School Education
_‘Home Education’ Series_
By CHARLOTTE M. MASON
_Each Volume 3s. 6d. net_
I. HOME EDUCATION.
II. PARENTS AND CHILDREN.
III. SCHOOL EDUCATION.
IV. ESSAYS IN PRACTICAL EDUCATION.
V. OURSELVES, OUR SOULS AND BODIES.
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER, & CO., LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE
43 GERRARD STREET, LONDON, W.
_‘Home Education’ Series_
VOLUME III.
School Education
By
Charlotte M. Mason
_SECOND EDITION_
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER, & CO., LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.
1907
_The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved_
_TO_
Henrietta Franklin
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED, IN VERY GRATEFUL
RECOGNITION, NOT ONLY OF HER GENEROUS
LIFE’S LABOUR GIVEN TO THE SPREAD
OF CERTAIN EDUCATIONAL IDEAS,
BUT ALSO OF HER SINGULAR
APPREHENSION OF
THOSE IDEAS
[Illustration: FOR THE CHILDRENS SAKE]
“O maraviglia! che come altrui piacque
l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque
Subitamente là onde la svelse.”
We read in the _Purgatorio_, Canto I., how Virgil was directed to prepare
Dante for his difficult ascent:
“Va dunque, e fa che tu costui ricinghe
d’un giunco schietto, e che gli lavi il viso
si che ogni sucidume quindi stinghe:
...
Questa isoletta intorno ad imo ad imo,
laggiu, cola dove la batte l’onda,
porta de’ giunchi sopra il molle limo.
Null’ altra pianta, che facesse fronda
o indurasse, vi puote aver vita,
pero che alle percosse non seconda.
...
Venimmo poi in sul litro diserto,
...
Quivi mi cinse si come altrui piacque:
o maraviglia! che qual egli scelse
l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque
Subitamente là onde la svelse.”
“Go, then, and see thou gird this one about
With a smooth rush, and that thou wash his face,
So that thou cleanse away all stain therefrom.
...
This little island round about its base,
Below there, yonder where the billow beats it,
Doth rushes bear upon its washy ooze;
No other plant that putteth forth the leaf,
Or that doth indurate, can there have life,
Because it yieldeth not unto the shocks.
...
Then came we down upon the desert shore.
...
There he begirt me as the other pleased;
O marvellous! for even as he culled
The humble plant, such it sprang up again
Suddenly there where he uprooted it.”
(LONGFELLOW’S TRANSLATION.)
Preface to the ‘Home Education’ Series
The educational outlook is rather misty and depressing both at home
and abroad. That science should be a staple of education, that the
teaching of Latin, of modern languages, of mathematics, must be reformed,
that nature and handicrafts should be pressed into service for the
training of the eye and hand, that boys and girls must learn to write
English and therefore must know something of history and literature;
and, on the other hand, that education must be made more technical and
utilitarian—these, and such as these, are the cries of expedience with
which we take the field. But we have no unifying principle, no definite
aim; in fact, no philosophy of education. As a stream can rise no higher
than its source, so it is probable that no educational effort can rise
above the whole scheme of thought which gives it birth; and perhaps this
is the reason of all the ‘fallings from us, vanishings,’ failures, and
disappointments which mark our educational records.
Those of us, who have spent many years in pursuing the benign and
elusive vision of Education, perceive that her approaches are regulated
by a law, and that this law has yet to be evoked. We can discern its
outlines, but no more. We know that it is pervasive; there is no part of
a child’s home-life or school-work which the law does not penetrate. It
is illuminating, too, showing the value, or lack of value, of a thousand
systems and expedients. It is not only a light, but a measure, providing
a standard whereby all things, small and great, belonging to educational
work must be tested. The law is liberal, taking in whatsoever things are
true, honest, and of good report, and offering no limitation or hindrance
save where excess should injure. And the path indicated by the law is
continuous and progressive, with no transition stage from the cradle
to the grave, except that maturity takes up the regular self-direction
to which immaturity has been trained. We shall doubtless find, when we
apprehend the law, that certain German thinkers—Kant, Herbart, Lotze,
Froebel—are justified; that, as they say, it is ‘necessary’ to believe in
God; that, therefore, the knowledge of God is the principal knowledge,
and the chief end of education. By one more character shall we be able
to recognise this perfect law of educational liberty when it shall be
made evident. It has been said that ‘The best idea which we can form of
absolute truth is that it is able to meet every condition by which it can
be tested.’ This we shall expect of our law—that it shall meet every test
of experiment and every test of rational investigation.
Not having received the tables of our law, we fall back upon Froebel or
upon Herbart; or, if we belong to another School, upon Locke or Spencer;
but we are not satisfied. A discontent is it a divine discontent? is
upon us; and assuredly we should hail a workable, effectual philosophy
of education as a deliverance from much perplexity. Before this great
deliverance comes to us it is probable that many tentative efforts will
be put forth, having more or less of the characters of a philosophy;
notably, having a central idea, a body of thought with various members
working in vital harmony.
Such a theory of education, which need not be careful to call itself a
system of psychology, must be in harmony with the thought movements of
the age; must regard education, not as a shut-off compartment, but as
being as much a part of life as birth or growth, marriage or work; and it
must leave the pupil attached to the world at many points of contact. It
is true that educationalists are already eager to establish such contact
in several directions, but their efforts rest upon an axiom here and an
idea there, and there is no broad unifying basis of thought to support
the whole.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; and the hope that there may be
many tentative efforts towards a philosophy of education, and that all of
them will bring us nearer to the _magnum opus_, encourages me to launch
one such attempt. The central thought, or rather body of thought, upon
which I found, is the somewhat obvious fact that the child is a _person_
with all the possibilities and powers included in personality. Some of
the members which develop from this nucleus have been exploited from time
to time by educational thinkers, and exist vaguely in the general common
sense, a notion here, another there. One thesis, which is, perhaps, new,
that _Education is the Science of Relations_, appears to me to solve the
question of curriculæ, as showing that the object of education is to put
a child in living touch with as much as may be of the life of Nature
and of thought. Add to this one or two keys to self-knowledge, and the
educated youth goes forth with some idea of self-management, with some
pursuits, and many vital interests. My excuse for venturing to offer a
solution, however tentative and passing, to the problem of education
is twofold. For between thirty and forty years I have laboured without
pause to establish a working and philosophic theory of education; and
in the next place, each article of the educational faith I offer has
been arrived at by inductive processes; and has, I think, been verified
by a long and wide series of experiments. It is, however, with sincere
diffidence that I venture to offer the results of this long labour;
because I know that in this field there are many labourers far more able
and expert than I—the ‘angels’ who fear to tread, so precarious is the
footing!
But, if only _pour encourager les autres_, I append a short synopsis of
the educational theory advanced in the volumes of the ‘Home Education
Series.’ The treatment is not methodic, but incidental; here a little,
there a little, as seemed to me most likely to meet the occasions of
parents and teachers. I should add that in the course of a number of
years the various essays have been prepared for the use of the Parents’
Educational Union in the hope that that Society might witness for a more
or less coherent body of educational thought.
“The consequence of truth is great; therefore the judgment of
it must not be negligent.”
1. Children are born _persons_.
2. They are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good
and evil.
3. The principles of authority on the one hand and obedience on the
other, are natural, necessary and fundamental; but—
4. These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality of
children, which must not be encroached upon, whether by fear or love,
suggestion or influence, or undue play upon any one natural desire.
5. Therefore we are limited to three educational instruments—the
atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation
of living ideas.
6. By the saying, EDUCATION IS AN ATMOSPHERE, it is not meant that a
child should be isolated in what may be called a ‘child environment,’
especially adapted and prepared; but that we should take into account
the educational value of his natural home atmosphere, both as regards
persons and things, and should let him live freely among his proper
conditions. It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the
‘child’s’ level.
7. By EDUCATION IS A DISCIPLINE, is meant the discipline of habits
formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body.
Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual
lines of thought—_i.e._, to our habits.
8. In the saying that EDUCATION IS A LIFE, the need of intellectual and
moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on
ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
9. But the mind is not a receptacle into which ideas must be dropped,
each idea adding to an ‘apperception mass’ of its like, the theory upon
which the Herbartian doctrine of interest rests.
10. On the contrary, a child’s mind is no mere _sac_ to hold ideas; but
is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual _organism_, with an
appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is
prepared to deal, and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does
food-stuffs.
11. This difference is not a verbal quibble. The Herbartian doctrine lays
the stress of education—the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels,
presented in due order—upon the teacher. Children taught upon this
principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge;
and the teacher’s axiom is, ‘What a child learns matters less than how he
learns it.’
12. But, believing that the normal child has powers of mind that fit him
to deal with all knowledge proper to him, we must give him a full and
generous curriculum; taking care, only, that the knowledge offered to him
is vital—that is, that facts are not presented without their informing
ideas. Out of this conception comes the principle that,—
13. EDUCATION IS THE SCIENCE OF RELATIONS; that is, that a child has
natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must
train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art,
and upon _many living_ books; for we know that our business is, not to
teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as
may be of—
‘Those first-born affinities
That fit our new existence to existing things.’
14. There are also two secrets of moral and intellectual self-management
which should be offered to children; these we may call the Way of the
Will and the Way of the Reason.
15. _The Way of the Will._—Children should be taught—
(_a_) To distinguish between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’
(_b_) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts
from that which we desire but do not will.
(_c_) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of or
do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting.
(_d_) That, after a little rest in this way, the will returns
to its work with new vigour.
(This adjunct of the will is familiar to us as _diversion_,
whose office it is to ease us for a time from will effort,
that we may ‘will’ again with added power. The use of
suggestion—even self-suggestion—as an aid to the will, is to be
deprecated, as tending to stultify and stereotype character. It
would seem that spontaneity is a condition of development, and
that human nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of
success.)
16. _The Way of the Reason._—We should teach children, too, not to ‘lean’
(too confidently) ‘unto their own understanding,’ because the function of
reason is, to give logical demonstration (_a_) of mathematical truth; and
(_b_) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case reason
is, perhaps, an infallible guide, but in the second it is not always a
safe one; for whether that initial idea be right or wrong, reason will
confirm it by irrefragable proofs.
17. Therefore children should be taught, as they become mature enough to
understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on
them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of initial ideas. To help
them in this choice we should give them principles of conduct and a wide
range of the knowledge fitted for them.
These three principles (15, 16 and 17) should save children from some of
the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to live at
a lower level than we need.
18. We should allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual
and ‘spiritual’ life of children; but should teach them that the divine
Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their continual
helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.
_The ‘Home Education’ Series is so called from the title of the
first volume, and not as dealing, wholly or principally, with
‘Home’ as opposed to ‘School’ education._
Preface
The intention of the following volume is to offer some suggestions
towards a curriculum for boys and girls under twelve. A curriculum,
however, is not an independent product, but is linked to much else by
chains of cause and consequence; and the manner of curriculum I am
anxious to indicate is the outcome of a scheme of educational thought,
the adoption of which might, I believe, place educational work generally
upon a sounder footing.
The fundamental principles of docility and authority have been considered
in the first place because they _are_ fundamental; but, for that very
reason, they should be present but not in evidence: we do not expose
the foundations of our house. Not only so, but these principles must be
conditioned by respect for the personality of children; and, in order
to give the children room for free development on the lines proper to
them, it is well that parents and teachers should adopt an attitude of
‘masterly inactivity.’
Having considered the relations of teachers and taught, I have touched
upon those between education and current thought. Education should be
in the flow, as it were, and not shut up in a watertight compartment.
Perhaps, reverence for personality as such, a sense of the solidarity
of the race, and a profound consciousness of evolutionary progress, are
among the elements of current thought which should help us towards an
educational ideal.
In considering the training of children under the convenient divisions of
physical, mental, moral, and religious, I have not thought it necessary
to enlarge upon matters of common knowledge and general acceptance, but
have dwelt upon aspects of training under each heading which are likely
to be overlooked. Under the phrase, ‘Education is a life,’ I have tried
to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life upon ideas,
and, as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium for ideas,
and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children have a
natural desire for, and a right of admission to, all fitting knowledge,
appears to me to be suggested by the phrase, ‘Education is the science of
relations.’
These considerations clear the ground towards that of a curriculum.
The sort of curriculum I have in view should educate children upon
_Things_ and _Books_. Current thought upon the subject of education
by _Things_ is so sound and practical, and so thoroughly carried into
effect, that I have not thought it necessary to dwell much here upon
this part of education. Our great failure seems to me to be caused by
the fact that we do not form the _habit of reading books that are worth
while_ in children while they are at school and are under twelve years of
age. The free use of books implies correct spelling and easy and vigorous
composition without direct teaching of these subjects.
The Appendices show, I think, that such use of books in education works
out well in practice, and is a great saving of time and labour to both
teacher and pupils, especially relieving both of the deadly dull labour
wasted on ‘_corrections_.’
The much-diluted, or over-condensed, teaching of the oral lesson, or
the lecture, gives place to the well thought out, consecutive treatment
of the right book, a _living_ book in which facts are presented as the
outcome of ideas.
Children taught in this way are remarkable for their keenness after
knowledge, and do well afterwards in any examination for which they may
have to prepare; and, what is of much more consequence, are prepared
to take their full share of all that life offers of intellectual and
practical interests.
AMBLESIDE, _November 1904_.
_Will the reader kindly substitute ‘teachers’ for ‘parents’ when the
former title suits the case?_
Contents
PAGE
CHAPTER I
DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND SCHOOL
Better relations between children and their elders—The
elder generation of parents, autocratic—Arbitrary rule not
always a failure—But truer educational thought results in
worthier character—Doctrine of the infallible reason—Leads
to the dethronement of authority—Authority not inherent,
but deputed—‘Quick as thought’—The notion of the finality
of human reason intolerable—Authority and docility,
fundamental principles—Work of rationalistic philosophers,
inevitable—Authority, vested in the office, 1
CHAPTER II
DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND THE SCHOOL
_Part II.—How Authority Behaves_
Mistakes made on principle—Authority distinguished
from autocracy—Behaviour of ‘autocracy’—Behaviour of
‘authority’—Qualities proper to a ruler—Mechanical and
reasonable obedience—Response of docility to authority, a
natural function—The habit of prompt obedience—The effort
of decision—Authority avoids cause of offence—Authority is
alert—Who gave thee this authority? 13
CHAPTER III
‘MASTERLY INACTIVITY’
Increased sense of responsibility—A sign of moral
progress—Parental responsibility—Anxiety the note of a
transition stage—A fussy and restless habit—‘Masterly
inactivity’—The element of good humour—Self-confidence—The
fine, easy way of fathers—Confidence in the
children—Omniscience of parents and teachers—‘Fate’ and
‘free-will’—The component parts of masterly inactivity—Serenity
of a Madonna—Leisure—Faith, 25
CHAPTER IV
SOME OF THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AS PERSONS
Children should be free in their play—Organised games are not
play—Personal initiative in work—Children must stand or fall by
their own efforts—Boys and girls are generally dutiful—Children
should choose their own friends—Should be free to spend their
own pocket-money—Should form their own opinions—Spontaneity, 36
CHAPTER V
PSYCHOLOGY IN RELATION TO CURRENT THOUGHT
Educational thought in the eighteenth century—General
dissatisfaction with education—Psychologies are many—Conditions
of an adequate system—Sacredness of the person—The evolution
of the individual—The solidarity of the race—The best thought
is common thought—Locke’s ‘states of consciousness’—Does not
provide for the evolution of the person—Modern physiological
psychology—‘Unjustifiable materialism’—Psychology ‘a
phrase of diffidence’—We become devitalised—This system
inadequate—Unnecessary—Inharmonious—Evolution is checked, 44
CHAPTER VI
SOME EDUCATIONAL THEORIES EXAMINED
Theories of Pestalozzi and Froebel—Lack the element
of personality—The struggle for existence a part of
life—Herbartian psychology—The person an effect and not a
cause—A tempting vista—Eliminates personality—Turns out
duplicates—Each system fails to meet our tests—A psychology
that meets the demands upon it—Educational truth a common
possession—We take children as persons—The person wills and
thinks and feels—An adequate doctrine—Education the science of
relations—Teaching must not be obtrusive—The art of standing
aside, 56
CHAPTER VII
AN ADEQUATE THEORY OF EDUCATION
A human being—_His capacities_—_His limitations_—_His
education_—The behaviour of ideas—No one can beget an idea by
himself—Certain persons attract certain ideas—The idea that
‘strikes’ us—Expansion and activity of the person—Story of
Kaspar Hauser—What Nature does for a child—The child has every
power that will serve him—Fulness of living depends on the
establishment of relations—The power of recognition—Æsthetic
appreciation—First-hand knowledge—Appreciative knowledge and
exact knowledge—How a child sets up a new relation, 68
CHAPTER VIII
CERTAIN RELATIONS PROPER TO A CHILD
Dynamic relations—Power over material—Intimacy with animals—The
great human relationships—The awakening idea—Human intelligence
limited by human interests—The full human life—Duty not within
the scope of present-day psychology—Casual ethical teaching—The
moral relation of person to person—The sense of what is due
from us does not come by Nature—Relations of oneself with
oneself—Intimacy with persons of all classes—Fitness as
citizens—Relations with each other as human beings—Relation to
Almighty God—Sentiment is not duty, 79
CHAPTER IX
A GREAT EDUCATIONALIST
_A Review_
We look to Germany for educational reform—Herbartian thought
the most advanced on the Continent—Comparison with P.N.E.U.
thought—The development of the ‘faculties’—We, like Herbart,
discard the ‘faculties’—Pervasiveness of dominant ideas—The
Zeitgeist—The child’s schoolmasters—A noble piety—A mediæval
conception of education—The family principle—Uncertainty as to
the purpose of education—Some attempts to fix—Herbart’s theory,
ethical—Obscurity of psychology—Two luminous principles, 91
CHAPTER X
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF PHYSICAL TRAINING
Does our physical culture make heroes?—A
serviceable body the end of physical culture—‘Ye
are not your own’—Use of habit in physical
training—Self-restraint—Self-control—Self-discipline—Local
habits—Alertness—Quick perception—Stimulating
ideas—Fortitude—Service—Courage—Prudence—Chastity, 101
CHAPTER XI
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF INTELLECTUAL TRAINING
We are law-abiding in matters physical and moral—Not so
in matters intellectual—Three ultimate facts, not open to
question—Limitations of reason—Reason brings logical proof
of any idea we entertain—Another fallacy—intellect man’s
peculiar sphere, knowledge his proper discovery—Great
eras come from time to time—Nothing so practical as great
ideas—The formation of intellectual habits—We trust blindly to
disciplinary subjects—Some intellectual habits—Meditation—The
sustenance of living ideas—Children’s literature—Independent
intellectual development of children—Self-selection and
self-appropriation—Inherited parsimony in lesson-books—Plato’s
educational aim, 113
CHAPTER XII
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF MORAL TRAINING
Three foundation principles—Authority the basis of moral
teaching—Principles not rules—Limitations of authority—Duty
can exist only as that which we _owe_—Morals do not come
by nature—Children born neither moral nor immoral—Moral
teaching—Of the poets—Ethical teaching of the Middle
Ages—We have no authoritative teaching—High ideals—Value
of biography—Of patriotic poems—Mottoes—The habit of sweet
thoughts—Virtues in which children should be trained, 126
CHAPTER XIII
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Authority in religious education—Questions in the air—How
authority works—The habits of the religious life—Habit of the
thought of God—Reverent attitudes—Regularity in devotions—The
habit of reading the Bible—Children formalists by nature—The
habit of praise—The habit of Sunday-keeping—Inspiring ideas
of the religious life—The fatherhood of God—The kingship of
Christ—Our Saviour—The indwelling of the Holy Ghost, 137
CHAPTER XIV
A MASTER-THOUGHT
A motto—Nineteenth-century formula, Education is an
atmosphere—Results in inanition—And _ennui_—Eighteenth-century
formula, Education is a life, results in intellectual
exhaustion—Education is the cultivation of faculties,
leads to abnormal developments—Education has three
faces—Education is a life, one of these—A creed which
unifies life—The diet of great ideas—Science, _the_ teaching
vouchsafed to men to-day—Evolution, the master-thought of
our age—The ages have sought for a unifying principle—But
personality remains—Attitude of parents and teachers towards
evolution—Education is a world business—A captain idea for us,
Education is the science of relations—A wide curriculum—We may
not choose or reject subjects arbitrarily, 148
CHAPTER XV
SCHOOL-BOOKS AND HOW THEY MAKE FOR EDUCATION
Line upon line—An incident of schoolgirl life—How did the girls
get their enthusiasm?—What manner of book sustains the life of
thought—The ‘school-books’ of the publishers—Reason for oral
teaching—Limitations of teachers—Our aim in education is to
give a full life—We undervalue children—Children of the last
generation—Children as they are—Our work, to give vitalising
ideas, 164
CHAPTER XVI
HOW TO USE SCHOOL-BOOKS
Disciplinary subjects of instruction—‘Open sesame’—The Bible,
the great storehouse of moral impressions—Effect of our liturgy
on a child—Principles on which to select school-books—Marks
of a fit book—How to use the right books—Children must
labour—Value of narration—A single careful reading—Other ways
of using books—The teacher’s part—Disciplinary devices must not
come between children and the soul of the book, 174
CHAPTER XVII
EDUCATION THE SCIENCE OF RELATIONS: WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR
INTIMACIES: _THE PRELUDE_ AND _PRÆTERITA_
Only three educational instruments—Our limitations—We temper
life too much for the children—Fairy lore, a screen and
shelter—Spontaneous living—On what does fulness of living
depend?—The child, a person—An infant’s self-education—Our
part, to remove obstructions and to give stimulus—Our
error—‘Business and desire’—The setting up of dynamic
relations—Ruskin’s indictment of the limitations of his
condition—Wordsworth’s recognition of his opportunities, 182
CHAPTER XVIII
WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR INTIMACIES
_Part II.—Further Affinities_
Affinity for material: Ruskin’s opportunities—Intimacy with
natural objects—Ruskin’s flower-studies—His pebble studies—A
life-shaping intimacy—Insatiate delight in books, Ruskin’s,
Wordsworth’s—‘_They must_ have their food’ of romance—Children
must range at will among books—Words, ‘a passion and a
power’—Ruskin’s _local_ historic sense—Living touch with
the past necessary—Wordsworth and Ruskin aloof from the
past—Knowledge learned in schools—Comradeship, 194
CHAPTER XIX
WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR INTIMACIES
_Part III.—Vocation_
Turner’s ‘call’ to Ruskin—Sincere work—Initiation—Nature,
a passion—The calling of a poet—The education of the
little prig—Children have affinities and should have
relations—Education not desultory—Strenuous effort and
reverence—Comradeship has duties—The angel troubles the still
pool—The highest relationship, 204
AN EDUCATIONAL MANIFESTO, 216
CHAPTER XX
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS A CURRICULUM
(_For Children under Twelve_)
_Part I._
Summary of preceding chapters—Some preliminary
considerations—We take too much upon us—A definite
aim—Education objective, not subjective—Interests—Educational
unrest—A unifying principle—Education should give knowledge
touched with emotion—Education is the science of relations—Is
there such a thing as the ‘child-mind’?—Knowledge
_versus_ information—Children have a natural craving for
knowledge—Children must be educated on books, 215
CHAPTER XXI
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS A CURRICULUM
(_For Children under Twelve_)
_Part II.—School-books_
Books that supply the sustenance of ideas—Books and
oral teaching—The use of appliances—The co-ordination
of studies—Our aim in education—Education by
things—Education by books—The question of a
curriculum—Religion—History—Language—Mathematics—‘Practical
instruction’—Science—Drawing—Picture talks, 228
CHAPTER XXII
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS A CURRICULUM
_Part III.—The Love of Knowledge_
The use of books makes for short hours—‘Utilitarian’
education—Relations and interests—Causes of failure—Intelligent
education—Blind alleys—An educated child—Children delight
in school, but not for love of knowledge—An educational
revolution—The children’s Magna Carta, 240
APPENDICES
I. QUESTIONS FOR THE USE OF READERS, 248
II. SOME SPECIMENS OF EXAMINATION WORK DONE IN A SCHOOL IN
WHICH THE PUPILS ARE EDUCATED UPON BOOKS AND THINGS, 271
III. WHAT A CHILD SHOULD KNOW AT TWELVE, 300
IV. EXAMINATION OF A CHILD OF TWELVE ON THE WORK OF A TERM, 302
V. HOW ORAL LESSONS ARE USED, 329
INDEX, 360
School Education
CHAPTER I
DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND THE SCHOOL
=Better Relations between Children and their Elders.=—All of us who have
accepted education as our _métier_ are keenly alive to the signs of the
times as they are to be read in the conduct and manners of children.
Upon one thing, anyway, we may congratulate ourselves with unmixed
satisfaction: the relations between children and parents, and indeed
between children and their grown-up friends generally, are far more
intimate, frank and friendly than such relations used to be. There does
not seem to be any longer that great gulf fixed between child thought
and grown-up thought, which the older among us once tried to cross with
frantic but vain efforts. The heads of the house, when we were little,
were autocratic as the Czars of all the Russias. We received everything
at their hands, from bread and milk to mother’s love, with more or
less gratitude, but with invariable docility. If they had stubborn
questionings as to whether was better for us, this or that, they kept
them to themselves. For us, everything was decreed, and all decrees were
final. There were rebellious children, perhaps, as one in a score, or
one in a hundred, but then these were rebellious with the fine courage
of Milton’s Satan: they dared everything and set themselves up in bold
opposition. These were the open rebels who would, sooner or later, come
to a bad end; so we were told and so we secretly believed. For the
others, there was no middle course. They were brought under rule, and
that rule was arbitrary and without appeal.
=The Elder Generation of Parents, Autocratic.=—This is how children were
brought up some forty or fifty years ago, and even young parents of
to-day have, in many cases, grown up under a _régime_, happy, loving and
wise very likely, but, before all things, arbitrary. There were what the
Scotch would call ‘ill-guided’ homes, where the children did what was
right in their own eyes. These will always exist so long as there are
weak and indolent parents, unconcerned about their responsibilities. But
the exceptions went to prove the rule; and the rule and tradition, in
most middle-class homes, was that of well-ordered and governed childhood.
Every biography, that issues from the press, of the men and women who
made their mark during the first half of the century, is a case in point.
John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, the Lawrences, Tennyson, almost everyone who
has made for himself a distinguished name, grew up under a martinet rule.
Only the other day we heard of an instance, the recollection of which
had survived for seventy years. A boy of twelve or thirteen had been out
shooting rabbits. He came home in the early darkness of a bitterly cold
winter evening. His father asked him by which gate he had entered the
park. ‘By (such a) gate.’ ‘Did you shut it?’ ‘I don’t recollect.’ ‘Go and
see’; and the boy went, though he was already tired out, and the gate
in question was more than a mile from the house. Such an incident would
scarcely happen to-day; the boy would protest, plead his own benumbed
fatigue, and suggest that a man should be sent to shut the gate, if,
as did not appear from the story, it was important that it should be
shut at all. Yet this was a kind father, whom his children both loved
and honoured; but arbitrary rule and unquestioning obedience were the
habits of the household. Nor is this notion of domestic government quite
obsolete yet. I heard the other day of a Scotch father who confined
his daughter of eighteen to her room for a week on account of some, by
no means serious, breach of discipline. The difference is, that where
you find an arbitrary parent now, he is a little out of touch with the
thought and culture of the day; while, a few decades ago, parents were
arbitrary of set principle and in proportion as they were cultivated and
intelligent.
=Arbitrary Rule not always a Failure.=—It cannot be said that this
arbitrary rule was entirely a failure. It turned out steadfast, capable,
able, self-governed, gentle-mannered men and women. In our less hopeful
moments, we wonder as we watch the children of our day whether they will
prove as good stuff as their grandfathers and their fathers. But we need
not fear. The evolution of educational thought is like the incoming of
the tide. The wave comes and the wave goes and you hardly know whether
you are watching ebb or flow; but let an hour elapse and then judge.
=But truer Educational Thought results in Worthier Character.=—After
all allowances for ebb and flow, for failure here and mistake there,
truer educational thought must of necessity result in an output of more
worthy character. For one thing, this very arbitrariness arose from
limitations. Parents knew that they must govern. Righteous Abraham, who
ruled his house, was their ensample; and it is far easier to govern from
a height, as it were, than from the intimacy of close personal contact.
But you cannot be quite frank and easy with beings who are obviously of
a higher and of another order than yourself; at least, you cannot when
you are a little boy. And here we have one cause of the inscrutable
reticence of children. At the best of times they carry on the busy
traffic of their own thoughts all to themselves. We can all recollect
the pathetic misgivings of our childish days which a word would have
removed, but which yet formed the secret history of years of our lives.
Mrs Charles, in her autobiography, tells us how her childhood was haunted
by a distressing dream. She dreamed that she had lost her mother and
hunted for her in vain for hours in the rooms and endless corridors of
a building unknown to her. Her distress was put down to fear of ‘the
dark’ and she never told her tender mother of this trouble of the night.
Probably no degree of loving intimacy will throw the closed doors of the
child’s nature permanently ajar, because, we may believe, the burden
of the mystery of all this unintelligible world falls early upon the
conscious soul, and each of us must beat out his conception of life for
himself. But it is much to a child to know that he may question, may talk
of the thing that perplexes him, and that there is comprehension for his
perplexities. Effusive sympathy is a mistake, and bores a child when it
does not make him silly. But just to know that you can ask and tell is a
great outlet, and means, to the parent, the power of direction, and to
the child, free and natural development.
=Doctrine of the Infallible Reason.=—With the advance of one line of
educational insight, we have, alas, to note the receding of another and a
most important principle. Early in the century, authority was everything
in the government of the home, and the docility of the children went
without saying, that is, always excepting the few rebellious spirits.
However little we may be aware of the fact, the direction of philosophic
thought in England has had a great deal to do with the relations of
parents and children in every home. Two centuries ago Locke promulgated
the doctrine of the infallible reason. That doctrine accepted, individual
reason becomes the ultimate authority, and every man is free to do that
which is right in his own eyes. Provided, Locke would have added, that
the reason be fully trained, and the mind instructed as to the merits
of the particular case; but such proviso was readily lost sight of, and
the broad principle remained. The old Puritanic faith and the elder
traditions for the bringing up of children, as well as Locke’s own
religious feelings and dutiful instincts, were too strong for the new
philosophy in England; but in France there was a soil prepared for the
seed. Locke was eagerly read because his opinions jumped with the thought
of the hour. His principles were put into practice, his conclusions
worked out to the bitter end, and thoughtful writers consider that this
religious and cultivated English gentleman cannot be exonerated from a
share of the guilt of the atrocities of the French Revolution.
=Leads to the Dethronement of Authority.=—We in the twentieth century
have lost some of the safeguards that held good in the seventeenth, and
we have our own, perhaps greater, philosopher, who carries the teaching
of Locke to the inevitable conclusions which the earlier thinker shirked.
Mr Herbert Spencer proclaims, as they did in France, the apotheosis
of Reason. He sees, as they saw in France, that the principle of the
infallible reason is directly antagonistic to the idea of authority. He
traces this last idea to its final source and justification. So long as
men acknowledge a God, they of necessity acknowledge authority, supreme
and deputed. But, says Mr Spencer, in effect, every man finds his own
final authority in his own reason. This philosopher has the courage
of his convictions; he perceives, as they did in France, that the
enthronement of the human reason is the dethronement of Almighty God. He
teaches, by processes of exhaustive reasoning, that—
“We sit unowned upon our burial sod,
And know not whence we come nor whose we be.”
From the dethronement of the divine, follows the dethronement of all
human authority, whether it be of kings and their deputies over nations,
or of parents over families. Every act of authority is, we are taught, an
infringement of the rights of man or of child. Children are to be brought
up from the first self-directed, doing that which is right in their own
eyes, governed by the reason which is to be trained, by experience
of right and wrong, in the choosing of the right course. Life has its
penalties for those who transgress the laws of reason, and the child
should be permitted to learn these laws through the intervention of these
penalties. But ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’ are to be eliminated
from the vocabulary of parents. So complete and detailed is Mr Spencer’s
scheme for the emancipation of children from rule, that he objects to
the study of languages on the ground that the rules of grammar are a
transgression of the principle of liberty.
=Authority not Inherent, but Deputed.=—Mr Spencer’s work on education is
so valuable a contribution to educational thought that many parents read
it and embrace it, as a whole, without perceiving that it is a part, and
a carefully worked out part, of a scheme of philosophy with which perhaps
they are little in sympathy. They accept the philosopher’s teaching when
he bids them bring up children without authority in order to give them
free room for self-development; without perceiving, or perhaps knowing,
that it is the labour of the author’s life to eliminate the idea of
authority from the universe, that he repudiates the authority of parents
because it is a link in the chain which binds the universe to God. For
it is indeed true that none of us has a right to exercise authority, in
things great or small, except as we are, and acknowledge ourselves to
be, deputed by the one supreme and ultimate Authority. When we take up
this volume on education, small as it is, easy reading as it is, we must
bear in mind that we have put ourselves under the lead of a philosopher
who overlooks nothing, who regards the least important things from the
standpoint of their final issue, and who would not have the little child
do as he is bid lest he should learn, as a man, to obey that authority,
other than himself, which we believe to be Divine.
‘=Quick as Thought.=’—The influence of his rationalistic philosophy is by
no means confined to those who read this author’s great works, or even to
those who read his manual on education. ‘Quick as thought’ is a common
phrase, but it would be interesting to know how quick thought is, to have
any measure for the intensity, vitality, and velocity of an idea, for the
rate of its progress in the world. One would like to know how soon an
idea, conceived in the study, becomes the common property of the man in
the street, who regards it as his own possession, and knows nothing of
its source. We have no such measures; but there is hardly a home, of even
the lowest stage of culture, where this theory of education has not been
either consciously adopted or rejected, though the particular parents in
question may never have heard of the philosopher. An idea, once launched,
is ‘in the air,’ so we say. As is said of the Holy Spirit, we know not
whence it comes, nor whither it goes.
=The Notion of the Finality of Human Reason Intolerable.=—But, because
philosophic thought is so subtle and permeating an influence, it is our
part to scrutinise every principle that presents itself. Once we are able
to safeguard ourselves in this way, we are able to profit by the wisdom
of works which yet rest upon what we regard as radical errors. It seems
not improbable that the early years of this very century may thus see the
advent of England’s truly great philosopher, who shall not be confined by
the limitations of rationalistic or of materialistic thought. Men have
become weary of themselves. The notion of the finality of human reason
has grown an intolerable limitation. Nothing less than the Infinite will
satisfy the spirit of a man. We again recognise that we are made for God,
and have no rest until we find Him; and philosophic thought, at home and
abroad, has, to some degree, left these channels high and dry, and is
running in other courses, towards the Infinite and the Divine.
=Authority and Docility, Fundamental Principles.=—One of the first
efforts of this reconstructive thought, which is building us once more
a temple for our spirits, a house not made with hands, is to restore
Authority to its ancient place as an ultimate fact, no more to be
accounted for than is the principle of gravitation, and as binding and
universal in the moral world as is that other principle in the natural.
Fitting in to that of authority, as the ball fits the socket to make
a working joint, is the other universal and elemental principle of
Docility, and upon these two hang all possibilities of law and order,
government and progress, among men. Mr Benjamin Kidd, in his _Social
Evolution_, has done much for the recognition of these two fundamental
principles. Why a football team should obey its captain, an army its
commanding officer; why a street crowd should stand in awe of two or
three policemen; why property should be respected, when it is the many
who want and the few who have; why, in a word, there should be rule and
not anarchy in the world—these are the sorts of questions Mr Kidd sets
himself to answer. He turns to Reason for her reply, and she has none
to give. Her favourite argument is that the appeal to self-interest is
final; that we do, individually and collectively, whatever is shown to be
for our advantage. But when that company went down in the ‘Royal George,’
standing at ‘Attention!’ because that was the word of command; when the
Six Hundred rode ‘into the valley of death’ because—
“Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,”
—the subtlest reasoning can find no other motive than the single and
simple one of authority acting upon docility. These men had been told to
do these things, and, therefore, they did them. That is all. And that
they did well, we know; our own heart is the witness. We speak of such
deeds as acts of heroism, but it is well to notice that these splendid
displays of human nature at its best resolve themselves for the most part
into acts of obedience to the word of authority. The abuse of authority
gives us the slave and the despot, but slavery and despotism could not
exist except that they are founded upon elemental principles in human
nature. We all have it in us to serve or to rule as occasion demands. To
dream of liberty, in the sense of every man his own sole governor, is as
futile as to dream of a world in which apples do not necessarily drop
from the tree, but may fly off at a tangent in any direction.
=Work of Rationalistic Philosophers, Inevitable.=—What is Authority? The
question shows us how inevitable in the evolution of thought has been
the work of the rationalistic philosophers. It is to them we owe our
deliverance from the autocrat, whether on the throne or in the family.
Their work has been to assert and prove that every human soul is born
free, that liberty is his inalienable right, and that an offence against
the liberty of a human being is a capital offence. This also is true.
Parents and teachers, because their subjects are so docile and so feeble,
are tempted more than others to the arbitrary temper, to say—Do thus and
thus because I bid you. Therefore they, more than others, owe a debt of
gratitude to the rationalistic school for holding, as they do, a brief
for human freedom, including the freedom of children in a family. It
would seem to be thus that God educates the world. It is not only one
good custom, but one infallible principle, which may ‘corrupt a world.’
Some such principle stands out luminous in the vision of a philosopher;
he sees it is truth; it takes possession of him and he believes it to be
the whole truth, and urges it to the point of _reductio ad absurdum_.
Then the principle at the opposite pole of thought is similarly
illuminated and glorified by a succeeding school of thought; and, later,
it is discerned that it is not by either principle, but by both, that men
live.
=Authority, vested in the Office.=—It is by these countercurrents, so to
speak, of mind forces that we have been taught to rectify our notion of
authority. Easily within living memory we were upon dangerous ground.
We believed that authority was vested in persons, that arbitrary action
became such persons, that slavish obedience was good for the others. This
theory of government we derived from our religion; we believed in the
‘divine right’ of kings and of parents because we believed that the very
will of God was an arbitrary will. But we have been taught better; we
know now that authority is vested in the office and not in the person;
that the moment it is treated as a personal attribute it is forfeited.
We know that a person in authority is a person authorised; and that he
who is authorised is _under_ authority. The person under authority holds
and fulfils a trust; in so far as he asserts himself, governs upon the
impulse of his own will, he ceases to be authoritative and authorised,
and becomes arbitrary and autocratic. It is autocracy and arbitrary
rule which must be enforced, at all points, by a penal code; hence the
confusion of thought which exists as to the connection between authority
and punishment. The despot rules by terror; he punishes right and left to
uphold his unauthorised sway. The person who is vested with authority, on
the contrary, requires no rigours of the law to bolster him up, because
authority is behind him; and, before him, the corresponding principle of
docility.
CHAPTER II
DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND THE SCHOOL
PART II.—_HOW AUTHORITY BEHAVES_
=Mistakes made on Principle.=—Mr Augustus Hare has, apparently, what
somebody calls a _bad_ memory, _i.e._ one which keeps a faithful record
of every slight and offence that had been done to him since the day
he was born! For this reason _The Story of My Life_[1] is not quite
pleasant reading, though it is full of interesting details. But all is
fish that comes to our net. We have seldom had a more instructive record
of childhood, even if we must allow that the instruction comes to us on
the lines of what not to do. The fine character and beautiful nature
of Mrs Augustus Hare have been known to the world since the _Memorials
of a Quiet Life_ were published by this very son; and when we find how
this lady misinterpreted the part of mother to her adopted and dearly
beloved son, we know that we are not reading of the mistakes of an
unworthy or even of a commonplace woman. Mrs Hare always acted upon
principle, and when she erred, the principle was in fault. She confounded
the two principles of authority and autocracy. She believed that there
was some occult virtue in arbitrary action on the part of a parent,
and that a child must be the better in proportion as he does as he is
bidden—the more outrageous the bidding the better the training. Here is
an example of what a loving mother may force herself to do:—“Hitherto,
I had never been allowed anything but roast mutton and rice pudding for
dinner. Now all was changed. The most delicious puddings were talked
of—_dilated_ on—until I became, not greedy, but exceedingly curious
about them. At length _le grand moment_ arrived. They were put on the
table just before me, and then, just as I was going to eat some of them,
they were snatched away, and I was told to get up and carry them off
to some poor person in the village. I remember that, though I did not
really in the least care about the dainties, I cared excessively about
Lea’s wrath at the fate of her nice puddings, of which, after all, I was
most innocent.” Here is another arbitrary ruling:—“Even the pleasures
of this home-Sunday, however, were marred in the summer, when my mother
gave in to a suggestion of Aunt Esther that I should be locked in the
vestry of the church between the services. Miserable, indeed, were the
three hours which—provided with a sandwich for dinner—I had weekly to
spend there; and, though I did not expect to see ghosts, the utter
isolation of Hurstmonceaux church, far away from all haunts of men, gave
my imprisonment an unusual eeriness. Sometimes I used to clamber over
the tomb of the Lords Dacre, which rises like a screen against one side
of the vestry, and be stricken with vague terrors by the two grim white
figures lying upon it in the silent desolation, in which the scamper of
a rat across the floor seemed to make a noise like a whirlwind.... It was
a sort of comfort to me, in the real church-time, to repeat vigorously
all the worst curses in the Psalms, those in which David showed his most
appalling degree of malice, and apply them to Aunt Esther & Co. As all
the Psalms were extolled as beatific, and the Church of England used them
constantly for edification, their sentiments were all right, I supposed.”
And yet how wise this good mother is when she trusts to her own instinct
and insight rather than to a fallacious principle:—“I find in giving
any order to a child, it is always better not to _look_ to see if he
obeys, but to take it for granted that it will be done. If one appears to
doubt the obedience, there is occasion given for the child to hesitate,
‘Shall I do it or no?’ If you seem not to question the possibility of
non-compliance, he feels a trust committed to him to keep and fulfils
it. It is best never to repeat a command, never to answer the oft-asked
question ‘Why?’”
=Authority distinguished from Autocracy.=—Mrs Hare, like many another
ruler, would appear to have erred, not from indolence, and certainly not
from harshness, but because she failed to define to herself the nature
of the authority she was bound to exercise. Autocracy is defined as
independent or self-derived power. Authority, on the other hand, we may
qualify as not being self-derived and not independent. The centurion in
the Gospels says: “I also am a man set under authority, having under me
soldiers, and I say unto one, ‘Go,’ and he goeth; to another, ‘Come,’ and
he cometh; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it.”
Here we have the powers and the limitations of authority. The centurion
is set under authority, or, as we say, authorised, and, for that reason,
he is able to say to one, ‘go,’ to another, ‘come,’ and to a third, ‘do
this,’ in the calm certainty that all will be done as he says, because
he holds his position for this very purpose—to secure that such and such
things shall be accomplished. He himself is a servant with definite
tasks, though they are the tasks of authority. This, too, is the position
that our Lord assumes; He says: “I came not to do mine own will, but
the will of Him that sent me.” That is His commission and the standing
order of His life, and for this reason He spake as one having authority,
knowing Himself to be commissioned and supported.
=Behaviour of Autocracy.=—Authority is not uneasy; captious, harsh
and indulgent by turns. This is the action of autocracy, which is
self-sustained as it is self-derived, and is impatient and resentful,
on the watch for transgressions, and swift to take offence. Autocracy
has ever a drastic penal code, whether in the kingdom, the school, or
the family. It has, too, many commandments. ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt
not,’ are _chevaux de frise_ about the would-be awful majesty of the
autocrat. The tendency to assume self-derived power is common to us all,
even the meekest of us, and calls for special watchfulness; the more
so, because it shows itself fully as often in remitting duties and in
granting indulgences as in inflicting punishments. It is flattering when
a child comes up in the winning, coaxing way the monkeys know how to
assume, and says, ‘_Please_ let me stay at home this morning, only this
once!’ The next stage is, ‘I don’t want to go out,’ and the next, ‘I
won’t!’ and the home or school ruler, who has no principle behind his
own will, soon learns that a child can be autocratic too—autocratic and
belligerent to an alarming extent.
=Behaviour of Authority.=—Authority is neither harsh nor indulgent.
She is gentle and easy to be entreated in all matters immaterial, just
because she is immovable in matters of real importance; for these, there
is always a fixed principle. It does not, for example, rest with parents
and teachers to dally with questions affecting either the health or
the duty of their children. They have no authority to allow children
in indulgences—in too many sweetmeats, for example—or in habits which
are prejudicial to health; nor to let them off from any plain duty
of obedience, courtesy, reverence, or work. Authority is alert; she
knows all that is going on and is aware of tendencies. She fulfils the
apostolic precept—“He that ruleth (let him do it), with diligence.” But
she is strong enough to fulfil that other precept also, “He that showeth
mercy (let him do it), with cheerfulness”; timely clemency, timely
yielding, is a great secret of strong government. It sometimes happens
that children, and not their parents, have right on their side: a claim
may be made or an injunction resisted, and the children are in opposition
to parent or teacher. It is well for the latter to get the habit of
swiftly and imperceptibly reviewing the situation; possibly, the children
may be in the right, and the parent may gather up his wits in time to
yield the point graciously and send the little rebels away in a glow of
love and loyalty.
=Qualities proper to a Ruler.=—Nobody understood this better than Queen
Elizabeth, who contrived to make a curious division of her personality
and be, at the same time, a model ruler and, as a woman, full of the
weaknesses of her sex. It has been well said that she knew when to yield
and how to yield. Her adroitness in getting over many a dangerous crisis
has been much praised by historians; but, possibly, this saving grace was
not adroitness so much as the tact born of qualities proper to all who
are set in authority—the meekness of one who has been given an appointed
work, the readiness to take counsel with herself and with others, the
perception that she herself was not the be-all and the end-all of her
functions as a queen, but that she existed for her people, and the quick
and tender open-minded sympathy which enabled her to see their side of
every question as well as her own—indeed, in preference to her own. These
are the qualities proper to every ruler of a household, a school, or a
kingdom. With these, parents will be able to order and control a fiery
young brood full of energy and vitality, as Elizabeth was, to manage the
kingdom when the minds of men were in a ferment of new thought, and life
was intoxicating in the delightfulness of the possibilities it offered.
=Mechanical and Reasonable Obedience.=—It is a little difficult to
draw the line between mechanical and reasonable obedience. ‘I teach
my children obedience by the time they are one year old,’ the writer
heard a very successful mother remark; and, indeed, that is the age
at which to begin to give children the ease and comfort of the habit
of obeying lawful authority. We know Mr Huxley’s story of the retired
private who was carrying home his Sunday’s dinner from the bakehouse.
A sergeant passed by who recognised the man’s soldierly gait, and was
bent on a practical joke. ‘Attention!’ he cried, and the man stood at
attention while his mutton and potatoes rolled in the gutter. Now, this
kind of obedience is a mere question of nerves and muscles, a habit of
the brain tissue with which the moral consciousness has nothing to do.
It is a little the fashion to undervalue any but reasonable obedience,
as if we were creatures altogether of mind and spirit, or creatures
whose bodies answer as readily to the ruling of the spirit as does the
ship to the helm. But, alas for our weakness! this description fits us
only in proportion as our bodies have been trained to the discipline
of unthinking mechanical obedience. We all know the child who is fully
willing to do the right thing so far as mind is concerned, but with whom
bodily _vis inertiæ_ is strong enough to resist a very torrent of good
intentions and good resolutions; and if we wish children to be able, when
they grow up, to keep under their bodies and bring them into subjection,
we must do this _for_ them in their earlier years.
=Response of Docility to Authority, a Natural Function.=—So far as the
daily routine of small obediences goes, we help them thus to fulfil a
natural function—the response of docility to authority. It may be said
that a child who has acquired the habit of involuntary obedience has
proportionately lost power as a free moral agent; but, as the acts of
obedience in question are very commonly connected with some physical
effort, as, ‘Make haste back,’ ‘Sit straight,’ ‘Button your boots
quickly,’—they belong to the same educational province as gymnastic
exercises, the object of which is the masterly use of the body as a
machine capable of many operations. Now, to work a machine such as a
typewriter or a bicycle, one must, before all things, have practice;
one must have got into the way of working it involuntarily, without
giving any thought to the matter: and to give a child this power over
himself—first in response to the will of another, later, in response to
his own, is to make a man of him.
=The Habit of Prompt Obedience.=—It is an old story that the failures in
life are not the people who lack good intentions; they are those whose
physical nature has not acquired the habit of prompt and involuntary
obedience. The man who can make himself do what he wills has the world
before him, and it rests with parents to give their children this
self-compelling power as a mere matter of habit. But is it not better
and higher, it may be asked, to train children to act always in response
to the divine mandate as it makes itself heard through the voice of
conscience? The answer is, that in doing this we must not leave the other
undone. There are few earnest parents who do not bring the power of
conscience to bear on their children, and there are emergencies enough in
the lives of young and old when we have to make a spiritual decision upon
spiritual grounds—when it rests with us to choose the good and refuse
the evil, consciously and voluntarily, because it is God’s will that we
should.
=The Effort of Decision.=—But it has been well said by a celebrated
preacher that the effort of decision is the greatest effort of life. We
find it so ourselves; shall we take this line of action or the other,
shall we choose this or the other quality of carpet, send our boy to
this or the other school? We all know that such questions are difficult
to settle, and the wear and tear of nervous tissue the decision costs
is evidenced often enough by the nervous headache it leaves behind. For
this reason it is, we may reverently believe, that we are so marvellously
and mercifully made that most of our decisions arrive, so to speak, of
themselves: that is, ninety-nine out of a hundred things we do, are done,
well or ill, as mere matters of habit. With this wonderful provision in
our tissues for recording repeated actions and reproducing them upon
given stimuli—a means provided for easing the burden of life, and for
helping us to realise the gay happiness which appears to be the divine
intention for us so far as we become like little children—it is startling
and shocking that there are many children of thoughtful parents whose
lives are spent in day-long efforts of decision upon matters which it is
their parents’ business to settle for them. Maud is nervous, excitable,
has an over-active brain, is too highly organised, grows pale, acquires
nervous tricks. The doctor is consulted, and, not knowing much about the
economy of the home, decides that it is a case of over-pressure. Maud
must do no lessons for six months; change of air is advised, and milk
diet. Somehow the prescription does not answer, the child’s condition
does not improve; but the parents are slow to perceive that it is not the
soothing routine of lessons which is exhausting the little girl, but the
fact that she goes through the labour of decision twenty times a day, and
not only that, but the added fatigue of a contest to get her own way.
Every point in the day’s routine is discussed, nothing comes with the
comforting ease of a matter of course; the child always prefers to do
something else, and commonly does it. No wonder the poor little girl is
worn out.
=Authority avoids Cause of Offence.=—On the other hand, children are
before all things reasonable beings, and to some children of acute
and powerful intelligence, an arbitrary and apparently unreasonable
command is cruelly irritating. It is not advisable to answer children
categorically when they want to know the why for every command, but wise
parents steer a middle course. They are careful to form habits upon which
the routine of life runs easily, and, when the exceptional event requires
a new regulation, they may make casual mention of their reasons for
having so and so done; or, if this is not convenient and the case is a
trying one, they give the children the reason for all obedience—“for this
is right.” In a word, authority avoids, so far as may be, giving cause of
offence.
=Authority is Alert.=—Another hint as to the fit use of authority may
be gleaned from the methods employed in a well-governed state. The
importance of _prevention_ is fully recognised: police, army, navy, are
largely preventive forces; and the home authority, too, does well to
place its forces on the Alert Service. It is well to prepare for trying
efforts: ‘We shall have time to finish this chapter before the clock
strikes seven’; or, ‘we shall be able to get in one more round before
bedtime.’ Nobody knows better than the wise mother the importance of
giving a child time to collect himself for a decisive moment. This time
should be spent in finishing some delightful occupation; every minute of
idleness at these critical junctures goes to the setting up of the _vis
inertiæ_, most difficult to overcome because the child’s will power is in
abeyance. A little forethought is necessary to arrange that occupations
do come to an end at the right moment; that bedtime does not arrive in
the middle of a chapter, or at the most exciting moment of a game. In
such an event authority, which looks before and after, _might_ see its
way to allow five minutes’ grace, but would not feel itself empowered to
allow a child to dawdle about indefinitely before saying good-night.
=Who gave thee this Authority?=—We need not add that authority is just
and faithful in all matters of promise-keeping; it is also considerate,
and that is why a good mother is the best home-ruler; she is in touch
with the children, knows their unspoken schemes and half-formed desires,
and where she cannot yield, she diverts; she does not crush with a
sledge-hammer, an instrument of rule with which a child is somehow never
very sympathetic.
We all know how important this, of changing children’s thoughts,
diverting, is in the formation of habit. Let us not despise the day
of small things nor grow weary in well-doing; if we have trained our
children from their earliest years to prompt mechanical obedience, well
and good; we reap our reward. If we have not, we must be content to lead
by slow degrees, by ever-watchful efforts, by authority never in abeyance
and never aggressive, to ‘the joy of self-control,’ the delight of proud
chivalric obedience which will hail a command as an opportunity for
service. It is a happy thing that the ‘difficult’ children who are the
readiest to resist a direct command are often the quickest to respond to
the stimulus of an idea. The presentation of quickening ideas is itself a
delicate art, which I have, however, considered elsewhere.
I am not proposing a one-sided arrangement, all the authority on the one
part and all the docility on the other; for never was there a child who
did not wield authority, if only over dolls or tin soldiers. And we of
the ruling class, so far as the nursery and schoolroom go, are we not
fatally docile in yielding obedience to anyone who will take the trouble
to tell us we had better do this or that? We need not be jealous for the
independence of children: that will take care of itself.
To conclude: authority is not only a gift, but a grace; and,
“As every rainbow hue is light,
So every grace is love.”
Authority is that aspect of love which parents present to their children;
parents know it is love, because to them it means continual self-denial,
self-repression, self-sacrifice: children recognise it as love, because
to them it means quiet rest and gaiety of heart. Perhaps the best aid to
the maintenance of authority in the home is for those in authority to
ask themselves daily that question which was presumptuously put to our
Lord—“Who gave Thee this authority?”
CHAPTER III
‘MASTERLY INACTIVITY’
=Increased Sense of Responsibility.=—It would be an interesting task for
a literary expert to trace the stages of ethical thought marked by the
uses, within living memory, of the word _responsibility_. People, and
even children, were highly responsible in the fifties and sixties, but
then it was for their own character, conduct, and demeanour. It is not at
all certain that we hold ourselves responsible in this matter to the same
degree. We are inclined to accept ourselves as inevitable, to make kindly
allowance for our own little ways and peccadilloes, and are, perhaps,
wanting in that wholesome sense of humour, ‘the giftie’ which should “gie
us
“To see oursels as ithers see us.”
=A Sign of Moral Progress.=—If we take ourselves more easily, however,
we take other people more seriously. The sense of responsibility still
rests upon us with a weight ‘heavy as frost’; we have only shifted it to
the other shoulder. The more serious of us are quite worn with the sense
of what we owe to those about us, near and far off. Men carry the weight
more easily than women, because, for most of them, each day brings work
that must be done, and they have less time than women to think anxiously
about their relations with, and duties to, others. By the way, it is
rather a note of the time that the translators of the Revised Version
have given us—‘Be not _anxious_ for your life,’ instead of the older
rendering. But, if women feel the wear of responsibility for others
more constantly, let but a burning question arise—the condition of East
London, Home Rule, massacres in Armenia—and men feel it more intensely
and passionately. This sharpened sense is not a malady of the age, but a
sign of the times.
To those of us who believe we are all at school and have our lessons set
as we are fit to take them in, this general sense of responsibility for
others is an encouraging sign that we are being taught from above, and
are, on the whole, getting on.
=Parental Responsibility.=—If we all feel ourselves responsible for the
distressed, the suffering, the sick, the feeble in body or mind, the
deficient, the ignorant, and—would that we all felt this particular
burden more—for the heathen, there is one kind of responsibility which
is felt by thoughtful people with almost undue acuteness. Parental
responsibility is, no doubt, the educational note of the day. People
feel that they _can_ bring up their children to be something more than
themselves, that they _ought_ to do so, and that they _must_; and it is
to this keen sense of higher parental duty that the Parents’ Union owes
its successful activity.
=Anxiety the Note of a Transition Stage.=—Every new power, whether
mechanical or spiritual, requires adjustment before it can be used to
the full. In the scientific world there is always a long pause between
the first dawn of a great discovery—as the Röntgen rays, for example—and
the moment when it is applied to the affairs of everyday life with full
effect and without the displacement of other powers whose functions are
just as important and as necessary. We should regard with suspicion
any attempt to make the Röntgen rays supply the place of stethoscope,
thermometer, and all other clinical apparatus. Just so is it in the moral
sphere. Our keener sense of responsibility arises from a new development
of altruistic feeling—we have greater power of loving and wider scope for
our love; we are more leavened by the Spirit of Christ, even when we do
not recognise the source of our fuller life. But to perceive that there
is much which we ought to do and not to know exactly what it is, nor how
to do it, does not add to the pleasure of life or to ease in living. We
become worried, restless, anxious; and in the transition stage between
the development of this new power and the adjustment which comes with
time and experience, the fuller life, which is certainly ours, fails to
make us either happier or more useful.
=A Fussy and Restless Habit.=—It is by way of an effort towards this
adjustment of power that I wish to bring before parents and teachers
the subject of ‘masterly inactivity.’ We ought to do so much for our
children, and are able to do so much for them, that we begin to think
everything rests with us and that we should never intermit for a moment
our conscious action on the young minds and hearts about us. Our
endeavours become fussy and restless. We are too much with our children,
‘late and soon.’ We try to dominate them too much, even when we fail to
govern, and we are unable to perceive that wise and purposeful letting
alone is the best part of education. But this form of error arises from
a defect of our qualities. We may take heart. We _have_ the qualities,
and all that is wanted is adjustment; to this we must give our time and
attention.
‘=Masterly Inactivity.=’—A blessed thing in our mental constitution is,
that once we receive an idea, it will work itself out, in thought and
act, without much after-effort on our part; and, if we admit the idea of
‘masterly inactivity’ as a factor in education, we shall find ourselves
framing our dealings with children from this standpoint, without much
conscious effort. But we must get clearly into our heads what we mean by
masterly inactivity. Carlyle’s happy phrase has nothing in common with
the _laisser allez_ attitude that comes of thinking ‘what’s the good?’
and still further is it removed from the sheer indolence of mind that
lets things go their way rather than take the trouble to lead them to any
issue. It indicates a fine healthy moral pose which it is worth while for
us to analyse. Perhaps the idea is nearly that conveyed in Wordsworth’s
even more happy phrase, ‘wise passiveness.’ It indicates the power to
act, the desire to act, and the insight and self-restraint which forbid
action. But there is, from our point of view at any rate, a further idea
conveyed in ‘masterly inactivity.’ The mastery is not over ourselves
only; there is also a sense of authority, which our children should be as
much aware of when it is inactive as when they are doing our bidding. The
sense of authority is the _sine quâ non_ of the parental relationship,
and I am not sure that without that our activities or our inactivity will
produce any great results. This element of strength is the backbone of
our position. ‘We could an’ if we would,’ and the children know it. They
are free under authority, which is liberty; to be free without authority
is license.
=The Element of Good Humour.=—The next element in the attitude of
masterly inactivity is good humour—frank, cordial, natural, good humour.
This is quite a different thing from overmuch complacency, and a general
giving-in to all the children’s whims. The one is the outcome of
strength, the other of weakness, and children are very quick to see the
difference. ‘Oh, mother, may we go blackberrying this afternoon, instead
of lessons?’ The masterly ‘yes’ and the abject ‘yes’ are quite different
notes. The first makes the holiday doubly a delight; the second produces
a restless desire to gain some other easy victory.
=Self-confidence.=—The next element is confidence. Parents should trust
themselves more. Everything is not done by restless endeavour. The mere
blessed fact of the parental relationship and of that authority which
belongs to it, by right and by nature, acts upon the children as do
sunshine and shower on a seed in good soil. But the fussy parent, the
anxious parent, the parent who explains overmuch, who commands overmuch,
who excuses overmuch, who restrains overmuch, who interferes overmuch,
even the parent who is with the children overmuch, does away with the
dignity and simplicity of that relationship which, like all the best and
most delicate things in life, suffer by being asserted or defended.
=The fine, easy way of Fathers.=—Fathers are, sometimes, more happy than
mothers in assuming that fine easy way with their children which belongs
of right to their relationship, but this is only because the father is
occupied with many things, and the mother is apt to be too much engrossed
with her children. It is a little humiliating to the best of us to see a
careless, rather a selfish mother, whose children are her born slaves and
run to do her bidding with delight. The moral is, not that all mothers
should be careless and selfish, but that they should give their children
the ease of a good deal of letting alone, and should not oppress the
young people with their own anxious care. The small person of ten who
wishes to know if her attainments are up to the average for her age,
or he who discusses his bad habits with you and the best way of curing
them, is displeasing, because one feels instinctively that the child is
occupied with cares which belong to the parent only. The burden of their
children’s training must be borne by the parents alone. But let them bear
it with easy grace and an erect carriage, as the Spanish peasant bears
her water-jar.
=Confidence in the Children.=—Not only confidence in themselves, but
confidence in their children, is an element of the masterly inactivity,
which I venture to propose to parents as a ‘blue teapot’ for them ‘to
live up to.’ Believe in the relation of parent and child, and trust the
children to believe in it and fulfil it on their part. They will do so if
they are not worried.
=Omniscience of Parents and Teachers.=—Parents and teachers must, of
course, be omniscient; their children expect this of them, and a mother
or father who can be hoodwinked is a person easy to reckon with in the
mind of even the best child. For children are always playing a game—half
of chance, half of skill; they are trying how far they can go, how much
of the management of their own lives they can get for the taking, and how
much they must leave in the hands of the stronger powers. Therefore the
mother who is not _up to_ children is at their mercy, and need expect
no quarter. But she must see without watching, know without telling, be
on the alert always, yet never obviously, fussily, so. This open-eyed
attitude must be sphinx-like in its repose. The children must know
themselves to be let alone, whether to do their own duty or to seek their
own pleasure. The constraining power should be present, but passive,
so that the child may not feel himself hemmed in without choice. That
free-will of man, which has for ages exercised faithful souls who would
prefer to be compelled into all righteousness and obedience, is after all
a pattern for parents. The child who is good because he must be so, loses
in power of initiative more than he gains in seemly behaviour. Every
time a child feels that he chooses to obey of his own accord, his power
of initiative is strengthened. The bearing-rein may not be used. When it
occurs to a child to reflect on his behaviour, he should have that sense
of liberty which makes his good behaviour appear to him a matter of his
own preference and choice.
=‘Fate’ and ‘Free-will.’=—This is the freedom which a child enjoys who
has the confidence of his parents as to his comings and goings and
childish doings, and who is all the time aware of their authority. He is
brought up in the school proper for a being whose life is conditioned by
‘fate’ and ‘free-will.’ He has liberty, that is, with a sense of _must_
behind it to relieve him of that unrest which comes with the constant
effort of decision. He is free to do as he ought, but knows quite well in
his secret heart that he is not free to do that which he ought not. The
child who, on the contrary, grows up with no strong sense of authority
behind all his actions, but who receives many exhortations to be good and
obedient and what not, is aware that he may choose either good or evil,
he may obey or not obey, he may tell the truth or tell a lie; and, even
when he chooses aright, he does so at the cost of a great deal of nervous
wear and tear. His parents have removed from him the support of their
authority in the difficult choice of right-doing, and he is left alone
to make that most trying of all efforts, the effort of decision. Is the
distinction between being free to choose the right at one’s own option,
and not free to do the wrong, too subtle to be grasped, too elusive to be
practical? It may be so, but it is precisely the distinction which we are
aware of in our own lives so far as we keep ourselves consciously under
the divine governance. We are free to go in the ways of right living, and
have the happy sense of liberty of choice, but the ways of transgressors
are hard. We are aware of a restraining hand in the present, and of sure
and certain retribution in the future. Just this delicate poise is to be
aimed at for the child. He must be treated with full confidence, and must
feel that right-doing is his own free choice, which his parents trust him
to make; but he must also be very well aware of the deterrent force in
the background, watchful to hinder him when he would do wrong.
=The Component Parts of Masterly Inactivity.=—We have seen that
authority, good humour, confidence, both self-confidence and confidence
in the children, are all contained in masterly inactivity, but these are
not all the parts of that whole. A sound mind in a sound body is another
factor. If the sound body is unattainable, anyway, get the sound mind.
Let not the nervous, anxious, worried mother think that this easy, happy
relation with her children is for her. She may be the best mother in the
world, but the thing that her children will get from her in these vexed
moods is a touch of her nervousness—most catching of complaints. She
will find them fractious, rebellious, unmanageable, and will be slow to
realise that it is her fault; not the fault of her act but of her state.
=Serenity of a Madonna.=—It is not for nothing that the old painters,
however diverse their ideas in other matters, all fixed upon one quality
as proper to the pattern Mother. The Madonna, no matter out of whose
canvas she looks at you, is always serene. This is a great truth, and
we should do well to hang our walls with the Madonnas of all the early
Masters if the lesson, taught through the eye, would reach with calming
influence to the heart. Is this a hard saying for mothers in these
anxious and troubled days? It may be hard, but it is not unsympathetic.
If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their
children when these are overdone, we should have happier households.
Let the mother go out to play! If she would only have courage to let
everything go when life becomes too tense, and just take a day, or half a
day, out in the fields, or with a favourite book, or in a picture gallery
looking long and well at just two or three pictures, or in bed, _without
the children_, life would go on far more happily for both children and
parents. The mother would be able to hold herself in ‘wise passiveness’
and would not fret her children by continual interference, even of hand
or eye—she would let them be.
=Leisure.=—Another element is leisure. Sometimes events hurry us, and
sometimes—is it not true?—we like the little excitement of a rush. The
children like it, too, at first. Father’s birthday is coming, and Nellie
must recite a poem for him; the little _fête_ has only been thought of a
week in advance, and Nellie is seized at all sorts of odd moments to have
some lines of the recitation crammed into her. At first she is pleased
and important, and goes joyously to the task; but by-and-by it irks her;
she is cross and naughty, is reproached for want of love for father,
sheds tears over her verses, and, though finally the little performance
may be got through very well, Nellie has suffered physically and morally
in doing what, if it had been thought of a month beforehand, would have
been altogether wholesome and delightful. Still worse for the children is
it when mother or teacher has a ‘busy’ day. Friends are coming, or the
family wardrobe for the summer must be seen to, or drawers and cupboards
must be turned out, or an examination is at hand. Anyway, it is one of
those fussy, busy days which we women rather delight in. We do more than
we can ourselves, our nerves are ‘on end,’ what with the fatigue and what
with the little excitement, and everybody in the house or the school is
uncomfortable. Again, the children take advantage, so we say; the real
fact being that they have caught their mother’s mood and are fretful and
tiresome. Nerve storms in the nursery are the probable result of the
mother’s little ebullition of nervous energy. Leisure for themselves and
a sense of leisure in those about them is as necessary to children’s well
being, as it is to the strong and benign parental attitude of which I am
speaking.
=Faith.=—Other ingredients go to the making of the delectable compound we
call ‘masterly inactivity,’ but space will allow me to speak of only one
more. That highest form of confidence, known to us as faith, is necessary
to full repose of mind and manner. When we recognise that God does not
make over the bringing up of children absolutely even to their parents,
but that He works Himself, in ways which it must be our care not to
hinder, in the training of every child, then we shall learn passiveness,
humble and wise. We shall give children space to develop on the lines of
their own characters in all right ways, and shall know how to intervene
effectually to prevent those errors which, also, are proper to their
individual characters.
Let us next consider a few of the various phases of children’s lives
in which parents and teachers would do well to preserve an attitude of
‘masterly inactivity.’
CHAPTER IV
SOME OF THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AS PERSONS
=Children should be Free in their Play.=—We have considered the wisdom
and duty of ‘a wise passiveness,’ ‘a masterly inactivity,’ in the
bringing up of children. It remains to glance in detail at the various
points in a child’s life, where this principle should govern us. And,
first, as regards children’s _play_. There is a little danger in these
days of much educational effort that children’s play should be crowded
out, or, what is from our present point of view the same thing, should
be prescribed for and arranged until there is no more freedom of choice
about play than that about work. We do not say a word against the
educational value of games. We know that many things are learned in the
playing-fields; that the qualities which we associate with the name of
Englishman are largely the product of the laws of the games; and there
is a pretty steady effort being made to bring these same forces to bear
upon girls, that they, too, may grow up with the law-abiding principle,
the moral stamina, and the resourcefulness, which are more or less the
outcome of the education carried on in the playing-fields.
=Organised Games are not Play.=—But organised games are not _play_
in the sense we have in view. Boys and girls must have time to invent
episodes, carry on adventures, live heroic lives, lay sieges and carry
forts, even if the fortress be an old armchair; and in these affairs the
elders must neither meddle nor make. They must be content to know that
they do not understand, and, what is more, that they carry with them a
chill breath of reality which sweeps away illusions. Think what it must
mean to a general in command of his forces to be told by some intruder
into the play-world to tie his shoe-strings! There is an idea afloat that
children require to be taught to play—to play at being little fishes and
lambs and butterflies. No doubt they enjoy these games which are made for
them, but there is a serious danger. In this matter the child who goes
too much on crutches never learns to walk; he who is most played with by
his elders has little power of inventing plays for himself; and so he
misses that education which comes to him when allowed to go his own way
and act,
“As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.”
=Personal Initiative in Work.=—In their _work_, too, we are too apt to
interfere with children. We all know the delight with which any scope
for personal initiative is hailed, the pleasure children take in doing
anything which they may do their own way; anything, in fact, which allows
room for skill of hand, play of fancy, or development of thought. With
our present theories of education it seems that we cannot give much scope
for personal initiative. There is so much task-work to be done, so many
things that must be, not learned, but learned _about_, that it is only
now and then a child gets the chance to produce himself in his work. But
let us use such opportunities as come in our way. A very interesting and
instructive educational experiment on these lines has lately been tried
at the School Field, Hackney, where Mr Sargent got together some eighty
boys and girls under the conditions of an ordinary elementary school,
except that the school was supported, not by the Education Department nor
by the rates, but by the founder. The results seem to have been purely
delightful; the children developed an amazing capacity for drawing,
perhaps because so soon as they were familiar with the outlines of the
flower and foliage of a given plant, for example, they were encouraged
to form designs with these elements. The really beautiful floral designs
produced by these girls and boys, after quite a short art training, would
surprise parents whose children have been taught drawing for years with
no evident result. These School Field children developed themselves a
great deal on their school magazine also, for which they wrote tales and
poems, and essays, not prescribed work, but self-chosen. The children’s
thought was stimulated, and they felt they had it in them to say much
about a doll’s ball, Peter, the school cat, or whatever other subject
struck their fancy. ‘They felt their feet,’ as the nurses say of children
when they begin to walk; and our non-success in education is a good deal
due to the fact that we carry children through their school work and do
not let them feel their feet.
=Children must Stand or Fall by their own Efforts.=—In another way,
more within our present control, we do not let children alone enough in
their work. We prod them continually and do not let them stand or fall
by their own efforts. One of the features, and one of the disastrous
features, of modern society, is that, in our laziness, we depend upon
prodders and encourage a vast system of prodding. We are prodded to our
social duties, to our charitable duties, and to our religious duties. If
we pay a subscription to a charity, we expect the secretary to prod us
when it becomes due. If we attend a meeting, do we often do so of our
own spontaneous will, or because somebody asks us to go and reminds us
half a dozen times of the day and the hour? Perhaps it is a result of the
hurry of the age that there is a curious division of labour, and society
falls into those who prod and those who are prodded. Not that anybody
prods in all directions, nor that anybody else offers himself entirely
as a pincushion. It is more true, perhaps, to say that we all prod, and
that we are all prodded. Now, an occasional prick is stimulating and
wholesome, but the _vis inertiæ_ of human nature is such that we would
rather lean up against a wall of spikes than not lean at all. What we
must guard against in the training of children is the danger of their
getting into the habit of being prodded to every duty and every effort.
Our whole system of school policy is largely a system of prods. Marks,
prizes, exhibitions, are all prods; and a system of prodding is apt to
obscure the meaning of _must_ and _ought_ for the boy or girl who gets
into the habit of mental and moral lolling up against his prods.
=Boys and Girls are generally Dutiful.=—It would be better for boys
and girls to suffer the consequences of not doing their work, now and
then, than to do it because they are so urged and prodded on all hands
that they have no volition in the matter. The more we are prodded the
lazier we get, and the less capable of the effort of will which should
carry us to, and nearly carry us through, our tasks. Boys and girls
are, on the whole, good, and desirous to do their duty. If we expect
the tale of bricks to be delivered at the due moment without urging or
entreating, rewarding or punishing, in nine cases out of ten we shall
get what we look for. Where many of us err is in leaning too much to our
own understanding and our own efforts, and not trusting sufficiently to
the dutiful impulse which will carry children through the work they are
expected to do.
=Children should Choose their own Friends.=—With regard to the choice
of friends and companions, again, we should train children so that we
should be able to honour them with a generous confidence; and if we give
them such confidence we shall find that they justify it. If Fred has
made a companion of Harry Jones, and Harry is not a nice boy, Fred will
find the fact out as soon as his mother if he is let alone, and will
probably come for advice and help as to the best way of getting out of
an intimacy which does not really please him. But if Harry is boycotted
by the home authorities and made the object of various prohibitions and
exclusions, why Fred, if he be a generous boy, will feel in honour bound
to take his comrade’s part, and an intimacy which might have been easily
dropped becomes cemented. Ethel will not see the reason why she, as the
daughter of a professional man, may not make a friend of Maud, who sits
beside her at school and is the daughter of a tradesman. But these minor
matters must be left to circumstances, and the mother who brings forward
questions of class, appearance, etc., as affecting her children’s choice
of friends, does her best to create that obtuseness as to vital points of
character which is the cause of most shipwrecked lives. In this matter,
as in all others, the parent’s inactivity must be masterly; that is, the
young people should read approval or disapproval very easily, and should
be able to trace one or the other to general principles of character and
conduct, though nothing be said or done or even looked in disparagement
of the ally of the hour.
=Should be free to Spend their own Pocket-Money.=—In the spending of
pocket-money is another opportunity for initiative on the children’s part
and for self-restraint on that of the parents. No doubt the father who
doles out the weekly pocket-money and has never given his children any
large thoughts about money—as to how the smallest income is divisible
into the share that we give, and the share that we keep, and the share
that we save for some object worth possessing, to be had, perhaps, after
weeks or months of saving; as to the futility of buying that we may eat,
an indulgence that we should rarely allow ourselves, and never except
for the pleasure of sharing with others; as to how it is worth while
to think twice before making a purchase, with the lesson before us of
_Rosamund and the Purple Jar_—such a father cannot expect his children
to think of money in any light but as a means to self-indulgence. But
talks like these should have no obvious and immediate bearing on the
weekly pocket-money; that should be spent as the children like, they
having been instructed as to how they should like to spend it. By degrees
pocket-money should include the cost of gloves, handkerchiefs, etc.,
until, finally, the girl who is well on in her teens should be fit to
be trusted with her own allowance for dress and personal expenses. The
parents who do not trust their young people in this matter, after having
trained them, are hardly qualifying them to take their place in a world
in which the wise, just, and generous spending of money is a great test
of character.
=Should form their own Opinions.=—We have only room to mention one more
point in which all of us, who have the care of young people, would do
well to practise a wise ‘letting alone.’ There are burning questions in
the air, seething opinions in men’s minds: as to religion, politics,
science, literature, art, as regards every kind of social effort, we
are all disposed to hold strenuous opinions. The person who has not
kept himself in touch with the movement of the thought of the world in
all these matters has little cause to pride himself. It is our duty to
form opinions carefully, and to hold them tenaciously in so far as the
original grounds of our conclusions remain unshaken. But what we have no
right to do, is to pass these opinions on to our children. We all know
that nothing is easier than to make vehement partisans of young people,
in any cause heartily adopted by their elders. But a reaction comes, and
the swinging of the pendulum is apt to carry them to a point of thought
painfully remote from our own. The mother of the Newmans was a devoted
Evangelical, and in their early years passed her opinions over to her
sons, ready-made; believing, perhaps, that the line of thought they
received from her was what they had come to by their own thinking. But
when they are released from the domination of their mother’s opinions,
one seeks anchorage in the Church of Rome, and another will have no
restriction as to his freedom of thought and will, and chooses to shape
for himself his own creed or negation of a creed. Perhaps this pious
mother would have been saved some anguish if she had given her children
the living principles of the Christian faith, which are not matters of
opinion, and allowed them to accept her particular practice in their
youth without requiring them to take their stand on Evangelical opinions
as offering practically the one way of salvation.
In politics, again, let children be fired with patriotism and instructed
in the duties of citizenship, but, if they can be kept out of the party
strife of an election, well for them. Children are far more likely to
embrace the views of their parents, when they are ripe to form opinions,
if these have not been forced upon them in early youth when their lack of
knowledge and experience makes it impossible for them to form opinions
at first hand. Only by ‘masterly inactivity,’ ‘wise passiveness,’ able
‘letting alone,’ can a child be trained—
“To reverence his conscience as his king.”
=Spontaneity.=—We all admire spontaneity, but this grace, even in
children, is not an indigenous wild-flower. In so far as it is a grace,
it is the result of training,—of pleasant talks upon the general
principles of conduct, and wise ‘letting alone’ as to the practice of
these principles. To parents, who have in their hands the making of
family customs, it belongs especially to beware—
“Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
CHAPTER V
PSYCHOLOGY IN RELATION TO CURRENT THOUGHT
=Educational Thought in the Eighteenth Century.=—If the end of the
eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries have one feature in
common more than another, it is, that in both education comes to the
front as among the chief ends of man. The eighteenth-century people
had the best of it. They had clear oracles in their Locke and their
Rousseau. They knew what they wanted to do, and they did it with charming
enthusiasm. The period teems with memoirs; and it is very pleasant to
read about the philosophically and consistently brought up children of
the more thoughtful families. They had convictions, and they had the
courage of their convictions. We are less happy. A few decades ago we
too were in a furore of joyous excitement about education. Educational
‘movements,’ schools, colleges, lectures, higher education for women,
‘public’ day schools for girls, examination tests which should give
assurance on every point, were multiplied all over the country and
all over the world. It was a forward movement which has brought us
incalculable gains; and not the least of these gains is the fact that
to-day we are dissatisfied and depressed, and inclined to wonder whether
we are not on the wrong tack. If educational work of the best kind had
not been going on amongst us for the last two or three decades, we
should not have arrived at this ‘divine discontent.’ All the same, it
is pretty evident that the time has come when we must change our front.
Now, elementary schools, now, girls’ high schools, now, public schools,
now, women’s colleges, are pronounced to be, on the whole, ‘a failure.’
They do a great deal, it is said, but is what they do worth doing? Is
it, in fact, education? The bolder sceptics go so far as to attack our
two ancient universities; but they, very likely, will weather the storm
because of the very inertness, the ‘masterly inactivity,’ let us call
it, which their opponents abuse; the universities do a great deal of
‘letting-alone.’
=General Dissatisfaction with Education.=—Our pretty general
dissatisfaction with education, as it is, is a wholesome symptom, and
probably means that sounder theory and happier practice are on their way
to us. One thing we begin to see clearly, that the stream can rise no
higher than its source, that sound theory must underlie successful work.
We begin to suspect that we took up schemes and methods of education
a little hastily, without considering what philosophy or, let us say,
psychology, underlies those schemes and methods; now, we see that our
results cannot be in advance of our principles. To-day the _psychologist_
is abroad, as, twenty or thirty years ago, the _schoolmaster_ was abroad.
=Psychologies are many.=—But, alas, psychologies are many, and
educational denominations are bitterly opposed to one another. We must
feel our way to some test by which we can discern a working psychology
for our own age; for, like all science, psychology is progressive. What
worked even fifty years ago will not work to-day, and what fulfils our
needs to-day will not serve fifty years hence; there is no last word to
be said upon education; it evolves with the evolution of the race. At
the same time, that there should be at least half a dozen systems in the
field, no one of them entirely satisfactory even to the persons who adopt
it, shows that we, who practise education, should at any rate attempt to
know what are the requirements of a sound system of psychology.
=Conditions of an Adequate System.=—That system which shall be of use to
practical people in giving purpose, unity and continuity to education,
must satisfy the following demands:—_It must be adequate_, covering
the whole nature of man and his relations with all that is other than
himself. _It must be necessary_, that is, no other equally adequate
psychology should present itself; and _it must touch at all points the
living thought of the age_; that is, it must not be a by-issue to be
discussed by specialists at their leisure, but the intelligent man in the
street should feel its movement to be in step with the two or three great
ideas by which the world is just now being educated.
=Sacredness of the Person.=—Among the thoughts which the mysterious
Zeitgeist is employing to bring us up, I think we may put first _the
sacredness of the person_. Every person is interesting to us to-day.
The interviewer does more than satisfy vulgar curiosity; what he has
to tell is equally welcome to us all, whether he interviews the London
‘step-girl,’ the costermonger, the man of the book-barrow, ’Arry and
’Arriet out for a holiday, an ambassador, an author, an artist, a royal
personage; every detail that will help us to realise the personality
of one or other is more than welcome. So, too, of what is called the
‘Kailyard’ literature; it rests on a sound basis. Literary merit it may
or may not have, but it tells us what we want to know—everyday details
about the people, any people, of any county, or of any country. Slang
dictionaries, collections of folk-lore, big biographies which tell us
minutely how a man dines and breakfasts, walks and sleeps, all is grist
to our mill. We set an enormous and, I think, an increasing value upon
_persons_, simply, _per se_; and any system of psychology which is to
appeal to us must bring the _person_ to the fore. He may be influenced
by this and that; but he, himself, the indefinable person, of whom we
are sensible while he is yet in arms, and of whom we never finally lose
sight, however he be marred by vice and misery, must play for himself
the game of life, and shape for himself those influences of environment,
education, and what not, that do their part to make him what he is. A
system of psychology which gives us man in this sort of relation to
educational forces should become common property at once, because this
is what every mother of a family and teacher of a school, every sort of
director of men and women, knows about.
=The Evolution of the Individual.=—Next we demand of education that it
should _make for the evolution of the individual_; should not only put
the person in the first place, but should have for its sole aim the
making the very most of that person, intellectually, morally, physically.
We do not desire any dead accretions of mere knowledge, or externals of
mere accomplishment. We desire an education that shall be assimilated;
shall become part and parcel of the person; and the psychology which
shall show us how to educate our children in this vital way will meet
our demands. The doctrine of evolution has brought about a greater
_bouleversement_ in philosophy than perhaps we are aware of, and we shall
find by-and-by that ‘education’ means nothing less than the evolution of
the human being at all points; and that the acquisition of mere learning
is not necessarily education at all.
=The Solidarity of the Race.=—One other idea that appears to be at work
in the world for the elevation of mankind is that of _the solidarity
of the race_. The American poet, Walt Whitman, expresses one side of
this intuition when he tells us how _he_ conquers with every triumphant
general, bleeds with every wounded soldier, shares the spring morning and
the open road and the pride of the horses with every jolly waggoner—in
fact, lives in all other lives that touch him anywhere, even in
imagination. This is something more than the brotherhood of man; that
belongs to the present; but our sense of the oneness of humanity reaches
into the remotest past, making us regard with tender reverence every
relic of the antiquity of our own people or of any other; and, with a
sort of jubilant hope, every prognostic of science or philanthropy which
appears to us to be the promise of the centuries to come. Is it too much
to expect that psychology shall take cognisance of this great educational
force as well as of the two others I have indicated? I do not say that
these three are the only, so to speak, _motor_ ideas of our age; but I
think they are the three of which we are all most aware, and I think,
too, that any system of psychology which takes no cognisance of either,
or of all of them, does not afford that basis for our educational theory
and practice of which we are in search.
=The Best Thought is Common Thought.=—Let us consider now some three or
four of the psychologies which have the most widespread influence to-day.
But we do not presume to do this as critics, rather as inheritors of
other men’s labour, who take stock of our possessions in order that we
may use them to the most advantage. For the best thought of any age is
common thought; the men who write it down do but give expression to what
is working in the minds of the rest. But we must bear in mind that truth
behaves like a country gate allowed to ‘swing to’ after a push. Now it
swings a long way to this side and now a long way to that, and at last
after shorter and shorter oscillations the latch settles. The reformer,
the investigator, works towards one aspect of truth, which is the whole
truth to him, and which he advances out of line with the rest. The next
reformer works at a tangent, apparently in opposition, but he is bringing
up another front of truth. Then there is work for us, the people of
average mind. We consider all sides, balance what has been done, and find
truth, perhaps in the mean, perhaps as a side issue which did not make
itself plain to original thinkers of either school. But we do not scorn
the bridge that has borne us.
=Locke’s ‘States of Consciousness.’=—We need not go further back than
Locke, who represents the traditional educational notions in the homes
of the upper middle classes. People who bring up their children by
‘common sense,’ according to ‘the way of our family,’ do so more often
than they know because their great-great-grandfathers read Locke. He
did not concern himself with the _mind_, or _soul_, of man, but with
‘_states of consciousness_.’ Ideas, images, were for him to be got only
through the senses; and a man could know nothing but what he got hold
of through his own senses and assimilated by his own understanding.
As for choice and selection in these ideas and images, Locke gives a
comprehensive counsel—‘What it becomes a gentleman to know’ is the proper
subject-matter for education. The mind (_i.e._ the man?) appears to
have little colour or character of its own, but has certain powers and
activities for the employment of the ideas it receives; and to account
for these, Locke invented the pestilent fallacy which has, perhaps, been
more injurious than any other to the cause of education—the fallacy of
the ‘faculties of the mind.’
=Does not provide for the Evolution of the Person.=—Now let us bring
Locke up to the standard which we have erected, remembering always that
our power to raise a higher standard is due to him and such as he. There
is no unity of an inspiring idea, no natural progress and continuity, no
ennobling aim, in an education which stops at the knowledge a gentleman
should acquire and the accomplishments a gentleman should possess.
The _person_ hardly appears except in the way of the semi-mechanical
activities of his so-called faculties; he is practically the resultant of
the images conveyed through his senses. The _evolution_, the expansion of
the individual in the directions proper to him, has no place here; every
man is shut tight, as it were, in his own skin, but is taught to behave
himself becomingly within that limit. That intellectual commerce of
ideas whereby the dead yet speak their living thoughts in the work they
have left us, and by which as by links of an endless chain all men are
bound to each and all men influence each, has no place in a philosophy
which teaches that a man can know only through his own understanding
working upon the images he receives through his senses. In so far as we
wish to attain to the possibilities of the hour we must take farewell of
Locke, though we do so with gratitude, and even with affection.
=Modern Physiological-Psychology.=—The modern school, which regards
psychology strictly as a ‘natural science,’ works more or less on the
basis of Locke, plus an illuminating knowledge of biology. Here, as with
Locke, the ‘mind’ is apprehended only as ‘states of consciousness’; the
senses are the sole avenues of knowledge, which reaches the brain in the
form of ideas or images. But I shall represent this ‘rational psychology’
best by citing a few sentences from Professor James (Harvard University),
whose wise and temperate treatment of the subject commands the respect
and attention of even those who differ from him. He opens with a limiting
definition of psychology as the ‘_description and explanation of states
of consciousness as such_.’ He treats psychology as a ‘natural science.’
After bringing forward facts familiar to most of us, showing the intimate
connection between acts of thought and the cerebral hemisphere, he says:
“Taking all such facts together, the simple and radical conception
dawns upon the mind that mental action may be uniformly and absolutely
a function of brain action varying as the latter varies, and being to
the brain action as effect to cause. This conception is the working
hypothesis which underlies all the physiological-psychology of recent
years.” This is not far removed from the announcement of the Frenchman
that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, both
processes being purely material and mechanical, and doing away with any
requirement for the profoundest thinking beyond that of a well-nourished
brain.
=Unjustifiable Materialism.=—No wonder the author finds himself compelled
to admit that to some readers “such an assumption will seem like the
most unjustifiable _à priori_ materialism.” The discussion of ‘the
self’ might be supposed to present insuperable difficulties, but they
are disposed of, and, says our author, “The logical conclusion seems to
be that the _states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to
do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the soul to exist,
but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of
unity is superfluous._” That is to say, the important personage which
I call _I_, _myself_, need be no more than perpetually shifting states
of consciousness effected by the brain; and the sameness or identity
of person, which seems at first sight the one bit of solid ground in a
shifting morass, rests upon no more than the fact that the brain may be
conscious of the same objects to-day that it was conscious of years ago.
=Psychology, ‘A Phrase of Diffidence.’=—But, after proving with great
clearness and power through a considerable volume[2] that all the
phenomena of intelligent life _may_ have their sole source in the
physical brain, Professor James concludes—“When, then, we talk of
psychology as a natural science we must not assume that that means a
sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just
the reverse; it means a psychology particularly fragile and into which
the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint, a psychology
all of whose elementary assumptions and data must be reconsidered in
wider connections and translated into other terms. It is, in short, a
phrase of diffidence and not of arrogance, and it is indeed strange
to hear people talk triumphantly of the ‘New Psychology’ and write
‘Histories of Psychology’ when into the real elements and forces, which
the word covers, not the first glimpse of clear insight exists. A string
of raw facts, a little gossip and wrangle about opinions, a little
classification and generalisation on the mere descriptive level ... but
not a single law ... not a single proposition from which any consequence
can causally be deduced.” This is soothing, and we close Professor
James’s book with satisfaction; but the pity of it is that all the ‘new’
psychologists are not so modest as the Professor,—some of them are, may
we venture to say so, not a little arrogant: what is more, the student
who goes carefully through this text-book of psychology is only too
likely to consider that the author has proved his case—that psychology is
a ‘natural science,’ ‘and it is,’ like Peter Bell’s primrose, ‘nothing
more’—up to the hilt, and he is not likely to go through a process of
reconversion at the last page.
=We become Devitalised.=—It is dreary to suppose that one may not be
anybody after all, but only a momentary state of consciousness. Hope
goes out of life, for there is nothing pleasant to look forward to. If
something agreeable should happen next year, there is no _I_, _myself_,
to enjoy it; only the ‘state of consciousness’ of some moment to come.
Faith goes where all is fortuitous; when other people and ourselves are,
so to speak, the circumstances of the moment. Where there are no persons,
there is no possibility of that divine afflatus which we call enthusiasm;
for that recognition of another on a higher plane which we mean when we
say ‘I believe in so and so,’ for that recognition of the divine Being
which we call Faith. We become devitalised; life is flat and grey; we
throw desperate, if dull, energy into the task of the hour because we
shall so, any way, get rid of that hour; we are glad to be amused, but
still more glad of the stimulus of feverish work; but the work, like
ourselves, is devitalised, without living idea, without consecrating aim.
Our manner becomes impassive, our speech caustic, our countenance dreary
and impenetrable. This is the change that is passing over large numbers
of the teaching profession, men and women of keen intelligence, who might
well have been inspired by high ideals, quickened by noble enthusiasms,
had they not imbibed an educational faith which meets all aspirations
with a _Cui bono?_ We give what we have, and only what we have. What have
these to pass on to the children under their care?
=This System Inadequate, Unnecessary, Inharmonious.=—But we need not sit
down under this blighting system of thought. It is _inadequate_, as the
best of their own prophets—Mr James, for example—freely allow; there is
more in man than this philosophy has ever dreamt of. It is _unnecessary_,
for, as we shall presently see, more than one other psychology accounts
with greater, though never with complete, success for the phenomena
which a human being presents. It is _inharmonious_ with the _movement
of the age_. It effaces that personality which the age tends to exalt
and magnify, and to regard with tender interest, under even sordid
conditions. The principle of _solidarity_ is lost, and those of social
and family life loosened; for what binding tie can there be between
beings whose entity _may_ be no more than a state of consciousness?
=Evolution is Checked.=—Again, the _evolution_ of the individual is
checked at the point of mechanical perfection. Good mathematicians,
clear-headed scientists, may be turned out; but what place is there for
the higher forces of humanity, aspiration, speculation, devotion? We have
reason to keep watch at the place of the letting out of waters, that is,
the psychology upon which our educational thought and action rest. There
is delightful certitude in the results of anthropometrical research. You
may predicate with certainty given facts about a child from the way in
which he stretches out his arm. Good _pathological_ work is being done,
and many a child’s hidden weakness is revealed and consequently brought
under curative treatment by the tests which it is now possible to apply.
The danger is that we should take a part for the whole and allow this
‘new psychology’ to usurp the whole field of education.
CHAPTER VI
SOME EDUCATIONAL THEORIES EXAMINED
=Theories of Pestalozzi and Froebel.=—It is refreshing to turn to that
school of German educational thought which has produced the two great
apostles, Pestalozzi and Froebel. What we may call the enthusiasm of
childhood, joyous teaching, loving and lovable teachers and happy school
hours for the little people, are among the general gains from this
source. To look a gift horse in the mouth is unworthy, and it would
seem pure captiousness to detect any source of weakness in a system of
psychology to which our indebtedness is so great. But no stream can rise
higher than its source, and it is questionable whether the conception
of children as cherished plants in a cultured garden has not in it an
element of weakness. Are the children too carefully tended? Is Nature
too sedulously assisted? Is the environment too perfectly tempered?
Is it conceivable that the rough-and-tumble of a nursery should lend
itself more to the dignity and self-dependence of the _person_ and to
the evolution of individual character, than that delightful place, a
child-garden? I suppose we have all noticed that children show more keen
intelligence and more independent thought in home-play and home-talk
than one expects of the angelic little beings one sees at school.
I daresay the reader will know Fra Angelico’s picture of ‘The Last
Judgment,’ one of the scenes in which gives us a circle of little monks
(become as little children) dancing round, hand-in-hand, with gracious
angels on their way to Paradise. The little monks are obviously very
happy and very good; but somehow one misses the force of personality;
they do not look as if they were capable of striking out a line for
themselves; and this may be a danger in the Kindergarten.
=Lack the Element of Personality.=—‘Make children happy and they will be
good,’ is absolutely true, but does it develop that strenuousness, the
first condition of virtue, which comes of the contrary axiom—‘Be good
and you will be happy’? Kindergarten teachers are doing beautiful work;
but many of them are hampered by the original metaphor of the _plant_,
which is exactly lacking in that element of personality, the cherishing
and developing of which is a sacred and important part of education. The
philosophic German mind beheld in man a part of the _Cosmos_, which, like
the rest, needed only to be placed in fit conditions to develop according
to its nature.
=The Struggle for Existence, a Part of Life.=—The weak point in the
argument is that man would appear to fall under the laws of two
universes, the material and the spiritual; and that to energise and
resist and repel is the law of his being. It will be said that this
need not apply to the child; that the struggle for existence may well
begin after a happy childhood has been secured; but probably any sort of
transition violates the principles of unity and continuity which should
rule education. No doubt all thoughtful Kindergarten teachers recognise
in what direction the limitations—all men have their limitations—of their
Founder lay, and their practices are levelled up to modern thought. The
general substitution of free brush-drawing, in which the children have
some initiative, for the cramped pencil drawing in chequers of the old
Kindergarten, is an illustration of the modern spirit; but it is well for
us all to remember our origins and our tendencies, that we may recognise
and avoid our dangers.
=Herbartian Psychology.=—I have only space to glance at one more
‘psychology,’ that which is, curiously enough, dividing the American mind
with the school which regards psychology as a ‘natural science,’ and at
which English teachers are beginning to snatch as a drowning man snatches
at a straw. This is the psychology of Herbart, another German philosopher
of the beginning of the last century, contemporary with both Pestalozzi
and Froebel during the best years of his life. His theory of man is wide
as the poles apart from either of those we have already considered;
and there is no denying that it affords a tempting working basis for
education. It is only when we come to examine the Herbartian psychology
in connection with the two or three great thoughts upon which, as we have
seen, the world is being educated, that it is found wanting. Herbart
begins to account for man minus what I have called the _person_.[3]
He allows a soul, but he says, “The soul has no capacity nor faculty
whatever either to receive or to produce anything. It has originally
neither ideas nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and
nothing of other things. Further, within it lie no forms of intuition or
thought, no laws of willing and acting, nor any sort of predisposition,
however remote, to all this.”[4] There remain two possibilities for the
soul: an effective _vis inertiæ_, and what Herbart describes as the power
of reacting on an idea; that is to say, the soul itself is no longer
quite as it was after it has thus reacted.
=The Person, an Effect and not a Cause.=—The problem is simplified
anyway. All our complex notions of intellect, will, feeling and so on,
disappear. The soul is thrown open to ideas—a fair field and no favour;
and ideas, each of them a living entity, according to the familiar
Platonic notion, crowd and jostle one another for admission, and for the
best places, and for the most important and valuable coalitions, once
they have entered. They lie below the ‘threshold’ watching a chance to
slip in. They hurry to join their friends and allies upon admission,
they ‘vault’ and they ‘taper,’ they form themselves into powerful
‘apperception masses’ which occupy a more or less permanent place in the
soul; and the soul—what does it do? It is not evident otherwise than as
it affords a stage for this drama of ideas; and the self, the soul or the
_person_, however we choose to call him, is an effect and not a cause, a
result, and not an original fact.
A philosopher who emphasises the potency of ideas does good work in the
cause of education. We get glimpses of a perfect theory—how our function
shall be, to supply the child always with fit ideas, and with the best
ideas; how we shall take care so to select and arrange these ideas that
they shall naturally fly to one another and make strong ‘apperception
masses’ once they have got beyond the ‘threshold’ in the child’s soul.
=A Tempting Vista.=—A fascinating vista is open before us; education
has all things made plain and easy for her use; she has nothing to
do but to select her ideas and turn out a man to her mind. Here is a
tempting scheme of unity and continuity! One might occupy all the classes
in a school for a whole month upon all the ideas that combine in one
‘apperception mass’ with the idea ‘book.’ We might have object-lessons
on the colours, shapes, and sizes of books; more advanced object-lessons
on paper-making and book-binding; practical lessons in book-sewing and
book-binding; lessons, according to the class, on the contents of books,
from A B C and little Bo-Peep to philosophy and poetry. A month! why, a
whole school education might be arranged in groups of ideas which should
combine into one vast ‘apperception mass,’ all clustering about ‘book.’
The sort of thing was done publicly some time ago, in London, _apple_
being the idea round which the ‘apperception mass’ gathered.
=Eliminates Personality.=—If one is to find the principles of unity and
continuity in the _ideas_ presented to the soul, this is all good and
well. But if, as we believe, these principles must emanate from the soul,
or person, himself, this tempting unity may result in the collection of a
mass of heterogeneous and unassimilated information.
=Turns out Duplicates.=—Again, given two souls supplied with precisely
the same ideas, in precisely the same order, and with no other ideas
whatsoever, and we get duplicates of the same person, a possibility which
would demolish once and for ever that great conception, the _solidarity
of the race_. Once more, what does the Herbartian theory of man minister
to our interest in personality, our sense of the _sacredness of the
person_? The person is _non est_, or is the mere sport of the ideas which
take possession of him. He has not so much as a special fitness for one
class of ideas rather than for another; all is casual; and, as for the
_evolution of the individual_, it is not he, but this or that mass of
ideas which possesses him, that expands. The man appears to be no more
than a sort of vessel of transport to carry ideas into their proper
sphere of action. Herbartian psychology is rich in suggestion, but we
cannot take it up as it stands without losing the educational value of
the two or three leading principles which are, as we say, ‘in the air’
for the teaching of mankind.
=Each System fails to meet our Tests.=—I have now examined briefly
the three or four psychologies which hold, more or less, the field of
educational thought. We see that each _advances_ truth, but that neither
expresses the whole truth even so far as to afford a working basis for
educators. So people either work on by rule of thumb, or they borrow
a fragment here and a fragment there as the case appears to demand;
like children with a hard sum whose answer they know, and who try now
division, now multiplication, now subtraction, to make it come right. No
doubt there are also many able psychologists who may not have written
books, but who work out the problems of education, not with a view to the
answer, but according to a code of inherent principles which they have
discerned for themselves.
=A Psychology that meets the Demands upon it.=—What have we to bring
forward in the way of a working psychology which shall meet the demands
I have indicated? We do not claim to be philosophers; we are modest and
practical people looking out for a secure basis for education. It is
just possible that bringing unbiassed minds and a few guiding principles
to the task, we have, not joined the parts of the puzzle, but perceived
dimly how an outline here and an outline there indicate, not so many
separate psychologies, but shadowings forth of a coherent, living,
educational principle destined to assume more and more clearness and
fulness until it is revealed to us at last as the _educational gospel_,
the discovery of which may be the destined reward and triumph of our
age. Let me try to set forth, though with diffidence, what we have done,
knowing that no man and no society can say of educational truth, ‘This is
mine and that is thine,’ for all is common, and none of us can know how
much he gives and how much he takes.
=Educational Truth a Common Possession.=—For years we have worked
definitely and consistently upon a psychology which appears to me fairly
adequate, necessary, and in touch with the thought of our age.[5]
Children brought up on this theory of education, wherever we come across
them, have certain qualities in common. They are curiously vitalised;
not bored, not all alive in the playing-field and dull and inert in the
schoolroom—even when it is that place, proverbial for dulness, a home
schoolroom taught by a governess. There is unity in their lives; they
are not two persons, one with their play-fellows and quite other with
their teachers and elders; but frank, fresh, showing keen interest in
whatever comes in their way. Then, too, there is continuity in their
education. Little children are always eager to know; but the desire for
knowledge seldom survives two or three years of school-life. But these
children begin on lines that go on from the first baby lessons, through
boyhood, girlhood, womanhood, motherhood; there is no transition stage,
but simple, natural, living progress. The claims I venture to make for
these children must rest, not only on the evidence of the few, but on the
principles upon which we work.
=We take Children as Persons.=—In the first place, we take children
seriously as _persons_ like ourselves, only more so; the first question
that comes before us is—What do we understand by a person? We believe
the thinking, invisible soul and acting, visible body to be one in so
intimate a union that—
“Nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.”
If the doctrine of the Resurrection had not been revealed to us, it
would be a necessity, in however unimagined a form, to our conception
of a person. The countenance of our friend with the thousand delicate
changes which express every _nuance_ of feeling; the refinement,
purpose, perception, power, revealed in his hand, the dear familiar
carriage, these are all inseparable from our conception of the person.
Whatever is advanced by the physiologist and the rational psychologist
as to the functions of that most marvellous brain cortex, the seat of
consciousness, as furnishing us with images and impulses, of the motor
nerves as originating action, of the brain as the seat of habit; of
the possibility of educating a child in all becoming habits of act, in
all sweet habits of thought, by taking measures to secure that these
habits become, as it were, a memory of the brain to be awakened by
due stimuli,—all these things we believe and receive; and we believe
further that the possibility of a rational education rests upon this
physiological basis, only fully discovered to us within the present
generation.
=The Person Wills, and Thinks, and Feels.=—But then, we believe the
assumption that all this delicate mechanism is automatic to be gratuitous
and inadequate; it is to be assumed that the _person_ should possess
such vehicle of expression and medium of relation to the outer world.
For the rest, we believe that the _person_ wills and thinks and feels;
is always present, though not always aware of himself; is without parts
or faculties; whatever he does, _he_ does, all of him, whether he take
a walk or write a book. It is so much the habit to think of the person
as a dual being, flesh and spirit, when he is, in truth, one, that it is
necessary to clear our minds on this subject. The person is one and not
several, and he is no more compact of ideas on the one hand than he is
of nervous and muscular tissues on the other. That he requires nutriment
of two kinds is no proof that he is two individuals. Pleasant and
well-cooked food makes man of a cheerful countenance, and wine gladdens
the heart of man, and we all know the spiritual refreshment of a needed
meal. On the other hand, we all know the lack-lustre eye and pallid
countenance of the well-fed who receive none of that other nutriment
which we call ideas; quick and living thought is as necessary for the
full and happy development of the body as it is for that of the soul.
=An Adequate Doctrine.=—Holding this view, we believe that our
educational doctrine is _adequate_, because, while following the progress
of biological psychology with avidity, and making use of every gain that
presents itself, and while following with equal care the advance of
philosophic thought, we recognise that each of these sees the chameleon
in a different light, that the person includes both and is more than
both; and, if our educational creed is by no means conclusive, we think
it is not narrow, because we have come across no problem of life or mind
the solution of which is shut out from us by any dogma of ours. We cannot
say that our doctrine is _necessary_, but we do say that some educational
theory which shall include the whole nature of man and the results of
scientific research, in the same or a greater degree, is necessary. We
find ourselves, too, in touch with those three great ideas which seem
to me to be the schoolmasters of the world at the present moment. The
_person_ of the child is sacred to us; we do not swamp his individuality
in his intelligence, in his conscience, or even in his soul; perhaps one
should add to-day, or even in his physical development. The person is all
these and more. We safeguard the initiative of the child and we realise
that, in educational work, we must take a back seat; the teacher, even
when the teacher is the parent, is not to be too much to the front. There
is no more facile way of swamping character and individuality than by
that idol of the ‘fifties’—_personal influence_.
=Education the Science of Relations.=—We consider that _education is the
science of relations_, or, more fully, that education considers what
relations are proper to a human being, and in what ways these several
relations can best be established; that a human being comes into the
world with capacity for many relations; and that we, for our part,
have two chief concerns—first, to put him in the way of forming these
relations by presenting the right idea at the right time, and by forming
the right habit upon the right idea; and, secondly, by not getting in the
way and so preventing the establishment of the very relations we seek to
form.
=Teaching must not be Obtrusive.=—Half the teaching one hears and sees
is more or less obtrusive. The oral lesson and the lecture, with their
accompanying notes, give very little scope for the establishment of
relations with great minds and various minds. The child who learns his
science from a text-book, though he go to Nature for illustrations,
and he who gets his information from object-lessons, has no chance of
forming relations with things as they are, because his kindly obtrusive
teacher makes him believe that to know _about_ things is the same thing
as knowing them personally; though every child knows that to know about
Prince Edward is by no means the same thing as knowing the boy-prince.
We study in many ways the art of standing aside. People sometimes write
that the books set in our school constitute much of its usefulness; they
do not always see that the choice of books, which implies the play of
various able minds directly on the mind of the child, is a great part of
that education which consists in the establishment of relations.
=The Art of Standing Aside.=—I have even known of teachers who have
thought well to compose the songs and poems which their children use.
Think of it! not even our poets are allowed to interpose between the poor
child and the probably mediocre mind of the teacher. The art of standing
aside to let a child develop the relations proper to him is the fine art
of education, when the educator perceives the two things he _must_ do and
how to do these two things. The evolution of the individual is a natural
sequence of the opening up of relations.
How we labour towards _the solidarity of the race_ I hope to show more
fully, later. But, for example, we do not endeavour to give children
outlines of ancient history, but to put them in living touch with a
thinker who lived in those ancient days. We are not content that they
should learn the history of their own country alone; some living idea
of contemporaneous European history, anyway, we try to get in; that the
history we teach may be the more living, we work in, _pari passu_, some
of the literature of the period and some of the best historical novels
and poems that treat of the period; and so on with other subjects.
There is nothing new in all this; what we venture to claim is that our
work is unified and vitalised by a comprehensive theory of education and
a sound basis of psychology.
CHAPTER VII
AN ADEQUATE THEORY OF EDUCATION
=A Human Being.=—I have laid before the reader, as a working
hypothesis,—that man is homogeneous, a spiritual being invested with a
body—capable of responding to spiritual impulses, the organ by which he
expresses himself, the vehicle by which he receives impressions, and the
medium by which he establishes relations with what we call the material
world;—that will, conscience, affection, reason, are not the various
parts of a composite whole, but are different modes of action of the
person.
_His Capacities._—That he is capable of many relations and consequently
of many modes of action; that, given the due relations, his power of
expansion in these relations appears to be, not illimitable, but, so far
as we know, as yet unlimited.
_His Limitations._—But that, deprived of any or all of the relations
proper to him, a human being has no power of self-development in these
directions; though he would appear not to lose any of his capacity for
these relations.
_His Education._—Again, that any relation once initiated leaves, so to
speak, an organic memory of itself in the nervous tissue of the brain;
that in this physical registration of an experience or a thought, or
of the memory of an experience or a thought, lies the possibility of
habit; that some nine-tenths of our life run upon lines of habit; and
that, therefore, in order to educate, we must know something of both the
psychological and physiological history of a habit, how to initiate it
and how to develop it; and, finally, that a human being under education
has two functions—the formation of habits and the assimilation of ideas.
=The Behaviour of Ideas.=—Physiologists and ‘rational psychologists’ have
made the basis of habit pretty plain to us. All who run may read. The
nature, functions, and behaviour of ideas, and how ideas have power in
their impact upon the cerebral hemisphere to make some sort of sensible
impression—all this is matter as to which we are able only to make
‘guesses at truth.’ But this need not dismay us, for such other ultimate
facts as sleep and life and death are equally unexplained. In every
department of science we are brought up before facts which we have to
assume as the bases of our so-called science. Where a working hypothesis
is necessary, all we can do is to assume those bases that seem to us the
most adequate and the most fruitful. Let us say with Plato that an idea
is an entity, a live thing of the mind.
=No one can Beget an Idea by Himself.=—Apparently no one has power to
beget an idea by himself; it appears to be the progeny of two minds.
So-and-so ‘put it in my head,’ we say, and that is the history of all
ideas—the most simple and the most profound. But, once begotten, the
idea seems to survive indefinitely. It is painted in a picture, written
in a book, carved into a chair, or only spoken to someone who speaks
it again, who speaks it again, who speaks it again, so that it goes on
being spoken, for how long? Who knows! Nothing so strikes the student of
history as the persistent way in which ideas recur, except the way in
which they elude observation until occasion calls them forth. Our natural
progeny may indeed die and be buried; but of this spiritual progeny of
ideas, who may forecast the history or foretell the end?
=Certain Persons attract Certain Ideas.=—Perhaps we may be allowed
this further hypothesis—that, as an idea comes of the contact of two
minds, the idea of another is no more than a _notion_ to us until it
has undergone a process of generation within us; and for that reason
different ideas appeal to different minds—not at all because the ideas
themselves have an independent desire to club into ‘apperception masses,’
but because certain persons have in themselves, by inheritance, may we
assume, that which is proper to attract certain ideas. To illustrate
invisible things by visible, let us suppose that the relation is
something like that between the pollen and the ovule it is to fertilise.
The ways of carrying the pollen are various, not to say promiscuous, but
there is nothing haphazard in the result. The right pollen goes to the
right ovule and the plant bears seed after its kind; even so, the person
brings forth ideas after his kind.
=The Idea that ‘Strikes’ us.=—The _crux_ of the situation is: how can
an emanation so purely spiritual as an idea make an impression upon
even the most delicate material substance? We do not know. We have some
little demonstration that it is so in the fact of the score of reflex
actions by which we visibly respond to an idea that ‘strikes’ us. The eye
brightens, the pulse quickens, the colour rises, the whole person becomes
vitalised, capable, strenuous, no longer weighed down by this clog of
flesh. Every habit we have formed has had its initial idea, and every
idea we receive is able to initiate a habit of thought and of action.
Every human being has the power of communicating notions to other human
beings; and, after he is dead, this power survives him in the work he has
done and the words he has said. How illimitable is life! That the divine
Spirit has like intimate power of corresponding with the human spirit,
needs not to be urged, once we recognise ourselves as spiritual beings at
all.
=Expansion and Activity of the Person.=—Nor does this teeming population
of ideas arise to us without order and without purpose beyond the scope
of our busy efforts and intentions. It would seem as if a new human being
came into the world with unlimited capacity for manifold relations,
with a tendency to certain relations in preference to certain others,
but with no degree of adaptation to these relations. To secure that
adaptation and the expansion and activity of the person, along the lines
of the relations most proper to him, is the work of education; to be
accomplished by the two factors of ideas and habits. Every relation must
be initiated by its own ‘captain’[6] idea, sustained upon fitting ideas;
and wrought into the material substance of the _person_ by its proper
habits. This is the field before us.
=Story of Kaspar Hauser.=—To make my meaning plainer, let me run over the
story of Kaspar Hauser, that ‘child of Nuremberg’ upon whom an unique
experiment was said to have been tried, criminal in its character, and
therefore not to be repeated. The story is as well accredited as most of
our data, but we will assume its truth in so far only as the experience
of this boy tallies with what we know of the experience of an infant;
or, as regards the use of his senses, with the experience of an adult
person who has for the first time attained to, sight, let us say. On
28th May 1828, the attention of a cobbler in Nuremberg was excited by a
strange figure leaning, as if unable to support itself, against a wall
and uttering a moaning sound. The figure was that of a young man of about
seventeen, who, when the cobbler approached, moaned some incoherent
sounds. He had fair hair and blue eyes, and the lower part of his face
projected a little like a monkey’s. Everyone who watched him came to the
same conclusion, that his mind was that of a child of two or three, while
his body was nearly grown up; and yet he was not half-witted, because he
immediately began to pick up words and phrases, had a wonderful memory,
and never forgot a face he had once seen or the name which belonged
to it. At first, he was placed in the guard-house for safety, and the
children of the gaoler taught him to walk and to talk as they did their
own baby-sister. He was not afraid of anything. After six or seven weeks
the townspeople decided to adopt him as the ‘child of Nuremberg.’ He was
placed under the charge of Professor Daumer, whose interest led him to
undertake the difficult task of developing his mind so that it might fit
his body. Later, Dr Daumer gleaned a short account of his previous life
from Hauser by careful questioning. It was to this effect. ‘He neither
knows who he is nor where he came from. He always lived in a hole where
he sat on straw on the ground. He never heard a sound nor saw any vivid
light. He awoke and he slept and awoke again. When he awoke he found a
loaf of bread and a pitcher of water beside him. Sometimes the water
tasted nasty, and then he fell asleep again. He never saw the face of the
man who came to him. At last the man taught him to stand and to walk, and
finally carried him out of his hole.’ For several months after he came
to Nuremberg he refused to eat anything but bread and water, and was, in
fact, made quite ill by the smell of meat, beer, wine or milk. For the
first four months of his stay with Daumer, his senses of sight, taste,
hearing and smell were very acute. He could see much further than most
people by day, without, however, losing his power of seeing in the dark.
At the same time he could not distinguish between a thing and a picture
of that thing, and could not for a long time judge distances at all,
for he saw everything flat. He thought a ball rolled because it wished
to do so, and could not see why animals should not behave, at table for
instance, like human beings. His sense of smell was very keen, painfully
so, in fact, for he was made quite ill by the smell of the dye in his
clothes, the smell of paper, etc. On the other hand, he could distinguish
the leaves of trees by their smell. In about three months Dr Daumer was
able to teach him other things besides the use of his senses. He was
encouraged to write letters and essays, to use his hands in every way,
to dig in the garden, etc. For the next eleven months he lived a happy,
simple life with his friend and tutor, who mentions, however, that the
intense acuteness of his senses was gradually passing away, but that he
had still the charming, obedient, child-like nature which had won all
hearts.
=What Nature does for a Child.=—Here we have an instance (more or less
credible), and the only instance on record, of what Nature, absolutely
unaided and unhindered, has done for a child. Kaspar Hauser came out of
his long retirement, unusually intelligent, with his senses intensely
acute, and sweet and docile in disposition. This is an object-lesson
which cannot lawfully be repeated, and we may not take a single instance
as proving any position. But certainly this illuminating story—coupled
with the fact that Kaspar Hauser, on his emergence, was in some respects
in the condition of an infant in arms—that is, he knew nothing of
round, or flat, or far, or near, or hot, or cold, he had no experience;
and in some respects in that of a child of two years old with quick
intelligence, keen perceptive powers, capital memory, and child-like
sweetness—Kaspar Hauser’s story and our common experience go to prove
that the labour we spend on developing the ‘faculties,’ or in cultivating
the senses, is largely thrown away. Nature has no need of our endeavours
in these directions. Under the most adverse conceivable conditions
she can work wonders if let alone. What she cannot away with is our
misdirected efforts, which hinder and impede her beneficent work. Nature
left to herself hands over every child to its parents and other educators
in this condition of acute perceptive powers, keen intelligence, and
moral teachableness and sweetness. This solitary instance goes to show
that she is even capable of maintaining a human being in this child-like
condition until he reaches the verge of manhood.
=The Child has every Power that will serve Him.=—What, then, have we
to do for the child? Plainly we have not to develop the _person_; he
is there already, with, possibly, every power that will serve him in
his passage through life. Some day we shall be told that the very word
education is a misnomer belonging to the stage of thought when the
drawing forth of ‘faculties’ was supposed to be a teacher’s business.
We shall have some fit new word meaning, perhaps, ‘applied wisdom,’ for
wisdom is _the science of relations_, and the thing we have to do for a
young human being is to put him in touch, so far as we can, with all the
relations proper to him.
=Fulness of Living depends on the Establishment of Relations.=—We begin
to see light, both as to the lines upon which we should form habits and
as to that much-vexed question—the subjects of instruction proper for
children. We are no longer divided between the claims of the classical
and the modern side. We no longer ask ourselves whether it is better to
learn a few subjects ‘thoroughly,’ so we say, or to get a ‘smattering’
of many. These questions are beside the mark. In considering the
relationships which we may initiate for a child, I will begin with what
we shall probably be inclined to call the lowest rung of the ladder. We
may believe that a person—I have a ‘baby person’ in view—is put into
this most delightful world for the express purpose of forming ties of
intimacy, joy, association, and knowledge with the living and moving
things that are therein, with what St Francis would have called his
brother the mountain and his brother the ant and his brothers in the
starry heavens. Fulness of living, joy in life, depend, far more than
we know, upon the establishment of these relations. What do we do? We
consider the matter carefully; we say the boy will make a jumble of it
if he is taught more than one or two sciences. We ask our friends—‘What
sciences will tell best in examinations?’ and, ‘Which are most easily
learned?’ We discover which are the best text-books in the smallest
compass. The boy learns up his text, listens to lectures, makes diagrams,
watches demonstrations. Behold! he has learned a science and is able
to produce facts and figures, for a time any way, in connection with
some one class of natural phenomena; but of tender intimacy with Nature
herself he has acquired none. Let me sketch what seems to me the better
way for the child.
=The Power of Recognition.=—His parents know that the first step in
intimacy is recognition; and they will measure his education, not
solely by his progress in the ‘three R’s,’ but by the number of living
and growing things he knows by look, name, and habitat. A child of six
will note with eager interest the order of time in which the trees put
on their leaves; will tell you whether to look in hedge, or meadow,
or copse, for eyebright, wood-sorrel, ground-ivy; will not think that
flowers were made to be plucked, for—
“’Tis (his) faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes”—
but will take his friends to see where the milk-wort grows, or the
bog-bean, or the sweet-gale. The birds of the air are no longer casual;
he soon knows when and where to expect the redstart and the meadow
pipit. The water-skater and the dragon-fly are interesting and admired
acquaintances. His eyes have sparkled at the beauty of crystals, and,
though he may not have been able to find them _in situ_, he knows the
look of the crystals of lime and quartz, and the lovely pink of felspar,
and many more.
=Æsthetic Appreciation.=—Æsthetic appreciation follows close upon
recognition, for does he not try from very early days to catch the flower
in its beauty of colour and grace of gesture with his own paintbrush?
The wise mother is careful to open her child’s eyes to another kind of
appreciation. She makes him look from a distance at a wild cherry-tree,
or at a willow with its soft catkins, and she shows him that the picture
on a Japanese screen has caught the very look of the thing, though when
he comes to compare a single catkin or a single cherry blossom with those
on the screen, there is no portraiture; and so he begins to learn at a
very early age that to paint that which we see and that which we know to
be there, are two different things, and that the former art is the more
gratifying.
=First-hand Knowledge.=—By-and-by he passes from acquaintance, the
pleasant recognition of friendly faces, to knowledge, the sort
of knowledge we call science. He begins to notice that there are
resemblances between wild-rose and apple blossom, between buttercup
and wood-anemone, between the large rhododendron blossom and the tiny
heath floret. A suggestion will make him find out accurately what these
resemblances are, and he gets the new and delightful idea of families of
plants. His little bit of knowledge is real science, because he gets it
at first-hand; in his small way he is another Linnæus.
=Appreciative Knowledge and Exact Knowledge.=—All the time he is storing
up associations of delight which will come back for his refreshment when
he is an old man. With this sort of appreciative knowledge of things to
begin with, the superstructure of exact knowledge, living science, no
mere affair of text-books and examinations, is easily raised, because a
natural desire is implanted. We might say the same of art, so far, any
way, as the appreciation of art goes. The child who has been taught to
see, appreciates pictures with discrimination.
=How a Child sets up a New Relation.=—This is how a child goes to work
to set up a new relation: a little girl of seven was handling an oar for
the first time and remarked—‘What a lot of crab-water there is to-day!’
Then the next day—‘There’s not near so much crab-water to-day.’ She was
asked—‘How do you know when it’s crab-water?’ ‘Oh! it’s so tough and you
can’t get your oar through, and it knocks you off your seat!’ The child
was all wrong, of course, but she was getting a scrap of real science and
would soon get on the right track. How much better this than to learn out
of a text-book, ‘the particles which constitute water have no cohesion,
and may be readily separated by a solid substance.’
When we consider that the setting up of relations, moral and
intellectual, is our chief concern in life, and that the function of
education is to put the child in the way of relations proper to him,
and to offer the inspiring idea which commonly initiates a relation, we
perceive that a little incident like the above may be of more importance
than the passing of an examination.
CHAPTER VIII
CERTAIN RELATIONS PROPER TO A CHILD
Geology, mineralogy, physical geography, botany, natural history,
biology, astronomy—the whole circle of the sciences is, as it were, set
with gates ajar in order that a child may go forth furnished, not with
scientific knowledge, but with, what Huxley calls, common information, so
that he may feel for objects on the earth and in the heavens the sort of
proprietary interest which the son of an old house has in its heirlooms.
We are more exacting than the Jesuits. They are content to have a child
till he is seven; but we want him till he is twelve or fourteen, if we
may not have him longer. You may do what you like with him afterwards.
Given this period for the establishing of relations, we may undertake
to prepare for the world a man, vital and vigorous, full of living
interests, available and serviceable. I think we may warrant him even to
pass examinations, because he will know how to put living interest into
the dullest tasks.
=Dynamic Relations.=—But we have not yet done with his relations with
mother earth. There are, what I may call, _dynamic_ relations to be
established. He must stand and walk and run and jump with ease and
grace. He must skate and swim and ride and drive, dance and row and sail
a boat. He should be able to make free with his mother earth and to do
whatever the principle of gravitation will allow. This is an elemental
relationship for the lack of which nothing compensates.
=Power over Material.=—Another elemental relationship, which every
child should be taught and encouraged to set up, is that of power over
material. Every child makes sand castles, mud-pies, paper boats, and
he or she should go on to work in clay, wood, brass, iron, leather,
dress-stuffs, food-stuffs, furnishing-stuffs. He should be able to _make_
with his hands and should take delight in making.
=Intimacy with Animals.=—A fourth relation is to the dumb creation; a
relation of intelligent comprehension as well as of kindness. Why should
not each of us be on friendly terms with the ‘inmates of his house and
garden’? Every child longs for intimacy with the creatures about him; and—
“He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
=The Great Human Relationships.=—Perhaps the main part of a child’s
education should be concerned with the great human relationships,
relationships of love and service, of authority and obedience, of
reverence and pity and neighbourly kindness; relationships to kin and
friend and neighbour, to ‘cause’ and country and kind, to the past and
the present. History, literature, archæology, art, languages, whether
ancient or modern, travel and tales of travel; all of these are in one
way or other the record or the expression of persons; and we who are
persons are interested in all persons, for we are all one flesh, and
we are all of one spirit, and whatever any of us does or suffers is
interesting to the rest. If we will approach them with living thought,
living books, if we will only awaken in them the sense of personal
relation, there are thousands of boys and girls to-day capable of
becoming apostles, saviours, great orientalists who will draw the East
and the West together, great archæologists who will make the past alive
for us and make us aware in our souls of men who lived thousands of years
ago.
=The Awakening Idea.=—It rests with us to give the awakening idea and
then to form the habit of thought and of life. Here is an example of what
a youth could do. “Young Rawlinson had” (I quote from the _Academy_)
“from the outset of his career, a taste for the history and antiquities
of Persia, a leaning which he himself attributed to his conversations
with Sir John Malcolm on his first passage to India; and when with
the Shah’s army he chanced to be quartered at Kirmanshah, in Persian
Kurdistan. Close to this stands the Rock of Behistun, bearing on its
face a trilingual inscription which we now know to be due to Darius
Hystaspes, the restorer of Cyrus’ Empire. The cuneiform or wedge-shaped
letters in which it is written had long baffled all attempts to decipher
them. Rawlinson contrived, at the risk of life and limb, to climb the
almost inaccessible face of the rock and to copy the easiest of the
three versions of the inscription. A prolonged study of it enabled him
to pronounce it to be in the Persian language, and, two years later,
he succeeded in discovering the system by which the Persian words were
reproduced in cuneiform characters.” What is the result? “We can now
produce the chronicles of empires, more highly-organised than was
ever any Greek state, going back to dates millennia before that which
our fathers used to assign to the earliest appearance of man upon the
earth. The changes of thought consequent upon these discoveries are
incalculable;” and all are more or less due to Rawlinson’s climb up the
face of the Behistun Rock, which again was due to the awakening of an
idea by his conversation with Sir John Malcolm.
=Human Intelligence limited to Human Interests.=—We are not all Henry
Rawlinsons, but there seems good reason to believe that _the limit to
human intelligence arises largely from the limit to human interests_,
that is, from the failure to establish personal relations on a wide
scale with the persons who make up humanity,—relations of love, duty,
responsibility, and, above all, of interest, _living_ interest, with the
near and the far-off, in time and in place. We hammer away for a dozen
years at one or two languages, ancient or modern, and rarely know them
very well at the end of that time, but directly they become to us the
languages of persons whom we are aching to get at and can only do so
through the medium of their own tongues, there seems no reason why many
of us should not be like the late Sir Richard Burton, able to talk in
almost any known tongue.
=The Full Human Life.=—I think we should have a great educational
revolution once we ceased to regard ourselves as assortments of so-called
faculties and realised ourselves as persons whose great business it is
to get in touch with other persons of all sorts and conditions, of all
countries and climes, of all times, past and present. History would
become entrancing, literature, a magic mirror for the discovery of other
minds, the study of sociology, a duty and a delight. We should tend to
become responsive and wise, humble and reverent, recognising the duties
and the joys of the full human life. We cannot, of course, overtake such
a programme of work, but we can keep it in view; and, I suppose, every
life is moulded upon its ideal. We talk of lost ideals, but perhaps they
are not lost, only changed; when our ideal for ourselves and for our
children becomes limited to prosperity and comfort, we get these, very
likely, for ourselves and for them, but we get no more.
=Duty not within the Scope of Present-day Psychology.=—The psychology of
the hour has had a curious effect upon the sense of duty. Persons who
are no more than a ‘state of consciousness’ cannot be expected to take
up moral responsibilities, except such as appeal to them at the moment.
Duty, in the sense of relations imposed by authority and _due_ to our
fellows, does not fall within the scope of present-day psychology. It
would be interesting to know how many children of about ten years of
age can say the Ten Commandments, and those most clear interpretations
of them which children are taught to call ‘my duty towards God and my
duty towards my neighbour’; or, if they are not members of the Church
of England, whatever explanation their own Church offers of the law
containing the whole duty of man. With the Ten Commandments as a basis,
children used to get a fairly thorough ethical teaching from the Bible.
They knew St Paul’s mandates:—‘Love the brethren,’ ‘Fear God,’ ‘Honour
the King,’ ‘Honour all men,’ ‘Study to be quiet.’ They knew that
thoughts of hatred and contempt were of the nature of murder. They knew
what King Solomon said of the virtuous woman, of the sluggard, of the
fool. Their knowledge was not confined to precepts; from history, sacred
and profane, they were able to illustrate every text. We in England have
not the wealth of moral teaching carved in wood and stone—so that the
unlettered may read and learn—which some neighbouring countries rejoice
in, but our teaching, until the present generation, has been systematic
and thorough.
=Casual Ethical Teaching.=—I appeal to common experience as to whether
this is now the case. We eschew for our children (and we often eschew
wisely) all stories with a moral; their books must be amusing, and we ask
little more; next after that, they must be literary, and then, perhaps, a
little instructive. But we do not look for a moral impulse fitly given.
It is not that we give no ethical teaching, but our teaching is casual.
If we happen on a story of heroism or self-denial, we are glad to point
the moral. But children rarely get now a distinct ethical system resting
on the broad basis of the brotherhood of man. It is something for a child
only to recite—‘My duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself,’
and ‘to do unto all men as I would that they should do unto me.’ A great
many fine things are said to-day about the brotherhood of man and the
solidarity of the race, but I think we shall look in vain in modern
writings for a sentence which goes to the root of the matter as does this
authoritative code of duty.
=The Moral Relation of Person to Person.=—If we receive it, that the
whole of education consists in the establishment of relations, then, the
relations with our fellow-beings must be of the first importance; and all
associations formed upon any basis except that of ‘my duty towards my
neighbour,’—as upon sympathy in art or literature, for example,—are apt
to degenerate into sentimental bonds; and the power of original thought
appears curiously to depart with that of moral insight. If you ask, ‘But
how are we to get a scheme of ethical teaching for our children?’ I
really do not know, if we choose to forego the Ten Commandments and the
old-fashioned teaching of exposition and example founded upon them. There
are a thousand supplementary ways of giving such teaching; but these are
apt to be casual and little binding if they do not rest upon the solid
foundation of _duty_ imposed upon us by God, and _due_ to each other,
whether we will or no. This moral relation of person to person underlies
all other relations. We owe it to the past to use its gains worthily and
to advance from the point at which it left off. We owe it to the future
to prepare a generation better than ourselves. We owe it to the present
to _live_, to live with all expansion of heart and soul, all reaching out
of our personality towards those relations appointed for us.
=The sense of what is due from us does not come by Nature.=—We owe
knowledge to the ignorant, comfort to the distressed, healing to the
sick, reverence, courtesy and kindness to all men, especially to those
with whom we are connected by ties of family or neighbourhood; and the
sense of these dues does not come by nature. We all know the vapid young
man and the vapid young woman who care for none of these things; but do
we always ask ourselves—why? and whether there are not many children
to-day growing up in good homes as untrained in their moral relations as
are these young people whom we despise and blame, perhaps more than they
deserve, for have they not been neglected children?
=Relations of Oneself with Oneself.=—Another preparation for his
relations in life which we owe to a young person is, that he should be
made familiar with such a working system of psychology or philosophy,
whichever one likes to call it, as shall help him to conduct his
relations with himself and with other people. The world is not ripe,
perhaps, for a _bonâ fide_ science of life, but we are unhappily more
modest than the ancients, who made good use of what they had, and
turned out a Marcus Aurelius, an Epictetus, a Socrates. Neither did
they think that their youth were furnished for life without instruction
in philosophy. Modern scientists have added a great deal to the sum of
available knowledge which should bear on the conduct of those relations
of oneself with oneself which are implied in the terms, self-management,
self-control, self-respect, self-love, self-help, self-abnegation, and
so on. This knowledge is the more important because our power to conduct
our relations with other people depends upon our power of conducting our
relations with ourselves. Every man carries in his own person the key
to human nature, and, in proportion as we are able to use this key, we
shall be tolerant, gentle, helpful, wise and reverent. The person who has
‘given up expecting anything’ of servants or of dependents, of employés,
or of working people, proclaims his ignorance of those springs of conduct
common to us all.
I think we may really take a little credit to ourselves as a Society[7]
for an advance in this direction. Most people associated with us know
something of the treatment of sensations, the direction of the will,
the treatment of temper, the psychology of attention, the desires and
affections which are the springs of conduct, and other practical matters
concerned with the management of one’s life. We hear of people who use
that fine old nursery plan expressed in ‘change your thoughts’ with
method and success in the case of cross, or even delirious, or morbid
patients. We (of the Parents’ Union) feel as if we had a tool in our
hands and knew how to set to work. The principle, anyhow, we perceive to
be right, and, if we blunder in its application, we try again, whether
for ourselves or for our children. We know that ‘one custom overcometh
another,’ and that one idea supplants another. We do not give up a child
to be selfish, or greedy, or lazy. These are cases for treatment; and a
child who has been cured by his mother of some such blemish will not be
slow to believe when he grows up in the possibility of reform for others,
and in the use of simple, practical means.
=Intimacy with Persons of all Classes.=—Sociology is a long word, but
it implies a practical relation with other people which children should
begin to get, and it is a kind of knowledge they are very ready for.
The carpenter, the gardener, the baker, the candlestick maker, are all
delightful persons; and it is surprising how much a child at the seaside
will get to know about boats and sails and fishermen’s lives that will
pass by his unobservant elders. Most working men are on their honour
with children, and every craftsman is a valuable acquaintance to a
child. Later, when his working neighbours come before him in the shape
of ‘causes’ and ‘questions,’ he will see the men and their crafts behind
the veil of words; and in his ‘Book of Trades,’ a _Who’s Who_ for the
million, he will look out for the heading _Recreation_, for shoemaker,
tailor, factory-hand, as well as for the distinguished author and the
member of Parliament. There is nothing like early intimacy for helping
one to know people. That is why what the tub-orator calls ‘the bloated
aristocrat’ knows how to get on with everybody; he has been intimate with
all sorts and conditions of men since his babyhood.
=Fitness as Citizens.=—The value of self-managed clubs and committees,
debating societies, etc., for young people, is becoming more and more
fully recognised. Organising capacity, business habits, and some power of
public speaking, should be a part of our fitness as citizens. To secure
the power of speaking, I think it would be well if the habit of narration
were more encouraged, in place of written composition. On the whole, it
is more useful to be able to speak than to write, and the man or woman
who is able to do the former can generally do the latter.
=Relations with each other as Human Beings.=—But the subject of our
relations with each other as human beings is inexhaustible, and I can
do no more than indicate a point here and there, and state again my
conviction that a system of education should have for its aim, not the
mastery of certain ‘subjects,’ but the establishment of these relations
in as many directions as circumstances will allow.
=Relation to Almighty God.=—I have set before the reader the proposition
that a human being comes into the world, not to develop his faculties
nor to acquire knowledge, nor even to earn his living, but to establish
certain relations; which relations are to him the means of immeasurable
expansion and fulness of living. We have touched upon two groups of these
relations—his relations to the universe of matter and to the world of
men. To complete his education, I think there is but one more relation to
be considered—his relation to Almighty God. How many children are to-day
taught to say at their mother’s knee, to learn from day to day and from
hour to hour, in all its fulness of meaning—‘My duty towards God is to
believe in Him, to fear Him, and to love Him with all my heart, with all
my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength; to worship Him,
to give Him thanks, to put my whole trust in Him, to call upon Him, to
honour His holy name and His word, and to serve Him truly all the days
of my life’? Whether children are taught their duty towards God in these
or other words matters little; but few of us will venture to say that,
in this short summary, more is demanded than it is our bounden duty and
service to yield. But I fear that many children grow up untaught in these
matters. The idea of _duty_ is not wrought into the very texture of their
souls; and _duty_ to Him who is invisible, which should be the very
foundation of life, is least taught of all. I do not say that children
are allowed to grow up without religious sentiments and religious
emotions, and that they do not say quaint and surprising things, showing
that they have an insight of their own into the higher life.
=Sentiment is not Duty.=—But duty and sentiment are two things. Sentiment
is optional; and young people grow up to think that they _may_ believe in
God, _may_ fear God, _may_ love God in a measure—but that they _must_ do
these things, that there is no choice at all about the love and service
of God, that it is their duty, that which they _owe_, to love Him ‘with
all their heart, with all their mind, with all their soul, with all their
strength,’ these things are seldom taught and understood as they should
be. Even where our sentiment is warm, our religious notions are lax;
and children, the children of good, religious parents, grow up without
that intimate, ever-open, ever-cordial, ever-corresponding relation with
Almighty God, which is the very fulfilment of life; which, whoso hath,
hath eternal life; which, whoso hath not, is, like Coleridge’s ‘lovely
Lady Geraldine,’ ice-cold and dead at heart, however much he may labour
for the free course of all other relations.
“I want,—am made for,—and must have a God,
Ere I can be aught, do aught;—no mere Name
Want,—but the True Thing, with what proves its truth,—
To wit, a relation from that Thing to me,
Touching from head to foot:—which Touch I feel,
And with it take the rest, this Life of ours!”
—_Browning._
CHAPTER IX
A GREAT EDUCATIONALIST
(_A REVIEW_)
=We look to Germany for Educational Reform.=—We in England require, every
now and then, to pull ourselves together, and to ask what they are doing
on the Continent in the way of education. We still hark back to the older
German educational reformers. We may not know much of Comenius, Basedow,
Ratich; we do know something of Pestalozzi and Froebel; but how much do
we know of the thought of Johann Friedrich Herbart, the lineal successor
of these, who has largely displaced his predecessors in the field of
Pedagogics?
=Herbartian Thought the most advanced on the Continent.=—How entirely
German educators work upon Herbart, and Herbart only, is proved by the
existence of a Herbartian educational literature greatly more extensive
than the whole of our English educational literature put together.
A little volume on the _Outlines of Pedagogics_,[8] by Professor W. Rein,
of the University of Jena, is offered to us by the translators, C. C. and
Ida J. Van Liew, as a brief introduction to the study of Herbart and his
school, the author making due allowance for the advances that have been
made in the decades that have elapsed since Herbart’s death.
As Herbart and his interpreters represent the most advanced school of
educational thought on the Continent, it will, perhaps, be interesting to
the reader to make a slight comparison between the educational philosophy
I am trying to set forth, and the school of thought which exercises such
immense influence in Germany.
=Comparison with P.N.E.U. Thought.=—One of the most characteristic
features of Herbart’s thinking, and that feature of it which constitutes
a new school of educational thought, is, that he rejects the notion of
separate mental faculties. The earlier reformers, notably Pestalozzi and
Froebel, divide the faculties up with something of the precision of a
phrenologist, and a chief business of education is, according to them,
‘to develop the faculties.’
=The Development of the Faculties.=—There is a certain pleasing neatness
in this idea which is very attractive. We want to know, definitely, what
we have to do. Why, develop the perceptive faculties here, with the
conceptive there, the judgment in this lesson, the affections in the
other, until you have covered the whole ground, giving each so-called
faculty its due share of developmental exercise! But, say the followers
of Herbart, we have changed all that. The mind, like Wordsworth’s cloud,
moves altogether when it moves at all.
=We, like Herbart, discard the ‘Faculties.’=—Now this appears to be but
a slight fundamental difference, but it is one upon the recognition of
which education changes front. The whole system of beautifully organised
lessons, whose object is to develop this or that faculty, is called in
question; for the _raison d’être_ of specialised intellectual gymnastics
is gone when we no longer recognise particular ‘muscles’ of the mind to
be developed. The aim of education must be something quite other, and, if
the aim is other, the methods must be altered, for what is method but _a
way to an end_? So far we are entirely with Herbart; we do not believe in
the ‘faculties’; therefore we do not believe in the ‘development of the
faculties’; therefore we do not regard lessons as instruments for this
‘development’: in fact, our whole method of procedure is altered.
=Pervasiveness of Dominant Ideas.=—Again, we are with the philosopher in
his recognition of the force of an idea, and especially of those ideas
which are, as we phrase it, in the air at any given moment. “Both the
circle of the family and that of social intercourse are subjected to
forces that are active in the entire social body, and that penetrate
the entire atmosphere of human life in invisible channels. No one knows
whence these currents, these ideas arise; but they are there. They
influence the moods, the aspirations, and the inclinations of humanity,
and no one, however powerful, can withdraw himself from their effects;
no sovereign’s command makes its way into their depths. They are often
born of a genius to be seized upon by the multitude that soon forgets
their author; then the power of the thought that has thus become active
in the masses again impels the individual to energetic resolutions: in
this manner it is constantly describing a remarkable circle. Originating
with those that are highly gifted, these thoughts permeate all society,
reaching, in fact, not only its adult members, but also through these
its youth, and appearing again in other highly gifted individuals in whom
they will perhaps have been elevated to a definite form.
“Whether the power of these dominant ideas is greater in the individual,
or in the body of individuals as a whole, is a matter of indifference
here. Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that their effect upon the
one is manifested in a reciprocal action upon the other, and that their
influence upon the younger generation is indisputable.”
=The Zeitgeist.=—We entirely agree that no one can escape the influence
of this Zeitgeist, and that the Zeitgeist is, in fact, one of the most
powerful of the occult educational influences, and one which parents and
all who have the training of children will do well to reckon with in the
adjustment of their work.
=The Child’s Schoolmasters.=—Nature, family, social intercourse, this
Zeitgeist, the Church and the State, thus Professor Rein, as interpreting
Herbart, sums up the schoolmasters under whose influences every child
grows up; a suggestive enumeration we should do well to consider.
‘_Erziehung ist Sache der Familien; von da geht sie aus und dahin kehrt
sie grössenteils zurück_,’ says Herbart. He considers, as do we, that
by far the most valuable part of education is carried on in the family,
because of the union of all the members under a common parentage, of the
feeling of dependence upon a head, of the very intimate knowledge to be
gained of the younger members.
=A Noble Piety.=—“The members of the family look confidently to the
head; and this sense of dependence favours, at the same time, the proper
reception of that which is dearest to mankind, namely, the religious
feeling. If the life of the family is permeated by a noble piety, a
sincere religious faith will take root in the hearts of the children.
Faithful devotion to the guide of the youth also calls forth faithful
devotion to Him who controls human destinies—a thought which Herbart
expresses so beautifully in the words—‘To the child, the family should be
the symbol of the order in the world; from the parents one should derive
by idealisation the characteristics of the deity.’”
=A Mediæval Conception of Education.=—This idea of all education
springing from and resting upon our relation to Almighty God is one
which we have ever laboured to enforce. We take a very distinct stand
upon this point. We do not merely give a _religious_ education, because
that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a
secular education, for example. But we hold that all education is
divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above,
that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and
that the culmination of all education (which may, at the same time, be
reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy
with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection. We hold, in
fact, that great conception of education held by the mediæval Church, as
pictured upon the walls of the Spanish chapel in Florence. Here we have
represented the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Twelve, and directly
under them, fully under the illuminating rays, are the noble figures
of the seven liberal arts, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Music, Astronomy,
Geometry, Arithmetic, and under these again the men who received and
expressed, so far as the artist knew, the initial idea in each of these
subjects; such men as Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Euclid, whom _we_ might call
pagans, but whom the earlier Church recognised as divinely taught and
illuminated.
=The Family Principle.=—Here follows a passage which we do more than
endorse, for it contains the very _raison d’être_ of our society. “The
education of the children will always remain the holiest and highest
of all family duties. The welfare, civilisation, and culture of a
people depend essentially upon the degree of success that attends the
education in the homes. The family principle is the point at which both
the religious and educational life of a people centres, and about which
it revolves. It is a force in comparison with which every sovereign’s
command appears powerless.”
By the way, we are inclined to think that Dr Rein’s mention of
Rousseau is a little misleading. It is true that in _Emil_ the parents
are supplanted, but, notwithstanding that fact, perhaps no other
educationalist has done so much to awaken parents to their great work
as educators. After investigating the conditions of home training, Dr
Rein proceeds to a discussion of schools (_a_) as they exist in Germany;
(_b_) as they exist in his own ideal, a discussion which should be most
interesting to parents.
=Uncertainty as to the Purpose of Education.=—Teleology, _i.e._ the
theory of the purpose of education, falls next under discussion in
an extremely instructive chapter. It is well we should know the vast
uncertainty which exists on this fundamental point. As a matter of fact,
few of us know definitely what we propose to ourselves in the education
of our children. We do not know what it is possible to effect, and, as
a man does not usually compass more than he aims at, the results of our
education are very inadequate and unsatisfactory.
=Some Attempts to fix the Purpose of Education.=—“Shall the educator
follow Rousseau and educate a man of nature in the midst of civilised
men? In so doing, as Herbart has shown, we should simply repeat from the
beginning the entire series of evils that have already been surmounted.
Or shall we turn to Locke and prepare the pupil for the world which is
customarily in league with worldlings? We should then arrive at the
standpoint of Basedow, and aim to educate the pupil so that he would
become a truly useful member of human society. Of course we should always
be harassed with the secret doubt as to whether this is the ideal purpose
after all, and whether we are not at times directly enjoined to place the
pupil at variance with the usage and customary dealings of the world. If
we reflect that an endless career is open to man for his improvement, we
realise that only that education, whose aims are always the highest, can
hope to reach the lofty goals that mark this career.
“Therefore an ideal aim must be present in the mind of the educator.
Possibly he can obtain information and help from Pestalozzi, whose nature
evinced such ideal tendencies. Pestalozzi wished the welfare of mankind
to be sought in the harmonious cultivation of _all_ powers. If one only
knew what is to be understood by a multiplicity of mental powers, and
what is meant by the _harmony_ of various powers. These phrases sound
very attractive, but give little satisfaction. The purely _formal_ aims
of education will appeal just as little to the educator: ‘Educate the
pupil to independence’; or, ‘Educate the pupil to be his own educator’;
or, ‘Educate the pupil so that “it” will become better than “its”
educator.’ (_Hermann and Dorothea_, Hector and Astyanax in the _Iliad_.)
Such and similar attempts to fix the purpose of education are abundant
in the history of pedagogy; but they do not bring us nearer the goal. In
their formal character they do not say, for example, of what kind the
independence shall be, what content it shall have, what aims it shall
have in view, or in what directions its course shall lie. For the pupil
that has become independent can use his freedom rightly for good just as
well as misuse it for evil.”
=Herbart’s Theory, Ethical.=—Herbart’s own theory of education, so far
as we may venture to formulate it, is strictly ethical as opposed to
intellectual, that is, the development and sustenance of the intellect
is of secondary importance to the educator for two reasons: character
building is the matter of first importance to human beings; and this
because, (_a_) train character and intellectual ‘development’ largely
takes care of itself, and (_b_) the lessons designed for intellectual
culture have high ethical value, whether stimulating or disciplinary.
This is familiar ground to us: we too have taught, in season and out of
season, that the formation of character is the aim of the educator. So
far, we are at one with the philosopher; but, may we venture to say it?
we have arrived, through the study of Physiology, at the definiteness of
aim which he desires but does not reach.
=Obscurity of Psychology.=—We must appeal, he says, to Psychology, but
then, he adds, “of course we cannot expect a concordant answer from all
psychologists; and in view of the obscurity which still prevails in this
sphere, the different views as to the nature of the human soul and the
extraordinary difficulty with which the empirical method of investigation
meets, an absolutely indubitable explanation can hardly be expected.”
=Two Luminous Principles.=—This is doubtless true of Psychology alone,
but of Psychology illuminated by Physiology we have another tale to tell.
It is the study of that border-land betwixt mind and matter, the brain,
which yields the richest results to the educator. For the brain is the
seat of habit: the culture of habit is, to a certain extent, physical
culture: the discipline of habit is at least a third part of the great
whole which we call education, and here we feel that the physical science
of to-day has placed us far in advance of the philosopher of fifty years
ago. We hold with him entirely as to the importance of great formative
ideas in the education of children, but we add to our ideas, habits, and
we labour to form habits upon a physical basis. Character is the result
not merely of the great ideas which are given to us, but of the habits
which we labour to form _upon those ideas_. We recognise both principles,
and the result is a wide range of possibilities in education, practical
methods, and a definite aim. We labour to produce a human being at his
best physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually, with the enthusiasms
of religion, of the good life, of nature, knowledge, art, and manual
work; and we do _not_ labour in the dark.
I have ventured to indicate in a former chapter what appears to me the
root-defect of the educational philosophy of this great thinker—that
it tends to eliminate personality, and therefore leads to curious
futilities in teaching. It is therefore the more gratifying to observe
that certain fundamental ideas, long the property of the world, which we
have embraced in our scheme of thought, appealed with equal force to so
great and original a thinker as Herbart.
CHAPTER X
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF PHYSICAL TRAINING
Perhaps never since the days of the Olympian games has more attention
been paid to physical culture than it receives in England to-day.
But possibly this physical cult suffers from the want of unity and
sanctity of purpose which nullifies to a considerable extent most of our
educational efforts.
=Does our Physical Culture make Heroes?=—We want to turn out ‘a fine
animal,’ a man or woman with a fine physique and in good condition,
and we get what we lay ourselves out for. The development, in women
especially, within the last twenty years, is amazing. I heard it
remarked the other day that the stiff little brocaded dresses of our
great-grandmothers, which are kept here and there, appear to have
belonged to little women, while the grandmothers we are rearing to-day
promise to be daughters of Anak. So far, so good. All the same, it is
questionable whether we are making heroes; and this was the object of
physical culture among the early Greeks, anyway. Men must be heroes, or
how could they fulfil the heavy tasks laid upon them by the gods? Heroes
are not made in a day; therefore, the boy was trained from his infancy
in heroic exercises, and the girl brought up to be the mother of heroes.
Flashes of the heroic temper seem to remain to this day in that little
country with a great history. ‘Your son has behaved like a hero,’ was
said to the mother of a soldier who fell some years ago. ‘That’s what I
bore him for,’ was the reply. Englishmen, too, can die, but it is not so
certain that they can live, like heroes. The object of the fine physical
culture that English youths and maidens receive is, too often, the
poor and narrow one that they may get the most, especially the most of
physical enjoyment, out of life; and so young people train their bodies
to hardships, and pamper them with ease and self-indulgence, by turns,
the one and the other being for their own pleasure; the pampering being
the more delightful after the period of training, the training itself
rather a pleasant change from the softness of pampering.
=A Serviceable Body, the End of Physical Culture.=—Some of our young
people prefer to endure hardness all the time, and go off in the
Berserker spirit to find adventures; but even this is not the best that
might be done. The object of athletics and gymnastics should be kept
steadily to the front; enjoyment is good by the way, but is not the end;
the end is the preparation of a body, available from crown to toe, for
whatever behest ‘the gods’ may lay upon us. It is a curious thing that
we, in the full light of Revelation, have a less idea of vocation and
of preparation for that vocation than had nations of the Old World with
their ‘few, faint and feeble’ rays of illumination as to the meaning and
purpose of life. ‘Ye _are_ your own,’ is perhaps the unspoken thought of
most young persons—your own, and free to do what you like with your own.
Therefore, excess in sports, excess in easy-going pleasure, excess in
study, excess in desultory reading, excess of carelessness in regard to
health, any excess that we have a mind to, is lawful to us if only it is
expedient. This loose morality with regard to our physical debts, without
touching actual vice, which is probably on the decline, is the reason why
the world does not get all that it should out of splendid material.
=Ye are not Your Own.=—But if children are brought up from the first with
this magnet—‘Ye are _not_ your own’; the divine Author of your being has
given you life, and a body finely adapted for His service; He gives you
the work of preserving this body in health, nourishing it in strength,
and training it in fitness for whatever special work He may give you to
do in His world,—why, young people themselves would readily embrace a
more Spartan regimen; they would desire to be available, and physical
transgressions and excesses, however innocent they seem, would be
self-condemned by the person who felt that he was trifling with a trust.
It would be good work to keep to the front this idea of living under
authority, training under authority, serving under authority, a
discipline of life readily self-embraced by children, in whom the heroic
impulse is always strong. We would not reduce the pleasures of childhood
and youth by an iota; rather we would increase them, for the disciplined
life has more power of fresh enjoyment than is given to the unrestrained.
Neither is it lawful for parents to impose any unnecessary rigours upon
their children; this was the error of the eighteenth century and of the
early decades of our own age, when hunger, cold, and denial, which was
by no means self-denial, were supposed wholesome for children. All we
claim is that every young person shall be brought up under the sense of
_authority_ in the government, management, and training of his body. The
sense that health is a duty, and that any trifling with health, whether
vicious or careless, is really of the nature of suicide, springs from
this view—that life is held in trust from a supreme Authority.
Direct teaching or reading on such subjects as the following might be
profitable to parents and teachers on the one hand and to boys and girls
on the other:—
Greek games and Greek heroes.
How a child may be trained to his physical responsibilities.
The vocation of the body.
‘Innocent’ excesses.
Unlawful and lawful home discipline.
The heroic impulse.
The training afforded by games.
Athletics, their use and abuse.
Parental authority in physical matters.
The right uses of self-denial.
The government, management, and training of the body.
The duty of health.
=Use of Habit in Physical Training.=—It is well that a child should be
taught to keep under his body and bring it into subjection, first, to the
authority of his parents and, later, to the authority of his own will;
and always, because no less than this is due, to the divine Authority
in whom he has his being. But to bring ourselves under authority at all
times would require a constantly repeated effort of thought and will
which would make life too laborious. Authority must be sustained by
habit. We all know something of the genesis of a habit, and most of us
recognise its physical basis, _i.e._ that frequently-repeated thoughts or
acts leave some sort of register in the brain tissue which tends to make
the repetition of such thoughts, at first easy, and at last automatic.
In all matters of physical exercise it is obvious to us that—do a thing
a hundred times and it becomes easy, do a thing a thousand times and it
becomes mechanical, as easy to do as not. This principle is abundantly
applied in cricket, boating, golf, cycling, all the labours we delight
in. But there is an outfit of half-physical, half-moral habits of life
which the playing-field tends to form, but which are apt to be put on and
off with the flannels if they are not steadily and regularly practised
in the home life also. These are the habitudes which it is the part of
parents to give their children, and, indeed, they do form part of the
training of all well brought-up young people; but it is well not to lose
sight of this part of our work.
=Self-restraint.=—Self-restraint in indulgences is a habit which most
educated mothers form with care. Children are well and agreeably fed, and
they do not hanker after a bit of this and a taste of the other. Whether
one or two sweetmeats a day are allowed, or whether they go without
any, well brought-up children do not seem to mind. It is the children
of cottage homes who, even when they are comfortably fed and clothed,
keep the animal instinct of basking in the heat of the fire. But there
is perhaps danger lest the habits of the nursery and schoolroom should
lapse in the case of older boys and girls. It is easy to get into the
way of lounging in an armchair with a novel in the intervals between
engagements which are, in fact, amusements. This sort of thing was a
matter of conscience with an older generation; lethargic, self-indulgent
intervals were not allowed. When people were not amusing themselves
healthfully, they were occupying themselves profitably; and, little as we
may think of the crewel-work our grandmothers have left behind, it was
better for them morally and physically than the relaxed muscles and mind
of the novel and the lounge. No doubt the bodily fatigue which follows
our more active exercises has something to say in the matter, but it is a
grave question whether bodily exercises of any kind should be so frequent
and so excessive as to leave us without mental and moral vigour in the
intervals.
=Self-control.=—Self-control in emergencies is another habit of the
disciplined life in which a child should be trained from the first; it
is the outcome of a general habit of self-control. We all see how ice
accidents, boat accidents, disasters by fire (like a late melancholy
event in Paris), might be minimised in their effects if only one person
present were under perfect self-control, which implies the power of
organising and controlling others. But the habit of holding oneself well
in hand, the being impervious to small annoyances, cheerful under small
inconveniences, ready for action with what is called ‘presence of mind’
in all the little casualties of the hour—this is a habit which should be
trained in the nursery. If children were sent into the world with this
part of their panoply complete, we should no longer have the spectacle of
the choleric Briton and of the nervous and fussy British lady at every
foreign _doûane_; people would not jostle for the best places at a
public function; the mistresses of houses would not be fretted and worn
out by the misdoings of their maids; the thousand little sorenesses of
social life would be soothed, if children were trained to bear little
hurts to body and mind without sign. ‘If you are vexed, don’t show it,’
is usually quite safe teaching, because every kind of fretfulness,
impatience, resentfulness, and nervous irritability generally, grows
with expression and passes away under self-control. It is worth while to
remember that the physical signs promote the mental state just as much as
the mental state causes the physical signs.
=Self-discipline.=—The discipline of habit is never complete until it
becomes self-discipline in habits. It is not a trifle that even the
nursery child messes his feeder, spills his milk, breaks his playthings,
dawdles about his small efforts. The well-trained child delights to bring
himself into good habits in these respects. He knows that to be cleanly,
neat, prompt, orderly, is so much towards making a man of him, and man
and hero are in his thought synonymous terms. Supposing that good habits
have not been set up at home, parents look to school life to supply the
omission; but the habits practised in school and relaxed at home, because
‘it’s holidays now, you know,’ do not really become habits of the life.
=Local Habits.=—The fact that habits have a tendency to become local,
that in one house a child will be neat, prompt, diligent; in another
untidy, dawdling, and idle, points to the necessity for self-discipline
on the part of even a young child.
“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.”
This subject of training in becoming habits is so well understood amongst
us that I need only add that such habits are not fully formed so long as
supervision is necessary. At first, a child wants the support of constant
supervision, but, by degrees, he is left to do the thing he ought of his
own accord. Habits of behaviour, habits of deportment, habits of address,
tones of voice, etc., all the habits of a gentleman-like bearing and a
kind and courteous manner, fall under this head of self-discipline in
bodily habits.
“When first thou camest—such a courtesy
Spake through the limbs and in the voice—I knew
For one of those who eat in Arthur’s hall.”
=Alertness.=—Many a good man and woman thinks regretfully of the
opportunities in life they have let slip through a certain physical
inertness. They missed the chance of doing some little service, or some
piece of courtesy, because they did not see in time. It is well to bring
up children to think it is rather a sad failure if they miss a chance
of going a message, opening a door, carrying a parcel, any small act
of service that presents itself. They should be taught to be equally
alert to seize opportunities of getting knowledge; it is the nature of
children to regard each grown-up person they meet as a fount of knowledge
on some particular subject; let their training keep up the habit of
eager inquiry. Success in life depends largely upon the cultivation of
alertness to seize opportunities, and this is largely a physical habit.
We all know how opportunity is imaged—a figure flying past so rapidly
that there is no means of catching him but, in advance, by the forelock
which overhangs his brow.
=Quick Perception.=—Closely connected with that of alertness is the
habit of quick perception as to all that is to be seen, heard, felt,
tasted, smelt in a world which gives illimitable information through our
five gateways of knowledge. Mr Grant, in his most interesting studies
of Neapolitan character, describes the training of a young Camorrist
(the Camorra is a dangerous political faction; and, ill as we may think
of the ends of such training, the means are well worth recording).
“The great object of this part of his training was to teach him to
observe habitually with minuteness and accuracy, and it was conducted in
something like the following manner. When walking through the city the
Camorrist would suddenly pause and ask, ‘How was the woman dressed who
sat at the door of the fourth house in the last street?’ or, ‘What were
the two men talking about whom we met at the corner of the last street
but three?’ or, ‘Where was cab 234 ordered to drive to?’ or perhaps it
would be, ‘What is the height of that house and the breadth of its upper
window?’ or, ‘Where does that man live?’” This habit, again largely a
physical habit, of quick perception has been dwelt upon in other aspects.
All that now need be urged is that the quickness of observation natural
to a child should not be relied upon; in time, and especially as school
studies press upon him, his early quickness deserts the boy, but the
trained habit of seeing all that is to be seen, hearing all that is to be
heard, remains through life. I have not space to go further into these
habitudes of body, which become also, mental and moral habitudes, but
perhaps reading and reflection and direct teaching on such subjects as
the following would be useful:—
Self-control in emergencies.
Self-restraint in indulgences.
Self-discipline in habits.
Alertness to seize opportunities.
Promptness and vigour in bodily exercises.
Quick perception as to that which is to be seen, heard, felt, tasted,
smelt.
=Stimulating Ideas.=—A habit becomes morally binding in proportion to
the inspiring power of the _idea_ which underlies it. When I was a child
I used to have a book full of moral aphorisms from the Greek and Latin
classics, translated. These fine rolling sentences, full of matter, made,
I recollect, a great impression on me; and one can understand that the
Greek or Roman boy, brought up on this strong meat, developed virtues in
regard to which we are a little slack. In like manner the early Church
personified and typified in a thousand ways the three evangelical and
four cardinal virtues and the opposing seven deadly sins. We shall have
to revive this kind of teaching if we would have children undertake the
labour of the discipline of habit, a discipline that we can do no more
than initiate.
=Fortitude.=—Touch the right spring and children are capable of an
amazing amount of steady effort. I know a little boy of ten who set
himself the task of a solitary race of three miles every day in the
hot summer holidays because he was to compete in a race when he went
back to school; and this, not because he cared much about sports, but
because his eldest brother had always distinguished himself in them,
and he must do the same. When we think how little power we have to do
the tiresome things we set ourselves to do every day, we appreciate the
self-compelling power a child can use, given a strong enough impulse.
The long name, Fortitude, would have its effect on the little boy in
the dentist’s hands. It is good to know that it is a manly and knightly
virtue to be strong to bear pain and inconvenience without making any
sign. The story of the Spartan boy and the fox will still wake an echo;
and the girl who finds it a fine thing to endure hardness will not make
a fuss about her physical sensations. She will be pained for the want of
fortitude which called forth the reproof, ‘Could ye not watch with me one
hour?’ and will brace herself to bear, that she may be able to serve.
Portia, the wife of Brutus, gave a fair test of her quality when she
wounded her tender flesh to prove that she was fit to share her husband’s
counsels.
=Service.=—Service is another knightly quality which a child should be
nerved for by heroic examples until he grudges to let slip an opportunity.
=Courage.=—Courage, too, should be something more than the impulse of
the moment; it is a natural fire to be fed by heroic example and by the
teaching that the thing to be done is always of more consequence than the
doer.
=Prudence.=—Prudence, too, is a condition of knightly service, whether
to our kind or to our kin, and courage without prudence is recklessness;
but, in this connection of bodily service, prudence is largely concerned
with the duty of health. I have heard of a boy at a school where a
good deal of hygienic teaching was given, getting quite anxious and
overcharged with the care of his own health. This meaner kind of caution
is not worthy to be called prudence, which should regard every physical
power as a means of service and of conflict, and should think it a shame
by any foolhardiness to make any part of the body unable for its due
service.
=Chastity.=—For Chastity we can have no impulse higher than ‘Your bodies
are the temples of the Holy Ghost’; but how inadequately do we present
the thought! The inspiring ideas which should sustain all physical
culture and training are very numerous, and teaching on such subjects as
Chastity, Fortitude, Courage, Constancy, Prudence, Temperance, with the
consideration of heroic examples, should strengthen the hands of parents
and teachers for the better physical culture of their charges. Parents
would do well to see to it that they turn out their children fit for
service, not only by observing the necessary hygienic conditions, but by
bringing their bodies under rule, training them in habits and inspiring
them with the ideas of knightly service.
CHAPTER XI
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF INTELLECTUAL TRAINING
=We are Law-abiding in Matters Physical and Moral.=—We all recognise that
we are under the reign of law so far as our bodies go. We know that ‘put
your finger in the fire and it will be burnt,’ ‘sit in a draught and you
will catch cold,’ ‘live a vigorous and temperate life and health will be
your reward.’ That law attends our steps with its penalties and rewards
in all matters physical we know very well. Some of us go further and have
a personal sense of the Lawgiver in matters of sickness and health. In
sickness especially we feel that God is dealing with us, and we endeavour
to lay ourselves open to the lesson of the hour. In moral matters, too,
we live under the law. We may forget ourselves, but we have compunctions
and are aware of penalties.
=Not so in Matters Intellectual.=—But in matters intellectual we are
disposed to stand upon our rights. Here we recognise no authority, abide
by no law. Every man is free to his own opinion, however casually formed.
Every man kindles his own ‘lights,’ and thinks that no more is expected
of him than to live up to those lights. In fact our attitude with regard
to our own intellectual processes leads to that disturbing sense of
duality which causes the shipwreck of many lives, the distressing unrest
of others, and the easy drifting of many more. Our thinking is not a
separate thing from our conduct and our prayers, or even from our bodily
well-being. Man is not several entities. He is one spirit (visibly
expressed in bodily form), with many powers. He can work and love and
pray and live righteously, but all these are the outcome of the manner of
thoughts he thinks.
=Three Ultimate Facts—Not open to Question.=—There are two directions
in which we commit intellectual offences against the law, and oppose
ourselves to authority. In the first place we are disposed to regard
everything by turns as an open question. We forget that there are three
ultimate postulates which the thought of man can neither prove nor
disprove, though in every age it has played uneasily about one or the
other. God, Self, and the World, are the three fixed points of thought.
The active Western mind, with each new evolution of scientific thought,
finds again and again that there is no place for God in the world; nay,
so active and pleasant is the conception of self that an important school
of philosophy has demonstrated that the real world is no more than a
simulacrum, a mirage, as it were, projected from the conscious self.
The more passive Eastern mind, is, on the contrary, inclined to regard
selfhood as a passing phase in a state of absorption or reabsorption by
deity. But when we learn to realise that—God is, Self is, the World is,
with all that these existences imply, quite untouched by any thinking of
ours, unprovable, and self-proven,—why, we are at once put into a more
humble attitude of mind. We recognise that above us, about us, within
us, there are ‘more things ... than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’ _We
realise ourselves as persons, we have a local habitation, and we live
and move and have our being in and under a supreme authority._ It is not
well we should take it for granted that everybody knows these things.
Perhaps we all have a hearsay acquaintance with, but very few of us have
a realising knowledge of, these ultimate facts.
=Limitations of Reason.=—A second direction in which it is well that
we should recognise our limitations is with regard to the nature and
function of what we call our reason, and should, perhaps, describe more
accurately as our power of reasoning. We all know how often we go to bed
with a difficult question to settle. We say we will sleep upon it, and,
in the morning, behold, the whole question has worked itself into shape:
we see all its bearings and know just how to act. We are so accustomed
to take wonders as matters of course, mere everyday events, that it does
not occur to us to be surprised. We even say, the mind is clearer after
sleep, regardless of the fact that we have no labour of thinking at all
in the morning; all comes straight of itself. When we come to think of
it, most of our decisions arrive in this unlaborious way. We really
cannot say that we have thought such and such a matter out: the decision
comes to us in a flash, by an intuition, what you will. The subject is a
large one, but all I care to stipulate for here is that children should
be taught to know that much of our reasoning and so-called thinking is
involuntary,—is as much a natural function as is the circulation of our
blood, and that this very fact points to the limitations of reason.
=Reason brings Logical Proof of any Idea we Entertain.=—We, personally,
might or might not be trusted to come to a morally right conclusion from
any premise we entertain. But the reasoning power, acting in a more or
less mechanical and involuntary manner, does not necessarily work towards
the morally right conclusion. All that reason does for us is to prove,
logically, any idea we choose to entertain. For example, as we have said,
important schools (Eastern and Western) of philosophy entertain the
idea that there is no actual real world independent of man’s conception
thereof. The logical proofs of this premise pour in upon their minds
in such volume that a considerable literature exists to prove an idea
which on the face of it appears absurd. We all know that, entertain a
notion that a servant is dishonest, that a friend is false, that a dress
is unbecoming, and some power within us, unconsciously to us, sets to
work to collect evidence and bring irrefragable proof of the position we
have chosen to take up. This is the history of wars and persecutions and
family feuds all over the world. How necessary then that a child should
be instructed to understand the limitations of his own reason, so that
he will not confound logical demonstration with eternal truth, and will
know that the important thing to him is the ideas he permits himself
to entertain, and not by any means the conclusions he draws from these
ideas, because these latter are self-evolved.
=A Third Fallacy—Intellect Man’s Peculiar Sphere, Knowledge his Proper
Discovery.=—A third fallacy which lies at the root of our thinking, and
therefore, of our education, is, that while nature, morals, and theology
may be more or less divine in their origin and relations, not only is
intellect man’s proper and peculiar sphere, but knowledge,—the knowledge
of witty inventions, of man and nature, of art and literature, of the
heavens above and the earth beneath,—all this knowledge is man’s proper
discovery. He has found it out himself, thought it out for himself,
observed, reasoned, collected, laboured, gathered his forces, altogether
of his own will and for his own ends and as an independent agent. Now,
this pride of intellect also comes of the arrogance of man; not only
in our age, which, I venture to think, is the very best age the world
has ever seen, but in all time, it is our nature to lift up our heads
and say, ‘We are the people; before us there were none like unto us,
neither shall there be any more after us.’ But when we come to ourselves
we realise that our Author and Father has not in this way made over any
single vast realm of our lives into our own hands.
=Great Eras come from Time to Time.=—The knowledge that comes to us is
given us in repasts, so to speak. Great eras of scientific discovery or
literary activity or poetic insight or artistic interpretation come to
the world from time to time; and then there is a long interval for the
assimilation of the new knowledge or the new thought. After that, the
world is taken by storm by the rise of another constellation of its great
intellects; and yet we do not discern the signs of the times nor realise
that thus our God is bringing us up in knowledge, which is also divine,
just as much as in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The mediæval
Church recognised this great truth—as Mr Ruskin has eloquently pointed
out, showing how the ‘Captain Figures,’ the inventors, as it were, of
grammar and music, astronomy and geometry, arithmetic and logic, all
spake that which was in them under the direct outpouring of the Holy
Spirit, even though none of them had any such revelation of the true
God as we recognise. What a revolution should we have in our methods
of education if we could once conceive that dry-as-dust subjects like
grammar and arithmetic should come to children, living with the life of
the Holy Spirit, who, we are told, ‘shall teach you all things.’
=Nothing so Practical as Great Ideas.=—It may occur to some readers to
consider that such lines of thought as I have suggested are perhaps
interesting but not practical. Believe me, nothing is so practical as
a great idea, because nothing produces such an abundant outcome of
practical effort. We must not turn the cold shoulder to philosophy.
Education is no more than applied philosophy—our effort to train children
according to the wisdom that is in us; and not according to the last
novelty in educational ideas.
‘Man, know thyself,’ is a counsel which we might render, ‘Child, know
thyself, and thy relations to God and man and nature’; and to give their
children this sort of preparation for life it is necessary that parents
should know something of the laws of mind and of the source of knowledge.
=The Formation of Intellectual Habits.=—The second part of our
subject—the formation of intellectual habits—need not occupy us long. We
know that the possession of some half-dozen such habits makes up what is
well called ability. They make a man able to do that which he desires to
do with his mental powers, and to labour at the cost of not a tenth part
of the waste of tissue which the same work would exact of a person of
undisciplined mental habits. We know, too, that the habits in question
are acquired through training and are not bestowed as a gift. Genius
itself, we have been told, is an infinite capacity for taking pains; we
would rather say, is the habit of taking infinite pains, for every child
is born with the capacity.
=We trust blindly to Disciplinary Subjects.=—We trust perhaps a little
blindly to the training which certain subjects give in certain mental
habits. The classics, we consider, cultivate in one direction, the
mathematics, in another, science, in a third. So they do, undoubtedly, so
far as each of these subjects is concerned; but possibly not in forming
the general habits of intellectual life which we expect to result. Remove
the mathematician from his own field and he is not more exact or more on
the spot than other men; indeed he is rather given to make a big hole for
the cat and a little hole for the kitten! The humanities do not always
make a man humane, that is, liberal, tolerant, gentle, and candid, as
regards the opinions and status of other men. The fault does not lie in
any one of these or in any other of the disciplinary subjects, but in our
indolent habit of using each of these as a sort of mechanical contrivance
for turning up the soil and sowing the seed. There is no reprieve for
parents. It rests with them, even more than with the schoolmaster and his
curriculum, to form those mental habits which shall give intellectual
distinction to their children throughout their lives.
=Some Intellectual Habits.=—I need not refer again to the genesis of
a habit; but perhaps most of us set ourselves more definitely to form
physical and moral than we do to form intellectual habits. I will only
mention a few such, which should be matters of careful training during
the period of childhood:—_Attention_, the power of turning the whole
force of the mind upon the subject brought before it: _Concentration_,
which differs from attention in that the mind is actively engaged on
some given problem rather than passively receptive: _Thoroughness_,
the habit of dissatisfaction with a slipshod, imperfect grasp of
a subject, and of mental uneasiness until a satisfying measure of
knowledge is obtained;—this habit is greatly encouraged by a reference
to an encyclopædia, to clear up any doubtful point, when it turns up:
_Intellectual Volition_, the power, that is, of making ourselves think
of a given subject at a given time;—most of us know how trying our
refractory minds are in this matter, but, if the child is accustomed to
take pleasure in the effort as effort, the man will find it easy to make
himself think of what he will: _Accuracy_, which is to be taught, not
only through arithmetic, but through all the small statements, messages,
and affairs of daily life: _Reflection_, the ruminating power which is so
strongly developed in children and is somehow lost with much besides of
the precious cargo they bring with them into the world. There is nothing
sadder than the way we allow intellectual impressions to pass over the
surface of our minds, without any effort to retain or assimilate.
=Meditation.=—I can mention only one more invaluable habit. Mr Romanes
consulted Darwin about the conduct of his intellectual life. ‘Meditate,’
was the answer, and we are told that the younger scientist set great
store on this advice. Meditation is also a habit to be acquired, or
rather preserved, for we believe that children are born to meditate, as
they are to reflect; indeed, the two are closely allied. In reflecting
we ruminate on what we have received. In meditating we are not content
to go over the past, we allow our minds to follow out our subject to
all its issues. It has long been known that progress in the Christian
life depends much upon meditation; intellectual progress, too, depends,
not on mere reading or the laborious getting up of a subject which we
call study, but on that active surrender of all the powers of the mind
to the occupation of the subject in hand, which is intended by the word
meditation. It would be easy for any of us to suggest to himself a dozen
more important intellectual habits, the consideration of which should be
profitable and stimulating.
=The Sustenance of Living Ideas.=—The intellectual life, like every
manner of spiritual life, has but one food whereby it lives and grows—the
sustenance of living ideas. It is not possible to repeat this too often
or too emphatically, for perhaps we err more in this respect than
any other in bringing up children. We feed them upon the white ashes
out of which the last spark of the fire of original thought has long
since died. We give them second-rate story books, with stale phrases,
stale situations, shreds of other people’s thoughts, stalest of stale
sentiments. They complain that they know how the story will end! But
that is not all; they know how every dreary page will unwind itself. I
saw it stated the other day that children do not care for poetry, that
a stirring narrative in verse is much more to their taste. They do like
the tale, no doubt, but poetry appeals to them on other grounds, and
Shelley’s _Skylark_ will hold a child entranced sooner than any moving
anecdote. As for children’s art, we hang the nursery with ‘Christmas
Number’ pictures, and their books are illustrated on a lower level
still. In regard to book illustrations, we are improving a little, but
still there is room.
=Children’s Literature.=—The subject of ‘Children’s Literature’ has been
well threshed out, and only one thing remains to be said,—children have
no natural appetite for twaddle, and a special literature for children is
probably far less necessary than the book-sellers would have us suppose.
Out of any list of ‘the hundred best books,’ I believe that seventy-five
would be well within the range of children of eight or nine. They would
delight in _Rasselas_, _Eöthen_ would fascinate them as much as _Robinson
Crusoe_, the _Faëry Queen_, with its allegory and knightly adventures
and sense of free moving in woodland scenery, would exactly fall in with
their humour. What they want is to be brought into touch with living
thought of the best, and their intellectual life feeds upon it with
little meddling on our part.
=Independent Intellectual Development of Children.=—We do not
sufficiently recognise the independent intellectual development of
children which it is our business to initiate and direct, but not to
control or dominate. I know a little girl of nine who pined every day
because the poems of Tennyson which she loved best were not to be found
in the volumes of the larger works, which were all the house she was
visiting at afforded. She literally missed her favourite poems as a
child would miss a meal; and why not? The intellectual appetite is just
as actual and just as exigeant as bodily hunger; more so, alas, in
some cases. Miss Martineau has a charming story[9] of the intellectual
awakening of “a schoolboy of _ten_ who laid himself down, back uppermost,
with Southey’s _Thalaba_ before him, on the first day of the Easter
holidays, and turned over the leaves, notwithstanding his inconvenient
position, as fast as if he were looking for something, till in a few
hours it was done, and he was off with it to the public library, bringing
back the _Curse of Kehama_. Thus he went on with all Southey’s poems
and some others through his short holidays, scarcely moving voluntarily
all those days except to run to the library. He came out of the process
so changed that none of his family could help being struck by it. The
expression of his eye, the cast of his countenance, his use of words,
and his very gait were changed. In ten days he had advanced years in
intelligence; and I have always thought that this was the turning-point
of his life. His parents wisely and kindly let him alone, aware that
school would presently put an end to all excess in the new indulgence.”
As there is no religious conversion for the child who has always been
brought up in the conscious presence of God, so parents who have always
satisfied the intellectual craving of their children must needs forego
the delight of watching a literary awakening. A little girl brought up
on temperance principles, who said, ‘I am so sorry my father isn’t a
drunkard,’ that she might rejoice in his reformation, put the case for us
very plainly.
=Self-selection and Self-appropriation.=—Given a bountiful repast of
ideas, the process of natural selection soon begins. Tennyson with his—
“Our elm tree’s ruddy-hearted blossom-flake is fluttering down,”
“Ruby-budded lime,”
“Black as ash-buds in the front of March,”
has done more to make field botanists than ever the Science and Art
Department was able to undo with its whole apparatus of lectures and
examinations.
Here, again, Browning gives us a poet’s impulse to a nature student:—
“By boulder stones where lichens mock
The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit
Their teeth to the polished block.”
Ideas of nature, of life, love, duty, heroism,—these children find and
choose for themselves from the authors they read, who do more for their
education than any deliberate teaching; just for this reason, that these
vital ideas are self-selected and self-appropriated.
I shall touch later upon the burning question of a curriculum which shall
furnish children, not with dry bones of fact, but with fact clothed upon
with the living flesh, breathed into by the vital spirit of quickening
ideas. A teacher objected the other day that it was difficult to teach
from Freeman’s _Old English History_, because there were so many stories;
not perceiving that the stories were the living history, while all the
rest was dead.
=Inherited Parsimony in Lesson-Books.=—I should like to say here that a
sort of unconscious, inherited parsimony, coming down to us from the days
when incomes were smaller and books were fewer, sometimes causes parents
to restrict their children unduly in the matter of lesson-books—living
books, varied from time to time, and not thumbed over from one schoolroom
generation to another until the very sight of them is a weariness to the
flesh. But the subject of the intellectual sustenance of children upon
ideas is so large and important that I must content myself with bald
suggestions. Further considered, such subjects as the following might be
useful:—
(1) Children’s tastes in Fiction, in Poetry, in books of Travel and
Adventure, in History, in Biography (most stimulating subject).
(2) Ideas of life and conduct that children assimilate from their reading.
(3) Ideas of duty assimilated in the same way.
(4) Ideas of nature that children seize.
(5) The leading, vitalising ideas in subjects of school study, as
geography, grammar, history, astronomy, Cæsar’s Commentaries, etc., etc.
Let me again refer the reader to Mr Ruskin’s description of the ‘Captain
Figures’ at the head of each of the Liberal Arts, in his account of
the Spanish Chapel; and conclude with a wise sentence of Coleridge’s
concerning the method of Plato, which should be always present to the
minds of persons engaged in the training of children:—
=Plato’s Educational Aim.=—“He desired not to assist in storing the
passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if
the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting room, but to place
it in such relations of circumstance as should gradually excite its
vegetating and germinating powers to produce new fruits of thought, new
conceptions and imaginations and ideas.”
CHAPTER XII
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF MORAL TRAINING
=Three Foundation Principles.=—Three principles which underlie the
educational thought of the Union,[10] and the furtherance of which some
of us have deeply at heart, are:—(_a_) The recognition of authority as a
fundamental principle, as universal and as inevitable in the moral world
as is that of gravitation in the physical; (_b_) the recognition of the
physical basis of habits and of the important part which the formation of
habits plays in education; (_c_) the recognition of the vital character
and inspiring power of ideas.
=Authority, the Basis of Moral Teaching.=—First let us consider the
principle of authority, which is the basis of moral as it is of religious
teaching. ‘Ought’ is part of the verb ‘to owe,’ and that which we owe
is a personal debt to a Lawgiver and Ruler, however men name the final
authority. If they choose to speak of Buddha or Humanity, they do not
escape from the sense of a moral authority. They know that that which
they _ought_ is that which they _owe_ to do, a debt to some power or
personality external to themselves. God has made us so that, however much
we may be in the dark as to the divine Name, we can never for a minute
escape from the sense of ‘Ought,’ the law, which becomes flesh-torturing
and spirit-quelling in proportion as we are removed from the light of
Revelation. To us, who know the name of God and have the revelation
of the Scriptures, authority carries no vague terror. We know what is
required of us, and that the requirements are never arbitrary, but
necessary in the nature of things, both for the moral government of the
world and to gratify the unquenchable desire of every human soul to rise
into a higher state of being. Perhaps parents, great as they are and
should be in the eyes of their children, should always keep well to the
front the fact that their authority is derived.
=Principles, not Rules.=—‘God does not allow’ us to do thus and thus
should be a rarely expressed but often present thought to parents
who study the nature of the divine authority where it is most fully
revealed, that is, in the Gospels. They see there that authority works
by principles and not by rules, and as they themselves are the deputy
authorities set over every household, it becomes them to consider the
divine method of government. They should discern the signs of the times
too; the tendency is to think that a man can only act according to his
‘lights,’ and, therefore, that it is right for him to do that which is
right in his own eyes; in other words, that every man is his own final
authority in questions of right and wrong. It is extremely important that
parents should keep in view, and counteract if need be, this tendency of
the day.
=Limitations of Authority.=—On the other hand, it is well that they
should understand the limitations of authority. Even the divine authority
does not compel. It indicates the way and protects the way-farer, and
strengthens and directs self-compelling power. It permits a man to make
free choice of obedience rather than compels him to obey. In the moral
training of children arbitrary action almost always produces revolt.
Parents believe that they are doing well to _rule_ their households,
without considering the pattern, the principles, and the limitations of
parental authority.
=Duty can exist only as that which we owe.=—An American writer on
the moral instruction of children states that ‘it is the business
of the moral instructor in the school to deliver to his pupils the
subject-matter of morality, but not to deal with the sanctions of it.’
Here we have a contention at least two thousand years old. Socrates
combated it as expressed in the formulæ:—‘Man is the measure of all
things’; ‘Just as each thing appears to each man, so it is to him’; ‘All
truth is relative.’ We say to-day that a man can but live up to his
‘lights’; in other words, there is no authority, no truth, and no law
beyond what every man carries in his own bosom. The necessary issue of
this teaching is the doctrine of the unknowable God—the God who, if He
exists, does not exist for us, because we have no relations with Him.
It is in their early years at home that children should be taught to
realise that duty can exist only as that which we _owe_ to God; that
the law of God is exceeding broad and encompasses us as the air we
breathe, only more so, for it reaches to our secret thoughts; and this
is not a hardship but a delight. That mothers should love their little
children and make them happy all day long—this is part of the law of
God: that children are glad when they are good, and sad when they are
naughty—this, too, is the law of God: that, if Tommy drops his spoon, it
falls to the ground, is a law of God too, of a different kind. Mother or
teacher cannot give children a better inheritance than the constant sense
of being ruled and encompassed by law, and that law is another name for
the will of God.
=Morals do not come by Nature.=—No doubt every child is born with a
conscience, that is, with a sense that he ought to choose the right
and refuse the wrong; but he is not born with the power to discern
good and evil. An educated conscience is a far rarer possession than
we imagine; we are all startled now and then by the laxities of
right-minded neighbours in matters the right and wrong of which is patent
to ourselves; but probably our own moral eccentricities are equally
startling to our friends. The blame rests on our faulty moral education,
which has hardly made us aware of fallacious thought and insincere
speech; we believe that Latin and Greek must be taught, but that morals
come by nature. A certain rough-and-ready kind of morality, varying with
our conditions, does come by heredity and environment; but that most
delicate and beautiful of human possessions, an educated conscience,
comes only by teaching with authority and adorning by example.
=Children born neither Moral nor Immoral.=—It is curious how educated
people are still at sea as regards the moral status of children. Some
time ago I was present at an interesting discussion, among the members
of an educational society, on the subject of children’s lies. It was
interesting to notice that the meeting, consisting of able, educated
people, divided itself into those who held that children were born
true and those who held that they were born false; it did not occur
to anybody to recall his own childhood, or even to reflect on his own
condition at the present moment. The question lay between children being
born moral and born immoral. Nobody reflected that every human being
comes into the world with infinite possibilities for good; and, alas!
infinite possibilities for evil; possibly with evil hereditary tendencies
which may be rectified by education, or with good tendencies which his
bringing-up may nullify.
=Moral Teaching.=—We need go no further than the Ten Commandments and
our Lord’s exposition of the moral law to find corrective teaching for
the spasmodic, impulsive moral efforts which tend to make up our notion
of what the children call ‘being good,’ and nowhere shall we find a
more lucid and practical commentary on the moral law than is set forth
in the Church Catechism. It was the practice of a venerable Father of
the Church, Bishop Ken, to recite the ‘duty towards God,’ and the ‘duty
towards my neighbour’ every day. It is a practice worth imitating, and it
would not be amiss to let all children of whatever communion learn these
short abstracts of the whole duty of man.
=Of the Poets.=—The poets give us the best help in this kind of teaching;
as, for example, Wordsworth’s _Ode to Duty_:—
“Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.”
Or Matthew Arnold’s lines on _Rugby Chapel_—
“Servants of God!—or sons
Shall I not call you? because
Not as servants ye knew
Your Father’s innermost mind,
His, who unwillingly sees
One of His little ones lost—
Yours is the praise, if mankind
Hath not as yet in its march
Fainted, and fallen, and died!”
Or this, again, of Tennyson—
“Not once or twice in our fair island story
The path of duty was the way to glory:
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro’ the long gorge to the far light, has won
His path upward and prevail’d,—
Shall find the toppling crags of duty, scaled,
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun.”
Or Matthew Arnold’s _Morality_—
How, “Tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.”
Possibly we could hardly do better than lead children to reflect on some
high poetic teaching, adding love to law and devotion to duty, so that
children shall know themselves, by duty as by prayer,
“Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”
In the matter of the ideas that inspire the virtuous life, we miss much
by our way of taking things for granted.
=Ethical Teaching of the Middle Ages.=—The mediæval Church preserved
classical traditions. It endeavoured to answer the Socratic inquiry:
“What ought we to do and what do we mean by the words ‘ought’ and
‘doing’ or ‘acting’?” and it answered, as far as might be by way of
object-lessons, visible signs of spiritual things signified.
In the Arena Chapel at Padua, we have Giotto’s Faith and Infidelity, Love
and Envy, Charity and Avarice, Justice and Injustice, Temperance and
Gluttony, Hope and Despair, pictured forth in unmistakable characters
for the reading of the unlearned and ignorant. We have the same theme,
treated with a difference, in what Mr Ruskin calls the ‘Bible of
Amiens,’ where we may study Humility and Pride, Temperance and Gluttony,
Chastity and Lust, Charity and Avarice, Hope and Despair, Faith and
Idolatry, Perseverance and Atheism, Love and Discord, Obedience and
Rebellion, Courage and Cowardice, Patience and Anger, Gentleness and
Churlishness,—in pairs of quatrefoils, an upper and a lower, each under
the feet of an Apostle, who was held to personify the special virtue. But
_we_ know nothing about cardinal virtues and deadly sins.
=We have no Authoritative Teaching.=—We have no teaching by authoritative
utterance strong in the majesty of virtue. We work out no schemes of
ethical teaching in marble; we paint no scale of virtues on our walls,
and no repellent vices. Our poets speak for us, it is true; but the moral
aphorisms, set like jewels though they be on the fore-finger of time,
are scattered here and there, and we leave it serenely to happy chance
whether our children shall or shall not light upon the couple of lines
which should fire them with the impulse to virtuous living. It may be
said that we neglect all additional ethical teaching because we have the
Bible; but how far and _how_ do we use it? Here we have indeed the most
perfect ethical system, the most inspiring and heart-enthralling, that
the world has ever possessed; but it is questionable whether we attempt
to set a noble child’s heart beating with the thought that he is required
to be perfect as his Father which is in Heaven is perfect.
=High Ideals.=—It is time we set ourselves seriously to this work of
moral education which is to be done, most of all, by presenting the
children with high ideals. ‘Lives of great men all remind us we can
make our lives sublime,’ and the study of the lives of great men and
of the great moments in the lives of smaller men is most wonderfully
inspiring to children, especially when they perceive the strenuousness
of the childhood out of which a noble manhood has evolved itself. As one
grows older no truth strikes one more than that ‘the child is father to
the man.’ It is amazing how many people of one’s own acquaintance have
fulfilled the dreams of their childhood and early youth, and have had
their days indeed ‘bound each to each in natural piety.’
=Value of Biography.=—The Bible is, of course, a storehouse of most
inspiring biographies; but it would be well if we could manage our
teaching so as to bring out in each character the master-thought of
all his thinking. The late Queen has done this with singular tact and
power in the Albert Memorial Chapel, where, as we know, Prophets and
Patriarchs are presented, each showing in action that special virtue or
form of endeavour which seemed to her the keynote of his character. This
is a happy effort to revive the mediæval object teaching of which I have
already spoken. The same thing occurs again in the School of Song of
the Edinburgh Cathedral, where Mrs Traquair has frescoed the walls to
illustrate the _Benedicite_, where ‘holy and humble men of heart,’ for
example, is illustrated by three men of our own day of different schools
of thought—Cardinal Newman is the only one I recollect. The force of this
kind of master-idea, and the unity it gives to life, cannot be better
illustrated than by the perhaps apocryphal ‘I will be good’ of our late
beloved Queen. There are few children in the kingdom whose hearts have
not thrilled to the phrase. Perhaps she will one day know how much was
done to give moral impulse to this great Empire by that simple child-like
promise so abundantly fulfilled.
=Of Patriotic Poems.=—Next in value to biographies from the point of view
of inspiration are the burning words of the poets,—Tennyson’s _Ode to
the Iron Duke_, for example. Perhaps no poet has done more to stir the
fire of patriotism amongst us than Mr Rudyard Kipling: “We learn from our
wistful mothers to call Old England ‘home,’” opens the door to a flood of
patriotic feeling; as indeed do the whole of the poems, _The Native-born_
and _The Flag of England_:—
“Never was isle so little,
Never were seas so lone,
But over the scud and the palm trees
The English flag has flown.”
From another point of view, how this (of Browning’s) makes the heart
quick with patriotic emotions!—
“Buy my English posies,
Kent and Surrey may,
Violets of the undercliff
Wet with Channel spray,
Cowslips of the Devon combe,
Midland furze afire;
Buy my English posies
And I’ll sell you heart’s desire.”
=Mottoes.=—In the reading of the Bible, of poetry, of the best prose,
the culling of mottoes is a delightful and most stimulating occupation,
especially if a motto book be kept, perhaps under headings, perhaps not.
It would not be a bad idea for children to make their own year-book,
with a motto for every day in the year culled from their own reading.
What an incentive to a good day it would be to read in the morning as
a motto of our very own choice and selection, and not the voice of an
outside mentor: ‘Keep ye the law; be swift in all obedience’! The theme
suggests endless subjects for consideration and direct teaching: for
example, lives with a keynote; Bible heroes; Greek heroes; poems of moral
inspiration; poems of patriotism, duty, or any single moral quality;
moral object-lessons; mottoes and where to find them, etc.
=The Habit of Sweet Thoughts.=—Moral habits, the way to form them and
the bounden duty of every parent to send children into the world with
a good outfit of moral habits, is a subject so much to the front in
our thoughts, that I need not dwell further upon it here. The moral
impulse having been given by means of some such inspiring idea as we
have considered, the parent’s or teacher’s next business is to keep the
idea well to the front, with tact and delicacy, and without insistence,
and to afford apparently casual opportunities for moral effort on the
lines of the first impulse. Again, let us keep before the children that
it is the manner of thoughts we think which matters; and, in the early
days, when a child’s face is an open book to his parents, the habit of
sweet thoughts must be kept up, and every selfish, resentful, unamiable
movement of children’s minds observed in the countenance must be changed
before consciousness sets in.
=Virtues in which Children should be Trained.=—One more point: parents
should take pains to have their own thoughts clear as to the manner
of virtues they want their children to develop. Candour, fortitude,
temperance, patience, meekness, courage, generosity, indeed the whole
rôle of the virtues, would be stimulating subjects for thought and
teaching, offering ample illustrations. One caution I should like to
offer. A child’s whole notion of religion is ‘being good.’ It is well
that he should know that being good is not his whole duty to God,
although it is so much of it; that the relationship of love and personal
service, which he owes as a child to his Father, as a subject to his
King, is even more than the ‘being good’ which gives our Almighty Father
such pleasure in His children.
CHAPTER XIII
SOME UNCONSIDERED ASPECTS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
=Authority in Religious Education.=—I should like to preface my remarks
on Religious Education by saying that there is not the slightest pretence
that they are exhaustive. My treatment has for its object the indication
of practical lines for religious education, and I very earnestly hope
that the reader will find I have left out things I ought to have said, or
said things I ought not to have said.
Let us first consider how the principle of authority bears on religious
teaching. The sense of duty, more or less illuminated, or more or less
benighted, is always relative to a ruler with whom it rests to say ‘Thou
shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not.’ It is brought home, too, to most of us who
are set in authority, that we ourselves are acting under a higher, and
finally, under the highest rule. A child cannot have a lasting sense
of duty until he is brought into contact with a supreme Authority,
who is the source of law, and the pleasing of whom converts duty into
joy. In these rather latitudinarian days, there is perhaps no part of
religious teaching more important than to train children in the sense
of the immediate presence and continual going forth of the supreme
Authority. ‘Thou art about my path and about my bed and spiest out all
my ways,’ should be a thought, not of fear, but of very great comfort to
every child. This constant recognition of authority excites the twofold
response of docility and of reverence. It is said that the children
of our day are marked by wilfulness and a certain flippancy and want
of reverence; if this is so, and in so far as it is so, it is because
children are brought up without the consciousness of their relation to
God, whom we are taught to call ‘Our Father.’ This divine name reminds
us that authority is lodged in the Author of our being, and is tender,
pitiful, preventive, strong to care for and wise to govern; as we see it
feebly shown forth even in the best of human fathers.
=Questions in the Air.=—But there are questions in the air about the
authenticity of the Scriptures, and what not, and we are all more or less
at the mercy of words; and, because the so-called higher criticism finds
much to question as to the verbal accuracy of passages of the Scriptures,
we get a dim idea that the divine authority itself is in question. One
part of the work of this Union[11] is, no doubt, to strengthen the hands
of parents by comforting them with the sense of the higher Power behind
theirs and always supporting them in the exercise of the deputed powers
they hold as heads of families. There is another notion in the air which
tells against the recognition of authority, and that is, the greatly
increased respect for individual personality and for the right of each
individual to develop on the lines of his own character. But it is a
mistake to suppose that the exercise of authority runs counter to any
individual development that is not on morally wrong lines.
=How Authority Works.=—The supreme authority (and all deputed authority)
works precisely as does a good and just national government, whose
business it is to defend the liberties of the subject at all points,
even by checking, repressing, and punishing the licence which interferes
with the rights of others and with the true liberty of the transgressor.
The law (that is, the utterance of authority) is for the punishment of
evil-doers, but for the praise of them that do well; and the association
of harshness, punishment, force, arbitrary dealings, with the idea
of authority, human and divine, is an example of the confusion of
thought to which most of our errors in conduct are traceable. It is not
authority which punishes: the penalties which follow us through life,
of which those in the family are a faint foretaste, are the inevitable
consequences of broken law, whether moral or physical, and from which
authority, strong and benign, exists to save us by prevention, and, if
needs be, by lesser and corrective penalties.
It seems to me that reading and teaching on the following subjects,
for example, might help to focus thought on a subject of vital
importance:—our relation to the supreme authority, not a relation of
choice, but as inevitable as the family relationships into which we
are born; the duty of loyalty and the shame of infidelity; the duty
of reverence; the duty of docility to indications of the divine will;
scriptural revelations of God, as the ruler of men, as saying to Abraham,
‘Go, and he goeth’; to Cyrus, ‘Do this, and he doeth it’; revelations
which history affords of God as the ruler of nations, and as the benign
ruler of men who prospers the ways of His servants; how the sense of
the divine authority may be imparted in the home; how reverence for holy
things may be taught; definite Bible teaching on this head.—Indeed, the
subject is capable of great amplification, and suggests trains of thought
very important in these days.
=The Habits of the Religious Life.=—The next point we must set ourselves
to consider is the laying down of lines of _habit_ in the religious life.
We need not enter again into the physiological reasons for the compelling
power of habit. My present purpose is to consider how far this power can
be employed in the religious development of a child. Let us consider the
subject as it bears upon habits of thought and of attitude, of life and
of speech; though indeed all these are one, for every act and attitude is
begotten of a thought, however unaware we be of thinking.
=Habit of the Thought of God.=—It is said of the wicked that ‘God is
not in all their thoughts.’ Of the child it should be said that God is
in all his thoughts; happy-making, joyous thoughts, restful and dutiful
thoughts, thoughts of loving and giving and serving, the wealth of
beautiful thoughts with which every child’s heart overflows. We are
inclined to think that a child is a little morbid and precocious when he
asks questions and has imaginings about things divine, and we do our best
to divert him. What he needs is to be guided into true, happy thinking;
every day should bring him ‘new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.’ He
understands things divine better than we do, because his ideas have not
been shaped to a conventional standard; and thoughts of God are to him an
escape into the infinite from the worrying limitations, the perception
of the prison bars, which are among the bitter pangs of childhood. To
keep a child in this habit of the thought of God—so that to lose it, for
even a little while, is like coming home after an absence and finding his
mother out—is a very delicate part of a parent’s work.
=Reverent Attitudes.=—The importance of reverent attitudes is a little
apt to be overlooked in these days. We are, before all things, sincere,
and are afraid to insist upon ‘mere forms,’ feeling it best to leave
the child to the natural expression of his own emotions. Here perhaps
we are wrong, as it is just as true to say that the form gives birth to
the feeling as that the feeling should give birth to the form. Children
should be taught to take time, to be reverent at grace before meals,
at family prayers, at their own prayers, in church, when they are old
enough to attend. Perhaps some of us may remember standing daily by our
mother’s knee in reverent attitude to recite the Apostles’ Creed, and
the recollection of the reverence expressed in that early act remains
with one through a lifetime. ‘Because of the angels’ should be a thought
to repress unbecoming behaviour in children. It is a mistake to suppose
that the forms of reverence need be tiresome to them. They love little
ceremonies, and to be taught to kneel nicely while saying their short
prayers would help them to a feeling of reverence in after life. In
connection with children’s behaviour in church, the sentiment and forms
of reverence cannot be expected if they are taken to church too young,
or to too long services, or are expected to maintain their attention
throughout. If children must be taken to long services, they should be
allowed the resource of a Sunday picture-book, and told that the hymns
and the ‘Our Father,’ for example, are the parts of the service for
them. But in these days of bright short services especially adapted for
children the difficulty need not arise.
=Regularity in Devotions.=—The habit of regularity in children’s
devotions is very important. The mother cannot always be present, but
I have known children far more punctual in their devotions when away
from their mother, because they know it to be her wish, than if she were
there to remind them. They may say, like a little friend of mine, aged
four, ‘Mother, I always worship idols.’ ‘Do you indeed, Margaret? when?’
‘Why, when I say my prayers to the chair.’ But it is a great thing for
all of us to get the habit of ‘saying our prayers’ at a given time and
in a given place, which comes to be to us as a holy place. The chair, or
the bedside, or the little prayer-table, or, best of all, the mother’s
knee, plays no small part in framing the soul to a habit of devotion.
In this connection it is worth while to remark that the evening prayers
of children and of school girls and boys should not be left until the
children are tired and drop asleep over their evening exercises. After
tea is a very good set time for prayers when it can be managed.
=The Habit of Reading the Bible.=—The habit of hearing, and later, of
reading the Bible, is one to establish at an early age. We are met with a
difficulty—that the Bible is, in fact, a library containing passages and,
indeed, whole books which are not for the edification of children; and
many parents fall back upon little collections of texts for morning and
evening use. But I doubt the wisdom of this plan. We may believe that the
narrative teaching of the Scriptures is far more helpful to children,
anyway, than the stimulating moral and spiritual texts picked out for
them in little devotional books. The twopenny single books of the Bible,
published by the Bible Society, should be a resource for parents. A child
old enough to take pleasure in reading for himself would greatly enjoy
reading through the Gospel of St Mark, bit by bit, for example, in a nice
little book, as part of his morning’s devotions.
=Children Formalists by Nature.=—But while pressing the importance of
habits of prayer and devotional reading, it should be remembered that
children are little formalists by nature, and that they should not be
encouraged in long readings or long prayers with a notion of any merit in
such exercises.
=The Habit of Praise.=—Perhaps we do not attach enough importance to the
habit of praise in our children’s devotions. Praise and thanksgiving come
freely from the young heart; gladness is natural and holy, and music is a
delight. The singing of hymns at home and of the hymns and canticles in
church should be a special delight; and the habit of soft and reverent
singing, of offering our very best in praise, should be carefully formed.
Hymns with a story, such as: ‘A little ship was on the sea,’ ‘I think
when I read that sweet story of old,’ ‘Hushed was the evening hymn,’ are
perhaps the best for little children.
Children should be trained in the habits of attention and real devotion
during short services or parts of services. The habit of finding their
places in the prayer-book and following the service is interesting and
aids attention, but perhaps it would be well to tell children, of even
ten or eleven, that during the litany, for example, they might occupy
themselves by saying over silently hymns that they know.
=The Habit of Sunday-keeping.=—The habit of Sunday observances, not
rigid, not dull, and yet peculiar to the day, is especially important.
Sunday stories, Sunday hymns, Sunday walks, Sunday talks, Sunday
painting, Sunday knitting even, Sunday card-games, should all be special
to the day,—quiet, glad, serene. The people who clamour for a Sunday
that shall be as other days little know how healing to the jaded brain
is the change of thought and occupation the seventh day brings with it.
There is hardly a more precious inheritance to be handed on than that of
the traditional English Sunday, stripped of its austerities, we hope,
but keeping its character of quiet gladness and communion with Nature as
well as with God. But I cannot pursue the subject further. The field of
the habits of the religious life should afford many valuable matters for
reflection and teaching; as, for example, the habitual thought of God in
a family; the habit of reverence in thought, attitude, act, and speech;
the habit of prayer as regards time, place, manner, matter; the habit
of praise and thanksgiving; the habits of attention and devotion during
a service (or part of a service); aids to devout habits; the habit of
devotional reading.
=Inspiring Ideas of the Religious Life.=—The most important part of our
subject remains to be considered—the inspiring ideas we propose to give
children in the things of the divine life. This is a matter we are a
little apt to leave to chance; but when we consider the vitalising power
of an idea, and how a single great idea changes the current of a life, it
becomes us to consider very carefully what ideas of the things of God
we may most fitly offer children, and how these may be most invitingly
presented. It is a very sad fact that many children get their first ideas
of God in the nursery, and that these are of a Being on the watch for
their transgressions and always ready to chastise. It is hard to estimate
the alienation which these first ideas of the divine Father set up in
the hearts of His little children. Another danger is, lest the things of
the divine life should be made too familiar and hackneyed, that the name
of our blessed Lord should be used without reverence; and that children
should get the notion that the Lord God exists for their uses, and not
they, for His service.
=The Fatherhood of God.=—Perhaps the first vitalising idea to give
children is that of the tender Fatherhood of God; that they live and move
and have their being within the divine embrace. Let children grow up
in this joyful assurance, and, in the days to come, infidelity to this
closest of all relationships will be as shameful a thing in their eyes as
it was in the eyes of the Christian Church during the age of faith.
=The Kingship of Christ.=—Next, perhaps, the idea of Christ their King
is fitted to touch springs of conduct and to rouse the enthusiasm of
loyalty in children, who have it in them, as we all know, to bestow
heroic devotion on that which they find heroic. Perhaps we do not make
enough of this principle of hero-worship in human nature in our teaching
of religion. We are inclined to make our religious aims subjective rather
than objective. We are tempted to look upon Christianity as a ‘scheme of
salvation’ designed and carried out for our benefit; whereas the very
essence of Christianity is passionate devotion to an altogether adorable
Person.
=Our Saviour.=—But, recognising this, there is still a danger in these
days of adopting a rose-water treatment in our dealings with children.
Few grown-up people, alas! have so keen and vivid a sense of sin as a
little transgressor say of six or seven. Many a naughty, passionate, or
sulky and generally hardened little offender is so, simply because he
does not know, with any personal knowledge, that there is a Saviour of
the world, who has for him instant forgiveness and waiting love. But
here again, the thoughts of a child should be turned outwards to Jesus,
our Saviour, and not inward to his own thoughts and feelings towards our
blessed Saviour.
=The Indwelling of the Holy Ghost.=—One more salient truth of the
Christian verity I have space to touch upon. Most Christian parents
teach their children to recognise the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the
Comforter; they expand the ideas expressed in—
“Enable with perpetual light
The dulness of our blinded sight.”
“Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With the abundance of Thy grace.”
But it would be well if we could hinder in our children’s minds the
rise of a wall of separation between things sacred and things so-called
secular, by making them feel that all ‘sound learning,’ as well as all
‘religious instruction,’ falls within the office of God, the Holy Spirit,
the supreme educator of mankind.
Many other inspiring ideas concerning the religious life will occur to
every parent and teacher, ideas of more value than any I can suggest.
Teaching, reading, and meditation, for example, on any one of the several
clauses of the Lord’s Prayer and of the Apostles’ Creed, or, again, on
the clauses of that Duty towards God in the Church Catechism which all
who receive the Old and the New Testament Scriptures must accept, should
be profitable.
I have touched very inadequately, not upon all that is necessary to bring
up children in ‘the nurture and admonition of the Lord,’ but on a few of
the principles which seem to me essential.
CHAPTER XIV
A MASTER-THOUGHT
=A Motto.=—Some of my readers will know the Parents’ Union motto,
‘Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life,’ especially well in
the neat diagrammatic form in which it appears on the covers of our
Library books. I am told that we, as a society, are destined to live by
our motto. A notable educationalist writes to me, in connection with
public education: ‘There is more need than ever for such a view of
education as that embodied in the memorable words which are the motto of
the _Parents’ Review_.’ An inspiring motto must always be a power, but
to live _upon_ the good repute of our motto, and to live _up_ to it and
_in_ it, are two different things, and I am afraid the Parents’ Union
has much and continual thinking and strenuous living to face, if it
proposes to stand before the world as interpreting and illustrating these
‘memorable words.’ But we are not a faint-hearted body; we _mean_, and
mean intensely; and to those who purpose the best, and endeavour after
the best, the best arrives.
=Nineteenth-Century Formula, Education is an Atmosphere.=—Meantime,
we sometimes err, I think, in taking a part for the whole, and a part
of a part for the whole of that part. Of the three clauses of our
definition, that which declares that ‘education is an atmosphere’ pleases
us most, perhaps, because it is the most inviting to the _laissez aller_
principle of human nature. By the way, we lose something by substituting
‘environment’ (that blessed word, Mesopotamia!) for atmosphere. The
latter word is symbolic, it is true, but a symbol means more to us all
than the name of the thing signified. We think of fresh air, pure,
bracing, tonic,—of the definite act of breathing which must be fully
accomplished; and we are incited to do more and mean more in the matter
of our children’s surroundings if we regard the whole as an atmosphere,
than if we accept the more literal ‘environment.’
=Results in Inanition.=—But, supposing that ‘Education is an atmosphere’
brings a fresh and vigorous thought to our minds, suppose that it means
to us, for our children, sunshine and green fields, pleasant rooms and
good pictures, schools where learning is taken in by the gentle act of
inspiration, followed by the expiration of all that which is not wanted,
where charming teachers compose the children by a half-mesmeric effluence
which inclines them to do as others do, be as others are,—suppose that
all this is included in our notion of ‘Education is an atmosphere,’ may
we not sit at our ease and believe that all is well, and that the whole
of education has been accomplished? No; because though we cannot live
_without_ air, neither can we live _upon_ air, and children brought up
upon ‘environment’ soon begin to show signs of inanition; they have
little or no healthy curiosity, power of attention, or of effort; what is
worse, they lose spontaneity and initiative; they expect life to drop
into them like drops into a rain-tub, without effort or intention on
their part.
=And Ennui.=—This notion, that education is included in environment,
or, at the best, in atmosphere, has held the ground for a generation
or two, and it seems to me that it has left its mark upon our public
and our private lives. We are more ready to be done unto than to do; we
do not care for the labour of ordering our own lives in this direction
or in that; they must be conducted for us; a press of engagements must
compel us into what next, and what next after. We crave for spectacular
entertainment, whether in the way of pageants in the streets, or
spectacles on the boards. Even Shakespeare has come to be so much
the occasion for gorgeous spectacles that what the poet says is of
little moment compared with the show a play affords. There is nothing
intentionally vicious in all this; it is simply our effort to escape
from the _ennui_ that results from a one-sided view of education,—that
education is an atmosphere _only_.
=Eighteenth-Century Formula, Education is a Life, results in Intellectual
Exhaustion.=—A still more consuming _ennui_ set in at the end of the
eighteenth century, and that also was the result of a partial view of
education. ‘Education is a life’ was the (unconscious) formula then; and
a feverish chase after ideas was the outcome. It is pathetic to read
how Madame de Staël and her coterie, or that ‘blue-stocking’ coterie
which met at the Hôtel Rambouillet, for example, went little to bed,
because they could not sleep; and spent long nights in making character
sketches of each other, enigmas, anagrams, and other futilities of the
intellect, and met again (some of them) at early breakfast to compose and
sing little airs, upon little themes. We may be as much inclined to yawn
in each other’s faces as they were, but, anyway, if we sin as they did
by excess in one direction, there is less wear and tear in a succession
of shows than in their restless pursuit of inviting notions. Still, the
beginning of the nineteenth century has its lessons for the beginning of
the twentieth. They erred, as we do, because they did not understand the
science of the proportion of things. We are inclined to say, ‘Education
is environment’; they would say, ‘Education is ideas.’ The truth includes
both of these, and a third definition introducing another side, a third
aspect, of education.
=Education is the Cultivation of Faculties, leads to Abnormal
Developments.=—The third conceivable view, ‘Education is a discipline,’
has always had its votaries, and has them still. That the discipline of
the habits of the good life, both intellectual and moral, forms a good
third of education, we all believe. The excess occurs when we imagine
that certain qualities of character and conduct run out, a prepared
product like carded wool, from this or that educational machine,
mathematics or classics, science or athletics; that is, when the notion
of the development of the so-called faculties takes the place of the more
physiologically true notion of the formation of intellectual habits. The
difference does not seem to be great; but two streams that rise within a
foot of one another may water different countries and fall into different
seas, and a broad divergence in practice often arises from what appears
to be a small difference in conception, in matters educational. The
father of Plutarch had him learn his Homer that he might get heroic
ideas of life. Had the boy been put through his Homer as a classical
grind, as a machine for the development of faculty, a pedant would have
come out, and not a man of the world in touch with life at many points,
capable of bringing men and affairs to the touchstone of a sane and
generous mind. It seems to me that this notion of the discipline which
should develop ‘faculty’ has tended to produce rather one-sided men, with
the limitations which belong to abnormal development. An artist told
me the other day that the condition of successful art is absorption in
art, that the painter must think pictures, paint pictures, nothing but
pictures. But when art was great, men were not mere artists. Quentin
Matsys wrought in iron and painted pictures and did many things besides.
Michael Angelo wrote sonnets, designed buildings, painted pictures;
marble was by no means his only vehicle of expression. Leonardo wrote
treatises, planned canals, played instruments of music, did a hundred
things, and all exquisitely. But then, the idea of the development of
faculty, and the consequent discipline, had not occurred to these great
men or their guardians.
=Education has Three Faces.=—Having safe-guarded ourselves from the
notion that education has only one face, we may go on to consider how
‘education is a life,’ without the risk of thinking that we are viewing
more than one side of the subject.
=Education is a Life, one of these.=—It has been said that ‘man doth not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God’; and the augustness of the occasion on which the words were
spoken has caused us to confine their meaning to what we call the life
of the soul; when, indeed, they include a great educational principle
which was better understood by the mediæval Church than by ourselves. May
I be allowed once again to describe a painting in which the educational
creed of many of us is visibly expressed? The reader is, probably,
familiar with the frescoes on the walls of the so-called Spanish Chapel
of the church of S. Maria Novella. The philosophy of the Middle Ages
dealt, as we know, with theology as its subject-matter; and, while there
is much ecclesiastical polity with which we have little sympathy pictured
on the remaining walls, on one compartment of wall and roof we have a
singularly satisfying scheme of educational thought. At the highest point
of the picture we see the Holy Ghost descending in the likeness of a
dove; immediately below, in the upper chamber are the disciples who first
received His inspiration; below, again, is the promiscuous crowd of all
nationalities who are brought indirectly under the influence of that
first outpouring; and in the foreground are two or three dogs, showing
that the dumb creation was not excluded from benefiting by the new grace.
In the lower compartment of the great design are angelic figures of the
cardinal virtues, which we all trace more or less to divine inspiration,
floating above the seated figures of apostles and prophets, of whom we
know that they ‘spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.’ So far,
this mediæval scheme of philosophy reveals no new thought to persons
instructed in the elements of Christian truth. But below the prophets
and apostles are a series of pictured niches, those to the right being
occupied by the captain figures, the ideal representations, of the
seven Liberal Arts, figures of singular grace and beauty, representing
such familiar matters as grammar, rhetoric, logic, music, astronomy,
geometry, and arithmetic, all of them under the outpouring of the Spirit
of God. Still more liberal is the philosophy which places at the foot
of each of these figures him who was then accepted as the leader and
representative of each several science,—Priscian, Cicero, Aristotle,
Tubal Cain, Zoroaster, Euclid, Pythagoras; men whom a narrower and later
theology would have placed beyond the pale of the Christian religion,
and therefore of the teaching of the Spirit of God. But here all are
represented as under the same divine outpouring which illuminated the
disciples in the upper chamber.
=A Creed which unifies Life.=—Our nature craves after unity. The travail
of thought, which is going on to-day and has gone on as long as we have
any record of men’s thoughts, has been with a view to establishing some
principle for the unification of life. Here we have the scheme of a
magnificent unity. We are apt to think that piety is one thing, that our
intellectual and artistic yearnings are quite another matter, and that
our moral virtues are pretty much matters of inheritance and environment,
and have not much to do with our conscious religion. Hence, there come
discords into our lives, discords especially trying to young and ardent
souls who want to be good and religious, but who cannot escape from the
overpowering drawings of art and intellect and mere physical enjoyment;
they have been taught to consider that these things are, for the most
part, alien to the religious life, and that they must choose one or the
other; they do choose, and the choice does not always fall upon those
things which, in our unscriptural and unphilosophical narrowness, we
call the things of God. Let us bless Taddeo Gaddi and Simone Memmi for
placing before our eyes a creed (copies[12] of which we might all hang
upon our walls), which shows that our piety, our virtue, our intellectual
activities, and, let us add, our physical perfections, are all fed from
the same source, God Himself; are all inspired by the same Spirit,
the Spirit of God. The ages which held this creed were ages of mighty
production in every kind; the princely commerce of Venice was dignified
and sobered by this thought of the divine inspiration of ideas—ideas of
trade, ideas of justice and fair balance and of utility; Columbus went
out to discover a new world, informed by the divine idea, as our own
philosopher, Coleridge, points out, adding that ‘great inventions and
Ideas of Nature presented to chosen minds by a higher power than nature
herself, suddenly unfold as it were in prophetic succession systematic
views destined to produce the most important revolutions in the state
of man.’ When Columbus came back, his new world discovered, people and
princes took it as from God and sang _Te Deum_.
=The Diet of Great Ideas.=—Michael Angelo writes to his friend Vittoria
Colonna, that ‘good Christians always make good and beautiful figures. In
order to represent the adored image of our Lord, it is not enough that a
master should be great and able. I maintain that he must also be a man
of good morals and conduct, if possible a saint, in order that the Holy
Ghost may give him inspiration.’ In truth, a nation or a man becomes
great upon one diet only, the diet of great ideas communicated to those
already prepared to receive them by a higher Power than Nature herself.
=Science, the Teaching vouchsafed to Men to-day.=—I think we[13] hold
amongst us the little leaven which is able to leaven the whole lump.
Let us set ourselves to labour with purpose and passion to restore to
the world, enriched by the additions of later knowledge, that great
scheme of unity of life which produced great men and great work in the
past. Nor need we fear that in endeavouring after some such doctrine of
ideas as may help us in the work of education, we are running counter
to science. Many of us feel, and, I think, rightly, that the teaching
of science is _the_ new teaching which is being vouchsafed to mankind
in our age. Some of us are triumphant, and believe that the elements of
moral and religious struggle are about to be eliminated from life, which
shall run henceforth, whether happy or disastrous, on the easy plane
of the inevitable; others are bewildered and look in vain for a middle
way, a place of reconciliation for science and religion; while others of
us, again, take refuge in repudiating ‘evolution’ and all its works and
nailing our colours to religion, interpreted on our own narrow lines.
Whichever of these lines we take, we probably err through want of faith.
Let us first of all settle it with ourselves that science and religion
cannot, to the believer in God, by any possibility be antagonistic.
Having assured ourselves of this, we shall probably go on to perceive
that the evolution of science is in fact a process of revelation, being
brought about in every case, so far as I am aware, by the process which
Coleridge has so justly described; that is, “that the _Ideas_ of Nature,
presented to chosen minds by a higher power than Nature herself, suddenly
unfold as it were in prophetic succession systematic views destined to
produce the must important revolutions in the state of man.” Huxley
defines the utility of Biology “as helping to give right ideas in this
world, which is, after all,” he goes on to say, “absolutely governed
by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas.”
Again, he writes, “those who refuse to go beyond the fact rarely get as
far as the fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows
that almost every great step therein has been made by the ‘anticipation
of nature,’ that is, by the invention of hypotheses.” One cannot help
thinking that scientific men would find the unifying principle they are
in search of in the fine saying of Coleridge’s which I have quoted more
than once or twice; so would they stand revealed to themselves as the
mouthpieces, not merely of _the truth_, for which they are so ready to
combat and suffer, but also as the chosen and prepared servants of Him
who is the Truth.
=Evolution, the Master-thought of the Age.=—Few of us can forget
Carlyle’s incomparable picture of the _Tiers État_ waiting for
organisation: “Wise as serpents; harmless as doves: what a spectacle for
France! Six hundred inorganic individuals, essential for its regeneration
and salvation, sit there, on their elliptic benches, longing passionately
towards life.” Less picturesque, but otherwise very much on a par with
this, is Coleridge’s description of Botany, as that science existed
in his own day, waiting for the unifying idea which should give it
organisation. “What,” he says, “is Botany at this present hour? Little
more than an enormous nomenclature; a huge catalogue, _bien arrangé_,
yearly and monthly augmented, in various editions, each with its own
scheme of technical memory and its own conveniences of reference!
The innocent amusement, the healthful occupation, the ornamental
accomplishment of _amateurs_; it has yet to expect the devotion and
energies of the philosopher.” The key-word for the interpretation of
life, both animal and vegetable, has been presented to our generation,
and we cannot make too much of it.
=The Ages have sought for a Unifying Principle.=—We cannot overrate the
enormous repose and satisfaction to the human mind contained in the
idea of evolution. But it is well to remember that for three thousand
years thinkers have been occupied with attempts to explain the world by
means of a single principle, which should also furnish an explanation of
reason and the human soul. Herakleitos and his age thought they had laid
hold of the informing idea in the phrase, ‘The true Being is an eternal
Becoming’: the ‘universal flux of things’ explained all. Demokritos and
his age cried—Eureka! solved the riddle of the universe, with the saying
that ‘nothing exists except atoms moving in vacancy.’ Many times since,
with each epoch-making discovery, has science cried—Eureka! over the one
principle which should explain all things and eliminate Personality.
=But Personality Remains.=—But some little knowledge of history and
philosophy will give us pause. We shall see that each great discovery,
each luminous idea of nature that the world has received hitherto, is
like a bend in a tortuous lake which appears final until your boat
approaches it, and then—behold an opening into further and still further
reaches beyond! And the knowledge of God will give us something more than
the wider outlook which comes of a knowledge of history—the knowledge
that there _is_ what Wordsworth calls the ‘stream of tendency,’ a stream
of immeasurable force in shaping character and events; but there is also
Personality, a power able to turn the ‘stream of tendency’ to its uses,
if also liable to be carried away in its current.
=Attitude of Parents and Teachers towards Evolution.=—If I appear to
dwell on a subject which at first sight appears to have little to
do with the bringing up of children, it is because I think that his
attitude towards the great idea, great lesson, set for his age to grasp,
is a vital part of a parent’s preparation. If parents take no heed of
the great thoughts which move their age, they cannot expect to retain
influence over the minds of their children. If they fear and distrust the
revelations of science, they introduce an element of distrust and discord
into their children’s lives. If, with the mere neophyte of science, they
rush to the conclusion that the last revelation is final, accounts for
all that is in man, and, to say the least, makes God unnecessary and
unknowable, or negligible, they may lower the level of their children’s
living to that struggle for existence—without aspiration, consecration,
and sacrifice—of which we hear so much. If, lastly, parents recognise
every great idea of nature as a new page in the progressive revelation
made by God to men already prepared to receive such idea; if they realise
that the new idea, however comprehensive, is not final nor all-inclusive,
nor to be set in opposition with that personal knowledge of God which
is the greatest knowledge, why, then, their children will grow up in
that attitude of reverence for science, reverence for God, and openness
of mind, which befits us for whom life is a probation and a continual
education. So much for the nutriment of ideas laid on the table of the
world during this particular course of its history.
=Education is a World Business.=—Next, we may have poetry, or art, or
philosophy; we cannot tell; but two things are incumbent upon us,—to keep
ourselves and our children in touch with the great thoughts by which
the world has been educated in the past, and to keep ourselves and them
in the right attitude towards the great ideas of the present. It is our
temptation to make too personal a matter of education, to lose sight of
the fact that education is a world business, that the lessons of the ages
have been duly set, and that each age is concerned, not only with its own
particular page, but with every preceding page. For who feels that he has
mastered a book if he is familiar with only the last page of it? This
brings me to a point I am anxious to bring forward.
We do not sufficiently realise the need for unity of principle in
education. We have no Captain Idea which shall marshal for us the
fighting host of educational ideas which throng the air; so, in default
of a guiding principle, a leading idea, we feel ourselves at liberty to
pick and choose. This man thinks he is free to make science the sum of
his son’s education, the other chooses the classics, a third prefers a
mechanical, a fourth, a commercial programme, a fifth makes bodily health
his cult, and chooses a school which makes the care of health a special
feature of its programme (not that we must allow health to be neglected,
but that, given good general conditions, the less obvious attention their
health receives the better for the boys and girls); and everyone feels
himself at liberty to do that which is right in his own eyes with regard
to the education of his children.
Let it be our negative purpose to discourage in every way we can the
educational faddist, that is, the person who accepts a one-sided notion
in place of a universal idea as his educational guide. Our positive
purpose is to present, in season and out of season, one such universal
idea; that is, that education is the science of relations.
=A Captain Idea for us,—Education is the Science of Relations.=—A
child should be brought up to have relations of force with earth and
water, should run and ride, swim and skate, lift and carry; should know
texture, and work in material; should know by name, and where and how
they live at any rate, the things of the earth about him, its birds and
beasts and creeping things, its herbs and trees; should be in touch with
the literature, art and thought of the past and the present. I do not
mean that he should _know_ all these things; but he should feel, when
he reads of it in the newspapers, the thrill which stirred the Cretan
peasants when the frescoes in the palace of King Minos were disclosed
to the labour of their spades. He should feel the thrill, not from mere
contiguity, but because he has with the past the relationship of living
pulsing thought; and, if blood be thicker than water, thought is more
quickening than blood. He must have a living relationship with the
present, its historic movement, its science, literature, art, social
needs and aspirations. In fact, he must have a wide outlook, intimate
relations all round; and force, _virtue_, must pass out of him, whether
of hand, will, or sympathy, wherever he touches. This is no impossible
programme. Indeed it can be pretty well filled in by the time an
intelligent boy or girl has reached the age of thirteen or fourteen; for
it depends, not upon _how much_ is learned, but upon _how_ things are
learned.
=A Wider Curriculum.=—Give children a wide range of subjects, with
the end in view of establishing in each case some one or more of the
relations I have indicated. Let them learn from first-hand sources of
information—really good books, the best going, on the subject they are
engaged upon. Let them get at the books themselves, and do not let
them be flooded with a warm diluent at the lips of their teacher. The
teacher’s business is to indicate, stimulate, direct and constrain to the
acquirement of knowledge, but by no means to be the fountain-head and
source of all knowledge in his or her own person. The less parents and
teachers talk-in and expound their rations of knowledge and thought to
the children they are educating, the better for the children. Peptonised
food for a healthy stomach does not tend to a vigorous digestion.
Children must be allowed to ruminate, must be left alone with their own
thoughts. They will ask for help if they want it.
=We may not Choose or Reject Subjects.=—You will see at a glance,
with this Captain Idea of establishing relationships as a guide, the
unwisdom of choosing or rejecting this or that subject, as being more
or less useful or necessary in view of a child’s future. We decide, for
example, that Tommy, who is eight, need not waste his time over the Latin
Grammar. We intend him for commercial or scientific pursuits,—what good
will it be to him? But we do not know how much we are shutting out from
Tommy’s range of thought besides the Latin Grammar. He has to translate,
for example,—‘_Pueri formosos equos vident._’ He is a ruminant animal,
and has been told something about that strong Roman people whose speech
is now brought before him. How their boys catch hold of him! How he
gloats over their horses! The Latin Grammar is not mere words to Tommy,
or rather Tommy knows, as we have forgotten, that the epithet ‘mere’ is
the very last to apply to words. Of course it is only now and then that a
notion catches the small boy, but when it does catch, it works wonders,
and does more for his education than years of grind.
Let us try, however imperfectly, to make education a science of
relationships—in other words, try in one subject or another to let the
children work upon living ideas. In this field small efforts are honoured
with great rewards, and we perceive that the education we are giving
exceeds all that we intended or imagined.
CHAPTER XV
SCHOOL-BOOKS AND HOW THEY MAKE FOR EDUCATION
=Line upon Line.=—The theme of ‘School-Books’ is not a new one, and I
daresay the reader will find that I have said before what I shall say
now. But we are not like those men of Athens who met to hear and to
tell some new thing; and he will, I know, bear with me because he will
recognise how necessary it is to repeat again and again counsels which
are like waves beating against the rock of an accepted system of things.
But, in time, the waves prevail and the rock wears away; so we go to work
with good hope. Let me introduce what I have to say about school-books by
a little story from an antiquated source.
=An Incident of Schoolgirl Life.=—Frederika Bremer, in her novel of
_The Neighbours_ (published 1837), tells an incident of schoolgirl life
(possibly a bit of autobiography), with great spirit. Though it is rather
long, I think the reader will thank me for it—the little episode advances
what I have to say better than could any duller arguments of my own.
The heroine says:—“I was then sixteen, and, fortunately for my restless
character, my right shoulder began to project at the time. Gymnastics
were then in fashion as remedies against all manner of defects, and
my parents determined to let me try gymnastics. Arrayed in trimmed
pantaloons, a _Bonjour_ coat of green cloth and a little morning cap with
pink ribbon, I made my appearance one day in an assemblage of from thirty
to forty figures dressed almost the same as myself, who were merrily
swarming about a large saloon, over ropes, ladders, and poles. It was
a strange and novel scene. I kept myself in the background the first
day, and learned from my governess the ‘bending of the back’ and the
‘exercises of the arms and legs.’ The second day I began to be intimate
with some of the girls, the third I vied with them on ropes and ladders,
and ere the close of the second week I was the leader of the second
class, and began to encourage them to all manner of tricks.
“At that time I was studying Greek history; their heroes and their heroic
deeds filled my imagination even in the gymnastic school. I proposed to
my band to assume masculine and antique names and, in this place, to
answer to no other than such as Agamemnon, Epaminondas, etc. For myself
I chose the name of Orestes, and called my best friend in the class,
Pylades. There was a tall thin girl, with a Finlandish accent, whom I
greatly disliked, chiefly on account of the disrespect for me and my
ideas which she manifested without reserve; ... from this arose fresh
cause for quarrels.
“Although in love with the Greek history, I was no less taken with the
Swedish. Charles XII. was my idol, and I often entertained my friends
in my class with narration of his deeds till my own soul was on fire
with the most glowing enthusiasm. Like a shower of cold water, Darius
(the tall girl, whose name was Britsa) one day came into the midst of
us, and opposed me with the assertion that the Czar Peter I. was a much
greater man than Charles XII. I accepted the challenge with blind zeal
and suppressed rage. My opponent brought forward a number of facts with
coolness and skill, in support of her opinion, and when I, confuting all
her positions, thought to exalt my victorious hero to the clouds, she was
perpetually throwing Bender and Pultawa in my way. O Pultawa! Pultawa!
many tears have fallen over thy bloody battlefield, but none more bitter
than those which I shed in secret when I, like Charles himself, suffered
a defeat there. Fuel was added to the flame until—‘I challenge you, I
demand satisfaction,’ cried I to Darius, who only laughed and said,
‘Bravo, bravo!’ ... I exclaimed, ‘You have insulted me shamefully, and I
request that you ask my pardon in the presence of the whole class, and
acknowledge that Charles XII. was a greater man than Czar Peter, or else
you shall fight with me, if you have any honour in your breast and are
not a coward.’ Britsa Kaijsa blushed, but said with detestable coolness:
‘Ask pardon indeed? I should never dream of such a thing. Fight? O, yes,
I have no objection! but where and with what? With pins, think you,
or’—‘With the sword if you are not afraid, and on this very spot. We
can meet here half an hour before the rest; arms I shall bring with me;
Pylades is my second and you shall appoint your own!’ ... Next morning
when I had entered the spacious saloon, I found my enemy already there
with her second. Darius and I saluted each other proudly and distantly.
I gave her the first choice of the swords. She took one and flourished
it about quite dexterously, as if she had been accustomed to the use of
it. I saw myself (in imagination) already stabbed to the heart.... ‘Czar
Peter _was_ a great man,’ cried Darius. ‘Down with him! long life to
Charles XII.!’ I cried, bursting into a furious rage. I placed myself in
an attitude of defence. Darius did the same.... Our swords clashed one
against the other, and in the next moment I was disarmed and thrown on
the ground. Darius stood over me and I believed my last hour had arrived.
How astonished was I, however, when my enemy threw her sword away from
her, took me by the hand and lifted me up, whilst she cheerfully cried:
‘Well, now you have satisfaction; let us be good friends again; you are
a brave little body!’ At this moment a tremendous noise was heard at the
door and in rushed the fencing master and three teachers. My senses now
forsook me.”
I hope the reader is not among the naughty children who read the fable
and skip the moral; for, whatever is to follow, is, in fact, the moral of
this pretty incident.
=How did the Girls get their Enthusiasm?=—What was it, we wonder, in
their school-books that these Swedish maidens found so exciting? There
is no hint of other than _school_ reading. In the first place we may
conclude it was _books_. The oral lesson for young children, the lecture
for older, had not been invented in the earlier years of the last
century. We use books in our schoolrooms; but one does not hear of wild
enthusiasm, ungovernable excitement, over the tabulated events of the
history books, the tabulated facts of the science primers. Those Swedish
girls must have used books of another sort; and it is to our interest to
find out of what sort. As records would be hard to come by, we must look
for information to the girls themselves; not that we can summon them to
give a direct answer, but if we can get at what _they_ were, we shall be
able to make a good guess at what should fire their souls.
=What manner of Book sustains the Life of Thought?=—The story discloses
no more than that they were intelligent girls, probably the children of
intelligent parents. But that is enough for our purpose. The question
resolves itself into—What manner of book will find its way with upheaving
effect into the mind of an intelligent boy or girl? We need not ask what
the girl or boy likes. _She_ very often likes the twaddle of goody-goody
story books, _he_ likes condiments, highly-spiced tales of adventure. We
are all capable of liking mental food of a poor quality and a titillating
nature; and possibly such food is good for us when our minds are in need
of an elbow-chair; but our spiritual life is sustained on other stuff,
whether we be boys or girls, men or women. By spiritual I mean that which
is not corporeal; and which, for convenience’ sake, we call by various
names—the life of thought, the life of feeling, the life of the soul.
It is curious how every inquiry, superficial as it may seem to
begin with, leads us to fundamental principles. This simple-seeming
question—what manner of school-books should our boys and girls use?—leads
us straight to one of the two great principles which bottom educational
thought.
=The School-Books of the Publishers.=—I believe that spiritual life,
using spiritual in the sense I have indicated, is sustained upon only one
manner of diet—the diet of ideas—the living progeny of living minds. Now,
if we send to any publisher for his catalogue of school books, we find
that it is accepted as the nature of a school-book that it be drained dry
of living thought. It may bear the name of a thinker, but then it is the
abridgment of an abridgment, and all that is left for the unhappy scholar
is the dry bones of his subject denuded of soft flesh and living colour,
of the stir of life and power of moving. Nothing is left but what Oliver
Wendell Holmes calls the ‘mere brute fact.’
It cannot be too often said that information is not education. You may
answer an examination question about the position of the Seychelles and
the Comoro Islands without having been anywise nourished by the fact of
these island groups existing in such and such latitudes and longitudes;
but if you follow Bullen in _The Cruise of the Cachelot_, the names
excite that little mental stir which indicates the reception of real
knowledge.
=Reason for Oral Teaching.=—Intelligent teachers are well aware of the
dry-as-dust character of school books, so they fall back upon the ‘oral’
lesson, one of whose qualities must be that it is not _bookish_. Living
ideas can be derived only from living minds, and so it occasionally
happens that a vital spark is flashed from teacher to pupil. But
this occurs only when the subject is one to which the teacher has
given _original_ thought. In most cases the oral lesson, or the more
advanced lecture, consists of information got up by the teacher from
various books, and imparted in language, a little pedantic, or a little
commonplace, or a little reading-made-easy in style. At the best, the
teacher is not likely to have vital interest in, and, consequently,
original thought upon, a wide range of subjects.
=Limitations of Teachers.=—We wish to place before the child open doors
to many avenues of instruction and delight, in each one of which he
should find quickening thoughts. We cannot expect a school to be manned
by a dozen master-minds, and even if it were, and the scholar were taught
by each in turn, it would be much to his disadvantage. What he wants of
his teacher is moral and mental discipline, sympathy and direction; and
it is better, on the whole, that the training of the pupil should be
undertaken by one wise teacher than that he should be passed from hand to
hand for this subject and that.
=Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life.=—We begin to see what we
want. Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate
an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’
should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all
_living_, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or
all feeling or all thinking—the strain would be too great—but, all
living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever
we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot
_give_ the children these interests; we prefer that they should never
say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The
question is not,—how much does the youth _know_? when he has finished
his education—but how much does he _care_? and about how many orders of
things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his
feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?
I know you may bring a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink.
What I complain of is that we do _not_ bring our horse to the water. We
give him miserable little text-books, mere compendiums of facts, which
he is to learn off and say and produce at an examination; or we give him
various knowledge in the form of warm diluents, prepared by his teacher
with perhaps some grains of living thought to the gallon. And all the
time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of
thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children.
=We undervalue Children.=—The fact is, we undervalue children. The
notion that an infant is a huge oyster, who by slow degrees, and more
and more, develops into that splendid intellectual and moral being, a
full-grown man or woman, has been impressed upon us so much of late years
that we believe intellectual spoon-meat to be the only food for what we
are pleased to call ‘little minds.’ It is nothing to us that William
Morris read his first Waverley Novel when he was four and had read the
whole series by the time he was seven. He did not die of it, but lived
and prospered; unlike that little Richard, son of John Evelyn, who died
when he was five years and three days old, a thing not to be wondered at
when we read that he had ‘a strong passion for Greek, could turn English
into Latin and _vice versâ_ with the greatest ease,’ had ‘a wonderful
disposition to Mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of
Euclid’; but I quote little Richard (nobody could ever have called him
Dick) by way of warning and not of example.
Macaulay seems to have begun life as a great reader. We know the
delightful story of how, when Hannah More called on his parents, he, a
little boy of four, came forward with pretty hospitality to say that if
she ‘would be good enough to come in’ he would bring her ‘a glass of old
spirits.’ He explained afterwards that ‘Robinson Crusoe often had some.’
=Children of the Last Generation.=—But we may dismiss these precocious
or exceptional children. All we ask of them is to remind us that our
grandfathers and grandmothers recognised children as reasonable beings,
persons of mind and conscience like themselves; but, needing their
guidance and control, as having neither knowledge nor experience.
Witness the queer old children’s books which have come down to us; these
addressed children as, before all things, reasonable, intelligent,
and responsible persons. This is the note of home-life in the last
generation. So soon as the baby realised his surroundings, he found
himself morally and intellectually responsible.
=Children as they are.=—And children have not altered. This is how we
find them—with intelligence more acute, logic more keen, observing powers
more alert, moral sensibilities more quick, love and faith and hope more
abounding; in fact, in all points like as we are, only more so; but
absolutely ignorant of the world and its belongings, of us and our ways,
and, above all, of how to control and direct and manifest the infinite
possibilities with which they are born.
=Our Work, to give vitalising Ideas.=—Knowing that the brain is the
physical seat of habit and that conduct and character, alike, are the
outcome of the habits we allow; knowing, too, that an inspiring idea
initiates a new habit of thought, and hence, a new habit of life; we
perceive that the great work of education is to inspire children with
vitalising ideas as to every relation of life, every department of
knowledge, every subject of thought; and to give deliberate care to
the formation of those habits of the good life which are the outcome
of vitalising ideas. In this great work we seek and assuredly find the
co-operation of the Divine Spirit, whom we recognise, in a sense rather
new to modern thought, as the supreme Educator of mankind in things that
have been called secular, fully as much as in those that have been called
sacred.
CHAPTER XVI
HOW TO USE SCHOOL-BOOKS
=Disciplinary Subjects of Instruction.=—Having cleared our minds as to
the end we have in view, we ask ourselves—‘Is there any fruitful _idea_
underlying this or that study that the children are engaged in?’ We
divest ourselves of the notion that to develop the faculties is the chief
thing, and a ‘subject’ which does not rise out of some great thought
of life we usually reject as not nourishing, not fruitful; while we
retain those studies which give exercise in habits of clear and orderly
thinking. Mathematics, grammar, logic, etc., are not purely disciplinary,
they do develop (if a bull may be allowed) intellectual muscle. We by no
means reject the familiar staples of education in the school sense, but
we prize them even more for the record of intellectual habits they leave
in the brain tissue, than for their distinct value in developing certain
‘faculties.’
=‘Open, Sesame.’=—I think we should have a great educational revolution
once we ceased to regard ourselves as assortments of so-called faculties,
and realised ourselves as persons whose great business it is to get in
touch with other persons of all sorts and conditions, of all countries
and climes, of all times, past and present. History would become
entrancing, literature a magic mirror for the discovery of other minds,
the study of sociology a duty and a delight. We should tend to become
responsive and wise, humble and reverent, recognising the duties and
the joys of the full human life. We cannot of course overtake such a
programme of work, but we can keep it in view; and I suppose every life
is moulded upon its ideal.
=The Bible, the great Storehouse of Moral Impressions.=—Valuable as are
some compendiums of its moral teaching, it is to the Bible itself we
must go as to the great storehouse of moral impressions. Let us hear De
Quincey on this subject:—
“It had happened, that among our vast nursery collection of books was
the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark evenings,
as my three sisters with myself sat by the firelight round the guard of
our nursery, no book was so much in request amongst us. It ruled us and
swayed us as mysteriously as music. Our younger nurse, whom we all loved,
would sometimes, according to her simple powers, endeavour to explain
what we found obscure. We, the children, were all constitutionally
touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the
room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings; and they suited
also, the divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed
us. Above all, the story of a just man—man and yet _not_ man, real
above all things, and yet shadowy above all things—who had suffered the
passion of death in Palestine, slept upon our minds like early dawn upon
the waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in
oriental climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express
themselves, more or less, in varying relation to the great accidents and
powers of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria—these seemed to argue
everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears of corn—that _must_
be summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in
the English Church) troubled me like an anthem.”
=Effect of our Liturgy on a Child.=—I cannot refrain from adding De
Quincey’s beautiful words describing the effect of our liturgy upon him
as a child. “On Sunday mornings I went with the rest of my family to
church: it was a church on the ancient model of England, having aisles,
galleries, organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions
majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through the long litany,
as often as we came to that passage, so beautiful amongst many that
are so, where God is supplicated on behalf of ‘all sick persons and
young children,’ and that He would ‘show His pity upon all prisoners
and captives,’ I wept in secret; and raising my streaming eyes to the
upper windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a
spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The _sides_ of
the windows were rich with stained glass; through the deep purples and
crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination
(from the sun) mingling with the earthly emblazonries (from art and
its gorgeous colouring) of what is grandest in man. _There_ were the
apostles that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of
celestial love to man. _There_ were the martyrs that had borne witness
to the truth through flames, through torments, and through armies of
fierce, insulting faces. _There_ were the saints who, under intolerable
pangs, had glorified God by meek submission to His will.” “God speaks to
children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But
in _solitude_, above all things, when made vocal to the meditative heart
by the truths and services of a national church, God holds with children
‘communion undisturbed.’ _Solitude_, though it may be silent as light,
is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to
man. All men come into this world _alone_; all leave it _alone_.”
=Principles on which to select School-Books.=—In their power of giving
impulse and stirring emotion is another use of books, the right books;
but that is just the question—which _are_ the right books?—a point upon
which I should not wish to play Sir Oracle. The ‘hundred best books for
the schoolroom’ may be put down on a list, but not by me. I venture to
propose one or two principles in the matter of school-books, and shall
leave the far more difficult part, the application of those principles,
to the reader. For example, I think we owe it to children to let them dig
their knowledge, of whatever subject, for themselves out of the fit book;
and this for two reasons: What a child _digs for_ is his own possession;
what is poured into his ear, like the idle song of a pleasant singer,
floats out as lightly as it came in, and is rarely assimilated. I do not
mean to say that the lecture and the oral lesson are without their uses;
but these uses are, to give impulse and to _order_ knowledge; and not to
convey knowledge, or to afford us that part of our education which comes
of fit knowledge, fitly given.
Again, as I have already said, ideas must reach us directly from the mind
of the thinker, and it is chiefly by means of the books they have written
that we get into touch with the best minds.
=Marks of a Fit Book.=—As to the distinguishing marks of a book for the
schoolroom, a word or two may be said. A fit book is not necessarily
a big book. John Quincy Adams, aged nine, wrote to his father for the
fourth volume of Smollett for his private reading, though, as he owned
up, his thoughts were running on birds’ eggs; and perhaps some of us
remember going religiously through the many volumes of Alison’s _History
of Europe_ with a private feeling that the bigness of the book swelled
the virtue of the reader. But, now, big men write little books, to be
used with discretion; because sometimes the little books are no more than
abstracts, the dry bones of the subjects; and sometimes the little books
are fresh and living. Again, we need not always insist that a book should
be written by the original thinker. It sometimes happens that second-rate
minds have assimilated the matter in hand, and are able to give out what
is their own thought (only because they have _made_ it their own) in a
form more suitable for our purpose than that of the first-hand thinkers.
We cannot make any hard and fast rule—a big book or a little book, a book
at first-hand or at second-hand; either may be right provided we have
it in us to discern a _living_ book, quick, and informed with the ideas
proper to the subject of which it treats.
=How to use the Right Books.=—So much for the right books; the right use
of them is another matter. The children must enjoy the book. The ideas
it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds,
must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea.
The teacher’s part in this regard is to see and feel for himself, and
then to rouse his pupils by an appreciative look or word; but to beware
how he deadens the impression by a flood of talk. Intellectual sympathy
is very stimulating; but we have all been in the case of the little girl
who said, “Mother, I think I could understand if you did not explain
_quite_ so much.” A teacher said of her pupil, “I find it so hard to tell
whether she has really grasped a thing or whether she has only got the
mechanical hang of it.” Children are imitative monkeys, and it is the
‘mechanical hang’ that is apt to arrive after a douche of explanation.
=Children must Labour.=—This, of getting ideas out of them, is by no
means all we must do with books. ‘In all labour there is profit,’ at
any rate in some labour; and the labour of thought is what his book
must induce in the child. He must generalise, classify, infer, judge,
visualise, discriminate, labour in one way or another, with that capable
mind of his, until the substance of his book is assimilated or rejected,
according as he shall determine; for the determination rests with him and
not with his teacher.
=Value of Narration.=—The simplest way of dealing with a paragraph
or a chapter is to require the child to narrate its contents after a
single attentive reading,—_one_ reading, however slow, should be made
a condition; for we are all too apt to make sure we shall have another
opportunity of finding out ‘what ’tis all about.’ There is the weekly
review if we fail to get a clear grasp of the news of the day; and, if we
fail a second time, there is a monthly or a quarterly review or an annual
summing up: in fact, many of us let present-day history pass by us with
easy minds, feeling sure that, in the end, we shall be _compelled_ to see
the bearings of events. This is a bad habit to get into; and we should
do well to save our children by not giving them the vague expectation
of second and third and tenth opportunities to do that which should have
been done at first.
=A Single Careful Reading.=—There is much difference between intelligent
reading, which the pupil should do in silence, and a mere parrot-like
cramming up of contents; and it is not a bad test of education to be
able to give the points of a description, the sequence of a series of
incidents, the links in a chain of argument, correctly, after a single
careful reading. This is a power which a barrister, a publisher, a
scholar, labours to acquire; and it is a power which children can acquire
with great ease, and once acquired, the gulf is bridged which divides the
reading from the non-reading community.
=Other Ways of using Books.=—But this is only _one_ way to use books:
others are to enumerate the statements in a given paragraph or chapter;
to analyse a chapter, to divide it into paragraphs under proper headings,
to tabulate and classify series; to trace cause to consequence and
consequence to cause; to discern character and perceive how character and
circumstance interact; to get lessons of life and conduct, or the living
knowledge which makes for science, out of books; all this is possible
for school boys and girls, and _until_ they have begun to use books for
themselves in such ways, they can hardly be said to have begun their
education.
=The Teacher’s Part.=—The teacher’s part is, in the first place, to see
what is to be done, to look over the work of the day in advance and see
what mental discipline, as well as what vital knowledge, this and that
lesson afford; and then to set such questions and such tasks as shall
give full scope to his pupils’ mental activity. Let marginal notes be
freely made, as neatly and beautifully as may be, for books should be
handled with reverence. Let numbers, letters, underlining be used to help
the eye and to save the needless fag of writing abstracts. Let the pupil
write for himself half a dozen questions which cover the passage studied;
he need not write the answers if he be taught that the mind can know
nothing but what it can produce in the form of an answer to a question
put by the mind to itself.
=Disciplinary Devices must not come between Children and the Soul of the
Book.=—These few hints by no means cover the disciplinary uses of a good
school-book; but let us be careful that our disciplinary devices, and our
mechanical devices to secure and tabulate the substance of knowledge,
do not come between the children and that which is the _soul_ of the
book, the living thought it contains. Science is doing so much for us in
these days, nature is drawing so close to us, art is unfolding so much
meaning to us, the world is becoming so rich for us, that we are a little
in danger of neglecting the art of deriving sustenance from books. Let
us not in such wise impoverish our lives and the lives of our children;
for, to quote the golden words of Milton: “Books are not absolutely dead
things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that
soul was, whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial,
the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred
them. As good almost kill a man, as kill a good book; who kills a man
kills a good reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good
book, kills reason itself—kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”
CHAPTER XVII
EDUCATION, THE SCIENCE OF RELATIONS: WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR INTIMACIES:
THE _PRELUDE_ AND _PRÆTERITA_
“But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say,
‘This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain’?”—_Prelude._
I need not again insist upon the nature of our educational tools. We
know well that “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” In
other words, we know that parents and teachers should know how to make
sensible use of a child’s _circumstances_ (atmosphere) to forward his
sound education; should train him in the discipline of the _habits_ of
the good life; and should nourish his life with _ideas_, the food upon
which personality waxes strong.
=Only Three Educational Instruments.=—These three we believe to be the
only instruments of which we may make lawful use in the upbringing of
children; and any short cut we take by trading on their sensibilities,
emotions, desires, passions, will bring us and our children to grief.
The reason is plain; habits, ideas, and circumstances are external, and
we may all help each other to get the best that is to be had of these;
but we may not meddle directly with the personality of child or man. We
may not work upon his vanity, his fears, his love, his emulation, or
anything that is his by very right, anything that goes to make him a
person.
=Our Limitations.=—Most thinking people are in earnest about the
bringing-up of children; but we are in danger of taking too much upon us,
and of not recognising the limitations which confine us to the outworks
of personality. Children and grown-up persons are the same, with a
difference; and a thoughtful writer has done us good service by carefully
tracing the method of our Lord’s education of the Twelve.
“Our Lord,” says this author, “reverenced whatever the learner had in
him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth.... Men,
in His eyes, were not mere clay in the hands of the potter, matter to be
moulded to shape. They were organic beings, each growing from within,
with a life of his own—a personal life which was exceedingly precious
in His and His Father’s eyes—and He would foster this growth so that it
might take after the highest type.”[14]
=We temper Life too much for Children.=—I am not sure that we let life
and its circumstances have free play about children. We temper the wind
too much to the lambs; pain and sin, want and suffering, disease and
death—we shield them from the knowledge of these at all hazards. I do
not say that we should wantonly expose the tender souls to distress,
but that we should recognise that life has a ministry for them also;
and that Nature provides them with a subtle screen, like that of its
odour to a violet, from damaging shocks. Some of us will not even let
children read fairy tales because these bring the ugly facts of life
too suddenly before them. It is worth while to consider Wordsworth’s
experience on this point. Indeed I do not think we make enough use of
two such priceless boons to parents and teachers as the educational
autobiographies we possess of the two great philosophers, Wordsworth and
Ruskin.
=Fairy Lore a Screen and Shelter.=—The former tells us how, no sooner had
he gone to school at Hawkshead, than the body of a suicide was recovered
from Esthwaite Lake; a ghastly tale, but full of comfort as showing how
children are protected from shock. The little boy was there and saw it
all;—
“Yet no soul-debasing fear,
Young as I was, a child not nine years old,
Possessed me, for my inner eye had seen
Such sights before, among the shining streams
Of fairyland, the forests of romance:
Their spirit hallowed the sad spectacle
With decoration of ideal grace;
A dignity, a smoothness, like the works
Of Grecian art, and purest poesy.”
It is delightful to know, on the evidence of a child who went through it,
that a terrible scene was separated from him by an atmosphere of poetry—a
curtain woven of fairy lore by his etherealising imagination.
But we may run no needless risks, and must keep a quiet, matter-of-fact
tone in speaking of fire, shipwreck, or any terror. There are children
to whom the thought of Joseph in the pit is a nightmare; and many of us
elders are unable to endure a ghastly tale in newspaper or novel. All I
would urge is a natural treatment of children, and that they be allowed
their fair share of life, such as it is; prudence and not panic should
rule our conduct towards them.
=Spontaneous Living.=—The laws of habit are, we know, laws of God, and
the forming of good and the hindering of evil habits are among the
primary duties of a parent. But it is just as well to be reminded that
habits, whether helpful or hindering, only come into play occasionally,
while a great deal of spontaneous living is always going on towards which
we can do no more than drop in vital ideas as opportunity occurs. All
this is old matter, and I must beg the reader to forgive me for reminding
him again that our educational instruments remain the same. We may not
leave off the attempt to form good habits with tact and care, to suggest
fruitful ideas, without too much insistence, and to make wise use of
circumstances.
=On what does Fulness of Living depend?=—What is education after all? An
answer lies in the phrase—_Education is the Science of Relations_. I do
not use this phrase, let me say once more, in the Herbartian sense—that
things are related to each other, and we must be careful to pack the
right things in together, so that, having got into the brain of a boy,
each thing may fasten on its cousins, and together they may make a strong
clique or ‘apperception mass.’ What we are concerned with is the fact
that we personally have relations with all that there is in the present,
all that there has been in the past, and all that there will be in the
future—with all above us and all about us—and that fulness of living,
expansion, expression, and serviceableness, for each of us, depend upon
how far we apprehend these relationships and how many of them we lay hold
of.
George Herbert says something of what I mean:—
“Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And _all to all the world besides_;
Each part may call the farthest brother,
For head with foot hath private amity,
And _both with moons and tides_.”[15]
Every child is heir to an enormous patrimony, heir to all the ages,
inheritor of all the present. The question is, what are the formalities
(educational, not legal) necessary to put him in possession of that which
is his? You perceive the point of view is shifted, and is no longer
subjective, but objective, as regards the child.
=The Child a Person.=—We do not talk about developing his faculties,
training his moral nature, guiding his religious feelings, educating him
with a view to his social standing or his future calling. The joys of
‘child-study’ are not for us. We take the child for granted, or rather,
we take him as we find him—a person with an enormous number of healthy
affinities, embryo attachments; and we think it is our chief business
to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these
attachments valid.
=An Infant’s Self-Education.=—An infant comes into the world with a
thousand such embryonic feelers, which he sets to work to fix with
amazing energy:—
“The Babe,
Nursed in his Mother’s arms, who sinks to sleep
Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul
Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!
For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
Objects through widest intercourse of sense.
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature that connects him with the world.”[16]
He attaches his being to mother, father, sister, brother, ‘nanna,’ the
man in the street whom he calls ‘dada,’ cat and dog, spider and fly;
earth, air, fire, and water attract him perilously; his eyes covet light
and colour, his ears sound, his limbs movement; everything concerns him,
and out of everything he gets—
“That calm delight
Which, if I err not, surely must belong
To those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things,
And, in our dawn of being, constitute
The bond of union between life and joy.”[16]
He gets also, when left to himself, the real knowledge about each thing
which establishes his relation with that particular thing.
=Our Part, to remove Obstructions and to give Stimulus.=—Later, we step
in to educate him. In proportion to the range of living relationships we
put in his way, will he have wide and vital interests, fulness of joy in
living. In proportion as he is made aware of the laws which rule every
relationship, will his life be dutiful and serviceable: as he learns
that no relation with persons or with things, animate or inanimate, can
be maintained without strenuous effort, will he learn the laws of work
and the joys of work. Our part is to remove obstructions and to give
stimulus and guidance to the child who is trying to get into touch with
the universe of things and thoughts which belongs to him.
=Our Error.=—Our deadly error is to suppose that we are his showman to
the universe; and, not only so, but that there is no community at all
between child and universe unless such as we choose to set up. We are
the people! and if we choose that a village child’s education should be
confined to the ‘three R’s,’ why, what right has he to ask for more? If
_life_ means for him his Saturday night in the ale-house, surely that is
not our fault! If our own boys go through school and college and come out
without quickening interests, without links to the things that are worth
while, we are not sure that it is our fault either. We resent that they
should be called ‘muddied oafs’ because we know them to be fine fellows.
So they are, splendid stuff which has not yet arrived at the making!
=Business and Desire.=—Quoth Hamlet,—
“Every man hath business and desire.”
Doubtless that was true in the spacious days of great Elizabeth; for
us, we have business, but have we desire? Are there many keen interests
soliciting us outside of our necessary work? Perhaps not, or we should be
less enslaved by the vapid joys of Ping-Pong, Patience, Bridge, and their
like. The fact is that ‘interests’ are not to be taken up on the spur of
the moment; they spring out of affinities we have found and laid hold of.
Or, in the words of an old writer: “In worldly and material things, what
is Used is spent; in intellectual and spiritual things, what is not Used
is not Had.”
Supposing we have realised that we must make provision for the future of
our children otherwise than by safe investments, the question remains,
how to set about it.
=The Setting-up of Dynamic Relations.=—We say a child should have what we
will call _Dynamic Relations_ with earth and water, must run and leap and
dance, must ride and swim. This is how _not_ to do it, as set forth in
_Præterita_:—
“And so on to Llanberis and up Snowdon.... And if only then my
father and mother had seen the real strengths and weaknesses of
their little John; if they had given me but a shaggy scrap of
a Welsh pony, and left me in charge of a good Welsh guide, and
of his wife, if I needed any coddling, they would have made a
man of me there and then.... If only! But they could no more
have done it than thrown me like my cousin Charles into Croydon
Canal, trusting me to find my way out by the laws of nature.
Instead, they took me back to London; my father spared time
from his business hours, once or twice a week, to take me to a
four-square, sky-lighted, sawdust-floored prison of a riding
school in Moorfields, the smell of which, as we turned in at
the gate of it, was a terror and horror and abomination to me:
and there I was put on big horses that jumped and reared, and
circled, and sidled, and fell off them regularly whenever they
did any of these things; and was a disgrace to my family, and
a burning shame and misery to myself, till at last the riding
school was given up on my spraining my right hand fore-finger
(it has never come straight again since); and a well-broken
Shetland pony bought for me, and the two of us led about the
Norwood roads by a riding master with a leading string.
“I used to do pretty well as long as we went straight, and then
get thinking of something and fall off as we turned a corner.
I might have got some inkling of a seat in heaven’s good time,
if no fuss had been made about me, nor inquiries instituted
whether I had been off or on; but as my mother the moment I
got home made searching scrutiny into the day’s disgraces, I
merely got more nervous and helpless after every tumble; and
this branch of my education was at last abandoned, my parents
consoling themselves as best they might, in the conclusion that
my not being able to learn to ride was the sign of my being a
singular genius.”
=Ruskin’s Indictment of the Limitations of his Condition.=—Ruskin
suffered from the malady of his condition. He was of the suburban
dwellers of the rich middle class who think, not wisely but too much,
about the bringing up of their children, who choke a good deal of life
with care and coddling, and are apt to be persuaded that their children
want no outlets but such as it occurs to them to provide. Suburban life
is a necessity, but it is also a misfortune, because, in a rich suburb,
people live too much with their own sort. They are cut off from the small
and the great, from labour, adventure, and privation. Let me recommend
all rich educated parents who live in suburbs to read _Præterita_.
With all his chivalrous loyalty to his parents, Ruskin has left here a
grave indictment, not of them, but of the limitations of his condition.
One hears the cry of the child, like that of Laurence Sterne’s caged
starling—‘I can’t get out, I can’t get out’—repeated from page to page.
You will say, whatever were the faults of his education, _Ruskin_ emerged
from it, such as it was; and _we_ look for no more. But it is not for
us to say how much greater an apostle among men even Ruskin would have
become had he been allowed his right of free living as a child. And it
may be, on the other hand, safe to admit that not every child, born and
bred in a villa, will certainly be another Ruskin!
We cannot follow Mr Ruskin further in the setting up of the dynamic
relations proper to him, because his parents forbade, and nothing
happened. His mother, he says, ‘never allowed me to go to the edge
of a pond or be in the same field with a pony.’ But he notes ‘with
thankfulness the good I got out of the tadpole-haunted ditch in Croxted
Lane.’ Camberwell Green had a pond, and, he says, ‘it was one of the
most valued privileges of my early life to be permitted by my nurse to
contemplate this judicial pond with awe from the other side of the way.’
=Wordsworth’s Recognition of his Opportunities.=—Wordsworth tells us of
a much more rough-and-tumble bringing up. When he was nine, he was sent
to the Grammar School in the little village of Hawkshead and lodged with
Dame Tyson in the cottage many of us know; and found most things, at
home and abroad, congenial to his soul. He had no lessons in riding and
skating, hockey and tennis; but no doubt the other boys made it plain to
the little chap that he must do as they did or be thought a fool. But
then he went to school a hardy youngster; his mother had let her little
boy _live_:—
“Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,
In a small mill-race severed from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;
Basked in the sun, and plunged, and basked again.”
Of his childhood, he says:—
“Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.”
Ere he had told ten birthdays, he was transplanted to that ‘belovèd Vale’
of which he says:—
“There were we let loose
For sports of wider range.”
What was there those Hawkshead boys did not do! He tells us of times,—
“When I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag.”
The boys skated:—
“All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.”
They played:—
“From week to week, from month to month, we lived
A round of tumult. Duly were our games
Prolonged in summer till the daylight failed.”
They boated:—
“When summer came,
Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays,
To sweep along the plain of Windermere
With rival oars....
In such a race
So ended disappointment could be none,
Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy:
We rested in the shade, all pleased alike,
Conquered and conqueror.”
The young Wordsworth, too, had his essays on horseback when he and his
schoolmates came back rich from the half-yearly holidays and hired
horses from ‘the courteous innkeeper,’ and off they went, ‘proud to curb,
and eager to spur on, the galloping steed’; and then, the home-coming:—
“Through the walls we flew
And down the valley, and, a circuit made
In wantonness of heart, through rough and smooth
We scampered homewards.”
CHAPTER XVIII
WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR INTIMACIES
PART II.—_FURTHER AFFINITIES_
=Affinity for Material: Ruskin’s Opportunities.=—Of the _Affinity for
Material_, the joy of handling and making, Wordsworth says little, but
Ruskin sent out feelers in this direction which began with ‘two boxes of
well-cut wooden bricks’ and culminated, perhaps, in the road-making of
the Oxford days:—
“I was afterwards,” he says, “gifted with a two-arched bridge,
admirable in fittings of voussoir and keystone, and adjustment
of the level courses of masonry with bevelled edges, into which
they dovetailed in the style of Waterloo Bridge. Well-made
centrings, and a course of inlaid steps down to the water,
made this model largely, as accurately, instructive: and I was
never weary of building, _un_-building—(it was too strong to be
thrown down, but had always to be _taken_ down)—and re-building
it.”
We know how he busied himself with making a small dam and reservoir at
both the Herne Hill and Denmark Hill homes; and how, while still a boy,
he scrubbed down, with pail of water and broom, the dirty steps of an
Alpine hotel, because they offended his mother. We feel that in this
direction, again, his nature cried aloud for opportunities.
=Intimacy with Natural Objects.=—We do not hear much of the intimacy
of either boy with _Natural Objects_, such as birds and flowers; but
here, again, we feel that Ruskin was deprived of opportunity. His flower
friends were garden dwellers; and could anything be more pathetic than
this: “My chief prayer for the kindness of heaven, in its flowerful
seasons, was that the frost might not touch the almond blossom.”[17]
Wordsworth appears to have waited for his intimacy with wild-flowers
until he could say of his sister Dorothy, “She gave me eyes, she gave
me ears.” Birds, as we have seen, he knew through the wicked joy of
birdsnesting; but not only so, that day when the wild cavalcade rode to
Furness Abbey, he marked—
“That simple wren
Which one day sang so sweetly in the nave
Of the old church, that....
I could have made
My dwelling-place, and lived for ever there
To hear such music.”
=Ruskin’s Flower Studies.=—If Ruskin had not, as a child, a wide
acquaintance with the flowers of the field, he made up, perhaps, by the
enormous attention he gave to such as came in his way; and, just as his
toy bricks and his bridge gave him his initiation in the principles of
architecture, so, perhaps, his early flower studies resulted in his
power of seeing and expressing detail. He says of flowers: “My whole
time passed in staring at them or into them. In no morbid curiosity,
but in admiring wonder, I pulled every flower to pieces till I knew all
that could be seen of it with a child’s eyes; and used to lay up little
treasures of seeds, by way of pearls and beads,—never with any thought
of sowing them.” He complains that books on Botany were harder than the
Latin Grammar.
=His Pebble Studies.=—“Had there been anybody then to teach me anything
about plants or pebbles,” he says, “it had been good for me.” He loved
the pebbles of the Tay, and followed up his acquaintance with pebbles at
Matlock. “In the glittering white broken spar, speckled with galena, by
which the walks of the hotel garden were made bright, and in the slopes
of the pretty village, and in many a happy walk along its cliffs, I
pursued my mineralogical studies on fluor, calcite, and the ores of lead,
and with indescribable rapture when I was allowed to go into a cave.”
=A Life-shaping Intimacy.=—Later we find him going up Snowdon, “of which
ascent I remember, as the most exciting event, the finding for the
first time in my life a real ‘mineral’ for myself, a piece of copper
pyrites!” This eagerly sought acquaintance with pebbles resulted in the
life-shaping intimacy with minerals to which we owe _The Ethics of the
Dust_.
=Insatiate Delight in a Book—Ruskin’s.=—As for _Books_, we are told how
Ruskin grew up upon the Waverley Novels, on Pope’s Homer’s _Iliad_, many
of Shakespeare’s plays, and much else that is delightful; but he does
not give us an instance of the sort of thing we are looking for—the
sudden keen, insatiate delight in a book which means kinship—until he is
introduced to Byron. His first acquaintance with Byron he puts “about the
beginning of the teen period”:—
“But very certainly, by the end of this year 1834, I knew
my Byron pretty well all through, all but Cain, Werner, the
Deformed Transformed, and Vision of Judgment, none of which
I could understand, nor did papa and mamma think it would be
well I should try to.... So far as I could understand it, I
rejoiced in all the sarcasm of Don Juan. But my firm decision,
as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron
was to be my master in verse, as Turner in colour, was made
of course in that gosling (or say cygnet) epoch of existence,
without consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted
it: only two things I consciously recognised, that his truth
of observation was the most exact, and his chosen expression
the most concentrated, that I had yet found in literature....
But the thing wholly new and precious to me in Byron was his
measured and living _truth_—measured, as compared with Homer;
and living, as compared with everybody else.... He taught me
the meaning of Chillon and of Meillerie, and bade me seek first
in Venice—the ruined homes of Foscari and Falieri.... Byron
told me of, and reanimated for me, the real people whose feet
had worn the marble I trod on.”
=Wordsworth’s.=—This is how Wordsworth took to his books:—
“A precious treasure had I long possessed,
A little yellow canvas-covered book,
A slender abstract of the Arabian tales;
And, from companions in a new abode,
When first I learnt, that this dear prize of mine
Was but a block hewn from a mighty quarry—
That there were four large volumes, laden all
With kindred matter, ’twas to me, in truth,
A promise scarcely earthly....
And when thereafter to my father’s house
The holidays returned me, there to find
That golden store of books which I had left,
What joy was mine! How often ...
have I lain
Down by thy side, O Derwent! murmuring stream,
On the hot stones, and in the glaring sun,
And there have read, devouring as I read,
Defrauding the day’s glory, desperate!”
=“They must have their Food” of Romance.=—Nor can I omit the counsel that
follows:—
“A gracious spirit o’er this earth presides,
And o’er 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.
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised
By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,
Out of the bowels of those very schemes
In which his youth did first extravagate;
These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours,
And _they must_ have their food. Our childhood sits,
Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne
That hath more power than all the elements.”
=Children must range at will among Books.=—And this other counsel:—
“Rarely and with reluctance would I stoop
To transitory themes; yet I rejoice,
And, by these thoughts admonished, will pour out
Thanks with uplifted heart, that I was reared
Safe from an evil which these days have laid
Upon the children of the land, a pest
That might have dried me up, body and soul....
Where had we been, we two, belovèd Friend!
If in the season of unperilous choice,
In lieu of wandering, as we did, though vales
Rich with indigenous produce, open ground
Of fancy, happy pastures ranged at will,
We had been followed, hourly watched, and noosed.
Each in his several melancholy walk.”
=Words, ‘a Passion and a Power.’=—Later, follows the story of his first
enthralment by poetry:—
“Twice five years
Or less I might have seen, when first my mind
With conscious pleasure opened to the charm
Of words in timeful order, found them sweet
For their own _sakes_, a passion and a power;
And phrases pleased me chosen for delight,
For pomp, or love. Oft, in the public roads
Yet unfrequented, while the morning light
Was yellowing the hill tops, I went abroad
With a dear friend, and for the better part
Of two delightful hours we strolled along
By the still borders of the misty lake,
Repeating favourite verses with one voice,
Or conning more, as happy as the birds
That round us chaunted.”
=Ruskin’s Local Historic Sense.=—The awakening of the _Historic Sense_ in
Ruskin appears to be always, and here is a great lesson for us, connected
with places: that historic interest and æsthetic delight are one with
him, is another thing to take note of. We have seen how Byron served
him in this way. Again, he tells us of the “three centres of my life’s
thought, Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa, which have been tutoresses of all I
know and were mistresses of all I did from the first moments I entered
their gates.” These came later, but Abbeville “was entrance for me into
immediately healthy labour and joy.... My most intense happinesses have
of course been among mountains. But for cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying
pleasure, the getting sight of Abbeville on a fine summer afternoon,
jumping out in the courtyard of the Hôtel de l’Europe and rushing down
the street to see St Wulfran again before the sun was off the towers,
are things to cherish the past for—to the end.”
=Living Touch with the Past necessary.=—But Ruskin’s want of living
touch with the past, except as such touch was given by the newly
discovered history of a place he happened to be in, is shown in his first
impressions of Rome:—
“My stock of Latin learning, with which to begin my studies
of the city, consisted of the two first books of Livy, never
well known, and the names of places remembered without ever
looking where they were on a map; Juvenal, a page or two of
Tacitus, and in Virgil the burning of Troy, the story of Dido,
the episode of Euryalus, and the last battle. Of course, I
had nominally read the whole Æneid, but thought most of it
nonsense. Of later Roman history, I had read English abstracts
of the imperial vices, and supposed the malaria in the Campagna
to be the consequence of the Papacy. I had never heard of a
good Roman Emperor, or a good Pope; was not quite sure whether
Trajan lived before Christ or after, and would have thanked,
with a sense of relieved satisfaction, anybody who might
have told me that Marcus Antoninus was a Roman philosopher
contemporary with Socrates.... We of course drove about the
town, and saw the Forum, Coliseum, and so on. I had no distinct
idea what the Forum was or ever had been, or how the three
pillars, or the seven, were connected with it, or the Arch of
Severus.... What the Forum or Capitol had been, I did not in
the least care; the pillars of the Forum I saw were on a small
scale, and their capitals rudely carved, and the houses above
them nothing like so interesting as the side of any close in
the ‘auld toun’ of Edinburgh.”
=Wordsworth and Ruskin, aloof from the Past.=—Wordsworth, too, stood
aloof. He was aware of
“Old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago;”
but the past of nations did not enthral him; even the throes of the
French Revolution, to judge by what he tells us in the _Prelude_,
hardly shook him to his foundation, though he took a walking tour on the
Continent at the moment when, as he himself says—
“As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed
Their great expectancy.”
But for him—
“I looked upon these things
As from a distance; heard and saw and felt,
Was touched, but with no intimate concern.”
=Knowledge learned in Schools.=—As for the _Knowledge learned in
Schools_, Ruskin gives us rather dry details of his experiences in
Euclid, the Latin grammar, and the like, but neither boy appears to have
been ‘stung with the rapture of a sudden thought’ in the course of his
lessons, unless Hawkshead Grammar School can take this to itself:—
“Many are our joys
In youth, but oh! what happiness to live
When every hour brings palpable access
Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight,
And sorrow is not there!”
But the praise of the unfolding of the seasons follows, and I am afraid
it is the lore they brought with them that the poet had in his mind’s eye.
=Comradeship.=—We have all been interested in the late Mr Rhodes’s
illuminating will, and I suppose most mothers and most masters have
pondered the four groups of qualifications for scholarships. In (3) we
have ‘fellowship,’ in (4) ‘instincts to lead and take an interest in
his schoolmates.’ It is well that a talent for _Comradeship_ should
be brought before us in this prominent way as a _sine quâ non_. Here
is the rock upon which Ruskin’s education split, as he was sadly
aware; he never knew the joys of comradeship. Having spoken of ‘peace,
obedience, faith; these three for chief good; next to these the habit of
fixed attention with both eyes and mind,’ as the main blessings of his
childhood, he goes on to enumerate ‘the equally dominant calamities’:—
“First, that I had nothing to love. My parents were—in a
sort—visible powers of nature to me, no more loved than the
sun and the moon: only I should have been annoyed and puzzled
if either of them had gone out; (how much, now, when both
are darkened!)—still less did I love God; not that I had any
quarrel with Him, or fear of Him; but simply found what people
told me was His service, disagreeable; and what people told me
was His book, not entertaining. I had no companions to quarrel
with neither; nobody to assist, and nobody to thank. Not a
servant was ever allowed to do anything for me, but what it was
their duty to do; and why should I have been grateful to the
cook for cooking, or the gardener for gardening?... My present
verdict, therefore, on the general tenor of my education at
that time, must be, that it was at once too formal and too
luxurious; leaving my character at the most important moment
for its construction, cramped indeed, but not disciplined; and
only by protection innocent, instead of by practice virtuous.”
Wordsworth, on the contrary, as we have seen, lived the life of his
schoolfellows with entire _abandon_. He was with a crowd of his mates
or he was with a friend, and was only alone in those moments of deeper
intimacy which we shall speak of presently. The simple life of his
‘belovèd Vale’ took such hold on his tenacious northern nature that
not Cambridge, nor London, nor (as we have seen) Europe in its time of
convulsion, could displace the earlier images or give new direction to
his profoundest thought.
Scott laid claim to ‘intimacy with all ranks of my countrymen from the
Scottish peer to the Scottish ploughman,’ and—we get the Waverley
Novels. Wordsworth was satisfied to know the fine-natured peasant folk
of his own dales, and poet-souls like his own. Perhaps such limitations
went to the making of the poet of plain living and high thinking; but
limitations are hazardous.
CHAPTER XIX
WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR INTIMACIES
PART III.—_VOCATION_
I might trace the consummation of various other affinities in these two
illustrious subjects, but space fails; I can only indicate the joy of
pursuing the acquaintanceship, followed by the endless occupation for
mind and heart, in that high intimacy which we call the _Vocation_ of
each of these men of genius.
=Turner’s Call to Ruskin.=—Ruskin’s ‘career,’ to use our own common and
expressive figure, began when,—
“On my thirteenth (?) birthday, 8th February 1832, my father’s
partner, Mr Henry Telford, gave me Rogers’s Italy, and
determined the main tenor of my life.... I had no sooner cast
my eyes on the Turner vignettes than I took them for my only
masters, and set myself to imitate them as far as I possibly
could by fine pen shading....
“My father at last gave me, not for a beginning of a Turner
collection, but for a specimen of Turner’s work, which was
all—as it was supposed—I should ever need or aspire to possess,
the ‘Richmond Bridge, Surrey.’”
Again, anent his purchase of Turner’s ‘Harlech’:—
“Whatever germs of better things remained in me, were then all
centred in this love of Turner. It was not a piece of painted
paper, but a Welsh castle and village, and Snowdon in blue
cloud, that I bought for my seventy pounds.”
=Sincere Work.=—Not until he is twenty-two does he produce what he
considers his first sincere drawing:—
“One day on the road to Norwood, I noticed a bit of ivy round
a thorn stem, which seemed, even to my critical judgment, not
‘ill-composed,’ and proceeded to make a light and shade pencil
study of it in my grey paper pocket-book, carefully, as if it
had been a bit of sculpture, liking it more and more as I drew.
When it was done, I saw that I had virtually lost all my time
since I was twelve years old, because no one had ever told me
to draw what was really there!”
=Initiation.=—Later, follows the story of his true initiation:—
“I took out my book and began to draw a little aspen tree, on
the other side of the cart-road, carefully.... Languidly, but
not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the langour passed
away, the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, without
weariness. More and more beautiful they became as each rose
out of the rest and took its place in the air. With wonder
increasing every instant, I saw that they composed themselves
by finer laws than any known of men. At last the tree was
there, and everything that I had thought before about trees
nowhere.... ‘He hath made everything beautiful in His time’
became for me thenceforward the interpretation of the bond
between the human mind and all visible things.”
=Nature a Passion.=—Let us intrude into the consummation of one more
intimacy. Already the boy has made acquaintance with mountains; he is
now to have his first sight of the Alps. He, his father, his mother, and
his cousin Mary, went out to walk the first Sunday evening after their
arrival on the garden terrace of Schaffhausen, and—
“Suddenly—behold—beyond! There was no thought in any of us for
a moment of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal,
sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose
by the setting sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever
thought or dreamed—the seen walls of lost Eden could not have
been more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the
walls of sacred death. It is not possible to imagine, in any
time of the world, a more blessed entrance into life, for a
child of such temperament as mine.”
How shall we venture to trace the growth of that austere, most gracious
and enthralling intimacy with Nature which was to Wordsworth the
master-light of all his seeing? He unfolds to us—
“The simple ways in which my childhood walked;
Those chiefly that first led me to the love
Of rivers, woods, and fields. The passion yet
Was in its birth, sustained as might befall
By nourishment that came unsought.”
We cannot trace every step of the growth of this ethereal passion,
but only take a phase of it here and there. The boy and some of his
schoolfellows were boating on Windermere in the late evening, and they
left one of their number, ‘the Minstrel of the Troop,’ on a small island:—
“And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock—oh, then, the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream!
Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus
Daily the common range of visible things
Grew dear to me: already I began
To love the sun; a boy, I loved the sun,
Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge
And surety of our earthly life, a light
Which we behold and feel we are alive;
Not for his bounty to so many worlds—
But for this cause, that I had seen him lay
His beauty on the morning hills, had seen
The western mountain touch his setting orb.”
=The Calling of a Poet.=—We may take one more look at this marvellous
boy, who, become a man, held that every child, as he, is born a poet:—
“My seventeenth year was come,
... I, at this time,
Saw blessings spread around me like a sea.
Thus while the days flew by, and years passed on,
From nature and her overflowing soul
I had received so much, that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling; I was only then
Contented, when with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of Being spread
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O’er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of waters.
... If I should fail with grateful voice
To speak of you, ye mountains, and ye lakes
And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds
That dwell among the hills where I was born.
If in my youth I have been pure in heart,
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours.”
=The Education of the Little Prig.=—Before taking leave of the _Prelude_,
may I introduce Wordsworth’s sketch of the ‘child-studied’ little prig
of his days—days of much searching of heart and of many theories on the
subject of education?—
“That common sense
May try this common system by its fruits,
Leave let me take to place before her sight
A specimen pourtrayed with faithful hand.
Full early trained to worship seemliness,
This model of a child is never known
To mix in quarrels; that were far beneath
Its dignity; with gifts he bubbles o’er
As generous as a fountain; selfishness
May not come near him, nor the little throng
Of flitting pleasures tempt him from his path;
The wandering beggars propagate his name,
Dumb creatures find him tender as a nun,
And natural or supernatural fear,
Unless it leaps upon him in a dream,
Touches him not. To enhance the wonder, see
How arch his notices, how nice his sense
Of the ridiculous; ... he can read
The inside of the earth, and spell the stars;
He knows the policies of foreign lands;
Can string you names of districts, cities, towns,
The whole world over, tight as beads of dew
Upon a gossamer thread; he sifts, he weighs;
All things are put to question; he must live
Knowing that he grows wiser every day,
Or else not live at all, and seeing too
Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart:
For this unnatural growth the trainer blame,
Pity the tree....
Meanwhile old grandame earth is grieved to find
The playthings, which her love designed for him,
Unthought of: in their woodland beds the flowers
Weep, and the river sides are all forlorn.
Oh! give us once again the wishing-cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
And Sabra in the forest with St George!
The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.”
=Children have Affinities and should have Relations.=—I cannot stop here
to gather any more of the instruction and edification contained in those
two great educational books, _The Prelude_ and _Præterita_. It is enough
for the present if they have shown us in what manner children attach
themselves to their proper affinities, given opportunity and liberty.
Our part is to drop occasion freely in the way, whether in school or at
home. Children should have relations with earth and water, should run and
leap, ride and swim, should establish the relation of maker to material
in as many kinds as may be; should have dear and intimate relations with
persons, through present intercourse, through tale or poem, picture or
statue; through flint arrow-head or modern motor-car: beast and bird,
herb and tree, they must have familiar acquaintance with. Other peoples
and their languages must not be strange to them. Above all they should
find that most intimate and highest of all Relationships,—the fulfilment
of their being.
This is not a bewildering programme, because, in all these and more
directions, children have affinities; and a human being does not fill his
place in the universe without putting out tendrils of attachment in the
directions proper to him. We must get rid of the notion that to learn the
‘three R’s’ or the Latin grammar well, a child should learn these and
nothing else. It is as true for children as for ourselves that, the wider
the range of interests, the more intelligent is the apprehension of each.
=Education not Desultory.=—But I am not preaching a gospel for the
indolent and proclaiming that education is a casual and desultory matter.
Many great authors have written at least one book devoted to education;
and _Waverley_ seems to me to be Scott’s special contribution to our
science. Edward Waverley, we are told, ‘was permitted in a great measure
to learn as he pleased, when he pleased, and what he pleased.’ That he
did please to learn and that his powers of apprehension were uncommonly
quick, would appear to justify this sort of education. But wavering he
was allowed to grow up, and ‘Waverley’ he remained; instability and
ineffectiveness marked his course. The manner of his education and its
results are thus shortly set forth:—
“Edward would throw himself with spirit upon any classical
author of which his preceptor proposed the perusal, make
himself master of the style so far as to understand the story,
and, if that pleased or interested him, he finished the
volume. But it was in vain to attempt fixing his attention on
critical distinctions of philology, upon the difference of
idiom, the beauty of felicitous expression, or the artificial
combinations of syntax. ‘I can read and understand a Latin
author,’ said young Edward, with the self-confidence and rash
reasoning of fifteen, ‘and Scaliger or Bentley could not do
much more.’ Alas! while he was thus permitted to read only for
the gratification of his amusement, he foresaw not that he was
losing for ever the opportunity of acquiring habits of firm
and assiduous application, of gaining the art of controlling,
directing, and concentrating the powers of his mind for earnest
investigation—an art far more essential than even that intimate
acquaintance with classical learning which is the primary
object of study.”
_Waverley_ but illustrates, what Mr Ruskin says in plain words; that our
youth—whatever we make of it—abides with us to the end:—
“But so stubborn and chemically inalterable the laws of the
prescription were, that now, looking back from 1886 to that
brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the whole of my youth,
I find myself in nothing whatsoever _changed_. Some of me is
dead, more of me is stronger. I have learned a few things,
forgotten many. In the total of me, I am but the same youth,
disappointed and rheumatic.”
=Strenuous Effort and Reverence.=—We have seen in Ruskin and Wordsworth
the strenuous attention—condition of receptiveness—which made each
of them a producer after his kind; and whosoever will play the game,
whether it be cricket or portrait painting, must learn the rules with
all diligence and get skill by his labour. It is true, ‘the labour we
delight in physics pain,’ but it is also true that we cannot catch hold
of any one of the affinities that are in waiting for us without strenuous
effort and without reverence. A bird-lover, one would say, has chosen
for himself an easy joy; but no: your true bird-lover is out of doors by
four in the morning to assist at the levée of the birds; nay, is he not
in Hyde Park by 2.30 a.m. to see—the kingfisher, no less! He lies in wait
in secret places to watch the goings on of the feathered peoples, travels
far afield to make a new acquaintance in the bird-world; in fact, gives
to the study of birds attention, labour, love, and reverence. He gets joy
in return, so is perhaps little conscious of effort; but the effort is
made all the same.
=Comradeship has Duties.=—To take one more instance of an
affinity—comradeship. Most of us have serious thoughts about friendship;
but we are apt to take comradeship, fellowship, very casually, and to
think it is sufficiently maintained if we meet for parties, games,
picnics, or what not. Public school boys generally learn better; they
know that comradeship means much cheerful give-and-take, chaff, help,
unsparing criticism; if need be, the taking or giving of serious reproof;
loyalty each to each, plucky and faithful leading, staunch following,
truth-speaking; the power to see others put first without chagrin, and to
bear advancement without conceit. Here, too, are calls for attention,
labour, love, and reverence; but, again, labour is swallowed up in
delight.
=The Angel troubles the Still Pool.=—One more point. We are steadfast to
the affinities we take hold of, till death do us part, or longer. And
here let me say a word as to the ‘advantages’ (?) which London offers
in the way of masters and special classes. I think it is most often the
still pool which the angel comes down to trouble: a steady unruffled
course of work without so-called advantages lends itself best to that
‘troubling’ of the angel—the striking upon us of what Coleridge calls
‘the Captain Idea,’ which initiates a tie of affinity.
=The Highest Relationship.=—Neither _The Prelude_ nor _Præterita_
lends itself to the study of the highest Relationship, the profoundest
Intimacy, which awaits the soul of man. I think I cannot do better than
close with an extract from a little book[18] which tells the spiritual
history of _Brother Lawrence_, a lay Brother among the barefooted
Carmelites, at Paris, in the seventeenth century.
“The first time I saw _Brother Lawrence_ was upon the 3rd of
August, 1666. He told me that God had done him a singular
favour in his conversion at the age of eighteen. That in the
winter, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering
that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and
after that the flower and fruit appear, he received a high view
of the Providence and Power of God, which has never since been
effaced from his soul. That this view had perfectly set him
loose from the world, and kindled in him such a love for God,
that he could not tell whether it had increased in about forty
years that he had lived since. That he had been footman to M.
Fieubert, the treasurer, and that he was a great awkward fellow
who broke everything. That he had desired to be received into
a monastery, thinking he would there be made to smart for his
awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and so he should
sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures: but that God had
disappointed him, he having met with nothing but satisfaction
in that state.... That with him the set times of prayer were
not different from other times; that he retired to pray,
according to the directions of his Superior, but that he did
not want such retirement, nor ask for it, because his greatest
business did not divert him from God.... That the greatest
pains or pleasures of this world were not to be compared
with what he had experienced of both kinds in a spiritual
state; so that he was careful for nothing and feared nothing,
desiring but one only thing of God, viz., that he might not
offend Him.... That he had so often experienced the ready
succours of Divine Grace upon all occasions, that from the same
experience, when he had business to do, he did not think of it
beforehand; but when it was time to do it he found in God, as
in a clear mirror, all that was fit for him to do. That of late
he had acted thus, without anticipating care; but before the
experience above mentioned he had used it in his affairs. When
outward business diverted him a little from the thought of God,
a fresh remembrance coming from God invested his soul, and so
inflamed and transported him that it was difficult for him to
contain himself, that he was more united to God in his outward
employments than when he left them for devotion in retirement.”
“I want,—am made for,—and must have a God,
Ere I can be aught, do aught;—no mere Name
Want, but the True Thing, with what proves its truth,—
To wit, a relation from that Thing to me
Touching from head to foot:—which Touch I feel,
And with it take the rest, this Life of Ours!”
—_Browning._
AN EDUCATIONAL MANIFESTO
“_Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability._”
Every child has a right of entry to several fields of knowledge.
Every normal child has an appetite for such knowledge.
This appetite or desire for knowledge is a sufficient stimulus for all
school work, if the knowledge be fitly given.
There are four means of destroying the desire for knowledge:—
(_a_) Too many oral lessons, which offer knowledge in a diluted
form, and do not leave the child free to deal with it.
(_b_) Lectures, for which the teacher collects, arranges, and
illustrates matter from various sources; these often offer
knowledge in too condensed and ready prepared a form.
(_c_) Text-books compressed and re-compressed from the big book
of the big man.
(_d_) The use of emulation and ambition as incentives to
learning in place of the adequate desire for, and delight in,
knowledge.
Children can be most fitly educated on _Things_ and _Books_. Things,
_e.g._:—
i. Natural obstacles for physical contention, climbing,
swimming, walking, etc.
ii. Material to work in—wood, leather, clay, etc.
iii. Natural objects _in situ_—birds, plants, streams, stones,
etc.
iv. Objects of art.
v. Scientific apparatus, etc.
The value of this education by _Things_ is receiving wide recognition,
but intellectual education to be derived from _Books_ is still for the
most part to seek.
Every scholar of six years old and upwards should study with ‘delight’
_his own, living_, books on every subject in a pretty wide curriculum.
Children between six and eight must for the most part have their books
read to them.
This plan has been tried with happy results for the last twelve years in
many home schoolrooms, and some other schools.
By means of the free use of books the mechanical difficulties of
education—reading, spelling, composition, etc.—disappear, and studies
prove themselves to be ‘for delight, for ornament, and for ability.’
There is reason to believe that these principles are workable in all
schools, Elementary and Secondary; that they tend in the working to
simplification, economy, and discipline.
CHAPTER XX
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS A CURRICULUM
(_For Children under Fourteen_)
PART I
=Summary of Preceding Chapters.=—I have left the consideration of a
curriculum, which is, practically, the subject of this volume, till the
final chapters; because a curriculum is not an independent product,
but is linked to much else by chains of cause and consequence. The
fundamental principles of docility and authority have been considered
in the first place because they _are_ fundamental; but, for that very
reason, they should be present but not in evidence; we do not expose
the foundations of our house. Not only so, but these principles must be
conditioned by respect for the personality of children; and, in order to
give children room for free development on the lines proper to them, it
is well that parents and teachers should adopt an attitude of masterly
inactivity.
Having considered the relations of teachers and taught, I have touched
upon those between education and current thought. Education should be
in the flow, as it were, and not shut up in a watertight compartment.
Perhaps, reverence for personality as such, a sense of the solidarity
of the race, and a profound consciousness of evolutionary progress, are
among the elements of current thought which should help us towards an
educational ideal.
In considering the training of children under the convenient divisions of
physical, mental, moral, and religious, I have not thought it necessary
to give counsels upon matters of common knowledge and general acceptance,
but have dwelt upon aspects of training under each heading which are
rather likely to be overlooked. Under the phrase ‘Education is a life,’ I
have tried to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life
upon ideas, and, as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium
for ideas and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children
have a natural desire for, and a right of admission to, all knowledge,
appears to me to be covered by the phrase, ‘Education is the science of
relations.’
These considerations clear the ground for the consideration of a
curriculum, which occupies the remaining chapters; these are, in fact,
a summary of what has gone before; and therefore I beg the reader’s
patience with such repetitions as seem to me necessary in bringing the
argument to a point.
=Some Preliminary Considerations.=—As the following suggestions have
been worked out in connection with the Parents’ National Educational
Union, it may perhaps be desirable to repeat here that the first effort
of this society, continued through ten years of its existence, was to
impress upon its members the definition of Education contained in our
motto, ‘_Education is an Atmosphere, a Discipline, a Life._’ By this we
mean that parents and teachers should know how to make sensible use of
a child’s circumstances (_atmosphere_), should train him in habits of
good living (_discipline_), and should nourish his mind with ideas, the
food of the intellectual _life_. These three we believe to be the only
instruments of which we may make lawful use in bringing up children. An
easier way may be found by trading on their sensibilities, emotions,
desires, passions; but the result must be disastrous. And for this
reason, that habits, ideas, and circumstances are external, and we may
help each other to get the best that is to be had of them; we may not,
however, meddle directly with the personality of child or man; we may not
work upon his vanity, his fears, his love, his emulation, or anything
that goes to make him a person. Most thinking people are in earnest about
the bringing up of children; but we are in danger of taking too much
upon us, and of not recognising the limitations which confine us to the
outworks of personality.
=A Definite Aim.=—The Parents’ Union, having devoted, as I have said, ten
years of its existence to learning how to use the three instruments of
education (circumstances, habits, and ideas), took a new departure some
few years ago, and asked what should be the end in view as the result of
a wise use of due means. What is education? The answer we accept is that
_Education is the Science of Relations_.
We do not use this phrase in the Herbartian sense, that things or
thoughts are related to each other and that teachers must be careful to
pack the right things, in together, so that, having got into the pupil’s
brain, each may fasten on its kind, and, together, make a strong clique
or apperception mass.
What concerns us personally is the fact that we have relations with
what there is in the present and with what there has been in the past,
with what is above us, and about us; and that fulness of living and
serviceableness depend for each of us upon how far we apprehend these
relationships and how many of them we lay hold of. Every child is heir
to an enormous patrimony. The question is, what are the formalities
necessary to put him in possession of that which is his?
=Education Objective, not Subjective.=—The point of view is shifted;
it is no longer _subjective_ as regards the child, but _objective_. We
do not talk about developing his faculties, training his moral nature,
guiding his religious feelings, educating him with a view to his social
standing or his future calling. We take the child as we find him, a
person with many healthy affinities and embryonic attachments, and we
try to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these
attachments valid.
An infant comes into the world with a thousand feelers which he at once
begins to fix with great energy; and out of everything about him he gets—
“That calm delight which, if I err not, surely must belong,
To those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things,
And in our dawn of being, constitute
The bond of union between life and joy.”[19]
He gets also when left to himself that real knowledge about each thing
he comes across which establishes his relations with that thing.
Later, we step in to educate him. In proportion to the range of living
relationships we put in his way will he have wide and vital interests and
joy in living. His life will be dutiful and serviceable if he is made
aware of the laws which rule each relationship; he will learn the laws of
work and the joys of work as he perceives that no relation with persons
or with things can be kept up without effort.
Our part is to remove obstructions, to give stimulus and guidance to the
child who is trying to get into touch with the universe of things and
thoughts. Our error is to suppose that we must act as his showman to
the universe, and that there is no community between child and universe
except such as we choose to set up.
=Interests.=—Have we many keen interests soliciting us outside of our
necessary work? If we have, we shall not be enslaved by vapid joys.
Interests are not to be taken up on the spur of the moment; they spring
out of the affinities which we have found and laid hold of. And the
object of education is, I take it, to give children the _use_ of as much
of the world as may be.
Influenced by such considerations as these, the phrase, ‘_Education is
the Science of Relations_,’ gives us the advantage of a definite aim in
our work.
=Educational Unrest.=—We have been made familiar with the phrase
‘educational unrest,’ and we all feel its fitness. Never were there
more able and devoted teachers, whether as the heads or on the staffs
of schools of all classes. Money, labour, and research are freely spent
on education, theory is widely studied, and pains are taken to learn
what is done elsewhere; yet there is something amiss beyond that ‘divine
discontent’ which leads to effort. We know that a change of front is
necessary; and we are ready, provided that the change be something more
than an experiment. Headmasters and mistresses are, I believe, amongst
the persons most ready to fall in with a sound reform; but, because these
are persons with wide experience and highly-trained intellects, they are
unwilling to launch changes which have not a philosophic basis as well as
a utilitarian end.
=A Unifying Principle.=—Hitherto we, of the Parents’ Union, have
pressed on the public rather our views on home-training than those on
school-teaching, but this is because we have been unwilling to disturb
the existing order. We have, however, during the last twelve years worked
out in our training college and school _a unifying principle and adequate
methods_ with happy results. We exist because we have a definite aim, and
to carry out that aim. I need not now speak of the few principles which
form a guide to us in the upbringing of children; but that principle
which guides us in what is commonly called education—the teaching of
knowledge—may be found to indicate the cause of many educational failures
and may point the way to reform.
=Education should give Knowledge touched with Emotion.=—To adapt a phrase
of Matthew Arnold’s concerning religion,—education should aim at giving
knowledge ‘_touched with emotion_.’ I have already quoted the charming
episode in Frederika Bremer’s _Neighbours_, where two schoolgirls fight
a duel on behalf of their heroes—Charles XII. and Peter the Great.
Parents may be glad that we have no girl-duels to-day! The schoolgirl
does not care for heroes, she cares for marks. Knowledge for her is not
‘touched with emotion,’ unless it be those of personal acquisitiveness
and emulation. The boys and girls have it in them to be generous and
enthusiastic; that they leave school without interests, beyond that of
preparing for further examinations or the absorbing interest of games,
is no doubt the fault of the schools. Perhaps the ‘unrest’ of the public
mind at home and abroad about secondary education is due to the fact
that young people are turned out from excellent schools _devitalised_ so
far as their minds go. No ‘large draughts of intellectual day’ have been
offered to their thirst; and yet the thirst was there to begin with.
Mr Benson[20] speaks very frankly. He says: “I honestly believe that the
masters of public schools have two strong ambitions—to make boys good
and to make them healthy; but I do not think they care about making them
intellectual: intellectual life is left to take care of itself. My belief
is that a great many masters look upon the boys’ work as a question of
duty—that is, they consider it from the moral standpoint and not from
the intellectual.... It must be frankly admitted that the intellectual
standard maintained at the English public schools is low; and, what is
more serious, I do not see any evidence that it is tending to become
higher.”
Professor Sadler, with a perhaps wider outlook, says, practically, the
same thing—our secondary schools have capital points, but intellectually
they are behind-hand, compared even with those of some continental
nations. Mr Benson speaks no doubt from personal knowledge; but is it a
fact that so intellectual a body as our headmasters deliberately forego
intellectual distinction in their schools? Or is it not rather that
examinations throw them back on the pseudo-intellectual work known as
‘cram’? It is because cram is deadening that some of us deprecate the
registration of teachers as a backward movement. Hundreds of mediocre
young women set themselves to cram for a course of examinations, often a
long course, to end at last in registration; and already headmistresses
feel the evil and inquire diligently for assistants who are ‘not the
usual sort.’ Women are apt to be over-strenuous and over-conscientious,
and the strain of moral effort carried on through years of preparation
for successive examinations often leaves a certain dulness of
apprehension. There are brilliant exceptions, but the average young woman
who has undergone such an experience has little initiative, is slow of
perception, not readily adaptable, not quick in the uptake; is, in fact,
a little devitalised. I speak of moral effort, because the labour of
preparing for examinations, of going through steady long-sustained grind,
is apt to be rather a moral than an intellectual effort. With young men
it is otherwise; they are commonly less strenuous, less absorbed, and
therefore, perhaps, more receptive to the ideas that beset the way of
their studies.
=Education is the Science of Relations.=—The idea that vivifies teaching
in the Parents’ Union is that _Education is the Science of Relations_;
by which phrase we mean that children come into the world with a natural
‘appetency,’ to use Coleridge’s word, for, and affinity with, all the
material of knowledge; for interest in the heroic past and in the age
of myths; for a desire to know about everything that moves and lives,
about strange places and strange peoples; for a wish to handle material
and to make; a desire to run and ride and row and do whatever the law of
gravitation permits. Therefore we do not feel it is lawful in the early
days of a child’s life to select certain subjects for his education to
the exclusion of others; to say he shall not learn Latin, for example, or
shall not learn Science; but we endeavour that he shall have relations
of pleasure and intimacy established with as many as possible of the
interests proper to him; not learning a slight or incomplete smattering
about this or that subject, but plunging into vital knowledge, with a
great field before him which in all his life he will not be able to
explore. In this conception we get that ‘touch of emotion’ which vivifies
knowledge, for it is probable that we _feel_ only as we are brought into
our proper vital relations.
=Is there such a thing as the ‘Child-Mind’?=—We get courage to attack
so wide a programme through a few working ideas or principles: one of
these is, there is no such thing as the ‘child-mind’; we believe that
the ignorance of children is illimitable, but that, on the other hand,
their intelligence is hardly to be reckoned with by our slower wits.
In practical working we find this idea a great power; the teachers do
not talk down to the children; they are careful _not_ to explain every
word that is used, or to ascertain if children understand every detail.
As a girl of twelve or so the writer browsed a good deal on Cowper’s
poems and somehow took an interest in _Mrs Montague’s Feather Hangings_.
Only the other day did the ball to fit that socket arrive in the shape
of an article in _The Quarterly_ on ‘The Queen of the Bluestockings.’
Behold, there was Mrs Montague with her feather hangings! The pleasure
of meeting with her after all these years was extraordinary; for in no
way is knowledge more enriching than in this of leaving behind it a,
so to speak, dormant appetite for more of the kind. The recent finds at
Knossos are only to be appreciated by those who recollect how Ulysses
told Penelope about Crete with its ninety cities, and Knossos, and King
Minos. Not what we have learned, but what we are waiting to know, is
the delectable part of knowledge. Nor should knowledge be peptonised or
diluted, but offered to the children with some substance in it and some
vitality. We find that children can cover a large and various field with
delight and intelligence in the time that is usually wasted over ‘the
three R’s,’ object-lessons, and other much-diluted matter in which the
teaching is more than the knowledge.
=Knowledge _versus_ Information.=—The distinction between _knowledge_
and _information_ is, I think, fundamental. Information is the record of
facts, experiences, appearances, etc., whether in books or in the verbal
memory of the individual; knowledge, it seems to me, implies the result
of the voluntary and delightful action of the mind upon the material
presented to it. Great minds, a Darwin or a Plato, are able to deal at
first hand with appearances or experiences; the ordinary mind gets a
little of its knowledge by such direct dealing, but for the most part it
is set in action by the vivifying knowledge of others, which is at the
same time a stimulus and a point of departure. The information acquired
in the course of education is only by chance, and here and there, of
practical value. Knowledge, on the other hand, that is, the product of
the vital action of the mind on the material presented to it, is power;
as it implies an increase of intellectual aptitude in new directions, and
an always new point of departure.
Perhaps the chief function of a teacher is to distinguish information
from knowledge in the acquisitions of his pupils. Because knowledge is
power, the child who has got knowledge will certainly show power in
dealing with it. He will recast, condense, illustrate, or narrate with
vividness and with freedom in the arrangement of his words. The child who
has got only information will write and speak in the stereotyped phrases
of his text-book, or will mangle in his notes the words of his teacher.
=Children have a Natural Craving for Knowledge.=—It is the easier for
us to deal in this direct fashion with knowledge because we are not
embarrassed by the necessity of cultivating faculties; for working
purposes the so-called faculties are sufficiently described as _mind_;
and the normal mind is, we find, as able to deal with knowledge as are
the normal digestive organs with food. Our concern is to give a child
such knowledge as shall open up for him as large a share as may be of the
world he lives in for his use and enjoyment. As there are gymnastics for
the body, so for the mind there are certain subjects whose use is chiefly
disciplinary, and of these we avail ourselves. Again, as our various
organs labour without our consciousness in the assimilation of food,
so judgment, imagination, and what not, deal of their own accord with
knowledge, that it may be _incorporated_, which is not the same thing as
‘remembered.’ A further analogy—as the digestive organs are incited by
appetite, so children come into the world with a few inherent desires,
some with more, some less, to incite them to their proper activities.
These are, roughly speaking, the desire for power, for praise, for
wealth, for distinction, for society, and for _knowledge_. It seems to
me that education, which appeals to the desire for wealth (marks, prizes,
scholarships, or the like), or to the desire of excelling (as in the
taking of places, etc.), or to any other of the natural desires, _except
that for knowledge_, destroys the balance of character; and, what is
even more fatal, destroys by inanition that desire for and delight in
knowledge which is meant for our joy and enrichment through the whole of
life. “A desire for knowledge,” says Dr Johnson, “is the natural feeling
of mankind, and every human being whose mind is not debauched will be
willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.” Is it possible that
what has been called ‘mark-hunger’ is a debauchery of the mind? The
undebauched mind takes knowledge with avidity; and we find their studies
are so interesting to children that they need no other stimulus.
=Children must be Educated on Books.=—A corollary of the principle that
education is the science of relations, is, that no education seems to
be worth the name which has not made children at home in the world of
books, and so related them, mind to mind, with thinkers who have dealt
with knowledge. We reject epitomes, compilations, and their like, and put
into children’s hands books which, long or short, are _living_. Thus it
becomes a large part of the teacher’s work to help children to deal with
their books; so that the oral lesson and lecture are but small matters in
education, and are used chiefly to summarise or to expand or illustrate.
Too much faith is commonly placed in oral lessons and lectures; “to be
poured into like a bucket,” as says Carlyle, “is not exhilarating to any
soul”; neither is it exhilarating to have every difficulty explained to
weariness, or to have the explanation teased out of one by questions. “I
will not be put to the _question_. Don’t you consider, sir, that these
are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with _what_ and
_why_; what is this? what is that? why is a cow’s tail long? why is a
fox’s tail bushy?” said Dr Johnson. This is what children think, though
they say nothing. Oral lessons have their occasional use, and when they
are fitly given it is the children who ask the questions. Perhaps it is
not wholesome or quite honest for a teacher to pose as a source of all
knowledge and to give ‘lovely’ lessons. Such lessons are titillating for
the moment, but they give children the minimum of mental labour, and the
result is much the same as that left on older persons by the reading
of a magazine. We find, on the other hand, that in working through a
considerable book, which may take two or three years to master, the
interest of boys and girls is well sustained to the end; they develop
an intelligent curiosity as to causes and consequences, and are in fact
educating themselves.
CHAPTER XXI
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS A CURRICULUM
(_For Children under Twelve_)
PART II.—_SCHOOL-BOOKS_
=Books that supply the Sustenance of Ideas.=—Mr H. G. Wells has put
his finger on the place when he says that the selection of the right
school-books is a great function of the educator. I am not at all sure
that his remedy is the right one—or that a body of experts and a hundred
thousand pounds would, in truth, provide the manner of school-books that
reach children. They are kittle cattle, and, though they will plod on
obediently over any of the hundreds of dry-as-dust volumes issued by the
publishers under the heading of ‘School Books,’ or of ‘Education,’ they
keep all such books in the outer court, and allow them no access to their
minds. A book may be long or short, old or new, easy or hard, written by
a great man or a lesser man, and yet be the _living_ book which finds
its way to the mind of a young reader. The expert is not the person to
choose; the children themselves are the experts in this case. A single
page will elicit a verdict; but the unhappy thing is, this verdict is
not betrayed; it is acted upon in the opening or closing of the door
of the mind. Many excellent and admirable school-books appreciated by
masters are on the Index Expurgatorius of the schoolboy; and that is why
he takes nothing in and gives nothing out. The master must have it in him
to distinguish between twaddle and simplicity, and between vivacity and
life. For the rest, he must experiment or test the experiments of others,
being assured of one thing—that a book serves the ends of education only
as it is vital. But this subject has been treated at some length in an
earlier chapter.
=Books and Oral Teaching.=—Having found the right book, let the master
give the book the lead and be content himself with a second place. The
lecture _must be subordinated to the book_. The business of the teacher
is to put his class in the right attitude towards their book by a word
or two of his own interest in the matter contained, of his own delight
in the manner of the author. But boys get knowledge only as they dig for
it. Labour prepares the way for assimilation, that mental process which
converts information into knowledge; and the effort of taking in the
sequence of thought of his author is worth to the boy a great deal of
oral teaching.
Do teachers always realise the paralysing and stupefying effect that a
flood of talk has upon the mind? The inspired talk of an orator no doubt
wakens a response and is listened to with tense attention; but few of us
claim to be inspired, and we are sometimes aware of the difficulty of
holding the attention of a class. We blame ourselves, whereas the blame
lies in the instrument we employ—the more or less diluted oral lesson
or lecture, in place of the living and arresting book. We cannot do
without the oral lesson—to introduce, to illustrate, to amplify, to sum
up. My stipulation is that oral lessons should be few and far between,
and that the child who has to _walk_ through life,—and has to find his
intellectual life in books or go without,—shall not be first taught to go
upon _crutches_.
=The Use of Appliances.=—For the same reason, that is, that we may not
paralyse the mental vigour of children, we are very chary in the use of
appliances (except such as the microscope, telescope, magic lantern,
etc.). I once heard a schoolmaster, who had a school in a shipbuilding
town, say that he had demanded and got from his committee a complete
sectional model of a man-of-war. Such a model would be of use to his boys
when they begin to work in the Yards, but during their school years I
believe the effect would be stultifying, because the mind is not able to
conceive with an elaborate model as basis. I recently visited M. Bloch’s
admirable ‘Peace and War’ show at Lucerne. Torpedoes were very fully
illustrated by models, sectional diagrams, and what not, but I was not
enlightened. I asked my neighbour at dinner to explain the principle; he
took up his spectacle case as an illustration, and after a few sentences
my intelligence had grasped what was distinctive in a torpedo. This
gentleman turned out to have been in the War Office and to have had
much concern with torpedoes. The power in the teacher of illustrating
by inkpot and ruler or any object at hand, or by a few lines on the
blackboard, appears to me to be of more use than the most elaborate
equipment of models and diagrams; these things stale on the senses and
produce a torpor of thought the moment they are presented.
=The Co-ordination of Studies.=—Another point, the co-ordination of
studies is carefully regulated without any reference to the clash of
ideas on the threshold or their combination into apperception masses;
but solely with reference to the natural and inevitable co-ordination
of certain subjects. Thus, in readings on the period of the Armada, we
should not devote the contemporary arithmetic lessons to calculations as
to the amount of food necessary to sustain the Spanish fleet, because
this is an arbitrary and not an inherent connection; but we should read
such history, travels, and literature as would make the Spanish Armada
live in the mind.
=Our Aim in Education.=—Our aim in education is to give children vital
interests in as many directions as possible—to set their feet in a large
room—because the crying evil of the day is, it seems to me, intellectual
inanition.
Believing that he is in the world to lay hold of all that he can of those
possessions which endure; that full, happy living, expansion, expression,
resourcefulness, power of initiative, serviceableness—in a word,
character, for him, depends upon how far he apprehends the relationships
proper to him and how many of them he seizes, we should be gravely uneasy
when his education leaves a young person with prejudices and caring for
‘events’ (in the sporting sense) rather than with interests and pursuits.
Principles, we believe, the best of our young people have and bring away
from their schools fully as much as from their homes. Our educational
shortcomings seem to be intellectual rather than moral.
=Education by Things.=—Education should be by _Things_ and by _Books_.
Ten years ago education by _Things_ was little thought of except in the
games of public schools. To-day, a great reform has taken place, and the
worth of education by _Things_ is recognised everywhere. Disciplinary
exercises, artistic handicrafts, are seen to make for education as truly
as do geography and Latin. ‘Nature study’ has come in later, but has come
with a rush. If that Sikh quoted by Cornelia Sorabji[21] should visit us
again ten years hence, it is to be hoped he would not then say of us,
“The very thoughts of the people are merchandise; they have not learned
the common language of Nature.” The teaching of Science is receiving
enormous attention; and the importance of education in this kind need
not be enforced here. Works of art are, here and there, allowed their
chance with boys and girls, and we shall look more and more to this means
of education. What everyone knows it is unnecessary to repeat; and such
general attention is given to education by Things, and this is carried
on so far on right lines, that I have nothing to add to the general
knowledge of this subject.
=Education by Books.=—The great educational failure we have still to
deal with is in the matter of _Books_. We know that _Books_ store the
knowledge and thought of the world; but the mass of knowledge, the
multitude of books, overpower us, and we think we may select here and
there, from this book and that, fragments and facts of knowledge, to be
dealt out, whether in the little cram book or the oral lesson.
Sir Philip Magnus, in a recent address on Headwork and Handwork in
Elementary Schools, says some things worth pondering. Perhaps he gives
his workshop too big a place in the school of the future, but certainly
he puts his finger on the weak point in the work of both elementary and
secondary schools—the ‘getting by heart scraps of knowledge, fragments
of so-called science.’ And we are with him in the emphasis he lays upon
_reading and writing_; it is through these that even school ‘studies’
shall become ‘for delight.’ Writing, of course, comes of reading,
and nobody can write well who does not read much. Sir Philip Magnus
says,[22] speaking of the schools of the future:—“We shall no longer
require children to learn by constant repetition, scraps of history,
geography, and grammar, nor try to teach them fragments of so-called
science. The daily hours devoted to these tasks will be applicable to
the creation of mental aptitudes, and will be utilised in showing the
children how to obtain knowledge for themselves.... In future the main
function of education will be to train our hands and our sense organs
and intellectual faculties, so that we may be placed in a position of
advantage for seeking knowledge.... The scope of the lessons will be
enlarged. Children will be taught to read in order that they may desire
to read, and to write that they may be able to write.... It will be
the teacher’s aim to create in his pupils a desire for knowledge, and
consequently a love of reading, and to cultivate in them, by a proper
selection of lessons, the pleasure which reading may be made to yield.
The main feature of the reading lesson will be to show the use of books,
how they may be consulted to ascertain what other people have said or
done, and how they may be read for the pleasure they afford. The storing
of the memory with facts is no part of elementary school work.... It is
not enough that a child should learn how to write, he must know _what_
to write. He must learn to describe clearly what he has heard or seen,
to transfer to written language his sense-impressions, and to express
concisely his own thoughts.”
We should like to add a word to Sir Philip Magnus’s conception,
emphasising the _habit_ of reading as a chief acquirement of school life.
It is only those who have read who do read.
=The Question of a Curriculum.=—In regard to a curriculum, may I
enforce what I have said in an earlier chapter? Perhaps the main
part of a child’s education should be concerned with the great human
relationships. History, literature, art, languages (whether ancient or
modern), travel—all of these are the record or expression of persons;
so is science, so far as it is the history of discoveries, the record
of observations, that is, so far as it is to be got out of books.
Essentially, however, science falls under the head of _Education by
Things_, and is too large a subject to be dealt with, by the way.
Before all these ranks _Religion_, including our relations of worship,
loyalty, love and service to God; and next in order, perhaps, the
intimate interpersonal relations implied in such terms as self-knowledge,
self-control. Knowledge in these several kinds is due to children; for
there seems reason to believe that the limit to human intelligence
coincides with the limit to human interests; that is, that a normal
person of poor and narrow intelligence is so because the interests proper
to him have not been called into play. The curriculum which should
give children their due falls into some six or eight groups—Religion,
Philosophy (?), History, Languages, Mathematics, Science, Art, Physical
Exercises, and Manual Crafts.
=Religion.=—For _Religion_ it is, no doubt, to the Bible itself we must
go, as the great storehouse of spiritual truth and moral impressions. A
child might, in fact, receive a liberal education from the Bible alone,
for _The Book_ contains within itself a great literature.
There was a time when ‘National Schools’ brought up their scholars on
one of the three great bodies of ancient classical literature which
the Western world possesses, and which we include under the one name,
Bible; and, perhaps, there has been some falling off both in national
intelligence and character since the Bible has been practically deposed
for the miscellaneous ‘Reader.’ It is not possible or desirable to revert
to old ways in this matter; but we should see to it that children derive
as much intellectual, as well as moral and religious, nutriment from
books as they did when their studies ranged from the story of Joseph to
the Epistles of St Paul.
=History.=—In History, boys and girls of twelve to fourteen should
have a fairly intimate knowledge of English history, of contemporary
French history, and of Greek and Roman history—the last, by way of
biography;—perhaps nothing outside of the Bible has the educational
value of Plutarch’s _Lives_. The wasteful mistake often made in teaching
English history is to carry children of, say, between nine and fourteen
through several small compendiums, beginning with _Little Arthur_;
whereas their intelligence between those ages is equal to steady work on
one considerable book.
=Language.=—In Language, by twelve, they should have a fair knowledge
of English grammar, and should have read some literature. They should
have more or less power in speaking and understanding French, and
should be able to read a fairly easy French book; the same with German,
but considerably less progress; and in Latin, they should be reading
‘Fables,’ if not ‘Cæsar,’ and perhaps ‘Virgil.’
=Mathematics.=—I need not touch upon the subject of Mathematics. It is
receiving ample attention, and is rapidly becoming an instrument for
living teaching in our schools.
‘=Practical Instruction.=’—To turn to the question of practical
instruction, under the heads of ‘Science, Drawing, Manual and Physical
Training,’ etc., I can do no more here than repeat our convictions. We
believe that education under these four heads is due to every child of
whatever class; and, for boys and girls under twelve, probably the same
general curriculum would be suitable for all. I have nothing to add to
the sound ideas as to the teaching of each of these subjects which are
now common property.
=Science.=—In _Science_, or rather, nature study, we attach great
importance to _recognition_, believing that the power to recognise and
name a plant or stone or constellation involves classification and
includes a good deal of knowledge. To know a plant by its gesture and
habitat, its time and its way of flowering and fruiting; a bird by its
flight and song and its times of coming and going; to know when, year
after year, you may come upon the redstart and the pied fly-catcher,
means a good deal of interested observation, and of, at any rate, the
material for science. The children keep a dated record of what they
see in their nature note-books, which are left to their own management
and are not corrected. These note-books are a source of pride and joy,
and are freely illustrated by drawings (brushwork) of twig, flower,
insect, etc. The knowledge necessary for these records is not given
in the way of teaching. On one afternoon in the week, the children (of
the Practising School) go for a ‘nature walk’ with their teachers. They
notice for themselves, and the teacher gives a name or other information
as it is asked for, and it is surprising what a range of knowledge a
child of nine or ten acquires. The teachers are careful _not_ to make
these nature walks an opportunity for scientific instruction, as we wish
the children’s attention to be given to observation with very little
direction. In this way they lay up that store of ‘common information’
which Huxley considered should precede science teaching; and, what is
much more important, they learn to know and delight in natural objects
as in the familiar faces of friends. The nature-walk should not be made
the occasion to impart a sort of _Tit-Bits_ miscellany of scientific
information. The study of science should be pursued in an ordered
sequence, which is not possible or desirable in a walk. It seems to me a
_sine quâ non_ of a living education that all school children of whatever
grade should have one half-day in the week, _throughout the year_, in the
fields. There are few towns where country of some sort is not accessible,
and every child should have the opportunity of watching, from week to
week, the procession of the seasons.
Geography, geology, the course of the sun, the behaviour of the clouds,
weather signs, all that the ‘open’ has to offer, are made use of in
these walks; but all is incidental, easy, and things are noticed as they
occur. It is probable that in most neighbourhoods there are naturalists
who would be willing to give their help in the ‘nature walks’ of a given
school.
We supplement this direct ‘nature walk’ by occasional object-lessons,
as, on the hairs of plants, on diversity of wings, on the sorts of
matters taken up in Professor Miall’s capital books; but our main
dependence is on _books_ as an adjunct to out-of-door work—Mrs Fisher’s,
Mrs Brightwen’s, Professor Lloyd Morgan’s, Professor Geikie’s, Professors
Geddes’ and Thomson’s (the two last for children over fourteen), etc.,
etc. In the books of these and some other authors the children are put in
the position of the original observer of biological and other phenomena.
They learn what to observe, and make discoveries for themselves, original
so far as they are concerned. They are put in the right attitude of mind
for scientific observations and deductions, and their keen interest is
awakened. We are extremely careful not to burden the verbal memory with
scientific nomenclature. Children learn of pollen, antennæ, and what not,
incidentally, when the thing is present and they require a name for it.
The children who are curious about it, and they only, should have the
opportunity of seeing with the microscope any minute wonder of structure
that has come up in their reading or their walks; but a good lens is a
capital and almost an indispensable companion in field work. I think
there is danger in giving _too_ prominent a place to education by Things,
enormous as is its value; a certain want of atmosphere is apt to result,
and a deplorable absence of a standard of comparison and of the principle
of veneration. ‘We are the people!’ seems to be the note of an education
which is not largely sustained on _books_ as well as on _things_.
=Drawing.=—In pictorial art we eschew mechanical aids such as chequers,
lines of direction, etc., nor do we use the blacklead pencil, which
lends itself rather to the copying of linear work than to the free
rendering of objects. The children work always from the round, whether
in charcoal or brushwork. They produce, also, illustrations of tales or
poems, which leave much to seek in the matter of drawing, and are of
little value as art instruction, but are useful imaginative exercises.
=Picture Talks.=—We attach a good deal of value to what we call picture
talks, that is:—a reproduction of a suitable picture, by Millet,
for example, is put into the children’s hands, and they study it by
themselves. Then, children of from six to nine describe the picture,
giving all the details and showing by a few lines on the blackboard where
is such a tree or such a house; judging if they can the time of day;
discovering the story if there be one. The older children add to this
some study of the lines of composition, light and shade, the particular
style of the master; and reproduce from memory certain details. The
object of these lessons is that the pupils should learn how to appreciate
rather than how to produce.
But there is no space for further details of a curriculum which is more
fully illustrated in an appendix.
CHAPTER XXII
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS A CURRICULUM
PART III.—_THE LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE_
=The Use of Books makes for Short Hours.=—Considering that under the
head of ‘Education by Books’ some half-dozen groups of subjects are
included, with several subjects in each group, the practical teacher
will be inclined to laugh at what will seem to him Education in Utopia.
In practice, however, we find that the use of books makes for short
hours. No book-work or writing, no preparation or report, is done in the
_Parents’ Review_ School, except between the hours of 9 and 11.30 for the
lowest class, to 9 and 1 for the highest, with half an hour’s interval
for drill, etc.
From one to two hours, according to age and class, are given in the
afternoons to handicrafts, field-work, drawing, etc.; and the evenings
are absolutely free, so that the children have leisure for hobbies,
family reading, and the like. We are able to get through a greater
variety of subjects, and through more work in each subject, in a shorter
time than is usually allowed, because children taught in this way get the
habit of close attention and are carried on by steady interest.
=‘Utilitarian’ Education.=—I should be inclined to say of education, as
Mr Lecky says of morals, that “the Utilitarian theory is profoundly
immoral.” To educate children for any immediate end—towards commercial
or manufacturing aptitude, for example—is to put a premium upon general
ignorance with a view to such special aptitude. The greater includes
the less, but the less does not include the greater. Excellent work of
whatever kind is produced by a person of character and intelligence, and
we who teach cannot do better for the nation than to prepare such persons
for its uses. He who has intelligent relations with life will produce
good work.
=Relations and Interests.=—I have throughout spoken of ‘_Relations_,’
and not of ‘_Interests_,’ because interests may be casual, unworthy,
and passing. Everyone, even the most ignorant, has interests of a sort;
while to make valid any one relation, implies that knowledge has begun
in, at any rate, that one direction. But the defect in our educational
thought is that we have ceased to realise that knowledge is vital; and,
as children and adults, we suffer from underfed minds. This intellectual
inanition is, no doubt, partly due to the fact that educational theorists
systematically depreciate knowledge. Such theorists are, I think,
inclined to attach more importance to the working of the intellectual
machinery than to the output of the product; that is, they feel it to be
more important that a child should _think_ than that he should _know_.
My contention is rather that he cannot _know_ without having _thought_;
and also that he cannot think without an abundant, varied, and regular
supply of the material of knowledge. We all know how the reading of a
passage may stimulate in us thought, inquiry, inference, and thus get
for us in the end some added knowledge. The depreciation of which I
speak is by no means of set purpose, nor is it even realised; but the
more education presents itself as a series of psychological problems, the
greater will be the tendency to doctor, modify, and practically eliminate
_knowledge_;—that knowledge, which is as the air, and the food, and
the exercise, the whole life of the mind of man. In giving ‘education’
without abundant knowledge, we are as persons who should aim at physical
development by giving the maximum of exercise with the minimum of food.
The getting of knowledge and the getting of delight in knowledge are the
ends of a child’s education; and well has said one of our prophets, “that
there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I
call a tragedy.”
To sum up, I believe that our efforts at intellectual education commonly
fail from six causes:—
=Causes of Failure.=—(_a_) The oral lesson, which at its worst is very
poor twaddle, and at its best is far below the ordered treatment of
the same subject by an original mind in the right book. (The right
books exist, old and new, in countless numbers, but very great care
is necessary in the choice, as well as much experience of the rather
whimsical tastes and distastes of children.)
(_b_) The lecture, commonly gathered from various books in rapid notes
by the teacher; and issuing in hasty notes, afterwards written out, and
finally crammed up by the pupils. The lecture is often careful, thorough,
and well-illustrated; but is it ever equal in educational value to direct
contact with the original mind of one able thinker who has written his
book on the subject? Arnold, Thring, Bowen, we know, lectured with great
effect, but then each of them lectured on only a few subjects, and each
lecture was as the breaking out of a spring of slowly gathered knowledge.
We are not all Arnolds or even Bowens.
(_c_) The text-book, compressed and re-compressed from one or many
big books. These handbooks are of two kinds—the frankly dry and
uninteresting, which enumerate facts and details; and the easy and
beguiling. I think we are safe in saying that there is _no educational
value_ in either sort of text-book.
(_d_) The debauchery of the mind which comes of exciting other desires to
do the work of the inherent and fully adequate desire of knowledge.
(_e_) In elementary schools, the dependence upon apparatus and
illustrative appliances which have a paralysing effect on the mind.
(_f_) Again in elementary schools, the use of ‘Readers,’ which, however
well selected, cannot have the value of consecutive works.
=Education by Books.=—For the last twelve years we have tried the plan
of bringing children up on _Books_ and _Things_, and, on the whole, the
results are pleasing. The _average_ child studies with ‘delight.’ We
do not say he will remember all he knows, but, to use a phrase of Jane
Austen’s, he will have had his ‘imagination warmed’ in many regions of
knowledge.
=Blind Alleys.=—May I digress for a moment to raise a warning note
against the following of blind alleys, whether in our educational
thought or our methods. We do not, in the sphere of education, find
hidden treasure by casual digging in the common roadways. Believing
in evolution, we perceive that ideas also have their pedigree and
their progeny and follow their own laws of generation. A learned and
thoughtful Chinese will abstract himself from the outer world, separate
himself from the ideas of others, and, when he has arrived at a due
state of vacuity, take his writing-brushes and produce out of his inner
consciousness—not anything that he has ever seen or heard of, or even
imagined—but some hieroglyph of curves, rather pleasing and presentable
if he happen to be an artist. This disconnected production he arbitrarily
invests with the character of a symbol, and his fellows are willing to
receive it as such, and it is duly hung in his Hall of Tablets.[23] Some
of us perhaps know the flowing curves which stand for ‘happiness’ in this
language of symbols.
Now, all this is very engaging, and the Western mind is ready enough to
succumb to the charm of such fancies. But does it not offer a key to that
baffling problem we call China? Here we have a vast people with some
high moral qualities, of astute and sometimes profound intelligence,
whose civilisation has for thousands of years remained to all appearance
_stationary_. Is the cause, perhaps, a tendency to follow intellectual
futilities, blind alleys, in every direction? These people do not realise
that method implies an end perceived, a way to that end, and step by
step progress in the way; nor do they perceive that a notion becomes
a fruitful idea only upon the impact of an idea from without. A fine
Celestial arrogance assures them of their right to casual finds; hence,
they do not progress, but remain in all things as they were.
Now, here is the danger that besets us in education. We seize upon
ambidexterity, upon figures drawn with the compasses without intention,
upon ‘child study’ as applied to mind, upon terrible agglutinations
which we call ‘apperception masses,’ upon intellectual futilities in
a hundred directions, each of which will, we hope, give us the key to
education. We may perceive the futility of such notions by applying
the test of progress. Are they the way to anything, and, if so, to
what? Let us, out of reverence for the children, be modest; let us not
stake their interests on the hope that this or that new way would lead
to great results if people had only the courage to follow it. It is
exciting to become a pioneer; but, for the children’s sake, it may be
well to constrain ourselves to follow those roads only by which we know
that persons have arrived, or those newer roads which offer evident and
assured means of _progress towards a desired end_. Self-will is not
permitted to the educationalist; and he may not take up fads.
=An Educated Child.=—Knowledge is, no doubt, a comparative term, and the
knowledge of a subject possessed by a child would be the ignorance of a
student. All the same, there is such a thing as an educated child—a child
who possesses a sound and fairly wide knowledge of a number of subjects,
all of which serve to interest him; such a child studies with ‘delight.’
=Children delight in School, but not for Love of Knowledge.=—It will be
said with truth that most children delight in school; they delight in
the stimulus of school life, in the social stir of companionship; they
are emulous, eager for reward and praise; they enjoy the thousand lawful
interests of school life, including the attractive personality of such
and such a teacher; but it seems doubtful whether the love of knowledge,
in itself and for itself, is usually a powerful motive with the young
scholar. The matter is important, because, of all the joyous motives
of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only
one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will
hereafter live. My contention is, to repeat what has been said, that all
children have a capacity for and a latent love of knowledge; and, that
knowledge concerning persons and States can best be derived from books,
and should be got by the children out of their own books.
In a hundred biographies there are hints of boys and girls who have grown
up on books; and there is no doubt that in many schools the study of
books is the staple of the work. This probably is the principle which
keeps our great public schools perennially alive; they live, so far as
they do live, upon books. The best public schoolboy is a fine product;
and perhaps the worst has had his imagination touched by ideas; yet most
of us recognise that the public school often fails, in that it launches
the average and dull boy ignorant upon the world because the curriculum
has been too narrow to make any appeal to him. And we must remember, that
if a young person leave school at seventeen or eighteen without having
become a diligent and delighted reader, it is tolerably certain that
he will never become a reader. It may be, however, that the essential
step in any reform of public schools should come in the shape of due
_preparation_ upon a wide curriculum, dealt with intelligently, between
the ages of six and twelve.
=An Educational Revolution.=—I add appendices to show, (_a_) how a wide
curriculum and the use of many books work in the _Parents’ Review_
School; (_b_) what progress a pupil of twelve should have made under
such conditions; and (_c_) what use is made of oral lessons. Should the
reader consider that the children in question prove their right of entry
to several fields of knowledge, that they show a distinct appetite for
such knowledge, that thought and power of mind develop upon the books
we read, as they do not and cannot upon the lectures we hear; should he
indeed be convinced of the truth of what I have advanced, I think he will
see that, not an educational reform here and there, but an EDUCATIONAL
REVOLUTION is before us to which every one of us is bound to put his hand.
=The Children’s Magna Carta.=—My plea is, and I think I have justified
it by experience, that many doors shall be opened to boys and girls
until they are at least twelve or fourteen, and always the doors of good
houses, (‘Education,’ says Taine, ‘is but a card of invitation to noble
and privileged salons’); that they shall be introduced to no subject
whatever through compendiums, abstracts, or selections; that the young
people shall learn what history is, what literature is, what life is,
from the living books of those who know. I know it can be done, because
it is being done on a considerable scale.
If conviction has indeed reached us, the Magna Carta of children’s
intellectual liberty is before us. The need is immediate, the means are
evident. This, at least, I think we ought to claim, that, up to the age
of twelve, all boys and girls shall be educated on some such curriculum,
with some such _habit_ of _Books_ as we have been considering.[24]
Appendices
APPENDIX I
_Questions for the Use of Readers_[25]
CHAPTER I
DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND SCHOOL
1. In what points are there better relations between children and their
elders than there were a generation or two ago?
2. Characterise the elder generation of parents.
3. What of ‘ill-guided’ homes?
4. Give an example of martinet rule. Name some notable men who grew up
under such rule.
5. Compare the arbitrary parent now with the arbitrary parent of the past.
6. Was arbitrary rule a failure?
7. What thought should encourage our own efforts?
8. Show that arbitrariness arose from limitations.
9. That it is one cause of the reticence of children.
10. In what way has the direction of philosophic thought altered the
relations of parents and children?
11. What effect has the doctrine of the ‘Infallible Reason’ upon
authority?
12. Show that English thought again proclaims the apotheosis of Reason.
13. What is the final justification of the idea of authority?
14. Why is the enthronement of the human reason the dethronement of the
highest authority?
15. Show that the spread of an idea is ‘quick as thought.’
16. Why has the notion of the finality of human reason become intolerable?
17. On what grounds would you say that authority and docility are
fundamental principles?
18. Show that self-interest does not account for the response of docility
to authority.
19. Show that the work of the rationalistic philosophers was necessary.
20. Show that they hold a brief for human freedom.
21. Describe the way in which the education of the world seems to be
carried on.
22. Show the danger of the notion that authority is vested in persons.
23. Show that a person in authority is under authority.