I have often wished, Gentlemen, that some more winning name could
be found for the thing we call Education; and I have sometimes
thought wistfully that, had we made a better thing of it, we
should long ago have found a more amiable, a blither, name.
For after all it concerns the child; and is it quite an accident
that, weaning him away from lovely things that so lovelily call
themselves 'love,' 'home,' 'mother,' we can find no more alluring
titles for the streets into which we entrap him than 'Educational
Facilities,' 'Local Examinations,' 'Preceptors,' 'Pedagogues,'
'Professors,' 'Matriculations,' 'Certificates,' 'Diplomas,'
'Seminaries,' Elementary or Primary, and Secondary Codes,'
'Continuation Classes,' 'Reformatories,' 'Inspectors,' 'Local
Authorities,' 'Provided' and 'Non-Provided,' 'Denominational' and
'Undenominational,' and 'D.Litt.' and 'Mus. Bac.'? Expressive
terms, no doubt!--but I ask with the poet
Who can track
A Grace's naked foot amid them all?
Take even such words as should be perennially beautiful by
connotation-words such as 'Academy,' 'Museum.' Does the one (O,
"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy!") call up visions
of that green lawn by Cephissus, of its olives and plane trees
and the mirrored statues among which Plato walked and held
discourse with his few? Does the other as a rule invite to haunts
(O God! O Montreal!) where you can be secure of communion with
Apollo and the Nine? Answer if the word Academy does not first
call up to the mind some place where small boys are crammed, the
word Museum some place where bigger game are stuffed?
And yet 'academy,' 'museum,' even 'education' are sound words if
only we would make the things correspond with their meanings. The
meaning of 'education' is a leading out, a drawing-forth; not an
_imposition_ of something on somebody--a catechism or an uncle--
upon the child; but an eliciting of what is within him. Now, if
you followed my last lecture, we find that which is within him to
be no less, potentially, than the Kingdom of God.
I grant that this potentiality is, between the ages of four and
sixteen, not always, perhaps not often, evident. The boy--in
Bagehot's phrase 'the small apple-eating urchin whom we know'--
has this in common with the fruit for which he congenitally sins,
that his very virtues in immaturity are apt, setting the teeth on
edge, to be mistaken for vices. A writer, to whom I shall recur,
has said:
If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple
were to eat one in July, he would probably come to the
conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit,
`conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity,' fit only to be
consigned to perdition (on a dust heap or elsewhere). But if
the same man were to wait till October and then eat an apple
from the same tree, he would find that the sourness had
ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness
into firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the
palate, makes the apple 'keep' better than any other fruit;
the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities,
and so on....
In other words--trench, manure, hoe and water around your young
tree, and patiently allow the young fruit to develop of its own
juice from the root; your own task being, as the fruit forms, but
to bring in all you can of air and sunshine upon it. It must, as
every mother and nurse knows, be coaxed to realise itself, to
develop, to grow from its individual root. It may be coaxed and
trained. But the main secret lies in encouraging it to grow, and,
to that end, in pouring sunshine upon it and hoeing after each
visitation of tears parentally induced.
Every child wants to grow. Every child wants to learn. During his
first year or so of life he fights for bodily nutriment, almost
ferociously. From the age of two or thereabouts he valiantly
essays the conquest of articulate speech, using it first to
identify his father or his mother amid the common herd of
Gentiles; next, to demand a more liberal and varied dietary;
anon, as handmaid of his imperious will to learn. This desire,
still in the nursery, climbs--like dissolution in Wordsworth's
sonnet--from low to high: from a craving to discover
experimentally what the stomach will assimilate and what reject,
up to a kingly debonair interest in teleology. Our young
gentleman is perfectly at ease in Sion. He wants to know why
soldiers are (or were) red, and if they were born so; whence
bread and milk is derived, and would it be good manners to thank
the neat cow for both; why mamma married papa, and--that having
been explained and thoughtfully accepted as the best possible
arrangement--still thoughtfully, not in the least censoriously,
'why the All-Father has not married yet?' He falls asleep
weighing the eligibility of various spinsters, church-workers, in
the parish.
His brain teeming with questions, he asks them of impulse and
makes his discoveries with joy. He passes to a school, which is
supposed to exist for the purpose of answering these or cognate
questions even before he asks them: and behold, he is not happy!
Or, he is happy enough at play, or at doing in class the things
that should not be done in class: his master writes home that he
suffers in his school work 'from having always more animal
spirits than are required for his immediate purposes.' What is the
trouble? You cannot explain it by home-sickness: for it attacks
day boys alike with boarders. You cannot explain it by saying
that all true learning involves 'drudgery,' unless you make that
miserable word a mendicant and force it to beg the question.
'Drudgery' is _what you feel to be drudgery_--
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and th' action fine.
--and, anyhow, this child learned one language--English, a most
difficult one--eagerly. Of the nursery through which I passed
only one sister wept while learning to read, and that was over a
scholastic work entitled "Reading Without Tears."
Do you know a chapter in Mr William Canton's book "The Invisible
Playmate" in which, as Carlyle dealt in "Sartor Resartus" with an
imaginary treatise by an imaginary Herr Teufelsdröckh, as Matthew
Arnold in "Friendship's Garland" with the imaginary letters of an
imaginary Arminius (Germany in long-past happier days lent the
world these playful philosophical spirits), so the later author
invents an old village grandpapa, with the grandpapa-name of
Altegans and a prose-poem printed in scarecrow duodecimo on
paper-bag pages and entitled "Erster Schulgang," 'first
school-going,' or 'first day at school'?
The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as
it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace
in fact. All over the world--and all under it too, when their
time comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe
swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always
morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the
morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot---
shining companies and groups, couples and bright solitary
figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about
them.
He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely
moorlands ... he sees them on the hillsides ... in the woods, on
the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the
seacliffs and on the water-ribbed sands; trespassing on the
railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in the
ferry-boats; he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities,
in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is
known only as a strange tradition.
The morning-side of the planet is alive with them: one hears
their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents
sweep `eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the
moon' ... and as new nations with _their_ cities and villages,
their fields, woods, mountains and sea-shores, rise up into the
morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet
again fresh troops of these school-going children of the dawn.
What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of
childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on
moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be
daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and
bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful picture of all, he sees them
travelling schoolward by the late moonlight which now and again in
the winter months precedes the tardy dawn.
That vision strikes me as being poetically true as well as
delightful: by which I mean that it is not sentimental: we know
that it ought to be true, that in a world well-ordered according
to our best wishes for it, it would be _naturally_ true. It
expresses the natural love of Age, brooding on the natural eager
joy of children. But that natural eager joy is just what our
schools, in the matter of reading, conscientiously kill.
In this matter of reading-of children's reading--we stand, just
now, or halt just now, between two ways. The parent, I believe,
has decisively won back to the right one which good mothers never
quite forsook. There was an interval, lasting from the early
years of the last century until midway in Queen Victoria's reign
and a little beyond, when children were mainly brought up on the
assumption of natural vice. They might adore father and mother,
and yearn to be better friends with papa: but there was the old
Adam, a quickening evil spirit; there were his imps always in the
way, confound them! I myself lived, with excellent grandparents,
for several years on pretty close terms with Hell and an
all-seeing Eye; until I grew so utterly weary of both that I have
never since had the smallest use for either. Some of you may have
read, as a curious book, the agreeable history called "The
Fairchild Family," in which Mr Fairchild leads his naughty
children afield to a gallows by a cross-road and seating them
under the swinging corpse of a malefactor, deduces how easily
they may come to this if they go on as they have been going. The
authors of such monitory or cautionary tales understood but one
form of development, the development of Original Sin. You stole a
pin and proceeded, by fatal steps, to the penitentiary; you threw
a stick at a pheasant, turned poacher, shot a gamekeeper and
ended on the gallows. You were always Eric and it was always
Little by Little with you.... Stay! memory preserves one gem from
a Sunday school dialogue, one sharp-cut intaglio of childhood
springing fully armed from the head of Satan:
Q. Where hast thou been this Sabbath morning?
A. I have been coursing of the squirrel.
Q. Art not afraid so to desecrate the Lord's Day with idle
sport?
A. By no means: for I should tell you that I am an Atheist.
I forget what happened to that boy: but doubtless it was, as it
should have been, something drastic.
The spell of prohibition, of repression, lies so strong upon
these authors that when they try to break away from it, to appeal
to something better than fear in the child, and essay to amuse,
they become merely silly. For an example in verse:
If Human Beings only knew
What sorrows little birds go through,
I think that even boys
Would never think it sport or fun
To stand and fire a frightful gun
For nothing but the noise.
For another (instructional and quite a good _memoria technica_ so
far as it goes):
William and Mary came next to the throne:
When Mary died, there was William alone.
Now for a story of incident.--It comes from the book "Reading
Without Tears," that made my small sister weep. She did not weep
over the story, because she did not claim to be an angel.
Did you ever hear of the donkey that went into the sea with the
little cart?... A lady drove the cart down to the beach. She had
six children with her. Three little ones sat in the cart by her
side. Three bigger girls ran before the cart. When they came to
the beach the lady and the children got out.
Very good so far. It opens like the story of Nausicaa ["Odyssey,"
Book vi, lines 81-86].
The lady wished the donkey to bathe its legs in the sea, to make
it strong and clean. But the donkey did not like to go near the
sea. So the lady bound a brown shawl over its eyes, and she bade
the big girls lead it close to the waves. Suddenly a big wave
rushed to the land. The girls started back to avoid the wave, and
they let go the donkey's rein.
The donkey was alarmed by the noise the girls made, and it went
into the sea, not knowing where it was going because it was not
able to see. The girls ran screaming to the lady, crying out,
'The donkey is in the sea!'
There it was, going further and further into the sea, till the
cart was hidden by the billows. The donkey sank lower and lower
every moment, till no part of it was seen but the ears; for the
brown shawl was over its nose and mouth. Now the children began
to bawl and to bellow! But no one halloed so loud as the little
boy of four. His name was Merty. He feared that the donkey was
drowned....
Two fishermen were in a boat far away. They said 'We hear howls
and shrieks on the shore. Perhaps a boy or girl is drowning. Let
us go and save him: So they rowed hard, and they soon came to the
poor donkey, and saw its ears peeping out of the sea. The donkey
was just going to sink when they lifted it up by the jaws, and
seized the bridle and dragged it along. The children on the shore
shouted aloud for joy. The donkey with the cart came safe to
land. The poor creature was weak and dripping wet. The fishermen
unbound its eyes, and said to the lady, 'We cannot think how this
thing came to be over its eyes.' The lady said she wished she had
not bound up its eyes, and she gave the shillings in her purse to
the fishermen who had saved her donkey.
Now every child knows that a donkey may change into a Fairy
Prince: that is a truth of imagination. But to be polite and say
nothing of the lady, every child knows that so donkey would be
ass enough to behave as in this narrative. And the good parents
who, throughout the later 18th century and the 19th, inflicted
this stuff upon children, were sinning against the light.
Perrault's Fairy Tales, and Madame D'Aulnoy's were to their hand
in translations; "Le Cabinet des Fées", which includes these and
M. Galland's "Arabian Nights" and many another collection of
delectable stories, extends on my shelves to 41 volumes (the last
volume appeared during the fury of the French Revolution!). The
brothers Grimm published the first volume of their immortal tales
in 1812, the second in 1814. A capital selection from them,
charmingly rendered, was edited by our Edgar Taylor in 1823; and
drew from Sir Walter Scott a letter of which some sentences are
worth our pondering.
He writes:
There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales]
which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken
the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the
good-boy stories which have been in later years composed
for them. In the latter case their minds are, as it were, put
into the stocks ... and the moral always consists in good
moral conduct being crowned with temporal success. Truth
is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding
Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred
histories of Jemmy Goodchild.
Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel. She has been
ousted by completer, maybe far better, translations of the
Grimms' "Household Tales". But turning back, the other day, to
the old volume for the old sake's sake (as we say in the West) I
came on the Preface--no child troubles with a Preface--and on
these wise words:
Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we
might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy
and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated
by some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of
improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory.
And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my
discourse to-day. I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth's
Ode and its doctrine that 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy.'
It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of
the 17th century: and critics who trace back the Ode "Intimations
of Immortality" to Henry Vaughan's
Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy.
might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of that
century. Here is one from "Centuries of Meditations" by that poor
Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, whom I quoted to you the other
day:
Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the
womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the
best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the
Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His
special favour I remember them till now.... Certainly Adam
in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions
of the world, than I when I was a child.
And here is another from John Earle's Character of 'A Child' in
his "Microcosmography":
His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein
he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and
sighs to see what innocence he has out-liv'd. He is the
Christian's example, and the old man's relapse: the one
imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his
simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat,
he had got Eternity without a burthen, and exchang'd but one
Heaven for another.
Bethinking me again of 'the small apple-eating urchin whom we
know,' I suspect an amiable fallacy in all this: I doubt if when
he scales an apple-bearing tree which is neither his own nor his
papa's he does so under impulse of any conscious yearning back to
Hierusalem, his happy home,
Where trees for evermore bear fruit.
At any rate, I have an orchard, and he has put up many excuses,
but never yet that he was recollecting Sion.
Still the doctrine holds affinity with the belief which I firmly
hold and tried to explain to you with persuasion last term:
that, boy or man, you and I, the microcosms, do--sensibly,
half-sensibly, or insensibly--yearn, through what we feel to be
best in us, to 'join up' with the greater harmony; that by poetry
or religion or whatnot we have that within us which craves to be
drawn out, 'e-ducated,' and linked up.
Now the rule of the nursery in the last century rested on
Original Sin, and consequently and quite logically tended not to
educate, but to repress. There are no new fairy-tales of the days
when your grandmothers wore crinolines--I know, for I have
searched. Mothers and nurses taught the old ones; the Three Bears
still found, one after another, that 'somebody has been sleeping
in my bed'; Fatima continued to call 'Sister Anne, do you see
anyone coming?' the Wolf to show her teeth under her nightcap and
snarl out (O, great moment!) 'All the better to eat you with, my
dear.' But the Evangelicals held field. Those of our grandfathers
and grandmothers who understood joy and must have had fairies for
ministers--those of our grandmothers who played croquet through
hoop with a bell and practised Cupid's own sport archery--those
of our grandfathers who wore jolly peg-top trousers and Dundreary
whiskers, and built the Crystal Palace and drove to the Derby in
green-veiled top-hats with Dutch dolls stuck about the brim--_tot
circa unum caput tumultuantes deos_--and those splendid uncles
who used to descend on the old school in a shower of gold--
half-a-sovereign at the very least--all these should have trailed
fairies with them in a cloud. But in practice the evangelical
parent held the majority, put away all toys but Noah's Ark on
Sundays, and voted the fairies down.
I know not who converted the parents. It may have been that
benefactor of Europe, Hans Christian Andersen, born at Odensee in
Denmark in April 1805. He died, near Copenhagen, in 1875, having
by a few months outlived his 70th birthday. I like to think that
his genius, a continuing influence over a long generation, did
more than anything else to convert the parents. The schools,
always more royalist than the King, professionally bleak,
professionally dull, professionally repressive rather than
educative, held on to a tradition which, though it had to be on
the sly, every intelligent mother and nurse had done her best to
evade. The schools made a boy's life penitential on a system.
They discovered athletics, as a safety-valve for high spirits
they could not cope with, and promptly made that safety-valve
compulsory! They went on to make athletics a religion. Now
athletics are not properly a religious exercise, and their
meaning evaporates as soon as you enlist them in the service of
repression. They are being used to do the exact opposite of that
for which God meant them. Things are better now: but in those
times how many a boy, having long looked forward to it, rejoiced
in his last day at school?
I know surely enough what must be in your minds at this point: I
am running up my head hard against the doctrine of Original Sin,
against the doctrine that in dealing with a child you are dealing
with a 'fallen nature,' with a human soul 'conceived in sin,'
unregenerate except by repression; and therefore that repression
and more repression _must_ be the only logical way with your
Original Sinners.
Well, then, I am. I have loved children all my life; studied them
in the nursery, studied them for years--ten or twelve years
intimately--in elementary schools. I know for a surety, if I have
acquired any knowledge, that the child is a 'child of God' rather
than a 'Child of wrath'; and here before you I proclaim that to
connect in any child's mind the Book of Joshua with the Gospels,
to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind with the Father
of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, to confuse, as we do in any
school in this land between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty
tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true
God the Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse.
But let me get away to milder heresies. If you will concede for a
moment that the better way with a child is to draw out, to
_educate,_ rather than to repress, what is in him, let us observe
what he instinctively wants. Now first, of course, he wants to
eat and drink, and to run about. When he passes beyond these
merely animal desires to what we may call the instinct of growth
in his soul, how does he proceed? I think Mr Holmes, whom I have
already quoted, very fairly sets out these desires as any
grown-up person can perceive them. The child desires
(1) to talk and to listen;
(2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word);
(3) to draw, paint and model;
(4) to dance and sing;
(5) to know the why of things
(6) to construct things.
Now I shall have something to say by and by on the amazing
preponderance in this list of those instincts which Aristotle
would have called _mimetic._ This morning I take only the least
imitative of all, the desire to know the why of things.
Surely you know, taking only this, that the master-key admitting
a child to all, or almost all, palaces of knowledge is his ability
to _read._ When he has grasped that key of his mother-tongue he
can with perseverance unlock all doors to all the avenues of
knowledge. More--he has the passport to heavens unguessed.
You will perceive at once that what I mean here by 'reading' is
the capacity for silent reading, taking a book apart and
mastering it; and you will bear in mind the wonder that I
preached to you in a previous lecture--that great literature
never condescends, that what yonder boy in a corner reads of a
king is happening to _him._ Do you suppose that in an elementary
school one child in ten reads thus? Listen to a wise ex-inspector,
whose words I can corroborate of experience:
The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an
ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in
progress is that the children are not reading at all, in the
accepted sense of the word. They are not reading to
themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the
book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual nutriment that
it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up one by
one and reading aloud to their teacher.
Ah! but I have seen far worse than that. I have visited and
condemned rural schools where the practice was to stand a class
up--- say a class of thirty children--and make them read in
unison: which meant, of course, that the front row chanted out
the lesson while the back rows made inarticulate noises. I well
remember one such exhibition, in a remote country school on the
Cornish hills, and having my attention arrested midway by the
face of a girl in the third row. She was a strikingly beautiful
child, with that combination of bright auburn, almost flaming,
hair with dark eyebrows, dark eyelashes, dark eyes, which of
itself arrests your gaze, being so rare; and those eyes seemed to
challenge me half scornfully and ask, 'Are you really taken in by
all this?' Well, I soon stopped the performance and required each
child to read separately: whereupon it turned out that, in the
upper standards of this school of 70 or 80 children, one only--
this disdainful girl--could get through half a dozen easy
sentences with credit. She read well and intelligently, being
accustomed to read to herself, at home.
I daresay that this bad old method of block-reading is dead by
this time.
Reading aloud and _separately_ is excellent for several purposes.
It tests capacity: it teaches correct pronunciation by practice,
as well as the mastery of difficult words: it provides a good
teacher with frequent opportunities of helping the child to
understand what he reads.
But as his schooling proceeds he should be accustomed more and
more to read to himself: for that, I repeat, is the master-key.