Edward Harper Parker - "Ancient China Simplified"

Johanna Brandt - "The Petticoat Commando"

Arsene Houssaye - "Les grandes dames"

William le Queux - "The Four Faces"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

What Is and What Might Be

E >> Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be




What is it that grows? It is time that I should ask myself this
question. My answer to it is, in brief, that it is the whole human
being that grows, the whole nature of the child,--body, mind, heart
and soul. When I use these familiar words, I am far from wishing
to suggest that human nature is divisible into four provinces or
compartments. In every stage of its development human nature is a
living and indivisible whole. Each of the four words stands for a
typical aspect of Man's being, but one of the four may also be said
to stand for the totality of Man's being,--the word _soul_. For it
is the soul which manifests as _body_, which thinks as _mind_, which
feels and loves as _heart_, and which is what it is--though not
perhaps what it really or finally is--as _soul_.

The function of education, then, is to foster the growth of the
child's whole nature, or, in a word, of his soul. I ought, perhaps,
to apologise for my temerity in using this now discredited word. In
the West Man does not believe in the soul. How can he? He does not
believe in God either as the eternal source or as the eternal end of
his own nature. It follows that he does not and cannot believe in
the unity of his own being. He has been taught that his nature is
corrupt, evil, godless; and that the "soul," which is somehow or
other attached to his fallen nature during his "earthly pilgrimage,"
was supernaturally created at the moment of his birth. He is now
beginning to reject this conception of the soul; but he cannot yet
rise to the higher conception of it as the vital essence of his
being, as the divine germ in virtue of which his nature is no mere
aggregate of parts or faculties, but a living whole. So deeply rooted
in the Western mind is disbelief in the reality of the soul that it
is difficult to use the word, when speaking to a Western audience,
without exposing oneself to the charge of insincerity,--not to speak
of the graver charge of "bad form." A savour either of _cant_ or
_gush_ hangs about the word, and is not easily detached from it. That
being so, it must be clearly understood that I mean by the soul the
nature of Man considered in its unity and totality,--no more than
this, and no less.

In the opening paragraph of this book I said that some of my readers
would regard my fundamental assumption as a truism, others as a
challenge, and others again as a wicked heresy. Whether it shall be
regarded as a truism, a challenge, or a heresy, will depend on the
way in which it is worded. To say that the function of education is
to foster the growth of human nature, is to invite condemnation from
those who regard human nature as ruined and corrupt. To say that the
function of education is to foster the growth of the soul, is to
issue a challenge to Western civilisation, which is based on the
belief that the end of Man's being is not the growth of his soul, but
the growth of his balance at the bank of material prosperity. To say
that the function of education is to foster the growth of certain
faculties, is to insist on what no one who had given his mind to
the matter would care to deny. For even the orthodox, who regard
Man's nature in its totality as intrinsically evil, admit without
hesitation that there are faculties in Man which can be and ought
to be trained; while the "man of the world," whom we may regard as
the most typical product of Western civilisation, is clamorous in
his demand that education shall foster the growth of certain mental
faculties which will enable the child to become an efficient clerk or
workman, and so contribute to the enrichment of his employer and the
community to which he belongs.

The Western educationalist will admit, then, that the function of
education is to foster growth; and if you ask him what it is that
grows or ought to grow under education's fostering care, he will give
you a long list of faculties--mental, for the most part, but also
moral and physical--and then break off under the impression that he
has set education an adequate and a practicable task. But he has
set it an inadequate and an impracticable task. For behind all the
faculties that he enumerates dwells the living reality which he
cannot bring himself to believe in,--the soul. And because he cannot
bring himself to believe in the soul, he deprives the faculties
which he proposes to cultivate of the very qualities which make
them most worthy of cultivation,--of their interrelation, their
interdependence, their organic unity. In other words he devitalises
each of them by cutting it off from the life which is common to all
of them, and so paralyses its capacity for growing in the very act
of taking thought for its growth. He forgets that every faculty which
is worth cultivating both draws life from, and contributes life to,
the general life of the growing child. He forgets that the child
himself--"the living soul"--is growing in and through the growth of
each of his opening faculties; and that unless, when a faculty seems
to be growing, the life of the child is at once expressing itself in
and renewing itself through the process of its growth, its semblance
of growth is a pure illusion, the results that are produced being in
reality as fraudulent as artificial flowers on a living rose-bush.

But the whole question may be looked at from another point of view.
Let us assume, for argument's sake, that the function of education
is to train, or foster the growth of, certain faculties, which are
mainly though not exclusively mental, and that when those faculties
have been duly trained the teacher has done his work. What, then,
are the faculties which education is supposed to train? In my attempt
to answer this question I will confine myself to the elementary
school,--the only school which I can pretend to know well. A glance
at the time-table of an ordinary elementary school might suggest to
us that there were two chief groups of faculties to be trained--those
which perceive and those which express, those which take in and those
which give out. When such subjects as History, Geography, or Science
are being taught, the child's perceptive faculties are being trained.
When such subjects as Composition, Drawing or Singing are being
taught, the child's expressive faculties are being trained. So at
least one might be disposed to assume.

In what relation do the perceptive faculties stand to the expressive?
Is it possible to cultivate either group without regard to the other?
It must be admitted that the methods employed in the ordinary
elementary school seem to be governed by the assumption that the
perceptive and the expressive faculties are two distinct groups which
admit of being separately trained. In the ordinary Drawing lesson,
for example, the child is trying to express what he does not even
pretend to have perceived; whereas in the ordinary History or Science
lesson the process is reversed, and the child pretends to perceive
what he makes no attempt to express.

But is the assumption correct? Do the two groups of faculties admit
of being separately trained? Is it possible to devote this hour or
half-hour to the training of perception, and that to the training
of expression? Surely not. Perception and expression are not two
faculties, but one. Each is the very counterpart and correlate, each
is the very life and soul, of the other. Each, when divorced from
the other, ceases to be its own true self. When perception is real,
living, informed with personal feeling, it must needs find for
itself the outlet of expression. When expression is real, living,
informed with personal feeling, perception--the child's own
perception of things--must needs be behind it. More than that. _The
perceptive faculties_ (at any rate in childhood) _grow through the
interpretation which expression gives them, and in no other way. And
the expressive faculties grow by interpreting perception, and in no
other way_. The child who tries to draw what he sees is training his
power of observation, not less than his power of expression. As he
passes and repasses between the object of his perception and his
representation of it, there is a continuous gain both to his vision
and to his technique. The more faithfully he tries to render his
impression of the object, the more does that impression gain in truth
and strength; and in proportion as the impression becomes truer and
stronger, so does the rendering of it become more masterly and more
correct. So, again, if a man tries to set forth in writing his views
about some difficult problem--social, political, metaphysical, or
whatever it may be--the very effort that he makes to express himself
clearly and coherently will tend to bring order into the chaos and
light into the darkness of his mind, to widen his outlook on his
subject, to deepen his insight into it, to bring new aspects of it
within the reach of his conscious thought. And here, as in the case
of the child who tries to draw what he sees, there is a continuous
reciprocal action between perception and expression, in virtue of
which each in turn helps forward the evolution of the other. Even in
so abstract and impersonal a subject as mathematics, the reaction of
expression on perception is strong and salutary. The student who
wishes to master a difficult piece of bookwork should try to write
it out in his own words; in the effort to set it out concisely and
lucidly he will gradually perfect his apprehension of it. Were he to
solve a difficult problem, he would probably regard his grasp of the
solution as insecure and incomplete until he had succeeded in making
it intelligible to the mind of another. When perception is deeply
tinged with emotion, as when one sees what is beautiful, or admires
what is noble, the attempt to express it in language, action, or art,
seems to be dictated by some inner necessity of one's nature. The
meaning of this is that the perception itself imperatively demands
expression in order that, in and through the struggle of the artistic
consciousness to do full justice to it, it may gradually realise its
hidden potentialities, discover its inner meaning, and find its true
self.

Once we realise that expression is the other self of perception, it
becomes permissible for us to say that to train the perceptive
faculties--the faculties by means of which Man lays hold upon the
world that surrounds him, and draws it into himself and makes it his
own--is the highest achievement of the teacher's art. Even from the
point of view of my primary truism, this conception of the meaning
and purpose of education holds good. For according to that truism the
business of the teacher is to foster the growth of the child's soul;
and the soul grows by the use of its perceptive faculties, which, by
enabling it to take in and assimilate an ever-widening environment,
cause a gradual enlargement of its consciousness and a proportionate
expansion of its life. But the perceptive faculties in their turn
grow by expressing themselves; and unless they are allowed to express
themselves--unless the child is allowed to express himself (for
expression, if it is genuine, is always self-expression)--their
growth will be arrested, and the mission which _all_ educationalists
assign to education will not have been fulfilled.

The question is, then, Does the system of education which prevails in
all Western countries provide for self-expression on the part of the
child?


FOOTNOTES:

[5] I mean by the words "original sin" what the plain,
unsophisticated, believing Christian means by them. A modern poet,
in a moment of impulsive orthodoxy, praises Christianity because it

"taught original sin,
The corruption of man's heart ..."

This definition is sufficiently accurate. "Original sin," says the
Ninth Article of the Anglican Church, "... is the fault and
corruption of the Nature of every man ... whereby man is of his own
nature inclined to evil ... and therefore, in every person born into
the world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." How far the
popular interpretation of the doctrine of original sin coincides with
the latest theological refinement of the doctrine, I cannot pretend
to say. When it finds it convenient to explain things away, theology,
like Voltaire's Minor Prophet, "est capable de tout"; and the need
for reconciling the doctrine of original sin with the teaching of
modern science has in recent years laid a heavy tax on its
ingenuity.




CHAPTER III

A FAMILIAR TYPE OF SCHOOL[6]


In this chapter I shall have in my mind a type of school which is
familiar to all who are interested in elementary education. What
percentage of the schools of England are of that particular type
I cannot pretend to say. In the days of payment by results the
percentage was unquestionably very high. The system under which we
all worked made that inevitable. The days of payment by results are
over, but their consequences are with us still. The pioneer is abroad
in the land, but he has had, and still has, formidable difficulties
to overcome. The percentage of routine-ridden schools is considerably
lower than it used to be, and it is falling from year to year. Of
this there can be no doubt. Each teacher in turn who reads this
chapter will, I hope, be able to say that the school which is in my
mind is not his. But I can assure him that there are thousands of
schools in which all or most of the evils on which I am about to
comment are still rampant; and I will add, for his consolation, that
it would be a miracle if this were not so.

The first forty minutes of the morning session are given, in almost
every elementary school, to what is called _Religious Instruction_.
This goes on, morning after morning, and week after week. The child
who attends school regularly and punctually, as many children do,
will have been the victim of upwards of two thousand "Scripture
lessons" by the time he leaves school.

The question of religious education in elementary schools has long
been the centre of a perfect whirlpool of controversial talk. The
greater part of this talk is, to speak plainly, blatant cant. Every
candidate for a seat in the House of Commons thinks it incumbent upon
him to say something about religious education, but not one in a
hundred of them has ever been present in an elementary school while
religious instruction was being given. The Bishops of the Established
Church wax eloquent in the House of Lords over the wickedness of a
"godless education" and the virtue of "definite dogmatic teaching,"
but it may be doubted if there is a Bishop in the House who has in
recent years sat out a Scripture lesson in a Church of England
school. It would be well if all who talked publicly about religious
education could be sentenced to devote a month to the personal study
of religious instruction as it is ordinarily given in elementary
schools. At the end of the month they would be wiser and sadder men,
and in future they would probably talk less about religious education
and think more.

The Scripture lesson, as it is familiarly called, is supposed to make
the children of England religious, in the special sense which each
church or sect attaches to that word,--to make them good Catholics,
good Churchmen, good Wesleyans, good Bible Christians, good Jews. But
as those who are most in earnest about religion, and most sincere in
their religious convictions, unite in assuring us that England is
relapsing into paganism, it may be doubted if the religious education
of the elementary school child--a process which has been going on for
half a century or more--has been entirely successful. While the fact
that the English parent, who must himself have attended from 1,500
to 2,000 Scripture lessons in His schooldays, is not under any
circumstances to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own
children, shows that those who control the religious education of the
youthful "masses" have but little confidence in the effect of their
system on the religious life and faith of the English people.

They have good ground for their subconscious distrust of it. We have
seen that the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge is
at the root of much that is unsound in education. There is no branch
of education in which this confusion is so fallacious or so fatal as
in that which is called religious. The process of converting
information into knowledge is a comparatively easy one when we are
dealing with matters of detailed fact. Information as to the dates of
the kings of England, as to the bays and capes of the British Isles,
as to the exports and imports of Liverpool, as to the weights and
measures of this or that country, is in each case readily convertible
into knowledge of the given facts. But directly we get away from mere
facts, and begin to concern ourselves with what is large, vague,
subtle, and obscure,--with forces, for example, with causes, with
laws, with principles,--the difficulty of collecting adequate and
appropriate information about our subject becomes great, and the
difficulty of converting such information into knowledge becomes
greater still. Information as to the dates and names of the English
kings, and other historical facts, is easily converted into knowledge
of those facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of
English history. Information as to the names and positions of capes
and bays, as to areas and populations, and other geographical facts,
is easily converted into knowledge of those facts, but it is not
easily converted into knowledge of geography. Information as to
arithmetical rules and tables, as to weights and measures, and other
arithmetical facts, is easily converted into knowledge of those
facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of arithmetic.
In each case a _sense_ must be evolved if the information is to be
assimilated, and so converted into real knowledge; and though it is
true that the sense in question grows, in part at least, by feeding
on appropriate information, it is equally true that if, owing to
defective training, the sense remains undeveloped, the information
supplied will remain unassimilated, and the tacit assumption that the
possession of information is equivalent to the possession of real
knowledge will delude both the teacher and the taught. It is
possible, as one knows from experience, for a boy to have mastered
all the arithmetical rules and tables with which his master has
supplied him, and to have all his measures and weights at his
fingers' ends, and yet to be so destitute of the arithmetical sense
as to give without a moment's misgiving an entirely nonsensical
answer to a simple arithmetical problem,--to say, for example, as I
have known half a class of boys say, that a _room_ is _five shillings
and sixpence wide_. Such a boy, though his head may be stuffed with
arithmetical information, has no knowledge of arithmetic.

The gulf between memorised information and real knowledge becomes
deep and wide in proportion as the subject matter is one which
demands for its effective apprehension either intellectual effort or
emotional insight. When both these variables are demanded, the gulf
widens and deepens at a ratio which is "geometrical" rather than
"arithmetical"; and when a high degree of each is demanded, the
separation between knowledge and information is complete.

The Art Master who should try to train the aesthetic sense of his
pupils by making them learn by heart a string of propositions in
which he had set out the artistic merits of sundry masterpieces of
painting and sculpture, would expose himself to well-merited
ridicule. So would the teacher who should try to train the scientific
sense of his pupils by no other method than that of making them
learn scientific formulae by heart. What shall we say, then, of the
teacher who tries to train the religious sense of his pupils by
supplying them with rations of theological and theologico-historical
information? Whatever else we may mean by the word God, we mean what
is infinitely great, and therefore beyond the reach of human thought,
and we mean what is "most high," and therefore beyond the reach of
the heart's desire. It follows that for knowledge of God the maximum
of intellectual effort is needed, in conjunction with the maximum of
emotional insight; and it follows further that the gulf between
knowledge of God and information about God is unimaginably wide and
deep,--so wide and so deep that out of our very attempts to span or
fathom it the doubt at last arises whether the idea of acquiring
information about God may not, after all, be the idlest of dreams.

Nevertheless the pastors and masters of our elementary schools are,
with few exceptions, engaged, _sancta simplicitate_, in trying to
make the children of England religious by cramming them with
theological and theologico-historical information,--information as to
the nature and attributes of God, as to the inner constitution of
his being, as to his relations to Man and the Universe, as to his
reported doings in the past. And in order that the giving, receiving,
and retaining of this unverifiable information may be regarded by
all concerned as the central feature of the Scripture lesson, to
the neglect of all the other aspects of religious education, the
spiritual "powers that be" (and also, I am told, some of the Local
Education Authorities) have decreed that the schools under their
jurisdiction shall be subjected to a yearly examination in
"religious knowledge" at the hands of a "Diocesan Inspector," or some
other official.

To one who has convinced himself, as I have, that a right attitude
towards the thing known is of the essence of knowledge, and that
reverence and devotion--to go no further--are of the essence of a
right attitude towards God, the idea of holding a formal examination
in religious knowledge seems scarcely less ridiculous than the idea
of holding a formal examination in unselfishness or brotherly love.
The phrase "to examine in religious knowledge" has no meaning for me.
The verb is out of all relation to its indirect object. What the
Diocesan Inspector attempts to do cannot possibly be done. The test
of religious knowledge is necessarily practical and vital, not formal
and mechanical. Even if I were to admit, for argument's sake, that
the information with which we cram the elementary school child
between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m. had been supernaturally communicated by God
to Man, my general position would remain unaffected. For experience
has amply proved that a child--or, for the matter of that, a man--may
know much theology and even be "mighty in the Scriptures," and yet
show by his conduct that his religious sense has not been awakened,
and that therefore he has no knowledge of God; just as we have seen
that a child may know by heart all arithmetical rules and tables, and
yet show, by his helplessness in the face of a simple problem, that
his arithmetical sense has not been awakened, and that therefore he
has no knowledge of arithmetic.

The time given to religious instruction is, to make a general
statement, the only part of the session in which the children are
being prepared for a formal _external_ examination. That being so, it
is no matter for wonder that many of the glaring faults of method and
organisation which the examination system fostered in our elementary
schools between the years 1862 and 1895, and which are now being
abandoned, however slowly, reluctantly, and sporadically, during the
hours of "secular" instruction, still find a refuge in the Scripture
lesson. Overgrouping of classes, overcrowding of school-rooms,
collective answering, collective repetition, scribbling on slates,
and other faults with which inspectors were only too familiar in
bygone days, are still rampant while religious instruction is being
given.[7] The Diocesan Inspector is an examiner, pure and simple, and
is never present when the Scripture lesson is in progress. Whether he
would find anything to criticise if he were present, may be doubted.
I have frequently been told by teachers that it is his demand for a
good volume of sound, when he is catechising the children, which
keeps alive during the Scripture lesson the pestilent habit of
collective answering, in defiance of the obvious fact that what is
everybody's business is nobody's business, and that an experienced
bell-wether can easily give a lead to a whole class. An inconvenient
train service may compel H.M. Inspector to be present when religious
instruction is being given; but though he may find much to deplore
in what he sees and hears, he must abstain from criticism, and be
content to play the _role_ of the man who looks over a hedge while a
horse is being stolen.

In most elementary schools religion is taught on an elaborate
syllabus which is imposed on the teacher by an external authority,
and which therefore tends to destroy his freedom and his interest in
the work. It is not his business to take thought for the religious
training of his pupils, to consider how the religious instinct may
best be awakened in them, how their latent knowledge of God may
best be evolved. His business is to prepare them for their yearly
examination, to cram them with catechisms, hymns, texts, and
collects, and with stories of various kinds,--stories from the
folk-lore of Israel, from the history of the Jews, from the Gospel
narratives. To appeal to the reasoning powers of his pupils would be
foreign to his aim, and foreign, let me say in passing, to the whole
tradition of religious teaching in the West. The burden of preparing
for an examination, whatever the examination may be, falls mainly on
the faculty of memory. This is a rule to which there are very few
exceptions. When the examination is one in "religious knowledge," the
burden of preparing for it falls wholly on the faculty of memory.
To appeal to the reasoning powers of the scholars might conceivably
provoke them to ask inconvenient questions, and might even give
rise to a spirit of rationalism in the school,--the spirit which
"orthodoxy" has always regarded as the very antipole to religious
faith.

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