Various

“ It was, then, not merely the revival of interest in classical studies which so profoundly affected the life and education of western Europe. It was rather that in those literatures men found a response to intellectual and moral cravings which had been blindly gathering force for generations, and which found themselves formulated and objectified in the writings which set forth the Pagan view of life with its assumption of the essential worth and self-reliance of the individual and its frank delight in all the pleasures of existence. ”

“ We have already shown how these methods, in their turn, require the aid of general theory, but not of a general theory which tries to do their work. In fact, every attempt to make it do so must inevitably fail. How can such a huge mass of general propositions as are necessarily included in a system of economics ever be thoroughly tested by an appeal to facts? If they are not so tested, the general theory will remain a general theory, of no practical use in itself, until the end of time. ”

“ The most profitable way of developing an educational theory for the present is to trace how in the past education has consciously adapted itself, more or less truly and fully, to the conditions of culture and social life; and by analysis to discover the reasons for comparative success or failure in the degree of clearness with which the end to be sought was apprehended and the nature of the children to be trained was understood. ”

“ In the history of economics or the biography of Ricardo it is of interest to show that he anticipated later writers, or that his analysis bears the test of modern criticism; but no economist is under any obligation to defend Ricardo’s reputation, nor is the fact that a doctrine is included in his works to be taken as a demonstration of its truth. The appeal to authority cannot be permitted in economics any more than in chemistry, physics or astronomy. But the cases stated above suggest more or less false issues. There has been no revolution in economic science, and is not likely to be any. ”

“ The growth of a science is much like the growth of a constitution. It proceeds by adaptation and precedent. The scientific and historical movement of the 19th century was revolutionary in character. When it began to affect economics, many people were afraid that the whole fabric of science would be destroyed and the practical gains it had achieved, jeopardized. These fears were justified, in so far as those who entertained them shut their eyes to everything new and assumed an attitude of no compromise. ”

“ But the inference that, therefore, no comparative estimate of the education of different times and places can be made would be fallacious. For, despite all differences in conception and efficiency among individual educators, each expresses, more or less perfectly and clearly, the common conception and energy of his age and country. As these rise or fall the general level of the actual educative practice rises or sinks with them. The first essential for successful educative effort is, then, that the community as a whole should have a true estimate of the nature and value of education. ”

“ While, then, all true education must be in direct relation with the culture of its age and country, yet, especially on the ethical side, it should aim at transcending the average thought and tone.
Still more does this imply that education strives to transcend the present condition of the educated by making their life more rational, more volitional, and more attracted by goodness and beauty than it would otherwise be. It can never be a passive watching of the child’s development. ”

“ Every volume of records we look through contains a mass of detailed information on the economic life of England in the period we are studying. How much of it is relevant to the subject of inquiry? What is to be the principle of selection? How shall we determine the relative weight and importance of different kinds of relevant evidence? As in modern problems, so in those of past times, a man requires for success qualities quite distinct from those conferred by merely academic training and the use of scientific methods. ”

“ Among the many sweet memories her unsullied pages have bequeathed to the world, not the least precious is her own noble character, which ever responded to all that is best and most enduring in human nature. ”

“ If we study the economy of a village, the idiosyncrasies of every individual in it are of importance. If the village is replaced by a large area, inhabited by millions, with modern facilities of communication, it is a matter of observation and experience that for the purposes of general reasoning the idiosyncrasies of individuals may be neglected. Whether such large numbers have the character of the “economic man” of the early economists matters very little. All the assumptions we require are furnished by observation of people in the mass and the larger generalizations of statistics. ”

“ In all ages the claims of the individual and those of the community have struggled for the mastery as the ultimate principles of life. As one or the other has prevailed the conception of education has emphasized social service or individual success as the primary end. The true harmony of human life will only be attained when these two impulses, contradictory on their own level, are united in a higher synthesis which sees each as the complement of the other in a life whose purpose is neither simple egoism nor pure altruism. ”

“ The Constitution of 1791 decreed that primary instruction should be compulsory and gratuitous. (It may be explained that the term “free education,” instruction libre, does not bear the same meaning in France as in England. In The Revolution and Napoleon. France a free school means a school not under state control and not forming part of the state system.) In this as in much else the Revolution was powerless to do more than enunciate general principles which it left for later generations, in the present instance after the lapse of nearly a century, to carry into effect. ”

“ In practice the study of “political” economy is mainly devoted to the sphere of the State; the welfare of the individual as a member of the State, and of the State in its relation to the world, being internal aspects of the prosperity of the State itself. Economics thus includes the discussion of all the numerous factors which make life profitable, whether to the nation or to the business, or to the individual man. It may be conceived either as an historical science (What principles have in fact paid?) ”

“ From these fundamental conceptions flowed the demands of Plato and Aristotle that education should be regulated in all its details by the state authority, should be compulsory on all free citizens, and should be uniform—at any rate in its earlier stages—for all. In the Republic and the Laws, Plato shows to what extreme lengths theory may go when it neglects to take account of some of the most pertinent facts of life. For the guardian-citizens of the ideal state family life and family ties are abolished; no lower community is to be allowed to enter into competition with the state. ”

“ The economist must, therefore, not only be prepared to take account of the physical features of the world, the general structure and organization of the industry and commerce of different states, the character of their administration and other important causes of economic change. He must be in touch with the actual life of the community he is studying, and cultivate “that openness and alertness of the mind, that sensitiveness of the judgment, which can rapidly grasp the significance of at first sight unrelated discoveries or events.” ”

“ Some people are of opinion that the factors to be taken account of in economic investigation are so numerous that progress on these lines is impossible. It would certainly be impossible if we had to begin de novo to construct the whole fabric of economic science. But, as we shall see, it is no more necessary to do this in the world of science than it is in the world of business or politics. There is in existence a vast store of accumulated knowledge, and few, if any, departments of economics have been left quite unilluminated by the researches of former generations. ”

“ When the aim of the man of affairs and the hypothesis of the economist was unrestricted competition, and measures were being adopted to realize it, general theory such as the classical economists provided was perhaps a sufficiently trustworthy guide for practical statesmen and men of business. If only people can be got to believe in them, a few abstract principles are quite enough to destroy an institution which it has taken centuries to create. ”

“ In general, it may be said that the progress of public education in the United States is marked by (1) compulsory schools, (2) compulsory licensing of teachers, (3) compulsory school attendance, and (4) compulsory school supervision, and by the increasingly efficient administration of these provisions. The compulsion comes in each case from the state government, which alone, in the American system, has the power to prescribe it and to enforce it. Each state is therefore an independent educational unit, and there is no single, uniform American system of education in any legal sense. ”

“ The economist frankly assumes the reality of the existing world and takes men as they are, or as they have been if he is studying past times. His assumptions are based upon ordinary observation and experience, and are usually accurate in proportion to his practical shrewdness and sagacity, so that he is not interested in the speculative flights of philosophy, except in so far as they influence or have influenced conduct. In times past, and to a less extent in our own day, philosophical conceptions have formed the basis of great systems of politics and economics. ”

“ In modern countries it takes myriads of forms, from the sweating of parasitic trades to the organization of scientific research. Economic motives, again, are as varied as the forms of competition, and their development is coeval with that of human society. They have to be interpreted in every age in relation to the state of society, the other motives or ideals with which they are associated, the kind of action they inspire, and the means through which they operate. ”

“ In general theory the inverse rule seems to prevail. There the unity of conception and aim, the firm grip of all the different lines of argument and their relation to each other, which are required, can only be given by a single brain. But no one individual can do original work over the whole field. He is lucky if he can throw new light on a few old propositions. For the rest, he can only, with the utmost caution, adopt the suggestions of other minds as qualifications of old doctrines, never feeling quite sure that he is right in doing so. ”

“ Yet there is no doubt that the education really given was in conformity with Athenian ideals of culture and life, and that it was generally received by the children of free citizens, though of course the sons of the wealthy, then as now, could and did continue their attendance at school to a later age than their poorer brethren. The education of girls was essentially a domestic training. What Plato and Aristotle, with the theorist’s love of official systematic regulation, regarded as the greatest defect of Athenian education was in reality its strongest point. ”

“ The assumptions, the definitions, the reasoning, the conclusions of the classical writers have been ruthlessly overhauled. Defects in their arguments have been exposed to view by those who are most concerned to defend their reputation. Writers with none of the prejudices of the historical school, but with the cold and remorseless regard for logic of the purely objective critic, have pointed out serious inconsistencies here, the omission of important factors there, until very little of the “old Political Economy” is left unscathed. In fact, there never was a scientific system at all. ”

“ On the contrary, Christian teaching exalted humility as one of the highest virtues, and regarded pride and self-confidence as the deadliest of sins. It recognized no doctrine of limitation; what was to be condemned could not be abhorred too violently, nor could what was good be too strongly desired or too ardently sought. The highest state attainable by man was absorption in loving ecstasy in the mystic contemplation of God. ”

“ Edelinck stands above and apart from his predecessors and contemporaries in that he excelled, not in some one respect, but in all respects,—that while one engraver attained excellence in correct form, and another in rendering light and shade, and others in giving colour to their prints and the texture of surfaces, he, as supreme master of the burin, possessed and displayed all these separate qualities, in so complete a harmony that the eye is not attracted by any one of them in particular, but rests in the satisfying whole. ”

“ In all economic investigation assumptions must be made, but we must see that they are legitimate in view of the actual life and character of the community or communities which are the subject of investigation. In common with other sciences, economics makes use of “abstractions”; but if for some problems we employ symbolic processes of reasoning, we must keep clearly in view the limits of their significance, and neither endow the symbols with attributes they can never possess, nor lose sight of the realities behind them. ”

“ That is, original investigation of special problems has to be carried out on a more gigantic scale than any economist of the historical school ever dreamt of or the world requires, with the certain knowledge that at the end of it all the general theory will not correspond with the facts of life. For there is all the difference in the world between using a body of general theory as an indication of the factors to be considered in the study of a special problem, and undertaking special studies with a view to testing the general theory. ”

“ It is extremely important to consider how far the economic conceptions based upon this view of the action of men in the ordinary business of life—such, for example, as the doctrine of marginal utility—depend for their truth and relevance on the fact that in economics we are dealing with large aggregates. The earlier writers generally assumed perfect mobility of labour and capital. No economist would deliberately make that assumption now unless he were dealing with some purely theoretical problem, for the solution of which it was legitimate at some stage in the reasoning. ”

“ The conception of a rhetorical culture is seen at its best in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, the most systematic treatise on education produced by the ancient world. With Quintilian the ideal of an orator was a widely cultured, wise and honourable man. And at first the teaching of rhetoric undoubtedly made for higher and true culture. But with the autocracy, soon passing into tyranny, of the empire, rhetoric ceased to be a preparation for real life. The true function of oratory is to persuade a free people. ”

“ So some ages will show a relatively fixed conception of the educative process, others will be times of unrest and change in this as in other modes of social and intellectual life.
It is in these latter times that the actual work of education is apt to lose touch with the culture of the community. For schools (q.v.) and universities (q.v.) , which are the ordinary channels through which adult culture reaches the young, are naturally conservative and bound by tradition. They are slow to leave the old paths which have hitherto led to the desired goal, and to enter on new and untried ways. ”

“ The genius—or rather characteristic habit—of the English people is averse from the philosophical system, and is disposed to regard education, not as a science, but as a body of expedients to be discovered empirically and amended from time to time as occasion may require.” Clearly, then, the English system of public education, as it results from successive acts of the administration and the legislature, is one which can only adequately be appreciated in the light of an historical survey of the various stages which have led up to it and the social conditions by which they were determined. ”

“ Had classical culture been less formal than it was during the early centuries of Christianity, the innate antagonism of the Pagan and Christian views of life and character must have been so apparent that the education which prepared for the one could not have been accepted by the other. It was only because rhetorical culture was so emphatically intellectual, and so little, if at all, moral in its aims, that its inherent opposition to the Christian conception of character was not obvious. ”

“ True to its theories of individualistic liberty, the Revolution admitted liberty of teaching. Napoleon, on the other hand, by the law of 1806, centralized all forms of education in one official teaching body under the name of the Imperial University, thus securing a monopoly of teaching to the state. The Napoleonic idea of the university, doubtless because a true expression of the national genius, has never ceased to exert a profound influence upon French education, an influence which of late years has been revivified and reinforced by the modern ideal of social solidarity. ”