manner of unpleasant things for these “unhappy victims of a father’s
folly,” who must inevitably fade into an early grave. But the father
only smiled serenely, confident that the future would vindicate his
educational innovation. And, of a surety, the future did. For James
Thomson, the older of the two, living to the age of seventy, left
behind him the reputation of one of England’s leading authorities on
engineering; while William, who did not die until he was eighty-three,
became even more famous, winning, as Lord Kelvin of Largs, a place in
the annals of science fairly comparable with that held by the immortal
Newton.
A similar process of intensive child culture was carried out, with
similarly happy results, in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose father
modelled his whole upbringing in accordance with the theory that the
mind, like the body, grows with exercise, and that the sooner the
process of exercising and training it begins, the better the child’s
prospects for a worthy and efficient manhood. Like James Thomson the
elder Mill was an exceedingly busy man, but this did not prevent him
from making the intellectual development of his son a matter of
patient, personal attention. Almost as soon as the little John could
talk, his formal education began, and throughout his childhood was
continued along lines that have provoked indignant comment in many
quarters.
“I have no remembrance,” he tells us, in his interesting
“Autobiography,” “of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been
told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection
on the subject is that of committing to memory what my father termed
vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification
in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until
some years later, I learned no more than the inflexions of the nouns
and verbs, but after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to
translation; and I faintly remember going through ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ the
first Greek book which I read. The ‘Anabasis,’ which I remember better,
was the second. I learned no Latin until my eighth year.
“At that time I had read, under my father’s tuition, a number of
Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and
of Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’ and ‘Memorials of Socrates’; some of the
lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian; and
‘Isocrates ad Demonicum’ and ‘Ad Nicoclem.’... What he himself was
willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from
the fact that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek
lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing;
and as in those days Greek and English lexicons were not, and I could
make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made
without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse
to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This
incessant interruption he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted
to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of his history
and all else that he had to write during those years.
“The only thing besides Greek that I learned as a lesson in this part
of my childhood was arithmetic; this also my father taught me. It was
the task of the evenings, and I well remember its disagreeableness.
But the lessons were only a part of the daily instruction I received.
Much of it consisted in the books I read by myself, and my father’s
discourses to me, chiefly during our walks.
“From 1810 to 1813 (that is, from Mill’s fourth to eighth year) we
were living in Kensington Green, then an almost rustic neighbourhood.
My father’s health required considerable and constant exercise, and he
walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes toward
Hornsey. In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my earliest
recollections of green fields and wild-flowers, is mingled that of the
account I gave him daily of what I had read the day before. To the
best of my remembrance, this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed
exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, and from these
in the morning walks I told the story to him....
“In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as
opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting
civilisation, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he
required me afterward to restate to him in my own words.... He was
fond of putting into my hands books which exhibited men of energy and
resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and
overcoming them: of such works I remember Beaver’s ‘African Memoranda,’
and Collins’s ‘Account of the First Settlement of New South Wales.’...
Of children’s books, any more than of playthings, I had scarcely any,
except an occasional gift from a relation or acquaintance: among those
I had, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was pre-eminent, and continued to delight me
through all my boyhood.
“It was no part, however, of my father’s system to exclude books of
amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he
possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed several for me;
those which I remember are the ‘Arabian Nights,’ Cazotte’s ‘Arabian
Tales,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ Miss Edgeworth’s ‘Popular Tales,’ and a book of
some reputation in its day, Brooke’s ‘Fool of Quality.’”
In one respect, it must be conceded, Mill’s early education was
deficient—it depended altogether too much on the knowledge to be gained
from books, and not enough on direct study of the laws and beauties of
Nature. But against this stands the unquestionable fact that it did
establish in him lifelong habits of industry and thoroughness, and an
abiding joy in intellectual achievement; and, more important, it had
the happy result of habituating him to regard himself as consecrated to
a life of labour for the public good. As to the “wrong” done to Mill
by “robbing him of the joys of childhood,” one of his biographers,
Professor William Minto, justly observes:
“Much pity has been expressed over the dreary, cheerless existence
that the child must have led, cut off from all boyish amusements and
companionship, working day after day on his father’s treadmill; but
a childhood and boyhood spent in the enlargement of knowledge, with
the continual satisfaction of difficulties conquered, buoyed up by
day-dreams of emulating the greatest of human benefactors, need not
have been an unhappy childhood, and Mill expressly says that his was
not unhappy. It seems unhappy only when we compare it with the desires
of childhood left more to itself, and when we decline to imagine its
peculiar enjoyments and aspirations. Mill complains that his father
often required more than could be reasonably expected of him, but his
tasks were not so severe as to prevent him from growing up a healthy,
hardy, and high-spirited boy, though he was not constitutionally
robust, and his tastes and pursuits were so different from those of
other boys of the same age.”
Mill was never a college student, and was for the most part
self-educated after his sixteenth year. But had he been sent to college
at an early age, as his home training amply warranted, there is every
reason to think he would have acquitted himself as brilliantly as did
the Thomson boys, and as did Karl Witte, another noteworthy example of
the possibilities open to all parents. Indeed, Witte’s case is in some
respects the most interesting and instructive on record. For one thing
his father has left a minutely detailed account of the methods employed
in his education; and there is ground to suspect that at the outset of
life Karl Witte was below rather than above the average in mentality.
Born in July, 1800, in the German village of Lochau, near Halle, he was
the son of a country clergyman, likewise named Karl Witte, who had long
been regarded as somewhat “eccentric.” In especial the elder Witte was
known to hold “peculiar” views on education. It was his firm belief,
just as it was the belief of James Thomson and James Mill, that only
by beginning the educational process in infancy could one make sure of
developing children into really rational men and women. Looking at the
world about him, and noting the extent to which people wasted their
lives in hopeless inefficiency and reckless dissipation, he said to
himself, in effect:
“These poor people do not reason, do not use their God-given
intellects. If they did they would conduct themselves altogether
differently. The trouble must be that they have not been educated
aright. They have not been taught how to think, and what to think
about. They have been started wrong in life. The schools and
universities are to blame, but far more their parents are to blame. If
love of the good, the beautiful, and the true had been implanted in
them in youth, if they had been trained from the first in the proper
use of their minds, they would not now be living so foolishly.”
Holding these views, Pastor Witte promised himself that if God blessed
him with children he would make their education his special care. His
first child, however, died in early infancy. Then came Karl, at birth
so unprepossessing and “stupid” in appearance that his father wondered
in what way he had offended God that he should be afflicted with a
witless child. The neighbours, sympathising, held out what hopes they
could, but secretly agreed that Pastor Witte’s boy was undoubtedly an
idiot.
Thus matters stood until one day the father fancied that he detected in
the child signs of intelligence. There and then he set about “making
a man of him,” as he expressed it. He began, even before Karl could
speak, by naming to him different parts of the human body, objects
in his bedroom, etc. Later, as soon as the child was old enough to
toddle about, he gradually broadened the horizon of his knowledge,
taking him for walks through the streets and fields of Lochau, and
calling his attention to all sorts of interesting things. Encouraging
him to ask questions he went in his replies as fully as possible into
the essential details of the subject under discussion. Above all,
he avoided giving superficial answers, for it was his great aim to
impress on Karl the importance of reasoning closely, of appreciating
relationships and dissimilarities. If the child asked him something to
which he could not respond intelligently, he frankly confessed his
ignorance, but suggested that by working together they might obtain a
satisfactory answer.
Also, in his daily walks and conversations with his son, “baby talk”
had no place. It was part of Pastor Witte’s theory, as it is part of
Doctor Berle’s to-day, that this mode of addressing children, however
it may appeal to the sentimental side of fathers and mothers, is
intellectually enervating to their little ones. The child who would
think correctly, he argued, must be taught to speak correctly.
For this reason he not only drilled Karl in the correct pronunciation
and use of words, but insisted that all who talked with the child
should be careful how they spoke to him. Besides which, with an
intuitive appreciation of the formative value of even the seemingly
most trivial details of the home environment, he arranged the household
furnishings so that they too, by the subtle influence of suggestion,
should contribute powerfully to Karl’s development. As he tells us
in his own account, of which an abridged translation into English has
recently been made by Professor Leo Wiener, of Harvard University:[1]
“I tolerated as far as possible nothing in my house, yard, garden,
etc., that was not tasteful, especially nothing that did not harmonise
with its surroundings. If anything was not harmonious, I was uneasy
about it until it was removed. All my rooms were papered with
wall-paper of one colour, the fields being surrounded by pleasing
borders. In every room there was but little furniture, but such as
there was, was carefully selected. On all the walls hung paintings or
etchings, but none of these was tastelessly glaring in colours, or
represented an unpleasant subject. Our yard and garden were in bloom
from earliest Spring to very late in the Fall. Snowbells and crocuses
started the procession, and winter asters were crushed only by the
snow or a severe frost. We ourselves were always dressed cleanly but
simply.”
At first, it must be said, Karl’s mother had scant sympathy with her
husband’s enthusiasm. She felt that he was mistaken, that the child was
“too stupid” to be educated, and that nothing would come of the pains
taken with him. This was the general belief of the neighbourhood, but
it gave place to a feeling of astonished incredulity upon the discovery
that in reality the youngster was making extraordinary progress, and
was displaying not only intelligence but a love of knowledge rarely
seen in boys of any age. Before he was six all who talked with him
were amazed at the proofs he gave of the great extent to which he had
profited from his early training.
Most impressive was the accuracy and fulness of the information he even
then possessed regarding a variety of subjects, and his linguistic
proficiency. His study of foreign languages began with French, while
he still was very young, and was conducted in a novel way, his father
giving him French translations of books with which he was already
familiar in German, and telling him to read them for a certain time
each day. No attempt was made to teach him the grammar of the language
as it is commonly taught in the schools, his father’s belief being that
the boy could best pick up the grammar for himself in the course of his
reading, and that he would be able to master the French translations
with comparatively little trouble by reason of his previous training
in the art of observation, analysis, and synthesis. This expectation
was realised so fully that, according to his father’s statement, Karl
within a year was reading French with ease.
Meantime he had begun the study of Italian, and from Italian passed to
Latin. Chance played some part in introducing him to this language.
His father had taken him to a concert in Leipzig, and during an
intermission handed him the libretto. He looked at it casually, then
with some intentness, and exclaimed:
“Why, father, this is not French, nor is it Italian. It must be Latin!”
“Let it be what it may,” said Witte, “if only you can make out what it
means. Try at least.”
The boy, already grounded in two languages derived from Latin,
puzzled out the meaning with considerable success, and declared
enthusiastically:
“Father, if Latin is such an easy language as this, I should like to
learn it.”
English came next, and then the study of Greek, a language regarding
which the boy’s curiosity was whetted by tales from Homer and Xenophon
told to him by his father. Again the process was chiefly one of
self-education, the father answering—when he could—the questions put to
him by Karl, but always insisting to the latter that the proper way to
learn anything is to overcome its difficulties for oneself. He was now
studying and reading French, Italian, Latin, English, and Greek, in all
of which he made such progress that, we are told, by the time he was
nine he had read Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, Cicero, Fénelon, Florian, and
Metastasio in the original, besides Schiller and other classical German
writers.
Naturally the fame of the boy spread abroad, and with its spreading his
father came in for some sharp criticism. Formerly he had been laughed
at as a man who was essaying the impossible in striving to impart
intelligence to a mentally subnormal child. Now that he had succeeded
so well in his undertaking people asserted that he was fanatically
endeavouring to convert the child into a weird thinking machine, and
endangering his health and sanity. Precisely the same objections, in
short, were raised to his educational experiment that were later raised
in the case of the Thomson boys and John Stuart Mill, and that have
recently been raised against the educational methods of the fathers of
the three youths now in Harvard.
All kinds of absurd stories were circulated regarding Karl. He was
pictured quite generally as a pale, anæmic, puny, goggle-eyed “freak,”
who had missed the delights of childhood and was vastly to be pitied.
In reality, he was a happy, joyous youngster, who got as much “fun” out
of life as any boy could. This is the unanimous testimony of those who
“investigated” the lad for themselves. Thus the archæologist Heyne,
in a statement to his friend the famous philosopher and poet Wieland,
frankly admitted:
“I allowed myself to be persuaded to examine young Witte, in order to
be able to form my own opinion of him. I found the boy in body and
mind happy and hale to a greater degree than I had expected. I found,
in testing him with Homer and Virgil, that he had sufficient knowledge
of words and things to translate readily and strike the right meaning,
and that, without exact grammatical and lingual knowledge, he was able
to guess correctly the meaning of a passage from its context. What was
most remarkable to me was that he read with understanding, feeling, and
effect.
“Otherwise I found in him no preponderating faculty. Memory,
imagination, reasoning, were about in equilibrium. In other matters
besides those that had been inculcated by education, I found him a
happy, lusty boy, not even averse from mischief, which was to me a
quieting thing.”
At the same time that he was thus instructing Karl in languages and
literature, Witte sought to awaken in him a love of art and science.
Neither artist nor scientist himself, he none the less believed that if
he could only interest his son sufficiently in artistic and scientific
subjects, he would study them enthusiastically. To this end he adopted
a plan which might well be imitated by all parents.
Whenever he went to Halle, Leipzig, or any other German city, he
took Karl with him, and together they visited art galleries, natural
history museums, zoölogical and botanical gardens, and manufacturing
establishments. Not for a moment, however, did he hint to the boy that
he was doing this for educational purposes. When, for example, they
visited a factory, he did not say, “I have brought you here to give
you a lesson in mechanics.” He allowed the boy to think that he simply
wished to entertain him; and in this way, without Karl’s suspecting it,
he was able to impart to him much elementary instruction in zoölogy,
botany, physics, chemistry, etc.
Similarly he taught Karl geography by the pleasing device of first
taking him, on a clear day, to the top of a high tower that happened
to be in Lochau, and asking him to mark on a piece of paper, brought
to the tower for that purpose, the position of the different villages
visible in the surrounding country. This first trip was followed by
others, in which the boy expanded and corrected the markings on his
paper, putting in rivers, lakes, and forests. Witte then bought for him
a set of maps showing, in succession, the part of Germany in which he
lived, all Germany, Europe, and the other continents. These father and
son studied together, not as a study, but as a game, in which the boy
took part with the greatest enthusiasm.
“I never acted,” Witte himself has declared, “as though he had to learn
these things. He would have been surprised if told that he had been
studying geography, physics, chemistry. I avoided the mention of such
terms, so as not to frighten him, and in order not to make him vain.”
Not to make him vain! Be sure, indeed, that Pastor Witte, while
promoting his son’s mental development, would not forget to ground him
in moral principles. He was not, let it be clearly understood, striving
to make an intellectual “prodigy” of his son; he was aiming only to
make him a man in the truest sense, strong physically and morally as
well as mentally. If he believed that the boy’s reasoning powers could
not be properly developed unless he were trained from infancy in the
principles of sound reasoning, he was quite as firmly convinced that
the process of moral education should likewise begin at the earliest
possible moment. To this end, believing as he did in the importance of
early environmental influences and of parental example, he endeavoured
to secure for his son wholly ennobling surroundings.
He even laid down rules to be observed by the maid-of-all-work, a
simple but good-hearted peasant girl, in her dealings with the child.
The whole family life was regulated with a view to “suggesting” to the
little Karl ideas which, sinking into the subconscious region of his
mind, would tend to affect favourably his moral outlook and exercise
a lasting influence on his conduct. In their relations with all who
visited their home—as with each other, with Karl himself, and with the
little serving-maid—both Pastor Witte and his wife were unfailingly
courteous, considerate, and sympathetic. Over and above all this, they
set him a constant example in diligence, of that earnest activity which
is itself a powerful factor in moral discipline.
Important also is it to note that in their daily walks and talks
together, Karl’s father took good care to cultivate in him the gift of
imagination, which means so much to the moral as well as the mental
growth of man. When they went hand in hand across the fields of Lochau,
it was not only in rudiments of science that Witte instructed his
son; he deftly awakened in him an appreciation of the sublimity and
beauty in the workings of Nature. When he narrated to him stories from
history, it was not merely to interest him in the study of history; the
emphasis was on some moral trait exemplified by the particular story.
In familiarising him with the life of Lochau itself, in introducing him
to its shops and cottage-homes, the effort was tactfully made to awaken
and broaden his sympathies. Always it was one of Witte’s chief objects
to keep his son as free as possible from anything that might make for
harshness, narrowness, and intolerance in later years.
Even when Karl was not more than three or four years old, his father
did not deem it too early to attempt by rebuke and admonition to instil
into him the idea that he ought to guard his tongue closely to avoid
hurting the feelings of other people. All children, as is well known,
are inclined to “speak out in meeting,” and frequently their “cute”
comments, which many parents applaud as evidences of keen observational
power, convey a sting to the person commented on. So soon as this
universal trait of childhood appeared in little Karl his father set
about suppressing it, and at the same time sought to utilise it as an
aid in his moral education. The occasion arose following a thoughtless
remark by the child regarding some slight eccentricity in the behaviour
of a certain Herr N., a friend of the family. When father and son were
alone, the former asked:
“Why did you speak of Herr N. as you did?”
“Because what I said was true.”
“I grant that. It was true—it was, indeed, very true. But that is no
reason you should have said it. It was neither good nor kind of you.
Did you not see how disturbed he became? He would say nothing back,
perhaps because of the love he bears for us. But it pained him very
much that a child should say anything so unpleasant to him. If he is
unhappy to-day, the fault is yours.”
Witte tells us that it was not long before Karl acquired the excellent
habit of “putting himself in the other fellow’s place” before uttering
censorious judgments. Similarly, and with equal success, his father
endeavoured to broaden his sympathies so as to include the brute
creation. It happened one day, when Karl was about three years old,
that there were at his home a number of guests, who made much of the
child, naturally to his great delight. While they were talking to
him the family dog came into the room, and Karl, as any child might,
playfully caught it by the tail and drew it to him. As he did so, his
father, putting out his hand, caught Karl himself by his long hair and
pulled it exactly as he was pulling the tail of the dog. Karl turned,
saw his father’s indignant look, blushed crimson, and released the dog.