Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15Temple, William
Religion
Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15
Temple, William
Church and state
for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an
ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most
able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism.
This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and
to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in
human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the
old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have
already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in
the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that
it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of
their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living
acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.
The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type
of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be
said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than
corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than
aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than
with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for
it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress
were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the
demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking
down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must
be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree,
though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and,
consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of
education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it
has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has
been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but
to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because
it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all
social divisions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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