- EDUCATION - AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS •
Tose the education of the citizens ie a matter of supreme im- portance to the State seems nowadays a truism too trite for argument, yet it ie only within the last few generations that it has found its logical consequence in the State provision and control of elementary education. No doubt the delay may be explained in part by the normal human reluctance to make practical application of general theories, but it is due in part also to the increasing complexity of civilization demanding a higher level of attainment amongst the workers. Every one remembers the passage in which Mscaulay enumerates, with painful im- pressiveness, the means of culture to which an Athenian, albeit deprived of the resources of the circulating library, could obtain access in the Great Age
The Athenian might pass every morning in conversation with Socrates, and might hear Periolee speak four or- five times every month. He saw the plays of Sophocles and Arietophanes : he walked amidst- the friezes of Phidiee and the paintings of Bemis he knew by heart the choruses of Aeschylue : he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the street reciting the Shield of Achilles or the Death of Argue : he was a legislator, convereant with high questions of affiance, revenue, and war he was a soldier trained under a liberal and generous discipline he was judge, compelled every day to weigh the effect of opposite arguments."
Certainly all these constituted an excellent education in Civics, but they were rendered possible only by the existence of a servile class content, or compelled, to discharge the necessary routine of life without any prospect of improving their col- lective status. When-that class disappeared general intellectual progreea ceased.
The aim of the present work ie to trace such points of con- nexion between social and educational history, more particularly in England and during the last two centuries. The volume before us is only an instalment, and it breaks off the story at the point where its interest and importance are becoming greatest ; there is in it very little dealing directly with the urgent problems of the moment ; but it suggests some valuable lines of thought for future development and offers some sound seasons for a rationally hopeful outlook. Mr. Dobbs does not confine himself to the formal education of the schools ; some of his most interesting pages are devoted to the growth of free libraries and cheap literature, to the rise and-fall of the system of Mechanics' Institutes, and to the educative effect of the mere collision of human beings which teaches men to be something when text- books can teach them only to know something or to do something. The discussion of the tendency of educational institutions to drop out of touch with the (dam for which they were originally designed and endowed, and the consequent complaint of genera- tion after generation of inquirers that education had failed to reach those most in need of it, s both encouraging in its reminder that the diffioultiea-of to-day-are not altogether the fault of the existing system, and- useful, as a warning of the necessity of "-tbinting.ahead " in matters of mental sod, moral training. Indeed,the -only serious fault we can find in the book is a lack of vitality and enthusiasm ; we should like to see Mr. Dobbs more excited about his theories, more anxious to "bring his declama- tion to a point" with an argument-provoking dogmatism. He qualifies all his-statements with such conscientious thoroughness that he leaves on the reader's mind an-impression of woolly moderation too elusive to produce a olear.outoissue. We rescue one delightful fact from the unworthy obscurity of a footnote. "At a village Grammar School in Yorkshire, almost within living memory, there was a holiday whenever the master desired to go fishing, and the school prime were 'tossed for' at the end of term amid universal merriment."
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