The Shining Pyramid (collection)/Education and the Uneducated

It is hardly possible to read the newspaper for many weeks in succession without being confronted by some delightful remarks about the older universities and their system. Perhaps some idiot parent writes to express his conviction that Latin and Greek are of but little use in the City; possibly some young budding virgin of the press, who is acquiring the first principles of the Gospel according to Peter Keary, warns Oxford and Cambridge that unless they set their archaic house in order and grant degrees and honours in Business (otherwise common swindling) they must go. Or, possibly, the field may be changed, and some Hermit of Mount Carmel may startle hundreds of thousands of readers with the discovery that the curriculum of the County Council Schools does not make a lad a good plumber or an expert carpenter. In each case the concealed hypothesis (which is taken for granted) is the same; and, roughly stated, it is to the effect that education is that process which enables a man to get on in life. This, of course, is nonsense and confusion. Education is a mental and spiritual training; it has no relation of any sort to the matter of technical instruction, whatever the technique to be acquired may be. A man may be a perfect plumber and be uneducated, another man may be a supreme violinist and be uneducated, a third man may man age a bank with the most exquisite skill and the most delightful grace and yet be wholly uneducated. Let it be understood, then, once for all, that apprenticeship to a craft has nothing whatever to do with the process by which a man is enabled to realise his own true self, to become what he was intended to become in the interior sphere of things. Oxford may be or may not be a home of true education; but the fact—if it be a fact—that Oxford does not fit a man for a Stock Exchange career must be set aside at the beginning of any inquiry as to its educational merits as wholly impertinent. On the other hand, the "Board School" education may or may not be bad and mischievous; but, at any rate, it is not the business of the Board School to teach the Art of Scavenging, and any allegations to that effect are nihil ad rem.

Then, there is another point. Owing to a very unimportant discovery, now dating back to some four and a half centuries, we have got strangely confused ideas as to the instruments and subject-matter of real education. This discovery of the art of multiplying copies of a book at a cheap rate by the use of movable types has somehow given birth to the crazy notion that a man who can read books is educated, while a man who cannot read books is uneducated. Anyone who likes to take the trouble of thinking will see that this proposition is quite ludicrously false. If it were not false, then the "illiterate" Greeks who listened to the bard reciting the Odyssey, the Jews who heard the prophecy of Isaiah, the country folk who knew a whole library of goodly and noble ballads were all uneducated; while young Guppy in the train with his sheets of "yellow" intelligence, his sheaves of Snippets, is educated; and young De Vere, pale with his study of the Guide to the Turf, is also educated. This is so clearly a ridiculous and intolerable proposition that one wonders how it can ever have been advanced, and yet it is of some antiquity. The venerable and pompous band of Scholar Boobies who made much of Burns at Edinburgh, and helped to ruin him for life, were, clearly, under the impression that they were educated and that the poet was uneducated. This was the marvel to them: here was a man who could "make" very well indeed, there was no denying it; and yet he had no degrees or honours from any university whatever, knew no Greek, no Latin, and only the most elementary French—just enough to sign himself Ruisseau. In fact, Burns had read very few books in any language whatever: therefore, said the Boobies aforesaid, he is an uneducated man. Hence their wonder, as at some strange prodigy and sport of Nature; they stared at poor Burns as others might have stared at a Learned Pig or Mathematical Magpie. The real fact was that the Literati of Edinburgh were, for the most part, wholly uneducated, while Burns was a very highly-educated man, not on account of his smattering of school instruction, but rather in spite of it. He would have been a greater man still, in all probability, if he had never been taught to read printed books; it was from books that he learned that it was proper and "poetic" to call the sun "Phœbus," it was the study of books that set him to writing his weak and stilted imitations of English poetry, it was the study of books and the company of men stupefied with books that caused him to despise the real university that he had attended—a stool at the feet of an old woman who knew the "auld sangs" and the ancient tales, and all the legends of the old, vanished Scotland. There is, then, no necessary connection between "book-learning" and education; many men have been educated in the very highest degree who could not tell B or Beth or Beta from a bull's foot.

Of course, in the days when the great majority of men were really educated, education was not so much in books as in the whole structure of life; it was "in the air" that they breathed. A man not only went to the theatre and heard the Œdipus, not only listened to the story of the Wanderings of Ulysses, not only heard the Fairy History of Herodotus declaimed: he lived in a land undefiled by the devil temples called factories; he saw on every side the gracious dwelling-places of the gods; he joined in his village rituals; he could wear a wreath without feeling that he was making a fool of himself; he saw in all Nature a wonderful operation of unseen and mysterious forces; his eyes could almost see the gleam of the white naiad in the brook; and the oak boughs rustled with the feet of the tree-nymph; in the depths of the wood there lurked Great Pan; there were Powers in the clouds and Powers in the mighty deeps; on the mountain-tops present Deity was enthroned. Wonders and mysteries were about all his ways; his eyes beheld beauty, and his lips uttered beauty. This was an "educated" man; and till people learn that all these "old fables" tell infinitely more of the real truth of things than their sixpenny manuals of chemistry and biology; nay, that the whole effect of the one is Truth, and that the whole effect of the other is Lies—they will remain uneducated, in spite of their manuals, or rather, because of them. It is not that these little books are technically incorrect—they are probably quite truthful as far as they go, or till next year or so, when their theories, such as they are, will be entirely overturned by some new discovery. They would be quite useful little books if those into whose hands they fell understood that they were merely the fanciful and pleasing dreams of "scientific" men about the appearances and outside skirts of the universe; but unfortunately the statement that gold is an element is taken by most readers as a final and eternal truth—and the result is, naturally enough, great mental confusion, as the readers in question imagine, not that they are in possession of a questionable statement which may be shattered to dust in to-morrow's paper, but that they know all that is to be known about gold. It is as if we were asked for a description of a Turner, and replied by giving a detailed chemical analysis of the various pigments employed by the artist, assuring the inquirer at the same time that he now understood all that there is to understand in this or that masterpiece. So, if we would be educated, we must pitch the sixpenny manuals into the fire (not into the dustbin, lest the scavengers become corrupted), and summon back the nymph to the brake and the dryad to the oak.

Or there is a still better way, since there was a time in which men had a finer education than any that Greece could afford. So far as the Gothic cathedral is exalted above the Parthenon, so much higher was the standard of education in the Middle Ages than in the days of Pericles. I am not sure whether it is still necessary to bring forward evidence as to this proposition; one knows what a stupendous and absurd paradox it would have seemed to Macaulay. Macaulay, of course, thought that the age of real education, of true enlightenment, had only just begun in his own time. From his point of view all creation had been groaning for countless centuries under a dark pall of ignorance; the Greeks were almost as bad as the people in the Middle Ages—neither the one or the other had so much as thought of the steam engine; all history had been but a sort of groping, a long and weary setting of the scene, till at last the curtain went up on a blaze of light, on the Whig Administration, and on the passing of the first Reform Act. The schoolmaster was at last abroad, as Macaulay's fellow-lunatic observed, and real history was just going to begin. Alas! we have "stepped up" since then, in response to the blatant showman's invitation, and we have found the show by no means answerable to the pictures painted outside. I think it is now hardly necessary to argue this point; I think it is fairly well agreed that the man who calls the period c. 1200—c. 1450 the "Dark Ages" is an ignorant ass. One may say that during this time man approached very nearly to the state to which he has been called; that in the chief work of that day—the cathedral—he realised most perfectly the image of the world—a vast place of splendours and glories, of heights and of depths, of descents and aspirations, of shining light and abodes of darkness, of ringing bells and chanting choirs, of glowing martyrs in dyed vestments, of strange and hideous grotesques; and all designed for worship. Those who made these places were educated, those who bowed down in them were educated; and so great a spirit moved then on the waters of the world that not only the altars of the Most High, but the commonest things of common life showed some gleam from the Inmost Shrine. The barns, the hovels, the bowls and platters, the pot that hung over the farmhouse fire, the very nails that studded the doors—all the things that this age made are now objects on which we barbarians look with longing; and if we have money we pay artists and skilled artisans to imitate for us, as well as they can, the work of the mediæval blacksmith and carpenter. If we could have a little village church, just as it was before the "schoolmasters" of the Reformation began to be abroad, the wealth of an American millionaire could hardly purchase it; it would actually be a commercial asset of enormous value. It seems to me unlikely that any future age, however dark may be the period of besotted and blatant ignorance that is before us, will wish to spend countless millions on the acquisition of "Dr." Clifford's Meeting House. These men, then, I think we may call educated; these makers of beauty, these dwellers amongst sculptured loveliness, these men who made the images of the Eternal Glory. Even "business men" might pause and reflect, for it seems that in the long run it pays not to be a Brute, that there is actually "money" in being a man, instead of being a wretched slave-driver and stink-finger and erector of "free" churches which blaspheme the sun and the sky and the flowers and the light of day in their stones as in their doctrine.

It would be, perhaps, too much to say that education in any real sense is utterly impossible at the present day. We can see from what has been said that it must be a work of enormous difficulty; for any true teaching that can be given from books or from word of mouth is straightway contradicted and annulled by the whole atmosphere and circumstances of modern life. How can we truly learn beauty if our days are passed for the most part in a horrible orgy of hideousness and corruption? How can we expect a "factory hand" to realise the beauty, the wonder, the mystery of anything whatever when his whole life is passed in some soul- and mind- and body-destroying occupation; when his daily work is hardly more intelligent than that of the cogs and endless bands and poison vats which he has to supervise—and his only holiday is made up of a nightmare called "t' coop," washed down with much adulterated beer? A man who lives such a life can see nothing and understand nothing; he has, not by his own fault, but by the fault of his masters and spiritual teachers, fallen again from Paradise; and, so far as one can see, his one idea of happiness is to turn out his master and become master himself—which is about as foolish and futile as if one proposed to regenerate America by seeing that every adult citizen became a millionaire. One discovers but little hope for such men as these; and the so-called education that is given them is probably but the adding of fuel to the flames of their burning—it is a giving of a picture gallery to a blind man. It was shown some weeks ago in that the result of more than thirty years' compulsory "education" had been the creation of a race of ferocious and degraded brutes called Hooligans. Why should we expect any other result? We should not dream, I hope, of insisting on a typhoid patient eating a hearty meal of roast beef, greens, Yorkshire pudding, and potatoes, with apple tart and Stilton cheese to follow; the whole washed down by a pint or so of strong ale. We have done a more deadly deed than that, however; and perhaps some of us may live to see the result of our ignorant and malignant folly.

So much for the education of the people who work with their hands, of the poor—worse still is the case of the rich. The poor have many ills to endure; but they have nothing quite so bad as the Great English Public School System. The County Council claims only so many hours of their lives every day; it does not shut them up for months at a time in accursed barracks, and indoctrinate them with a poison called "the tone," or "the ethos." Poor boys who are sensible make haste to forget the farrago of useless information that they have been compelled to acquire, and devote themselves to their craft, whatever it may be, with such relaxations as street-gambling for halfpence and an interest in "all the winners" to make life endurable. One hopes that there are very few children of the County Council who in after life remember any thing whatever as to the height of Mont Blanc, the course of the Dneiper, the date of the invention of gunpowder, or the difference between a calyx and a stamen. But the public school boy does not escape so easily. It is not that he is burdened with learning, useful or useless; he does not worry his friends by repeating Greek choruses in a rapt undertone between the courses at dinner; he does not speak the French tongue with such second nature that his replies to casual remarks are often couched in that language; his knowledge of English literature would be counted in championship points as—100; his perceptions of art are about as keen as those of a hippopotamus, and his acquirements in theology would expose him to the derision of the eight years old child of a Spanish farm labourer. Let us do justice to the system; the public school boy's master has brought the art of not teaching anything in particular and of doing everything in the wrong way to such an exquisite pitch that very few boys leave their school with any ideas worth speaking of on any subject whatever. Everything in this way has been done that mortal wit can compass. Not only has the lad been "taught" the classics in such a rut that he comes quite early to regard Latin and Greek as mere pits of destruction from which horrible and tortuous puzzles of grammatical construction are exploded by the master; not only is he curiously and thoroughly purged of the idea that Greeks and Romans were human beings who wrote (sometimes) wonderful and splendid literature; not only is he instructed in French to such purpose that he can neither speak it, understand it, or write it. All this is great, but it is not enough. The beautiful things in English literature are seized on by "the dear old Head"; brave, roaring plays of Shakespeare, such as Henry IV., Henry V., The Merry Wives of Windsor—things full of life and action and clanging swords and wine and tavern gaiety and the supreme blackguardism of Falstaff and his followers—all this the schoolboy receives in a little book encrusted with the laborious filth and rubbish of many notes. At every line the wretched lad finds his interest annihilated by some horrible command to "cf." something with something else not a bit like it; with those noble Agincourt speeches, celebrating the memory of Crispin Crispinian comes a hideous drench of Franco-English history; Pistol cannot pour out his wonderful rodomontados without the miserable annotator speculating as to where and when he picked up his vocabulary, and the boy is lucky if the fooleries of Dr. Caius do not lead to a lengthy and futile dissertation on the founder of Gonville and Caius. It is done and done thoroughly; the pupil acquits himself brilliantly in that Chinese Lunacy called "the examination," and firmly resolves never to open a Shakespeare for the rest of his days. All this is granted; nothing is omitted which may convince the boy that all learning is a disagreeable folly, and that literature is one of the most tiresome of the many forms of "rot." In ten years' time the average public school man has shed all the useless catalogue of facts and dates and notes that he has been forced to stuff into his brain.

But, unfortunately, there is much else that he cannot shed. It is easy enough to forget the date of Agincourt and the rules relative to the optative and the oratio obliqua. It is not so easy—it is very difficult indeed—to eliminate the poisonous stream of cant, humbug, lies, and devil-worship which is injected day after day into the wretched inmates of these public schools. The infernal cultus of success and money, of "getting on," of "making good friends," the entire and absolute absence of anything remotely resembling real religion, the positive presence of the grossest materialism, of the vulgarest ideals: these things stay. It is bad enough that two hundred and fifty pounds may be spent yearly for eight or nine years in the manufacture of the Uninstructed Booby; it is much worse that the system, not content with this mainly negative result, imparts grace to the boys, enabling them to become Offensive Bounders, persons from whom all the generous, noble, and compassionate impulses which become generosi are entirely missing. It was not always so: sixty or seventy years ago an "Italian image man" was mobbed by the Rugby boys, and his wares set up for Aunt Sallies and smashed. There was trouble; and a Mr. Hughes, an old Tory squire in Berkshire, wrote in high wrath to his son at the school, pointing out that he who despised and outraged the poor, despised and outraged God's ordinance in making them so; and also, that it was a gentleman's chiefest privilege to protect and succour the poor. Mr. Hughes was evidently a politician of an obsolete type. It is not four years since a band of poor strolling players—men and women—were hounded and insulted through the High Street of Harrow by the young disciples of "the tone," "the ethos," and "the system."