Culture & Anarchy. Arnold Matthew
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regards the matter of education, he was all for Reality, as against Pretentiousness, "the stamp of plainness and freedom from charlatanism." He had no notion that children could be humanized by being made to read that "the crocodile is oviparous," or that "summer ornaments for grates are made of wood shavings and of different coloured papers." He wished that the youngest and poorest children should be nurtured on the wholesome and delicious food of actual literature, instead of "skeletons" and "abstracts." He set great store on learning poetry by heart, for he believed in poetry as the chief instrument of culture. He poured just contempt upon the wretched doggerel which in school reading-books too often passed for poetry. "When one thinks how noble and admirable a thing genuine popular poetry is, it is provoking to think that such rubbish should be palmed off on a poor child, with any apparent sanction from the Education Department and its grants."
With regard to the special evil of teaching poetry by "selections" or "extracts," he wrote in his Report for 1880: "That the poetry chosen should have real beauties of expression and feeling, that these beauties should be such as the children's hearts and minds can lay hold of, and that a distinct point or centre of beauty and interest should occur within the limits of the passage learned—all these are conditions to be insisted on. Some of the short pieces by Mrs. Hemans, such as 'The Graves of a Household,' 'The Homes of England,' 'The Better Land,' are to be recommended because they fulfil all three conditions; they have real merits of expression and sentiment; the merits are such as the children can feel, and the centre of interest, these pieces being so short, necessarily occurs within the limits of what is learnt. On the other hand, in extracts taken from Scott or Shakespeare, the point of interest is not often reached within the hundred lines which is all that children in the Fourth Standard learn. The Judgment Scene in the Merchant of Venice affords me a good example of what I mean.... The children in the Fourth Standard begin at the beginning and stop at the end of a hundred lines. Now the children in the Fourth Standard are often a majority of the children learning poetry, and this is all their poetry for the year. But within these hundred lines the real interest of the situation is not reached; neither do they contain any poetry of signal beauty and effectiveness. How little, therefore, has the poetry-exercise been made to do for these children, many of whom will leave school at once, and learn no more poetry!" He greatly favoured all such exercises as tend to make the mind "creative," and give it "a native play of its own, as against such exercises as learning strings of promontories, battles, and minerals." As to the number of subjects taught, he was in favour of few rather than many. He dreaded for the children the strain of having to receive a large number of "knowledges" (as he oddly called them), and "store them up to be reproduced in an examination." But in spite of this well-founded dread of an undue multiplication of subjects, he wished to make Latin compulsory in the upper standards of elementary schools, and he wished to see it taught through the Vulgate. Perhaps in this particular he showed an effect of his father's influence; for the late Dean of Westminster19 used to imitate the enormous emphasis with which Dr. Arnold replied to some one who had depreciated the language of the Vulgate as "Dog Latin"—"Dog Latin, indeed! I call it Lion Latin!"
Be that as it may, Matthew Arnold thus gave his judgment on the possible uses of the Vulgate in elementary schools—
"Latin is the foundation of so much in the written and spoken language of modern Europe, that it is the best language to take as a second language; in our own written and book language, above all, it fills so large a part that we perhaps hardly know how much of their reading falls meaningless upon the eye and ear of children in our elementary schools, from their total ignorance of either Latin or a modern language derived from it. For the little of languages that can be taught in our elementary schools, it is far better to go to the root at once; and Latin, besides, is the best of all languages to learn grammar by. But it should by no means be taught as in our classical schools; far less time should be spent on the grammatical framework, and classical literature should be left quite out of view. A second language, and a language coming very largely into the vocabulary of modern nations, is what Latin should stand for to the teacher of an elementary school. I am convinced that for his purpose the best way would be to disregard classical Latin entirely, to use neither Cornelius Nepos, nor Eutropius, nor Cæsar, nor any delectus from them, but to use the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. A chapter or two from the story of Joseph, a chapter or two from Deuteronomy, and the first two chapters of St. Luke's Gospel would be the sort of delectus we want; add to them a vocabulary and a simple grammar of the main forms of the Latin language, and you have a perfectly compact and cheap school book, and yet all that you need. In the extracts the child would be at home, instead of, as in extracts from classical Latin, in an utterly strange land; and the Latin of the Vulgate, while it is real and living Latin, is yet, like the Greek of the New Testament, much nearer to modern idiom, and therefore much easier for a modern learner than classical idiom can be. True, a child whose delectus is taken from Cornelius Nepos or Cæsar will be better prepared perhaps for going on to Virgil and Cicero than a child whose delectus is taken from the Vulgate. But we do not want to carry our elementary schools into Virgil or Cicero; one child in five thousand, with a special talent, may go on to higher schools, and to Virgil, and he will go on to them all the better for the little we have at any rate given him. But what we want to give to our Elementary Schools in general is the vocabulary, to some extent, of a second language, and that language one which is at the bottom of a great deal of modern life and modern language. This, I am convinced, we may give in some such method as the method I have above suggested, but in no other."
There is, perhaps, no more interesting or more characteristic feature of his doctrine about elementary schools than his insistence, early and late, on a close and familiar acquaintance with the Bible. "Chords of power," he said, "are touched by this instruction which no other part of the instruction in a popular school reaches, and chords various, not the single religious chord only. The Bible is for the child in an elementary school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy. What a course of eloquence and poetry (to call it by that name alone) is the Bible in a school which has and can have but little eloquence and poetry! and how much do our elementary schools lose by not having any such course as part of their school programme! All who value the Bible may rest assured that thus to know and possess the Bible is the most certain way to extend the power and efficacy of the Bible."
The spiritual sense, the doctrinal and dogmatic import, of Holy Scripture lay, in his judgment, quite outside the scope of the School. "The Bible's application and edification belong to the Church; its literary and historical substance to the School." He saw clearly the manifold and conflicting perils to which a simple love and knowledge of the Bible were exposed the moment that exegesis began to play about it. He pointed out that Cardinal Newman interpreted the words, I will lay thy stones with fair colours and thy foundations with sapphires, as authorizing "the sumptuosities of the Church of Rome"; and to Protestants who said that this was a wrong use of the passage he pointed out that their similar use of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman and Antichrist would seem equally wrong to Cardinal Newman; "and in these cases of application who shall decide"? What he insisted on was the value of the Bible as a beautiful and ennobling literature, easily accessible to all. He would have it taught with intelligence, sympathy, reverence, and, above all, "as a Literature,"—for biblical teaching ought to show the widely varying elements of which the Bible is composed: the profound differences, not merely of authorship and style, but of tone and temper, between one book and another; the historical circumstances under which each came into being; the section of humanity and the period of time to which each made its appeal.
In 1869 he wrote in his Annual Report—
"Let the school managers make the main outlines of Bible history, and the getting by heart a selection of the finest Psalms, the most interesting passages from the historical and prophetical books of the Old Testament, and the chief parables, discourses, and exhortations, of the New, a part of the regular school work, to be submitted to inspection and to be seen in its strength or weakness like any other. This could raise no jealousies; or, if it still raises some, let a sacrifice be made of them for the sake of the end in view. Some will say that what we propose is but a small use to put the Bible to; yet it is that on which all higher use of the Bible is to be built, and its adoption is the only chance for saving the one elevating and inspiring element in the scanty instruction of our primary schools from being sacrificed to a politico-religious difficulty. There was no Greek school in which