SECTION L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 



THE FUTURE IN EDUCATION 



ADDRESS BY 



SIR RICHARD LIVINGSTONE, M.A., Hon. D.Litt., Hon. LL.D., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



Our view of the future of education will depend on our view of education 

 itself, but presumably we should all accept the following maxims : ' Every 

 individual has a threefold function in the world — to make a livelihood, to 

 be a citizen and to be a man ' ; and ' The duty of the state is to see that, so 

 far as education is concerned, everyone has the opportunity of performing 

 these three functions.' They vary in difficulty. It is easier to make a 

 living than to have the intelligence, the knowledge and the disinterested- 

 ness which, ideally, every voter requires. But there is something more 

 difficult still. The third function of education is to make men in the sense 

 of Shakespeare's description of us : ' What a piece of work is man ! 

 How noble in reason ! How infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how 

 express and admirable ! in action how like an angel ! in apprehension how 

 like a god ! the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! ' The task 

 of education is to take the rough-hewn block which it receives from the 

 quarry of nature and shape from it a human figure, to develop the faculties, 

 and quicken and discipline the reason and apprehension, so that before it 

 leaves the workshop there is at least a chance and a hope that it may become, 

 if not a paragon of animals, at least a piece of work. The model to which 

 education should work in every human being is a figure with a body, a 

 character and a mind, each of which is capable of development towards 

 an ideal : a body with its own perfection of physical development and 

 fitness, of health, of skill of hand and precision of eye ; a character, whose 

 excellence lies in the great virtues ; a mind, capable of some perception 

 of what the world is, and of what man has done and has been and may be. 

 That is the pattern to which education works, and which she tries to 

 reproduce in a medium sometimes plastic, oftener stubborn. She is 

 limited by her material. No unflawed figure ever comes from her work- 

 shop. But she, or rather we, are to blame for any product in which one 

 cannot discern the outline of a man. The final goal of education is not 

 the capacity to earn one's bread or to live in a community, though these are 

 included in it, but the making of human beings. Body, character and, in 

 the widest sense, reason, make the man. A body undeveloped, a character 

 weak or debased, a mind unaware of the universe which we inhabit or 



