What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in ParticularHolmes, Edmond
Philosophy
What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular
Holmes, Edmond
Education
any training during the nine or ten years of his school life; and as,
in his struggle for the "Pass" degree of his University, he will
follow the lines on which he has been accustomed to work in both his
schools, he will go out into the world at the age of twenty-two or
twenty-three, the victim of a course of education which has lasted
for fourteen years and cost thousands of pounds, and which has done
nothing whatever to foster his mental or spiritual growth. It is true
that in all the Public Schools a certain amount of informal education
is done through the medium of Musical Societies, Natural History
Societies, Debating Societies, School Magazines, and the like; that
the discipline of a Public School, with its system of School and
House prefects, has considerable educational value; that the playing
fields do something towards the formation of character; that the
boys, by exchanging experiences and discussing things freely among
themselves, help to educate one another; and that during the four
months of each year which the schoolboy spends away from school, he
is, or may be, exposed to educative influences of various kinds.[29]
But the broad fact remains that the _studies_ of the youthful
graduate, whether in school classroom or college lecture-room, have
been wholly unformative and therefore wholly uneducative.
But let us consider the education given in our Public Schools and
Universities, at what is presumably the highest of all its levels.
Let us see what is done for the boys who have sufficient ability to
win Scholarships and read for Honours at Oxford and Cambridge. It is
to the supposed interests of these brighter boys that the vital
interests of their duller schoolfellows are perforce sacrificed. Are
the results worth the sacrifice? The brighter boys fall into two main
groups,--those who have a turn for the "Humanities," and those who
have a turn for Mathematics and Science. Where the "Humanities" are
effectively taught,--where, for example, the scholar is allowed to
pass through the portals of Latin and Greek grammar and composition
into the wonder-world that lies beyond them,--the _communicative_
instinct receives a valuable training. It is, unfortunately, quite
possible for a boy, or even for a man, to be what is called a "good
scholar," and yet to take no interest whatever in the history or
literature of Greece and Rome; and the examination system undoubtedly
tends to foster this bastard type of humanism. But when, as a result
of his school and University training, a scholar has passed the
linguistic portals and found pleasure in the worlds beyond, we may
say of him that his education has fostered the growth of one of his
expansive instincts,--perhaps the most important of all, but still
only one. When Science is effectively taught, the growth of the
_inquisitive_ instinct is similarly fostered; but the inquisitive
instinct, though of great value, when trained in conjunction with
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