CHAPTER VII

REFORMS

My love for any place, person or institution is exactly the measure of my desire to reform them.

THOMAS ARNOLD.

MANY of the critics of a classical education have never had it; but for its other enemies, its teachers have themselves to blame. If Latin and Greek are what they are, and we have taught them, and at the end our pupils cry, "Away with them,” the fault is not in the subject taught, but in us; and anyone who has been through a big public school or university, and would then like to turn the classics out of education, is a standing indictment of his teachers. In this chapter it is proposed to consider where we have come short, and what we can do to make matters better. I shall not attempt to discuss secondary education as a whole, or even the relation of classical to other subjects. I shall, however, assume that Greek and Latin, for those

who continue the study of them after the age of fifteen, should have an important place in a curriculum-unless they are thoroughly learnt they had better not be learnt at all—and simply consider some changes for the better which might be made in their teaching. At the same time we can glance at a question which readers have probably asked themselves-how far boys really get from the classics all that has been claimed in the previous chapters?

The main problem is threefold: first there are boys up to the age of fifteen and sixteen and boys who never get beyond a lower fifth; then there are those who reach sixth forms and get facility enough in reading ancient languages really to appreciate them as literature; finally there are classics at the University. Clearly these are three different questions. Small boys (still more the drudges or lotus-eaters of seventeen and eighteen, who linger half way up a school) get few of the advantages of the classics which form the subjects of Chapters III.-V. in this book; their minds are not developed enough to appreciate the genius of Greece and Rome, or to be interested in ideas or problems; and in any case, they hardly know enough of the language to get at them. Like the

unferried spirits in Hades, they flit along a rather barren beach, eyeing the promised land across the water, and not always "stretching out their hands with longing for the further shore." On the other hand, the Elysian plains are in part accessible to those who reach a sixth form; and they are fully open to University students. There is nothing, for instance, in this book, except, perhaps, Hippocrates, which should not be common property for anyone who takes the classical schools at Oxford; if it is not, he has only himself or his tutors to blame.

What then of these three classes?

The small boy and the laggard.

No one should want to keep the laggard at the classics, if by the age of sixteen he has shewn no taste or capacity for them. Plato has described his condition precisely. "You can never expect a person to take a decent delight in an occupation which he goes through with great pain, and in which he makes small

progress with great exertion?

No, it would be impossible.

Again, if he can remember nothing of what he

has learned, can he fail, being thus full of forgetfulness, to be empty of knowledge?

No, he cannot.

Then will not his unfruitful toil compel him at last to hate both himself and his occupation? Doubtless it will." 1

It is absurd to keep anyone in this condition at Latin and Greek. He had much better make the most of what lies on his own, and, as we think, the wrong side, of the Styx. One of the great blemishes in the public school education of the past, which has brought more obloquy on the classics than anything else, and which a great deal has already been done to remedy, is the retention of such boys at work for which their minds were unfitted. It made them "hate themselves and their occupation," and left them without an education. It ought to be a first aim to prevent these abuses for the future, and in especial to avoid diverting boys with mechanical or scientific tastes, who have no aptitude for linguistics, into studies that will be barren for them.

On the other hand, unless he is exceptionally unsuitable, a boy will do well to learn at least Latin till the age of sixteen. He will gain the advantages mentioned in Chapter VI., he will be learning a language which will help him with modern lan1 Republic, 486.

guages, and throw light on much in English that would otherwise be obscure: he will get the mental training given by composition, translation and grammar, at the age when it is most necessary. Some such training he must have; nothing can make it fascinatingly interesting, and substitutes for Greek or Latin are likely to be less effective and equally offensive. Also it should be possible when a boy is sixteen-it is often difficult earlierto tell where his real gifts lie. Nor, up to that age, is the work such drudgery as we might suppose. I think most teachers would agree that small boys, on the whole, enjoy translating into and from Latin. It is a sort of jigsaw puzzle with words, pulling them to pieces and fitting them together, and it interests them as such; it requires all their attention and uses up most of their intense mental activity; thus it occupies their minds, which is half the difficulty with them. Boredom and loathing sets in much later, when they are seventeen and find themselves in the lower fifth doing subjects in which they will never get beyond a certain point, and with nothing to satisfy a mind that has grown and is calling for some more suitable food. This is the age when the burden presses, and when they should be freed from it.