Educational Programme.
When I had set in order round my sitting-room and school-room my
valuables (they were manuscripts) and my effects (the inventory of
which was not over thirty lines deep), and my paternal and maternal
property (that was I myself); when I had already previously taken three
long strides to see the prospect from my window, which consisted of a
windmill, the evening sun and a little starling's house on a birch
tree, then I could forthwith be a ready-made tutor and needed only to
begin. I could now look serious the whole week, and oblige my pupil to
also--all my words could be weekly sermons, all my faces tables of the
law. I had even two ways before me of being a fool: I could make an
immortal soul decline, conjugate, memorize and analyze itself half dead
in Latin--I could also dip and drown his young pineal gland so deeply
in the higher sciences, that it should be quite bloated and puffed up
with great draughts of logic, politics and statistics. I could
accordingly (who should prevent it?) plane out the bony walls of his
cranium to a dry bookcase, or press apart the living head into a
profile-board, on which learned heads should be adumbrated; his heart,
meanwhile, might be wrought over from being a high altar of nature to a
wire-table of the Old Testament, from a celestial globe to a
paternoster-globule of sanctimony--or, in fact, to a swimming-bladder
of worldly policy; verily, I could be a ninny and make him a still
greater one....
Thou precious one! thou confiding, friendly soul, that didst throw
thyself with thy whole fate, with thy whole future, into my arms! Oh, I
am already distressed that so much depends upon me!
Seeing, however, that just as much depends on the tutor of my future
children, I will have printed for him here the following sheets of an
Educational Programme, which he cannot take ill of me, because I really
do not yet know the good man and do not mean him.
"My dear Mr. Tutor!
"Were I yours, you would certainly sit down and write out for me the
following very good rules:
"Let Natural History be the sugar-cake which the schoolmaster shall put
into the child's pocket in the first study hour, as a bait to lure him
on; so, too, stories from history. Only let not history itself come as
yet! What might not this lofty goddess, whose temple stands on nothing
but graves, make of us, if she should then for the first time address
us, when our head and heart were now open, and both understood her
language of eternity--Fatherland, People, Constitution, Laws, Rome,
Athens? As regards Mr. Schroeckh, who appends thereto respectable
literary history and pure orphan-house morality, I only beg that you
will not, Mr. Tutor, cut out from his book the copper-plate engravings,
and the English binding I also insist upon.
"Geography is a wholesome first course for the child's soul; arithmetic
and geometry are also suitable for an early scientific breakfast; not
because they teach to think, but because they do not teach it (the
greatest arithmeticians and differentiators and mechanicians are often
the shallowest philosophers), and because the exertion attending them
does not weaken the nerves, as is proved by the case of revenue
auditors and algebraists.
"But philosophy, or the effort of deep thinking, is deadly to children,
or snaps off forever the too thin point of deep thought. To resolve
virtue and religion into their first principles with children is
equivalent to cutting away a man's breast and dissecting the heart, to
show him how it beats. Philosophy is no bread-earning science, but
mental broad itself, and a necessary: and one cannot teach either it or
love; both, if taught too early, unman body and soul.
"It pleases me that you yourself explained you would send out French
before Latin, speaking before rules of grammar (_i. e_., the go-cart
before theories of muscular motion), and undertake the languages later,
because they are apprehended more through the _understanding_ than the
_memory_. One reason why Latin is so difficult is that it comes on so
early; in the fifteenth year one can do therein, with a finger, what at
an earlier period required a whole hand.
"It is abominable that even now our children have to read and sit and
make the fundament the underpinning and base of their education. The
book of _instruction_ does not make good to them the place of the
instructor, nor the _amusing_ one that of more wholesome play. Poetry
is for a _beardless_ age too unintelligible and unwholesome; the
teacher who _reads a lecture_ must be a miserable one, if he does not
far more emphatically _speak_. In short, no children's books!
"In a pedagogical album we should both write: Useless censure is worse
than no censure at all. Faults which age takes away let not the teacher
undertake to, who has more lasting ones to combat, etc. Let their
catechism be Plutarch and Feddersen (only without his miserable style);
_i. e_., no moralities, but narratives with a moral effect--and
moreover, at no stated hour, but at the right one, so that the brains
of my children may not be a _spelling-school_ of morals, but their
heart may become an illuminated _Rotunda_[29] of virtue.
"Since a purblind, narrow, anxious propriety of behavior is the most
stupid and unnatural, accordingly you teach the children the best by
not enjoining upon them any: by nature they respect neither silver
stars nor silver heads--do not wean them to any such.
"My greatest prayer is--which I have had printed many years
beforehand--that you be the most jocose man in my house; merriment
makes all fields of knowledge for children fields of sugar-cane. Mine
must, while with you, have full liberty to jest, talk, sit at their
_good pleasure_. We grown people, reasonable as we are, could not
stand the abominable school-confinement of our offspring a week; and
yet we expect it of them, with their brains and veins busy as
swarming ant-hills. In brief: Is childhood, then, only the painful
preparation-day for the _Sunday_ enjoyment of later age, or is it not
rather itself a Sabbath eve, which brings its own joys? Ah, if we in
this empty, drizzling life do not regard every _means as a nearer end_
(as well as every end a more distant means), what then do we find here
below? Your principal (an abominable word) took as much pleasure in his
betrothal as in his wedding.
"Playful instruction does not mean sparing and saving the child effort,
but awakening in him a passion which shall compel and lighten for him
the hardest. Now to this end no lugubrious passions are at all
serviceable--_e. g_., fear of censure, of punishment, etc.--but only
joyous ones; in play every girl in Scheerau would learn Arabic, if her
lover wrote to her in no other language than in that synonymous one.
Hope of praise (the praise of external distinctions alone excepted) is
what harms children far less than censure, and something to which no
child, least of all the best ones, can grow obdurate. I will tell you
here what my own tutor made use of as an educational espalier: he
stitched for himself a cipher-book; in this he gave each member of his
lyceum (nineteen in all) for every task a large or small number; these
numbers when they had reached a certain fixed sum, gained a letter of
nobility or certificate of diligence, whereupon one took his praise
home with him. Since rewards are ineffectual when they come _too often_
or only _from afar_, accordingly he, in this ingenious manner
constructed the way to the remote reward out of daily little ones. We
could, moreover, save up our numbers; and nothing so strongly holds
children to diligence as a _growing property_ (or ciphers or of
writing-books). The striking out of such numbers was a punishment. He
thereby made us all so diligent, me particularly, that a few years
after I was able to write a biography, which is even now being read.
"Never talk with my darlings briefly or abstractly, but in the
concrete, and _make your narratives as explicit and circumstantial as
Voss does his Idyls_.
"Thus have I used the molding and modeling tool upon my Gustavus, not,
assuredly, to adjust him to the biography of him which I was composing,
but to fit him for life itself; but deuce take the heart of a man, I
say, who will not do for his own children what he did for another's.
"My daughters, on the other hand, worthy Sir Tutor, the elder as well
as the younger, I do not commit to you for the same school-hour--girls
might as well share with boys the same dormitory as the same
school-room--in fact I would have for them no school-hours at all. A
tutor, in order to know how to train girls, must (as you know) have so
much knowledge of the world, so much knowledge of woman, so much wit,
so much flexibility of humor with so much firmness;--meanwhile mine are
trained by a very clever governess--household labor under the eye of a
cultured mother.
"Before closing these secret instructions, I further remark that they
are wholly useless--first, for you, because a man of genius even with
any other method whatever is still omnipotent; secondly, for a clumsy
head, because such a one, let him do what he will, will always exhaust
children's mental powers as an old bedfellow does the bodily powers of
a younger. In fact, I have sent forward this pedagogical Swabian code
and mirror into the world long before I do my children--consequently
not for you at all, but for a book."
Namely, for this one.
By way of showing my principal what I had done in education, I said as
follows: "The Superintendent in Upper Scheerau has a setter named
_Hetz_, which he would not give for a menagerie of lap-dogs. Now, one
would think that, as the man has church-children, children of his own
and wines and East India fowls enough, he would be content; but no:
Hetz does not allow it. For so soon as the soup smokes on the table,
Hetz begins cruising round the table, jumps up,--his snout then lies on
a water-level with the leg of venison--and pecks and pokes so with his
nose at every knee, particularly at the official, that the man, for his
part, gobbles away as in a purgatory and frequently does not know
whether he is eating sugar or salt. It did not relieve him at all that
he often himself barked at the dog; but at the next meal, from
forgetfulness or fury, he hit the pest with a bone which he flung at
him. This single bone spoiled the whole dog. For the shepherd of souls,
I fear, there is no longer any help, till Hetz, who will not change
himself, in some way goes out of the world. Me, on the contrary, Hetz
always treats with reason and forbearance. Why? So long as I ate at
that table I never gave Hetz a morsel, in a single instance. With
Hetzes and humans firmness is omnipotent. Whoso cannot educate a dog,
Mr. Captain, neither can he educate a child. I would try tutors who
would eat my bread, by no other touchstone than this: that they should
tame for me squirrels and mice; whoever understood this best should be
admitted, _e. g_., Wildau, for his bee-taming." But my gracious
godfather never laughed heartily at my jests or Fenk's; on the other
hand at one of Hoppedizel's he would laugh immoderately, and yet he
loves both of us better.
When I shall have rescued in an extra sheet two more educational
idiosyncrasies--one of which is that I exercised the wit of my pupil as
strongly as his understanding; the second, that I went over with him
only authors from the ages of the baser metals;--then we will go on
again with his life.