Author: Sir Henry H. Cunynghame

Publisher: ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO

Published:

Total Pages: 89

ISBN-13:

When we read the works of Homer, or Virgil, or Plato, or turn to the later productions of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, and the host of writers and poets who have done so much to instruct and amuse us, and to make our lives good and agreeable, we are apt to look with some disappointment upon present times. And when we turn to the field of art and compare Greek statues and Gothic or Renaissance architecture with our modern efforts, we must feel bound to admit our inferiority to our ancestors. And this leads us perhaps to question whether our age is the equal of those which have gone before, or whether the human intellect is not on the decline. This feeling, however, proceeds from a failure to remember that each age of the world has its peculiar points of strength, as well as of weakness. During one period that self-denying patriotism and zeal for the common good will be developing, which2 is necessary for the formation of society. During another, the study of the principles of morality and religion will be in the ascendant. During another the arts will take the lead; during another, poetry, tragedy, and lyric poetry and prose will be cultivated; during another, music will take its turn, and out of rude peasant songs will evolve the harmony of the opera. To our age is reserved the glory of being easily the foremost in scientific discovery. Future ages may despise our literature, surpass us in poetry, complain that in philosophy we have done nothing, and even deride and forget our music; but they will only be able to look back with admiration on the band of scientific thinkers who in the seventeenth century reduced to a system the laws that govern the motions of worlds no less than those of atoms, and who in the eighteenth and nineteenth founded the sciences of chemistry, electricity, sound, heat, light, and who gave to mankind the steam-engine, the telegraph, railways, the methods of making huge structures of iron, the dynamo, the telephone, and the thousand applications of science to the service of man. And future students of history who shall be familiar with the conditions of our life will, I think, be also struck with surprise at our estimate of our own peculiar capabilities and faculties. They will note with astonishment that a gentleman of the3 nineteenth century, an age mighty in science, and by no means pre-eminent in art, literature and philosophy, should have considered it disgraceful to be ignorant of the accent with which a Greek or a Roman thought fit to pronounce a word, should have been ashamed to be unable to construe a Latin aphorism, and yet should have considered it no shame at all not to know how a telephone was made and why it worked. They will smile when they observe that our highest university degrees, our most lucrative rewards, were given for the study of dead languages or archæological investigations, and that science, our glory and that for which we have shown real ability, should only have occupied a secondary place in our education. They will smile when they learn that we considered that a knowledge of public affairs could only be acquired by a grounding in Greek particles, or that it could ever have been thought that men could not command an army without a study of the tactics employed at the battle of Marathon. But the battle between classical and scientific education is not in reality so much a dispute regarding subjects to be taught, as between methods of teaching. It is possible to teach classics so that they become a mental training of the highest value. It is possible to teach science so that it becomes a mere enslaving routine. The one great requirement for the education4 of the future is firmly to grasp the fact that a study of words is not a study of things, and that a man cannot become a carpenter merely by learning the names of his tools. To be continue in this ebook...