On the other hand, while these things expand in the modern school, there are declining elements, once in older schemes of scholastic work much more evident. In the culture of the mediaeval knight, for example, and of the eighteenth-century young lady, elegant accomplishments, taught disconnected from the general educational scheme and for themselves, played a large part. The eighteenth-century young lady was taught dancing, deportment, several instruments of music, how to pretend to sketch, how to pretend to know Italian, and so on. The dancing still survives—a comical mitigation of high school austerities—and there is also a considerable interruption of school work achieved by the music-master. If there is one thing that I would say with certainty has no business whatever in schools, it is piano- teaching. The elementary justification of the school is its organization for class-teaching and work in unison, and there is probably no subject of instruction that requires individual tuition quite so imperatively as piano-playing; there is no subject so disadvantageously introduced where children are gathered together. But to every preparatory and girls' school in England—I do not know if the same thing happens in America—the music-master comes once or twice a week, and with a fine disregard of the elementary necessities of teaching, children are called one by one, out of whatever class they happen to be attending, to have their music-lesson. Either the whole of the rest of the class must mark time at some unnecessary exercise until the missing member returns, or one child must miss some stage, some explanation that will involve a weakness, a lameness for the rest of the course of instruction. Not only is the actual music-lesson a nuisance in this way, but all day the school air is loaded with the oppressive tinkling of racked and rackety pianos. Nothing, I think, could be more indicative of the real value the English school- proprietor sets on school-teaching than this easy admission of the music-master to hack and riddle the curriculum into rags.[26] It is an extension and a very doubtful improvement. It is a modern necessity, a rather irksome necessity, of little or no essential educational value, an unavoidable duty the school will have to perform.[27]
There are two subjects in the modern English school that stand by themselves and in contrast with anything one finds in the records of ancient and oriental schools, as a very integral part of what is regarded as our elementary general education. They are of very doubtful value in training the mind, and most of the matter taught is totally forgotten in adult life. These are history and geography. These two subjects constitute, with English grammar and arithmetic, the four obligatory subjects for the very lowest grade of the London College of Preceptors' examinations, for example. The examination papers of this body reveal the history as an affair of dated events, a record of certain wars and battles, and legislative and social matters quite beyond the scope of a child's experience and imagination. Scholastic history ends at 1700 or 1800, always long before it throws the faintest light upon modern political or social conditions. The geography is, for the most part, topography, with a smattering of quantitative facts, heights of mountains, for example, populations of countries, and lists of obsolete manufactures and obsolete trade conditions. Any one who will take the trouble to run through the text-books of these subjects gathered together in the library of the London Teachers' Guild, will find that the history is generally taught without maps, pictures, descriptive passages, or anything to raise it above the level of an arid misuse of memory; and the highest levels to which ordinary school geography has attained are to be found in the little books of the late Professor Meiklejohn. These two subjects are essentially "information" subjects. They differ in prestige rather than in educational quality from school chemistry and natural history, and their development marks the beginning of that great accumulation of mere knowledge which is so distinctive of this present civilization.
There are, no doubt, many minor subjects, but this revision will at least serve to indicate the scope and chief varieties of school work. Out of some such miscellany it is that in most cases the student passes to specialization, to a different and narrower process which aims at a specific end, to the course of the College. In some cases this specialized course may be correlated with a real and present practice, as in the case of the musical, medical, and legal faculties of our universities; it may be correlated with obsolete needs and practices and regardless of modern requirements, as in the case of the student of divinity who takes his orders and comes into a world full of the ironical silences that follow great controversies, nakedly ignorant of geology, biology, psychology, and modern biblical criticism; or it may have no definite relation to special needs, and it may profess to be an upward prolongation of schooling towards a sort of general wisdom and culture, as in the case of the British "Arts" degrees. The ordinary Oxford, Cambridge, or London B.A. has a useless smattering of Greek, he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that tongue; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical literature, he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it clearly, and none of German, he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite useless knowledge of certain rudimentary sections of mathematics, and an odd little bite out of history. He knows practically nothing of the world of thought embodied in English literature, and absolutely nothing of contemporary thought; he is totally ignorant of modern political or social science, and if he knows anything at all about evolutionary science and heredity it is probably matter picked up in a casual way from the magazines. Art is a sealed book to him. Still, the inapplicability of his higher education to any professional or practical need in the world is sufficiently obvious, it seems, to justify the claim that it has put him on a footing of thought and culture above the level of a shopman. It is either that or nothing. And without deciding between these alternatives, we may note here for our present purpose, that the conception of a general upward prolongation of schooling beyond adolescence, as distinguished from a specific upward prolongation into professional training, is necessary to the complete presentation of the school and college scheme in the modern state.
There has always been a tendency to utilize the gathering together of children in schools for purposes irrelevant to schooling proper, but of some real or fancied benefit. Wherever there is a priestly religion, the lower type of religious fanatic will always look to the schools as a means of doctrinal dissemination; will always be seeking to replace efficiency by orthodoxy upon staff and management; and, with an unconquerable, uncompromising persistency, will seek perpetually either to misconduct or undermine; and the struggle to get him out and keep him out of the school, and to hold the school against him, will be one of the most necessary and thankless of New Republican duties. I have, however, already adduced reasons that I think should appeal to every religious mind, for the exclusion of religious teaching from school work. The school gathering also affords opportunity for training in simple unifying political conceptions; the salutation of the flag, for example, or of the idealized effigies of King and Queen. The quality of these conceptions we shall discuss later. The school also gives scope for physical training and athletic exercises that are, under the crowded conditions of a modern town, almost impossible except by its intervention. And it would be the cheapest and easiest way of raising the military efficiency of a country, and an excellent thing for the moral tone and public order of a people, to impose upon the school gathering half an hour a day of vigorous military drill. The school, too, might very easily be linked more closely than it is at present with the public library, and made a means of book distribution; and its corridors may easily be utilized as a loan picture gallery, in which good reproductions of fine pictures might bring the silent influence of the artist mind to bear. But all these things are secondary applications of the school gathering; at their best they are not conducted by the school-teacher at all, and I remark upon them here merely to avoid any confusion their omission might occasion.
26
Piano playing as an accomplishment is a nuisance and encumbrance to the school course and a specialization that surely lies within the private Home province. To learn to play the piano properly demands such an amount of time and toil that I do not see how we can possibly include it in the educational scheme of the honourable citizens of the coming world state. To half learn it, to half learn anything, is a training in failure. But it is probable that a different sort of music teaching altogether—a teaching that would aim, not at instrumentalization, but at intelligent appreciation—might find a place in a complete educational scheme. The general ignorance that pervades, and in part inspires these papers, does, in the matter of music, become special, profound, and distinguished. It seems to me, however, that what the cultivated man or woman requires is the ability to read a score intelligently rather than to play it—to distinguish the threads, the values, of a musical composition, to have a quickened ear rather than a disciplined hand. I owe to my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, the suggestion that the piano is altogether too exacting an instrument to use as the practical vehicle for such instruction, and that something simpler and cheaper—after the fashion of the old spinet—is required. Possibly some day a teacher of genius will devise and embody in a book a course of class lessons, sustained by simple practice and written work, that would attain this end. But, indeed, after all is said and done, music is the most detached and the purest of arts, the most accessory of attainments.] Apart from the piano work, the special teaching of elegant accomplishments seems just at present on the wane. And on the whole I think what one might call useful or catchpenny accomplishments are also passing their zenith—shorthand lessons, book-keeping lessons, and such-like impostures upon parental credulity.
There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a convenient accomplishment, and which has—with that increase in communication which is the salient material fact of the nineteenth century—developed in Western Europe to the dimensions of a political necessity, and that is the teaching of one or more modern foreign languages. The language-teaching of all previous periods has been done with a view to culture, artistic, as in the case of Elizabethan Italian, or intellectual as with English Latin. But the language- teaching of to-day is deliberately, almost conscientiously, not for culture. It would, I am sure, be a very painful and shocking thought indeed to an English parent to think that French was taught in school with a view to reading French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity for purposes of vulgar communication. The stirring together of the populations that is going on, the fashion and facilities for travel, the production of the radii from the trading foci, are rapidly making a commonplace knowledge of French, German, and Italian a necessity to the merchant and tradesman, and the ever more extensive travelling class. So that so far as Europe goes, one may very well regard this modern modern-language teaching as—with the modern mathematics—an extension of the
27
In one way the foreign language may be made educationally very useful, and that is as an exercise in writing translations into good English.