See also:

Board of Education. Reports.

Civics and Moral Education League Papers, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi,
W.C. 2.

[Footnote 1: American.]

VI

THE PLACE OF LITERATURE IN EDUCATION

By NOWELL SMITH

Head Master of Sherborne School

Education is a subject upon which everyone--or at least every
parent--considers himself entitled to have opinions and to express
them. But educational treatises or the considered views of educational
experts have a very limited popularity, and in fact arouse little
interest outside the circle of the experts themselves. Even the
average teacher, who is himself, if only he realised it, inside the
circle, pays little heed to the broader aspects of education, chiefly,
no doubt, because in the daily practice of the art of education he
cannot step aside and see it as a whole; he cannot see the wood for
the trees. The indifference of laymen however is mainly due to the
fact that educational theory, like other special subjects, inevitably
acquires a jargon of its own, an indispensable shorthand, as it were,
for experts, but far too abstract and technical for outsiders.

And his technical language too often reacts upon the actual ideas of
the educational theorist, who tends to lose sight of the variety of
concrete boys and girls in his abstract reasonings, necessary as these
are. We are apt to forget that what is sauce for the goose may not be
sauce for the gander, and still more perhaps that what is sauce for
the swan may not be sauce for either of these humbler but deserving
fowl. But it is certain that in discussing education we ought
constantly to envisage the actual individuals to be educated.
Otherwise our "average pupil of fifteen plus" is only too likely to
become a mere monster of the imagination, and the intellectual
_pabulum_, which we propose to offer, suited to the digestion of no
human boy or girl in "this very world, which is the world of all of
us."

In considering, then, the place of literature in education, I propose
to keep constantly before my eyes the people with whose education I am
personally familiar, namely, myself, my children, and the various
types of public school boy which I have known as boy, as
undergraduate, as college tutor and as schoolmaster. I say various
types of public school boy; for although there still is a public
school type in general which is easily recognisable by certain marked
superficial characteristics, the popular notion