192 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



in his own experience, or they will be meaningless ; once grasped, they 

 awake his reasoning faculties. An appeal, therefore, to a love of colour, or 

 of animals, or to a child's creative instinct, will equally lay the foundations 

 of cultural development. Anything in human or natural creation that 

 arouses interest, that awakes a response, any spark that, in Browning's 

 words, ' disturbs our clod,' must be an agent, and a powerful one, in the 

 great process which we call education. 



It would be ungrateful to the many reformers of the past not to re- 

 cognise how extensive has already been the widening of the curriculum 

 both in school and university. The history of education may indeed 

 be said to be the story of the broadening of the outlook. We have travelled 

 long and far since the cathedral schools of the Middle Ages in which, the 

 purpose being to train boys for the Church's service, whether as choristers 

 or clergy, the instruction was confined to Latin, the language of the Church. 

 Universities, when founded, marked a slight extension of function, inas- 

 much as they trained men not only for the Church but for medicine and 

 the law. But, as Professor Adamson points out, in the age of chivalry the 

 education of both school and university was felt to be unfitted for the 

 boy who was destined for the more active life of a soldier or an adminis- 

 trator of landed estates, and he received training on entirely different lines, 

 lines that in some respects appear to us to-day as more truly cultural, if 

 somewhat superficial. The Renaissance added Greek to the curriculum of 

 our universities — though do not let us forget that the direct intervention 

 of Henry VIII. was necessary to secure its admission to Oxford — and the 

 ' New Learning ' of that time gave a more humanistic outlook to all 

 classical study, but many centuries were to pass before the other studies 

 necessary to a well-balanced curriculum won their rightful place in school 

 or university. 



France, from the sixteenth century onwards, had her ' academies ' in 

 which modern languages, mathematics and some science were added to the 

 study of the classics. Locke, as early as the end of the seventeenth century, 

 took another long step forward, and stressed the value of manual instruction. 

 He urged that it should form part of the education of everyone who fol- 

 lowed what he termed a ' gentleman's calling,' and pointed out the ad- 

 vantage of handwork as a recreation for ' one whose chief business is with 

 books and study.' Rousseau and Pestalozzi alike denounced the pre- 

 vailing ' bookishness ' of the education of their days ; Pestalozzi in parti- 

 cular, as we know, laying great emphasis on the value of handwork. English 

 public schools and grammar schools, however, remained dominated by the 

 purely classical tradition until the nineteenth century was far advanced, 

 though the industrial revolution gradually brought into being private 

 schools, with a modern and commercial bias, but for the most part super- 

 ficial in their work. Such schools were frequented by the sons of manu- 

 facturers who regarded the classical curriculum as an unsuitable pre- 

 paration for a business career. ' Academies ' on fairly modern lines were 

 opened in Scotland from the middle of the eighteenth century, but so great 

 was the prestige of the old classical tradition in North as well as South 

 that the Scottish ' academy ' often ended by becoming the grammar 

 school on a slightly more modern basis. Mr. Fearon, however, 

 reporting in 1866 to the Schools Inquiry Commission on the principal 



