THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY ON HOLIDAYS.
THE Archbishop of Canterbury, according to the Daily Telegraph, recently declared his opinion that holidays, to be most beneficial, should be entirely unspoiled by work. We have been preaching that belief for the last thirty years, we fear without much acceptance; but the Archbishop has gone beyond us, for he extends the principle to the holidays of children. They should not, he told his audience at the King's School, Canterbury, do any schoolwork in holiday- time. He had watched boys closely at Rugby for years, and had found that they were never so bright and so open to instruction as after a complete holiday. We have not a doubt that Dr. Temple is right, and should not wonder if his speech produced a valuable reform. Ordinary masters have little interest in setting holiday tasks, which, as they quite well know, will be very badly learned ; the lads themselves hate a requirement which only spoils their last three days of freedom ; and parents, to meet whose solicitudes the system is kept up, will feel their anxieties disappear when told that an Archbishop who was one of the most successful of Head- Masters sees no harm and some benefit in their boys' tem- porary idleness being made a little more complete. The holidays will at last be recognised as what they ought to be,— periods of rest, during which the brain recovers its full strength ; times of mental sleep, which, if they are to be fruit- ful, ought no more to be disturbed than the times of physical recuperation. There are, of course, boys without number to whom they are of comparatively little use because they never really work, but for the majority intervals of brain- torpor are distinctly reinvigorating, more especially in an age in which the steady tendency is towards over-driving, and those who will learn may learn till they are prematurely used up by over-toil. If the holidays are too long, shorten them, but a month without worry does more for mental health than six weeks darkened by a cloud of work in the distance, which the lads' consciences tell them ought to be got through deliberately, but which is never tackled until the last three days, when they either fail knowingly in a peremptory duty, or give themselves a fit of mental indigestion. The value of complete rest for adults is beginning to be recognised, and there is nothing in the boy's mind to distinguish it from that of the adult, except perhaps, if he has the perceptions which enable him to learn, a greater capacity for the kind of appre- hensiveness which we call worry, and which is fatal to any benefit in the way of fresh strength to be derived from leisure. If any master denies this, which we think improbable now that the Archbishop has dispersed the fog of tradition, just let him set himself on his next rash to Switzerland a week's hard work in reading, or better still, in learning, say, Lucretius by heart, and he will soon know the difference between a broken holiday and a perfect one, and everybody else will know it too, for he will come home as ready to be "cross," that is, irritably nervous, atti he was when he went away. Boys can be cross when overstrained as well as their teachers, and when they are they either learn nothing or learn with a fury of receptiveness which speedily exhausts their powers. Let the holiday be a slumber for the mind.
We wish a few more Head-Masters would give the world the result of their experience as plainly as the Archbishop of Canterbury has done. The community wants greatly some sound opinions upon the best methods of education. Teachers have improved immensely in our time, are better qualified by a wider knowledge, are younger, and, being more considered, are happier, and therefore teach with more patience and less ferocity. They get more rest and they have better hopes. But we are not sure that the improvement in the methods of education keeps pace with the improvement in the teachers. The classes are still too large, the teaching itself is often needlessly dull, the times during which strict attention is necessary are too long—we doubt if anybody attends fully to anything for more than an hour on end—and there is a failure to regulate work by capacities which is most disastrous. That some of these evils are practically incurable we fully admit. The interestingness of teaching must depend upon that of the teacher, and an examination in interestingnese is unhappily impracticable. Dr. Thring's idea, again, as to the proper size of a school would end, we fear, if education re- mained as good as ever, in unendurable costliness—a difficulty which is at this moment reducing the value of our rate-paid schools by at least one-half—and to distinguish between the the capacities of boys in school is as hard as Mrs. Prig said it was to "wash one featuri and miss another." A little, however, could still be done. We rather believe in learning by heart, holding that we know nothing in after life so per- fectly as we know the multiplication table ; but we are certain that the power of learning by heart differs as greatly as the range of sight, and that to require the same amount of memory frem each individual in a class of twenty is to harass ten of them' uselessly, and expose five to a kind of torture. The slow ones can learn if they give more time and trouble to it ? That is what is always said, and it is simply not true. Memory is perhaps the only power of the mind which is essentially physical, as physical as eyesight, and there are a great many boys, often boys with excellent powers, who simply cannot, so to speak, develop the photographic plate. They may acquire the power afterwards, as actors, for example, often do ; but they cannot do it as boys, and they not only suffer miserably, but they lose much of the total advantage of their education. They hate their work because one bit of it harasses them so much. Is it impossible to allow of exemptions, to substitute some other subject requir- ing effort, or even to suffer the slow-minded to let" repetition" alone ? We do not attempt to answer a question which can be rightly answered only by competent masters, but it is difficult for laymen to understand why it is practically im- possible to make a distinction so obvious and so broad. The memory can be cultivated, and ought to be? Certainly ; and the way not to cultivate it is to overtax it when it is obviouley feeble. The writer is speaking in this instance of what he personally knows, for he has seen lads made seriously ill by the effort to learn Greek choruses, which he himself could learn as quickly as English doggrel, and say off in an im- pressive manner without understanding half the words in them. And then there is the old stumbling-block, competi- tion. Is it perfectly impossible to let some boys compete, and release others from the necessity ? Experienced masters must be perfectly aware that there are boys whom competi- tion stimulates, whose brains wake under the pricking, either of vanity—call it emulation, if you like—or of combat, and that there are others, almost as numerous, and quite as com- petent, whom competition discourages, who simply cannot work with that motive, or under that order to "hurry up." Everybody recognises this difference in after life, and why cannot it be recognised during schooldays ? Because every school is a machine P That is precisely the evil which in the next generation we faintly hope to see corrected, even if it can only be done as it is done in the Army, by the im- portation into the great schools of a large class of cheap non- commissioned officers. That suggestion is absurd ? Very good; we have not the least wish to suggest, or belief in our own inspiration as to this subject ; but we want experienced masters, with their eyes open to recognise that our current methods of education are not yet quite perfect, that something is at all events a little wrong with the system, and to tell the community what they think and know. Why is a Lycee which fails in almost everything else almost invariably suc- cessful in teaching Latin
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