relates to the training of the senses. “The first faculties which become
strong in us,” says he, “are our senses. These then are the first that
should be cultivated; they are in fact the only faculties we forget
or at least those which we neglect most completely.” We find that the
young child “wants to touch and handle everything. By no means check
this restlessness; it points to a very necessary apprenticeship. Thus
it is that the child gets to be conscious of the hotness or coldness,
the hardness or softness, the heaviness or lightness of bodies, to
judge of their size and shape and all their sensible properties by
looking, feeling, listening, especially by comparing sight and touch,
and combining the sensations of the eye with those of the fingers.”[140]
“See a cat enter a room for the first time; she examines round and stares
and sniffs about without a moment’s rest, she is satisfied with nothing
before she has tried it and made it out. This is just what a child does
when he begins to walk, and enters, so to say, the chamber of the world.
The only difference is that to the sight which is common to the child
and the cat the first joins in his observations the hands which nature
has given him, and the other animal that subtle sense of smell which has
been bestowed upon her. It is this tendency, according as it is well
cultivated or the reverse, that makes children either sharp or dull,
active or slow, giddy or thoughtful.
“The first natural movements of the child being then to measure himself
with his surroundings and to test in everything he sees all its
sensible properties which may concern him, his first study is a kind of
experimental physics relating to his own preservation; and from this we
divert him to speculative studies before he feels himself at home here
below. So long as his delicate and flexible organs can adjust themselves
to the bodies on which they ought to act, so long as his senses as yet
uncorrupted are free from illusion, this is the time to exercise them all
in their proper functions; this is the time to learn to understand the
sensuous relations which things have with us. As everything that enters
the mind finds its way through the senses, the first reason of a human
being is a reason of sensations; this it is which forms the basis of the
intellectual reason; our first masters in philosophy are our feet, our
hands, our eyes. Substituting books for all this is not teaching us to
reason, but simply to use the reason of other people; it teaches us to
take a great deal on trust and never to know anything.
“In order to practise an art we must begin by getting the proper
implements; and that we may have good use of these implements they must
be made strong enough to stand wear and tear. That we may learn to think
we must then exercise our members, our senses, our organs, as these are
the implements of our intelligence; and that we may make the most of
these implements the body which supplies them must be strong and healthy.
We see then that far from man’s true reason forming itself independently
of his body, it is the sound constitution of the body that makes the
operations of the mind easy and certain.”[141]
§ 25. Rousseau does not confine himself to advising that the senses
should be cultivated; he also gives some hints of the _way_ in which
they should be cultivated, and many modern experiments, such as “object
lessons” and the use of actual weights and measures, may be directly
traced to him. “As soon as a child begins to distinguish objects, a
proper choice should be made in those which are presented to him.”
Elsewhere he says, “To exercise the senses is not simply to make use of
them; it is to learn to judge aright by means of them; it is to learn,
so to say, to perceive; for we can only touch and see and hear according
as we have learnt how. There is a kind of exercise perfectly natural and
mechanical which serves to make the body strong without giving anything
for the judgment to lay hold of: swimming, running, jumping, whip-top,
stone throwing; all this is capital; but have we nothing but arms and
legs? have we not also eyes and ears? and are these organs not needed
in our use of the others? Do not then merely exercise the strength but
exercise all the senses which direct it; get all you can out of each
of them, and then check the impressions of one by the impressions of
another. Measure, reckon, weigh, compare.”[142]
§ 26. Two subjects there were in which Émile was to receive instruction,
viz.: music and drawing. Rousseau’s advice about drawing is well worth
considering. He says: “Children who are great imitators all try to
draw. I should wish my child to cultivate this art, not exactly for
the art itself, but to make his eye correct and his hand supple: Les
enfants, grands imitateurs, essayent tous de dessiner: je voudrais que
le mien cultivât cet art, non précisément pour l’art même, mais pour se
rendre l’œil juste et la main flexible.” (_Ém._ ij., 149). But Émile is
to be kept clear of the ordinary drawing-master who would put him to
imitate imitations; and there is a striking contrast between Rousseau’s
suggestions and those of the authorities at South Kensington. Technical
skill he cares for less than the training of the eye; so Émile is always
to draw _from the object_, and, says Rousseau, “my intention is not
so much that he should get to _imitate_ the objects, as get to _know_
them: mon intention n’est pas tant qu’il sache imiter les objets que les
connaître.” (_Ém._ ij., 150).
§ 27. Before we pass the age of twelve years, at which point, as someone
says, Rousseau substitutes another Émile for the one he has hitherto
spoken of, let us look at his proposals for moral training. Rousseau
is right, beyond question, in desiring that children should be treated
as children. But what are children? What can they understand? What is
the world in which they live? Is it the material world only, or is the
moral world also open to them? (Girardin’s _R._, vol. ij., 136). On the
subject of morals Rousseau seems to have admirable instincts,[143] but
no principles, and moral as he is “on instinct,” there is always some
confusion in what he Says. At one time he asserts that “there is only
one knowledge to give children, and that is a knowledge of duty: Il n’y
a qu’une science à enseigner aux enfants: c’est celle des devoirs de
l’homme.” (_Ém._ j., 26). Elsewhere he says: “To know right from wrong,
to be conscious of the reason of duty is not the business of a child:
Connaître le bien et le mal, sentir la raison des devoirs de l’homme,
n’est pas l’affaire d’un enfant.” (_Ém._ ij., 75).[144] In another place
he mounts his hobby that “the most sublime virtues are negative” (_Ém._
ij., 95), and that about the best man who ever lived (till he found
Friday?) was Robinson Crusoe. The outcome of all Rousseau’s teaching
on this subject seems that we should in every way develop the child’s
animal or physical life, retard his intellectual life, and ignore his
life as a spiritual and moral being.
§ 28. A variety of influences had combined, as they combine still, to
draw attention away from the importance of physical training; and by
placing the child’s bodily organs and senses as the first things to
be thought of in education, Rousseau did much to save us from the bad
tradition of the Renascence. But there were more things in heaven and
earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy, and whatever Rousseau might
say, Émile could never be restrained from inquiring after them. Every boy
will _think_; _i.e._, he will think _for himself_, however unable he may
seem to think in the direction in which his instructors try to urge him.
The wise elders who have charge of him must take this into account, and
must endeavour to guide him into thinking modestly and thinking right.
Then again, as soon as the child can speak, or before, the world of
sensation becomes for him a world, not of sensations only, but also of
sentiments, of sympathies, of affections, of consciousness of right and
wrong, good and evil. All these feelings, it is true, may be affected by
traditional prejudices. The air the child breathes may also contain much
that is noxious; but we have no more power to exclude the atmosphere of
the moral world than of the physical. All we can do is to take thought
for fresh air in both cases. As for Rousseau’s notion that we can
withdraw the child from the moral atmosphere, we see in it nothing but a
proof how little he understood the problems he professed to solve.[145]
§ 29. Although the governor is to devote himself to a single child,
Rousseau is careful to protest against over-direction. “You would stupify
the child,” says he, “if you were constantly directing him, if you
were always saying to him, ‘Come here! Go there! Stop! Do this! Don’t
do that!’ If your head always directs his arms, his own head becomes
useless to him.” (_Ém._, ij., 114). Here we have a warning which should
not be neglected by those who maintain the _Lycées_ in France, and the
ordinary private boarding-schools in England. In these schools a boy
is hardly called upon to exercise his will all day long. He rises in
the morning when he must; at meals he eats till he is obliged to stop;
he is taken out for exercise like a horse; he has all his indoor work
prescribed for him both as to time and quantity. In this kind of life he
never has occasion to think or act for himself. He is therefore without
self-reliance. So much care is taken to prevent his doing wrong, that
he gets to think only of checks from without. He is therefore incapable
of self-restraint. In the English public schools boys have much less
supervision from their elders, and organise a great portion of their
lives for themselves. This proves a better preparation for life after
the school age; and most public schoolmasters would agree with Rousseau
that “the lessons the boys get from each other in the playground are a
hundred times more useful to them than the lessons given them in school:
les leçons que les écoliers prennent entre eux dans la cour du collège
leur sont cent fois plus utiles que tout ce qu’on leur dira jamais dans
la classe.” (_Ém._ ij., 123.)
§ 30. On questions put by children, Rousseau says: “The art of
questioning is not so easy as it may be thought; it is rather the art of
the master than of the pupil. We must have learnt a good deal of a thing
to be able to ask what we do not know. The learned know and inquire, says
an Indian proverb, but the ignorant know not what to inquire about.” And
from this he infers that children learn less from asking than from being
asked questions. (_N. H._, 5th p. 490.)
§ 31. At twelve years old Émile is said to be fit for instruction. “Now
is the time for labour, for instruction, for study; and observe that it
is not I who arbitrarily make this choice; it is pointed out to us by
Nature herself.”
§ 32. What novelties await us here? As we have seen Rousseau was
determined to recommend nothing that would harmonise with ordinary
educational practice; but even a genius, though he may abandon previous
practice, cannot keep clear of previous thought, and Rousseau’s plan for
instruction is obviously connected with the thoughts of Montaigne and of
Locke. But while on the same lines with these great writers Rousseau goes
beyond them and is both clearer and bolder than they are.
§ 33. Rousseau’s proposals for instruction have the following main
features.
1st. Instruction is to be no longer literary or linguistic. The teaching
about words is to disappear, and the young are not to learn by books or
about books.
2nd. The subjects to be studied are to be mathematics and physical
science.
3rd. The method to be adopted is not the didactic but the method of
_self-teaching_.
4th. The hands are to be called into play as a means of learning.
§ 34. 1st. Till quite recently the only learning ever given in schools
was book-learning, a fact to which the language of the people still bears
witness: when a child does not profit by school instruction he is always
said to be “no good at his book.” Now-a-days the tendency is to change
the character of the schools so that they may become less and less mere
“Ludi Literarii.” In this Rousseau seems to have been a century and
more in advance of us; and yet we cannot credit him with any remarkable
wisdom or insight about literature. He himself used books as a means of
“collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear” (J.
Morley’s _Rousseau_, j. chap. 3, p. 85), and he has recorded for us his
opinion that “the sensible and interesting conversations of a young woman
of merit are more proper to form a young man than all the pedantical
philosophy of books” (_Confessions_, quoted by Morley j., 87). After
this, whatever we may think of the merit of his suggestions we can sit at
the Sage’s feet no longer.
§ 35. 2nd. Rousseau had himself little knowledge of mathematics and
natural science, but he was strongly in favour of the “study of Nature”;
and in his last years his devotion to botany became a passion. His
curriculum for Émile is in the air, but the chief thing is to get him to
attend to the phenomena of nature, and “to foster his curiosity by being
in no hurry to satisfy it.”
§ 36. 3rd. About teaching and learning, there is one point on which we
find a consensus of great authorities extending from the least learned of
writers who was probably Rousseau to the most learned who was probably
Friedrich August Wolf. In one form or other these assert that there is no
true teaching but _self_-teaching.
Past a doubt the besetting weakness of teachers is “telling.” They can
hardly resist the tendency to be didactic. They have the knowledge which
they desire to find in their pupils, and they cannot help expressing
it and endeavouring to pass it on to those who need it, “like wealthy
men who care not how they give.” But true “teaching,” as Jacotot and
his disciple Joseph Payne were never tired of testifying, is “causing
to learn,” and it is seldom that “didactic” teaching has this effect.
Rousseau saw this clearly, and clearly pointed out the danger of
didacticism. As usual he by exaggeration laid himself open to an answer
that seems to refute him, but in spite of this we feel that there is
valuable truth underlying what he says. “I like not explanations given
in long discourses,” says he; “young people pay little attention to
them and retain little from them. The things themselves! The things
themselves! I shall never repeat often enough that we attach too much
importance to words: with our chattering education we make nothing but
chatterers.”[146] Accordingly Rousseau lays down the rule that Émile is
not to learn science but to invent it (qu’il n’apprenne pas la science;
qu’il l’invente); and he even expects him to invent geometry. As Émile
is not supposed to be a young Pascal but only an ordinary boy with
extraordinary _physical_ development such a requirement is obviously
absurd, and Herbart has reckoned it among Rousseau’s _Hauptfehler_ (_Päd.
Schriften_, ij., 242). The training prescribed is in fact the training
of the intellectual athlete; and the trainer may put the body through
its exercises much more easily than the mind. Of this the practical
teacher is only too conscious, and he will accept Rousseau’s advice, if
at all, only as “counsels of perfection.” Rousseau says: “Émile, obliged
to learn of himself, makes use of his own reason and not that of others;
for to give no weight to opinion, none must be given to authority; and
the more part of our mistakes come less from ourselves than from other
people. From this constant exercise there should result a vigour of mind
like that which the body gets from labour and fatigue. Another advantage
is that we advance only in proportion to our strength. The mind like
the body carries that only which it can carry. When the understanding
makes things its own before they are committed to memory, whatever it
afterwards draws forth belongs to it; but if the memory is burdened with
what the understanding knows nothing about we are in danger of bringing
from it things which the understanding declines to acknowledge.”[147]
Again he writes: “Beyond contradiction we get much more clear and certain
notions of the things we learn thus of ourselves than of those we derive
from other people’s instruction, and besides not accustoming our reason
to bow as a slave before authority, we become more ingenious in finding
connexions, in uniting ideas, and in inventing our implements, than when
we take all that is given us and let our minds sink into indifference,
like the body of a man who always has his clothes put on for him, is
waited on by his servants and drawn about by his horses till at length he
loses the strength and use of his limbs. Boileau boasted of having taught
Racine to find difficulty in rhyming. Among all the admirable methods of
shortening the study of the sciences we might have need that some one
should give us a way of learning them _with effort_.”[148]
§ 37. 4th. However highly we may value our gains from the use of books we
must admit that in some ways the use of books tends to the neglect of
powers that should not be neglected. As Rousseau wished to see the young
brought up without books he naturally looked to other means of learning,
especially to learning by the eye and by the hand. Much is now said
about using the hand for education, and many will agree with Rousseau:
“If instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a
workshop, his hands work to the advantage of his intellect: he becomes
a philosopher while he thinks he is becoming simply an artisan: Au lieu
de coller un enfant sur des livres, si je l’occupe dans un atelier, ses
mains travaillent au profit de son esprit: il devient philosophe, et
croît n’être qu’un ouvrier.” (_Ém._ iij., 193).
§ 38. In these essays I have done what I could to shew the best that each
reformer has left us. In Rousseau’s case I have been obliged to confine
myself to his words. “We attach far too much importance to words,” said
Rousseau, and yet it is by words and words only that Rousseau still
lives; and for the sake of his words we forget his deeds. Of the _Émile_
Mr. Morley says: “It is one of the seminal books in the history of
literature. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and
obscure inveterate usage which made education one of the dark formalistic
arts; and it admitted floods of light and air into tightly-closed
nurseries and schoolrooms” (_Rousseau_, ij., 248). In the region of
thought it set us free from the Renascence; and it did more than this, it
announced the true nature of the teacher’s calling, “_Study the subject
you have to act upon._” In these words we have the starting point of
the “New Education.” From them the educator gets a fresh conception of
his task. We grown people have received innumerable impressions which,
forgotten as they are, have left their mark behind in our way of looking
at things; and as we advance in life these experiences and associations
cluster around everything to which we direct our attention, till in the
end the past seems to dominate the present and to us “nothing is but
what is not.” But to the child the present with its revelations and the
future which will be “something more, a bringer of new things,” are all
engrossing. It is our business as teachers to try to realize how the
world looks from the child’s point of view. We may know a great many
things and be ready to teach them, but we shall have little success
unless we get another knowledge which we cannot teach and can learn only
by patient observation, a knowledge of “the subject to be acted on,” of
the mind of our pupils and what goes on there. When we set out on this
path, which was first clearly pointed out by Rousseau, teaching becomes a
new occupation with boundless possibilities and unceasing interest in it.
Every teacher becomes a learner, for we have to study the minds of the
young, their way of looking at things, their habits, their difficulties,
their likes and dislikes, how they are stimulated to exertion, how they
are discouraged, how one mood succeeds another. What we need we may well
devote a lifetime to acquiring; it is a knowledge of the human mind with
the object of influencing it.
XV.
BASEDOW AND THE PHILANTHROPINUM.
§ 1. One of the most famous movements ever made in educational reform
was started in the last century by John Bernard Basedow. Basedow was
born at Hamburg in 1723, the son of a wigmaker. His early years were not
spent in the ordinary happiness of childhood. His mother he describes
as melancholy, almost to madness, and his father was severe almost to
brutality. It was the father’s intention to bring up his son to his own
business, but the lad ran away, and engaged himself as servant to a
gentleman in Holstein. The master soon perceived what had never occurred
to the father, viz., that the youth had very extraordinary abilities.
Sent home with a letter from his master pointing out this notable
discovery, Basedow was allowed to renounce the paternal calling, and
to go to the Hamburg Grammar School (_Gymnasium_), where he was under
Reimarus, the author of the “Wolfenbüttel Fragment.” In due course his
friends managed to send him to the University of Leipzig to prepare
himself for the least expensive of the learned professions—the clerical.
Basedow, however, was not a man to follow the beaten tracks. After an
irregular life he left the university too unorthodox to think of being
ordained, and in 1749 became private tutor to the children of Herr von
Quaalen in Holstein. In this situation his talent for inventing new
methods of teaching first showed itself. He knew how to adapt himself to
the capacity of the children, and he taught them much by conversation,
and in the way of play, connecting his instruction with surrounding
objects in the house, garden, and fields. Through Quaalen’s influence, he
next obtained a professorship at Soroe, in Denmark, where he lectured for
eight years, but his unorthodox writings raised a storm of opposition,
and the Government finally removed him to the Gymnasium at Altona. Here
he still continued his efforts to change the prevailing opinions in
religious matters; and so great a stir was made by the publication of
his “Philalethia,” and his “Methodical Instruction in both Natural and
Biblical Religion,” that he and his family were refused the Communion at
Altona, and his books were excluded, under a heavy penalty, from Lübeck.
§ 2. About this time Basedow, incited by Rousseau’s “Emile,” turned
his attention to a fresh field of activity, in which he was to make
as many friends as in theology he had found enemies. A very general
dissatisfaction was then felt with the condition of the schools. Physical
education was not attempted in them. The mother-tongue was neglected.
Instruction in Latin and Greek, which was the only instruction given,
was carried on in a mechanical way, without any thought of improvement.
The education of the poor and of the middle classes received but little
attention. “Youth,” says Raumer, “was in those days, for most children,
a sadly harassed period. Instruction was hard and heartlessly severe.
Grammar was caned into the memory, so were portions of Scripture and
poetry. A common school punishment was to learn by heart Psalm cxix.
School-rooms were dismally dark. No one conceived it possible that the
young could find pleasure in any kind of work, or that they had eyes for
aught besides reading and writing. The pernicious age of Louis XIV. had
inflicted on the poor children of the upper class, hair curled by the
barber and messed with powder and pomade, braided coats, knee breeches,
silk stockings, and a dagger by the side—for active, lively children a
perfect torture” (_Gesch. d. Pädagogik_, ii. 297). Kant gave expression
to a very wide-spread feeling when he said that what was wanted in
education was no longer a reform but a revolution. Here, then, was a good
scope offered for innovators, and Basedow was a prince of innovators.
§ 3. Having succeeded in interesting the Danish minister, Bernstorff,
in his plans, he was permitted to devote himself entirely to a work on
the subject of education whilst retaining his income from the Altona
Gymnasium. The result was his “Address to Philanthropists and Men of
Property on Schools and Studies and their Influence on the Public Weal”
(1766), in which he announces the plan of his “Elementary.”[149] In this
address he calls upon princes, governments, town-councils, dignitaries
of the Church, freemasons’ lodges, &c., &c., if they loved their
fellow-creatures, to come to his assistance in bringing out his book. Nor
did he call in vain. When the “Elementary” at length appeared (in 1774),
he had to acknowledge contributions from the Emperor Joseph II., from
Catherine II. of Russia, from Christian VII. of Denmark, from the Grand
Prince Paul, and many other celebrities, the total sum received being
over 2,000_l._