These educational idealists are always disregarding the fundamental problem of educational organization altogether, the problem of economy, economy of the most precious thing of all, teaching power. It is the problem of stretching the competent teacher over the maximum number of pupils, and that can be done only by the same methods of economy that are practised in every other large-scale production—by the standardization of everything that can be standardized, and by the use of every possible time and labour-saving device and every possible replacement of human effort, not in order to dispense with originality and initiative but in order to conserve them for application at their points of maximum efficiency.
I have said that a disregard of the possibilities of wide organization and its associated economy of effort is characteristic of most "advanced" educational literature. You will, if you will examine them, find that disregard working out to its natural consequences in what are called the "advanced" schools that appeal to educationally anxious parents nowadays. You will find that these places, often very picturesque and pleasing-looking places, are rarely prosperous enough to maintain more than one or two good teachers. The rest of the staff shrinks from scrutiny. You will find these schools adorned with attractive diagrams drawn by the teachers, and strikingly original models and apparatus made by the teachers, and if you look closely into the matter or consult an intelligent pupil, you will find there are never enough diagrams and apparatus to see a course through. If you press that matter you will find that they haven't had time to make them so far. And they will never get so far. No school, however rich and prosperous and however enthusiastically run, can hope to make for itself all the plant and diagrams and apparatus needed for a fully efficient modern education such as we have sketched out. As well might a busy man hope to array himself, by his own efforts, with hats, suits and boots made by himself out of wool and raw hides.
But now I think you will begin to see what I am driving at. It is this: that if the general level of education is to be raised in our modern community, and if that better education is to be spread over most of our community, it is necessary to reorganize education in the world upon entirely bolder, more efficient, and more economical lines. We are inexorably limited as to the number of good teachers we can get into the educational organization, and we are limited as inexorably as to the quality of the rank and file of our teaching profession; but we are not limited in the equipment and systematic organization of teaching methods and apparatus. That is what I want particularly to enlarge upon now.
Think of the ordinary schoolhouse—a mere empty brick building with a few hat-pegs, a stale map or so, half a dozen plaster casts, a few hundred tattered books, a blackboard, and some broken chemical apparatus: think of it as the dingy insufficiency it is! In such a place the best teacher must needs waste three-fourths of his energies. In such a place staff and pupils meet chiefly to waste each other's time. This is the first and principal point at which we can stanch the wastage of teaching energy that now goes on. Everywhere about the world nowadays, the schoolhouse is set up and equipped by a private person or a local authority in more or less complete ignorance of educational possibilities, in more or less complete disconnectedness, without any of the help or any of the economy that comes from a centralized mass production. Let us now consider what we might have in the place of this typical schoolhouse of to-day.
Let me first suggest that every school should have a complete library of very full and explicit lesson notes, properly sorted and classified. All the ordinary subjects in schools have been taught over and over again millions and millions of times. Few people, I think, realize that, and fewer still realize the reasonable consequences of that. Human minds are very much the same everywhere, and the best way of teaching every ordinary school subject, the best possible lesson and the best possible succession of lessons, ought to have been worked out to the last point, and the courses ought to have been stereotyped long ago. Yet if you go into any school to-day, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred you will find an inexpert and ill-prepared young teacher giving a clumsy, vamped-up lesson as though it had never been given before. He or she will have no proper notes and no proper diagrams, and a halting and faulty discourse will be eked out by feeble scratchings with chalk on a blackboard, by querulous questioning of the pupils, and irrelevancies. The thing is preposterous.
And linked up with this complete equipment of proper lesson notes upon which the teacher will give the lessons, there should be a thing which does not exist at present in any school and which ought to exist in every school, a collection of some hundreds of thousands of pictures and diagrams, properly and compactly filed; a copious supply of maps, views of scenery, pictures of towns, and so forth for teaching geography, diagrams and tables for scientific subjects, and so on and so on. You must remember that if the schools of the world were thought of as a whole and dealt with as a whole, these things could be produced wholesale at a cost out of comparison cheaper than they are made to-day. There is no reason whatever why school equipment should not be a world market. A lesson upon the geography of Sweden needs precisely the same maps, the same pictures of scenery, types of people, animals, cities, and so forth, whether that lesson is given in China or Peru or Morocco or London. There is no reason why these pictures and maps should not be printed from the same blocks and distributed from the same centre for the schools of all mankind. If the government of any large country had the vigour and intelligence to go right ahead and manufacture a proper equipment of notes and diagrams for its own use in all its own schools, it would probably be able to recoup itself for most of the outlay by dominating the map and diagram markets of the rest of the world.
And next to this full and manageable collection of pictures and diagrams, which the teacher would whip out, with the appropriate notes, five minutes before his lesson began, the modern school would have quite a considerable number of gramophones. These would be used not only to supply music for drill and so forth, and for the analytical study of music, but for the language teaching. Instead of the teacher having to pretend, as he usually pretends now, to a complete knowledge of the foreign language he can really only smatter, he would become the honest assistant of the real teaching instrument—the gramophone. Here, again, it is a case for big methods or none—a case for mass production. A mass production of gramophone records for language teaching throughout the world would so reduce the cost that every school could quite easily be equipped with a big repertory of language records. For the first year of any language study, at any rate, the work would go always to the accompaniment of the proper accent and intonation. And all over the world each language would be taught with the same accent and quantities and idioms—a very desirable thing indeed.
And now let me pass on to another requirement for an efficient school that our educational organization has still to discover—the method of using the cinematograph. I ask for half a dozen projectors or so in every school, and for a well-stocked storehouse of films. The possibilities of certain branches of teaching have been altogether revolutionized by the cinematograph. In nearly every school nowadays you will find a lot of more or less worn and damaged scientific apparatus which is supposed to be used for demonstrating the elementary facts of chemistry, physics and the like. There is a belief that the science teachers—and they do their best with the time and skill and material at their disposal—rig up experimental displays of the more illuminating experimental facts with this damaged litter. Many of us can recall the realities of the sort of demonstration I mean. The performance took two or three hours to prepare, an hour to deliver and an hour or so to clear away; it was difficult to follow, impossible to repeat, it usually went wrong, and almost invariably the teacher lost his temper. These practical demonstrations occurred usually in the opening enthusiasm of the term. As the weeks wore on, the pretence of practical teaching was quietly dropped, and we crammed our science out of the text-book.