Post-Prandial Philosophy

15. Eye versus Ear

It is admitted on all hands by this time, I suppose, that the best way

of learning is by eye, not by ear. Therefore the authorities that

prescribe for us our education among all classes have decided that we

shall learn by ear, not by eye. Which is just what one might expect from

a vested interest.

Of course this superiority of sight over hearing is pre-eminently true

of natural science--that is to say, of nine-tenths among the subjects

worth learning by humanity. The only real way to learn geology, for

example, is not to mug it up in a printed text-book, but to go into the

field with a geologist's hammer. The only real way to learn zoology and

botany is not by reading a volume of natural history, but by collecting,

dissecting, observing, preserving, and comparing specimens. Therefore,

of course, natural science has never been a favourite study in the eyes

of school-masters, who prefer those subjects which can be taught in a

room to a row of boys on a bench, and who care a great deal less than

nothing for any subject which isn't "good to examine in." Educational

value and importance in after life have been sacrificed to the teacher's

ease and convenience, or to the readiness with which the pupil's

progress can be tested on paper. Not what is best to learn, but what is

least trouble to teach in great squads to boys, forms the staple of our

modern English education. They call it "education," I observe in the

papers, and I suppose we must fall in with that whim of the profession.

But even the subjects which belong by rights to the ear can nevertheless

be taught by the eye more readily. Everybody knows how much easier it is

to get up the history and geography of a country when you are actually

in it than when you are merely reading about it. It lives and moves

before you. The places, the persons, the monuments, the events, all

become real to you. Each illustrates each, and each tends to impress the

other on the memory. Sight burns them into the brain without conscious

effort. You can learn more of Egypt and of Egyptian history, culture,

hieroglyphics, and language in a few short weeks at Luxor or Sakkarah

than in a year at the Louvre and the British Museum. The Tombs of the

Kings are worth many papyri. The mere sight of the temples and obelisks

and monuments and inscriptions, in the places where their makers

originally erected them, gives a sense of reality and interest to them

all that no amount of study under alien conditions can possibly equal.

We have all of us felt that the only place to observe Flemish art to the

greatest advantage is at Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and Antwerp; just

as the only place to learn Florentine art as it really was is at the

Uffizi and the Bargello.

These things being so, the authorities who have charge of our public

education, primary, secondary, and tertiary, have decided in their

wisdom--to do and compel the exact contrary. Object-lessons and the

visible being admittedly preferable to rote-lessons and the audible,

they have prescribed that our education, so called, shall be mainly an

education not in things and properties, but in books and reading. They

have settled that it shall deal almost entirely and exclusively with

language and with languages; that words, not objects, shall be the facts

it impresses on the minds of the pupils. In our primary schools they

have insisted upon nothing but reading and writing, with just a

smattering of arithmetic by way of science. In our secondary schools

they have insisted upon nothing but Greek and Latin, with about an equal

leaven of algebra and geometry. This medi*** fare (I am delighted that

I can thus agree for once with Professor Ray Lankester) they have thrust

down the throats of all the world indiscriminately; so much so that

nowadays people seem hardly able at last to conceive of any other than a

linguistic education as possible. You will hear many good folk who talk

with contempt of Greek and Latin; but when you come to inquire what new

mental pabulum they would substitute for those quaint and grotesque

survivals of the Dark Ages, you find what they want instead is--modern

languages. The idea that language of any sort forms no necessary element

in a liberal education has never even occurred to them. They take it for

granted that when you leave off feeding boys on straw and oats you must

supply them instead with hay and sawdust.

Not that I rage against Greek and Latin as such. It is well we should

have many specialists among us who understand them, just as it is well

we should have specialists in Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. I merely mean

that they are not the sum and substance of educational method. They are

at best but two languages of considerable importance to the student of

purely human evolution.

Furthermore, even these comparatively useless linguistic subjects could

themselves be taught far better by sight than by hearing. A week at Rome

would give your average boy a much clearer idea of the relations of the

Capitol with the Palatine than all the pretty maps in Dr. William

Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary. It would give him also a sense of

the reality of the Latin language and the Latin literature, which he

could never pick up out of a dog-eared Livy or a thumb-marked ****. You

have only to look across from the top of the Janiculum, towards the

white houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Alban

hills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all the

geography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject on

earth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actual

observation.

And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise than

acquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man can

dissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms a

component member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociate

itself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselves

free from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let our

boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better

education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to

impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more

valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred

with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not

what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" in

examination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of a

system; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individual

action but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abuse

till at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world so

complex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only do

anything in the long run by influencing the mass--by securing the

co-operation of many among his fellows.

Meanwhile, I believe it is gradually becoming the fact that our girls,

who till lately were so very ill-taught, are beginning to know more of

what is really worth knowing than their public-school-bred brothers. For

the public school still goes on with the system of teaching it has

derived direct from the thirteenth century; while the girls' schools,

having started fair and fresh, are beginning to assimilate certain newer

ideas belonging to the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. In time they

may conceivably come down to the more elementary notions of the present

generation. Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys,

the girls are beginning to know something now, not indeed of the

universe in which they live, its laws and its properties, but of

literature and history, and the principal facts about human development.

Yet all the time, the boys go on as ever with Musa, Mus, like so many

parrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with just

enough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired a

life-long distaste for Horace and an inconquerable incapacity for

understanding *******. One year in Italy with their eyes open would be

worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a

platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around

them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to

discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.

What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our

boys' schooling interfere with their education!