classes have a “religion-lesson” (_Religionstunde_) nearly every day, the
younger children in the German Bible, the elder in the Greek Testament
or Church History; and in all cases the teacher is careful to instruct
his pupils in the tenets of Luther or Calvin. The Germans may urge that
if we believe a set of doctrines to be a fitting expression of Divine
revelation, it is our first duty to make the young familiar with those
doctrines. I cannot say, however, that I have been favourably impressed
by the religion-lessons I have heard given in German schools. I do
not deny that dogmatic teaching is necessary, but the first thing to
cultivate in the young is reverence; and reverence is surely in danger
if you take a class in “religion” just as you take a class in grammar.
Emerson says somewhere, that to the poet, the saint, and the philosopher,
all distinction of sacred and profane ceases to exist, all things become
alike sacred. As the schoolboy, however, does not as yet come under any
one of these denominations, if the distinction ceases to exist for him,
all things will become alike profane.
§ 11. I believe that religious instruction is conveyed in the most
impressive way when it is connected with worship. Where the prayers
are joined with the reading of Scripture and with occasional simple
addresses, and where the congregation have responses to repeat, and
psalms and hymns to sing, there is reason to hope that boys will
increase, not only in knowledge, but in wisdom and reverence too. Without
asserting that the Church of England service is the best possible for
the young, I hold that any form for them should at least resemble it
in its main features, should be as varied as possible, should require
frequent change of posture, and should give the congregation much to say
and sing. Much use might be made as in the Church of Rome, of litanies.
The service, whatever its form, should be conducted with great solemnity,
and the boys should not sit or kneel so close together that the badly
disposed may disturb their neighbours who try to join in the act of
worship. If good hymns are sung, these may be taken occasionally as the
subject of an address, so that attention may be drawn to their meaning.
Music should be carefully attended to, and the danger of irreverence
at practices guarded against by never using sacred words more than is
necessary, and by impressing on the singers the sacredness of everything
connected with Divine worship. Questions combined with instruction may
sometimes keep up boys’ attention better than a formal sermon. Though
common prayer should be frequent, this should not be supposed to take the
place of private prayer. In many schools boys have hardly an opportunity
for private prayer. They kneel down, perhaps, with all the talk and play
of their schoolfellows going on around them, and sometimes fear of public
opinion prevents their kneeling down at all. A schoolmaster cannot teach
private prayer, but he can at least see that there is opportunity for it.
Education to goodness and piety, as far as it lies in human hands, must
consist almost entirely in the influence of the good and pious superior
over his inferiors, and as this influence is independent of rules, these
remarks of mine cannot do more than touch the surface of this most
important subject.[209]
§ 12. In conclusion, I wish to say a word on the education of opinion.
Sir Arthur Helps lays great stress on preparing the way to moderation
and open-mindedness by teaching boys that all good men are not of the
same way of thinking. It is indeed a miserable error to lead a young
person to suppose that his small ideas are a measure of the universe,
and that all who do not accept his formularies are less enlightened than
himself. If a young man is so brought up, he either carries intellectual
blinkers all his life, or, what is far more probable, he finds that
something he has been taught is false, and forthwith begins to doubt
everything. On the other hand, it is a necessity with the young to
believe, and we could not, even if we would, bring a youth into such a
state of mind as to regard everything about which there is any variety of
opinion as an open question. But he may be taught reverence and humility;
he may be taught to reflect how infinitely greater the facts of the
universe must be than our poor thoughts about them, and how inadequate
are words to express even our imperfect thoughts. Then he will not
suppose that all truth has been taught him in his formularies, nor that
he understands even all the truth of which those formularies are the
imperfect expression.[210]
XXII.
CONCLUSION.
§ 1. When I originally published these essays (more than 22 years ago)
the critic of the _Nonconformist_ in one of the best, though by no
means most complimentary, of the many notices with which the book was
favoured, took me to task for being in such a hurry to publish. I had
confessed incompleteness. What need was there for me to publish before I
had completed my work? Since that time I have spent years on my subject
and at least two years on these essays themselves; but they now seem to
me even further from completeness than they seemed then. However, I have
reason to believe that the old book, incomplete as it was, proved useful
to teachers; and in its altered form it will, I hope, be found useful
still.
§ 2. It may be useful I think in two ways.
First: it may lead some teachers to the study of the great thinkers on
education. There are some vital truths which remain in the books which
time cannot destroy. In the world as Goethe says are few voices, many
echoes; and the echoes often prevent our hearing the voices distinctly.
Perhaps most people had a better chance of hearing the voices when there
were fewer books and no periodicals. Speakers properly so called cannot
now be heard for the hubbub of the talkers; and as literature is becoming
more and more periodical our writers seem mostly employed like children
on card pagodas or like the recumbent artists of the London streets who
produce on the stones of the pavement gaudy chalk drawings which the next
shower washes out.
But if I would have fewer books what business have I to add to the
number? I may be told that—
“He who in quest of quiet, ‘Silence!’ hoots,
Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.”
My answer is that I do not write to expound my own thought, but to draw
attention to the thoughts of the men who are best worth hearing. It is
not given to us small people to think strongly and clearly like the great
people; we, however, gain in strength and clearness by contact with them;
and this contact I seek to promote. So long as this book is used, it will
I hope be used only as an _introduction_ to the great thinkers whose
names are found in it.
§ 3. There is another way in which the book may be of use. By considering
the great thinkers in chronological order we see that each adds to the
treasure which he finds already accumulated, and thus by degrees we are
arriving in education, as in most departments of human endeavour, at a
_science_. In this science lies our hope for the future. Teachers must
endeavour to obtain more and more knowledge of the laws to which their
art has to conform itself.
§ 4. It may be of advantage to some readers if I point out briefly what
seems to me the course of the main stream of thought as it has flowed
down to us from the Renascence.
§ 5. As I endeavoured to show at the beginning of this book, the Scholars
of the Renascence fell into a great mistake, a mistake which perhaps
could not have been avoided at a time when literature was rediscovered
and the printing press had just been invented. This mistake was the
idolatry of books, and, still worse, of books in Latin and Greek. So the
schoolmaster fell into a bad theory or conception of his task, for he
supposed that his function was to teach Latin and Greek; and his practice
or way of going to work was not much better, for his chief implements
were grammar and the cane.
§ 6. The first who made a great advance were the Jesuits. They were
indeed far too much bent on being popular to be “Innovators.” They
endeavoured to do well what most schoolmasters did badly. They taught
Latin and Greek, and they made great use of grammar, but they gave up the
cane. Boys were to be made happy. School-hours were to be reduced from 10
hours a day to 5 hours, and in those 5 hours learning was to be made “not
only endurable but even pleasurable.”
But the pupils were to find this pleasure not in the exercise of their
mental powers but in other ways. As Mr. Eve has said, young teachers
are inclined to think mainly of stimulating their pupils’ minds and so
neglect the repetition needed for accuracy. Old teachers on the other
hand care so much for accuracy that they require the same thing over and
over till the pupils lose zest and mental activity. The Jesuits frankly
adopted the maxim “Repetition is the mother of studies,” and worked over
the same ground again and again. The two forces on which they relied for
making the work pleasant were one good—the personal influence of the
master (“boys will soon love learning when they love the teacher,”) and
one bad or at least doubtful—the spur of emulation.
However, the attempt to lead, not drive, was a great step in the right
direction. Moreover as they did not hold with the Sturms and Trotzendorfs
that the classics in and for themselves were the object of education
the Jesuits were able to think of other things as well. They were very
careful of the health of the body. And they also enlarged the task of
the schoolmaster in another and still more important way. To the best of
their lights they attended to the moral and religious training of their
pupils. It is much to the credit of the Fathers that though Plautus
and Terence were considered very valuable for giving a knowledge of
colloquial Latin and were studied and learnt by heart in the Protestant
schools, the Jesuits rejected them on account of their impurity. The
Jesuits wished the whole boy, not his memory only, to be affected by the
master; so the master was to make a study of each of his pupils and to go
on with the same pupils through the greater part of their school course.
The Jesuit system stands out in the history of education as a remarkable
instance of a school system elaborately thought out and worked as a
whole. In it the individual schoolmaster withered, but the system grew,
and was, I may say _is_, a mighty organism. The single Jesuit teacher
might not be the superior of the average teacher in good Protestant
schools, but by their unity of action the Jesuits triumphed over their
rivals as easily as a regiment of soldiers scatters a mob.
§ 7. The schoolmaster’s theory of the human mind made of it, to use
Bartle Massey’s simile, a kind of bladder fit only to hold what was
poured into it. This pouring-in theory of education was first called in
question by that strange genius who seems to have stood outside all the
traditions and opinions of his age,
“holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all.”
I mean Rabelais.
Like most reformers, Rabelais begins with denunciations of the system
established by use and wont. After an account of the school-teaching and
school-books of the day, he says—“It would be better for a boy to learn
nothing at all than to be taught such-like books by such-like masters.”
He then proposes a training in which, though the boy is to study books,
he is not to do this mainly, but is to be led to look about him, and
to use both his senses and his limbs. For instance, he is to examine
the stars when he goes to bed, and then to be called up at four in the
morning to find the change that has taken place. Here we see a training
of the powers of observation. These powers are also to be exercised on
the trees and plants which are met with out-of-doors, and on objects
within the house, as well as on the food placed on the table. The study
of books is to be joined with this study of things, for the old authors
are to be consulted for their accounts of whatever has been met with.
The study of trades, too, and the practice of some of them, such as
wood-cutting, and carving in stone, makes a very interesting feature
in this system. On the whole, I think we may say that Rabelais was the
first to advocate training as distinguished from teaching; and he was the
father of _Anschauungs-unterricht_, teaching by _intuition_, _i.e._, by
the pupil’s own senses and the spring of his own intelligence. Rabelais
would bestow much care on the body too. Not only was the pupil to ride
and fence; we find him even shouting for the benefit of his lungs.
§ 8. Rabelais had now started an entirely new theory of the educator’s
task, and fifty years afterwards his thought was taken up and put forward
with incomparable vigour by the great essayist, Montaigne. Montaigne
starts with a quotation from Rabelais—“The greatest clerks are not the
wisest men,” and then he makes one of the most effective onslaughts
on the pouring-in theory that is to be found in all literature. His
accusation against the schoolmasters of his time is twofold. First, he
says, they aim only at giving knowledge, whereas they should first think
of judgment and virtue. Secondly, in their method of teaching they do
not exercise the pupils’ own minds. The sum and substance of the charge
is contained in these words—“We labour to stuff the memory and in the
meantime leave the conscience and understanding impoverished and void.”
His notion of education embraced the whole man. “Our very exercises and
recreations,” says he, “running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting,
riding, fencing, will prove to be a good part of our study. I would have
the pupil’s outward fashion and mien and the disposition of his limbs
formed at the same time with his mind. ’Tis not a soul, ’tis not a body,
that we are training up, but a _man_, and we ought not to divide him.”
§ 9. Before the end of the fifteen hundreds then we see in the best
thought of the time a great improvement in the conception of the task of
the schoolmaster. Learning is not the only thing to be thought of. Moral
and religious training are recognised as of no less importance. And as
“both soul and body have been created by the hand of God” (the words
are Ignatius Loyola’s), both must be thought of in education. When we
come to instruction we find Rabelais recommending that at least part of
it should be “intuitive,” and Montaigne requiring that the instruction
should involve an exercise of the intellectual powers of the learner. But
the escape even in thought from the Renascence ideal was but partial.
Some of Rabelais’ directions seem to come from a “Verbal Realist,” and
Montaigne was far from saying as Joseph Payne has said, “every act of
teaching is a mode of dealing with mind and will be successful only in
proportion as this is recognised,” “teaching is only another name for
mental training.” But if Rabelais and Montaigne did not reach the best
thought of our time they were much in advance of a great deal of our
_practice_.
§ 10. The opening of the sixteen hundreds saw a great revolt from the
literary spirit of the Renascence. The exclusive devotion to books was
followed by a reaction. There might after all be something worth knowing
that books would not teach. Why give so much time to the study of words
and so little to the observation of things? “Youth,” says a writer of the
time, “is deluged with grammar precepts infinitely tedious, perplexed,
obscure, and for the most part unprofitable, and that for many years.”
Why not escape from this barren region? “Come forth, my son,” says
Comenius. “Let us go into the open air. There you shall view whatsoever
God produced from the beginning and doth yet effect by nature.”
And Milton thus expresses the conviction of his day: “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.”
This great revolution which was involved in the Baconian philosophy may
be described as a turning from fancy to fact. All the creations of the
human mind seemed to have lost their value. The only things that seemed
worth studying were the material universe and the laws or sequences which
were gradually ascertained by patient induction and experiment.
§ 11. Till the present century this revolution did not extend to our
schools and universities. It is only within the last fifty years that
natural science has been studied even in the University of Bacon and
Newton. The Public School Commission of 1862 found that the curriculum
was just as it had been settled at the Renascence. But if the walls of
these educational Jerichos were still standing this was not from any
remissness on the part of “the children of light” in shouting and blowing
with the trumpet. They raised the war-cry “Not words, but things!” and
the cry has been continued by a succession of eminent men against the
schools of the 17th and 18th centuries and has at length begun to tell
on the schools of the 19th. Perhaps the change demanded is best shown in
the words of John Dury about 1649: “The true end of all human learning
is to supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our
ignorance of the nature and use of the creatures and the disorderliness
of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them.” So the
Innovators required teachers to devote themselves to natural science and
to the science of the human mind.
§ 12. The first Innovators, like the people of the fifteen hundreds,
thought mainly of the acquisition of knowledge, only the knowledge
was to be not of the classics but of the material world. In this they
seem inferior to Montaigne who had given the first place to virtue and
judgment.
§ 13. But towards the middle of the sixteen hundreds a very eminent
Innovator took a comprehensive view of education, and reduced instruction
to its proper place, that is, he treated it as a part of education
merely. This man, Comenius, was at once a philosopher, a philanthropist,
and a schoolmaster; and in his writings we find the first attempt at a
science of education. The outline of his science is as follows:—
“We live a threefold life—a vegetative, an animal, and an intellectual
or spiritual. Of these, the first is perfect in the womb, the last in
heaven. He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world, much more
he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. According to the heavenly idea
a man should—1st, Know all things; 2nd, He should be master of things and
of himself; 3rd, He should refer everything to God. So that within us
Nature has implanted the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety. To
bring these seeds to maturity is the object of education. All men require
education, and God has made children unfit for other employment that they
may have time to learn.”
Here we have quite a new theory of the educator’s task. He is to bring
to maturity the seeds of learning, virtue, and piety, which are already
sown by Nature in his pupils. This is quite different from the pouring-in
theory, and seems to anticipate the notion of Froebel, that the educator
should be called not _teacher_ but _gardener_. But Comenius evidently
made too much of knowledge. Had he lived two centuries later he would
have seen the area of possible knowledge extending to infinity in all
directions, and he would no longer have made it his ideal that “man
should know all things.”
§ 14. The next great thinker about education—I mean Locke—seems to me
chiefly important from his having taken up the principles of Montaigne
and treated the giving of knowledge as of very small importance.
Montaigne, as we have seen, was the first to bring out clearly that
education was much more than instruction, as the whole was greater than
its part, and that instruction was of far less importance than some other
parts of education. And this lies at the root of Locke’s theory also.
The great function of the educator, according to him, is not to _teach_,
but to _dispose_ the pupil to virtue first, industry next, and then
knowledge; but he thinks where the first two have been properly cared for
knowledge will come of itself. The following are Locke’s own words:—“The
great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and to form the mind,
to settle in his pupil good habits and the principles of virtue and
wisdom, to give him little by little a view of mankind and work him into
a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy; and in the
prosecution of it to give him vigour, activity, and industry. The studies
which he sets him upon are but, as it were, the exercise of his faculties
and employment of his time; to keep him from sauntering and idleness; to
teach him application and accustom him to take pains, and to give him
some little taste of what his own industry must perfect.”[211] So we see
that Locke agrees with Comenius in his enlarged view of the educator’s
task, and that he thought much less than Comenius of the importance of
the knowledge to be given.
§ 15. We already see a gradual escape from the “idols” of the Renascence.
Locke, instead of accepting the learned ideal, declares that learning
is the last and least thing to be thought of. He cares little about the
ordinary literary instruction given to children, though he thinks they
must be taught something and does not know what to put in its place. He
provides for the education of those who are to remain ignorant of Greek,
but only when they are “gentlemen.” In this respect the van is led by
Comenius, who thought of education for _all_, boys and girls, rich and
poor, alike. Comenius also gave the first hint of the true nature of our
task—to bring to perfection the seeds implanted by Nature. He also cared
for the little ones whom the schoolmaster had despised. Locke does not
escape from a certain intellectual disdain of “my young masters,” as he
calls them; but in one respect he advanced as far as the best thinkers
among his successors have advanced. Knowledge, he says, must come by the
action of the learner’s own mind. The true teacher is within.
§ 16. We now come to the least practical and at the same time the most
influential of all the writers on education—I mean Rousseau. He, like
Rabelais, Montaigne, and Locke, was (to use Matthew Arnold’s expression)
a “child of the idea.” He attacked scholastic use and wont not in the
name of expedience, but in the name of reason; and such an attack—so
eloquent, so vehement, so uncompromising—had never been made before.
Still there remained even in theory, and far more in practice, effects
produced by the false ideal of the Renascence. This ideal Rousseau
entirely rejected. He proposed making a clean sweep and returning to what
he called the state of Nature.
§ 17. Rousseau was by no means the first of the Reformers who advocated
a return to Nature. There has been a constant conviction in men’s
minds from the time of the Stoics onwards that most of the evils which
afflict humanity have come from our not following “Nature.” The cry of
“Everything according to Nature” was soon raised by educationists. Ratke
announced it as one of his principles. Comenius would base all action
on the analogy of Nature. Indeed, there has hardly ever been a system
of education which did not lay claim to be the “natural” system. And by
“natural” has been always understood something different from what is
usual. What is the notion that produces this antithesis?
§ 18. When we come to trace back things to their cause we are wont to
attribute them to God, to Nature, or to Man. According to the general
belief, God works in and through Nature, and therefore the tendency
of things apart from human agency must be to good. This faith which
underlies all our thoughts and modes of speech, has been beautifully
expressed by Wordsworth—
“A gracious spirit o’er this earth presides,
And in the heart of man; invisibly
It comes to works of unreproved delight
And tendency benign; directing those
Who care not, know not, think not, what they do.”
_Prelude_, v, _ad f._