Cambridge Essays on Education

.C.

gdalene Coll

onsidering the part which the best and noblest works of imagination must always play in a literary education, it has often surprised me to reflect how little scope ordinary literary exercises give for the use of that particular faculty. The old themes and verses aimed at producing decorous centos culled from the works of classical rhetoricians and poets. No boy, at least in my day, was ever encouraged to take a line of his own, and to strike out freely ac

g past memories, and in forecasting and anticipating interesting events. The boy who, weary of the school-term, considers what he will do on the first day of the holidays, or who anxiously forebodes paternal displeasure, is exercising his imagination; and the truth is that the faculty of imagination plays an immense part in all human happiness and unhappiness, considering that, whenever we take refuge from

e; it learns a certain conduct and demeanour for use in public. Yet all the time the thought of the boy is running backwards and forwards in secrecy, considering the memories of its experience, pleasant or unpleasant, and comforting itself in tedious hours by framing little plans for the future. I remember my old schoolmastering days, and the hours I spent with a class of boys sitting in front of me; how constantly one saw boys in the midst of their work, with pen suspended and page unturned, look up with that expression denoting that some vision had passed before the inward eye-which, as Wordsworth justly observes, constitutes "the bliss of solitude"-obliter

ight be, and, alas, in our worst moments, upon what might have been "My unhappiest experiences," said Lord Beaconsfield, "have been those which never happened"; and again the same acute cr

ess. It certainly does seem singular that this deep and persistent element in human life is left so untrained and unregarded, to range at will, to feed upon itself. All that the teacher does is to insist as far as possible on a certain concentration of the mind on business

od many boys whose work is not interesting to them, and a certain number to whom the prescribed games are a matter of routine rather than of active pleasure. Indeed it may be said that hardly any boys enjoy either work or games in which they see no possibility of any personal distinction. It is therefore of great importance that every boy whose chances of successful performance are small should be encouraged to have a definite hobby; for an occupation which the mind can remember with pleasure and anticipate with delight supplies the food for the restless imagination, which may otherwise become dreary from inaction, or tainted by thoughts of baser pleasure. A schoolmaster only salves his conscience by supplying a strict time-table and regular games. A house master ought to be most careful in the case of boys whose work is languid and proficiency in games small, to find out what the boy really likes and enjoys, and to encourage it by every means in his power. That is the best corrective, to administer wholesome food for the mind to digest. But I believe that good teachers ought to go much further, and speak quite plainly to boys, from time to time, on the necessity of practising control of thought. My own experience is that boys were always interested in any talk, call it ethical or religious, which based itself directly upon their own actu

mediately give self-control, but most peoples' worst sufferings are caused by what is called "having something on their mind"; and yet, so far as I know, in the process of education, no attempt whatever is made, except quite incidentally, to dispossess the strong man armed by the stronger victor, or to help immature minds to hold an unpleasant or a pleasant thought at arm's length, or to train th

ucation, they will regard with deep bewilderment the amazing fact that we applied so careful a training to other faculties, and yet left so helplessly alone the training of the imaginative faculty, upon which, as I have said, our happiness and unhappiness mainly depend. We must, all of us be aware of the fact that there have been times in our live

action from education of pure and simple enjoyment. I used to try many experiments as a schoolmaster, and I remember at one time bribing a slow and unintelligent class into some sort of concentration by promising that I would tell a story for a few minutes at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily mastered. It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and brisk tangible i

lleys, Thackerays; such airy creatures have a way of catering for themselves! I do riot at all want to turn out a generation of third-rate writing amateurs. But many boys have a distinct pleasure not only in listening to imaginations, and riding like the beetle on the engine, but in evoking and realising some little vision and creation of their own brains. Of course there are boys to whom mental activity is all of the nature of a cross laid upon them for some purpose, wise or unwise. But there are also a good

not effect much, it gives a most wholesome opening to the creative faculties of boys, whose min

our worst mistakes in education arise from our not basing it upon the actual needs and faculties of human nature, but up

his has no origin in fact. Boys used not to be encouraged to guess at words, but to be punished for shirking work if they had not looked them out. It is to be hoped that English will be in the future increasingly taught in schools; but even so there is the danger of connecting it too much with erudition. The old Clarendon Press Shakespeare was an almost perfect example of how not to edit Shakespeare for boys; the introductions were learned and scholarly, the notes were crammed with philology, derivation, illustration. As a matter of fact there is a good deal that is interesting, even to small minds, in the connection and derivation of words, if briskly communicated. Most boys are responsive to the pleasure of finding a familiar word concealed under a variation of shape; but this should be conveyed orally. What is really requisite is that boys should be taught how to read a book intelligently. In dealing with classical books, vocabulary must be always a difficulty, and I myself very much doubt the advisability in the case of average boys of attempting to teach more than one foreign language at a time, especially when in dealing, say, with three kindred languages, such as Latin, French, and English, the same word, such as spiritus, esprit, and spirit bear very different significations. The great need is that there should be some work going on in which the boys should not be conscious of dragging an ever-increasing burden of memory. Let me take a concrete case. A poem like the Morte d'Arthur, or The Lay of the Last Minstrel, is well within the comprehension of quite small boys. These could be read in a class, after an introductory lecture as to date, scene, dramatis personae, with perfect ease, words explained as they occurred, difficult passages paraphrased, and the whole action of the s

y's horizon, to show him that history holds the seeds and roots of the present, and that geography is the life-drama which he sees about him, enacting itself under different climatic and physiographical conditions. The dreariness and dreadfulness of knowledge to the immature mind is because it represents itself as a mass of dry facts to be mast

great men, really intelligible to youthful minds. As a rule, biographies of the first order require an amount of detailed knowledge in the reader which puts them out of the reach of ill-stored minds. But I have again and again found with boys that simple biographical lectures are among the most attractive

ossible. What we must try to do is to educate the faculties of curiosity, interest, imagination and sympathy; we must begin from the boy himself, and conduct him away from himself. What we really ought to aim at is to give him the sense that he is surrounded by strange and beautiful mysteries of nature, of which he can himself observe certain phenomena; that human history, as well as the great world about him, is crowded with interesting and animating figures who have laboured, toiled, loved, acted, suffered, sinned, have felt the impulse both of base and selfish desires, but no less of beautiful, exalted, and inspiring hopes. We want to convince the young that it is not well to be narrow, close-fisted, insolent, suspicious, petty, self-satisfied. Imaginative sympathy, that is to be the end of all our efforts. If we aim only at producing sympathy, we may get a vague sentimentalism which is just distressed by apparent suffering, and anxious to relieve it momentarily, without reflecting whether it is not the outcome of perfe

pose that he was to fortify his mind solely for his own advantage. This individualist theory must somehow be modified. The aim of the process I have described is not simply to indicate to the boy the amount of selfish pleasure which he can obtain from literary masterpieces; it is rather to show the boy that he is not alone and isolated, in a world where it is advisable for him to take and keep all that he can; but that he is one of a great fellowship of emotions and interests, and that his

he is probably, like most young creatures, and indeed like a good many elderly ones, inclined to be suspicious of all that is strange and foreign, and to anticipate hostility or indifference. What he would willingly share with a relation or friend, he eagerly withholds from an outsider. To cultiv

nd welding communities together. It cannot be done in a year or a decade; but it ought to be the first aim of education to initiate the imagination of the young into the idea of fel