230 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



themselves. Invaluable as their subjects and methods were, they pleased 

 not the million ; 'twas caviare to the general. But the general, the million, 

 need food no less than the elite ; and in giving it their tastes and digestions 

 must be considered. To nourish them we must enlarge our conception 

 of adult education. Music, drama, handicraft, gardening, and many 

 other subjects are a part of it no less than history, politics, science and 

 literature. The festivals, held so successfully in the small towns of Ulster, 

 where crowded audiences come to listen not only to musical competitions 

 but to verse-speaking, show what a large public can be interested by such 

 things ; nor is it only in the houses of the educated that the Symphony 

 Concerts of the B.B.C. are listened to with delight. Subjects like these 

 may well take a large place in the adult education of to-morrow. Not that 

 the academic, book, subjects will be absent. But they too may take a 

 rather different form. Studies of the W.E.A. type will continue. But 

 for the ordinary man, history and literature need to be treated differently. 

 They must be brought into connection with his outlook, interests, mind. 

 History as the Bible conceives it or as Herodotus conceived it, rather than 

 as Thucydides or Acton or Ranke or even Macaulay and Gibbon conceived 

 it : history, not as a study of economic laws or high policy, but as concrete 

 moral philosophy, as scenes from the most romantic of all dramas splendidly 

 staged and greatly acted, as a study of human nature at its highest reach 

 and lowest descent. It is difficult for us, disciplined in different methods, 

 to accustom ourselves to such conceptions ; and one of the reasons perhaps 

 why so little progress has been made in adult education is that the teachers 

 have mostly been men with honours degrees who brought to their work 

 the methods and outlook of their own education. At any rate, whoever 

 the teachers are, they need to look elsewhere for models than to W.E.A. 

 classes and Extension Lectures. If we are feeling after adult education 

 for the million, we may be helped by studying the Women's Institutes. 

 That is an institution which embraces almost every type of person. You 

 will find in them domestic servants, cottagers', doctors', landowners' 

 wives, farmers' daughters, the village postmistress, the village school- 

 mistress. 



For adult education to be successful, the intellectual digestion of the 

 masses must be studied. If scholars sniff disdainfully at such popular- 

 isation, they should be asked to remember the dream which St. Peter had 

 at Joppa. I also think that we shall not succeed, unless — again following 

 the Danes — we make our adult education more social. Even in education 

 man remains a social animal. Consider how often education has burned 

 most brightly at a common hearth , where men gathered together in company 

 to warm their hands at its flame : in antiquity, Socrates in the market-place 

 and gymnasium, the great classical schools of the Academy, the Lyceum, 

 the Stoa, the Museum of Alexandria ; in the Middle Ages, the Universities, 

 culminating in the residential university, recognised, at least in the Anglo- 

 Saxon world, as their ideal form ; in our own day, the Danish Folk High 

 School and its descendants. These examples may teach us something. 

 No doubt the lamp of wisdom can burn in solitary shrines and even in 

 dismal lecture halls. But for the many its right place is in the simple but 



