THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS A VEHICLE FOR THE HUMANITIES.
ACOMMITTEE, among whose members were Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. John Bailey and Sir Arthur QuiIler-Couch, was recently appointed by the President of the Board of Education. It was
" To inquire into the position occupied by English (Language and Literature) in the educational system of England, and to advise how its study may best be promoted in schools of all types, including Continuation Schools, and in Universities and other Institutions of Higher Education, regard being had to :— (1) The requirements of a liberal education ; (2) The needs of businesS, the professions, and public services, and (3) The relation of English to other studies.
The Committee have issued a Report (The Teaching of English in England • London : H.M. Stationery Office ; 1s. 6d. net) which all who have to do with education, whether as parents or teachers, will find most interesting, enlightened and well expressed. Here is a Blue-book with nothing in it of official pomposity, dealing with a learned subject without a trace of pedantry. In the best sense it is statesmanlike, wise and at once idealistic and practical. The terms of the reference were so wide that the Com- mittee came to the conclusion that they must decide what was meant by the term " a liberal education," and pronounce at large upon what were its aims :- "Education is not the same thing as information, nor does it deal with human knowledge as divided into so-called subjects. It is not the storing of compartments in the mind, but the development and training of faculties already existing. It proceeds, not by the presentation of lifeless facts, but by teaching the student to follow the different lines on which life may be explored and proficiency in living may be obtained. It is, in a word, guidance in the acquiring of experience. Under this general .term are included experiences of different kinds ; those which are obtained, for example, by manual work, or by the orderly investigation of matter and its qualities. The most valuable for all purposes are those experiences of human relations which are gained by contact with human beings. . . . Education is complete in proportion as it includes within its scope a measure of knowledge in the principal sciences and a measure of skill in literature, the drama, music, song and the plastic arts ; but not all of these are equally useful for the training of the young. We recognize fully, on the one side, the moral, practical, educational; value of natural science, on the other side the moral, practical, educational value of the arts and of all great literatures ancient or modern."
What subject or what arrangement of curriculum will give us the highest value on these lines ?
" We make no comparison, we state what appears to us to be an incontrovertible primary fact, that for English children no form of knowledge can take precedence of a knowledge of English, no form of literature can take precedence of English literature : and that the two are so inextricably connected as to form the only basis possible for a national education."
And here, as it seems to us, is one of the singularly few blemishes in an otherwise admirably-contrived treatise. The Committee never once quite face the arguments put forth by those who prefer music, one of the plastic arts, or perhaps the sciences as a means to culture. They seem rather to forget that there are those who believe that the mind of a child is more easily approached through science. Mr. Sanderson, for example, shows at Oundle the complete working-model of a curriculum arranged from the stand- point that mental balance, clear thinking and intellectual disinterestedness arc best taught to children through a study of the palpable wonders of the material world. Through Darwin, Pasteur, Newton and Einstein, say this school, we can more easily widen a boy's horizon and teach him to think than through Euripides, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Shaw. This is to many a new, and even somewhat puzzling point, for it is only lately that the scientist has admitted the fact that his aims and those of the advocate of the Humanities are identical. Science has only just ceased to have materialistic aims. To hear such a teacher as Mr. Sanderson enlarging, almost in the words of the old pedagogues, upon the advantages of " a sound, fortifying curriculum " for the formation of mind and character is apt to prove a little bewildering. More- over, the ' scientist has another point to make, and in bringing out Professor Aydelotte's theory meets the humanist on his own ground. Professor Aydelotte, criticizing the curricula of a good many American universities, protests vigorously against giving boys and girls what he calls " the abstract gift of the gab." Make boys and girls think, he urges, and in nine cases out of ten, if their thoughts are burning enough, the gift of expression will be added unto them.
This is, of course, our old friend the Owl and the Egg dilemma come back to haunt us. Is it the desire to express something that gives us the power of expression, or is it an innate desire to express something that makes us seek for something to express ? The present writer believes, how- ever, that this will not be found, on examination, to be quite so real a dilemma as it seems at first.- The solution to it is, he thinks, to be sought in the region of a concept of the arts as a very subtle form of communication between man and man. We are each one of us shut into our private cell of individual sense perception. What may be called a direct statement—it may be conveyed in a statement in words, in a chemical formula, or in an algebraical equation— is a communication between one conscious intelligence and another conscious intelligence. An artistic statement— it may be one of Beethoven's posthumqus Sonatas, it may be a passage from Early Intimations of Immortality—is a communication both between one mind and another and also between one subconsciousness and another. The arts are not, we believe, so much an expression of emotion as has been formerly thought—the emotions are amphibious and may be conscious or subconscious—but of the deeper substructure of the human mind. The artist's statement is the statement of what cannot be put " into so many words." Though, therefore, it is conceivable (we are far from immediately admitting it) that the exact sciences form the more perfect medium by which one mind can understand another mind, yet in a curriculum based on the sciences the whole of man's mental substructures are left out of account, and it is only through the medium of the arts that we find the whole of the nature of man brought into play. It is on these grounds that the humanist should, we hold, base his claim as against the scientist. It is on these gro,unds that he can maintain that men can best reach that state of mutual understanding, sympathy and co-operation which, were it achieved, would so nearly bring us back to the state of an earthly paradise. But upon this side of the question the compilers of the Report have not touched even briefly, and those who are inclined to believe in the approach to a civilized and developed intelligence through the sciences may find themselves somewhat antagonized by a merely tacit assumption that everyone acknowledges that we can approach culture best through the arts and the humanities ; by being brought into contact, that is, with other and great minds rather than with marvellous and stimulating facts. As for the minor question which we raised just now as to which art should be given the preference for teaching purposes, again the Report rather baldly assumes that the arts of literature are to be preferred. We wish, for the sake of the unconverted, that they had supported their contention, were it never so briefly, with the argument of brute convenience, which in actual practice, when we come to deal with millions of children, puts an abstract discussion as to which is the " best art " out of court. Once, however, we have admitted their fundamental contentions—contentions we believe to be true—then nothing could be better than their application of their principles. Nothing could exceed the lucidity, sympathy and insight with which the Committee have at each stage defined what, to borrow a military phrase, we may call the " limited objectives " to be reached by the way and laid down their recommendations as to methods of getting there. What are the faults of education as it stands in England in the classical curriculum of our public schools, and in the education provided by State schools Education has for a long time past been too remote from life, says the Report. Education should bear directly upon life : no part of its processes should be without a purpose intelligible to everyone concerned." Ben Jonson's dictum, which we quoted a week or so ago, might indeed have served as a motto for this part of the Report. " A youth should not be made to hate study before he know the causes to love it." How can we best give children cause to love learning ? Put very briefly, the conclusions of the inquiry seem to be that so far as teaching them to write scoes we are to seek for the forms of literary expression best suited to the child along the lines of what, if left alone, he will choose for himself. The essay form, for instance, is singularly unsuited to children, and " Composition " and the school " Essay " are both now condemned except for quite big boys and girls. Again, it used to be—alas ! it still is in many schools—the custom to go through a play of Shakespeare's a term. By the old system the soul-shaking, breath-taking story of Macbeth is interrupted for the parsing of special passages, or a discussion as to whether the crow flew to Rooky or Rocky Woods. The modern method is to let the children read as grown-up people do, quickly and currently, with occasional skipping and occasional ignoring of difficult passages. Alas ! space does not allow us, as we should like, to quote from the Itvort's admirable and enlightened section on the drama as a source of education, on literature and adult education, on the use of books, or on the history of the humanistic ideal and its pursuit through English. We hope that the reader who is interested in the subject will pay the is. 6d. which will put all this before him. But the reader, even in the brief abridgment that this article can give him, will by now have realized that the crux of the whole affair is the supply of teachers. The Committee require the schoolmaster or mistress to perform a function as delicate and subtle as it is important. They require him not only to give the children the fruits of knowledge, but to give them with the bloom still on them, and they are fully aware how much they are asking :— " We desire to express our strong conviction that for the purposes of such an education as we have outlined no teacher can, in his own grade, be too highly gifted or too highly trained, and that this is at least as true in the earlier as in tho later stages."
What steps can be taken to help those who are to engage in the work " to keep in the mental health and strength necessary for their task " ? The obvious solution is, of course, as a preliminary, a university course at some university where there is some sort of school of English Humane Letters. But this sort of change in the teacher's equipment must necessarily be long in coming into effect and be one of the matters in which the country's present lamentable financial position will inevitably hinder progress. In the meantime, however, the Com- mittee have an excellent suggestion :- " We believe that something might be done to help the existing staff of teachers by voluntary effort on the part of men and women who have themselves received a university education and have time to spare for lecturing in schools or training colleges. The enrolment of a fraternity of itinerant preachers on English Literature—a panel of men and women who are recognized autholities on their own subjects and are willing to lecture upon them occasionally—would be a step in accord with other move- ments of the time and with our national tradition of unpaid public service."
These itinerant preachers would, we understand them to suggest, in some cases help the children directly, but more often would address an audience of teachers. If such courses can be arranged and the right " preachers " selected, surely here is a new opportunity of service which would appeal to many of those who feel incompetent to deal with the more " practical " branches of philanthropy. Such courses of lectures are already occasionally available at Oxford and Cambridge, but these courses can be attended only by a very limited number of people. We cannot help feeling that if sympathetic people—say those responsible for the excellent Educational Conference that took place this Fear at Stratford-on-Avon—would appeal for such lecturers, there would be an immediate response. Par- ticularly interesting it would be, of course, if contemporary men of letters—poets, novelists or playwrights—would lecture to teachers on their own subjects and perhaps on their own works. The names of half a dozen such writers, who are also known to be good speakers, will immediately occur to the reader. Is this not a piece of work which might be set about immediately ?
Previous page
