The third of his excursions into the field of education, in his
burning desire to give the people that right knowledge for want of
which they perish, was the training of the teachers who prepared
pupils for the examinations of the Science and Art Department. The
future of scientific teaching depended upon the proper supply of
trained teachers. Now, the School of Mines in Jermyn Street was
without a laboratory in which to make even his own students work out
with their own hands the structure of the biological "types" expounded
in the lectures. An opportunity to train these new "scientific
missionaries" came in 1871, when he was deep in the great schemes of
elementary education. More than a hundred of them flocked to South
Kensington, where some large rooms on the ground floor of the museum
had been secured and rigged up for the purpose by the Professor and
his three demonstrators. For six weeks in the summer there was a
daily lecture, followed by four hours' laboratory work under the
demonstrators, in which the students verified for themselves facts
which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate
pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of
the more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One
clergyman, who had for years conducted classes in physiology under the
Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under
the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture
in Huxley's _Physiology_."
From 1872 onwards, when the School of Mines removed bodily to new
buildings at South Kensington, Huxley had a fine laboratory of his
own, in which not only were these teachers taught, but he was able
to adopt the same method with the students in his regular courses--a
method for long universally adopted in detail as well as in principle.
The first and unchangeable principle was to make the student verify
every fact for himself; to be satisfied with nothing at second hand.
The system was to work over a chosen set of biological types, each
representing a well-marked group and providing comparisons one
with another as well as stepping stones to further investigations.
Originally he started the series with the simplest organisms, and
proceeded to the more complex; but, though a good philosophical order,
it had the disadvantages of requiring the beginner to have much skill
in handling the microscope, and of proceeding from the less known
organism to the better known. Starting with the latter, the beginner
would know better what to look for. His demonstrator, Jeffery Parker,
argued the point vigorously with Huxley, and finally persuaded him
to invert the series, with great success, albeit other lecturers
preferred to keep to his original arrangement.
Education, furthermore, owes him a great debt for his long and active
work upon the Royal Commissions on the Royal College of Science for
Ireland, on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, on Scientific
Instruction and the Advancement of Science; on Vivisection, to inquire
into the Universities of Scotland, and on the Medical Acts--all in the
sixteen years between 1866 and 1882. At the London University, also,
he was an examiner for many years, and in the early nineties he strove
hard to give it a new constitution, first as a member of the Senate,
and then as president of a reforming Association. It is noteworthy,
too, that ten years earlier he was elected a Governor of Eton College,
and in the short time before his health broke down a second time he
did something to aid science-teaching there and to make drawing a
general subject.
In the general need for education he ranked high the need for the
education of women. As early as 1860 he wrote: "I don't see how we are
to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is
sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese
superstitions." If only people would not bring up their daughters as
man-traps for the matrimonial market, the next generation would see
women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits; "though,"
he added, "I don't think that men have anything to fear from their
competition." On this point he remarked five years later: "Nature's
old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will
be effected, though whatever argument justifies a given education for
boys justifies its application to girls as well."
A letter of 1874, touching the first efforts of women to qualify as
doctors, prefigures what has been done since for the higher education
of women:--
Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the
average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally,
as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are
much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and
I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or
public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most
foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of
vigour and capacity. We have heard a great deal lately about
the physical disabilities of women. Some of these alleged
impediments, no doubt, are really inherent in their
organization, but nine-tenths of them are artificial--the
products of their modes of life. I believe that nothing would
tend so effectually to get rid of these creations of idleness,
weariness, and that "over-stimulation of the emotions" which,
in plainer-spoken days, used to be called wantonness, than
a fair share of healthy work, directed towards a definite
object, combined with an equally fair share of healthy play
during the years of adolescence; and those who are best
acquainted with the requirements of an average medical
practitioner will find it hardest to believe that the attempt
to reach that standard is likely to prove exhausting to an
ordinarily intelligent and well-educated young woman.
Twenty years later he supported the entry of women into public life
in a plainly reasoned letter, which he himself thought highly
complimentary, although a number of estimable ladies flew at him for
writing it:--
The best of women are apt to be a little weak in the great
practical arts of give-and-take and putting up with a beating,
and a little too strong in their belief in the efficacy of
government. Men learn about these things in the ordinary
course of their business; women have no chance in home life,
and the boards and councils will be capital schools for them.
Again, in the public interest it will be well; women are more
naturally economical than men, and have none of our false
shame about looking after pence. Moreover, they don't job for
any but their lovers, husbands, and children, so that we know
the worst.
Directly, then, as teacher, lecturer, and essayist indirectly as
organizer, he ranks among the great educators of his age. But he did
not establish a "school" of his own; such a thing was abhorrent to
him. A resolute seeker after truth, he bade others seek also; but he
refused to impose his own conclusions on any man.
Of all possible positions [he wrote in 1892], that of master
of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears
to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British
matron cannot look upon followers with a more evil eye than I
do. Such acquaintance with the history of thought as I
possess has taught me to regard school, parties, and sects as
arrangements, the usual effect of which is to perpetuate
all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's,
or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it
altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire
of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the
kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit
of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am,
and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever
proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned,
thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but
do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own
laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions
the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.
In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught
as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn
from them. As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized
common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the
ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out. And the correlative
to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until
adequate proof is forthcoming.