Essay No. 31
Discipline and Development
Presidential Address
delivered at the Annual Conference
of the National Union of Women Workers
at Lincoln, October II, 1910.
BY
The Lady Laura Ridding
I REJOICE that this year a departure from our usual custom will be made in consequence of the fact that the subjects of our Conference will take our thoughts. beyond the region of practical experiences into that of ideals and aims. Of late years I have felt that there has been too strong a tendency to confine out attention to the problems of life, to the exclusion ol the consideration of its ideals.
Not that our programme does not envelope packetful of problems ! Happily, however, ideals are intermixed with them. It is their presence that suggests to me the lines which I now ask to be allowed to follow for a few minutes in this my presidential address.
From the cradle of the human race to this moment of its earthly career, its parental and pedagogic guardians have doubtless always cherished certain
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ideals as to the way in which it should be educated. As generation has succeeded generation in the never ending procession of life, these ideals have changed and disappeared to be replaced by others ; and we, who are members of the generation now occupying the centre of the earth's stage, may not find it un¬edifying to compare our present ideals with those of the past, to try to discover some of the losses and gains that have accrued to us from these shifting standards, and to observe how, in certain curious instances, the trend of modern requirements is curv¬ing back towards some of the long abandoned ideals of the ancient world.
I suppose that no one would challenge the asser¬tion that the keynote, up to which all the educational ideals of the ancient and medival world were pitched, was Discipline; discipline intended to bend body and mind into complete obedience, so that every child should grow to maturity as a plastic member of the community. The rulers of the State aspired to train each of its human units to drop irresistingly, like interwoven links in a coat of mail, into the place allotted to him or her in the tribe, fraternity, army, or city.
he present day, so with the ancient warrior races, such as the Persians and Spartans, the science of education was practically confined to the training of the body. Their children
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were exercised in wrestling, shooting with the bow or throwing the javelin, riding, and hunting; and they were deliberately subjected to trials of long marches in hunger, thirst, cold and nakedness, in order to harden them and to develop the qualities of endur¬ance, self-restraint and courage.
With the ancient intellectual races, such as the Athenians and Romans, a severe bodily training was combined with a mental training. Socrates described this education as "Gymnastic for the body and music for the soul," the term "music " being used to include all mental studies which produce order and harmony in the soul, i.e., literature, the history of heroes and gods, memory exercises, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, dialectic, philosophy, besides the actual study of music and song.
Josephus maintained that the system of Jewish education combined these two lines of training to a degree attained by no other national system. The body was tamed, the mind disciplined and the soul uplifted under the teaching of the law, inasmuch that, for the Jew, religion was not made to be a part of virtue, but virtues were ordained to be parts of re¬ligion : justice, fortitude, temperance, brotherly kind¬ness, peace and piety towards God.
This complete system of education was lost in the fog of intellectual darkness that shrouded Europe during the migration of nations and the Middle Ages, when the Jews found themselves excluded from almost
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every possibility of bodily discipline in war-like exer¬cises and manly adventures, and the Christians, from those of mental discipline in intellectual and literary study and research.
The medieval rival schools of education were the Castle and the Cloister. In the Castle, discipline, obedience and endurance were taught by instruction in riding, swimming, shooting with the bow, boxing and hawking, while the scanty mental exercises con¬sisted of chess-playing and versifying.
In the Cloister, harsh discipline and mental sub-mission were enforced by instruction in Latin, gram-
mar, writing, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, dialectics, rhetoric, the art of illumination, music, and the duties of the various religious ceremonials.
The foundation on which the education of these various periods of history was based was Discipline—
discipline which forced the individual to conform to
the universal pattern ; while discipline also formed the coping-stone of the fabric of Society, under which that
individual, when equipped for his part in life, took his place in whatever niche his governors had destined him to occupy.
This stern figure of Discipline held aloft the torch of learning during thirty centuries. It is interesting
for us to look back and observe the moving shapes taken by the flames as they burned upwards, if we may so symbolise the ideals of education of those days.
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The Jewish ideal expressed in the words of Simon, Son of Gamaliel, as : "Not learning, but doing, is the chief thing," is to be found, not only in that oldest handbook of education, the Book of Proverbs, but in the Books of Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus. The whole theory of the prepara¬tion of life there put forth is, that God educates men and men educate each other. The motto prefixed to the Book of Proverbs : "The fear of the Lord is the principal part of knowledge ; but fools despise wisdom and instruction," is repeated in the final statement of the Book of the Preacher : "Of making many books there is no end ; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter, even all that hath been heard, is, Fear God and keep His commandments ; for this is the whole duty of man." The Wisdom of Solomon gives the ascending steps through wisdom to eternity in the following words : "The very true beginning of wisdom is the desire of discipline ; and the care of discipline is love; and love is the keeping of her laws; and the giving heed unto her laws is the assurance of incorruption ; and incorruption maketh us near unto God. Therefore the desire of wisdom bringeth to a Kingdom," and " the multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world." *
These great ideals of the servants of Jehovah find an echo in the ideals of Socrates, as given to us by Plato. He says : "The idea of Good is the highest
*Wisdom vi. 17-20, 24.
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knowledge . . . without which any other knowledge will profit us nothing."*
The business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge . . . they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good."
He states that the direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life," and teaches that it should be such knowledge as "would draw the soul from becoming to being."
Plato in his Dialogue on Laws gives us these definitions of a good education, as that "which tends most to the improvement of mind and body," and, "education in virtue which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which deserves the name."
The group of educational ideals of the ancients must, of course, include that of the Romans. Quin¬tilian, in his description of his own aims as a teacher, draws it for us. He says : "We are educating that perfect orator, who cannot exist unless he be a good man as well, and therefore we not only demand an extraordinary capacity for speaking in him, but all the virtues of the mind. I am not inclined to allow that those are right who relegate a systematic life of virtue to philosophy. The true citizen, if he is to
*The quotations from Plato are taken from Jowett's Plato, "The Republic" and "Laws."
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manage public and private affairs well, to rule cities with his policy, found them with his laws, reform them with his proposals, must certainly be an orator. The precepts which the books of the philosophers contain are really and truly without a doubt part of my work."
In a previous sentence I coupled the medieval views of education with those of the ancient world, because the real cleavage between ancient and modern ideals appeared to me to begin in the fifteenth century. Therefore I will now give an instance of the ideal of the educator of the Middle Ages in a quotation from the words of its greatest English educator, and the creator of the first Public School, William of Wykeham. In the foundation deed of Winchester College he stated his belief that "Gram¬mar is the foundation gate and source of all other liberal arts," and that "by knowledge of letters justice is cultivated and the prosperity of human life increased." And in the first clause of his Statutes for his College at Oxford he stated that he had founded it for the study of Holy Scripture, Civil and Canon Law, Philosophy, divers faculties, but especially the faculty of Theology, to the end that "the praise of God may be spread, the Church ruled, the strength and fervour of the Christian religion grow hotter and all knowledge and virtue be increased in strength."
Can anyone, however modern, assert that ideals such as these, Jewish, Pagan and Christian, which put before us as their high aim the attainment of wisdom and the fear of God, the pursuit of the Good, the devotion of service in citizenship, the love of virtue, the spread of the Christian religion with knowledge, virtue, justice, and the prosperity of the
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race, can be surpassed in sublimity of aim by any newer theories of education, or can even be super-seded without disastrous results to the human race ? Tennyson tells us that "The old order changeth, yielding place to new," and so, despite the sufficiency of these old theories, they have been succeeded by other modern theories of education, the original con¬ception of which may, be traced back to the dawn of the Renaissance.
With its advent, the attitude of the civilised Euro¬pean nations changed gradually towards the prime meaning of education. In the place of the paramount idea of discipline for the benefit of the corporate life, the development of the Individual and of all his latent forces began to be recognised as the great aim of the teacher. As time went on, it unconsciously re¬duced his obligation to qualify each scholar for his place in the community, to a negligible consideration, which might be shifted on to the shoulders of circum¬stance, accident or, temperament. As the scholar stepped forth from the lecture hall into the busy world, these untried attendants were allowed to decide for him what duties he should undertake, what posi¬tion he should occupy. The teacher was bidden to
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remember that the scholar's individual development was the matter of greatest importance; and thus Development took the place formerly held by Dis¬cipline as the keynote to which all educational theories must now be tuned.
This change of attitude was a natural result of the Renaissance, a movement which found immediate expression in a revolutionised system of education. The new education offered a vivid contrast to the barren stagnation of the Schoolmen's teaching, for it represented to the fifteenth century the most living, inspiring teaching that could be given. It embodied progress, energy, self-emancipation and indi-vidualism, as opposed to a passive submission of body, mind, and spirit to the ecclesiastical rule. Not that individualism had been entirely ignored in past ages. Quintilian, for instance, laid stress on the im¬portance of the study of individual dispositions as well as on treating them with humanity in training and discipline; but the idea needed to be stirred into life by the later forces of the Renaissance.
Two movements went on side by side : the revival of the ancient learning and the evolution of a new ideal of life and civilisation. The old wine, equally with the new, was put into new bottles.
The Educational Reformation found its apostles in the Humanists, who endeavoured to inspire their followers with "a just perception of the dignity of man as a rational, volitional, and sentient being born
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upon the earth with a right to use it and enjoy it." As a result of this teaching the brutality of primitive
discipline disappeared, and the assertion of indi-vidualism with its "Rights of Man" waxed louder and more and more persistent.
The Humanists were the ancestors of our modern educational theorists. They venerated the old ideals, while they prescribed new methods of attaining to them. The change is startling when we compare the tortures to which the Spartan youths were compelled to submit at the scourging matches before the altar of Artemis with the discipline inculcated by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini in his educational treatise written in 145o. Boys, he said, should be taught self-restraint and temperance : "A boy whose lot it may be to face life in the camp or in the forest should be so disciplined that he may eat even beef."
Of course the new veneration for the individual took many generations to establish itself. Erasmus believed in it, while his friend, Sir Thomas More, held it apparently of small account. Erasmus pleaded that the teacher "should take account of individual peculiarities, because the best results would be ob¬tained by following nature." Sir Thomas More com¬pelled his Utopians to submit to one universal curriculum, in which the only subject open to choice was the curious exception of the "studie of good literature." Of this, he said, that " every sort of people, both men and women, go to hear lectures,
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some one, some another, as every man's nature is inclined," and if anyone chooses to shirk these lectures "he is not Jetted nor prohibited." Outside this solitary exception, all Utopians were made to learn the compulsory subjects of husbandry, music, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, natural science, moral philosophy and weather study.
From the time of Erasmus until now, educational reformers have followed one another in swift suc¬cession. They have differed from each other in nationality, religion, character, influence, and a hundred other distinctions, but they have all agreed in each believing himself to be the real discoverer of the true method of education. Profound thinkers like Comenius, Milton and Locke were succeeded by fantastic dreamers like Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Jacotot. But as the procession moved on, it might have been observed that certain decisions were handed down to the succeeding generations and were accepted by them, as men abide by the opinions of bygone judges. The abolition of severe corporal punishment, the study of modern languages, of nature and of science, once revolutionary ideas, gradually became accepted articles of belief. Schools of pedagogy were formed and elaborate systems of education were evolved. Through the jangle of these clamorous system builders, we catch certain phrases repeated constantly which show that the rival systems are all now built upon the same ground plan,
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traced five hundred years ago by the Humanists, i.e., the Development of the Individual.
The ideals of education of the earlier modern teachers exemplify this. We see it underlying Comenius' statement that God's plan is that man should know all things, should be master of all things, including himself, and should refer everything to God. Therefore Nature has implanted within us the seeds of learning, virtue and piety. To bring these to maturity is the object of education.
Milton, in his noble letter, Of Education," says that "The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him." . . . "I call that a complete and generous education which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of peace and war."
Pestalozzi, fired with the "enthusiasm of humanity," defined his ideal of the aim of education to be that every man may attain to a consciousness of his own dignity through his feeling of the universal powers and endowments which he possesses awakened within him."
The views of two leaders of thought among the pioneers of the French Revolution must not be omitted. They flash discordant rays upon the picture drawn by their sober educational forerunners, but, nevertheless, many have chosen to guide their foot-
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steps by their erratic light. Rousseau scorns all re¬ceived views and methods : he directs the parent or teacher to "Take the road directly opposite to that which is in use, and you will almost always do right." He enlarges in Emile on the necessity of the young child's education consisting in his learning the art of being ignorant, of losing time, of a return to Nature, and of self-teaching, and that all this should be learned in perfect freedom from restraint. Thus alone, he averred, would the scholar learn to discover his own innate goodness and the sanctity of his primary impulses.
Jacotot taught that the aim of education was to lead every individual to self-development and self-in¬struction. He laid down in his famous trinity, of paradoxes his dictum that :
A11 men have an equal intelligence.
2. Everyone can teach ; and can teach that which he does not know himself.
3. Everything is in everything.
Fantastic as these Frenchmen's theories seem, they have, in varying shapes, survived to this day ; and, with the other soberer theories of the Humanists and their descendants, have exercised an overwhelm¬ing influence on mankind. Their victorious assertion of the duty of educationalists to develop the individual is now unquestioned. They have relegated discipline by corporal austerities to the limbo of dead tyrants, and have substituted a system of stimulating a desire
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for knowledge by all kinds of moral suasion, in hope that some future discovery of the "learning bacillus" (with which infants of the twentieth century may be inoculated) may altogether render education an effortless, enjoyable process.
During this week we shall hear much of the really good work accomplished by modern methods. No one doubts the fact. Nevertheless, I want to point out, in regard to my two keynotes of Discipline and Development, that we are at the Present time threat¬ened with a real danger, which it behoves us to resist with all our strength; namely, the widespread dis¬position to resent all mental discipline.
No formation of character can be carried on in opposition to this temper; which, if not subdued in time, must undoubtedly result in a general national degeneracy from the loss of the moral fibre of the rising generation.
Educationalists may argue over the controversies of the day ; the uses to which the faculty of memory should be put, the relative value of ancient and modern languages, the rival claims of literature and science; but these are side issues compared with the struggle to maintain the rule of mental discipline.
The most thoughtful among them have given us grave warnings of the menacing danger.
"Why is it," asks one of them, "that so large a part of the English people does not effectually believe in education ? Partly because Education means dis-
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cipline, and the mass of a nation does not take kindly to discipline, unless some great change in its fortunes has made it see in discipline its chief hope of deliverance." •
Mr. Meyrick Booth in his introduction to the works of Dr. F. W. Forster, Lecturer on Education in Zurich University, writes :f
"The modern spirit of individualism, with its contempt for all obedience, was first brought into the educational world by Rousseau. His influence has been immense. More than anyone else he is the originator of all the current ideas about obedience being derogatory to personal dignity or incompatible with self-development, about discipline crushing in¬dividuality, and so on." And he continues, quoting Dr. Forster : "The disciples of the ' New Education ' begin with quite a correct idea—namely, that the compulsory forcing of children into a mould leaves their personality undeveloped, and even injuriously affects it. They do not perceive that the laxity of their own methods is even more dangerous. The true centre of personality of a human being is in his spiritual life, and can only be developed in so far as the spirit is trained to mastery over the whole lower nature. This enthronement of the spirit . . . is not to be obtained without severe struggle; a true
* "What is a Secondary Education?" p. 25. Edited by R. P. Scott.
t From "Duty and Discipline Series," No. 3o.
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personality develops precisely by the control of mere individual desires. The more the lower self is granted freedom the more hopeless does the development of personality become. . . . It is pitifully superficial to suppose that the elimination of obedience and restraint sets the individual free for higher development. . .
"There are schools in America where there is simply no discipline at all. The children do prac-tically what they like. To indulge a child's every mood, whim and weakness is called the development of the individual. Many American teachers are so terribly afraid of demanding any, serious effort of self-conquest from their pupils that their only en¬deavour is to make everything easy and interesting. Such schools become kindergartens in which the only motive power is the spirit of play. . .
"The exaggerated modern belief in individual freedom for the young puts children into the way of allowing themselves to be directed by wayward im¬pulses, moods and fancies, and in this manner de¬velops a type of character that cannot resist outward influences. No one has less independence than he who has never learnt obedience."
After these words there is no need for me to emphasise further the national danger involved in this deterioration of the character of the people. I should, however, like to point out two strangely contradic¬tory results directly traceable to the exaggerated doctrine of the development of the individual.
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First: The absence of the hardening quality of discipline, with the mental coddling treatment, pro¬duce the evaporation, not the evolution, of the in¬dividual. They blight with atrophy the power of initiation, forethought, self-control, and mental dis¬cipline, all the qualities which build up character.
Second: An exaggerated value of individualism implants in the scholars "a ludicrously dispropor-tionate sense of their own importance, accompanied by a loss of modest independence." The inspiring hero-worship so sedulously taught under the old system is contemptuously abandoned by, these vain
self-centred minds. Such self-worshippers, when
they arrive at manhood, show a venomous jealousy of superiority in others; they, abhor mental culture and knowledge ; they desire to level all men down to one dull mediocrity of capability ; and for that pur¬pose, they would establish the rule of an impersonal State which should reduce all the people to the same condition of monotonous equality.
Thus does an excessive, and therefore noxious, in-dividualism complete the circle and bring us back—though, with a difference—to the ancient ideal of the submerging of the individual in the State
This is no unique instance of present-day rever¬sion to ancient outworn beliefs. Father Time, grop¬ing about in his vast treasure house, where moulder dim memories of antique educational experiments, must laugh to himself as he now and again flings
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some of these dusty relics out into the light of the sun, and men alight upon them and proclaim them everywhere as wonderful brand-new discoveries.
For instance, Froebel discovered The Kinder-. garten; but Father Time would remind us that the method dates back to the pyramids ; and that, as a little child, the great lawgiver Moses probably learnt arithmetical games with garlands and apples in the Kindergarten of an Egyptian temple on the banks of the Nile.
American teachers vaunt their plan of Co-educa¬tion, but it was originally systematically developed in Sparta. The boys and girls of Sparta shared the same course of education ; and Plato, in his Dialogues on "Laws," makes his Athenian stranger say : "My law would apply to female pupils as well as to males." . . . "They shall both go through the same exer¬cises." On this system of education Grote remarks that "in this universal system of schooling imposed on men and women alike, the national characteristics are to be sought."
The unrealised ideal of many statesmen of our Empire, of America and of Europe, that a complete education should include a Universal Military Train¬ing in the home service army of all the boys, was carried out in stern completeness by the Persians and Spartans ; while Plato's vision soared still further, and in his " Laws" he decreed that "women ought not to neglect military matters, but that all citizens,
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male and female alike, shall attend to them." And he explains why he wishes women to have a military
training " While they are yet girls they should
have practised the whole art of fighting—if for no other reason, yet in case the whole people should have to leave the city and carry on operations of war outside, that the young who are left to guard and the rest of the city may be equal to the task."
Lest you should hastily condemn Plato for the extreme primitiveness of his conceptions, I would remind you that Mr. Mundella, in his Compulsory Education provisions of the Education Act of 188o, was a mere plagiarist from Plato's "Laws," which state that : "The children shall come [to the schools] not only if their parents please, but if they do not please ; and if their education is neglected there shall be compulsory education, as the saying is, of all and sundry, as far as this is possible ; and the pupils shall be regarded as belonging to the State rather than to their parents."
The most advanced Socialist is not more modern than Plato here !
Technical Education, in the farmyard, the garden and the workshop, that latest panacea for the defects in our educational system, ought, by rights, to come on to the stage clad, not in coat and trousers, but in the doublet and buskins of Tudor days. Does not Sir Thomas More inform us how in Utopia "All men and women were instructed in husbandry even from
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their youth, partly in their schools with traditions and precepts, and partly in the country, nigh the city, brought up as it were in playing, not only beholding the use of it, but practising it also. Besides hus¬bandry, everyone of them learneth one or other several and particular science as his own proper craft " ?
The five strata of ancient cities below the Homeric Troy were as nothing to the remote depths of the old foundations upon which our twentieth century fabric of education is built ! And, as the instances just given show us, some of the old ideas, once buried as anachronisms, have been excavated, brought again to light and once more placed in positions of honour. Let this fact give us courage. Let it inspire us to pray to God that He may guide the parents and teachers of our nation to rediscover virtues, which in former days were made the very foundation stones of education, but which now seem too often to be hidden out of sight: Duty, Loyalty, Courage, Obedience, Humility, Faith, Love, Truth, Self-sacrifice. The Christian ideal of education needs these qualities to complete its perfect work of discipline and develop¬ment upon our sons and daughters, the work of forming in them character and thought ; of filling their hearts and minds with a knowledge of true re¬ligion and useful learning ; and of training them to live for the honour of God and the service of Christ, of their country and of their fellow men.
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