united by only one or two sympathies, with many differences. Their first
wisdom would be to find out each other’s nature, and accommodate to it
as a fixed fact; instead of which, how many spend their lives in a
blind fight with an opposite nature, as good as their own in its way,
but not capable of meeting their requirements!
A woman trained in an exact, thriving, business family, where her father
and brothers bore everything along with true worldly skill and energy,
falls in love with a literary man, who knows nothing of affairs, whose
life is in his library and his pen. Shall she vex and torment herself
and him because he is not a business man? Shall she constantly hold up
to him the example of her father and brothers, and how they would manage
in this and that case? or shall she say cheerily and once for all to
herself,--“My husband has no talent for business; that is not his forte;
but then he has talents far more interesting: I cannot have everything;
let him go on undisturbed, and do what he can do well, and let me try to
make up for what he cannot do; and if there be disabilities come on us
in consequence of what we neither of us can do, let us both take them
cheerfully”?
In the same manner a man takes out of the bosom of an adoring family one
of those delicate, petted singing-birds that seem to be created simply
to adorn life and make it charming. Is it fair, after he has got her, to
compare her housekeeping, and her efficiency and capability in the
material part of life, with those of his mother and sisters, who are
strong-limbed, practical women, that have never thought about anything
but housekeeping from their cradle? Shall he all the while vex himself
and her with the remembrance of how his mother used to get up at five
o’clock and arrange all the business of the day,--how she kept all the
accounts,--how she saw to everything and settled everything,--how there
never were breakdowns or irregularities in her system?
This would be unfair. If a man wanted such a housekeeper, why did he not
get one? There were plenty of single women, who understood washing,
ironing, clear-starching, cooking, and general housekeeping, better than
the little canary-bird which he fell in love with, and wanted for her
plumage and her song, for her merry tricks, for her bright eyes and
pretty ways. Now he has got his bird, let him keep it as something fine
and precious, to be cared for and watched over, and treated according to
the laws of its frail and delicate nature; and so treating it, he may
many years keep the charms which first won his heart. He may find, too,
if he watches and is careful, that a humming-bird can, in its own small,
dainty way, build a nest as efficiently as a turkey-gobbler, and hatch
her eggs and bring up her young in humming-bird fashion; but to do it,
she must be left unfrightened and undisturbed.
But the evils of domestic intolerance increase with the birth of
children. As parents come together out of different families with
ill-assorted peculiarities, so children are born to them with natures
differing from their own and from each other.
The parents seize on their first new child as a piece of special
property which they are forthwith to turn to their own account. The poor
little waif, just drifted on the shores of Time, has perhaps folded up
in it a character as positive as that of either parent; but, for all
that, its future course is marked out for it, all arranged and
predetermined.
John has a perfect mania for literary distinction. His own education was
somewhat imperfect, but he is determined his children shall be
prodigies. His first-born turns out a girl, who is to write like Madame
de Staël,--to be an able, accomplished woman. He bores her with
literature from her earliest years, reads extracts from Milton to her
when she is only eight years old, and is secretly longing to be playing
with her doll’s wardrobe. He multiplies governesses, spares no expense,
and when, after all, his daughter turns out to be only a very pretty,
sensible, domestic girl, fond of cross-stitching embroidery, and with a
more decided vocation for sponge-cake and pickles than for poetry and
composition, he is disappointed and treats her coldly; and she is
unhappy and feels that she has vexed her parents, because she cannot be
what Nature never meant her to be. If John had taken meekly the present
that Mother Nature gave him, and humbly set himself to inquire what it
was and what it was good for, he might have had years of happiness with
a modest, amiable, and domestic daughter, to whom had been given the
instinct to study household good.
But, again, a bustling, pickling, preserving, stocking-knitting,
universal-housekeeping woman has a daughter who dreams over her
knitting-work and hides a book under her sampler,--whose thoughts are
straying in Greece, Rome, Germany,--who is reading, studying, thinking,
writing, without knowing why; and the mother sets herself to fight this
nature, and to make the dreamy scholar into a driving, thorough-going,
exact woman-of-business. How many tears are shed, how much temper
wasted, how much time lost, in such encounters!
Each of these natures, under judicious training, might be made to
complete itself by cultivation of that which it lacked. The born
housekeeper can never be made a genius, but she may add to her household
virtues some reasonable share of literary culture and appreciation,--and
the born scholar may learn to come down out of her clouds, and see
enough of this earth to walk its practical ways without stumbling; but
this must be done by tolerance of their nature,--by giving it play and
room,--first recognizing its existence and its rights, and then seeking
to add to it the properties it wants.
A clever Yankee housekeeper, fruitful of resources, can work with any
tools or with no tools at all. If she absolutely cannot get a
tack-hammer with a claw on one end, she can take up carpet-nails with an
iron spoon, and drive them down with a flat-iron; and she has sense
enough not to scold, though she does her work with them at considerable
disadvantage. She knows that she is working with tools made for another
purpose, and never thinks of being angry at their unhandiness. She might
have equal patience with a daughter unhandy in physical things, but
acute and skilful in mental ones, if she once had the idea suggested to
her.
An ambitious man has a son whom he destines to a learned profession. He
is to be the Daniel Webster of the family. The boy has a robust,
muscular frame, great physical vigor and enterprise, a brain bright and
active in all that may be acquired through the bodily senses, but which
is dull and confused and wandering when put to abstract book-knowledge.
He knows every ship at the wharf, her build, tonnage, and sailing
qualities; he knows every railroad-engine, its power, speed, and hours
of coming and going; he is always busy, sawing, hammering, planing,
digging, driving, making bargains, with his head full of plans, all
relating to something outward and physical. In all these matters his
mind works strongly, his ideas are clear, his observation acute, his
conversation sensible and worth listening to. But as to the distinction
between common nouns and proper nouns, between the subject and the
predicate of a sentence, between the relative pronoun and the
demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the
preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of
abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth
is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible
studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual
failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to
make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to till
the soil or manage the material forces of the world. He might be a
farmer, an engineer, a pioneer of a new settlement, a sailor, a soldier,
a thriving man of business; but he grows up feeling that his nature is a
crime, and that he is good for nothing, because he is not good for what
he had been blindly predestined to before he was born.
Another boy is a born mechanic; he understands machinery at a glance; he
is all the while pondering and studying and experimenting. But his
wheels and his axles and his pulleys are all swept away, as so much
irrelevant lumber; he is doomed to go into the Latin School, and spend
three or four years in trying to learn what he never can learn
well,--disheartened by always being at the tail of his class, and seeing
many a boy inferior to himself in general culture who is rising to
brilliant distinction simply because he can remember those hopeless,
bewildering Greek quantities and accents which he is constantly
forgetting,--as, for example, how properispomena become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, and proparoxytones become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, while paroxytones with a short penult remain
paroxytones. Each of this class of rules, however, having about sixteen
exceptions, which hold good except in three or four other exceptional
cases under them, the labyrinth becomes delightfully wilder and wilder;
and the crowning beauty of the whole is, that, when the bewildered boy
has swallowed the whole,--tail, scales, fins, and bones,--he then is
allowed to read the classics in peace, without the slightest occasion to
refer to them again during his college course.
The great trouble with the so-called classical course of education is,
that it is made strictly for but one class of minds, which it drills in
respects for which they have by nature an aptitude, and to which it
presents scarcely enough of difficulty to make it a mental discipline,
while to another and equally valuable class of minds it presents
difficulties so great as actually to crush and discourage. There are, we
will venture to say, in every ten boys in Boston, four, and those not
the dullest or poorest in quality, who could never go through the
discipline of the Boston Latin School without such a strain on the brain
and nervous system as would leave them no power for anything else.
A bright, intelligent boy, whose talents lay in the line of natural
philosophy and mechanics, passed with brilliant success through the
Boston English High School. He won the first medals, and felt all that
pride and enthusiasm which belong to a successful student. He entered
the Latin Classical School as the next step on his way to a collegiate
education. With a large philosophic and reasoning brain, he had a very
poor verbal and textual memory; and here he began to see himself
distanced by boys who had hitherto looked up to him. They could rattle
off catalogues of names; they could do so all the better from the habit
of not thinking of what they studied. They could commit the Latin
Grammar, coarse print and fine, and run through the interminable mazes
of Greek accents and Greek inflections. This boy of large mind and brain
found himself always behindhand, and became, in time, utterly
discouraged; no amount of study could place him on an equality with his
former inferiors. His health failed, and he dropped from school. Many a
fine fellow has been lost to himself, and lost to an educated life, by
just such a failure. The collegiate system is like a great coal-screen:
every piece not of a certain size must fall through. This may do well
enough for screening coal; but what if it were used indiscriminately for
a mixture of coal and diamonds?
“Poor boy!” said Ole Bull, compassionately, when one sought to push a
schoolboy from the steps of an omnibus, where he was getting a
surreptitious ride. “Poor boy! let him stay. Who knows his trials?
Perhaps he studies Latin.”
The witty Heinrich Heine says, in bitter remembrance of his early
sufferings,--“The Romans would never have conquered the world, if they
had had to learn their own language. They had leisure, because they were
born with the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives in _im_.”
Now we are not among those who decry the Greek and Latin classics. We
think it a glorious privilege to read both those grand old tongues, and
that an intelligent, cultivated man who is shut out from the converse of
the splendid minds of those olden times loses a part of his birthright;
and therefore it is that we mourn that but one dry, hard, technical
path, one sharp, straight, narrow way, is allowed into so goodly a land
of knowledge. We think there is no need that the study of Greek and
Latin should be made such a horror. There is many a man without a verbal
memory, who could neither recite in order the paradigms of the Greek
verbs, nor repeat the lists of nouns that form their accusative in one
termination or another, who, nevertheless, by the exercise of his
faculties of comparison and reasoning, could learn to read the Greek and
Latin classics so as to take their sense and enjoy their spirit; and
that is all that is worth caring for. We have known one young scholar,
who could not by any possibility repeat the lists of exceptions to the
rules in the Latin Grammar, who yet delightedly filled his private
note-book with quotations from the “Æneid,” and was making extracts of
literary gems from his Greek Reader, at the same time that he was every
day “screwed” by his tutor upon some technical point of the language.
Is there not many a master of English, many a writer and orator, who
could not repeat from memory the list of nouns ending in _y_ that form
their plural in _ies_, with the exceptions under it? How many of us
could do this? Would it help a good writer and fluent speaker to know
the whole of Murray’s Grammar by heart, or does real knowledge of a
language ever come in this way?
At present the rich stores of ancient literature are kept like the
savory stew which poor Dominie Sampson heard simmering in the witch’s
kettle. One may have much appetite, but there is but one way of getting
it. The Meg Merrilies of our educational system, with her harsh voice,
and her “Gape, sinner, and swallow,” is the only introduction,--and so,
many a one turns and runs frightened from the feast.
This intolerant mode of teaching the classical languages is peculiar to
them alone. Multitudes of girls and boys are learning to read and to
speak German, French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of
expatiating in the literature of a new language, purely because of a
simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode of teaching these languages.
Intolerance in the established system of education works misery in
families, because family pride decrees that every boy of good status in
society, will he, nill he, shall go through college, or he almost
forfeits his position as a gentleman.
“Not go to Cambridge!” says Scholasticus to his first-born. “Why, I went
there,--and my father, and his father, and his father before him. Look
at the Cambridge Catalogue and you will see the names of our family ever
since the College was founded!”
“But I can’t learn Latin and Greek,” says young Scholasticus. “I can’t
remember all those rules and exceptions. I’ve tried, and I can’t. If you
could only know how my head feels when I try! And I won’t be at the foot
of the class all the time, if I have to get my living by digging.”
Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on at the point of the bayonet to a kind
of knowledge in which he has no interest, communicated in a way that
requires faculties which Nature has not given him,--what occurs?
He goes through his course, either shamming, _shirking_, _ponying_, all
the while consciously discredited and dishonored,--or else, putting
forth an effort that is a draft on all his nervous energy, he makes
merely a decent scholar, and loses his health for life.
Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical
education,--if it were admitted that the great object is to read and
enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few
things absolutely essential to this result,--if the tortoise were
allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to
swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon,--all might in
their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and
its coolness.
“But,” say the advocates of the present system, “it is good mental
discipline.”
I doubt it. It is mere waste of time.
When a boy has learned that in the genitive plural of the first
declension of Greek nouns the final syllable is circumflexed, but to
this there are the following exceptions: 1. That feminine adjectives
and participles in-ος,-η,-ον are accented like the genitive masculine,
but other feminine adjectives and participles are perispomena in the
genitive plural; 2. That the substantives _chrestes_, _aphue_,
_etesiai_, and _chlounes_ in the genitive plural remain paroxytones,
(Kühner’s _Elementary Greek Grammar_, page 22,)--I say, when a boy has
learned this and twenty other things just like it, his mind has not been
one whit more disciplined than if he had learned the list of the old
thirteen States, the number and names of the newly adopted ones, the
times of their adoption, and the population, commerce, mineral and
agricultural wealth of each. These, too, are merely exercises of memory,
but they are exercises in what is of some interest and some use.
The particulars above cited are of so little use in understanding the
Greek classics that I will venture to say that there are intelligent
English scholars, who have never read anything but Bohn’s translations,
who have more genuine knowledge of the spirit of the Greek mind, and the
peculiar idioms of the language, and more enthusiasm for it, than many a
poor fellow who has stumbled blindly through the originals with the
bayonet of the tutor at his heels, and his eyes and ears full of the
Scotch snuff of the Greek Grammar.
What then? Shall we not learn these ancient tongues? By all means. “So
many times as I learn a language, so many times I become a man,” said
Charles V.; and he said rightly. Latin and Greek are foully belied by
the prejudices created by this technical, pedantic mode of teaching
them, which makes one ragged, prickly bundle of all the dry facts of the
language, and insists upon it that the boy shall not see one glimpse of
its beauty, glory, or interest, till he has swallowed and digested the
whole mass. Many die in this wilderness with their shoes worn out before
reaching the Promised Land of Plato and the Tragedians.
“But,” say our college authorities, “look at England. An English
schoolboy learns three times the Latin and Greek that our boys learn,
and has them well drubbed in.”
And English boys have three times more beef and pudding in their
constitution than American boys have, and three times less of nerves.
The difference of nature must be considered here; and the constant
influence flowing from English schools and universities must be tempered
by considering who we are, what sort of boys we have to deal with, what
treatment they can bear, and what are the needs of our growing American
society.
The demands of actual life, the living, visible facts of practical
science, in so large and new a country as ours, require that the ideas
of the ancients should be given us in the shortest and most economical
way possible, and that scholastic technicalities should be reserved to
those whom Nature made with especial reference to their preservation.
On no subject is there more intolerant judgment, and more suffering from
such intolerance, than on the much mooted one of the education of
children.
Treatises on education require altogether too much of parents, and
impose burdens of responsibility on tender spirits which crush the life
and strength out of them. Parents have been talked to as if each child
came to them a soft, pulpy mass, which they were to pinch and pull and
pat and stroke into shape quite at their leisure,--and a good pattern
being placed before them, they were to proceed immediately to set up and
construct a good human being in conformity therewith.
It is strange that believers in the divine inspiration of the Bible
should have entertained this idea, overlooking the constant and
affecting declaration of the great Heavenly Father that _He_ has
nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against Him,
together with His constant appeals,--“What could have been done more to
my vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it
should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?” If even God,
wiser, better, purer, more loving, admits Himself baffled in this great
work, is it expedient to say to human beings that the forming power, the
deciding force, of a child’s character is in their hands?
Many a poor feeble woman’s health has been strained to breaking, and her
life darkened, by the laying on her shoulders of a burden of
responsibility that never ought to have been placed there; and many a
mother has been hindered from using such powers as God has given her,
because some preconceived mode of operation has been set up before her
which she could no more make effectual than David could wear the armor
of Saul.
A gentle, loving, fragile creature marries a strong-willed, energetic
man, and by the laws of natural descent has a boy given to her of twice
her amount of will and energy. She is just as helpless, in the mere
struggle of will and authority with such a child, as she would be in a
physical wrestle with a six-foot man.
What then? Has Nature left her helpless for her duties? Not if she
understands her nature, and acts in the line of it. She has no power of
command, but she has power of persuasion. She can neither bend nor break
the boy’s iron will, but she can melt it. She has tact to avoid the
conflict in which she would be worsted. She can charm, amuse, please,
and make willing; and her fine and subtile influences, weaving
themselves about him day after day, become more and more powerful. Let
her alone, and she will have her boy yet.
But now some bustling mother-in-law or other privileged expounder says
to her,--
“My dear, it’s your solemn duty to break that boy’s will. I broke my
boy’s will short off. Keep your whip in sight, meet him at every turn,
fight him whenever he crosses you, never let him get one victory, and
finally his will will be wholly subdued.”
Such advice is mischievous, because what it proposes is as utter an
impossibility to the woman’s nature as for a cow to scratch up worms for
her calf, or a hen to suckle her chickens.
There are men and women of strong, resolute will who are gifted with the
power of governing the wills of others. Such persons can govern in this
way,--and their government, being in the line of their nature, acting
strongly, consistently, naturally, makes everything move harmoniously.
Let them be content with their own success, but let them not set up as
general education-doctors, or apply their experience to all possible
cases.
Again, there are others, and among them some of the loveliest and purest
natures, who have no power of command. They have sufficient tenacity of
will as respects their own course, but have no compulsory power over
the wills of others. Many such women have been most successful mothers,
when they followed the line of their own natures, and did not undertake
what they never could do.
_Influence_ is a slower acting force than authority. It seems weaker,
but in the long run it often effects more. It always does better than
mere force and authority without its gentle modifying power.
She who obtains an absolute and perfect government over a child, so that
he obeys, certainly and almost mechanically produces effects which are
more appreciable in their immediate action on family life; her family
will be more orderly, her children in their childhood will do her more
credit.
But she who has consciously no power of this kind, whose children are
often turbulent and unmanageable, need not despair if she feel that
through affection, reason, and conscience, she still retains a strong
_influence_ over them. If she cannot govern her boy, she can do even a
better thing if she can inspire him with a purpose to _govern himself_;
for a boy taught to govern himself is a better achievement than a boy
merely governed.