MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
HAVE this week been studying two wholly different publica- I dons which deal with the subject of education. The first is the detailed and comprehensive Bill in which Mr. R. A. Butler has embodied the principles of his White Paper. The Bill will not have a quick passage through the House since it affects principles and interests in respect of which many members have deep feelings and long experience. But it has behind it what might be called " the will of the House," and, whatever modifications of detail may be necessary, Mr. Butler will find that his scheme will in principle become the Butler Act. As was pointed out in last week's Spectator, this Act must necessarily form one of the foundation- stones of our reconstruction. , The impetus which revolutionary phases are apt to gather, the torrents of rapacity which they tend to engender, can be checked only if there exists in the community a fund of thoughtfulness wide enough to moderate impatience and deep enough to reduce appetites. The sole anxiety which I have regarding Mr. Butler's Bill is that it may have come -twenty years too late. We may be faced with an unfortunate transition period in which the wisdom of the educated has lost authority and the knowledge of the younger generation is still uncreative. Yet if we can traverse' this stage without disorder, if we can render our educational system organic to the whole community, then learning may again recover its old influence and even the humanities may cease to be regarded as a vanity of the privileged. The aims, the categories and the methods of our education will in any case become essentially different. The quantitative improvement is bound to be valuable ; but what of the qualitative values which we may lose? What was the actual quality of our old class-system? * * * *.
The second publication which I have read this week is a study of Wellington College, which has been written by Mr: R. St. C. Talboys under the title A Victorian School (Basil Blackwell, I2S. 6d.). Mr. Talboys was both a pupil and a master at Wellington; and has been able to trace its development from a Military Academy towards one of the more progressive types of modernised school. Dons and schoolmasters are as men who lean upon the parapet of a bridge and watch the river pour under the arches, never wholly different and never wholly the same. The constant stream of boy- hood passes below them, stirring the same weeds, carrying the same forms-of scum upon its surface, now slow, now fast, now dull, now limpid—varying in speed and colour according to some unseen !Iteration in the springs from which it comes. Mr. Talboys has leant over that bridge for many years, and on his face there is a smile—half sceptical, half affectionate. He is not, I should imagine, one of the more fervent devotees of Dr. Arnold, nor is he convinced that the quality of our public-school education should be sought for solely in the type of character which it enferceS, or the degree of muscularity which its Christianity is able to include. He is not, again, the type of man who believes that the success of a school is to be judged either by the number of the boys-it attracts or by the social eminence of their parents. One can detect in his study a faint note of regret that Wellington, which was founded " for the gratuitous, or nearly gratuitous, education of orphan children of indigent and meritorious officers of the Army," should during the later nineteenth century have developed ambitions to become the equal of, and the example for, other establishments devoted to the nurture of the younger rich. Wellington has in the last ninety years proved an enormous success ; it is today one of the most enlightened schools in the country ; but it is not, in any sense, the school which its founding fathers had in mind.
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My own memories Of Wellington are not enthusiastic memories. It is not that I was ever unhappy while at Wellington ; it is that I was bored there as I have never been bored in all my life. To this day the sight of conifers, heather or rhododendrons fills me With a special brand of melancholy associated with that long grey regiment of days. What was the nature and what the purpose of
the deliberate dullness which, at the turn of the century, Wellington enforced? The original conception had been that . the nucleus of
the college should consist of eighty Foundationers who were to be the real "Heroum flu," or, in other words, the orphans of defunct military officers. In addition to these, other sons of impecunious officers were to be admitted at " reduced rates " ; but it was never intended that the school should contain more than two hundred and fifty boys. When towards the opening years of this century I reached Wellington, the school had swollen to some five hundred boys, but the old conception of a military orphanage remained, in terms of discipline and virility, the dominating conception. " Moreover," writes Mr. Talboys, " the primitive sons of heroes were, measured by our standards, little more than Hottentots." Thus the general damp and dullness which, in the last half of the nineteenth century, sub- stituted " character " in all our Public Schools for the laxity and adventures of Byron's days, became at Wellington particularly oppressive. That general change has been admirably defined by Mr. Talboys. "The Public Schools," he writes, " infected by the high moral fervour and by the administrative example of Dr. Arnold at Rugby, greatly changed in character. 'They ceased to be the ' nurseries of vice,' as the Rev. Mr. Bowdler had termed them, and set themselves towards the ordered standardisation of the English schoolboy with which we are now familiar. . . . In truth, the Public Schools in their new guise reflected and responded to the desires of the lately enriched middle class, with its evangelical and earnest demand for Christian manliness and gentlemanly conduct in its sons."
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Mr. Talboys writes with careful irony about this period. Con- ditions, he admits, were severe indeed. " All the year round," he writes, " work began at seven, and on midwinter mornings we shivered in the gaslit classrooms, with minds too benumbed to think. Meals were frugal and monotonous. There were times indeed when our privations seemed to rival those of an orphanage. . . . Trained to watch for guidance and to listen to orders, the boys responded to their directing genius, and if at times there was a certain lack of self-expression among groups and individuals, it was perhaps but a surface price to pay for so thriving a prestige in the world of fashion and affairs." And what was the type of " character " which this system created? Obedience was. fostered at the price of initiative, discipline secured at the cost of originality. The Prefects, who were chosen almost entirely for their athletic prowess, may have acquired the great virtues of responsibility and restraint. But the ordinary boy, even the intelligent boy, ceased, in Mr. Talboys words, " to be an individual, to have anything but a corporate identity." At Wellington, with its original theory of military discipline, this process of standardisation was emphasised -by a most rigid routine. There was no moment of the day which_ was left to us for self-employment, with the result that we became as identical as a row of buttons on a card. If this uniformity was the " character " which was aimed at, then the system succeeded admirably. But it was certainly not the sort of character best fitted to cope with the intricacies of a changing world.
* * * I am grateful to Mr. Talboys for his book, since he explains how and why Wellington, after my departure, expanded upon wiser and more liberal lines. It may well be that the present system fosters virtues and nourishes capacities not dreamt of in my dark drab days. Such resentment as I feel against the Wellington of my own boyhood centres upon the uniformity of dullness which it sought to impose ; it seemed almost deliberately to aim at creating a generation of bores. The vast scheme which Mr. Butler has pre- pared may, in its wide diversity, avoid the danger of the uniform ; it may, by its varied grades and categories, create other forms of jealousy and other types of inferiority ; but at least it will not be dull. And Mr. Talboys, gazing over his bridge at these new tribu- taries, may see the waters gushing fresh and clean and clear.
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