The Need for a Liberal Education
Editor’s Note, by Art Middlekauff
The Contemporary Review was a monthly journal, founded in 1866, which “became known as a forum for open, erudite inquiry into controversial theological and philosophical issues of the day.”[1] In the July 1922 issue, an article by H. W. Household appeared which advocated for a liberal education for all according to the method developed by Charlotte Mason.
Miss Mason was delighted by all the work that Mr. Household, Secretary for Education of Gloucestershire County, was doing. In a personal letter to him in 1920 she wrote, “it is a very great thing to an old woman to have a ‘son in the faith’ who will carry on & who is an expert in the whole thing—both theory and practice.”[2]
Household’s article was soon reprinted in The Parents’ Review: it was the cover piece of the October 1922 issue. In November, Mason wrote to Household again, exulting, “Our materials and methods are fragments of a philosophy which will I hope alter many things a hundred years hence!”[3] Just over a hundred years after this article and letter were written, we share this new transcription. We hope it will encourage those of us today who have themselves been altered by the materials and methods of Mason’s philosophy.
The Need for a Liberal Education:
How It May Be Given
By H. W. Household
The Parents’ Review, 1922, pp. 689–697
Few people see the truth of things, or really try to find it. They are contented to hold opinions which are rooted in prejudice. They believe this or that because their fellow employers or fellow workmen believe it, or because their favourite newspaper so teaches. They cannot make an impartial study of burning questions. They have no power of judgment. They accept the herd view, taking their principles ready made. They pass their lives in a mental atmosphere that distorts all facts and hides the truth. Most children begin life with a desire to find the truth, a wish to know. They take a joy in learning, until we kill it in our schools. They have a natural capacity for mental vision, but it is not developed. Therefore, as they grow, it atrophies, and when they reach maturity they can no longer see the truth, except at those rare moments when some tremendous shock sweeps away the distorting media, and for a short time (probably too late) reveals to sight the naked facts.
This paralysis of mental vision affects all classes, though in varying degrees.[1] … At the moment, whether in the elementary or in the secondary school (no matter what the type) we largely fail to secure the interest of the pupil. He has to listen too much: he does too little for himself. He does not acquire the habit of independent work, of grappling with and conquering difficulties, of concentration or ordered thought, of free expression, or of what will follow when these are gained—judgment. This is the tale of many teachers, of most inspectors. It is a sorry tale but true.
Yet in our midst there is being conducted an experiment in education which has shown in many schools of many types how the desired end may be achieved. The real greatness of an educational reformer is seldom apparent to his own generation. Recognition comes slow and late. It may be that when we hail the living prophet we alarm the orthodox. If it must be so, so be it. The truth must be told none the less. In the end it will prevail.
Miss Charlotte Mason at Ambleside, during a long life, has shown us (if we would heed) by precept and example what school and teacher should aim at; what any school and almost any teacher can achieve, if they will. Vision and faith are necessary, but even the least of us may win to these. 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. And the right form 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 in 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 second discovery. There is only one reading, and it is always followed by oral narration or written report, when the pupil gives back in orderly sequence the substance of what has been read, be it one page or eight or ten. The knowledge that there will be 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 we must 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 some of those set in Form III, roughly the Standard V., the eleven-year-olds of the primary school last 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’s British Museum for Children, Chap. 8 (Egypt). Fletcher’s The Great War, 1914–1918, pp. 29–66. 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. Strachey’s Social and Industrial Life, pp. 36–71.]
Natural History and Botany: Haines’s The Changing Year, April to July, or Furneaux’ Country Side Rambles, April to July. Furneaux’ A Nature Study Guide. Stope’s Study of Plant Life, pp. 72–108. Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust, Lectures I., II., and III.
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 may seem a full bill of fare, but as there is only the one reading, time is saved and more books can be read. Who does not recall by way of contrast how in his own school days he learnt his lessons in “preparation,” then had them heard in school to test his industry, and finally got all the books up again with feverish haste for the examination at the end of term? It should be noted in passing what a part is played in this syllabus by “the reading of histories” (which Amyot in his preface to Plutarch’s Lives called “the school of wisdom”) and how skilfully the other books are chosen that they may make the histories live.
The effect of all this reading upon the children is marvellous. To the parent unaccustomed 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, it will be remembered, had just been greatly pleased by the declaration of the boy who was sculling him 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 school boys of ten, eleven, and twelve years of age, who already knew all Jason’s story, reading 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 known to the writer, not having the money for the train fare (their all had been spent upon the tickets of admission) tramped stoutly eight miles out and eight 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 has told us why. “The great books have in them,” he says, “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 life-long quest, is worth more than all school teaching, though impossible without 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. The programme, of which a specimen has been given above, is pursued steadily at Ambleside and in many other schools, as a coherent whole until the stage of secondary education is completed. The method that is so successful with English is equally successful with foreign languages. The foreign tongue is a spoken tongue from the beginning, and the masterpieces of its literature, read and narrated, impart “the burning fire of life” that is in them.
While the provision of secondary schools remains so utterly inadequate there is the greater reason to encourage the elementary schools to adopt the programmes and methods of Miss Mason, and so to give within their own walls a liberal education to those children who stay with them beyond the age of fourteen. Such children would no longer mark time as now, but would progress from term to term through a veritable “school of wisdom.” Such an experiment might even show that the multiplication of different types of institutions and of buildings is not so indispensably necessary as is commonly supposed, and that we might, if we would, make a much more extended and profitable use of what we have. Many an elementary school might develop with success a secondary top.
[1] Editor’s Note: At this point, the author began an extended critique of Trade Unionism. Readers who are interested in that portion of the article may consult the unabridged version.
Editor’s Note: The formatting of the above article was optimized for online viewing. To access a version which is formatted more similarly to the original, and which includes the original page numbers, please click here.
Endnotes for the Editor’s Note
[1] https://rossettiarchive.iath.virginia.edu/docs/ap4.c7.raw.html
[2] A Liberal Education for All?, by John Thorley and J. Carroll Smith, p. 271.
[3] Ibid., p. 302.
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