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Holmes (1911) (page numbers in brackets) Part I What Is or The Path of Mechanical Obedience Chapter I (3-41)
Part II What Might Be or The Path of Self-Realisation Chapter IV (153-194)
See also the text of Holmes' Introduction to Dorothy Canfield Fisher's 1913 book A Montessori Mother. |
What Is and What Might Be Edmond Holmes (1911) London: Constable and Co. Ltd Notes on the text History Edmond Holmes became Chief Inspector of Elementary Schools in 1905. In 1911 he wrote a confidential memorandum in which he criticised school inspectors who had previously been elementary school teachers. Teachers were angered when it was made public: Holmes resigned, and Robert Morant, Secretary to the Board of Education, was forced to leave his post. Holmes had a lifelong interest in Buddhism and pantheism, and his religious ideas permeate What Is and What Might Be. Nonetheless the book was an important contribution to the debate about the nature and purpose of education. In their 1980 book Inside the Primary Classroom (The ORACLE Report) Galton, Simon and Croll describe it as 'the first striking manifesto of the "progressives" in its total condemnation of the arid drill methods of the contemporary elementary school'. The online text The full text is online. A copy of the original 1911 publication was photocopied at the Bodleian library, the copies scanned and read by my OCR software program (ReadIris). I then proof-read, corrected and spell-checked the resulting text and added explanatory notes. Finally, it was prepared for the web. There were few misprints in the printed version: I have corrected those I spotted. I have given explanations to some archaic words and (most of the) Latin phrases. (I have not attempted to offer translations of the French phrases used: my French, I regret to say, isn't up to it! If anyone would like to do the job, I'd be grateful). I have also added the sources of the quotations in the text (those I could find). Anything I've added by way of explanation is shown [in square brackets]. The only liberty I have taken with the text is to correct Holmes' incorrect positioning of speech marks where they occur at the end of a sentence. Thus ... when they have realised its inner meaning, as a "wicked heresy."is shown here as ... when they have realised its inner meaning, as a "wicked heresy".Otherwise, Holmes' punctuation (some of it odd by today's standards) is shown as printed. The formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) is a reasonably accurate representation of the printed version. However, please note that the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the original printed version: the font (Times, Arial etc) and size of print - and therefore the number of words to a line and lines to a page - are determined by the settings you have chosen for your web browser. The text of What Is and What Might Be is available elsewhere on the web but I hope readers will find this version, with my additions, the easiest to use. (Incidentally, beware of buying 'print-on-demand' versions of the book. I paid £9.85 for one such publication, only to find that it was full of errors, had some footnotes missing, and did not even include the page numbers from the original). 
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