VI

EDUCATION IN FOREIGN PERIODICALS

The Teaching of Civic Duty1

JAMES BRYCE IN THE

CONTEMPORARY REVIEW"

"In Britain, as in most countries, each step in the extension of popular education has been due to some antecedent political change. Men have not received the franchise because they had been already sufficiently instructed to exercise it, but have been provided with the means of instruction after the franchise had been given, partly because they used their new power to demand those means, partly because it was felt that the education of the citizens had become more directly and pressingly needful for the welfare of the State. It was soon after the establishment of Household Suffrage in the boroughs by the Act of 1867 that Mr. Robert Lowe delivered his famous counsel, 'Educate your masters.' It was under the impulse of that Act that the reformed Parliament of 1868 passed the Elementary Education Act of 1870. In 1884 and 1885 we had in the County Franchise and Redistribution Acts two still more sweeping measures of Parliamentary reform, by which government of the country was fully, and as all are agreed, irrevocably committed to the hands of the masses of the people. That great change has been followed, as was to be expected, by a general stirring of the popular mind, by a desire to use the power thus gained to carry sweeping legislative measures and effect large changes in the social and economic sphere. Here, as in other countries, the air is now full of new schemes. Efforts are made in all directions; cries are heard from all quarters. The need for knowledge and judgment among the voters who have become the rulers is even clearer and stronger than it was in 1870.

"Strangely enough, Mr. Robert Lowe, whose phrase became famous as the expression of what everyone had begun to feel, was of all the British statesmen who have had to deal with educa

'Abridged from an address delivered to the London Association of Head Masters of Public Elementary Schools, December, 1892.

tion, the one who, despite his literary culture and his brilliant natural gifts, took the narrowest views of what education ought to be and might effect. His Revised Code did much to tie the teacher down to merely elementary subjects and to deprive him of due opportunities to train and widen the pupils' minds, and of the motives likely to stimulate him to use those opportunities. For the kind of training that would help him to bear his part in governing it made no provision. To teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, became nearly the whole of the teacher's function; and it is only by slow degrees that our schools. have reverted to that larger and freer, but not yet sufficiently large and free, system under which they are now at work. It was a grave error to lay so much stress on these mere mechanical instruments of education, reading and writing,, and to neglect the objects they were to serve. Reading and writing are no more education than the lane that leads into a field is the field itself; and you might as well try to feed a flock of sheep on the flints of the lane as send children away from school and hold them to have been prepared for their life's work with the mere possession of reading and writing. It is not the power of reading that makes the difference between. one man and another so much as the being taught what to read and how to read, that is, having acquired the taste for reading and the habit of thinking about what is read. More and more is it our task to-day not to be content with having built schools, and gathered children into them, and compelled their attendance by law and relieved the parents from the payments of fees, but to widen the scope and deepen the grasp of the teaching given, leading the child to love knowledge, and forming in it wholesome tastes and high feelings. It is of one such kind of knowledge and one such group of feelings that I have undertaken to speak to-day-that which touches the relation to the community of the child who is to grow up into a governing citizen. But before we inquire how civic duty is to be taught, let us attempt to determine what civic duty means.

"The French are fortunate in possessing a word civisme, for which there is no precise English equivalent, since 'patriotism,' as we shall see presently, has received a slightly different sense. Civisme is taken to include all the qualities which make up the good citizen-the love of country and of liberty, respect for right and justice, attachment to the family and the

community. This is perhaps not too wide an extension to give to civic duty, at least in a free country, where the love of liberty is no less essential than the respect for constituted order. Or we may describe it as one aspect or side-the domestic side-of the love of country, a virtue generally thought of as displaying itself in services rendered to, and sacrifices made for, one's fatherland in struggles against external enemies, but which ought to be extended to cover the devotion to all that can subserve her inner welfare. To desire that the State we belong to shall be not only strong against other Powers, but also well and wisely governed, and therefore peaceful and contented, to fit ourselves for rendering to her such service as our capacities permit, to be always ready to render this service, even to our own hurt and loss-this is a form of patriotism less romantic and striking than the expulsion of a tyrant, or such a self-chosen death as that of Publius Decius or Arnold von Winkelried; but it springs from the same feelings, and it goes as truly in its degree to build up the fabric of national greatness.

"This home side of patriotism, this sober and quiet sense of what a man owes to the community into which he is born, and which he helps to govern, has been found specially hard to maintain in modern times and in large countries. It suffers. from three difficulties. One is the size of our modern States. In small city republics, like those of Greece and Rome, or of the Italian Middle Ages, every citizen felt that he counted for something, and that the fortunes of the community were his own. When a riot occurred half the citizens might swarm out into the streets. When a battle was fought the slaughter of a thousand men might mean ruin or the loss of independence. The individual associated himself heartily with all that befell the State, and could perceive the results of his own personal effort. Now, in a vast population like ours, the individual feels swallowed up and obliterated, so that his own action seems too small a unit in the sum of national action to be worth regarding. It is like the difference between giving a vote in a representative assembly, where you are one of 670, or perhaps of only 356 persons, and giving a vote at a general election, where you are one of six millions. Another difficulty springs from the peaceful life which Englishmen and Americans are fortunately now able to lead. There is nothing romantic about the methods in which we are now called upon

to show our devotion to the State. The citizen of Sparta, or the peasant of Schwytz, who went out to repel the invader, went under circumstances which touched his imagination and raised his emotion to the highest point. In the days when the safety of England was threatened, the achievements of Drake at sea, the chivalric gallantry of Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen, struck a chord which vibrated in every English heart. To us, with exceptions too few to be worth regarding, such a stimulus is seldom applied. What can be less romantic, and to the outward eye and ordinary apprehension less inspiring than the methods of our elections-meetings of committees and selections of candidates, platform harangues, and huntings up of careless voters, and marking crosses on bits of paper in hideous polling booths, with sawdust-sprinkled floors? Even the civic strife in Parliaments and County Councils, exciting as it often is, wants the elements which still dazzle imagination from the conflicts of fleets and armies of the past. The third difficulty springs from the extent to which party spirit tends to overlay, if not to supersede, national spirit in those selfgoverning countries whose politics are worked by parties. To the ordinary citizen, participation in the govermnent of his country appears in the form of giving a vote. His vote must

be given for a party candidate; his efforts must be directed to carrying his party ticket. Each party necessarily identifies its programme and its leaders with the welfare of the State; each seeks to represent its opponents as enemies, even if it may charitably admit them to be rather ignorant than malevolent, still, nevertheless, enemies of the highest interests of the State. As a rule the men who care most about public affairs are the most active and earnest party men; and thus the idea of devotion to the whole community, and to a national ideal, higher and more enduring than any which party can present, is apt to be obscured and forgotten. We all admit in words that party and its organization are only means by which to secure good government, but, as usually happens, the means so much absorb our energies that the end is apt to slip altogether from our view. These obstacles to the cultivation of civic duty are all obvious, so obvious that I should hesitate to repeat them to you were it not the case that some truths, just because they have passed into truisms, have ceased to be felt as truths. They are obstacles which will not disappear as time goes on, and party organization becomes more perfect.

All we can do is to exhort ourselves and one another to feel the growing greatness of the interests committed to our charge, and to remember that civic virtue is not the less virtue because she appears to-day in sober gray, and no longer in the gorgeous trappings of military heroism. Even at Trafalgar there was many a powder-monkey running to and fro between decks who saw nothing and knew little of the progress of the fight, but whose soul had been stirred by the signal of the morning.

"You may ask me in what the habits of civic duty consist which the schoolmaster may seek to form in his pupils and by what methods he is to form them. The habits are, I think, these three-To strive to know what is best for one's country as a whole. To place one's country's interest, when one knows it, above party feeling, or class feeling, or any other sectional passion or motive. To be willing to take trouble, personal and even tedious trouble, for the well-governing of every public community one belongs to, be it a township or parish, a ward or a city, or the nation as a whole. And the methods of forming these habits are two, methods which of course cannot in practice be distinguished but must go hand in hand-the giving of knowledge regarding the institutions of the country-knowledge sufficient to enable the young citizen to comprehend their working—and the inspiring of a love for the nation, an appreciation of all that makes its true greatness, a desire to join in serving it.

"In speaking of the methods I come upon practical ground, and feel some diffidence in making suggestions to those who may, as practical teachers, be expected to know better than I can myself what it is possible to effect under the pressure of many competing subjects and with children, most of whom leave school before fourteen. The outline of such a course of instruction as I am contemplating would be something like the following. It is, and must be, an outline which includes only the elements of the subject, but you will not fail to remember that there is all the difference in the world between being elementary and being superficial.

"The teacher must not attempt to give many details, or to enter upon difficult and disputed questions. But it is essential that whatever is given should be thoroughly understood, and so taken into the learner's mind as to become thenceforth a part of it. That abstract ideas and technical expressions