i6 
Land & Water 
August 2 2, 1 91 8 
Life and Letters Qj J. C. Squire 
Humane Education 
IT is evident that we are in for a struggle about educa- 
tion after the war. Everybody is agreed — except the 
dwindhng minority who have a sentimental preference 
for illiterate and deferential simpletons — that the 
quality and quantity of our education must be improved 
■after the war. But there is a violent divergence of opinion 
as to what " impravement " is, what sort of things we are 
increasingly to teach. Strong sections pf industrials who 
still imagine that men can be mere machines and are at' 
their best as machines if they are mere machines are already 
menacing what they call "useless" education. They deride 
the classics, and they are mildly contemptuous of history, 
philosophy, and English. They want our educational 
institutions, from the oldest University to the youngest 
elementary school, to concentrate on business or the things 
that are patently useful in business. Technical instruction 
is to be provided for adolescent artisans ; book-keeping and 
shorthand for prospective clerks ; and the cleverest we are 
to set to "business methods," to modern languages (which 
can be used in correspondence with foreign firms), and to 
science (which can be applied to industry). French and 
German are the languages, not of Montaigne and Goethe, 
but of Schmitt Brothers of Elberfeld and Dupont et Cie, of 
Lyons. Chemistry and physics are not explorations into the 
physical constitution of the universe, but sources of new 
dyes, new electric light filaments, new means of making 
things which can be sold cheap and fast to the Nigerian and 
the Chinese. For Latin there is a limited field so long as 
the druggists insist on retaining it in their prescriptions. 
Greek has no apparent use at all, unless it be as a source of 
syllables for the hybrid names of patent medicines and 
metal polishes. The soul of man, the spiritual basis of 
civilisation — what gibberish is that ? 
It is against blind and ruinous bigotry of that kind that 
Professor Gilbert Murray has written his Religio Grammatici 
(Allen & Unwin, is. net). Professor Murray is a Professor 
of Greek. He has spent most of his life studying Greek, 
and is openly unrepentant. Lest it be supposed that he is 
merely — a thing frequently suggested of those who support 
the ancient tongues — defending his own vested interests, 
it may be added that were Greek forbidden by a Defence of 
the Realm Act regulation produced by some Business Govern- 
ment of the future, he would be equally competent as a 
Professor of English. At all events, his present plea is not 
a plea for Greek and Latin exclusively. He argues, with 
reason, that we are mainly what -we are and know most 
of what we know because the Greeks an4 Latins, pagan and 
Christian, lived before us. With them we find the origins 
of our religious and political institutions, of our literature, 
to a great extent of our language, of our mathematics, 
mechanics, law, and morals. Whatever the percentage of 
Jute and Angle blood in us, we are not the children of the 
Jutes. The Germans themselves, who have far more Teu- 
tonic blood in them, do not draw from Teutonic sources 
such things as they have in common with civilised Europe, 
and when the Kaiser exhorts the youths of Germany to be 
"little Germans, not little Greeks and Romans," he is asking 
them to cut away the ground they stand on. In Aristophanes 
and Horace we find (with local differences) ourselyes ; in 
Beowulf we find something remote and savage, much more 
alien from ourselves, thinking and feeling in strange categories, 
and talking in language most remarkably strange. 
m Hf * if * * 
Professor Murray, however, in urging the retention of the 
classics as an element in education, does not make the mistake 
(made often by their supporters and always by their 
opponent^) of treating them as a separate and peculiar 
thing. He regards them as part- — though a very large 
part— of our past, as Europeans, and of the past of the 
human race as a whole. As such, they have — and the advan- 
tages they offer are shared, in varying degree, by all literary 
and historical studies — great advantages to offer. They 
offer to the individual what is at lowest a continual source 
of enjoyment and entertainment, and at highest much more. 
Professor Murray says that pure science offers "an escape 
from the world about him, an escape from the noisy present 
into a region of facts which are as they are, and not as foolish 
human beings want them to be ; an escape from the com- 
monness of daily happenings into the remote world of high 
and severely trained imagination ; an escape from mortality 
in the service of a growing and durable purpose, the pro- 
gressive discovery of truth." That is the literary man's 
tribute to a mode of intellectual discovery which is not his; 
of the. mode which is his he speaks thus : 
The Philistine, the vulgarian, the Great Sophist, the passer 
of base coin for true, he is all about us and, worse, he has his 
outposts inside us, persecuting our peace, spoiling our sight, 
confusing our values, making a man's self seem greater than 
the race and the jiresent thing more important thiiu the eternal. 
From him and his influence we find our escape by means of the 
Grammata into that calm world of tlieirs, where stridency and 
clamour are forgotten in the ancient stillness, where the strong 
iron is long since rusted and the rocks of granite broken into 
'dust, but the great things of the human spirit still shine Hke 
stars pointing Man's way onwai'd to the great triumph or the 
great tragedy, and even the little things, the beloved and tender 
and funny and familiar things, beckon across gulfs of death and 
change with a magic poignancy, the old things that our dead 
leaders and forefathers loved, viva adhuc et desiderio pulcrinra 
(" Living still and more beautiful because of our longing "). 
But let us be more "practical." Literary records being in 
the main the records of conspicuous men and conspicuous races 
their study offers the spiritual and intellectual examples 
which are a perpetual source of new effort. The virtues, 
without which great new enterprise (even commercial enter- 
prise) cannot be carried through, are not so common all 
round us that we can spare the contemplation of the great 
achievements of the dead. As Professor Murray suggests, 
progress in historical times has consisted, as far as we 
can tell, in the accumulation of knowledge and material 
objects ; we cannot afford to neglect Pericles and St. Francis 
merely because (unlike Hindenburg, Mr. Dudley Docker and 
myself) they never used a telephone. Sir Philip Sidney 
— scarcely the type of the spectacled and ineffective 
recluse — said that he never heard the old Ballad of Chevy 
Chase, but his heart was stirred as it were by a trumpet. 
Take the humblest of examples : Bruce and the Spider, which 
has been set before scores of millions of British children. 
It had its uses, though it taught the "pedestrian virtue of 
pertinacity." It may be that the Great Film, or the Man 
who Saved the Empire, will be deemed in the future adequate 
substitute for that anecdote ; but even that is historical 
education, literary education, education which (whatever 
utility it may have to others) cannot be supposed to increase 
the ability of those who see it to earn their own living save 
in so far as it gives them not technical, but moral, assistance. 
And, finally, if you are to think about the future, your "con- 
jectures will not be mflch good unless you have in some way 
studied other places and other ages." All literature is, in a 
sense, social science ; we learn from it what men are, what 
can be done with them, where they have failed, where^and 
under what conditions they have succeeded. 
* * * * * ^ * 
All this is trite, and has Been said (though not so well as 
by Professor Murray) ten thousand times. Nevertheless, in 
Mr. Chesterton's old image, the wall will go black if j'ou 
don't keep on whitewashing it. The world at this moment 
contains a great many people whp think — or,, rather, think 
they think, or, rather, talk as they thought they thought — 
that man exists for the two ' only purposes of producing 
goods, and more men to eat and wear them ; and who talk 
also as though our little life were not rounded by a sleep, 
with something beyond it. They will be on the ramp when 
reconstruction comes ; the d^ns (who feel very solitary and 
timid and unsupported) may not realise how miich backing 
they can command if they only begin to fight ; and some 
supporters of the humanities ridiculously and disastrouslj' 
argue as if Greek and Latin were the only indispensables 
and the endowment of scientific research somehow incom- 
patible with them. They would, be better advised to yield 
a little as to compulsory classics, and to endeavour to secure 
that if Greek and Latin be not compulsorily studied, then the 
literature and history of England should be. We should never 
have had half the uproar about tl.e classics if their more 
pedantic and conventional champions had not so systematic- 
ally ignored the claims of English, which is; after all, even 
more important for us than Latin and Greek. It is a good 
thing to know Homer, but it is preposterous for an English- 
man to know Homer and never to have opened Chaucer. If 
the humanities are to be saved, the ground of defence will 
have to be shifted a little. 
