William Parsons Atkinson

“ It is to ignore the vast progress of the human mind since the days of Erasmus to try any longer to make classical learning stand in the same relation to the modern student that it stood in to Erasmus: and Erasmus, if he were alive today, would be the first to abandon the dead pedantries of the past for the fountains of new thought he would see flowing all round him. ”

“ The layman has nothing to do with the science of medicine: he must be cured, or, more probably, killed, secundum artem, by his physician. The layman has nothing to do with the science of the law: it is his business to get into lawsuits, and it is the lawyer's secret how to extricate him. But these superstitions, the relics of an age of popular ignorance, are in their turn disappearing, as just ideas of what constitutes real knowledge begin to penetrate the minds of the whole people. ”

“ This is the great change which liberal education is silently undergoing, far more than it is a change from a literary to a scientific basis.
I know of no educational fallacy more common and more mischievous than that of enormously overrating the educating value of the process of acquiring the mere form of foreign languages, whether dead or living; yet it is in this barren study that we waste the precious time that should be employed, from the very beginning of school-life, in acquiring the substance of real knowledge. ”

“ There is one form of art-study, and that, perhaps, the highest, which is open to all, even to the humblest student, and the most elementary school, and that is, the study of poetry. It is a prime element in any conception of a liberal education, which shall take as its chief instrument of language-training the mother-tongue, that the real study of English poetry will take the place of the pretended study of classical poetry. ”

“ When, therefore, I propose modern language-study instead of ancient, as a chief instrument of school education, I mean much more than the mere substitution of the study of some modern language as language, for some ancient language as language—German, for instance, instead of Greek, as has sometimes been suggested. ”

“ Looked at as the language of the laws which govern the world of matter, and used as the instruments to unlock so many of its secrets, they lose their disgustfulness, and become a necessary, if a narrow and partial instrument of training—one which performs certain disciplinary functions which no other instrument can perform so well; but it is only live mathematics, not dead mathematics, mathematical in vital connection with physical science, not prematurely thrust as an ugly skeleton alone upon the youthful mind, upon the pretense that its sole object is their mental discipline. ”

“ When the Revival of Learning gave birth to the present classical system of literary, or, as I have termed it, ethical liberal study, it did so by putting into the hands of scholars not merely two grammars as instruments of youthful mental discipline, as the advocates of the grindstone-system would fain have us believe, but two languages that unlocked the stores of a whole new world of ethical thought, in the shape of the philosophy, the history, and the poetry contained in Greek and Roman literature. ”

“ If to try by knowledge to make this world a better place to live in, and. to teach men how to make the highest and best use of it be utilitarianism, then I make bold to say that any knowledge that cannot make good its claim to such usefulness is worse than utilitarian, for it is useless knowledge. The charge that is meant to be brought is this, that none but the advocates of classical learning have or can have the higher ends of life in view in planning schemes of education; that all other systems look solely to the stomach or the pocket. ”

“ But to sacrifice an attainable education in not attaining them, what is it but to sow the barren sea-shore, to travel half a journey, to possess one's self of half an instrument useless without the other half. Languages alone are knowledge only to the professed philologist; we sacrifice a real education attainable through an instrument we already possess in the fruitless labor of giving our boys other instruments they will never make use of. ”

“ And should our universities, ceasing to be schools of grammar and mathematics, resume their proper functions, it will be found that a far larger proportion of minds than we now suspect are capable of arriving at this stage of progress. For, be it again repeated, it it not a knowledge, but a discipline that is required; not science, but the scientific habit; not erudition, but scholarship. And those who have not leisure to amass stores of knowledge to master in detail the facts of science, may yet acquire the power of scientific insight, if opportunity is afforded them. ”

“ The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box. But it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not. And he is as likely to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he swallows the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may as well be purblind as unable to read—lame, as unable to write. ”

“ It is seen that, so far from being mysterious, such knowledge is the very substance and material of sound education for all men; and the layman will no longer allow himself to be led blindfold by priest, or lawyer, or physician, for there is no longer any magical sacredness in their callings. And thus it comes about that a knowledge of physiology, which will help save the patient from any need of a physician; a knowledge of law, that shall obviate the necessity for lawsuits; a knowledge of political science and history worthy of men who have become their own rulers ”

“ The scholars of the Revival, without Shakespeare or Milton, had to master Homer and Æschylus, or go without poetry altogether. With no wealth of modern literature, such as lies all round us, they were perforce classical students in order to be scholars. We cannot put back the wheels of time, and reproduce their circumstances. The mind of the generation refuses to be bound within antiquated limits: it will seek the new world of thought which lies before it. Try, therefore, to make classical scholars now of all liberally-educated boys, and you make nine-tenths of them into dunces or pedants. ”

“ I am aware that such a scheme for the teaching of modern languages, including our own, so systematically and scientifically, as that the mental discipline derived from it shall not be inferior to that derived from the teaching of the classics, implies an adaptation of the results of modern philology to the purposes of elementary instruction such as has hardly yet been realized; implies a body of teachers of modern linguistic science such as hardly yet exist—teachers whose instruction shall not be inferior in philosophic breadth and thoroughness to the very best of classical teaching. ”

“ The distinction represents a remnant of aristocratic feeling, and springs from the idea that it is the duty of the educated, as a higher class, to take a paternal care for the masses; not the duty of the people, as a self-governing community, to give itself a liberal education. One cannot well see a higher function to be performed by the people, acting as a body, than to promote, by public action, its own higher education. ”

“ But if it is this, and more than all this, then it claims more than a subordinate place; it is no toy for idle hours, no subject to fill up gaps and intervals of time. It claims a right to no less than a full half of all available time and power; of time for training the student's senses—all left by our older training in worse than Egyptian darkness—of power to be employed in training the reasoning faculties, by processes as rigorous as any the older studies can boast of. Nothing less than this will satisfy the demands of science as an element in modern liberal education. ”

“ Shall the people be allowed to promote the teaching of the three R's, and the four rules of arithmetic, but be forbidden to meddle with any thing beyond them? And in whose hands is the higher education to remain, in a country which has no established church? Is its progress forever to remain at the fitful mercy of an unenlightened and unsystematic private charity? ”

“ Whoever continues to believe in the antithesis between matter and spirit, and insists upon looking on the world of material things as of necessity the world of the devil, must see in this tendency only disaster to all our higher interests; but whoever sees that it is the true function of modern science to spiritualize material things by enabling us to put them to higher uses, will see in science not the great antagonist but the great hope of the religion and the philosophy of the future. ”

“ This would be the mere semblance of a remedy, for the difficulty consists in the enormous overrating, by what I have called the grindstone-theory, of the educating value of the study of the mere structure and vocabulary of any strange language whatever. It has sometimes been doubted if we can ever really know more than one tongue, and certainly all our deeper mental processes go on in that one we know best. If that is a foreign one, it is because we have lost a mother to gain a step-mother; and a stepmother she will ever remain. ”

“ Ladies and gentlemen, I have thus given you, very feebly and imperfectly, an outline of a scheme of liberal education, applicable to a whole free people, which shall use that people's own language on the one hand, and the great instrument of modern science on the other, as its chief disciplinary instruments, in lieu of the obsolescent scheme for a liberal class education, based upon the study of dead languages as its chief educating instrument. ”

“ Whatever, therefore, enters into our conception of liberal education—and we have already seen that nothing less than all extant knowledge should enter into it that should enter into it—from the beginning. Language and literature should be the subjects of elementary teaching; science should be the subject of elementary teaching; art should be the subject of elementary teaching. ”

“ Read and learn the classics simply for the discipline they afford to the understanding. You may, if it comes in your way and does not interfere with your training, combine a literary pleasure with this mode of study, but this is no part of your education. As teachers, we do not care to encourage it; we do not care to interpret for you the thought or feeling of your author. All such teaching is weak and rhetorical: we do not profess to examine into your capacity of receiving pleasure. ”

“ Our own attempts to establish a liberal education seem to me to have thus far proved little less than abortive, because, following as we have in the steps of the mother-country, we cannot bring ourselves to abandon the old shadow for the new substance. For classical study has really dwindled into a shadow. Once it did mean the study of philosophy, of ethics, politics, history, poetry; now, for ninety-nine in a hundred of its students, it means none of these, but the mere dry study of grammar. ”

“ A transfer of the power alone, without a transfer of the privilege and the opportunity necessary to prepare for the exercise of it, cannot but be disastrous. If republicanism is to remain republicanism, and not degenerate into oligarchy or plutocracy, or end in anarchy, there must be one homogeneous education-system for all, and that one the highest attainable. ”

“ Yet, in the shape of elementary drawing, the rudiments of art are beginning to take their proper place in our schools as a necessary and indispensable element of all real education, and the art galleries and the foreign musicians of a few of our older cities are beginning to exert their influence, if a slight one, in introducing higher ideas of the importance of art into our new country. They will have but a limited influence, however, till the study of the fine arts takes its proper place among us as a necessary element in every conception of true education. ”

“ The rudiments of all those studies must be reckoned as the most valuable of all the elements of general elementary training, which, in their higher departments, and after liberal culture, diverging in various directions, form the substance of professional knowledge, both that of those professions now reckoned, and of all those hereafter to be reckoned liberal. For, what should liberal education be but the preparatory general stage for that work of life which all honest callings and professions carry on in diverse directions afterward? ”

“ Sellar, Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh: "The one extreme theory," he says [2] , "is that education is purely a discipline of the understanding; that the form of the subject is every thing, the content little or nothing. A severe study, such as classics or mathematics, is the thing wanted to train or brace the faculties; it does not matter whether it is in itself interesting or not. The student will find sufficient interest in the sense of power which he has to put forth in training for the great race with his competitors. ”