Part 1
PROCRUSTES OR THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION
PROCRUSTES _or the_ FUTURE _of_ ENGLISH EDUCATION
BY M. ALDERTON PINK, M.A.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE
Published, 1927 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION: THE PROCRUSTEAN BED 1
II. THE SCHOOLS: PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS AND TENDENCIES 14
III. THE SCHOOLS: FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS 49
IV. THE UNIVERSITIES: THE ACADEMIC MIND OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 77
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH EDUCATION
PROCRUSTES
I
INTRODUCTION
The Procrustean Bed
_Andrew Undershaft._――“Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnado homes, or School Board Officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with second-hand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching.”――(_Bernard Shaw_).
During the Debate on the last Education Estimates (1925), Lord Hugh Cecil made a speech which most enthusiasts of education dismissed offhand as hopelessly reactionary. In the central part of his argument he deprecated the doctrine that education is to be equally distributed to all sorts of people, irrespective of their real capacity. He maintained that we must train children for the station to which, not by birth but by natural capacity, they properly belong. He would select the clever children and spend money liberally in giving them the fullest possible opportunities for higher study. But to the great body of children who are incapable of really using any higher teaching he would give a very low standard of education confined to the three R’s: the teaching of reading should be made the basis, for reading is the key to knowledge.
These views are certainly extreme; but, looked at impartially, they contain so much plain common-sense that it is rather remarkable that they provoked such bitter opposition. Of course, Lord Hugh Cecil laid himself open to two obvious charges: first, that he had no special knowledge of his subject, and, secondly, that his reforms were presumably intended for the children of masses and not those of his own class. But his opponents must take account of the statement made a few weeks later by the headmaster of Rugby, whose opinions cannot be discounted on these two grounds. Speaking as President of the Education Section of the British Association, Dr Vaughan disputed the assumption that the State should develop to the full the intellectual abilities of all its citizens. He considered that schooling is even now continued too long for some boys. He would give a thrice-generous remission after fourteen to those who had shewn no special aptitude for book-learning or any other form of direct education, on condition that they were kept within the spell of corporate life. Thus a distinguished practical schoolmaster corroborates the view of Lord Hugh Cecil that before providing unlimited educational facilities we should face the fact that many children are not amenable to the present educational process; and we ought therefore to consider whether we are promoting either their efficiency as citizens or their happiness as individuals by submitting them to a training for which they are not fitted. We are reminded that education has of recent years become a cult whose followers allow their zeal to blind them to stubborn realities.
The suggestion that we are on a false track in seeking to multiply indefinitely the educational institutions of existing type naturally provokes strong opposition, for it runs counter to one of the most cherished democratic doctrines of to-day. Ever since the first extension of the franchise, publicists have been preaching that the success of democracy depends upon the diffusion of culture among the masses who have the ultimate control of affairs. And whenever fears have been expressed that popular government has fallen short of the original ideal we have been assured that all will be well as soon as the electorate is properly educated. The public has thus been taught to believe that it is the duty of the State (so long as the financial position permits) to increase to the utmost the facilities for training its citizens.
The need for more education has, in fact, become a political commonplace. It has been only too easy for statesmen who have little real interest in the matter to talk vaguely about the educational ladder from the elementary school to the university, because such talk provides plausible material for the platform-speaker whose business it is to rehabilitate a popular system which has not quite come up to expectations. In a somewhat disillusioned democratic world education has threatened to become a political nostrum to be unintelligently applied and to be foolishly regarded as a panacea.
It is, in fact, the latest of a series of expedients prompted by belief in the perfectibility of mankind. A century or so ago republican reformers imagined that all the ills the State is heir to would be cured if King George’s government were replaced by a government of Tom Paine’s. Later on, the radicals thought that the millennium would be reached when every adult had a vote. The present generation has been too readily fooled by the equally delusive hope that the new Utopia will be created when everybody receives a university education at public expense.
It is therefore all to the good that our leaders should occasionally remind us that education is not a magic weapon of unlimited power. It is time that the public mind was disabused of the notion that a perfect system of education would of itself prove the salvation of the State. The fallacy lies, of course, in the assumption that everybody is capable of being educated. Those who are personally in touch with schools see only too clearly how unwarrantable such an assumption is. While they realise that every child, dull or clever, benefits by being under discipline and by taking part in the social life of a school, they know also that a certain proportion of children undergo no mental development commensurate with the time and labour expended on their behalf. Thus even if we imagine a perfect educational process, carried out by teachers who are all men and women of light and leading, the result of that process will be ultimately conditioned by the quality of the human beings who pass through it. Just as democracy pre-supposes education, so education pre-supposes children who are educable. It would seem, therefore, that political and social reformers who are still looking for a panacea must go to the eugenists.
The public statement of considered views such as those of Lord Hugh Cecil and the Headmaster of Rugby is one of the signs that we are at length emerging from the mental attitude which expresses itself in the crude demand for more and more education to be doled out indiscriminately. It is indeed time that we got rid of the prevalent notion that schools are factories (chiefly brain-factories) which can pass any sort of human material through a standardised course and in so many years turn out satisfactory finished products. And the friends of education need not be alarmed at the new trend of opinion. All reasonable people now admit the theoretical principle that the State must provide adequate training for all future citizens; and the Labour Party is flogging a dead horse when it insists so laboriously that every child, irrespective of social status, should be given the fullest educational opportunities. Present-day informed discussion has advanced beyond the consideration of this almost platitudinous statement of principle to an enquiry of a much more important character. The question being now asked is not whether every child should be given education to the age of sixteen or beyond, but what kinds of education ought to be provided for the many thousands of children of varied types who will receive advanced training through the increased facilities to be provided in the future.
The stage of educational development upon which we are now entering will, in fact, be marked by greater realism in the attitude of both the authorities and the general public towards the problems to be solved. We are gradually coming to acknowledge the fairly obvious truth that not every child is a potential Prime Minister, or even a capable civil servant, or a manager of a business. When we have shed the more romantic of the democratic habits of thought we shall even publicly admit that a certain proportion of mankind (whether the offspring of dukes or of dustmen) are fitted by nature to be nothing better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that to give them more than a limited amount of ordinary schooling is to perform a work of sentimental supererogation. We shall also realise that the course of instruction which has now become stereotyped as secondary, however admirable in itself, is a course for which relatively few children are really suited. And when we have taken more account than at present of the profound differences in individual capacities we shall cease to think of an education as something extraneous to the person educated, and to regard the school-curriculum as a Procrustean bed, to suit the dimensions of which the child’s mentality can be extended or truncated as required.
II
THE SCHOOLS
Present-Day Problems and Tendencies
A survey of present tendencies makes it clear that the next few years will witness a general overhaul of the educational machine. Among both the general public and the teaching profession the feeling is becoming widespread that, quite apart from its obvious incompleteness, our present system suffers from certain fundamental defects. Damaging criticisms of the work of the schools are by no means infrequent in press-articles. The proceedings of the various teachers’ organizations are eloquent of the need for radical reforms. Business men are giving public expression to their concern about the inadequacy of school-training for economic requirements: the Association of British Chambers of Commerce, for instance, has recently passed a resolution containing a sweeping condemnation of the methods and aims of the elementary schools. Already an official enquiry is being conducted into the relationship between the schools and industry. These signs of an impending revision of our educational programme derive added importance from the consideration that for some years to come Chancellors of the Exchequer will be very unwilling to sanction increases in public expenditure. Education ministers will therefore have to make out a very good case for any new developments and will have to satisfy public opinion that they are not merely increasing material and personnel but are also promoting increased efficiency.
The inevitable enquiry into the working of our present system will necessarily concern itself mainly with post-primary training since it is in this direction that development is most urgently needed. It is almost universally admitted that the time is overdue for a largely increased provision of further education of children beyond the age of fourteen; for though the secondary schools, owing to faulty methods of admission, at present contain many pupils who are unfit for the training they receive, there are also outside these schools numbers of children who reach the required standard of ability but who are denied entry simply because there is no room for them.
Public educational policy during the last quarter of a century has provided for higher education mainly by the foundation of secondary schools of a single type, controlled by the local authorities; and those who demand more secondary education generally mean more schools of this kind. The secondary schools are filled partly by scholarship-holders who represent the cream of the elementary schools, and partly by fee-payers who, as they do not usually have to pass a stringent entrance-examination, may represent all grades of ability. Thus only a proportion (now up to 40 per cent.) of the pupils are specially selected; the remainder are doing more advanced work simply because their parents wish it and can pay part of the cost.
When the activities of these schools come under a critical review, certain facts will be difficult to explain away. In the first place, it will be noticed that, although the pupils are intended to remain at school until the age of sixteen at least, a relatively large proportion leave before that age. According to the “London Statistics” for 1923–24, there were present at the end of 1923 in the aided and maintained secondary schools of London, 9,118 pupils who were twelve or thirteen years of age, 8,700 who were fourteen or fifteen, 3,280 who were sixteen or seventeen, and 342 who were eighteen or over. In other words, only about one-third remained until the age of sixteen or more, and this in spite of the fact that parents give undertakings to keep their children at school until sixteen. Again, the curriculum of these schools is largely determined by the First School Examination (equivalent to University Matriculation), and every pupil who remains at school sufficiently long should normally take this examination. Now the report of the Board of Education for 1923–24 shows that in each of the last five years an average of 78,000 children have entered the grant-earning secondary schools of England and the highest number that has taken the First School Examination in any one year is roughly 35,000, of whom about a third failed. That is to say, about two-thirds of the pupils either fail to complete the school course or fail to reach the standard of intellectual attainment necessary to pass an external test.
When all allowance has been made for the fact that a certain number of pupils are withdrawn at an early age purely on account of economic circumstances, we have still to face the failure of the schools to retain the pupils and to enable them to pass what is presumably a fair test of the kind of training given. The conclusion can scarcely be avoided that there are some radical defects in the aims and methods of the schools.
It is often urged that the secondary schools are not at present getting the best material, that owing to economic circumstances or to the insufficient provision of secondary school accommodation many children who are fit to profit by higher instruction are at present excluded in favour of fee-payers who are not fit. But this is merely begging the question. We are still confronted with the problem of what we are to do with those pupils who do not take kindly to the secondary school curriculum but who, by their very presence in secondary schools, show their readiness to undergo some form of higher instruction. And what are we to do with the many children in the primary schools who, under a scheme of more extended financial assistance, might also remain at school until sixteen or later, and would also be square pegs in round holes in the ordinary secondary school?
We are forced, therefore, to ask whether the present secondary school curriculum is adapted to the needs of the varied types of pupils who enter or are likely to enter the schools. What are the aims? At present the secondary school’s main function is to give sufficient training in the humanities, in mathematics and science, to enable pupils to pass the entrance examination of a university. (We may for the purpose of the present argument disregard the social activities of the school.) In other words, its business is to produce scholars of the intellectual type fitted for university training. It is true that art, handicraft, domestic science, and physical exercises appear in the curriculum but they occupy more or less subordinate places. The secondary school course, on its academic side, is directed to one main end, and any pupil who enters such a school is regarded, irrespective of his natural aptitudes, as a prospective candidate for matriculation. Teachers may demur to the suggestion that their horizon is dominated by an examination: they may talk hopefully about a test which their pupils can take “in their stride.” But the fact remains that the work of the upper part of the school is determined by requirements of an external body. There is a conventional list of “subjects” which the pupil must study, and if his individuality does not fit in with this scheme so much the worse for him.
The secondary schools are therefore designed, in so far as they are designed for any specific purpose, as a training-ground for university students. But only three per cent. of the pupils ever reach the universities. And the statistics already given indicate that a large proportion show themselves to be unfitted for university training. Teachers in secondary schools do not, of course, need these statistics to bring home to them the fact that a considerable proportion of the pupils with whom they have to deal are misfits. They realise that there are other sorts of capacity besides those which enable pupils to pass the usual examinations. They constantly see in their pupils special interests and aptitudes which find little or no outlet in the ordinary academic routine. They so often have to shake hands with old boys or old girls who were duffers at ordinary school subjects, but who have since achieved success in business or industry that it has become a commonplace with them that failure at school does not necessarily mean failure in life. But this commonplace surely implies the tragic fact that school has not discovered what the “duffer” can do, but has consistently tried to make him do things for which he has no aptitude.
The fact is that the ordinary secondary school is attempting――unsuccessfully, of course――to give the same treatment to pupils of various types who, owing to lack of sufficiently varied provision for higher education, now find themselves herded together. In any such school there is a certain number of pupils of good general ability who are capable of proceeding with credit to advanced work in the humanities or in science. These are the pupils for whom the secondary course is really intended. At the other extreme there is a certain number who are simply not profiting by academic training. Between these extremes there are, no doubt, a few who have a natural bent towards one of the arts; there are a good many of very pedestrian abilities who can by industry just keep abreast of their studies, though they are not attracted by academic ideals; and there are still others who are in difficulties because they are interested not in abstract ideas but in things. Pupils of these three classes are all, to a greater or less degree, misfits in the ordinary secondary school. The few intending to follow the arts and lacking wide intellectual interests should be devoting more time than is generally available to acquiring the technique of their art. The many of a little less than average capacity who have no real enthusiasm for things of the mind gain something, no doubt, from the course they pursue, but they would gain more from a practical curriculum containing fewer subjects and having a more direct bearing on their probable future careers. The remaining class, which includes those who think with their hands, is the one for which we now most conspicuously fail to make adequate provision. In this category is to be found the boy who is bored by the theory of electricity while being thoroughly interested in making a piece of electrical apparatus, and who will not willingly learn any more of the theory than is necessary to make the apparatus work. When we consider that a large proportion of people in the world have no bookish interests and are not attracted by pure science and yet are capable of bringing sound intelligence to bear on practical problems concerning concrete things, it is strange that educationists have done so little to meet their needs.
Another question arises. What is to be the occupation of the pupils leaving the secondary schools? Those who have remained at these schools until sixteen or more acquire a certain social tone which causes them to despise manual toil, and so they aim at the professions, the Civil Service, posts in banks and stores, and, failing all else, the perennially respectable junior clerkship in any kind of office. Clearly, boys who have at seventeen or eighteen successfully completed a course of literary and scientific training should be fitted for posts of responsibility in business or the professions. But the professions are already overcrowded, and positions are difficult to obtain. We are taking children from the homes of artisans, small tradespeople, and even unskilled workers, and giving them an education which makes them unwilling to take up the same occupation as their parents follow, but which leads to no certainty of better employment in the end. We are thus rapidly being brought face to face with the difficulty which confronted Germany before the War. The advantages attaching to scholastic attainment were such that every parent who could possibly do so gave his child a higher education so that he might obtain the coveted passport to the professions. The result was that the competition for the higher professional and official posts became intolerably keen, and the universities were turning out numbers of fully qualified men for whom they could find no suitable employment.
There would be less theoretical objection to the process of raising the pupils out of the economic class of their families into another class, if they were all of high capacity and suitable for administrative posts. But, actually, many of those who at present receive higher education are by no means fitted by native ability for important administrative work. In fact, the investigations of the psychologists go to show that out of the whole child population only a small proportion have the grade of intelligence needed for the highest posts. Dr Cyril Burt has carried out a survey of London school children, by means of intelligence-tests, to provide evidence for use in vocational guidance. He finds that the few children of the type who win scholarships to secondary schools and thence to the universities, and who are fitted to seek higher professional and Civil Service posts form about one per thousand of the child population. About two per cent. come into the second grade, which includes those who win scholarships to the secondary school but not to the university, and who are suitable for lower professional posts: they may become, for instance, elementary teachers, clerks holding responsible posts, or successful tradespeople. The third grade is composed of about ten per cent. of the children, and includes those who are suited to become, say, clerks doing work of an intelligent but moderately routine character, or manual workers engaged in highly skilled work. Below this comes a body of children of moderate ability forming about four-fifths of the whole. These may enter many of the ordinary commercial posts,――they may become small tradespeople, or shop-assistants: skilled manual-workers also belong to this group. The remaining children have an intelligence which fits them only for unskilled work. This classification is, admittedly, only tentative; but if it has any validity, it is clear that the percentage of children really fitted for professional work is relatively very low, and account must be taken of this fact in framing secondary courses.