15. Eye versus Ear - Page 2

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 mediæval 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 Æneid. 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