Civics: as Applied Sociology/Part 2/I—Development of School, and Its Reaction Upon Town

The reactions of the School upon the Town are observed in practice to be of very different values;—how are these differences to be explained?

From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers. The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention, is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the fixation of habit and custom, so that at length "custom lies upon us with a weight heavy as death, and deep almost as life." This continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral ones is thus a prime explanation of each reformer's difficulty in making his moral standard the fashionable one, and also, when his doctrine has succeeded, of the loss of life and mummification of form which it so speedily undergoes.

Of conventional "education," considered as the memorisation of past records, however authoritative and classic, the decay is thus intelligible and plain, and the repetition of criticisms already adequately made need not therefore detain us here.

For this process is there no remedy? Science here offers herself—with senses open to observe, and intellect awake to interpret. Starting with Place, she explores and surveys it, from descriptive travel books at very various levels of accuracy, she works on to atlas and gazetteer, and beyond these to world-globe and "Geographie Universelle." With her charts and descriptions we are now more ready for a journey; with her maps and plans we may know our own place as never before; nay, rectify it, making the rough places plain and the crooked straight; even restoration may come within our powers.

Similarly as regards Work. Though mere empiric craft-mastery dies with the individual, and fails with his successors, may we not perpetuate the best of this? A museum of art treasures, a collection of the choicest examples of all times and lands, will surely raise us from our low level of mechanical toil; nay, with these carefully observed, copied, memorised, and duly examined upon, we shall be able to imitate them, to reproduce their excellencies, even to adapt them to our everyday work. To the art museum we have thus but to add a "School of Design," to have an output of more and less skilled copyists. The smooth and polished successes of this new dual institution, responding as they do to the mechanical elements of modern work and of the mechanical worker-mind, admitting also of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and certificated art-mastery. Our School of Design thus becomes a School of Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction of the nation, to the satisfaction not only of its promoters, but of the general public and their representatives, so that annual votes justly increase. Lurking discontent may now and then express itself, but is for practical purposes negligible.

The example of art accumulation and art instruction is thus naturally followed in other respects. For the commercial information of the public, varied representative exhibitions—primarily, therefore, international ones—naturally suggest themselves; while so soon as expansion of imperial and colonial interests comes upon the first plane, a corresponding permanent Exhibition is naturally instituted. But when thus advancing commercial instruction, we must also recognise the claims of industry in all its crafts and guilds, and in fact the technical instruction of the community generally. Hence the past, present, and promised rise of technical institutes upon increasing scales of completeness.

In the rise of such a truly encylopædic system of schools, the university cannot permanently be forgotten. Since from the outset we have recognised the prime elements of the school in observation and memory, the testing of these by examinations—written, oral, and practical—however improvable in detail, must be fairly recognised, and the examining body or university has therefore to be adopted as the normal crown of our comprehensive educational system. Teaching, however is found to be increasingly necessary, especially to examination, and for this the main field left open is in our last column, that of People. Their lore of the past, whether of sacred or classical learning, their history, literature, and criticism, are already actively promoted, or at any rate adequately endowed at older seats of learning; while the materials, resources, conditions and atmosphere are here of other kinds. Hence the accessibility of the new University of London to the study of sociology, as yet alone among its peers.

Hence, beside the great London, maritime, commercial and industrial, residential and governmental, there has been growing up, tardily indeed, as compared with smaller cities, yet now all the more massively and completely, a correspondingly comprehensive system of schools; so that the historic development of South Kensington within the last half century, from International Exhibitions of Work, Natural History Museums of Place onwards to its present and its contemplated magnitude, affords a striking exemplification of the present view and its classification, which is all the more satisfactory since this development has been a gradual accretion.

Enough then has been said to show that the rise of schools, their qualities and their defects, are all capable of treatment upon the present lines; but if so, may we not go farther, and ask by what means does thought and life cope with their defects, especially that fixation of memory, even at its best, that evil side of examination and the like, which we often call Chinese in the bad sense, but which we see arises so naturally everywhere?