Cambridge Essays on Education | Page 8

to boys.
These two movements towards a fuller liberty of self-fulfilment, and
towards a fuller and stronger social life, are convergent, and
supplement, or rather complement, each other. Personality, after all, is
best defined as "capacity for fellowship," and only in the social milieu
can the individual find his real self-fulfilling. Unless he functions
socially, the individual develops into eccentricity, negative criticism,
and the cynical aloofness of the "superior person." On the other hand
without freedom of individual development, the organisation of life
becomes the death of the soul. Prussia has shown how the psychology
of the crowd can be skilfully manipulated for the most sinister ends. It
is a happy omen for our democracy that both these complementary
movements are combined in the new life of the schools. To both
appeals, the appeal of personal freedom, and the appeal of the corporate
life, the British child is peculiarly responsive. Round these two
health-centres the form of the new system will take shape and grow.
And growth it must be, not building. The body is not built up on the

skeleton, the skeleton is secreted by the growing body. The hope of
education is in the living principle of hope and enthusiasm, which
stretches out towards perfection. One distrusts instinctively at the
present time anything schematic. There are men, able enough as
organisers, who will be ready to sit down and produce at two days'
notice a full cut-and-dried scheme of educational reconstruction. They
will take our present resources, and make the best of them, no doubt,
re-arranging and re-manipulating them, and making them go as far as
they can. They will shape the whole thing out in wood, and the result
will be wooden. It will be static and stratified, with no upward lift. But
that is not the way. Education is a thing of the spirit, it is instinct with
life, [Greek: thermon ti pragma] as Aristotle would say, drawing upon
resources that are not its own, "unseen yet crescive in its faculty" and in
its growth taking to itself such outward form as it needs for the purpose
of its inward life. Six years at least it will take for the new spirit to
work itself out into the definite larger forms.
That does not mean that it will come without hard purposeful thinking
and much patient effort. Education does not "happen" any more than
"art happens,"--and just as with the arts of the middle ages, so the
well-being of education depends not on the chance appearance of a few
men of genius but on the right training and love of the ordinary
workman for his work. Education is a spiritual endeavour, and it will
come, as the things of the spirit come, through patience in well-doing,
through concentration of purpose on the highest, through drawing
continually on the inexhaustible resources of the spiritual world. The
supreme "maker" is the poet, the man of vision. For the administrator,
the task is different from what it has been. It is for him to watch and
help experiments, to prevent the abuse of freedom, not to preserve
uniformities but to select variations. But he is handling a power which,
as George Meredith says, "is a heaven-sent steeplechaser, and takes a
flying leap of the ordinary barriers."
To-morrow is the day of opportunity. To-day is the day of preparation.
Yesterday's ideals have become the practical politics of the present
hour. Our countrymen recognise now as they have never done before
that the problem of national reconstruction is in the main a problem of
national education: "the future welfare of the nation," to use Mr Fisher's
words, "depends upon its schools." Men make light now of the extra

millions which a few years ago seemed to bar the way of progress. At
the same time the discipline of the last three years has hammered into
us a new consciousness of national solidarity and social obligation. As
the whole energies of a united people are at this moment concentrated
on the duty of destruction which is laid upon us, so after the war with
no less urgency and no less oneness of heart the whole energies of a
united nation must be concentrated on the upbuilding of life. That
upbuilding is to be economic as well as spiritual, but those who think
out most deeply the need of the economic situation, are most surely
convinced that the problems of industry and commerce are at the
bottom human problems and cannot find solution without a new sense
of "co-operation and brotherliness[1]."
Such is the need and such the task. England is looking to her schools as
she never did before. The aim of her education must be both high and
wide, higher than lucre, wider than the nation. And the aim of our
education cannot