74 



NATURE 



[September i6, 1915 



loss of this close link with home life has not had a 

 bad educational effect, taking education in its wider 

 sense, which is not compensated for by possible im- 

 provement in the schools. 



I must admit that in saying this I have in mind 

 only a limited area. I have made no wider investiga- 

 tion. The population I am thinking of is an entirely 

 rural one in a purely agricultural district in the south 

 of Scotland, with which I was intimately acquainted 

 as a young woman, and which I re- visit from time 

 to time. In such a district compulsion to send the 

 children to school was unnecessary. It probably was 

 required in the large towns and the more industrial 

 parts of the country. I do not complain of the intro- 

 duction of compulsion, but it did strike me at the 

 time of its introduction that it was of very doubtful 

 advantage in my own part of the country, and this 

 impression has not diminished since. 



To see if it was shared by others I wrote to a 

 friend, more familiar with the district than I am now, 

 to ask whether he did not think that parental interest 

 in the children's school education had decreased, and 

 also whether he chought that, as judged, for instance, 

 by the books they borrowed from the parish library, 

 the grown-up population was less inclined to serious 

 reading than they used to be. I received from him 

 a very interesting reply. He agreed with what I 

 have just said as regards the first question, and after 

 speaking of the warm and genuine wish in old time's 

 to give the children a good education, added : — 



"The parents might, indeed, let their older children 

 be absent for short times from school for light farm 

 work or the like. But this was more than made up 

 for by the zeal with which they were sent to winter 

 evening classes, which could be gathered then far 

 more easily than now. It is an unfortunate effect of 

 legislation that it has largely deprived us of the great 

 asset we had in the keenness of parental interest. It 

 came about in this way. Government made it com- 

 pulsory that no child should be employed in wage- 

 earning who had not passed the fifth standard. Almost 

 instantly the ideal of our people was lowered. A child 

 was "educated" who had passed the fifth standard! 

 And when by and by Government made it compulsory 

 that a child should be at school till fourteen years of 

 age, the parents in many cases felt this hard upon 

 them, and our School Board every year has applica- 

 tions for permission to children to work before they 

 are fourteen on various pretexts. I do not say that 

 our people are not interested in their children's educa- 

 tion. They still inherit that interest. But compulsion, 

 and the fact of the responsibility being taken by 

 Government, has greatly changed their attitude." 



With regard to my second question — "Whether there 

 is in country parishes as much reading of serious 

 books, books of weight, history, travels, etc." — he 

 says he "must answer No." He thinks that the young 

 people are perhaps more intelligent than they used to 

 be, "but the reading is in enormous proportion novels 

 and very light literature." He goes on to tell me of 

 an old man who died two years ago " of the finest 

 old Scottish type — devout, independent, interested in 

 religious reading, in lives of men like Livingstone, 

 in travels (he was reading Nansen in his ninetieth 

 year and most interested in his nearing the Pole). 

 But the list of books in his steady reading from the 

 library here was of quite different character from that 

 opposite other names in our catalogue of the same 

 rank." He says also that forty or fifty years ago good 

 audiences could be got for lectures — historical, travel, 

 etc., but that now a good audience can only be got for 

 concerts, entertainments, or at most lectures with 

 lantern pictures. All this seems, so far as it goes, to 

 show a diminution in culture, in capacity for the higher 

 intellectual pleasures, in fruitful curiosity. My corre- 

 NO. 2394, VOL". 96] 



spondent is not prepared, however, to say that this 

 change is due to changes in school education. It 

 comes, he thinks, "of the different spirit in young 

 people, less under authority, indulging more in 

 pleasures, not pressing hard or thinking they need 

 this in order to get on." He thinks, in short, that 

 the young men now are more self-indulgent and less 

 energetic than they were, and he looks to the nobler 

 spirit which the war has called out to carry us into 

 better ideals of life. He may be right in thinking 

 that causes independent of school education have pro- 

 duced the result. But we must admit that if it is true 

 that, concurrently with a school education improved 

 in some important ways, there has been a diminution 

 in intellectual interests — in culture, in short — the school 

 education has at any rate failed in one of the objects 

 aimed at. 



Well, you must take these views about a particular 

 country district for what they are worth. Facts ob- 

 served among a comparatively small number of people 

 may not represent the average. Moreover, my corre- 

 spondent and I are both old — we could not remember, 

 or think we remembered, the state of things fifty 

 years ago if we were not — and you may, if you think 

 proper, discount what we have to say, on the almost 

 proverbial ground that old people put the Golden Age 

 behind them. I am not, however, myself conscious 

 of any such tendency. I believe very much in pro- 

 gress, and look -forward to a gradually improving 

 world, and I believe we are on the whole improving 

 in educational ideals and educational methods as in 

 other things. But it behoves us to watch what we do, 

 and not to acquiesce, if we can possibly help it, in 

 loss on one side without being very sure that it is 

 more than compensated for by gain on the other. The 

 loss of the parents' real co-operation where 'it has 

 existed, and the failure to gain it where it has previ- 

 ously been absent, is serious. It is serious even if it 

 is limited to the intellectual side of education and does 

 not extend to the formation of character, as I fear it 

 sometimes does. With the greatest zeal the school- 

 master cannot replace the parents, nor even the 

 parents' influence in producing the right attitude of 

 mind in the pupil. And it is at the very least doubtful 

 whether the better teaching which improved methods 

 secure to the pupil can make up for any loss of spon- 

 taneous desire to put his own mind into the effort of 

 learning for learning's sake. 



And so I come back to the point that the general 

 public must be encouraged to take its share even in 

 the part of education carried on at school and college, 

 and in particular those members of the general public 

 who are parents of pupils. But this conclusion is 

 rather barren, for I have no very, definite plan to 

 suggest for carrying it out. The State cannot now, 

 even if it would, abandon the responsibility for the 

 elementary school education of the children, and even 

 if it could it is more than doubtful whether it would 

 be desirable. For though we have now secured that 

 all parents shall themselves have had school education, 

 we still cannot trust them all voluntarily to give that 

 advantage to their children. So the drawback must 

 be put up with that parents cannot feel the same 

 degree of responsibility resting on themselves when the 

 responsibility is undertaken by the State. 



It is to be hoped, however, that we shall be very 

 careful how far we entrust to the State the regulation 

 of education higher than the primary. Bureaucratic 

 regulation may be well adapted to produce German 

 Kultur, but it is not the way to secure the attitude 

 of mind which leads to freedom, independence of 

 thought, and culture in the best sense. And it is very 

 apt to lead to want of independence in the teacher. 



Probably our best hope for progress in the right 

 direction lies in movements like the Workers' Educa- 



