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Page 21
In a letter to the _Times_ Huxley replied (April 29, 1893):--
I cannot say what may have been in the minds of the framers
of the rule; but, assuredly, if I had dreamed that any such
interpretation could fairly be put upon it, I should have
opposed the arrangement to the best of my ability.
In fact, a year before the rule was framed I wrote an
article in the _Contemporary Review_, entitled "The School
Boards--what they can do and what they may do," in which
I argued that the terms of the Education Act excluded such
teaching as it is now proposed to include.
And this contention he supported by the quotation from Mr. W.E.
Forster, given above.
Further, in October, 1894, he replied as follows to a correspondent
who had asked him whether flat adhesion to the compromise had not
made nonsense of a certain Bible lesson, which was the subject of much
comment:--
I am at one with you in hating "hush up" as I do all other
forms of lying; but I venture to submit that the compromise
of 1871 was not a "hush up." If I had taken it to be such, I
should have refused to have anything to do with it....
There has never been the slightest ambiguity about my position
in the matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the
School Board written by me before my election in 1870, I
think you will find that I anticipated the pith of the present
discussion.
The persons who agreed to the compromise did exactly what all
sincere men who agree to compromise do. For the sake of
the enormous advantage of giving the rudiments of a decent
education to several generations of the people, they accepted
what was practically an armistice in respect of certain
matters about which the contending parties were absolutely
irreconcilable.
To return to his activity on the School Board. His vigorous work as
chairman of the committee appointed to frame an educational scheme was
marked by great breadth of view. He desired the elementary schools
to be linked at the one end with infant schools; at the other with
continuation schools and some scheme for technical education. A
perfect scheme would provide what he first called a ladder from the
gutter to the university, whereby children of exceptional capacity
might reach the places for which nature had fitted them. His sense of
fitness would have welcomed even more warmly some system whereby the
incompetent born into the higher strata of the social organism should
be automatically graded down to the positions more appropriate to
their wits and character. But this is an ideal only possible in
Plato's State, where philosophers are kings and possess superhuman
power of intuition.
Sincerity is sometimes impracticable. But here sincerity was combined
with common-sense practicality, and even an opponent like Lord
Shaftesbury was impelled to write in his journal:--"Professor Huxley
has this definition of morality and religion: 'Teach a child what is
wise: that is _morality_. Teach him what is wise and beautiful: that
is _religion!_' Let no one henceforth despair of making things clear
and of giving explanations!"
He did not, however, disguise his fundamental opposition to
Ultramontanism, that intellectual and social _imperium in imperio_,
with its basic hostility to the free scientific spirit. This he had
already expressed in his "Scientific Education" (_Coll. Ess._, iii,
111), an address of 1869, and he repeated it towards the end of his
service on the School Board when opposing a bye-law that the Board
should pay over direct to denominational schools the fees for poor
children--to schools, that is, outside the Board's control. He opposed
it partly because it would assuredly lead to repeated contests on
the Board; partly because it would give a handle to that party whose
system, as set forth in the syllabus, of securing complete possession
of the minds of their flock, was destructive of all that was highest
in the nature of mankind and inconsistent with intellectual and
political liberty.
The committee did excellent work in systematizing important matters
and leaving minor arrangements to the local managers; in apportioning
essential and discretionary subjects, and--what was of special
interest to its chairman--the teaching of elementary geography
and elementary social economy, and in particular the systematized
object-lessons, embracing a course of elementary construction in
physical science, and serving as an introduction to the courses for
the examinations under the Science and Art Department. Science, as he
declared, was assuming such a position alike in practical life and in
thought that any one totally ignorant of it would be at a disadvantage
in both spheres. Moreover, the proposed technical schools--for applied
science, that is--must suffer if they had to deal with pupils who had
no preliminary grounding in the principles of physical science. His
early advocacy of music and drawing, not to produce artists, but to
develop personality, also bore some fruit. The man of science, too,
was found defending Latin as a discretionary subject, alternatively
with a modern language. Latin was the gate to many things, and, apart
from the question of overloading the curriculum, there was great
danger if educational possibilities were not thrown open to all
without restriction. There is no more frightful "sitting on the safety
valve" than in denying men of ability the means of rising to the
positions for which their talents and industry might qualify them.
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