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CLASSICAL EDUCATION. CLASSICAL EDUCATION.
November 28.
Sin—The Spectator is quite competent to defend its own views and criti- cisms, and the reviewer of Mr. Cookeeley's Pinelar needs no help from me : but the strictures of your correspondent at Scarborough are so fair a specimen of the arguments current among those who uphold the "pure and simple" Greek and Latin system of instruction,—and they are a very large or at any rate very influential class,—that it is worth while inquiring how much these arguments are worth. The reviewer presses upon our attention the undeniable fact, that an enor- mous number of the youth of England, after years of enforced and almost undivided labour at the ancient writers, fail in acquiring a competent know- ledge either of the language or the mind of antiquity ; and he very fairly and very forcibly puts the question, whether the introduction at an early stage of other than formal studies would not help instead of hindering both the growth of mind and the study of grammar—would not raise instead of lower- ing the very low average of classical attainments reached by the 1)1488 of those educated in our great schools and universities. How low this standard
is, let any examiner for matriculation, "little go," or ordinary degree, de- clare.
"But," says your correspondent, "this is the fault of parents : they .per- slat in sending to school hundreds of boys whose minds have never been trained at home, and who ought to be gamekeepers and mechanics." A bold answer this ; for it means, if it means anything, that those who profess to educate will only educate the gifted few ; that to the rest of her children England can only offer the lot of killing vermin and watching poachers— they are to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water to her true sons, her First-class men and Wranglers. Yet this answer is quite a type of its class: it has a large circulation among schoolmasters and tutors; it is the poor anodyne with which many a weary teacher lulls his inward misgivings, Is he looks round the barren waste, the howling wilderness, of a large part of his realm.
And yet, Sir, such is the perversity of the human race, or, if Mr. Oates chooses, the " vanity " of parents, these youths do not take the advice which indignant teachers are apt to tender them : they do not go to the Diggings, or enlist as privates, or tend the pheasant, or swell the supply of labour at Preston or West Norfolk ; but they do something very different—they fill our public offices, they help to govern India, they officer our regiments, they sit at Quarter-Sessions, they find their way into our Senate ; above all, they take orders in numbers, and are scattered up and down England and Wales to bring light into the dark regions of agricultural ignorance, to meet and answer and win back the infidels and heathens of our hives of industry ; and what is more, they have been known to do this work well and worthily, even those who never got a prize or won a scholarship. And now, Sir, granting, what I cheerfully grant, that even to the mass of boys a stringent drilling in the structure and grammar of Latin and Greek is a most useful discipline, I return to the question which the reviewer puts, Is the study of the classics incompatible with any other ? Is the child, so full of interest in outward objects, to have no pabulum offered to its craving appetite, (how craving, let those answer who have watched children from three to ten years old, ere grammar has fallen on them like a frost,) except the accidence, and in due time the syntax—no power to be taxed but that of memory ? I say this because your correspondent's "cry of the children" is "Grammar, grammar, more grammar "; as though there were something of the upas tree in other studies—in the structure and nature of the earth on which we live, in the history of its races, in the marvels of the microscope and the telescope ; as though the language of Goethe or of Guizot, the science of Humboldt or of Herschell, were a forbidden field, fatal to the growth of mental vigour, and above all fatal to the powers of rigid analysis and scientific method.
Space forbids me to follow your correspondent through the rest of his somewhat discursive letter. I will simply say, that my main and cherished employment is the study and teaching of the ancient writers : that I know well how useful to the highest class of minds, and to others also, that study is ; but that I differ with Mr. Oates as to the best gleans of raising a large class of minds to the level of those great writers ; that what he s.$) a about their being the necessary teachers of poetry and philosophy, must be assented to with large di ductions ; that as to taste and elegance of mind, these are not, even if to be realized by his method, the main ends of Christian education ; and as for composition, we all know that Messrs. Bright and Cobden in our own day speak (unless their reporters are very able correctors) wonderfully good and terse Saxon, and that a greater man than they has left us " Despatches " many of which would be, even in a schoolmaster's eyes, models of " admirable composition." This is a very long letter ; and I will at once end by saving, that while I scarcely believe one part of your reviewer's remarks to be based on practical observation,—that, I mean, in which he speaks of the tie between tutors and pupils at public schools,—I thank him heartily for his review, and subscribe myself, Your constant reader,
A MASTER AND TUTOR IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL.
P.S.—I have purposely abstained from touching on the large amount of education, as distinct from instruction, which school life and college life in Englund give : no one recognizes this more cheerfully, or could enlarge on it more gladly, than I: but this is not the subject under discussion, namely, whether we do or do not give the best food, and in the best proportions, to the mind of Young England.
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