Public schools and the public needs : suggestions for the reform of our teaching methods in the light of modern requirements

Front matter

SUGGESTIONS

FOR THE REFORM OP OUR TEACHING METHODS IN THE

LIGHT OF MODERN REQUIREMENTS

Preface

This book aims at bringing home to English parents some ideas which have long been familiar to hundreds of thinking schoolmasters. It will be seen that I discuss only those problems which are most urgent at the present moment, and that I have avoided any full consideration of such wide-reaching changes as would be involved in our adoption of the " Frankfort Curriculum " or the "New Method " of teaching Modern Languages. My aim has been to plead for nothing which could not be attempted at once, and without serious dislocation of present Public School arrangements ; though it may be evident that such reforms, when once started, would by their own natural impetus carry us far beyond the very obvious changes suggested in this book.

iv Preface.

I have to thank manj kind friends for valuable assistance ; especially Mr. C. C. Cotterill, to whose criticism and advice I am very deeply indebted, and Messrs. E. D. Mansfield and G. Gidley Robinson, who have kindly looked through my proofs. I am also very much indebted to the following gentlemen, on most of whom I had no personal claim whatever, but who have all shown the most courteous readiness to help me in my enquiries : M. Leon Cledat, Professor of Mediaeval French Language and Literature at Lyons ; Dr. Granger, of University College, Nottingham ; Mr. F. Griffin, Headmaster of Birkenhead Grammar School ; the Rev. W. S. Grignon, formerly Headmaster of Felsted School ; Prof. Dr. A. Hamann, Director of the Dorotheenschule at Berlin ; Mr. H. R. King, Assistant and House Master at Sherborne School ; Prof. Dr. Morsbach, of Gottingen ; Geheimrath W. Miinch, Professor of Pedagogy at Berlin ; Dr. Rosenberg, Oberlehrer at the Kollnisches Gymnasium, Berlin ; Prof. W. W.

Preface. v

Skeat, of Cambridge ; Mr. F. Storr, Editor of the Journal of Education ; and Dr. Henry Sweet, of Oxford. I should add, however, that none of these gentlemen are in any way responsible for any fact or opinion for which I do not quote them specially by name.

In the matter of books, 1 am under the greatest obligations to Dr. Sweet's "Practical Study of Languages," to the late W. H. Widgery's " Teaching of Languages in Schools," to various articles by Mr. Fabian Ware in different parts of the Education Department's " Reports," and to the back numbers of the Journal of Education,

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Our bad French and German Results due to

Defective Organization 1

Chapter I. OUR BAD FRENCH AND GERMAN

RESULTS DUE TO DEFECTIVE

ORGANIZATION.

"Headmasters fortunately cannot prevent such boys from growing up into good men ; but great men, in spite of their affection for their schools, often look back to them as a time of intellectual waste." — Dr. Welldon, Headmaster of Harrow, at the Headmasters' Conference of 1890.

Early in this year 1901, there took place in the columns of the Times one of the longest and most desperate battles on record, between the champions of Public Schools and of ' Crammers ' respectively, concerning the policy of our Schools with reference to Modern Languages and to preparation for the Army : yet even this very lengthy discussion can have done very little to enlighten the average parent. Some men may have come to the cynical conclusion which I heard expressed by one man of business, that

" there must have been pretty hard swearing on one side or the other." But the more charitably inchned persons, whom we may trust to have been in the majority, must have turned away in hopeless bewilderment from this tangle of directly conflicting assertions, wdth a weary feeling that there must be something wrong somewhere, but without any definite idea where the evil lies, or how it is to be remedied. It is for such parents as these that the present book is written : for those who are honestly anxious to do the best for their sons, but who are unable, as hard-worked men, to study the technicalities of any profession but their own. Complicated and obscure as many educational controversies must be, the points at issue in this Times discussion were quite simple, if only they had not been so confused by the passions of the combatants. The main question can be made perfectly comprehensible to outsiders, for the simple reason that, as I hope to show, our educational authorities are themselves, to a great extent, amateurs, working on principles of which the man in the street is as competent to judge as they. Whatever technical discussions have been found necessary in this book, have been relegated to the Appendix, where the reader will also find much documentary and other corroborative evidence in support of assertions which, in order to avoid fatiguing his attention, I have put as briefly as possible in the text.

Boy and man, I have been connected with our Public Schools for nearly twenty years, and am still as convinced as ever that, on the whole, they do deserve the confidence and respect of the country. Though 1 know from personal experience (what the Public School champions too often ignore) that there are some private tutors who exert over their pupils a moral influence which, under the same circumstances, very few even of the best Public School masters would be able to exert, yet I cannot for one moment subscribe to the attacks made by several private tutors upon the Public School system in general. I say this by way of preface because, on the particular points which come within the scope of my criticism, it seems to me impossible to avoid condemning the policy of the Schools almost as strongly as it has been condemned by their most bitter adversaries. Their attitude towards the teaching of Modern Languages and the preparation of our future officers has been almost incredibly stupid and perverse : and these are two very important branches of school work. But, at the back of this, the system itself is still honest and healthy : its worst faults, however intolerable in their present effects, are comparatively superficial, and could far more easily be remedied than others which, though less glaring to the eye, might indicate a much deeper corruption. Our schools are suffering from no paralysis, no deep-seated insidious disease, (unless that amateurism which pervades so many institutions of the country be reckoned as such), but simply from a decayed tooth or two which cause far more present pain, yet could soon be put right by the dentist. The only pity is that the very part of the body educational which most needs this simple operation, is precisely that part without whose consent the body cannot march off to face the forceps. Though the whole body feels the pain, yet the head, which is mainly responsible, insists on attributing it to other causes. It would fain persuade us all that the evil lies elsewhere : the unfortunate stomach must be drenched with pills and potions : our substance must be wasted on artificial pain-killers and anodynes. For a moment, it may be, we are drugged into forgetfulness : but the fumes of these drowsy syrups soon evaporate, the pain begins again to rage worse than ever, and again the bitter cry of the whole body echoes down the columns of the Times : and again the head tries to argue with us that this is no toothache which Ave feel, but some delusion sent by the devil Philistinism for our sins.

The simile may not be artistic, but I have caught at it as a means of expressing what it is not easy to express otherwise. Anyone pleading for an educational reform has to face the same difficulty which, until a year ago. Army reformers felt so acutely. The public, knowing that we take pains to get good men and that we pay them very liberally, is slow to realize that even the best men, when placed in a position where they become a law unto themselves, are almost certain to fall here and there into absurdities so gross, and to cling with such loving conservatism to these absurdities, that each generation wonders how its fathers could have tolerated such a preposterous state of things. The Headmasters, like the War Office officials, have hitherto been a law unto themselves, strong against even the most damaging criticism : and only now at last, when this war has opened our eyes to the follies which may be first committed and then defended by picked men, supposed to be specialists because we pay them highly for special services — only now at last, I say, is the public ready to judge a system, not merely by the individual worth of the men who work it, but also by common-sense enquiries into the lines on which they work it, and above all into the results which they obtain. For it must be distinctly understood that there can be no criticism more damaging to our present Modern Language system than to state, in plain words, its results. While English Headmasters find it difficult to get homeborn assistants who, even after a short professional stay abroad, can talk French or German in class, there are German schools (and Classical schools too) where even boys of twelve never hear a word of any language than French, nor speak themselves any other language, during their French lesson.

Apart from what any intelligent boy picks up for himself in class, and would pick up, perhaps even better, if shut up alone with a dumb book, — apart from this, the average amount of French taught in an hour's lesson at a German school is at least double of that which is taught in the same time with us. The reader will find, in Appendix A, the most startling evidence as to this difference. I will only quote here two facts : first, that an English boy may pass into Sandhurst with more than twice as many marks for French as the lowest successful candidate, and yet write French iiwrse than it is written by the average boy of twelve-and-a-half at a German classical school: and again, that one of the defenders of compulsory Latin for Army candidates, in a debate in the House of Commons, pleaded that " the knowledge of French and German acquired at school [in England] was so superficial that it was a farce to examine candidates in those languages. ''"' The reader must bear in mind, all through these following pages, that what I have to do is not to prove our Public School Modern Language results to be bad : this is practically admitted by all. My real task is to make the parent realize, if only dimly, firstly how bad they are, and secondly how thoroughly our educational authorities are responsible for this inferiority. And my main difficulty — even harder than to render intelligible those technical details upon which I must

Oiir Bad French and German Results, 7

sometimes touch — is that of making the man in the street understand how it is possible for men otherwise so able, so honest, so hardworking as are the majority of our Headmasters, to suffer — nay even partly to create, and most pertinaciously to defend — a system so Chinese in its elaborate stupidity as our present method of teaching Modern Languages, and indeed most modern subjects. So long as we consider our Headmasters only individually and personally, it is impossible to understand the present state of affairs. But when we consider them professionally, and as members of a large and powerful corporation proud of its ancient traditions, we find these men responsible for abuses of which it is difficult to speak in measured language.

As the value of a man's criticism depends enormously on his experience and on his point of view, I must here crave indulgence for a few words of frank egotism. I believe that there are few men in England who have been compelled by the necessities of their practical work to look so closely at both sides of this question, and who at the same time are so free to publish exactly what they think, as the present writer. Circumstances of a nature too personal to interest the reader have been responsible for giving me a more varied scholastic experience, probably, than that enjoyed even by any of the distinguished correspondents who wrote to the Times, I began by learning at a French Lycee more

French than it was possible to forget afterwards on the benches of an English Public School. Having taken a Classical degree at Cambridge, I spent some time as a student at Heidelberg. Besides earning my daily bread, from time to time, at one Preparatory and four Public Schools, I have gone out of my way at other times to study my profession as a volunteer teacher in an elementary school, and as a privileged listener at Berlin and Frankfort, in days when 'the New Curriculum ' of that latter town was scarcely known even by hearsay in England. For seven years I Avas at the head of Army Classes in two of our best known Public Schools : for a year abroad and four years in England I have seen the inner working of ' cramming ' establishments. In my Public School work, I can fairly claim to have met with more than average success : while I have since found it possible to obtain on terms far more liberal than any which I enjoyed at those Schools, more teaching work than in fact I care to undertake. Three times, during the last five years, pupils of mine have obtained the highest French mark among the successful candidates for Woolwich ; and one of these was a boy who had never been abroad in his life : so that I may fairly ask my readers to believe that in criticizing our present Army Examinations I am actuated by no feeling of personal failure. Again, I have been fortunate in working under Headmasters of whom every one has been well up to the average of his fellows, while several have been far beyond this average, and indeed among the best men, in every respect, whom it has ever been my fortune to know. After ten years' experience ^ of Public School teaching, a man cannot ignore the splendid work which those Schools have done, and are still doing, on the whole.

In my first draft of this book, whenever 1 had mentioned some experience which would naturally raise in the reader's mind the questions " Can this be really so ? How can such things be done under Headmasters of only ordinary efficiency ? Is there not some gross exaggeration here on the writer's part ? " — at all such points as this, I found that I had turned aside for a moment to answer the obvious objection by reminding the public that our Headmasters, though personally first-rate men, are as a rule quite devoid of strict professional training, — and are in fact distinguished amateurs. It seemed better therefore, instead of repeating this reminder in connexion with every question to which it is obviously germane, to put it plainly here and beg the reader to bear it in mind all through. He will find my contention justified at length in Appendix F, and on pp. 74 sq. ; in the meanwhile 1 beg him to bear it in mind, (not as a fact of course, since I have not yet proved it, but as a conceivable possibility) that his son's Headmaster, while in other matters of deeper importance than mere class-teaching, and more difficult, he is very likely quite in the first rank of the world's educators, is yet, by the force of circumstances, so ignorant of the science of teaching, and so devoid of that special interest in the subject which alone enables a man to see into the heart of it, that there is, in this special matter, no abuse so scandalous as to be impossible, even under his very eyes.

I say, by the force of circumstances, since it is partly the whole attitude of the nation, and enormously the heavy weight of Public School tradition, which is responsible for such a state of things. Knowing what fine work has been done in the past by men without special training in teaching, our Schoolmasters, Assistant or Head, are not only unwilling to go through an irksome course of study, but generally have a real conscientious objection to it, fearing less it should stifle their originality. Badly taught, or in nauseously superfluous quantities, no doubt it might do so : but it is difficult to understand how a university graduate's mind could be really corrupted by compelling him to know something of the contents of, say, three or four smallish books describing the methods of great educators in the past, and contemporary pioneers abroad. Napoleon thought such a study of military methods the very first necessity of all for an officer : the absorbing study of history and mathematics at school did not blunt his originality, nor does a still more formal system blunt that of our friendly rivals in Germany, where class-teaching is far more original and more living than the average teaching with us. A very little compulsory study would furnish our masters with a nucleus of knowledge round which thousands of fresh facts would accumulate from their own observation — facts which under present circumstances pass by as thick and as unheeded as the motes in a sunbeam. Let me give a single illustration. 1 remember a man coming fresh from Oxford to take the lower forms of a school : at the end of term he had to set a history paper to the lowest form of all, who had read in a popular history from the Conquest to the Civil War. One of his questions, shaped after the best Oxford models, ran thus : " ' The Age of Elizabeth is the brightest period of English Literature.' Illustrate this by quotations and examples." Only one boy attempted the question ; a model boy who knew his book by heart, and who (though no doubt sorely p^zzled) wrote down bravely all that was said in it of the Age of Elizabeth. " The Age of Elizabeth was sixtynine. She wore red hair and false teeth, and is described by Hentzner, a German who saw her on his travels, as etc., etc., etc." The examiner, though by no means a fool, never realized that this answer told against himself : he passed on in a few months to parish work, and probably still repeats the answer as an illustration of that

12 Puhlic Schools and the Public Needs.

particular boy's stupidity. Yet a man who has once been reminded, in Mr. Hutchinson's words, that a golf-ball is not a 16lb. shot, is at least conscious thereafter that it is his own mistake if he hits at it too hard : and a similar simple reminder at the outset of their career would open many masters' eyes for ever to the fact that a small boy is not merely a preternaturally stupid and perverse kind of university man. As it is, many of them never realize this fact, though every moment some reminder of it comes to them from their class-work. The whole Public School atmosphere is saturated with the conviction that any systematic study of the profession from lectures or printed books is fit only for Board- School masters; and, in spite of the earnest efforts of Canon Lyttleton and others, the examinations for Public School masters have been a dead failure. So long as the man who has really good natural qualifications knows that he can step straight from the universities into a mastership without further trouble, so long will that trouble be taken by very few except those men who are conscious that they must try to make up for inferior natural qualities. It results from this that the very best of our masters, with all their virtues and their real success, have nearly always the amateur's weak spot here and there ; while the ordinary teacher stumbles through thirty or forty years at a Public School without eyes to see or ears to hear, and quite incapable of seizing the occasion even when his own sheep show him the real waj through the hedge. A man knows vaguely that his boys have practically nothing to show for a term's work ; but he supposes this to be a more or less universal natural law, as a befogged statesman attributes everything to the English Constitution. He is sublimely ignorant of the fact that in Germany — perhaps in the next classroom — some very simple change of routine is enabling another man to do what he himself looks upon as impossible. The progress of Germany in the past century during which education has been scientifically organized is one of the most startling facts of modern history ; yet our teachers, from the justfledged graduate to the grey Head, are often as ignorant of things which are already commonplaces abroad as if those things were taking place upon the planet Mars. This splendid isolation, which is accentuated by the far more defensible hatred of * shop ' outside school hours, tells less upon the Modern Side master. He finds no traditional methods which he can accept as final, and is therefore driven to invent for himself or borrow from elsewhere, if he has any energy at all. The Classical master inherits a tradition hallowed by splendid names of the past, and has therefore every temptation to look upon change as sacrilege. But not one Headmaster in twenty is other than a Classical man.

On the whole, I would not exchange our

Headmasters with those of any other nation. Considering that thej are paid just about five times the income of a German Headmaster, and that the conventional social status of the PubHc School Master is also higher with us than in Germany, it would be strange indeed if we did not get men of ability and high character : and I acknowledge fully (if such acknowledgment were needed) their healthy moral influence and their devotion to their work as they understand it. But, without neglecting any of this, they might fairly be required to know the real technicalities of their profession. As it is, the parent knows that he finds in his son's Headmaster a man really devoted to the boy's moral and spiritual welfare, and not by any means disposed to underrate the value of healthy outdoor games. Many parents, in times of trouble, have found more than this — genuine sympathy, ready help, and even considerable self-sacrifice. But, on any point involving a comprehension of the technicalities of class-teaching, the ordinary Headmaster would be a less safe guide to the parent than at least one-third even of his own assistant masters. I do not say this at random : I give, on the pages quoted above, explanations to show why this is to be expected a priori, and evidence to prove that it is so in fact. For the present, I ask the reader only to look upon it as a working theory ; and, at the end of the book, to reflect soberly whether I have exaggerated in anything.

I am giving as manj facts as I can : for this is a book for the parent, the outsider. Much of what I advance is notorious already to those who have read but a little on this question : what I write here about the different results of English and German teaching of French, for instance, is in great part taken from our own Government publications, and may easily be verified by any traveller abroad. But I give a good many other details which few other men are in a position to give : for nobody knows these things who has not had the main responsibility of a Public School Army Class ; and those who know them are, for obvious reasons, unwilling to publish them. Such " indiscretions " are absolutely necessary to enable the British parent to advance a step or two beyond his present vague feeling that there is something seriously wrong somewhere— a feeling which leaves it still possible for the Blackwood critic, for instance, to assert that Lord Rosebery is merely * haunted by a bogey ' when he speaks of the necessity of bringing our education up to modern requirements. But I believe it will be found that none of my arguments rest upon the necessarily somewhat veiled instances which I produce from my own experience, and that my own personal evidence does but give a bodily shape to things already notorious in a vaguer form. I shall of course quote no names, and shall even disguise some of my instances by superficial alterations, wherever this can be done without altering at the same time their value as evidence. Those few who already know the incidents to which I shall refer, will recognize them at once : but I hope to make it impossible for others to fill in the names of persons and places which, for obvious reasons, I do not give in my text. And I shall state nothing as a fact for which I have not the most definite evidence, mainly from my own experience, but sometimes from that of friends whose testimony I know to be beyond suspicion.

Chapter II. GENERAL INFERIORITY

OF "MODERN SIDE" BOYS AND

MASTERS.

" Those who have had much to do with French masters know, to their sorrow, that a large number of them are wholly inefficient, and unfit to be teachers." — Prof. Leon Delbos, in the Journal of Education^ Sept. 1889, p. 480.

The Headmaster of Loretto ( Times, Jan. 3), after urging very rightly that we wanted y«c^5 in this discussion, went on to contribute, under this rubric, certain experiences gleaned from his own Modern Side of twenty-Jive boys : which experiences were taken to indicate that the ' classical ' boy always beats his * modern ' competitor even on the latter's own ground. It is difficult to understand how a thinking man of Dr. Almond's experience can fail to see that his observations made on a Modern Side which is considerably smaller than an average single form at our great schools have, by themselves, about the same scientific value as observations of tides taken in a teacup : yet it is unfortunately too true that, in spite of the inadequacy of this particular piece of evidence. Modern Side work is in very many cases definitely inferior to that on the Classical Side.* Whether this is any real proof of the inherent inferiority of Modern Subjects for mental training, the reader will perhaps be able to judge after considering the facts which I shall presently give as to the treatment of Modern Subjects by our Public School — or (for the words are in England practically synonymous) by our Classical — authorities. There are, of course, a few brilliant exceptions : but the average Classical man, like the orthodox of the Middle Ages, enjoys the double pleasure of condemning all heretics, and then of holding them up to scorn for that very degradation to which he himself has condemned them. Even though they be not filled with that crusader's zeal for their Classics which impels some men to adopt as their motto " I'll larn you to be a Modern-Sider ; " even though they may not adopt an attitude of inac-

*There are sometimes, however, striking exceptions to this. At one school, where prizes for an English essay and an English poem were offered for competition in each class, Classical and Modern being for the moment lumped together, out of (I think) twelve prizes only one was won by a Classical boy. This was about six years ago.

cessible superiority, and starve the Modern Side with cold neglect, jet at best the Modern masters are too often compelled to look on the ruling powers as Figaro looked on the nobilitj, and to feel that "he who does us most good is simplj he who does least positive harm." The undeniable inferiority, as a rule, of the Modern Side may be traced to three main causes : (i) the boys, to begin with, are mostly of inferior stuff, (ii) the masters also are either of inferior stuff or are definitely treated as inferiors, (iii) the examinations (and therefore the teaching which aims at success in those examinations), are both vicious in their conception and slovenly in their execution.

Firstly, the ' Modern ' boy is, as a rule, of inferior stuff. The father who has chosen that Side for his boy is too often one who has only painful recollections of Classics in his own school days, and who sees that the son is like himself. Boys, again, except from ignoble reasons of sloth, or, from a consciousness of hopeless inferiority, prefer the infinitely more respectable Classical Side. A boy of any ability, however ' Modern ' his future career is to be, can, under existing conditions, slip into it easily enough from the Classical Side ; and a father who has any ambition for his son takes care that this course shall be adopted, knowing that, in too many schools, the transference would only mean that his boy would cease to progress in

Classics, without any corresponding gain in other branches of learning. Those boys who join the Modern Side in order to be prepared for the rare historical or Modern Language scholarships which are offered at the Universities, are too few in number to leaven the mass, even if they were themselves up to the average ability of the boys who run for Classical scholarships. In fact the parent knows nearly always, and the boy himself is always aware, that if he entered the Modern Side he would find himself under inferior teachers, and in competition with still more inferior schoolfellows ; for I suppose no master would deny that, taking one school with another, the average ability of a Modern Side form is barely up to the average of a Classical form one step lower down in the school. Let me quote a sentence or two from the revelations of Mr. Storr, Head Modern Language Master at Merchant Taylors' School, as published in this May's number of the " Modern Language Quarterly," p. 18. " Boys are forced up into the first class [on the Modern Side] by pressure from below, whether they are fit for it or not. A clever boy who has risen rapidly will have been under me in the first French or German class two or even three years. He is joined by boys who do not know the declension of German adjectives, who cannot conjugate a personal verb in French, who write Das Mond loarden in sex Tage geschaffen (the M'orld was created in six