It may be as well to make the number of them as large as possible. No
doubt there are no facts which are _known_ so perfectly as these. For
instance, a boy who has tried to smoke knows the fact that tobacco is
apt to produce nausea much better than another who has picked up the
information second-hand. An intelligent master may suggest experiments,
even in matters about which he himself is ignorant, and thus, in
Jacotot’s sense, he teaches things which he does not know. But some facts
cannot be learnt in this way, and then a Newton is helpless either to
find them out for himself, or to teach them to others without knowing
them. If the teacher does not know in what county Tavistock is, he can
only learn from those who do, and the pupils will be no cleverer than
their master. Here, then, I consider that Jacotot’s pretensions utterly
break down. “No,” the answer is; “the teacher may give his pupil an
atlas, and direct the boy to find out for himself: thus the master will
teach what he does not know.” But, in this case, he is a teacher only
so far as he knows. For what he does not know, he hands over the pupil
to the maker of the map, who communicates with him, not orally, but by
ink and paper. The master’s ignorance is simply an obstacle to the boy’s
learning; for the boy would learn sooner the position of Tavistock if it
were shown him on the map. “That’s the very point,” says the disciple of
Jacotot. “If the boy gets the knowledge without any trouble, he is likely
to forget it again directly. ‘Lightly come, lightly go.’ Moreover, his
faculty of observation will not have been exercised.” It is indeed well
not to allow the knowledge even of facts to come too easily; though the
difficulties which arise from the master’s ignorance will not be found
the most advantageous. Still there is obviously a limit. If we gave boys
their lessons in cipher, and offered a prize to the first decipherer,
one would probably be found at last, and meantime all the boys’ powers
of observation, &c., would have been cultivated by comparing like signs
in different positions, and guessing at their meaning; but the boys’
time might have been better employed. Jacotot’s plan of teaching a
language which the master did not know, was to put a book with, say,
“Arma virumque cano,” &c., on one side, and “I sing arms and the man,
&c.” on the other, and to require the pupil to puzzle over it till he
found out which word answered to which. In this case the teacher was the
translator; and though from the roundabout way in which the knowledge
was communicated the pupil derived some benefit, the benefit was hardly
sufficient to make up for the expenditure of time involved.
Jacotot, then, did not teach facts of which he was ignorant, except in
the sense in which the parent who sends his boy to school may be said to
teach him. All Jacotot did was to direct the pupil to learn, sometimes in
a very awkward fashion, from somebody else.[180]
§ 8. 2. When we come to science, we find all the best authorities agree
that the pupil should be led to principles if possible, and not have the
principles brought to him. Men like Tyndall, Huxley, H. Spencer, J. M.
Wilson have spoken eloquently on this subject, and shown how valuable
scientific teaching is, when thus conducted, in drawing out the faculties
of the mind. But although a schoolboy may be led to great scientific
discoveries by anyone who knows the road, he will have no more chance
of making them with an ignorant teacher than he would have had in the
days of the Ptolemies. Here again, then, I cannot understand how the
teacher can teach what he does not know. He may, indeed, join his pupil
in investigating principles, but he must either keep with the pupil or
go in advance of him. In the first case he is only a fellow-pupil; in the
second, he teaches only that which he knows.
§ 9. Finally, we come to arts, and we are told that Jacotot taught
drawing and music, without being either a draughtsman or a musician.
In art everything depends on _rightly directed practice_. The most
consummate artist cannot communicate his skill, and, except for
inspiration may be inferior as a teacher to one whose attention is
more concentrated on the mechanism of the art. Perhaps it is not even
necessary that the teacher should be able to do the exercises himself,
if only he knows how they should be done; but he seldom gets credit for
this knowledge, unless he can show that he knows how the thing should
be done, by doing it. Lessing tells us that Raphael would have been a
great painter even if he had been born without hands. He would not,
however, have succeeded in getting mankind to believe it. I grant, then,
that the teacher of art need not be a first-rate artist, and, in some
very exceptional cases, need not be an artist at all; but, if he cannot
perform the exercises he gives his pupil, he must at least _know how they
should be done_. But Jacotot claims perfect ignorance. We are told that
he “taught” drawing by setting objects before his pupils, and making them
imitate them on paper as best they could. Of course the art originated
in this way, and a person with great perseverance, and (I must say, in
spite of Jacotot) with more than average ability, would make considerable
progress with no proper instruction; but he would lose much by the
ignorance of the person calling himself his teacher. An awkward habit of
holding the pencil will make skill doubly difficult to acquire, and thus
half his time might be wasted. Then, again, he would hardly have a better
eye than the early painters, so the drawing of his landscape would not
be less faulty than theirs. To consider music I am told that a person
who is ignorant of music can teach, say, the piano or the violin. This
seems to go beyond the region of paradox into that of utter nonsense.
Talent often surmounts all kinds of difficulties; but in the case of
self-taught, and ill-taught musicians, it is often painful to see what
time and talent have been wasted for want of proper instruction.
I have thus carefully examined Jacotot’s pretensions to teach what he did
not know, because I am anxious that what seems to me the rubbish should
be cleared away from his principles, and should no longer conceal those
parts of his system which are worthy of general attention.
§ 10. At the root of Jacotot’s paradox lay a truth of very great
importance. The highest and best teaching is not that which makes the
pupils passive recipients of other peoples’ ideas (not to speak of the
teaching which conveys mere words without any ideas at all), but that
which guides and encourages the pupils in working for themselves and
thinking for themselves. The master, as Joseph Payne well says, can no
more think, or practise, or see for his pupil, than he can digest for
him, or walk for him. The pupil must owe everything to his own exertions,
which it is the function of the master to encourage and direct. Perhaps
this may seem very obvious truth, but obvious or not it has been very
generally neglected. The old system of lecturing which found favour with
the Jesuits, has indeed now passed away, and boys are left to acquire
facts from school-books instead of from the master. But this change
is merely accidental. The essence of the teaching still remains. Even
where the master does not confine himself to hearing what the scholars
have learnt by heart, he seldom does more than offer explanations. He
measures the teaching rather by the amount which has been put before
the scholars—by what he has done for them and shown them—than by what
they have learned. But this is not teaching of the highest type. When
the votary of Dulness in the “Dunciad” is rendering an account of his
services, he arrives at this climax,
“For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it,
And write about it, Goddess, and about it.”
And in the same spirit Mr. J. M. Wilson stigmatises as synonymous “the
most stupid and most _didactic_ teaching.”
§ 11. All the eminent authorities on education have a very different
theory of the teachers function. According to them the master’s attention
is not to be fixed on his own mind and his own store of knowledge, but
on his pupil’s mind and on its gradual expansion. He must, in fact, be
not so much a _teacher_ as a _trainer_. Here we have the view which
Jacotot intended to enforce by his paradox; for we may possibly train
faculties which we do not ourselves possess, just as the sportsman trains
his pointer and his hunter to perform feats which are altogether out
of the range of his own capacities. Now, “training is the cultivation
bestowed on any set of faculties with the object of developing them” (J.
M. Wilson), and to train any faculty, you must set it to work. Hence it
follows, that as boys’ minds are not simply their memories, the master
must aim at something more than causing his pupils to remember facts.
Jacotot has done good service to education by giving prominence to this
truth, and by showing in his method how other faculties may be cultivated
besides the memory.
§ 12. “_Tout est dans tout_” (“All is in all”), is another of Jacotot’s
paradoxes. I do not propose discussing it as the philosophical thesis
which takes other forms, as “Every man is a microcosm,” &c., but merely
to inquire into its meaning as applied to didactics.
If you asked an ordinary French schoolmaster who Jacotot was, he
would probably answer, Jacotot was a man who thought you could learn
everything by getting up Fénelon’s “Télémaque” by heart. By carrying your
investigation further, you would find that this account of him required
modification, that the learning by heart was only part, and a very small
part, of what Jacotot demanded from his pupils, but you would also find
that entire mastery of “Télémaque” was the first requisite, and that
he managed to connect everything he taught with that “model-book.” Of
course, if “tout est dans tout,” everything is in “Télémaque;” and, said
an objector, also in the first book of “Télémaque” and in _the first
word_. Jacotot went through a variety of subtilties to show that all
“Télémaque” is contained in the word _Calypso_, and perhaps he would
have been equally successful, if he had been required to take only the
first letter instead of the first word. His maxim indeed becomes by his
treatment of it a mere paraphrase of “_Quidlibet ex quolibet_.” The
reader is amused rather than convinced by these discussions, but he finds
them not without fruit. They bring to his mind very forcibly a truth
to which he has hitherto probably not paid sufficient attention. He
sees that all knowledge is connected together, or (what will do equally
well for our present purpose) that there are a thousand links by which
we may bring into connexion the different subjects of knowledge. If by
means of these links we can attach in our minds the knowledge we acquire
to the knowledge we already possess, we shall learn faster and more
intelligently, and at the same time we shall have a much better chance of
retaining our new acquisitions. The memory, as we all know, is assisted
even by artificial association of ideas, much more by natural. Hence the
value of “tout est dans tout,” or, to adopt a modification suggested by
Joseph Payne, of the connexion of knowledges. Suppose we know only one
subject, but know that thoroughly, our knowledge, if I may express myself
algebraically, cannot be represented by ignorance plus the knowledge of
that subject. We have acquired a great deal more than that. When other
subjects come before us, they may prove to be so connected with what we
had before, that we may also seem to know them already. In other words
when we know a little thoroughly, though our actual possession is small,
we have potentially a great deal more.[181]
§ 13. Jacotot’s practical application of his “tout est dans tout” was
as follows:—“_Il faut apprendre quelque chose, et y rapporter tout
le reste._” (“The pupil must learn something thoroughly, and refer
everything to that.”) For language he must take a model book, and become
thoroughly master of it. His knowledge must not be a verbal knowledge
only, but he must enter into the sense and spirit of the writer. Here we
find that Jacotot’s practical advice coincides with that of many other
great authorities, who do not base it on the same principle. The Jesuits’
maxim was, that their pupils should always learn something thoroughly,
however little it might be. Pestalozzi insisted on the children going
over the elements again and again till they were completely master of
them. Ascham, Ratke, and Comenius all required a model-book to be read
and re-read till words and thoughts were firmly fixed in the pupil’s
memory. Jacotot probably never read Ascham’s “Schoolmaster.” If he had
done so he might have appropriated some of Ascham’s words as exactly
conveying his own thoughts. Ascham, as we saw, recommended that a short
book should be thoroughly mastered, each lesson being worked over in
different ways a dozen times at the least, and in this way “your scholar
shall be brought not only to like eloquence, but also to all true
understanding and right judgment, both for writing and speaking.” In this
the Englishman and the Frenchman are in perfect accord.
§ 14. But if Jacotot agrees so far with earlier authorities, there is
one point in which he seems to differ from them. He makes great demands
on the memory, and requires six books of “Télémaque” to be learned by
heart. On the other hand, Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, H. Spencer, and
other great writers would be opposed to this. Ratke insisted that nothing
should be learnt by heart. Protests against “loading the memory,” “saying
without book,” &c., are everywhere to be met with, and nowhere more
vigorously expressed than in Ascham. He says of the grammar-school boys
of his time, that “their whole knowledge, by learning without the book,
was tied only to their tongue and lips, and never ascended up to the
brain and head, and therefore was soon spit out of the mouth again. They
learnt without book everything, they understood within the book little or
nothing.” But these protests were really directed at verbal knowledge,
when it is made to take the place of knowledge of the thing signified.
We are always too ready to suppose that words are connected with ideas,
though both old and young are constantly exposing themselves to the
sarcasm of Mephistopheles:—
... eben wo Begriffe fehlen,
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
... just where meaning fails, a word
Comes patly in to serve your turn.
Against this danger Jacotot took special precautions. The pupil was to
undergo an examination in everything connected with the lesson learnt,
and the master’s share in the work was to convince himself, from the
answers he received, that the pupil thoroughly grasped the meaning, as
well as remembered the words, of the author. Still the six books of
“Télémaque,” which Jacotot gave to be learnt by heart, was a very large
dose, and he would have been more faithful to his own principles, says
Joseph Payne, if he had given the first book only.
§ 15. There are three ways in which the model-book may be studied. 1st,
it may be read through rapidly again and again, which was Ratke’s plan
and Hamilton’s; or, 2nd, each lesson may be thoroughly mastered, read in
various ways a dozen times at the least, which was Ascham’s plan; or,
3rd, the pupil may begin always at the beginning, and advance a little
further each time, which was Jacotot’s plan.[182] This last, could not,
of course, be carried very far The repetitions, when the pupil had
got on some way in the book, could not always be from the beginning;
still every part was to be repeated so frequently that _nothing could
be forgotten_. Jacotot did not wish his pupils to learn simply in
order to forget, but to learn in order to remember for ever. “We are
learned,” said he, “not so far as we have learned, but only so far as
we remember.” He seems, indeed, almost to ignore the fact that the act
of learning serves other purposes than that of making learned, and to
assert that to forget is the same as never to have learned, which is
a palpable error. We necessarily forget much that passes through our
minds, and yet its effect remains. All grown people have arrived at some
opinions, convictions, knowledge, but they cannot call to mind every spot
they trod on in the road thither. When we have read a great history,
say, or travelled through a fresh country, we have gained more than the
number of facts we happen to remember. The mind seems to have formed
an acquaintance with that history or that country, which is something
different from the mere acquisition of facts. Moreover, our interests,
as well as our ideas, may long survive the memory of the facts which
originally started them. We are told that one of the old judges, when a
barrister objected to some dictum of his, put him down by the assertion,
“Sir, I have forgotten more law than ever you read.” If he wished to
make the amount forgotten a measure of the amount remembered, this was
certainly fallacious, as the ratio between the two is not a constant
quantity. But he may have meant that this extensive reading had left its
result, and that he could see things from more points of view than the
less travelled legal vision of his opponent. That _power_ acquired by
learning may also last longer than the knowledge of the thing learned
is sufficiently obvious. So the advantages derived from having learnt a
thing are not entirely lost when the thing itself is forgotten.[183]
§ 16. But the reflection by no means justifies the disgraceful waste of
memory which goes on in most school-rooms. Much is learnt which, for
want of the necessary repetition, will soon be lost again, besides much
that would be valueless if remembered. The thing to aim at is not giving
“useful knowledge,” but making the memory a store house of such facts
as are good material for the other powers of the mind to work with; and
that the facts may serve this purpose they must be such as the mind can
thoroughly grasp and handle, and such as can be connected together. To
_instruct is instruere_, “to put together in order, to build;” it is not
cramming the memory with facts without connexion, and, as Herbert Spencer
calls them, _unorganisable_. And yet a great deal of our children’s
memory is wasted in storing facts of this kind, which can never form
part of any organism. We do not teach them geography (_earth knowledge_,
as the Germans call it), but the names of places. Our “history” is a
similar, though disconnected study. We leave our children ignorant of the
land, but insist on their getting up the “landmarks.” And, perhaps, from
a latent perception of the uselessness of such work, neither teachers
nor scholars ever think of these things as learnt to be remembered. They
are indeed got up, as Schuppius says of the Logic of his day, _in spem
futuræ oblivionis_. Latin grammar is gone through again and again, and a
boy feels that the sooner he gets it into his head, the better it will be
for him; but who expects that the lists of geographical and historical
names which are learnt one half-year, will be remembered the next? I have
seen it asserted, that when a boy leaves school, he has already forgotten
nine-tenths of what he has been taught, and I dare say that estimate is
quite within the mark.
§ 17. By adopting the principles of Jacotot, we avoid a great deal of
this waste. We give some thorough knowledge, with which fresh knowledge
may be connected. And it will then be found that perfect familiarity
with a subject is something beyond the mere understanding it and being
able, with difficulty, to reproduce what we have learned. By thus going
over the same thing again and again, we acquire a thorough command over
our knowledge; and the feeling perfectly at home, even within narrow
borders, gives a consciousness of strength. An old adage tells us that
the Jack-of-all-trades is master of none; but the master of one trade
will have no difficulty in extending his insight and capacity beyond
it. To use an illustration, which is of course an illustration merely,
we should kindle knowledge in children, like fire in a grate. A stupid
servant, with a small quantity of wood, spreads it over the whole grate.
It blazes away, goes out, and is simply wasted. Another, who is wiser
or more experienced, kindles the whole of the wood at one spot, and the
fire, thus concentrated, extends in all directions. Similarly we should
concentrate the beginnings of knowledge, and although we could not expect
to make much show for a time, we might be sure that after a bit the fire
would extend, almost of its own accord.[184]
§ 18. From Joseph Payne I take Jacotot’s directions for carrying out the
rule, “II faut apprendre quelque chose, et y rapporter tout le reste.”
1. LEARN—_i.e._, learn so as to know thoroughly, perfectly, immovably
(_imperturbablement_), as well six months or twelve months hence,
as now—SOMETHING—something which fairly represents the subject to be
acquired, which contains its essential characteristics. 2. REPEAT that
“something” incessantly (_sans cesse_), _i.e._, every day, or very
frequently, from the beginning, without any omission, so that no part
may be forgotten. 3. REFLECT upon the matter thus acquired, so as, by
degrees, to make it a possession of the mind as well as of the memory,
so that, being appreciated as a whole, and appreciated in its minutest
parts, what is as yet unknown, may be _referred to_ it and interpreted by
it. 4. VERIFY, or test, general remarks, _e.g._, grammatical rules, &c.,
made by others, by comparing them with the facts (_i.e._, the words and
phraseology) which you have learnt yourself.
§ 19. In conclusion, I will give some account of the way in which
reading, writing, and the mother-tongue were taught on the Jacototian
system.
The teacher takes a book, say Edgeworth’s “Early Lessons,” points to the
first word, and names it, “Frank.” The child looks at the word and also
pronounces it. Then the teacher does the same with the first two words,
“Frank and”; then with the three first, “Frank and Robert,” &c. When
a line or so has been thus gone over, the teacher asks which word is
Robert? What word is that (pointing to one)? “Find me the same word in
this line” (pointing to another part of the book). When a sentence has
been thus acquired, the words already known are analysed into syllables,
and these syllables the child must pick out elsewhere. Finally, the
same thing is done with letters. When the child can read a sentence,
that sentence is put before him written in small-hand, and the child is
required to copy it. When he has copied the first word, he is led, by the
questions of the teacher, to see how it differs from the original, and
then he tries again. The pupil must always correct himself, guided only
by questions. This sentence must be worked at till the pupil can write
it pretty well from memory. He then tries it in larger characters. By
carrying out this plan, the children’s powers of observation and making
comparisons are strengthened, and the arts of reading and writing are
said to be very readily acquired.
§ 20. For the mother-tongue, a model book is chosen and thoroughly
learned. Suppose “Rasselas” is selected. “The pupil learns by heart
a sentence, or a few sentences, and to-morrow adds a few more, still
repeating from the beginning. The teacher, after two or three lessons of
learning and repeating, takes portions—any portion—of the matter, and
submits it to the crucible of the pupil’s mind:—Who was Rasselas? Who was
his father? What is the father of waters? Where does it begin its course?
Where is Abyssinia? Where is Egypt? Where was Rasselas placed? What sort
of a person was Rasselas? What is ‘credulity’? What are the ‘whispers of
fancy,’ the ‘promises of youth,’ &c., &c.?”