137 The Parthenon And The Optative
137 THE PARTHENON AND THE OPTATIVE
'The trouble with these boys,' said a grim old classical scholar looking up from some milk-and-watery entrance papers which he had been marking: 'the trouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the Optative.' We all knew what he meant. We had read work like that ourselves.
Ever since then I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in 'Appreciation' and ends in gush. When the first fails it has, at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like. He may decide that he doesn't care for knowledge; but he knows he doesn't care for it, and he knows he hasn't got it. But the other kind fails most disastrously when it most succeeds. It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce. It makes him think he is enjoying poems he can't construe. It qualifies him to review books he does not understand, and to be intellectual without intellect. It plays havoc with the very distinction between truth and error.
And yet, education of the Parthenon type is often recommended by those who have and love real learning. They are moved by a kind of false reverence for the Muses. What they value, say, in Literature, seems to them so delicate and spiritual a thing that they cannot bear to see it (as they think) degraded by such coarse, mechanic attendants as paradigms, blackboards, marks and examination papers. They point to the questions examiners set, 'Give the context of any five of the following and add any necessary explanation.' What has that to do with the real quality of The Tempest? Would it not be better just to teach the boys to appreciate it?
But there is a profound misunderstanding here. These well-meaning educationalists are quite right in thinking that literary appreciation is a delicate thing. What they do not seem to see is that for this very reason elementary examinations on literary subjects ought to confine themselves to just those dry and factual questions which are so often ridiculed. The questions were never supposed to test appreciation; the idea was to find out whether the boy had read his books. It was the reading, not the being examined, which was expected to do him good. And this, so far from being a defect in such examinations, is just what renders them useful or even tolerable.
Let us take an example from a higher sphere. A plain, factual examination in Scripture is, at the very worst, a harmless affair. But who could endure an examination which tried to find out whether the candidates were 'saved' and demanded 60 per cent for a Credit Pass in Sanctity? The situation in literary subjects bears a certain analogy to this. Tell the boy to 'mug up' a book and then set questions to find out whether he has done so. At best, he may have learned (and, best of all, unconsciously) to enjoy a great poem. At second best he has done an honest piece of work and exercised his memory and reason. At worst, we have done him no harm: have not pawed and dabbled in his soul, have not taught him to be a prig or a hypocrite. But an elementary examination which attempts to assess 'the adventures of the soul among books' is a dangerous thing. What obsequious boys, if encouraged, will try to manufacture, and clever ones can ape, and shy ones will conceal, what dies at the touch of venality, is called to come forward and perform, to exhibit itself, at that very age when its timid half conscious stirrings can least endure such self-consciousness.
How easily such false reverence can defeat itself may be seen in the Norwood Report. (Note: The Report, so called after its chairman Sir Cyril Norwood is entitled Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council Appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941) The makers of that Report want external examinations in English to be abolished at schools. Their reason is that literature is such a 'sensitive and elusive thing' that these examinations touch only its 'coarse fringe'. If they stopped here, though I fail to see why the coarsest part of a thing should be least touched, I might have some sympathy with them. There is a good deal to be said for excluding literature from school curricula altogether. I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be to forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you. But that is not at all what the Report intends. It wants literary appreciation to be taught. It even wants the teaching to be tested: but not by outsiders. 'The teacher's success', it says, 'can be gauged by himself or by one of his immediate colleagues who knows him well.’
Something like examination is, then, to continue. The two reforms are (a) that it should deal with the 'sensitive and elusive' core, instead of the 'coarse fringe' (b) that it must be all in the family, so to speak. The masters are to 'gauge' their own success or one another’s success. I am quite at a loss to understand what we should hope from the second novelty. The whole purpose of external examinations in any subject is to get an impartial criticism from a learned outsider who can have no prejudices, either about the boys or about the teachers. In direct opposition to this the Norwood Report desires as an examiner not only the teacher’s colleague, but a colleague 'who knows him well’. I suppose this must be connected with the fact that the subject is 'sensitive and elusive'. But I can't, for the life of me, see how. They cannot mean that because the subject is specially unamenable to objective tests it should therefore (alone of all subjects) be tested under conditions which make objectivity ideally difficult. Mr A (just down from reading English with Dr Leavis at Cambridge) pours out his personality - in pure non-factual Appreciation to his form. The naughty boys rag and the 'good' boys lap it all up and reproduce it. There is a result sufficiently difficult for anyone to judge objectively. But the solution is to hand judgement over to Mr B who has been living cheek by jowl with Mr A for thirteen weeks and who learned his kind of Appreciation from W.P. Ker at London. And meanwhile no one has found out whether the boys actually understand the words the author wrote, for that is only the coarse fringe'. Yet that could have been tested with tolerable accuracy by any number of people and the boys would have been spared doing spiritual gymnastics under their examiners' eyes. The old kind of examination was better.
Of course we meet many people who explain to us that they would by now have been great readers of poetry if it had not been 'spoiled for them' at school by 'doing' it for examinations of the old kind. It is theoretically possible. Perhaps they would by now have been saints if no one had ever examined them in Scripture. Perhaps they would have been strategists or heroes if they had never been put into the school O.T.C. It may be so: but why should we believe that it is? We have only their word for it; and how do they know?