly leads the enquirer to any item of information in the 40,000 articles. No teacher could hope to form, in the course of a lifetime, a collection of separate books which would contain anywhere near as much information.
A Library of Text-Books
In another relation, the Britannica is of daily service to anyone engaged in educational work. It has already been remarked that the teacher needs a “factor of safety,” a reserve of knowledge beyond that which is directly called for in the ordinary routine of the class room. But in the very course of that routine, there is also a need for co-ordinated knowledge, presented in a form available for use in teaching, of a more advanced kind than that in the text-books with which pupils are provided. And the Britannica is, in itself, a vast collection of text-books.
Professor Shotwell, of Columbia University, recently wrote to the publishers a letter in which he said: “I shall use the articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which deal with industrial processes as a substitute for a text-book in one of my courses in Social and Industrial History and have especially in mind the splendid treatment of the cotton industry by Professor S. J. Chapman and others.” A large number of Britannica articles have, by permission, been reprinted, word for word, for use as text-books; and it is impossible to say how many have been paraphrased, and, in a form less clear and vivid than the originals, similarly employed. The writers of the Britannica have, among them, done so large a share of the world’s recent work in research and criticism, that no one who is engaged in writing a text-book or in preparing a course of lectures should fail to use the work as a check to test the completeness and the accuracy of independent investigation.
Fortunately, the system of monthly payments has enabled teachers to purchase the Britannica to an extent which, in view of their limited resources, is a striking evidence of their earnest desire to perfect their professional equipment. In some cases two and even three teachers have combined their efforts in order that they might jointly possess the work. But whatever may be the difficulties to be overcome, it is certain that the Britannica is, for the teacher, an instrument as directly productive as a technical library is for a doctor or a lawyer.
A professor in an eastern college wrote to the publishers: “It has become ‘the collection of books’ which Carlyle might term ‘the true university’”; and the practical head of a business school in Pennsylvania says: “By its purchase, I have secured access to a university education.” A well known professor of German calls it “aHausschatzof amazing richness and variety,” and adds: “I hope you will not be sued at law for an attempt to monopolize the market for profitable and entertaining literature.” The presidentof a southern university wrote: “It is the first book to consult, the one book to own, if you can own but one.” And a Harvard professor says: “I have been particularly interested in some of the recent phases of European history. Concerning some movements, about which it is as yet extremely difficult to find material in books, I have found the Encyclopaedia most useful.” A teacher in a theological seminary exclaims: “What a university of solid training it would be for a young student, if he would spend an hour each day reading the work, volume by volume, and including all the articles except those of a technical nature belonging to other departments than his own!”
This is what teachers have said of the value to them of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Specialists in school-hygiene and school librarians have also noted the advantage of the light, handy volumes printed on India paper—one weighs no more than two monthly magazines—, which may be easily held at the proper angle for eye-focus on a large page.
The teacher will find in this Guide valuable suggestions about particular subjects which he may wish to teach or study,—such as history, literature, language and biology. In this chapter we suggest a general course.
The Theory of Education
Let him begin with the articleEducation(Vol. 8, p. 951), which is the equivalent in length of 120 pages of the size and type of this Guide, and of which the first part is by James Welton, professor of education in the University of Leeds and author ofLogical Bases of Education, etc., the sections on national systems by G. B. M. Coore, assistant secretary of the London Board of Education, and that on the United States by Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University. This valuable article begins with a discussion of the meaning of the term “Education,” excludes John Stuart Mill’s extension to everything which “helps to shape the human being,” and narrows the meaning to definitely personal work,—the true “working” definition for the practical teacher.
The section on educational theory might equally well be styled a sketch of the history of education and will prove valuable to the teacher preparing for a licence-examination in this subject or for a normal training course. It discusses old Greek education with special attention to Spartan practice, Plato’s theory and Aristotle’s, and the gradual change from the point of view of the city-state to Hellenistic cosmopolitanism. The older Roman education, practical and given by father to son, is contrasted with the later Hellenized training, largely by Greek slaves, largely rhetorical and largely summed up in Quintilian’sInstitutio. The contest between the pagan system and Christianity is shown to have culminated in monasticism; and barbarian inroads stifled classical culture until the Carolingian revival under Alcuin in the 8th century and the scholastic revival (11th to 13th centuries) of Abelard, Aquinas and Arabic workings over of Aristotle. Scholastic education is considered especially in relation to the first great European universities and the schools of the Dominicans, Franciscans and Brethren of the Common Life, and in contrast to chivalry, the education of feudalism. The Renaissance is treated at greater length, and this is followed by sections on the influence of the Reformation on education, and the consequent growth of Jesuit schools. The keynote of the story thereafter is reform,—the movement away from the classics, toward natural science, and, especially after the French Revolution, by means of new methods and theories, notably those of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel and Herbart.
The remainder of the articleEducaTIONdeals with national systems of education: French, German, Swiss, Belgian, Dutch, Scotch, Irish, English, Welsh and American, with an excellent bibliography. These, and other, national systems are also treated from another point of view in the articles on the separate countries.
Articles on Great Schools
The articleEducationshould naturally be followed by a study of the articleUniversities(Vol. 27, p. 748—about 100 pages, if printed in the style of this Guide) by James Bass Mullinger (author of theHistory of Cambridge,The Schools of Charles the Great, etc.) and, for American universities, by Daniel Coit Gilman, late president of Johns Hopkins University; and by a reading of articles on the great universities, as for instance, Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Dublin, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, Leland Stanford, Jr., etc. The student should then turn to the articleSchools(Vol. 24, p. 359; equivalent to about 40 pages of this Guide) by Arthur Francis Leach, author ofEnglish Schools at the Reformation, who gives a summary of what is known of Greek, Roman and English schools.
Then,—to supplement these general articles,—he should read—
OnGreekeducation:
Plato(Vol. 21, p. 808), especially p. 812 (onMeno) and 818 (on theRepublic).
Aristotle(Vol. 2, p. 501).
Sparta(Vol. 25, p. 609, particularly p. 611).
OnRomaneducation:
Cato(Vol. 5, p. 535).
Quintilian(Vol. 22, p. 761).
Onearly Christianeducation:
Clement of Alexandria(Vol. 6, p. 487, particularly p. 488, on thePaedagogus).
Augustine(Vol. 2, p. 907) andJerome(Vol. 15, p. 326), with especial attention to their early pagan education and their attitude toward it as Christians.
Ambrose(Vol. 1, p. 798).
Martianus Capella(Vol. 5, p. 249).
Boetius(Vol. 4, p. 116).
Cassiodorus(Vol. 5, p. 459).
Isidore(Vol. 14, p. 871).
St. Gregory(Vol. 12, p. 566).
Bede(Vol. 3, p. 615).
Monasticism(Vol. 18, p. 687).
On theCarolingian revival:
Alcuin(Vol. 1, p. 529).
Angilbert(Vol. 2, p. 9).
Charlemagne(Vol. 5, p. 891, especially p. 894).
France(Vol. 10, p. 810).
On theScholastic revival:
Scholasticism(Vol. 24, p. 346).
Abelard(Vol. 1, p. 40).
John of Salisbury(Vol. 15, p. 449).
Albertus Magnus(Vol 1, p. 504).
Grosseteste(Vol. 12, p. 617).
Thomas Aquinas(Vol. 2, p. 250).
Roger Bacon(Vol. 3, p. 153).
On theRenaissance:
Renaissance(Vol. 23, p. 83).
Dante(Vol. 7, p. 810).
Petrarch(Vol. 21, p. 310).
Boccacio(Vol. 4, p. 102).
Manuel Chrysolaras(Vol. 6, p. 320).
Manutius(Vol. 17, p. 624).
Thomas More(Vol. 18, p. 822).
Erasmus(Vol. 9, p. 727).
John Colet(Vol. 6, p. 681).
Thomas Linacre(Vol. 16, p. 701).
On theReformation period and Counter-Reformation:
Reformation(Vol. 23, p. 4).
Melancthon(Vol. 18, p. 88).
Luther(Vol. 17, p. 133).
Trotzendorff(Vol. 27, p. 308).
Reuchlin(Vol. 23, p. 204).
Ascham(Vol. 2, p. 720).
Rabelais(Vol. 22, p. 769).
Jesuits(Vol. 15, p. 337), especially p. 342.
La Salle(Vol. 16, p. 231).
On theModern period:
Comenius(Vol. 6, p. 759).
Rousseau(Vol. 23, p. 775).
Voltaire(Vol. 28, p. 199).
Pestalozzi(Vol. 21, p. 284).
Froebel(Vol. 11, p. 238).
Herbart(Vol. 13, p. 335).
Wilhelm Von Humboldt(Vol. 13, p. 875).
Andrew Bell(Vol. 3, p. 684).
Joseph Lancaster(Vol. 16, p. 147).
Sir John Fitch(Vol. 10, p. 438).
James Blair(Vol. 4, p. 34).
T. H. Gallaudet(Vol. 11, p. 416).
F. A. P. Barnard(Vol. 3, p. 409).
Henry Barnard(Vol. 3, p. 410).
Horace Mann(Vol. 17, p. 587).
Mark Hopkins(Vol. 13, p. 684).
William T. Harris(Vol. 13, p. 21).
Justin S. Morrill(Vol. 18, p. 869).
Alexander Melville Bell(Vol. 3, p. 684).
S. C. Armstrong(Vol. 2, p. 591).
Booker T. Washington(Vol. 28, p. 344).
Co-Education(Vol. 6, p. 637).
Blindness(Vol. 4, p. 66).
Deaf and Dumb(Vol. 7, p. 887).
Infant Schools(Vol. 14, p. 533).
Kindergarten(Vol. 15, p. 802).
Museums of Art(Vol. 19, p. 60).
Museums of Science(Vol. 19, p. 64).
Polytechnic(Vol. 22, p. 38).
Technical Education(Vol. 26, p. 487), an elaborate article, about 40 pages in the form of this Guide, by Sir Philip Magnus, author ofIndustrial Education, member of the Royal Commission on technical instruction (1881–1884) and, in 1907, president of the education section of the British Association.