Cambridge Essays on Education | Page 7

upon the senses as on
moral qualities, the sense of sympathy and of fairness; it needs
self-discipline as well as knowledge both of oneself and one's
fellow-man. "How can a man," says Carlyle, "without clear vision in
his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head?" "Eyes and
ears," said the ancient philosopher, "are bad witnesses for such as have
barbarian souls." Thirdly, the tragedy of the past generation was not its
failure to accumulate wealth; in that respect it was more successful than
any generation which preceded it. The tragedy of the nineteenth century
was that, when it had acquired wealth, it had no clear idea, either
individually or collectively, what to do with it.
And yet the house of humanity faces both ways; it looks out towards
the world of appearances as well as to the world of spirit, and is, in fact,

the meeting-place of both. Materialism is not wrong because it deals
with material things. It is wrong because it deals with nothing else. It is
wrong, also, in education because taking the point of view of the adult,
it makes the material product itself the all-important thing. In every
right conception of education the child is central. The child is interested
in things. It wants first to sense them, or as Froebel would say "to make
the outer inner"; it wants to play with them, to construct with them, and
along the line of this inward propulsion the educational process has to
act. The "thing-studies" if one may so term them, which have been
introduced into the curriculum, such as gardening, manual training
(with cardboard, wood, metal), cooking, painting, modelling, games
and dramatisation, are it is true later introductions, adopted mainly
from utilitarian motive; and they have been ingrafted on the original
trunk, being at first regarded as detachable extras, but they quickly
showed that they were an organic part of the real educative process;
they have already reacted on the other subjects of the curriculum, and
have, in the earlier stages of education become central. In the same way,
vocation is having great influence upon the higher terminal stages of
education. All this is part of the most important of all correlations, the
correlation of school with life.
But the child's interest in things is social. Through the primitive
occupations of mankind, he is entering step by step into the heritage of
the race and into a richer fuller personal experience. The science which
enlists a child's interest is not that which is presented from the logical,
abstract point of view. The way in which the child acquires it is the
same as that in which mankind acquired it--his occupation presents
certain difficulties, to overcome these difficulties he has to exercise his
thought, he invents and experiments; and so thought reacts upon
occupation, occupation reacts upon thought. And out of that reciprocal
action science is born. In the same way his play is social--in his games
too he enters into the heritage of the race, and in playing them he is
learning unconsciously the greatest of all arts, the art of living with
others. In his play as well as in his school work the lines of his natural
development show how he can be trained to co-operate with the law of
human progress.
This fitness and readiness to co-operate with the great movement of
human progress, all-round fitness of body, mind and spirit, provides the

formula which fuses and reconciles two growing tendencies in modern
education.
There is in the first place the movement towards self-expression and
self-development--postulating for the scholar a larger measure of
liberty in thought and action, and self-direction than hitherto--this
movement is represented mainly by Dr Montessori, and by "What is
and what might be"; it is a movement which is spreading upwards from
the infant school to the higher standards. Side by side with it is the
movement towards the fuller development of corporate life in the
school, the movement which trains the child to put the school first in
his thoughts, to live for the society to which he belongs and find his
own personal well-being in the well-being of that society. This has
been, ever since Arnold, sedulously fostered in the games of the public
schools, and fruitful of good results in that limited sphere; it has been
applied with conspicuous success to the development of
self-government, and it has reached its fullest expression in the little
Commonwealth of Mr Homer Lane. But we are beginning to recognise
its wider applications, it is capable of transforming the spirit of the
class-room activities as well as the activities of a playing field, it is in
every way as applicable to the elementary school as to Eton, or Rugby,
or Harrow, and to girls as well as