THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary

contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight

against this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs

clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of

indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were

possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian

will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the

commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian

enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.

I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social

institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they

should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust

of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the

general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about

the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train

teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and

provide properly written school-books. These things it was felt

MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was

manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in

default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money

payments. The State set up a machinery of examination both in

Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known

technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination

results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to

send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would be

established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,

inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was

created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.

In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-

earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far

as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the

task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the

most part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also

were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared

that injustice might be done. Year after year these eminent persons

set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the

increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the

national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were

careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing

the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask. As a

result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and

permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the

practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science,

but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-

earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine

education whatever.

Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of

the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science

prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by

making graduates in arts and priests in the established church

Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private

enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according

to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district. Private

enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books. A number of

competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in

Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce

text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of

knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty

subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and

models and instructions that should give precisely the method and

gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book

was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the

examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former

years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the

teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of

grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other

methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with

questions and then dictated model replies.

That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes

as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,

and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table,

smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible

formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of

desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to

a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and

deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in

coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or

arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute in

which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus

prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the

Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with

maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.

But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in

systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to

pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it,