Читать книгу Judgments in Vacation - Edward Abbott Sir Parry - Страница 5

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“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine:

But a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

Proverbs xvii., 22.

The Professors of dry bones have broken so many spirits in their machine that they will not grudge me a laugh at their little failings. A mere “man in the street” like myself can do little more than call attention to some of the weaknesses of our educational system, well understanding that the earnest Schoolmaster knows far more about the disadvantages of education than anything he can learn from his surviving pupils. For my part I have never made any secret of the fact that from my earliest days I disliked education, and had a natural, and I hope not unhealthy, distrust of schoolmasters. Let it here be understood with the greatest respect to the sex that “schoolmaster” embraces “schoolmistress.” Most school-boys that I remember have had that attitude of mind, but many remained so long in scholastic cloisters that the sane belief of their youth, that the schoolmaster was their natural enemy, became diminished and was ultimately lost altogether. Indeed, there are few minds that undergo the strain of years of toil among scholastic persons without becoming dulled into the respectable belief that schoolmasters are in themselves desirable social assets, like priests and policemen and judges. Now no small boy with a healthy mind believes this. He knows that the schoolmaster and the policeman are merely evidences of an imperfect social system, that no progress is likely to be made until society is able to dispense with their services, and though he cannot put these ideas into words he can and does act upon that assumption, and continues to do so until his natural alertness is destroyed and he is dragooned into at all events an outward observance of the official belief in the sanctity of schoolmasters.

Personally I have always regarded it as a matter of congratulation that I escaped from school at a comparatively early age, nor can I honestly say that I remember to-day anything that I formerly learnt at school, or that if I did remember anything I learnt, there,—except perhaps a few irregular French verbs—that it would be of the slightest use to me in the everyday business of life.

If I were, for instance, to model my methods of trial in the County Court upon the proceedings of Euclid, who spent his life in endeavouring to prove by words, propositions that were self-evident even in his own very rudimentary pictures, I should be justly blamed by a commercial community for wasting their time. Yet how many of the most precious hours of the best of my youth have been wasted for me by schoolmasters, who were so dull as not to perceive that Euclid, like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, was the writer of a book of nonsense? Not nonsense that can possibly appeal to the child of to-day, but nonsense that will always have its place in the library of those to whom the Absurd is as precious in life as the Beautiful.

If you believe at all in evolution and progress, and the descent of man from more primitive types, with its wonderfully hopeful corollary, the ascent of man to higher things, you must acknowledge at once that education has necessarily been, and always must be, a great set back to onward movement. A schoolmaster can only teach what he knows, and if one generation only learns what the last generation can teach there is not much hope of onward movement.

Schoolmasters are apt to believe that the hope of the younger generation depends upon their assimilating the ideas of their pastors and masters, whereas the true hope is that they will not be so long overborne by authority, as to make their young brains incapable of rejecting at all events some of the false teaching that each generation complacently offers to the next.

We need not accept the new generation entirely at its own valuation, nor need we disturb ourselves about the exaggerated under-estimate with which one-and-twenty sets down for naught the wisdom of fifty. But unless we pursue education as a preparation for the betterment of the human race we are beating the air. And the responsibility is a great one. For the mind of a child, as Roger Ascham says, is “like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing!” But, alas! it is equally able to receive printing of an inferior type. Every one of us, I should imagine, half believes something to-day that he knows to be untrue because it was impressed on the wax of his child-mind by some well-meaning but ignorant schoolmaster.

One of the gravest disadvantages about education is the way it thwarts progress by teaching young folk that which, to say the least of it, is uncertain. If education were to be strictly confined by the schoolmaster to the things he really knew, what a quantity of lumber could be trundled out of the schoolroom to-morrow. Teaching should be kept to arts, accomplishments and facts—opinions and theories should have no place whatever in the schoolroom.

Open any school book of a hundred years ago and read its theories and opinions, and remember that these were thrust down the throats of the little ones with the same complacent conceit that our opinions and theories of to-day are being taught in the schools. And yet we all know that theories and opinions in the main become very dead sea-fruit in fifty or a hundred years, whilst the multiplication table remains with us like the Ten Commandments, a monument of everlasting truth.

This chief disadvantage of education will probably continue with us for many generations, until it is recognised as immoral and wicked to warp a child’s mind by teaching things to it as facts which are at the best only conjectures, in the hope that in after life it may take some side in the affairs of the world, which the teacher, or the committee of the school, is interested in. The true rule should of course be to teach children, especially in State Schools, only ascertained facts, the truth of which all citizens, who are not in asylums, agree to be true.

My view of the ideal system of education is much the same as Mr. Weller senior’s. You will remember that he said to Mr. Pickwick about his son Sam, “I took a great deal of pains with his eddication, sir! I let him run in the streets when he were very young and shift for his self. It’s the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” I could not ask any body of schoolmasters to adopt this principle, though it is one that seems to me thoroughly sound. Put into other and more scholastic words, it may be made a copy-book sentiment. Emerson says much the same thing as old Tony Weller, when he writes, “That which each can do best only his Maker can teach him,” and the spirit of the Maker of the Universe seems to me at least as likely to be met with in Market Street as in a committee room of the Manchester Town Hall, where the destinies of our national education are so ably managed by citizens of respectability and authority.

Some such preface as this is needed if I am to make it clear to you why I choose the disadvantages of education rather than the advantages, as the subject matter of my essay. One should always try to speak on something one really believes in heartily and thoroughly. The advantages of education have been spread before us during the last fifty years by every writer of importance—a writer of no importance may fairly give an idle hour to the other side of the picture.

In any commercial country it should not be necessary to apologise for the endeavour to make a rough balance-sheet describing the liabilities of education; even if we are all convinced that the assets of education are more than enough to meet the liabilities and that we are educationally solvent. Nor am I really stating anything very new or startling, for all thinkers and writers on education seem beginning at last to discover that education is only a means to an end, and that when you have no clear idea of what end you hope to arrive at it is not very probable that you will choose the right means.

If a man wanted to travel to Blackpool and was so ignorant as to imagine that Blackpool was in the neighbourhood of London, he would probably in the length of his journey lose many beautiful hours of the sea-side and spend them in the stuffy atmosphere of a railway train. This would be of little importance to the community if it was only the case of an individual man—a schoolmaster for instance. But what if the man had taken a party of children with him? thereby losing for them wonderful hours of digging on the sand, or seeing Punch or Judy, or listening to a Bishop preaching—that indeed would be a serious state of things for everyone.

One of the great disadvantages of modern education is that few of its professors and teachers, and fewer of its elected managers, have the least idea where they are going to. The authorities shoot out codes and prospectuses and minutes and rules and orders, and change their systems with the inspired regularity of a War Office.

Another of the disadvantages of education to-day is that there is too much of it, and that what there is is in the hands of well-meaning directors, who are either middle-aged and ignorant, or, what is worse, middle-aged and academic. If we cannot reach the ideal of Tony Weller and let the child shift for himself, let us at all events unshackle the schoolmaster and allow him to shift for himself. The head master of a great English school is a despot. He has at his back—and I use the phrase “at his back” with deliberate care, not meaning “upon his shoulders”—he has at his back a powerful board of citizens of position who are wise enough and strong enough to leave the question of education to the man at the wheel, and to remember that it is dangerous to speak to him whilst he is steering the ship. Any system of education that is to be of any avail at all must be a personal system in a great measure, and the elementary head master should be in the same position as the head master of our great public schools. The boards and committees should interfere as little as possible with the schoolmasters they employ. A schoolmaster, of all workmen, wants freedom and liberty to do his work his own way. And who can teach anything, worth teaching, who is being constantly worried and harassed by inspectors and committees? Education is not sewage, and you cannot judge of its results by a chemical analysis of the mental condition of the human effluent that pours out of the school gates into the rivers of life.

I have expressed my distrust of schoolmasters quite freely, but I must confess that my detestation of boards and committees amounts almost to a mania, though when I notice the pleasure and delight so many good citizens have in sitting on a committee and preventing business from being done, I fairly admit it is quite possible I am wrong about the matter. It may well be that there is some hidden virtue in these boards and committees, some divine purpose in them that I cannot see. I have sometimes thought that in the course of evolution they will arrive at a condition of permanent session without the transaction of any business whatever. Then possibly the golden age will have arrived, and then the individual servant, no longer hampered by their well meant interference, will have a chance to do his best work. But for my part, so oppressed am I by the futility of committees that I am tempted sometimes to doubt the personality of the Evil One, in the sure belief that the affairs of his territory would be governed more to his liking by a large committee elected on a universal suffrage of both sexes. Who are our ideal schoolmasters in the history of the profession? Roger Ascham, who, learned man that he was, impressed on youth the necessity of riding, running, wrestling, swimming, dancing, singing and the playing of instruments cunningly; Arnold, of Rugby, whose whole method was founded on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy, and who was the personal guide and friend of those of the scholars who could appreciate the value of his friendship; Edward Thring, of Uppingham, who thought “the most pitiful sight in the world was the slow, good boy laboriously kneading himself into stupidity because he is good,” and who stood firm for the individual master’s “liberty to teach.” Are any of these schoolmasters men who could or would have tolerated any interference in their life’s work from an unsympathetic inspector or a prosy town councillor? The work of the committees should be devoted to choosing a good man or woman to be head master of a school and then to leaving him or her alone. The inspectors should be pensioned—and turned off on the golf-links.

Having dealt with these serious disadvantages to education, let me hasten to say a little more about that grave disadvantage to education, the schoolmaster himself. The schoolmaster is generally a man who, having learnt to teach, has long ago ceased to learn. It is the past education of the schoolmaster that generally stands in his way. He believes in education, and thinks it a good thing in itself; he believes in rules and orders and lessons as desirable, whereas they are only the necessary outcome of Adam’s misconduct in the Garden of Eden. I cannot quite agree with Tolstoi’s suggestion that all rules in a school are illegitimate, and that the child’s liberty is inviolable. I do not think anarchy in a school is more possible to-day than anarchy in a state. But I do think that the schoolmaster of to-day should rule as far as possible by the creation of a healthy public opinion among his scholars and make the largest use of that public opinion as a moral and educational force. Looking back on my own experience, it is not what I learnt from my schoolmasters but what I learnt from my companions that has been of any real value to me in after life.

A child should go early to some good kindergarten presided over by some delightfully bright and pleasant lady, merely to learn the lesson that there are other children in the world besides itself. How important it is in life to learn to sit cheerfully next to someone you cordially detest without slapping him or her. And yet such a lesson, to be really mastered, should be learnt before five or seven at the latest. After that it can only be learned by much prayer and—dining out. At dinner parties, and particularly public dinners, one can get the necessary practice in this kind of self-control, but it is better to learn it whilst you are young, when alone it is possible to master the great lessons of life thoroughly and with comparatively little pain. Men have reached the position of King’s Counsel without attaining this simple moral grace.

If you come to think of it, all the really important things in life must of necessity be self-taught. I suppose schoolmasters, being experts in education, have never given serious thought to the fact that the child teaches itself, with the aid of a mother, all the best and necessary lessons of life in the first few years of its being. It learns to eat, for instance. I have watched a baby struggling to find the way to its mouth with a rusk, with intense interest and admiration. How it jabs itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and clothes with the debris, and kicks and fights in disgust and loses the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother, finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed energy on its way, and at length is rewarded by success. What a smile of victory, what a happy relapse into the dreamless sleep of the successful. The child has learned a lesson it will never forget. It has found its way to its mouth. One never learns anything as good as that from a schoolmaster. And indeed if you think of it the baby is learning useful things on its own every day of its life, and working hard at them. It learns to talk, and that in spite of its father and mother, who insist on cooing at it, and talking a wild baby language that must greatly irritate and impede a conscientious self-educating baby endeavouring to master the tongue of the land of its adoption. It learns to walk, too, not without tumbles, and tumbles which inspire it to further effort. I have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there were no schoolmaster?

If you were to abolish the schoolmaster what would happen? I think the answer is that the Burns, the Milton and the Sam Weller of a nation would profit by the stimulus to self-education. The child whose father was a musician or a carpenter or a ploughman who loved his art or craft, would be found striving to become as good an artist or craftsman as his father, and perhaps in the end bettering the paternal example. The school and the schoolmaster can do little but hinder the evolution of any worker in any art or craft. The real worker’s work must be the result of self-education, and he must live from early childhood among the workers. Read, for instance, the delightful account given by Miss Ellen Terry of her early days in “The Story of My Life.” “At the time of my marriage,” she writes, “I had never had the advantage—I assume it is an advantage—of a single day’s schooling in a real school. What I have learned outside my own profession I have learnt from environment. Perhaps it is this that makes me think environment more valuable than a set education and a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity.” Lives there even the schoolmaster who believes that there was any school or schoolmistress in Victorian days that could have done anything but hinder Miss Terry in the triumph of her artistic career? A born actress like Miss Terry could not be aided by Miss Melissa Wackles, with her “English grammar, composition and geography,” even though in that day of lady’s education it was tempered by the use of the dumb-bells.

In the same way, if we could assure to a boy or girl an apprenticeship from early days to a craftsman or farmer, it would probably be better for the children and the State than any other form of education they receive to-day. It is quite unlikely the world will ever see the minor arts and crafts ever restored to their former glory, unless it encourages parents who are themselves good craftsmen to keep their children away from the schoolmaster in the better atmosphere of a good workshop.

We talk largely about the melancholy increase of unemployment, but how much of this is caused by the education of masses of people in useless subjects. The bad boy who gets into trouble and has the good fortune to be put in a reformatory and there learns a trade has a much better chance of a useful and pleasurable life than the good boy who gains a County Council prize in geography.

I came across a servant in Cumberland whose education had resulted among other things in a knowledge of the catechism and a list of the rivers on the East coast of England, but who did not know the name of the river she could see from the window and who had not the least idea how to light a fire. What is the good of learning your duty to your neighbour when you cannot light a fire to warm him when he is wet through, without wasting two bundles of sticks and a pint of paraffin oil?

One must not however blame the girl, nor indeed her schoolmistress, for probably she too could not light a fire, and both regarded the lighting of a fire as a degrading thing to do. No doubt if you had pursued your educational researches in Cumberland to the source of things, you would have found that the committee could not light fires, and the inspector of schools could not light fires—it may be the Minister of Education himself cannot light a fire—and though there is plenty of material for fires in every board room there is nothing in the code about teaching children to make use of it. Yet I can conceive nothing a child would like better, in his or her early days in school, than being a fire monitor and having charge of the fire and learning to light and look after it. I have made much of this little incident because it is typical of the school education of to-day.

In the old days of family life boys and girls, and especially the latter, learnt in a good home a great deal of domestic work, and the boys could help in their father’s shop or farm or inn as the case might be, and learnt thereby many things that you cannot learn in schools. Mr. Squeers, though not a moral character, was possessed of a practical mode of teaching. “C-l-e-a-n clean, verb active to make bright, to scour. W-i-n win, d-e-r der, winder a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book he goes and does it.” And if you come to think of it, it is far more important that a boy should know how to keep a window clean than that he should know how to spell it.

The schoolmaster of an elementary school therefore should be a man of good domestic tastes, who wishes to see his home neat and clean and well kept and tidy, who insists on having his food well cooked, and prefers that his wife and daughter should be well dressed at the smallest possible cost to himself. These virtues he should be urged to put before scholars as being the first duties of life and the chiefest honour of a good citizen. The false notion that reading and writing are in themselves higher attainments than carpentering, cooking and sewing should be sternly discouraged, and only teachers should be chosen capable of some technical excellence in the practical work of crafts. For the same reasons teachers should never be chosen for any academic degree they possess, for every day it becomes more certain that the man who obtains these degrees is the man who has deliberately failed to make himself a master of any one subject. He is a man who has wasted precious hours in getting a smattering of many useless branches of learning, and has been forced by the sellers of degrees to abandon all hope of having sufficient leisure to study music or painting or the workmanship of a craft, or even to have read widely of English literature. In the education of the young the man who can play the piano, or better still, the fiddle, is more important to my purpose than the man who can make Latin verses; and the man who can model a toy boat with a pocket-knife whilst he is telling you a fairy tale is, from the standpoint of real education, a jewel of rare price. The schoolmaster of to-day is one of the disadvantages of education because he is interested mainly in subjects of smaller importance and is not really a sound man in any one real pursuit, such as music or drawing.

Another disadvantage of English elementary education is that it places the school course and literary things above the playing fields and physical things. All men who have thought about education at all, and who had any capacity for thinking wisely, have recognised that in training a child to make and keep his body a healthy body we are proceeding upon lines that experience tells us are right and sound lines. Here we can teach something we know. Plato tells us that the experience of the past in his day had discovered that right education consisted in gymnastics for the body and music for the mind. I do not know that we can say with certainty that we have ascertained to-day much more about education than Plato knew. In our day I should put the arts and crafts of home life and the practice—not preaching—of its virtues, first in the programme, and secondly, to use Plato’s word, gymnastics. These should include cricket, football, running, jumping, wrestling, dancing, fives, tennis, and all manly and womanly associated games which exercise and develop the body, and have by the public opinion of the players to be played with modesty and self-restraint, and with a reasonable technical skill that can only be arrived at by taking pains. All these things are far more useful than any subjects that can be taught in a schoolroom. One of the great advantages of middle-class public school life is that these things are taught, and that the boys work at them in a healthy spirit of emulation and a magnificent desire to succeed that would turn the whole nation into a Latin-speaking race, if by any misfortune its motive power were diverted into the schoolroom.

Elementary education and its schoolmasters have but small opportunities to foster this natural healthy training of the body in which all young people are willing and ready to co-operate with their teachers. Unfortunately, the men who obtain positions on educational committees are too often men who have amassed wealth at the expense of their livers, and who would look askance at the ideas of Plato, Roger Ascham, or Tolstoi. Still, I think a day is coming when playing-fields and playgrounds will be attached to every elementary school, and used not only by existing scholars, but by the old boys and girls, who will thereby keep in touch with the school and its good influences.

But, you will say, nothing has been said hitherto about any lessons. Are reading, writing, and arithmetic to be considered wholly as disadvantages? It would be easy to take up such a position and hold it in argument but it is not necessary. The advantages of educating the masses in the three R’s are obvious and on the surface, but the grave disadvantages are also there. It is no use teaching a person anything that he is likely to make a bad use of, and experience tells us that many people are ruined by learning to read. Since the Education Act of 1870, a mass of low-class literature and journalism has sprung up to cater for the tastes of a population that has undergone a compulsory training in reading. Betting and gambling have been greatly fostered by the power of reading and answering advertisements. In the same way quack remedies for imaginary ailments must have done a lot of harm to the health of the people, and the use of them is the direct result of teaching ignorant people to read and not teaching them to disbelieve most things they may happen to read. Writing in the same way by being made popular and common has become debased. One seldom sees a good handwriting nowadays and spelling is a lost art. Writing, however, must in a few years go out in favour of machine writing. Penmanship will hardly be taught some years hence when everyone will have a telephone and typewriter of his own. I cannot see that the universal habit of writing has done very much for the world. The great mass of written matter that circulates through the post, the vast columns of newspaper reports that are contradicted the next day—these things are the fruits of universal writing. There is no evidence that in the past anything worth writing ever remained unwritten. But there is strong evidence that since 1870 much has been written that had better have remained unwritten, and would have so remained but for State encouragement through its system of education. As to arithmetic—if you saw the books of the small shopkeepers in the County Court—you would recognise its small hold on the people. One chief use of it by the simpler folk seems to be the calculations of the odds on a horse race. In France and other more civilised countries this is done more honestly by a machine called a totaliser, and gambling is thereby kept within more reasonable limits. Elementary arithmetic has been profitable to the bookmaker—but to how many besides? If you teach a boy cooking or carpentering he is very unlikely to make an evil use of these accomplishments in after life because they naturally minister to the right enjoyment of life. Whereas if you teach a boy reading, writing, and arithmetic, the surroundings of youth being what they are, he is at least as likely to misuse these attainments as to use them to the benefit of himself and his fellow creatures. Once recognise this and you must admit not that the three R’s should be discontinued, but that much more should be done to teach the young persons to whom you have imparted these pleasant arts how to make use of them legitimately and honourably. It is no use teaching young people any subject unless you see that in after life they are to have opportunities of using their attainment for the benefit of the State. Our fathers and grandfathers were all for education as an end. We are face to face with the results of a national system of elementary education with no system whatever of helping the educated to make good use of their compulsory equipment. It is as though you gave a boy a rifle and taught him to shoot and turned him out into the world to shoot at anything he felt inclined. Such a boy would be a danger to the community, whereas if you placed him in a cadet corps when he left school he and his rifle might be a national asset.

That learning without a proper outlet for its use may be a grave danger to the individual and to the community is seen in the present state of India, and Lord Morley of Blackburn, one of the greatest supporters of education himself, called attention to the necessity of a community which provides an education to a certain class allowing the citizens so educated a proper opportunity of exercising the faculties it has developed. As he said in the House of Lords, “I agree that those who made education what it is in India are responsible for a great deal of what has happened since.” And what is true of India is equally true of England.

It is in providing healthy outlets and uses for the educational power that has been created that the Boards and Committees who govern these matters will have to turn immediate attention if they wish to justify their existence.

I know that these detached remarks of mine on education must necessarily appear heretical—and they are to some extent intentionally so. I do not agree with Mr. Chesterton that the heretic of old was proud of not being a heretic, and believed himself orthodox and all the rest of the world heretics. If he did he was indeed a madman. But there is a place in the world for the utterer of heresies if only to awaken the orthodox from slumber and to make him look around and see if there is any reform that can be made without destroying the whole edifice. Reforms come slowly and we, for our part, shall only see the dawn of a better era whose sunshine will gladden the lives of our grandchildren. I am not a pessimist about the English school though I have chosen to speak of its disadvantages. I think, to use an American phrase, it is a “live” thing.

If you go into an English village you find three great public institutions, the Church, the Inn, and the School. Each is licensed to some extent by the State and each is burdened by the connection. You find as a rule that the Church has voluntarily locked its doors and put up a notice that the key may be found at some old lady’s cottage half a mile away. You go into the Inn and find it struggling to make itself hospitable in spite of the mismanagement of brewers and the unsympathetic bigotry of magistrates. But from the door of the School troop out merry children, who some day will look back to that time of their life as the happiest of all, and who will recognise the debt of gratitude they are under to the schoolmaster, who in spite of the limitations of his system and himself encourages his pupils to effort and self-reliance and teaches them lessons of duty, reverence, and love.

I am not greatly interested in the Church or the Inn, both of which institutions seem well able to guard themselves from the disestablishment they are said to deserve. But I am interested in the School—and I wish to see it housed in fairer and more ample buildings with larger playing fields around them. And I want to see a race of schoolmasters not only better paid—but worth more. Men and women to whom the State can fairly give a free hand, knowing that their object in education would be to mould their pupils into self-reliant citizens rather than to teach them scholastic tricks. “The schoolmaster is abroad,” said Lord Brougham, “and I trust to him armed with his primer.” For my part, a schoolmaster armed with a primer is an abomination of desolation standing in a holy place. I differ from a Lord Chancellor with a very natural diffidence but his Lordship was wrong. The schoolmaster of 1828 was not abroad, he was in the same predicament as the schoolmaster of 1911—at sea.

If I were Minister of Education, I would write over the door of every school in the country the beautiful words, “Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto Me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Let us beware lest we forbid them by dogmas and creeds that lead only to hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; let us take heed lest we forbid them by lessons and learning dull for to-day and dangerous for to-morrow. Let us at least teach them as our grandmothers taught children when there were no schools in the land, the simple duties of life that we all know the meaning of, and the Christian duty of unselfishness which we none of us practise. And in this, as in all things, let us strive to teach by example rather than by word. And if we are to teach by the Christian rule, then how great, how noble, how enduring is to be the work of the schoolmaster in continuing the greatness of our nation. And the man or woman we shall choose shall not be a pedant, whose long ears are decorated by degrees, but an honest, simple person of any creed whatsoever, who will humbly and reverently teach the children of his or her school the few simple facts of life, and add to that something of its arts and its crafts and so much or little of its learning as can be a service and not a hindrance to the child’s career.