The Problem of Tom

The Weekly Machen

Anyone who has read The Secret Glory will no doubt have an idea of Arthur Machen’s poor opinion of education system of his day. In the following article, Machen allows others to criticize the British system while offering alternatives. The problems of “free education” have not yet been solved, but continually worsen. Truly, it is an ongoing tragedy.

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The Problem of Tom:
Sir John Gorst and Two Novelists on Education
by
Arthur Machen
December 20, 1911

I have just been talking to one of the greatest educational authorities in England; Sir Gorst, formerly vice-president of the Board of Education. Mr. Stephen Reynolds has been saying in “Seems So” that our elementary education is a useless sham: Professor Sadler, of Leeds, respectfully differs from Mr. Reynolds; and I asked Sir John Gorst if he would be good enough to give me his judgement on the matter.

“I must state, to begin with,” he said, “that I have not read ‘Seems So,’ nor have I seen Mr. Sadler’s reply. But my view is this: To begin at the beginning, the object of education, I take it, is to let the child grow in body and in mind and in soul to its best possible development, so as to become fit for that place in life to which to which it shall please God to call it.

“Our system is to do our very best to kill all its natural gifts, all its initiative, all its curiosity, all its desire for knowledge. We do this by putting it into a class where it is obliged to sit still and not allowed to speak. If it does speak, it is ordered to keep silence till it is spoken to.

“Mechanical knowledge is then forced into its mind mechanically by the teacher; so at last the child is no longer a human being; it is a machine; or rather it is like some little performing dog; it can do tricks, and the inspector comes along and notices the complete lack of all initiative and of all intelligence, and says: ‘What admirable discipline!’”

Examinations Condemned

“So the course goes on. Some children may get scholarships; and here I may say that no pupil in any secondary school is educated at all; it is simply coached to pass examinations. The same rule obtains at the public schools and at the Universities, the same repression of all thought and all individuality. I was third wrangler myself, and before the examination my coach—a very famous one—said to me, ‘For heaven’s sake don’t think in the Senate House; thinking is fatal!’”

Sir John Gorst was reminded of an axiom he had uttered in the course of a private conversation many years ago: “It would be much better if we selected men for civil and military posts, not by examination, but by the process of climbing the greasy pole.” Sir John laughed.

“I don’t remember saying that, but it’s true all the same. The only possible reform that I can suggest is the abolition of all examinations; they are fatal to true education.

“The result of our present system is that no one begins to be educated till he has left school. The first thing a boy does is to fling his books down; he is sick of them and all that they stand for. Then if his natural curiosity and intelligence are not quite dead he begins to educate himself.”

So far Sir John Gorst; now for another witness. Mr. Jacks, the editor of “The Hibbert Journal,” has just published a book called “Among the Idolmakers” (Williams and Norgate), and in this collection is the story of Tom, M. A., under the title “That Sort of Thing.” Tom’s father spent thousands of pounds on Tom’s “education”; and the end was that Tom knew nothing whatever!

The Father’s Pathetic Request

On one occasion old Sydenham wrote to the head to ask if it would be possible to give a little more attention to Tom’s reading, writing, spelling, and cyphering in all of which he was distressingly backward. The head replied with a polite formula.

          So Tom continued to write home to his parents weekly that he had receaved their letter, that he sor no good in Greek, that he had bort a moddle aroplain off a chap for twenty-five bob, jolly cheep, that he was getting on alright, that there were ten chaps with hooping coff in the sanny, that he remaned their afectionate son—with three thumb marks and five blots.

So “Tom’s mind, naturally inert, gradually became a mere mush”; he lived in a sort of thick mental fog. If you asked Tom what time work began he would answer, ‘Oh, about nine o’clock and that sort of thing.’” Mr. Jacks wishes us to understand by the parable of Tom that for the average boy, as distinguished from the exceptional and brilliant boy, the higher education is an astounding and elaborate system of costly humbug. He is probably right in the general principle; but I think that he is wrong in two particular assertions.

When a Classical Education is—an Education

Firstly, he implies rather than states that if a system of education does not enable a young man to “make good” commercially, it is of no use, and should be swept away. When old Sydenham lost all his money Tom went to Canada and tried to get into a bank. He saw the manager.

Manager: “What did you learn at school?”

Tom: “Oh, Latin and Greek and—”

Manager: “Don’t use ’em in this bank. What else?”

Tom: “Oh, arithmetic and all that sort of thing.”

Manager: “We don’t want ‘that sort of thing’ in the bank. We only want arithmetic.”

Now Tom, of course, had not learnt Latin and Greek; he had pretended to learn those languages, and his master had pretended had pretended to teach him. But if Tom had learnt Latin to such purpose that he could have chatted with ease to Cicero in his retirement at Tusculum, and had been able to turn the leading article in the Calgary “Herald” into Greek choric metres at sight, it would still have profited him nothing with that Canadian bank manager. But it must clearly be stated that a classical education is not to be blamed because it does not fit a man to earn his living by being a bank clerk. It does not pretend to any such office; its purpose is to develop the imaginative faculty by the instrument of two great literatures.

An Arrant Superstition

This is one mistake in the tale of Tom; the other error is that a “Council education” is better than a public school education. Old Sydenham once told the author “that his son, if started fair in the race of life with any lad who had received a free education in a Council school ‘wouldn’t have the ghost of a chance.’” The superstition that “Board” or “Council” education is efficient is an old one; I have seen it, I think, in Mr. Wells’s books; but it is an arrant superstition for all that.

Sir John Gorst has expressed himself on the subject without doubt or reservation; and every few months some indignant business man writes to the Press, enclosing a few answers that he has received in reply to his advertisement. There is only one verdict, and there are no dissentients. Council education, oddly called “free,” in reality costing millions of money, is a huge and as futile and as disastrous a sham as the two hundred guinea a year course which old Mr. Sydenham paid for in the case of Tom.

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