BOOKS.

FOREIGN SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES.*

MR. ARNOLD was " charged by the Schools' Inquiry Commissioners with the task of investigating the system of education for the middle and upper classes which prevails in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland." This volume contains the substance of his report. We are glad to see so valuable a document presented in a form more attractive and convenient than that of a blue-book. Nor are we without a hope that some good may follow upon an appeal made to the general public by a writer so distinguished as Mr. Matthew Arnold. A sad experience has taught us that the publication of a blue-book, however overwhelming the evidence, however masterly the suggestions, which it contains, is generally separated by a long interval from any practical results. Four years, not much less than a generation in the life of a school, have passed since the Public Schools' Commissioners issued their report, and nothing has been done but to introduce and to withdraw one or two ill-considered Bills. When the "hubbub of our sterile politics " shall have subsided, we may find leisure to commence the work of social reconstruction ; and it is to be hoped that the new electors will not be satisfied with Governments which are content to abdicate all the functions of governing. Meanwhile no man can do more useful work than in informing the minds of his countrymen upon this subject.

The first necessity is to tell them facts. They are just now in that state of ignorant dissatisfaction with the existing order of things which makes any kind of change seem salutary. The occasion invites every quack to advertize his specific, every enthusiast to propound his theory. We are called upon to change the methods and the very basis of our education, and to risk in the very wildest experiments the well-being of the next generation. But, all the while, the ordinary Englishman is wholly unaware that there are systems of education working with admirable effectiveness within a few hundred miles from him, systems which employ to a great extent the same methods with which he is familiar, and which are certainly founded on the same basis. " Organize your secondary and your superior instruction " are Mr. Arnold's parting words to his countrymen. It is not change so much as system which is the pressing need of the time. And the first thing necessary is to make Englishmen understand what a thoroughly well organized system can effect. Nor could a fitter man than Mr. Arnold have been found for this purpose. He is familiar with the very best aspect of English school life and education ; we pride ourselves on not fettering individual efforts, and in his father's work at Rugby he saw to the best advantage what unfettered individual effort can do. He would probably allow that such a man could not exist under the rigid system of • Schools and Universities on the Continent. By Matthew Arnold M.A. London: Macmillan and Co. 1868.

France and Germany, and that these systems would be superfluous, if every schoolmaster had but a share of his qualities. But the wise and benevolent despot is as rare in the school as in the world, nor can we have any security for permanent excellence except in the continuous action of an unchanging body like the State. Mr. Arnold evidently appreciates at their full value the associations of his early training ; and the judgment which he has formed, it might almost be said in spite of them, has a peculiar weight.

That the descriptions contained in this volume are admirably clear and graphic need hardly be said. It is seldom that we see combined great literary power and that habit of exact observation which comes from official training; and the result of the combina- tion is of the happiest kind. Nor ought we to omit to praise Mr. Arnold's moderation. That he is incapable of rudeness and vio- lence we all know, but though he would not demean himself by striking with the fist, he can use with terrible effect a keener and more dangerous weapon. He shows something of this power in the preface, in which he convicts a number of wise and distin- guished persons of talking the most arrant nonsense about English education, but throughout the volume he practises an habitual self-restraint, preserves the tone of counsel rather than of contro- versy, and is, in consequence, singularly persuasive.

It would be idle to attempt to conceal from ourselves that no little persuasiveness is needed if what is here proposed is to be made generally acceptable. We are met at the outset by a diffi- culty of vast proportions, by the question whether education is to be compulsory. There are numbers of persons ready enough to answer the question in the affirmative, but not one in a hundred of these persons ever thinks of its being made compulsory for his own class. " The educated and intelligent middle and upper classes amongst us are to confer the boon of compulsory education upon the ignorant lower class which needs it, while they do not." But it is only on the condition of it being universal that it is possi- ble. Mr. Arnold says :-

"I doubt whether our educated and intelligent classes are prepared for this. I have an acquaintance in easy circumstances, of distinguished connections, living in a fashionable part of London, who, like many other people, deals rather easily with his son's schooling. Sometimes the boy is at school, then for months together he is away from school and taught, so far as he is taught, by his father and mother at home. He is not in the least an invalid, but it pleases his father and mother to bring him up in this manner. Now I imagine no English friends of compulsory education dream of dealing with such a defaulter as this, and certainly his father, who, perhaps, is himself a friend of com- pulsory education for the working classes, would be astounded to find his education of his own son interfered with. But if my worthy acquaintance lived in Germany or Switzerland, he would be dealt with

as follows The Municipal Education Committee of the district where my acquaintance lived would address a summons to him, in- forming him that a comparison of the school rolls of their district with the municipal list of children of school age, showed his son not to be at school; and requiring him in consequence to appear before the Muni- cipal Committee at a time and place named, and there to satisfy them either that his son did attend some public school, or that, if privately taught, he was taught by duly trained and certificated teachers. On the back of the summons, my friend would find printed the penal articles of the school law, sentencing him to a fine if he failed to satisfy the Municipal Committee ; and, if he failed to pay the fine or was found a second time offending, to imprisonment. In some Continental States he would be liable, in case of repeated infraction of the school law, to be deprived of his parental rights, and to have the care of his son transferred to guardians named by the State."

Are we ready to submit to this? It may be said, with a certain amount of truth, that education may be organized without being made compulsory. But the question must be asked, nevertheless, because it brings us face to face with the real difficulty. Germans and Swiss are willing to submit to what Englishmen would deem an intolerable tyranny because they value culture, and people may generally be trusted to know how the thing which they value is to be attained. Mr. Arnold says :-

" I believe that if ever our zeal for the cause mounts high enough in England to make our popular education bear ' favourable comparison,' except in the imagination of popular speakers, with the education of Prussia and Switzerland, this same zeal will also make it compulsory."

Zeal of a certain kind we have, but no love, hardly even the idea of culture ; and one proof of this, out of many, is that the great advocates of education feel more interest about other classes than they do about their own. The governing class issues com- missions to inquire into middle-class education, but is itself, by all accounts, growing more devoted to frivolous pleasures, more careless of the great interests of politics and literature. The middle class is willing to spend millions upon primary education, because it fancies that to teach reading and writing will lessen the poor rates and empty the prisons, but it suffers the secondary education in which it is itself interested to become an absolute chaos. And all the while the indifference and the necessities of the labouring class are continually making less effective the primary education on which nearly all the organizing energy of the last thirty years has been spent.

With a defect so radical it is difficult to deal, but it is some- thing that the facts should be known, and the facts indeed have an ominous significance which even those who care very little for culture cannot mistake. Englishmen talk of German learning with a half contemptuous wonder, happy in the persuasion that their superiority in the pursuits of practical life cannot be ques- tioned. Let them listen to Mr. Arnold :—

" The Swiss and Germans aver, if you question them as to the benefit they have got from their Realschulen and Polytechnicums, that in every part of the world their men of business trained in these sch000ls are beating the English when they meet on equal terms as to capital M. Duruy, the French Minister of Public Instruction, confirms this averment, not as against England in especial, but generally, by saying that all over the Continent the young North German or young Swiss of Zurich or Basle is seizing, by reason of his better instruction, a confidence and a command in business which the young men of no other nation can dispute with him."

And again,— " I was lately saying to one of the first mathematicians in England, who had been a distinguished Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, and a practical mechanician besides, that in one department, at any rate, that of mechanics and engineering, we seemed, in spite of the absence of special schools, good instruction, and the idea of science, to get on wonderfully well. ` On the contrary,' said he, we get on wonderfully ill. Our engineers have no real scientific instruction, and we let them learn their business at our expense by the rule of thumb ; but it is a ruinous system of blunder and plunder. A man without the requisite scientific knowledge undertakes to build a difficult bridge ; he builds three which tumble down, and so learns how to build a fourth which stands ; but somebody pays for the three failures. In France or Switzerland he would not have been suffered to build his first bridge until he had satisfied competent persons that he knew how to build it."

Whatever position we hold we owe to our capital, upon which, indeed, we are living. It represents a past superiority and success, achieved at a time when the Continental nations had as little organization as ourselves. Enormously powerful as it is, it cannot long hold out against the rivalry of their intelligence and carefully economized resources.

Conscious of this danger, we are crying out for schools of technical instruction. But technical instruction, Mr. Arnold points out, can be of no service except to pupils who have had a careful and complete training. As long as we cannot supply this, it will be useless. Competition, the other panacea which we have tried already with such zeal, he considers worse than useless. Applied to regulate the distribution of our great school endow- ments, it ruins, he maintains, the most promising of our boys with the premature exhaustion of intellectual energy. Applied to regulate admission into the public service, he holds that it does not secure the best men.

"I once took part," says Mr. Arnold, "in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service, and I can truly say that the candidates to whom I gave the highest marks were almost, without exception, the candidates whom I would not have appointed. They were crammed men, not formed men; the formed men were the public-school men, but they were ignorant on the special matter of examination—English literature."

IVe know that other examiners in the same examination, going to it with all Mr. Arnold's prepossessions, hold strongly a very different opinion, and Mr. Arnold's is, we suspect, formed in some degree a priori. But the Germans avoid the danger with charac- teristic intelligence. At the end of the school course comes the " leaving examination." No one who fails to pass this can enter the special schools, the civil or military service, or the universities. The difficulty in our case is the jobbery with which our whole social system is corrupted. We want the best men to be appointed, and we can trust no official, from the highest to the lowest, to do it. Whether a real certificate of competency is not the best thing that we can secure is worth considering. But where is the school that can be trusted to give that?

In the German rather than in the French school organization Mr. Arnold sees the model best adapted to our imitation. It is more free, in fact, entirely free, from political influences, is less fettered by central control, and gives,—a most important considera- tion in our case,—more scope for the exercise of local energy and ability. The German schools are at present, for a change is con- templated, almost wholly day-schools ; the French, on the other hand, are boarding-schools. Of the latter Mr. Arnold seems to have received an impression not wholly favourable. " The boys," he says of one of the lycees, " did not look so fresh, happy, and healthy as our public-school boys." And the incessant surveil- lance is an evil, though, probably, a less evil than those which are too often suffered to grow up unchecked in our great boarding- schools. The best plan, on the whole, seems to be to distribute the boys who do not live at home in numbers not too large to over- power the idea of a family. Our common clumsy expedient for increasing the pay of our masters by turning them into " licensed victuallers," to use Mr. Ayrton's expression, is seldom practised on the Continent. The teacher must gain vastly in teaching power by his freedom from incongruous duties. All that can be said for our plan is, that it does in a way secure its object. Schools which do not offer to their masters the emoluments of boarders cannot, it must be allowed, secure such men as fill the assistant- masterships of Eton, Harrow, and Rugby.

For a mass of most interesting information, given in the most attractive form, on these and kindred topics we must refer our readers to the book itself. Nor are Mr. Arnold's suggestions less valuable, to our judgment, than his observations. We had marked many points for notice in both parts of the volume, but we must content ourselves with one which we select because it exhibits most felicitously the qualities of mind, the acuteness, the depth, and the impartiality which give such value to Mr. Arnold's opinions. It is refreshing, after hearing so much violent empirical talk about the classical and scientific system of educa- tion, to find such genuinely philosophical reflections as these :— " The prime direct aim (of instruction) is to enable a man to know himself and the wort& Such knowledge is the only sure basis of action. To know himself, a man must know the capabilities and per- formances of the human spirit ; and the value of the humanities, of Alterthumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity is that it affords for this purpose an unsurpassed source of light and stimulus But it is also a vital and formative knowledge to know the world, the laws which

govern nature, and man as a part of nature The humanists are loth to believe that man has any access to vital knowledge except by knowing himself—the poetry, philosophy, history which his spirit has created ; the realists that he has any access except by knowing the

world,—the physical sciences, the phenomena and laws of nature So long as the realists persist in cutting in two the circle of knowledge, so long do they leave for practical purposes the better portion to their rivals, and in the government of human affairs their rivals will beat them, and for this reason. The study of letters is the study of the operation of human force, of human freedom and antiquity ; the study of nature is the study of the operation of non-human forces, of human limitation and passivity. The contemplation of human force and activity tends naturally to heighten our own force and activity ; the contem- plation of human limits and passivity tends rather to check it."

The whole chapter (pp. 251 et seq.) is of the greatest value and interest. We would commend to the attention of the humanists, and that the more earnestly as ourselves holding with them in the main, the remarks on the failure of their system as administered in England to attain their real object. We can quote but one sen- tence which will exhibit Mr. Arnold's views :—

" An immense development of grammatical studies, and an immense use of Latin and Greek composition, take so much of the pupils' time, that in nine cases out of ton he has not any sense at all of Greek and Latin literature as literature, and ends his studies without getting any."

It is seldom that a reviewer has an opportunity of doing such useful work as he has in recommending such a book as this to his readers.