this day and the faith of this assembly will declare that it is
possible to save the children of orphanage, intemperance, neglect, scorn
and ignorance, from many of the evils which surround them. Let it not be
assumed and believed that the task of training and saving girls is less
hopeful than similar labors in behalf of the other sex. It has been
found true in Europe, and it is a prevailing opinion in this country,
that, among adults, the reformation of females is more difficult than
the reformation of males. But an analysis of this fact, assuming it to
be true, will unfold qualities of female character that render it
peculiarly easy to shield and save girls who are exposed to a life of
crime; for, be it remembered, this institution deals with mere children,
who are exposed, but not yet lost. It differs, in this respect, from
most institutions, although many include this class with others. And it
may be well to remark, that every reformatory school in Europe, even
those altogether penal,--as Parkhurst in England, and Mettray in
France,--have had some measure of success. Eighty-nine per cent. of the
colons, or convicts, at Mettray, have become respectable and useful;
while, of the youth sent to the ordinary jails and prisons, seventy-five
per cent. are totally lost. It is not fair, therefore, to assume that
this attempt will fail. The degree of success will depend upon
circumstances and causes, to a great extent, within human control.
There are, however, three elements of success, so distinct that they may
well stand as the appropriate divisions of what remains for
consideration. They are the right action of the government; the faithful
conduct of superintendent, matrons, and assistants; the sympathy and aid
of the people of the state in matters which do not admit of legislative
interference.
The act of the Legislature, though voluminous in its details,
contemplates only this: A home for girls between seven and sixteen years
of age, who are found "in circumstances of want and suffering, or of
neglect, exposure, or abandonment, or of beggary." The first idea of
_home_ precludes the possibility of the inmates being sent here as a
punishment for crime; therefore they are neither adjudged nor actual
criminals, but persons exposed to a vicious life. Secondly, the idea of
home involves the necessity of reproducing the family relation, as
circumstances may permit. Hence, the members of this institution are to
be divided into families; and over each a matron will preside, who is to
be a kind, affectionate, discreet mother to the children.
And here, for once, in Massachusetts, a public institution has escaped
the tyranny of bricks and mortar; and we are permitted to indulge the
hope, that any future additions will tend to make this spot a
neighborhood of unostentatious cottages, quiet rural homes, rather than
the seat of a vast edifice, which may provoke the wonder of the
sight-seer, inflame local or state pride, but can never be an effectual,
economical agency in the work of reformation. Every public institution
has some great object. Architecture should bend itself to that object,
and become its servant; and it must ever be deemed a mistake, when
utility is sacrificed that art or fancy may have its way.
Reformation, if wrought by external influences, is the result of
personal kindness. Personal kindness can exist only where there is
intimate personal acquaintance; this acquaintance is impossible in an
institution of two, three, or five hundred inmates. But, in a family of
ten, twenty, or thirty, this knowledge will exist, and this kindness
abound. Warm personal attachments will grow up in the family, and these
attachments are likely to become safeguards of virtue.
Nor let the objection prevail that the expense is to be increased. It is
not the purpose to set up an establishment and maintain it for a
specific sum of money, but to provide thorough mental and moral training
for the inmates. Make the work efficient, though it be limited to a
small number, rather than inaugurate a magnificent failure.
The state has wisely provided that the "trustees shall cause the girls
under their charge to be instructed in piety and morality, and in such
branches of useful knowledge as shall be adapted to their age and
capacity; they shall also be instructed in some regular course of labor,
either mechanical, manufacturing, or horticultural, or a combination of
these, and especially in such domestic and household labor and duties as
shall be best suited to their age and strength, disposition and
capacity; also in such other arts, trades, and employments, as may seem
to the trustees best adapted to secure their reformation, amendment, and
future benefit."
It is sometimes the bane of the poor that they do not work, and it is
often equally the bane of the rich that they have nothing to do. The
idle, both rich and poor, carry a weight of reproach that not all ought
to bear. The disposition and the ability to labor are both the result of
education; and why should the uneducated be better able to labor than to
read Greek and Latin? Surely only that there are more teachers in one
department than in the others; but a good teacher of labor may be as
uncommon as a good teacher of Latin or Greek. There is a false, vicious,
unmanly pride, which leads our youth of both sexes to shun labor; and
it is the business of the true teacher to extirpate this growth of a
diseased civilization. And we could have no faith in this school, if it
were not a school of industry as well as of morality,--a school in which
the divine law of labor is to be observed equally with the laws of men.
Industry is near to all the virtues. In this era every branch of labor
is an art, and sometimes it is necessary for the laborer to be both an
artist and a scientific person. How great, then, the misfortune of
those, whether rich or poor, who are uninstructed in the business of
life! We should hardly know what judgment to pass upon a man of wealth
who should entirely neglect the education of his children in schools;
but the common indifference to industrial learning is not less
reprehensible. Labor should be systematic; not constant, indeed, but
always to be reckoned as the great business of life, never to be
avoided, never to cease.
Labor gives us a better knowledge of the fulness, magnificence and
glory, of the divine blessing of creation. This lesson may be learned by
the farmer in the wonderful growth of vegetation; by the artist, in the
powers of invention and taste of the human mind and soul; by the man of
science, in the beauty of an insect or the order of a universe. The
vision of the idle is limited. The ability to see may be improved by
education as much as the ability to read, remember, or converse. With
many people, not seeing is a habit. Near-sighted persons are generally
those who declined to look at distant objects; and so nature, true to
the most perfect rules of economy, refused to keep in order faculties
that were entirely neglected. The laborer's recompense is not money, nor
the accumulation of worldly goods chiefly; but it is in his increased
ability to observe, appreciate, and enjoy the world, with its beauties
and blessings. Nor is labor, the penalty for sin, a punishment merely,
but a divine means of reformation. It is, therefore, a moral discipline
that all should submit to; and especially is it a means by which the
youth here are to be prepared for the duties of life. But industry is
not only near to all the virtues; it is itself a virtue, as idleness is
a vice. The word _labor_ is, of course, used in the broadest
signification. Labor is any honest employment, or use of the head or
hands, which brings good to ourselves, and consequently, though
indirectly, brings good to our fellow-men.
The state has now furnished a home, reproduced, as far as practicable,
the family relation, and provided for a class of neglected and exposed
girls the means of mental, industrial, moral, and religious culture. The
plan appears well; but its practical value depends upon the fidelity of
its execution by the superintendent, matrons and assistants. I venture
to predict in advance, that the degree of success is mainly within their
control. This is a school, they are the teachers; and they must bend to
the rule which all true teachers willingly accept.
The teacher must be what he would have his pupils become. This was the
standard of the great Teacher; this is the aim of all who desire to make
education a matter of reality and life, and not merely a knowledge of
signs and forms. Here will be needed a spirit and principle of devotion
which will be fruitful in humility, patience, earnestness, energy, good
words and works for all. Here must be strictness, possibly sternness of
discipline; but this is not incompatible with the qualities mentioned.
It is a principle at Mettray to combine unbounded personal kindness with
a rigid exclusion of personal indulgence.
This principle produces good results that are two-fold in their
influence. First, personal kindness in the teacher induces a reciprocal
quality in the pupils. The habit of personal kindness, proceeding from
right feelings, is a potent element of good in the family, the school,
and the prison. Indeed, it is an element of good citizenship; and no one
destitute of this quality ought to be intrusted with the education of
children, or the punishment and reformation of criminals.
Secondly, the rigid exclusion of personal indulgence trains the inmates
in the virtue of self-control. And may it not be forgotten that all
apparent reformation must be hedged by this cardinal virtue of practical
life! Otherwise the best-formed expectations will fail; the highest
hopes will be disappointed; and the life of these teachers, and the
promise of the youth who may be gathered here, will be like the sun and
the winds upon the desert, which bring neither refreshing showers nor
fruitful harvests. Every form of labor requires faith. This labor
requires faith in yourselves, and faith in others;--faith in yourselves,
as teachers here, based upon your own knowledge of what you are and are
to do; and faith in others upon the divine declaration that God breathed
into man the breath of life, and he became a living soul,--not merely as
the previous creations, possessed of animal life; but as a sentient,
intellectual, and moral being, capable of a progressive, immortal
existence.
"'Tis nature's law
That none, the meanest of created things,
* * * * *
Should exist
Divorced from good,--a spirit and pulse of good,
A life and soul, to every mode of being
Inseparably linked.
See, then, your only conflict is with men;
And your sole strife is to defend and teach
The unillumined, who, without such care,
Must dwindle."
And always, as in the beginning, the reliance of this school is upon the
people of the commonwealth, whose voice has spoken into existence
another instrumentality to give eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, a
heart for the work of this life, and a hope for an hereafter, to those
who from neglect and vicious example would soon pass the period of
reformation. But may the people always bear in mind the indisputable
truth, that schools for the criminal and the exposed yield not their
perfect fruits in a day or a year! They must, if they will know whether
the seed here planted produces a harvest, wait for the birth and growth
of one generation, the decay and death of another. Yet these years of
delay will not be years of uncertainty. The public faith will be
strengthened continually by cases of reformation, usefulness, and
virtue. But, whether these cases be few or many, let no one despond. The
career of the criminal is, often in money and always in influence, the
heaviest burden which an individual can impose upon society.
This is a school for girls; and we may properly appeal to the women of
Massachusetts to do their duty to this institution, and to the cause it
represents. We can already see the second stage in the existence of many
of those who are to be sent here; and there is good reason to fear that
the relation of mistress and servant among us is in some degree
destitute of those moral qualities that make the house a home for all
who dwell beneath its roof. But, whether this fear be the voice of truth
or the suggestion of prejudice, that woman shall not be held blameless,
who, under the influence of indolence, pride, fashion, or avarice, shall
neglect, abuse, or oppress, the humblest of her sex who goes forth from
these walls into the broad and dangerous path of life. But this day
shall not leave the impression that they who are most interested in the
elevation and refinement of female character are indifferent to the
means employed, and the results which are to wait on them.
The greatest delineator of human character in this age says, as the
images of neglected children pass before his vision:
"There is not one of them--not one--but sows a harvest mankind _must_
reap. From every seed of evil in this boy a field of ruin is grown that
shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in
the world, until regions are over-spread with wickedness enough to raise
the waters of another deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a city's
streets would be less guilty in its daily toleration than one such
spectacle as this. There is not a father, by whose side, in his daily or
nightly walk, these creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the
ranks of loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the
state of childhood, but shall be responsible, in his or her degree, for
this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth on which it
would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would
not deny; there is no people on earth that it would not put to shame."
This institution, then, in the true relation of things, is not the glory
of the state, but its shame. It speaks of families, of schools, of the
church, of the state, not yet educated to the discharge of their
respective duties in the right way. But it is the glory of the state as
a visible effort to correct evils, atone for neglects, and compensate
for wrongs. It comes to do, in part at least, what the family, the
school, the press, the library, the Sabbath, have nest yet perfectly
accomplished. As these agencies partially failed, so will this; but, as
the law of progress exists for all, because perfection with us is
unattainable, we may reasonably have faith in human improvement, and
trust that the life of each succeeding generation shall unite, in
ever-increasing proportions, the innocence of childhood with the wisdom
of age.
ELEMENTARY TRAINING IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
[Extract from the Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Secretary of the
Massachusetts Board of Education.]
We are still sadly defective in methods of education. Until recently
teaching was almost an unknown art; and we are at present struggling
against ignorance without any well-defined plan, and attempting to
develop and build up the immortal character of children, without a
philosophical and generally accepted theory of the nature of the human
mind. There are complaints that the duties and exactions of the schools
injure the health and impair the constitutions of pupils; that the
progress in intellectual attainments is not always what it should be;
that the training given is sometimes determined by the wishes of
committees against the better judgment of competent teachers; that the
text-books are defective; that the studies in the common schools are too
numerous; that the elements are consequently neglected; and that, in
fine, too much thought is bestowed upon exhibitions and contests for
public prizes, to the injury of good learning, and of individual and
general character. For these complaints there is some foundation; but
care should be exercised lest incidental and necessary evils become, in
the public estimation, great wrongs, and exceptional cases the evidence
of general facts.
It is to some extent true that the duties and exactions of the schools
seriously test the health of pupils; but it is, as I believe, more
generally true that many pupils are physically unable to meet the
ordinary and proper duties of the school-room. School life, as usually
conducted, is physically injurious, and our best efforts thus far have
been limited to the dissemination of elementary knowledge of physiology
as a science, and to an acquaintance with a limited number of important
physiological facts. Yet even here little has been accomplished in
comparison with what may be done. In this department there is much
instruction given that has no practical value, and children are often
permitted to live in daily and uniform neglect of the most essential
truths of science and the facts of human experience. Neither physiology
nor hygiene can be of much value in the schools, as a study, unless
there is an application of what is taught. Great proficiency cannot be
made in these branches in the brief period of school life; but a
competent teacher may induce the pupils to put in practice the lessons
that are applicable to childhood and youth. If, however, as is sometimes
the case, pupils are undermining the physical constitution in their
efforts to know how they are made, the loss is, unquestionably, more
than the gain. Physical health and growth depend, first, upon
opportunity; and hence it happens that, where physical life is most
defective, there the greatest difficulties in the way of its improvement
are found. Boys born in the country, living upon farms, accustomed
continually to outdoor labors and sports, walking a mile or more every
day to school, have but little use, in their own persons, for the
science or facts of physiology; and it is a very rare thing, where such
conditions have existed, that any teacher is able to exact an amount of
intellectual service that proves in any perceptible degree injurious.
But these opportunities are not so generally enjoyed by girls, and the
mass of children in cities are wholly deprived of them. In the country,
and even in villages and towns of considerable size, there is no excuse,
better than ignorance or indifference, for the lack of judicious and
efficient physical training of children and youth of both sexes. But
ignorance and indifference are facts; and, while and where they exist,
they are prejudicial to the growth of mind and body. The age at which
children should be admitted to school has not been ascertained, nor can
a satisfactory rule upon this point ever be laid down. If children are
not in schools, they are yet subject to influences that are formative of
character. When proper government and methods of education exist at
home, the presence of the child in school at an early age is not
desirable. Even when education at home is not methodical, it may be
continued until the child is seven or even eight years of age, if it is
at once moral, intelligent, and controlling. It is not, however, wise to
expect a child who is infirm physically to perform the labors imposed by
the necessary and proper regulations of school. When children enjoy good
health, and are not blessed with suitable training at home, they may be
introduced to the school, at the age of five years, with positive
advantage to themselves and to society.
When the child is a member of the school, what shall be done with him?
He must first be taught to take an interest in the exercises by making
the exercises interesting to him. That the transition from home to the
school may be easy, he should first occupy himself with those topics and
studies that are presented to the eye and to the ear, and may be
mastered, so as to produce the sensation that follows achievement with
only a moderate use of the reasoning and reflective faculties. Among
these are reading, writing, music, and drawing. This is also the time
when object lessons may be given with great advantage. The forms and
names of geometrical solids may be taught. Exercises may be introduced
tending to develop those powers by which we comprehend the qualities of
color, size, density, form, and weight. Important moral truths may be
presented with the aid of suitable illustrations. In every school the
teacher and text-books may be considered a positive quality which should
balance the negative power of the school itself. In primary schools
text-books have but little value, and the chief reliance is, therefore,
upon the teacher. Instruction must be mainly oral; hence the mind of the
teacher should be well furnished, and her capacities chastened by
considerable experience. As the pupils are unable to study, the teacher
must lead in all their exercises, and find profitable employment for the
children, or they will give themselves up to play or to stupid
listlessness. Of these alternatives, the latter is more objectionable
than the former.
It is, of course, not often possible for a teacher to occupy herself six
hours a day with a single class in a primary school, especially if she
confines her attention to the studies enumerated. In many schools, of
various grades, gymnastic exercises have been introduced with marked
advantage. There are many such exercises which do not need apparatus,
and in which the teacher can properly lead.
These furnish a healthful variety to the studies usually pursued, and
they prepare the pupils to receive appropriate instruction in sitting,
standing, and in the modulation and use of the voice. Indeed, gymnastic
exercises are indispensable aids to proper training in reading, which,
as an art of a high order, is immediately dependent upon position,
habits of breathing, the consequent power of voice, and expressiveness
of tone. I am fully satisfied that much more may be done in the early
period of school life than is usually accomplished. In the district
mixed schools the primary pupils receive but little attention, and they
are not infrequently occupied from one to three years in obtaining an
imperfect knowledge of the alphabet. Usually much better results are
attained by the combined agency of the home and the school, but there is
an average loss of one-fourth of the time employed in teaching and
learning the elements of our language.
Mr. Philbrick, Superintendent of Public Schools in Boston, has taught
and trained a class of fifty primary-school pupils with a degree of
success which fully sustains the statement of the average waste in
schools generally. Twenty-two lessons of a half-hour each were given;
and in this brief period of time the class, with a few exceptions, were
so well advanced that they could write the alphabet in capital and
script hand, give the elementary sounds of the letters, produce and name
the Arabic characters and the common geometrical figures found upon
Holbrook's slates. I saw a girl, five and a half years of age, write the
alphabet without delay in script hand, in a manner that would have been
creditable to a pupil in a grammar school.
I present Mr. Philbrick's own account of his mode of proceeding, in an
extract from his third quarterly report to the school committee of the
city of Boston.
"The regulations relating to the primary schools require every scholar
to be provided with a slate, and to employ the time not otherwise
occupied in drawing or writing words from their spelling lessons, on
their slates, in a plain script hand. It is further stated, in the same
connection, that the teachers are expected to take special pains to
teach the first class to write--not print--all the letters of the
alphabet on slates.
"The language of this requirement seems to imply that the classes below
the first are to draw and write words, in a plain script hand, without
any special pains to teach them, and that by such occupation they were
to be kept from idleness. As I saw neither of these objects
accomplished in any primary school, I thought it worth while to satisfy
myself, by actual experiment, what can and ought to be done, in the use
of the slate and blackboard, in teaching writing and drawing in primary
schools. To accomplish this object, I have given a course of lessons in
a graded or classified school of the third class. The number of pupils
instructed in the class was about fifty. The materials of the school are
rather below the average; about twenty of the pupils being of that
description usually found in schools for special instruction. The
school-room is furnished, as every primary school-room should be, with
stationary chairs and desks, and Holbrook's primary slates. Twenty-two
lessons, of from thirty to forty minutes each, were given, about
one-third of the time being devoted to drawing, and two-thirds to
writing. As to the method pursued, the main points were, to present but
a single element at a time; to illustrate on the blackboard defects and
excellences in execution; frequent review of the ground passed over,
especially in the _first_ steps of the course; a vigorous exercise of
all the mental faculties requisite for the performance of the task; and
a desire for improvement, encouraged and stimulated by the best and
strongest available motives; the greater part of the time being
bestowed upon the dull and backward pupils.