Written
byR. W. Livingstone
The
nation is discontented with itself and with its education. It is
probably too discontented. Self-criticism is a constant trait of the
Anglo-Saxon, and his dark views of himself are always to be accepted with
reserve.
What is
the cause of them?
The
classics are favorite scapegoats. And this view is the more odd, because it is
one of the few which can certainly be disproved. Germany has a strong history
of scientific achievement, and it is implied that they have become “scientific”
by giving physical science a predominant place in their higher education.
Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, their secondary
education is far more classical than ours, and they have far more compulsory
Greek and Latin.
It is
superficial to suppose that our one defect is ignorance of physical science. It
is true that without physical science our whole civilization would collapse;
and it is a just conclusion from this that the community must contain a
sufficient number of trained men of science to meet its needs. But it is not a
just conclusion that every citizen must be a trained scientist. Because
specialists are necessary in all branches of life, it does not follow that we
must all specialize in every form of specialization. Why is physical science to
be given an exceptionally favored position?
The great gap in science is that it tells us hardly anything about man. That is why it is impossible to “base our education on physical science.” It omits a branch of knowledge which everyone needs. Considering that the world reposes on physical science, it is wonderful how well most of us can get along without any knowledge of it, provided our occupation does not demand actual scientific knowledge.
But no
one can dispense with a knowledge of man. Everyone needs it, and using it each
minute he is in relation with human beings, whether he is speaking to them, or
reading what they have written, or engaged in work which at any point touches
them.
Our need
of science may be great, but our need of political and moral wisdom is greater.
As
science reveals to us the physical constitution of ourselves and of the world
round us, so the humanities reveal to us man. There is no science of man;
anatomy and biology, while they have much to say about his body, throw little
light upon his behavior, nor explain why he makes a French Revolution or a
European war, why he is a miser or a spendthrift, a Machiavelli or a Frederick
the Great. Physical science does not deal with this kind of thing. Yet the
“science” which everyone needs, and statesmen above all, is such a knowledge of
man.
Now there
is, if not a science, yet a record and account of man; we call it, according to
its various aspects, by the various names of literature, history, philosophy.
And this is the justification of the literary-philosophic-historical education
which prevails in our secondary schools and universities.
Before
the student of literature, philosophy, and history are displayed all the forces
and ideas that have governed man, personal, religious, or political; to see why
he has rejected this and espoused that, why this failed and that was
successful, what are liberty and religion, family affection and personal greed,
and in a word, to study Man. As he reviews them, and compares them with the
present, he can see, as far as a man can see, what ideas have come down to his
own day, and what new elements are combining with them, can forecast in some
degree the future, and by virtue of his knowledge guide the streaming forces,
and shape the molten mass, serve his country and use to the best advantage his
own powers.
If anyone
thinks this pedantic, and believes that the knowledge of man is only got from
life, let him read Anna Karenina or The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and say if
he learns nothing from them about marriage, education, and human nature in
general; and let him remember the opinion of a man who knew the world and was
not a pedant.
Lord
Chesterfield wrote to his son: The knowledge of the world and that of books
assist one another reciprocally; and no man will have either perfectly, who has
not both. The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and
not in a closet. Books alone will never teach it you; but they will suggest
many things to your observation, which might otherwise escape you; and your own
observations upon mankind, when compared with those which you will find in
books, will help you to fix the true point.
That is
perfectly true.
The world
is far more intelligible to us if we have studied history and literature. We
understand Hamlet or Brutus, when we meet them in the flesh, far more readily
if we have already met them in Shakespeare. Their actions have a meaning for us
because we have the clue to their character. We are like visitors to a foreign
town who have already studied its map; the lay of the land, the plan of the
whole is already familiar for us, and we pick up our bearings quickly, instead
of wandering vaguely about the streets.
Consider
what a literary education in theory is, and in fact might easily become. The
student of literature moves familiarly in an infinitely vast and varied
assembly. Even if he confines himself narrowly to the classics, he meets there
all sorts and conditions of men—neurotics as different as Lucretius and
Propertius, conservatives as different as Pindar and Aristophanes; he meets the
man of letters as politician in Isocrates and Cicero, and the politician as man
of letters in Caesar; he learns to know worldly common sense incarnate in
Horace, reason incarnate in Socrates; he sees the pessimists of an
over-civilised society—Juvenal, the disappointed bourgeois, Tacitus, the soured
aristocrat, Marcus Aurelius, the disillusioned saint; he notes how differently
Plato, the imaginative idealist, and Aristotle, the clear-sighted analyst,
prescribe for their distempered age. These are only a few of the types whom he
learns to know as intimate friends, whose dispositions become familiar to him,
into whose moods and personality he can in a moment throw himself. And I have
said nothing of the characters they have painted in their books.
The value
of history is even more obvious. … One great danger, as we set about social reform,
is that the democracy knows very little history. Yet even so, we have learnt
immensely from history, and our whole political attitude, consciously or
unconsciously, is coloured by our knowledge of it. One point in which we differ
most profoundly from the Greeks and Romans, in other ways so like us, is that
we have more history behind us, and have learnt more from it.
If
history needs no apology, philosophy needs a good deal. Its name is against it;
and we forget that when we think, argue, or act, it stands behind us, the
unseen framework of all our practice, which becomes visible as soon as we ask
how or why. Bishop Berkeley’s grave and measured saying is its best
justification: “Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon
God, the human mind, and the Summum Bonum, may possibly make a thriving
earthworm, but will certainly make a sorry patriot and a sorry
statesman.”
It is as
the study of man that the humanities claim their predominant place in
education, and in this age of material things, while we honor science and pay
her dues, we shall do well sometimes to remind ourselves that man is more
important than nature, and man’s spiritual constitution more important than his
physical constitution. Philosophically it may be disputable, practically it is
admitted, that the world exists for him; and those who deny it with their lips
assert it by their actions and their attitude to life. “Quand univers
l’ecraserait,” “homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue.” “Social
progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the
substitution for it of . . . the ethical process.” Pascal and Huxley are here
agreed. We cannot in our education give the chief place to the junior
partner.
Then a
further point. One of the chief objects of education is to train flexibility of
mind, to make a man quick to comprehend other points of view than his own.
Obviously, no power is more necessary in dealing with men. To be able to
discard for the moment his own opinions, and see the world through the eyes of
other classes, races, or types, is as indispensable to the merchant as to the
statesman; for men are hardly to be controlled or influenced unless they are
understood. And yet no power is rarer. It is almost non-existent among
uneducated people. A man who has not risen above the elementary school is
hardly ever able to seize an attitude of mind at all different to his own; he
may acquiesce in it because he trusts or respects the character of the person
in question, but he does not understand it; he cannot perform the great feat
for which our intellectual gymnasia train us, of being in two (or more)
people’s skins at the same time. And this is not due to the absence of any
organ from his body, but simply to the fact that he has never practiced the
art.
Nor is
the failing confined to the quite uneducated. We all of us spend half of our
time in misunderstanding our neighbor, and in most controversies
misunderstanding is the dividing line between the parties concerned. Now the
power of sympathetic insight is trained by a literary education. A man learns
above all from the study of literature and history to put himself in the place
of other men, races, and times, to identify himself with them, to see what they
mean and how they felt. And so, by continual practice, he becomes quick at
seizing the views of other people than himself, seeing what is in their mind,
and accommodating himself to it.
Here
physical science gives no help. In literature the mind must continually be
moving from one place to another; in twenty-five pages the reader must
successively become Polonius, Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, Gertrude—to mention no
other characters of the play. In fact, he must do what the merchant does who
wishes to sell goods in half a dozen different markets, or the statesman who
has to consider the interests and temper of half a dozen different classes and
nationalities. But science keeps on one plane; she is not puzzled by the subtle
and profound variations of outlook which separate a Russian from an Englishman,
a Herefordshire farmer from a Tyneside artisan. Minerals and nerves, alkalis
and engines have no point of view, no outlook on life, into which it is
necessary to enter; understanding them is very different from understanding
Shakespeare or Euripides. You deal with them and all the while remain your own
insulated self. Science does not train sympathy, because nothing in its
subject-matter has feelings with which we can sympathise.
Science
studies things rather than man, and where she studies him, studies only his
physical, and least important, aspect; we shall learn little from her of human
nature. She can never teach us to enter into other men’s minds; one of the most
obvious weaknesses of the mere scientist is the difficulty of making him see
other points of view than his own. She is of herself unimaginative, for her
business is with the causes of things not with their spiritual values; and
though her great representatives have brought imagination with them to their
work, the quality is curiously absent in her lesser lights.
“For many
years,” wrote Charles Darwin, “I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have
tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intensely dull that it
nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.”
Our
danger in education today comes, not from men of science as a whole, but from
her less liberal devotees, and from that part of the public, which (in a
thoroughly unscientific spirit) talks about education without studying it. We
should remember that an education based on physical science would not only
leave the mind unflexible, unsympathetic, unimaginative, undeveloped, but would
ignore what is more important than the Cosmos itself.
Our motto
was written 2,500 years ago on the walls of the temple of Apollo at Delphi:
“Know thyself.”
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