'The most certain means,' Beccaria wrote in the preceding century, 'of
rendering a people free and happy, is, to establish a perfect method of
education.' If, in this conclusion, Beccaria only reiterates an opinion
at least tacitly held long before his time by some of the Grecian sages,
still, the later assertion of the principle should, it seems, derive
some additional weight from the circumstance of the time allowed in the
interim for repeated reconsiderations of the question. The theologian
may interpose, that, toward rendering a people free and happy, the
influences of religion must constitute the most efficacious, the
dominant agency. But when we admit that man is _one_,--that heart and
hand are not only alike, but together subjects for culture,--then it
will be seen that religion falls into its place in the one comprehensive
scheme of human education; and we discover that Beccaria's position,
instead of being assailed from this point of view, becomes, according as
our conception of the case is truthful and clear, correspondingly
strengthened.
The ease, however, with which we utter those little qualifiers, 'free'
and 'happy,' observed to stand here in the positive or absolute degree,
and not in any degree of comparison, is noticeable. For 'degrees of
comparison' are always concessions of steps _down_, even when they most
stoutly present themselves as steps _up_. Were all men simply wise and
just, all predicating of certain men that they were _more_, or _most,
wise_ or _just_, would be at once absurd and without utility. It is our
intensified adjective that confesses fatally the prior fact of a coming
short, and by an amount indefinitely great, of the simple, absolute
standard. So, to come once for all to ridding ourselves of comparative
forms of speech, and to be warranted to look for the rendering of a
people, in the simple, positive sense, free and happy, would be, in the
expressive language of one 'aunt Chloe' respecting the 'glory' to which
she aspired, 'a mighty thing!' On the other hand, so far have our race,
up to this moment, and without a single decided instance in exception,
fallen short of aught that could be styled a perfect method of
education, and so closely must educational training affect every nascent
man or woman in those vitalest particulars,--character and
capability,--that, could the perfect method sought once be brought into
effective operation on the plastic child-manhood of a nation, or of all
nations, we are not prepared to deny the possibility of any results
therefrom to humanity, even the grandest utterable or conceivable.
Admitting such method found, and in process, Beccaria could have
dispensed with his tell-tale 'most,' and written, The certain means of
rendering a people free and happy, is, to establish a perfect method of
education.
To secure, therefore, so great an end: First, find--the perfect
educational method! The recipe is brief; the labor it imposes is more
than Herculean. To measure it, we should have to find the ratio in
which mind transcends matter, or that in which the broad generalizations
of genius in the materials of science surpass the poor conceptions that
the wild Australian must almost utter audibly in his own ear to realize
that he at all possesses them.
In the 5,865 years which the most unquestioned belief accords to the
history of man on our planet, could we suppose the average duration of
life throughout equal to that of a generation now, there would have been
time for 177 generations of working, planning, inventive men--of men
desiring at each period the best they could conceive of, and framing the
best schemes they were capable of to attain it. Here has been space for
the slow rise and fall of nation after nation,--vast solitary tides
heaving at long intervals the face of a wide, living, sullen sea: and
history reports that the nations have actually risen, flourished, and
fallen. Here has been space for exquisite triumphs of art; for the late
birth, and nevertheless large progress, of the sciences concerned about
phenomena of physical nature; the art triumphs have been achieved, and
the germs of sciences are in our possession. Here has been space for the
multiplication, upon all imaginable themes, of books, to a number and
volume utterly beyond the powers of the most prolonged and assiduous
life even to peruse; and the books crowd our alcoves, and meet us
wherever men are wont to make their abode or transit. Here has been
space for the organization, though so long impracticable and late
conceived, of a system of daily diffusion of intelligence, and to such a
pitch as almost to bring the world freshly photographed to our eyes with
each returning sun; and, lo! the photographs are here; they await us at
the breakfast or the counting table. Here has been space for the
springing up among the people, at distances of years or centuries, of
profound educating intellects, marked by clear insight, large human
love, and patient self-sacrifice, and contributing to the growth of
humanity by worthy examples, and by propounding successively more and
more rational modes for the informing and developing of youthful minds;
and, see! Confucius, Socrates and Plato, Petrarch, Bacon, Comenius,
Pestalozzi, Père Girard, Arnold of Rugby, and Horace Mann--to make no
mention of many co-laborers among the dead, and earnest successors among
the living--stepping from their niches in the vanishing corridors of
history, lay at our feet the treasures accumulated through their patient
and clear thought and their faithful experience.
Will it then readily be believed--and yet it is unquestionably
true--that, to this hour, neither the schools nor the teachers can be
found that are in possession and practice of a well-defined, positively
guiding, and always trustworthy _method_ of intellectual, and other
means and steps by which to conduct and consummate the education of our
children? Note, we do not here declare the want of the true and
universal method of educating, if there can be such a thing; but we
distinctly assert that no school and no living teacher employs or
conforms to any well-defined, positive, and, in and for its purposes,
completed method of educating the young; nor, since this latter is a
supposition better pleasing certain critically-minded gentlemen, have we
in anything like clear delineation and positive practice the _several_
methods that may be imagined requisite for minds of varying bent and
capacity. If we sum up in one word the most pervading, constant, and
obvious characteristic of our schools, and of the teaching and the
learning in them to this day, that word must be, _immethodical_.
Although admitting that the education of the young should distinctly
embrace the four departments of a training, _physical_, _intellectual_,
_moral_, and _social_, yet, for the sake of clearness in our discussion
and its results, not less than through the necessities of a restricted
space, we shall here confine our remarks wholly to education in its
intellectual aspect.
To move, for each subject, and for each part of it essayed, always along
the right way, and by the true character and order of steps,--that is
the thing to be desired, and which is, as yet, unattained. As a
consequence, the prosecution of studies is by attempts and in ways that
are generally imperfect, at best make-shift or provisional, often
radically erroneous or worthless. Doubtless, the defects in method are
now less glaring and influential at the two extremes of the
sensibly-conducted infant school, and the well-appointed and leisurely
collegiate course. There is no true study that is not what the origin of
the word implies--STUDIUM, a work of _zeal, fondness, eager desire,
voluntary endeavor, interest_. Such study has two essential
characteristics; where these are wanting, study does not exist; the
appearance of it is a sham; and though results disconnected and partial
are attained, real acquisition is meager, and apparent progress
deceptive.
Of these characteristics, the first is what the word directly
expresses--zealous exertion on the part of the student's own
intellectual powers, a zeal literally pre-venting all other incentives,
or, at the least, subordinating them, through pure love of finding out
that which is new and curious, or true. In two words, this first
essential of study, and fraught with all the desirable results of study,
is genuine INTELLECTUAL WORK. It is the _nisus_ of the intelligent
principle to bring itself into ascertained and well-ordered relations
with the facts, agencies, and uses of nature, alike in her physical and
spiritual domains. The bright-minded boy or girl who may not comprehend
the feeling or thought when so uttered, nevertheless _knows_ it, and,
for his or her range of effort, as keenly as does the adult explorer.
But, when a mind thus _works_, the truth that it can never advance
beyond missing or unfound links in the chain of thought does not need to
be taught to it. The impossibility of so doing has become a matter of
experience and of certain conviction. The mathematician knows, that,
beyond that form of his equation containing an actual mis-step, or a
positively irresoluble expression, all subsequent forms or values
involving that step or expression are vitiated, and the results they
seem to show substantially worthless. Now, every actually working mind,
and at every stage, from schoolboy perplexities over algebraic signs, up
to philosophic ventures in quest of one remove further of solid ground,
in respect to the interrelations of physical forces, or the law of
development of organized forms, finds itself in precisely the
predicament of the mathematician: it feels no footing and accomplishes
no advance beyond that link in the chain of fact and thought, which, to
its comprehension, stands as uncertain, erroneous, wanting, or
inexplicable. This is so from the very nature of our knowing faculties
and of knowledge. The true intellectual worker, encountering
interruption through any of these conditions, goes back to view his
difficulty from a better vantage ground, or attempts to approach it from
either side, or, failing these resources, bows to the necessity, and
suffers no harm, other than stoppage and loss of time. Thus, the second
characteristic of true study is in the rigidly natural and unfailing
CONSECUTION of the steps and processes by which the intellectual advance
is made. A mind so advancing never flatters itself of being able to
grasp that which, in the nature of knowledge, must be a consequent
truth, until the antecedent or antecedents german to the question in
hand have first been possessed by it. But in our schools, how vastly
much is _supposed_ to be taught, in which consequents come before
antecedents, or are promiscuously jumbled up with them, or assert
themselves, without so much as the grace to say to antecedents of any
sort, 'By your leave.' Obviously, however, such could not be the
character of so much of our teaching, did not the character of most of
our books for schools exactly correspond with it. And the books do
correspond: they not only give to a faulty teaching its cue, but, now
that the _theory_ of education is being so much discussed, and in good
degree improved, they constitute one of the most influential causes of
the almost hopeless lagging of its practice.
Now, how is it that pupils get on at all with such lessons and such
books? The explanation is a simple one; but the consequences it is
fraught with are not trifling. The simple fact is, pupils are not yet
allowed to _study_ (in the best sense and manner of that process) the
subjects they are prosecuting. When, now, they undertake in earnest to
study, they are but too constantly confused and delayed by the no-method
of the treatises they are being carried through. In a course of earnest
intellectual work, the pupil must too often, with his present aids,
become aware of absence of comprehension; he is ever and anon brought to
stand still and cast about for the unsupplied preliminary facts and
truths, for the unhinted hypotheses and inferences, which his situation
and previous study do not enable him to supply, but which are necessary
to a _comprehension_ of the results set down for him to deal with.
Barren results, _per se_, our learners are now too much required to
ingest; and such they are expected to assimilate into intellectual life
and power! As well feed a boy on bare elements of tissue--carbon,
sulphur, oxygen, and the rest; or, yet more charitably, dissect out from
his allowance of tenderloin, lamb, or fowl, a due supply of ready-made
nerve and muscular fiber, introduce and engraft these upon the nerve and
muscle he has already acquired, and then assure our _protegé_, that, as
the upshot of our masterly provision for his needs, we expect him to
become highly athletic and intellectual--that so he is to evolve larger
streams of muscular energy and more vivid flashes of spiritual force!
As it is, we too nearly put the pupil's intellect asleep by our false
method; and he endures it because of his unnatural condition. He thinks
he 'gets on' with it; and in an imperfect way and degree does so.
Rarely, we find, does such a one get so far as into the 'conics;' and he
is not certain to be in the habit of reading reviews: if we were sure,
however, that he could comprehend and would meet with our simile, we
would say to him, that the tardy inclination up which he now plods
painfully, must, if graphically represented, be shown by an oblique line
_descending_, in fact, below the curve of his possibilities, more
rapidly even than it _ascends_ above the horizontal cutting through the
point of his setting out. True, with pupils who are spontaneously
active-minded from the first, or who at some point in their course
become positively awakened to brain-work, very much of the repressive
influence of imperfect methods is prevented or overcome. The number of
those so fortunate is doubtless small in the comparison. The few who
_would_ know, by a necessity as imperative as that by which they _must_
feed, and sleep, and probably toil with hands or head for subsistence,
are able to supplement many of the deficiencies, and supersede some
erroneous processes of our methods, by the play of their own powers of
investigation upon and about their subject. To these, a false method can
bring perplexity and delay, but not repression nor veritable
intellectual torpor.
We assert, then, that from a course or manner of instruction from which
those characteristics of true study--real work of the learner's
faculties, and a just consecution of steps--are largely omitted or
excluded, the best sort of intellectual education can not, in the
majority of instances, accrue. On the other hand, the method embodying
these characteristics must present that unity, certainty, and guiding
force hinted at in the outset. Concisely summed up, it is a method
proceeding throughout by discovery, or, as we may say, by _re-discovery_
of the truths and results to be acquired in each department of knowledge
undertaken by the learner. In the absence of the one true method of
intellectual advance, what should we expect but a confusion of clashing,
imperfect, or tentative processes of instruction? He who could, to-day,
ciceroned by some pedagogic Asmodeus, visit one hundred of our schools,
or listen successively to a recitation on a given topic, conducted by
one hundred qualified and faithful instructors, would find the methods
and no-methods of introducing to the century of classes the truths of
this self-same subject to be--and we do not mean in the personal
element, which ought to vary, but in the radical substance and order of
the theme--quite as numerous as the workmen observed; in fact, a
conflicting and confusing display. Now, do causes, in any realm of
being, forbear to produce fruit in effects? Are the laws of psychologic
sequence less rigid and certain than those laws of physical sequence
which determine in material nature every phenomenon, from planet-paths
in space to the gathering of dew-drops on a leaf? If it were so, falsity
or confusion in intellectual method might be pronounced a thing of
trifling import, or wholly indifferent. But such suppositions are the
seemings only of postulates floating through the brains of Ignorance or
Un-heed, who really postulate nothing at all. If, on the contrary, we
admit this inflexible relation of cause and result in the mental, as
well as in the material world, and if we admit also that our
school-methods are yet fragmentary, varying and tentative, then we are
compelled to the conclusion, that at least the greater number of our
schools are falling short, in the time and with the outlay invested, of
doing their best and largest work, while in very many of our schools
there must be steadily going forward a positive and potent
mis-education!
If it be urged that these are in a degree deductive conclusions, let
them be submitted to the test of fact. At least two important
circumstances, it is admitted, will come in to complicate the inquiry:
first, one purpose of school training is to divert the forming mind in a
degree from sense toward thought, the latter being a less observable
sort of product than that curiosity and store of facts attendant on
activity of the merely perceptive powers; secondly, there is the growing
absorption of the mental powers with increase of age in the practical,
in meeting the necessities of life, which more and more displaces
intellectual activity as a set pursuit, and leaves it to be manifested
rather in the means than the ends, rather in the quality than in the
products of one's thinking, and, at the best, rather as an embellishment
than as the business of a career. And yet, in the mind which has passed
through a proper school-training, there should be apparent certain
decided qualities and results, which are manifested as, and as often as,
opportunity for their exercise presents itself. The schooled mind should
surely not possess a less active curiosity to observe and to know than
did the same mind before entering school, but even a stronger, more
self-directed, purposive and efficient zeal in such direction.
Intellectual vivacity and point, clearness of conception, and
truthfulness of generalization and of inference,--all these should
appear in more marked degree, along with the increased sobriety and
judgment, and the improved facility of practical adaptation, which
properly characterize maturity of mind and habit. Now, we suggest the
careful observation of any number of children, not yet sent to school,
and that are favored with ordinarily sensible parents, and ordinarily
happy homes; and then, the equally careful study of a like number who
have just emerged from their school course, or have fairly entered on
the business of life; and we warn the really acute and discriminating
observer to look forward (in the majority of instances) to a
disheartening result from his investigation! We are convinced that the
net product of our immensely expansive, patient, and ardently sought
schooling will, in a large proportion of all the cases, be found to
consist in the imperfect acquirement and uncertain tenure of knowledge,
upon a few rudimentary branches, often without definite understanding or
habit of applying even so much to its uses, and usually without the
conception or desire to make it the point of departure for life-long
acquisition; and all this accompanied, too often, with actual loss of
that spontaneous intellectual activity which began to manifest itself in
the child, and which should have been fruiting now in, at the least,
some degree of sound and true intellectuality. So, we are still left to
expect mainly of Nature not only the germs of capacity, but the maturing
of them; the latter, a work which Education surely ought to be competent
to. Meanwhile, like a wearied and fretted pedagogue, Education complains
of the bad materials Nature gives her, when she ought to be questioning
whether she has yet learned to bring out the excellence of the material
she has.
Is it not an expensive process, that thus amasses a certain quantity of
knowledge at cost of the disposition, sometimes of the ability, to add
to it through the whole of life? Really, schooling is short, and,
contrasted with it, life is long; but what mischiefs may not the latter
experience from the former! Let us clearly conceive, once, the aversion
many of our boys and girls persistently feel toward the school, and of
their leaving it, at the last, with rejoicing! Are we astonished that
when they have fairly escaped, frivolity is, with the young woman, too
apt to replace mental culture, and with the young man, vulgarity or
exclusive living for 'the main chance?' That the men and women so
educated are too receptive, credulous, pliant and unstable; that in too
large a degree they lack discrimination, judgment, and the good sense
and executive talent which plan understandingly, and work without
sacrifice of honor, manhood, or spiritual culture, to a true success?
But, if our instructors could find out, or if some other could find out
for them, _just how_ and _by what steps_ it is that the young mind
engages with nature and harvests knowledge, and if they should see,
therefore, how to strike in better with the current of the young,
knowing and thinking, to move with it, enlarge, direct and form it
aright, properly insuring that the mind under their charge shall do its
own work, and hence advance by consecutive and comprehended steps, we
ask with confidence whether much of the notorious short-comings now
manifest in the results of our patient efforts might not be replaced by
an approach toward an intellectual activity, furnishing, completeness,
and bent, more worthy of the name and the idea of education? We are not
alone in questioning the tendencies of existing methods. Other pens have
raised the note of alarm. Speaking on the character of the _product_ of
the English schools, Faraday says, 'The whole evidence appears to show
that the _reasoning faculties_ [mark, it is here the failure occurs, and
here that it shows itself], in all classes of the community, are very
imperfectly and insufficiently developed--_imperfectly, as compared with
the natural abilities, insufficiently, when considered with reference to
the extent and variety of information with which they are called upon to
deal_.' Does not this strong language find equally strong warrant in
current facts of individual conduct and of our social life?
That there is yet no recognized complete method in, and no ascertained
science of education, the latest writings on the subject abundantly
reiterate and confirm. The best of our annual School Reports, and the
most recent treatises,--among which, notwithstanding the abatement we
must make for their having been, through adventitious circumstances,
pushed in our country to a sudden and not wholly merited prominence,
Sir. Spencer's republished essays may be named,--while they acknowledge
some progress in details, disclose an undertone of growing conviction of
the incompetency and unsatisfactoriness of our present modes of teaching
and training. The Oswego School Report, speaking of primary education,
tells us 'There has been too much teaching by formulas;' and that 'We
are quite too apt, in the education of children, to "sail over their
heads," to present subjects that are beyond their comprehension,' etc.
Its way of escape 'out of the rut' is by importation into our country of
the object-lesson system, as improved from the Pestalozzian original
through the labors of Mr. Kay, now Sir J.K. Shuttleworth, and his
co-laborers, of the Home and Colonial Infant and Juvenile School
Society, London. In the report of Mr. Henry Kiddle, one of the four
making up the collective School Report of the City of New York for 1861,
the radical error of our present teachers is very forcibly
characterized, where the danger of the teachers is pointed out as that
of becoming 'absorbed in the mechanical routine of their office, losing
sight of the _end_ in their exclusive devotion to what is only the
_means--teaching the_ THING, _but failing to instruct the_ PERSON--eager
to pour in knowledge, but neglecting to bring out mind.' Is there not
indicated in these words a real and a very grave defect of the manner in
which subjects are now presented, studied, recited, and finished up in
our schools? We think there is. And then, what is the effect of this
study and teaching, with so much less thought toward the _end_ than
about the _material_?--what the result of this overlooking of the mind,
the individuality, the person?--what the fruitage, at last, of having
given so much time to the 'finishing up' of arithmetic, geography, and
the rest, as to have failed _to bring out the mind_ that was dealing
with these topics, and is hereafter to have so many others to deal with?
The physiologists have to tell us of a certain ugly result, occurring
only in rare instances in the _bodily_ organization, such that in a
given young animal or human form the developing effort ceases before
completion of the full structure; the individual remaining without
certain fingers or limbs, sometimes without cranium or proper brain.
They name this result one of 'arrest of development.' Is it not barely
possible that our studies and recitations are yet in general so
mal-adapted to the habitudes of the tender brain and opening faculties
of childhood, as not merely often to allow, but even to inflict on the
intellectual and moral being of the child a positive arrest of
development? And if it be possible, what question can take precedence of
one concerning the means of averting such a mischief? Pestalozzi
intuitively saw and deeply felt the existence of this evil in his day,
when, we may admit, it was somewhat more glaring than now. But Mr.
Spencer truly characterizes Pestalozzi as, nevertheless, 'a man of
_partial_ intuitions, a man who had occasional flashes of insight,
rather than a man of systematic thought;' as one who 'lacked the ability
logically to co-ordinate and develop the truths he from time to time
laid hold of;' and, at the same time, he accredits the great modern
leader with a true idea of education, 'the due realization of [which]
remains to be achieved.' How doubly important every rational attempt to
achieve such realization--every well-considered effort to improve the
method of the studies and the lessons--becomes but too apparent when we
note the early age at which, as a rule, pupils must leave the schools,
and the consequent brief space within which to evoke the faculties and
to establish right intellectual habitudes. As an illustration drawn from
the cities, where of course the school period is soonest ended, take the
incidental fact disclosed by Mr. Randall in the New York School Report,
that in that city the course of studies must be so framed as to allow of
its completion, with many, at the preposterously early age of _fourteen
years_--really the age at which study and mental discipline in the best
sense just begin to be practicable!
In all directions, in the educational world, we are struck with the
feeling and expression of a great need, though the questions as to just
what it is, and just how to be met, have not been so distinctly
answered. Let us agree with Mr. Currie, that 'Practical teaching can not
be learned from books, even from the most exact "photographing" of
lessons: it must be learned, like any other art or profession, by
imitation of good models, and by practice under the eye of a master.'
Yet it is true, however paradoxical the statement may appear, that
practical teaching will gain quite as much when the school-books shall
have been cast into the right form and method, as when all the teachers
shall have been obliged to imitate good models, in a system of sound
normal and model schools. What has given to the teaching of geometry its
comparatively high educating value through centuries, and in the hands
of teachers of every bent, caliber, and culture? What but the well-nigh
inevitable, because highly perfected and crystalline method of one
book--_Euclid's Elements_? Doubtless we want 'live' men and women, and
those trained to their work, to teach: quite as imperatively we then
want the right kind of text-books, in the pupils' hands, with which to
carry forward their common work. If mind is the animating _spirit_, and
knowledge the shapeless _matter_, still method--and to the pupil largely
the method of the books--is the organizing force or _form_ under which
the knowledge is to be organized, made available and valuable. We shall
suffer quite as much from any lack of the best form, as through lack of
the best matter, or of the most earnest spirit. In education, the
teacher is the fluent element, full of present resources; the book
should be the fixed element, always bringing back the discursive
faculties to the rigid line of thought and purpose of the subject. We
have now the fluent element in better forwardness and command than the
fixed. We have much of the spirit; an almost overwhelming supply of the
matter; but the ultimate and best _form_ is yet largely wanting, and
being so, it is now our most forcible and serious want.
But, rightly understood, all that we have said in reference to the
short-comings of our modes of educating the young, constitutes by no
necessity any sort of disparagement of teachers, or of the conductors of
our school system. If a re-survey of the ground seems to show very much
yet to be done, it is in part but the necessary result of an enlarging
comprehension as to what, all the while, should have been done. It is by
looking from an eminence that we gain a broader prospect, and
coincidently receive the conviction of a larger duty. Much that we
deplore in present methods is the best to which investigation has yet
conducted us, or that the slow growth of a right view among the patrons
of schools will allow. Then, how hard it is to foresee, in any direction
of effort, the effects our present appliances and plans shall be
producing a score of years hence, or in the next generation--hardest of
all to those whose work is directly upon that extremely variable
quantity, mind! And in what other human business, besides that of
education, are there not in like manner remissnesses and errors to point
out? Justice, in truth, requires the acknowledgment that probably no
other body of men and women can take precedence of the teaching class,
in devotion to their work, in self-sacrifice, or, indeed, in willingness
to adopt the new when it shall also commend itself to them as
serviceable; while, in a world of rough, material interests and
successes, like ours, the teacher's avocation still remains by far
underpaid, and by parents, and even by the very pupils on whom its
benefits are conferred, too rarely appreciated at anything like its just
deserts.
If further extenuation of present short-comings should be deemed
needful, the history of science--and let us not forget that this history
is almost wholly a very _recent_ one--presents it in abundant force.
Though practical arts have led to sciences, yet they have never advanced
far until after they have felt the reactive benefits of the sciences
springing from them. Finally, in its highest phases, the art becomes
subordinated to the science; thenceforth, the former can approach
perfection only as the latter prepares its way. Education has advanced
beyond this turning point: the art is henceforward dependent on the
sciences. But a science of education is an outgrowth from the science of
mind; and among sciences, the latter is one of the latest and most
difficult. Thus, our investigations result, not in casting blame upon
educators, but in revealing, we may say, what is still the intellectual
'situation' of the most cultivated and advanced nations. We have our
place still, not at any sort of consummation, but at a given stage in a
progress. And still, as ever in the past, the things that in reality
most closely touch our interests are farthest removed from our
starting-points of sense and reason, and by a necessity of the manner
and progress of our knowing, are longest in being found. And in this we
have at least the assurance that the perfection of our race is to occur
by no sudden bound or transformation, but by a toilsome and patient
insight and growth.
Granting, however, all that has now been said in palliation of existing
defects in education, that the whole business is a thing remote from
immediate interests, and not less so from immediate perceptions and
reasonings--a thing that, to all eyes capable of seeing in it something
more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic,
begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy
distance, obscure and incomprehensible--granting all this, and yet any
one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process,
that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and
intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the
actually existing indifference about questions as to the _method or
methods_ by which the work can most fully and satisfactorily be
accomplished. We have enacted laws, built school-houses, provided
libraries, employed teachers, and in a tolerable degree insisted on the
attendance of pupils, duly equipped with treatises of knowledge. We have
lavished money on a set of instrumentalities, more or less vaguely
considered requisite to insure qualification of the young for active
life, and the perpetuity of the national virtue and liberty. What we, in
America, however, have least essayed and most needed, has been to get
_beneath the surface_ of the great educational question; to look less
after plans of school buildings, and the schemes of school-districts and
funds, and more into the structure of the lessons and studies, and the
relationships, applications, and value of the ideas secured or attempted
during the daily sessions of the school classes. It will be a great day
for us, when our principals and schoolmasters cease to put forward so
prominently, at the end of the quarter or term, its smartest
compositions and declamations, and when the over-generous public shall
begin to attend on 'examinations' with a less allowance of eyes and
ears, and a more vigorous and active use of the discriminating and
judging powers of their own minds. In the externals of education,
England, France, and Germany must take rank after some of the States of
our country; but in the matter of seeking the right interior qualities
and tendencies of instruction, they have been in advance of us; though
just now the anti-progressive spirit of their governments is interposing
itself to hinder the largest practicable results by the schools, and to
what extent it will emasculate them of their best qualities, time only
can show. Among our teaching class, the apathy is not confined to the
ill-rewarded incumbents of the lower positions; with rare exceptions, it
is even more decided at the other extreme of the scale. Of all the
gentlemen holding place in our over-numerous college faculties, and
commanding, one would expect, the very passes to the _terra incognita_
of the human soul, how few seem disposed to prove their individual
_faculties_ by any thoroughgoing and successful incursions into unknown
regions of the psychologic and pedagogic realm! The spirit of this
should-be influential and leading class among us is one of serene assent
in the iteration of the old steps, with of course some minor
improvements, but with no attempts at a grand investigation and
synthesis, such as gave to philosophy her new method, and to the world
her growing fruitage of physical sciences.
If proof were needed of the comparative apathy under which we labor in
respect to activities and progress in the more abstract and higher
planes of intellectual effort, we find it in the contrast between the
rewards meted out to the successful in this and in more material fields,
in the general estimation awarded to the two classes of workers, and in
the present expressions of the public bereavement when leading
representatives of the two classes are removed from the scenes of their
labors. Compare the quiet with which the ordinary wave of business
interests and topic closed almost immediately over the announcement of
the death of Horace Mann, with the protracted eulogy and untiring
reminiscence of person, habits, work, and success, that, after the
decease of William H. Prescott, kept the great wave of current topics
parted for weeks--as if another Red Sea were divided, and the spirit of
the historian, lingering to the chanting of solemn requiems, should pass
over it dry-shod! For the great historian this was indeed no excess of
honor, because grand human natures are worthy of all our praises; but
was there not a painful want of respect and requital to the equally
great educator? Prescott wrote admirable volumes, and in our libraries
they will be 'a joy forever.' Horace Mann secured admirable means of
instruction, made admirable schools, awakened to their best achievements
the souls of our children; and his work is one to be measured by
enlarging streams of beauty and joy that flow down through the
generations. Would that, in the midst of so much justice as we willingly
render to self-sacrifice and worth, we could less easily forget those
whose labor it is directly to fit mankind for a higher nobleness, and
for higher appreciation of it when enacted in their behalf!
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