For the sole true end of educationis simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whateverinstruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

We have lostthe tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, thechisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, wehave merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task andno more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no manever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”

disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium withoutpassing through the Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken andmaimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities:

For the tools of learning are the same, in any and everysubject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get themastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effortexpended by the person who has not the tools at his command.

Rhetoric should be taken at aboutfourteen, the first category of pupil should study Grammar from about nineto eleven, and Dialectic from twelve to fourteen;

for as Dialectic will have shown all branches oflearning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledgeis one.

hildren sit in judgment on their masters;

It will doubtless be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert Ageto browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectlyintolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow;and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalised togood purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.

At this stage, it does not matter nearly so muchthat these things should be fully understood as that they should be knownand remembered. Remember, it is material that we are collecting.

The modern tendency is totry and force rational explanations on a child’s mind at too early an age

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 historicalknowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective ofhistory. It does not greatly matter which dates: those of the Kings of Englandwill do very nicely, provided they are accompanied by pictures of costume,architecture, and all “every-day things,” so that the mere mention of a datecalls up a strong visual presentment of the whole period.

Trivium adapts itself with a singularappropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-parrot, Dialectic tothe Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic Age.

We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone theschool leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachersslave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes aburden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largelyfrustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absencecan only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents;

the idea of playing Shakespeare’splays as he wrote them, and not in the “modernised” versions of Cibber andGarrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Distinguo

By teaching them all to read, we have left them atthe mercy of the printed word.

The proper subject of theargument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extensionin space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be thenature of angels

A glib speaker in the Brains Trust onceentertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helplessrage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to knowhow many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, Ihope, 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?

Whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivialthan the usual subjects set nowadays for “essay-writing” I should not like tosay: we may ourselves grow a little weary of “A Day in My Holidays,” “WhatI should Like to Do when I Leave School,” and all the rest of it.

modern education concentrates onteaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressingone’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along;

Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic andDisputation.

If not, his teacher and his fellow-pupils, trained alongthe same lines, would be quick to point out where he was wrong; for it wasthey whom he had to seek to persuade.

Thewhole of the Trivium was in fact intended to teach the pupil the proper use ofthe tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all

Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceablethrough all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—)that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we faillamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learneverything, except the art of learning.

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere andnoticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or howoften, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply thathe was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he hasalready defined them?

Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curiousinability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular questionwhich interests them?

laudator temporis acti