THE GOLDEN MEAN.
It is a large subject that we have to treat;--that of household
education; for the main part of every process of education is carried on
at home, except in the instance of boarding-schools, where a few years
are spent by a small number of the youth of our country. The queen was
brought up under a method of household education; and so was, no doubt,
the last pauper who went to his grave in a workhouse coffin. Elizabeth
Fry was brought up at home; so was the most ignorant and brutish convict
that was blessed by the saving light of her pitying eye. Sir Isaac
Newton, to whom the starry heavens were as a home-field for intellectual
exercises, was reared at home; and so were the poor children in the
Durham coal-pits in our own time, who never heard of God, and indeed
could not tell the names of their own fathers and mothers. If thus, the
loftiest and the lowliest, the purest and the most criminal, the wisest
and the most ignorant, are comprehended under the process of household
education, what a wide and serious subject it is that we have to
consider!
The royal child must, of course, be trained wholly at home; that is,
little princes and princesses cannot be sent to school. But, while
reared in the house with their parents, the influences they are under
scarcely agree with our ideas of home. The royal infant does not receive
its food from the bosom first, or afterwards from the hands of its
mother. She does not wash and dress it; and those sweet seasons are lost
which in humbler homes are so rich in caresses and play, so fruitful in
endearing influences both to mother and child. It is a thing to be
remarked and praised by a whole court, if not a whole kingdom, if a
royal mother is seen with her child in her arms; while the cottager's
child is blessed with countless embraces between morning and night, and
sleeps on its mother's arm or within reach of her eye and voice. The
best trained royal child is disciplined to command of temper and
manners; made to do little services for people about him, and sedulously
taught that a child should be humble and docile. But the young creature
is all the while taught stronger lessons by circumstances than can ever
come through human lips. He sees that a number of grown persons about
him are almost wholly occupied with him, and that it is their business
in life to induce him to command his temper and manners. He feels that
when he is bid to fetch and carry, or to do any other little service, it
is not because such service is wanted, but for the sake of the training
to himself. He is aware that all that concerns him every day is a matter
of arrangement, and not of necessity; and a want of earnestness and of
steady purpose is an inevitable consequence. This want of natural
stimulus goes into his studies. I believe no solitary child gets on well
with book-learning as a part of the business of every day. The best
tutors, the best books, the quietest school-room, will not avail, if the
child's mind be not stirred and interested by something more congenial
than the grammar and sums and maps he has to study. And every royal
child is solitary, however many brothers and sisters he may have older
and younger than himself. He has his own servants, his own tutor, his
own separate place and people, so that he can never be jostled among
other children, or lead the true life of childhood. And so proceeds the
education of life for him. He can never live amidst a large class of
equals, with whom he can measure his powers, and from among whom he may
select congenial friends. He passes his life in the presence of
servants, has no occupations and no objects actually appointed to him,
unless his state be that of sovereignty, in which case his position is
more unfavourable still. He dies at last in the midst of that habitual
solitude which disables him from conceiving, even at such a moment, of
the state in which "rich and poor lie down together." Such a being may,
if the utmost has been done for him, be decent in his habits, amiable in
temper and manners, innocent in his pursuits, and religious in his
feelings; but it is inconceivable that he can ever approach to our idea
of a perfect man, with an intellect fully exercised, affections
thoroughly disciplined, and every faculty educated by those influences
which arise only from equal intercourse with men at large.
The home education of the pauper child is no better, though there are
few who would venture to say how much worse it is. A pauper child must
(I think we may say) be unfortunate in its parentage, in one way or
another. If it knows its parents, they must probably be either sickly,
or foolish, or idle, or dissolute; or they would not be in a state of
_permanent_ pauperism. The infant is reared (if not in the workhouse) in
some unwholesome room or cellar, amidst damp and dirt, and the noises
and sights of vice or folly. He is badly nursed and fed, and grows up
feeble, or in a state of bodily uneasiness which worries his temper, and
makes his passions excitable. He is not soothed by the constant
tenderness of a decent mother, who feels it a great duty to make him as
good and happy as she can, and contrives to find time and thought for
that object. He tumbles in the dust of the road or the mud of the
gutter, snatches food wherever he can get it, quarrels with anybody who
thwarts him if he be a bold boy, and sneaks and lies if he be naturally
a coward. He indulges every appetite, as a matter of course, as it
arises; for he has no idea that he should not. He hates everybody who
interferes with this license, and has the best liking for those who use
the same license with himself. He knows nothing of any place or people
but those he sees, and never dreams of any world beyond that of his own
eyes. He does not know what society is, or law, or duty: and therefore,
when he injures society, and comes under the inflictions of the law for
gross violations of duty, he understands no more of what is done to him
than if he was carried through certain ceremonies conducted in an
unknown tongue. He has some dim notion of glory in dying boldly before
the eyes of the crowd; so he goes to the gallows in a mocking mood, as
ignorant of the true import of life and human faculties as the day he
was born. Or, if not laid hold of by the law, he goes on towards his
grave brawling and drinking, or half asleep in mind, and inert or
diseased in body, till at last he dies as the beast dies.
Here are the two extremes. The condition about half way between them
appears to me to be the most favourable, on the whole, for making the
most of a human being, and best fulfilling the purposes of his life.
There are stations above and below highly favourable to the attainment
of excellence; but, taking in all considerations, I think the position
of the well-conditioned artisan the most favourable that society
affords, at least, in our own day.
There is much good in enlarged book-learning; in what is commonly called
a liberal education. If united with hard and imperative labour--labour
at once of head and hands--it will help to make a nobler man than can be
made without it: but a liberal education, enlarged book-learning,
ordinarily leads to only head work, without that labour of the hands
which is the way to much wisdom. The benefits too are much confined to
the individual, so that the children of the wisest statesman, or
physician, or lawyer are only accidentally, if at all, the better for
his advantages; while the best circumstances in the lot of the
well-conditioned artisan are the inheritance and the privilege of his
children.
And again, the labourer may be so placed, in regard to employment,
marriage, and abode, as that he may, possessing an awakened mind, be for
ever learning great and interesting things from the book of Nature and
of Scripture, while he has comfort in his home, and some leisure for
training his children to his own work, and whatever else may turn up, so
that they may grow up intelligent, dutiful, affectionate, and able
continually to improve. The surgeon, the manufacturer, and the
shop-keeper on the one hand, and the street porter, the operative, and
the labourer on the other, may well work out the true purposes of life;
but the condition which appears to me to be the meeting point of the
greatest number of good influences is that of the best order of
artisans.
That condition affords the meeting point of book-knowledge, and that
which is derived from personal experience. Every day's labour of hand
and eye is a page opened in the best of books--the universe. When duly
done, this lesson leaves time for the other method of instruction, by
books. During the day hours, the earnest pupil learns of Nature by the
lessons she gives in the melting fire, the rushing water, the unseen
wind, the plastic metal or clay, the variegated wood or marble, the
delicate cotton, silk, or wool; and at evening he learns of men--of the
wise and genial men who have delivered the best parts of their minds in
books, and made of them a sort of ethereal vehicle, in which they can
come at a call to visit any secret mind which desires communion with
them. And this privilege of double instruction is one which extends to
the whole household of the chief pupil. The children of the artisan are
happily appointed, without room for doubt, to toil like their father;
and there is every probability that they will share his opportunity and
his respect for book-knowledge. At the outset of life, they are tended
by their mother, owing directly to her their food and clothes, their
lullaby and their incitement to play. During the day, they are under
her eye; and in the evening, they sit on their father's knee, and get
knowledge or fun from him. In their busy home, all the help is needed
that every one can give; so the real business of life begins early, and
with it the most natural and best discipline. The children learn that it
is an honour to be useful, and a comfort and blessing to be neat and
industrious. So much more energy is naturally put into what must be done
than into what it is merely expedient should be done, that the children
are likely to exert their once-roused faculties to much better purpose
than if their business was appointed to them for their own educational
benefit. The little girl who tends the baby, or helps granny, or makes
father's shirt, or learns to cook the dinner, is likely to put more mind
into her work than if she were set to mark a sampler or make a doll's
frock for the sake of learning to sew. And so with the boy who carries
the coals for his mother, or helps his father in the workshop: he will
become manly earlier and more naturally than the highborn child who sees
no higher sanction for his occupations than the authority of his
parents. And how dearly prized are the opportunities for book-study
which can be secured! The children see what a privilege and recreation
reading is to their father; and they grow up with a reverence and love
for that great resource. The hope and expectation carry them through
the tedious work of the alphabet and pothooks. And as they grow up, they
are admitted to the magnificent privilege of fireside intercourse with
the holy Milton, and the glorious Shakspeare, and many a sage whose best
thoughts may become their ideas of every day. They thus obtain that
activity and enlargement of mind which render all employments and all
events educational. The powers, once roused and set to work, find
occupation and material in every event of life. Everything serves--the
daily handicraft, intercourse with the neighbours, rumours from the
world without, homely duty, books, worship, the face of the country, or
the action of the town. All these incitements, all this material, are
offered to the thoughtful artisan more fully and impartially than to
such below and above him as are hedged in by ignorance or by
aristocratic seclusion: and therein is his condition better than theirs.
After having come to this conclusion, it is no small satisfaction to
remember that the most favoured classes are the most numerous. So great
a multitude is included in the middle classes, compared with the
highborn and the degraded, that if they who have the best chance for
wisdom will but use their privilege, the highest hopes for society are
the most reasonable.