Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the
evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic
process which specialist men of science and their public are alike apt
to overlook, but which is none the less vitally important. For we cannot
really understand, say Pasteur, save primarily as a thinking peasant; or
Lister and his antiseptic surgery better than as the shepherd, with his
tar-box by his side; or Kelvin or any other electrician, as the thinking
smith, and so on. The old story of geometry, as "_ars metrike_," and of
its origin from land-surveying, for which the Egyptian hieroglyph is
said to be that of "rope stretching," in fact, applies far more fully
than most realise, and the history of every science, of course already
thus partially written, will bear a far fuller application of this
principle. In short, the self-taught man, who is ever the most fertile
discoverer, is made in the true and fundamental school--that of
experience.
The need of abbreviating the recapitulation of this, however, sooner or
later develops the school in the pedagogic sense, and its many
achievements, its many failures in accomplishing this, might here be
more fully analysed.
Still more evident is this process in the column of Folk. From the
mother's knee and the dame's school of the smallest folk-place, the
townlet or hamlet, _ton_ or home, up to the royal and priestly school of
the law of ancient capitals, or from the "humanities" of a mediaeval
university to the "Ecole de Droit" of a modern metropolis, the series of
essential evolutionary stages may be set down. Or in our everyday
present, [Page: 79] the rise of schools of all kinds, primary,
secondary, higher up to the current movement towards university
colleges, and from these to civic and regional universities, might again
be traced. The municipalisation of education is thus in fact expressed,
and so on.
Leaving the schools in the main to speak for themselves of their
advancing and incipient uses, a word may be said upon the present lines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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