A Measuring Line
Editor’s Note, by Art Middlekauff
Elsie Kitching served as Charlotte Mason’s personal assistant for many years before succeeding her as editor of The Parents’ Review and Director of the Parents’ Union School. Kitching’s understanding of and devotion to Miss Mason’s ideas were unparalleled, making her an especially valuable interpreter of Charlotte Mason’s thought.
On several occasions in the years following Miss Mason’s death, Kitching wrote on the question of children up to school age. In 1933, however, she decided to speak on the topic of “children of school age and over,” a subject which led her to explore the relationship between Mason’s ideas and contemporary thought.
Kitching read her paper at the High Leigh conference center in April 1933.[1] High Leigh is located near London and is still a residential conference center today. It was the location of the 1933 Annual Conference of the PNEU, attended by 92 people “in residence for the whole or part of the time.”[2] Presumably Kitching read her paper at this event.
The thorough and thoughtful paper was published in the September 1933 Parents’ Review and remains a model for how to remain faithful to Mason’s ideals in the face of changing theories, goals, and beliefs.
By E. Kitching
The Parents’ Review, 1933, pp. 536-552[1]
As I dealt in my last paper with children under school age in considering Miss Mason’s principles and some aspects of modern thought, perhaps to-day we may consider children of school age and over in the same connections.
A distinguished doctor, Dr. H. C. Cameron, whose book upon ‘The Nervous Child’ has for years been a classic for parents and teachers, has now given us further cause for gratitude in his book, ‘The Nervous Child at School,’ just published. In the Preface he tells us, in referring to the Child Guidance Clinics, that these clinics have been founded upon experience with the maladjusted or delinquent child: ‘These therapeutic tanks are a notable addition to our armament, yet their possession does not make any less important the activities of the rank and file of parents, schoolmasters and doctors.’
Happily, most of us—children, parents and teachers—belong to the rank and file of normal people, even if we may at times develop tiresome kinks! If there were not thousands of normal parents with normal children it would be difficult to keep our minds clear in the face of all the conflicting modern theories which are offered, as to what to do and what not to do. Our work should be preventive, but in order to be so it must be both positive and progressive.
I suppose most of us, when we want to see life and see it whole, take up some literary classic which gives us a draught of common-sense, or a cup of elixir, both strengthening and refreshing. For example, who does not enjoy Kingsley’s Water-Babies! We read in it that Mother Carey, in putting a way of life before ‘Tom,’ says: ‘Anyone can make things if they will take time and trouble enough, but it is not everyone who, like me, can make things make themselves.’ And she goes on: ‘If you look forward, you will not see a step before you and be certain to go wrong, but if you look behind you and watch carefully whatever you have passed, and especially keep your eye on the dog, who goes by instinct and therefore cannot go wrong, you will know what is coming just as clearly as if you saw it in a looking-glass.’ (You will remember the little black-and-tan dog that looked after the baby!)
Then she tells him the story of Epimetheus and Prometheus. Prometheus was a clever fellow, who kept on looking before him far ahead, and ran about with a box of matches by which he set the Thames on fire; ‘his children are the fanatics, the theorists, the bores, and the noisy, windy people’; but Epimetheus was a very slow fellow; he did very little for many years, but he never had to do anything over again. ‘He got a great deal of trouble, but also the three best things in the world—a good wife, and experience, and hope … and his children are the men of science who get good, lasting work done in the world.’ Perhaps this is a parable for all of us. The rank and file of us must go steadily but slowly, and we must look backwards that we may know how to go forward.
In considering Miss Mason’s philosophy, her Method, her way of life, we bear in mind that it was the outcome of a life of close personal touch with children and young people. Her work did not start with the founding of the P.N.E.U., the P.U.S. and the House of Education. For nearly thirty years before that she had been teaching children, and (for a short time) lecturing to students. From the time of her training as a teacher, at 18, to her death at 81, she spent her life amongst young people. She was able, at 80 years of age, in speaking at theAmbleside Conference in 1922, and by showing the work of children and of students, to testify that principles which had come to her as a young woman were still vital and valid sixty years later in a changed world; for Miss Mason offered a philosophy which was also her own way of life.
She left ‘The Essay’ unpublished at her death, and it was published by her Trustees in 1925. Eight years later the Trustees issued a second and cheaper edition of the book, and it was well reviewed for the second time in 1932, the reviews showing that her work was—to quote one of them—‘exerting an increasing influence on British educational theory and practice.’
I have read letters written by Miss Mason during the twelve years when she was in Worthing (1861 to 1873) which show how she was in training for her life-work. In 1861 she writes of her joy in being made the Headmistress of the first Infant School in the British Empire. In a later letter she speaks of plans for a ‘Middle’ School which she eventually started. It proved a great success and there were two hundred girls.
As parents and teachers, we too are in the happy position of being in daily touch with children and young people. They give us hope, they give us courage, for we see in them the possibilities of a better world. What may not be accomplished if we too can give them a philosophy of life which shall use their powers to the full!
Miss Mason has told us in the ‘Essay’ how during those early years she came to realise from personal experience that ‘children are born persons’; for besides her school experience she lived in close contact with a family of young children, and she came to realise what she described later as the ‘potency’ of a child. We too get daily instances of this potency, this quality of mind. A little boy of seven said the other day, ‘Daddy, I wonder, can you help me? I have been discussing with myself for a long time, and I cannot find an answer. What was before time?’ Another little boy of six, who questioned the six days of Creation in Genesis, and to whom his mother said, ‘Well, I must think it over,’ came back after a few minutes: ‘Mother, I think I know the answer. A thousand years is with God as one day, and one day as a thousand years.’ The other day in a shop I watched a child of two who could hardly talk choosing his own new shoes with a ‘no’ and a ‘yes’ and a finger, without being invited to do so.
It was during these early years that Miss Mason came across the writings of F. D. Maurice, and his insistence on the family as the unit of the nation. We have for some years been losing sight of this. Indeed a recent book on psychology, advertised as ‘a handbook for parents and a Magna Carta for children,’ puts forward a conclusion that ‘it seems inevitable that the family as a unit should more and more fade away, leaving no group to interpose its authority between the individual and the State.’ Let us hope that this is the furthest swing of the pendulum, and that the return to the family as the unit of the nation is again becoming a matter for the serious thought of all of us. I have had several letters quite recently from parents, speaking of the dangers of the present abdication of parents. What can ever make up to a child for his loss if his early relationships are not established by his father and mother? Dr. Bridges gives us an authentic comment on the family as the unit of the nation in:
‘a boy with his mother, unto whom he oweth
more than he ever kenneth or stayeth to think, language,
knowledge, grace, love and those ideal aims whereby
his manly intelligence cometh to walk alone.’
A father wrote the other day: ‘My mother belonged to the P.N.E.U., but I want something which recognises the modern standpoint. The P.N.E.U. must take modern scientific, metaphysical and psychological thought into its ken.’ The P.N.E.U. certainly must, but we must also remember that it is necessary to look back, as ‘Tom’ was told to do, if we are to estimate the value of modern theories and see whither they are tending.
I. As regards scientific thought Miss Mason says,[2] ‘The fault is not in science—that mode of revelation which is granted to our generation, may we reverently say?—but in our presentation of it by means of facts and figures and demonstrations that mean no more to the general audience than the point demonstrated, never showing the wonder and magnificent reach of the law unfolded…
‘We are told that in times of great upheaval it profits not to cast blame on this or that section of the community; that we are all to blame even for the offences of individuals; and we partly believe it because our fathers have told us… Perhaps our duty is to give serious thought to the problems of our national life; then we may come to realise that man does not live by bread alone; we may perceive that “bread” (or cake!) is our sole and final offer to all persons of all classes; that we are losing our sense of any values excepting money values; that our young men no longer see visions, and are attracted to a career in proportion as “there’s money in it.” Nothing can come out of nothing, and, if we bring up the children of the nation on sordid hopes and low ambitions, need we be surprised that every man plays for his own hand?’
A writer in The Guardian, in reviewing An Outline of Modern Knowledge recently, says:
‘It is almost invariable for those who talk of modern knowledge to instil into the words a suggestion that knowledge means wisdom, and that a man who has collected more facts is intellectually superior to the man who has not, or could not have, done so… It is time to insist plainly that much of modern science … is not in any proper sense of the word knowledge.’
Again, we must remember that the countries of the spirit have a reality and boundaries which include or exclude certain ideas, according to the measure of the individual. Sometimes the modern standpoint is expressed as ‘movement with the times,’ and is considered the only sign of progress that is possible; but we must move from something to something, or we simply turn round in our own shadows. Again, theory and principle are two different things. A principle is a fundamental truth. A theory is a supposition, offering an explanation of something. A principle is an axiom; a theory depends upon any idea from which a course of reasoning starts. The principles which Miss Mason has given us are fundamental truths which are not dependent upon ever-changing theories in modern thought.
There are many educational theories to-day, which have been advanced to save poor ‘problem’ children from what are called ‘problem parents,’ and modern schools are started with a view in the first place to giving freedom to the children. One such school offers as its ‘principles,’ that ‘no knowledge of any sort or kind should be withheld from children,’ that ‘there should be respect for individual preferences and peculiarities of the children, both in work and behaviour,’ that ‘morality and reasoning should arise from the child’s actual experience, and never, of necessity, from the authority or convenience of adults.’ There is a germ of truth in all these statements, but they are theories rather than principles.
In her book on ‘Ourselves,’ Miss Mason shows that it is our business to secure for children a knowledge which shall prevent their picking up second-hand opinions, unproven theories, attractive ideas, and using them as truths. An ‘instructed conscience’ is part of the equipment of every boy and girl. He and she must learn to know that modern thought is not enough.
In the Times Educational Supplement for February, 1933, there was an article on ‘A New School Subject,’ and it was suggested that we should cultivate critical methods in our schools which should fortify children against those who try to exploit them, and that therefore children should be supplied with examples of the good and the bad in their subjects of study.
In discussing the Way of the Reason, Miss Mason writes that ‘children must follow arguments and detect fallacies for themselves. Reason, like the other powers of the mind, requires material to work upon, whether embalmed in history and literature, or afloat with the news of a strike or uprising. It is madness to let children face a debatable world with only, say, a mathematical preparation. If our business were to train their power of reasoning, such a training would no doubt be of service; but the power is there already, and only wants material to work upon.’ In the natural course of ‘a liberal education’ a child can receive this most necessary help towards an instructed conscience, and it is our business to see that he does receive it, but, like ‘Tom,’ he must learn to look backward that he may see ahead of him.
There are three ultimate relationships—God, self and the world. Miss Mason founded her Method on the knowledge which these imply and applied it by showing that relationships in these three kinds are due to every child as a person.
Every child must make good these relationships by entering into the fulness of them—‘he must make the most of himself because of the vast possibilities that are in him and of the law of God which constrains him.’
In so far as undue stress is laid upon one or other of these relationships (God, self and the world) the full relationships of a child’s life are limited, and perhaps the most limiting aspect of all comes from a modern school of thought—the New Humanism—which limits the relationships to two (merging God and the self). This limitation implies problems into which we need not go. ‘The child’s desire for God has not failed. The pitcher is not yet broken. It still goes to the well, and the office of the teacher is to attempt to satisfy a thirst that is never satisfied.’
II. Now a modern standpoint depends somewhat upon the measure of each individual, but if we are to co-operate in the training of boys and girls for the future we must see where their crossroads touch and where they part, and to this end must again, like ‘Tom,’ look behind and watch carefully what we have passed that we may look forward. Perhaps a few words may be said as to the other request that the P.N.E.U. should take modern psychological and metaphysical thought into its ken. I am not capable of discussing metaphysics, but the question ‘What is the world as we know it?’ may be answered in various ways:
‘(a) Materialism—Everything known is body or matter, and according to modern materialism, mind without soul is only an attribute or function of body; (b) Idealism—Everything known is mind, or some mental state; body has no different being apart from mind; (c) Realism—Everything known is either body or soul, neither of which alone exhausts the universe of being. At the present day realism is despised on the ground that its differentiation of body and soul ignores the unity of being… There are in reality two species of substances or entirely distinct things, those which are impenetrably resisting and those which are conscious substances; and it is impossible to reduce bodies and souls to one another, because resistance is incompatible with the attributes of spirit, and consciousness is inexplicable by the attributes of body.’[3]
When people do not accept Miss Mason’s philosophy, they lay stress upon either (a) metaphysical materialism, or (b) metaphysical idealism.
III. Again, psychology is still in its infancy, and the modern psychologist is concerned with the need of the moment and the latest theory as to its treatment. Much of it is therefore not for the ordinary parent, who cannot bring his children up on problematic solutions; but Dr. Allers[4] is a modern psychologist who has not forsaken first principles, nor the due relationships of a child, in sifting the theories of the Viennese psychologists.
In an able little book, Psycho-Analysis for Normal People (Oxford Press, 2/6, 1932), Dr. Geraldine Coster says:—
‘It follows, therefore, that modern psychology, inasmuch as it is a true science of the soul, will justify itself by corroborating, amplifying, and supplementing the ideas of the great thinkers, not by refuting them. … The science cannot grow out of infancy into established maturity until we habituate ourselves to looking at its hypotheses from a general rather than from a pathological view-point.’
The fact that this book, written first of all in 1926, has had to be re-written for the third edition published in June, 1932, is an instance of how impossible it would be to sacrifice children to ‘unproven theories.’
On the other hand, Professor A. E. Taylor (Professor of Moral Philosophy, Edinburgh) writes in Socrates (Peter Davies, 5/-, 1932):—
‘It was Socrates who, so far as can be seen, created the conception of the soul which has ever since dominated European thinking. For more than two thousand years it has been the standing assumption of the civilized European man that he has a soul, something which is the seat of his normal waking intelligence and moral character, and that, since this soul is either identical with himself or at any rate the most important thing about him, his supreme business in life is to make the most of it and do the best for it.
‘This Socratic doctrine of the soul, we must note, is neither psychology, in our sense of the word, nor psychophysics. It tells us nothing on the question what the soul is, except that it is “That in us, whatever it is, in virtue of which we are denominated wise and foolish, good and evil,” and that it cannot be seen or apprehended by any of the senses. It is no doctrine of the “faculties” of the soul, any more than of its “substance.” The thought is that the “work” or “function” of this divine constituent in man is just to know, to apprehend things as they really are, and consequently, in particular, to know good and evil, and to direct or govern a man’s acts so that they lead to a life in which evil is avoided and good achieved. What Socrates is concerned with is thus neither speculative nor empirical psychology, but a common principle of epistemology and ethics. To “make the soul as good as possible” would be, on the one side, to attain the knowledge of existence as it really is; on the other, to base one’s moral conduct on a true knowledge of “moral values.” In both spheres the one thing to be overcome is the putting of “opinion,” “fancy” (doxa), assumptions which cannot be justified as true, in the place of knowledge. As science is ruined by the confusion of fancy with fact, so practical life is spoiled by a false estimate of good.’
Modern young people have so many attractive qualities. They are frank and fearless and candid in facing life, but are curiously hesitating and undecided and critical in the conduct of life. But criticism is often an unconscious way of revealing an empty storehouse. A great artist once said that a critic was a man who had failed; and in trying to find a foothold upon the slippery ball of modern life, many a young person offers a criticism, sometimes entirely without conviction, in the hope of gaining a conviction. The education of the girl and of the boy has sometimes given them little beyond information upon which to use their keen intelligence. Their lack of education in the ‘humanities’ prevents their having the balance of knowledge by which to test modern theories. Our business is to help them by means of knowledge to true principles, principles which are true for all time. Nothing can supersede these. But theories must be measured and pruned and balanced by time, or discarded.
If we are to get at the heart of education, we must go even deeper than the short summary of the principles which Miss Mason gives in the Short Synopsis. The principles themselves must be understood, not only in their intrinsic meaning, but in their bearing upon current methods of education. To take one example, a child does not learn in order that he may know but that his mind may grow. The subjects of his education do afford him mental training, in a secondary sense, but the primary object is food for his growing mind. One school of thought will tell you to-day that ‘the desire for skill is deeper than the desire for knowledge’; that the object to be aimed at is creative power; and to attain these ends the organisation of a child’s powers is arranged for rather than the feeding of his mind. However important the secondary aims of skill and creative power may be, the danger is that the child will get much teaching with very little food, and will be expected to produce results stimulated by artificial feeding and organisation rather than as the true growth that comes of real food. It is a question of ‘educāre’ versus ‘educĕre.’
In the short synopsis of her philosophy which Miss Mason compiled, of twenty clauses, each of which deals with some special aspect of education, only seven touch upon schooling. All of them deal with education as derived from ‘educāre,’ meaning to feed, not from ‘educĕre,’ meaning to draw forth, and therefore her education, which is a process of feeding, cannot be organised as can education derived from ‘educĕre.’
Again, there is much talk in these days about vocational education, but Miss Mason warns us of the dangers of educating children for utilitarian purposes or for the uses of the State.
At the Ambleside Conference in 1922, Miss Mason put before us—‘the P.N.E.U. as service to the State.’[5]
‘These are days’ she said, ‘when we feel that we are all due to the country, if only for the sake of the men who have fallen. … What is wanted is a democratic education to include not only the fit, the aristocracy of mind, high and low, rich and poor, but everybody. … Mind, capable of dealing with knowledge in its three kinds, knowledge of God, knowledge of man, knowledge of the natural world.’ … ‘Mind in this sense appears to be a universal possession, and everyone can have the joy of the manifold interests which such knowledge affords.’ ‘Humanistic studies have a tendency to make things seem worth doing, even when they are done with little credit or profit. Suppose that a sense of duty impels the educated classes, and that however insistent personal claims may be, they are subordinated to the claims of service. Why, here is the very spirit we want to see in all classes of our countrymen, and the direct and very possible way to such a temper of mind is through a liberal education. … Our education in all classes of society has become mechanical, with only rare interludes of interest. Absolutely the first service to the State is to present it with good citizens. But the properties of a good citizen depend on due nourishment with fitting knowledge, and knowledge is information touched with emotion. For this reason it is that both literature and art offer children the pabulum they require. Who could feel emotion for a compendium, however praiseworthy? But literature, whether in the form of history, poetry, drama, scientific treatise, nourishes the soul, and, put the world in one scale and a single soul in the other, and the scale holding the world kicks the beam.’
It is each single soul we have to deal with, and always a different soul, different as day by day it grows into closer intimacy with its due relationships. The growth is secret and silent for the most part, and we wait with hope and patience, not with folded but with outstretched hands, and an understanding heart and mind, knowing that powers greater than our own are waiting upon our provision for each child of knowledge and opportunity.
The organisation by man of the vast forces which Science has revealed to his researches has led him once again to a belief that intellectual forces may be organised with benefit to the State, but the individual has no place in these calculations.
The games of children are still played by their elders, and if ever the game of tug-of-war was fashionable, it is to-day, when nation tries to pull nation to its own point of view, and when materialism weights each side to deadlock point. At any sign of a breaking away, a commission is appointed to collect the remnants which have fallen in the struggle, during which, as in most games of tug-of-war, the measuring line is obliterated. The B.B.C. invites eminent men on one side to wireless tugs-of-war with eminent men on the other. Religion, Science, Books, Education, Philosophy, Careers, Travel, Sport are thrown to the two lions, and they disport themselves with good humour to the interest and diversion of a vast audience, unseen but all-hearing: both audience and speakers impersonal, and no offence taken or meant on either side! It is all so impersonal!
I once knew some children whose aunt was a source of humour to them, though they loved her dearly. She suffered from hay fever and spoke of ‘the nose’ as being under a course of treatment from the doctor. ‘Why doesn’t she say my nose?’ asked the children. This illustrates the rather impersonal way in which many matters are regarded to-day. ‘The trouble,’ ‘the problem,’ ‘the race,’ ‘the world,’ internationalism, are matters for the best professional advice, the most expert committee, the most distinguished commission, which must collect and weigh evidence, and present a final opinion, a measuring line. In the meantime, a few people who feel that something must be done immediately while the committees sit, accept the problem as ‘my trouble’ and ‘your trouble,’ and suggest some action which may serve in the meantime, and which is not seldom found to contain the germ of a solution. This has been the history of many great social movements, like the Church Army, the Salvation Army, Dr. Barnardo’s (all of which have found the secret of making people make themselves), and last, but not least, the Personal Service League initiated by the Prince of Wales in his speech on ‘being neighbour’ to someone. Perhaps one secret of the success of these private movements is that they have never been out of touch with, not ‘the trouble,’ but ‘his or her trouble and my responsibility.’ A friend of mine was talking the other day of some visits she had paid to a voluntary club for unemployed girls; she said that what struck her most was that the girls were treated as girls, ‘our girls,’ not as cases, ‘the girls.’
Papers, books, committees, meetings, social claims, efforts to cope with growing expenses on a limited income, are apt to make us mutter that unblessed word ‘organisation,’ only to find that sometimes ‘the measuring lines’ offered by organisation do not fit; perhaps even that direct personal touch has been lost in the efforts at organising. The Church, as representing organised religion, is in some such predicament to-day, and education, organised as schooling, not less so; but those who have to deal immediately with children and young people, and who keep the love and respect of their children, pupils, patients, friends, have little use for measuring lines for persons, for in spite of difficulties they find so much common ground to stand upon that it rarely, if ever, comes to a tug-of-war. Measuring lines for theories are a different matter.
Such terms as ‘herd instinct,’ ‘mass production,’ ‘mass psychology’ tempt committees to a kind of megalomania which discounts personal effort and puts faith in organisation, which shall secure and set in motion the best machinery, which it is hoped will reduce the world to order. But conscience will still make cowards of us when ninety-nine may have been rescued and a lost sheep is still found wandering! Miss Mason taught us that in proportion as work needed organising, it lost life, and in these days of vast and unceasing organising in philanthropic life, in commercial life, and in education, there is a danger of looking at education as a process by which a child is to be educated for the purposes of the State.
It is a curious anomaly that in an age when the exercise of authority is said to hamper the freedom of the individual, we should see the spread of a domination which extends nearly half-way round the world’s circumference. We are told that all education in Soviet Russia is conducted upon the theory and practice of polytechnisation, which aims at producing a nation of ‘socialistically thinking technical experts.’[6]
Again, the theory that ‘unemployment, depression and disease are inevitable in capitalism’ has led to the theory of technocracy, in which machine energy is substituted for labour and the unit of economic theory is the unit of machine energy. There is an atmosphere of sterility about these terms—they can hardly be dignified as words—which is like a dead hand, paralyzing.
I have quoted the modern standpoints of two of the mind forces at work in the world to-day. They are extreme, but they are the logical outcome of ideas which are allowed entrance to the minds of people who would probably be amongst the first to repudiate the issues.
As long as economic thought is allowed to work in units of labour, of energy, of exchange, it loses touch with human relationships, and, as a well-known writer on Economics said recently, ‘Science and knowledge’ (perhaps ‘information’ would be a more correct term) ‘have gone ahead much faster than kindliness and good feeling—these are what is most wanted at the moment.’[7]
A very outspoken book on ‘The British Social Services: The Nation’s Appeal to the Housewife and her Response,’ by the Rev. J. C. Pringle, reaches me as I write this. The author, the Secretary of the London Charity Organisation Society, takes up the challenge thrown down by Professor Bagge of Stockholm at Stockholm in July, 1932, on the dangers to modern society ‘as a result of the decline in the feeling of personal responsibility and the expectation of public relief.’ In the preface to Mr. Pringle’s book, Sir Charles Mallet writes:—
‘We shall never solve our unemployment problem until we try to adjust it to the facts of family life. We shall never solve our housing problem until we acknowledge that the home must be made a centre of such interest and comfort that those who live in it may think it worth while to pay rent.’
In this connection we cannot but rejoice at the thousands of small homes which have sprung up outside many of our great cities—surely a sign of a national return to family life! Mr. Pringle makes a strong plea for a more general recognition of parents’ interest in their children, ‘the passion of the parents to see realised in their children all that they have failed to realise in their own lives … and one of the mainsprings of human life.’ He calls in question our faith in social services founded on ‘the crude mechanical materialism which prevailed when they were set up, when mass production and wholesale trade were the dominating ideas … human individuality whether of consumers, employees, citizens or taxpayers, failed to be interesting beside the great achievements of mass methods.’ ‘The idea of the collectivist State has become,’ he says, ‘a passion, and, as a consequence, the right of everybody to have his problems handled by a properly paid official.’ Mr. Pringle adds that ‘modern collectivist methods have, apart from the Great War, fostered the ills of the maladjusted, the defeated, and the defeatists in life.’ Perhaps we have lost sight of what constitutes progress?
Professor de Burgh writes in his Legacy of the Ancient World of a law which governs intellectual progress. ‘The enrichment of knowledge is never by mere accretion of new to old; the process is one of interpenetration.’ We have been passing through a number of years in which people have been working upon the theory of the accretion of new to old, that is, upon patches rather than growth from principles. When we realise Miss Mason’s distinction between information and knowledge, we see at once where the fallacy lies, and how true this distinction of Professor de Burgh’s is. In days when information pours in from every paper and book that we turn over, and when there is so much delightful information to be had for little trouble, in lectures, in magazines and illustrated papers, it is difficult to keep before us the fact that it is only the slow growth in knowledge that matters; and it is not easy in these days of easily achieved success along the lines of information to sit down and wait patiently for the slow-coming signs of growth in knowledge.
Again, interpenetration cannot take place without vision. Towards such a vision Dr. Norwood in an article (published in the January, 1932, Parents’ Review) on ‘Religion and Education’ offered us a contribution. Sir Michael Sadler uttered a warning also, last year, lest teachers should miss the something behind the scientific problems before them. ‘There must be,’ he said, ‘at the root of it a bridle of ethical principle which in the long run draws its strength from a belief in the unseen things. Either directly or indirectly the only foundation for a stern ethical discipline … is a really profound religious belief.’
We frequently get letters from mothers, and occasionally from fathers too, to whom the presenting of a principle has meant a new outlook both on the children and their work. But we have no ready-made system to offer; we may not present the P.U.S. as a cast-iron system; we have no ready-made panacea for the difficulties which come in the day’s work. It is usually through the life and work of the children themselves that conviction comes to the parents.
‘These little ones make one feel the enormous responsibility of dealing with anyone so extraordinarily wise as they are. How awful it would be to be in any way a stumbling-block to them,’ wrote a teacher the other day who had taken up Miss Mason’s work as her vocation.
Those of us who have grown old in the service of Miss Mason cannot hope to do more than continue the crusade which she began, and the work that we hope P.U.S. children will be known by in the future is not so much the distinctions they have gained, as the fruit that will spring eventually from seeds that have been sown towards the ‘good life and good literature.’ Dr. Lyttelton says in his book, Whither? (in which he devotes twenty pages to Miss Mason’s method of education, under the heading of ‘spiritual feeding’), that we are always wanting some new thing, whereas what we really need is a quickened understanding of something that is old. Again, we must look back that we may see forward.
* * * * *
I have waited till the end of my paper to touch upon the real reason for my title. In the vision in the second chapter of Zechariah, the prophet sees a man with a measuring line. He asks the purpose of it, and the man replies, ‘To measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, and what is the length thereof.’ The angel passes on, and another angel comes up to meet him, and says, ‘Run, speak to the young man, saying, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls … for I, saith the Lord, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and will be the glory in the midst of her.’ Miss Mason takes this vision as the Foreword to Ourselves, so we may conclude that in Ourselves she indicates in detail how an estimate of a person may be taken, and perhaps we may sum the measurement up in the P.U.S. motto, ‘I am, I can, I ought, I will.’
There was an interesting reference to Zechariah’s vision in a number of the Spectator of December, 1932, by a writer signing himself ‘H.C.M.’:—
‘The new psychology embraces the crudities and nakedness of the Freudian revelation—a revelation which reverses the habitual opinion that wisdom comes from above—and includes also the mathematical exactness of industrial psychology, which claims to justify the need for the “man with a measuring line in his hand” and to refute the angelic saying, in the second chapter of Zechariah, that the city of mind “shall be inhabited as towns without walls.”’
Now we do believe that the city of mind is without walls, and we know that the children are already in the Kingdom of God, and that it is our business to help them stay there.
Finally, in all our dealings with children and young people let us never forget the place of joy. Joy is a very wonderful thing. It comes second in the fruits of the Spirit. Miss Mason thought so much of it herself. Next to love it is the greatest thing in the world. It is not at all the same thing as happiness. It stands alone in the dictionary as an absolute quality; it has no peers, except possibly ‘delight,’ in the way of synonyms, and we remember that ‘studies serve for delight’ though ‘much study’ may be ‘a weariness to the flesh’!
We enter into joy in countless ways.
For all of us there are the lesser joys. We all know the joy of meeting a truth which we recognise as a first and old acquaintance. We see joy in the light of quickened understanding in the face of a friend, of a child. We know the quiet joy in the faces of those who have for the first time watched a robin hop with the flirt of his wings or sing in a whisper without opening his beak, or we have seen the joy with which a number of children literally fling themselves on a field of buttercups.
There are three supreme joys referred to in the New Testament, and the Greek word is the same for each: (i) the joy of Our Lord, ‘Who endured the Cross, despising the shame’; (ii) the joy of a mother; who ‘remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born into the world’; and (iii) the joy of the angels in heaven ‘over one sinner that repenteth.’ For joy is always objective, and difficulties and suffering and tears may all be means to that strange and beautiful fruit of the Spirit, which is the gift of God to every child born into the world and is kept by those who fulfil their three great relationships.
[1] A paper read at High Leigh, Hoddesdon, April, 1933.
[2] The Basis of National Strength: Knowledge, Reason and Rebellion (P.N.E.U. Office, 6d.)
[3] Encyclopedia Britannica.
[4] The Psychology of Character, by Rupert Allers (Sheed & Ward, 6/-).
[5] Parents’ Review, 1922.
[6] Times Literary Supplement.
[7] Hartley Withers.
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Endnotes for the Editor’s Note
[1] The Parents’ Review, vol. 44, p. 536
[2] Ibid., p. 504.
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