THE EDUCATIONAL CRISIS IN ENGLAND

CLOUDESLEY S. H. BRERETON, MELTON CONSTABLE, ENGLAND Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:

My first duty must be—and it is a very pleasant duty—to thank you most heartily for the great honor you have conferred upon me in asking me over to America to lecture to you on English education. I little thought a year ago, when I had the privilege of studying and appraising your excellent educational section at the Paris Exhibition, I should so soon have the opportunity of seeing on the spot the actual working of your schools and of meeting face to face the pick and flower of those who have built up, or are building up, this magnificent and unparalleled system of national education. The most casual observer cannot fail to be struck by the intense and fervent belief of American democracy in its schools, which is only to be matched by the fervent belief of the schools in American democracy. Such a happy conjunction between the two seems fraught with limitless possibilities. Every year the schools grow richer as more money and thought are poured into them. Every year they turn out a higher and more efficient type of citizens, ready, when their time of giving comes, to give as freely as they themselves have received. Believe me, deeply as I value the honor of being invited over here to speak on the problems of English education, I am still more grateful to you for giving me the chance of gaining some insight into your own.

No doubt, in part, some of this immense and rapid progress is due to the fact that you were able to begin, so to say, at the beginning, untrammeled by the excessive top hamper with which all countries of an older civilization are encumbered. I do not know how often, in seeing the ease and rapidity with which you have solved, or are solving, the various educational problems which confront you, I have experienced a regret that the age of miracles is past and that we, as a nation, cannot be re-created and born again, so that we too might start with a blank sheet, or tabula rasa so to say, on which we might erect a brand-new system of national education. And yet a moment's reflection has always convinced me that even the worst and most antiquated of our traditions, by which we are at times so sore let and hindered, are not without their uses. In fact, the problem is to modify rather than to abolish them. The curious habits and customs, the various modes of belief, the conception and ways of looking at things which have impressed themselves so strongly on English education, are not mere scaffolding by which we have been able to raise up, tier by tier, the mighty structure of national life, but are verily and indeed part and parcel of that structure, reaching down and extending to its very foundation and base, so that their complete removal, if it were possible, would be a distinct loss of certain elemental things essentially national, and their radical excision would be a mutilation of part

of those forces which make the English body politic what it is, and not something else.

If you agree with this view, I think you will readily admit that national education is not, as the mechanical-minded theorists of the eighteenth century imagined, a sort of machine you could clap on to this or that nation, whether English or French, European or Asiatic, in the sure and certain expectation of turning out exactly the same finished article, true in every detail to pattern and specification, a kind of education-made automaton, a great monstrosity, if it really existed, like that other figment of the eighteenth century, the economic man, so dear to early writers of political economy. If the spirit of the nineteenth century, which has just passed away, had one message for us, it was to substitute for this mechanical theory that of evolution; to dethrone the belief in cataclysms and sudden changes, in favor of the view of sure but certain processes; to restate the problem of progress in terms of living growth instead of artificial manufacture. It denied that the child is a mere lump of clay to be puddled and molded into some conventional type, as tho, forsooth, the Lord God had not already breathed into it a soul and a personality. On the contrary, it asserted that it is the bounden duty of the teacher to respect the child's individuality-a practice which you, to your eternal honor, have more than any other nation held to and maintained. It no less vigorously affirmed that it is the bounden duty of the statesman, in whatever reform he may undertake, to respect the genius and individuality of his nation.

For nations, as I consider them, are not mere undisciplined aggregates of competing individuals, but organized social wholes, to whom national education bears the same relationship as the flower to the parent plant. If I had to give a definition of national education, I would define it as the outcome, half conscious, half unconscious, of the desire of the more thoughtful members of a nation to hand down to the rising generation. the experience, ethical, intellectual, and practical, of the race, in order that they may continue to develop the nation on its own line, and realize more fully and perfectly the ideals, whether existing or naissant, in their own hearts.

They desire, it is true, to render their sons more efficient for the battle of life, yet, knowing that man cannot live by bread alone, they are anxious to see instilled into those that come after them those moral standards and aims which they believe to be the most precious heritage they have received from their forefathers; which form, so to say, the very bed.rock of national character and temperament, and enable a nation on the morrow of some crushing reverse or defeat to pull itself together and go on. In a word, the school should be the microcosm of all that is best in the national life and ideals, and its further progress largely depends on its becoming more and more the mirror of these high hopes and aspirations.

But perhaps someone will say: This theory may square very well with

European conditions, but our American schools are none the less one of the most efficient machines the world has ever known for converting into American citizens the countless children of the strangers that are within our gates. It is quite true that the American schools do literally help to transform the child of the newcomer into an American citizen, and it is indeed one of the chief glories of the American schools that they are able to effect such a conversion as deep and thoro as any other conversion, religious or otherwise.

But such a fact is not against my theory. On the contrary, it is a striking proof of how a nation is really a social whole, which demands, in the name of national unity, the assimilation of the individual of the national type. It emphasizes the vigor and genius of the American. national character that it is able so thoroly to leaven, permeate, and transform these foreign elements. It illustrates incidentally the fact that American education must proceed along the lines of American ideals, which is only what I have been urging in reference to England.

But I would not have you think for a moment that I wish to see a Chinese wall thrown around a nation or a nation's schools, in order to shut out and exclude all foreign influences. On the contrary, I am most anxious that in education, as in commerce, we should maintain the policy of the open door. Never in the history of the world, as far as one can judge, have the nations, and especially the English nation, been under at deeper obligation than at present to learn and copy from one another what is best. Besides, education in its highest sense is the raising and uplifting, not only of each of the several nations, but of all humanity; as such it cannot be shut up in water-tight compartments or separated by impassable boundaries. What I do contend for is this, that we cannot profitably copy the methods of other countries till we have got a clear idea of the condition and genesis of our own education. In other words, we must first be able to state the problem and appreciate its main factors before we can say whether this or that solution, however excellent it may be on abstract lines, however well it has worked in other countries, is really applicable in our case.

But this seems to me to be the place to mention another factor which appears to me second in importance only to that of national character in considering the problem of national education. Nations are not only divided by what they have inherited from the past; they are also differentiated by the diversity of their destinies. To understand the problem of national education we must not only ask from what the nation has come, we must also inquire whither it is going. For the school is not only the trustee of the past; it must also take thought for the future. Now, it seems to me that the problems with which every nation has to deal tend to group themselves around some central problem, which, in its turn, gives its own particular hue and color to the others.

Let me

come at once to concrete instances to show what I mean. Anyone conversant with French life will, I believe, readily admit that the fundamental problem in France is the religious problem. In fact, you cannot scratch, or even touch, the surface of any other problem without at once coming in contact with some of its seemingly endless ramifications. In Germany it will probably be readily admitted that the central problem is the reconstruction of society. Here in America, if a passing visitor may venture on an opinion, the problem with which you have to deal is that of the adjustment of the relation of capital and labor; while in England, it seems to me, the coming problem, if it has not come already, is that of imperialism. One might almost think it was a sort of divine dispensation that each of the chief civilizing states of the world is set down, as it were, to work out its own salvation on different lines, so that the other nations, if it succeeds, may enter into its labors; for no nation liveth unto itself alone, but to the benefit, in the end, of humanity.

The bottom problem, I repeat, in England is imperialism. To prevent any possible misunderstanding, let me attempt to state what I mean by the term. Of course, it has nothing to do with that militant spirit of spread eagleism we call jingoism; it is not mere flag-waving or any other form of human cockadoodleism; it is not land-grabbing; it is not the insane wish to paint as much as possible of the map of the world red, or whatever the national color may be. On the other hand, it seems to me stupid, if not criminal, to shut our eyes to the fact that our empire, even if we do not add another rod to it for fifty years, is already enormous.

Speaking roughly, we, a nation of bare forty million souls, are responsible to Almighty God for the lives, fortunes, and happiness of some four billions. Are we, like unworthy servants, unmindful of our high responsibilities, going to hide our talents in a napkin and do nothing, or are we going to attempt to take up as best we may the "white man's burden"? To me it seems there is but one alternative. If we are not to share in the fate of Tyre and Sidon, Macedonia and Rome, we must do our duty toward this great empire, not running it for our own selfish profit and pleasure, but for the welfare of all that are in it. Otherwise our fate is certain, be it long or short in coming. I feel in this matter we have your sympathy. To you, too, the call of empire has come, and, after long counting the cost, you, too, have put your hand to the plow, and, having put it, show little sign of turning back or of refusing to accept the greatness thus thrust upon you. But we cannot do our duty to others until we have done our duty to ourselves. If we are to run the empire as we should, we must put things on a far more efficient basis at home, not only in the way of social and economic reform (of political we have had enough and to spare), but also in education.

Now, English education is at present in a chaotic state. In some places there is overlapping and friction between competing schools and

conflicting local authorities; in others the educational supply is miserably deficient. What is wanted at the present time is organization and co-ordination, not indeed uniformity, but unity, or at least harmonious working, between the different educational agencies. This cry for unity. that is voiced by so many is, however, no new thing. It has been raised again and again, yet hitherto has always met with failure. The causes of this failure lie deep. They can be disclosed only by an inquiry into the reasons in the history of English education that have led to the present complicated position. I shall, therefore, attempt to give you, in a rough and ready fashion, some insight into historical causes, and, dividing the problem into two parts, deal first with the local and then with the central authorities.

The beginnings of English education were religious. The ethical bias in English education must never be lost sight of when any estimate of the problem is made. The Reformation only transferred the school from the church to the king, not as the head of the state, but as the temporal head of the church. This, of course, only applies to the secondary schools.

The seventeenth century was a blank as far as education of the working classes was concerned. At the commencement of the eighteenth century we find Sir Richard Steele pleading in the Tatler for the education of the poor. His cry did not fall on deaf ears, and produced a movement within the established church which led to the foundation of the so-called charity schools (under the auspices of the Society for Christian Knowledge). These schools at first grew and increased, and at one time contained as many as twenty-six thousand children. But opposi tion soon appeared; on one hand they were attacked by those who complained of their superficiality; on the other, by those who asserted that it made the poor discontented with their station in life. There was no idea of seeking the help or assistance of the state. The great English radical, Priestley, who had inherited the laissez-faire traditions of 1648, was dead against the notion. It is not until we come to Adam Smith that we find the idea of a state system of primary education mooted. He had been influenced by the ideas of Turgot and the working of the Scottish system; unhappily for the future of secondary education, he was utterly opposed to state aid or intervention in the sphere of higher education, looking on it as likely to lead to intellectual tyranny.

So at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were two tendencies in education, one laying stress on the ethical, the other on the intellectual side; the former represented by the now languishing charity schools, which were suffering from the attacks of the obscurantist faction in the church, who disbelieved in education for the working classes; the other, by the philosophical radicals, who were advocates of the state system of primary education, but encountered opposition from