What Is and What Might Be

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

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But it was not only because the teachers of England had got
accustomed to the Land of Bondage, that they shrank from entering the
Promised Land. There was, and still is, another and a stronger
reason. Wherever the teacher looks, he sees that the examination
system, with its demand for machine-made results, controls education;
and he feels that it is only by an accident that his school has
been exempted (in part at least) from its pressure. The Board of
Education still examine for labour certificates, for admission as
uncertificated assistants, for the teacher's certificate. They expect
head teachers to hold terminal examinations of all the classes in
their schools. They allow Local Authorities to examine children in
their schools as formally and as stringently as they please, and to
hold examinations for County Scholarships, for which children from
elementary schools are eligible. Admission to secondary schools of
all grades depends on success in passing entrance examinations. So
does admission to the various Colleges and Universities. In the
schools which prepare little boys for the "Great Public Schools,"
the whole scheme of education Is dominated by the headmaster's desire
to win as many entrance scholarships as possible. In the "Great
Public Schools" the scheme of education is similarly dominated by
the headmaster's desire to win as many scholarships as possible
at the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. In the Universities all the
undergraduates without exception are reading for examinations of
various kinds,--pass "schools," honour "schools," Civil Service
examinations, and the like. Officers in the Army and Navy have never
done with examinations; and there is not a single profession which
can be entered through any door but that of a public examination.
Wherever the teacher looks he sees that examinations are held in high
honour, and that the main business of teachers of all grades is to
produce results which an outside examiner would accept as
satisfactory; and he naturally takes for granted that the production
of such results is the true function of the teacher, whether his
success in producing them is to be tested by a formal examination or
not. The air that he breathes is charged with ideas--ideas about life
in general and education in particular--which belong to the order of
things that he is supposed to have left behind him, and are fiercely
antagonistic to those as yet unrecognised ideas which give the new
order of things its meaning, its purpose, and its value.

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

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

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

"The evil that men do lives after them,"

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

Things being as they are in the various grades of education and in
the various strata of social life, it is inevitable that the
education given in many of our elementary schools should be based,
in the main, on complete distrust of the child. In such schools,
whatever else the child may be allowed to do, he must not be allowed
to do anything by or for himself. He must not express what he really
feels and sees; for if he does, the results will probably fall short
of the standard of neatness, cleanness, and correctness which
an examiner might expect the school to reach. At any rate, the
experiment is much too risky to be tried. In the lower classes
the results produced would certainly be rough, imperfect, untidy.
Therefore self-expression must not be permitted in that part of the
school. And if not there, it must not be permitted anywhere, for the
longer it is delayed the greater will be the difficulty of starting
it and the greater the attendant risk. The child must not express
what he really perceives; and as genuine perception forces for itself
the outlet of genuine expression, he must not be allowed to exercise
his perceptive faculties. Instead of seeing things for himself, he
must see what his teacher directs him to see, he must feel what his
teacher directs him to feel, he must think what his teacher directs
him to think, and so on. But to forbid a child to use his own
perceptive faculties is to arrest the whole process of his growth.

I will now go back to the _Arithmetic_ lesson. During the years in
which the children in elementary schools were examined individually
in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the one virtue which was
inculcated while the arithmetic lesson was in progress was that of
obedience to the formulated rule. On the yearly examination day it
was customary to give each child four questions in arithmetic, of
which only one was a "problem." Two sums correctly worked secured
a "pass"; and it was therefore possible for the child to achieve
salvation in arithmetic by blindly obeying the various rules with
which his teacher had equipped him. He had, indeed, to decide for
himself in each case which rule was to be followed; but he did this
(in most schools), not by thinking the matter out, but by following
certain by-rules given him by his teacher, which were based on a
careful study of the wording of the questions set by the inspector,
and which held good as long as that wording remained unchanged. For
example, if a subtraction sum was to be dictated to "Standard II,"
the child was taught that the number which was given out first was to
be placed in the upper line, and that the number which came next was
to be subtracted from this. He was not taught that the lesser of the
two numbers was always to be subtracted from the larger; for in order
to apply that principle he would have had to decide for himself which
was the larger of the two numbers, and the consequent mental effort
was one which his teacher could not trust him to make. It is true
that in his desire to save the child from the dire necessity of
thinking, the teacher ran the risk of being discomfited by a sudden
change of procedure on the part of an inspector. The inspector, for
example, who, having been accustomed to say "From 95 take 57," chose
to say, for a change, "Take 57 from 95," would cause widespread havoc
in the first two or three schools that were the victims of his
unlooked-for experiment. But the risks which the teacher ran who
taught his pupils to rely on trickery rather than thought were worth
running; for the inspectors, like the teachers and the children, were
ever tending to become creatures of routine, and the vagaries of
those who had the reputation of being tiresomely versatile could be
provided against--largely, if not wholly--by increased ingenuity on
the part of the teacher, and increased attention to tricky by-rules
on the part of the child.

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

There is no folly perpetrated in the elementary school of to-day for
which there are not authoritative precedents to be found in the
conduct of one or other of the two great schools which the God of
Western theology is supposed to have opened for the education of Man.
And it is in that special development of the Legal School which
is known as Pharisaism that we shall look for a precedent for the
conventional teaching of arithmetic in our elementary schools. The
ultra-legalism of the Pharisee in the days of Christ finds its exact
counterpart in the ultra-legalism of the child who has been taught
arithmetic by the methods which the yearly examination fostered, and
which are still widely prevalent. In the one case there was, in the
other case there is, an entire inability on the part of the zealous
votary of the rule to estimate the intrinsic value of the results of
his blind and unintelligent action. The sense of humour, which is a
necessary element in every other healthy sense, and which so often
keeps us from going astray, by suddenly revealing to us the inherent
absurdity of our proposed action, is one of the first faculties to
succumb to the blighting influence of an ultra-legal conception of
life. As an example of the unwavering seriousness of the Pharisee in
the presence of what was intrinsically ridiculous, let us take his
attitude towards the problem of keeping food warm for the Sabbath
day. "According to Exodus xvi. 23, it was forbidden to bake and to
boil on the Sabbath. Hence the food, which it was desired to eat hot
on the Sabbath, was to be prepared before its commencement, and kept
warm by artificial means. In doing this, however, care must be taken
that the existing heat was not increased, which would have been
'boiling.' Hence the food must be put only into such substances as
would maintain its heat, not into such as might possibly increase it.
'Food to be kept warm for the Sabbath must not be put into oil-dregs,
manure, salt, chalk, or sand, whether moist or dry, nor into straw,
grape-skins, flock, or vegetables, if these are damp, though it may
if they are dry. It may, however, be put into clothes, amidst fruits,
pigeons' feathers, and flax tow. R. Jehudah declares flax tow
unallowable and permits only coarse tow.'"[10] Following his rule
out, step by step, with unflinching loyalty, into these ridiculous
consequences, the Pharisee had entirely lost the power of seeing that
they were ridiculous, and was well content to believe, with Jehudah,
that the difference between keeping food warm in coarse tow and in
flax tow was the difference between life and death. This _reductio
ad absurdum_ of legalism is exactly paralleled, in many of our
elementary schools, in the answers to arithmetical questions given by
the children. The "Fifth Standard" boys who told their inspector, as
an answer to an easy problem, that a given room was five shillings
and sixpence wide, had followed out their rule--they had
unfortunately got hold of a wrong rule--step by step, till it led
them to a conclusion, the intrinsic absurdity of which they were one
and all unable to see.[11] There are many elementary schools in
England in which a majority of the answers given to quite easy
problems would certainly be wrong, and a respectable minority of them
ludicrously wrong. Nor is this to be wondered at; for though the
types of problems that can be set in elementary schools are not
numerous, to provide his pupils with the by-rules which shall enable
them in all, or even in most cases, to determine which of the
recognised rules are appropriate to the given situation, passes the
wit of the teacher. But if the helplessness of so many elementary
scholars in the face of an arithmetical problem is lamentable, still
more lamentable is the fact that the scholar is seldom met with who,
having given an entirely wrong answer to an easy problem, is able to
see for himself that, whatever the right answer may be, the answer
given is and must be wrong. So fatal to the development of the
arithmetical sense is the current worship of the rule for its own
sake, and so deadly a narcotic is the conventional arithmetic lesson
to all who take part in it!

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

After the arithmetical lesson come, as a rule, lessons in "_Reading_"
and "_Writing_"--in reading in some classes, in writing in others.
The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary
elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress, is that the
children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word.
They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the
contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual
nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up,
one by one, even in the highest class of all, and reading aloud to
their teacher.

Why are they doing this? Is it in order that their teacher may show
them how to master the more difficult words in their reading lesson?
This may be the reason, in some schools; but there are others,
perhaps a majority, in which the teacher tells his pupils the words
that puzzle them instead of helping them to make them out for
themselves. Besides, if reading were properly taught in the lower
classes, the children in the upper classes would surely be able to
master unaided the difficulties that might confront them.

Or is it in order that elocution may be cultivated? But elocution is
seldom, if ever, cultivated in the ordinary elementary school, the
veriest mumbling on the part of the child being accepted by his
teacher (who follows him with an open book in his hand), provided
that he can read correctly and with some attempt at "phrasing."
Indeed, the indistinct utterance of so many school children may be
attributed to the fact that they have read aloud to their teachers
for many years, and that during the whole of that time a very low
standard of distinctness has been accepted as satisfactory.

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

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

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

But the main objection to the reading-aloud lesson is, I repeat, that
while it is going on the children are not reading at all, in the
proper sense of the word, not attacking the book, not enjoying it,
not extracting the honey from it. And the consequences of the
inability to read which is thus engendered are far-reaching and
disastrous. The power to read is a key which unlocks many doors. One
of the most important of these doors--perhaps, from the strictly
scholastic point of view, _the_ most important--is the door of study.
The child who cannot read to himself cannot study a book, cannot
master its contents. It is because the elementary school child cannot
be trusted to do any independent study, that the oral lesson, or
lecture, with its futile expenditure of "chalk and talk," is so
prominent a feature in the work of the elementary school. And it is
because the oral lesson necessarily counts for so much, that the
over-grouping of classes, with all its attendant evils, is so widely
practised. The grouping together of "Standards" V, VI, and VII, with
the result that the children who go through all those Standards are
compelled to waste the last two years of their school life, is a
practice which is almost universal in elementary schools of a certain
size. And there are few schools of that size in which those Standards
could not be broken up into two, if not three, independent classes,
if the children, whose ages range as a rule between eleven and
fourteen, could be trusted to work by themselves. In many cases this
over-grouping is wholly inexcusable, the headmaster having no class
of his own to teach, and being therefore free to do what obviously
ought to be done,--to separate the older and more advanced children
from the rest of the top class, and form them into a separate class
(a real top class) for independent study and self-education under his
direction and supervision. But so strong is the force of habit, and
so deeply rooted in the mind of the teacher is distrust of the child,
that it is rare to find the head teacher to whom the idea of breaking
up an over-grouped top class has suggested itself as practicable, or
even as intrinsically desirable.

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

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

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