between theory and practice. It is so easy to recommend that boys should
be got to understand and take an interest in their work—so difficult to
carry out the recommendation! Grown people can hardly conceive that words
which have in their minds been associated with familiar ideas from time
immemorial, are mere sounds in the mouths of their pupils. The teacher
thinks he is beginning at the beginning if he says that a transitive verb
must govern an accusative, or that all the angles of a square are right
angles. He gives his pupils credit for innate ideas up to this point, at
all events, and advancing on this supposition he finds that he can get
nothing out of them but memory-work; so he insists on this that his time
and theirs may seem not to be wholly wasted. The great difficulty of
teaching well, however, is after all but a poor excuse for contentedly
teaching badly, and it would be a great step in advance if teachers in
general were as dissatisfied with themselves as they usually are with
their pupils.[198]
§ 30. I do not purpose following Mr. Spencer through his chapters on
moral and physical education. In practice I find I can draw no line
between moral and religious education; so the discussion of one without
the other has not for me much interest. Mr. Spencer has some very
valuable remarks on physical education which I could do little more than
extract, and I have already made too many quotations from a work which
will be in the hands of most of my readers.
§ 31. Mr. Spencer differs very widely from the great body of our
schoolmasters. I have ventured in turn to differ on some points from Mr.
Spencer; but I have failed to give any adequate notion of the work I
have been discussing if the reader has not perceived that it is not only
one of the most readable, but also one of the most important books on
education in the English language.
XX.
THOUGHTS AND SUGGESTIONS.
$ 1. One of the great wants of middle-class education at present, is
an ideal to work towards. Our old public schools have such an ideal.
The model public school-man is a gentleman who is an elegant Latin and
Greek scholar. True, this may not be a very good ideal, and some of our
ablest men, both literary and scientific, are profoundly dissatisfied
with it. But, so long as it is maintained, all questions of reform are
comparatively simple. In middle-class schools, on the other hand, there
is no _terminus ad quem_. A number of boys are got together, and the
question arises, not simply _how_ to teach, but _what_ to teach. Where
the masters are not university men, they are, it may be, not men of
broad views or high culture. Of course no one will suppose me ignorant
of the fact that a great number of teachers who have never been at a
university, are both enlightened and highly cultivated; and also that
many teachers who have taken degrees, even in honours, are neither.
But, speaking broadly of the two classes, I may fairly assume that the
non-university men are inferior in these respects to the graduates.
If not, our universities should be reformed on Carlyle’s “live-coal”
principle without further loss of time. Many non-university masters
have been engaged in teaching ever since they were boys themselves,
and teaching is a very narrowing occupation. They are apt therefore to
be careless of general principles, and to aim merely at storing their
pupils’ memory with _facts_—facts about language, about history, about
geography, without troubling themselves to consider what is and what is
not worth knowing, or what faculties the boys have, and how they should
be developed. The consequence is their boys get up, for the purpose of
forgetting with all convenient speed, quantities of details about as
instructive and entertaining as the _Propria quæ maribus_, such as the
division of England under the Heptarchy, the battles in the wars of the
Roses, and lists of geographical names. Where the masters are university
men, they have rather a contempt for this kind of cramming, which makes
them do it badly, if they attempt it at all; but they are driven to this
teaching in many cases because they do not know what to substitute in
its place. In their own school-education they were taught classics and
mathematics and nothing else. Their pupils are too young to have much
capacity for mathematics, and they will leave school too soon to get
any sound knowledge of classics; so the strength of the teaching ought
clearly not to be thrown into these subjects. But the master really
knows no other. He soon finds that he is not much his pupils’ superior
in acquaintance with the theory of the English language or with history
and geography. There are not many men with sufficient strength of will to
study whilst their energies are taxed by teaching; and standard books are
not always within reach: so the master is forced to content himself with
hearing lessons in a perfunctory way out of dreary school-books. Hence it
comes to pass that he goes on teaching subjects of which he himself is
ignorant, subjects, too, of which he does not recognise the importance,
with an enlightened disbelief in his own method of tuition. He finds it
uphill work, to be sure, and is conscious that his pupils do not get on,
however hard he may try to drive them; but he never hoped for success in
his teaching, so the want of it does not distress him. I may be suspected
of caricature, but not, I think, by university men who have themselves
had to teach anything besides classics and mathematics.
§ 2. If there is any truth in what I have been saying, school-teaching,
in subjects other than classics and mathematics (which I am not now
considering), is very commonly a failure. And a failure it must remain
until boys can be got to work with a will, in other words, to feel
interest in the subject taught. I know there is a strong prejudice in
some people’s minds against the notion of making learning pleasant. They
remind us that school should be a preparation for after-life. After-life
will bring with it an immense amount of drudgery. If, they say, things
at school are made too easy and pleasant (words, by the way, very often
and very erroneously confounded), school will cease to give the proper
discipline: boys will be turned out not knowing what hard work is, which,
after all, is the most important lesson that can be taught them. In these
views I sincerely concur, so far as this at least, that we want boys to
work hard, and vigorously to go through the necessary drudgery, _i.e._,
labour in itself disagreeable. But this result is not attained by such a
system as I have described. Boys do not learn to work _hard_, but in a
dull stupid way, with most of their faculties lying dormant, and though
they are put through a vast quantity of drudgery, they seem as incapable
of throwing any energy into it as prisoners on the tread-mill. I think
we shall find on consideration, that no one succeeds in any occupation
unless that occupation is interesting, either in itself or from some
object that is to be obtained by means of it. Only when such an interest
is aroused is energy possible. No one will deny that, as a rule, the
most successful men are those for whom their employment has the greatest
attractions. We should be sorry to give ourselves up to the treatment of
a doctor who thought the study of disease mere drudgery, or a dentist who
felt a strong repugnance to operating on teeth. No doubt the successful
man in every pursuit has to go through a great deal of drudgery, but he
has a general interest in the subject, which extends, partially at least,
to its most wearisome details; his energy, too, is excited by the desire
of what the drudgery will gain for him.[199]
§ 3. Observe, that although I would have boys take pleasure in their
work, I regard the pleasure as a _means_, not an end. If it could be
proved that the mind was best trained by the most repulsive exercises, I
should most certainly enforce them. But I do not think that the mind _is_
benefited by galley-slave labour; indeed, hardly any of its faculties are
capable of such labour. We can compel a boy to learn a thing by heart,
but we cannot compel him to wish to understand it; and the intellect
does not act without the will (_v. supra_ p. 193). Hence, when anything
is required which cannot be performed by the memory alone, the driving
system utterly breaks down; and even the memory, as I hope to show
presently, works much more effectually in matters about which the mind
feels an interest. Indeed, the mind without sympathy and interest is like
the sea-anemone when the tide is down, an unlovely thing, closed against
external influences, enduring existence as best it can. But let it find
itself in a more congenial element, and it opens out at once, shows
altogether unexpected capacities, and eagerly assimilates all the proper
food that comes within its reach. Our school teaching is often little
better than an attempt to get sea-anemones to flourish on dry land.
§ 4. We see then, that a boy, before he can throw energy into a study,
must find that study _interesting in itself, or in its results_.
Some subjects, properly taught, are interesting in themselves.
Some subjects may be interesting to older and more thoughtful boys, from
a perception of their usefulness.
All subjects may be made interesting by emulation.
§ 5. Hardly any effort is made in some schools to interest the younger
children in their work, and yet no effort can be, as the Germans say,
more “rewarding.” The teacher of children has this advantage, that his
pupils are never dull and listless, as youths are apt to be. If they are
not attending to him, they very soon give him notice of it; and if he has
the sense to see that their inattention is his fault, not theirs, this
will save him much annoyance and them much misery. He has, too, another
advantage, which gives him the power of gaining their attention—their
emulation is easily excited. In the Waisenhaus at Halle I once heard a
class of very young children, none of them much above six years old,
perform feats of mental arithmetic quite, as I should have said, beyond
their age, and I well remember the pretty eagerness with which each
child held out a little hand and shouted, “_Mich! Bitte!_” to gain the
privilege of answering.
§ 6. Then again, there are many subjects in which children take an
interest. Indeed, all visible things, especially animals, are much more
to them than to us. A child has made acquaintance with all the animals
in the neighbourhood, and can tell you much more about the house and its
surroundings than you know yourself. But all this knowledge and interest
you would wish forgotten directly he comes into school. Reading, writing,
and figures are taught in the driest manner. The two first are in
themselves not uninteresting to the child, as he has something to do, and
young people are much more ready to do anything than to learn anything.
But when lessons are given the child to learn, they are not about things
concerning which he has ideas and feels an interest, but you teach him
mere sounds—_e.g._, that Alfred (to him only a name) came to the throne
in 871, though he has no notion what the throne is, or what 871 means.
The child learns the lesson with much trouble and small profit, bearing
the infliction with what patience he can, till he escapes out of school
and begins to learn much faster on a very different system.
§ 7. We cannot often introduce into the school the thing, much less the
animal, which children would care to see, but we can introduce what will
please them as well, in some cases even better, viz., good pictures. A
teacher who could draw boldly on the blackboard, would have no difficulty
in arresting the children’s attention. But, at present, few can do this,
and pictures must be provided. A good deal has been done of late years
in the way of illustrating children’s books, and even childhood must be
the happier for such pictures as those of Tenniel and Harrison Weir. But
it seems well understood that these gentlemen are incapable of doing
anything for children beyond affording them innocent amusement, and we
should be as much surprised at seeing their works introduced into that
region of asceticism, the English school-room, as if we ran across one of
Raphael’s Madonnas in a Baptist chapel.[200]
§ 8. I had the good fortune, many years ago, to be present at the lessons
given by a very excellent teacher to the youngest class, consisting both
of boys and girls, at the first _Bürger-schule_ of Leipzig. In Saxony the
schooling which the state demands for each child, begins at six years
old, and lasts till fourteen. These children were, therefore, between six
and seven. In one year, a certain Dr. Vater taught them to read, write,
and reckon. His method of teaching was as follows:—Each child had a book
with pictures of objects, such as a hat, a slate, &c. Under the picture
was the name of the object in printing and writing characters, and also
a couplet about the object. The children having opened their books, and
found the picture of a hat, the teacher showed them a hat, and told them
a tale connected with one. He then asked the children questions about
his story, and about the hat he had in his hand—What was the colour of
it? &c. He then drew a hat on the blackboard, and made the children copy
it on their slates. Next he wrote the word “hat” and told them that for
people who could read this did as well as the picture. The children then
copied the word on their slates. The teacher proceeded to analyse the
word “hat, (_hut_).” “It is made up,” said he, “of three sounds, the
most important of which is the _a_ (_u_), which comes in the middle.” In
all cases the vowel sound was first ascertained in every syllable, and
then was given an approximation to consonantal sounds before and after.
The couplet was now read by the teacher, and the children repeated it
after him. In this way the book had to be worked over and over till the
children were perfectly familiar with everything in it. They had been
already six months thus employed when I visited the school, and knew the
book pretty thoroughly. To test their knowledge, Dr. Vater first wrote a
number of capitals at random on the board, and called out a boy to tell
him words having these capitals as initials. This boy had to call out a
girl to do something of the kind, she a boy, and so forth. Everything was
done very smartly, both by master and children. The best proof I saw of
their accuracy and quickness was this: the master traced words from the
book very rapidly with a stick on the blackboard, and the children always
called out the right word, though I could not follow him. He also wrote
with chalk words which the children had never seen, and made them name
first the vowel sounds, then the consonantal, then combine them.
I have been thus minute in my description of this lesson, because it
seems to me an admirable example of the way in which children between
six and eight years of age should be taught. The method (see Rüegg’s
_Pädagogik_, p. 360; also _Die Normalwörtermethode_, published by Orell,
Füssli, Zürich, 1876), was arranged and the book prepared by the late Dr.
Vogel, who was then Director of the school. Its merits, as its author
pointed out to me, are:—1. That it connects the instruction with objects
of which the child has already an idea in his mind, and so associates
new knowledge with old; 2. That it gives the children plenty to _do_ as
well as to learn, a point on which the Doctor was very emphatic; 3. That
it makes the children go over the same matter in various ways till they
have _learnt a little thoroughly_, and then applies their knowledge to
the acquirement of more. Here the Doctor seems to have followed Jacotot.
But though the method was no doubt a good one, I must say its success
at Leipzig was due at least as much to Dr. Vater as to Dr. Vogel. This
gentleman had been taking the youngest class in this school for twenty
years, and, whether by practice or natural talent, he had acquired
precisely the right manner for keeping children’s attention. He was
energetic without bustle and excitement, and quiet without a suspicion of
dulness or apathy. By frequently changing the employment of the class,
and requiring smartness in everything that was done, he kept them all on
the alert. The lesson I have described was followed without pause by one
in arithmetic, the two together occupying an hour and three quarters, and
the interest of the children never flagged throughout.
§ 9. Dr. Vater’s method for arithmetic I cannot now recall; but I do
not doubt that, as a German teacher who had studied his profession, he
understood what English teachers and pupil-teachers do not understand,
viz., how children should get their first knowledge of numbers.
Pestalozzi and Froebel insisted that children should learn about numbers
from _things_ which they actually counted; and, according to Grubé’s
method, which I found in Germany over 30 years ago, and which is now
extending to the United States, the whole of the first year is given to
the relations of numbers not exceeding ten (see _Grubé’s Method_ by L.
Seeley, New York, Kellogg, and F. L. Soldan’s _Grubé’s M._, Chicago).
In arithmetic everything depends on these relations becoming thoroughly
familiar. The decimal scale is possibly not so good as the scale of eight
or of twelve, but the human race has adopted it; and even the French
Revolutionists, with all their belief in “reason,” and their hatred of
the past, recoiled from any attempt to change it. But in accepting it,
they endeavoured to remove anomalies, and so should we. Everything must
be based on groups of ten; and with children we should do well, as Mr.
W. Wooding suggests, to avoid the great anomaly in our nomenclature, and
call the numbers between ten and twenty (_i.e._, twain-tens or two-tens),
“ten-one, ten-two, &c.” Numeration should by a long way precede any
kind of notation, and the main truths about numbers should be got
at experimentally with counters or coins. In these truths should be
included all that we usually separate under the “First Four Rules,” and
with integers we may even from the first give a clear conception of the
fractional parts of whole numbers, _e.g._, that one third of 6 is 2.[201]
Actual measuring and weighing, besides actual counting, go towards actual
arithmetic for children.
All this teaching, if conducted as Dr. Vater would have conducted it,
would not give children any distaste for learning or make them dread the
sound of the school bell.
§ 10. I will suppose a child to have passed through such a course as this
by the time he is eight or nine years old. Besides having some clear
notions of number and form, he can now read and copy easy words. What
we next want for him is a series of good reading-books, about things in
which he takes an interest. The language must of course be simple, but
the matter so good that neither master nor pupils will be disgusted by
its frequent repetition.
The first volume may very well be about animals—dogs, horses, &c., of
which large pictures should be provided, illustrating the text. The first
cost of these pictures would be considerable, but as they would last for
years, the expense to the friends of each child taught from them would be
a mere trifle.
§ 11. The books placed in the hands of the children should be well
printed and strongly bound. In the present penny-wise system,
school-books are given out in cloth, and the leaves are loose at the end
of a fortnight, so that children get accustomed to their destruction and
treat it as a matter of course. This ruins their respect for books, which
is not so unimportant a matter as it may at first appear.
§ 12. After each reading lesson, which should contain at least one
interesting anecdote, there should be columns of all the words which
occurred for the first time in that lesson. These should be arranged
according to their grammatical classification, not that the child should
be taught grammar, but this order is as good as any other, and by it
the child would learn to observe certain differences in words almost
unconsciously.[202]
Here I cannot resist quoting an excellent remark from Helps’s _Brevia_
(p. 125). “We should make the greatest progress in art, science,
politics, and morals, if we could train up our minds to look straight
and steadfastly and uninterruptedly at the thing in question that we
are observing. This seems a very slight thing to do; but practically
it is hardly ever done. Between you and the object rises a mist of
technicalities, of prejudices, of previous knowledge, and, above all,
of terrible familiarity.” Perhaps it is this “terrible familiarity”
that has prevented our seeing till quite lately that reading is the art
of getting meaning by signs that appeal to the eye, _not_ the art of
reporting to others the meaning we have thus arrived at. “Accustoming
boys to read aloud what they do not first understand,” says Benjamin
Franklin, “is the cause of those even set tones so common among readers,
which, when they have once got a habit of using [them], they find so
difficult to correct; by which means, among fifty readers we scarcely
find a good one.” (_Essays, Sk. of English Sch._) It seems to have
escaped even Franklin’s sagacity that reading aloud is a different art
to the art of reading, and a much harder one. The two should be studied
separately, and most time and attention should be given to silent
reading, which is by far the more important of the two. Colonel F. W.
Parker, who has successfully cultivated the power of “looking straight
at” things, gives us in his _Talks on Teaching_ the right rule for
reading. “Changing,” says he, “the beautiful power of expression, full
of melody, harmony, and correct emphasis and inflection, to the slow,
painful, almost agonising pronunciation that we have heard so many times
in the school-room, is a terrible sin that we should never be guilty of.
There is, indeed, not the slightest need of changing a good habit to a
miserable one if we would follow the rule that the child has naturally
followed all his life. _Never allow a child to give a thought till he
gets it_” (p. 37). Now that the existence of a thought in children is
allowed for, we may expect all sorts of improvements. Reading, as a means
of ascertaining thought, is second only to hearing, and this art should
be cultivated by giving children books of questions (_e.g._, Horace
Grant’s _Arithmetic for Young Children_), and requiring the learner
silently to get at the question and then give the answer aloud.
§ 13. Easy descriptive and narrative poetry should be learnt by heart at
this stage. That the children may repeat it well, they should get their
first notions of it from the master _vivâ voce_. According to the usual
plan, they get it up with false emphasis and false stops, and the more
thoroughly they have learnt the piece, the more difficulty the master has
in making them say it properly.
§ 14. Every lesson should be worked over in various ways. The columns
of words at the end of the reading lessons may be printed with writing
characters, and used for copies. To write an upright column either of
words or figures is an excellent exercise in neatness. The columns will
also be used as spelling lessons, and the children may be questioned
about the meaning of the words. The poetry, when thoroughly learned,
may sometimes be written from memory. Sentences from the book may be
copied either directly or from the black-board, and afterwards used for
dictation.