114 ... is not the great defect of our education today - a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned - that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils subjects', we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? they learn everything, except the art of learning. it is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play The Harmonious Blacksmith upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorised The Har Black, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle The last Rose of Summer. why do i say, 'As though? in certain of the arts and crafts we sometimes do precisely this - requiring a child to 'express himself' in paint before wee teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. there is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. but observe - it is not teach himself a new medium. he, having learned by experience the best way to economise labour and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to 'give himself the feel of the tool'.
let us now look at the mediaeval scheme of education - the syllabus of the Schools. it does not matter, for the moment, whether it was devised for small children or for older students; or how long people were supposed to take over it. what mattes is the light it throws upon what the men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object and thee right order of the educative process.
the syllabus was divided into 2 parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium. the second part - the Quad- consisted of 'subjects', and need not for the moment concern us. the interesting thing for us is the composition of the Trivium, which preceded the Quad and
115 was the preliminary discipline for it. it consisted of 3 parts: Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric, in that order.
now the first thing we notice is that 2 at any rate of these 'subjects' are not what we should call 'subjects' at all: they are only methods of dealing with subjects. grammar, indeed, is a 'subject' in the sense that it does mean definitely learning a language - at that period it meant definitely learning a language - at that period it meant learning latin. but language itself is simply the medium in which thought is expressed. the whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to 'subjects' at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of language - A language and hence of language itself - what it was, how it was put together and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language: how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument (his own arguments and other people's). Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. thirdly, he learned to express himself in language; how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively. at this point, any tendency to express himself windily or to use his eloquence so as to make the worse appear the better reason would, no doubt, be restrained by his previous teaching in Dialectic. if not, his teacher and his fellow-pupils. trained along the same lines, would be quick to point out where he was wrong; for it was they whom he had to seek to persuade. at the end of his course, he was required to compose a thesis upon some theme set by his masters or chosen by himself and afterwards to defend his thesis against thee criticism of the faculty. by this time he would have learned - or woe betide him - not merely to write an essay on paper, but to speak audibly and intelligibly from a platform and to use his wits quickly when heckled. the
116 heckling, moreover, would not consist solely of offensive personalities o of irrelevant queries about what Julius Caesar said in 55 BC - though no doubt mediaeval dialectic was enlivened in practice by plenty of such primitive repartee. but there would also be questions, cogent and shrewd, from those who had already run the gauntlet of debate or were makeing ready to run it.
it is, of course, quite true that bits and pieces of the mediaeval tradition still linger or have been revived, in the ordinary school syllabus of today. some knowledge of grammar is still required when learning a foreign language - perhaps I should say, 'is again required' for during my own lifetime we passed through a phase when the teaching of declension and conjugations was considered rather reprehensible and it was considered better to pick these things up as we went along. school debating societies flourish; essays are written; the necessity for 'self-expression' is stressed and perhaps even over-stressed. but these activities are cultivated more o less in detachment, as belonging to the special subjects in which they are pigeon-holed rather than as forming one coherent scheme of mental training to which all 'subjects' stand in a subordinate relation. 'Grammar' belongs especially to the 'subject' of foreign languages, and essay-writing to the 'subject' of foreign languages, and essay-writing to the 'subject' called 'English' while Dialectic has become almost entirely divorced from the rest of the curriculum and is frequently practised unsystematically and out of school-hours as a separate exercise, only very loosely related to the main business of learning. taken by and large, the great difference of emphasis between the 2 conceptions holds good: modern education concentrates on teaching subjects. leaving the method of thinking, arguing and expressing one's conclusion s to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along; mediaeval education concentrated on fire Forging and Learning to handle the tools of learning,
117 using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.
'Subjects of some kind there must be, of course. one cannot learn the use of a tool by merely waving it in thee air; neither can one learn the theory of grammar without learning an actual language or learn to argue and orate without speaking about something in particular. the debating subjects of the Middle Ages were drawn largely from theology or from the Ethics and History of antiquity. often indeed , they became stereotyped, especially towards the end of the period and the far-fetched and wire-drawn absurdities of scholastic argument fretted Milton and provide food for merriment even to this day. whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivial than the usual subjects set nowadays for 'essay-writing' I should not lie to say; we may ourselves grow a little weary of 'A Day in my Holidays', 'What I should lie to Do when i Leave school' and all the rest of it. but most of the merriment is misplaced, because the aim and object of the debating thesis has by now been lost sight of. a glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and educed the late Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the Middle agrees it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. i need not say, I hope, that it never was a 'matter of faith' . it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material and if so, did they occupy space? thee answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. an analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing - say, the point of a needle - it is located thee in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is 'there', it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people's thoughts being concentrated upon the same needlepoint at the same time. the proper Subject of the argument is thus seen to to be the distinction between location and extension in space; the Matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be thee nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have something else); the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like 'there' in a lose and scientific way, without specifying whether you mean 'located there' or 'occupying space there'. scorn in plenty has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for hair-splitting: but when we look at the shameless abuse made, in print and on the platform, of controversial expressions with sifting and ambiguous connotations, we may feel it in our hearts to which that every reader and hearer had been so defensively armoured by his education as to be able to cry: DISTINGUO
for we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. by teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word.by the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from thee incessant battery of words, words, words. (note - now IMAGES, IMAGES, IMAGES!) they do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. we who were scandalised in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured takes with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of 'subjects'; and when whole classes and whole
119 nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spell-binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. we dole out lip-service to the importance of education - lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school leaving - age and plan to build big and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school-house, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as i believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
what, then, are we to do? we cannot go back to the Middle ages. that is a cry to which we have become accustomed. we cannot go back - or can we? DISTINGUO. I should like every term in that proposition defined. does 'go back' mean a retrogression in time or the revision of an error? the first is clearly impossible per se; (by, of for or in itself) the second is a thing which wise men do every day. 'Cannot' - does this mean that our behaviour is determined by some irreversible cosmic mechanism, or merely that such an action would be very difficult in view of the opposition it would provoke? 'the Middle ages' - obviously the 20the century is not and cannot be the 14th; but if 'Middle Ages' is, in this context, simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular educational theory, there seems to e no a priori reason why we should not 'go back' to it - with modifications - as we have already 'gone back'
let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive retrogression is possible. let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities and furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls. whom
120 we may experimentally equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chosen by ourselves. we will endow them with exceptionally docile parents; we will staff our school with teachers who are themselves perfectly familiar with the aims and methods of the Trivium; we will have our buildings and staff large enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate handling; and we will postulate a Board of Examiners willing and qualified to test the products we turn out. thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus - a modern Trivium 'with modifications' and we will see where we get to.
but first: what age shall the children be? well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, ONE CANNOT BEGIN A GOOD THING TOO EARLY , and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. we will, therefore, 'catch 'em young', REQUIRING ONLY of our pupils that they shall be ABLE TO READ WRITE AND CIPHER. (def - explain the text's meaning)
my views about child-psychology are, I admit, neither orthodox nor enlightened. looking back upon myself (since I am the child I know best and the only child I can pretend to know from inside) I recognise in myself 3 stages of development. these, in a rough-and- ready fashion, I will call the Poll-parrot, the Pert and the Poetic - the latter coinciding, approximately, with the onset of puberty. the Poll-parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and , on the whole, little relished. at this age, one readily memorises the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible poly syllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. the Pert age, which follows upon this ( and,
121 naturally, overlaps it to some extent) is only too familiar to all who have to do with children: it is characterised by contradicting, answering -back, liking to 'catch people out' (especially one's elders) and in the propounding of conundrums (especially one's elders) and in the propounding of conundrums (especially the kind with a nasty verbal catch in them). its nuisance-value is extremely high. it usually sets in about the Lower Fourth. the Poetic age is popularly known as the 'difficult' age. it is self centered
it yearns to express itself;
it rather specialises in being misunderstood;
it is restless and tries to achieve independence and, with good luck and good guidance,
it should show the beginnings of creativeness, a reaching-out towards a synthesis of what it already knows and
a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others.
now it seems to me that the lay-out of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these 3 ages:
Grammar to the Poll-parrot,
Dialetctic to the Pert and
Rhetoric to the Poetic Age.
let us begin, then with Grammar. this, in practice, means the grammar
of some language in particular and it must be an inflected language. the grammatical structure of an uninflected language is far too analytical to be tackled by any one without previous practice in Dialectic. moreover, the inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas the uninflected are of little use in interpreting the inflected. I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar . I say this , not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labour and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least 50 per cent.it is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Romance languages and to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the science was and to the literature of the
122 entire Mediterranean civilisation, together with all its historical documents. those whose pedantic preference for a living language persuades them to deprive their pupils of all these advantages might substitute Russian, whose grammar is still more primitive. (the verb is complicated by a number of 'aspects' - and I rather fancy that it enjoys 3 complete voices and a couple of extra aorists - but I may be thinking of basque or sanskrit.) Russian is, of course, helpful with the other Slav dialects. thee is something also to be said for Classical Greek. but my own choice is Latin. having thus pleased the Classicists among you, I will proceed to horrify them by adding that I do not think it either wise or necessary to cramp the ordinary pupil upon the Procrustean bed of the Augustan age, with its highly elaborate and artificial verse-forms and oratory. the post-classical and mediaeval Latin, which was a living language down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and in some ways livelier, both in syntax and rhythm; and a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning and literature came to a full-stop when Christ was born and only woke up again at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
However, i am running ahead too fast. we are still in the grammatical stage. Latin should be begun as early as possible - at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of 'amo, amas, amat' is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of 'eeny, meeny, miney, mo'.
during this age we must, of course, exercise the mind on other things besides Latin grammar. observation and memory are the faculties most lively at this period; and if we are to learn a contemporary foreign language we should begin now, before the facial and mental muscles become rebellious to strange intonations. spoken French
123 or German can be practised alongside the grammatical discipline of the Latin.
in English, verse and prose can be learned by heart, and the pupil's memory should be stored with stories of every kind - classical myth, European legend, and so forth. I do not think that the Classical stories and masterpieces of ancient literature should be made the vile bodies on which to practise the technics of Grammar - that was a fault of mediaeval education which we need not perpetrate. the stories can be enjoyed and remembered in English and related to their origin at a subsequent stage. recitation aloud should be practised - individually or in chorus; for we must not forget that we are laying the ground work for Disputation and Rhetoric.
the grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes and personalities. a set of dates to which one can peg all later historical knowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective of history. it does not greatly matter Which dates: those of the Kings of England will do very nicely, provided that they are accompanied by pictures of costume, architecture and other 'everyday things', so that the mere mention of a date calls up a strong visual presentment of the whole period.
GEOGRAPHY will similarly be presented in its factual aspect, with maps, natural features and visual presentment of customs, costumes, flora, fauna and so on, and I believe myself that the discredited and old-fashioned memorizing of a few capital cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc. does no harm. stamp collecting may be encouraged.
SCIENCE, in the Poll-parrot period, arranges itself naturally and easily round collections - the identifying and naming of specimens and, in general, the kind of thing that used to be called 'natural history', or, still
124 more charmingly, 'natural philosophy'. to know the names and properties of things is, at this age, a satisfaction in itself; to recognise a devil's coach-horse at sight and assure one's foolish elders that, in spite of its appearance, it does not sting; to be able to pick out Cassiopeia and the Pleiades and possibly even to know who Cassiopeia and the Pleiades were; to be aware that a whale is not a fish and a bat not a bird - all these things give a pleasant sensation of superiority; while to know a ring-snake from an adder or a poisonous fro an edible toadstool is a kind of knowledge that has also a practical value.
the grammar of MATHEMATICS begins, of course, with the multiplication table, which, if not learnt now, will never be learnt with pleasure and with the recognition of geometrical shapes and the groupings of numbers. these exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in arithmetic and if the pupil shows a bent that way, a facility acquired at this stage is all to the good. more complicated mathematical processes may and perhaps should be postponed, for reasons which well presently appear.
so far (except, of course, for the Latin) our curriculum contains nothing that departs very far from common practice. the difference will be felt rather in the attitude of the teachers, who must look upon all these activities less as 'subjects' in themselves than as a gathering-together of Material for use in the next part of the Trivium. what that material actually is, is only of secondary importance; but it is as well that anything and everything which can usefully be committed to memory should be memorised at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not. the modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child's mind at too early an age, intelligent questions spontaneously asked, should of course, receive an immediate
125 and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond its power to analyse - particularly if those things have a strong imaginative appeal (as, for example Kubla Shan), an attractive jingle (like some of the memory rhymes for Latin genders) or an abundance of rich, resounding polysyllables (like the Quicunque Vult).
the reminds me of the Grammar of THEOLOGY. I shall add it to the curriculum, because Theology is the mistress-science, (def - woman who has control, authority or power) ,without which the whole educational structure will necessarily lack its final synthesis. those who disagree about this will remain content to leave their pupils' education still full of loose ends. this will matter rather less than it might, since by the time that the tools of learning have been forged the student will be able to tackle Theology for himself and will probably insist upon doing so and making sense of it. still, it is as well to have this matter also handy and ready for the reason to work upon. at the grammatical age, therefore, we should become acquainted with the story of God and Man in outline - ie. the Old and New Testament presented as parts of a single narrative of Creation, Rebellion and Redemption - and also with 'the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. at this stage, it does not matter nearly so much that these things should be fully understood as that they should be known and remembered. remember, it is material that we are collecting.
it is difficult to say at what age precisely, we should pass from the first to the second part of the Trivium. generally speaking, the answer is: so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to Pertness and interminable argument (or, as a schoolmaster correspondent of mine more elegantly puts it: 'when the capacity for abstract thought (def - thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects or actual instances) begins to manifest itself') for as, in the first
126 part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason. in the first, the exercise to which the rest of the material was, as it were, keyed, was the Latin Grammar; in the second the key-exercise will be Formal Logic. it is here that our curriculum shows its first sharp divergence from modern standards. the disrepute into which FORMAL LOGIC (def - the branch of logic concerned exclusively with the principles of deductive reasoning (def - a logical process in which a conclusion drawn from a set of premises contains no more information than the premises taken collectively.
-all dogs are animals;
this is a dog;
therefore this is an animal.
* deduce - derive as a conclusion from something known or assumed; infer)
has fallen is the belief that it is entirely based upon universal assumptions that are either unprovable or tautological. this is not true. not all universal propositions are of this kind. but even if they were, it would make no difference, since every syllogism whose major premise is in the form 'All A is B' can be recast in hypothetical form Logic is the art of arguing correctly: 'If A, then B'; the method is not invalidated by the hypothetical character of a indeed, the practical utility of Formal Logic today lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference.
let us now quickly review our material and see how it is to be related to Dialectic. on the Language side, we shall now have our Vocabulary and Morphology (def - the patterns of word formation in a particular language, including inflection, derivation and composition) at our finger tips; henceforward we can concentrate more particularly
127 on Syntax and Analysis ( ie. the logical construction of speech) and the history of Language (ie. how we came to arrange our speech as we do in order to convey our thoughts.)
our Reading will proceed from narrative and lyric to essays, argument and criticism and the pupil will learn to try his own hand at writing this kind of thing. many lessons - on whatever subject - will take the form of debates; and the place of individual or choral recitation will be taken by dramatic performances, with special attention to plays in which an argument is stated in dramatic form.
MATHEMATICS - Algebra, Geometry and the more advanced kind of Arithmetic - will now enter into the syllabus and take its place as what it really is: not a separate 'subject' but a sub-department of Logic. it is neither more nor less than the rule of the syllogism in its particular application to number and measurement and should be taught as such, instead of being, for some, a dark mystery and for others, a special revelation, neither illuminating nor illuminated by any other part of knowledge.
HISTORY aided by a simple system of ethics derived from the Grammar of Theology, will provide much suitable material for discussion: was the behaviour of this stateman justified? what was the effect of such an enactment? what are the arguments for and against this or that form of government?
we shall thus get an introduction to Constitutional History - a subject meaningless to the young child, but of absorbing interest to those who are prepared to argue and debate.
THEOLOGY itself will furnish material for argument about conduct and morals; and should have its scope extended by a simplified course of dogmatic theology (ie. the rational structure of Christian thought), clarifying the relations between the dogma and the ethics and lending itself to
128 that application of ethical principles in particular instances which is properly called casuistry (def - specious (apparently good or right though lacking real merit; superficially pleasing or plausible), deceptive or oversubtle reasoning, especially in questions of morality; fallacious or dishonest application of general principles; sophistry.) Geography and the Sciences will all likewise provide material for Dialectic.
but above all, we must not neglect the material which i so abundant in the pupils' own daily life. there is a delightful passage in Leslie Paul's The Living Hedge which tells how a number of small boys enjoyed themselves for days arguing about an extraordinary shower of rain which had fallen in their town - a shower so localised that it left one half of the main street wet and the other dry. could one, they argued, properly say that it had rained that day On or Over the town or only In the town?
How many drops of water were required to constitute rain? and so on. argument about this led on to a host of similar problems about rest and motion, sleep and waking, est and non est, and the infinitestimal division of time. the whole passage is an admirable example of the spontaneous development of the ratiocinative (def - to carry on the process of reasoning) faculty and the natural and proper thirst of the awakening reason for definition of terms and exactness of statement. all events are food for such an appetite. an umpire's decision; the degree to which one may transgress the spirit of a regulation without being trapped by the letter; on such questions as these, children are born cauists and their natural propensity only needs to be developed and trained and, especially, brought into an intelligible relationship with events in the grown up world. the newspapers are full of good material for such exercises: legal decisions, on the one hand, in cases where the cause at issue is not too abstruse; on the other, fallacious reasoning and muddle-headed argument, with which the correspondence columns of certain papers one could name are abundantly stocked.
wherever the matter for Dialectic is found, it is, of course, highly important that attention should be focused
129 upon the beauty and economy of a fine demonstration or a well-turned argument, lest veneration should wholly die. criticism must not be merely destructive; though at the same time both teacher and pupils must be ready to detect fallacy, slipshod reasoning, ambiguity, irrelevance and redundancy and to pounce upon them like rats.
this is the moment when precis writing may be usefully undertaken; together with such exercises as the writing of an essay, and the reduction of it, when written, by 25 or 50%.
it will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age to browbeat, correct and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable. my answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalised (def - to make a canal through; divert into certain channels; give a certain direction to; provide a certain outlet for) to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. it may, indeed, be rather less obtrusive at home it it is disciplined in school; and anyhow, elders who have abandoned the wholesome principle that children should be seen and not heard have no one to blame but themselves. the teachers, to be sure, will have to mind their step, or they may get more than they bargained for. all children sit in judgment on their masters; and if the Chaplain's sermon or the Headmistress's annual Speech-day address should by any chance afford an opening for the point of th critical wedge, that wedge will go home the more forcibly under the weight of the Dialectical hammer, wielded by a practised hand. that is why I said that the teachers themselves would need to undergo the discipline of the Trivium before they set out to impose it on their charges.
once again: the contents of the syllabus at this stage may be anything you like. the 'subjects' supply material; but they are all to be regarded as mere grist for the mental mill to work upon. the pupils should be encouraged
130 to go and forage for their own information and so guided towards the proper use of libraries and books of reference and shown how to tell which sources are authoritative and which are not.
towards the close of this stage, the pupils will probably be beginning to discover for themselves that their knowledge and experience are insufficient and that their trained intelligences nee a great deal more material to chew upon. the imagination - usually dormant during the pert age - will re-awaken and prompt them to suspect the limitations of logic and reason. this means that they are passing into the Poetic age and are ready to embark on the study of Rhetoric. the doors of the storehouse of knowledge should now be thrown open for them to browse about as they will. the things once learned by rote will be seen in new contexts; the things once coldly analysed can now be brought together to form a new synthesis; here and there a sudden insight will bring about that most exciting of all discoveries: the realisation that a truism is true.
it is difficult to map out any general syllabus for the study of Rhetoric: a certain freedom is demanded. in literature, appreciation should be again allowed to take the lead over destructive criticism and self expression in writing can go forward, with its tools now sharpened to cut clean and observe proportion. any child that already shows a disposition to specialise should be given his head: for, when the use of the tools has been well and truly learned it is available for any study whatever. it would e well, i think, that each pupil should learn one or two subjects really well, while taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects so as the keep his mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge. indeed, at this stage, our difficulty will be to keep his mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge. indeed, at this stage, our difficulty will be to keep 'subjects' apart; for as Dialectic will have shown all branches of learning to e inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to
131 show that all knowledge is one. to show this, and show why it is so, is pre-eminently the task of the Mistress-science. but whether Theology is studied or not, we should at least insist that children who seem inclined to specialise on the mathematical and scientific side should be obliged to attend some lessons in the Himanities and Vice Versa. at this stage also, the latin Grammar, having done its work, may be dropped for those who prefer to carry on their language studies on the modern side; while those who are likely never to have any great use or aptitude for mathematics might also be allowed to rest, more or less, upon their oars. generally speaking: whatsoever is Mere apparatus may now be allowed to fall into the background, while the rained mind is gradually prepared for specialisation in the 'subjects' which, when the Trivium is completed, it should be perfectly well equipped to tackle on its own. the final synthesis of the Trivium - the presentation and public defence of the theses - should be restored in some form; perhaps as a kind of 'leaving examination' during the last term at school.
the scope of Rhetoric depends also on whether the pupil is to be turned out into the world at the age of 16 or whether he is to proceed to public school and/or university. since, really, Rhetoric should be taken at about 14, the first category of pupil should study Grammar from about 9 to 11, and Dialectic from 12 to 14; his last 2 school years would then be devoted to Rhetoric, which, in his case, would be of the second category would finish the Dialectical course in his Preparatory School and take Rhetoric during his first 2 years at his public School. at 16, he would be ready to start upon those 'subjects' which are proposed for his later study at the university: and this part of his education will
132 correspond to the mediaeval Quadrivium. what this amounts to is that the ordinary pupil, whose formal education ends at 16, will take the Trivium only; whereas scholars will take both Trivium and Quadrivium.
is the Trivium, then a sufficient education for life? properly taught, I believe that it should be. at the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coaevals (def - equally old; the same age) brought up on old-fashioned 'modern' methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. but after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the others had over fist. indeed, I am not at all sure that pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of 16, thus proving himself the equal of his mediaeval counterpart, whose precosity (def - unusually advanced or mature in development; 'baked early') astonished us at the beginning of this discussion. this, to be sure, would make hay of the public school system and disconcert the universities very much - it would, for example , make quite a different thing of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race. but I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. for the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject ; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. to learn 6 subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.
it is clear that they successful teaching of this neo-mediaeval curriculum will depend even more than usual
133 upon the working together of the whole teaching staff towards a common purpose. since no subject is considered as an end in itself, any kind of rivalry in the staff-room will be sadly out of place. the fact that a pupil is, unfortunately, obliged, for some reason, to miss the History period on fridays or the Shakespeare class on Tuesdays or even to omit a whole subject in favour of some other subject, must not be allowed to cause any heart-burnings - the essential is that he should acquire the method of learning in whatever medium suits his best. if human nature suffers under this blow to one's professional pride in one's own subject, there is comfort in the thought that the end-of-term examination results will not be affected; for the papers will be so arranged as to be an examination in method, by whatever means.
I will add that it is highly important that every teacher should, for his or her own sake, be qualified and required to teach in all 3 parts of the Trivium; otherwise the Masters of Dialectic, especially, might find their minds hardening into a permanent adolescence. for this reason, teachers in Preparatory Schools should also take Rhetoric classes in the Public Schools to which they are attached; or, if they are not so attached, then by arrangement in other schools in the same neighbourhood. alternatively, a few preliminary classes in Rhetoric might be taken in Preparatory Schools from the age of 13 onwards.
before concluding these necessarily very sketchy suggestions, I ought to say why I think it necessary, in these days, to go back to a discipline which we had discarded. the truth is that for the last 300 years or so we have been living upon our educational capital. the post-Renaissance world, bewildered and excited by the profusion of new 'subjects' offered to it. broke away from the old discipline (which had, indeed, become sadly dull and
134 stereotyped in its practical application) and imagined that henceforward it could, as it were, disport (def - divert or amuse oneself) itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium without passing through the Trivium. but the scholastic tradition, though broken and maimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities: Milton, however much he protested against it, was formed by it - the debate of the Fallen Angels, and the disputation of Abdiel with Satan have the tool-marks of the Schools upon them and might, incidentally, profitably figure as set passages for our Dialectical studies. right down to the 19th century, our public affairs were most managed and our books and journals were for the most part written, by people brought up in homes and trained in places, where that tradition was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood. just so, many people today who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it. but ONE CANNOT LIVE ON CAPITAL FOREVER. a tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. and today a great number -perhaps the majority - of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits - yes and who educate our young people. have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the scholastic discipline. less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. we have lost the tools of learning - the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane - tat were so adaptable to all tasks. instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more , and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the
135 work as a whole or 'looks to the end of the work'. what use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief abject is left unattained? it is not the fault of the teachers - they work only too hard already. the combined folly of a civilisation that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. they are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. for the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
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