Lydia Howard Sigourney - "Man of Uz, and Other Poems"

Charles Darwin - "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication"

L. T. Meade - "Sue, A Little Heroine"

Lewis C. Lockwood - "Mary S. Peake"

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




* * * * *

Hence the neglect of _Composition_ in so many elementary schools. I
mean by composition the sincere expression in language of the child's
genuine thoughts and feelings. The effort to "compose," whether
orally or on paper, is one of the most educational of all efforts;
for language is at once the most readily available and the most
subtle and sympathetic of all media of expression; and the effort
to express himself in it tends, in proportion as it is sincere
and strong, to give breadth, depth, and complexity to the child's
thoughts and feelings, and through the development of these to weave
his experiences into the tissue of his life. But sincerity of
expression is not easily measured, and the true value of the thoughts
and feelings that are struggling to express themselves in a child's
composition is beyond the reach of any rule or scale; whereas
neatness of handwriting and correctness of spelling are, as we have
seen, features which appeal even to the carelessly observant eye.

Knowing this, the teacher takes care that the exercise-books of his
pupils shall be filled with neat and accurate composition exercises,
and that some of the neatest and most accurate of these shall be
exhibited on the walls of his school. The visitor whose eye ranges
over these exercises and goes no further may be excused if he forms
a highly favourable opinion of the school which can produce such
seemingly excellent work. But let him spend a morning in the school,
and see how these "results" have been produced. He will probably
change his mind as to their value. The teaching of composition in
the ordinary elementary school is too often fraudulent and futile.
Indeed, there is no lesson in which the teacher's traditional
distrust of the child goes further than in this. In the lower classes
the child is taught how to construct simple sentences (as if he
had never made one in the previous course of his life), and he is
not trusted to do more than this. He listens to a so-called object
lesson, and when it is over he is told to write a few simple
sentences about the Cow or the Horse, or whatever the subject of the
lesson may have been; and lest his memory (the only faculty which he
is allowed to exercise) should fail him, the chief landmarks of the
lesson are placed before him on the blackboard. This string of simple
sentences reproduced from memory passes muster as composition. And
yet that child began to practise oral composition at the age of
eighteen months, and at the age of three was able to use complex
sentences with freedom and skill. In the upper classes the
composition is too often as mechanical, as unreal, and as insincere
as in the lower. Sometimes a given subject is worked out by the
teacher with the class, the children, one by one, suggesting
sentences, which are shaped and corrected by the teacher and then
written up on the blackboard, until there are enough of them to fill
one page of an ordinary exercise book. Then the whole essay (if one
must dignify it with that name) is copied out, very neatly and
carefully, by every child in the class; and the result is shown to
the inspector as original composition. At other times or in other
schools the class teacher does not go quite so far as this. He
contents himself with talking the subject over with the class, and
then writing a series of headings[12] on the blackboard. Or, again,
trusting to the child's red-hot memory, he will allow him to write
out what he remembers of an object-lesson, or a history lesson, or
whatever it may be. Composition exercises which are the genuine
expression of genuine perception, which have behind them what the
child has experienced, what he has felt or thought, what he has read,
what he has studied, are the exception rather than the rule; for
in such exercises there would probably be faults of spelling,
faults of grammar, colloquialisms, careless writing (due to the
child's eagerness), and so forth; and the work would therefore be
unsatisfactory from the showman's point of view. The child's natural
capacity for expressing himself in language is systematically starved
in order that outward and visible results, results which will win
approval from those who judge according to the appearance of things,
may be duly produced.

The case of oral composition in the unemancipated elementary school
is even more hopeless than that of written composition. The latter
has a time set apart for it on the time-table, and is at any rate
supposed to be taught. The former is wholly ignored. Many teachers
seem to have entirely forgotten that the desire and the ability to
talk are part of the normal equipment of every healthy child. There
was, indeed, a time when children were taught to answer questions
in complete sentences even when one-word answers would have amply
sufficed. For example, when a child was asked how many pence there
were in a shilling, he was expected to answer, "There are twelve
pence in a shilling"; when he was asked what was the colour of snow,
he was expected to answer, "The colour of snow is white "; and so on.
And both he and his teacher flattered themselves that this waste of
words was oral composition! In point of fact the sentence in each of
these cases was worth no more, as an effort of self-expression, than
its one important word--_twelve_, _white_, or whatever it might be;
and the child, who was allowed to think that he had produced a real
sentence, had in effect done no more than envelop one real word in a
hollow formula. There are still many schools in which this ridiculous
practice lingers, and in which it constitutes the only attempt at
oral composition that the child is allowed to make. Where it has died
out the idea of teaching oral composition has too often died with it.
Young children are, as a rule, voluble talkers, with a considerable
command of language. But it not infrequently happens that at the
close of his school life the once talkative child has lapsed into a
state of sullen taciturnity. In common with other vital faculties,
his power of expressing himself in speech has withered in the
repressive atmosphere to which he has so long been exposed.

It is in the oral lesson that one would expect oral composition to
be taught or at any rate practised. In such subjects as _History_,
_Geography_, _English_, _Elementary Science_, the teaching in most
elementary schools is mainly, if not wholly, oral. In the days of
payment by results separate and variable grants were given for these
subjects; and which, if either, of two grants should be recommended
depended in each case on the result of an oral examination conducted
by H.M. Inspector, the employment of a written test in any class
being strictly forbidden by "My Lords." In this examination proof
of the possession of information was all that the inspector could
demand; and the quickest and easiest way of obtaining such proof
was to ask the class questions which could be briefly answered by
the children individually. Questions which were designed to test
intelligence might, of course, have been asked, and in some districts
were freely asked; but to have reduced the grant because the children
failed to answer these would have provoked an outcry; while, had the
inspector asked questions which demanded long answers, he would, in
the limited time at his command, have given but few children the
chance of showing that they had been duly prepared for the
examination. The consequence was that the oral lesson on a "class
subject" usually took the form of stuffing the children with pellets
of appropriate information, some of which they would, in all
probability, have the opportunity of disgorging when they were
questioned by the inspector on the yearly "parade day."

Not only, then, did the official examination in history, geography
and elementary science direct the teaching of these subjects into
channels in which the golden opportunities that they offer for the
practice of written composition were perforce thrown away, but also
the examination was so framed that even the practice of oral
composition, in preparation for it, was actively discouraged. And the
neglect of composition acted disastrously on the teaching of the
subjects in question; for wherever self-expression on the part of the
child is forbidden, the appropriate "sense," or perceptive faculty,
cannot possibly evolve itself,--perception and expression being, as
we have elsewhere seen, the very life and soul of each other; and in
the absence (to take pertinent examples) of the historical or the
geographical sense, the possession of historical or geographical
information cannot possibly be converted into knowledge of history
or geography. The prompt, accurate, and general answering which was
rewarded by the award of the higher grants for "class subjects" was,
in nine cases out of ten, the outcome of assiduous and unintelligent
cram,--a mode of preparation for which the policy of the Education
Department was mainly responsible.

But when separate grants ceased to be paid for class subjects, were
not the teachers free to teach them by rational methods? No doubt
they were--in theory. In point of fact they were in bondage to the
strongest of all constraining influences,--the force of inveterate
habit. For twenty years they had taught the class subjects by the one
safe method of vigorous oral cram. This method had answered their
purpose, and it was but natural that they should continue to teach by
it. What happened, when separate grants ceased to be paid, was that
the need for responsiveness on the part of the scholar gradually
lessened. The pellets of information were still imparted, but it
became less and less incumbent upon the teacher to see that his
pupils were ready to disgorge them at a moment's notice. And so the
cramming lesson gradually transformed itself into a _lecture_, in
which the teacher did all or nearly all the talking, while the
children sat still and listened or pretended to listen, an occasional
yawn giving open proof of the boredom from which most of them were
suffering.

That is the type of oral lesson which is most common at the present
day. "Results" in history, geography, nature study and English are
seldom asked for by the inspector; and the teacher takes but little
trouble to produce them. But his distrust of the child is as firmly
rooted as ever, and his unwillingness to allow the child to work by
or for himself is as strong as it ever was. The consequence is that
there are many schools in which the teacher now does everything
during the oral lesson, while the child does as nearly as possible
nothing. Formerly the child was at any rate allowed (or rather
required) to be actively receptive. Now he is seldom allowed to do
anything more active than to yawn. And all the time he is secretly
longing to energise--to do something with himself--to use his mental,
if not his physical faculties--to work, if not to play. One might
have thought that in the history and geography lessons, if in no
other, "Standards VI" and "VII" (where the numbers were too small
to admit of these standards having a teacher to themselves) would
be separated from "Standard V," and allowed to work out their own
salvation by studying suitable text-books under proper supervision
and guidance. But no; the force of habit is too strong for the
machine-made teacher. Twenty years ago history and geography were
"class subjects," and as such were taught orally to whole classes of
children. And they must still be taught as "class subjects," even
if this should involve the "Sixth" and "Seventh Standards" being
brigaded with, and kept down for one or even two years to, the level
of the "Fifth,"--kept down, it would seem, for no other purpose than
that of being the passive recipients of the teacher's windy "talk,"
and the helpless witnesses of his futile "chalk," and of having their
own activities paralysed and their own powers of expression starved
into inanition.

I will deal with one more "secular" subject before I bring this
sketch to a close. There are still many schools in which the hours
that are set apart for _Drawing_ are devoted in large measure to the
slavish reproduction of flat copies. A picture of some familiar
object--outlined, shaded, or tinted as the case may be, and not
infrequently highly conventionalised--hangs in front of the class;
and the children copy it, stroke by stroke, and curve by curve, and
put in the shading and lay on washes of colour. As long practice at
work of this kind develops a certain degree of manual dexterity, and
as the free use of india-rubber is permitted and even encouraged, the
child's finished work may be so neat and accurate as to become worthy
of a place on the school wall. But what is the value, what is the
meaning of work of this kind? When such a drawing lesson as I have
described is in progress, the divorce between perception and
expression is complete. And as each of these master faculties is the
very life and soul of the other, their complete divorce from one
another involves the complete eclipse of each. The child who copies
a flat copy does not perceive anything except some other person's
reproduction of a scene or object; and even this he does not
necessarily grasp as a whole, his business being to reproduce it with
flawless accuracy, line by line. Indeed, it may well happen that he
does not even know what the picture or diagram before him is intended
to represent. Nor is he expressing anything, for he has not made his
model in any sense or degree his own. Thus, during the whole of a
lesson in which the perceptive and expressive faculties are supposed
to be receiving a special training, they are lying dormant and inert.
Each of them is, for the time being, as good as dead. And each of
them will assuredly die if this kind of teaching goes on for very
long, die for lack of exercise, die wasted and atrophied by disuse.
The extent to which the copying of copies can injure a child's power
of observation exceeds belief. I have seen a bowl placed high above
the line of sight of a class of fifty senior boys, each one of whom
(his memory being haunted, I suppose, by some diagram which he had
once copied) drew it as if he were looking into it from above. Not
one of those boys could see the bowl as it really was, or rather
as it really was to be seen. A child who had never drawn a stroke
in his life, but whose perceptive faculties had not been deadened
by education, would have sketched the bowl more correctly than
any of those quasi-experts. And with the wasting of the power of
observation, the executive power is gradually lost; for perception
is ever interpenetrating, reinforcing, and stimulating expression;
and when the eye is blind, the hand, however skilful its mere
manipulation may be, necessarily falters and loses its cunning.

Four or five years ago, had one entered an elementary school while
drawing was being taught, such a lesson as I have just described
would have been in progress in ninety-nine cases out of every
hundred. Since then a systematic warfare has been waged by the Board
against the "flat copy"; and though it is still very far from
extinct, there is now perhaps an actual majority of schools in which
its use has been discontinued. But the number of schools in which
drawing from the object is effectively taught, though increasing
steadily, is still small. In those schools, indeed, the results are
surprisingly good,--so good as to justify, not only the new gospel of
drawing from the object, but also the whole gospel of education
through self-reliance and self-expression. But elsewhere there has
been but little improvement, except so far as it may be better to
draw from an object without guidance, or with quite ineffective
guidance, than to draw from a flat copy. In some schools the formula
or "tip" is beginning to take the place of the flat copy. There is a
formula for the tulip, a formula for the snowdrop, a formula for the
daffodil, and so on; and the children draw from these formulae while
the actual flowers are before them and they are making believe to
reproduce them. In other schools an object is placed before the
class, and the teacher draws this for them on the blackboard,
explaining to them in detail how it ought to be drawn; and when he
has finished, the children pretend to draw the object, but really
copy his blackboard copy of it. In this, as in other matters, the
teacher who has become a victim of routine will give a facile but
mainly "notional" assent to the suggestions that are placed before
him, will promise to try them, and will make an unintelligent and
half-hearted attempt to do so, but will as often as not slide back
into practices which do not materially differ from those which he
professes to have abandoned. The pressure of the whole system of
Western education--not to speak of Western civilisation--will be too
strong for him. The flat copy, with its demand for mechanical work
and servile obedience, fits into that system. Drawing from the
object, with its demand for initiative and self-reliance, does not.
Hence the attractive force of the former,--a secret attractive force
which will neutralise the efforts that the teacher consciously makes
to free himself from its influence, and will arm him, as with
a hidden shirt of mail, against the missionary zeal of his
inspector.[13] Even the zeal of the inspector will be affected by his
possible inability to harmonise his gospel of self-expression in
drawing with any general system of self-education. It is because the
educational reformer is fighting, in his sporadic attempts at reform,
against his own deepest conviction, that he achieves so little even
in the particular directions in which he sees clearly that reform is
needed.

But how, it will be asked, is such a school as I have described to be
kept going? The whole _regime_ must be eminently distasteful to the
healthy child, and it can scarcely be attractive to his teacher. By
what motive force, then, is the school to be kept in motion,--in
motion, if not along the path of progress, at any rate along the
well-worn track of routine? By the only motive force which
the religion and the civilisation of the West recognise as
effective,--the hope of external reward, with its complement, the
fear of external punishment. From highest to lowest, from the head
teacher of the school to the youngest child in the bottom class, all
the teachers and all the children are subjected to the pressure of
this quasi-physical force. The teachers hope for advancement and
increase of salary, and fear degradation and loss of salary, or at
any rate loss of the hoped-for increment.[14] The children hope for
medals, books, high places in their respective classes, and other
rewards and distinctions, and fear corporal and other kinds of
punishment. The thoroughly efficient school is one in which this
motive force is duly transmitted to every part of the school
by means of a well-planned and carefully-elaborated machinery,
analogous to that by which water and gas are laid on at every
tap in every house in a well-governed town. Only those who are
intimately acquainted with the inside of the elementary school can
realise to what an extent the machinery of education has in recent
years encroached upon the vital interests of the school and the time
and thought of the teacher. In schools which are administered by
business-like and up-to-date Local Authorities, this encroachment is
becoming as serious as that of drifting sands on a fertile soil.
Time-tables, schemes of work, syllabuses, record books, progress
books, examination result books, and the rest,--hours and hours are
spent by the teachers on the clerical work which these mechanical
contrivances demand. And the hours so spent are too often wholly
wasted. The worst of this machinery is that, so long as it works
smoothly, all who are interested in the school are satisfied. But
it may all work with perfect smoothness, and yet achieve nothing
that really counts. I know of hundreds of schools which are to all
appearance thoroughly efficient,--schools in which the machinery of
education is as well contrived as it is well oiled and cleaned,--and
yet in which there is no vital movement, no growth, no life. From
highest to lowest, all the inmates of those schools are cheating
themselves with forms, figures, marks, and other such empty symbols.

The application of the conventional motive force to the school
children goes by the name of _Discipline_. If the pressure at each
tap is steady, constant, and otherwise effective, the discipline is
good. If it is variable, intermittent, and otherwise ineffective,
the discipline is bad. The life of the routine-ridden school is so
irksome to the child, that if he is healthy and vigorous he will long
to find a congenial outlet for his vital energies, which are as a
rule either pent back (as when he sits still listening to a lecture),
or forced into uninteresting and unprofitable channels. When this
desire masters him during school hours, it goes by the name of
"naughtiness," and is regarded as a proof of the inborn sinfulness
of his "fallen" nature. To repress the desire, to keep the child in
a state either of absolute inaction or of mechanically regulated
activity, is the function of school discipline. Whatever in the
child's life is free, natural, spontaneous, wells up from an evil
source. If educational progress is to be made, that source must be
carefully sealed. As an educator, the teacher must do his best
to reduce the child to the level of a wire-pulled puppet. As a
disciplinarian, he must overcome the child's instinctive repugnance
to being subjected to such unworthy treatment. The better the
"discipline" of the school, the easier it will be for the mechanical
education given in it to achieve its deadly work.

In making this sketch of what is still a common type of elementary
school, my object has been to provide myself with materials for
answering the question: Does elementary education, as at present
conducted in this country, tend to foster the growth of the child's
faculties? If my sketch is even approximately faithful to its
original, the answer to the question, so far at least as thousands of
schools are concerned, must be an emphatic No. For in the school, as
I have sketched it, the one end and aim of the teacher is to prevent
the child from doing anything whatever for himself; and where
independent effort is prohibited, the growth of faculty must needs be
arrested, the growth of every faculty, as of every limb and organ,
being dependent in large measure on its being duly and suitably
exercised by its owner. If this statement is true of faculty as such,
and of effort as such, still more is it true of the particular
faculties which school life is supposed to train, the faculties which
we speak of loosely as perceptive,--and of the particular effort by
which alone the growth of the perceptive faculties is effected, the
many-sided effort which we speak of loosely as self-expression. Far
perception and expression are, as I have endeavoured to prove, the
face and obverse of the same vital process; and the educational
policy which makes self-expression, or, in other words, sincere
expression, impossible, is therefore fatal to the outgrowth of the
whole range of the perceptive faculties.

The education given in thousands of our elementary schools is, then,
in the highest degree anti-educational. The end which education
ought to aim at achieving is the very end which the teacher labours
unceasingly to defeat. The teacher may, indeed, contend that his
business is not to evoke faculty but to impart knowledge. The answer
to this argument is that the type of education which impedes the
outgrowth of faculty is necessarily fatal to the acquisition of
knowledge. For the teacher can no more impart knowledge to his pupils
than a nurse can impart flesh and blood to her charges. What the
teacher imparts is information, just as what the nurse imparts is
food; and until information has been converted into knowledge the
child is as far from being educated as the infant, whose food
remains unassimilated, is from being nourished. The teacher may pump
information into the child in a never-ending stream; but so long as
he compels the child to adopt an attitude of passive receptivity, and
forbids him to react, through the medium of self-expression, on the
food that he is receiving, so long will the food remain unassimilated
and even undigested, and the soul and mind of the child remain
uneducated and unfed.

Whether, then, we concern ourselves, as educationalists, with the
growth of the child's whole nature, or with the growth of his master
faculties, or again with the growth of those special "senses"
which evolve themselves in response to the stimulus of special
environments, we see that in each case the effect of the teacher's
policy of distrust and repression is to arrest growth. When the
stern supernaturalist reminds us that the child's nature is
intrinsically evil, and that therefore in arresting its growth
education renders him a priceless service, we answer that, in
arresting the growth of the child's nature as a whole, education
arrests the growth of all the master faculties of his being, and
that there are some at least among these which, even in the judgment
of the supernaturalist, imperatively need to be trained. When the
strait-laced, result-hunting teacher reminds us that his sole
business is to teach certain subjects, and that therefore he cannot
concern himself with growth, we answer that, in neglecting to foster
growth, he makes it impossible for the child to put forth a special
"sense," a special faculty of direct perception, in response to each
new environment, and so (for reasons which have already been given)
incapacitates him for mastering any subject. There is always one
point of view, if no more, from which my primary assumption--that
the function of education is to foster growth--is seen to be a
truism. And from that point of view, if from no other, the failure
of the routine-ridden school to fulfil its destiny is seen to be
final and complete.

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