March 29, 190^ 



NA TURE 



the accumulation of facts. Education may bring us into 

 contact with doing things by which money may be earned, 

 but that contact in education is used for mental training. 

 Useful knowledge may easily become the bane of educa- 

 tion. Instruction in doing things frankly pursued for the 

 purpose of earning a living is generally not so imparted 

 that the power of thinking properly is increased and the 

 general training carried on further. If that is anything 

 like true, we come to the important consideration that the 

 best teaching must certainly include the teaching ot doing 

 things — we must not merely cultivate the memory — and, 

 above all, we must not stuff useful knowledge or any- 

 thing else into those young minds with which we have 

 to deal. They are not Strassburg geese ; and the more 

 you attempt to stuff them the worse it will be. What we 

 have to do is to train the mind as a delicate rapier, enabling 

 it to do anything it has to do in the most perfect manner 

 — to train the eye, the hands, the brain to face anything 

 under the best possible conditions. The question here 

 arises, What sort of a Code have we now for the education 

 of the young? — this new Code — the Code for the year 1905 

 for elementary schools. Well, for myself, I thank God 

 that we have such a document. It is an enormous improve- 

 ment upon everything, upon anything, which has gone 

 before it in our country. I remember some twenty years 

 ago, when the only concession made to the new knowledge 

 was that some candidate, if he liked, might say some- 

 thing of what he knew about the common pump; it hardly 

 went further than the common pump, but the new Code 

 goes very much further than the common pump, and you 

 may even look at the stars if you like ; you may even 

 observe once or twice a year where the sun is or where 

 the moon rises. Having this official education for the 

 young, how are we to deal with it in relation to such an 

 institution as yours? How are we to consider what should 

 happen to the young minds of boys and girls going up 

 that educational ladder which Huxley pictured to us some 

 years ago — that educational ladder from the gutter to the 

 university? In considering such a ladder as this, of course 

 the end of the teaching, the end of the time spent, in the 

 primary school constitutes the first rung at which the 

 educational ladder may be left, and you have to consider 

 the certain number of boys and girls unfortunately getting 

 off the educational ladder when they leave the elementary 

 school. The question arises, Must everybody when they 

 leave the primary school, and that, I am thankful to say, 

 al a gradually increasing age; when they have done with 

 the official, with the complete education, must they have 

 done with the instruction which will enable them better 

 111 their daily bread — the instruction which should, if 

 possible, be placed before them, because really it is to 

 tackle that instruction and to tackle the life connected 

 with it that they have been taught to think? If you omit 

 ". give a higher education, or education combined with 

 instruction, to your boys and girls after you have taught 

 rhem to think, you have made a good deal of that educa- 

 tion ridiculous. Your institute proves that it is much 

 better to give instruction to the young" in things that they 

 have to do before you make them absolutely face the 

 music in the real contact with the stern world of reality, 

 which they will certainly have to face sooner or later. 

 When you consider, therefore, the stepping-off places from 

 the education ladder — I have just referred to the first — and 

 the necessity of getting instruction, of putting instruction 

 in the way of those who have to step off the educational 

 ladder, the importance, the enormous importance, of such 

 an institution as yours begins to force itself upon one. 

 Take the child in an elementary school under the present 

 regulations. Instead of going on to the secondary school 

 and continuing still further up the educational ladder, it 

 can go to a higher elementary school. That is a new idea 

 in England, and it is a very admirable one. When you 

 ask, Why does the child step off? you will find yourself con- 

 fronted chiefly with the dearness of education in this 

 country, and then with the supposed necessity for early 

 employment. 



With regard to those two questions, I would just like 

 to tell you a little story. I had, some thirty years ago, 

 to visit Holland on an official mission, and among others 

 I saw the Minister of Public Instruction there, who was 



NO. igOO, VOL. 73I 



a great friend of Prof. Reike, to whom I was accredited, 

 and he told me what they had been doing then in Holland 

 for the last six or seven years ; precisely this same thing 

 that the Board of Education is now doing with regard 

 to the higher elementary schools. The boys left the 

 elementary schools generally at the age of fourteen, and 

 the habit was for those little creatures to be sent at once 

 to the offices and counting-houses of the merchants in 

 Rotterdam and Amsterdam and other places to begin their 

 work as clerks, and the Minister told me, with a twinkle 

 in his eye, that these shops and counting-houses were most 

 extraordinary places, because they were full of high stools. 

 The Minister thought he could not proceed with this sug- 

 gested change of the continuation school, which was called 

 the higher town school, until he could get the sympathy 

 of those various merchants, and he went round and asked 

 them whether, if he could prepare boys up to the age of 

 seventeen years, they would make a trial of them. They 

 said they would. I visited Holland some four or five 

 years after this had taken place, and the Minister told 

 me that if I went to Rotterdam or Amsterdam I should 

 no longer find any of those tall stools. He said : — 

 " Seventeen-year-old boys are there, and they will 

 have none others ; the time for the use of the boy of 

 fourteen in a merchant's office in Holland has passed away ; 

 the boys who begin to do their work after they have been 

 taught to think up to seventeen are so much better." 

 There is just another story touching another point I will 

 say a word about later. The Minister was so interested 

 with this, and was so satisfied and delighted at the satis- 

 faction which those boys gave to their employers, that he 

 thought he would go a step further. I should tell you that 

 the boys who continued in school after fourteen up to the 

 age of seventeen were chiefly taught science and Latin, 

 and he was anxious to know what would happen in the 

 case of a competition between these boys and those from 

 the gymnasia, which are the equivalents of our higher 

 grammar or public schools in this country. The boys from 

 the gymnasia went, in the natural course, when they left 

 the gymnasia, to the university. So he obtained per- 

 mission from the Government to give the high town school 

 boys an extra year. Now, what did they have to do in 

 this extra year? They had learned Latin, and they had 

 learned science from the age of fourteen in their continu- 

 ation school; all they had to do was to learn Greek. It 

 seemed an impossible thing for the town schoolboys to 

 attempt to learn as much Greek in nine months, which was 

 the school year, as the boys in the gymnasia, who had 

 been accumulating during nine years their instruction in 

 the gymnasia and the primary schools ; but, as a matter 

 of fact, when the test leaving examination came to be gone 

 through, the boys from the higher town school romped 

 in over the gymnasia boys. So you see my story shows 

 that the university is not an absolutely prohibited thing 

 if those who have to do with the boys and girls concerned 

 are keen enough to take every advantage of every oppor- 

 tunity ; and it shows also that employers of labour, at all 

 events in other countries, and I expect in this, will see 

 the advantage of getting supplied with clerks and other 

 assistants who have been taught to think as opposed to 

 getting their offices crowded with people who have still 

 to learn how to think. 



There are several other questions connected with the 

 Huxley educational ladder. One is that in leaving each 

 rung we have frankly to acknowledge that we have to face 

 the music of the struggle for existence. Not every boy 

 who enters a primary school can go, of course, to the 

 university, can go perhaps higher than a secondary school ; 

 some will even fail to get to a secondary school, but what 

 you have to consider, I think, generally in relation to 

 institutions like this is that if there is to be any stepping 

 off the ladder the change must be made in the best possible 

 way. The present system of allowing these changes from 

 rung to rung to take place by examination by outsiders is, 

 I think, absolutely and completely indefensible. I would 

 hold the teachers in every primary school absolutely re- 

 sponsible for saying that such and such of their students 

 will benefit by secondary education and some of their 

 students will not, and if that be done, then, in conse- 

 quence of the recent action of the London County Council, 



