ESSAY-REVIEWS 



REAL EDUCATIONAL REFORM, by Philip E. B. Jourdain, M.A. : 

 on The Organisation of Thought: Educational and Scientific. By 

 A. N. Whitehead, Sc.D., F.R.S., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 

 and Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science 

 and Technology. [Pp. viii. + 228.] (London : Williams & Norgate, 

 191 7. Price 6s. net.) 



Usually we understand by the word " education " a system of mental training 

 given with the purpose of making the student pass certain prescribed examina- 

 tions, and with the ulterior purpose of enabling him to earn a livelihood. 

 Thus, considering now what is called " secondary education," we may hear of a 

 boy who is to go to Cambridge being described as of " scholarship standard " or 

 of " Tripos standard." The actual knowledge is relegated to the background, and 

 it is chiefly from some of those who, without being learned, adorn the " learned 

 professions," and have had the advantage, if indeed it is an advantage, of spending 

 some years at Oxford or Cambridge, that we hear that the benefit of a University 

 education lies not so much in the acquirement of learning as in experiencing the 

 " life of a college." I suppose that the last phrase means such things as boating 

 and conviviality. The kind of livelihood that is to be gained by a University 

 education is either the outcome of pursuits quite or nearly quite unconnected with 

 the knowledge of books or life which is supposed to be acquired, as is the case 

 with the livings got from work in the Church or at the Bar ; or is the fruit of a 

 thoroughly artificial life for which the knowledge of books and football that has 

 been acquired may indeed be some sort of preparation. This last profession is 

 that of schoolmastering. In that part of this profession which is concerned with 

 the mental training of boys, the boys are taught in such a way as, in very many 

 cases, to produce the greatest quantity of boredom for the pupil with the least 

 expenditure of thought on the part of the teacher. This is managed by the 

 introduction of subjects that have an absorbing life and growth of their own in 

 a fashion that completely hides both the humanly interesting and the logically 

 interesting aspects of these subjects. Then, too, a good schoolmaster always 

 hopes to train up some of his most promising pupils to become adepts at the task 

 of boring future generations of schoolboys in the same way. Some schoolmasters, 

 I know, have fine ideals ; but what has been described seems to me to represent 

 faithfully the practice of most of those whom I have come across. The profession 

 of teaching is an artificial way of earning a living : most of what is taught serves 

 no intellectual or practical end, and it is doubtful if the " discipline " which is 

 supposed to be taught by the syslem serves any good moral end. Most teachers 

 are intellectually inferior men, and the feebleness and lack of real originality 

 shown in their text-books is a sign of this. Most teachers are only saved from 

 intellectual dishonesty by the fact that they are too stupid to realise that they are 

 doing wrong to human minds for the sake of money to eke out their own 



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