Division L A 1 3 Section .ft C- THE PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence ! They both in power and act Are permanent, and Time is not with them Save as it worketh for them, they in it. Coi.eridg 191 THE PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION BY KENNETH RICHMOND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. CLUTTON-BROCK NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE First Published igiy PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN CONTENTS PAGE Preface .vii Introduction by A. Clutton-Brock . . xi CHAPTER I. Jewish and Greek Ideals i II. Roman and Medieval Ideals . . n III. The Renaissance .... 23 IV. COMENIUS AND THE “ PANSOPHICAL Way ”.34 V. Milton and Caste Education . . 46 VI. Locke and the Quest of Truth . 58 VII. Rousseau and Social Liberty . . 68 VIII. Pestalozzi’s Work .... 78 IX. The Creed of Froebel ... 89 X. Herbart and the Exact Method . 101 XI. Summary. hi XII. Conclusion : Education and Reality. 124 Index ...... 135 PREFACE T HESE brief studies are offered as hors d'oeuvres for the neglected feast of educational history. We are perhaps in sight of the time, long overdue, when teachers will have full opportunity and in¬ centive to learn the elements of their art before they are called to its practice ; and when that time has come a book of this kind will be superseded, as it ought to be superseded, by the mere minimum of recollection that every teacher will carry in his own mind from the historical side of his training in pedagogy. Meanwhile, many teachers have never opened a book that tells any part of the in¬ spiring story. It is literally inspiration, not only instruction, of which they deprive themselves. It might seem a harsh exaction to demand that the schoolmaster and mistress, when classes are over, paper work corrected and to-morrow’s lessons pre¬ pared (if they prefer, with Thring, to give children to drink from a running stream, not from a stagnant pool), should give their hour of leisure to an arid absorption in the history of ideals ancient and out¬ worn. But the old ideals are not outworn ; the vii viii PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION trouble with them, as Mr. Chesterton has said of the Christian ideal, is not that they have been tried and found wanting, but that they have been found difficult, and left untried. Their inspiration lies in the hope that they may yet be tried, and tried effectually. The teacher who turns for rest and refreshment at the day’s tired close to the original sources of this inspiration—the wide universalism of Comenius, the devoted humanitarianism of Pestalozzi, or the practical idealism of Froebel—will not be disap¬ pointed. It is good to feel the companionship of other and greater teachers of the past in one’s struggles with the present; and such companion¬ ship is of a kind that gives hope and courage for the future in these days when education has every¬ thing to offer in furtherance of our task of recon¬ struction. This little book does not aspire to point the way of educational reconstruction, but only to suggest that there are springs yet unexhausted from which living water can be drawn by the educators of to-day. At the same time personal conclusions, personal attempts at a revaluation of old ideals in terms of new conditions, are put forward here in all their probable crudity. It is of no use to absorb even yesterday’s thoughts without recasting them in to-day’s mould; and ideals that have lain in PREFACE IX a state of half-suspended animation for centuries need to be still more carefully reinterpreted by all who study them. My own reinterpretations must be regarded as sacrifices upon the altar of this principle. If they are immature and inconclusive, they are here to be improved upon. It is only fair to add that they are also, in the main, subsequent additions to a series of articles which have appeared in The Times Educational Supplement , and reappear in this extended form by the courtesy of The Times. Anything inept in my work should be regarded as having been written outside the scrutiny of the Supple¬ ment’s editor, to whom I am indebted not only for good editing and the judicious help which a few editors have the ability and the will to give, but also for the suggestion that originally prompted an undertaking full of interest at least for myself. The debt which my concluding chapter owes to Mr. Clutton-Brock’s book, The Ultimate Belief, will be apparent, most of all to those who have had the good fortune to read that book; and Mr. Clutton-Brock has added to my obligation by con¬ senting to write the introduction that follows. ■ INTRODUCTION HE first thing, perhaps, that will strike the J- reader of this book is the fact that nearly all the great educators, whether teachers them¬ selves or only theorists, have been rebels against the ordinary education of their time. It seemed to them so absurd a waste and perversion of human faculties that most of them could not refrain from bad language about it. Mr. Richmond quotes the saying of Montaigne : “ We toil only to stuff the memory and leave the conscience and understand¬ ing void.” Bacon speaks of cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit. Milton says that we “ hale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.” Pestalozzi says that, after reading Emile, the home as well as the public education of the whole world, and of all ranks of society, appeared to him as a crippled thing. So actual education always has appeared to the great educators ; and XI xii PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION one might suppose from a hasty reading of Mr. Richmond’s chapters that the history of education, at least, tells us only of follies and crimes. And yet the great educators themselves, and their fame, prove that mankind have always had an immense desire for a better education and an unfailing hope of it. Indeed there is nothing that they are so constantly sanguine about, nothing that seems to them so bright in the future and therefore so dull in the present and past. We all desire better things for our children than we have known in our own childhood. Here are the children with the future of the world in their hands ; are they to grow dull, as we have grown dull, by being robbed of curiosity and desire in the very process that ought to fill them with these things ? All through the ages, no doubt, parents have looked at the bright faces of their children and have sworn to themselves that that brightness shall not be dimmed by the schoolmaster. And yet there is something in these very parents which makes them consent, generation after generation, to this same dimming process ; and the schoolmaster protests that, where he fails, it is because he obeys the parent’s will. But for the parents, he says, he could make education what it ought to be. There is clearly some malign force in parents or in schoolmasters, or in both, which constantly INTRODUCTION xi 11 perverts all their desires and efforts, which makes the schoolmaster a byword to the parent and the parent a byword to the schoolmaster ; but what is it ? We may search through Mr. Richmond’s work for this force as well as for those permanent values which it seems so constantly to obscure ; and I think we shall find it, as persistent as those values themselves. The great educators always tell us that we must appeal to the child’s own sense of absolute values; for that sense is in the child, and it is the same in all children, though it may vary in strength. It is the common faith of all great educators that abso¬ lute values are always of the same nature in all human beings. That faith is the reason why they are educators, why education seems to them the most interesting thing in the world. Mr. Richmond, for instance, quotes the saying of Locke that children “ have as much a mind to shew that they are free ; that their good actions come from them¬ selves ... as any of the proudest of you grown men.” The aim of education, for Locke and for all the great educators, is to give the child that free¬ dom of the spirit which can only come with obedi¬ ence to the sense of absolute values, to his, the child’s own sense and not to his teacher’s. The child must know that his good actions come from himself, if they are to be to him good actions. But, xiv PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION though the parent and the schoolmaster may desire this freedom for the child, there is something in both which makes them fear this freedom ; and both teach the child himself to be afraid of it. What is the cause of this fear ? It is not merely the vulgar will to power over the child, but something far subtler and more un¬ conscious. It is their constant tendency to associate education with status, to regard it as a means, not to freedom of the spirit but to some kind of superiority. The education of the Jew, for instance, was based upon the belief that the Jews were the chosen people of God and superior in righteousness to all other peoples. It was an education which inevitably led to self-righteousness, as we see in the case of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not as other men. Then Mr. Richmond summarizes Xenophon’s account of the education of the Persians : “ Keep youth fit, and active, and honourable, and nothing else is of great account.” That was the education of a conquering race. It taught the boy to take a pride in those qualities which marked him as a member of that race. It appealed to the sense of honour ; and honour is always associated with status. It is the form which the moral sense takes in those who feel themselves to be members of a superior class. This Persian education, as Mr, Richmond says, was in its aims INTRODUCTION xv very like the education of our own public schools. It was fine so far as it went; but it did not go far enough, and it must very easily have declined into an encouragement of certain kinds of stupidity. If a Persian had the sense of honour and obeyed it we may guess there was no need for him to think much, least of all to criticize the results of his sense of honour in action. It must be right because it was the morality of his own superior class ; and if it were not right then his class would not be superior. So status always robs those who are keenly aware of it of their critical faculty ; their egotism is en¬ listed on the side of their education, and they prize their education with the blindness of self-love. Greek education, except the education of the Spartans, must have been much freer from the sense of status than Persian ; and yet it too was the education of a superior people constantly aware of their intellectual and aesthetic superiority. Aristotle’s ideal man is what we should call a superior person, and his whole system of behaviour is based upon his sense of his own superiority. In his own way, a more intelligent way, he is a Pharisee, and one can see that he might easily become a pedant. So the whole education of the Roman Empire, an education based in the main upon Greek principles, became more and more pedantic. What is it that leaves us a little cold in the Meditations xvi PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION of Marcus Aurelius ? It is the fact that this lofty Stoic morality of his is inspired by the sense of its own loftiness. It is purified of all the more vulgar kinds of status. The Emperor is not proud of being an Emperor, or a Roman, or an Aristocrat ; but he is proud of being a Stoic. As a Stoic he must be kind and forbearing to all men ; but only because he is a Stoic and has a wisdom which they do not possess. Lucian in that Dialogue of his in which he puts all the philosophers up to auction treats the Stoic with more respect than most of them. But he makes the Auctioneer proclaim that the Stoic is the only just and wise man ; and the Stoic in his satire is, as we should say, a little Bethellite. That is his weak point, which Lucian, the universal sceptic, ridicules ; and through this weak point he fell easily into pedantry. Christianity made a direct attack upon all sense of status, yet it could not free the education of the Roman empire of Pedantry ; and even St. Augus¬ tine thought that the style of the Gospels was bad. A Christian might condemn all culture as Pagan ; he did not make the deadlier attack upon the culture of his time that it was no longer culture because it was pedantic. He did not see that Christianity, if all its principles were acted upon, meant a new life to culture itself, a new sense of adventure and beauty which must produce great art and literature and INTRODUCTION xvii philosophy. And we have not seen this even to the present day. We still appeal to one sense of status or another in our education, and in that appeal we are constantly falling into one kind of pedantry or another. Why, for instance, is it that the well-to-do have so long submitted to the manner in which Greek and Latin are taught in most of our public schools ? They complain but they do not rebel; and the reason clearly is that they believe Greek and Latin, as they are taught, to be part of the education of a gentleman. A public school boy may not learn to read either language, with ease or pleasure., after five years of teaching ; but he does learn not to make a false quantity, and we are all agreed that a false quantity is the mark of a socially inferior education. Those who do not make false quantities belong to one class, and those who do make them belong to another. It is a test more exclusive than the dropping of an “ H.” But if our education were emptied of the sense of status we should not be content with this avoidance of false quantities as the result of five years of teaching ; and we should see that it is an absurd pedantry to be proud of it. Education, in fact, is not a thing to be proud of at all. One of the first aims of education should be to remove all pride in it. The better a man is educated, morally, intellectually, and aesthetically, the less b xviii PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION proud he is of what he knows ; for the result of his education is to give him a thirst for knowledge and for doing all things rightly, in which he forgets to pride himself on what he knows or on what he does rightly ; forgets himself and his own achievements altogether. He, himself, exists only in a certain relation with the universe outside him ; he opens out to all that is good or true or beautiful as a plant opens out to the sun ; and the proper aim of educa¬ tion is to make men open out thus, forgetting them¬ selves and their own status in the warmth and light of their fellowship with the universe outside them. But education cannot achieve this aim, or even possess it, if it appeals to any sense of status in the pupil. Mr. Richmond speaks of the wider ideal of Comenius, which was also shared by Pestalozzi, the ideal of education “ as the service of humanity, not merely as the culture of a superior caste, which sufficed for the educational idealism of Milton and Locke.” Pestalozzi wished all children to be edu¬ cated, not merely that they might " do their duty in that state of life to which it should please God to call them,” but so that they might be fully developed human beings. The child was to him a child and not a member of some particular class ; and so it has been with all the great modern educators who have followed him. They have been freed from pedantry because they have been freed from the INTRODUCTION xix sense of status. The Kindergarten, said Froebel, is the free republic of childhood. It would be im¬ possible to base Froebel’s principles upon any sense of status whatever. He believed in the free activity of the child’s mind and in an incessant appeal to that activity. Education for him was a means of achieving freedom, a freedom from that conflict in the mind which is itself slavery, because it is im¬ potence. But he further believed that this freedom ought to be attained to by all human beings ; and it can only be so attained to if all human beings wish to attain to it in common. As soon as it is regarded as a privilege of some one class, superior either in birth, in riches or in culture, it cannot be attained to at all, for the very sense of superiority is itself a slavery. The individual who belongs to the superior class and whose morality is based on his sense of superiority, is the slave of his class. He submits to its ideas so that he may feel superior, and not to the voice of his own conscience. It is the faith of all great educators that conscience in all men is the same, so far as it really is conscience and the inner voice. But when it is an outer voice, then it is subject to the differences of class or nationality. It is something which does not speak in a man’s own mind, something rather which is spoken to that mind and obeyed from cowardice or pride. And this obedience, so far from being education, is the XX PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION very opposite of it. For it enslaves the mind rather than frees it; enslaves it intellectually no less than morally. It imposes a uniformity rather than dis¬ covers that unity which is in the minds of all men ; imposes a set of values which are local and tem¬ porary rather than leads men to discover those values which are universal and everlasting. Always, as I have said, education has been hampered by this sense of status; always the theories of the great educators have been more or less perverted in practice, because there never has been a general desire in any society for equality of education. The arguments against it are very plausible. It is obviously absurd to attempt to educate the peasant in just the same way as the peer. Pestalozzi insisted, as Mr. Richmond points out, that “ popular education must take the life of the people where it finds it, and, in awakening and developing the minds of children, must keep them in touch with the domestic realities among which they are growing up.” Indeed the very effort to educate them above those realities is itself the result of a sense of status. It is an effort to make them fit for a superior class, not to improve the life of that class to which they belong. To despair of the common people, to establish a system of educa¬ tion which offers to the cleverest children a chance of escaping from their own class, that is only the INTRODUCTION xxi pedantic madness produced by the sense of status. What we need is an education that will enrich the life of all classes, of the poor and stupid no less than of the rich and clever ; and we cannot aim at such an education, or even conceive it, unless we empty our minds of the sense of status, and of intellectual no less than of social status. There must be peasants and we need an education that will teach them to be good peasants and will give them a chance of enjoying the peasant life. Such an education we cannot provide unless we cease altogether to despise peasants, to regard the peasant lot as the penalty of stupidity from which the cleverer children of the peasant class can be encouraged to escape. The brotherhood of the whole nation, that is what we should aim at in our education, and we cannot aim at it unless we rid ourselves of our own sense of status. If we despise the peasant, we shall teach him to despise his own lot, however artfully we may conceal our contempt from him. And in despising him or any other class, we shall pervert our educa¬ tion no less than his. We are always talking about the minds of those who are to be educated, but in doing so we are apt to forget the mind of the educator. Yet every weakness in his mind, every wrong idea that he has absorbed from his surroundings, is sure to betray itself in his teaching. It is not enough that xxii PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION he shall know facts accurately or shall be able to impart them. If he has himself any sense of status, whether social or intellectual, he will impart it also like a poison to his pupils. The stupid ones he will make conscious of their stupidity, the clever he will make dangerously conscious of their cleverness; and inevitably he will value most the kind of facul¬ ties which he himself possesses. So a pedant or a prig will train some of his pupils into pedants or prigs and others into a blind rebellion against his pedantry or priggishness. That is how the sense of intellectual status works and has worked all through the ages. It raises the same prejudice against education as is raised by the self-righteous against religion. But, as true religion destroys self- righteousness, so true education destroys the sense of status, and particularly of intellectual status. The pedant and the prig are men who have had a wrong education, as the Pharisee is one who has a wrong religion. By their fruits ye shall know them ; and humility is the fruit of true education as of true religion. Since Mr. Richmond has said so much in this book about the positive side of education, since he has traced the main ideas which have given life to it all through the ages, I may be excused perhaps for speaking of those errors which have deadened it all through the ages. The great negative task INTRODUCTION XXlll for us now is to rid our education, for all classes, of this sense of status. Our ideal must be to educate all as men and women, as members of the nation, so that all may be able to enjoy the fulness of that life which the nation offers to its children. If we have that purpose we shall communicate it also to those whom we teach ; our whole education will be quickened by it, and we shall find a new meaning in the words, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these little ones ye have done it unto Me.” A. CLUTTON-BROCK. THE PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION I JEWISH AND GREEK IDEALS HE stirring of a new sense of educational re- J- sponsibility, in these days so strongly felt by all who are laying to heart the lessons of Europe’s catastrophe, makes increasingly urgent the need for a unified body of educational doctrine. Diver- sity of aim and method has been not the least vital factoi in the very real and enheartening progress of recent years ; but the need for a realized unity in diversity, nay, more, for an organized unity, is becoming more and more articulate as we look forward into times that will call aloud for a genera¬ tion united in thoughtful citizenship and in en¬ lightened goodwill. We are all aware that the approach to unity must be spontaneous and general if it is to be real. Organization in such a cause as ours must be no cut-and-dried system, but the ex¬ pression of a continually developing impulse to unify and co-ordinate our ideals ; and we all feel it B 2 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION a duty to reach out and come into touch with the general aspiration—to become ourselves better citizens of the educational world. In the general search for unifying principles we may be sure that one mode of mutual approach will be of constant and unique value : the seeking out of permanent educational truths that have vindicated their position in the past. Many such truths we can trace, unchanged despite all differ¬ ences in their application, down to a definite place among the realized principles of our own day. Others we may find to have fallen into neglect ; and it may well be that some of these half-forgotten truths will prove capable of bridging the gaps, or penetrating the barriers, that divide one realized educational principle from another and so give rise to unnecessary divergences of theory. It is with the hope of making some small contribution to a general synthesis of opinion that certain ideals of bygone civilizations and of the great educators of the past will be traced, in this and succeeding chapters, with regard to the educational questions that confront us now and for the future. Let us start with a single instance, one of the most awkwardly two-edged questions that confront us when we think of the work that education has to do for the cause of the world’s peace in the future. It is a question that finds an immediate if only a partial answer in the example of one of the peoples in the past. Our present desire is to train up a 3 JEWISH AND GREEK IDEALS generation whose life and hope need not be sacri- ficially poured out in the heroic prosecution of war, but may be turned to the wise maintenance of the peace that has her victories no less renowned ; and the desire brings us to a whole series of dilemmas, all part of the age-long paradox of war, with its heroisms and its horrors. We face perhaps the most obvious dilemma that is before us when we ask what outlook upon war itself and upon preparedness for war is to be fostered in the minds of the young. Is the word to be Arm or Disarm ? Put in these terms the anti- tithesis seems complete ; no middle course appears. Yet either precept carries its inevitable peril. Both principles leave out some essential safeguard ; both have that flavour of plausible onesidedness which characterizes a half-truth. To rearm is to pile up new potential for another orgy of destruction. To disarm is to surrender national vitality, strength of purpose and power for good, to a lax fatalism that might well invite the obliteration of our value among the civilizing forces of the world. It is a very real dilemma, and its solution is not to be found in any immediate, easy formula. But we can begin by casting back to see what efforts have been made by peoples in the past to combine the ideal of a purposeful vitality, strong to resist any suppression of its essential character, with the con¬ trasted ideal of peaceful progress towards higher civilization, avoiding conflict and all the waste and 4 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION wrong and horror that conflict involves. To take the earliest of such peoples whose history is on record, we find the problem continually to the fore, in a crude and simple form, in the early story of the Jewish race. Here are warriors who could fight grimly and nobly, yet whose ideal was to keep clear of conflict and of the warring powers around them. Their outlook so far justified itself that they excelled in civilization—if by civilization we mean the development of high human quality— all the great contemporary nations ; and not only excelled, but survived them. What was the essen¬ tial feature of the paternal or the priest-given education of the Jew ? What must have been at the root of the teaching in those early Hebrew universities, the schools of the prophets, unique training grounds of wisdom and inspiration, of which the Old Testament gives us so tantalizing a glimpse ? We might define it, for our purpose, as the inculcation of a supreme sense of the national conscience as residing in the individual. Some such sense has been known to us, in vague and childish form, perhaps, in the esprit de corps of a public school or a regiment; nationally we have known it all too little. The Prussian system, on the other hand, inculcates the exact opposite : a blind sub¬ servience to a conscienceless spirit of national self- aggrandizement. To any such spirit we may oppose, if we learn from the Jewish nation at its best, not the mere absence of a like evil in our own JEWISH AND GREEK IDEALS 5 midst, but the positive development of the nation’s conscience, in microcosm, in every individual. Armed avowedly and manifestly for conscience sake, and on the sole ground that conscience un¬ armed is not yet safe in an imperfect world, a nation has adopted a principle which, once recog¬ nized, disarms the jealousy and mistrust that attend a blind accumulation of power. But although the Jews realized this principle in part, their own story shows how easily they could forget it and run after the gods of power for power’s sake. Their prophets taught not wholly but largely in vain. We shall have to consider in this survey of education not only the teaching of principles, but also the principles of teaching, which involve the turning of the ideal into the real, so that a right feeling may find anchorage in reality, and so be able to express itself consistently and increasingly in right action. But this is a theme for later con¬ sideration ; our first purpose is to elicit a few general ideals ; and the Jewish thought of self and society as a union having one conscience and one responsibility is carried as deep in the great litera¬ ture of the prophets as the related thought of the union of both society and self with the will of God. We may contrast with such an educational ideal the spirit fostered in one at least of the civilizations contemporary with the Jews, as that civilization is described by a Greek soldier-chronicler. Xeno¬ phon’s account of Persian education can hardly be 6 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION taken as simple reporting without ulterior motive ; he seems to idealize it somewhat, being anxious to commend its simplicities to the sophisticated Greeks of his time ; but the Persian system, with Xeno¬ phon’s bias all in its favour, comes down to us as having its roots in a shallow principle. The interest of this is that it singularly resembles a principle still of wide acceptance and sufficiency among oui- selves. Keep youth fit, and active, and honourable, and nothing else is of great account ; that is the prevailing note. The principle cannot be ques¬ tioned in respect of its admirable positive content; its peril is on the negative side, in the many things that it deliberately leaves out. It sufficed to grow human material for the building of a Persian em¬ pire, great and largely good ; it did not suffice to preserve the empire and the material from decay. Fitness and activity, alone, can build, but they cannot rightly enjoy—there supervenes a kind of fatty degeneration of the spirit. A code of honour left too much in vacuo is all too vulnerable in the later years. What were the things that the Persian system left out ? For a partial answer we may turn to Greek education. To simplify very crudely a highly complex phenomenon, we may say that the keynote of Greek education at its best is a great and a pure aesthetic. The Greeks did know how to enjoy ; even those of the stoic reaction, who saw the danger of caring overmuch for the enjoyments of the senses, turned JEWISH AND GREEK IDEALS 7 only to a remoter and a subtler aestheticism. The Greek system superadded to a more than Persian code of fitness and honour a great faculty for fruition. It may be said that the ultimate and terrible decline of the Greek worship of beauty, moral, intellectual, and physical, cast Hellenism in the eyes of Rome, and so, later, of Christendom, under a cloud from which it has never fully emerged. The true Hellenism has never yet come back into its own, as we feel whenever we look at a Greek statue ; and if the civilization of to-day is sick and ugly and restless with materialism, it is largely for lack of that high power of fruition. There is an urgency in healthy mankind to make and make, come what will of the making. At times the activity seems to be no higher than that of bees in a hive who, industrialized by the modern bee¬ keeper, go on making more and more honey in excess of their possible needs, knowing not at all what happens to the surplus. So it was in a measure for one stratum of the Greek community—the slaves, to whose importance in the Greek scheme of things we must presently look back; but of the polity of Greek freemen it is broadly true to say that it possessed one indispensable inspiration that preserves the works of man from degenerating into a mere aimless, unhappy agglomeration of the wealth that Ruskin called “ illth ” and of the power that is only a peril. The Greeks made beauty, not in a few but in all their works, from sculpture and 8 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION poetic drama to athleticism, from philosophy to politics ; and they made it because they wanted it. The desire that went to the making became the joy of fruition in achievement, and from that joy in turn sprang fresh desire, so long as Greece was healthy and made joy an active and creative, not a passive and consumptive, factor in life. How the desire arose, unless it is native to the human spirit, it is impossible to say. How it grew and extended was by the continual impulse to new expression and new fruition. How the achievement of each generation was handed down to the next through the educational system—apart from the sense in which all Greece was in itself an educational system—is well told in the late Mr. Kenneth Free¬ man’s book, Schools of Hellas. Our concern here is rather with the aesthetic principle as a value that has permanent significance in education. Is it possible that Greece was wrong ? Greece fell; was the fall because of, or in spite of, the aesthetic principle ? To compare our own systems with the Hellenic it would almost seem as though we had decided upon the former opinion. It is easy, by a simple confusion of mind, to drift into the belief that a sense of beauty is a very good thing in moderation, but that too much of it is dangerous. The good sense that lurks in this belief depends upon a loose em¬ ployment of the term “ too much ”—a purely rela¬ tive term that is often used, to save thinking, as though it meant something in itself. A very little JEWISH AND GREEK IDEALS 9 thought brings conviction that it is impossible to have too much sense of beauty, but that it is entirely possible to lack the other principles which can preserve an intense feeling for the beautiful upon the pathway of high aspiration, and keep the way of hedonistic degeneracy closed. For a long time Hellenism kept its poise and pro¬ portion—for long enough to build up a standard of human living that has in many ways been unap¬ proached and unapproachable ever since. It turned the high achievement of Greece in that friendly conquest of nature—including human nature— which is called civilization, into an exemplary work of art—of that true art which is the harmonious re¬ interpretation of Nature. If Hellenism, conserving for a time and marvellously embellishing what Greece had won, could not in the end conserve itself, the cause must surely be sought not in any taint inherent in beauty, but in the lack of some other principles of permanence that must be the object of our further quest. Meanwhile, is it idle to talk of beauty when the thought at the back of our minds is the rebuilding of a shattered Europe ? There is no good building without beauty, whether we speak of architecture or of the structures of spirit. And to revert for a moment to the Jewish ideal, can the union of self and society in a State that has both consciousness and conscience be achieved in a civilization which disregards beauty ? There is a danger that educa- 10 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION lion may neglect beauty in the interests of stern reality, just as there has been a danger that the State might neglect education, which is economy, in the interests of economy. Little doubt will be left whether this investigation of ours leads to reality in education. The doubt that needs to be raised is whether reality can be found without invoking the spirit of Praxiteles as well as of Isaiah. And those whose only watchward is economy might be attracted by the suggestion that, aiming at beauty in simplification, we should economize in unnecessary ugliness. II ROMAN AND MEDIEVAL IDEALS E have seen that the unique faculty of V V fruition developed by the Greeks did not suffice to conserve their civilization. Something gave way. A lesion appeared in the Greek organism. We all know why, if we are content with a negative explanation : Greek civilization was founded, eco¬ nomically, upon slavery. The crude, indispensable physical ultimates of social life were the hopeless privilege of slaves ; while the masters of Greece, the initiate of her mysteries, became divorced in increasing measure from reality, and their aesthetic attainment became an accelerating landslide into eroticism. The Greek joy in beauty lost its creative¬ ness ; the impulse to make, which is nothing if it is not also the impulse to serve, faded from a social order where service carried the stigma of servitude, where work and enjoyment came more and more to be thought the concern of different castes. Creative joy dies out in a world of the ready-made. Slavery is the negative reason for the Greek degringolade ; but it is of the positive factors that we are in search. What, in positive terms, was the ii 12 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION missing principle in a system that evolved a high aesthetico-moral ideal, a glorious art, and the least unsatisfactory political method known to history, and yet fell into decadence ? Freedom, of course, is the antithesis of slavery. But we must be patient for a while. Freedom is not to be pinned down by a word or a phrase. We must wait for Rousseau before we find even a naive and unbalanced expres¬ sion of social liberty as an educational ideal, though we shall see the reality in some degree accomplished in medieval times. Those who inherited the Greek empire of ideas did not even inherit all the Greek inspiration of partial freedom. The Romans, inspired by the Hellenistic ideal, had to interpret that ideal within the compass of their own heroic but materialistic limitations. Primarily Rome sought another aspect of the great truth ; and Rome also failed in the very climax of success. But the Roman spirit im¬ ported a new ideal into the history of civilization, an ideal that has survived the changes of fifteen hundred years. To-day in any discussion of respec¬ tive national values a Frenchman identifies himself proudly with la race latine. He appeals thereby to no racial fact, as the ethnologists remind us with tired persistence, but to an idea. The res publica embodied a thought that has had a common meaning for the Gracchi, for Caesar Augustus, for Charle¬ magne, and for the idealists of the French Revolu¬ tion. Every Gothic and Frankish combination in ROMAN AND MEDIEVAL IDEALS 13 the middle history of Europe that aspired to unify the European peoples sought the sanction of the old title and called itself a Roman empire. This was not only for the associations of power and dominion that the name carried. Rome was not only a name of power ; the title symbolized a claim to reliance and loyalty that rests upon more than force. There was a kind of vast homeliness about the Roman ideal. The Romans themselves were not only conquerors first, protectors afterwards, and finally, in their decadence, parasites upon the peoples whom they had conquered. There was some¬ thing other than the sense of Rome’s protection that niade a Briton of the second century proud to be enrolled a Roman citizen. Rome was possessed of a certain unifying spirit; and it is a spirit that has haunted Western Europe from the time of the Gothic irruption upon Rome’s decadence until the present day. Can we identify any aspect of this spirit with a corresponding aspect of Roman education ? The essence of Roman teaching was Rome. In the days of Rome’s ascendant greatness citizenship was taught as perhaps it has never been taught before or since. And the person to whom we have first to look for an explanation is the Roman mother. It was deliberately made an essential part of the Roman system that for seven years a child should be in his mother’s keeping. The State stood aside, and trusted to maternal care ; and we know that 14 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION that which is trusted, grows. Roman motherhood, growing in influence and responsibility, grew into alliance with the Roman ideal as a whole. Those first seven years of the Roman child’s life were all important. Roma Dea herself directed the first determining perceptions and ideals of her sons and daughters, in the person of the Roman matron ; and this was possible by reason of a splendid identi¬ fication between motherhood and the motherland. Roman motherhood, invested with all the dignity of Rome, vindicated its high status naturally and inevitably ; and the soul of his country for the Roman was made visible in the sight or memory of the eyes into which he had looked most deeply as a child. This was feminine enfranchisement indeed. Can we hope for the reattainment of such an ideal, as modern womanhood rises to a new dignity of service ? Past vagaries of agitation apart, a new order is or¬ ganically accomplishing itself; and it may be that our millions of domestic glories and tragedies to-day are destined to have a collective outcome in the deeper recognition of what motherhood means to the State. Further, there is promise in the growing tendency of the modern educated mother towards an eager realization of opportunities rather than an alarmed desire to delegate responsibilities. It does not follow that if we come to effect a revaluation of the Roman motherhood-ideal in our own times we shall have to make the same demand upon the time and energy of mothers as the Romans ROMAN AND MEDIEVAL IDEALS 15 made. Our conditions are widely different from theirs, to say the least; and it is the essence of the enfranchisement that is actually taking place, apart from its political symbol and instrument, that women are finding wider spheres of interest and influence in every activity that affects the condi¬ tions of to-day. On the other side of the picture we have the kindergarten and the Montessori school developing methods of teaching the young child which at their best are essentially motherly, and very much more educative than the methods that any but a tiny minority of mothers could apply. Does this mean a delegation of the mother’s responsibilities ? It should mean only their better expression through a higher social organization. All civilized advance depends upon increasing division of labour, upon increasing specialism coupled with increasing co-operation; and the expert teacher of young children is a specialist who co-operates with the mother to effect a higher ex¬ pression of maternal responsibility than the mother could contrive by herself. But our danger lies always in producing our specialists and then for¬ getting about the co-operation ; we achieve dif¬ ferences of function without the unity in diversity that gives them value, if we neglect the link of a union in understanding and aim between the specialist and those for whom the specialist works. An imitation Romanism that would close the kindergartens and infant schools and send the 16 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION children back to their nurseries—or to distracted kitchen living-rooms—is not a revaluation of the Roman idea. We can see the true revaluation being brought about in the increase of maternal interest in and understanding of the work of schools, giving hope that co-operation between home and school may become a vital interchange, and the school a true reflection of the desires of an understanding motherhood. A Roman mother, reincarnate in these times, can hardly be imagined as resting satisfied with getting her “ jewels ” conveniently out of the way, or remaining detached from the activities of their daily absence. And the modern State, realizing that it cannot usurp the function of mother-training without the inspiration of mother wit, may perhaps learn to enlist the co-operation of mothers along the lines that private philanthropy has already begun to mark out. But much thought¬ ful care is needed to translate the spontaneous simplicity of the Roman system into terms of the complex realities of to-day. We leave aside a great body of interesting detail with regard to Roman education in thus abstracting the ideal of State motherhood for a'central generali¬ zation ; and we must recognize that this, like all generalizations, is in part a figure of speech. But, in making it, we are endeavouring, to symbolize, if no more, a great underlying reality of Roman life. And it is interesting to watch the progress and the continuity in change of this motherhood-ideal. The ROMAN AND MEDIEVAL IDEALS 17 Christian era came upon a Rome already sickening from the luxury and artificiality that resulted from her parasitism upon the provinces. Roma Dea had become gross and lazy, a cushioned deity. What more natural than that a mother Church should begin to take her place—that a Church in process of formation and organization should seek to satisfy the demand for a motherhood-ideal ? Gradually but completely the Church took over the function of universalized motherhood, and did much, we may think, if not all, to conserve it in safe harbourage through the welter and chaos that succeeded. the Gothic irruption. As comparative order grew out of chaos there began what may be summarized as the Romantic Era, with chivalry as its fundamental note. The motherhood-ideal had found its shrine and its position of mild, austere dignity in Church worship, and the preux chevalier found his secular inspiration in the Lady of the Lists. It may be something more than a fancy that this universal spirit of knightly romance had its correspondence with the principal fact of the times : civilization was now not a mother to be revered, but a mistress to be won. It is typical of the synthetic genius of Charlemagne, the author of the finest of all the attempts at a new “ Roman Empire ” and of the attempt that had the most lasting influence, that he should have seen educa¬ tional opportunity in the stirrings and strivings of the knightly impulse, and laboured to unify the c i8 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION teaching of chivalry with the religious and scholarly training of the monastic schools. Not only did he develop the famous “ palace school ” that accom¬ panied the Royal Court from place to place into a genuinely educational institution, with the help of the eighth-century English educator, Alcuin of York ; his capitularies of the years 787 and 789, containing instructions to the heads of schools, bear witness to the zealous care with which he and Alcuin supervised and broadened the activities of the monastic schools themselves. Our own Board of Education circulars breathe no deeper spirit of solicitude. Knighthood alone, and romantic knighthood at that, for all its splendour of spirit, might well have led the social order of the Middle Ages into a blind alley, but that its very character, generously un- repressive in the main, permitted the growth of another and a complementary ideal. It was not a knightly and a priestly order in sole alliance that produced Gothic architecture, that amazing proof of a sustained and an ever-developing corporate vitality. The successive miracles of the Gothic bear witness to the long continuance of a fine ideal of craftsmanship and to the high regard in which the individual craftsman was held. Greek architecture could be noble and free in design but slavish in exe¬ cution ; nothing but the labour and the love of free men could have built the cathedral of Chartres or Lincoln. Besides the primary pervading influence of ROMAN AND MEDIEVAL IDEALS 19 the Christian spirit of common worship and service there was an education that upheld and developed the ideal of craftsmanship. It was almost entirely an education of apprenticeship in studio and work¬ shop, though it is likely that the burghers’ schools, the educational institutions of the well-to-do mer¬ chant class, contributed in the awakening of young minds to thought and appreciation that bore fruit later in noble design or in generous and discrim¬ inating support for the work of others. We shall touch later upon the causes, often enough expounded by now, of the decline of craftsmanship, and upon the broad lines along which it may perhaps be revived as a living and a civilizing force. William Morris and his school have done much— very much more than is generally realized—not to revive the old ideal in its old form (always a hopeless task for reformers, whose business indeed is the re-forming of the old), but to make the revaluation of the old ideal the inspiration of the new. The work done in some of our county schools, reflecting the inspiration of Morris in every harmony of thought with substance, bears witness to a true revival that is struggling to make itself felt. But meanwhile many idealist workers in the same field have treated the subject of craftsmanship as though nothing were possible but a sheer, uncompromising return to the medieval ideal as it was, which would involve an impossible return—fortunately impos¬ sible in most respects—to medieval conditions. Can 20 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION it be hoped that our sporadic and tentative little colonies of medievalist handworkers will reassemble after the war to be the seed of a new luxuriance of free craftsmanship ? Probably the most they can do is to keep a spark of the old ideal alive—a far from negligible function. A much greater hope lies in broadening the basis of education till every worker grow's up a craftsman in thought and feeling—and until the term “ worker ” becomes a title of honour, bestowed upon craftsmanship of mind and hand alike, not the supercilious label of a class distinction. This is part of a very necessary revolution in our educational system—a revolution that the gigantic shock of war may help to bring about, and a revolu¬ tion that would give us a new and a more stable social order by a process of natural and organic development—an order quite different, in all likeli¬ hood, from any that has been propounded, ready¬ made, by the wisest of political theorists. We can use so slippery a phrase as “ broadening the basis ” of education only in earnest of an attempt to define what it should imply, not only in relation to labour and craftsmanship, but to the whole field of educational problems. Pursuing our roughly historical method we find that from the Middle Ages onwards educational ideals become crystal¬ lized in the teaching of individual educators ; and it is in tracing the main tendencies to which certain of these great representatives have given expression that we shall hope, now, to elicit some general ROMAN AND MEDIEVAL IDEALS 21 synthesis of educational beliefs. The passions that inspired the great achievements of civilization in the past are, in a sense, irrecoverable ; in an exact and literal sense nothing can be again what it has been. But there is no bygone ideal that cannot find its reincarnation in the thought of some new pioneer ; and the great educators of our own era have re¬ vitalized, as we shall see, much of the inspiration that has been the glory of the past, besides fore¬ shadowing the ideals on which our hope for the future depends. This chapter has omitted, or passed over with a couple of bare, tentative references, the introduc¬ tion into education, as into the story of civilized life as a whole, of a greater uplifting and civilizing force than any upon which this book will directly touch. The opening of the Christian epoch raises questions that go far wider and deeper than the Roman ideal of State motherhood or the medieval ideals of chivalry and of craftsmanship. But the direct teaching of Christianity has become a controversial subject, so intricately controversial that a book of this character could not attempt to disengage the issues that are involved in it. If this is a confession of weakness, it is only one voice in a general con¬ fession. Among the things left undone that we ought to have done has been the bringing out of the unity that underlies the diversities of religious thought; and the result is intellectual chaos in spiritual matters. We shall trace the gradual 22 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION struggle of educational thought towards the edu¬ cational unities ; and it may be that with man’s still further realization of these a spirit will be bred that will dispute less about Christ’s teachings and carry them out more. Ill THE RENAISSANCE I T is difficult to imagine the glow of enthusiasm amid which the foundations were laid of our tradition of classical culture, when the spirit of Hellas was a glorious rediscovery and teachers of Greek were sought out eagerly and with difficulty by those who had caught a spark of the new fire that was abroad. It is all too easy, on the other hand, to forget the magnitude of our debt to the early humanist educators, remembering only the formalism and sterility into which the classical side of their ideal, divorced from their abundant vitality of interest in natural science, speedily lapsed in the hands of their later misinterpreted. It was pre¬ cisely such formalism against which they warred, and so often warred in vain. The lifeless scholiast reappears in every generation ; and Petrarch’s scathing account of the teaching of his times is applicable, mutatis mutandis, to much of our classical work to-day. But the right reaction from a dead classicism must always be in the direction of a live classicism, not of a revolt against the misused classics themselves. The inheritance of the true 2 3 24 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION classic spirit always has been, and perhaps always will be, the privilege, or the choice, of the few ; but those few are the guardians of a fountain of living water upon whose continued flow an essential part of the vitality of literature and philosophy depends. Neither is their guardianship without the value that is called practical, though we may recall the fact only when such an incident occurs as the calling of an eminent scholar and literary critic to the rescue of military education, because subalterns, products of our public school training in classic literature, were found incapable of writing a lucid dispatch. This particular occurrence of only a few years ago points with a neatness all its own to the double moral that formal classicism stifles, and that what formal classicism has stifled only living classicism can revive. But the influence of live scholarship, which means something other than a scholarship that so neglects the mother tongue as to teach the translating of ^Bschylus to English boys who have never been taught to translate Chaucer, touches the practical side of life at a thou¬ sand points. To neglect classics for the practicali¬ ties of science is exactly as foolish as to neglect science for classics. How much of the prevailing ignorance of the teachings of science, in such matters as child-welfare for example, is due on the one hand to lack of the sound literary training that makes for intelligent reading, and on the other to the expression of the root conclusions of science in THE RENAISSANCE 25 language bristling with unnecessary technicalities and devoid of scholarly lucidity ? Something very like our modern trouble in deter¬ mining the place of science was to follow the partial decline of humanist education, when the “ realists ” began to assert the advantages of scientific training. But it must not be forgotten that the best early exponents of the classic ideal were also those who best paved the way for the coming realist movement. Vittorius was “ the first modern schoolmaster ” ; Melanchthon, a classical enthusiast, advocated the addition of physics, mathematics, and astronomy to school curricula; Erasmus, a humanist par excellence, wished to introduce geography, arith¬ metic, and natural science. The realist educators are often regarded as having saved the educational situation when the humanists had landed the schools in hopeless formalism ; it would be more true to say that they carried on and developed the work of the best humanists, though it is true enough that they carried it out of the reach of many unworthy heirs of the humanist ideal. Then, as now, there was a classic spirit that was ready and eager to reach out and come into touch with the modern, conscious of its own vitality and of all that it had to give as well as to gain by contact with the newer developments of thought. Then, as at all times and in all human activities, there was a self-sufficient band of formalists receding from educational evolu¬ tion along their appointed blind alley ; but, essen- 26 PERMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION tially, the task of the great reformers, “ humanist ” and