THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF ENGLAND FROM AN AMERICAN POINT

OF VIEW.*

The subject which he discusses before the scientific audience to whom the lecture was delivered is the state of the great schools of England, as revealed in the Report of the late Commission, the effects of the defective education given in these schools on the pupils, and the general re* Classical and Scientifle Studies, and the Great Schools of sults in the national history. Though he styles

England: A Lecture read before the Society of Arts of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 6. 1855. By W.
P. Atkinson. Cambridge, U.S.: Sever and Francis. 1865.

educational powers of both studies. He asserts again and again that he has no intention to depreciate classical studies, and as strongly asserts the necessity of combining the study of science with that of classics, and shews that the study of both is required for the complete development of the mental powers. He maintains that the great schools of England have committed a monstrous mistake in not giving scientific studies their proper place, and he holds up to view their failure, which was acknowledged on all hands, even in respect to classical studies.

when, as we have assumed, the observing faculties are most active in their efforts to develop themselves. He doubtless finds there, to meet that want, the amplest provision which wealth can furnish for the practical study of outward nature, and for gaining at least an elementary knowledge of the wonderful laws by which the Creator governs the universe, in the shape of apparatus, laboratories, instruments, libraries, and teachers trained to use them. He is doubtless taught, as a discipline of the mind, to know and classify the living creatures around him, and to understand the He commences his lecture with a brief state- physical phenomena in the midst of which he ment of what he considers ought to be the educa- lives and has his being. The future citizen of tion of the boys of the English higher classes,— one of the leading industrial nations of the world, "A practical psychology, founded on a true himself perhaps heir to some great landed estate inductive observation of the phenomena of the of vast natural resources, or to some great manuhuman mind, such as should guide us in an a facturing establishment which has laid the foundapriori investigation of such a question, is yet to tion of his family's wealth and consequence; at seek; but I shall assume as axioms one or two any rate, the probable future legislator for these, propositions which you at least will not be disposed he will naturally be instructed in all those deto question. I shall assume that, in the science partments of science which have any bearing on and art of education, we must study and follow these, which will help him to govern and guide nature, and that we shall only be successful so far them successfully, or to legislate for them intellias we do so. I shall assume that there is a cer- gently. Born within that charmed cincle from tain natural order in the development of the human which the rulers of the people are drawn, he will faculties; and that a true system of education begin to be instructed betimes in all that relates will follow, not run counter to, that order. I shall to the history, government, and politics of his own assume further, that, in the absence of any nicer and other modern nations; a citizen of a great classification, we may roughly divide the faculties commercial nation, he will be taught something of the mind, for purposes of education, into ob- of the laws which control the distribution of serving and reflective; and that, in the order of wealth; the inhabitant of an island whose sails development, the observing faculties come first. are found on every sea, and whose trade reaches And again, I shall assume, though the point has to the ends of the earth, he will be well instructed been disputed, that individual minds come into at an age when such instruction is most easily the world with individual characteristics; often, imparted, in the geography, physical and political, in the case of superior minds, strongly marked, of the globe he inhabits. Born heir to the noblest and qualifying them for the more successful pur-language and the richest literature of modern suit of some one career than of any other. Finally, I shall assume, without stopping to qualify the statement, that the study of the phenomena of the material world may be said to be the divinely appointed instrument for the cultivation and development of the observing faculties; while the study of the immaterial mind, with all that belongs to it, including the study of language as the instrument of thought, is the chief agent in the development of the reflective faculties.

"This being premised, let us next inquire, from a practical rather than a theoretical point of view, what we should naturally expect as some at least of the results of the education of a young English gentleman entering one of those magnificently endowed institutions at the age of ten, and leaving at the age of eighteen or twenty for the university or the world? He enters it at an age

times, he will of course be carefully taught, from the very outset, to speak and write his mothertongue with accuracy and ease; and at the age of eighteen or twenty-one, he will be well acquainted with the great writers in prose and poetry who have adorned it. Connected closely with the nations of the continent, and likely from his wealth and position to be a traveller in after life, he will be well acquainted with one or more of the leading continental languages, so as to read them readily, and perhaps even speak them fluently. Finally, an heir to wealth, with perhaps unlimited means at his command of gratifying his tastes, a foundation will surely be laid for the study and appreciation of the fine arts, by a careful cultivation of eye and ear, by drawing and music."

Mr Atkinson then adduces evidence from the

Report in regard to all these matters, and sums of thought, so grammar is, or should be, the up thus:

"I have thus gone over nearly all the list of studies which we assumed to be such as ought to enter into the education of an English gentleman, and thus far, you observe, with next to no result. What then do these great schools teach? I need not give the answer. In place of all these, they teach Latin and Greek, and subordinate to these, mathematics. To these three studies, or rather to two, Latin and Greek, almost the whole teaching force of these great institutions is applied Of the thirty-five masters of Eton, twenty-four, or about seventy per cent., are classical, eight are mathematical, and three teach all the modern languages, physical science, natural history, English language and literature, drawing and music; and this is about the proportion in all save Rugby, where matters are somewhat better."

Mr Atkinson then discusses the classical teaching of the English schools. He extracts largely from the evidence, and pronounces classical studies a failure in them. Here is his opinion of what classical teaching should try to accomplish :

Here, then, is a ridiculous failure even in the classical teaching itself; and though the general cause of it has been already indicated, in the view we have been taking of what constitutes a true and natural education, yet the immediate causes of such a lamentable result seem to deserve a moment's further examination of the nature of the classical teaching itself. For it cannot be denied that, though classical study alone can never form a complete and perfect mental training, yet, in skilful hands, it may be made the means of a very tolerably good one. Let us imagine a school shipwrecked on a solitary island, or walled up in some old monastery, and thus cut off from all knowledge of modern life and access to modern literature; but with a cargo of Greek and Roman authors, and a sufficient supply of dictionaries, grammars, and other illustrative and critical apparatus. Surely good teachers should make something of them. With the grammars of two kindred languages, and with a knowledge of their own (perhaps this last is too great an assumption), they could teach something of the philosophy of speech, and make their pupils understand that grammar is no arbitrary matter, the work of old Lily, or of any Connecticut schoolmasters,merely to be crammed into the memory as a collection of dead, arbitrary rules; that grammar was not made first, and then the language made to fit it,—as one might suppose from the way languages are usually taught; but that as language is the divine and wonderful instrument

philosophical analysis of that instrument, and thus the groundwork of an exposition of the laws of thought. Highly abstract as the study is in its very nature, yet it can be taught intelligently, if pains enough be taken, even to children, though whether it should be is open to grave doubt. Let any one take a tolerably clever child, and first making one grand bonfire of all the school grammars that can possibly come within his reach,— and if certain grammars that I might name were among them, I would make the fire tenfold hotter,

let him proceed to analyse to him the first halfdozen sentences the boy utters, carefully abstaining from pedantic technicalities, and he will have gone a great way in laying the foundation of grammatical knowledge; and, with a little skill, he can carry the process a great way further before the child need even hear of those terrors to the youthful mind, Lindley Murray and his successors. And what shall hinder our imaginary teacher from continuing the process, and teaching the laws of Greek and Latin Grammar practically and rationally, even though it were as yet too much to expect that he should be master of that new science of Comparative Philology, which is destined sooner or later to revolutionise our teaching. Once taught to read the languages of Greece and Rome, our shipwrecked boys would have, in the subject-matter of the classic writers, material for the exercise of their faculties in very various directions. They could learn history from Herodotus, Livy, and Thucydides; politics from Aristotle; eloquence from Demosthenes; and philosophy from Plato. The politics, to be sure, would be antiquated; the morals, unchristian; and the progress the world has made in eighteen centuries would all have to be ignored. They could even acquire some rude notions of physical science, and the beginning of classification in natural history, from Pliny and Aristotle; and in Euclid they would have a geometry not yet superseded. In the careful practice of turning Greek and Latin into good idiomatic English, they would have, not the best certainly, but a very good training in their mother-tongue. And in the study of the severe beauty of the Greek poets, they would have a discipline of their taste, such as perhaps no other literature can give,-provided always they ever attained to such proficiency in the language as would enable them to appreciate its more delicate graces; a proficiency really attained, I presume, by about one in ten thousand of those who study the language. I have gone into this little sketch because it is precisely the way in which the classics are not taught in the great schools of England."

Mr Atkinson then proceeds to shew that the only real education got at Eton is got on the cricket ground, and that this is acknowledged by some of the gentlemen examined. 'Let me premise,' he says, 'that the moral standard at most of these great schools seems to be very high. The evidence, in the main, goes to shew, though evidence of an opposite kind is not wholly wanting, that the boys are healthy, frank, manly, and, on the whole, singularly free from vice. The famous system of 'fagging,' of which it was said not many years ago, that it was 'the only regular institution of slave-labour, enforced by brute violence, which now exists in these islands,' and to which may perhaps be attributed something of that bullying spirit and reckless disregard of right which has characterised the ruling classes in their intercourse with other nations, still exists; but, save at one school, Westminster, it is stripped of nearly all its old brutality, and amounts to merely a wholesome supervision and protection, exercised by the older boys over the younger, in return for which certain menial services are performed, of which, as the aristocracy seem to set great store by their educational value,* one is not disposed to grudge them the benefit.

ful practice consumes twenty-seven hours per week. We shall see that another master puts it higher."

It

Mr Atkinson describes what he deems the results of this state of matters. "One would think,” he says, "that the authorities, having regard to the etymology of the word, had convinced themselves that a school was a place, not of study, but of leisure; and it is a question whether that is not the theory which best satisfies the demands of the parents themselves. The real advantages derived from Eton,' says the Senior Censor of Christ Church, Mr Sandford, 'is less intellectual than social education. Eton is expected to make a boy a gentleman, and this expectation it fulfils. may be added, that many boys are sent to Eton, not to learn, but to form connections.' Compared with the police-spy system of French, or the Jesuist-priest system of Romish, education, no one would hesitate to which to give the preference, but, intellectually, do we not see its legitimate results? For whence come, but from these schools, those innumerable English Nimrods, who betake themselves, through lack of intellectual culture, to wandering up and down the earth, destroying wild animals, lions and elephants in Africa, buffaloes in our prairies, and bears in Norway, yachting to the North Pole, and in a thousand ways endeavouring to work off that superabundant animal life which has no intellec

solid but silent phalanx of Tory lords and country gentlemen, who, in Parliament, so steadily and persistently strive to keep the world from moving, —who fought for the Corn Laws, fought against the Reform Bill, and now are fighting us,-who are they but these ignorant young cricketers, grown up, and not come to years of discretion?

"Now, in any great collection of boys or young men, if the organised and accredited system of education should prove unsuitable and a failure, you may be sure that an unorganised and unaccredited system will be established by the boys them-tual life to balance it? Or whence comes that selves. At such an age, their bodily activity must have fair play, if their mental does not. If they are turbulent and vicious, they will give themselves an education in vice. If they are merely healthy and active young animals, they will be sure to organise a system of vigorous and manly sports; and this is the real education of these great schools. The studies of this curriculum are, first and foremost, cricket; second, and hardly less important, rowing; and, as subordinate elementary studies, racket, hare and hounds, &c., of which we read such glowing accounts in 'Tom Brown.' You may smile at this as a jest; but listen to the evidence. Mr Johnson, an Eton master, testifies that cricket has become such a grave and serious science as to require special trainers, professors as it were; and that the need

"In the London Daily News for June 7. 1864, may be found the report of a curious debate in the House of Lords, on the subject of the discipline of the public schools, in which Lord de Ros spoke in the highest terms of the benefit he had derived, while at Eton, from the operation of cleaning the shoes of a right reverend bishop, who sat opposite. The insolent self-sufficiency of the British aristocracy is such, in spite of disciplinary boot-blacking, that it is a curious inquiry what it would have been if untempered in early youth by that useful economical experience."

"And I might go on to ask, Who is it but the boys who swallow Greek plays whole for the sake of fellowships, that compose that Convocation of country parsons who think that geology tends to atheism because it contradicts Genesis, and even now are striving to silence Bishop Colenso and Professor Jowett? For, so far from this state of things in regard to the intellectual education of these schools being impossible, I will engage, if you will give me several hundred thousand dollars to be expended every year in premiums on the best acquaintance with the words of the Chickasaw language,-if, for instance, a knowledge of Chickasaw words could be made to lead straight to fivethousand-dollar sinecures in the Custom-house and the public offices,-I will engage to have half the community studying that aboriginal tongue, and its teachers defending it (and the kindred

Correspondence.