What Is and What Might Be

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

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But what of the child's emotional faculties? Will not the beauty of
the Gospel stories, will not the sublimity of the Old Testament
poetry, make their own appeal to these? They might do so if they were
allowed to exert their spiritual magnetism. But what chance have
they? The chilling shadow of the impending examination falls upon
them and cancels their educative influence. It is not because the
Gospel stories are full of beauty and spiritual meaning that the
child has to learn them, but because he will be questioned on them by
the Diocesan Inspector. It is not because certain passages from the
Old Testament are poetry of a high order that the child commits them
to memory, but because he may have to repeat them to the Diocesan
Inspector. We cannot serve God and Mammon,--the God of poetry and the
inward life, the Mammon of outward results. The thing is not to be
done, and the pretence of doing it is a mockery and a fraud. The
compulsory preparation of the plays of Shakespeare and other literary
masterpieces for a formal examination, too often gives the schoolboy,
or the college student, a permanent distaste for English literature.
The study of the Ancient Classics for the Oxford "Schools" or the
Cambridge "Tripos" too often gives the studious undergraduate a
permanent distaste for the literatures of Greece and Rome. Does it
not follow _a fortiori_ that to cram a young child, for the purposes
of a formal examination, to cram him, year after year, with the
idyllic stories of the New Testament and the poetic beauties of the
Old, will in all probability go a long way towards blighting in the
bud the child's latent capacity for responding to the appeal, not of
the Bible alone, but of spiritual poetry as such?

I do not wish to suggest that the religious instruction given in
our elementary schools is always formal and mechanical. There are
teachers who can break through the toils of any system, however
deadly, and give life to their teaching in defiance of conditions
which would paralyse the energies of lesser men. As I write, I recall
two teachers of elementary schools, who, in spite of having to
prepare their pupils for diocesan inspection, succeeded in quickening
their religious instincts into vital activity. The first was a
schoolmaster,--a "strong Churchman," and a sincerely religious man.
The second was a woman of genius, whose extraordinary sympathy with
and insight into the soul of the child, enabled her to give free play
to all his expansive instincts, and in and through the evolution of
these to foster the growth of his religious sense. I can never feel
quite sure that this teacher fully realised how deeply, and yet
healthily, religious her children were. If she did not, I can but
apply to her what Diderot said to David the painter, when the latter
confessed that he had not intended to produce some artistic effect
which the former had discovered in one of his pictures: "Quoi! c'est
a votre insu? C'est encore mieux." To make children religious without
intending to do so is a profoundly significant achievement, for
it means that the fatal distinction between religious and secular
education has been "utterly abolished and destroyed."

Both these teachers fell, as it happened, under the ban of the
Diocesan Inspector's displeasure. The schoolmaster took over a
school which was not only inefficient in the eyes of the Education
Department, in respect of instruction and discipline, but was also
tainted in its upper classes with moral depravity. He speedily
restored it to efficiency, and reformed its moral tone. In
accomplishing these salutary changes, he relied mainly on an appeal
which he made, in all manly sincerity, to the religious sense of the
older boys. The faith in human nature which prompted him to make this
appeal was justified by the response which it evoked. In less than a
year the school was transformed beyond recognition. In less than two
years it was one of the best in its county; indeed in respect of
moral tone and religious atmosphere it was perhaps _the_ best.
Meanwhile the work of cramming the children for the yearly diocesan
examination must have fallen into arrears; for the school, which
under my friend's incompetent predecessor had always been classed as
"Excellent," sank to the level of "Good" in the year after he left,
and in the following year to the level of "Fair." Any one who has any
acquaintance with the reports of the Diocesan Inspector knows that
the summary mark "Fair," when employed by him, is equivalent to
utter damnation.

The schoolmistress always had a horror of formal teaching, and a
special horror of cramming young children for formal examinations;
and I can only wonder that her downfall was so long delayed. Sooner
or later, if she was to remain true to her own first principles, her
work was bound to incur the condemnation of the Diocesan Inspector.

Nevertheless, having read hundreds of diocesan reports, and realised
how lavish of praise and chary of blame the Diocesan Inspector
usually is, I am inclined to suspect that the comparative failure
of the children on the examination day was not the sole or even the
chief cause of the severe censure which these two schools received.
I am inclined to think that in each case the inspector recognised in
the exceptional religious vitality of a school which was deficient,
from his point of view, in religious knowledge, an implicit challenge
to his own preconceived notions, and that, without for a moment
intending to be unfair, he responded to this challenge by giving the
school a strongly adverse report. Immorality and irreligiousness
as such are comparatively venial offences in the eyes of religious
orthodoxy. What it cannot tolerate is that men should be moral and
religious in any but the "orthodox" ways.

Apart from these two exceptional cases, there are of course hundreds
and even thousands of teachers whose personal influence is a partial
antidote to the numbing poison which is being distilled but surely,
from the daily Scripture lesson. But the net result of giving formal
and mechanical instruction on the greatest of all "great matters" is
to depress the spiritual vitality of the children of England to a
point which threatens the extinction of the spiritual life of the
nation. My schoolmaster friend, who, besides being deeply religious
(in the best sense of the word), is a man of sound judgment and wide
and varied experience, has more than once assured me that religious
instruction, as given in the normal Church of England school (his
experience has been limited to schools of that type), is paganising
the people of England,--paganising them because it presents religion
to them in a form which they instinctively reject, accepting it at
first under compulsion, but turning away from it at last with
deep-seated weariness and permanent distaste.

The boy who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to
himself when he leaves school: "If this is religion, I will have no
more of it," is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to
be honoured rather than blamed for having realised at last that the
chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain
which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands.

That England is relapsing into paganism is, as we have seen, the
sincere conviction of many earnest Christians. Why this should be so,
they cannot understand. In their desire to account for so distressing
a phenomenon, they will have recourse to any explanation, however
far-fetched and fantastic, rather than acknowledge that it is the
Scripture lesson in the elementary school which is paganising the
masses. If the Churches could have their way, they would doubtless
try to mend matters by doubling the hours that are given to
religious instruction, by making the Diocesan Inspector's visit
a half-yearly instead of a yearly function, and by cramming the
children for it with redoubled energy. In their refusal to reckon
with human nature, they are true to the first principles of their
religion and their philosophy. But it is possible to buy consistency
at too high a price. The laws and tendencies of Nature are what they
are; and it is madness, not heroism, to ignore them. To those who
refuse to reckon with human nature, the day will surely come when
human nature, evolving itself under the stress of its own forces and
in obedience to its own laws, will cease to take account of them.[8]

When the hands of the clock point to a quarter to ten, the religious
education of the child is over for the day, and his secular
instruction has begun. That the religious education of the child
should be supposed to end when the Scripture lesson is over, is the
last and strongest proof of the fundamental falsity of that
conception of religion on which, as on a quicksand, his education,
religious and secular, has been based.

After Scripture comes as a rule Arithmetic. During the former lesson
the teacher, acting under compulsion, does his best, as we have seen,
to deaden the child's spiritual faculties. During the latter, he not
infrequently does his best to deaden the child's mental faculties. In
each case he is to be pitied rather than blamed. The conditions under
which he works, and has long worked, are too strong for him. If we
are to understand why secular instruction, as given in our elementary
schools, is what it is, we must go back for half a century or so and
trace the steps by which the "Education Department" forced elementary
education in England into the grooves in which, in many schools,
it is still moving, and from which even the most enlightened and
enterprising teachers find it difficult to escape.

In 1861 the Royal Commission (under the Duke of Newcastle as
Chairman), which had been appointed in 1858 in order to inquire into
"the state of popular education in England, and as to the measures
required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction
to all classes of the people," issued its report, in which it
recommended _inter alia_ that the Grants paid to elementary schools
should be expressly apportioned on the examination of individual
children. This recommendation was carried into effect in the Lowe
Revised Code of 1862; and from that date till 1895 a considerable
part of the Grant received by each school was paid on the results of
a yearly examination held by H.M. Inspector on an elaborate syllabus,
formulated by the Department and binding on all schools alike. On the
official report which followed this examination depended the
reputation and financial prosperity of the school, and the reputation
and financial prosperity of the teacher.[9] The consequent pressure
on the teacher to exert himself was well-nigh irresistible; and he
had no choice but to transmit that pressure to his subordinates and
his pupils. The result was that in those days the average school was
a hive of industry.

But it was also a hive of misdirected energy. The State, in
prescribing a syllabus which was to be followed, in all the subjects
of instruction, by all the schools in the country, without regard to
local or personal considerations, was guilty of one capital offence.
It did all his thinking for the teacher. It told him in precise
detail what he was to do each year in each "Standard," how he was to
handle each subject, and how far he was to go in it; what width of
ground he was to cover; what amount of knowledge, what degree of
accuracy was required for a "pass," In other words it provided him
with his ideals, his general conceptions, his more immediate aims,
his schemes of work; and if it did not control his methods in all
their details, it gave him (by implication) hints and suggestions
with regard to these on which he was not slow to act; for it told him
that the work done in each class and each subject would be tested
at the end of each year by a careful examination of each individual
child; and it was inevitable that in his endeavour to adapt his
teaching to the type of question which his experience of the
yearly examination led him to expect, he should gradually deliver
himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the officials of the
Department,--the officials at Whitehall who framed the yearly
syllabus, and the officials in the various districts who examined
on it.

What the Department did to the teacher, it compelled him to do to the
child. The teacher who is the slave of another's will cannot carry
out his instructions except by making his pupils the slaves of
his own will. The teacher who has been deprived by his superiors
of freedom, initiative, and responsibility, cannot carry out his
instructions except by depriving his pupils of the same vital
qualities. The teacher who, in response to the deadly pressure of a
cast-iron system, has become a creature of habit and routine, cannot
carry out his instructions except by making his pupils as helpless
and as puppet-like as himself.

But it is not only because mechanical obedience is fatal, in the
long run, to mental and spiritual growth, that the regulation of
elementary or any other grade of education by a uniform syllabus is
to be deprecated. It is also because a uniform syllabus is, in the
nature of things, a bad syllabus, and because the degree of its
badness varies directly with the area of the sphere of educational
activity that comes under its control. It is easy for us of the
Twentieth Century to laugh at the syllabuses which the Department
issued, without misgiving, year after year, in the latter half of the
Nineteenth. We were all groping in the dark in those days; and our
whole attitude towards education was so fundamentally wrong that the
absurdities of the yearly syllabus were merely so much by-play in
the evolution of a drama which was a grotesque blend of tragedy and
farce. But let us of the enlightened Twentieth Century try our hands
at constructing a syllabus on which all the elementary schools of
England are to be prepared for a yearly examination, and see if
we can improve appreciably on the work of our predecessors. Some
improvement there would certainly be, but it would not amount to very
much. Were the "Board" to re-institute payment by results, and were
they, with this end in view, to entrust the drafting of schemes of
work in the various subjects to a committee of the wisest and most
experienced educationalists in England, the resultant syllabus would
be a dismal failure. For in framing their schemes these wise and
experienced educationalists would find themselves compelled to take
account of the lowest rather than of the highest level of actual
educational achievement. What is exceptional and experimental cannot
possibly find a place in a syllabus which is to bind all schools and
all teachers alike, and which must therefore be so framed that the
least capable teacher, working under the least favourable conditions,
may hope, when his pupils are examined on it, to achieve with decent
industry a decent modicum of success. Under the control of a uniform
syllabus, the schools which are now specialising and experimenting,
and so giving a lead to the rest, would have to abandon whatever was
interesting in their respective curricula, and fall into line with
the average school; while, with the consequent lowering of the
current _ideal_ of efficiency, the level of the average school would
steadily fall. A uniform syllabus is a bad syllabus, for this if for
no other reason, that it is compelled to idealise the average; and
that, inasmuch as education, so far as it is a living system, grows
by means of its "leaders," the idealisation of the average is
necessarily fatal to educational growth and therefore to educational
life.

It was preordained, then, that the syllabuses which the Department
issued, year by year, in the days of payment by results should have
few merits and many defects. Yet even if, by an unimaginable miracle,
they had all been educationally sound, the mere fact that all the
teachers in England had to work by them would have made them potent
agencies for evil. To be in bondage to a syllabus is a misfortune for
a teacher, and a misfortune for the school that he teaches. To be in
bondage to a syllabus which is binding on all schools alike, is a
graver misfortune. To be in bondage to a bad syllabus which is
binding on all schools alike, is of all misfortunes the gravest. Or
if there is a graver, it is the fate that befell the teachers of
England under the old _regime_,--the fate of being in bondage to a
syllabus which was bad both because it had to come down to the level
of the least fortunate school and the least capable teacher, and also
because it was the outcome of ignorance, inexperience, and
bureaucratic self-satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having for thirty-three years deprived the teachers of almost every
vestige of freedom, the Department suddenly reversed its policy and
gave them in generous measure the boon which it had so long withheld.
Whether it was wise to give so much at so short a notice may be
doubted. What is beyond dispute is that it was unwise to expect so
great and so unexpected a gift to be used at once to full advantage.
A man who had grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to
the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad
daylight. This is what was done in 1895 to the teachers of England,
and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind
ever since. For thirty-three years they had been treated as machines,
and they were suddenly asked to act as intelligent beings. For
thirty-three years they had been practically compelled to do
everything for the child, and they were suddenly expected to give him
freedom and responsibility,--words which for many of them had
well-nigh lost their meaning. To comply with these unreasonable
demands was beyond their power. The grooves into which they had been
forced were far too deep for them. The routine to which they had
become accustomed had far too strong a hold on them. The one change
which they could make was to relax their own severe pressure on the
child. This they did, perhaps without intending to do it. Indeed,
now that there was no external examination to look forward to, the
pressure on the child may be said to have automatically relaxed
itself. What happened--I will not say in all schools, but in far too
many--was that the teaching remained as mechanical and unintelligent
as ever, that the teacher continued to distrust the child and to do
everything for him, but that the child gradually became slacker and
less industrious. Not that his teacher wished him to "slack," but
that the stimulus of the yearly examination had been withdrawn at a
time when there was nothing to take its place. Exercise is in itself
a delightful thing when it is wholesome, natural, and rational;
but when it is unwholesome, unnatural, and irrational, it will not
be taken in sufficient measure except in response to some strong
external stimulus. Under the old examination system an adequate
stimulus had been supplied by the combined influence of competition
and fear (chiefly the latter). When the examination system was
abolished, that stimulus necessarily lost its point. Had it then been
possible for the teacher to make the exercise which his pupils were
asked to take wholesome, natural, and rational, a new stimulus--that
of interest in their work--would have been applied to the pupils, and
they would have exerted themselves as they had never done before.
But it was not possible for the average teacher to execute at a
moment's notice a complete change of front, and it was unwise of the
Department to expect him to do so. Apart from an honourable minority,
who had always been in secret revolt against the despotism of the
Code, the old teachers were helpless and hopeless. The younger ones
had been through the mill themselves, first in the Elementary School,
then in the Pupil-Teacher Centre, and then in the Training College
(both the latter having been in too many cases cramming
establishments like the Elementary School); and when they went back
to work under a head teacher who was wedded to the old order of
things, they found no difficulty in falling in with his ways and
carrying out his wishes. If a young teacher, fresh from an
exceptionally enlightened Training College, became an assistant under
an old-fashioned head teacher, he soon had the "nonsense knocked out
of him," and was compelled to toe the line with the rest of the
staff.

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