AN AMERICAN EDUC_ TIONIST.
THAT we Englishmen have a great deal to learn upon the subject of education we are all ready to admit. We are not, however, very ready as a rule to learn it from foreigners. Our system, we feel, is our own. It has its faults, but it has proved itself a great system. We want to better it, but not so keenly perhaps as we fear to destroy it. We owe what we are to our education, and we are but too naturally inclined to love even its defects. It would, however, be very foolish not to study the conclusions of foreign experts. Especially is this true of American experts who share our blood and language.
The January number of the Educational Review republishes an address delivered by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler before the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland upon " Education after the War." We hope it may be widely read in this country, as it is interesting, original, and contains much criticism and advice which apply almost as directly to this country as to America. For some dozen years before the war education had, in Dr. Butler'. judgment, made. no advance. " We have been living in an era of reaction that has masqueraded as progress," he complains. "The moral and spiritual values have been ground between the upper and nether millstones of a psychology without a soul and an economics with no vision beyond material gain." The world has, however, been pulled up in time; before, that is, America and Western Europe lost idealism. " At a critical moment for the history of education . . the German people found occasion to reveal themselves to an astonished world as the apostles and representatives of just this type of philosophy of education and of life." They worshipped efficiency and believed that through it they should be victorious—hut they hoped in vain. They are beaten, and the nations who did not put efficiency before freedom have conquered them. "The war has taught the lesson that the proper place of efficiency is 53 the servant of a moral ideal, and that efficiency apart from a moral ideal is an evil and a wicked instrument which in the end can only accom- plish disaster." Wo have come through a tremendous ordeal. and in the light of our present experience we must ask ourselves " What knowledge is of most worth " Before answering this question Dr. Butler takes his stand with the old-fashioned educationists who believed that education should put something into a child, not merely give him an opportunity to develop
without filling or biassing his mind. Education ought not, he wittily declares, to be regarded as "the art of conducting the human mind from an infantile void to an adokarent vacuum, due emphasis being laid upon self-interest while the process is going on." To find out what education really is we must consider what we mean by civilization, he tells us. We must look, he goes on, at civilization in its three " fundamental aspects." These are, he believes, " Ethics, the doctrine of conduct and service ; Economics, the doctrine of gainful °coups- tion ; and Politics, the doctrine of reconciliation between the two and of living together in harmony and helpfulness." The first must include the study of " personal and social ideals, as well as the discipline and the precepts that will promote their accomplishment", The close relation between this doctrine and that of the necessity for gainful occupation ought, our author think • to be constantly emphasized so that gain or accumulation for its own sake should bo neither inculcated nor excused. The study of politics he would make largely historical. In order to get any grasp of the subject a student must know something of how men have succeeded and how they have failed in their efforts to live together in a manner to promote their common good. Nothing of all this is contrary to the spirit of our English Public School, though our Public School education undoubtedly proceeds on narrower lines than theta laid down by Dr. Butler.
To turn from generalities to particulars, our author is not among those who deprecate the study of the classics; he deprecates only the present method of study. " The classics remain," he declares, "the unexhaueted and inexhaustible fountains of excellence in all that pertains to letters, to art, and to the intellectual life " ; but they are presented to boys as mere exercises in grammar. There is no use whatever, he argues, in trying to make the average boy a grammarian or a philologist. He should be given a grasp of Latin and Greek literature, and his mind should be turned upon the human interest of his study, with its bearings upon conduct and human emotion. A good many schoolmasters in England will, we knew, be found to disagree with him here. The minute study of which he com- plains has proved, they will say, the best possible mental gym- nastic. What is necessary is to strengthen rather than to fill the youthful mind. To this the present writer would reply that the value of dull gymnastics in strengthening the body is not comparable with the value of enjoyable games. To change the. analogy, no food which is unpalatable is as well assimilated as that which is eaten with pleasure. Somewhat to our surprise, Dr. Butler holds up French education to admiration, and that in no measured terms. We must quote him at some length if we are to show his exact attitude towards French culture :-
" It is worth remembering that the educational ideals of modern France are drawn from the classical tradition and are shaped under classical influence, and that the French are probably the best educated people in the world: Only recently the French Minister of Public Destruction and of Fine Arta told in a public address an anecdote of a student in the University of Montpellier, who overheard one evening in the trenches the conversation of his men : ' said one, am fighting for my fields of grain ' ; ' I,' said another, ' am fighting for my wife and children' ; and I,' said the third, ' em fighting for my mountains.' Then the young officer said gravely, I am fighting for La Fontaine and Moliere ; La Fontaine the im- mortal heir of Aesop and of Phaedrus ; Molier° the immortal heir of Plautus and of Terence, and still farther of Aristophanee and of Menander.' This young lieutenant knew well both how to live and how to die, for the beauty of the world and of man's achievement in it had seized hold of his soul."
Time saved from the intricacies of syntax may be given to modem languages, which may, as our author in common with a thousand new educationists believes, be mastered in half the time usually devoted to them. American soldiers, he declares, have been able after six months' residence in France, helped by three or four hours' efficient instruction in the week, to speak French easily. For the average boy or girl " the purpose in studying a foreign language is to gain sufficient practical mastery of it for use in daily intercourse, and so to obtain some compre- hension of the life, the institutions, and the modes of thought of the people whose language it is." It is amazing that proposi- tions so self-evident as these should as yet have been so little put into practice. It is hardly possible to account for the hitherto inadequate manner in which modem languages have been taught in English Public Schools, and very interesting to hear that this regrettable tradition continues in America, where apparently the fact that any intelligent child or young man can get a working knowledge of any living tongue in some time short of three years is a matter of recent discovery.
We are not quite certain how far Dr. Butler's hints about the teaching of English would apply in this country. English literature, and even English composition, should be taught almost entirely by reading, he asserts. In America boys are made to agonize daily over " themes," which are set them solely in order to develop their literary " style." They have nothing to say, and the manner, not the matter, of their composi- tion is regarded as the important point. Here we imagine English teaching to be ahead of American. We do not think that this absurd system of theme.writing is here carried to such excess.
Considering the great stress Dr. Butler lays upon ethics, we are surprised that he does not deal directly with the subject of religious teaching. He is indignant with the foolish persons who assert that the language of the Bible is antiquated, and that it is in need of fresh translation into the present vernacular ; but his indignation seems to be literary in its origin. As such it is of course fully justified. If the primary value of the Bible is literary, then it is sacrilege indeed to retranslate it. If, however, its value as literature be but secondary, if its study is still the most direct means of teaching the ethics and politics which Dr. Butler calls the essentials of civilization, then we can imagine good arguments for bringing it within easy reach of the illiterate and stupid. But we are digressing. Perhaps our author does well to avoid the vexed religious question. He wants to make a wide appeal, and to avoid the shafts of the fanatics. Against the reforms which he advocates there is surely nothing to be said except that we have done very well hitherto, and that we have no occasion at the present moment, either here or in America, to be ashamed of our record. Such is always the argument of the anti-reformer—but perhaps in this case it is a little more cogent than usual.
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