Pressure from Science and Examinations.

that the latest reformers, headed by Mr. Herbert Spencer, seem to make the well-being of the grown person depend mainly on the amount of scientific knowledge he stored up in his youth. This is the first cause of educational pressure.

§ 13 2. The second and more urgent cause is the rapid development of our system of examinations. Everybody's educational status is now settled by the examiner, a potentate whose influence has brought back in a very malignant form all the evils of which Montaigne complains. Do what we will, the faculty chiefly exercised in preparing for ordinary examinations is the "carrying memory." So the acquisition of knowledge-mere memory or examination knowledge has again come to be regarded as the one thing needful in education, and there is great danger of everything else being neglected for it. Of the fourfold results of education-virtue, wisdom, good manners, learning-the last alone can be fairly tested in examinations; and as the schoolmaster's very bread depends nowadays first on his getting through examinations himself and then on getting his pupils through, he would be more than human, if with Locke he thought of learning "last and least." A great change has come over our public schools. The amount of work required from the boys is far greater than it used to be and masters again measure their success by the amount of knowledge the average boy takes away with him. It seems to me high time that another Montaigne arose to protest that a man's intellectual life does not consist in the number of things he remembers, and that his true life is not his intellectual life only, but embraces his power of will and action and his love of what is noble and right. "Wisdom cried of old, I am the mother of fair Love and Fear and Knowledge and holy Hope" (Ecclesiasticus). In these

Danger from knowledge.

days of science and examinations does there not seem some danger lest knowledge should prove the sole surviver? May not Knowledge, like another Cain, raise its hand against its brethren "fair Love and Fear and holy Hope?" This is perhaps the great danger of our time, a danger especially felt in education. Every school parades its scholarships at the public schools or at the universities, or its passes in the Oxford and Cambridge Locals, or its percentage at the last Inspection, and asks to be judged by these. And yet these are not the one thing or indeed the chief thing needful: and it will be the ruin of true education if, as Mark Pattison said, the master's attention is concentrated on the least important part of his duty.*

* Lord Armstrong has perhaps never read Montaigne's Essay on Pedantry; certainly, he has not borrowed from it; and yet much that he says in discussing "The Cry for Useless Knowledge" (Nineteenth Century Magazine, November, 1888), is just what Montaigne said more than three centuries ago. "The aphorism that knowledge is power is so constantly used by educational enthusiasts that it may almost be regarded as the motto of the party. But the first essential of a motto is that it be true, and it is certainly not true that knowledge is the same as power, seeing that it is only an aid to power. The power of a surgeon to amputate a limb no more lies in his knowledge than in his knife. In fact, the knife has the better claim to potency of the two, for a man may hack off a limb with his knife alone, but not with his knowledge alone. Knowledge is not even an aid to power in all cases, seeing that useless knowledge, which is no uncommon article in our popular schools, has no relation to power. The true source of power is the originative action of the mind which we see exhibited in the daily incidents of life, as well as in matters of great importance.

A man's success in life depends incomparably more upon his capacities for useful action than upon his acquirements in knowledge, and the education of the young should therefore be directed to the development of faculties and valuable qualities rather than to the acquisition of know.

ledge.

Montaigne and Lord Armstrong.

Men of capacity and possessing qualities for useful action are at a premium all over the world, while men of mere education are at a deplorable discount." (p. 664).

"There is a great tendency in the scholastic world to underrate the value and potency of self-education, which commences on leaving school and endures all through life." (p. 667).

"I deprecate plunging into doubtful and costly schemes of instruction, led on by the ignis fatuus that 'knowledge is a power.' For where natural capacity is wasted in attaining knowledge, it would be truer to say that knowledge is weakness." (p. 668).

VII.

ASCHAM.

(1515-1568.)

§ 1. MASTERS and scholars who sigh over what seem to them the intricacies and obscurities of modern grammars may find some consolation in thinking that, after all, matters might have been worse, and that our fate is enviable indeed compared with that of the students of Latin 400 years ago. Did the reader ever open the Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa Dei, which was the grammar in general use from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century? (v. Appendix, p. 532). If so, he is aware how great a step towards simplicity was made by our grammatical reformers, Lily, Colet, and Erasmus. Indeed, those whom we now regard as the forgers of our chains were, in their own opinion and that of their contemporaries, the champions of freedom (Appendix, p. 533).

§ 2. I have given elsewhere (Appendix, p. 533) a remark. able passage from Colet, in which he recommends the leaving of rules, and the study of examples in good Latin authors. Wolsey also, in his directions to the masters of Ipswich School (dated 1528), proposes that the boys should be exercised in the eight parts of speech in the first form,

Wolsey on teaching.

and should begin to speak Latin and translate from English into Latin in the second. If the masters think fit, they may also let the pupils read Lily's Carmen Monitorium, or Cato's Distichs. From the third upwards a regular course of classical authors was to be read, and Lily's rules were to be introduced by degrees. "Although I confess such things are necessary," writes Wolsey, "yet, as far as possible, we could wish them so appointed as not to occupy the more valuable part of the day." Only in the sixth form, the highest but two, Lily's syntax was to be begun. In these schools the boys' time was wholly taken up with Latin, and the speaking of Latin was enforced even in play hours, so we see that anomalies in the accidence as taught in the As in præsenti were not given till the boys had been some time using the language; and the syntax was kept till they had a good practical knowledge of the usages to which the rules referred.*

§ 3. But although there was a great stir in education throughout this century, and several English books were published about it, we come to 1570 before we find anything that has lived till now. We then have Roger Ascham's Scholemaster, a posthumous work brought out by Ascham's widow, and republished in 1571 and 1589. The book was

* In another matter, also, we find that the masters of these schools subsequently departed widely from the intention of the great men who fostered the revival of learning. Wolsey writes: "Imprimis hoc unum admonendum censuerimus, ut neque plagis severioribus neque vultuosis minis, aut ulla tyrannidis specie, tenera pubes afficiatur: hac enim injuria ingenii alacritas aut extingui aut magna ex parte obtundi solet." Again he says: "In ipsis studiis sic voluptas est intermiscenda ut puer ludum potius discendi quam laborem existimet." He adds: "Cavendum erit ne immodica contentione ingenia discentium obruantur aut lectione prolonga defatigentur ; utraque enim juxta offenditur."