Cambridge Essays on Education | Page 6

divided into two
conflicting groups, and both were separated by an estranging gulf from
the grammar schools and high schools as the grammar schools in turn
were shut off from the public schools on the one hand, and from the
schools of art, music, and of technology on the other There was no
cohesion, no concerted effort, no mutual support, no great plan of
advance, no homologating idea.
This fact in itself is sufficient to account for the ineffectiveness, the
despondencies, the insincerities and ceaseless unrest of Western

civilisation in the nineteenth century. The tree of human life cannot
flower and bear fruit for the healing of the nations when its great
life-forces spend themselves in making war on each other.
If the experience of the century which lies before us is to be different, it
must be made so by means of education. Education is the science
which deals with the world as it is capable of becoming. Other sciences
deal with things as they are, and formulate the laws which they find to
prevail in things as they are. The eyes of education are fixed always
upon the future, and philosophy of whatever kind, directly adumbrates
a Utopia, thinks on educational lines.
The aim of education must therefore be as wide as it is high, it must be
co-extensive with life. The advance must be along the whole front, not
on a small sector only. William Morris, when he tried his hand at
painting, used to say, that what bothered him always was the frame: he
could not conceive of art as something "framed off" and isolated from
life. Just as William Morris wanted to turn all life into art, so with
education. It cannot be "framed off" and detached from the larger
aspects of political and social well-being; it takes all life for its
province. It is not an end in itself, any more than the individuals with
whom it deals; it acts upon the individual, but through the individual it
acts upon the mass, and its aim is nothing less than the right ordering of
human society.
To cope with a task which can be stated in these terms, education must
be free. A new age postulates a new education. The traditions which
have dominated hitherto must one by one be challenged to render
account of themselves, that which is good in them must be conserved
and assimilated, that which is effete must be scrapped and rejected.
Neither can the administrative machinery, as it exists, be taken for
granted; unless it shows those powers of adaptation and growth which
show it to be alive and not dead, it too must be scrapped and rejected;
new wine is fatal to old skins. Education must regain once more what
she possessed at the time of the Renascence--the power of direction;
she must be mistress of her fate.
Further, if education is to be a force which makes for co-operation in
place of conflict, she must not be divided against herself. She must
leave behind forever the separations and snobberies, the
misunderstandings, the wordy battles beloved of pedants and

politicians. The smoke and dust of controversy obscures her vision, and
she needs all her energies to tackle the great task which confronts her.
In this regard nothing is so full of promise for the future as the new
sense of unity which is beginning both to animate and actuate the
whole teaching profession, from the University to the Kindergarten,
and has already eventuated in the formation of a Teachers Registration
Council, on which all sorts and conditions of education are represented.
The materialists have not been slow to see their chance, to challenge
the old tradition of literary education, and to urge the claims of science.
But the aim which they place before us is frankly stated--it is the
acquisition of wealth; they are "on manna bent and mortal ends," and
their conception of the future is a world in which one nation competes
against another for the acquisition of markets and commodities. In
effect, therefore, materialism challenges the classics, but it accepts the
self-seeking ideals of the past generations, and accepts also, as an
integral part of the future, the scramble of conflicting interests, labour
against capital, nation against nation, man against man. Now the first
characteristic of the genuine scientific mind is the power of learning by
experience. Real science never makes the same mistake twice.
Obviously the repetition of the past can only eventuate in the repetition
of the present. And that is precisely what education sets itself to
counteract. The materialist forgets three outstanding and obvious facts.
Firstly, science cannot be the whole of knowledge, because "science"
(in his limited sense of the term) deals only with what appears.
Secondly, power of insight depends not so much