Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/380

 366 FOSTER WATSON : into harm. He does not scout the idea of a religious atmos- phere. Plato adumbrated one. Arnold created one, and so Pestalozzi. The atmosphere of reverence is all too rare in the school. It is not less of it that the educationist would wish to see ; it is rather more and purer. But the "outsider," the "many-headed" people, fear indoctrination into dogma. If they can, through their repre- sentatives, limit the teacher to a certain syllabus, are we not safe from dogma in the school ? No. If religion is to be taught in the schools, most people would include in the syllabus the Lord's Prayer. Surely that, if anything, is safe from the dogmatist. Yet I once knew a teacher who ex- pounded the first two words of the Lord's Prayer, " Our Father," and told his class to underline the word "our". He observed that "our" included all men, and therefore Christ and since Christ was included, indirectly and im- plicitly, in using the Lord's Prayer we pleaded His sacrificial merits. There was a dogmatist run wild in the class-room. But he was not an educationist. As we have seen, Plato would say that he who pursues the art of education, must be an educationist. Here, I believe, is the line of direction for us to take. We must not exclude religion from the field of the school disciplines because our teachers sometimes are not educationists; rather, seeing the unspeakable significance of the art of education, instead of excluding religion, we must see to it that those to whom we commit the work of education in that subject and in all subjects are educationists. The per- verted ingenuity of the dogmatist who is capable of pleading Christ's sacrificial merits through the words " Our Father," is just as harmful in other regions of intellectual and moral teaching as in the teaching of religion. The art of educa- tion would require him to consider the interest of his pupils whilst he is not only living in a den of his own, but what Plato would regard as far more serious, he does not know that he is blinded. He does not know the " limits " of his art, and so whilst he is professing to follow the art, he is, in truth, an " outsider ". The remedy I suggest is that as a nation we should see to it that those who follow the art of education should be educationists. The pursuit of an art may create artists or artisans. It is comparatively easy to be an artisan teacher. All a man needs is a certain amount of knowledge of techni- cal rules, a list of rules and regulations, full syllabuses to which he is to adhere and a set of inspectors to keep him up to the letter of official instructions. Such a teacher is