Selected Writings of Thomas Godolphin Rooper

Front matter

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Preface

The essays and other papers included in the present volume are a selection from School and Home Life (by arrangement with Messrs. Brown and Co., Hull), published in 1896, and Educational Studies and Addresses^ issued by the present publishers in 1901, tc^ther with a paper on "Practical Education in Rural Schools", published by the Agricultural Education Committee, by whose permission it is included here. The first seven, and the three which stand last but two in the selection, are from the earlier, the rest, with the exception of the one mentioned, from the later volume.

The papers contained in School and Home Life were read, as the author tells us in the preface, on various occasions during a period of ten years in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and were prepared for audiences composed of parents and teachers. His aim was "to assist, in the actual practice of education, those who have to instruct and manage young children ".

The Educational Studies and Addresses were most of them, as the preface informs us, read before various branches of the Parents' National Educational Union, and nearly all appeared in the Parent^ Review. They were written "to assist the members of that association, and others who are concerned with education, to maintain an interest in studies which are not the less important because they are not novel.

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Sound principles that are old may" (he modestly adds) ''easily be laid on the shelf and forgotten, unless in each successive generation a few industrious people can be found who will take the trouble to draw them forth from the store-house."

In the present volume the aim of the editor has been to include, in the first place, the most important of the author's more systematic studies in educational theory and method, and in certain subjects of school education to which he devoted special attention, and to add to these as large a selection as the limits of space allowed from those of his other writings which appear to be of most general interest and most characteristic of the writer. The difficulties in making such a selection are manifest. Much that might well have been included has been perforce omitted, and the editor is conscious that many readers may miss in these pages some of what they regard as Rooper's best work. But he does not think that of what has been included there is anything which such readers would willingly have spared.

Without attempting here a critical estimate of Rooper's writings, it may be said that their special claim to attention as a contribution to educational literature lies in the author's exceptional, in some respects unique, combination of practical experience with grasp of educational theory — *' probably no one else", says Professor Bosanquet, "could have written them" — and in the power which went along with this of clear and simple statement in the presentation of theory and its application to practice. "You have the gift", wrote Professor Seth, " of saying hard things in an easy way, and being at once popular and accurate." Such a " gift " does not come of itself, and Rooper's clearness was the result of patient and long-sustained thinking. For while most of his writings were composed in the scanty leisure of his life as a School

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Inspector, it must be remembered that they deal with different branches and aspects of a single subject to which he had given his best thought all his life, and which was never out of his mind. The most remarkable example of his power of making hard matter plain is probably the essay which he entitles " A Pot of Green Feathers", and of this he said, as I have recorded in the Memoir, that it took him seven years. He would carry a subject about with him in his mind till it worked itself out into perfect clearness. Many of the essays were no doubt written more easily, yet all are essentially Chips from a Workshops and, as a great painter claimed for his slighter work, they represent the experience of a lifetime.

But over and above all this there is something more which impresses us in Rooper's writings, and which flows not from experience and study but from the writer's personality. The wide outlook, the faith in principle, the union of ideal aims with practical sense, the sympathetic insight — " he writes ", it was said of him, ^ like a man and a woman rolled into one " — the understanding and love of children, the humour and gaiety of spirit, the belief in good and in human nature — these are some of the virtues which we find in his writings, and they were the virtues of the man.

A few words must be added as to the Memoir. A life so uneventful as Rooper's, and so removed from great affairs, may seem hardly to call for extended biographical notice. But in republishing the writings of one with whom theory and practice went hand in hand, it was felt that it would be well to give some account of the practical work, which was, after all, the main business of his life, and of which his writings were the direct outcome, and at the same time to place upon record the impression made upon those who knew him of a singularly beautiful character. The impossibility of separating the man from his work, and equally of giving any

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intelligible account of the work without entering into particulars, must excuse what may be felt to be the excessive detail in some parts of the Memoir.

I have acknowledged in the Memoir itself my indebtedness to Hooper's many friends and colleagues who have assisted me in its preparation. They do not need my thanks; it is enough to say that without their help it could not have been attempted. I can only trust that its inadequacy, of which no one can be so sensible as the writer, will not make them feel it altc^ther unworthy of its subject