442 



NA TURE 



[October 7, 1909 



an Accoun: of their Scientific, Commercial, Artistic and 

 Historical Aspects, J. VVodiska, illustrated. Rebman, 

 Ltd. — A new edition of Meteorology, Practical and Applied, 

 Sir J. W. Moore. Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 

 Ltd. — A translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, 

 J. B. BaiUie ; Thought and Things : a Study of the 

 Development and Meaning of Thought, or Genetic Logic, 

 Prof. J. M. Baldwin, 3 vols., vol. iii.. Real Logic; The 

 History of Philosophy, based on the work of Dr. J. E. 

 Erdmann, translated and edited by Prof. W. S. Hough ; 

 Physiological Psychology, Prof. W. Wundt, a translation 

 of the fifth and wholly re-written German edition by Prof. 

 E. B. Titchener, in 3 vols., vol. ii., illustrated. The 

 University Tutorial Press, Ltd. — Hygiene for Training 

 Colleges, Dr. R. .\. Lyster. T. Fisher Unwin. — Psycho- 

 therapy, Dr. H. Munsterberg. Williams and Norgate. — 

 Science, Matter and Immortality, R. C. Macfie. 



THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT WINNIPEG. 

 SECTION L. 



EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 



Opening Address by the Rev. H. B. Gray, D.D., 

 Warden of Bradfield College, Berkshire, President 

 OF the Section. 



The Educational Factors of Imperialism. 

 Among all civilised races and in all epochs of the 

 world's history there has existed an inveterate belief that 

 the particular age in which men live is fundamentally 

 distinct from those that have preceded it. 



Even in the most stagnant periods the illusion has pre- 

 vailed that the present day is a period of flux and move- 

 ment more or less organic, and as such either to be 

 welcomed or to be deplored. 



Notoriously difficult, however, as it is to gauge the 

 temper of an age while we live in its midst, yet the 

 phenomena in England at the beginning of the twentieth 

 century seem so unmistakably marked that even a super- 

 ficial thinker can hardly fail to recognise the spheres in 

 which the symptoms of change and unrest are clearlv 

 operating. They are surely in these two — the sphere of 

 education and the sphere of Imperial sentiment. 



It may not appear inapposite, therefore, if, meeting as 

 we do in this city of phenomenal growth and infinite 

 enterprise, our thoughts were to be directed in my in- 

 augural address on the science of education towards dis- 

 covering what may be either called the Imperial factors 

 in education, or conversely, and perhaps more properly, 

 the educational factors in Imperialism. 



It may be perhaps safely said in this great Dominion 

 what might possibly be disputed in the academic groves 

 of^ our ancient English universities, that there was no 

 width of educational outlook within our own little island 

 until the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. 



The only strongholds of learning which presumed to 

 give the lead to English secondary education were to be 

 found on the banks of the Isis and the Cam. In these 

 antique, I hesitate to say antiquated, fastnesses, the 

 " grand old fortifying classical curriculum " was, until 

 lately, regarded as the main, if not the only, highroad to 

 educational salvation. They preserved, indeed they pre- 

 serve to this day, almost the same entrance bars against 

 admission to their thresholds as existed in pre-Reforma- 

 tion days. And, conformably with (he pursuit of these 

 ideal studies, the vast mass of their emoluments were, 

 and still are, appropriated to the pursuit of the ancient 

 models of education. 



The result of this monopoly on the lower rungs of the 

 educational ladder has been obvious, and, to a scientific 

 thinker, lamentable. The curricula of the public secondary 

 schools have been narrowed, or rather have never been 

 widened coincidently with the development of new spheres 

 of knowledge and enterprise. The students in those 

 institutions have been dominated from above, for just as 

 " where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered 

 together," so where the emoluments have been, thither do 

 the cleverest students concentrate their intellectual forces. 



The ambition of the ablest bovs has been inevitably and 

 e.xclusively concentrated on a single line of studyj and 

 KG. 2084, VOL. 81] 



(as often happens in the minds of the young) other no less 

 humane but entirely unendowed departments of human 

 knowledge have been laughed down and despised. Oppro- 

 brious epithets, even, have been bestowed on the studv 

 of the natural sciences, while those modern linguistic 

 achievements which opened the door to the treasures of 

 French and German literature are still nothing accounted 

 of in the great schools of England. 



But (more marvellous than all) even the scientific 

 acquisition of and familiarity with the literature of the 

 mother tongue have been entirely neglected, because no 

 room could be found for it in a time-table, three-quarters 

 of which is confined for the great mass of boy students 

 in the historic schools of England (whatever their tastes 

 and capabilities) to the exclusive study of the grammar, 

 literature, and composition in the languages of ancient 

 Greece and Rome. And the particular methods pursued 

 in this confined curriculum have rendered the course more 

 straitened still. The acquisition of the literatures of the 

 two dead languages and of the great thoughts buried with 

 them has given place to a meticulous study of the subtle- . 

 ties of scholarship, and students are taught to wanton : 

 in the abnormalities of the words and phrases in which 

 those literatures were enshrined, so that in the mind of 

 the classical scholar the form has become, or at any rate 

 became until quite lately, more important than the sub- 

 stance. 



Nor is this all. Those who cannot find any stomach for 

 such drenching doses of medijeval learning are actually 

 driven away prematurely as lost souls from those moss- 

 grown seats of learning, which we acclaim as the great 

 public schools of England ; and, with moral characters 

 only half-fledged, have either been condemned to the limbo 

 of private tuition or sent as " submerged tenths " to find, 

 or lose, their fortunes in the great dependencies and 

 dominions of the Empire like that in which I am speaking 

 to-day. There has been no serious attempt made until 

 the twentieth century by the leaders of our best-known 

 places of secondary education to discover the bents and 

 aptitudes of the boys committed to their charge and to 

 give them any educational chance if they have not 

 possessed that particular kind of perception which could 

 find its way through the subtleties of a Euripides or a 

 Horace. Boys have been entirely denied the opportunity 

 of showing their mental powers in any other sphere of 

 learning. How many unsung Hampdens or mute, in- 

 glorious Miltons of mechanical genius have been lost to 

 the world bv the non-elastic systems prevailing (even now) 

 in our best-known educational institutions, is a tremend- 

 ous responsibility for conscientious trainers of the young 

 to contemplate and atone for. 



In how many, or rather how few, places of learning in 

 England, at the present time, can the establishment of 

 scientifically equipped carpentering and engineering shops 

 be found in which a voung mind which finds it impossible 

 to digest the crude morsels of Latin and Greek grammar 

 can find resource and development? In how few schools 

 has the connection between mind and hand and eye been 

 scientifically trained? Such establishments, even in the 

 first decade of the twentieth century, can be counted on 

 the fingers of one hand. 



And yet. in spite of it all, the surprising fact remains 

 — a fact which speaks volumes for the innate vigour and 

 originality of the English race — that, out of the stream 

 of young men which flows out annually from our public 

 schools ' and colleges, so many accommodate themselves 

 as happily as they do to the startlingly new conditions 

 which confront them when they pass over the seas and 

 swell the tide of population in great centres of industry 

 and enterprise such as that in which we stand to-day. 

 Their educational vision, however, has had such a narrow 

 and limited horizon that no wonder a large nroportion 

 are not verv adaptable to the practical life of the prairie 

 and the forest, or even of the counting-house and the 

 office stool. Am I, or am I not, correct in hazarding 

 the conjecture that many specimens of this really fine 

 English breed from the old country come to you here in 

 this Dominion without an elementary knowledge of the 



I It should lie noted in the forefront of ihi-^ address thnt the expression 

 "ptihlic s'-h'ioK " is used thronchont in its F.nglish (not in its more proper 

 and .American) sense — i.e., as the educational centres of the upper classes. 



