ARNOLD OF RUGBY
By THE HEAD OF THE SCHOOL
AS the centenary of Dr. Arnold's death falls this week, it seems i seasonable, and it may be profitable, to inquire into the results of his reforms of school life and to assess their value for the future. We ourselves are probably on the threshold of a radical change in forms and methods of education ; Arnold was the instrument of changes equally great. His ideas roused tremendous opposition in his own day, became the accepted creed of the next generation and in our time survive partly disused and wholly
forgetful of their origin. The problem is now whether Arnold's methods are to go by the board altogether in a revolutionary reform of education or whether they are still fit to be the keystone, as he believed, of all our bringing-up. Two points in his theory of education are outstanding. The one is the system whereby the Sixth Form were given authority over the rest of the school, and the other is his insistence on a religious foundation to teaching. Arnold's Sixth System seems to embody two principles : First, that older boys at a school have a right to authority over their juniors, quite apart from the normal influence of their personality ; and, secondly, that a necessary qualification for this authority is brains as opposed to brawn. Both these principles are right. Authority comes with age, or rather springs from the maturer experience that age gives, and an early start is the best possible training ; and the advance of the human race from the Stone Age to our present comparative state of civilisation having been a gradual transference of power from brute force to intelligence, there seems no reason to go back on this advance in this particular case. But many things that are utterly right are difficult to put into practice, and liable to abuse when once set on their way. The clever boy is not necessarily a moral one ; the influence of brawn hero-worshipped but unsupported by authority may be too much for brains supported by authority but despised ; and the duller kind are likely to resent a younger boy being put over their heads merely because he is in a higher form. Nevertheless, such momentary dicadvantages are offset by more permanent good The whole system is directed towards the combination of intelligence with strength of character, by discovering what strength is there and by beginning its development. In a nation lacking purposeful leadership this type of personality is sorely needed, and will continue to be so. The system must, in fact, be extended to wherever the education of youth is carried on, not confined merely to what are for the moment the public schools. Brains must remain the criterion. It is positively dangerous to put the merely muscular, whatever the force of their personality, in any position of legislative authority ; they lack ideals and they do not know how to think. And, incidentally, education after the war must have the aim, above all, of teaching people how to think, possibly by a modification of the rigorous lines of the present classical education, but certainly not through assimilation of a mass of proved facts or assimilation of nothing at all. Arnold is as right now as he was in Victorian Eng'and. He was himself the embodiment of the ideal product of his system—a man who combined intellectual ability with strength ' of character, and based everything on religious and moral principles.
Arnold said once that the three things to be aimed at in schbol life re, first, religious and moral principles ; second, gentlemanly conduct ; third, intellectual ability. Obviously his Sixth system was going to be of little use unless behaviour was grounded in morality. He in fact laid down the general principle that govern- ment of any sort, no matter how successful in keeping its subjects prosperous or docile or happy, is wrong unless its whole motive power lies in religion. The modern world testifies by its failure to his clarity of vision. Arnold took the future world-makers in their youth and tried to instil into them some of his own religious ardour. It did not matter to him, as he said, that his school should be one of three hundred boys or one hundred or fifty, but it must be a school of Christian gentlemen. That saying has been forgotten for three-quarters of a century. It was the most difficult of his ideals to put into practice and the one without which the rest are mere " cobwebs and moonshine." It is the point at which modern education has failed, and se failed in every point. An exaggerated belief in freedom of thought has practically speaking left the younger generation to form its own creed, and scepticism, miscalled healthy, has taken into its embrace everything which could not be accounted for by scientific phenomena. Hence the feeble agnosticism which prevails in modern times. Something dynamic is needed to uproot it and take its place, something like the faith of Arnold, which was not afraid to maintain itself before others as the truest faith, instead of bowing weakly before decadent individualism. We have seen the unbelievable effect of unremitting propaganda on minds still unformed. We have a creed which we believe is the nearest approach to truth and good- ness that man has yet made. And so we cannot be wrong, and we shall almost certainly be successful, if we drum the fundamental precepts of the Christian religion day by day into the receptive minds of the young. The greatest mistake the Church has made is in changing the tone of " This is right and you should believe it into " we believe this is right and you are at liberty to do so if you wish." Arnold wanted to create Christian gentlemen: we want to create a better world ; and the two ideas are the same. The place in which to found the brave new world is the school ; the means by which to found it is by education ; and the dynamic wil necessary to found it is in a burning and unashamed faith lik Arnold's.
Arnold's ideas are essential today. Whatever may be the for of school which will develop out of the war, education must embod his principles. First and last it must be religious. Few teacher now have the courage or the conviction to preface the morning work with a prayer, and indeed in a generation of sceptics an waverers such a proceeding would seem unintelligible Men wh teach the truths of science or the rules of Latin grammar as incon trovertible precepts are yet afraid when they come to the subjec that really matters—afraid of self-assertion, afraid of dogma. Onc establish that groundwork of morality, and the rest follows. Arnold chosen leaders, the intelligent boys, will have their powers of leader ship trained by experience, augmented by the ability to think o the right lines and based on religion. Arnold's Utopia of Christi gentlemen was to develop out of his already golden age ; ours mus rise from the ruins of a black civilisation ; but it is the same Utopi
R. DE C. PEELE.
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