Procrustes
Date: 2024-05-09T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Education -- England

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Title: Procrustes
or, The future of English education

Author: M. Alderton Pink

Release date: May 9, 2024 [eBook #73580]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: E. P. Dutton & Company

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROCRUSTES ***

PROCRUSTES
OR THE
FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

PROCRUSTES
or the
FUTURE of ENGLISH EDUCATION

BY

M. ALDERTON PINK, M.A.

New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue

Published, 1927
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

| | PAGE
I. | Introduction: The Procrustean Bed | 1
II. | The Schools: Present-Day Problems and Tendencies | 14
III. | The Schools: Future Developments | 49
IV. | The Universities: The Academic Mind of To-Day and To-Morrow | 77

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

PROCRUSTES

I
INTRODUCTION
The Procrustean Bed

Andrew Undershaft.—“Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnado homes, or School Board Officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with second-hand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching.”—(Bernard Shaw).

During the Debate on the last Education Estimates (1925), Lord Hugh Cecil made a speech which most enthusiasts of education dismissed offhand as hopelessly reactionary. In the central part of his argument he deprecated the doctrine that education is to be equally distributed to all sorts of people, irrespective of their real capacity. He maintained that we must train children for the station to which, not by birth but by natural capacity, they properly belong. He would select the clever children and spend money liberally in giving them the fullest possible opportunities for higher study. But to the great body of children who are incapable of really using any higher teaching he would give a very low standard of education confined to the three R’s: the teaching of reading should be made the basis, for reading is the key to knowledge.

These views are certainly extreme; but, looked at impartially, they contain so much plain common-sense that it is rather remarkable that they provoked such bitter opposition. Of course, Lord Hugh Cecil laid himself open to two obvious charges: first, that he had no special knowledge of his subject, and, secondly, that his reforms were presumably intended for the children of masses and not those of his own class. But his opponents must take account of the statement made a few weeks later by the headmaster of Rugby, whose opinions cannot be discounted on these two grounds. Speaking as President of the Education Section of the British Association, Dr Vaughan disputed the assumption that the State should develop to the full the intellectual abilities of all its citizens. He considered that schooling is even now continued too long for some boys. He would give a thrice-generous remission after fourteen to those who had shewn no special aptitude for book-learning or any other form of direct education, on condition that they were kept within the spell of corporate life. Thus a distinguished practical schoolmaster corroborates the view of Lord Hugh Cecil that before providing unlimited educational facilities we should face the fact that many children are not amenable to the present educational process; and we ought therefore to consider whether we are promoting either their efficiency as citizens or their happiness as individuals by submitting them to a training for which they are not fitted. We are reminded that education has of recent years become a cult whose followers allow their zeal to blind them to stubborn realities.

The suggestion that we are on a false track in seeking to multiply indefinitely the educational institutions of existing type naturally provokes strong opposition, for it runs counter to one of the most cherished democratic doctrines of to-day. Ever since the first extension of the franchise, publicists have been preaching that the success of democracy depends upon the diffusion of culture among the masses who have the ultimate control of affairs. And whenever fears have been expressed that popular government has fallen short of the original ideal we have been assured that all will be well as soon as the electorate is properly educated. The public has thus been taught to believe that it is the duty of the State (so long as the financial position permits) to increase to the utmost the facilities for training its citizens.

The need for more education has, in fact, become a political commonplace. It has been only too easy for statesmen who have little real interest in the matter to talk vaguely about the educational ladder from the elementary school to the university, because such talk provides plausible material for the platform-speaker whose business it is to rehabilitate a popular system which has not quite come up to expectations. In a somewhat disillusioned democratic world education has threatened to become a political nostrum to be unintelligently applied and to be foolishly regarded as a panacea.

It is, in fact, the latest of a series of expedients prompted by belief in the perfectibility of mankind. A century or so ago republican reformers imagined that all the ills the State is heir to would be cured if King George’s government were replaced by a government of Tom Paine’s. Later on, the radicals thought that the millennium would be reached when every adult had a vote. The present generation has been too readily fooled by the equally delusive hope that the new Utopia will be created when everybody receives a university education at public expense.

It is therefore all to the good that our leaders should occasionally remind us that education is not a magic weapon of unlimited power. It is time that the public mind was disabused of the notion that a perfect system of education would of itself prove the salvation of the State. The fallacy lies, of course, in the assumption that everybody is capable of being educated. Those who are personally in touch with schools see only too clearly how unwarrantable such an assumption is. While they realise that every child, dull or clever, benefits by being under discipline and by taking part in the social life of a school, they know also that a certain proportion of children undergo no mental development commensurate with the time and labour expended on their behalf. Thus even if we imagine a perfect educational process, carried out by teachers who are all men and women of light and leading, the result of that process will be ultimately conditioned by the quality of the human beings who pass through it. Just as democracy pre-supposes education, so education pre-supposes children who are educable. It would seem, therefore, that political and social reformers who are still looking for a panacea must go to the eugenists.

The public statement of considered views such as those of Lord Hugh Cecil and the Headmaster of Rugby is one of the signs that we are at length emerging from the mental attitude which expresses itself in the crude demand for more and more education to be doled out indiscriminately. It is indeed time that we got rid of the prevalent notion that schools are factories (chiefly brain-factories) which can pass any sort of human material through a standardised course and in so many years turn out satisfactory finished products. And the friends of education need not be alarmed at the new trend of opinion. All reasonable people now admit the theoretical principle that the State must provide adequate training for all future citizens; and the Labour Party is flogging a dead horse when it insists so laboriously that every child, irrespective of social status, should be given the fullest educational opportunities. Present-day informed discussion has advanced beyond the consideration of this almost platitudinous statement of principle to an enquiry of a much more important character. The question being now asked is not whether every child should be given education to the age of sixteen or beyond, but what kinds of education ought to be provided for the many thousands of children of varied types who will receive advanced training through the increased facilities to be provided in the future.

The stage of educational development upon which we are now entering will, in fact, be marked by greater realism in the attitude of both the authorities and the general public towards the problems to be solved. We are gradually coming to acknowledge the fairly obvious truth that not every child is a potential Prime Minister, or even a capable civil servant, or a manager of a business. When we have shed the more romantic of the democratic habits of thought we shall even publicly admit that a certain proportion of mankind (whether the offspring of dukes or of dustmen) are fitted by nature to be nothing better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that to give them more than a limited amount of ordinary schooling is to perform a work of sentimental supererogation. We shall also realise that the course of instruction which has now become stereotyped as secondary, however admirable in itself, is a course for which relatively few children are really suited. And when we have taken more account than at present of the profound differences in individual capacities we shall cease to think of an education as something extraneous to the person educated, and to regard the school-curriculum as a Procrustean bed, to suit the dimensions of which the child’s mentality can be extended or truncated as required.

II
THE SCHOOLS
Present-Day Problems and Tendencies

A survey of present tendencies makes it clear that the next few years will witness a general overhaul of the educational machine. Among both the general public and the teaching profession the feeling is becoming widespread that, quite apart from its obvious incompleteness, our present system suffers from certain fundamental defects. Damaging criticisms of the work of the schools are by no means infrequent in press-articles. The proceedings of the various teachers’ organizations are eloquent of the need for radical reforms. Business men are giving public expression to their concern about the inadequacy of school-training for economic requirements: the Association of British Chambers of Commerce, for instance, has recently passed a resolution containing a sweeping condemnation of the methods and aims of the elementary schools. Already an official enquiry is being conducted into the relationship between the schools and industry. These signs of an impending revision of our educational programme derive added importance from the consideration that for some years to come Chancellors of the Exchequer will be very unwilling to sanction increases in public expenditure. Education ministers will therefore have to make out a very good case for any new developments and will have to satisfy public opinion that they are not merely increasing material and personnel but are also promoting increased efficiency.

The inevitable enquiry into the working of our present system will necessarily concern itself mainly with post-primary training since it is in this direction that development is most urgently needed. It is almost universally admitted that the time is overdue for a largely increased provision of further education of children beyond the age of fourteen; for though the secondary schools, owing to faulty methods of admission, at present contain many pupils who are unfit for the training they receive, there are also outside these schools numbers of children who reach the required standard of ability but who are denied entry simply because there is no room for them.

Public educational policy during the last quarter of a century has provided for higher education mainly by the foundation of secondary schools of a single type, controlled by the local authorities; and those who demand more secondary education generally mean more schools of this kind. The secondary schools are filled partly by scholarship-holders who represent the cream of the elementary schools, and partly by fee-payers who, as they do not usually have to pass a stringent entrance-examination, may represent all grades of ability. Thus only a proportion (now up to 40 per cent.) of the pupils are specially selected; the remainder are doing more advanced work simply because their parents wish it and can pay part of the cost.

When the activities of these schools come under a critical review, certain facts will be difficult to explain away. In the first place, it will be noticed that, although the pupils are intended to remain at school until the age of sixteen at least, a relatively large proportion leave before that age. According to the “London Statistics” for 1923–24, there were present at the end of 1923 in the aided and maintained secondary schools of London, 9,118 pupils who were twelve or thirteen years of age, 8,700 who were fourteen or fifteen, 3,280 who were sixteen or seventeen, and 342 who were eighteen or over. In other words, only about one-third remained until the age of sixteen or more, and this in spite of the fact that parents give undertakings to keep their children at school until sixteen. Again, the curriculum of these schools is largely determined by the First School Examination (equivalent to University Matriculation), and every pupil who remains at school sufficiently long should normally take this examination. Now the report of the Board of Education for 1923–24 shows that in each of the last five years an average of 78,000 children have entered the grant-earning secondary schools of England and the highest number that has taken the First School Examination in any one year is roughly 35,000, of whom about a third failed. That is to say, about two-thirds of the pupils either fail to complete the school course or fail to reach the standard of intellectual attainment necessary to pass an external test.

When all allowance has been made for the fact that a certain number of pupils are withdrawn at an early age purely on account of economic circumstances, we have still to face the failure of the schools to retain the pupils and to enable them to pass what is presumably a fair test of the kind of training given. The conclusion can scarcely be avoided that there are some radical defects in the aims and methods of the schools.

It is often urged that the secondary schools are not at present getting the best material, that owing to economic circumstances or to the insufficient provision of secondary school accommodation many children who are fit to profit by higher instruction are at present excluded in favour of fee-payers who are not fit. But this is merely begging the question. We are still confronted with the problem of what we are to do with those pupils who do not take kindly to the secondary school curriculum but who, by their very presence in secondary schools, show their readiness to undergo some form of higher instruction. And what are we to do with the many children in the primary schools who, under a scheme of more extended financial assistance, might also remain at school until sixteen or later, and would also be square pegs in round holes in the ordinary secondary school?

We are forced, therefore, to ask whether the present secondary school curriculum is adapted to the needs of the varied types of pupils who enter or are likely to enter the schools. What are the aims? At present the secondary school’s main function is to give sufficient training in the humanities, in mathematics and science, to enable pupils to pass the entrance examination of a university. (We may for the purpose of the present argument disregard the social activities of the school.) In other words, its business is to produce scholars of the intellectual type fitted for university training. It is true that art, handicraft, domestic science, and physical exercises appear in the curriculum but they occupy more or less subordinate places. The secondary school course, on its academic side, is directed to one main end, and any pupil who enters such a school is regarded, irrespective of his natural aptitudes, as a prospective candidate for matriculation. Teachers may demur to the suggestion that their horizon is dominated by an examination: they may talk hopefully about a test which their pupils can take “in their stride.” But the fact remains that the work of the upper part of the school is determined by requirements of an external body. There is a conventional list of “subjects” which the pupil must study, and if his individuality does not fit in with this scheme so much the worse for him.

The secondary schools are therefore designed, in so far as they are designed for any specific purpose, as a training-ground for university students. But only three per cent. of the pupils ever reach the universities. And the statistics already given indicate that a large proportion show themselves to be unfitted for university training. Teachers in secondary schools do not, of course, need these statistics to bring home to them the fact that a considerable proportion of the pupils with whom they have to deal are misfits. They realise that there are other sorts of capacity besides those which enable pupils to pass the usual examinations. They constantly see in their pupils special interests and aptitudes which find little or no outlet in the ordinary academic routine. They so often have to shake hands with old boys or old girls who were duffers at ordinary school subjects, but who have since achieved success in business or industry that it has become a commonplace with them that failure at school does not necessarily mean failure in life. But this commonplace surely implies the tragic fact that school has not discovered what the “duffer” can do, but has consistently tried to make him do things for which he has no aptitude.

The fact is that the ordinary secondary school is attempting—unsuccessfully, of course—to give the same treatment to pupils of various types who, owing to lack of sufficiently varied provision for higher education, now find themselves herded together. In any such school there is a certain number of pupils of good general ability who are capable of proceeding with credit to advanced work in the humanities or in science. These are the pupils for whom the secondary course is really intended. At the other extreme there is a certain number who are simply not profiting by academic training. Between these extremes there are, no doubt, a few who have a natural bent towards one of the arts; there are a good many of very pedestrian abilities who can by industry just keep abreast of their studies, though they are not attracted by academic ideals; and there are still others who are in difficulties because they are interested not in abstract ideas but in things. Pupils of these three classes are all, to a greater or less degree, misfits in the ordinary secondary school. The few intending to follow the arts and lacking wide intellectual interests should be devoting more time than is generally available to acquiring the technique of their art. The many of a little less than average capacity who have no real enthusiasm for things of the mind gain something, no doubt, from the course they pursue, but they would gain more from a practical curriculum containing fewer subjects and having a more direct bearing on their probable future careers. The remaining class, which includes those who think with their hands, is the one for which we now most conspicuously fail to make adequate provision. In this category is to be found the boy who is bored by the theory of electricity while being thoroughly interested in making a piece of electrical apparatus, and who will not willingly learn any more of the theory than is necessary to make the apparatus work. When we consider that a large proportion of people in the world have no bookish interests and are not attracted by pure science and yet are capable of bringing sound intelligence to bear on practical problems concerning concrete things, it is strange that educationists have done so little to meet their needs.

Another question arises. What is to be the occupation of the pupils leaving the secondary schools? Those who have remained at these schools until sixteen or more acquire a certain social tone which causes them to despise manual toil, and so they aim at the professions, the Civil Service, posts in banks and stores, and, failing all else, the perennially respectable junior clerkship in any kind of office. Clearly, boys who have at seventeen or eighteen successfully completed a course of literary and scientific training should be fitted for posts of responsibility in business or the professions. But the professions are already overcrowded, and positions are difficult to obtain. We are taking children from the homes of artisans, small tradespeople, and even unskilled workers, and giving them an education which makes them unwilling to take up the same occupation as their parents follow, but which leads to no certainty of better employment in the end. We are thus rapidly being brought face to face with the difficulty which confronted Germany before the War. The advantages attaching to scholastic attainment were such that every parent who could possibly do so gave his child a higher education so that he might obtain the coveted passport to the professions. The result was that the competition for the higher professional and official posts became intolerably keen, and the universities were turning out numbers of fully qualified men for whom they could find no suitable employment.

There would be less theoretical objection to the process of raising the pupils out of the economic class of their families into another class, if they were all of high capacity and suitable for administrative posts. But, actually, many of those who at present receive higher education are by no means fitted by native ability for important administrative work. In fact, the investigations of the psychologists go to show that out of the whole child population only a small proportion have the grade of intelligence needed for the highest posts. Dr Cyril Burt has carried out a survey of London school children, by means of intelligence-tests, to provide evidence for use in vocational guidance. He finds that the few children of the type who win scholarships to secondary schools and thence to the universities, and who are fitted to seek higher professional and Civil Service posts form about one per thousand of the child population. About two per cent. come into the second grade, which includes those who win scholarships to the secondary school but not to the university, and who are suitable for lower professional posts: they may become, for instance, elementary teachers, clerks holding responsible posts, or successful tradespeople. The third grade is composed of about ten per cent. of the children, and includes those who are suited to become, say, clerks doing work of an intelligent but moderately routine character, or manual workers engaged in highly skilled work. Below this comes a body of children of moderate ability forming about four-fifths of the whole. These may enter many of the ordinary commercial posts,—they may become small tradespeople, or shop-assistants: skilled manual-workers also belong to this group. The remaining children have an intelligence which fits them only for unskilled work. This classification is, admittedly, only tentative; but if it has any validity, it is clear that the percentage of children really fitted for professional work is relatively very low, and account must be taken of this fact in framing secondary courses.

Realising the difficulty of finding suitable employment for their pupils, and sensitive about the accusation that they aim at producing “black-coated workers” only, the Headmasters have considered the possibility of finding openings in industry. In 1924 the Council of the Headmasters’ Association sent a deputation to the Federation of British Industries on the matter. The deputation was told quite plainly that manufacturers, and particularly engineers, made a regular practice of taking boys at fourteen: they had very little opportunity to offer to the boy who remained at school long enough to take the First School Examination, and still less to the boy who passed a Higher School Examination. There is little prospect that manufacturers will be able to alter their practice in this respect. Obviously, therefore, with our present lack of co-ordination between our educational and industrial systems, a boy deprives himself of many chances of employment by staying at school beyond fourteen.

There can be little doubt that this particular aspect of the educational problem will attract much official attention in the near future. There is even a chance that the issue may not be unduly obscured by political controversy, for leading politicians of both sides agree in their diagnosis. The President of the Board of Education, Lord Eustace Percy, has recently told a meeting that the desire of the working man to-day is to use the school to get his son into some black-coated job and to keep him away from skilled manual labour. This he regarded as a most extraordinary mistake. We should never get any real success until we re-created the pride of skilled manual work. In another speech he said that the danger of the secondary school system was that, when we should be using these schools for training leaders for all the professions and industries and businesses, we are in fact using them to train the subordinates in a few “respectable” industries. Such remarks might pass with many people for an expression of reactionary Toryism, if their attention were not called to the fact that Mr. Philip Snowden has recently written to the same effect in a Sunday newspaper—“A scholastic education is apt to make a youth despise useful mechanical work. The products of our secondary schools and universities are crowding the black-coated professions and occupations. Education is a failure unless it inculcates the idea that all useful work is honourable, and that the working engineer, or carpenter, or weaver is a more useful member of society than a ‘commission agent’. Society needs men and women with the highest scholastic attainments. But the number of such will always be small. The main part of the education problem is to fit the average person for the work of the average person.” The practical urgency of these views is indicated by the fact that the President of the Board of Education and the Minister of Labour have now jointly appointed a committee to inquire into the public system of education in relation to the requirements of trade and industry.

Idealists of a certain sort, however, will brush aside the sordid controversy about commercial values and will put up a hard fight for the principle of a Liberal Education,—an All-round Training that will provide an Outfit for Life. They will continue to maintain that the traditional modicum of the classics, mathematics, science, and the modern tongues, provides the best training for a lad, whether he is to become a clerk, an engineer, a company-promoter, or a pork-butcher. They will recoil in horror from the mere mention of “vocational training.”

But this “liberal education” theory involves several fallacies,—fallacies which are now being perceived in many quarters, and which will be completely exposed in the next few years. In the first place, an education completely divorced from the requirements of a vocation is a luxury appropriate only to a leisured class, or a class free from economic pressure: it is, in fact, a legacy from the independent families of the upper classes or the well-to-do middle classes who sent their children to the public schools and the old grammar schools, knowing that the question of bread and butter was not an urgent one. Now, in the changed conditions of the twentieth century, we still complacently take boys from working-class homes, give them a “liberal” education until they are sixteen or eighteen, and then turn many of them adrift to become clerks or grocers’ assistants, laying the flattering unction to our soul, as we say farewell, that they will add their figures or cut their rashers all the better for having tasted the sweets of poetry or wrestled with the problems of geometry. Of course, some of the boys concerned may find their true niche in clerking or in the grocery line; in which case their intellectual ability is such that training in the more abstruse mathematical or linguistic processes has been wasted on them. But if we give a boy of ability in any direction a prolonged education and then fail to find him a position in life which gives scope for his ability, we are surely conferring on him a very doubtful blessing. The major portion of his time after his leaving school will be spent in earning a livelihood; and the way in which he spends that time will have an enormous effect on his happiness. The frustrated and disgruntled man of culture is socially objectionable and politically dangerous. The dictum that education should teach a man how to use his leisure is one of those half-truths whose easy acceptance is so dangerous; in the future we shall have to learn the complementary half-truth that education must fit the individual for his life’s work.

The exponents of the “liberal education” theory are usually those who are most urgent in pleading that the aim of the school should be the formation of character. They maintain that the pupil’s personality can be developed and modified by the influences brought to bear on him in the school environment. Holding such views, they cannot ignore the need for providing a suitable career for the pupil after he leaves school. The process of forming his character does not cease as soon as he enters business; on the contrary, the nature of his occupation—its suitability or unsuitability to his temperament—will profoundly influence him for good or for evil. The school cannot, therefore, ignore the duty imposed on it of guiding its pupils as far as possible into the vocations for which they are naturally fitted.

The theoretical considerations just mentioned are reinforced by others of the most practical importance. For Great Britain, and indeed for the whole of Europe, the economic struggle during the next few years will be most intense. Conditions will be such that this country, in particular, will have to make the most of its human as well as its material resources. It will not be able to afford the wastage of human ability either through failure to find out and cultivate the best brains or through neglect to fit the man to the job. It will be forced to adopt a system of training which will provide an education at once liberal and adapted to economic needs. And it will be useless for the more narrow idealist to bewail the intrusion of economics into the domain of education. After all, literature, the arts, and the study of pure science flourish only so long as economic conditions permit. Just as the man who is constantly toiling for bread is debarred from purely cultural pursuits, so the nation whose economic position is unsound can spare its children neither the money nor the time for any education beyond the most elementary.

Nor is there any real antagonism between the claims of culture and those of economics. The State which seeks economic health must demand that each citizen shall do his best work. He will do his best work in the vocation for which he has a natural aptitude. The business of the school is to discover and foster natural aptitudes. The business of the State as an economic entity is to contrive by all possible means to guide its children into suitable vocations. In a state with a proper economic organisation there must, therefore, of necessity be a vital connection between a child’s school-training and his future career.

But this statement of the essential relationship between aptitudes, education, and vocation does not mean that schools should become merely training-establishments to act as feeders to particular professions or industries: it does not mean that the schoolmaster or a government official should examine every pupil at the age of twelve or fourteen and decide that he must be an engineer or a draper’s assistant and proceed to train him for that purpose and draft him into a post in due course. It does mean, however, that the boy, for instance, who wants to use his hands, and may eventually become an engineer, should not be given a bookish education which takes little or no account of his abilities and interests; it does mean that such a boy should pass through a course of instruction which will at once give scope for his native powers and through them develop his whole mentality; it does mean, also, that the school and the State should not dismiss that boy at a given age and allow him to drift into a clerkship merely because of some accidental financial considerations or because conditions of entrance to the engineering trade clash with academic arrangements. In short, it means that the school-system should be adapted to the boy and not the boy to the system, and, further, that education authorities should regard it as part of their function to guide into proper channels the special abilities which the teachers have reared.

Presented in this way, the case for some sort of correlation between education and vocation should convince even those obstinate opponents of “vocational training” who are apt to see in such a proposal nothing but a device of the devil (in the guise of the Federation of British Industries) for the more efficient production of “wage-slaves.” As ever increasing numbers of boys and girls pass into places of higher education, teachers are realising more and more the need for reform on the lines indicated. They see the waste of effort involved in passing boys and girls wholesale through a system which takes little account of individual differences or even of broad differences of type. They see that for many children a “liberal education” is not necessarily one which follows the traditional academic curriculum, but rather one which suits itself to individual needs and which seeks to develop the pupil’s powers by setting him to do what he can do, instead of forcing him to try to do what he can never do with success.

III
THE SCHOOLS
Future Developments

From the considerations adduced and the trend of opinion indicated in the previous chapter, we are able to give a reasonable forecast of practical developments in the next few years. In general terms we may say that our educational system will be made purposive where it is now haphazard, and that it will be brought into definite connection with the economic life of the country. Education will be regarded as a preparation for livelihood as well as for life,—as a training for working citizens rather than for a leisured class. Further, the waste of human effort will be avoided as far as possible by constantly observing the individual child and guiding him along lines which offer him the best chance of intellectual progress, and which give the best opportunities for a career in life. This, of course, implies that the types of instruction available will be much more numerous and varied than they are at present. No pupil whose schooling is provided wholly or partly at public expense will be allowed to proceed to courses for which, in the opinion of the competent authority, he is unfitted, though no obstacles will be placed in the way of a transfer from one course to another if circumstances warrant it. The individual capacity of the pupil will be made the starting-point for the teacher: the heresy which gives our present system the character of a Chicago canned-meat factory will be abandoned. As a corollary we shall give less exclusive reverence to purely bookish attainments and we shall realise that training in craftsmanship may be as productive to one individual, and hence to the State, as training in the differential calculus is to another.

We may assume that in the not too remote future every child of the required mental capacity will receive education to the age of sixteen at least. Of course, financial stringency will delay progress for some years. When the necessary school-accommodation is available every pupil in an institution under public control will be tested at a suitable age, probably at eleven plus. The results of the carefully devised examination will be collated with the report of his teachers and it will be decided whether he is fit to be given further instruction of a secondary character, and, if so, what form of training will suit his special needs. Methods of examination will be so far improved that few serious mistakes will be made in assessing the capacity of pupils. In any case, this regular test will not be regarded as final and irrevocable; the boy or girl who at a later age gives evidence of the need for a revised judgment will receive special treatment.

Pupils of the required standard will be drafted into the secondary schools at eleven plus. Those who remain in the primary schools until fourteen will be of roughly two grades; those whose ability fits them for work of some skill in trades or in the humbler ranks of business, and those of very low intelligence who are naturally destined for unskilled occupations. The former will pass from the elementary schools into some form of vocational training; the latter will go straight into industry and will receive no further teaching other than what may be given in some kind of continuation class.

Thus the principle of excluding all children of low mentality from secondary education in institutions under public control will be definitely accepted. This step will not be taken, of course, without much opposition. Political irrelevancies will come into play as soon as it is suggested. The cry will go up that, whereas the rich child, no matter what his capacity, will continue to be given a public school education, the poor child of the same mental capacity will be deprived of such an indulgence. Of course, the children of the two classes will not receive equal treatment. But so long as the State allows the existence of schools which it does not control, so long as it allows parents to contract out of the educational system, it will not be able to prevent wealthy people from spending their money on their brainless children, if they choose to do so. Clearly, however, if the State provides a costly system of free, or largely free, education, it will have the right to exercise its power of excluding from some or all of the benefits of that system, children (of whatever social position) who will not profit by it. Moreover, by requiring the same standard of ability from both scholarship-holders and fee-payers the authorities will remove the present iniquity by which, owing to insufficient free places, able children of poor parents are debarred from secondary schools while incompetent children of parents who can afford to pay a fraction of the cost secure admission.

Another objection likely to be put forward is that geniuses who blossom late will be lost to the world, if such drastic methods of exclusion are adopted. It is urged that the potentiality of a boy or girl cannot always be finally determined at the age of fourteen. This may be true; but it is also true that in at least ninety-nine per cent. of cases a competent teacher who has observed a child for some years can gauge his capacity sufficiently accurately at that age; and, in any case, the child has by that time been given the tools of learning in the ability to read and write. Moreover, your genius frequently does not take kindly to academic routine, and not seldom he looks with amused contempt at the efforts of the mediocre pedagogue to keep him in the recognised paths of learning. The biographers have been at pains to establish the fact that Shakespeare attended the Grammar School at Stratford. But we cannot doubt that “Hamlet” would have been written even if Shakespeare had never suffered the ferule and the Latin grammar of the Stratford dominie. The knowledge of people and places which Dickens picked up while running the streets was of more service to him as a novelist than anything he might have learned under the eye of a master who should have tried, with doubtful success, to instil into him a proper respect for history and a right appreciation of poetry. In fact, it may be reasonably doubted whether any child of latent genius, or even talent, will be blighted for ever through failure to receive the blessings of the academic course.

To come to details of the various types of schools in the future. With regard to secondary education, we may anticipate that to meet varied needs three different courses will be provided. A curriculum of roughly the same type as the present will be retained for those boys and girls of the highest grades of intelligence; that is to say, those who have the ability to proceed to university studies and who, in favourable circumstances, intend to do so. This curriculum will, however, be relieved of some of the subjects which at present overcrowd it through the attempt to provide an “omnibus” course by grafting the various “modern” studies on the old classical and mathematical courses.

Side by side with instruction of this type there will be at least two other types provided for pupils who can profit by full-time higher training until the age of sixteen or beyond. One course will be of a definitely practical character designed for the needs of those who are fitted to occupy leading positions in industry. Handwork will form a prominent feature, and a broad technical training will be given on cultural lines. The work will not be directly vocational in intention, nor will book-learning of the usual kind be entirely neglected: the object will be to provide a training of the greatest educational value for students of a certain type. The syllabus will be determined to some extent by the nature of local industries. In the big towns it will be a fairly simple matter to relate the technical teaching to the dominant manufacturing processes carried on in the area. In country districts it will be the business of these courses to foster that interest in rural industries which is at present so disastrously lacking. Already a certain number of secondary schools in the country are making a definite attempt to organise their teaching on lines intended to be of the greatest value to those pupils who intend to take up occupations connected with agriculture or horticulture. The fact that more has not been done in this direction is explained in a significant sentence in a pamphlet issued by the Board of Education on the subject.—“Hitherto the majority of parents have unfortunately been inclined to regard entry into commerce or into some clerical occupation as the only fitting sequel to a secondary school training, and there has been, therefore, little or no demand on their part that the education given to their children in the secondary school should be related to rural life and needs.” As a preliminary to the successful establishment of secondary schools with a technical bias it will thus be necessary to convince parents that suitable careers exist for their children in industry. Such schools must be recognised as the normal stepping-stones to the higher industrial positions, either directly or by way of the Technical or Agricultural College of university rank.

A third course will be designed for pupils who are likely to benefit from continued education after fourteen, but who are not suited to the purely academic studies and have no marked practical bent: they are probably destined for the fairly skilled commercial posts. The work in this course will be largely of a concrete character and will be definitely connected with economic life; but again it will not be directly vocational. The syllabus will consist in the main of what are known as the “ordinary school subjects”; but the pupils will concentrate on fewer subjects than is customary at present, and emphasis will be laid on those aspects which are most within the grasp of boys and girls who lack any great interest in ideas as such.

Pupils will be drafted into one or other of the various courses not primarily because they intend to enter this or that profession or business (though this might be given due consideration at the wish of the parent), but because their previous school-history will have shown that their all-round development can be best assured in one of these courses rather than in the others.

Will pupils following the various curricula remain side by side in the same school, or will they be separated into different institutions? It is possible that in London and the larger towns separate technical and commercial schools of secondary grade will be created to work side by side with the secondary schools of the present type. The anomalous Central Schools of to-day can scarcely remain a permanent feature of our system: they might well be converted into schools of fully secondary character with either a commercial or a technical bias. In the smaller areas which can support only a single institution for higher training the varied courses will be pursued in the same building. Such an arrangement will, no doubt, present difficulties in organisation, but it will have a considerable advantage in the fact that free transfer of pupils from one course to another will be possible.

What of the pupils who are judged unfit for education of a secondary type? Those who are likely to profit by some sort of further teaching will not be dismissed at the age of fourteen to the workshop or the office; but it will be recognised that their interests can be best served by giving them training of a frankly vocational character. To meet the needs of those who propose to enter trades there will be organised large numbers of trade schools in conjunction with local industries. Here, for two years or more, students will be prepared for a definite occupation, and will remain under cultural and disciplinary influences. Junior Technical Schools of this nature have already been firmly established during the last thirty years, and in London trade-classes exist for silversmithing, book-production, furnishing, dressmaking, tailoring, engineering, and so on. At present, however, half the total number of Junior Technical School places provided by the county boroughs throughout the country are in London: we may look forward to a wide extension of technical school facilities in the other industrial areas during the next few years.

The effective organisation of trade-schools will entail a solution of the problem of apprenticeship. The apprenticeship-system has long been obsolete: it is condemned educationally because it involves the transference of the pupil from the school to the workshop at too early an age, and it is ineffective industrially because under modern factory-conditions there is no certainty that the apprentice will even receive proper technical training. The system is already dead in many trades, and in others it is kept alive only to enable the trade unions to limit the number of entrants into the industry. It cannot be long, however, before common needs force education and industry into some sort of concordat. The industrial firms need skilled workers; the educationists want those skilled workers to be trained in such a way that they may derive educational benefit from their technical pursuits. To meet the difficulty there are two obvious possibilities. The whole apprentice-system might be abolished, and the training of skilled workers might be carried out entirely in technical schools organised on the lines of the écoles professionelles of France, which resemble factories in their equipment and which turn out fully-trained workers after a three years’ course. If, on the other hand, the rule of apprenticeship is retained, it should be possible to substitute education in Junior Technical Schools for the first two years of apprenticeship. Steps of this kind have already been taken in London, where it is usual for young workers to have their apprenticeship shortened by a period corresponding to their training in a trade school. But, of course, further advances in this direction can be taken only with the co-operation of the trade unions concerned. This may cause difficulty. Somewhat strangely, the educational spokesmen of the trade unions seem so much concerned about securing a university education for the sons of the “workers” that they have little interest in the matter of craft-instruction. But perhaps this attitude of the trade union leaders is no more strange than that of the employers who talk loudly of the need for increased efficiency if British manufacturers are to compete in the markets of the world, and yet do little or nothing to ensure that their young workers shall be given adequate training for the work they are to perform.

But we have still to consider the future of boys and girls of low mentality who, on leaving the primary school, will normally enter unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, and who are not likely to profit by full-time vocational training. It is these who present the most difficult problem to the educationist. It is hard to find the right way of approach to such children even under school-conditions; it is far harder to exert effective teaching-influence over them when they have been freed from disciplinary restraints. Yet it is imperative for the health of the community that young workers of this type should not be allowed to pass entirely out of educational control as soon as they leave the elementary school. For them, it would seem, the aid of Mr. Fisher’s Act will once more have to be invoked, and compulsory Continuation Schools will be established. At these classes the object will be not so much to teach the students any specific subjects as to keep them under disciplinary influences and to develop in them the sense of personal and civic responsibility. The short experience gained from the few continuation schools established immediately after 1918 made it clear that giving much purely cultural teaching to workers of low type in unskilled jobs, however desirable, is actually impracticable. Nor is it generally possible to give much direct vocational instruction. Physical training and handwork must be made important parts of the courses, and good work can be done through the formation of students’ clubs. In fact, those who have charge of Continuation classes will have to regard themselves less as teachers than as welfare-workers.

The scheme of development which has been mapped out clearly demands the creation of a link between education and industry such as does not at present exist. Boys and girls who, through lack of initiative or of any special predilection, have not found for themselves suitable employment by the time they are due to leave school will not be allowed to drift into the first blind-alley occupation that presents itself. The education authorities will have made full surveys of local industrial and business requirements and will thus be able to indicate suitable openings. Moreover, account will be taken of the applicant’s special abilities in recommending any particular post to him. The question of vocational guidance has for some years attracted a good deal of attention in America, and a considerable amount of work has been done in this direction. In this country, many local educational authorities (in particular, the London boroughs) are attempting to carry out schemes of juvenile vocational guidance through the After-Care Committees and the Juvenile Advisory Committee of the Employment Bureaux. In London, too, the Headmasters of the Secondary Schools have formed an Employment Committee which puts pupils in touch with firms who have vacancies.

More important in this connection is the investigation recently carried out by the Industrial Fatigue Research Board in conjunction with the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Under the direction of Dr Cyril Burt a careful study was made of all the children (to the number of a hundred) due to leave three selected London schools within a period of twelve months. All data obtainable from the schools were collected, the children were subjected to mental tests, the homes were visited, and each child was personally interviewed. In the light of the evidence thus obtained specific vocational recommendations were made. After an interval of two years the investigators again interviewed the children in their homes in order to test the results of the recommendations. It appeared that the children who had entered the industries suggested to them had proved more efficient than their fellows, and over 80 per cent. of them declared that they were satisfied with their position and prospects. On the other hand, of those who obtained employment different from the kind recommended, less than 40 per cent. were satisfied. The value of this experiment is, of course, limited by the smallness of its scale, but the results are certainly encouraging. One point that has been made clear is the need for full information as to the requirements of the various trades.

Such efforts at linking the schools with the office and the workshop are at present tentative and sporadic; but they are significant of future developments,—developments which will be hastened by the growing determination during these years of trade depression to prevent the waste and deterioration of our youths, so far as it can be prevented by better organisation. There can be little doubt that within the next few years we shall be forced, if not by practical wisdom, at least by economic necessity, into creating a universal scheme which shall relieve the employers of the need for haphazard advertisement in recruiting their junior staffs, and which shall ensure that everything possible is done to facilitate the entry of a youth into that particular job in which he can do work of most value to himself and to the community.

IV
THE UNIVERSITIES
The Academic Mind of To-Day and To-Morrow.

“’Tis not a melancholy utinam of my own, but the desires of better heads, that there were a general synod—not to unite the incompatible difference of religion, but,—for the benefit of learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first, in a few and solid authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions of rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgements of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.”—Sir Thomas Browne.

It will be observed that our survey of probable future developments in the lower branches of education is hopeful. These are good reasons for optimism: the trend of opinion which will mould the schools of the future is already clearly in evidence; our obvious defects to-day are defects of organisation, and these can be remedied by any capable administrator; the seeds of the growths we have foreseen have already been planted; and, finally, economic exigencies will provide the drive necessary to overcome the dilatoriness inseparable from public activity. But we must confess that we are much concerned about the universities. There are tendencies in university life to-day that give ample cause for misgiving,—the more so because they spring rather from vital weakness reflecting the intellectual vices of our age than from defective methods and organisation.

Not that our universities do not show very obvious defects in method and organisation. (We are considering now especially the new universities. Just as in our survey of secondary education we made no reference to the public schools, which have their own tradition, and which will remain outside a state-system, so we may now leave out of account Oxford and Cambridge, which have their own teaching-methods and which again are not likely to be amenable to state-interference. Moreover, the inevitable extension of higher education will be seen in the creation of more universities of the new type, as well as in the enlargement of those already in existence, and thus Oxford and Cambridge are likely to turn out an ever-diminishing proportion of the total number of graduates in this country). Criticism may well be levelled at the insufficient importance attached to social life in the modern universities. It is much too easy for young men and women to attend courses of lectures for three years or so and amass a certain quantity of information on given subjects without coming in contact with any intellectual influences outside the class room. This danger is, of course, inevitable when the students are not resident in a college. A remedy is being provided to some extent by the erection of hostels, and much more may be done in this direction; but there is still a difficulty arising from the fairly large proportion of students who live at home in the university-town. As part of the same problem must be mentioned the insufficient attention given to games. This is due not merely to the frequent absence of adequate playing-fields, which might be remedied, but to the fact that college lectures take place during the whole of the day and are so arranged that no considerable body of students is free for the whole of more than one afternoon a week. In other words, college work is organised solely with a view to academic requirements.

And then there is the teaching by means of lectures. As a method this was rendered obsolete as soon as books were rapidly and cheaply printed, and yet, whereas Oxford and Cambridge have long pursued a more excellent way, the new universities have strangely revived and perpetuated the mediaeval practice. A century-and-a-half ago Dr Johnson was emphatic about the futility of lectures. (“People have nowadays got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures. You might teach making of shoes by lectures!”). It is delightful to imagine his remarks if he could walk through a modern college and see dozens of lecturers each droning from his rostrum,—in these days when library shelves and publishers’ store-rooms are stuffed with reliable text-books on every conceivable subject. Surely no system of teaching can have ever been devised with so little regard for ordinary efficiency. Batches of students are set to take imperfect notes of a probably imperfectly delivered lecture by a man who has either taken his material from books that they ought to read themselves, or is dictating what is really an original text-book, which obviously, in the interests of economy in time and labour, to say nothing of accuracy, ought to be printed. It is to be feared that under present arrangements a college lecturer fulfils the whole of the duties officially required of him if he thus turns himself into a gramophone for so many hours per week. If university-teaching meant no more than this, and if the lecture were its only channel, we should feel bound to urge that the present wasteful duplication of lectures in various university-centres should be avoided by enlisting the aid of wireless, and that standard lectures should be broadcast to students throughout the kingdom in their own homes.

The educational efficacy of the universities of this and other countries is being weakened, however, by a more insidious disease,—a disease of which the defective teaching-methods and the excessive absorption in purely academic pursuits are merely outward symptoms. The intellectual and moral malady of this present age has infected our seats of learning so that they appear to be abandoning the ideal of a liberal education and to be substituting the narrow aim of the acquisition of specialised knowledge. The modern university must be a centre of research: the danger is that it will neglect to be also a centre of education.

Research is the intellectual idol of our time. The fiery zeal for discovery which animates us resembles that which was abroad five centuries ago in Europe. Indeed, we of to-day are borne along by the second wave of the great tide of the Renaissance. The great awakening of the human spirit, due, in part, to the rediscovery of ancient literature and art, urged men to the passionate pursuit of truth and beauty. Research and creative activity went hand in hand. The inspiration which produced the great scholars, painters, and architects lasted for a season. Then the vital energy was dissipated: scholarship degenerated into gerund-grinding, literature into stylistic display, and art into lifeless imitation. But meanwhile the newly-liberated spirit of enquiry was turning from the past and seeking fresh objects of study in natural phenomena. Slowly and tentatively, at first, the human intellect explored the fringes of those vast fields of knowledge which had lain almost untouched since the time of the Greeks. Then, in the last century, the scattered sparks suddenly flamed into a great outburst of scientific discovery, and the western mind was amazed by the undreamed-of treasures spread before it. Here was a second Renaissance, the child of the first and informed with the same spirit of divine curiosity, but working in a new direction. The prime object of the nineteenth century investigator was to accumulate observed facts about the material universe, to find theories to interpret those facts, and perhaps ultimately to lay bare the innermost secrets of Nature. More and more wonders were discovered; and each new wonder pointed the road to fresh territories awaiting the pioneer. There must be formed a great army of explorers. The recruitment and the training of this army was naturally carried on in the universities. The aims and methods of science acquired enormous prestige. The spirit of research pervaded every department of academic activity.

In the reorganised universities of nineteenth-century Germany, the new spirit found its most complete expression. The professor was given a two-fold function: he was to teach, and also to advance his particular study or science. To-day teaching is often made subordinate to research. A characteristic product of the German academic system is the “seminar,” which is for the student of humanistic learning what the laboratory is to the scientist: in the seminar the student is given training in methods of original investigation. The course of study is highly specialised and leads to the degree of “doctor of philosophy,” for which he must present a dissertation contributing to the advance of knowledge. The close association of American students with Germany has led to the importation of German university methods and ideals into the United States. In England, too, there has been an ever-increasing tendency to approximate our standards to those of Germany. The Honours courses, at any rate at the new universities, become increasingly specialised, and more and more insistence is being laid on the necessity for original research as the crown of an academic career.

Thus the universities are living in an intellectual atmosphere manufactured by the scientists. The great craving is for knowledge,—knowledge of natural processes, and knowledge of man’s past history. This craving manifests itself at every turn. Apart from the labours of scientists, historians, and archaeologists in what Johnson calls the “academic bowers,” we read daily of search-parties (many of whom are organised by European or American universities) proceeding to the ends of the earth,—this one bringing to light the treasures of Egyptian royal tombs, another revealing a hitherto unknown civilisation of the ancient world, a third finding dinosaur’s eggs, a fourth studying the characteristics and the history of a savage tribe. A leading newspaper recently informed us proudly that no fewer than two hundred exploring parties are setting out this year on various quests—more than ever before in the history of the world. The interest in these efforts is not confined to the few. Accounts of marvellous discoveries and inventions bring romance to the millions in our industrial civilisation. The popular press knows the appeal of big headlines over an article giving a highly coloured account of the latest results of research; and the bookstalls are crowded with magazines devoted to the Wonders of Science and giving the City clerk and typist, hungry for knowledge, an Illustrated Outline of this, that, or the other field of information.

Whither is this enthusiasm for knowledge leading us? What benefits will accrue to the individual or to society when, with untold labour, we have learned a fraction more about the history of man or penetrated a few steps further into the illimitable arcana of nature? These are questions which those engaged in investigation and those whose delight is to hear some new thing alike hardly pause to ask. It is assumed that all knowledge of fact is valuable, and therefore is to be pursued for its own sake. To many this will seem a self-evident proposition. Such people may be reminded that curiosity about the material world has not always been a characteristic of the western nations. For many centuries man was not in the least interested to know whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth: he was content to take on trust the evidence of his senses. It is even a matter for debate whether the sum of human happiness has been increased by the knowledge that has come from Galileo’s labours. It is a perennial human weakness to pursue one aim to the unreasonable exclusion of others, to mistake the means for the end. The great humanists were so possessed by ideals which they found in the antique world that they sought to achieve them even at the expense of personal and social morality; their successors mistook the husk for the kernel and allowed pedantry to displace scholarship. We of this age are being diverted from other aims and allowing our intellectual life to be narrowed by an unreasoning zeal for research. We are influenced too much by the delusion that the making of “a contribution to knowledge” is the beginning of wisdom.

Will the universities rid themselves of the incubus of research, or at least relegate it to a separate department so that the main efforts of the professors and lecturers may be concentrated on other matters? On the answer to this question the future of the universities depends. It must be decided whether the primary business of the university teacher is to teach or to carry on the investigations in which he is privately interested; whether the business of the student is to become educated or to become a specialist; whether, in short, there is any necessary relationship between the two branches of university activity,—research and education. At present there is little indication of how these problems will be settled: as yet they are scarcely mentioned in academic circles in this country. Criticism of university methods and ideals is heard among people who have left professorial tutelage, and book-reviewers are occasionally entertaining at the expense of typical products of the academic mind; but for the most part the standards of the dons are taken for granted. The late Sir Walter Raleigh, it is true, did not conceal his antipathy to the “serious business of scholarship,” but his brother professors must have considered him a sad dog.

While English universities give no sign of interest in fundamental problems affecting their well-being, a ray of hope comes from America. In the recent annual report of Columbia University, the president, Dr Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking with all the authority of his distinguished position, faces critical issues with a frankness that is possible, perhaps, only in America. He is concerned about the dearth of great minds in spite of the spread of educational facilities, and he asks whether the universities have not destroyed the ideal of a liberal education, and with it the liberally educated man himself, through allowing the choice of less valuable subjects and laying too much stress on early specialisation. In spite of the efforts of two generations to make science an instrument of education, and in spite of the inherent excellence of the scientific method, he has grave doubts about the results. He finds the cause of his dissatisfaction in the methods and aims of the teachers of the sciences. “If these subjects are to be presented only for the purpose of training specialists, and if the methods to be followed are those that, while appropriate for investigation, have no relation whatever to interpretation, then it may well be that in another generation general interest in the natural and experimental sciences and general knowledge of their meaning and significance will have greatly declined.... The example of the ancient classics ought to suffice. They were killed largely by those who taught them.” On the subject of research Dr Butler is equally outspoken. “The word research,” he says, “has come to be something like the blessed word Mesopotamia. It is used to reduce everyone to silence, acquiescence, and approbation. The fact of the matter is that something between seventy-five per cent. and ninety per cent. of what is called research in the various universities and institutes of the land is not properly research at all, but simply the re-arrangement or re-classification of existing data or well-known phenomena.” He reminds his readers that “an original investigation may, and usually does, add a good deal to the knowledge of the individual investigator without adding anything to the knowledge of the human race.”

Dr Butler attacks the principles on which present-day science-teaching in the universities is carried out: such an indictment applies with equal, if not with greater force, to the teaching of the humanities, into which scientific methods have intruded themselves with disastrous results. It is natural that the historian of to-day should adopt the character of the scientific investigator; but surely something is wrong when university and other presses issue volume after volume of historical study of a kind which, judged by any of the wider canons, can have no conceivable value. Too often the specialists forget that the many intriguing little puzzles that they try to solve are intriguing little puzzles and nothing more. The researcher in the natural sciences can always plead that his discoveries, however insignificant at the moment, may take on great importance in connection with work in other fields. The researcher in history can hardly put forward the same plea. The scientific or pseudo-scientific spirit applied to history has tended to destroy the sense of values.

Literature at the universities is in even a worse plight. The scientific historical method applied in this field is steadily devitalising literary study. Criticism and enjoyment of the great masters have to give place to the study of tendencies and influences, of historical minutiae and bibliographical irrelevancies. The academic mind apparently fails to see any incongruity in the eagerness and seriousness with which learned societies recently discussed the precise circumstances of the death of Marlowe; nor is it shocked at the regularity with which university lecturers and others write letters to the “Times Literary Supplement,” taking leave to record some “new fact” about a relative of a tenth-rate poet whose name lives only in the bigger histories of literature. Immature graduates in the American schools of English are steadily working through all our writers who are sufficiently unimportant to have escaped attention hitherto and producing monographs on them “in part preparation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of ——.” And as money is plentiful in the American universities the theses are duly printed. Similar so-called literary research is being carried on with unremitting energy in this country also; happily the results of most of it remain decently buried in the university archives. Dr Butler foresees a probable decline in the educational importance of scientific study through concentration on the unessentials and neglect of the essentials: for the same reason it is to be feared that the university departments of modern literature are already well on the road to decadence.

The outlook for university education is therefore not hopeful. It seems probable that the worship of the false gods of the academic world will take an unconscionable time in dying. Universities are conservative places: they hold themselves superior, and often rightly superior, to the rough and tumble of the world outside, and thus they are tardy in responding to the changing spirit of the age. Moreover, by their very system they are cramping the free intelligence and narrowing the vision of those who are to direct the universities of the future. Success in university life necessarily involves obedience to the tradition.

Thus it may be assumed that present tendencies will take a generation or two to reach their limit. With the improvement in the secondary schools through the better selection of pupils the standard of work there will be forced up to such a pitch that every student proceeding to the university will immediately specialise in a narrow field. Pass degrees will be abolished. The prestige of research-degrees will be such that most, if not all, graduates will proceed to them. In every university there will be a busy colony of researchers. In the departments of science in its various branches men and women will be labouring to discover new phenomena and to formulate fresh theories. Much of this work will fulfil the laudable purpose of improving man’s material lot. Much of it, on the other hand, will have the practical result of supplying an industrialised community with a surfeit of mechanical luxuries which the ordinary person will have neither the desire nor the time to use. The spirit of man may find some consolation in increased knowledge of such matters as the habits of atoms exposed to various sorts of experimental bombardments. In the departments of the modern languages and literatures the soil will have been so far exhausted that students will be reduced to collating and editing (with linguistic commentary) the dullest and most obscure mediaeval manuscripts. Or the American example will be followed of writing dissertations on recent or contemporary writers. We may expect doctoral theses with such titles as—“A Bibliographical Account of the Works of Arnold Bennett, together with a Hand-list of his Contributions to the Periodical Press”; or “The Sussex Farm-Labourer in English Fiction from 1900 to 1930.” In the realm of history, the evidence of the past will, in most directions, have been sifted and re-sifted; accounts of first-rate, second-rate, and even third-rate men and movements will have been multiplied ad nauseam on the excuse that an additional insignificant fact or two has been added to information that was already accessible. Students will be driven to editing the dreariest records (if any still remain unpublished) elucidating matters of the least possible concern to the twentieth century. They will, no doubt, be sustained in their thankless tasks by the thought that they are doing the Spade-work: they are doing their share, however humble, towards providing a greater than themselves with the materials for a new survey of a period. We can only hope that their single-minded devotion may not be disturbed by the horrible thought that the mass of accumulated research on any given topic will eventually be so vast that no single human life will give sufficient time in which to read it, and that no single human mind will be equal to the task of synthesising it.

When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the time will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought and action.

But that time is not yet.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.

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Table of Contents

- PROCRUSTES or the FUTURE of ENGLISH EDUCATION

- CONTENTS

- I INTRODUCTION The Procrustean Bed

- II THE SCHOOLS Present-Day Problems and Tendencies

- III THE SCHOOLS Future Developments

- IV THE UNIVERSITIES The Academic Mind of To-Day and To-Morrow.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE