Read Ebook: Cambridge Essays on Education by Benson Arthur Christopher Editor

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 354 lines and 67701 words, and 8 pages

A man foursquare, withouten flaw ywrought.

Of the teaching of science I am not competent to speak. But as an instrument of mind-training, and even of liberal education, it seems to me to have a far higher value than is usually conceded to it by humanists. To direct the imagination to the infinitely great and the infinitely small, to vistas of time in which a thousand years are as one day; to the tremendous forces imprisoned in minute particles of matter; to the amazing complexity of the mechanism by which the organs of the human body perform their work; to analyse the light which has travelled for centuries from some distant star; to retrace the history of the earth and the evolution of its inhabitants--such studies cannot fail to elevate the mind, and only prejudice will disparage them. They promote also a fine respect for truth and fact, for order and outline, as the Greeks said, with a wholesome dislike of sophistry and rhetoric. The air which blows about scientific studies is like the air of a mountain top--thin, but pure and bracing. And as a subject of education science has a further advantage which can hardly be overestimated. It is in science that most of the new discoveries are being made. "The rapture of the forward view" belongs to science more than to any other study. We may take it as a well-established principle in education that the most advanced teachers should be researchers and discoverers as well as lecturers, and that the rank and file should be learners as well as instructors. There is no subject in which this ideal is so nearly attainable as in science.

I shall not make any ambitious attempt to sketch out a scheme of literary studies. My subject is the training of the reason. But two principles seem to me to be of primary importance. The first is that we should study the psychology of the developing reason at different ages, and adapt our method of teaching accordingly. The memory is at its best from the age of ten to fifteen, or thereabouts. Facts and dates, and even long pieces of poetry, which have been committed to memory in early boyhood, remain with us as a possession for life. We would most of us give a great deal in middle age to recover that astonishingly retentive memory which we possessed as little boys. On the other hand, ratiocination at that age is difficult and irksome. A young boy would rather learn twenty rules than apply one principle. Accordingly the first years of boyhood are the time for learning by heart. Quantities of good poetry, and useful facts of all kinds should be entrusted to the boy's memory to keep: will assimilate them readily, and without any mental overstrain. But eight or ten years later, "cramming" is injurious both to the health and to the intellect. Years have brought, if not the philosophic mind, yet at any rate a mind which can think and argue. The memory is weaker and the process of loading it with facts is more unpleasant. At this stage the whole system of teaching should be different. One great evil of examinations is that they prolong the stage of mere memorising to an age at which it is not only useless but hurtful. Another valuable guide is furnished by observing what authors the intelligent boy likes and dislikes. His taste ought certainly to be consulted, if our main object is to interest him in the things of the mind. The average intelligent boy likes Homer and does not like Virgil; he is interested by Tacitus and bored by Cicero; he loves Shakespeare and revels in Macaulay, who has a special affinity for the eternal schoolboy.

My other principle is that since we are training young Englishmen, whom we hope to turn into true and loyal citizens, we shall presumably find them most responsive to the language, literature, and history of their own country. This would be a commonplace, not worth uttering, in any other country; in England it is, unfortunately, far from being generally accepted Nothing sets in a stronger light the inertia and thoughtlessness, not to say stupidity, of the British character in all matters outside the domain of material and moral interests, than our neglect of the magnificent spiritual heritage which we possess in our own history and literature. Wordsworth, in one of those noble sonnets which are now, we are glad to hear, being read by thousands in the trenches and by myriads at home, proclaims his faith in the victory of his country over Napoleon because he thinks of her glorious past.

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold That Milton held. In everything we are sprung Of Earth's best blood, have titles manifold.

I am not suggesting that the history and literatures of other countries should be neglected, or that foreign languages should form no part of education. But the main object is to turn out good Englishmen, who may continue worthily and even develop further a glorious national tradition. To do this, we must appeal constantly to the imagination, which Wordsworth has boldly called "reason in her most exalted mood." We may thus bring a little poetry and romance into the monotonous lives of our hand-workers. It may well be that their discontent has more to do with the starving of their spiritual nature than we suppose. For the intellectual life, like divine philosophy, is not dull and crabbed, as fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute.

Can we end with a definition of the happiness and well-being, which is the goal of education, as of all else that we try to do? Probably we cannot do better than accept the famous definition of Aristotle, which however we must be careful to translate rightly. "Happiness, or well-being, is an activity of the soul directed towards excellence, in an unhampered life." Happiness consists in doing rather than being; the activity must be that of the soul--the whole man acting as a person; it must be directed towards excellence--not exclusively moral virtue, but the best work that we can do, of whatever kind; and it must be unhampered--we must be given the opportunity of doing the best that is in us to do. To awaken the soul; to hold up before it the images of whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, pure, and of good report; and to remove the obstacles which stunt and cripple the mind; this is the work which we have called the Training of the Reason.

THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION

BY A. C. BENSON

Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

It might be hastily assumed by a reader bent on critical consideration, that the subject of my essay had a certain levity or fancifulness about it. Works of imagination, as by a curious juxtaposition they are called, are apt to lie under an indefinable suspicion, as including unbusinesslike and romantic fictions, of which the clear-cut and well-balanced mind must beware, except for the sake, perhaps, of the frankest and least serious kind of recreation. Considering the part which the best and noblest works of imagination must always play in a literary education, it has often surprised me to reflect how little scope ordinary literary exercises give for the use of that particular faculty. The old themes and verses aimed at producing decorous centos culled from the works of classical rhetoricians and poets. No boy, at least in my day, was ever encouraged to take a line of his own, and to strike out freely across country in pursuit of imagined adventures. Even English teaching in its earlier stages seldom aimed at more than transcriptions of actual experience, a day spent in the country, or a walk beside the sea. Only quite recently have boys and girls been encouraged to write poems and stories out of their own imaginations; and even now there are plenty of educational critics who would consider such exercises as dilettante things lacking in practical solidity.

In the first place then, it seems to me simply extraordinary that so little heed is paid in education to the using and controlling of what is one of the most potent instinctive forces of the mind. We take careful thought how to strengthen and fortify the body, we go on to spending many hours upon putting memory through its paces, and in developing the reason and the intelligence; we pass on from that to exercising and purifying the character and the will; we try to make vice detestable and virtue desirable. But meanwhile, what is the little mind doing? It submits to the drudgery imposed upon it, it accommodates itself more or less to the conditions of its life; it learns a certain conduct and demeanour for use in public. Yet all the time the thought of the boy is running backwards and forwards in secrecy, considering the memories of its experience, pleasant or unpleasant, and comforting itself in tedious hours by framing little plans for the future. I remember my old schoolmastering days, and the hours I spent with a class of boys sitting in front of me; how constantly one saw boys in the midst of their work, with pen suspended and page unturned, look up with that expression denoting that some vision had passed before the inward eye--which, as Wordsworth justly observes, constitutes "the bliss of solitude"--obliterating for a moment the surrounding scene. I do not mean that the thought was a distant or an exalted one--probably it was some entirely trivial reminiscence, or the anticipation of some coming amusement. But I do not think I exaggerate when I say that probably the greater part of a human being's unoccupied hours, and probably a considerable part of the hours supposed to be occupied, are spent in some similar exercise of the imagination. What a confirmation of this is to be found in the phenomena of sleep and dreams! Then the instinct is steadily at work, neither remembering nor anticipating, but weaving together the results of experience into a self-taught tale.

And then if one considers later life, it is no exaggeration to say that the greater part of human happiness and unhappiness consists in the dwelling upon what has been, what may be, what might be, and, alas, in our worst moments, upon what might have been "My unhappiest experiences," said Lord Beaconsfield, "have been those which never happened"; and again the same acute critic of life said that half the clever people he knew were under the impression that they were hated and envied, the other half that they were admired and loved;--and that neither were right!

The imaginative faculty then is a species of self-representation, the power of considering our own life and position as from the outside; from it arise both the cheerful hopes and schemes of the sound mind, and the shadowy anxieties and fears of the mind which lacks robustness. It certainly does seem singular that this deep and persistent element in human life is left so untrained and unregarded, to range at will, to feed upon itself. All that the teacher does is to insist as far as possible on a certain concentration of the mind on business at particular times, and if he has ethical purposes at heart, he may sometimes speak to a boy on the advisability of not allowing his mind to dwell upon base or sensual thoughts; but how little attempt is ever made to train the mind in deliberate and continuous self-control!

The latest school of pathologists, in the treatment of obsessed or insane persons, pay very close attention to the subjects of their dreams, and attribute much nerve-misery to the atrophy, or suppression by circumstances, of instincts which betray themselves in dreams. I am inclined to think that the educators of the future must somehow contrive to do more--indeed they cannot well do less than is actually done--in teaching the control of that secret undercurrent of thought in which happiness and unhappiness really reside. Those who have lived much with boys will know what havoc suspense or disappointment or anxiety or sensuality or unpopularity can make in an immature character. It seems to me that we ought not to leave all this without guidance or direction, but to make a frontal attack upon it. I do not mean that it is necessary to probe too deeply into the imagination, but I believe that the subject should be frankly spoken about, and suggestions made. The point is to get the will to work, and to induce the mind, in the first place, to realise and practise its power of self-command; and in the second place, to show that it is possible to evict an unwholesome thought by the deliberate welcoming and entertaining of a wholesome one. The best of all cures is to provide every boy with some occupation which he indubitably loves. There are a good many boys whose work is not interesting to them, and a certain number to whom the prescribed games are a matter of routine rather than of active pleasure. Indeed it may be said that hardly any boys enjoy either work or games in which they see no possibility of any personal distinction. It is therefore of great importance that every boy whose chances of successful performance are small should be encouraged to have a definite hobby; for an occupation which the mind can remember with pleasure and anticipate with delight supplies the food for the restless imagination, which may otherwise become dreary from inaction, or tainted by thoughts of baser pleasure. A schoolmaster only salves his conscience by supplying a strict time-table and regular games. A house master ought to be most careful in the case of boys whose work is languid and proficiency in games small, to find out what the boy really likes and enjoys, and to encourage it by every means in his power. That is the best corrective, to administer wholesome food for the mind to digest. But I believe that good teachers ought to go much further, and speak quite plainly to boys, from time to time, on the necessity of practising control of thought. My own experience is that boys were always interested in any talk, call it ethical or religious, which based itself directly upon their own actual experience. I can conceive that a teacher who told a class to sit still for three minutes and think about anything they pleased, and added that he would then have something to tell them, might have an admirable object-lesson in getting them to consider how swift and far-ranging their fancies had been; or again he might practise them in concentration of thought by asking them to think for five minutes on a perfectly definite thing--to imagine themselves in a wood, or by the sea, or in a chemist's shop, let us say, and then getting them to put down on paper a list of definite objects which they had imagined. The process could be infinitely extended; but if it were done with some regularity, it would certainly b possible to train boys to concentrate themselves in reflection and recollected observation. Or again a quality might be propounded, such as generosity or spitefulness, and the boys required to construct an imaginary anecdote of the simplest kind to illustrate it. This would have the effect of training the mind at all events to focus itself, and this is just what drudgery pure and simple will not do. The aim is not to train mere memory or logical accuracy, but to strengthen that great faculty which we loosely call imagination, which is the power of evoking mental images, and of migrating from the present into the past or the future.

I believe it to be a very notable lack in our theory of education that so little attempt is made to bring the will to bear upon what may be called the subconscious mind. It is that strange undercurrent of thought which is so imprudently neglected which throws up on its banks, without any apparent purpose or aim, the ideas and images which lurk within it. I do not say that such a training would immediately give self-control, but most peoples' worst sufferings are caused by what is called "having something on their mind"; and yet, so far as I know, in the process of education, no attempt whatever is made, except quite incidentally, to dispossess the strong man armed by the stronger victor, or to help immature minds to hold an unpleasant or a pleasant thought at arm's length, or to train them in the power of resolutely substituting a current of more wholesome images. The subconscious mind is too often treated as a thing beyond control, and yet the pathological power of suggestion, by which a thought is implanted like a seed in the mind, which presently appears to be rooted and flowering, ought to show us that we have within our reach an extraordinarily potent psychological implement.

So far then on the more negative side. I have indicated my strong belief that much may be done to train the mind in self-control. Indeed our whole education is built upon the faith that we can, perhaps not implant new faculties, but develop dormant ones; and I am persuaded that when future generations come to survey our methods and processes of education, they will regard with deep bewilderment the amazing fact that we applied so careful a training to other faculties, and yet left so helplessly alone the training of the imaginative faculty, upon which, as I have said, our happiness and unhappiness mainly depend. We must, all of us be aware of the fact that there have been times in our lives when all was prosperous, and when we were yet overshadowed with dreary thoughts; or again times when in discomfort, or under the shadow of failure, or at critical or tragic moments, we have had an unreasonable alertness and cheerfulness. All that is due to the subconscious mind, and we ought at least to try experiments in making it obey us better.

I now pass on to consider a further possibility, and that is of training and developing a higher sort of creative imagination. It is all in reality part of the same subject, because it seems to be certain that most human beings suffer by the suppression or the dormancy of existing faculties. It is here, I believe, that much of our intellectual education fails, from the tendency to direct so much attention to purely logical and reasoning faculties, and to the resolute subtraction from education of pure and simple enjoyment. I used to try many experiments as a schoolmaster, and I remember at one time bribing a slow and unintelligent class into some sort of concentration by promising that I would tell a story for a few minutes at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily mastered. It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and brisk tangible incidents. But the silence, the luxurious abandonment of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which I never had in teaching Latin Prose or the Greek conditional sentence. I always told stories for an hour on Sunday evenings to the boys in my house, and though few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are remembered by old pupils, I never met one who did pot recollect the stories.

Now we have here, I believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which is consistently neglected and even despised. It is regarded as a mere luxury; but we do not make the mistake of substituting gymnastics for games, and removing the pleasure of personal performance. Why can we not also do something to encourage what old Hawtrey used so beautifully to call "the sweet pride of authorship"? The worst of it all is that we look so much to tangible results. I do not mean that we must try to develop Shakespeares, Shelleys, Thackerays; such airy creatures have a way of catering for themselves! I do riot at all want to turn out a generation of third-rate writing amateurs. But many boys have a distinct pleasure not only in listening to imaginations, and riding like the beetle on the engine, but in evoking and realising some little vision and creation of their own brains. Of course there are boys to whom mental activity is all of the nature of a cross laid upon them for some purpose, wise or unwise. But there are also a good many shy boys, who will not venture to make themselves conspicuous by literary and imaginative feats, and who yet if it were a matter of course and wont, would throw themselves with intense pleasure into literary creation. The work done, for instance, at Shrewsbury, at the Perse School, at Carlisle Grammar School, in this direction--I daresay it is done elsewhere, but I have seen the work of these three schools with my own eyes--show what quite average boys are capable of in both English poetry and English prose.

One of the best points of such a system of literary composition is that even if slower boys cannot effect much, it gives a most wholesome opening to the creative faculties of boys, whose minds, if stifled and compressed, are most likely to work in unwholesome and tormenting directions.

My suggestion then becomes part of a larger plea, the plea for more direct cultivation of enjoyment in education. Some of our worst mistakes in education arise from our not basing it upon the actual needs and faculties of human nature, but upon the supposed constitution of a child constructed by the starved imagination of pedants and moralists and practical men.

The same principle applies with just the same force to history and geography; both of these studies can be made interesting, if they are not regarded as isolated groups of phenomena, but are approached from the boy's own experience as opening away and outwards from what is going on about him. The object is or ought to be slowly to extend the boy's horizon, to show him that history holds the seeds and roots of the present, and that geography is the life-drama which he sees about him, enacting itself under different climatic and physiographical conditions. The dreariness and dreadfulness of knowledge to the immature mind is because it represents itself as a mass of dry facts to be mastered without having any visible or tangible connection with the boy's own experience. The aim should rather be to teach him to look with zest and interest at what is going on outside his own narrow circle, and to help him to move perceptively along the paths of time and space which diverge in all directions from the scene where he finds himself.

It may be indisputably stated that all connected knowledge is stimulating, and that all unconnected knowledge is at best mechanical. Perhaps one of the most fruitful of all subjects is vivid biography, and no serious educator could perform a more valuable task than in providing a series of biographies of great men, really intelligible to youthful minds. As a rule, biographies of the first order require an amount of detailed knowledge in the reader which puts them out of the reach of ill-stored minds. But I have again and again found with boys that simple biographical lectures are among the most attractive of all lessons. At one time, with my private pupils, I would take a book at random out of my shelves, read an interesting extract or two, and then say that I would try to show why the author chose such a subject, why he wrote as he did, and how it all sprang out of his life and character and circumstances.

I must not be supposed, in saying this, to be leaving out of sight the virile exercise of logical and rational faculties; but that is another side of education; and the grave deficiency which I detect in the old theory was that practically all the powers and devices of education were devoted to what was called fortifying the mind and making it into a perfect instrument, while there were left out of sight the motives which were to guide the use of that instrument, and the boy was led to suppose that he was to fortify his mind solely for his own advantage. This individualist theory must somehow be modified. The aim of the process I have described is not simply to indicate to the boy the amount of selfish pleasure which he can obtain from literary masterpieces; it is rather to show the boy that he is not alone and isolated, in a world where it is advisable for him to take and keep all that he can; but that he is one of a great fellowship of emotions and interests, and that his happiness depends upon his becoming aware of this, while his usefulness and nobleness must depend upon his disinterestedness, and upon the extent to which he is willing to share his advantages. The teaching of civics, as it is called, may be of some use in this direction, as showing a boy his points of contact with society. But no instruction in the constitution of society is profitable, unless somehow or other the dutiful motive is kindled, and the heroic virtue of service made beautiful.

When then I speak of the training of the imagination, I really mean the kindling of motive; and here again I claim that this must be based on a boy's own experience. He understands well enough the possibility of feeling emotion in relation to a small circle, his home and his immediate friends. But he is probably, like most young creatures, and indeed like a good many elderly ones, inclined to be suspicious of all that is strange and foreign, and to anticipate hostility or indifference. What he would willingly share with a relation or friend, he eagerly withholds from an outsider. To cultivate his imaginative sympathy, to give him an insight into the ways and thoughts of other men, to show to him that the same qualities which evoke his trust and love are not the monopoly of his own small circle--this is just what must be taught, because it is exactly what is not instinctively evolved.

The training of the imagination then is a deliberate effort to persuade the young to believe in the real nobility and beauty of life, in the great ideas which are moulding society and welding communities together. It cannot be done in a year or a decade; but it ought to be the first aim of education to initiate the imagination of the young into the idea of fellowship, and to make the thought of selfish individualism intolerable. It is not perhaps the only end of education, but I can hardly believe that it has any nobler or more sacred end.

RELIGION AT SCHOOL

The Master of Wellington College

"After all, how seldom does a Christian education teach one anything worth knowing about Christianity." These are the words of a man whom the public schools are proud to claim, a man who has seen Christian education, whether given in the elementary or in the secondary schools tested by the slow fires of peace, and by the quick devouring furnace of war. They seem at first sight to be a verdict of "guilty" against the teachers or the system in which they play a part. That verdict will not be accepted without protest by those incriminated, but even the protesters will feel some compunction, and now that they can no longer question the heroic "student" as to what he means, and go to him for advice as to the remedies for this failure, they should search their hearts and their experience for the help he might have given, had he not laid down his arms and his life on the Somme last autumn.

For long the need of help has been felt. The teaching of religion may have been less talked and written about, and less organised by societies and associations, than have been other subjects dealt with at school, but the problem of how best to make it a living force in youth and an enduring force throughout the whole of life is often wrestled with at conferences of schoolmasters which do not publish their proceedings, and by little groups of men who feel the need of one another's help. It is certainly always present in the minds, if not in the hearts, of every head master, boarding-house master and tutor in England. These know well what the difficulties are; these know that a short cut to any subject is often a long way round: that a short cut to religion leads too often either to a slough of doubt or else to a pharisaical hilltop, from which there is no path to the great mountains where the Holy Spirit really dwells.

It is never well to insist too much on difficulties, but a bare statement of those that surround this subject is needed. There are the difficulties of course common to every subject; the difficulty of attracting the real teacher, keeping him as a teacher, improving him as a teacher when he has been attracted. Even those who start out on their career with a determination that the teaching of religion at all events should have its full share of their time and thought, find that as their teaching life goes on and fresh duties crowd in to usurp more and more all their energies, that the time they can spare, and the thought they can give, either to the preparation of their divinity lessons, or to the enriching and cultivation of their own souls, shrink. Now and then they are cruelly disappointed at the result of their efforts as some conspicuous failure seems to prove their teaching vain; they are often depressed by the apparent apathy of the leaders of the Church, by their manifest reluctance even to allow others to make the new bottles which can alone hold the new wine.

Schoolmasters belong to a devoted and to a comparatively learned profession. They should belong, especially those who feel the needs--and all must to some extent--of the religious life of the school, also to a learning profession; and their learning should go beyond the experience of boyish failings, and boyish tragedies, and boyish virtues with which they are almost daily brought into contact; beyond the dictionaries and handbooks that enable the Bible lesson to be well prepared; it should go out into the books that deal with the philosophy and the history of religion--the books of Harnack and Illingworth, Hort and Inge, Bevan and Glover, and of others who make us feel how narrow our outlook on our religion is. It would of course be foolish to drag our pupils with us exactly to the point to which these books may have brought us after many years' experience, but it is essential that we should know of the existence of such a distant point if we are to give to those we teach any idea of there being beyond the limits that they can reach at school a great and wonderful and inspiring region which they, with the help of such leaders as have been mentioned can, nay must, explore for themselves if religion is to be something more than mere emotion, fitful in its working, liable to succumb to all the stronger emotions with which life attacks the citadel of the soul.

Another difficulty is that the teacher of religion is being more continuously and searchingly tested than the teacher of any other subject. The man who expatiates in the form-room on the beauties of literature, and is suspected of never reading a book is looked upon as merely a harmless fraud by those he teaches. The man who preaches, whether officially in the pulpit or unofficially in the class-room or study, a high standard of conduct, and is unsuccessful in his own efforts to attain it, depreciates for all the value of religion. Patience and industry and long-suffering and charitableness are virtues that bear the hall mark of Christianity, but they are virtues in which the best men fail continually, are conscious of their own failure and would plead for merciful judgment. If the parish priest is exposed to the criticism of those among whom he lives, a still fiercer light beats upon the pulpit or the desk of the schoolmaster. His consciousness of this sometimes leads him to reduce his teaching to the limits of his practice, instead of extending the former and having faith in his power to bring the latter up to this level. Indeed, when teachers and those who are taught are living so close together, both, from a not unworthy fear of insincerity, are liable to make themselves and their ideals out to be worse than they are. It is sympathy alone that can overcome this difficulty. Indeed, it is safe to say that without sympathy--sympathy that understands difficulties, working equally in those who are old and those who are young--religion at school must be a very cautious and probably a very barren power.

Again, the schoolmaster is tempted, and even when he is not tempted the boys credit him with yielding to the temptation to treat religion as a super-policeman: something to make discipline easy and consequently to make his own life smooth. It is no good explaining too often that the aim is to get at religion through discipline, but this aim should ever be before us. Man cannot too early in life realise that discipline of itself is valueless. Its inestimable value in war, as in all the activities of life, is due to its being the necessary preliminary preparation for courageous action, noble thought, wise self-control and unselfish self-surrender. But above all these difficulties, dominating them all, affecting them all, perhaps poisoning them all, is the fact, not to be escaped though it is often ignored, that so many of the traditions of school life, as of national life, seem founded on a basis opposed to Christ's teaching. It is very hard to go through a day of our lives, or even a short railway journey, and not offend against the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Older people have never been able to solve this dilemma: the rulers find it more difficult than the ruled. The whole of school life is stimulated by the principle of competition, and kept together by a healthy and, on the whole, a kindly self-assertion which is hard to reconcile with the ideals that are upheld in the New Testament. Yet at school, quite as much as in the World, competition and self-assertion are tempered by abundant friendliness and generosity; and at school if not in the world, there are an increasing number of individuals who have so much spiritual power that they never need to exercise the more worldly power that clashes with the Beatitudes. Of this power boys seldom talk, except to some specially sympathetic ear at some specially heart-opening moment, but many are dumbly aware of it and they cultivate it, often unconsciously but to the great gain of those around them, by prayer and faithful worship. But even these richer natures are uncomfortably conscious that there is a conflict between what Christ commands and what the world advises. That conflict will not cease until faith has more power over our lives. It cannot grow naturally at school among boys, when it does not live in the nation among men; but it would indeed be faithless to miss, through fear of the world's withering power, any opportunity of quickening pure religion among the young. Though these opportunities vary very much in the day and the boarding school, they may be said to occur:

In the scripture lesson;

In the services whether held in chapel or, as is often the case especially in day schools, in the hall;

In the preparation for confirmation;

In all lessons in and out of school.

There is a great difference of opinion as to what should be taught in the scripture lesson, and who should teach it. It is easy enough to quote instances of extraordinary ignorance, to argue that, because a man who is in the trenches shocks his chaplain by his real or affected neglect of the facts of Bible history or the dogmas of the Church, therefore he has never had an opportunity of learning them; that same man would probably not give a much more impressive account of the profane subjects in the school curriculum. There is, too, the fact that a man may have forgotten everything of a subject and yet may have learnt much from it. Every teacher knows this, if every schoolboy does not. No one shrinks so much from revealing what he knows as the boy who is conscious that he has learnt a thing and is not sure that he can show his knowledge accurately. No subject has been left so free from what is supposed to be the sterilising influence of examinations as divinity. In many schools there have been one or two inspiring teachers of this subject who justify this system, but on the whole the result does not confirm the opinion that all would be well if we could have complete freedom from examinations. If in the future the harvest in religion is to be more worthy of the seed that is sown and the trouble of cultivation, we must face with more frankness, especially in the later years of a boy's life, all the difficulties that are presented by the problems of the Bible and Church History. We must have more courage in going beyond the syllabuses that are drawn up by universities and ecclesiastical societies. Both have to play for safety, but they are dull cards that this stake requires.

Teachers have overcome their timidity in dealing with the difficulties presented by the Old Testament. Very few now hesitate to take the book of Genesis, and, at all events if they are dealing with a high form, they let the boys see that the conflict between science and religion is only apparent, and that the victory of science does not mean the defeat of religion. If they have been lucky enough to use Driver's book on Genesis they will have felt on sure ground and any learner who has half understood it will have a shield against some of the weapons that assailed and defeated his father's generation. No teacher now would be afraid of making clear the problems presented by the book of Daniel or the book of Job, but when the New Testament is approached much more diffidence is felt, and indeed ought to be felt. Diffidence ought not however to involve silence.

A wise teacher has said that it is not the miracles of Christ but his standard that keeps men away from his Church, and therefore outside the influence for which the Church stands. True though this may be of men as life goes on, of the young it is not the whole truth. In those critical years of a man's religion--between eighteen and twenty-five--it is the sudden or the slow-growing doubt about the miracles of the New Testament, as much as the lofty standard that the "Follow me" of Christ requires, that makes the profession and even the holding of a religious faith so hard. More and more are the schools trying to prepare those in their charge for the perils that threaten the physical health and the character of the young; but it is tragic that they should be so unwilling to face frankly the perils that will sap the man's faith, and so expose his soul to the assaults of the world and the devil. It is very hard to put oneself in another's place; perhaps harder for the schoolmaster than for any other man, but when we are teaching such a subject as religion--a subject whose roots must perish if they cannot draw moisture from the springs of sincerity, we should try to imagine what must be the feelings of the thoughtful boy when he first discovers that the lessons which he has so often learnt and the Creeds that he has so often repeated were taken by his teachers in a sense which they carefully concealed from him. More harm is done by the economy of truth than by the suggestion of doubt.

It may be extraordinarily difficult to treat these problems of the New Testament with becoming reverence; but is it not true to say that the day when it becomes easy to any man to do so will be the day when he ought to stop dealing with them? The real irreverence, the only irreverence, is the glib confidence of the ignorant or the cynical concealment of one who knows but dare not tell. What idea of the New Testament does the average boy who leaves, say in the fifth form, carry away with him from his public school? He may know that certain facts are told in one Gospel and not in another; that there are certain inconsistencies in the accounts given by the different Synoptic Gospels of the same miracle, or what is apparently the same miracle. He may be able to explain the parables more fully than their author ever meant them to be explained; he may have at his fingers' ends St Paul's journeys and even have been thrilled by St Paul's shipwreck, but he will probably have missed the meaning of the good news for himself and the power to treasure it for his life's strength.

This failure to appreciate and to accept the challenge of religion--a failure shown later on in life in a certain diffidence about foreign missions, and in the toleration of social conditions that deny Christ as flatly as ever Peter did--is not the fault of the schools alone. The schools only reflect the world outside and the homes from which they are recruited. In neither is there as much light as there should be. The difficulty of the vicious circle dominates this as so many other problems. School reacts on the world, the world on the home and the home on school, the blame cannot be apportioned, need not be apportioned; how the circle can be broken it is much more important to determine. From time to time it has been broken, so decisively too that for a while the riddle seems solved, at all events the old way is abandoned for ever. Arnold's work at Rugby must have involved such a breach. His work has never had to be done all over again and there have been many to keep it in repair, but it needs to be extended now in the light of new problems, scientific, social and international. For this, as for all other extensions, courage is needed. The courage to face the difficulties that modern research and modern thought involve and the courage to point out that our Lord, though in his short career he changed the bias of men's lives, never claimed to leave man a detailed guide for conduct or for happiness. It was to a simple society that he taught the laws of purity and love, he did not extend the range of their application beyond the needs of the Pharisee, the Sadducee, the Scribe, the peasant and the dweller in the little towns through which he shed the light of his presence. These laws sanctify the whole of life because they dominate the heart, from which all life must spring, but they do not answer all questions about all the subordinate provinces of life. The arts in their narrow sense, philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by. Man will not neglect the one or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of Christ, but at times the urgency of his Master's business will seem to shut them out of his life.

All this needs learning by the old, and explaining to the young, for otherwise life will be one-sided, and when the day comes, as come it must to those who think, when a choice must be made, and there seems no alternative to following literally in Christ's footsteps and turning the back on much of the beauty and the thrill of the world, bewilderment will seize the chooser and at the best he will dedicate himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life. Religion at school must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and intellectual, that become powerful in late boyhood and early manhood. If, as so often is the case, it ignores their existence, or endeavours to starve them, they may well assert themselves with fatal power, to coarsen and degrade the whole of life.

The scripture lesson will indeed miss its opportunity if it does not, in the later stages of a boy's career, set him thinking on these subjects, and help him to a wise appreciation of the holiness of beauty as well as of the beauty of holiness. To accomplish this task the language of the Bible itself gives noble help. All the qualities of great literature shine forth from it and it should put to shame and flight the tawdry and the melodramatic. It is an ill service not to make all familiar with the actual words of Holy Writ. Commentaries and Bible histories may be at times convenient tools, but they are only tools, and accurate knowledge of what they teach is no compensation for a want of respectful familiarity with the text itself.

Hardly less important for good and evil are the chapel services. They are much attacked. It has been argued that public worship is distasteful in later life because of the compulsory chapels of boyhood. If this were really so, evidence should be forthcoming that those who come from schools where there is no compulsory attendance at chapel, because there is no chapel to attend, are more eager to avail themselves of the opportunities offered by college chapels than are their more chapel ridden contemporaries. No one, however, can be quite satisfied that chapel services are as helpful as they might be. The difficulty is how to improve them. The suggestion that they should all be voluntary is at first sight attractive but there are two insuperable difficulties. The one is the power of fashion, for it might well become fashionable in a certain house not to attend chapel. Those who know anything of the inside of schools know how such a fashion would deter many of the best boys from going, and martyrdom ought not to be part of the training of school life. The other difficulty is more subtle, but none the less real it originates in the boys' quite healthy fear of claiming merit. Those in authority, if wise, would not count attendance at chapel for righteousness, but some of the most sensitive boys might think that they would do so, and might stay away in consequence, and thus deprive themselves of something they really valued. Two or three, not many, might come from a wrong motive, and perhaps these would stay to pray, but they would be no compensation for the loss of the others.

From time to time it is possible to have voluntary services, and attendance at Holy Communion should always be voluntary, not only in name but in fact. On the whole it is better that a boy who neglects this duty should go on neglecting it, than that those who come should feel that their presence is noted with approval or the reverse.

But it is different with the daily service. Irksome it may sometimes be, not only to boys; but half its virtue lies in the fact that all are there in body and may sometimes be there in spirit too. The familiarity of the oft-repeated prayers and the oft-sung hymns leads to inattention perhaps, but seldom, it may be hoped, to callousness; religious emotion may only occasionally be stirred but the thread of natural piety, binding man to man and man to God, is strengthened, as fresh strands are added. At the least it may be claimed for the chapel services that they rescue from our hours of business some minutes each day in which our thoughts are free to make their way to the throne of God. Christ's promise to bring rest to those who come to him has been fulfilled in many a school chapel. Those of us who have had to pass through the valley of sorrow and temptation and loneliness--and who has not?--know that this is no mean claim. Boys, even men, often grumble at what they really value. To do so is our national defect, misleading to the onlooker. The truth is, we are so fearful of being accused of casting our pearls before swine, that we often pretend, even to ourselves, that what we know to be the most precious pearl in our possession is valueless.

Most masters and boys would agree that, in the few weeks preceding confirmation, the religious life is deepest and most sincere. There is a moving of the waters then, and many make the effort, and step in, and are made whole for the time at all events. As to what exactly goes on in the mind of anyone at such a time there can be no certainty. There is the obvious danger of a reaction, and, guard against it as one may, it exists and sometimes leads to disaster; but there is another danger to which the schoolmaster is then liable, it is the danger of making confirmation an occasion for much talk on sexual difficulties. The existence of these should be faced, but at any time rather than at confirmation, except so far as they occur quite naturally in dealing with the commandments.

It is a real disaster for a child to associate this time, when he should be trying to shoulder enthusiastically his responsibilities as a citizen of God's Kingdom upon earth, with any particular sin. He must indeed overcome evil, but he must overcome it with good. It is on good that his eyes should be fixed. It is towards the Lord of all that is good that his heart should be uplifted. Anyone who has had to do with this time knows what it means in a boy's religious life, how reluctant he is to speak of it, how perilous it is to disturb his reluctance by inquisitive question or excessive exhortation. He knows, too, how much his own nature has gained by contact at such times with the reverent stirrings of less world-stained souls, how wondrous has been the spiritual refreshment that has come to him from the unconscious witness of the younger heart.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet