The Refashioning of English Education: A Lesson of the Great War

I

IT is an interesting illustration of the unexpected in life, and the incalculable relation between cause and effect, that it should have needed the greatest war in history and a European convulsion to bring it home to English people that I heir children — all their children, rich and poor, girls and boys — should be trained in a knowledge of the English language and literature.

It is one of those facts, which, when once stated, appear so obvious that they need neither argument, nor support.

Yet it was only after nearly one hundred years of experiment in national education that it began to dawn on teachers and others interested in the subject, that all boys and girls, of whatever social class, ought to be trained in the elements of humane education, and that the indispensable preliminary to such an education for English children is a knowledge of how to use their own language, and an intreduction to the riches of their own literature.

Our eyes were sharpened to the practical need for this by many experiences and comparisons of ourselves with others during the late war; such, for instance, as the discovery that one of the reasons for the admirable and superior quality of French staff-work was the trained power of the French officer to express himself readily, accurately, and clearly in his own language, thereby immensely increasing the value of his directions and reports.

Or, to take quite another field, we learned much from the comparison that was made by Mr. P. B. Clayton, the chaplain at Poperinghe, between the product of the old elementary schools, as seen in the ordinary English soldier in the line, and the men from overseas. Mr. Clayton speaks with the most sympathetic appreciation of the English soldier, but laments that his ‘standard of general education is so low,’ and says that, by the side of the man from overseas ‘his mental equipment is pitiful. . . . The overseas man, with his freedom from tradition, his wide outlook on life, his intolerance of vested interests, and his contempt for distinction based on birth rather than on worth, has stirred in the minds of many a comparison between the son of the bondwoman and the son of the free.’

It is being gradually realized that this freedom and independence of thought, width of outlook and sense of real values, which a less trammeled life has given in some degree to our brothers overseas, may also be given to the children of the mother-country through a better education, and especially through contact with literature, which is still more untrammeled, as well as wider and more penetrating, when kept in closest relation to life.

This curious blindness, which has hitherto been almost universal in England, as to t he value of a training in English, is not owing to a marked lack of interest, or of belief in education : it is due to a variety of causes, — historical, social, and temperamental, — some of which have been pointed out recently with great cogency. We have, indeed, shown signs lately of a very vital interest in education; and to many observers it appeared to be one of the most remarkable evidences of the fundamental stability and sense of values in the English people, t hat, during the most critical period of the late war. they were able to pass an Education Act (unfortunately, for financial reasons, still inoperative), which, when it does operate, will immensely enlarge the conception of, and in some respects revolutionize, elementary education.

In the same spirit, during the depression and ferment immediately following upon the war, we find one committee after another — on Adult Education, on Modem Languages, on Natural Science, on the Classics, on English — being appointed by the Prime Minister, or the President of the Board of Education, to consider particular aspects of the educational problem in England.

All these reports are now issued, and the result is that we have, in small and convenient compass, a mass of expert information and opinion on the working of the educational system in England, such as has never before been available.

These educational papers bear no longer a merely specialist or technical interest; for all thoughtful people today realize that the future of civilization depends, not upon diplomats or politicians or leagues or kings or princes, but upon the education of the children of the world. If violence and misery and disorder are to be checked, if the swiftly increasing knowledge of material and destructive forces is to be balanced and controlled by an equal increase of the knowledge of spiritual and creative forces, the young generation must be educated, and the outlook upon life of millions of minds must be humanized and widened.

There is no other way. And the moment for it is now. For we are at a turning-point in the history of the world; we live at a time of acute crisis, in which, out of bitter suffering, a new spirit has been born, generating deeper perception and a wider and more generous vision; but it is not yet certain whether this spirit is strong enough to overcome and subdue the old forces of materialism and self-seeking. Its stirrings are to be seen in all the nations, tinder different forms.

In England its presence is felt by an open-mindedness, a sense of grave shortcomings, and an eagerness for change and improvement, such as have never before been known in our national history. To quote the remarkable let ter to the Prime Minister by the Master of Balliol, which serves as an introduction to the report of the Committee on Adult Education, of which he was chairman: —

A new era has come upon us. We cannot stand still. We cannot return to the old ways, the old abuses, the old stupidities. As with our international relations, so with the relations of classes and individuals inside our own nation: if they do not henceforth get better, they must needs get worse, and that means moving toward an abyss. Only by rising to the height of our enlarged vision of social duty can we do justice to the spirit generated in our people by the long effort of common aspiration and common suffering. To allow this spirit to die away unused would be a waste compared to which the material waste of the war would be a little thing; it would be a national sin, unpardonable in the eyes of our posterity. We stand at the bar of history for judgment, and we shall be judged by the use we make of this unique opportunity. It is unique in many ways, most of all in the fact that the public not only has its conscience aroused and its heart stirred, but also has its mind open and receptive of new ideas to an unprecedented degree.

This quickened conscience, stirring of heart, and liberation of mind are to be found in some degree among all the peoples, and one practical result of them is the dawning realization that the most pressing need for every nation is not battleships or guns, but education — enlightened and humane.

Hence these reports and the kind of investigat ion they represent are wort by of careful study, not only by the English-speaking peoples, but by all the peoples of the world; for they are an honest attempt on the part of one nation with a long educational history behind it to grapple with this vital problem, to point out defects, to weigh values, and to establish a basis for practical reconstruction.

II

To return, then, to the special question of the education of the English child of to-day as seen in these documents. The testimony is clear from them all that the old system, when weighed, is found wanting. It must be remembered that the idea of a similar elementary education for all, which in America is almost axiomatic, is for England revolutionary. In England, for generations past, only a very small section of the nation, the boys of families of a certain social class, have been given the chance of acquiring the equipment for life called education: and with them it has taken the form, almost exclusively, of a training in the languages and civilizations (too often, alas, in practice only the elements of the former) of ancient Greece and Rome. Since the days of the Renaissance, classical scholars have maintained, and rightly, that the mental discipline, training in accuracy and logical expression, to be gained by the study of Greek and Latin is unrivaled. Infinitely more valuable is the further training which the advanced student is fortunate enough to get in all that is included under the term ‘civilizations’ of Greece and Rome; in their history, law, social problems, politics, literature, and archaeology. The riches and variety of the mental and spiritual gains of such an education have never been more admirably summed up in brief compass than in the opening pages of the Report on the Classics.

In England, this invaluable training, this gateway to all that is greatest and most beautiful in the modern world, has, speaking broadly, been open, until quite recently, to only a small community of the sons of the wealthier classes. Their daughters, together with the great mass of the remainder of the British people, have been taught little or nothing beyond the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Matters, however, are changing very rapidly, and since the war with a rapidity which is startling. A large and eager democracy is knocking at the doors of our schools and universities and seeking entry, irrespective of sex or class, demanding that they also shall share in the advantages of this subtle, rather vaguely defined, and little-understood thing called education.

We are faced, therefore, with an entirely new problem in England. It is clear that this great company cannot all be taught the ancient Classical languages on the old system, demanding six, eight, or ten years of close and arduous study; only a small percentage of these new scholars — as of the ‘Public-School’ boys of the past — would, apart from financial considerations altogether, care to do this, or would adequately profit by it if they did.

What, then, is to be done? All the expert educational committees which have been at work during these last two years have been faced by this problem, but only one has boldly tackled it in its entirety.

The Classical experts recommend that all boys and girls, even those in elementary schools, ‘should beadmitted to some vision of the great chapter in the progress of mankind which is comprised in the history and literature of Greece and Rome’; and they sketch a most interesting scheme of classical education for boys and girls who leave school at sixteen.

The Workers’ Educational Association, which is the most significant, vital, and hopeful educational movement in Great Britain, in more general terms upholds the importance of the abstract and humanistic studies, in its declaration that ‘Since the character of British Democracy ultimately depends on the collective wisdom of its adult members, no system of education can be complete that does not promote serious thought and discussion on the fundamental interests and problems of life and society.’

The Modern Language experts also emphasize the fact that ‘a democracy cannot afford to be ignorant’; they maintain that modern languages have been more neglected than any other part of our education; they demonstrate their value as the basis of a training to widen outlook, to cultivate imagination and taste, to develop powers of accurate thought and expression; they point out that their many uses arc still imperfectly understood, and they urge reform.

The Committee on Natural Science, on the other hand, state most convincingly the claims of their subject, and indicate its various and distinct kinds of educational value. They claim, and rightly, that science can arouse and satisfy the element of wonder in human nature, that it opens and disciplines the mind, quickens and cultivates observation, trains judgment, teaches reasoning power, method, and arrangement, stimulates curiosity and interest, awakens thought, stirs imagination, cultivates reverence, and provides intellectual refreshment. All this is in addition to its practical utility and necessity to a modern nation in industry, commerce, war and peace, which is so obvious that it needs no argument. They therefore recommend that Natural Science should form an essential part of the general education of all, up to the age of about sixteen.

No enlightened reader of these various reports could do anything but agree most heart ih with all that is urged in favor of the several subjects, each opening up a world of thrilling interest and wonder; and we long, ourselves, to sit down straightway and study along the lines suggested by each one of them. But the truth is that life is too short; the capacity of the average child and of the average teacher is strictly limited, and subjects multiply, and human knowledge expands.

The real problem is one of time, and is broadly this: How can the intelligence of a child who leaves school at sixteen best be awakened; in what way and with what material can he best be given guidance, sustenance, and inspiration for his future life, while at the same time a sound foundation is laid for wider and deeper study for those who desire to carry it further?

III

It is the English Report alone — and this partly because of the nature of its subject — which faces this problem boldly and attacks it in its fundamental aspect; it is, consequently, the most revolutionary inspirit; its recommendations, if carried out, will be the most far-reaching in result; and from our immediate point of view, therefore, it is the most striking and suggestive of all these documents.

The Committee responsible for it included representatives of the universities (Professors C. H. Firth of Oxford, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch of Cambridge, and Caroline Spurgeon of London); of the elementary and secondary schools, the Board of Education Inspectorate, and Training Colleges (Mr. J. H. Fowler, Mr. J. Dover Wilson, Afiss Davies, Mr. G. Sampson, and others); while poetry and pure letters were represented by Air, John Bailey and the Chairman, Sir Henry Newbolt.¹

In an admirably reasoned introduction, almost wholly constructive, full of vision as well as of close thought, it is pointed out that the trouble is not that there is an inadequate concept ion of the teaching of English or too little time given to it, but that we have failed to conceive the full meaning and possibilities of national educat ion as a whole. This failure is due to the lack of any clear idea as to what the true nature of education is. The great majority of people still identify it with the imparting of information; and though some consider this largely useless, others value it as a possible means of obtaining increased wages or some other vocational advantage. In general, it may not unfairly be said, the Report continues, that ‘education is regarded as a suitable occupation for the years of childhood, with the further object, of equipping the young in some vague and little-understood way for the struggle of adult existence in a world of material interests.’

Our first concern, therefore, must be to formulate some common fundamental idea of education, and to build up on it a national system.

Many critics, from different angles, have pointed out that our present education has been for a long time past too remote from life. The instinctive feeling of the majority of English people is a right one, that education should bear directly upon life, and that no part of the process should be without, a purpose intelligible to everyone concerned.

The chief factor in the present divorce between education and reality is the theory, long accepted, that, ‘the process of education is the performance of compulsory hard labor, a “grind” or “stiffening process,” a “gritting of the teeth” upon hard substances, with the primary object, not of acquiring a particular form of skill or knowledge, but of giving the mind a general training and strengthening.’

If this theory were abandoned, the whole educational problem would be made easier, and it would be possible to secure for the child a living interest and a sense of purpose in his work. This purpose would be realized more and more fully as it came to be understood that education is not the same thing as information or discipline, or even the dealing with human knowledge divided up into so-called ‘subjects.’

True education, the ‘drawing out’ and training of already existing faculties, is really guidance in the acquiring of experience. For t he gaining of experience, physical, mental, and spiritual, is the one I hing which matters; it is in this continuous gain that life itself consists, and the full garnering and expression of this experience is the highest end we can see for man — ‘ripeness is all.'

Education, then, guides the child in experience of different kinds of manual work, investigation of matter and its qualities, and, most valuable of all, those experiences of human relations which are gained by contact with human beings, either by social contact at school, at home, in the outer world, or ‘in the inner world of thought and feeling, through the personal records of action and experience known to us under the form of literature. . . . Literature, the form of art most readily available, must be handled from the first as the most direct and lasting communication of experience by man to men.’ It must never be thought of merely as an ornament or pastime, and, ‘above all, it must never be treated as a field of mental exercise remote from ordinary life.’

Great literature, as those who care for it well know, is not only close to life, but is a means of life. For, after all, what is life? That is a question which, in its completeness, we are unable to answer; but perhaps the best working definition of it is that it is response to stimulus. The more we respond, the more we are alive; and the great makers of literature are those who have a range and delicacy and depth of response beyond that of the ordinary man; and by coming into touch with their spirit, we are enabled to share in some degree their vision of the glory and wonder of the world; we are able 1o realize how much more there is to be seen and to be felt than we ever before knew, or than we ever could know unaided; and we become more fully alive.

For the teacher and the taught alike must never forget that ‘books are not things in themselves: they are merely the instruments through which we hear the voices of those who have known life better than ourselves.'

Never yet has this great life-giving spring been made available for English boys and girls as a whole.

Boys and girls of all classes have for generations gone through a so-called education, without being disturbed by the slightest suspicion of what literature meant. The better scholars at our Public Schools have tasted of it through the mighty literatures of Greece and Rome. The select few who have a natural taste for it, together, perhaps, with an enthusiastic teacher, may have been led to read it; but the great mass of upper-class English schoolboys, hammering away for years at their Latin and Greek grammars, have remained blissfully unconscious of it.

The elementary school-child equally, though occasionally awakened to the literary treasures in our language through the good fortune of a sympathetic instructor, on the whole has gone out into life unaware of them.

Hence the bulk of English people of every class are unconsciously living starved existences. Here is waste unspeakable. waste of the possibilities of joy and refreshment and inspiration in the lives of millions. By no means the least of the many tragedies of the war — so it seems to one onlooker — was the spectacle of thousands of young men, the flower of her race, laying down their lives for England without ever having shared her proudest possession, without ever having even guessed at the wonder and the glory of the greatest treasure England can give her sons — her literature.

The Report, on English then urges that in national education what we need is the true starting-point for the whole of the structure. For this purpose there is but one material — English: ’for English children no form of knowledge can take precedence of a knowledge of English, no form of literature can take precedence of English literature,’and the ‘two are so inextricably connected as to form the only basis possible for a national education.’

It is not suggested for a moment that English should replace the Classics, but that it should precede them, so that, instead of the study of the Classics being forced on all indiscriminately, English should be used as a sifting-ground, to differentiate those who possess sufficient linguistic ability and literary instinct to justify their taking up Latin or Greek, or both.

Moreover, — as is pointed out in chapter three of the Report, — it will greatly assist the study of the Classics if children have first some perception of what literature is; so that, when they come ‘to Horace or Sophocles they may no longer have the two difficulties to confront at once, the difficulty of the unknown art of poetry, as well as the difficulty of an unknown language.’

This suggested foundation of English means that all English children, whatever their position or occupation in life, should have, in however elementary a form, a liberal education; that they should be taught to speak and to write good English — a matter of the most vital concern for all English men and women, and for them the one indispensable preliminary and foundation of all other branches of learning. For a lack of language is a lack of the means of communication, and of thought itself.

And, more important still, every English child should be introduced to English literature, and should be helped through it to realize what great literature is, and, by that means, what great art is.

For it is, indeed, true, as this introduction boldly declares, that, ‘the prevalence of a low view of art, and especially of the art of literature, has been a main cause of our defective conception of national education.’

A much higher view must be taken, not only of science — too often regarded as a kind of skilled labor, — but of art, and especially of literature, which has been almost universally misapprehended and degraded — confused with the science of language, or valued for its commercial uses. We make no apology for quoting in its entirety the following passage from the introduction, for it contains the very essence of its argument: —

This higher view of art is the only one consistent with a true theory of education. Commercial enterprise may have a legitimate and desirable object in view, but that object cannot claim to be the satisfaction of any of the three great natural affections of the human spirit — the love of truth, the love ot beauty, and the love of righteousness. Man loves all these by nature and for their own sake only. Taken altogether, they are, in the highest sense, his life, and no system of education can claim to be adequate if it does not help him to develop these natural and disinterested loves. But if it is to do this effectively, we must discard or unlearn all mean views of art, and especially of the art of literature. We must treat literature, not as language merely, not as an ingenious set of symbols, a superficial and superfluous kind of decoration, or a graceful set of traditional gestures, but as the selfexpression of great natures, the record and rekindling of spiritual experiences, and, in daily life for every one of us, the means by which we may, if we will, realize our own impressions and communicate them to our fellows. We reiterate, then, the two points which we desire to build upon: first, the fundamental necessity of English for the full development of the mind and character of English children, and, second, the fundamental truth that the use of English floes not come at all by nature, but is a fine art, and must be taught as a fine art.

It is clear, the Report goes on to point out, that such a liberal education, based on the English language and literature, for every child in England, would be the greatest benefit that could be conferred on him, and that ‘the common right to it, the common discipline and enjoyment of it, the common possession of the tastes and associat ions connected with it, would form a most important new element, of national unity, linking together the mental life of all classes.’

Our education up to now has been a powerful element of division; it has ‘gone far to make of us, not one nation, but two,’ neither of which shared the associations or tastes of the other.

The best currents of educational thought and experiment, in ignoring or despising the commercial and industrial facts of the modern world, have become remote from the life of the vast bulk of the population, who are mainly concerned with commerce and industry. A special preparation for them has therefore developed, known as technical education, which is not a complete education, but starves half the nature of man. So that the cleavage has been disastrous both for education and for industry.

Much of our social discord, suspicion, and bitterness, of our industrial warfare and unrest, is owing to this gulf between classes, between industry and culture, emphasized by the gulf between educated and uneducated speech; and nothing would do more to bridge this chasm than a common education, fundamentally English, resulting in a common pride and joy in the national language and literature.

And as one result of this common English elementary education, we should hope to find many more instances akin to the remarkable one cited in the Classical Report, of the school at Stornoway in the Island of Lewis, attended largely by t he children of fishermen and crofters, in which some thirty pupils are learning Greek, and those in the highest class are reading Homer, Æschylus, and Plato.

This recognition of the undoubtedly unifying national effects of a common education, thought out on a national basis, is an interesting foreshadowing of a recognition, which will come later, of the equally undoubted unifying international effect which can be got only through a common education, thought out on an international basis. We have an adumbration of its possibilities in Mr. Wells’s most suggestive Bible of Civilization.

IV

It can be seen from what we have already said that the conclusions and recommendations of this Report are not altogether of a type which we associate with Government committees and blue books, and, in consequence, they are all the more hopeful and inspiriting.

It is good to find it avowed by an experienced and practically minded committee, who have spent two and a half years on their task, have interviewed 102 witnesses, and amassed vast stores of evidence and information, that education is the acquisition of experience resulting in a wider outlook on life; that great literature is the record and rekindling of the spiritual experience of great natures, and that the transmission of it as such is an indispensable factor in education; that we have failed hitherto in national education because we have too low and mean a view of art in England; and that there is, consequently, a pressing need for a realization of the qualit y and character of art and its practical bearing on life.

It is good to have it reiterated, — as well as to have practical suggestions made for carrying if out, — that literalure, not being a knowledge-subject, cannot and should not be taught, but should be communicated to the students in such a way that, they will experience it, rightly. It is satisfactory to find many age-long educational fallacies exposed — as the delusion that the people as a whole should have only manual or ‘vocational’ training, such as fits them to be miners or engineers or cooks. This is the educational ‘lie in the soul,’ and the whole Report is a protest against it. There is also the opposite delusion, that, education unfits, makes a man too good for manual labor — the unfortunate notion that education somehow involves a black coat and a pen in the hand. Both alike are rooted in the same misconception, that education is exclusively an affair of vocation. That is just what it is not, at least in its earlier stages. The first thought of education must be fullness of life, not professional success.

It is good to hear that no teacher — be his work elementary or advanced — can be too highly gifted or too highly trained; that all our force must first be applied to him if we are to raise the mass; and that, therefore, it is a vital necessity and preliminary that the teacher should be properly trained at a university, properly equipped with libraries and other intellectual opportunities, and properly paid.

It is good, we repeat, to find these views and these recommendations between the gray covers of a government report; it will be better still when we see them acted upon.

Those are the basic principles upon which the Report is founded; for the development and application of them, we can only refer readers to the pamphlet itself. They will find there, amid much else, a brief but most suggestive history of the ideals and practice of English education since the Renaissance, and an account of the present teaching of English in elementary and secondary schools and at the universities. Doubtless, as regards this latter, the large amount of argument devoted to proving the importance of English in university studies will sound strange to American ears; but the need for it is explained by the historical introduction, where it is shown that, owing to the long dominance of Classics and mathematics, it is only quite lately that we have begun to be definitely conscious that we have a great and independent literature of our own. Hence, only recently has English had any position at all in English universities, or formed part of the ordinary or recognized studies.

Specially interesting in this chapter (‘The Universities’) is the part which deals with the study of language, showing the reaction which is taking place from that form of philology so aptly described by Sir Waller Raleigh as ‘hypothetical sound-shiftings in the primaeval German forests,’ and making a convincing case for a more literary and human study of language, its meanings and developments, especially during t he sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

They will find many valuable suggestions as to the training of teachers, in the section devoted to that subject, where great emphasis is laid on the need for ability in the leaeher of English to read and speak well, and on the fact (as expressed by the Uommittee on Adult Education) that, the ‘indispensable qualification of the teacher of literal ure is not learning but passion, and a power to communicate it.’

It is pointed out that it is not sufficiently borne in mind that the teachers of literature should, so far as possible, teach only those authors for whom they themselves have a real love. Else there is danger that their pupils may resemble a candidate in a recent examination, who wrote, ‘Scott has spent pages upon pages upon describing a country scene, this is very’ uninteresting, but it is intensely good literature.’

They will find a philosophy of the teaching of English in elementary schools, which is an illumination of the whole problem, and which, if taken to heart, should be as great an inspiration as a teacher of this most difficult subject in most difficult surroundings could possibly have. What, for instance, could better help, guide, and inspire such a teacher, keeping him ever conscious of the real magnitude and farreaching effect of his work, than to remember that ‘the lesson in English is not merely one occasion for the inculcation of knowledge — it is an initiation into the corporate life of man'?

They will find most striking testimony from representative business men as to the important place they consider training in spoken and written English should take in preparation for business life, and, most especially, as to the need for the clear thinking and broad outlook which the study of literature may be expected to provide.

The question of the need for the retention of some form of humanism of which English will form a part, as an essential element in a preparation for industrial and commercial life, is fully discussed, and it is pointed out that, as regards the giving of English itself — even literature — a vocational bias, so that it can be made to bear directly upon the life and work of those who study it, we in England can learn much from the interesting experiment in this direction made by Mr. Frank Aydelotte at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and described in his essay on The Problem, of English in Engineering Schools.

Signs are not wanting that some steps are already being taken in England to meet this need, such as the recent, appointment of a Director of Humanistic Studies to the staff of one of the most important technological institutes in the North. Two sentences from the testimony of this same director deserve quotation, for they embody not only his point, of view, but also that of the Committee. Speaking of the reading and acting of plays he says, —

This method of acquiring the art of selfexpression has the further advantage of developing what ex-technical students — engineers, chemists, mill-managers — so often lack, imagination. The main point I desire to bring out is that the intelligent study of literature develops personality, and is valuable to anyone in any walk of life; for literature deals with life, of which weaving and chemical research are parts.

Nothing could bring home more vividly the change in attitude toward humane education for the worker than to read this carefully thought out section on ‘English in Industrial and Commercial Life,’ and then to read the account of the kind of training received in the elementary schools thirty or forty years ago by those who are now adult workingmen and women.

In those days education was purely utilitarian. . . . Literature was not used in business, and therefore did not enter the curriculum. No advice was given on the subject of reading. A school library was a rarity . . . it was not uncommon for children to have two ‘poetry’ lessons each week for a year, and during the whole of that time read no more than one poem. When children left school — at the age of thirteen — they carried with them a detestation of poetry which most of them retained through life.

In this connection it is specially interesting to note the suggestions for teaching English in the new Day Continuation Schools, on the principle on which some now teach history and geography, from the local centre outward, in such wise that, speech, song and dance, acting and craftsmanship and history, based upon local manners and customs, should take a foremost place. The possibilities along this line are strikingly confirmed by the late Professor F. W. Moorman, of Leeds, who, in the preface to a little volume of Yorkshire dialect poems, published in 1918, tells how, in his dialect wanderings through Yorkshire, he discovered that, while there was a hunger for poetry in the hearts of the people, the great masterpieces of our national song, the outcome of a traditional culture coming down from the time of the Renaissance, made little or no appeal to them.

They were bidden to a feast of the rarest quality and profusion, but it consisted of food they could not assimilate. Spenser, Milton, Pope, Keats, Tennyson, all spoke to them in language which they could not understand, and presented to them a world of thought and life in which they had no inheritance. But the Yorkshire dialect verse, which circulated through the dales in chapbook or Christmas almanack, was welcomed everywhere,

This appeal of the local and dialect verse is further exemplified in the work of what is by far the most vital as well as the most ancient cultural movement for the people in Great Britain to-day — the centuries-old Celtic eisteddfod system in Wales, of the work and methods of which a very interesting account is given in the Report on Adult Education.

In addition to the renowned musical activity and great singing festivals to which it gives rise, it promotes verse and drama and essay competition of the most lively kind; so that practically every village in Wales contains a number of men and women who have mastered the most intricate system of Welsh verse, and for whom poetry generally is the principal interest of their leisure hours.

These, however, are exceptions, and the broad fact remains true, as faced frankly in the interesting discussion on Literature and the Nation, that the present generation of working people in England, as a whole, has no use for literature. This, it is suggested, is because there is no longer any ‘folk’ literature springing from the lives of the people, as in the mediaeval age, when they sang ballads and took part, in their guilds in plays and pageants. This lack in our modern working people of aesthetic delight, of joy in life expressing itself through music and verse, as compared with the people of Elizabethan England or of ancient Sicily and Greece, is made vividly real to us when we read what Mr. Cecil Sharp tells us of the ballad and part-singing of the Appalachian mountaineers in our Southern States, who have carried on undisturbed, in their far-off, inaccessible mountains, the habits of their seventeenth-century English forefathers; or when one sees, as the present writer did this spring, the shepherd boys in the narcissus fields of Northern Africa playing gayly upon the flute, dancing, and laughing, with roses garlanded behind their ears. The pastoral is no artificial form of verse for them, for it tells of what is as familiar a daily occupation as the drinking of beer in the village alehouse is to the English peasant.

But our working people of to-day, so one interesting witness told us, feel that literature expresses the point of view, for the most part, of the middle and upper classes, and tha t any attempt to teach them literature or art is an attempt to impose upon them the culture of another class. At the same time, evidence is given of the appeal to workingmen of such writers as Burns and Jack London.

Wordsworth, writing over a hundred years ago, with his poet’s insight, foresaw some part of the position in which we now find ourselves. He anticipated the likelihood of immense changes in the social life and industrial occupations of the vast majority of our people, and consequently in the ‘impressions which we habitually receive,’ and he prophesied that in these changed conditions the poet, who ‘follows wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings,’ will invade this vast new territory and make it his own.

This prophecy is — broadly speaking — as yet unfulfilled, though we should like to know whether such poems as those in Gibson’s little volumes of Daily Bread and Fires, make any appeal whatever to the miners and laborers and factory-hands about whom they are written.

The whole question of the relation of poetry, and indeed of art, to national life, though an old one, is intensely vital and interesting, and is as yet unsolved. If, however, we accept Wordsworth’s view, it may be that the explanation of the present, and, we hope, only transitory, divorce in England between art and industry may be the same that lias so far prevented the American people, with all their rich and varied life and intellectual vigor, from producing a literature that can in any sense be called national. It may be that its origins are too recent; that, as with our great industrial population, its occupations are too ‘modern,’ to have taken upon them that coloring of t he imagination necessary for the poet. It may be that the traditions and activities of the people of the New World, in common with those of the great majority of our own people, are — to use Wordswort h’s language — not yet sufficiently ‘familiarized to men . . .to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood,’ and, therefore, the poet cannot ’lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, or welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.’

If this be so, the hope of the future lies in the healing of the breach between art and common life, in the meeting together of culture, of poetry, and of everyday work; and this, in the words of our Report, can be brought about only through a humanized industrial education, which will make ‘ poetry and drama as free of the factory and the workshop as they were of the village green and moot-hall in the Middle Ages.’

V

Enough, perhaps, has been said to show the kind of questions raised and discussed in these Government reports, which we believe will prove to be historic documents, though we have here merely touched on the fringe of a few of the problems in one of them.

We have a mighty task ahead of us in England: nothing less than the remaking of our national educat ion on a vastly larger and more comprehensive and more humane scale; and a good start has been made by the investigations and conclusions of these various committees. Little as we—any of us — desire to multiply committees, I should, in this connection, welcome yet one more, to report on what we can learn from other countries to help us in our work.

The note on the teaching of the mother-tongue in France in the English Report, and the warm recommendation by the Classical Committee of two books by American scholars, — Professor J. H. Breasted’s Ancient Times, and Professor G. W. Botsford’s History of the Ancient World, — as invaluable for a boy in the ‘Classical Sixth,’ show that we are not blind to this. But the genius of the French for training their children in their own language, and the special and vivid power of generalized history-teaching in America, which makes her, as Mr. Wells says, ‘a hopeful laboratory of world-unifying thought,’ are only two of many directions in which we should gain greatly from more knowledge along these lines. In some of our newer university problems especially, it seems to me that, we in England may learn much from America, who, from the start of her educational life has been faced by conditions which are only now beginning to confront us.

America has been forced very rapidly to supply the needs of a great and varied democracy, with an insistent desire for education. This has resulted in the establishment and equipment of vast universities on a scale undreamed of here, and also in the evolution of social organization and student self-government of a high order. It has led her to aim, in these universities, at an allround development, physical and social as well as intellectual, and to provide means of physical and social well-being far in advance of anything we have yet attained. But, most important of all, it has constrained her to relate the teaching of subjects to life, in order to interest and to afford intellectual nourishment to many who do not come from cultivated surroundings, and who are not preparing to be scholars or educational specialists. Consequently, many of the lecture courses — the ‘live’ method of attacking a subject and of handling discussion classes — contain much that is suggestive, especially to those of us in England who have to deal with the newer type of university student.

Such courses as those given by Mrs. George Haven Putnam on Greek literature, and Miss Minor Latham on play-writing, at Barnard College, and Professor Baker’s training in dramatic art at Harvard, are a revelation of live and vigorous teaching, and of the close relation which can be made between a literary subject and life. For America is so intensely alive; it is her eager and thrilling vitality which, above everything else, strikes the English visitor to her shores; refreshing and invigorating him, though at first it may slightly overpower him.

We, of the Old World, are just a little weary — disillusioned it may be, critical certainly; and, in academic circles, we have been known at times to be somewhat suspicious and unreceptive about new methods. This is, possibly, the penalty of a long tradition and accumulated experience of centuries of scholarship centred at our old universities, and from them radiating throughout the country. This experience may, perhaps, be helpful to the New World, desirous of raising its standards to a high degree of finish and perfection. On the other hand, in the special task which lies before us in England, of the refashioning of our education in closest relation to life, in order to meet the needs of our great industrial population, I believe that America, of all the countries in the world, is the one that can teach us most.