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ENGLISH FOR THE ENGLISH 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 C. F. CLAY, Manager 
 
 LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.C.4 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. 
 
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 CALCUTTA ' MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 
 
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 TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OF 
 
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 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
English for the English 
 
 A CHAPTER ON NATIONAL EDUCATION 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE SAMPSON 
 
 Hon. M.A. Cambridge 
 ST John's college 
 
 I love Rome, but London better; I favour Italy, but England more; 
 I honour the Latin, but I worship the English. 
 
 Richard Mulcaster (1582). 
 
 To reconcile man as he is to the world as it is, to preserve and improve 
 all that is good, and destroy or alleviate all that is evil, in physical and 
 moral nature — have been the hope and aim of the greatest teachers 
 and ornaments of our species. 
 
 Thomas Love Peacock (18 18). 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1922 
 
TO 
 
 M. AND D, 
 
 First Ediiuni 1921, 
 Reprinted 1921, 1922. 
 
G5-S 
 
 .? 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE main subject of this essay is the education of boys and 
 girls up to the age of fourteen or fifteen. The children con- 
 cerned will be found (i) in the Elementary Schools, (2) in the 
 Preparatory Schools, (3) in the lower forms of the Secondary 
 Schools. My experience having lain with boys in the first of 
 these groups, I have naturally made them the theme of my dis- 
 course; but most of the matter is equally applicable to the other 
 two groups. I ndeed, I hope that teachers of all grades and subj ects 
 will find something here to interest them. What I hope for most 
 of all is to find a few readers among the general public, all of 
 whom, remember, as citizens, tax-payers, rate-payers or parents, 
 are vitally concerned in education. There is a Navy League to 
 stimulate general interest in the Navy and make the Estimates 
 seem worth while. Will someone found an Education League? 
 
 I have wandered now and then from my specific ground of 
 juvenile instruction into wider fields of education; but I do not 
 apologise and I do not repent. Digression is sometimes the better 
 part of travel. 
 
 As I am unwilling to ask for more than one revolution at a 
 time, I have taken the present organisation (or rather no organisa- 
 tion) of schools as it is, and I have said nothing about such 
 interesting topics as: (i) whether all education after the age of 
 twelve ought not to be considered as secondary education, 
 but not necessarily of one kind; (2) whether Central Schools, 
 Higher Grade Schools, Higher Standard Schools, Continuation 
 Schools and all other devices of Authority for evading the pro- 
 vision of a proper scheme of secondary education ought not to 
 be abolished; (3) whether the present elaborate isolation of 
 Secondary Schools from the main elementary high road, as shown 
 by the difference in scale of building and equipment, in status and 
 pay of teachers, in size of classes, and even in such trifles as length 
 of school day, incidence of term, and duration of holiday is not a 
 displayof diseased class consciousness and, therefore, unnatural and 
 provocative; (4) whether the official depreciation of elementary 
 
 520332 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 education as an inferior branch of public service implying social 
 and intellectual inferiority in the teachers is not a real cause of the 
 fatal shortage of teachers, especially of men teachers; (5) whether 
 training colleges are not now ripe for extinction instead of ex- 
 tension, their work in the education of prospective teachers being 
 done by the universities, to which it properly belongs, and whether 
 the people who imagine that teachers are taught how to teach in 
 the training colleges should not be reminded that there is only 
 one place in which a person can learn how to teach, and that is 
 the school — that, in fact, one learns how to teach by teaching. 
 
 All these are modest questions which I shall not discuss at die 
 moment. The revolution I am now asking for is a bloodless 
 revolution, involving no more than a conversion or change of 
 heart in teachers and officials, and the destruction of most 
 existing time-tables and syllabuses. In fact, I am asking for 
 nothing new at all. I merely propose that certain aspects of school 
 work, now dimly recognised as desirable, should be clearly recog- 
 nised as the most important of all, and made the chief charge upon 
 the available time and energy. As an inevitable corollary (time 
 being as short as ever) some of the school subjects now receiving 
 most attention will have to receive less. Briefly, what I urge in 
 these pages is that elementary education must be elementary — 
 that it should aim at beginning something, and not at finishing 
 everything. I hasten to assure the suspicious tax-payer who 
 buttons up his pockets at the sound of the word education that 
 the reform I propose will not add a farthing to national expen- 
 diture, but will give better value for money spent. 
 
 These pages resume the substance and sometimes the actual 
 words of various articles, addresses and memoranda of mine, 
 ranging over a period of several years. Any authority they possess 
 must derive from the fact that they present, not the speculations 
 of a theorist, but the convictions of a teacher who has been 
 engaged in elementary school work for twenty-five years, and 
 who feels more certain with every added year that the present 
 elementary system is a failure and needs re-orientation. I believe 
 that the great purpose of education is not to make people know 
 something but to make people be something. I believe that pur- 
 pose is not at present fulfilled by our schools. 
 
 I believe that the recommended interest of teachers in the 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 'science' of education — in * psycho-analysis' (imported from 
 Germany) in 'tests of intelligence' (imported from France) and 
 in 'experimental psychology' (imported from America) — means 
 excessive concern with the heads of children and no concern for 
 their souls. 
 
 I believe that recent gospels of anarchy urging that children 
 must never be instructed or restrained, but that they must always 
 be allowed to do just what they like, v/hen they like and how they 
 like, are false to the purpose of education, which is to prepare 
 mankind, not merely to live, but to live together in human fellow- 
 ship and reasonable subordination, here and now, in the very 
 world that is the world of all of us. 
 
 I believe that the course now followed in schools is in 
 substance unpractical and fanciful, that it does not give the 
 public what the public wants. I believe that this is true, not only 
 of the elementary schools, but of all schools that deal with the 
 education of 'juveniles.' If I may, without irreverence, parody 
 a question sacred to a beautiful legend, I want to ask briefly and 
 pointedly. Quo vadis, dominie? What exactly are you about? 
 Have you any clear notion of what you are trying to do for our 
 boys and girls? Adapting other phrases (not at all sacred, but not 
 without beauty); I urge in this essay that all English children, 
 whatever their schools may be called, shall have a practical 
 education that will fit them for their station in life. What their 
 station in life really is, is a question we have scarcely yet begun 
 to ask ourselves. The future of the nation depends upon how 
 we answer it. 
 
 G. S. 
 
 Barnes, 
 
 July 14, 1921. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 PRELIMINARY . 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 11. 
 
 A PLEA .... 
 
 15 
 
 III. 
 
 A PROGRAMME . 
 
 40 
 
 IV. 
 
 CONCLUSION . 
 
 . . 96 
 
 V. 
 
 EPILOGUE . 
 
 IIO 
 
I 
 
 Preliminary 
 
 LORDE God, howe many good and clene wittes of children 
 be nowe a dayes perisshed by ignorant schoie maisters. 
 
 Sir Thomas Elyot. 
 
 HA L F a century ago, the State decreed that all its children 
 should receive some sort of instruction. For those who 
 could pay, there already existed many schools, public and private, 
 endowed by deceased benefactors or conducted for personal profit. 
 These ranged from Eton and Winchester to Miss Pinkerton's 
 Academy on the Chiswick Mall. For the poorer classes there also 
 existed schools, public and private, supported by benevolent funds 
 or conducted for personal profit. These ranged from the National 
 and British Schools to the classes conducted by Mr Wopsle's great- 
 aunt. It was the privilege of the English parent to choose whether 
 his children should be instructed or not — whether his son should 
 be as tutored as Tom Jones or as unlettered as Tony Lumpkin. 
 The Education Act of 1 870 abolished this option. From that date 
 the entire youth of England had to be subjected to a recognised 
 form of instruction. This was called education. 
 
 The half-century since the passing of this Act has been a 
 wonderful period of experiment, adventure and speculation. A 
 comparison of the educational activities of 1871 with those of 
 1 92 1 discloses an amazing growth, not merely in the quantity, 
 but in the spirit and the rate of development. A period of con- 
 tented stagnation has been followed by a period of excitement. 
 Looking back we might say that the first part of those lifty years 
 was spent in an unconscious demonstration of what education is 
 not, and the second part in eager attempts to decide what educa- 
 tion is. 
 
 To this development the spirit of the age in science has contri- 
 buted. The seventeenth century was the century of mathematics. 
 
2 PRELIMINARY 
 
 the eighteenth century the century of chemistry, the nineteenth 
 century the century of biology. The twentieth century seems 
 likely to be the century of psychology — not the old psychology 
 of supposition, but the new psychology of practical investigation. 
 The schools are wonderful laboratories for experiment, and 
 teachers have already been told by persons of official importance 
 that they will not be respected unless they make definite contribu- 
 tions to educational science. The art of teaching, it would appear, 
 is not respectable. That an art is promoted by claiming to be a 
 science is a view entirely and delightfully official. It might be 
 called the traditional Front Bench view of all the arts. Certainly 
 the scientific attitude in schools is leading to a new interest in 
 children. Thereare already societies for the study of infancy, youth 
 and adolescence. The juvenile instincts, formerly assumed to be 
 wicked, are now respected and cultivated as materials. Soon, no 
 doubt, we shall go even further. Budding psychologists will walk 
 the schools as medical students walk the hospitals, and children 
 will be as useful to the educationist as dogs are to the vivisectionist. 
 They will be inoculated with doses of knowledge and tested for 
 reactions; their minds will be calibrated periodically with milli- 
 metric exactness, and their abilities neatly reduced to succinct 
 tables and beautifully sinuous curves. The psychologist will rejoice, 
 and so will the routine-loving official, whose cardiac system leaps 
 up when he beholds statistics from on high. And thus the juvenile 
 mind will be docketed and disposed of, and education comfortably 
 removed from the troublesome world of feeling. 
 
 Experimental work may be very valuable, and I am not so 
 stupid as to oppose or decry it; but it is not everybody's work, and 
 it must not be the first charge upon the energies of teachers. I 
 want teachers to remember that they are first of all healers and 
 not vivisectionists. I want them to see clearly that laboratory 
 work in school is not education, and that to test a child's mind is 
 not to teach it. Dogs are not really improved by vivisection even 
 if the mind of the vivisector is. Teachers may, if they will, con- 
 duct a series of very useful experiments in school, but that is not 
 what they are there for. Teachers go to school to practice the art 
 of teaching, not to pursue the science of education. What the 
 teacher has to consider is not the minds he can measure but the 
 souls he can save. Nothing is easier than to neglect children for 
 
PRELIMINARY 3 
 
 the pursuit of neurograms. Neurograms arc so much easier to 
 manage. Psychology can and should assist the teacher, but it must 
 not obsess the teacher. Let me put it this way: If a hungry child 
 came to you, you might find him an interesting field for a study 
 of the phenomena of starvation. You could compile illuminating 
 graphs of his reaction to various stimuli, and you might even work 
 out mathematically how long it would take him to die, and check 
 the result by experiment. You might do all these scientific things, 
 but the obvious human thing to do would be to give him some- 
 thing to eat. If teachers abandon the art of teaching for the science 
 of education, they may compile some ingenious and valuable 
 statistics; but while the shepherds are thus dallying with the de- 
 lights of mathematics, the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed. 
 
 One danger of the present passion for science has already shown 
 its head. Psychology is becoming the hand-maid of educational 
 reactionaries as chemistry became the hand-maid of the war-lords. 
 Delight in measured results means a demand for results that can 
 be measured. The tables and curves of the psychologist are taking 
 us back to examinations and a prescribed minimum standard of 
 attainment — that is, just to the old demand that has already ruined 
 the past and imperilled the future of elementary education. I say 
 * ruined,' because, with allits good intentions and its great achieve- 
 ments, our system of elementary education is a failure. This is the 
 test. An educational system that is not a failure will produce an 
 educated population. The present system obviously does not do 
 that; and it will continue not to do that, if the energy of teachers, 
 having been diverted from one kind of examination, is directed 
 towards another. Elementary education has failed because we 
 have thought too much of the children's heads and not enough of 
 their hearts. Hearts are still out of fashion in school. In spite of 
 its name psychology has nothing to do with the soul. 
 
 Much, indeed, has been accomplished in the past half-century 
 of national education; but one great need has been forgotten. We 
 have tried to educate the children: we have scarcely even tried 
 to educate the public. Before educational progress is possible the 
 public must be taught the meaning of education; and to this work 
 our official leaders and spokesmen should turn their strongest 
 efforts. The national mind must be got to see that education is 
 a spirit and not a substance. Education is not something of which 
 
4 PRELIMINARY 
 
 we must acquire a certain quantity and can then be relieved for 1 
 ever. There is no end to education. There are no * finishing schools,' 
 except in the worst sense, and most of them are that. We might 
 as well try to get in our 'teens the minimum of righteousness that 
 will admit us to heaven and consider that we are then 'finished' 
 with religion. Education is initiation, not apprenticeship. It has 
 nothing to do with trade, business or livelihood; it has no con- 
 nection with rate of wages or increase of pay. Its scale is not the 
 material scale of the market. Education is a preparation for life, 
 not merely for a livelihood, for living not for a living. Its aim is 
 to make men and women, not 'hands.' In moments of expansive- 
 ness we may admit this as an idea or ideal; but we deny it in our 
 practice. If we are really sincere, this ideal must inspire not 
 merely our educational talk, but our educational deeds. 
 
 A very admirable, hard- worki ng lady came one day to a London 
 elementary school on Care Committee business, and found that 
 the 'leavers' she wanted to interview had gone with their class 
 to a performance of Twelfth Night. " Of course," she said, quite 
 pleasantly, "it is very nice for the boys to go to the theatre, but 
 Shakespeare won't help them to earn their living." This is pro- 
 foundly true. Shakespeare will not help anyone to earn a living, 
 not even a modern actor-manager. Shakespeare is quite useless, as 
 useless as Beauty and Love and Joy and Laughter, all of which 
 many reputable persons would like to banish from the schools of 
 the poor. Yet it is in beauty and love and joy and laughter that we 
 must find the way of speaking to the soul — the soul, that does not 
 appear in the statistics and is therefore always left out of account. 
 By a dreadful inversion we conceive the proper progress of a poor 
 child to be from the Purgatory of school to the Hell of labour. 
 Happiness in the class-room is still regarded with suspicion. A 
 director of a large business house that had its own Day Con- 
 tinuation School came and watched a class of his girls reading J 
 Midsummer Nighfs Dream with an enthusiastic teacher. At the 
 end he asked, " Do they really get any good from the school or 
 do they just amuse themselves like this.f"' Teachers are no better 
 than the rest in their view of education. Their hearts are set upon 
 what they call 'practical subjects,' and when they appeal to 
 children to continue their education in evening schools, the 
 strongest argument they adduce is a possible improvement of 
 
PRELIMINARY 5 
 
 position. And so children think they learn in order to earn, and 
 cannot imagine any other purpose in learning. 
 
 Those who saw J. M. Barrie's Mary Rose will remember the 
 astonishment with which Mary Rose and her husband Simon 
 Blake discover that their Highland gillie is a prospective minister, 
 studying at the University of Aberdeen, and earning from English 
 tourists in the vacation enough to support him during term. An 
 even greater surprise awaits them: 
 
 Mary Rose. Is your father a crofter in the village.? 
 
 Cameron. He is. Ma'am, when he is not at the University of Aberdeen. 
 
 Simon. Great snakes! Does he go there too.!* 
 
 Cameron. He does so. We share a very small room between us. 
 
 Simon. Father and son! Is he going into the ministry too? 
 
 Cameron. Such is not his purpose. When he has taken his degree he will 
 
 return and be a crofter again. 
 Simon. In that case I don't see what he is getting out of it. 
 Cameron. He is getting the grandest thing in the world out of it. He is 
 
 getting education. 
 Simon. You make me feel small. 
 
 This is excellent; but it should be pointed out to Barrie that 
 Simon Blake represents, not exactly the English view, but what 
 a charitable Scotsman imagines the English view would be. That 
 Simon should say " I don't see what he is getting out of it," is 
 quite English; but that, being told the elderly student would get 
 out of it the greatest thing in the world, education, he should 
 reply " I feel small," is not English. It is merely what a Scotsman 
 would expect an Englishman to say. The spectacle of disinterested 
 education would not make an Englishman feel small; it would 
 make him feel contemptuous or hilarious. (Here, as an illustra- 
 tion of our national disinterestedness, the congregation will sing 
 Hymn 365 from Hymns Ancient and Modern : 
 
 mf. Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee 
 
 cr. Repaid a thousandfold will be; 
 
 f. Then gladly will we lend to Thee, 
 Who givest all. 
 Observe the financial ecstasy of the musical directions. The sen- 
 timent may be Ancient; it Is certainly Modern. That being the 
 national view of religion, we must not be too hopeful about dis- 
 interested education!) 
 
6 PRELIMINARY 
 
 Our English view of education is that, like honesty, it is the 
 best policy. It is an investment — a bit risky, but worth trying. 
 You put something into education and you may get a substantial 
 return. If you don't, education is a fraud. That is both the collective 
 view and the individual view. No public money is so grudged as 
 the money spent on education, and it is the expenditure that comes 
 most closely home to the bosom of the citizen, because much of 
 the cost is borne by the local rates. I suggest that the idealists who 
 want to abolish war should start a world movement for putting 
 all the armies and navies on the rates. Militarism would soon be 
 unpopular when it clearly worked out at so much in the pound 
 every quarter. 
 
 Let us repeat — and we shall say it again before the end of this 
 chapter — that education is not a 'business proposition.' It is like 
 pure religion and undefiled, without a cash value. It is not an 
 apprenticeship to a trade, and it may have no relation to success 
 in a chosen calling. Let me take a simple example. When I go 
 home at the end of a day's work, I show my season ticket to a 
 man at the door of a Tube lift. I reach the platform, and, when 
 the train arrives, the gates are opened and closed by a second man, 
 and the train goes off, started and stopped by a third man. At the 
 end of the train journey I show my ticket to a fourth man, and 
 I go into the street, get on a 'bus, where a fifth man collects my 
 fare and gives me a ticket as the 'bus careers along, guided by a 
 sixth man on the front seat. Probably before the end of the 
 journey I shall have to produce my ticket for inspection by a 
 seventh man. Consider the lift-men, gate-men, motor-men, con- 
 ductors; consider the steady growth of occupation in the direction 
 of tasks like theirs, in which there is the almost mechanical repe- 
 tition of almost mechanical actions! Modern mass-production 
 does not require educated workmen; it scarcely needs even in- 
 telligent workmen. How can it be pretended that education has 
 any specific application to tasks in which there is no need for 
 intelligence.? The lift-man would work his switch no worse if he 
 were quite illiterate and no better if he were a doctor of science. 
 It is not as a lift-man that he is worth educating, but as a man. 
 That is what the nation must be persuaded to see. If the nation 
 exclaims, "What! all this education, and he only a lift-man!" it 
 is uttering wickedness and stupidity: if the lift-man exclaims. 
 
PRELIMINARY 7 
 
 "What ! all this education, and me only a lift-man ! " he is uttering 
 wickedness and doubtful grammar. The lift-man must be told 
 that if he studied in his leisure and took a science degree he would 
 not therefore become a director. The politicians must be told that 
 when they denounce the education of children above their station 
 they are talking blasphemy. You cannot educate children above 
 their station, for you are educating men and women; and in this 
 world there is no higher station. 
 
 The relation of technical work to education is an interesting 
 subject. The position is all the clearer now that a belief in formal 
 training, or general 'mental gymnastic,' has been abandoned. 
 Stated roughly, the old idea was that almost any subject would do 
 to train the mind upon, provided that it was difficult enough — 
 and some martinets would add, disagreeable enough. It was 
 believed that the traditional classical curriculum gave a general 
 mental alertness and strength that was valid for all purposes of 
 life; skill in mathematics produced a special intellectual acuteness 
 applicable to most circumstances; Euclid cultivated the general 
 reasoning power; and so forth. Investigation has disproved these 
 claims — and, indeed, for the plain man they hardly needed dis- 
 proving. It is quite obvious that the great majority of classically 
 educated persons do not possess any remarkable alertness or 
 strength or breadth of mind; that persons addicted to the solution 
 of arithmetical puzzles are usually intolerable dullards; that 
 champion chess players, so far from being remarkable for a high 
 degree of foresight, and what may be called the practical strategy 
 and tactics of life, are among the stupidest of mankind. If you 
 labour to become specially good at Algebra (for instance) you do 
 not get a general mental training that will make you good at 
 Botany. If you want to be proficient in Botany, you must study 
 Botany and not Algebra. Our railways are built by engineers and 
 surveyors, our bodies are tended by physicians, surgeons and den- 
 tists, our music is provided by composers and executants who are 
 immensely skilled in their own calling, but who may be, and often 
 are, persons who cannot in the broad sense, be called educated. 
 Their elaborate training has carried over nothing at all to their 
 general education. What have they in common? Remove their 
 *shop' (and perhaps their golf) and they are ignorant and in- 
 articulate creatures, uninteresting and uninterested. Vocational 
 
8 PRELIMINARY 
 
 studies may contribute very largely to education, but intensive 
 work at any professional or vocational subject does not in itself 
 make an educated person. However, we need not here discuss 
 vocational studies, for it ought to be plain to everybody that 
 vocational studies and professional training should have no place 
 in the education of children at the elementary school age. In the 
 preface to Unto This Lasty Ruskin, writing eight years before the 
 passing of the Elementary Education Act of 1870, demanded 
 public schools in which a child should "imperatively be taught, 
 with the best skill of teaching that the country could produce, the 
 following three things: 
 
 {a) the laws of health and the exercises enjoined by themj 
 
 {b) habits of gentleness and justice; 
 
 {c) and the calling by which he is to live." 
 
 It will be seen in the sequel how far there is still need for the 
 first two prescriptions. There is none for the third. The only 
 'calling' that should be taught in school is the state of manhood, 
 to which we are all called. Every occupation, every variety of 
 occupation, has its own peculiarities, which must be acquired in 
 the appropriate place, and cannot be acquired at school. Ruskin, 
 like most other critics of education, would have been all the better 
 for a few years' work as a teacher in a large elementary school. 
 Here, for instance, is a school of four hundred and fifty boys. Ask 
 them what calling they intend to pursue, and they will unani- 
 mously reply 'Engineering.' Shall we, therefore, resort to a 
 curriculum of universal engineering? We had better not, because 
 very few, perhaps not one, of all the engineering aspirants will 
 ever see the inside of an engineering shop. The fallacy of the 
 Ruskinian prescription lies in the supposition that a boy chooses 
 a calling. What usually happens is that a calling chooses a boy. 
 Here are nineteen boys leaving school at the end of a term. Four 
 of them are going to secondary schools. Three of those who 
 wanted to be engineers are going straight into an office, because 
 a certain well-known firm has written to ask for three boys. Had 
 an engineering firm written for three boys they would have gone 
 into engineering. They are three good boys, and they will be just 
 as good clerks as they would have been engineers. Two of the 
 fifteen are going into the Post-office as messengers. One is going 
 into a hair-dresser's shop — a useful, and, in fact, an indispensable 
 
PRELIMINARY 9 
 
 institution; but we can hardly teach the calling of Figaro in 
 school, nor indeed, can I, at the moment, discover any school 
 subject that has vocational bearings in that direction. Another 
 of the fifteen is taken on by a picture-frame maker, and doubtless 
 his manual training lessons will be of use to him. Another is going 
 to work with a sign-writer, another is going into a house- 
 decorator's shop; several cannot find jobs at all, and some of them 
 will inevitably find their way on to a tradesman's tricycle. All 
 this variety is repeated with the leaving of every batch. Clearly, 
 we should have an exciting time in town schools if we ventured 
 far in the direction of the calling by which the boys will live! 
 Nor is the problem really different in the districts of one occupa- 
 tion. Think of the schools in our mining villages. The boys are 
 the sons of miners and the brothers of miners. They are born into 
 the atmosphere of the mine, they grow up in the shadow of the 
 mine, and in due course the mine swallows them up. No sane 
 person can really believe that it is the duty of the schools to under- 
 line the obvious, and tune the minds of these children for ever 
 to all the grim and dusky circumstances that encompass them. To 
 put the matter quite plainly, I deny utterly that it is the business 
 of the elementary school in a mining village to teach the boys to 
 be miners. I assert, on the contrary, that the elementary school 
 in a mining village must be conducted without any reference 
 whatever to coals or mines or managers or directors or share- 
 holders. 
 
 And let us look at another picture. Here is a model factory 
 employing girls taken straight from the elementary school. One 
 girl spends the whole of her day in putting sheets of tin plate into 
 the slot of a printing machine; another spends the whole of her 
 day in wiping the printed tin sheets with an oily rag; another 
 spends her day in putting the printed sheets into a stamping 
 machine; another spends her day in collecting the scrap tin that 
 comes from the stamping machine; another spends her day in 
 collecting the tin boxes stamped out by the machine; another 
 spends her day in placing the tins in position under an automatic 
 filler; another spends her day in putting lids on the filled tins; 
 another spends her day in packing the filled tins in cartons; and 
 so on; and as a rule not one of these girls ever does anything else 
 in all her factory life. Consider! Here are girls who daily for five 
 
10 PRELIMINARY 
 
 or ten or a dozen years do nothing else but put tin lids on boxes; 
 and all over the country there are hundreds of thousands — adoles- 
 cents and adults of both sexes — whose wage-earning life is spent 
 in tasks just as brainless, just as maddeningly mechanical. To 
 speak in abstractions is always impressive and always easy. It 
 sounds almost morally convincing to say that "education must 
 prepare a child for the calling by which he is to live." It sounds 
 almost scientifically convincing to say that "education should be 
 given a vocational bias with reference to the specific character 
 of the local industries." But let us leave abstractions, moral and 
 scientific, and speak in facts. Is anyone prepared to maintain that 
 the purpose of elementary education is to teach boys to hew out 
 coal and girls to put lids on boxes .? I am prepared to maintain, and, 
 indeed, do maintain, without any reservations or perhapses, that 
 it is the purpose of education, not to prepare children for their 
 occupations, but to prepare children against their occupations. I 
 asked if anyone thought the purpose of education was to teach 
 girls how to put lids on boxes. The Ruskinian idealist would, of 
 course, reply that the spectacle of girls putting lids on boxes is 
 abhorrent to God and a blot on the face of Nature, and, therefore, 
 something not to be prepared for, but to be utterly wiped out. All 
 of which may be true; but, however sincerely we desire to reform 
 the world, we must, for immediate purposes, take the world as 
 it is; and this happens to be, just now, a world in which girls are 
 required to put lids on boxes. It is, fortunately, also a world in 
 which those girls are compelled to go to school for several years. 
 The practical view will therefore embrace both these facts, and 
 regard this as a world in which girls have to be prepared, not, 
 indeed, for putting lids on boxes, but for a life of which putting 
 lids on boxes will be a large part. We must really get out of the 
 habit of talking as if education were the preparation of children 
 merely for that part of their life which does not belong to them, 
 as if they, as reasonable, living beings, had no existence at all. The 
 attempt to relate elementary education with wage-earning seems 
 to me not merely impracticable, but wrong in principle. There 
 are now schools with a 'vocational bias' into which children of 
 eleven are drafted. All we need say is that any serious attempt to 
 give children of eleven a vocational education is a crime, and any 
 pretended attempt a sham. Till the age of at least fourteen it is 
 
PRELIMINARY ii 
 
 our duty to educate a child, not train a 'hand.' The child will 
 become a hand quite soon enough : the schools need not hasten 
 the process. 
 
 What is vitally wrong in the curriculum of such schools is not 
 merely the vocational inclusions, but the vocational exclusions. 
 It is bad enough that children of this age should actually receive 
 regular protracted instruction in shorthand and type- writing, both 
 of which are purely mechanical activities, best acquired in a short 
 period of intensive practice; but worse than such inclusions, worse 
 even than the bias of mere utility given to a subject of delight like 
 drawing, are the deprivations, the exclusion of everything that 
 does not pertain to vocation. Thus, few school activities are more 
 humanising than music. Music on its practical and receptive side 
 — the singing of songs and the listening to pieces played — is 
 of high importance in education. I have known classes of wild 
 and boisterous factory girls in a continuation school soften into 
 docility and disciplined eagerness as a result of their music, and 
 there was no lesson they asked for so eagerly or missed so regret- 
 fully. Now it would be interesting to know in how many vocational 
 or junior technical schools music is taken seriously as a necessary 
 part of school life. The mere appearance of the name on a time- 
 table, of course, means little. The important question is whether 
 music IS actually treated by all in the school as an essential element 
 in the education of children, or whether it is not usually left to 
 cling to the skirts of unhappy chance, as something unworthy of 
 effort compared with shorthand, type-writing and the manipula- 
 tion of the slide rule. A school without musicshould be impossible. 
 
 It is, I think, indisputable that most people think of an ele- 
 mentary school as something quite different in purpose from a 
 public school. The difference may be put thus: Harrow is allowed 
 to make men: Hoxton has to make hands. From the elementary 
 schools employers expect to receive a steady supply of acquiescent 
 and well-equipped employees. If the supply does not reach ex- 
 pectation, the elementary schools are denounced. Remember that 
 boys leave the elementary school to go to work at just the age 
 when more fortunate boys leave the preparatory schools to go to 
 public schools. That is to say, the elementary schoolboy has done 
 with school when the public schoolboy is just beginning. Many 
 of them are physically mere children at fourteen, and, pray, what 
 
12 PRELIMINARY 
 
 is to be expected from the mind at that age? Yet I have regularly- 
 received applications from employers for boys qualified in short- 
 hand and typewriting. That is, employers vi^ant the elementary- 
 schools to give them clerks able to do an adult's work at a j uvenile's 
 wage, and they denounce the schools because their amiable desires 
 are not satisfied. 
 
 Unfortunately, many persons in authority are inclined to take 
 the alleged * practical' point of view, and to test the efficiency of 
 a school by suddenly asking the children to multiply ^£24. 3^. 7 J</. 
 by 29. Authority cannot measure the amount of personal refine- 
 ment or general development Tom Brown has acquired during 
 his six or seven years at school, so Authority takes no notice of 
 that; but Authority can easily measure Tom Brown's failure to 
 multiply ;{24. 3^. ']\d. by 29, and can even publish the statistics. 
 Tom Brown may have been changed (I speak of an actual in- 
 stance) from a dirty little street boy, truanting and cadging, to the 
 steady lad who now proudly oiSciates as prefect; but Tom 
 Brown's ability to multiply £2^1^. 3^. ']\d. by 29 is very precarious, 
 and so Tom Brown is denounced as one of the 'failures' of our 
 costly elementary schools, when he is really one of the successes. 
 His teacher is suspected as a slacker, and his teacher, therefore, 
 grows to think it wiser to conform to the world. After all, it is 
 much easier to make Tom Brown multiply £2^. 35. "j^d. by 29 
 than to make him a decent fellow. The elementary school-master 
 concentrates on making his boys pass the scrutiny of Authority 
 and the Practical Business Man, just as the preparatory school- 
 master concentrates on making his boys pass the scholarship and 
 entrance examinations of the public schools. The total result is 
 that a few (who would prosper in any circumstances) manage to 
 do well; but the many, the average boys, remain half crammed 
 and almost entirely uneducated. 
 
 What is the purpose of education, to make Tom Brown in- 
 crease in grace or multiply in arithmetic? The schools have 
 hesitated, have said one thing and done another. The old ele- 
 mentary school had no choice. It was told to make Tom Brown 
 multiply, and it made him multiply with extraordinary success; 
 but it did not make him grow in grace, and did not pretend to. 
 Now that fuller liberty has come, the elementary school is not 
 quite sure which it ought to do, and so it does neither quite well. 
 
PRELIMINARY 13 
 
 Our schools for the young have failed because they have tried for 
 obvious and immediate results instead of trying to lay the founda- 
 tions of a humane education; and so the melancholy fact remains 
 that, after fifty years of compulsory schooling, the Englishman 
 is still uneducated. That, at least, is a 'result' that cannot be 
 challenged! Let the schools, therefore, and especially the ele- 
 mentary schools, abandon their so-called * practical' aims and their 
 concern with some vague and disagreeable 'livelihood' avs^aiting 
 the pupils, and, leaving results to time and natural development, 
 turn their chief attention to the ideal embodied in that which, 
 because its aim is to make men and women and not machines, we 
 call the Humanities. By a strangely benevolent coincidence, the 
 elementary schools, in which the need for a purely personal and 
 humane form of education is most pressing, have by far the 
 greatest freedom in shaping instruction to the wants of the pupils, 
 as they alone, of all educational institutions, are free from the 
 binding tyranny of external examinations. What provides a liberal 
 education may be matter of controversy between the Franciscans 
 of classics and the Dominicans of science; but the truth is that 
 it is a matter of attitude rather than of subject — that a man may 
 be liberally educated in science and illiberally learned in classics. 
 The commercial attitude, the attempt to touch an early and 
 assured dividend, is fatal to education by whatever means pursued. 
 In education there are no debenture subjects, there are no short 
 cuts to culture. Fortunately, however, the controversies of ex- 
 tremists do not, or should not, affect the early stages of education; 
 — I say 'should not,' because even here it is difficult to escape 
 the classical extremist who insists that classical scholarship will 
 perish from this land unless children imbibe the ancient tongues 
 with their mothers' milk. The infliction of Latin grammar upon 
 infants of seven seems to me not so much a subject for educa- 
 tional discussion as a case for the N. S. P. C. C. Whatever form 
 the later education of boys and girls may take, whatever the 
 special subject or aspect of study they elect to pursue, whatever 
 the nature of the livelihood that actually awaits them at fourteen 
 or sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one, they must all be able to 
 speak, to read, to write, because speaking, reading, and writing 
 are the means of human intercourse, of communion between man 
 and his fellows. The inarticulate person is cut off from his kind 
 
14 PRELIMINARY 
 
 or fatally limited to a communion of sullen contact with the 
 equally inarticulate. Before the English child can awaken to any 
 creative fullness of life he must become proficient in the use 
 of his native tongue, the universal tool of all callings and of 
 all conditions. To assert the importance of English for the 
 English, to offer both a plea and a programme for a really practical 
 education is the purpose of the following pages. 
 
II 
 
 A Plea 
 
 It is only by amusing oneself that one can learn. ...The whole art of teaching 
 is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the 
 purpose of satisfying it afterwards; and curiosity itself can be vivid and whole- 
 some only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy. Those acquire- 
 ments crammed by force into the minds of children simply clog and stifle 
 intelligence. In order that knowledge be properly digested, it must have been 
 swallowed with a good appetite. If that child were intrusted to my care, I 
 should make her — not a learned woman, for I would look to her future 
 happiness only — but a child full of bright intelligence and full of life, in whom 
 everything beautiful in art or nature would awaken some gentle responsive 
 thrill. I would teach her to live in sympathy with all that is beautiful — 
 comely landscapes, the ideal scenes of poetry and history, the emotional charm 
 of noble music. I would make lovable to her everything I would wish her 
 
 ^° °^^* Anatole France. 
 
 THERE is a science of education, but education is not a 
 science. No one is entitled to lay down principles of teaching 
 as if they were laws of mechanics. The utmost a teacher can do 
 is to examine his beliefs and his experience (including, of course, 
 his observation of the pupils) and see what guidance they afford 
 him. I propose to discuss here the place of our language and 
 literature in the early stages of education. I shall not discuss 
 methods of teaching, and may scarcely even refer to them. It 
 should be said at once that the methods of teaching English have 
 very perceptibly changed for the better; but it cannot be said that 
 the place of English in education is clearly seen by many who 
 teach it well. At this stage of our national education what matters 
 is the faith, not the works. We have (so to speak) to undergo 
 conversion, not to practise new austerities. It is more important 
 to go to Damascus than to go to Canossa. 
 
 In considering the place of English in our scheme of national 
 education one thinks chiefly and immediately of the elementary 
 schools. Indeed, they should be thought of first and nearly all the 
 time, for they are not only important in themselves, but what is 
 
i6 A PLEA 
 
 true of them will be largely true of all other schools containing 
 children of the elementary age. I will begin, therefore, by stating 
 two propositions, the first of which needs no discussion: 
 
 (i) That the elementary schools are by far the most important 
 schools in the country; and (2) that English is by far the most 
 important subject in the elementary schools. These two pro- 
 positions depend upon an assumption that the purpose of the 
 elementary school is really to develop the mind and soul of the 
 children and not merely to provide tame and acquiescent 'labour 
 fodder.' If it is the national wish (as it is the wish of some indi- 
 viduals and groups) that the elementary school shall be simply an 
 institution for the creation of subdued and 'patriotic' hands — 
 institutions, therefore, with the minimum of material equipment 
 and with a staff of inferior child-minders, the question of educa- 
 tion does not arise and no discussion of method or purpose is 
 needed. If, however, it is desired that the elementary school shall 
 be an instrument of national education in the full sense, our two 
 propositions must be considered. Upon the first we need not 
 dwell very long. The safety of the world and the future of civilisa- 
 tion depend upon the character and intelligence of the multitude. 
 Rulers of whatever name or rank may rise and fall; the ultimate 
 power to make or mar the world will always be with the masses. 
 As long as the elementary school is the chief means of humanising 
 the masses, it is the most important school in the country, and no 
 thought or care can be too great for it. One of the gravest social 
 errors of the last half-century has been the deliberate depreciation 
 of the real public-schools of England, the elementary schools. 
 "Damned Board Schools," Mr Fisher's emphatic friend called 
 them. Set up damned Board Schools, staff them with damned 
 teachers, and you get a damnable population. Obviously you 
 cannot have a humane education in damned schools. Obviously 
 you will not find first-rate men and women willing to take service 
 in damned schools. To spend an enormous sum every year on 
 elementary education and then to depreciate elementary educa- 
 tion is a mad waste of money. Either the expenditure or the 
 depreciation must cease. The schools that educate the greatest 
 number of people in greatest need of education are surely of the 
 greatest importance. 
 
 Let us consider that as established and pass to our second pro- 
 
A PLEA 17 
 
 position, that English is by far the most important subject in the 
 elementary schools. 
 
 The past half-century of compulsory education has had its 
 great successes, but (as we have already pointed out) it can 
 hardly be described as successful. From the teacher's point of 
 view, I think it has been a series of well-meant efforts to do the 
 wrong thing in the right way. It is the system that is wrong. It 
 works in the wrong direction and for a wrong purpose; and that 
 it has produced good results is a tribute to the wonderful skill of 
 the teachers and the wonderful spirit of the population. Our ele- 
 mentary school system is Ptolemaic. It has chosen a wrong 
 centre. It has always been based, either overtly or tacitly, upon 
 the inculcation of the kind of knowledge that has a producible 
 result or 'answer,' something that can be tested, examined, marked. 
 You deliver over to five hundred children certain assorted pack- 
 ages of arithmetic or geography or spelling, and then after a lapse 
 of time you ask for them again. If four hundred and fifty give 
 them back, you win; if more than fifty have lost their packages 
 you lose. That was the prescribed official system of elementary 
 education for so many years that its evil spirit still terrorises us, 
 although its body is dead. Calling that education is like examining 
 churches for their percentage of public conversions and calling 
 that religion; it is like compelling preachers to be concerned 
 chiefly with the visible thing — with trying to fill the penitent 
 forms instead of trying to fill the kingdom of Heaven. For fifty 
 years teachers have been trying to make the elementary school- 
 boy know something, when they should have been trying to 
 make him be something. They have been trying to make him, not 
 a man, but an epitome of information. 
 
 The prescribed curriculum of the elementary schools almost 
 appears to have been based on a university pass course. The pass 
 man is expected to know a little about several subjects. Diminish 
 the requirements in each, make a few substitutions, and you have 
 the elementary school curriculum — a very little about a great 
 many subjects. Within the elementary system itself this diminishing 
 to scale was elaborately pursued. Each standard of the school was 
 the exact reproduction of every other on a slightly difl^erent scale. 
 The boy of seven in Standard I had preciselv the same shape of 
 work as the boy of thirteen in Standard VII; all that differea was 
 
i8 A PLEA 
 
 the quantity. Turn to the Code and Schedules for the 'eighties 
 and observe the pyramidally symmetrical tables in which all know- 
 ledge is arranged from the first standard to the seventh. Here, for 
 instance, is the official course in geography as it stood in 1887: 
 
 Standard I (i.e. age about 7) : 
 
 To explain a plan of the school and playgrounds. The four cardinal 
 points. The meaning and use of a map. 
 Standard II (i.e. age about 8) : 
 
 The size and shape of the world. Geographical terms simply ex- 
 plained and illustrated by reference to the map of England. Physical 
 geography of hills and rivers. 
 Standard III (i.e. age about 9) : 
 
 Physical and pohtical geography of England, with special knowledge 
 of the district in which the school is situated. 
 Standard IV (i.e. age about 10): 
 
 Physical and pohtical geography of the British Isles, British North 
 America and Australasia, with knowledge of their productions. 
 Standard V (i.e. age about 1 1): 
 
 Geography of Europe, physical and pohtical. Latitude and Longitude. 
 Day and night. The seasons. 
 Standard VI (i.e. age about 12): 
 
 Geography of the world generally, and especially of the British 
 Colonies and Dependencies. Interchange of productions. Circumstances 
 which determine chmate. 
 Standard VII (i.e. age about 13): 
 
 The Ocean. Currents and tides. General arrangement of the plane- 
 tary system. The phases of the moon. (^Note: In Standards V, VI and 
 VII, maps and diagrams may be required to illustrate the answers given.) 
 
 Thus it will be seen that, after thirteen, there is no geography 
 left for a child to learn; which is not surprising, since he has begun 
 to wrestle with the meaning and use of a map at seven, and the 
 physical geography of hills and rivers at eight. 
 
 Let us now turn to the official requirements in English for the 
 same year. They represent, remember, the total amount of in- 
 struction the elemeJitary school child ever received in his own 
 language and literature. 
 
 Standard I: 
 
 Reading. To read a short paragraph from a book not confined to 
 words of one syllable. 
 
 m 
 
A PLEA 19 
 
 Writing. Copy in manuscript characters a line of print, and write 
 from dictation not more than ten easy words, commencing with capital 
 letters. Copy books (large or half text hand) to be shown. 
 
 English. To repeat twenty lines of simple verse. 
 Standard II: 
 
 Reading. To read a short paragraph from an elementary reading book. 
 
 Writing. A passage of not more than six lines from the same book, 
 slowly read once, and then dictated word by word. Copy books (large 
 and half text hand) to be shown. 
 
 English. To repeat forty lines of poetry and to know their meaning. 
 To point out nouns and verbs. 
 
 Standard III: 
 
 Reading. To read a passage from a more advanced reading book, or 
 from stories from English history. 
 
 Writing. Six lines from one of the reading books of the Standard, 
 slowly read once and then dictated. Copy books (capitals and figures, 
 large and small hand) to be shovra. 
 
 English. To recite with intelligence and expression 60 lines of poetry, 
 and to know their meaning. To point out nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs 
 and personal pronouns, and to form simple sentences containing them. 
 Standard IV: 
 
 Reading. To read a few lines from a reading book or from a History 
 of England. 
 
 Writing. Eight lines of poetry or prose, slowly read once, and then 
 dictated. Copy books to be shown. 
 
 English. To recite 80 lines of poetry, and to explain the words and 
 allusions. To parse easy sentences, and to show by examples the use of 
 each of the parts of speech. 
 
 Standard V: 
 
 Reading. To read a passage from some standard author, or from a 
 History of England. 
 
 Writing. Writing from memory the substance of a short story read 
 out twice; spelling, hand-writing and correct expression to be con- 
 sidered. Copy books to be shown. 
 
 English. To recite 100 lines from some standard poet, and to explain 
 the words and allusions. To parse and analyse simple sentences, and to 
 know the method of forming English nouns, adjectives and verbs from 
 each other. 
 Standard VI: 
 
 Reading. To read a passage from one of Shakespeare's historical plays, 
 or from some other standard author, or from a History of England. 
 
20 A PLEA 
 
 Writing. A short theme or letter on an easy subject: spelling, hand- 
 writing, and composition to be considered. Copy books to be shown. 
 
 English. To recite 150 lines from Shakespeare or Milton, or some 
 other standard author, and to explain the words and allusions. To parse 
 and analyse a short complex sentence, and to know the meaning and use 
 of Latin prefixes in the formation of English words. 
 Standard VII: 
 
 Reading. To read a passage from Shakespeare or Milton, or from 
 some other standard author, or from a History of England. 
 
 Writing. A theme or letter. Composition, spelling and hand-writing 
 to be considered. Note books and exercise books to be shown. 
 
 English. To recite 1 50 lines from Shakespeare or Milton, or some 
 other standard author, and to explain the words and allusions. To 
 analyse sentences, and to know prefixes and terminations generally. 
 
 Is it not pitiful.? But why, it maybe asked, should we turn to the 
 obsolete schedules of the 'eighties? Because those obsolete schedules 
 still represent the spirit in which elementary education is under- 
 stood by most officials and teachers. The elementary school is still 
 moulded after that pattern, the only difference being that it is 
 moulded by the choice of the teacher instead of by the compulsion 
 of the code. The school syllabus of the present is just as absurdly 
 pyramidal — a little of everything in Standard I, a little more of 
 everything in Standard II and so on. The ideal 'time-table' of 
 to-day is a mechanically symmetrical document recording the 
 proud fact that every child in every class is taking the same subject 
 at the same time. That is the kind of time-table that most teachers 
 and inspectors love in their hearts, whatever they mav profess with 
 their lips. The dead hand of the old code, embodied in the clutch 
 of the compulsory time-table, is still heavy on the schools. A 
 time-table for an elementary school is not valid until it has been 
 approved and signed by an inspector, and any deviation from it 
 must be recorded in the school log-book. What a 'subject' may 
 mean can be gathered from the fact that the Time-Table Form 
 supplied by the London Countv Council to its elementary schools 
 has a printed summary on which is to be shown the time allotted 
 to each of the following 'subjects': {a) Composition, Written; 
 {h) Composition, Oral; {c) Dictation; {d) Grammar; [e) Reading; 
 (/) Recitation; {g) Word-building; {h) Hand-writing; {t) Litera- 
 ture. Teachers have been known to add even to that amazing list. 
 Instruction of this kind given in this spirit is not education; 
 and, so far from being 'practical,' it has no reference to any real 
 
A PLEA 21 
 
 needs of the children. Come into a London elementary school 
 and see what it is that the children need most. You will notice, 
 first of all, that, in the human sense, our boys and girls are almost 
 inarticulate. They can make noises, but they cannot speak. Linger 
 in the playground and listen to the talk and shouts of the boys; 
 listen to the girls screaming at their play — listen especially to 
 them as they *play at schools'; you can barely recognise your 
 native language. Go into a class-room, and ask each boy his name 
 and address. You will hardly understand the familiar names, you 
 will understand none of the unfamiliar names; you will barely 
 recognise the numbers, and, if the district is strange to you, you 
 will probably understand none of the street names^. Ask a boy 
 to tell you something — anything, about a book, or a game, or a 
 place, and he will struggle convulsively among words like a fly 
 in a jam-dish. Ask him to write, and he will produce something 
 like this, which has chanced to reach me on the very day when 
 these lines are being written: 
 
 OxFord Ward 
 
 St. Georges Hospital 
 
 T>, f>. Hyde Palk Corner 
 
 Dear Sir ^ 
 
 When we Broke up thurs I went up the Palk we Played a game 
 
 of Football, and we had Three Mins to go to Finish. Well the out side 
 
 Left of their team kick the Ball to me it happened to go a goal kick But 
 
 the misfortune came then for he could not stop.^ himself From running 
 
 he knock me Heads over Heels in the Coal and I thing it twisted me 
 
 angle, wel me Friends carried me to the antic festic Hospital in the 
 
 Battersea Bridge Road. They told they could nothing has the Dotor had 
 
 gone so I was Brought to st Georges. I was put under gas and what they 
 
 did I don't know But when I woke I was sick. Well I must Closed this 
 
 Letter now 
 
 I remam 
 
 yours affectionate 
 
 A L 
 
 Excuse Writing I can't write much sitting in Bed 
 
 G odd bye 
 
 P.S. I shall be glad when I get back to School. 
 
 1 I thought I knew my own school district very well, but I was puzzled 
 the other day by a boy of eleven who lold me he lived in <Cow Street.' 
 That, at least, was all I could make of his clearest repetitions, and I had to 
 ask him to write it down, when I found that what he was trying to say was 
 'Cale Street." 
 
22 A PLEA 
 
 This letter, which has its attractive and appealing qualities (I 
 feel rather uncomfortable about quoting it), was written by a boy 
 of 13 years 9 months, in Standard VI — that is, almost at the end 
 of his day school course. That the boy should write to his school 
 at all is an intimation of a sentiment and attachment of which far 
 too little use is made, especially by those responsible for the pro- 
 vision and maintenance of schools. The loyalty and affection of 
 a mere elementary boy does not count for anything in the school 
 statistics, and is therefore of no importance to the official mind. 
 The public school boy has all the gracious amenities of hall and 
 cloister and playing-field inviting and cherishing his loyalty. What 
 gracious amenities do we offer the public elementary school boy 
 to make his school a hallowed memory? We urge him severely 
 to become even as the public school boy; we bully him in the 
 press because he hasn't the Eton spirit; and, often, we don't give 
 him so much as a hall in which it is possible for his school to 
 assemble in a regular act of fellowship. 
 
 The letter I have quoted is no worse than you will find in any 
 Standard VI elsewhere. You will notice the significant fact that 
 some of the harder words are right and many of the easier words 
 are wrong. The boy can managequite well a mechanically difficult 
 word like * misfortune,' which he will seldom need to use, but he 
 does not know the crucial difference between *as' and 'has,' or 
 between 'kick' and 'kicked,' which he will constantly need to 
 use. That might be taken as an allegory of the whole elementary 
 system. We search out and overcome the difficulties that matter 
 very little, and ignore the significant difficulties that stare us in 
 the face. Our bright seventh standard boys know how to use a 
 table of logarithms and don't know how to behave at table. We 
 teach them with great labour to babble of isotherms and isobars, 
 and send them out of school unable to speak their own language. 
 Their reading is no better than their writing. In a popular story, 
 Mr W. J. Locke thus dismisses (with some heat) one of his minor 
 characters: 
 
 He hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word of a foreign 
 language, knew no scrap of history, had no sense of beauty, was utterly 
 ignorant, as every single one of our expensively State-educated English 
 lower classes is, of everything that matters on God's earth. 
 
 I do not wish to magnify the importance of Mr Locke; but his 
 
A PLEA 23 
 
 outburst is evidence of a kind, and some of it, at least, is true. As 
 a humanising agent the elementary school has in great measure 
 failed, in spite of much devoted and uncovenanted work by 
 teachers and members of public bodies. I am dealing here with 
 the only schools for which I have any right to speak; but I feel 
 bound to add that the secondary schools and the public schools, 
 with far greater opportunities, have also failed to create an 
 enlightened, humanely educated population. We are still a nation 
 of Barbarians, Materialists and Philistines. The only change since 
 Matthew Arnold's time is that the classes have become a little 
 more mixed. Mr Locke's impassioned reference to the costliness 
 of our system is quite justified. "State education of the lower 
 classes" is indeed a grotesquely prodigal dissipation of public 
 money — as wasteful as if the state launched out into building 
 without knowing whether it intended to build a workhouse or 
 a factory or a prison or a palace, and stopped building at the very 
 moment when the erection began to look like anything at all. 
 The provision of part-time education in a Day Continuation 
 School does not materially alter the circumstances, and I do not 
 think such a system will ever be successful. The attitude of a 
 boy at work cannot possibly be the attitude of a boy at school. 
 The crucial fact is that the poor boy goes to work just when the 
 wealthier boy goes to Eton; and we affect to be surprised at the 
 difference of result. There is, as every man of business knows, a 
 point at which a refusal to venture a little more money is a fatal 
 economy. It is just at this point that we refuse to go on with the 
 general education of our children. We drag our boys and girls 
 away from school just when the period of creative development 
 is beginning, thrust them into factories, mines, shops or offices, 
 and then (like Mr Locke) curse them for being uneducated. For 
 they are uneducated — we have only to look around us to discover 
 that. And to offer them a continuation of their education is a 
 mockery. In a very real sense their education has never been 
 begun! What they lack most of all is language, the means ot all 
 intellectual activity and humane development; and it is language 
 about which we seem to care least. 
 
 The tragic position in the elementary school is that English 
 cannot wait. (3ther subjects can, and yet it is to them that our 
 chief efforts are directed. If a boy is not taught arithmetic or 
 
24 A PLEA 
 
 geography or science, he will simply lack arithmetic or geography 
 or science for a time; but if he is not taught good English he will 
 be perfecting himself in bad English. Indeed, for elementary 
 school children and for many secondary school children, the 
 position is worse than that. Even while the schools may be teaching 
 good English, the surroundings of street and home will be teaching 
 bad English. The teacher of arithmetic in the school has not to 
 fight against the assembled powers of bad arithmetic outside; but 
 the teacher of English is continuously assailed by powerful and 
 almost insuperable hostile forces. He must expect to gain, not an 
 absolute advantage over simple ignorance, but a bare balance of 
 advantage over elaborate opposition. The teacher's hardest struggle 
 is not against pure ignorance but against evil knowledge. So 
 hopeless does the struggle seem that many elementary school 
 teachers give it up, and say that the attempt to teach good English 
 to children who live and move in an atmosphere of degraded 
 English is sheer waste of time. I taught for twelve years in 
 Rotherhithe and Poplar, and I sympathise with their feelings; 
 but I believe their view is wrong. I believe that the more powerful 
 the forces of evil the more powerful and unremitting must be 
 the opposing efforts. The Harrow master may, perhaps, relax his 
 vigilance for English, the Hoxton master never. A poor, in- 
 telligent boy who is compelled to come to school has a clear right 
 to have his language cleansed and purified, and we must accept 
 the burden of eff^ort. The teacher's business is not simply to lay 
 bricks on an empty foundation; he has first to clear the cumbered 
 ground, and begin his edifice, as he clears, with what appears to 
 be a heap of rubbish. In plain words and in the ordinary sense, 
 English is not a school * subject' at all. It is a condition of school 
 life. 
 
 The difference is important, for the failure of the elementary 
 school to be a humanising influence on its products may be attri- 
 buted in part to the mistaken efforts of the teachers in treating 
 English as they treat Arithmetic, namely, as a mere subject, with 
 a limited matter of its own, a fixed place in the time-table and a 
 right to no more than a share in their daily exertions. Those 
 exertions have been in the past not only limited, but sometimes 
 misapplied, with the result that, of all school lessons, the English 
 has usually made least effect upon the pupils' minds and the least 
 
A PLEA 25 
 
 appeal to their liking. Even to-day, when, as I have admitted, 
 methods of teaching have been reformed and the matter taught 
 has changed beyond recognition, there is evidence that teachers 
 have not really envisaged the right dimensions of English in the 
 schools, and that they are still expending their very admirable 
 enthusiasm and amazing skill upon it as a specific and limited 
 subject, or, worse, as a collection of detached subjects. But, as we 
 have said, English is really not a subject at all. It is a condition 
 of existence rather than a subject of instruction. It is an in- 
 escapable circumstance of life, and concerns every English- 
 speaking person from the cradle to the grave. The lesson in 
 English is not merely one occasion for the inculcation of know- 
 ledge; it is part of the child's initiation into the life of man. 
 
 Another peculiarity of English that gives it special importance 
 is that it is the medium of instruction in school — as, indeed, it 
 is the medium of all intercourse, social and commercial, public 
 and private. What should have been its strength in school has 
 been its weakness. As the medium of instruction it has been 
 everybody's business, and has, therefore, become nobody's busi- 
 ness. Teachers seem to think that it is always some other person's 
 work to look after English. But every teacher is a teacher of 
 English because every teacher is a teacher in English. That sentence 
 should be written in letters of gold over every school doorway. 
 Teachers are very specially the official guardians of the English 
 language. We cannot give a lesson in any subject without helping 
 or neglecting the English of our pupils. One of the most useful 
 lessons in economy and lucidity of speech I have seen was actually 
 a practical geometry lesson, in which the teacher required boys 
 in turn to come out and give the class exact directions, step hy 
 step, for the working of certain problems. Ability of the pupil 
 to make a concise and lucid statement is postulated in our teaching 
 of every subject; but how many of us ever try systematically to 
 cultivate it? Yet without clearness of expression clearness of 
 thought is impossible. No one can set down clearly what is not 
 clear to him; and the effort to secure clearness of expression is a 
 great step towards clearness of thought. The thought may be 
 wrong; but the very clearness of a difficulty helps us to clear it 
 up. English reacts everywhere. Teachers of science complain 
 that their work in science is wasted, not because their pupils 
 
26 A PLEA 
 
 cannot make observations, but because their pupils cannot record 
 observations. Teachers of languages complain that their pupils 
 are confused by a foreign language because they are confused by 
 their own. That is, progress in science, or French, or German, 
 is impeded by faulty English. But let this be clear; no teachers, 
 whether of science, or languages, or mathematics, or history, or 
 geography, must be allowed to evade their own heavy responsi- 
 bilities. They must not say "Our business is to teach Science or 
 Mathematics or French, not English." That is the great fallacy 
 of ^subject' teaching. It is very definitely their business to teach 
 English; and their failure to recognise it as their business is a 
 cause of the evil they deplore. In a sense the function of history, 
 geography, science and so forth in school is to provide material 
 for the teaching of English. The specialist teacher defeats his own 
 purpose precisely to the extent to which he neglects the language 
 of his pupils. 
 
 But in no sort of school is the English more sacrificed than 
 in the elementary school, where it is needed most. Elementary 
 education has failed — has failed nobly — because it has always 
 attempted too much. It has tried to accomplish something 
 when it should merely have tried to begin something. The 
 elementary school is nothing but a preparatory school and it 
 has tried to be a university. Knowing how many thousands of 
 children leave school in their earliest teens never to go to school 
 again, the teachers have striven (and have been driven) to cram 
 into their pupils during five or six years the information that more 
 fortunate boys get in the maturity and leisure of their public school 
 and university period. Consider the wickedness of trying to turn 
 out of the elementary school children of barely fourteen (from 
 poor and bookless surroundings), equipped with a clear view of 
 English dynastic and political history from Caractacus to George V 
 (not forgetting the history of the British Empire, the Near East 
 and the United States of America), with General Elementary 
 Science (or Nature Study) and the geography of the Five Conti- 
 nents and the Seven Seas thrown in; and that in addition to facility 
 in elaborate arithmetical calculations (some of which are never used 
 in these days of tables and slide rules), and a command of English 
 composition from paragraph to precis and of spelling from Abacus 
 to Zymotic — all that, and more, at fourteen, when it is obvious 
 
A PLEA 27 
 
 to every intelligent person that what the elementary school 
 children need most sorely is to be made humanly articulate and 
 aware of the decencies and amenities of life! English is thus not 
 merely something for them to learn, but the condition of their 
 learning everything else. All their immediate and future in- 
 tellectual progress, all their developing emotional powers, all 
 their social and industrial existence must be built, if they are 
 to be built successfully and enduringly, upon the foundation of 
 language communicated and communicable. By language they 
 will learn almost everything; without language they will learn 
 almost nothing. It is the special duty of the elementary school 
 to lay that foundation of language and leave later years to deter- 
 mine the nature of the building^. 
 
 A third peculiarity of English is that, for the immensely 
 greater number of English-speaking people, it is the only language 
 ever learnt, and thus the sole means of linguistic study, the sole 
 means of approach to literature. The word 'sole' is used numeri- 
 cally and not in disparagement. Unfortunately it has been the 
 habit of many English leaders of thought to speak of their own 
 language with at least an implication of disparagement. Most of 
 these leading men belong to the public school and university 
 
 ^ I am not anxious to drag that over-rated person 'the practical business 
 man' into a discussion of this sort, but I happened, at the moment of re- 
 considering this page, to hear something very apposite from the staff manager 
 of a world-famous business concern. He knew nothing of any special interests 
 and predilections of mine, nothing beyond the fact that I was a teacher. I 
 will try to reproduce his words: "If I may presume to offer my views about 
 education in the Council Schools, there are two things that I think are more 
 important than anything else. The first is the English language. Every boy 
 ought to have a thorough grounding in his own language. Anyone can put 
 words together to make some sort of meaning, but it takes a lot of work to 
 make a boy write a simple, clear and correct letter. The next important thing 
 is speech. Many a boy's prospects here [in the particular firm] have been 
 spoiled because he can't speak correctly and because he has a Cockney accent. 
 You ought to have eradicated the Cockney accent by this time ! You gentle- 
 men in the schools seem to spend all your time in teaching the bovs things 
 they ought to be learning three or four years later. What is the result? They 
 leave school with a lot of information that they forget in a few months, and 
 without any of the grounding in their own language that would stay by them 
 all their lives." It is only fair to say that this manager was speaking with the 
 requirements of his own firm in viewj but even so, my case could scarcely 
 have been put more strongly. 
 
28 A PLEA 
 
 tradition, a tradition endeared to them by the sanctities of place 
 and the joys of remembered youth. They were educated in a 
 certain way, and it seems to them impossible that there can be 
 any other way; and so their affectionate praise of a classical 
 education always comes with an implication or a declaration that 
 English is necessarily an inferior instrument. I suppose it is 
 literally true that some famous English scholars never had an 
 English lesson in their lives. Their English was always a by- 
 product of home and school and university. Happy the few who 
 get it thus; but they are the few, not the many! 
 
 I cannot speak with authority about the kind of education I 
 did not receive; but as a teacher I feel competent to criticise 
 the arguments usually advanced by the extreme classical 
 right. Perhaps the most striking fact in a long controversy is 
 that, although a classical education is claimed as a unique in- 
 strument of humane culture, no one has demanded that it should 
 be applied to the lower and lower middle class population, which 
 is plainly in need of some improving treatment. Why? If its 
 value is so great, it ought to be given the widest possible applica- 
 tion in a nation of freemen with political rights and power. Surely 
 the weak point about 'compulsory Greek' is that it never was 
 compulsory. A compulsion that touches only a tiny fraction of 
 the population is a comipuhion pour rire, and no compulsion at all. 
 If Greek is so precious that people must be made to learn it for 
 their good, then, obviously, all people must be made to learn it. 
 If we leave without protest the great population entirely un- 
 affected by something alleged to be necessary, we stultify all our 
 arguments for the necessity. In India, we are told, the despised 
 sudra must not listen to the sacred books and must not memorise 
 any passages from them. These privileges are restricted to persons 
 of caste. Can it be that the unrecognised or unproclaimed motive 
 of our classical extremists is the perpetuation of social inequalities 
 — one kind of education for the poor and another for the wealthier? 
 That object may be very desirable, but then it ought to be made 
 unmistakably clear as an object. If it is understood that a classical 
 education is merely a class education writ large, much recurrent 
 controversy will be prevented. But, apart from all that, the large 
 claims made for the effect of a classical education on the mind 
 cannot be established. Some of these claims are based on the now 
 
A PLEA 29 
 
 discredited belief in thepossibility of a general 'mental gymnastic' or 
 formal training obtainable from one special subject. The palpable 
 failures of the classical system poured out from the public schools 
 surely disprove any high claims for the peculiar efficacy of that 
 discipline. Whatever is trained in the average agreeable products 
 of the public school it is certainly not the mind. But there have 
 been some shining successes, and it is to these that our attention 
 is alwavs directed. They certainly deserve our attention; for it 
 soon becomes obvious to any careful observer that they are the 
 kind of men who would have been successful products of almost 
 any system, even of almost no system. The virtues they have 
 modestly attributed to their classical education are really the 
 virtues of their own minds — minds that have taken a wonderful 
 polish under classics, and would have taken a wonderful polish 
 under anything. But, even if we admit (as we may) that they 
 probably benefited more by classical study than they would have 
 by any other, the important fact for us to notice is that their 
 education was in the main a literary education — an education in 
 humane letters. That the vehicle of that education was Latin and 
 Greek is important, but not of the greatest importance. The cause 
 of the classical languages is always assumed to be the cause of the 
 humanities; and the cause of the humanities is nearly always 
 assumed to be the cause of the classical languages. Whenever 
 there is an outbreak of that perennial battle of the ancient and 
 modern curricula, the classical combatants will almost invariably 
 be found to be defending one thing under the impression that 
 they are defending another. That is to say, the eloquent champion 
 of compulsory Greek is often not defending Greek at all, but 
 urging the claim of humane studies. And one very unfortunate 
 result of this is that those who are moved to attack the studv of 
 what they call dead languages have the appearance of attacking 
 the humanities. Sometimes, indeed, but less often than people 
 suppose, they actually are attacking the humanities in order to 
 press the claims of physical science; and of science we may say 
 briefly that though for the few it may be as humanising as the 
 classics, for the education of the many it is even more arid and 
 unprofitable. The cause of the classical languages is certainly 
 not the cause of the humanities. The two overlap, but they are 
 not coincident; and it is highly important that wc should recognise 
 
30 A PLEA 
 
 this. The possibility of a general humane education lies precisely 
 in the fact that the humanities are far wider than the classics. 
 For consider what a good classical education really means. It 
 means, as a first step, the gradual acquisition of a language, its 
 vocabulary and its simpler mechanism; then, later, a more ex- 
 tended acquaintance with vocabulary and mechanism, and a 
 struggle to achieve a higher standard of correctness; and then, 
 later still, an habitual association with the beauty, delicacy and 
 refinements of human speech; that is, with the possibilities of a 
 marvellously delicate yet elaborate organism having a life — a sort 
 of living logic — of its own. It means an acquaintance with lawand 
 order, with sanctions and implicit prohibitions, a submission to 
 grace and strength and economy and power, and the recognition 
 of a force that can disregard old laws and make a law of its own — 
 i.e. with development and growth. And together with all this 
 such an education means a gradual, leisured and comprehending 
 acquaintance with that crystallisation of personality, life and ex- 
 perience which we call great literature, and with the history, 
 science and philosophy that, in natural consequence, form 
 part of the completeness of literature. Such a progressive, 
 co-operative initiation into the uttered and embodied life of man 
 we call a humane education; but it is certainly not the prero- 
 gative of two tongues alone of all the world's speech to give it. 
 For some, for a few, the Greek and Latin languages are the gates 
 that open immediately into Paradise; for others, for the many, 
 they are gates, shut and barred, at which they knock and wait m 
 vain when they might have found an open door elsewhere. We 
 can cheerfully concede to the classical enthusiasts almost as much 
 as they claim; but we must never concede to them that Greek 
 and Latin are the only means of access to the gardens of the soul, 
 and that, these unopened, nothing remains to mankind but the 
 bleaker plains of text-book knowledge. We need not spend any 
 argument upon those who, in trying to imitate the raptures of 
 their betters, have adopted a cant of the classics as a public in- 
 timation of their social superiority. They have their reward. Nor 
 need we take much notice of those who (as I have heard with my 
 own ears) adduce the classics as the origin or source of English 
 literature, and maintain that, as Sophocles wrote plays two 
 thousand years before Shakespeare, it is necessary to read Sophocles 
 
A PLEA 31 
 
 before it is possible to understand Shakespeare. I am reminded 
 of the early nineties when the later works of Wagner were still 
 esoteric, and were forcing their way with difficulty upon the 
 London stage. I was given to understand by the elect that before 
 I could attain to any appreciation of the Ring des Nihelungen I 
 must study the principles of Greek drama, the economics of Marx 
 and Lassalle, the politics of Bakunin, the doctrines of Buddha, 
 Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, the history of opera, the com- 
 positions of Gluck, the interminable prose works of Wagner 
 himself, the history of Teutonic mythology, the difference between 
 an opera and a music-drama, and the dramatic significance of the 
 musical themes or motives in the whole work. All this being 
 accomplished, I might then be fit to go to a performance. Really, 
 it is very like the contention that a boy must labour in youth at 
 the Aeneid in order to read Paradise Lost when he is old, at 
 Theocritus in order to read Lycidas^ and at Plato in order to read 
 Shelley. It is all very strange. The earnest classical master who 
 would pronounce Milton and Browning too difficult for the boy 
 of twelve has no hesitation in making him read Virgil and Horace. 
 I found in music that the best way to an appreciation of any com- 
 poser was to read the scores and hear them played as often as 
 possible; and I know that in poetry the way to approach an ap- 
 preciation of Milton or Shelley or Wordsworth is simply to read 
 Milton and Shelley and Wordsworth. Indeed, it may even be 
 better to read first our contemporary Masefields and Hardys and 
 work backwards to the older masters — at least, Charles Sorley 
 found it so. When we have read Shelley we can find a special 
 interest in Plato; but we shall not get at the beauty of Shelley by 
 wrestling first with the language of Plato. Neither in art nor in 
 science can we begin at some arbitrary point called the beginning: 
 we have to begin at a very clear point called the end — our end of 
 knowledge, not the other undiscoverable end. 
 
 What guidance in English can we get from this old con- 
 troversy about the classics? The first point to note is this: that for 
 every one of the choice spirits who get their splendid culture from 
 the classics, there are hundreds of others, their social equals, who 
 get very little culture at all, because they can never break through 
 the barriers of a foreign language. The second point is this: that 
 those barred out and forbidden hundreds can receive an excellent 
 
32 A PLEA 
 
 education in and through their own language. The British naval 
 officer is not conspicuously inferior to the products of the Army 
 Class, and he is educated at a school where the classics are not 
 taught at all. The third point that emerges is this: that even if 
 we granted all the claims made on behalf of a classical education, 
 the plain fact stands that the greater number of English boys 
 and girls do not and cannot receive that education. A classical 
 education is something for the aristocracy of mind, in whatever 
 social class it is found; it is not an education for the masses, in 
 whatever social class they are found. Let us hear no more, then, 
 of the parrot cry that no one can be disciplined in humane letters 
 save through the medium of the classical languages. The assertion 
 is untrue, and an impediment to national education. We don't 
 want Anathema in the school room. Let Quicunque vult and 
 threatened excommunications of all kinds remain in the realm 
 of theology and outside the realm of education. After all, it 
 should need no heroic self-denial in anyone to refrain from asserting 
 that the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Shelley, of Bacon 
 and Burke and Gibbon, of Sidney and Spenser and Ralegh, of 
 Lamb and Swift and Johnson, is mysteriously disabled from con- 
 tributing to the making of an Englishman. 
 
 Thomas Huxley was not only a great man of science, but an 
 excellent writer of English. These words of his, therefore, deserve 
 respectful consideration : 
 
 Every Englishman has, in his native tongue, an almost perfect instrument 
 of literary expression; and, in his own literature, models of every kind 
 of literary excellence. If an Englishman cannot get hterary culture out 
 of his Bible, his Shakespeare, his Milton, neither, in my belief, will the 
 profoundest study of Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, give it 
 to him. 
 
 This discussion of the classics is neither irrelevant nor un- 
 necessary, because, unfortunately, among the hostile forces to be 
 encountered by those who believe in the value of English for the 
 English must be reckoned those who persistently urge the claims 
 of Greek and Latin, and consider English no language for a 
 gentleman. It seems to be held that English boys cannot be 
 taught English, and, on the whole, need not be taught English. 
 What is necessary is to teach them Greek and Latin, and then 
 in some mysterious way, English will come. There are possibly 
 
A PLEA 33 
 
 some old public school men whose instincts of loyalty will urge 
 them to agreement. But is there, I ask, any other country in 
 the world, where men of intellectual standing will be found 
 assuring their countrymen that carefully selected boys of the 
 most favoured class in the land cannot learn their own language 
 without the special support of two ancient tongues? Statements 
 of this sort are merely the cliches of tradition. They are delivered 
 with the authority of the centre, but they sound remarkably like 
 provincialism. 
 
 It may be said, I hope without offence, that the classics are 
 exotics; and I think we must beware of cultivating the exotic 
 habit — the frame of mind, that is, in which we find nothing good 
 in what is around us, but must scour the seas and dislocate the 
 seasons to gratify ourselves. There is a story, apparently frivolous, 
 that can be read as a parable. A certain epicure, who loved all 
 things out of season, who ate strawberries in December and 
 scorned them in June, who found green peas delicious in February 
 and uninteresting in July, once asked some friends to a dinner in 
 May at which he promised them a very great rarity. The expected 
 dish proved to be new potatoes. When it was objected to him that 
 new potatoes in May can scarcely be called a rarity, he replied 
 very earnestly, "Ah! you don't understand, these are next year's 
 new potatoes." Now, isn't that precisely what the classical ex- 
 tremists are always doing, looking in May for next year's new 
 potatoes ? 
 
 The classics in education must be described as a powerful 
 vested interest, liable to show resentment if a rival claimant to 
 a share in the humanities is brought forward. The classics can 
 still claim the power of the purse and the pride of place, and can 
 be vigorous in obstruction. No person who knows and loves our 
 national inheritance of literature can regard the classical languages 
 and their great tradition in our oldest schools with anything but 
 reverence and affection: but that emotion is not incompatible 
 with an equally sincere belief that, for English people, the great 
 and immediate means of a humane education is to be found in 
 English, and in no alien tongue whatsoever, either ancient or 
 modern. 
 
 It is as well to remind ourselves that the claim of English for 
 the English has quite a respectable tradition. Riciiard Mulcaster, 
 
34 A PLEA 
 
 the first Headmaster of Merchant Taylors' School (where he had 
 Edmund Spenser for pupil) and later High Master of St Paul's, 
 author of two most excellent treatises on education — Positions 
 (1581) and First Part of the Element arie (1582) — thus urges the 
 peculiar value of English for the English as against all other 
 tongues — I quote Mr Oliphant's modernized paraphrase: 
 
 It is the opinion of some that we should not treat any philosophical 
 subject, or any ordinary subject in a philosophical manner, in the English 
 tongue, because the unlearned find it too difficult to understand in any 
 case, and the learned, holding it in little esteem, get no pleasure from it. In 
 regard both to writing in English generally, and my own writing in parti- 
 cular, I have this to say: no one language is finer than any other naturally, 
 but each becomes cultivated by the efforts of the speaker who, using such 
 opportunities as are afforded by the kind of government under which he 
 lives, endeavours to garnish it with eloquence, and enrich it with learn- 
 ing. Such a tongue, elegant in form and learned in matter, while it keeps 
 within its natural soil, not only serves its immediate purpose with just 
 admiration, but in foreigners who become acquainted with it, it kindles 
 a great desire to have their own language resemble it. Thus it came to 
 pass that the people of Athens beautified their speech in the practice of 
 pleading, and enriched it with all kinds of knowledge, bred both within 
 Greece and outside of it. Thus it came to pass that the people of Rome, 
 having formed their practice in imitation of the Athenian, became 
 enamoured with the eloquence of those from whom they were borrowing, 
 and translated their learning also. However, there was not nearly the 
 same amount of learning in the Latin tongue during the time of the 
 Romans as there is at this day by the industry of students throughout the 
 whole of Europe, who use Latin as a common means of expression, both 
 in original works and in translations. Roman authority first planted Latin 
 among us here, by force of their conquest, and its use in matters of 
 learning causes it to continue. Therefore the so-called Latin tongues have 
 their own peoples to thank, both for their own cultivation at home and 
 for the favour they enjoy abroad. So it falls out that, as we are profited 
 by means of these tongues, we should pay them honour, and yet not 
 without cherishing our own, in regard both to cases where the usage is 
 best and to those where it is open to improvement. For did not these 
 tongues use even the same means to cultivate themselves before they 
 proved so beautiful.? Did the people shrink from putting into their owti 
 language the ideas they borrowed from foreign sources.? If they had 
 done so, we should never have had the works we so greatly admire. 
 
 There are two chief reasons which keep Latin, and to some extent 
 
A PLEA 35 
 
 other learned tongues, in high consideration among us — the knowledge 
 which is registered in them, and their use as a means of communication, 
 by the learned class throughout Europe. While these two benefits are 
 retained, if there is anything else that can be done with our own tongue, 
 either in beautifying it, or in turning it to practical account, we cannot 
 but take advantage of it, even though Latin should thus be displaced, 
 as it displaced others, bequeathing its learning to us. For is it not indeed 
 a marvellous bondage, to become servants to one tongue for the sake of 
 learning, during the greater part of our time, when we can have the very 
 same treasures in our own language, which forms the joyful title to our 
 own liberty, as the Latin reminds us of our thralldom.? I love Rome, 
 but I love London better: I favour Italy, but I favour England more: I 
 honour the Latin tongue, but I worship the English. I wish everything 
 were in our own tongue which the learned tongues gained from others, 
 nor do I wrong them in treating them as they did their predecessors, 
 teaching us by their example how boldly we may venture, notwith- 
 standing the opinion of some among us, who desire rather to please 
 themselves with a foreign language that they know, than to profit their 
 country in their own language, which they ought to know. It is no 
 argument to say : Will you dishonour those tongues which have honoured 
 you, and without which you could never have enjoyed the learning of 
 which you propose to rob them.'' For I honour them still, as much as 
 any one, even in wishing my own tongue to be a partaker of their honour. 
 For if I did not hold them in great admiration, because I know their 
 value, I would not think it any honour for my own language to imitate 
 their grace. I wish we had the stores with which they furnished them- 
 selves from foreign sources. For the tongues that we study were not the 
 first getters, though by learned labour they prove to be good keepers, 
 and they are ready to discharge their trust, in handing on to others what 
 was committed to them for a term.... The dishonour will lie with 
 the tongue that refuses to receive the inheritance intended for it and duly 
 offered to it, and from this dishonour I would our language were free. 
 I admit the good fortune of those tongues that had so great a start over 
 others that they are most welcome wherever they set foot, and are always 
 admired for their rare excellence, disposing all men to think little of any 
 form of speech that does not resemble them, and to rank even the best 
 of these as marvellously behind them. The diligent labour of the learned 
 men of ancient times so enriched their tongues that they proved very 
 pliable, as I am assured our own will prove, if our learned fellow-country- 
 men will bestow their labour on it. And why, I pray you, should such 
 labour not be bestowed on English, as well as on Latin or any other 
 language? Will you say it is needless? Certainly that will not hold. If 
 
 3—2 
 
36 A PLEA 
 
 loss of time over tongues, while you are pilgrims to learning, is no injury, 
 or lack of sound skill, while language distracts the mind from the sense, 
 especially with the foolish and inexperienced, then there might be some 
 ground for holding it needless. But since there was no need for the 
 present loss of time in study through labouring with tongues, and since 
 our understanding is more perfect in our natural speech, however well 
 we may know the foreign language, methinks necessity itself calls for 
 English, by which all that bravery may be had at home that makes us 
 gaze so much at the fine stranger.... 
 
 Our English is our own, and must be used by those to whom it belongs. 
 First Part of the Elementarie: Peroration. 
 
 Mulcaster died over three hundred years ago, and the obscure 
 language of his little island has become the language of the world 
 with a literature second to no other. But no attempt has ever yet 
 been made to give the whole English people a humane education 
 in and by the English language. What we need to do is to take 
 the enthusiasm and enlightenment that marked the best classical 
 teaching and transfer it to English. It was often said that classical 
 masters were the best teachers of English. Obviously! for they 
 were the only teachers who had received a literary education. At 
 the Renaissance, when our speech seemed barbarous and our 
 literature nothing but an old song, the English scholars who lit 
 their torch from the lamp that Marsilio Ficino burned before the 
 bust of Plato carried light into darkness, and, by giving us Greek, 
 really gave us English. They sang, and rightly sang, the glorv of 
 Greek, because it was a living tongue when English had not fully 
 come to birth; but the pedant of to-day finds some special glory 
 in Greek because it is dead. English has inherited; and those who 
 still try to imitate the faded ecstasies of the Renaissance scholars 
 are untrue to the Renaissance. The Renaissance was not so much 
 a new birth as a resurrection. Why seek we, then, the living among 
 the dead? Our monks still babble of Greek and Latin as the only 
 way to literary salvation; and rather than abate a jot or tittle of 
 that claim they are ready to let the millions of boys and girls from 
 the elementary schools and the modern middle class schools, 
 and the thousands of eager and energetic young men from the 
 colleges of science and technology — all hopelessly lost to classics 
 — ^pass into life untouched by the thoughts that breathe and words 
 that burn in exhalations from the native soil. We do not give our 
 elementary school children even so little as the decencies of 
 
A PLEA 37 
 
 cultivated speech. It is simply the fact that, after fifty years of 
 compulsory education, John Bull has far less facility in his own 
 language than the despised foreigner in his. In whatever direction 
 of knowledge the elementary school products may have progressed 
 during that half-century, in English (and all that it implies) they 
 have progressed least of all. We have called one novelist in evidence, 
 let us call another. Thus writes George Gissing in Thyrxa-. 
 
 The working man does not read, in the strict sense of the word ; fiction 
 has litde interest for him, and of poetry he has no comprehension what- 
 ever; your artizan of brains can study, but he cannot read. 
 
 That is unquestionably true — how true, even of the ambitious 
 working man, let the teachers of W. E. A. and U.T. C. classes 
 testify. The deficiency is just what is wrong with the class from 
 which the clever artizan comes. The English workman woos 
 knowledge for her dowry, not for her diviner charms — if ever he 
 is moved to woo knowledge at all. At the back of his mind is the 
 idea of 'improving his position in life,' when what most needs im- 
 provement is his posture towards life. The English lower middle 
 class is an uneducated class, and therefore the special prey of the 
 political humbug and the 'stunt' newspaper. The man who can 
 only study is in a lov/er stage of development than the man who 
 can read. He is one to whom the primrose on the river's brim is 
 not even a primrose: it is P. vulgaris^ and nothing more. He is 
 the man who can never see the wood for the trees — the man who 
 can never take a view of things, the man without vision, or sense 
 of something afar. 
 
 It seems plain, then, that our Ptolemaic educational system 
 is in need of reformation. Its centre of gravity must be changed 
 from subjects that give the boy scraps of information to subjects 
 that will make him a civilised articulate human being. So far, in 
 the process of education we have been looking for power before 
 capacity — we have been trying to force a spade into hands that 
 can hardly wield a spoon. That the elementary school boy's educa- 
 tion iscut short at the age when the public school boy's is beginning 
 is a tragic fact that may be lamented, but must not be allowed to 
 determine the range and character of the curriculum. The ele- 
 mentary school boy is going to have a vastly harder and more 
 disagreeable life in manhood than the public school boy; but that 
 is no reason why we should make his school days harder with 
 tough masses or indigestible knowledge. Mark Twain is not 
 
38 A PLEA 
 
 usually regarded as an educationist; but upon education, as upon 
 other human activities, he has something wise to say. His text is 
 this maxim: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for 
 practice. Then he made School Boards." Here is the com- 
 ment: 
 
 Suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and 
 dumb and blind children than we sometimes apply in our American 
 public (i.e. elementary) schools to the instruction of children who are 
 in possession of all their faculties,? The result would be, that the deaf and 
 dumb and blind would acquire nothing. They would live and die as 
 ignorant as bricks and stones. The methods used in the asylums are 
 rational. The teacher exactly measures the child's capacity, to begin with, 
 and from thence onward the tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the 
 gradual development of that capacity: the tasks keep pace with the steps 
 of the child's progress, they don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it, 
 by irrational caprice, and land in vacancy — according to the average 
 pubhc school plan. In the public school, apparently, they teach the child 
 to spell cat, then ask it to calculate an eclipse; when it can read words of 
 two syllables, they require it to explain the circulation of the blood ; when 
 it reaches the head of the infant class they bully it with conundrums that 
 cover the domain of universal knowledge. 
 
 It is undeniably true that we do not fit instruction to the 
 obvious needs and deficiencies of normal children as carefully as 
 to those of mental and physical defectives. A sound educational 
 system must be based upon the great means of human inter- 
 course — human speech in spoken and written word. For English 
 children it must recognise the great peculiarities of English already 
 described: (i) that it is of all school activities the chief, the most 
 important and the most practical, because it covers the whole life 
 of man from the cradle to the grave; (2) that it is the one school 
 subject in which we have to fight, not for a clear gain of knowledge, 
 but for a precarious margin of advantage over powerful influences 
 of evil; (3) that it is the medium of all instruction, communica- 
 tion, business and general intercourse, the basis of knowledge, the 
 condition upon which progress depends; (4) that it is (for the 
 majority) the only language learned, and thus the sole means of 
 linguistic study and access to literature, the sole means by which 
 the people can be placed in contact with the embodied feeling, 
 thought and experience of mankind. That is to say, our chief task 
 in school is twofold: (a) to treat English as a tool, and (b) to treat 
 English as a means of access to formative life and beauty. 
 
A PLEA 39 
 
 There Is no class in the country that does not need a full 
 education in English. Possibly a common basis of education might 
 do much to mitigate the class antagonism that is dangerously keen 
 at the moment and shows no signs of losing its edge. At present, 
 social antagonism is emphasised by the whole of our school system 
 — if anything so haphazard can be called a system. The poor boy 
 in the elementary school receives a certain kind of education — 
 a kind, as we have seen, not at all adapted to his personal needs; 
 the wealthier boy, of precisely the same age and much the same 
 mental endowment, receives in the preparatory school, an entirely 
 different kind of education, equally ill adapted to his personal 
 needs. In the education of the poor boy and of the rich boy there 
 is nothing whatever in common except the profound uselessncss 
 of that education. For some of the elementary children there 
 are various kinds of further education — central schools, day 
 continuation schools, junior technical schools, trade schools, and 
 I think even additional kinds are in contemplation. These schools 
 are fences and barriers meant to keep the elementary school 
 children from going into the schools of the 'respectable' classes. 
 A few actually reach the secondary schools as scholarship children 
 or * free-placers' — and in some schools they are kept apart from 
 the 'paying' pupils. No elementary school children ever pass into 
 the public schools. Thus, our elementary schools, secondary 
 schools and public schools represent, not eclucational grades, but 
 social antagonisms. For instance, the late head-mistress of a well- 
 known girls' secondary school in London refused to hold any 
 communication with the head-mistresses of the elementary schools 
 from which she received the Junior County Scholars. It may be 
 quite right that social grades should be emphasised by the schools, 
 it may be quite right that there should be (as there is) a distinctive 
 'class' education; but we must not be astonished to find as its 
 inevitable product a distinctive class antagonism. If we want 
 that class antagonism to be mitigated, we must abandon our system 
 of class education and find some form of education common to 
 the schools of all classes. A common school is, at present, quite 
 impracticable. We are not nearly ready yet to assimilate such a 
 revolutionary change. But though a common school is imprac- 
 ticable, a common basis of education is not. The one common 
 basis of a common culture is the common tongue. 
 
Ill 
 
 A Programme 
 
 '* He described himself as a senior English master in a London private school." 
 "Poor wretch," said I. 
 
 " That's what I thought, and the more he talked, the more I thought it." 
 
 H. G. Wells. 
 
 AS a school subject English can be considered in six aspects — 
 xV aspects of one thing, remember, not separate 'subjects,' 
 sometimes not even separable subjects. I am writing with the 
 elementary schools chiefly in my mind; but the course here 
 suggested should form the 'elementary education' of all English 
 boys and girls, no matter what their social class may be or what 
 their schools may be called. Naturally the amount of stress laid 
 upon each aspect of the subject will vary with the immediate 
 needs of the pupils. Thus, a child whose ear has been accustomed 
 to the pitch, intonation and accent tliat mark the speech of culti- 
 vated people will naturally need very little of the training that 
 must necessarily be given to elementary school children. These 
 are what I call the six aspects of the English course: (i) Training 
 in Speech; (2) Training in Talk; (3) Training in Listening; 
 (4) Training in Writing; (5) Training in Study; (6) The In- 
 duction to Literature. Let us consider each of these in detail. 
 
 I 
 
 Systematic training in standard 'English speech 
 
 This is a difficult and disputable part of the course. I give here 
 my own view, but I know it is a view that many refuse to take. 
 I believe, however, that, within certain limits, most teachers are 
 in agreement. 
 
 This country is torn with dialects, some of which are, in the 
 main, degradations. Enthusiastic 'localists' cling to their dialects 
 
A PROGRAMME 41 
 
 — and cling, sometimes, to the merely ignorant mispronunciations, 
 blunders and lapses which they fondly imagine to be part of dialect. 
 The untutored speech of the multitude does not necessarily repre- 
 sent the unspoiled freshness of a beautiful patois. Thus, to quote 
 a simple example, the majority of English people — even some 
 who pretend to education — talk of Maying down' when they 
 mean 'lying down.' Are we going to protect what is nothing but 
 a piece of ignorance on the ground that it is part of the natural 
 common speech.? I feel, myself, that the schools have nothing to 
 do with any patois. The language of all English schools should 
 be standarci English speech. It is not the business of teachers 
 either to cherish or destroy a local dialect; they have simply to 
 equip their pupils with the normal national speech — as a sort of 
 second language, if the grip of patois is very strong. Most educated 
 Englishmen who spent their youth in a dialect area are bi-lingual 
 — indeed the desire to write in Doric is an eternal passion in the 
 literary breast. Standard English need not be fatal to local idiom. 
 Where a dialect is genuinely rooted it will live; where it is feeble 
 but curiously interesting, it may be kept artificially alive by en- 
 thusiasts; where it has no real reason for existing it will perish, 
 as all provisional institutions must perish. Even if the school tends 
 to extinguish a local idiosyncracy of speech, it is not necessarily 
 doing evil. No serious damage is done to national tradition if a 
 boy is taught to say 'I'll hit him' instead of 'Us'U hit he.' He will 
 fight all the same. It seems clear to me that every English child, 
 whether he has a local speech or not, should be taught in school 
 the standard English of the day. There is no need to define 
 standard English speech. We know what it is, and there's an end 
 on't. We know standard English when we hear it just as we know 
 a dog when we see it, without the aid of definitions. Or, to put 
 it another way, we know what is not standard English, and that 
 is a sufficiently practical guide. If any one wants a definite 
 example of standard English we can tell him that it is the kind 
 of English spoken by a simple unafl^ected young Englishman like 
 the Prince of Wales, or by Mr Balfour (born in Scotland) or by 
 Mr Asquith (born in Yorkshire), or by Mr Dennis Eadie or 
 Mr Gerald du Maurier or Miss Ellen Terry or Miss Henrietta 
 Watson — actors as a rule speak with lessafl^ecration than actresses. 
 We want English people to speak English as unaffectedly as 
 
42 A PROGRAMME 
 
 Coquelin spoke French. French people do not all speak alike (as 
 the untrained English ear is apt to suppose), but there is much less 
 divergence from the centre in France than in England. We have 
 no need, however, to go to France for an example. One of my 
 most cherished memories of happy nights at the theatre in days 
 of youth is the Buckingham of Forbes-Robertson in Irving's 
 production of Henry Fill. Buckingham is not so much a cha- 
 racter as a speech ; and that speech as Forbes-Robertson delivered 
 it, was a model, or rather a monument, of beautiful English 
 utterance. That sort of thing, we can say, is standard English 
 speech at its noblest. We need waste no time upon the people who 
 hold up hands of horror at the thought of everybody's speaking 
 just like everybody else. What we have to look at is the first 
 possibility of reform, not the theoretical extremity of accomplish- 
 ment. No form of living speech can be stationary even though a 
 standard be fixed. Everybody will not speak like everybody else. 
 There will always be some divergence, as there now is among 
 people of undoubted cultivation, to say nothing of the personal 
 overtones that we could not eliminate even if we tried. What we 
 want to do, what we must do, is to lessen the extremes of difference 
 that make Whitehall, Whitechapel and Whitehaven foreign to 
 each other. 
 
 What we must not do is to set up affected suburban 'refine- 
 ment' as a standard. One out-spoken young person in a factory 
 continuation school, when speech training was mentioned, de- 
 clared that she wasn't going to talk like 'the rich people.' She 
 added scornfully, "They talk as if they weren't well. They pinch 
 their mouths up and say, 'Oo, noo,' and 'Thenks offly.'" Well, 
 her decision might have been strengthened by a very impressive 
 lady who sat opposite to me in a 'bus the other day and asked 
 quite unmistakably for a ticket to 'Sloon Squah,' thus meeting, 
 as extremes will, the aspiring young shop-girls whom I hear every 
 morning at Hammersmith asking for tickets to 'Natesbridge.' 
 It is distressing to hear a London elementary school sing, in a 
 well-known hymn, "Pryse Him for His gryce and fyver"; but 
 it is just as distressing to hear a church choir in a highly re- 
 spectable suburb intimating a similar gratitude for 'grease and 
 fever.' A man's speech is usually his label for life, and we ought 
 to see that good boys are not wrongly labelled. 
 
A PROGRAMME 43 
 
 As the 'O' revealed Giotto (writes the Autocrat) — as the one word 
 'moi' betrayed the Stratford-attc-Bowe-taught Anglais — so all a man's 
 antecedents and possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which 
 gives at once the gauge of his education and his mental organisation. 
 
 Possibilities, Sir? said the divinity student, can't a man who says 
 Haozut arrive at distinction? 
 
 Sir, I replied, in a republic all things are possible. But the man with 
 a future has almost of necessity sense enough to see that any odious trick 
 of speech or manners must be got rid of. 
 
 The desiderated training in speech must begin in the earliest 
 stages and continue without any lapse through the child's school 
 life. At first the training will be purely imitative, but later it 
 should mean instruction in the use of the speech-organs. Needless 
 to say that a teacher of speech untrained m phonetics is as useless 
 as a doctor untrained in anatomy. The teacher without a phonetic 
 training is unable to make any systematic correction because, as 
 a rule, the untrained ear cannot isolate the real cause of the trouble 
 — often, in London speech, for instance, a defect of one element 
 in an unrecognised diphthong. Speech-training reveals, at times, 
 physical defects that need specific remedial or surgical treatment. 
 Defects of the speech-organs are often overlooked at medical 
 inspections. It is unnecessary to do more than barely mention 
 how immensely the training in English speech will benefit every 
 child who comes later to learn a foreign language. 
 
 Allied with pronunciation and the production of sounds is 
 clearness of articulation. This is a very important aspect of English 
 teaching and it is frequently overlooked. Slovenly, lazy articula- 
 tion must never be tolerated in any class of any school of any 
 grade. The affected 'refinement' of one social group is as 
 abominable as the unaffected lack of refinement of another. Many 
 mistakes in spelling are really mistakes in articulation. "Fhe 
 London boy who writes 'he at to go' is not making a mistake in 
 spelling; he is spelling correctly what he habitually savs. The first 
 correction must come in his speech. For most London boys there 
 is a number called 'lem'; that they ever spell it 'eleven' is a 
 mystery. On the explosive subject of phonetic or 'simplified' 
 spelling I propose to say nothing at all. The teacher's obvious 
 business is to teach the kind of spelling in public demand. As 
 long as the general public demand is for the existing spelling 
 
44 A PROGRAMME 
 
 teachers must teach it. Our present spelling is deplorable and 
 makes the teaching of reading to very small children a terrible 
 labour. Still, both reading and spelling are taught; and though 
 the child of seven spells with a wild and wonderful license, by 
 fourteen he spells, on the whole, pretty well. More will be said 
 about spelling in a subsequent section. 
 
 What seems to me a final answer to those who despair of 
 teaching the decencies of speech to our elementary school children 
 is the fact that these same children are taught to sing beautifully. 
 Those who can be taught to sing can be taught to speak. But to 
 accomplish this means hard work — it means unsleeping zeal and 
 patience. The desired standard will not be attained in one genera- 
 tion or two, but every step will be something gained. Naturally 
 much of the labour will fall, as it already does, upon the teachers 
 in the infants' schools; and, in happier conditions, their work will 
 be regularly continued in the next departments of the school, 
 instead of being abandoned (as it usually is) for something more 
 'practical' — like arithmetic. I think specially of one infants' 
 department, in which, owing to the personal enthusiasm of an 
 enlightened head-mistress, speech training was a stressed activity, 
 with the result that little fellows of seven and eight came up to 
 the boys' department able to pronounce such crucial vowels for 
 Londoners as the a and the / and the ee in say and wi/d a.nd wheel 
 quite prettily. But speech training had no place among the stern 
 and useful activities of the boys' department, and in a very short 
 time the little graces of speech had vanished, and say had become 
 sy^ wi/dy wahl and wheels wily as in any other London school. 
 Now, let this sedulous training of speech become universal in the 
 infants' school, and let it be continued as a compulsory and 
 rationalised activity in the boys' and girls' departments, and what 
 a difference we should make! In this country classes are sun- 
 dered by difference in language — difference of speech is a symbol 
 of class antagonism. How far a common speech would go to 
 mitigate antagonism and remove misunderstanding — how far the 
 removal of class difference is either desirable in itself or a proper 
 aim of education — these are debatable questions; but surely if 
 there is a unity called England there should be a unity called 
 English ! 
 
 And the matter goes further than the limits of this island. 
 
A PROGRAMME 
 
 English is now incontestably the language of the world. W 
 should the standard of spoken English be found if not in Engl 
 But there is no standard here. Each county, almost each town, is 
 a law to itself and claims the right purity for itself This is not 
 independence, it is merely provincialism; and it is not the duty 
 of the schools to encourage provincialism, but to set the standard 
 of speech for the Empire. The difficulties are not insuperable. 
 Individual efforts of particular schools are useless — there must 
 be concerted action. Let the central authority for education 
 clearly demand that in all English schools standard English speech 
 alone must be used, and we shall soon find our way in the right 
 direction without elaborate and disputable prescriptions. A written 
 constitution in phonetics is not desirable. What does seem desirable 
 is that the teacher's own equipment in accent and intonation 
 should be more closely scrutinised than it is. I urge, then, as an 
 important and essential part of school activity the training of the 
 pupils in the sounds of standard English speech. The English boy 
 has an indefeasible right to the King's English. 
 
 II 
 
 Systematic training in the use of correct spoken English 
 
 The person who cannot make a concise, correct, lucid and 
 intelligible statement in speech is an uneducated person, whether 
 he is a Fellow of All Souls or a fellow from the slums. The im- 
 portance of this 'talk-training' is so great that little need be said 
 about it. It ought to be the most successful feature of school work, 
 simply because the interchange of views between teacher and 
 taught is the staple of most good lessons; but it is very obviouslv 
 not the most successful feature of school work, as any visitor will 
 at once discover. Too often teaching is little more than the deli verv 
 of monologues by the teacher, the pupils' required contribution 
 being dead silence. Even when the class is asked questions, the 
 teachers are usually content to accept the intention of an answer 
 (sometimes a very good thing to do) — that is, to accept answers 
 for the sake of facts and to regard the form of expression as un- 
 important or beyond their control. This is not limited to the 
 elementary schools. But, in a very real sense, a f ict badly expressed 
 
46 A PROGRAMME 
 
 is much less valuable both to speaker and hearer than the same 
 fact clearly expressed — if, indeed, it can be said to be a fact at all 
 before it has reached exact expression. We cannot here discuss the 
 value of style in art — we must simply take it as indisputable that 
 style is not an added and irrelevant adornment, but something 
 that gives speed, force and direction to utterance. We shall not 
 be so foolish as to demand from the speech of our pupils the grace 
 that is called style; but we must not be so foolish as to think that 
 in any aspect of life fact is everything and form nothing. The 
 decencies and amenities of civilised existence amount to feeling 
 embodied in form. In a very real sense it is form that makes the 
 world go round. 
 
 Any lesson requiring the use of speech should always be a 
 lesson in spoken English, whatever the subject of the lesson and 
 the special domain of the teacher. The business of the science 
 teacher is not to teach some impalpable abstraction called science, 
 but science embodied in decent speech. The business of a person 
 at table is not merely to eat, but to eat decently. He may eat 
 enormously, rapidly, and even rapturouslv, but if he does not eat 
 decently he eats badly; in short, he does not know how to eat. 
 So, the boy who slobbers out history in smears and messes of words, 
 simply does not know his history, even if the facts he has emitted 
 are correct. The power to transmit knowledge is part of know- 
 ledge. It is useless for a person to claim that his sentences mean 
 something to him if they mean nothing to everybody else. Teachers 
 must abandon utterly the tacit belief that it doesn't matter how 
 a thing is said if the facts are all right. Hell is paved with the 
 sentences that have failed to express their meaning. Teachers 
 must also abandon their tacit belief that the geography teacher's 
 business is to teach geography, not English. It is every teacher's 
 business to teach English^. Remember that our chief work in 
 
 1 Here is an actual example of what happens. In a certain continuation 
 school, attended by pupils of a low intellectual order, the cookery note-books 
 containing recipes dictated by the cookery-teacher were found to be full of 
 incomprehensible rubbish — the girls having been unable to take down what 
 was said. When this was pointed out to the teacher, she was very indignant and 
 declared expressly that it was not her work to see that the girls could do dicta- 
 tion. She further added that the girls had an hour's English lesson every week, 
 and it was Miss So-and-so's business to teach dictation. She found general 
 support and agreement in her repudiation of responsibility. Now the whole 
 
A PROGRAMME 47 
 
 school is to call out capacity. Give the boy a workmanlike ability 
 to use his own language, and it doesn't matter much if he thinks 
 that the Equator is also called the Meridian of Greenwich. If his 
 English is put right he will be able to get his Equator right, but 
 while his English is bad he will get nothing right. 
 
 Probably the least valuable lessons in spoken English are those 
 specifically called Oral Composition lessons; the most valuable 
 are the casual lessons that occur in every subject. It is much 
 harder to be natural than artificial; it is much harder for a boy 
 to acquire the regular habit of decent natural speech than to 
 remember the formalities of an occasional harangue. This is not 
 said to depreciate the value of oral composition lessons in the 
 least, but to prevent a tendency of teachers to limit 'talk-training' 
 to these lawful occasions. 
 
 Personally I should never put oral composition on a school 
 time-table. To assign a limited definite time for practice in talk 
 seems to me as absurd as to assign a limited definite time for 
 practice in conduct. Informal training in talk should scarcely 
 ever cease; and I should assume that when a teacher wanted a 
 debate, or a set of speeches, or any other special form of utterance, 
 he would use any composition lesson, or, indeed, any other lesson, 
 if the matter were appropriate. 'Oral Composition' on the time- 
 table is apt to imply that we need not concern ourselves with the 
 children's speech at half-past ten on Monday because the oral 
 composition lesson is at half-past three on Wednesday. Much of 
 what is said m a later section about the teaching of composition 
 can be applied to the teaching of conversation. 
 
 The correction of the pupil's spoken English is a difHcult and 
 delicate matter, calling for the utmost of a teacher's technical 
 skill. Correction should be kindly and casual, intimated rather 
 than impressed. If your children like you they will try to imitate 
 you. The act of speech must not be made an ordeal of terror. 
 I have never encountered any boys who resented correction 
 genially made; and I have usually found that they really do want 
 to learn how to speak nicely. Remember that when a boy is 
 speaking to you very badly he is not trying to speak badly; he 
 
 of the present contention can be concentrated on that one point. It certainly 
 is the business of the cookery -mistress to teach dictation — as long » she finds 
 it necessary to use dictation. 
 
48 A PROGRAMME 
 
 is not even indifferent; he is trying to speak well, and failing. 
 He is suffering from a disease of language which it is the teacher's 
 business to cure. Remember too, that the best teaching is that 
 which means friendly cooperation between teacher and taught. 
 Friendly conversation is a mode of friendly cooperation. 
 
 There are few graces in which the Englishman is more deficient 
 than the grace of easy speech. No one wants him to be per- 
 petually talkative, but then, surely, no one wants him to be a 
 sullen and silent boor. We want him to be able to talk, even 
 though he prefers silence. Neither public school nor secondary 
 school appears to do much for him in this respect; the elementary 
 school appears to do next to nothing, and to be unaware of his 
 need or its own neglect. In spite of its alleged preoccupation with 
 the boy's ability to earn a living, the elementary school does not 
 equip him with the chief tool of all trades and callings, clear and 
 intelligible speech. And yet of all his deficiencies, this lack of 
 language is the most obvious. At least that is so in London. The 
 elementary school boy takes out of school at fourteen, unmitigated 
 and unimproved, the debased idiom he brought into it at seven, 
 and even in that he is but semi-articulate. Less time is spent in 
 school on the spoken language than on any other activity, and 
 yet none needs more — none so glaringly needs more. The elemen- 
 tary school fulfils neither any immediate or ultimate purpose of 
 education as long as it is content to take the speech of the children 
 as it finds it, and to leave it there. The most damaging criticism 
 that can be uttered against the elementary school is to be heard 
 in the speech of its products. Surely, the first healthy impulse of 
 any kindly person confronted with a class of poor, inarticulate 
 children should be to say, not, *' I will teach you arithmetic and 
 history and geography and science and drawing," but 'T must 
 teach you how to speak like human beings." What can literature 
 possibly mean to children whose habitual misshapen and un- 
 taught speech bears no resemblance to what they see in print.? 
 For them, in a sense, English literature is in a foreign language. 
 To speech the rest can be added. Correct and lucid speech is not 
 only an ornament and grace of life: it is one of the first and last 
 necessities of corporate existence. There is no more 'practical* 
 subject in the whole range of school work; there is no subject 
 more generally neglected. 
 
A PROGRAMME 49 
 
 III 
 
 Regular practice in the art of listening 
 
 The six aspects under which we are considering Engb'sh are 
 not clearly defined and exclusive. Indeed, they cannot, they 
 must not, be made exclusive. Thus, our first two aspects shade 
 into one another, and much that we have said about speaking 
 applies equally to writing. This third aspect, the art of hearing, 
 cannot be dissociated from the others — it is a part of speech, of 
 writing, and of reading. As, however, listening seems specially 
 associated with talking, let us consider it here. Very little need 
 be said to indicate its importance in education. A poor teacher 
 or lecturer can make an audience endure; a good teacher or 
 lecturer can make an audience listen. Unfortunately everybody 
 is not interesting, and listening involves much disciplined attention. 
 How far do we give our pupils practice in listening.? There is a 
 passage in Mrs Piozzi's Anecdotes of Johnson that should be 
 valuable to teachers as well as parents : 
 
 I will relate one thing more that Dr Johnson said about babyhood 
 before I quit the subject; it was this: That little people should be en- 
 couraged always to tell whatever they hear particularly striking to some 
 brother, sister or servant immediately, before the impression is erased 
 by the intervention of newer occurrences. He perfectly remembered 
 the first time he ever heard of Heaven and Hell, he said, because when 
 his mother had made out such a description of both places as she thought 
 hkely to seize the attention of her infant auditor, who was then in bed 
 with her, she got up, and dressing him before her usual time, sent him 
 directly to call a favourite workman in the house, to whom she knew he 
 would communicate the conversation while it was yet impressed upon 
 his mind. The event was what she wished, and it was to that method 
 chieiiy that he owed his uncommon felicity of remembering distant 
 occurrences and long past conversations. 
 
 We need not press the anecdote too hard for a moral. Dr John- 
 son never had much difficulty in communicating any conversation, 
 but it cannot certainly be said that he excelled in listening to 
 others. Nevertheless, the practice described in the story is a dis- 
 cipline in listening as well as in communicating, and its application 
 to school work is plain. No boy can repeat what he has not heard. 
 
 S. B. 4 
 
50 A PROGRAMME 
 
 If a boy knows that, as a regular part of his work, he may be 
 called upon to repeat to the class something that has recently been 
 told him, he will also know that a regular part of his work is to 
 listen carefully. The old 'code' composition exercise for Standard 
 V, in which the children were required to write the substance of 
 a short story read to them, may have been ineffective as a means 
 of teaching the art of writing, but it was effective as a means of 
 teaching the art of listening. Read a short simple poem to a class, 
 even of older children, such a poem as "Home they brought her 
 warrior dead," and ask individual children to come out and repeat 
 it to the others, either in the original words or in words of their 
 own, and you will be astonished to find, not merely how little 
 they have remembered, but how little they have heard. Dictate 
 to a seventh standard a short stanza — say, of The Ancient Mariner 
 — and ask the boys to write it down after one hearing, and you 
 will find that very few of them have really heard it. They have 
 heard a few isolated words, but they have not heard the stanza 
 as a whole thing. The limiting of dictation to a mere spelling test 
 is a misuse of a valuable instrument. There should be a regular 
 use of sense-dictation to give practice in the art of consecutive 
 listening. Dictate a stanza, not phrase by phrase, but as a whole, 
 and expect, not mere accuracy of spelling, but accuracy of appre- 
 hension. Dictate short prose passages — proverbs at first, then brief 
 sentences, then longer sentences, and expect that the class should 
 be able to reproduce, not merely some of the words, but all of the 
 meaning. You will be training them to do something really 
 difficult and really valuable, namely, to listen consecutively and 
 constructively. There is far too much monologue in the teacher's 
 school-work and far too much passive listening in the child's; 
 frequent exercises in cooperative listening are good for both. 
 
 The many stories told of children's misapprehension of prayers 
 and hymns conveyed to them orally indicate the need for some 
 insistence upon sensible listening. "Old Father Whichard in 
 heaven," "Lead us not into Thames Station," "For Emma and 
 Emma," "Pity mice and plicity," and so forth, are amusing as 
 blunders of childhood, but not as misunderstandings of maturity. 
 There are people old enough to know better who apparently take 
 no trouble to understand what is said to them. They have never 
 learned to listen. To know when not to listen is a valuable art 
 in this world of bores; but the act should be under our own control. 
 
A PROGRAMME 51 
 
 IV 
 
 Systematic training in the art of ^writing 
 
 The person who cannot make a correct, concise, lucid and 
 inteHigible statement in writing is an uneducated person. Writing 
 is not one of the great technical arts like the composition of music 
 or the painting of pictures. Behind the Chromatic Fantasia and 
 Fugue of Bach and the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian lies an 
 enormous technical equipment. Behind the power to play the 
 first or copy the second there also lies a great technical equipment. 
 The art of writing demands no such quantity of gymnastic, but 
 it demands a good deal. One general impression is that everybody 
 can write without taking special pains; but that is quite un- 
 true, as we can discover daily. Many people are obliged to write 
 letters, or to make written statements, and very few can do either. 
 The teacher's obligation is plain. It is still the fact that true ease 
 in writing comes by art, not chance, even though the eighteenth 
 century and the appreciation of form are both out of fashion. The 
 English view of writing oscillates between these two extremes, 
 first, the belief we have already mentioned, that any one can 
 write without special teaching, and next, a belief that no one can 
 be taught to write by any quantity of teaching. Neither belief is 
 sound. A few favoured persons are born writers, able to transmit 
 their thoughts and their personality without effort; though eveis 
 here we seldom know how much labour lies behind apparent ease. 
 When a writer rashly confesses to taking pains in the practice of 
 his art, as Stevenson did in an unhappy moment, many people 
 regard the pains as reprehensible, the skill as suspicious and the 
 confession as improper. Nevertheless, though no teaching will 
 turn Tom Brown into Sir Thomas Browne, Tom Brown can 
 be taught a workmanlike skill in the use of his own language; and, 
 without teaching, it is highly improbable that he will ever acquire 
 that skill. At the moment, Tom Brown is not taught to write 
 and, as everybody knows, he cannot; — though I must add at once 
 that increasing pains are being taken to teach him. He must, as 
 a rule, be taught English through English. When Professor 
 Saintsbury speaks of "translation and re-translation from and into 
 
52 A PROGRAMME 
 
 Latin" as "undoubtedly the surest (if not the only) way to master 
 English writing," he is saying what is not helpful and what is 
 simply not true; for it is painfully obvious that many thousands 
 of English boys have spent several years in translating and re- 
 translating from and into Latin without betraying the faintest 
 symptoms of an immediate or subsequent mastery of English 
 writing. This point is worth further consideration, for Mr Max 
 Beerbohm, in the act of saying something entirely to our purpose, 
 concludes by recommending the same panacea: 
 
 We have to consider that English is an immensely odd and irregular 
 language, that it is accounted very difficult by even the best of foreign 
 linguists, and that even among native writers there are few who can so 
 wield it as to make their meaning clear without prolixity — and among 
 these few none who has not been well-grounded in Latin. 
 
 I regret the final exaggeration because it may make readers 
 doubt the entire truth of the rest. That English is a most 
 difficult language to use lucidly, correctly and concisely is literally 
 and absolutely true; but that no one can so use it who is not well- 
 grounded in Latin is only partly true. Bunyan, who was not well- 
 grounded in Latin, wrote a more classical English than Bentley, 
 who was. Dickens, who was not well-grounded in Latin, is a 
 more correct and shapely writer than Thackeray, who was. Jane 
 Austen, who was not well-grounded in Latin, wrote a more 
 exact and concise English than Scott, who was. Mark Twain, 
 who was not well-grounded in Latin, wrote a much finer-edged 
 English prose than Swinburne, who was. Mr Bernard Shaw, 
 who was not well-grounded in Latin, writes as keenly and con- 
 cisely as Mr Max Beerbohm, who was. On the other hand, many 
 whose classical grounding is indubitable have written atrociously. 
 Examples gross as earth exhort me, but I will quote one only, the 
 deathless Henry Riley, B.A., of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who 
 provided the old Bohn Library with translations that are a per- 
 petual joy: 
 
 Ipse miser vidi, cum me dormire putares, 
 Sobrius apposito crimina vestra mero. 
 
 Multa superciho vidi vibrante loquentes. 
 Nutibus in vestris pars bona vocis erat. 
 
 Thus Ovid. 
 
A PROGRAMME 53 
 
 Now hear the well-grounded Riley: 
 
 To my sorrow, in my sober moments, with the wine on the table, I 
 myself was witness of your criminality, when you thought I was asleep. 
 I saw you both uttering many an expression by moving your eyebrows; 
 in your nods there was a considerable amount of language. 
 
 Once more: 
 
 Di melius, quam me, si sit peccasse libido, 
 Sordida contemtae sortis amica juvet! 
 
 Now hear the delicate Riley: 
 
 May the gods prove more favourable, than that if I should have any 
 inclination for a faux pas, a low-born mistress of a despised class should 
 attract me! 
 
 (I hope my examples will not be frowned at by the austere.) 
 
 Surely these passages are a sufficient answer to the claims of 
 Mr Saintsbury and Mr Beerbohm. 
 
 The worst of such utterances is that there is just enough truth 
 and just enough fallacy in them to make them dangerous. The 
 fallacy is this: Mr Saintsbury and Mr Beerbohm had a natural 
 instinct for letters, and they were, therefore, both consciously and 
 unconsciously interested in such of their studies as provided a 
 definite discipline in the art of writing. What they learned in 
 Latin was naturally applied to English; but it need not have been 
 Latin, it need not have been a foreign language at all. Any boy 
 with an instinct for writing will take to the technique of his art, 
 just as a boy with an instinct for music will take to the technique 
 of his art. Stevenson, whose Latin was negligible, found his 
 technical exercises in English; if he had been at Charterhouse 
 with Mr Max Beerbohm the College Magazine essay would have 
 sung the praises of Latin. Now what happened to be true of 
 Mr Saintsbury and Mr Beerbohm is not true of boys in general. 
 In effect these authors say, "We learned to write English from 
 the discipline of Latin prose" — and so far they are partly right; 
 but they continue, "Therefore no one can learn to write English 
 without the discipline of Latin prose" — and there they are 
 entirely wrong, both positively and negatively: positively, because, 
 as we have seen, some excellent writers of English have been 
 innocent of Latin, and negatively, because, not merely many, but 
 
54 A PROGRAMME 
 
 the majority, of boys laboriously grounded in Latin, simply do 
 not learn how to write decent English. That is not a matter of 
 opinion, it is a matter of fact, and the theme of constant complaint. 
 Our friend Riley had clearly no instinct for letters and his Latin 
 did not make him write good English. No foreign language would 
 have done so. What the Rileys need is not Latin or Greek, which 
 their literary process is too feeble to assimilate, but sound, steady 
 instruction in English itself; and that is what, as a rule, they never 
 get. The general truth in Mr Saintsbury's assertion is just this, 
 that an intelligent knowledge of Latin is of great advantage 
 to the practised or practising writer of English. But surely that 
 is a truth so obvious as to need no proclamation. 
 
 Mr H. G. Wells has recently been saying something on this 
 matter, and his remark is specially worth notice, for the first 
 demand he makes from the schools is precisely that which is urged 
 in the present pages: 
 
 First we shall want our pupil to understand, speak, read and 
 write the mother tongue well. To do this thoroughly in Enghsh 
 involves a fairly sound knowledge of Latin grammar and at least 
 some slight knowledge of the elements of Greek. Latin and Greek, 
 which are disappearing as distinct and separate subjects from 
 many school curricula, are returning as necessary parts of the Enghsh 
 
 We need not discuss this sentence in detail. Its claim for the 
 classical languages is clearly not the same as Mr Saintsbury's, for 
 Mr Saintsbury, I imagine, represents the kind of person who 
 would die in the last ditch ratlier than consent to the dethrone- 
 ment of classics from supreme sovereignty to a mere servitor- 
 ship in the realm of English. Classics like politics will always 
 have its Jacobites. But what I want specially to say at this point 
 is that, however helpful Latin grammar may be to the older 
 writer (and no one denies its value), it is of no use whatever in 
 the early or elementary stages of English. This perpetual harping 
 on Latin whenever English is mentioned is a positive impediment 
 to good teaching. We cannot say too clearly that the vast majority 
 of English school children must be taught English without 
 reference to any foreign language whatsoever. Think of the 
 actual facts, and forget Mr Wells's abstractions. Here are our 
 
A PROGRAMME 55 
 
 hundreds of thousands of young children, half-articulate, unable 
 to speak or write, and surrounded by constant examples of debase- 
 ment in language. We certainly want these pupils " to understand, 
 speak, read and write the mother tongue well." But how, pre- 
 cisely, is Latin grammar or rudimentary Greek to help them? 
 While children are engaged in unlearning their bad English it is 
 fatal to multiply their confusion by the complications of any foreign 
 tongue. Writers on education must endeavour to forget (or per- 
 haps, rather, endeavour to remember) the circumstances of their 
 own childhood when they make prescriptions for the elementary 
 schools. What is true of upper or middle class bovs is not true 
 of all children. We must take elementary school children as they 
 are. I have no hostility to the classical languages. Indeed, if I 
 were the autocrat of education I would prescribe that the first 
 foreign language learned by all English children should be Latin, 
 partly because of the instructive value of the mechanism, and 
 partly because, in the long run, Latin is the most generally useful 
 language to the greater number of people. But that does not mean 
 I should insist on Latin as a means towards the teaching of 
 English. In any well-ordered educational system English would 
 be the means towards the teaching of Latin, because by the time 
 a boy began to get his grounding in Latin he should have been 
 well-grounded in the elements of English. Without that grounding 
 in English he will never, never learn Latin to any advantage. 
 The Saintsburys and Beerbohms, born with an instinct for letters, 
 are special cases, outside the argument. The fact we have to grasp 
 very clearly is that all but a very few English children must learn 
 to write English from English, and from English alone; and that 
 to talk of the necessity or the advantages of Latin or Greek in 
 this connection is merely to add confusion to difficulty. Let us 
 repeat that, in general, the art of writing English must be learnt 
 from English, and cannot be learnt except from English. The 
 foreign auxiliaries will help, especially in later years, but they 
 are only auxiliaries. 
 
 Many excellent masters can teach, and do teach, good English 
 through Latin or Greek or French or German; but that is 
 because they are excellent teachers, not because they teach foreign 
 languages; and to talk of this foreign route as "the surest (if not 
 the only) way" is, pace Mr Saintsbury, to talk nonsense — ^just 
 
56 A PROGRAMME 
 
 the kind of nonsense that, on the one hand, has impeded the sane 
 teaching of Enghsh, and, on the other, impelled the rough rude 
 critic to denounce the classics as humbug. After all, people really 
 know that the classics do not do what is claimed for them. This 
 affectation of making every accomplishment in English depend 
 upon some other language is an evil tradition. It is a form 
 of snobbery, and has produced the infuriating Englishman 
 who never really knows anything till it is told him in a foreign 
 language. 
 
 In the elementary schools there is an evil tradition of another 
 kind. A reference to page 19 will show that, under the old Code, 
 children never heard of composition till they reached Standard V 
 (about eleven), when they were expected to reproduce the sub- 
 stance of a short story read aloud to them twice. When they 
 reached Standard VI a year later, they were supposed to have 
 acquired the power (no one knows how) of producing essays on 
 " Procrastination is the Thief of Time" or " Unpunctuality is the 
 Mother of Invention." From these productions, the pronoun ' I ' 
 (the only one we have any right to use) was rigorously banished. 
 We do better than that now; but a composition lesson, in a pain- 
 fully large number of classes, still means that a subject is set and 
 that boys write for some fifty minutes, while the teacher marks 
 dictation or arithmetic. Subsequentlv, in the intervals of other 
 work, or in his own leisure, he marks the compositions laboriously, 
 correcting the more hopeful mistakes, or crossing out in despair 
 the frequent passages that defy correction. This ceremony is gone 
 through, once, twice, even thrice, every week. It can be de- 
 scribed briefly as a hideous sacrifice of precious time and effort. 
 The only compositions that can be corrected are those that least 
 need correction. No one can correct a really bad composition. 
 Methods of teaching composition need not be described here, for 
 there are now several good books for teachers and several good 
 volumes of class exercises. One or two broad principles may, 
 however, be stated. The younger children should be encouraged 
 to write and to write copiously — if they desire to write at all. 
 Writing, as a regular exercise, should never be forced upon lower 
 standard children. The notion that what they write is to be looked 
 at censoriously and discussed disagreeably should never enter their 
 Httle heads. The assumption must be that it is splendid and that 
 
A PROGRAMME 57 
 
 teacher will love to read it. The teacher who can get little boys 
 and girls to pour themselves out freely on paper may be well 
 satisfied. Some very general corrections can be intimated, as for 
 instance, that no really nice boy ever says "We was going up the 
 Park," or "I never done it," or "Him and me went to the 
 pictures" — though the teacher must sorrowfully prepare to 
 accompany boys "up the Park" and to meet "him and me" as 
 grammatical subjects, for many a long day; but any disheartening 
 personal correction should be avoided. As the boy gets older, 
 some attempt must be made to discipline his fluency into form. 
 He has to learn that certain ways of expression are allowed and 
 certain ways of expression are not allowed. Don't imagine that 
 this will cause him surprise or distress. He will hear as calmly 
 that there are good and bad ways of writing as that there are good 
 and bad ways of walking and sitting and eating. He is already 
 resigned to the dreadful mystery that things alleged to be good 
 for him are often more disagreeable than those alleged to be bad, 
 and that the easy way of eating is not the approved way; and he 
 will accept the same sanctions and prohibitions about sentences 
 without demanding the theological support of gramm.ar. If there 
 is one thing more pleasing and wholesome than anything else 
 in the human boy, it is his entire disregard of first principles 
 and his refusal to behave (in bulk) like the hypothetical Child of 
 the educational treatises. That is what troubles young teachers: 
 they have been led to expect The Child, and they encounter 
 children. No one can or should lay down rules about the age 
 or class at which the specific teaching of composition ought to 
 begin. Every practised teacher will know by instinct when it is 
 profitable to intimate instruction or to take specific lessons on the 
 framing and linking of sentences. Roughly we can say that a 
 little (but not too much!) occasional instruction can usuallv be 
 given in Standard III. As the boy gets older he will need frequent 
 exercises in the use of words, phrases, sentences and so forth. 
 These are the scales of composition and must be practised very 
 thoroughly and regularly. 
 
 Boys should not be expected to write more than one set piece 
 a week; but what they begin must be finished, though not 
 necessarily at one sitting and not necessarily in school. The 
 practice of allowing boys to use a week's composition lessons in 
 
58 A PROGRAMME 
 
 beginning half-a-dozen fragments of composition which they 
 never finish is both specifically and generally harmfiil. Occasionally 
 a boy may be allowed to scrap a failure — a very valuable ex- 
 perience for him; but he must recognise why it is a failure, and 
 why it would be better to make a fresh start. Otherwise the rule 
 must be that a composition begun must be worked out to its 
 conclusion. It is a piece of valuable training for a boy to learn 
 that his written productions, like the building he erects with his 
 toy bricks, or the bridge he builds with his Meccano strips, or the 
 things he makes with tools at his Manual Training Centre, must 
 have substance, form and balance, must have too, a beginning, 
 middle and end. The three stages of an essay or story or other 
 composition should be always in the teacher's mind and some- 
 times in the pupil's: they are (i) Invention, or the assembling 
 of possible matter; (2) Arrangement, or the selecting from the 
 assembled matter; (3) Expression, or the embodiment of the 
 selected matter. Of course no one will imagine that these are 
 three dissociated processes; but they must take place and can be 
 considered separately. A written composition is really a very 
 severe test of capacity. To be confronted with a topic like A Loaf 
 of Bread, or How to Lay a Table, or A Dog's Day; to be ex- 
 pected first, to assemble knowledge and notions; then to make 
 an intelligent sequence of this knowledge; then to find adequate 
 expression for it, is to receive a painful and paralysing intimation 
 of one's mental emptiness. To work a set of sums is both easier 
 and more mechanical! I should like to ask teachers how often 
 since their own examination days they have been subjected to the 
 literary inquisition they inflict so regularly on children. I shall 
 return to this point later. 
 
 It is, of course, quite absurd to demand that all boys in a class 
 must be writing on the same subject at the same time. It is just 
 as absurd to demand that all boys in a class should be working the 
 same kind or set of sums at the same time; but it usually is 
 demanded. This ridiculous synchronism, this assumption that all 
 boys are born equal (though not free) is one of the many evil 
 results of the large classes that prevail in elementary schools. The 
 public or secondary school master teaches a manageably small 
 class. The Manual Training Instructor is not allowed to teach 
 more than twenty. The unfortunate elementary school master is 
 
A PROGRAMME 59 
 
 expected to teach sixty! No man can teach sixty children. He 
 can lecture them or drill them, but he cannot teach them. In 
 a lecture-lesson or drill-lesson all the pupils are supposed to be 
 doing the same thing at the same time. In a practice-lesson thev 
 should be working at their natural speed; but where the class is 
 large it is physically impossible for the teacher to keep in touch 
 with all these varying speeds. Consequently in a large class every 
 lesson tends to become a drill-lesson — the mechanical repetition 
 of set exercises. For his composition exercise a boy has a reason- 
 able right to choose the subject — so has the teacher; and justice 
 should be done to both. Each must give and take. When A has 
 finished his piece he should be allowed to begin another without 
 any reference to the quantity written by B or C. The starting 
 of a composition exercise, so to speak, by pistol-shot, with the 
 understanding that all the runners must get to the tape in much 
 the same time (without handicap) is a damnable inheritance from 
 the tyranny of examinations. That a composition has to be written 
 within a fixed limit of time is an accident of certain circumstances, 
 not an essential of the exercise. 
 
 A composition must obviously be 'about something,' and have 
 relation to the writer's knowledge, experience or suppositions. 
 Composition is not like mechanics — it cannot be divided into 
 'pure' and 'applied.' There is nosuch thing as 'pure' composition. 
 Even the most ethereal of lyrics or the most airy of literary 
 fantasies (both utterly beyond the normal person's capacity) will 
 prove to be 'applied' composition of an elaborate kind. On the 
 whole it may be said that teachers do not make the composition 
 exercises practical enough. Composition is too rarely applied to 
 the matter of lessons, and, paradoxical though this may seem, too 
 rarely applied to matter of fact. In the back of his mind the 
 teacher will usually be found to have one standard for a set com- 
 position and another for an answer to a history or geography 
 question. But explicit answers to clear questions are much the 
 more valuable form of composition in school, if only because 
 they have a meaning to the child that a set theme has not. They 
 are certainly simpler for all concerned. The teaching of asscmblv, 
 selection and expression will be found to flow more profitablv 
 from the statement-composition than from the inventive-com- 
 position, because in the former all the pupils will have been 
 
6o A PROGRAMME 
 
 trying to write much the same sort of thing. If you ask a set of 
 boys to write something about the Peasants' Revolt, theoretically 
 they will reproduce the facts of the history lesson and their 
 answers will be alike; but if you give them a theme, such as 
 "When I was a Rebel with Wat Tyler," their opportunities 
 for personal divagation will be infinite. Now it is much 
 easier to base a lesson in matter, form and style upon the 
 papers that are alike than upon the papers that are unlike. 
 From the latter, indeed, many delightful and stimulating lessons 
 may be drawn; but technical instruction in composition can more 
 easily and obviously be applied to the more mechanical exercise. 
 So far I have written with the usual school subject called 'com- 
 position' in mind. But I have grown into a conviction that the 
 usual school subject called * composition' is a mistaken and useless 
 activity, wasting more time and effort than any subject in the 
 curriculum — except, perhaps, arithmetic. I will crystallise my 
 views in a sentence and say, "Let us abolish composition from 
 the curriculum." Certainly I hope I shall live to see composition 
 as it is usually understood, consigned to everlasting perdition 
 with (let us say) mental gymnastics, literature (as she is taught), 
 grammatical definitions, parsing, model-drawing, and problems, 
 as the seven devils of the school-room. As a provisional measure 
 let us cross out 'composition' — that word of ill omen — wherever 
 it is mentioned in time-table or syllabus and put some description 
 like 'Constructive English' in its place. If any reader thinks I 
 am going to extremes let him ask himself these questions: Do 
 children like composition? Do children ever ask to be allowed to 
 write as they ask to be allowed to draw? Do their faces brighten 
 when you say, "We are all going to write a composition this 
 afternoon"? I will assume the negative answer and say that the 
 reason why they do not like composition is that composition is 
 something entirely beyond their power. The 'composition' — the 
 essay, the impression, the 'chose vue' — is really a difficult and 
 recondite form of writing. Consider how few first-rate essayists 
 there are, consider how few are the essays that give permanent 
 delight, and you will recognise how foolish is the attempt to turn 
 the creative faculty of children into this narrow and precarious 
 direction. I said on an earlier page that we cannot turn Tom Brown 
 into Sir Thomas Browne; but that is just what we have all been 
 
A PROGRAMME 6r 
 
 trying to do! We seem to proceed on tlie assumption that 
 the boys' filled exercise books must resemble The Essays oj 
 Eliay and our teaching is bad because we dimly recognise that 
 there is a serious mistake somewhere — that we are laboriously 
 exercising the pupils in a difficult, artificial gesture, that can never 
 form part of their normal, natural life. I asked above how often 
 teachers had subjected themselves to the composition tests they 
 inflict on children. I will push the question to the point of rude- 
 ness and ask how many teachers themselves could write the 
 compositions they demand from children .? How many teachers of 
 composition can be called connoisseurs of composition? If they 
 are not, it is dangerous for them to presume to teach something 
 beyond the range of their own accomplishment or appreciation; 
 if they are, the more hopeless they will find the task of teaching 
 a delicate and difficult art. The root of the trouble is surely this, 
 that we have not clearly distinguished in our own minds between 
 the writing that is a statement or record, and the writing that is 
 a creation or invention. What we ought to be trying to teach is 
 the first; what we are usually trying to teach is the second; and 
 the vital fact is that, whereas the first can be taught, the second 
 cannot. I hasten to add that I should never dream of ruling out 
 attempts at literary invention from the school curriculum. On 
 the contrary, I would encourage them; but I would encourage 
 them in more profitable directions. What I demand at the moment 
 is that we should ruthlessly clear our own minds about this time- 
 honoured school subject called * composition.' Analogies are not 
 argument, but they are sometimes instructive. Music is taught 
 in most schools. Well, I ask teachers if they would ever dream 
 of giving out sheets of music paper to a class, once a week or 
 oftener, with a demand for a song, or a study, or a prelude, or 
 an impression, or a musical composition of any sort; and I ask 
 further whether the practice of giving out sheets of writing paper 
 to a class, once a week or oftener, with a deniand for a story or a 
 sketch or an impression or a dialogue or a literary composition 
 of any sort is not very nearly as absurd? In music we can reason- 
 ably set exercises in tune and time and rhvthm; but we cannot 
 reasonably make demands for composition. In writing we can 
 reasonably set exercises in vocabulary, construction and state- 
 ment: but we cannot reasonably make demands for composition. 
 
62 A PROGRAMME 
 
 Teachers must not imagine that, because everybody uses words 
 in daily speech, creative art in the medium of words is easy or 
 possible to everybody. The art of writing is difficult. Some great 
 writers to the end of their days have never found facility, but have 
 had to wring out words by the sweat of their brow. To set a piece 
 of blank paper before a child and expect him, first, to spin out of 
 a scarcely existent self something that is not there, and next, to 
 present this something in a form that is technically correct, is to 
 expect a miracle — or, to speak without rhetoric — it is to make 
 a demand that is disheartening, disabling, unjust and almost cruel. 
 In a recent examination for the Junior County Scholarship set 
 by the London County Council, this was one of the two questions 
 that constituted the English paper: 
 
 "Suppose that Shakespeare and Nelson met to-day in London. 
 Write a conversation between them." (The candidates at this 
 examination must be less than eleven years old and working in 
 Standard IV and above.) 
 
 Now what can a child of ten-and-a-half in Standard IV (or 
 above) know about Shakespeare — or about Nelson? What kind 
 of conversation can such a child possibly invent appropriate to 
 a meeting between an early sixteenth century character of which 
 he barely knows the name, and an eighteenth century character 
 of which he knows little more.f* How many teachers could 
 write a satisfactory composition on such a theme? Does not 
 the question amount to a demand for creative literature of a 
 singularly delicate and recondite kind? You may think this an 
 extreme view to take of a question set at a half-yearly scholarship 
 examination; but that examination is, in effect, an examination 
 of all the schools by sample, and it is therefore an examination 
 that is prepared for. And thus our ten-year-olds in Standard IV 
 (or above) have to spend their poor little powers in super-Landorian 
 exercises of this sort. I say roundly that it is worse than pre- 
 posterous to inflict such exercises upon children, and I say further 
 that from no quantity of such exercises will our children ever 
 learn the rudiments of composition. When I demand the abolition 
 of composition, that is the sort of thing I want abolished. I shall 
 doubtless be told that nowadays we do not expect our children 
 to write essays and that the whole subject of composition has 
 undergone a revolution. I can only reply in the words that 
 
A PROGRAxMME 63 
 
 Alphonse Karr applied to another kind of revolution, "P/wj fti 
 change, plus c'est la 7ncme chose ^ We really have not changed much 
 when we ask the child to become Landor or Lucian instead oF 
 Lamb or Bacon. Composition, by whatever name we call it, 
 comes to much the same thing in the end. We cannot, I say, 
 reasonably give a boy a piece of paper and order him to go and 
 create something; but we can reasonably order him to go and 
 record something. Creation is his affair, not ours; but statement, 
 record, reproduction — the mechanical art or craft of writing, that 
 is our affair. Few of our pupils will be called upon to become 
 literary artists; but most of them will have to make statements 
 in writing. What, therefore, we must do is to teach children how 
 to make brief, clear, correct and concise statements. 
 
 Teachers themselves should have undergone a precisely similar 
 training. I have asked for the abolition of composition in schools, 
 I ask also for the abolition of composition in Training Colleges 
 — understanding by composition the writing of set Essays. If 
 teachers are compelled to commit the crime of formal composition 
 as a regular part of their own training they will naturally urge 
 it in turn upon their pupils. At present, the Essay is a compulsory 
 paper at the Teachers' Certificate Examination. It should be 
 abolished, and the marks for composition should be awarded by 
 the examiners after a close scrutiny of the candidate's written 
 work in such subjects as Literature, History, Science, Geographv 
 and Pedagogy. The student-teacher will then be made to under- 
 stand that what is required from him is not the strained and 
 artificial gestures usually found in examination essays, but the 
 ability to make clear, correct, concise and well-ordered statements 
 in plain workmanlike prose. Further, he will be made to under- 
 stand that, as every teacher in English is necessarily a teacher of 
 English, every teacher, without any exception, must possess that 
 ability, or be, so far, disqualified as a teacher. Those who intend 
 to specialise in music or drawing or needlework or cookcrv or 
 carpentry can claim no exemption. If people are going to teach 
 at all in any subject they must be able to express themselves clearly, 
 cogently and correctly, without awkwardness, affectation, weak- 
 ness, inflation, slovenliness or any other offence against good taste. 
 No one will expect teachers as a body to be artists in words; but 
 no one must expect them not to be capable artisans. Honest, 
 
64 A PROGRAMME 
 
 careful craftsmanship in language — that is what we must demand 
 from the practical composition of all teachers. I suggest, how- 
 ever, that the Certificate Examination should include an optional 
 composition paper to be taken by those who are genuinely attracted 
 by the art of writing, or who have any creative leanings, and that 
 the marks gained in this paper, together with the general com- 
 position marks, should count towards Honours or Special Dis- 
 tinction in Composition. It would have to be made clear that 
 no marks at all would be awarded to Composition papers not 
 reaching a very fair standard of excellence; for we do not want 
 to abolish compulsory composition merely to find it coming back 
 as optional composition attempted by everybody. We want 
 students to understand that there are two kinds of writing, the 
 statement and the creation: that ability to state is expected from 
 them, but not ability to create, though we are ready to give them 
 credit for genuine attempts at creation. At present they do dimly 
 understand that there are two kinds of writing, but their under- 
 standing takes the form of a vague idea that, though you must 
 write with elaborate and uneasy ceremony in the paper called 
 Composition, you may write anyhow in the paper called History, 
 as long as you are careful not to say that King Alfred shot a burnt 
 cake from the head of his little son Prince Arthur outside the 
 Banqueting House at Whitehall. What we must make students 
 clearly understand is that we do not want the elaborate ceremony, 
 and that we will not tolerate anything written anyhow — that, m 
 short, everything they write is 'composition.' When they under- 
 stand this they will give up the attempt to teach their pupils 
 composition and begin to teach them how to write. The lessons 
 in history, geography, science and kindred subjects will afford 
 abundant material, both for expanded and summarised statements. 
 Merely to ask boys and girls to set down in writing how they 
 would clean a pair of boots, or how they would lay a table is to 
 give them really efficient practice in the craft of writing. We do 
 not want them to be literary, we want them to be precise and 
 practical. To ask them to pretend they are the Moon writing a 
 letter to the Sun is to expect them to be literary before they are 
 articulate. Here someone will say he has actually seen charming 
 letters to the Sun written by little girls of ten in the Junior 
 Scholarship Examination. I do not doubt it; but I ask, first, what 
 
A PROGRAMME 65 
 
 proportion the charming letters bear to the mass of school com- 
 position that is not charming, and next, whether exercises of this 
 sort should be juvenile human nature's daily food in the way of 
 composition. By all means let the pretty fancies of children have 
 their way. Encourage them, and encourage the expression of 
 them; but do not imagine you are going to secure in the general 
 mass of children a workmanlike command of their language 
 by daily demands for these profuse strains of unpremeditated 
 art. Our business, so to speak, is with the sparrows, not the 
 skylarks. 
 
 It is towards the story and the play, and not towards the essay 
 or 'composition' that the creative activity of children can be most 
 profitably directed. For purposes of school work a play has three 
 aspects, it is something to be written, something to be read, some- 
 thing to be acted. The last two aspects do not concern us at the 
 moment; but let us consider the first. A play, as something 
 written, may be original or adapted. The plays of J. M. Barrie 
 are examples of original drama, and the plays of Shakespeare 
 examples of adapted drama. These obvious instances are given 
 as a reminder that the attempts of school children at either line 
 of composition have a parallel and justification in the realm of 
 public art. The writing of plays in school is a very valuable and 
 practical form of composition — much more practical than the 
 writing of essays. In a sense, children are primitive beings, and 
 the essay is not a primitive form. The essay has no place in classical 
 literature, and none in modern literature before Montaigne. The 
 bison painted in the cave at Altamira indicates the existence of 
 high artistic capacity in ages almost immeasurably distant; but 
 there is no evidence that the men of Cro-Magnon took in each 
 other's essays. Epics existed before essays; the world had a large 
 body of narrative and dramatic literature before it arrived at the 
 essay: and yet it is precisely this difficult and fragile — even 
 sophisticated — form of composition that our juvenile pupils are 
 expected to produce! The essay for them has no purpose. Children 
 know what a story or play is long before they know what an 
 essay is. They can understand writing a story for the class 
 magazine, or a play for a class performance; they cannot under- 
 stand writing an essav for the waste-paper basket. 
 
 The collective composition of a play can be attempted by quite 
 
66 A PROGRAMME 
 
 young pupils. As soon as boys are old enough to enjoy a ballad 
 or a story in verse they should try to translate it into action. Thus, 
 the defence of the bridge by Horatius and his comrades is a fine 
 exciting story that can be done in action. But action without 
 words is only half the fun. The class will, therefore, have to fit 
 words to the action — that is, translate the narrative of the poem 
 into drama. They must decide the point at which they will begin, 
 the speaker who is to open the scene and the words he is to utter. 
 The sentences approved by the class will be written down by the 
 teacher (who is merely the humble scribe) and when something 
 like a scene has been achieved it can be tried over and its short- 
 comings detected and corrected. The one scene can be expanded 
 to a couple or more as the exigences of the story demand, and so 
 a play is made. A familiar story or fairy tale or a famous historical 
 incident can be treated in the same way. An older class will not 
 be content with a simple scene or two of which the plan is more 
 or less ready made, but will like to invent a drama of its own. 
 History is again a fruitful source. Consider the training involved 
 in the composition of a drama on the subject, say, of Sir Walter 
 Ralegh. There is the work of planning the whole drama, then 
 of planning each scene, then of choosing the characters, then of 
 fitting the characters with becoming words, then of making the 
 scenes accord with the conditions of time and space — of time and 
 space in the artistic, historical sense, and of time and space in the 
 practical, theatrical sense. Then there is the trying over, the 
 correction, the expansion of this, the excision of that, and so on. 
 All this is training in the writing of English such as the weekly 
 attempts at a 'composition' will never give. It is in the fullest 
 sense practical English composition. 
 
 The collective composition of a story is an equally excellent 
 and exciting adventure for a class. The pupils must first decide 
 what kind of a story it is to be — a school story, an adventure 
 story, a historical story — and what its general course is going to 
 be; they must choose their principals (the minor characters have 
 a habit of coming in by necessity rather than by choice) and then 
 embark on the opening chapter. They (usually a few individuals) 
 will suggest the sentences, and those approved by the class will be 
 written down by the teacher. The class will soon see if the story 
 works or if it halts and breaks down. 
 
A PROGRAMME 67 
 
 One immediate effect of this joint composition is usually an 
 outbreak of individual composition — which is just what we want. 
 And there should be a place for the best efforts, namely the Class 
 Magazine, of manuscript paper (with drawings intermingled), 
 produced by the boys themselves. No class of twelve-year-olds or 
 above can be considered alive that does not venture on a magazine. 
 As a means of creating 'class consciousness' (of the right kind) a 
 class magazine is invaluable. 
 
 When a boy wants to try his pinions alone he should receive 
 encouragement and sometimes tangible support. Let his reading 
 help his writing. For, consider, what mental stock has a boy of 
 twelve or thirteen? If he is an elementary schoolboy, that is, 
 a boy from a poor and probably bookless home, what general 
 mental stock can he possibly have.? What has he seen or read or 
 heard or done? He has had no adventures, has rarely been away 
 on holidays, and has spent in the streets near home what leisure 
 has been left from school and errand-getting and odd jobs. 
 Nowadays he has 'the pictures,' and instead of cursing them 
 solemnly as most pastors and masters seem to do, we should bless 
 them as a tremendous means of opening and stocking his mind. 
 To ask the poor elem^entary boy to express himself in writing is 
 like asking a penniless man to be liberal with his money. The 
 spirit may be willing, but the means are to seek. You are really 
 asking the boy to give you what he has come to get from you, 
 namely, ideas, notions and views of life. If the boy wants to 
 write, let him begin with the help of his betters. Give him some- 
 thing to imitate. Most schools possess some Dickens volumes. 
 The paragraphs of Dickens are models of structure and punctua- 
 tion, and can be set as examples for imitation. As a boy I always 
 liked that old composition book by Dr Theophilus Hall — I 
 enjoyed the specimens of style he gave, and I enjoyed the hopeless 
 task of trying to write something to the patterns set. I mention 
 that kind of exercise without recommending it for general use. 
 Elementary school children are, as a rule, too young for it. At 
 the worst it is a more valuable exercise in writing than paraphrase, 
 for, rightly used, a paraphrase is a test of reading rather than 
 of writing — the imphed question being, not. Can vou write this 
 passage in a different way? but. Do you understand what this 
 passage is about? 
 
68 A PROGRAMME 
 
 It should be unnecessary to say that no one can teach 
 composition properly without a trained and cultivated sense 
 of writing; unfortunately it is not unnecessary^. Teachers must 
 keep their prose conscience active if they presume to teach 
 others how to write. 
 
 As I must suppose that 'compositions' will continue to be 
 written, I will add a few remarks on correction. Most of them 
 will apply to the simple exercises in construction and statement 
 that (in my opinion) should replace the cherished essay. The 
 correction of any written work is necessarily a laborious task, 
 even though the red ink interlining be abandoned. Every piece 
 should be read by the teacher and have a mark assigned to it. 
 The standard should be high. The full mark should be reserved 
 for exceptional merit — the V.C. of composition. Elaborate cor- 
 rection of individual books is quite useless. What is wanted is 
 collective correction or criticism. Let the teacher take one or 
 two typical examples (of excellence or mediocrity or failure) and 
 initiate a class discussion. The trouble will always be to make the 
 critics direct their attention to the major qualities of matter, form 
 and style; they will generally devote their ingenuity to the detection 
 of minor, and sometimes imaginary faults; but as the major 
 qualities of writing are precisely what the teacher is anxious to 
 exhibit, the trouble, however great, is well spent. A correction 
 book containing the typical faults of a week's batch of pieces will 
 give invaluable matter for lessons or discussions. It will show 
 the prevalence of certain errors and indicate the direction in which 
 special efforts at correction must be made. No teacher should 
 make the mistake of expecting or demanding uniformity of style 
 or treatment in the writing of a class. Tons les styles sont bonsy 
 hormis Vennuyeux says a Frenchman. Honest sincere thought 
 should be encouraged, and windy platitudes discouraged; but 
 teachers should be tender with the child who likes to be a little 
 * flowery' — it is natural for the young to be artificial! The one 
 
 ^ The necessity can be illustrated by an example. An exercise book used by 
 an adult student for one teacher's work contained, on a certain occasion, a 
 composition written for another teacher. At the end of that strayed composi- 
 tion exercise the teacher of composition wrote this: "Please keep my work in 
 a diflFerent book to the other teachers; it adds confusion." It would be 
 difficult to achieve more mistakes in a dozen words. 
 
A PROGRAMME 69 
 
 really hateful style is that based on the jargon and cliches of 
 newspapers and offices; and this unfortunately, is a style that is 
 only too easy to acquire. One recent prize essay in a competition 
 was composed almost entirely of j ournalistic cliches and in Hations. 
 Nor do we want a schoolmaster's English. There is a kind of 
 discount usually known as 'banker's discount,' and another kind 
 called by commercial people 'schoolmaster's discount.' School- 
 masters themselves call it 'true discount.' They would. There is 
 also a kind of elaborated uneasiness in writing that we may call 
 'schoolmaster's English.' Let us avoid it. It is a sham. If we 
 are to ask for sincerity in our pupils, we must first be sure that 
 we really appreciate it ourselves. A class of adult students (they 
 were teachers) once elected to write a composition on Wild 
 Flowers. Most of them began after this fashion: "Beautiful as 
 are the blooms that adorn our gardens in summer, they are sur- 
 passed in loveliness by the little wild flowers that grow unregarded 
 in the woodlands and meadows." When I denounced this as 
 humbug and asked if they really thought that any wild flowers 
 were lovelier than our garden roses and carnations, they cheerfully 
 and readily replied that they did not, but that they said so because 
 they thought it was the kind of sentence they were expected to 
 write in an essay! In their answer it seems to me that the final 
 damnation of the usual 'composition' has been uttered. What can 
 teachers expect from pupils if they are not sincere themselves? 
 What sense of artistic proportion can they cultivate in others if 
 they lack it themselves.? A young friend of mine (aged just 
 seventeen) at a well-known secondary school was required to 
 write an essay on "The treatment of death in EcclesiasteSy The 
 Pilgrirns Progress and Urn BuriaP"'] At seventeen, "What 
 should she know of death!" — what indeed, of Ecclesiastes and 
 Sir Thomas Browne? Two young ladies, also in their teens, asked 
 me one day where they could read something about the character 
 of Falstaff. I suggested Henry IF^ and they were visibly dis- 
 appointed. They then explained that they had been set to write 
 an essay on the character of Falstaff, and what they really wanted 
 (though they did not put it quite so crudely) was a source (not 
 easily spotted) from which they could lift a few choice sentences. 
 Surely neither Sir Thomas nor Sir John — neither that spirit nor 
 that flesh — is matter for girU of that age! If we stuff our pupils 
 
70 A PROGRAMME 
 
 with humbug and hypocrisy how can we expect them ever to see 
 the truth of great art? 
 
 The chief vices of education (says Ruskin) have arisen from the one great 
 fallacy of supposing that noble language is a communicable trick of 
 grammar and accent, instead of simply the careful expression of right 
 thought. All the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral; it becomes 
 accurate if the speaker desires to be true; clear, ifhe speaks with sympathy 
 and a desire to be intelHgible; powerful, ifhe has earnestness; pleasant, 
 if he has sense of rhythm and order. There are no other virtues of 
 language producible by art than these; but let me mark more deeply 
 for an instant the significance of one of them. Language, I said, is only 
 clear when it is sympathetic. You can, in truth, understand a man's word 
 only by understanding his temper. Your own word is also as of an un- 
 known tongue to him unless he understands yours. And it is this which 
 makes the art of language, if any one is to be chosen separately from the 
 rest, that which is fitting for the instrument of a gentleman's education. 
 To teach the meaning of a word thoroughly, is to teach the nature of 
 the spirit that coined it; the secret of language is the secret of sympathy, 
 and its full charm is possible only to the gentle. And thus the principles 
 of beautiful speech have all been fixed by sincere and kindly speech. 
 
 How far do our 'compositions' and 'essays' go towards revealing 
 the secret of language and the sincerity of great literary art.? Are 
 they not, in fact, what Stevenson called his youthful diaries, "a 
 school of posturing and melancholy self-deception"? Sincerity is 
 a moral quality, and we must demand that always. The technical 
 quality to be msisted on above all others is lucidity. The ability 
 to state clearly, shortly and exactly what we mean is very rare; 
 and to teach that ability is a prime duty of those responsible for 
 composition lessons. To go further is dangerous. We can teach 
 children to write clearly; we cannot teach them to write beautifully, 
 though we can make them aware of beauty. 
 
 Nothing has been said, so far, about grammar. My own con- 
 viction is that grammar as a science, as a subject-in-itself, with 
 a name of its own and a separate place in the time-table, ought 
 never to form part of the elementary curriculum. It is a study 
 for the senior schools, certainly not for the elementary schools. 
 It is really an adult subject; the administration of it to young 
 persons is dangerous. For the elementary schools, grammar is 
 simply an aspect of the writing and speaking of English, and 
 
A PROGRAMME 71 
 
 should never be anything else. Grammar as a separate subject 
 inevitably means definitions and difficulties. My ears still recall 
 the voices of Standard IV boys filling the air with their sweet 
 jargoning as they chanted definitions of relative pronouns, mood 
 and prepositions — yes, actually those! And I remember finding 
 a Standard VII engaged in analysing a dozen lines from Henry V^ 
 containing an anacoluthon. That is what always happens, when 
 grammar is an isolated subject on the time-table. Grammar is, 
 in fact, a science, and a difficult science, because inexact. But 
 though grammar should not be taught in school as a thing-in-itself, 
 it can be considered as a thing-in-itself, its existence acknowledged, 
 and its name and rules invoked. Banishing grammar from the 
 time-table does not mean banishing grammar from the school. 
 In the course of composition lessons such matters as number, 
 gender, concords, cases of pronouns, subject and predicate, 
 transitive and intransitive verbs, object and the commonly used 
 tenses must necessarily come up for notice and they can be 
 shortly and practically dealt with in relation to the art of writing. 
 Casually, incidentally rather than specifically, the junior classes 
 will get to know the names of certain parts of speech, and the 
 senior classes all of them. The senior classes should know the 
 structure of a simple sentence and how a sentence may be enlarged 
 by phrase and clause. The golden rule must be never to seek for 
 difficulties. Deal only with the grammar of such English as the 
 boys actually use in writing — there will be more than enough 
 difficulty in that ! Remember that some of the children will soon 
 have to begin a foreign language and will need to be acquainted 
 with the usual grammatical terms. 
 
 I have been rather short with grammar, but, even thus, I am 
 afraid I may have said too much in its favour, because I knc^w the 
 tendency of teachers to go too far in either direction — I have 
 met a teacher who would not so much as mention the words 
 'noun' and 'verb' to a class on the ground that 'grammar' was 
 not taken in the school. Let me put my view with aggressive 
 brevity and say that // is impossible to have too little grammar at the 
 elementary stage of education. Certain grammatical tcrnis — such 
 as sentence, subject, object — are time-saving appliances and 
 naturally must be used in teaching. To use a term, however, does 
 not in the least involve an obligation to explain it. The besetting 
 
72 A PROGRAMME 
 
 sin of the conscientious, methodical elementary teacher is the 
 desire to explain everything, and to precede the use of a term with 
 complete and accurate definition. Thus, in his view, if boys are 
 going to deal with verbs, the first great step is to arrive at a sound 
 definition of a verb by the principles of orthodox pedagogy, and 
 the next step is to see that the definition duly achieved is com- 
 mitted to memory. Thus equipped the boy is fit to deal with 
 verbs. Now in actual life we do not learn anything by definitions. 
 As I said earlier, we all know a dog when we see one, though none 
 of us could define a dog. I am sure I know any verb when I see 
 one, but I am quite sure I don't know how to define one. In 
 teaching most things to children we must be pragmatists. Do we 
 need to talk about prepositions? Well, these are prepositions, by 
 the fire, under the table, at the war, in the soup. Children will 
 instantly understand what a preposition is by seeing it (so to 
 speak) alive, and doing its work; by definition they would never 
 understand a preposition to their dying day. We really must get 
 out of our heads the idea that a child learns things by starting 
 from first principles. I remember when I was an assistant master 
 in my first school and had to teach drawing, it seemed to me a 
 gruesome thing to afflict lively and eager boys with those unreal 
 and arid 'models' — cubes, cylmders, hexagonal prisms, and so on. 
 I therefore got some real things for them to draw, including a 
 large jam-jar. But my old head-master (peace to his soul, he was 
 a good friend to me) would have none of me and my jam-jars; 
 and I have never forgotten his remark — "when they can draw 
 a cylinder perfectly, then you can give them a jam-jar to draw"; 
 — it has remained in my mind as the typical fallacy of 'first 
 principles' in teaching. This fallacy lies at the root of much 
 argument about the classics — for instance, that you cannot under- 
 stand the English poets till you have read the classical poets who 
 were their source and inspiration. The same fallacy lies at the 
 root of our fond belief that grammar is useful. It is useful; but 
 not to children. Little Tom Brown of Prince's Gate talks 
 charmingly, but not because he is well-grounded in grammar; 
 Httle Tom Brown of Prince's Gate Mews talks badly, but not 
 because he has omitted to study the principles of grammar. Almost 
 the only common fact in their English is their total ignorance of 
 English grammar. They talk well or ill purely as a result of 
 
A PROGRAMME 73 
 
 unquestioning imitation. The amount of practical help a boy will 
 get in speech or writing from grammar is infinitesimal. But the 
 teacher himself should be clear about grammar; for the clearer 
 he is, the less tempted he will be to inflict difficulties on children. 
 A grammarian was very fierce with me one day because I denied 
 that a boy was better otf for knowing that 'go' in 'I shall go,' is 
 in the infinitive mood. I still deny it; and I assert on the contrary 
 that to trouble the juvenile mind with the infinitive mood is to 
 make it worse off, not better off. But whatever our views on 
 grammar in general I think most of us will agree that in the early 
 stages grammar should be a means, and never an end in itself, 
 that it should be reduced to the helpful and necessary minimum, 
 and that it should be as simple as such a difficult subject can be. 
 What happens when grammar is treated as a separate subject can 
 be best illustrated by an example. Recently the girls in the Lower 
 Fifth of a County Secondary School had to analyse this passage: 
 
 We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being 
 a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feehng for the rest of 
 the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings 
 so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what 
 we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. 
 (Jiomola.) 
 
 Really, it is nothing short of an outrage that girls of fourteen 
 and fifteen should have such exercises inflicted on them; it is an 
 outrage that such a passage as the above should be brought to 
 their notice at all except for reprobation as a piece of bad writing; 
 and it is certainly an outrage that crimes of this kind should 
 be committed in the name of English. The exercise is so far 
 from exceptional that the unfortunate girls have a book full 
 of similar passages and have to dissect one each week. Surely no 
 one will pretend that such exercises have any purpose, intellectual 
 or emotional, useful or ornamental. The one effect they certainly 
 achieve is to make the victims hate English with peculiar intensity. 
 We must not have the shadow of this sort of thing in the elemen- 
 tary schools. I think it is fairly safe to say that the worst science 
 teaching, or French teaching, or geography teaching, or indeed 
 any other kind of teaching, is never quite so bad as the worst 
 English teaching and never quite so common. 
 
74 A PROGRAMME 
 
 Personally I should like our bright top-class children in the 
 elementary schools to attempt a little logic. It would be at least 
 as useful as grammar, and there is just the touch of ritual (or 
 rigmarole, if you like) in it that boys like. I am sure that much 
 of the value of Euclid lay, not in the geometry or the alleged 
 gymnastic, but in the delightful rigmarole. Boys love rigmarole, 
 and elaborate nonsense, and quote it at each other with 
 glee. Now the rigmarole of grammar is the wrong rigmarole. 
 There is no fun in it, as The Comic English Grammar pain- 
 fully proves; but there is fun in the rigmarole of logic. Look 
 at Lewis Carroll! 
 
 The question of spelling arises in connection with the writing 
 of English. As we have already pointed out, some spelling mis- 
 takes can be traced to faulty enunciation. Other so-called errors 
 of spelling — 'there' and 'their,' 'as' and 'has,' are really matters 
 of syntax; the boys know how to spell the words; what they 
 don't know is when to use them. Spelling lessons in the main 
 should be based on the children's own vocabulary, i.e. they should 
 learn to spell the words that they want to use. Lists of the words 
 frequently miss-spelled in the composition exercises should be 
 collected by the teacher and specifically dealt with. No method 
 of teaching spelling carries us very far; the anomalies of the 
 language must be frankly faced as difficulties and dispatched as 
 they arise. A boy should always have access to a dictionary as 
 soon as he knows how to handle it, and should be encouraged to 
 use a wide vocabulary in his composition. Regular exercises 
 for the extension of vocabulary should be given. They are 
 amusing as well as useful. Roget's Thesaurus is a gold mine of 
 examples. 
 
 So far we have spoken only of prose. The writing of verse 
 should not be overlooked. It is remarkable how men who believe 
 that the writing of Greek and Latin verse is a useful part of a 
 classical education seem startled when it is suggested that the 
 writing of English verse is a useful part of an English education. 
 The two things are not quite the same, of course; but they are 
 not entirely different. Verse-writing certainly has a place in the 
 English course, but it should not be a place within the meaning 
 of the time-table. It should be suggested to the boys, not imposed 
 on them. When they find that the good verse maker is praised 
 
A PROGRAMME 75 
 
 and admired they will be stimulated to try. Quite little boys will 
 often produce some charming examples oivers I'thres. It should 
 be added that school verse- writing — ^and school play-writing and 
 school story-writing — should never become a 'stunt' or advertised 
 activity. Schools ought not to wash even their clean linen in 
 public. The place for the best class verse is the class magazine. 
 
 Systematic training in the use of books 
 
 The person who cannot make practical use of books as sources 
 of information is an uneducated person. Samuel Butler is alleged 
 to have said that no man needs more than two books, Whttaker 
 and Bradshaw. Certainly the person who can use Whitaker has 
 a vast store of information at his disposal, and our upper standard 
 boys should be made aware of its existence. I encourage such 
 boys to get for themselves a copy ofPears^ Cyclopaedia (in happier 
 days obtainable for a shilling); there are few lessons in which they 
 cannot get practice in using it. 
 
 In general, the growing boy must learn how to get the marrow 
 from a simple treatise. He must learn how to read a history book 
 for its historical information, a geography book for its geographical 
 information, and so on. He must be able to use an ordinarv 
 dictionary and such books as Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionan^ 
 a copy or which should be in every classroom of Standard V and 
 above. He must learn how to use a simple encyclopaedia, a bio- 
 graphical dictionary, a gazetteer, an atlas, the index of a book, and 
 a library catalogue. And it will not hurt him if he learns that 
 there are such works in existence as the Dictionary of National 
 Biography^ the Oxford Dictionary,, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
 and the Annual Register. I should like to see a simple form of 
 Roget's Thesaurus for school use to help the young pupil in his 
 writing. It will be seen that we have left the limited province of 
 the English master and gone afield in the great Empire of 
 English — into the great world of books. It is a very necessary 
 excursion. The men, and especially the women, who are the 
 
76 A PROGRAMME 
 
 products of the elementary schools are generally a race without 
 books. Their reading matter is current fiction in its cheaper 
 forms, and even this is usually borrowed. Books other than 
 cheap novels are to them a kind of furniture, like pictures — 
 the sort of thing it is respectable to have in the parlour, but no 
 more to be read than the Family Bible. Certainly our working 
 classes (the product of the elementary schools) appear unable to 
 use books either for pleasure or profit, and have no delight in 
 possessing them. 
 
 Above all things (says the Autocrat), as a child, a man should have 
 tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, who have not 
 handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear Professor over 
 there ever read Poii Synopsis, or consulted Castelli Lexicon, while he 
 was growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the 
 hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he touched 
 them, as the precious drugs sweated through the bat's handle in the 
 Arabian story. I tell you he is at home whenever he smells the fragrance 
 of Russia leather. 
 
 To teach the use of books should therefore be one of the school 
 aims. Boys should be set little pieces of research involving some 
 cross reference and the consultation of several volumes. In most 
 London boroughs the children are fortunate in having a public 
 library at their disposal; in remote rural districts it is an imperative 
 duty of the local education authority to establish a small reference 
 library in each school. During the short time we have our boys 
 and girls we can do few things more useful than to show them 
 how to use books as tools, as sources of information and as the 
 means of further study. Perhaps if we can teach them how to get 
 fact from print we may be teaching them not to draw opinions 
 from print. The danger of the age is the perpetual vociferation 
 of inflammatory opinion by all sorts of periodicals (and their 
 placards) at all sorts of prices. If we can make our pupils under- 
 stand that behind print, even of the largest circulation, there is 
 merely a man of no special importance, we may be doing them 
 and the world a lasting service. We want to create people who 
 can use print, not people who are intimidated by print. 
 
 If teachers can be persuaded to forego some of their mono- 
 logues and to substitute lessons in which the pupils have to get 
 their own information from class text-books or volumes borrowed 
 
A PROGRAMME 77 
 
 from the library they will save immediate time and be teaching 
 the boy how to lay up almost the only kind of treasure on earth 
 that no one can tax out of existence. I don't want to have the 
 appearance of continual exhortation, but I must remind teachers 
 again that one of their faults is the well-intentioned crime of 
 doing too much. The ideal teacher is the one who does nothing 
 while the class does everything; but the actual earnest teacher is 
 usually someone who works himself (or herself) to exhaustion 
 while the pupils sit silent, often bored, absorbing (say) about one- 
 tenth of the information poured out upon them, and, incidentally 
 failing to acquire one of the greatest gifts that school should give 
 them, the ability to help themselves. Once more I beg teachers 
 to remember that their work is elementary. They have merely 
 to begin something. Teach the children how to use books; teach 
 them, in fact, how to read; direct their reading, test their reading, 
 and show them how to extend their reading, and you will do 
 more for them than if you talked high wisdom to them sans 
 intermission for five hours a day. The best thing a child can get 
 from a teacher is not a mass of authoritative information that 
 settles evervthing for ever, but the thrilling assurance that life 
 is a great adventure worth pursuing in a spirit of discovery. 
 
 VI 
 
 The induction to literature 
 
 With the approach to literature we reach a different plane of 
 work. So far we have considered English almost solely on its 
 practical side — as the acquisition of necessary skill in speaking, 
 writing and reading. We have dealt with the aspects of English 
 that everybody must teach without exception; we now touch 
 upon the aspect of English that nobody must teach without special 
 ability to receive and transmit. We reach the English that is not 
 a routine, but a religion. 
 
 The reading of literature is a kind of creative reception. It is 
 almiost sacramental In the ordinary sense of the words, literature 
 cannot be tau<^ht. If in any school something called literature 
 is systematically taught, the efforts will usually be found to be 
 
78 A PROGRAMME 
 
 directed towards literary history, or 'meanings,' or the explana- 
 tion of difficulties, or summaries of plays and stories, or descriptions 
 of characters, or chatter about Harriet — all of which may be useful, 
 perhaps desirable and even interesting; but all of which are 
 evasions of the real work before the teacher responsible for 
 literature. It is, unfortunately, a familiar fact that a poem without 
 'difficulties' is for many teachers itself an insuperable difficulty; 
 they cannot find or give any 'notes' on it. 
 
 The true teacher does not teach, but transmit. What the 
 teacher has to do with lines like — 
 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides, 
 
 is not to describe the Hebrides or give an account of Wordsworth's 
 visits to Scotland, but to transmit the magic of the utterance, or, 
 at least, to remove anything that may impede the transmission. 
 There is a well-founded tradition in a certain district of London 
 that an old elementary head-master, examining a class in The 
 Merchant of Venice^ and encountering the line "Came you from 
 Padua, from Bellario?" called for a map and insisted that boys 
 should point out the position of Padua, and then the position of 
 Bellario. The story is supposed to be funny, but it is really tragic. 
 Its real point is not the comic ignorance of the head-master, but 
 the evidence it affords of the outrages committed in schools in 
 the name of literature. No wonder children left school without 
 regret, and shuddered ever after at the mention of poetry. It is 
 still possible to use the present tense in that sentence. 
 
 If literature in schools is not a delight, if it is not, in all senses, 
 a 're-creation,' an experience in creative reception, it is a failure. 
 The teacher is, as we have pointed out, not so much a teacher, 
 as a transmitter. What has to be presented to the children is not 
 a piece of information, or a 'lesson,' but a living creation, date- 
 less, timeless, eternal, the moral of which is that it has no moral, 
 and the lesson of which is the Rhodora's lesson, that beauty is its 
 own excuse for being. For the work of presentation a pleasing 
 voice and a responsive soul are more necessary than much know- 
 ledge and a research degree. Not for a moment would I seem 
 to depreciate literary knowledge and research or the academic 
 recognition of either. I am thinking of the special need and the 
 
A PROGRAMME 79 
 
 occasion — the class of young barbarians whose souls are to be 
 touched v/ith the magic of poetry and whose souls will certainly 
 not be touched unless there is first a soul to touch them. Academic 
 distinction is warrant for a mind, but not for a soul; it does not 
 pretend to vouch for an emotional equipment. Thus the task of 
 choosing a specialist teacher for literature is peculiarly difficult. 
 There is nothing to go on. University qualifications are a safe 
 enough guide when you are looking for acquirements — when 
 you want a science master or a history master; but not when you 
 are choosing someone to be a medium for the transmission of the 
 spirit. There is, of course, at least as much chance that a graduate 
 in honours will be the right kind of person as that an untrained 
 teacher will be the right kind of person; but there is no certainty. 
 That is why it is absurd of education authorities to demand 'a 
 good honours degree' from applicants: they are taking the 
 guarantee of one quality to be the guarantee of another. The 
 successful teacher of literature must have a little in common with 
 the actor. In the slang of the stage he must be able to *get it 
 across' to the audience. If an actor is going to play Shylock, he 
 must not come on the stage and give a lecture embodying his 
 views on the text of the play, its construction, stage history, 
 characters and so forth. He has to take his text and 'get it across' 
 to the audience. So the teacher who is going to read The Merchant 
 of Venice^ or The Ancient Mariner^ or any piece of pure literature, 
 must take the text and *get it across' to the class. That is not to 
 say that the teacher is forbidden to talk about the play or the 
 poem; he may do that with great advantage, if he can do it well; 
 but it is altogether subsidiary to his real business, which is to pass 
 on a living spark undimmed. Neither is it to say that the teacher 
 must be an actor — heaven defend any class from the histrionic 
 teacher! But the teacher and the actor are alike in having to 
 depend upon something personal, something emotional, some- 
 thing that is not acquired knowledge or information. I should 
 like to add from my own observation, and for the encouragement 
 of beginners, that the teacher, like the actor, is made as well as 
 born. He will develop slowly, but certainly — and develop not 
 merely in technique, but in the personality of which technique is 
 the instrument. The teacher may need almost the dowze annees 
 that Talma thought necessary for the making of an actor; he will 
 
8o A PROGRAMME 
 
 certainly be better able to transmit the thrill of things at thirty 
 than at twenty — ^just as an actress is much more capable of 
 transmitting the thrill of Juliet at forty than at fourteen. So, 
 let the young teacher not despair if he cannot quite *get it across' 
 at first. Let him consider, for his encouragement, the life of 
 Siddons. 
 
 I have spoken once or twice of * difficulties' in literature. I 
 do not mean to suggest that there are no difficulties or that there 
 is no need for explanations. All I want to convey is that the 
 explanation of difficulties is the housemaid's work of literature, 
 and not the artist's work. Poetry, if we like to think so, is a form 
 of music. Such lines as these: 
 
 O world! O life! O time! 
 On whose last steps I climb, 
 Trembling at that where I had stood before; 
 When will return the glory of your prime.? 
 
 No more — O, never more! 
 
 — such lines are a kind of music, an appeal to the emotions, with 
 no more 'meaning' or 'moral' tlian Chopin's Prelude in E minor. 
 But there is this important difference. A sensitive child could 
 be deeply moved by the Prelude without knowing or caring what 
 is meant by Prelude or E or minor. He is not quite so much at 
 ease with a poem. In the Prelude the music is made by the 
 combination of elements called notes, which have, singly, no 
 meaning or significance; in poetry the music is made by the 
 combination of certain elements called words, which have singly 
 certain meanings or associations. Sometimes the words get so 
 battered that they spoil the music, like a broken note in the piano. 
 Sometimes the words acquire associations that force themselves 
 incongruously on the hearer and spoil the music, like incongruous 
 noises from without spoiling a beautiful performance. Thus, to 
 take a simple illustration, the once poetic word 'balmy' has now 
 become impossible in a serious piece. ' Priceless' is almost equally 
 impossible, and it is very difficult to make boys take seriously such 
 a phrase as 'with eyes like carbuncles.' On the other hand some 
 beautiful lines may miss their emotional effect because certain 
 of the word elements have no significance for the hearer. A child 
 can get the thrill of beauty from lines like these: 
 
A PROGRAMME 8i 
 
 The moving Moon went up the sky. 
 And nowhere did abide: 
 Softly she was going up, 
 And a star or two beside; 
 
 but he will miss something from lines like these: 
 
 Her beams bemocked the sultry main. 
 Like April hoar-frost spread ; 
 
 or like these: 
 
 Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood 
 Toward the morning star; 
 
 the emotional effect will be partly lost because some of the 
 elements have no significance for the young hearers. They are 
 blank notes in his mental instrument. To deal with these 
 ^meanings' is one of the teacher's difficulties. Where, as is often 
 the case, the difficulty is merely one of vocabulary, simple 
 equivalents of the unusual words can be written up beforehand 
 and treated as a vocabulary exercise without any reference to 
 the poem. If a boy knows beforehand, or at the moment, the 
 appropriate meaning of the unusual words in such lines as these; 
 
 Make me a willow cabin at your gate. 
 And call upon my soul within the house. 
 Write loyal cantons of contemned love. 
 And sing them loud even in the dead of night; 
 Holloa your name to the reverberate hills, 
 And make the babbling gossips of the air 
 Cry out, "Olivia!" 
 or these: 
 
 No, this my hand will rather 
 The multitudinous seas incarnadine — 
 
 the music of some wonderful passages will not be lost to him. 
 What is wanted for immediate use is the bare equivalent meaning. 
 Any elaborate discussion of unusual words must be reserved for 
 another occasion. 
 
 A detailed discussion of the language and style of a great writer 
 can be a very delightful and valuable lesson for the older boys. 
 It is the kind of lesson that they get far too rarely, and, as applied 
 to fine prose, the kind of lesson they get almost never. Such 
 lessons are naturally more fruitful when the pupils are older than 
 
 S.B. 6 
 
82 A PROGRAMME 
 
 those we are here considering, but they can and should be given 
 (in due proportion and with judicious care) to any class that is old 
 enough to think about what it reads. Part of the initiation into 
 literature should be a glimpse of the glory of language, a fostered 
 sense and feeling that language is a form of beauty with its roots 
 in the imagination. 
 
 At the very beginning of his Homer the young reader is taught 
 to consider the effect of iro^v^kolsl^oio; is he equally taught 
 to consider the effect of 'multitudinous'? Surely we take the 
 beauties of our wonderful language too much for granted ! 
 
 Through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the day-spring from 
 on high hath visited us, 
 
 To give hght to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, 
 and to guide our feet into the way of peace. 
 
 Do we ever stay to dwell on the loveliness of a passage like 
 that, in which almost every word is a poem, or do we not just go 
 passively through it as the hustled tourist goes through a foreign 
 picture-gallery, encompassed with beauty and seeing almost 
 nothing? 
 
 Now since these dead bones have already outlasted the hving ones of 
 Methuselah, and in a yard underground and thin walls of clay, outworn 
 all the strong and spacious buildings above it, and quietly rested under 
 the drums and tramplings of three conquests — 
 
 Do we stop to ask ourselves why *drums and tramplings' and 
 not 'strife and tumult,' or 'struggles and vicissitudes,' or some 
 other pair? If we are to teach literature we must be able both 
 to feel these touches and to communicate them ! 
 
 But what we must not do, and what I fear we often do, is to 
 mix two different kinds of lesson. We must not turn the reading 
 of a play or a poem into a study of form or language, or we shall 
 be trying to live on two planes at once. The explicatory lesson 
 is one thing, and the presentation of a poem something quite 
 different. What pleasure should we get from a performance of 
 the C minor Symphony if the conductor stopped the orchestra 
 at every occurrence of the main theme to expatiate upon the 
 wonderful significance with which Beethoven can invest a simple 
 rhythmic phrase, or from a performance of the B minor Mass if 
 
A PROGRAMME 83 
 
 the choir were silenced while someone explained the harmonic 
 effects that make the hushed close of the Crucifixus such a won- 
 derful moment? It is delightful to have these beauties of musical 
 language pointed out to us; but not while we are on the emotional 
 plane of a performance. If explanation and performance are put 
 together we get good from neither; but isn't our usual method 
 of dealing with school literature rather like a blend of explanation 
 and performance? It needs must be that explanations come: but 
 woe unto those that foist them into the very utterance of poetry! 
 And there are some difficulties that we should not even try 
 to explain. Shakespeare abounds in them. When we sometimes 
 slightingly contrast English indifference to Shakespeare with 
 German enthusiasm for him, we forget that German-Shake- 
 speare is written in a language that every German understands, 
 and that English Shakespeare is written in a language that every 
 Englishman does not understand. It is hardly too much to say 
 that to English people without a literary education Shakespeare 
 is written in a foreign language. Some poets (e.g. Wordsworth) 
 are verbally easy, and some poets (e.g. Francis Thompson) are 
 verbally difficult. Shakespeare is not only difficult but archaic as 
 well; and thus he seems doubly unsuitable for young readers. 
 Fortunately, he is saved for the schools by his wonderful power 
 of re-telling a story in dramatic form, and his equally wonderful 
 power of characterisation, and we may add, his incomparable 
 mastery of word-music. Indeed, it is Shakespeare the musician 
 as much as Shakespeare the dramatist to whom we must introduce 
 our pupils. The teacher's business is to give Shakespeare's scenes 
 and characters the best chance of impressing themselves on a class; 
 and his task, therefore, is to remove the impediments. Now 
 extensive explanation will not only not remove the impediments, 
 it will actually add more. How can such a passage as this be 'ex- 
 plained' to boys and girls of fourteen, who, nevertheless, will 
 respond to the marvellous dramatic appeal oi Macbeihl — 
 
 if the assassination 
 
 Could trammel up the consequence, and catch 
 With his surcease, success; that but this blow 
 Might be the be-all and the end-all; here, 
 But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, 
 We'ld jump the life to come. 
 
 6—2 
 
84 A PROGRAMME 
 
 In vocabulary this passage is not specially difficult, but in 
 significance it is almost inexplicable. Indeed, as a matter of word- 
 by-word meaning it is utterly inexplicable; the meaning, as in 
 a passage of music, comes, not from the separate sounds, but from 
 the consort of sounds. Shakespeare, of all our poets, is the least 
 capable of a word-by-word explanation. It is not paradox, but 
 simple fact to say that children understand Shakespeare quite well 
 as long as he is not explained to them. But the teacher must 
 understand more than the children; and until he can follow and 
 feel the great and subtle sweeps of phrase with the occasional poise 
 upon some magically-used word, he had better not attempt to 
 read Shakespeare to a class. 
 
 What, then, is the unhappy teacher to do? Well, he must do 
 nothing at all with Shakespeare until he is moderately sure that 
 for himself the impediments have all been removed. Shakespeare 
 is not a musician who can be read at sight. For this reason it 
 seems inadvisable that the first reading of a play should be under- 
 taken by young pupils themselves. If Shakespeare were easy, 
 there would be no better way of class reading than an immediate 
 plunge into part-by-part delivery; as he is difficult it is better that 
 the class should get their first impressions from a skilled and 
 understanding reader, as the teacher must be assumed to be. 
 Certainly no pause should ever be made for explanations. Indeed, 
 it is important that children should get their first impressions, 
 not merely of plays, but of all great literature from a good reader. 
 A poem is, in a sense, a musical score, full of difficulties — some 
 scores being much more difficult than others. A child's ability 
 to receive a poem must not (as in the eighties) be measured by 
 his ability to deliver it. We should no more expect an average boy 
 of thirteen to read Lycidas at sight than we should expect the 
 average young pianist to play the F minor Ballade at sight. What 
 impresses each immediately is not the beauty, but the difficulty 
 Let the teacher first read the piece to the class, but read it so that 
 the members of the class will want to read it too. A child should 
 as naturally desire to read or recite a piece of word music as to 
 sing a piece of note music. 
 
 I hope I may, without offence, beg teachers to use their best 
 discretion in choosing Shakespeare's plays for school use. They 
 must not allow their enthusiasm to reach the height of belief that 
 
A PROGRAMME 85 
 
 there is something sacrosanct called Shakespeare, all as indubitably- 
 inspired as our grandparents used to think the Bible, with not 
 a word or a sentence questionable. There are, for children, dull 
 passages that are better omitted or hurried through — that tediously 
 protracted dialogue, for instance, between Malcolm and Macduff 
 in Act IV, Sc. iv of Macbeth. Between Act 11, Sc. ii of Hamlet 
 and Act 11, Sc. ii of The Aierchant of Venice there is a wide world 
 of difference, and we must not pretend to children that they are 
 equally splendid. And there are plays that are better left un- 
 touched. So few can be read in the elementary school course that 
 it seems to me a pity to lavish time upon The Comedy of Errors 
 and The Taming of the Shrew, to mention two I have known 
 taken, when there is so much that is finer. Enthusiasm for 
 Shakespeare is delightful in school, but I think we may doubt 
 whether a teacher in whose opinion Twelfth Night and The 
 Taming of the Shrew are both equally Shakespeare and suitable 
 for children is a person v/ho can safely be trusted to deal with 
 Shakespeare at all. 
 
 As soon as possible let scenes be acted, and as soon as 
 possible let the whole play be performed. If it is considered 
 necessary that I should offer here a defence of dramatic per- 
 formances as a part of education, I will say that the drama is an 
 ancient and honoured form of literature that has enlisted the 
 powers of the greatest poets and afforded rational delight to a 
 hundred generations of civilised beings. The sooner a child 
 becomes familiar with the best forms of theatrical amusement 
 the less likely is he to be permanently attracted by the worst. 
 As I have already pointed out, it is an important, though often 
 forgotten, function of education to teach young men and women 
 the rational use of leisure and the best possibilities of decent 
 amusement. Any school activity that contributes to the amenities 
 of existence and intercourse is a necessary and laudable part of 
 the educational system. 
 
 The pupils who take part in performances of plays must learn 
 to speak well and move well, to appreciate character and to express 
 emotion becomingly, to be expansive yet restrained, to subordinate 
 the individual to the whole and to play the game, to be resourceful 
 and self-possessed and to overcome or mitigate personal dis- 
 abilities. It will hardly be suggested that these are negligible 
 accomplishments. Incidentally it has been found that boys or 
 
86 A PROGRAMME 
 
 girls usually regarded as stupid, and incapable of learning, have 
 exhibited unsuspected ability in acting and have gained a new- 
 interest in themselves and their possibilities. Ability to do some- 
 thing is the first ingredient in self-respect 
 
 The pupils who only look on miss something of all this, but 
 they get a useful sense of participation in a school activity, and 
 they get, too, something that the drama can specially give — the 
 immediate sense of a completed thing, of an artistic whole, with 
 beginning, middle and end. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the 
 educative value of a spectacle that shows in a spirit of poetry and 
 magnanimity, character in action, developing to greatness or 
 lapsing to disaster, triumphing in apparent failure, or failing in 
 apparent success. 
 
 Class performances are joyous and instructive adventures. They 
 may range from happy improvisations to a formal show on a 
 special occasion. In their Elizabethan inadequacy of equipment 
 they make an excellent introduction to the conditions of Shake- 
 spearean drama. A school performance even with very limited 
 resources can be delightful and profitable to everybody. I saw 
 a very remarkable and admirable performance oi Richard //given 
 by the boys of a London elementary school — the youngest actor 
 aged ten and the oldest fourteen — the whole preparation of which, 
 from first reading to first performance was accomplished in twelve 
 weeks, without dislocation of the regular school course. The dresses 
 were prepared by the parents and teachers in cooperation, and 
 the function had thus a social and friendly side of great importance 
 to the school. Two of the most delightful performances o( Js Tou 
 Like it and A Midsummer Night's Dream I have ever seen (and 
 I have seen Ada Rehan in both) were given by girls and women 
 of sixteen and upwards in attendance at a London Evening 
 Institute. Of course, performances such as these cannot be com- 
 pared with regular stage performances for technical efficiency, 
 but the spirit of the young amateur is usually finer. 
 
 Visits to public performances of plavs studied in class are an 
 officially recognised form of educational activity^. This is a great 
 privilege, in which remote districts are naturally unable to share; 
 
 ^ "Were," unfortunately. The position at the moment is that the Law (as 
 represented by the Board of Education) will not allow pupils to pay for them- 
 selves, and the Law (as represented bv the Ministry of Health) will not allow 
 the Local Authority to pay for them. Well, we always knew what the Law was. 
 
A PROGRAMME 87 
 
 but for town schools it is a privilege that has its dangers as well 
 as its delights. If I could be sure that pupils would see per- 
 formances like the Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson, or the Portia 
 of Ellen Terry — if I could merely be sure that they would see 
 nothing that dishonoured the spirit of Shakespeare, I should urge 
 upon teachers the fullest employment of their liberty: but we 
 have to recognise frankly that professional performances may 
 sometimes be precisely what children ought not to see. Boys and 
 girls should never be allowed to see the wood-magic of A Mid- 
 summer Ntght^s Dream destroyed by the protracted clowning of 
 Bottom, or to find the flower-sweet loveliness of Twelfth Night 
 sullied by extravagant orgies of supposed comic drunkenness. 
 Better, far, the feebleness and inadequacy of a school performance 
 than this kind of efficiency. It would be an outrage, if, in the 
 exercise of a precious liberty, teachers allowed their pupils to get 
 their first acquaintance with Shakespeare on the stage from per- 
 formances in which the sweetness of the music is soured, in 
 which "time is broke and no proportion kept." The power of 
 surrender to first impressions is one of the gifts of youth; but it 
 is a gift with its dangers, and teachers must, therefore, recognise 
 the imperative duty of ensuring that a child's first impressions of 
 Shakespeare are neither foul nor misshapen. That does not mean 
 that we must approach Shakespeare in an attitude of artificial 
 solemnity. Shakespeare must not be made either unnaturally dull 
 or unnaturally grotesque. He wrote his plays to give immediate 
 pleasure to a miscellaneous audience, and he resented liberties 
 with his text. Anything in our treatment that makes Shake- 
 speare dull or distorted is a crime against his spirit — it is "from 
 the purpose of playing." 
 
 It was in no inglorious time of our history that Englishmen 
 delighted altogether in dance and song and drama, nor were these 
 pleasures the privilege of a few or a class. It is a legitimate hope 
 that a rational use of the drama in schools may bring back to 
 England an unshamed joy in pleasures of the imagination and in 
 the purposed expression of wholesome and natural feeling. 
 
 We must not overlook prose in our school literature course. 
 The ear for prose is a rarer thing than the car for poet^\^ It is 
 easier to catch the beauty of Shelley than the beauty of Swift. 
 Our treatment ot prose as pure literature need not be difi^^erent 
 
88 A PROGRAMME 
 
 from our treatment of poetry. Poetry is word music with regular 
 rhythm, prose is word music with irregular rhythm. We all agree 
 that passages of verse should be memorised. How many of us 
 ever set passages of prose? 
 
 I plead for a greater use of the Bible in our school reading. 
 To borrow a phrase that readers of Oliver Wendell Holmes will 
 recognise, the Bible needs to be * depolarised.' We must not adopt 
 a special attitude towards the Bible; we must simply consider it, 
 for present purposes, as a great book of English prose published 
 in 1 6i I, just as Shakespeare should mean a great book of English 
 poetry published in 1623. The Bible will be brought into better 
 perspective if it is drawn upon for selections, like any other 
 seventeenth century literature; and I hope editors and publishers 
 will take care that the chosen portions are presented as rationally 
 as ordinary reading matter — for instance, in paragraphs where 
 the matter is in prose, and in stanzas or strophes where the matter 
 is poetry — of course without 'verse' numbers, and with such 
 simple historical comment or setting as will enable the reader 
 to place the characters or events or circumstances in proper 
 relation to time and place. People too often read the Bible as 
 if its persons and events belonged to another world. The men of 
 the middle ages were much nearer the artistic truth of Biblical 
 narrative when thev saw in their pictures apostles and patriarchs 
 and evangelists habited like themselves and walking the streets 
 of familiar cities. The Bible offers us almost every quality of fine 
 prose, and I am sure that the once common practice of making 
 children commit passages to memory had a chastening effect on 
 the general ear and literary conscience. We may all be the better 
 for not reading the Bible fanatically and superstitiously; but we 
 are much the worse for not reading the Bible at all. I think it 
 would be hard to treat the usual school or home Bible as a volume 
 of reading-matter — the associations of the black cover or the gilt 
 edges and the double columns will be too strong. Whenever the 
 repulsive-looking school book called 'The Bible' is used, the 
 atmosphere will be tinged with theological controversy and the 
 inspiration of literature will be enfeebled. Present well chosen 
 extracts from the Bible in association with other literature, and 
 the theological associations will not trouble us. With boys of the 
 elementary school age we must not be too austere — we do not 
 
A PROGRAMME 89 
 
 expect them to read all Bacon or all Hooker, and we should not 
 expect them to read all St Paul or all Ezekiel. What we want 
 chiefly to do is to break down the tradition that still keeps our 
 wonderful Bible as a book apart to be read only in some unnatural 
 way at certain moments of a seventh of the week. 
 
 Teachers will have their own views of how to deal with long 
 prose works, a novel by Dickens for example. Plainly, neither 
 teacher nor class can read the whole of David Copperfield or 
 Pichvick aloud in a single term. It is unfair to protract the reading 
 of any work. The class will do much by silent reading, but 
 occasionally the teacher will read scenes or passages as a treat — 
 if his reading is not a treat he ought not to be a teacher — and 
 occasionally members of the class will be expected to read to the 
 others. Any book that a class finds 'dry' should not be pursued 
 to the bitter end, however sweet the teacher may think it. It is 
 a mistake to force obnoxious books or opinions upon anybody. 
 In fact, the whole idea of compulsion is alien to the world of art. 
 The quality of nurture is not strained. We have to proceed in 
 education, as evolution itself proceeds, upon the principle of 
 conservative innovation — the principle of attempting no more 
 of the unusual than the system can healthily absorb. There is 
 scriptural authority for not casting Jane Austen before those who 
 like — let us say — any female novelist the reader happens to detest. 
 This is certain, that if you make boys read The Fair Maid of 
 Perth when they would rather be reading Ivanhoe you will make 
 them dislike Scott altogether. To persist with an unpopular work 
 merely because it has been begun is to make a discipline of what 
 should be a delight, and to disallow a rational exercise of the taste 
 we are trying to cultivate. We must be ready to try any adven- 
 turous experiment in education; we must be just as ready to scrap 
 our failures. A short work might well be read right through even 
 if it is not specially liked. Thus, to return to poetry, CoriolaJius 
 is less liked than Julius Caesar ^ but that is no reason why it should 
 not be read as well. I am, personally, against abbreviated editions. 
 If boys can read any oi Pickwick they can read all Pickzvick; but 
 I should certainly introduce them to the gentle art of skipping, 
 and advise them not to read The Convict^ s Return or Jl Madman^ s 
 Manuscript or the story about the Queer Client. 
 
 1'eachers must not let their passion for synchronism drive tliem 
 
90 A PROGRAMME 
 
 to decreeing that all boys must be reading the same page of the 
 same book at the same time. If children are reading naturally, 
 they will be reading not only different pages but different books. 
 There is a time and a place for synchronous reading; but it must 
 not usurp all times and places. Teachers, will, of course, endeavour 
 to advise and direct the boys in their private reading, and make 
 them familiar with the names of books worth looking at when 
 they are older. But let us all beware of too much zeal, and 
 especially of the false austerity whose truer name is humbug. 
 There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the reading of boys 
 — their Gems and their Magnets^ their wild and woolly cowboys 
 and their super-Sherlockian sleuth-hounds, their dashing school- 
 boy heroes and their utterly villainous cads. In the main these 
 slandered * dreadfuls' are entirely wholesome and almost fiercely 
 moral. The fact that magistrates periodically denounce them from 
 the bench need not surprise us, for the utterances of magistrates 
 upon all matters connected with education are usually beneath 
 contempt. A year's reading of the boy is probably much healthier 
 than a year's reading of the magistrate. The effect of the weekly 
 'dreadful' on the mind of the boy is much less harmful than the 
 effect of the daily newspaper on the mind of the magistrate. Boys 
 could not find, if they sought for it, literature so deliberately 
 pernicious as the matter in most of our newspapers — matter 
 deliberately pernicious in suggestion and in suppression. If any 
 reader thinks I am exaggerating let him buy a day's newspapers 
 in London and, having considered them, ask himself if one of 
 their main purposes is not to perpetuate animosity, produce mis- 
 understanding, alienate sympathy and create the atmosphere in 
 which disputes can never be adjusted, troubles avoided or wrongs 
 righted. Nothing that the boy reads does this daily evil. The 
 stories produced for boys are vastly better than most of the novels 
 produced for adults. The teacher who has just indignantly con- 
 fiscated a surreptitiously-read 'Nelson Lee,' has probably sent in 
 to Mudie's his weekly requisition for a volume of sentimental 
 lies, romantic sophistications or furtive sexualism — all of which 
 he takes for truth about life. The boys who devour the weekly 
 'bloods' are the hopeful boys; the hopeless ones are those who are 
 not interested even in Sexton Blake. What we have to do is to 
 take the boy's passion for reading, and enlarge its range. If he is 
 
A PROGRAMME 91 
 
 avid of heroes, let us introduce him to D'Artagnan, Athos, 
 Porthos and Aramis; if he is fascinated by detectives, let us in- 
 troduce him to the Abbe Faria, who, in those memorable con- 
 versations with Edmond Dantes proves himself the best, though 
 not quite the first of all 'detectives' in literature. On the other 
 hand, if we really think that we can so elevate the mind of the 
 elementary schoolboy of thirteen that he will make a sacrifice of 
 his weekly periodicals and ask spontaneously for SouthGy's History 
 of Braxil and Buckley's translation of Aeschylus, we had better 
 abandon the attempt to teach literature at all, and take to 
 Economics or Commerce or Engineering or some other faculty 
 that gets down to facts. 
 
 And now having defended the penny 'dreadful,' I will go to 
 the other extreme and propose that the boy of fourteen should be 
 introduced to a kind of reading that finds no place in the usual 
 scheme. I want him to make a first acquaintance with philosophy; 
 and, to put the matter in a simple and concrete way I will suggest 
 that he should begin to read Plato. The reader will no doubt 
 consider the proposal absurd, but, instead of arguing with him, 
 I will beg him to glance through the Crito and ask himself, first, 
 what there is in it that a Seventh Standard or Fourth Form boy 
 cannot follow; next, whether anything in our present curriculum 
 provides that kind of reading; and next whether that process of 
 steady mental interrogation, that gradual reduction of abstractions, 
 either to thin air or to something actual, is not precisely the kind 
 of education our pupils need and ought to get. From this point 
 of view it is unimportant whether the teacher is by nature a 
 Platonist, or whether (with Samuel Butler in his fine extension 
 of chronology) he puts Plato with Marcus Aurelius among 'the 
 seven humbugs of Christendom.' The student must first find 
 Plato in order to find out Plato; he must examine humbug to 
 make sure that it really is humbug. The process of that examina- 
 tion is the kind of discipline to which the average English mind 
 is never subjected. The Crito does not exhaust Plato, and Plato 
 does not exhaust the possibilities of philosophy for young readers. 
 
 Generally, I may add, for school purposes, English literature 
 means anything good to read extant in English. Whether it was 
 originally written in Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, 
 Spanish, French, German, Irish or Welsh, in the fifth century 
 
92 A PROGRAMME 
 
 before Christ or the twentieth century after, makes no difference 
 at all. In the world of education there should be no battle of the 
 ancient and modern books, but one great concord of Humanism. 
 There are those who hesitate to admit literature to the school 
 curriculum at all, because they dread the effect of the heavy- 
 handed, conscientious teacher upon matter so precious. Is not 
 the bloom of some exquisite pieces eternally destroyed for us by 
 the rough usage they had at school? Had we not better, as one 
 pessimist proposes (knowing that literature needs must come), 
 deliberately choose third or fourth rate stuff for teaching purposes, 
 so that the best may still remain unsullied by association with the 
 routine of school and the preparation for examinations? The 
 danger is very real, but I think we must face it, and not run away 
 from it. The plain fact is that every teacher cannot deal with 
 literature and we must not expect every teacher to deal with it. 
 Most teachers, with proper preparation, could give very effective 
 lessons in arithmetic and 'information' subjects; but no quantity 
 of preparation will enable those teachers to make the literature 
 lessons anything but a dismal failure, if they have not a genuine 
 gift of transmissible appreciation. Unfortunately most of our 
 teachers, especially the 'trained certificated teachers' who staff 
 the best elementary schools, are so extraordinarily efficient that 
 they do not know their limitations. They are ready to teach 
 anything and really can teach almost anything, and they would 
 resent a suggestion that they should leave literature alone in 
 schools. But a simple test should convince them. Do they 
 themselves habitually turn to the world's best literature for their 
 own daily refreshment, pleasure or consolation? Do they find 
 in the great poetry and prose of the past and the adventurous 
 poetry and prose of the present the real challenging call of soul 
 to soul? If so, they will probably be very safe persons to pass on 
 to their pupils the torch still burning. But if for them literature 
 is a 'subject,' like geography or history, something that has to be 
 studied or 'got up' from a text book, something to be acquired by 
 means of copious annotation and analysis, and laid aside when 
 examinations are over, then I say such teachers have not the ear 
 for literature and must no more attempt to teach it in school than 
 the tone-deaf teacher must attempt to teach music. There is no 
 crime in not bavins; the ear for literature or music; the crime is 
 
A PROGRAMME 93 
 
 lacking the ear and persisting in spoiling the song. Some years 
 ago I was engaged in preparing students for the Teachers' 
 Certificate examination. The classes were new, one examination 
 was immediately pending, and the few students who were taking 
 this withdrew from lessons for their last revisions. A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream was the prescribed play that year, and most of 
 them had editions specially laden with the kind of information 
 expected to be demanded in examination questions. At the end 
 of one afternoon I heard a student say to another, *' Have vou 
 got up the list of merits and defects yet?" "No," replied the 
 other, " I did the merits this afternoon, and I'm going to do the 
 defects to-night." It would plainly be a crime to let teachers to 
 whom that sort of thing meant literature be charged with the 
 task of transmitting literature to children. But literature will be 
 safe with the genuine enthusiasts; and as for examinations, the 
 best way of preparing for examinations in literature is not to 
 prepare for them. The defence of the literature teacher is that 
 he has abundantly justified his existence. Most people, I imagine, 
 can point to a definite day when the glory of literature was first 
 revealed to them, and often the magician has been a teacher. One 
 day a man read something to you. He didn't tell you anything, 
 or teach you anything, he just read something, and you suddenly 
 found that straight in front of you was a door that led to paradise, 
 and the odd thing was that you had not noticed that door till he 
 showed it to you. That is a fanciful way of putting what generally 
 happens. A few, by natural instinct or happy chance, have found 
 their way alone; but most people, I imagine, have owed their 
 induction to literature directly to some person. The book is 
 before you: but till the mysterious voice cries *'Tolle, lege!" 
 you do not read, and the conversion does not happen. Without 
 the teacher most children would never so much as begin the 
 approach to literature. 
 
 As a last word on this subject let me beg teachers to take a sane 
 view of literature. Let us have no pose or affectation about it. 
 Reading Blake to a class is not going to turn boys into saints. 
 In the other parts of our English course we can be certain of 
 accomplishing something; in literature there is merely a chance 
 that we shall do something for somebody, and in that hope we 
 proceed. The end of great literature is truth; and truth, though 
 
94 A PROGRAA4ME 
 
 sometimes exquisite, is often terrible. We do not want a cant of 
 literature in the schools. 
 
 So far, I have not isolated 'reading aloud' for separate treat- 
 ment; but that exercise must not be forgotten. Not very long 
 ago reading in elementary schools was officially fixed to mean 
 nothing but the glib parroting of a paragraph from some wretched 
 primer, three of which formed the total reading of a child for 
 a whole year. How the child pattered his paragraph was all that 
 mattered; what he read did not matter at all. Thus the provision 
 of reading matter was determined entirely by the ability of the 
 children in delivery — i.e. all a boy of thirteen was allowed to 
 read for a whole year, was the kind of stuff one was sure he would 
 be able to patter glibly with fewest chances of breakdown; and 
 the primers were manufactured expressly to fit that requirement. 
 The boy read nothing to himself and nothing was ever read to 
 him. The teacher's sole business was to see that his boys 'passed 
 in reading' ; and if he was very thorough he made them read their 
 primers again and again, till many boys (as well as the unhappy 
 teacher) actually knew the wretched stuff by heart. Times have 
 changed for the better now — certainly in opportunity. 
 
 Reading, as the technical art of audibly delivering printed 
 matter in an agreeable manner, has to be clearly distinguished 
 from reading as the art of extracting personal delight from 
 Twelfth Night or The Ancient Mariner^ ox David Copperfieldy 
 and it must be worked for as a distinct accomplishment — an 
 accomplishment like the music and water-colour painting and 
 dancing of the old genteel establishments for young ladies, but 
 vastly more useful, wholesome and pleasure giving. 
 
 This is not a manual of method; but there is one technical 
 point about reading that should be mentioned. The element in 
 reading is the phrase, not the word, just as in music the element 
 is the phrase, not the note. Children are kept at reading words 
 long after they should be reading phrases. The stressing of pre- 
 positions, conjunctions and other particles, the relentless rigidity 
 of tempo and the usual inflexibility of delivery, all arise from 
 the pupils' habit of reading by words. With increasing age 
 and practice the young readers should learn to broaden their 
 phrasing and get the natural ruhato of civilised speech. The 
 breaking up of verse lines into short ejaculations is specially 
 
A PROGRAMME 95 
 
 distressing. What we usually hear from children is this sort of 
 thing: 
 
 But where/are the galleons/of Spain, 
 
 when we ought to hear one sweeping phrase. Such a line as 
 
 The human mortals want their winter here, 
 
 is artistically one phrase, not two phrases, or three phrases, or 
 seven words, or ten syllables. It will be phrased, of course, as 
 music is phrased, with clear and unmistakable reference to its 
 rhythmic pattern, but it must be one element, not ten elements. 
 The good teacher of music gets the pupil from notes to phrases 
 as soon as possible; the average teacher of reading keeps his pupil 
 far too long among mere words. The verse reading of children 
 is bad, not because it is sing-song, but because it is unphrased and 
 inflexible sing-song. If poetry is not sing-song it is not song. 
 
IV 
 
 Conclusion 
 
 Do you remember this passage in The Pilgrim's Progress — as the pilgrims 
 passed down that valley? 
 
 "Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a Boy feeding his 
 Father's Sheep. The Boy was in very mean Cloaths, but of a very fresh and 
 well-favoured Countenance, and as he sate by himself he Sung. Hark, said 
 Mr Greatheart, to what the Shepherd's Boy saith." 
 Well, it was a very pretty song, about Contentment. 
 He that is down need fear no fall, 
 
 He that is low, no Pride: 
 He that is humble ever shall 
 Have God to be his Guide. 
 But I care less for its subject than for the song. Though life condemn him 
 to live it through in the Valley of Humiliation, I want to hear the Shepherd 
 Boy singing. Quiller-Couch. 
 
 THESE, then, are the six main aspects of English regarded 
 as a school subject, (i) Training in Speech, (2) Training 
 in Talk, (3) Training in Listening, (4) Training in Writing, 
 (5) Training in the Use of Books, (6) The Induction to Literature. 
 And here, perhaps, the reader who has been expecting some 
 wildly subversive programme will ask with impatience what there 
 is new and revolutionary in these proposals. " Do we not already," 
 he will exclaim, " teach our children to read and write and speak ? " 
 Well, do we.? And can they read and write and speak when 
 they leave us? And do their reading and writing and speech stay 
 by them? It is one of our delusions that we teach these things; 
 and the revolutionary programme amounts precisely to a request 
 that we should abandon the delusion and face the facts, especially 
 the fact that, after fifty years of compulsory education, the 
 population of this country is uneducated. " It is very important," 
 says a Report of the Headmasters' Conference (19 16) on the 
 Curriculum of the Preparatory Schools, "it is very important to 
 
CONCLUSION 97 
 
 define precisely the aim and content of the study of Enghsh; there 
 will be considerable danger of its being quite ineffective, partly 
 through vagueness, partly through exhausting after a term or two 
 the resources of the subject; we have to remember that a very 
 large number of teachers were brought up on a curriculum which 
 practically ignored the subject altogether." Well, in the preceding 
 pages we have defined "precisely the aim and content of the 
 study of English" as far as it relates to children of the Elementary 
 and Preparatory school age; and does anyone still think that there 
 is any "considerable danger" of the subject's being exhausted 
 "after a term or two" ? The real danger is not that teachers will 
 exhaust the subject, but that the subject will exhaust the teachers 
 and consume the whole time-table. But no school work is so 
 necessary and, in the real sense, so practical. If insistence on 
 English causes the postponement or readjustment of mathematics 
 and foreign languages (ancient or modern) in our schools, no 
 harm will be done to mathematics or languages. The sight of 
 little boys and girls of seven or eight working on paper printed 
 sets of sums is, to me, a painful and infuriating spectacle. The 
 sight of little boys of seven or eight laboriously grinding at Latin 
 verbs would also infuriate me if I were in the habit of seeing it. 
 Children of this age ought to be playing at shops and cutting 
 things out of paper instead of filling up paper with meaningless 
 figures and words. The whole of the traditional arithmetic 
 syllabus of elementary schools should be readj usted, and it certai nly 
 ought to be purged of its artificial and unpractical difficulties. 
 "Reduce 10587397576 square inches to square miles." There 
 is not the faintest justification for making children work sums 
 of that kind. There is neither educational nor practical value in 
 the exercise. The dull inaccurate child will not be made bright 
 or accurate by any quantity of such sums. All that rigmarole of 
 "thirty-and-a-quarter square yards one square pole, forty square 
 poles one rood, four roods one acre, six-hundred-and-forty acres 
 one square-mile," means nothing, and never could mean any- 
 thing to any child, and to keep him grinding at exercises in it is 
 a crime. Let him know from actual allotments or fields or parks 
 or city squares what poles or acres are; but don't waste precious 
 time and enerev on puzzles that should be solved by tables or a 
 calculating machine. People rightly talk of ccrtam poems or 
 
 E. s. 
 
98 CONCLUSION 
 
 plays as 'too hard' for children; but they never seem to think 
 that there are measures and quantities too hard for children. It 
 would be interesting if our experimental psychologists could 
 determine exactly the value to the child mind of such exercises 
 as "Find the h.c.f. of 
 
 2x^ — I3jf2 + i^x — 21 and (^x^ -\- x^ — 4.4.x + 21." 
 And consider the usual type of * problem' set to children. Here are 
 one or two, taken straight from a class book for young children : 
 
 jf 36. 1 51. was to be equally shared among 42 persons. 6 persons took 
 only the amount of their shares, but 9 others declined their shares, 
 preferring that their amounts should be shared equally among the rest. 
 How much did each of the rest receive? 
 
 I have enough money to pay either Brown's wages for 12 days or 
 Smith's wages for 1 8 days. If I employ both Brown and Smith, for how 
 many days can I pay them with the money? 
 
 In 10 days 12 workmen earn £^^1. los. 20 labourers earn the same 
 amount in 9 days, (a) How much more does a workman earn in a day 
 than a labourer? (^) What is the ratio of a workman's wages to a 
 labourer's? 
 
 I ask teachers to examine their experience honestly and say 
 whether they have detected the least increase in the general or 
 specific intelligence of any child resulting from a course of such 
 sums? Is it not simply the case that the boy who is 'good' at 
 that kind of work continues good, while the boy who is 'fair' 
 continues fair — that, in fact, there has been, and will be, no 
 accession to the intelligence of either ? Elementary school-masters 
 who believe that arithmetic will make children sharp are on just 
 the same plane as public school-masters who believe that Latin 
 will make children write English. Such sums as those quoted 
 above are neither tonic nor nutrient. They are simply tests (and 
 not always good tests) for a rough assessment of mathematical 
 capacity; and there is no good to be got from spending an hour 
 every day on tests. The explanation of the strong arithmetical 
 bias of the elementary schools will be found in the pyramidal 
 requirements of the code given on an earlier page. The whole 
 elementary system revolved round the yearly 'examination day,' 
 when every child in every standard was expected to 'pass' in 
 reading, writing and arithmetic — i.e., in things with immediately 
 assessable results; and so the year was spent in elaborate training 
 
CONCLUSION 99 
 
 for the event. The annual examination day has long been 
 abolished, but still the elaborate training goes on; and as the 
 modern tendency has been to drop simple 'rule' sums in favour 
 of 'problems,' the children are not even so accurate as they used 
 to be. Let us once grasp the indisputable fact that daily doses of 
 arithmetic will no more make children bright than daily doses 
 of Easton syrup will make them strong, and we shall take a saner 
 view of the subject. What children of the elementary school age 
 need to know in mathematics is, first, the arithmetic of daily life — 
 the actually used weights and measures of the household, the 
 values of coins, very simple and practical changes of denomination, 
 and the four manipulations — addition, subtraction, multiplication 
 and division — applied to practical and not fancy quantities. 
 It is citizens', not actuaries' arithmetic they need. They must 
 get to understand fractions — farthings and half-pennies and halves 
 of cakes and quarters of apples are fractions that they already 
 understand, and they can understand decimals as soon as they 
 know the place value of integers. Percentages are only a par- 
 ticular case of fractions. They should know how to work easy 
 practical areas and volumes (squares and cubes will introduce 
 them at once to indices) and they should get on to equations and 
 the great practical mystery of logarithms as soon as possible. 
 Wherever possible their arithmetical work should be real — it 
 should mean actual weighing, exchanging, measuring, cutting 
 out and so on. At least half of the time now wasted in the 
 purposeless problems and unreal calculations that constitute 
 elementary school arithmetic could be given to English. The 
 whole elementary curriculum needs careful and rigorous re- 
 consideration. A brave President of the Board of Education 
 should appoint an even braver committee to prepare a Report on 
 the needful minima of knowledge — the really necessary things 
 a child should know. To keep boys occupied with problems and 
 interminable reductions is just as valuable as letting the engine 
 of a stationary motor-car run free. In my childhood I learned 
 tables containing 'firkins' and 'kilderkins.' To this hour I have 
 not the faintest notion what firkins or kilderkins arc, or wiiat they 
 measure. I think it must be wine, tor surely nothing but wine 
 deserves to be measured by things with such delightful names. 
 This digression into arithmetic is not irrelevant to our subject, 
 
 7—2 
 
100 CONCLUSION 
 
 for the hearts of most teachers in elementary schools — certainly 
 the hearts of the men teachers — are still set upon arithmetic. Do 
 they not always want to give it the biggest share and choicest 
 place in the time-table? They think it is 'practical.' I want to 
 assure them that most of it is fanciful, unreal and unpractical; 
 and that the real 'practical' subject is the English that they leave 
 to odd corners of the curriculum. 
 
 The preparatory schools are as dominated by Latin as the 
 elementary schools are by arithmetic. They, too, must put their 
 house in order. A child should begin his first new language, 
 aficient or modern, at about eleven. Four years will have been 
 gained for his English without loss to his Latin, and he will be 
 a happier child. 
 
 What school with its 'show' subjects and 'useful knowledge' 
 often means to our victims let us call on Mr Wells to describe: 
 
 I remember seeing a picture of Education in some place — I think it 
 was Education, but quite conceivably it represented the Empire teaching 
 her Sons, and I have a strong impression that it was a wall painting upon 
 some public building in Manchester or Birmingham or Glasgow, but 
 very possibly I am mistaken about that. It represented a glorious woman, 
 with a wise and fearless face, stooping over her children, and pointing 
 them to far horizons. The sky displayed the pearly warmth of a summer 
 dawn, and all the painting was marvellously bright as if with the youth 
 and hope of the delicately beautiful children in the foreground. She was 
 telling them, one felt, of the great prospect of life that opened before 
 them, of the splendours of sea and mountain they might travel and see, 
 the joys of skill they might acquire, of effort and the pride of effort, and 
 the devotions and nobilities it was theirs to achieve. Perhaps even she 
 whispered of the warm triumphant mystery of love that comes at last 
 to those who have patience and unblemished hearts.. . . She was reminding 
 them of their great heritage as English children, rulers of more than one- 
 fifth of mankind, of the obligation to do and be the best that such a pride 
 of empire entails of their essential nobility and knighthood, and of the 
 restraint and charities and disciplined strength that is becoming in knights 
 and rulers — 
 
 The education of Mr Polly did not follow this picture very closely. 
 He went for some time to a National School, which was run on severely 
 economical lines to keep down the rates, by a largely untrained staff; 
 he was set sums to do that he did not understand, and that no one made 
 him understand; he was made to read the Catechism and the Bible with 
 
CONCLUSION loi 
 
 the utmost industry and an entire disregard of punctuation or signifi- 
 cance; caused to imitate writing copies and drawing copies; given object- 
 lessons on sealing wax and silk-worms and potato bugs and ginger and 
 iron and suchlike things; taught various other subjects his mind refused 
 to entertain; and afterwards, when he was about twelve, he was jerked 
 by his parents to 'finish-oif' in a private school of dingy aspect and still 
 dingier pretensions, where there were no object-lessons, and the studies 
 of Book-keeping and French were pursued (but never effectually over- 
 taken) under the guidance of an elderly gentleman, who wore a non- 
 descript gown and took snuff, wrote copperplate, explained nothing, and 
 used a cane with remarkable dexterity and gusto. 
 
 Mr Polly went into the National School at six, and he left the private 
 school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same state 
 that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for appen- 
 dicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather overworked 
 and underpaid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the climax of 
 the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but intemperate 
 habits — that is to say, it was in a thorough mess. The nice little curiosities 
 and willingness of a child were in a jumbled and thwarted condition, 
 hacked and cut about — the operators had left, so to speak, all their 
 sponges and ligatures in the mangled confusion — and Mr Polly had lost 
 much of his natural confidence, so far as figures and sciences and languages 
 and the possibilities of learning things were concerned. He thought of 
 the present world no longer as a wonderland of experiences, but as 
 geography and history, as the repeating of names that were hard to 
 pronounce, and lists of products and populations and heights and lengths, 
 and as lists and dates — oh! and Boredom indescribable. He thought of 
 religion as the recital of more or less incomprehensible words that were 
 hard to remember, and of the Divinity as of a limitless Being having the 
 nature of a school-master and making infinite rules, known and unknowni, 
 rules that were always ruthlessly enforced, and with an infinite capacity- 
 for punishment, and, most horrible of all to think of, limitless powers of 
 espial. (So to the best of his ability he did not think of that unrelenting 
 eye.) He was uncertain about the spelling and pronunciation of most of 
 the words in our beautiful but abundant and perplexing tongue — that 
 especially was a pity, because words attracted him, and under happier 
 conditions he might have used them well — he was always doubtful 
 whether it was eight sevens or nine eights that was sixty-three (he knew 
 no method for settling the difficulty), and he thought the merit of a 
 drawing consisted in the care with which it was 'lined in.' 'Lining in' 
 bored him beyond measure. 
 
 The picture is still true. 
 
102 CONCLUSION 
 
 The most serious objection that can be raised to the proposed 
 scheme of education in Enghsh is that we haven't the teachers to 
 work it. Possibly; but then we have never asked for them. As 
 our quoted head-masters say, "We have to remember that a very 
 large number of teachers were brought up on a curriculum which 
 practically ignored the subject altogether." We have never in- 
 sisted that the chief and crowning qualification of an English 
 teacher is ability to teach English. Students come to the elemen- 
 tary schools from the training colleges and give their practice- 
 lessons in arithmetic and history and geography and nature-study 
 — to say nothing of English itself; and the one feature common 
 to nearly all of them is an inability to speak or read decently. 
 To the student, English is merely one of many competing 
 * subjects,' and not one that matters much, because it isn't 'about 
 something.' History, geography, mathematics, science — these, to 
 the student, are the real 'subjects,' because they give something 
 to get hold of, something to 'get up'; but English — why, every- 
 body knows English ! And so it happens that when, in course of 
 time, these students become qualified teachers and enter the 
 elementary schools, the work that lies nearest to their hands and 
 cries aloud for their finest energies and their toughest patience 
 is precisely the work they are least capable of doing. I suppose 
 there isn't an elementary school teacher in the country who does 
 not feel perfectly capable of teaching all the English needed in 
 elementary schools. I wonder how many there really are? I 
 wonder how many could be safely trusted to undertake even the 
 beginning of our programme, the teaching of standard English 
 speech? Certainly not all; perhaps a long way from all. But that 
 need not always be so. Let the paramount claim of English be 
 admitted and teachers will shape themselves and be shaped for 
 the task of teaching it. 
 
 Nothing here said must be taken as doubting or denying a 
 great improvement recently in the teaching of English, or as 
 belittling the wonderful work of many gifted and cultivated 
 teachers. Let us recognise this with all due gratitude and praise; 
 but let us recognise just as honestly that these efforts do not 
 represent the general texture of elementary school work, and 
 that, in particular, some men teachers are still satisfied with a 
 very low standard of accomplishment in English. 
 
CONCLUSION 103 
 
 Education is one complete process, but it may be viewed in 
 three aspects. There is first the education of the intellect, that 
 opens to us the world of fact and knowledge; there is next the 
 education of the will that guides us in the world of morals; and 
 there is next the education of the emotions, that takes us into 
 the world of art, beauty, feeling, expression, spirit — all the in- 
 tangibiiia that make the difference between life and death. In 
 our schools we have done something with the first, a little with 
 the second, but almost nothing with the third. This is true, not 
 merely of the elementary schools, but of nearly all schools and 
 places of instruction. The feelings of the Englishman are un- 
 educated. He is ashamed of emotion and regards any approach 
 to it as improper. He is taught, as Gissing says the lower class 
 women are taught, "few of life's graces and none of its serious 
 concerns," and in the world of high feeling he is an embarrassed 
 boor. Let us call as evidence someone who was not an apostle 
 of the emotions or a prophet of culture or an enthusiast for any 
 form of art, but as complete a specimen of pure mind as one could 
 imagine. Thus writes John Stuart Mill, recording his Continental 
 impressions: 
 
 Having so little experience of English life, and the few people I knew 
 being mostly such as had public objects, of a large and personally dis- 
 interested kind, at heart, I was ignorant of the low moral tone of what 
 in England is called society; the habit of, not indeed professing, but 
 taking for granted in every mode of impHcation, that conduct is of course 
 always directed towards low and petty objects; the absence of high 
 feelings which manifests itself by sneering depreciation of all demonstra- 
 tions of them, and by general abstinence (except among a few of the 
 stricter rehgionists) from professing any high principle of action at all, 
 except in those preordained cases in which such profession is put on as 
 part of the costume and formalities of the occasion. 
 
 I could not then know or estimate the difference between this manner 
 of existence, and that of a people like the French, whose faults, if equally 
 real, are at all events different; among whom sentiments, which by com- 
 parison at least may be called elevated, are the current coin of human 
 intercourse, both in books and in private life; and though often evapora- 
 ting in profession are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant 
 exercise, and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living and active 
 part of the existence of great numbers of persons, and to be recognised 
 and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate the general 
 
104 CONCLUSION 
 
 culture of the understanding, which results from the habitual exercise 
 of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most uneducated classes 
 of several countries on the Continent, in a degree not equalled in 
 England, among the so-called educated, except where an unusual ten- 
 derness of conscience leads to an habitual exercise of the intellect on 
 questions of right and wrong, I did not know the way in which, among 
 the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of an unselfish 
 kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and there, and the habit 
 of not speaking to others, nor much even to themselves, about the things 
 in which they do feel interest, causes both their feelings and their in- 
 tellectual faculties to remain undeveloped, or to develop themselves only 
 in some single and very limited direction ; reducing them, considered as 
 spiritual beings, to a kind of negative existence. All these things I did 
 not perceive till long afterwards; but I even then felt, though without 
 stating it clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociality and 
 amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of 
 existence in which everybody acts as if everybody else, with few or no 
 exceptions, was either an enemy or a bore. 
 
 Many years have passed since Mill wrote that, and his charge 
 is still true. The English, as a nation, are inarticulate, almost 
 illiterate, and contemptuously indifferent to art and beauty. If 
 you think that is too hard a saying, walk the streets of London, 
 or Manchester, or Birmingham, or any town whatsoever, large 
 or small, see what you see, and hear what you hear, and ask 
 yourself if you are being afforded the spectacle of an educated 
 nation with a sense of beauty. We possess the greatest dramatist 
 of the world and the most contemptible theatre in Europe. We 
 have an almost unequalled heritage of poetry, and we feel 
 ashamed to confess any knowledge of it. We have a language of 
 incomparable beauty and we write and talk illiterate drivel. These 
 are not exaggerations. Go into any club and examine the many 
 weekly illustrated papers, costing a shilling each, and circulating, 
 presumably, in classes above the lower — the extravagant British 
 workm^an does not, I believe, run to the extravagance of shilling 
 papers. Here is the beginning of one of the regular articles in 
 one of the shilling weekly papers for the week in which these 
 lines are written: "Well, B'lov'dest, I wouldn't care to be in 
 Pearl White's breeches! Umps. Yes! I s'pose this does sound 
 rather boastful. H'ever, it's like this" — etc., all in the same 
 manner. Consider the moral, intellectual, and emotional level 
 
CONCLUSION 105 
 
 of the readers postulated by these papers, and you will scarcely 
 be inclined to urge that thev are designed for an educated public. 
 As I have already pointed out, the usual denunciation of the 
 elementary school-boy's penny 'bloods' by magistrates and other 
 licensed humorists is very ridiculous. The delinquent boy's 
 reading will compare very favourably with the periodicals, novels 
 and memoirs consumed by the average adult of the middle or 
 upper classes, and his cheap cinema is quite as healthy as the more 
 expensive theatre. It is not the elementary school product that 
 fills the stalls and boxes for the newest and nudest revues. It is 
 not the ex-elementary school-boy who seeks out the horrors of 
 our "Grand Guignol" plays, or who goes one hundred and 
 twenty-seven times to "Frilly Bits" and ends by marrying a 
 chorus-girl and in being divorced by her a year later. "We have 
 talked expansively about the classics and the public schools, and 
 we have produced (by the neglect of many) a few scholars of 
 extraordinary and exquisite fineness; but into the education of 
 our great middle and upper classes the humanities have never 
 really entered. No attempt has ever yet been made to give the 
 whole English people a humane, creative education in and through 
 the treasures of their own language and literature. The great 
 educational reform now needed is to begin that universal educa- 
 tion. English, in the large sense here used, is the one subject that 
 will cover all three aspects of education — intellectual, moral and 
 emotional — and very specially will it cover all that we at present 
 leave naked and barbarous. 
 
 It is a scheme of education that will impede no other form of 
 study, but is the needed preliminary to all forms of study. It is 
 proposed, remember, as a foundation not as a completion. As I 
 have already said, elementary education must be elementary. It 
 must begin something, it must not try to finish everything. Upon 
 the foundation of a sound education in English any future fabric 
 of art, language, science, philosophy, commerce or mechanics 
 can be firmly erected. Witliout that foundation nothing am be 
 firmly erected. Once more I beg the reader not to confuse 
 education with the acquisition of knowledge, of which a man 
 may have much and still be uneducated. A boy goes to school, 
 not to get a final stock of information, but to learn how he 
 may go on learning, and to learn that going on is worth while. 
 
io6 CONCLUSION 
 
 A humane education has no material end in view. It aims at 
 making men, not machines; it aims at giving every human 
 creature the fullest development possible to it. Its cardinal 
 doctrine is "the right of every human soul to enter, unhindered 
 except by the limitation of its own powers and desires, into the 
 full spiritual heritage of the race." It aims at giving "the philo- 
 sophic temper, the gentle judgment, the interest in knowledge 
 and beauty for their own sake" that mark the harmoniously 
 developed man. Humanism is a matter of life, not of a living. 
 We pretend to believe this, but our practice betrays us; for the 
 latest argument in defence of the * Greats' man is that certain 
 business people prefer him to any other. Would the value of his 
 education be less if they didn't? A whole book has been produced 
 in America to prove that the classics are a sound business pro- 
 position. Well, we haven't got quite to that depth here, yet. Some 
 of us still cling to the old belief that there are things in life 
 immeasurable even in dollars. I have in earlier pages denounced 
 the prevalent and pernicious doctrine that elementary education is 
 the process of fitting children to become factory hands or domestic 
 servants. I want to denounce with equal earnestness the prevalent 
 and pernicious doctrine that education is the process of unfitting 
 children to become factory hands or domestic servants. When 
 teachers urge children to study for the sake of getting good 
 positions, do they not realise how they are falsifying the currency 
 of life? To suggest to boys that a clerk is something better than 
 a carpenter, an insurance-agent better than a bricklayer is entirely 
 wrong. It is not the extension of education to all that is socially 
 dangerous, but the belief that education ought to mean a 
 black-coated calling. Yet no people are more frequently guilty 
 than teachers of suggesting that a boy is 'too good' to go 
 into a workshop and ought to go into an office. The County 
 Councillor who recently urged that as ninety per cent, of the 
 elementary school children would have to go into manual labour 
 they did not need a good education is not more dangerous to 
 society than the teachers who openly or tacitly believe that if 
 elementary school children receive a good education they ought 
 not to go into manual labour. Teachers, especially the teachers 
 in elementary schools, are the last persons on earth who can believe 
 that all men are born equal; they should be the last persons on 
 
CONCLUSION 107 
 
 earth to countenance the beh"ef that a manual labourer who is 
 educated is fitted for something better than manual labour. Surely 
 the experiences of the war should have taught us that it is not 
 what a man has to do that degrades him, but what he is, in habit 
 and association. We must get into our minds the vital truth that 
 education is our contribution to the whole twenty-four hours of 
 man, and not merely to the eight or six or five that he sells to an 
 employer. Vocational or professional training, as we have said, 
 may or may not be education; but into the early foundation stages 
 of education the circumstances of occupation must never be 
 allowed to enter. We want the educated boy to rise; but we want 
 him to rise above himself, not above somebody else. If we teach 
 the village boy to read for himself and think for himself, if we 
 give him, not mere instruction or information, but the ability 
 to take a view of things and share in man's spiritual heritage, it 
 is not because we want him to grow up into the village squire, 
 but because we want him to walk 
 
 in glory and in joy 
 Following his plough, along the mountain side. 
 
 The beginnings of a humane education here advocated will 
 not involve a domestic revolution, or a rearrangement of the 
 social system, or a new scale of moral values, or a preference of 
 one sort of -ocracy or -ism to any other, or an upheaval of any 
 sort. A humane education is a possession in which rich and poor 
 can be equal without disturbance to their material possessions. 
 In a sense it means the abolition of poverty, for can a man be poor 
 who possesses so much? And we can begin this new world to- 
 morrow if we wish. Let us abandon the view that humanism has 
 to be sought in Rome or in Athens. Here, or nowhere, is our 
 Athens. Greek or Latin may be one means to a humane educa- 
 tion, but ninety-nine thousand English people will not be 
 humanely educated because one Englishman learns Greek. Let 
 me quote a passage from Sir Frederic Kenyon's address to the 
 Classical Association in January, 19 14: 
 
 The cause of the classics is the cause of all imaginative associations, of 
 
 all intellectual interests A man will be a better man of business, a 
 
 better lawyer, a better merchant, a better stock-broker, a less hide-bound 
 politician, if he keeps alive in his soul the love of hterature, the interest 
 
io8 CONCLUSION 
 
 in things of the intellect, of which the Greek and Latin classics are the 
 spring and perennial source of refreshment. 
 
 Sir Frederic's statement comes to this, that such a being as 
 man in such a world as the present is all the better for a humane 
 education, as distinguished from professional training. Well, that 
 is either true or not true. If it is not true, then the cause of the 
 classics is entirely a lost cause. If it is true, then I say there is 
 not a single word of Sir Frederic's claim that may not be true 
 of the Englishman who knows neither Greek nor Latin, French 
 nor Italian, but who has been shown the glory and the grandeur 
 that are England. If (as we hope) to his English he will add the 
 other great languages, why, so much the wider will be his 
 heritage; but we must not assume that without the classics he is 
 a pauper. The necessity of our plea for English is made clear by 
 the fact that The Times^ in its leading article on Sir Frederic 
 Kenyon's address, assumed that the only alternative to education 
 by means of Greek and Latin is education by means of 'shilling 
 scientific handbooks.' And at the moment of writing Comes 
 another j usti fi cation, for here is a sentence from Punch's review of 
 a book on the classics: '''Punchy who for four-score years has 
 endeavoured to hold the balance fairly between the claims of 
 science and the classics, welcomes this reasoned defence of 
 ancient letters." You see.? It is 'science' or 'ancient letters.' 
 There is no room for the language of Moliere or of Dante or of 
 Cervantes or of Goethe; and, of course, none for the mere mother 
 tongue! Mr Kipling also testifies against the language of his 
 Empire, for his story, Regulus^ adopts with unction the usual 
 cant of the classics. 
 
 But let me now call another classical witness, a great scholar 
 and a great man, from whom I have already borrowed the quoted 
 sentences on an earlier page. Professor Gilbert Murray in his 
 address to the Classical Association on January 8th, 191 8, de- 
 scribes thus the enemy whom it is the special glory of the humani- 
 ties to oppose: 
 
 The enemy has no definite name, though in a certain degree we all 
 know him. He who puts always the body before the spirit, the dead 
 before the living, the avayKalov before the Ka\6v\ who makes things 
 only in order to sell them ; who has forgotten that there is such a thing 
 as truth, and measures the world by advertisement or by money; who 
 
CONCLUSION 109 
 
 daily defiles the beauty that surrounds him and makes vulgar the tragedy; 
 whose innermost religion is the worship of the Lie in his Soul. The 
 Philistine, the vulgarian, the Great Sophist, the passer of base coin for 
 true, he is all about us and, worse, he has his outposts inside us, perse- 
 cuting our peace, spoiling our sight, confusing our values, making a man's 
 self seem greater than the race and the present thing more important 
 than the eternal. From him and his influence we find our escape by 
 means of the Grammata into that calm world of theirs, where stridency 
 and clamour are forgotten in the ancient stillness, where the strong iron 
 is long since rusted and the rocks of granite broken into dust, but the 
 great things of the human spirit still shine hke stars pointing Man's way 
 onward to the great triumph or the great tragedy, and even the little 
 things, the beloved and tender and funny and famihar things, beckon 
 across gulfs of death and change with a magic poignancy, the old things 
 that our dead leaders and forefathers loved, viva adhuc et desiderio 
 pulcriora. 
 
 That is beautifully, greatly said. We know too well that 
 enemy of beauty and truth ! It has no definite name, says Gilbert 
 Murray, but Goethe descried it, and named it, in that tribute 
 to Schiller of which Matthew Arnold reminded us: 
 
 Indessen schritt sein Geist gewaltig fort 
 Ins Ewige des Wahren, Guten, Schonen, 
 Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine 
 Lag, was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine. 
 
 Well, das Gemeine has us in thrall now as never before; but is not 
 the power of the enemy due to the folly that has limited the 
 warriors who might destroy it to the few who could utter the 
 Shibboleth of the classics.? How is the enemy's growing tyranny 
 to be most effectively fought to-day — by the weapons of Shake- 
 speare and Milton or of Sophocles and Homer.? To escape the 
 foul influence must we always go back to the old things and 
 funny things that are foreign and not to the old things and 
 funny things that are native? Is Prometheus less significant in 
 Shelley than in Aeschylus? It is because I know that the power 
 of the evil is so strong and the power of the good as yet so small 
 that I beg the place of honour in the fight for our own great 
 native force — "the illustrious, cardinal, courtly and curial ver- 
 nacular" of England. 
 
V 
 
 Epilog 
 
 ue 
 
 For unto us a childe is borne, unto us a Sonne is given, and the government 
 shalbe upon his shoulder. 
 
 Do I understand — is it credible — that the rates and taxes are at present being 
 legally used to teach children to bathe? 
 
 Sir J. D. Rees, in the House of Commons, 1921. 
 
 AND now by way of Epilogue I must add what will seem 
 IV. an anti-climax. I turn from my aspirations and see an actual 
 elementary school in an area of mean streets and slums. I see 
 the squalid, frowsy, raucous women (ex-elementary school-girls), 
 the dulled, unclean, brutalised men (ex-elementary school-boys), 
 the ragged, screaming, verminous children (present elementary 
 school-boys and girls) — all the trimmings of the Christian civili- 
 sation that has crowned the evolution of the world. Is it not 
 wildly, grotesquely foolish to talk of a humaneeducation for such as 
 these? — to cast great language and literature before the unclean? 
 I have lived too long to be an optimist, but I affirm my faith once 
 more. To doubt the end or to shirk the struggle is to surrender 
 all these souls to the enemy. No one can stand before an assembled 
 school of children, even in the London slums, without feeling 
 deeply sure that these boys and girls are worth fighting for. 
 Consider: the children are ours for a few precious moments — 
 do we make the best of the time? We try to do something for 
 their minds, something, too, for their bodies; but their starved 
 and perishing souls, what have we ever done for them ? Do we 
 even try to make school a place of joy for them? Children are 
 like dogs — it takes so little to make them happy ! Follow them 
 in your mind's eye, as they go out of school at the end of the after- 
 noon. We go to our comfortable homes, and they go, whither? 
 Many to a course of errand getting; many of the boys to odd jobs 
 
EPILOGUE III 
 
 at the local shops; many of the girls to the unending task of 
 * minding the baby.' They have no room to call their own; no 
 place of escape but the street. Their school is shut against 
 them. They cannot do home lessons, for they have no home in 
 which to work. We do not realise what 'indoors' means to the 
 poor town child. Surely, for them, school should be the daily 
 escape into a world of sweetness and light — of space and breadth 
 and vision ! Is it always that, I wonder? Is it always even a place 
 of personal kindness? We are apt to forget sometimes, in what 
 a deep and abiding sense we are the children of love. Affection 
 is creative; it fashions and moulds us through all the plastic years 
 of childhood, and, in the end, we are at the best what love has 
 made us. Think of your own childhood and then think how little 
 place there is for love and creative affection in those mean streets 
 of teeming houses ! I am purposely thinking of schools in the bad 
 areas, not of those in the best, because I want to think of children 
 the furthest removed from humanism. Let no reader unused to 
 the elementary schools imagine that they are all of one type with 
 identical problems to face ! There are schools of street boys and 
 schools of home boys; and in the latter you will find children 
 from happy little lower middle class households where the depth 
 of creative affection could not be exceeded by the most favoured 
 homes of England — and what a pity it is that these little house- 
 holds are so often households of one lonely child. No children 
 could be more sanely and happily brought up than some I have 
 known from homes in which the father's wage was very near 
 the poverty line, and from homes in which there was no father at 
 all, but just a brave mother. It is not of such children that I am 
 thinking — though they need thought — they need to be saved 
 from the material and stuffy ideals of the suburbs; I am thinking 
 of those in whose lives love and affection have no part. It is they 
 who have most need of all the humanising influence we can shed 
 upon them. They can be humanised by the work of the school 
 and by the personal kindness of the teachers. They can live, for 
 those few precious hours of school, in an atmosphere of humane 
 thought and feeling. We cannot expect them to be human if we 
 do not humanise them; and our present school system does not 
 humanise them. Slums exist because there are slum-souls, because 
 there are souls that would turn a palace into a rookery of slums. 
 
112 EPILOGUE 
 
 It is the slum-souls that we must strive to save. The vilest thing 
 in the world is cruelty; the sweetest, human loving-kindness. We 
 shall do little in one generation, little in two; and with one 
 dreadful fraction of poor creatures, stunted in mind and body, 
 nothing at all for ever; but from the rest, slowly, certainly, the 
 enemy with all his Rightfulness will be driven back. I know 
 that we can never work miracles of transformation in any 
 number of generations; but I know just as surely that we can do 
 much more than we have done as yet. 
 
 And think of those others I have mentioned, all the very 
 many children who are not as foul as the dregs — boys and girls 
 who in mind and body are as rich as could be found in the most 
 favoured schools of the most favoured classes. Surely they are 
 worth fighting for! We have done very little for them so far, 
 except to turn their eyes towards *a better position in life' and 
 to urge them to learn in order to earn; but we can begin. We can 
 make them decently, humanly articulate, and give them access 
 to the world of ideals, of hope, of beauty. By means of their own 
 language and literature we can begin to educate them in the 
 humane qualities — in breadth of view, in depth of thought, in 
 clearness, accuracy and force of expression, in appreciation of 
 beauty, passion, and nobility, and give them a living sense — 
 
 Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope, 
 
 And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith; 
 
 Of blessed consolations in distress; 
 
 Of moral strength and intellectual Power, 
 
 Of joy in widest commonalty spread. 
 
 If I were asked to say in one word what it is that a liberal educa- 
 tion gives, I should reply, Vision. *' Where there is no vision the 
 people perish." 
 
 F IS\C^^ 
 
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