Knowledge the Pathway to the Dawn
Editor’s Note, by Art Middlekauff
The 23rd annual conference of the PNEU was held in London in June of 1921. The report from the conference stated:
Although Miss Mason was so far away at the moment, she was ever with them in spirit, her activities unceasing, and her interest as keen as ever, and thousands of children all over the world were benefiting by these activities.[1]
On the second day, the afternoon speaker was introduced by H. M. Richards, Chief Inspector, Board of Education. According to the report:
[Richards] explained that the Board was sympathetic with this method for two reasons: that it released the teacher from a large amount of the bondage of teaching, and the child from the strain of being constantly taught, and that he regarded the movement as a re-action against the material view of education which dominated the country in the latter half of the last century…
There is a change of spirit passing over the world, and it was felt that in literature this spirit of beauty and truth could be found, and that to throw open the whole world of books to children was to throw open to spirituality, beauty and truth the future generation and through them influence the future of the world.[2]
After this warm introduction, the featured speaker stepped up to the podium. His name was H. W. Household.
By H. W. Household
The Parents’ Review, 1921, pp. 797-808
Secretary for Education to the Gloucestershire County Council.
An age is dying—nay is dead!
A breath of change, of morning, stirs!
Ah, yonder now the skies grow red,
And lo! the sun’s sweet harbingers,
Birds of new vision and new thought
Are everywhere upon the wing!
Fair promise has the dawning brought—
What shall the coming daylight bring?
O you whose hearts are bold and free,
O you whose eyes with fire are lit,
A whisper thrills: “The day shall be
Whate’er yourselves will make of it.”
In 1807, when the age which, please God, is dying was still young, a President of the Royal Society, speaking in the House of Commons, told his fellow members, the great majority of whom agreed with him, that,
“However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would in effect be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture, and other laborious employments to which their rank in Society had destined them; instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them factious andrefractory, as was evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors; and in a few years the result would be that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them, and to furnish the executive magistrate with much more vigorous laws than were now in force.”
The occasion of these remarks, so objectionable in tone to our modern way of thinking, was a debate upon a Bill for the general provision of elementary schools throughout England. Needless to say, it was not a government measure. It found few friends in either House, and it was killed by the House of Lords on the advice of the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
…
But, it may be asked, what has all this to do with Miss Mason and her method of education? It has everything to do with it. She for the first time admits the children of the workers, all, not only some, to the school of wisdom. They follow the same curriculum, use the same books, as the children from the best homes in the land. Nothing can really be too good for any child of man. In the wonderful reunions at Winchester and Whitby, children drawn from every type of home sat down together and worked side by side, foreshadowing the day when all will go to the same schools and none will be excluded, when the University itself will stand open free to all, and class distinctions, class exclusiveness, will have disappeared under the influence of a common heritage.
It is not too much to say that Miss Mason has shewn us how we may revolutionise the primary school; and not only the primary school, for there is not a school in the country that would not do well to learn from her.
There is much that is wonderfully good in the English public schools, but there is much that might be greatly better. Too many boys of average ability pass through them without having felt the quickening fire. They have been trained for muscular but not intellectual development, to act but not to think, to command but not to sympathise. Taste and imagination are too often left dormant, and atrophy as the years go by. The boys go out from school into the world honest but rather stupid and uninformed. They will play the game so far as they understand it, and the rival will always be a friend; but the game brings them into contact with so few, and the rest have not the playfellow’s claim upon them.
What is lacking here Miss Mason gives. From the beginning she kindles interest. How is it done, this most difficult thing, which so many have tried to do with such small success? How does she banish indifference and inattention, for banish them she surely does?
First of all she has discovered that children of all ages and of every class are eager for knowledge, if only it be put before them in the right form. They begin learning, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (for he has made the same discovery)—as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Lectures on the Art of Reading would convince us, with “a natural eager joy”; but, alas, he too, like Miss Mason, is constrained to add that “that natural eager joy is just what our schools, in the matter of reading, conscientiously kill.” They kill it because they put knowledge before the child in the wrong form, and in the wrong manner. The right form, Miss Mason tells us, is literary form, a good book exact to the last line and letter as it came from the hand and brain of him to whom God gave the wit to write it. No intermediary is needed, neither the watered compilation so dear to publishers and teachers, nor the obtrusive voice raised in well-meaning lecture that only interrupts, “Given a book of literary quality suitable to their age,” says Miss Mason, “and the children will know how to deal with it without elucidation.” The teacher has been mistaken in thinking that they cannot and that he must interpret between them and the writer. The children greatly prefer to do their work upon his pages for themselves; and in doing it they develop a power with which they had not been credited. They work as individuals, the personality of each respected, not merged with thirty or forty others into that artificial and soulless entity the class.
“Let the boy read and he knows, that is, if he must tell again what he has read.” Here is Miss Mason’s secondary discovery. There is only one reading (with the little children it is often, with the older still not infrequently, by the Teacher), and it is always followed by oral narration or written report, when the child gives back in orderly sequence the substance of what has been read. The knowledge that there will be but one reading, and that narration has to follow, compels attention, and fixes the content in the mind so surely that, without any re-reading or further preparation, he will face and satisfy a searching examination at the end of term. He “knows.”
That Miss Mason’s methods do what she claims for them has been proved in scores of primary schools. Children and teachers who have used her methods and her books would not for worlds return into the old groove. But beware, there are no short cuts, no substitutes.
So much, all too briefly, of the method. What of the books, these books that of themselves, unaided, compel an interest that the talking, always talking, teacher so rarely can inspire?
It must suffice to enumerate those set for some of the subjects, the literary subjects, in Form III, roughly the Standard V, the eleven year-olds of the primary school, during the present term.
Literature.
Marshall’s History of English Literature for Boys and Girls, pp. 581–632.
The Old Curiosity Shop.
Hamlet or The Tempest.
Shelley’s Poems (Oxford Classics).
Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
Lamb’s Essays.
English History.
Arnold Forster’s History of England, pp. 719–726 and 745–806 (1820–1861).
French and General History.
Frances Epps’ British Museum for Children, Chapter 8 (Egypt).
Fletcher’s The Great War, 1914–1918, pp. 22–66.
Creighton’s First History of France, pp. 279–290.
Citizenship.
Miss Mason’s Ourselves Book I., pp. 108–139.
North’s Plutarch’s Lives, Timoleon.
Smith’s Smaller Classical Dictionary.
Strachey’s Social and Industrial Life, pp. 36–71.
Geography.
The Ambleside Geography Books, Book IV., pp. 142–187 and 277–284, with special reference to recent changes.
Fighting for Sea Power in the Days of Sail, pp. 30–65.
The children are expected to know something about foreign places coming into notice in the current newspapers, and Map questions have to be answered before each lesson.
Hatch’s Out-door Geography is used by the teacher.
Natural History and Botany.
Haines’ The Changing Year, April to July—or
Furneaux Country Side Rambles, April to July.
Furneaux’ A Nature Study Guide.
Stopes’ Study of Plant Life, pp. 72–108.
Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust, Lectures 1, 2 and 3.
Some special study is to be followed for out-of-door work, and a Nature Note-Book with flower and bird lists is kept, with daily notes.
General Science.
Architecture (Jack) pp. 24–42.
Geikie’s Physical Geography, pp. 1–46.
Reading.
Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, pp. 156–186.
Longfellow’s Golden Legend.
In addition, of course, there are the other subjects of the ordinary curriculum, and one more so characteristic that it must not be omitted, the study of pictures by great artists, a set of six being circulated every term.
This it will be admitted is a full bill of fare, full in quantity as well as in quality, but if you may read once only how much more you can take! And observe what a part is played in this syllabus by the “reading of histories,” and how skilfully the other books are chosen that they may make the histories live. Scott for whom there is no place this term is a great ally for this purpose.
Of the effect of all this reading upon the children one could say much, and multiply examples, if there were time. It is marvellous. To the parent accustomed to the methods and results of the ordinary school the tale of it would be beyond belief. What the children become, what they do, must be seen to be believed. It is idle to talk to those who have not seen it for themselves of the freedom of expression, the copious vocabulary, the vigorous imagination, the new wealth of knowledge, the joy and pride in work.
After all, the great books are the real educators of mankind. Is it so strange, then, that they should prove to be superlatively the best teachers of children too, or that the child should love them? “A desire of knowledge,” said Dr. Johnson, “is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.” Johnson, you will remember, had just been greatly pleased by the declaration of the boy, who was sculling him and Boswell down to Greenwich, that he would give all that he had to know about the Argonauts. How it would have rejoiced his heart if he could have seen elementary schoolboys of 10, 11 and 12 years of age, who already knew all Jason’s story, reading without notes Macbeth and Twelfth Night, and even Lear itself, and acting them with joy and spirit; learning, some of them, their parts right through the plays. It sounds incredible, but they do it; and a few months ago seven or eight of them, from a school I know, not having the money for the train fare (their all had been spent upon the tickets of admission) tramped stoutly 8 miles to Gloucester and 8 miles home again, that they might see acted on the stage Twelfth Night, which they themselves had read and acted the term before.
That is the effect of one great book, an effect that will be lifelong, manifesting itself in many ways. And it is only what we should expect. David Grayson, if I may quote him a second time, has told us why. “The great books have in them,” he says, “the burning fire of life.” But let him lead up to his conclusion in his own delightful way.
He and his neighbours have been talking of old Izaak Walton, and the professor remarks, “How superior it makes one feel, in behalf of the enlightenment and progress of his age, when he reads Izaak’s extraordinary natural history.
‘Does it make you feel that way?’ asked the Scotch preacher. ‘It makes me want to go fishing.’”
And he reads a delightful passage from the old book, in which Izaak unfolds the method of attack with artful grasshopper upon the Chub, “fearfulest of fishes.” Having read it, he repeats, and if we read it we shall agree that his conclusion is most just, “Now I say that it makes me want to go fishing.”
Thereupon Grayson in his own person takes up the parable and points its moral.
“‘That,’ I said, ‘is true of every great book: it either makes us want to do things, to go fishing, or fight harder, or endure more patiently—or it takes us out of ourselves and beguiles us for a time with the friendship of completer lives than our own.’
The great books indeed have in them the burning fire of life.”
These books so used—the one reading, the immediate narration, the subsequent examination—give a quality and an influence to education, and above all to the education of the primary school, that it has never had before. They point the road and stimulate to self-education, which, because it is a lifelong quest, is worth more than all school teaching, though impossible with-out it; and they give one education to the worker’s child and the rich man’s child. For the first time we have in England a common education and the making of a common school. Here is a real foundation of knowledge, a school of Wisdom.
And the Dawn, what of the Dawn?
It is the rosy, dancing, elusive light upon the mountains of our horizon, which seems to point the way to a Land of Hope beyond them, where, if we could attain to it, we should shake off most of that burden of ignorance, poverty, disease, hatred, strife and crime, which weighs us down to-day.
The Athenian saw the light and set out towards it along the path of democracy, but he had not knowledge—only a brilliant eager fancy—nor had he the means of judgment, for the recorded past was still too short.
The French people of the eighteenth century, beset by privilege and crushed by taxation, saw the light beckoning fitfully through the gloom; the Russians have seen it. But neither French nor Russians reached the mountains, for they too lacked knowledge and judgment. Their leaders had not made a faithful survey of the path, or taken Wisdom for their guide.
Failures have been so many, and the attendant disasters so grave, that those who burrow in the subterranean ways of commerce, and are content to batten on the wreckage of a world in misery, shout derisively that the Dawn is but a cheat, and that there is no Land of Hope beyond the difficult forbidding peaks. If the long past had had no greater share of faith and vision, man would have been still eating roots and berries in the forests, a creature little better than the beasts.
Let us proclaim our faith. What should be, shall be. Another century shall see (our own children may see) a secondary education free and compulsory for all; and the best brains will have ready access without charge to the Universities. The huge untapped reservoir of creative genius among the workers will have begun to yield its hidden store. Yet another step, a second century onwards, and, if man is wise and patient, thrifty andindustrious (now alas being ill-educated, he is not), and does not mar his work by over-haste (he seeks short cuts to-day, only to find them blind alleys), there will be no slums, no dirt, no preventable disease, no poverty, very little crime. None will seek to live in private palaces or pile up private wealth. There will be a full and rounded life for all. Self-interest will no longer be the guiding motive of man’s life. In that day the note of patriotism will not be so much willingness to die for country as eagerness to live for it. It will be enough reward, enough honour, that a man’s talent shall have served and enriched his state—whatever that may be—and that his children’s children will be the happier and the better for his days on earth.
As for us, we see the first light of the dawn, and all the pathway lies before us. Let us march resolutely, but without haste, towards the mountains, that, in a far hereafter, men and women sprung from our stock may pass their summits, and reach the Land of Hope that lies beyond.
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Endnotes for the Editor’s Note
[1] The Parents’ Review, vol. 32, p. 581.
[2] Ibid., p. 597.
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