advance any art or science. He complains that “the wits and endeavours of
the world are as so many scattered coals or fire-brands, which for want
of union are soon quenched, whereas being but laid together they would
yield a comfortable light and heat.” This is a thought which may well
be applied to the bringing up of the young; and the following passage
might have been written to secure a training for teachers: “Methinks
the present condition of men is like a field where a battle hath been
lately fought, where we may see many legs and arms and eyes lying here
and there, which for want of a union and a soul to quicken and enliven
them are good for nothing but to feed ravens and infect the air. So we
see many wits and ingenuities lying scattered up and down the world,
whereof some are now labouring to do what is already done, and puzzling
themselves to re-invent what is already invented. Others we see quite
stuck fast in difficulties for want of a few directions which some other
man (might he be met withal) both could and would most easily give him.”
I wonder how many young teachers are now wasting their own and their
pupils’ time in this awkward predicament.
§ 20. “As for ... education,” says Petty, “we cannot but hope that those
who make it their trade will supply it and render the idea thereof much
more perfect.” His own contributions to the more perfect idea consist
mainly in making the study of “realities” precede literature, and thus
announcing the principle which in later times has led to the introduction
of “object lessons.” The Baconians thought that the good time was at
hand, and that they had found the right road at last. By experiments they
would learn to interpret Nature. After scheming a “Gymnasium, Mechanicum,
or College of Tradesmen,” Petty says, “What experiments and stuff would
all those shops and operations afford to active and philosophical heads,
out of which to extract that interpretation of nature whereof there is so
little, and that so bad, as yet extant in the world!”[104] And this study
of things was to affect the work of the school-room, and redeem it from
the dismal state into which it was fallen. “As for the studies to which
children are now-a-days put,” says Petty, “they are altogether unfit for
want of judgment which is but weak in them, and also for want of will,
which is sufficiently seen ... by the difficulty of keeping them at
schools and the punishment they will endure rather than be altogether
debarred from the pleasure which they take in things.”
§ 21. The grand reform required is thus set forth; “Since few children
have need of reading before they know or can be acquainted with the
things they read of; or of writing before their thoughts are worth the
recording or they are able to put them into any form (which we call
inditing); much less of learning languages when there be books enough
for their present use in their own mother-tongue; our opinion is that
those things being withal somewhat above their capacity (as being to be
attained by judgment which is weakest in children) be deferred awhile,
and others more needful for them, such as are in the order of Nature
before those afore-mentioned, and are attainable by the help of memory
which is either most strong or unpreoccupied in children, be studied
before them. We wish, therefore, that the educands be taught to observe
and remember all sensible objects and actions, whether they be natural
or artificial, which the educators must upon all occasions expound unto
them.”
§ 22. In proposing this great change Petty was influenced not merely
by his own delight in the study of things but by something far more
important for education, by observation of the children themselves. This
study of things instead of “a rabble of words” would be “more easy and
pleasant to the young as the more suitable to the natural propensions we
observe in them. For we see children do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles,
guns made of elder sticks, and bellows’ noses, piped keys, &c., painting
flags and ensigns with elderberries and cornpoppy, making ships with
paper, and setting even nut-shells a-swimming, handling the tools of
workmen as soon as they turn their backs and trying to work themselves;
fishing, fowling, hunting, setting springes and traps for birds and other
animals, making pictures in their writing-books, making tops, gigs and
whirligigs, gilting balls, practising divers juggling tricks upon the
cards, &c., with a million more besides. And for the females they will
be making pies with clay, making their babies’ clothes and dressing them
therewith; they will spit leaves on sticks as if they were roasting meat;
they will imitate all the talk and actions which they observe in their
mother and her gossips, and punctually act the comedy or the tragedy (I
know not whether to call it) of a woman’s lying-in. By all which it is
most evident that children do most naturally delight in things and are
most capable of learning them, having quick senses to receive them and
unpreoccupied memories to retain them” (_ad f._).
§ 23. In these writers, Dury and Petty, we find a wonderful advance in
the theory of instruction. Children are to be taught about _things_ and
this because their inward constitution determines them towards things.
Moreover the subjects of instruction are to be graduated to accord with
the development of the learner’s faculties. The giving of rules and
incomprehensible statements that will come in useful at a future stage
is entirely forbidden. All this is excellent, and greatly have children
suffered, greatly do they suffer still, from their teachers’ neglect of
it. There seems to me to have been no important advance on the thought of
these men till Pestalozzi and Froebel fixed their attention on the mind
of the child, and valued things not in themselves but simply as the means
best fitted for drawing out the child’s self-activity.
§ 24. In several other matters we find Sir William Petty’s
recommendations in advance of the practice of his own time and ours. He
advises “that the business of education be not (as now) committed to the
worst and unworthiest of men [here at least we have improved] but that
it be seriously studied and practised by the best and abler persons.” To
this standard we have not yet attained.
§ 25. Handwork is to be practised, but its educational value is not
clearly perceived. “All children, though of the highest rank, are to be
taught some gentle manufacture in their minority.” _Ergastula Literaria_,
literary workhouses, are to be instituted where children may be taught as
well to do something towards their living as to read and write.[105]
§ 26. Education was to be universal, but chiefly with the object of
bringing to the front the clever sons of poor parents. The rule he would
lay down is “that all children of above seven years old may be presented
to this kind of education, none being to be excluded by reason of the
poverty and unability of their parents, for hereby it hath come to pass
that many are now holding the plough which might have been made fit to
steer the state.”[106]
§ 27. From these enthusiasts for realities we find a change when we turn
to their contemporary, a schoolmaster and author of a Latin Accidence,
who was perhaps the most notable Englishman who ever kept a school or
published a school-book.
§ 28. Milton was not only a great poet: he was also a great scholar.
Everything he said or wrote bore traces of his learning. The world of
books then rather than the world of the senses is his world. He has
benefited as he says “among old renowned authors” and “his inclination
leads him not” to read modern _Januas_ and _Didactics_, or apparently
the writings of any of his contemporaries including those of his great
countryman, Bacon. But, as Professor Laurie reminds us, no man, not even
a Milton, however he may ignore the originators of ideas can keep himself
outside the influence of the ideas themselves when they are in the air;
and so we find Milton using his incomparable power of expression in the
service of the Realists.
§ 29. But brief he endeavours to be, and paying the Horatian penalty he
becomes obscure. In the “few observations which flowered off and were the
burnishing of many studious and contemplative years,” Milton touches only
on the bringing up of gentlemen’s sons between the ages of 12 and 21, and
his suggestions do not, like those of Comenius, deal with the education
of the people, or of both sexes.[107] This limit of age, sex, and station
deprives Milton’s plan of much of its interest, as the absence of detail
deprives it of much of its value.
§ 30. Still, we find in the _Tractate_ a very great advance on the ideas
current at the Renascence. Learning is no longer the aim of education but
is regarded simply as a means. No finer expression has been given in our
literature to the main thesis of the Christian and of the Realist and to
the Realist’s contempt of verbalism, than this: “The end of learning is
to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright,
and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as
we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being
united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.
But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on
sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things
invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature,
the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching.
And seeing every Nation affords not experience and tradition enough for
all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of
those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so
that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be
known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues
that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid
things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much
to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise
in his mother-dialect only.”
§ 31. The several propositions here implied have thus been “disentangled”
by Professor Laurie (_John Milton_ in _Addresses_, &c., p. 167).
1. The aim of education is the _knowledge_ of God and _likeness_ to God.
2. _Likeness_ to God we attain by possessing our souls of true virtue and
by the Heavenly Grace of Faith.
3. _Knowledge_ of God we attain by the study of the visible things of God.
4. Teaching then has for its aim _this_ knowledge.
5. Language is merely an instrument or vehicle for the knowledge of
things.
6. The linguist may be less _learned_ (_i.e._, educated) in the true
sense than a man who can make good use of his mother-tongue though he
knows no other.
§ 32. Elsewhere, Milton gives his idea of “a complete and generous
education;” it “fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and
magnanimously all the offices both private and public of Peace and
War.” (Browning’s edition, p. 8.) Here and indeed in all that Milton
says we feel that “the noble moral glow that pervades the _Tractate
on Education_, the mood of magnanimity in which it is conceived and
written, and the faith it inculcates in the powers of the young human
spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are merits everlasting.”
(Masson iij, p. 252.)
§ 33. But in this moral glow and in an intense hatred of verbalism
lie as it seems to me the chief merits of the Tractate. The practical
suggestions are either incomprehensible or of doubtful wisdom. The
reforming of education was, as Milton says, one of the greatest and
noblest designs that could be thought on, but he does not take the
right road when he proposes for every city in England a joint school
and university for about 120 boarders. The advice to keep boys between
12 and 21 in this barrack life I consider, with Professor Laurie, to be
“fundamentally unsound;” and the project of uniting the military training
of Sparta with the humanistic training of Athens seems to me a pure
chimæra.
§ 34. When we come to instruction we find that Milton after announcing
the distinctive principle of the Realists proves to be himself the last
survivor of the Verbal Realists. (See _supra_, p. 25.) No doubt
“His daily teachers had been woods and rills,”
but his thoughts had been even more in his books; and for the young he
sketches out a purely bookish curriculum. The young are to learn about
things, but they are to learn through books; and the only books to which
Milton attaches importance are written in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. He
held, probably with good reason, that far too much time “is now bestowed
in pure trifling at grammar and sophistry.” “We do amiss,” he says, “to
spend 7 or 8 years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin
and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one
year.” Without an explanation of the “otherwise” this statement is a
truism, and what Milton says further hardly amounts to an explanation.
His plan, if plan it can be called, is as follows: “If after some
preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, the
boys were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned
thoroughly to them, they might then proceed to learn the substance of
good things and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language
quickly into their power. This,” adds Milton, “I take to be the most
rational and most profitable way of learning languages.” It is, however,
not the most intelligible.
§ 35. “I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and
laziest youth, our stocks and stubbs, from the infinite desire of such
a happy nurture than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and
hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles which
is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their
tenderest and most docible age.” We cannot but wonder whether this belief
survived the experience of “the pretty garden-house in Aldersgate.” From
the little we are told by his nephew and old pupil Edward Phillips we
should infer that Milton was not unsuccessful as a schoolmaster. In this
we have a striking proof how much more important is the teacher than the
teaching. A character such as Milton’s in which we find the noblest aims
united with untiring energy in pursuit of them could not but dominate the
impressionable minds of young people brought under its influence. But
whatever success he met with could not have been due to the things he
taught nor to his method in teaching them. In spite of the “moral glow”
about his recommendations they are “not a bow for every [or any] man to
shoot in that counts himself a teacher.”
§ 36. Nor did he do much for the science of education. His scheme is
vitiated, as Mark Pattison says, by “the information fallacy.” In the
literary instruction there is no thought of training the faculties of all
or the special faculties of the individual. “It requires much observation
of young minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of unassimilable
information stupefies the faculties instead of training them,” says
Pattison; and Milton absorbed by his own thoughts and the thoughts of the
ancients did not observe the minds of the young, and knew little of the
powers of any mind but his own.
For information the youths are not required to observe for themselves
but are to be taught “a general compact of physicks.” “Also in course
might be read to them out of some not tedious writer the Institution of
Physick; that they may know the tempers, the humours, the seasons, and
how to manage a crudity.”
§ 37. Even the study of the classics is advocated by Milton on false
grounds. If, like the Port-Royalists, he had recommended the study of
the classical authors for the sake of pure Latin and Greek or as models
of literary style, the means would have been suited to the end; but it
was very different when he directed boys to study Virgil and Columella
in order to learn about bees and farming. In after-life they would find
these authorities a little out of date; and if they ever attempted to
improve tillage, “to recover the bad soil and to remedy the waste that is
made of good, which was one of Hercules’s praises,” they would have found
a knowledge of the methods of Hercules about as useful as of the methods
of the Romans.
§ 38. Milton was then a reformer “for his own hand;” and notwithstanding
his moral and intellectual elevation and his superb power of rhetoric, he
seems to me a less useful writer on education than the humble Puritans
whom he probably would not deign to read. In his haughty self-reliance,
he, like Carlyle with whom Seeley has well compared him (_Lectures and
Addresses: Milton_), addressed his contemporaries _de haut en bas_, and
though ready to teach could learn only among the old renowned authors
with whom he associated himself and we associate him.
§ 39. Judged from our present standpoint the Tractate is found with many
weaknesses to be strong in this, that it co-ordinates physical, moral,
mental and æsthetic training.
§ 40. But nothing of Milton’s can be judged by our ordinary canons. He
soars far above them and raises us with him “to mysterious altitudes
above the earth” (_supra_, p. 153, _note_). Whatever we little people may
say about the suggestions of the Tractate, Milton will remain one of the
great educators of mankind.[108]
XIII.
LOCKE.
(1632-1704).
§ 1. When an English University established an examination for future
teachers,[109] the “special subjects” first set were “Locke and Dr.
Arnold.” The selection seems to me a very happy one. Arnold greatly
affected the spirit and even the organization of our public schools at
a time when the old schools were about to have new life infused into
them, and when new schools were to be started on the model of the old.
He is perhaps the greatest educator of the English type, _i.e._, the
greatest educator who had accepted the system handed down to him and
tried to make the best of it. Locke on the other hand, whose reputation
is more European than English, belongs rather to the continental type.
Like his disciple Rousseau and like Rousseau’s disciples the French
Revolutionists, Locke refused the traditional system and appealed from
tradition and authority to reason. We English revere Arnold, but so long
as the history of education continues to be written, as it has been
written hitherto, on the Continent, the only Englishman celebrated in it
will be as now not the great schoolmaster but the great philosopher.
§ 2. In order to understand Locke we must always bear in mind what I may
call his two main characteristics; 1st, his craving to know and to speak
the truth and the whole truth in everything, truth not for a purpose but
for itself[110]; 2nd, his perfect trust in the reason as the guide, the
only guide, to truth.[111]
§ 3. 1st. Those who have not reflected much on the subject will naturally
suppose that the desire to know the truth is common to all men, and the
desire to speak the truth common to most. But this is very far from being
the case. If we had any earnest desire for truth we should examine things
carefully before we admitted them as truths; in other words our opinions
would be the growth of long and energetic thought. But instead of this
they are formed for the most part quite carelessly and at haphazard, and
we value them not on account of their supposed agreement with fact but
because though “poor things” they are “our own” or those of our sect or
party. Locke on the other hand was always endeavouring to get at the
truth for its own sake. This separated him from men in general. And he
brought great powers of mind to bear on the investigation. This raised
him above them.
§ 4. 2nd. Locke’s second characteristic was his entire reliance on the
guidance of reason. “The faculty of reasoning,” says he, “seldom or
never deceives those who trust to it.” Elsewhere, borrowing a metaphor
from Solomon (Prov. xx, 27), he speaks of this faculty as “the candle of
the Lord set up by Himself in men’s minds.” (F. B. ij., 129). In a fine
passage in the _Conduct of the Understanding_ he calls it “the touchstone
of truth” (§ iij, Fowler’s edition, p. 10). He even goes so far in his
correspondence with Molyneux as to maintain that intelligent honest men
cannot possibly differ.[112]
But if we consider it from one point of view the treatise on the _Conduct
of the Understanding_ is itself a witness that human reason is a compass
liable to incalculable variations and likely enough to shipwreck those
who steer by it alone. In this book Locke shows us that to come to a
true result the understanding (1) must be perfectly trained, (2) must
not be affected by any feeling in favour of or against any particular
result, and (3) must have before it all the data necessary for forming a
judgment. In practice these conditions are seldom (if ever) fulfilled;
and Locke himself, when he wants an instance of a mind that can acquiesce
in the certainty of its conclusions, takes it from “angels and separate
spirits who may be endowed with more comprehensive faculties” than we are
(C. of U. § iij, 3).
§ 5. It seems to me then that Locke much exaggerates the power of
the individual reason for getting at the truth. And to exaggerate
the importance of one function of the mind is to unduly diminish the
importance of the rest. Thus we find that in Locke’s scheme of education
little thought is taken for the play of the affections and feelings; and
as for the imagination it is treated merely as a source of mischief.
§ 6. Locke, as it has often been pointed out, differs from the
schoolmaster in making small account of the knowledge to be acquired
by those under education. But it has not been so often remarked that
the fundamental difference is much deeper than this and lies in the
conception of knowledge itself. With the ordinary schoolmaster the test
of knowledge is the power of reproduction. Whatever pupils can reproduce
with difficulty they know imperfectly; whatever they can reproduce with
ease they know thoroughly. But Locke’s definition of knowledge confines
it to a much smaller area. According to him knowledge is “the internal
perception of the mind” (Locke to Stillingfleet _v._ F. B. ij, 432).
“Knowing is seeing; and if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves
we do so by another man’s eyes, let him use never so many words to tell
us that what he asserts is very visible. Till we ourselves see it with
our own eyes, and perceive it by our own understandings, we are as much
in the dark and as void of knowledge as before, let us believe any
learned authors as much as we will” (C. of U. § 24).[113]
§ 7. Here Locke makes no distinction between different classes of truths.
But surely very important differences exist.
About some physical facts our knowledge is at once most certain and
most definite when we derive it through the evidence of our own senses.
“Seeing is believing,” says the proverb. It may be believing, but it is
not knowing. That certainty which we call knowledge we often arrive at
better by the testimony of others than by that of our own senses.
Miss Martineau in her Autobiography tells us that as a child of ten she
entirely and unaccountably failed to see a comet which was visible to all
other people; but, although her own senses were at fault, the evidence
for the comet was so conclusive that she may be said to have _known_
there was a comet in the sky.
On sufficient evidence we can know anything, just as we know there is
a great water-fall at Niagara though we may never have crossed the
Atlantic. But we cannot be so certain simply on the evidence of our
senses. If we trusted entirely to them we might take the earth for a
plane and “know” that the sun moved round it.
§ 8. But Locke probably considers as the subject of knowledge not so much
physical facts as the great body of truths which are ascertained by the
intellect. It is the eye of the mind by which alone knowledge is to be
gained. Of these truths the purest specimens are the truths of geometry.
It may be said that only those who have followed the proofs _know_
that the area of the square on the side opposite the right angle in a
right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other
sides. But even in pure reasoning like this, the tiro often seems to see
what he does not really see; and where his own reason brings him to a
conclusion different from the one established he _knows_ only that he is
mistaken.