Cambridge Essays on Education | Page 4

and Latin have dilated on the value of grammar as
a mental discipline, and argued that the best way to acquire a good
English style is to know the ancient languages, a proposition
discredited by many examples to the contrary. It is really this insistence

on grammatical minutiae that has proved repellent to young people and
suggested the dictum that "it doesn't much matter what you teach a boy
so long as he hates it." Better had it been, abandoning the notion that
every one should learn Greek, to dwell upon the boundless pleasure
which minds of imagination and literary taste derive from carrying in
memory the gems of ancient wisdom which are more easily
remembered because they are not in our own language, and the finest
passages of ancient poetry. There are plenty of things--indeed there are
far more things--in modern literature as noble and as beautiful as the
best of the ancients can give us. But they are not the same things. The
ancient poets have the freshness and the fragrance of the springtime of
the world [2]. Or take another sort of instance. Take the pleasures
which nature spreads before us with a generous hand, hills and fields
and woods and rocks, flowers and the songs of birds, the ever-shifting
aspects of clouds and of landscapes under light and shadow. How few
persons in most countries--for there is in this respect a difference
between different peoples--notice these things. Everybody sees them
few observe them or derive pleasure from them. Is not this largely
because attention has not been properly called to them? They have not
been taught to look at natural objects closely and see the variety there is
in them. Persons in whom no taste for pictures has ever been formed by
their having been taken to see, good pictures and told what constitutes
merit, are, when led into a picture gallery, usually interested in the
subjects. They like to see a sportsman shooting wild fowl, or a battle
scene, or even a prize fight, or a mother tending a sick child, because
these incidents appeal to them. But they seldom see in a picture
anything but the subject; they do not appreciate: imaginative quality or
composition, or colour, or light and shade or indeed anything except
exact imitation of the actual. So in nature the average man is; struck by
something so exceptional as a lofty rock, like Ailsa Craig or the
Needles off the Isle of Wight, or an eclipse of the moon, or perhaps a
blood-red sunset; but he does not notice and consequently draws no
pleasure from landscapes in general, whether noble; or quietly beautiful.
The capacity for taking pleasure, in all these things may not be absent.
There is reason: to think that most children possess it, because when
they are shown how to observe they usually respond, quickly
perceiving, for instance, the differences between one flower and

another, quickly, even when quite young, learning the distinctive
characters and names of each, enjoying the process of recognising each
when they walk along the lanes, as indeed every intelligent child enjoys
the exercise of its observing powers. The disproportionate growth of
our urban population, a thing regrettable in other respects also, has no
doubt made it more difficult to give young people a familiar knowledge
of nature, but the facilities for going into the country and the happy
lengthening of summer holidays render it easier than formerly to
provide opportunities for Nature Study, which, properly conducted, is a
recreation and not a lesson. There is no source of enjoyment which lasts
so keen all through life or which fits one better for other enjoyments,
such as those of art and of travel. Of the value of the habit of alert
observation for other purposes I say nothing, wishing here to insist only
upon what it may do for delight.
It is often alleged that in England boys and girls show less mental
curiosity, less desire for knowledge than those of most European
countries, or even than those of the three smaller countries north and
west of England in which the Celtic element is stronger than it is in
South Britain. A parallel charge has, ever since the days of Matthew
Arnold, been brought against the English upper and middle classes. He
declared that they care less for the "things of the mind" and show less
respect to eminence in science, literature and art, than is the case
elsewhere, as for instance in France, Germany, or Italy (to which one
may add the United States); and he thus explained the scanty interest
taken by these classes in educational progress.
Should this latter charge be well founded, the fact it notes would tend
to perpetuate the former evil, for the indifference of parents reacts upon
the