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AN ESSAY TOWARDS
A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
+------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| HOME EDUCATION. |
| |
| PARENTS AND CHILDREN. |
| |
| SCHOOL EDUCATION. |
| |
| OURSELVES. |
| |
| SOME STUDIES IN THE FORMATION OF |
| CHARACTER. |
| |
| THE SAVIOUR OF THE WORLD: OR, THE |
| GOSPELS IN VERSE. |
| Each Volume profusely illustrated. |
| |
| VOL. I: THE HOLY INFANCY. |
| VOL. II: HIS DOMINION. |
| VOL. III: KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. |
| VOL. IV: BREAD OF LIFE. |
| VOL. V: THE GREAT CONTROVERSY. |
| VOL. VI: THE TRAINING OF THE DISCIPLES. |
| |
| THE AMBLESIDE GEOGRAPHY READERS. |
| |
| BOOK 1.--ELEMENTARY. Maps, Plans, etc. |
| |
| BOOK 2.--CHIEF DIVISIONS OF THE WORLD, |
| with special reference to the British |
| Empire. |
| |
| BOOK 3.--COUNTIES OF ENGLAND. |
| |
| BOOK 4.--EUROPE. |
| |
| BOOK 5.--ASIA, AFRICA, N. AND S. AMERICA, |
| AUSTRALIA. |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------+
An Essay Towards
A Philosophy of Education
A LIBERAL EDUCATION FOR ALL
BY
CHARLOTTE M. MASON
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER, & CO., LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE: 68-74, CARTER LANE, E.C. 4
1925
_Printed in Great Britain by
The Bowering Press, Plymouth._
“ALL KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL MEN.”
_Comenius._
“Books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good,
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”
_Wordsworth._
Contents
PAGE
FOREWORD xxiii
PREFACE xxv
SYNOPSIS xxix
INTRODUCTION 1
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
SELF-EDUCATION 23
Not self-expression--A person, built up from within--Life,
sustained on food--Plant analogy misleading--Mental and
physical gymnastics--Mental food--The life of the mind--Proper
sustenance--Knowledge, not sensation or information--Education,
of the spirit--Cannot be applied from without--Modern educators
belittle children--Education will profit by divorce from
sociology--Danger of an alliance with pathology--A comprehensive
theory--Fits all ages--Self-education--All children have
intellectual capacity--Should learn to ‘read’ before mechanical
art of reading--Are much occupied with things and books--A
knowledge of principles, necessary--Education chaotic for want of
unifying theory--The motive that counts.
CHAPTER II
CHILDREN ARE BORN PERSONS 33
1.--_The Mind of a Child_: The baby, more than a huge
oyster--Poets on infancy--Accomplishments of a child of
two--Education does not produce mind--The range of a child’s
thoughts--Reason and imagination present in the infant--Will and
wilfulness.
2.--_The Mind of a School-Child_: Amazing potentialities--Brain,
the organ of mind--The “unconscious mind,” a region of
symptoms--Mind, being spiritual, knows no fatigue--Brain, duly
fed, should not know fatigue--A “play-way” does not lead to
mind--Nor does environment--Mind must come into contact with
mind--What is mind?--Material things have little effect upon
mind--Education, the evidence of things not seen--Ideas, only fit
sustenance for mind--Children must have great ideas--Children
_experience_ what they hear and read of--Our want of confidence
in children--Children see, in their minds--Mind, one and works
altogether--Children must _see_ the world--Dangers of technical,
commercial, historical geography--Every man’s mind, his means
of living--All classes must be educated--The æsthetic sense--A
child’s intellect and heart already furnished--He learns to order
his life.
3.--_Motives for Learning_: Diluted teaching--_Every_ child has
infinite possibilities--The Parents’ Union School--The House of
Education--Teachers must know capabilities and requirements of
children.
CHAPTER III
THE GOOD AND EVIL NATURE OF A CHILD 46
1.--_Well-Being of Body_: “Children of wrath”--“Little
angel” theory--Good and evil tendencies--Education, handmaid
of Religion--Religion becoming more magnanimous--New-born
children start fair--Children, more of persons in their
homes--Appetites--Senses--Undue nervous tension--Overpowering
personality--Parasitic habits.
2.--_Well-Being of Mind_: Mind, not a chartered
libertine--Has good and evil tendencies--Intellectual
evil--Intellect enthroned in every child--A child’s vivifying
imagination--Explanations unnecessary--Children sense the
meaning of a passage--_Incuria_--Going over same ground--Dangers
of specialisation--Of the _questionnaire_--Capacity _v._
aptness--Imagination, good and evil--Reason deified by
the unlearned--Fallacious reasoning--A liberal education
necessary--The beauty sense.
3.--_Intellectual Appetite_: The desires--Wrong use of--Love of
knowledge sufficient stimulus.
4.--_Misdirected Affections_: The feelings--Love and
justice--Moral education--Children must not be fed morally--They
want food whose issue is conduct--Moral lessons worse than
useless--Every child endowed with love--And justice--Rights and
duties--Fine art of self-adjustment--To think fairly requires
knowledge--Our thoughts are not our own--Truth, justice in
word--Opinions show integrity of thought--Sound principles--All
children intellectually hungry--Starve on the three R’s.
5.--_The Well-Being of the Soul_: Education and the Soul of
a child--Ignorance of the child--Approaches towards God--How
knowledge grows--Narration--Great thoughts of great thinkers
illuminate children--Education drowned by talk--Formative
influence of knowledge--Self-expression--Education, a going forth
of the mind--The “unconscious mind”--Mind always conscious--But
thinks in ways of which we are unconscious--Dangers of
introspection--“Complexes”--Necessity for a Philosophy of
Education.
CHAPTER IV
AUTHORITY AND DOCILITY 68
Deputed authority, lodged in everyone--No such thing as
anarchy--A mere transference of authority--Authority makes
for Liberty--Order, the outcome of authority--Docility,
universal--The principles of authority and docility inherent
in everyone--_Crux_, to find the mean--Freedom, offered as
solution--“Proud subjection and dignified obedience”--Secured
by feeding the mind--Subservience _v._ docility--Docility
implies equality--Physical activities do not sustain mind--Many
relationships must be established--No undue emphasis--Sense of
_must_ in teacher and child--Freedom comes with knowledge--The
office makes the man--Children must have responsibility of
learning--The potency of their minds--All children have quick
apprehension--And the power of attention--Humane letters make for
efficiency--Delightful to use any power--Common interests--Powers
of attention and recollection a national asset--But want of
intellectual interests a serious handicap.
CHAPTER V
THE SACREDNESS OF PERSONALITY 80
An adequate conception of children necessary--All
action comes from the ideas held--The child’s estate
higher than ours--Methods of undermining personality--
Fear--Love--“Suggestion”--Influence--Methods of stultifying
intellectual and moral growth--The desires--Of approbation--Of
emulation--Of ambition--Of society--The natural desire of
knowledge--Definite progress, a condition of education--Doctrine
of equal opportunities for all, dangerous--But a liberal
education the possibility for all.
CHAPTER VI
THREE INSTRUMENTS OF EDUCATION 94
1.--_Education is an Atmosphere_: Only three means of
education--Not an artificial environment--But a natural
atmosphere--Children must face life as it is--But must not be
overburdened by the effort of decision--Dangers of intellectual
feebleness and moral softness--Bracing atmosphere of truth and
sincerity--Not a too stimulating atmosphere--Dangers of “running
wild”--Serenity comes with the food of knowledge--Two courses
open to us.
2.--_Education is a Discipline_: We must all make efforts--But
a new point of view, necessary--Children must work for
themselves--Must perform the _act of knowing_--Attention, the
hall-mark of an educated person--Other good habits attending upon
due self-education--Spirit, acts upon matter--Habit is to life
what rails are to transport cars--Habit is inevitable--Genesis
of habit--Habits of the ordered life--Habits of the religious
life--De Quincey on going to church--Danger of thinking in a
groove--Fads.
3.--_Education is a Life_: Life is not self-existing--Body pines
upon food substitutes--Mind cannot live upon information--What
is an idea?--A live thing of the mind--Potency of an
idea--Coleridge on ideas--Platonic doctrine of ideas--Functions
of education not chiefly gymnastic--Dangers attendant upon
“original composition”--Ideas, of spiritual origin--The child,
an eclectic--Resists forcible feeding--We must take the risk of
the indirect literary form--Ideas must be presented with much
literary padding--No one capable of making extracts--Opinions
_v._ ideas--Given an idea, mind performs acts of selection and
inception--Must have humane reading as well as human thought.
CHAPTER VII
HOW WE MAKE USE OF MIND 112
Herbartian Psychology--“Apperception masses”--Dangers of
correlation--“Concentration series”--Children reduced to
inanities--Mind, a spiritual organism--Cannot live upon
“sweetmeats”--Burden of education thrown on teacher--Danger of
exalting personality of teacher--“Delightful lessons”--_Across
the Bridges_, by A. Paterson--Blind alleys--Unemployment--Best
boys run to seed--Continuation Classes--Education Act of
1918--An eight hours’ University course--Academic ideal of
Education--Continuation school, a People’s University--Dangers
of utilitarian education--The “humanities” in English--Narration
prepares for public speaking--Father of the People’s High
Schools--Munich schools--Worship of efficiency--A well-grounded
humanistic training produces capacity--Mr. Fisher on Continuation
Schools--A more excellent way--Education from six to seventeen--A
liberal education for all.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAY OF THE WILL 128
Will, “the sole practical faculty”--“The will is the man”--Its
function, to choose, to decide--Opinions provided for us--We take
second-hand principles--One possible achievement, character--Aim
in education, less conduct than character--Assaults upon the
will--“Suggestion”--Voluntary and involuntary action--We
must choose between suggestions--Danger of suggestion given
by another with intent--Vicarious choosing--Weakens power
of choice--Parasitic creatures may become criminal--Gordon
Riots--His will, the safeguard of a man--Indecent to probe
thoughts of the “unconscious mind”--Right thinking, _not_
self-expression--It flows upon the stimulus of an idea--Will must
be fortified--Knowledge of the “city of Mansoul” necessary--Also
instruction concerning the will--Dangers of drifting--A child
must distinguish between will and wilfulness--A strong will
and “being good”--Will must have object outside of self--Is
of slow growth--Will _v._ impulse--A constant will, compasses
evil or good--The “single eye”--_Bushido_--Will, subject to
solicitation--Does not act alone--Takes the whole man--He must
_understand_ in order to will--Will, a free agent--Choice, a
heavy labour--Obedience, the sustainer of personality--Obedience
of choice--Persons of constant will--Dangers of weak
allowance--Two services open to all--Self and God--Will is
supreme--Will wearies of opposition--Diversion--The “way of the
will”--Freewill--We may not think what we please--Will supported
by instructed conscience and trained reason--Education must
prepare for immediate choice--Adequate education must be outward
bound.
CHAPTER IX
THE WAY OF THE REASON 139
Reason brings forward infallible proofs--May be furtherer of
counsels, good _or_ bad--Inventions--How did you think of
it?--Children should follow steps of reasoning--Psychology
of crime--Reasonable and right, not synonymous--Reason works
involuntarily--Reason never begins it--Reason will affirm any
theory--Logic, the formula of reason--But not necessarily
right--Beauty and wonder of act of reasoning--But there
are limitations--We must be able to expose fallacies--Karl
Marx--Socialistic thought of to-day--Reason requires material
to work upon--Reason subject to habit--Children must have
principles--Be able to detect fallacies--Must know what Religion
is--Miracles--Quasi-religious offers--Great things of life
cannot be proved--Reason is fallible--Children, intensely
reasonable--Reasoning power of a child does not wait upon
training--But children do not generalise--Must not be hurried to
formulate--Mathematics should not monopolise undue time--Cannot
alone produce a reasonable soul.
CHAPTER X
THE CURRICULUM 154
Standard in Secondary Schools set by public
examinations--Elementary Schools less limited with regard
to subjects--A complete curriculum in the nature of
things--Education still at sea--Children have inherent
claims--Law of supply and demand--Human nature a composite
whole--The educational rights of man--We may not pick and
choose--Shelley offers a key--Mistakes _v._ howlers--Knowledge
should be consecutive, intelligent, complete--Hours of work, not
number of subjects, bring fatigue--Short hours--No preparation.
SECTION I: THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 158
Knowledge of God indispensable--Mothers communicate it
best--Relation to God a first-born affinity--“Kiddies” not
expected to understand--School education begins at six--_No
conscious mental effort_ should be required earlier--Dr.
Johnson on “telling again”--Two aspects of Religion--Attitude
of Will towards God--Gradual perception of God--Goethe
on repose of soul--Children must have passive as well as
active principle--New Testament teaching must be grounded
on Old--Sceptical children--Must not be evaded or answered
finally--A thoughtful commentator necessary--Method of lessons,
six to twelve, twelve to fifteen, fifteen to eighteen--Aids of
modern scholarship--Dogmatic teaching comes by inference--Very
little hortatory teaching desirable--Synthetic study of life and
teaching of Christ, a necessity--“Authentic comment” essayed in
verse--Catechism--Prayer Book--Church History.
SECTION II: THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN 169
(_a_) _History_: Montaigne on history--The League of Nations
and its parallels--_Henry VIII_ on precedent--Dangers of
indifference to history--Rational patriotism depends upon
knowledge of history--History must give more than impressions
and opinions--P.U.S. method multiplies time--Concentrated
attention given to the right books--Condition, a _single_
reading--Attention a natural function--Teacher’s interest
an incentive--Teacher who “makes allowance” for wandering,
hinders--Narration in the history lesson--Distinction between
word memory and mind memory--English history for children of six
to nine--Of nine to twelve--French history--Ancient history--For
children of twelve to fifteen--Indian history--European
history--History for pupils of fifteen to eighteen--Literature--A
mental pageant of history--Gives weight to decisions,
consideration to action, stability to conduct--Labour
unrest--Infinite educability of all classes--Equal opportunity
should be afforded--But uneasiness apt to follow--Knowledge
brings its own satisfaction--Education merely a means of getting
on, or, of progress towards high thinking and plain living.
II: THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN 180
(_b_) _Literature_: Literature in Form I--Classics, not
written down--In Form II--Children show originality in “mere
narration”--Just as Scott, Shakespeare, Homer--Children all
sit down to the same feast--Each gets according to his needs
and powers--Reading for Forms III and IV--Abridged editions
undesirable--Children take pleasure in the “dry” parts--Must have
a sense of wide spaces for the imagination to wander in--Judgment
turns over the folios of the mind--Statesmanship, formed upon
wide reading--Reading for Forms V and VI (fifteen to eighteen).
II: THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN 185
(_c_) _Morals and Economics_: _Citizenship_: Form
I--Tales--Fables--Hears of great citizens--Form II--The
inspiration of citizenship--Plutarch--Present day
citizenship--Problems of good and evil--Plutarch does not
label actions--Children weary of the doctored tale--The
human story always interesting--Jacob--The good, which is
all virtuous, palls--Children must see life whole--Must be
protected from grossness by literary medium--Learn the science
of proportion--Difficulty of choosing books--Chastely taught
children watch their thoughts--Expurgated editions--Processes
of nature must not be associated with impurity--Games--Offences
bred in the mind--Mind must be continually and wholesomely
occupied--A sound body and a sound mind--_Ourselves, our Souls
and Bodies_--An ordered presentation of the possibilities and
powers of human nature.
II: THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN 190
(_d_) _Composition_: Oral, from six to seven--Dangers of
teaching composition--The art of “telling”--Power of composition
innate--Oral and written from nine to twelve--Integral
part of education in every subject--From twelve to
fifteen--An inevitable consequence of free and exact use of
books--Verse--Scansion--Rhythm--Accent--Subject must be one
of keen interest--From fifteen to eighteen, some definite
teaching--Suggestions or corrections--Education bears on the
issues and interests of everyday life.
II: THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN 209
(_e_) _Languages_: English--Grammar--Begin with
sentence--Difficulty of abstract knowledge--French--Narration
from the beginning--Italian--German--Latin.
II: THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN 213
(_f_) _Art_: Art is of the spirit--Reverent knowledge of
pictures themselves--Method--No talk of schools of painting
or style--Picture tells its own tale--Drawing--Original
illustrations--Figures--Objects--Colour--Field
studies--Architecture--Clay-modelling--Artistic
handicrafts--Musical Appreciation.
SECTION III: THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE 218
(_a_) _Science_: Huxley--“Common information”--Books should be
literary in character--French approach to science--Principles
underlying science meet for literary treatment--Details of
application too technical for school work--Universal principles
must be linked with common incidents--Verbiage that darkens
counsel--Out-of-door work--Natural history, botany, astronomy,
physiology, hygiene, general science--A due combination of field
work with literary comments--Fatal divorce between science and
the “humanities”--Nature Note Books--Science not a utilitarian
subject.
_Geography_: Suffers from utilitarian spirit--Mystery and
beauty gone--Modern geography, concerned with man’s profit--A
map should unfold a panorama of delight--Map work--Children
read and picture descriptions--Knowledge of England, a key
to the world--Naval history--Empire geography--Current
geography--Countries of Europe--Romance of natural features,
peoples, history, industries--Generalisations, not
geography--Children must see with the mind’s eye--Two ways of
teaching geography--Inferential method--But general principles
open to modification--No local colour and personal interests--No
imaginative conception--Panoramic method--Gives colour, detail,
proportion, principles--Pictures not of much use--Except those
constructed by the imagination from written descriptions--Survey
of Asia--Africa--America--Physical geography--Geography in
connection with history--Practical geography.
III: THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE 230
(_b_) _Mathematics_: Reasoning powers do not wait upon our
training--Beauty and truth of Mathematics--A sense of limitation
wholesome--We should hear _sursum corda_ in natural law--Mind
invigorated by hard exercise--Mathematics easy to examine
upon--Dangers of education directed not to awaken awe but to
secure exactness--Which does not serve in other departments
of life--Work upon special lines qualifies for work on those
only--Mathematics to be studied for their own sake--Not as
they make for general intelligence and grasp of mind--Genius
has her rights--Tendency to sacrifice the “humanities” to
Mathematics--Mathematics depend upon the teacher--Few subjects
worse taught--A necessary part of education.
III: THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE 233
(_c_) _Physical Development, Handicrafts._ No special methods for
these.
BOOK II
THEORY APPLIED
CHAPTER I
A LIBERAL EDUCATION IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 235
A liberal education, birthright of every child--Good life implies
cultivated intelligence--Difficulty of offering Humanism to
everyone--Problem solved at last--by the Drighlington School
(Yorks)--Teachers, not satisfied--Potency, not property,
characteristic of mind--We try to give potency rather than
knowledge--Result, devitalisation--Mind receives knowledge _in
order to grow, not to know_--Office of teacher depreciated--He
has prophetic power of appeal and inspiration--Delightful
commerce of equal minds--And friction of wills ceases--Children
not products of education and environment--Carlyle on “a
person”--Children not incomplete and undeveloped, but
ignorant and weak--Potentialities of a child as he is--_David
Copperfield_--Knowledge, conceived in mind--Ignorance, a chief
cause of our difficulties--Matthew Arnold--Three divisions
of knowledge--All classed under Humanism--Mind acts upon
it--Vitality results--Mind and knowledge like ball and socket
joint--Results of P.N.E.U. method made good by thousands of
children--Work done by self-effort--Single reading tested
by narration--No revision--For children _know_--Use proper
names with ease--Write fully--Rarely make howlers--Get at
gist of book or subject--Children of six to eight dictate
answers at examination time--Teacher reads with intention--Is
careful to produce author--Children listen with attention--No
selection of subjects--Book read through--Older children read
for themselves--Work done in less time--No preparation--No
working-up--Time for vocational work--Such education, a social
lever--A venture of faith--In knowledge and in children--A
new product appears--Peculiar experience, misleading--General
experience testifies to laws--Usual educational equipment
based on false assumption--Which intervenes between child and
knowledge--Method specially suitable for large classes--Labour
of correction minimised--Choice of books--Character of P.U.S.
examination--Children reject wrong book--Great cause of Education
_v_. Civilisation--Grand elementary principle of pleasure--Only
one education common to all.
CHAPTER II
A LIBERAL EDUCATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 250
Pelmanism, an indictment--Monotonous drudgery the stumbling-block
to education--A “play way”--Handicrafts--Eurhythmics--Enthusiasm
of teachers amazing--Education, a passion--_Joan and Peter_
types--Public School men do the work of the world--But schools
do not teach what a boy wants to know--Mulish resistance--Ways
of mind subtle and evasive--The error of “not what you know
that matters but how you learn it”--Every school must educate
every scholar--What is knowledge?--Intellectual requirements
satisfied by bridge and golf--Attention acts without marks,
praise or blame--But training, not education--No faculties,
only mind--Text-books make no appeal to mind--Way of Natural
Science through field work illuminated by literature--Mind,
a crucible, but no power to distil ideas from sawdust--Dr.
Arnold--“Very various reading”--Mind, a deceiver ever--Class
will occupy itself and accomplish nothing--Outer court of
mind--Inner place where personality dwells--We “go over it in our
minds”--Attention must not be allowed a crutch--Should be tested
by the reader--Knowledge, received with attention, fixed by
narration--We have ceased to believe in mind--Physical brain and
spiritual mind--Education must go as a bolt to the mind--Teacher
not a bridge--A key to humanistic teaching in English--A
liberal education, measured by the number of substantives used
with fitness and simplicity--The school not merely a nursery
for the formation of character--Knowledge in common for the
“masses” and the “classes”--All hearts rise to a familiar
allusion--Speech with those who know--Opposition, natural
resource of ignorance--A democratic education--We shall cease
to present motives of self-interest and personal advantage--The
classics in English--Old exclusive education must broaden its
base and narrow its bounds--Avoid overlapping--Academic success
and knowledge not the same thing--Brilliant, average and dull
children delight in knowledge--It unites the household--Makes
children delightful companions--A fine sense of things
worth knowing and living for--Magnanimity, proper outcome
of education--The schoolboy’s sterile syllabus--In spite of
culture common among teachers--A method which brings promise of
relief from _aphasia_--Barrenness in the written essay--Oral
composition, a habit from six to eighteen--Method cannot be
worked without a firm adherence to principle--Otherwise the books
a failure--Parents must provide necessary books--Which must take
root in the homes--Spelling comes with the use of books--Books
_and_ text-books--The choice of books, a question of division of
labour--Terminal examinations, records of permanent value--Bible
teaching must further the knowledge of God--The law and the
prophets still interpreters--History, the rich pasture of the
mind--Amyot on history--Plutarch--Poets--Every age has its
poetic aspect--Gathered up by a Shakespeare--A Dante--A world
possession--An essence of history which is poetry--An essence of
science to be expressed in exquisite prose--Art--Drawing, not
a means of self-expression--Languages--Possibility of becoming
linguists--Finally, another basis for education--Which must be
in touch with life--We aim at securing the vitality of many
minds--Which shall make England great in art and in life--Great
character comes from great thoughts--Great thoughts from great
thinkers--Thinking, not doing, the source of character.
CHAPTER III
THE SCOPE OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 279
Napoleonic Wars outcome of the wrong thinking of
ignorance--Intellectual renaissance followed--To be superseded by
the utilitarian motive--Continuation School movement--Technical
education--The Munich Schools--“The utilitarian theory profoundly
immoral”--“Service and self-direction”--But food and work not
synonymous terms--The wide reading of great statesmen--Duly
ordered education means self-sustaining minds and bodies--Moral
bankruptcy--Co-existent with utilitarian education--Moral
madness--National insanity--The better man does better
work--German efficiency--We depreciate ourselves--People’s High
Schools of Denmark--“A well of healing in the land”--“To blend
all classes into one”--A profoundly Christian movement--Widely
liberal as that of the “Angelic Doctor”--Agricultural
schools--Humanistic training for business capacity--A village
should offer happy community life--Intellectual well-being
makes for stability--An empty mind seizes on any notion--A
hungry mind, responsible for labour unrest--Continuation
Schools should not exist for technical instruction--Evening
hours still free for recreation--Eight hours a week for things
of the mind--Not for opinions--Lest leisure bore and strikes
attract--But for knowledge--Not for due exercise but for food--No
education but self-education--A great discovery has been
vouchsafed--Not a “good idea” or a “good plan”--But a natural
law in action--Grundtvig saw impassible barrier of no literary
background--But hope of Comenius “all knowledge for all men”
is taking shape--In the case of thousands of children--Even
dull and backward ones--Under the right conditions--Knowledge
meet for the people--The Parents’ Union School--A common
curriculum for _all_ children of _all_ classes--Test of a
liberal education--Only one education common to all--Nothing
can act but where it is--National work done by men brought up
on the “humanities”--Fetish of progress--The still progress
of growth--The “humanities” in English alone, bring forth
stability and efficiency--A common ground of thought has cohesive
value--Kindles light in the eyes--Peace, signalised by a new bond
of intellectual life--Danger of ignorance in action--A hopeful
sign--Demos perceives the lack.
CHAPTER IV
THE BASIS OF NATIONAL STRENGTH
A LIBERAL EDUCATION FROM A NATIONAL STANDPOINT 300
1. _Knowledge_: Failure of attempt to educate average
boy--Industrial unrest often reveals virtue but want
of knowledge--Dangerous tendency--The spirit of the
horde--Individual, less important--“Countenance,” a
manifestation of thought, dropped out of use--Never were more
devoted teachers--Substitutes for knowledge--A mischievous
fallacy--A child brought up for uses of society--Joy in
living a chief object of education--Knowledge is the
source of Pleasure--Children get knowledge for their own
sakes--Assets within power of all--Intellectual resources--No
dull hours--Knowledge passed like light of torch from
mind to mind--Kindled at original minds--A school judged
by books used--Indirect method of teaching--Parables of
Christ--Not enough even of the right books--Children, beings
“of large discourse”--Alertness comes of handling various
subjects--Scholarship _v._ knowledge--Napoleon a great
reader--Nations grow great upon books--Queen Louisa of
Prussia--Kant--Fichte--The Danes--The Japanese.
2. _Letters, Knowledge and Virtue_: Classics take so much
time--But University men, our educational achievement--Letters,
the content of Knowledge--Knowledge, not a store but a
state--Culture begins with the knowledge that everything has
been said and known--We have a loss to make good--Rich and
poor used to be familiar with the Bible--A well of English
undefiled--And no longer rule as those who serve--Recklessness
due to ignorance--Scholarship, an exquisite distinction--But not
the best thing--Erudition, out of count--The average boy--Ladies
of the Italian and French Renaissance--Tudor women--“Infinitely
informed”--A leakage somewhere--Democracy coming in like a
flood--Examination tests should safeguard Letters--Which open
life-long resources--We need a practical philosophy--Not to be
arrived at by Economics, Eugenics--But gathered harvests of
Letters.
3. _Knowledge, Reason and Rebellion_: Irresponsibility
characterises our generation--Lettered ignorance follows specious
arguments to logical conclusions--Reason apt to be accompanied
by Rebellion--Reason cannot take place of Knowledge--Shakespeare
on reason--The art of living is long--Bodies of men act with
momentum which may be paralysing or propelling--Glorious thing
to perceive action of mind, reasoning power--Greek training
in use and power of words--Great thoughts anticipate great
works--People, conversant with great thoughts--Knowledge
of The Way, the Truth, the Life--A region of sterility
in intellectual life--Science the preoccupation of our
age--Principle of life goes with flesh stripped away--History
expires--Poetry, not brought forth--Religion faints--Science,
without wonder, not spiritual--Eighteenth Century Science
was alive--Lister--Pasteur--Science, as taught, leaves us
cold--Coleridge has revealed the secret--Science waits its
literature--We are all to blame--Man does not live by bread
alone--We are losing our sense of spiritual values--An industrial
revolution--“Humbler franchises” won by the loss of “spiritual
things”--Wordsworth--Trade Unionism a tyranny, centuries
ago--Predicts no triumph for Syndicalism now--Irresponsible
thought and speech--Question must be raised to plane of spiritual
things--Working man demands too little--And things that do not
matter--For knowledge, the basis of a nation’s strength.
4. _New and Old Conceptions of Knowledge_: Knowledge,
undefined and undefinable--Knowledge _v._ facts--England
suffering from intellectual inanition--Mediæval conception
of knowledge--_Filosofica della Religione Cattolica_--_The
Adoration of the Lamb_--Promethean Fable--Knowledge does
not arrive casually--Is not self-generated in man--“The
teaching power of the Spirit of God”--Unity of purpose in
the education of the race--Knowledge comes to the man who
is ready--“Abt Vogler”--All knowledge is sacred--A great
whole--Mind lives by knowledge--Which must not be limited
by choice--or time--Knowledge and “learning”--Country needs
persons of character--“New” educational systems present
a grain of knowledge in a gallon of diluent--Rousseau’s
theory--Joy in “sport”--Knowledge plays no part in
these--“Get understanding,” our need--Fallacious
arguments--Prejudice--Platitudes--Insincerity, outcome of
ignorance--Most teachers doing excellent work--New universities
full of promise--But need for the “Science of Relations”--And the
Science of the proportion of things.
5. _Education and the Fulness of Life_: “I must live
my life”--What should the life be?--We are doing
something--The book of nature--Relations with Mother
Earth--Sports--Handicrafts--Art--We all thrive in the well-being
of each--The contribution of our generation to the science
of education--Person to be brought up for his own uses--But
what of mind?--Mechanical art of reading, _not_ reading--An
unsuspected unwritten law concerning “material” converted into
knowledge--The Logos--“The words of eternal life”--Words,
more things than events--Rhetoric a power--Motives conveyed
by words--American negroes fell upon books--Mechanical labour
performed in solitude--Labour goes better because “my mind to
me a kingdom is”--Browning on mind--“Have mynde”--Faith has
grown feeble, Hope faints, Charity waxes strong--But social
amelioration not enough--The pleasant places of the mind--Books,
“watered down”--Christ exposed profoundest philosophy to
the multitude--Working men value knowledge--Can deal with
it--Emotional disturbances come from mind hunger.
6. _Knowledge in Literary Form_: Mind demands method--No one can
live without a philosophy which points out the end of effort--A
patchwork of principles betrays us--Human nature has not
failed--But education has failed us--A new scale of values--We
want more life--Engrossing interests--We want hope--Pleasure
comes in effort, not attainment--We want to be governed--A new
start--Other ways of looking at things--We are uneasy--And yet
almost anyone will risk his life--Splendid magnanimity in the
War--We are not decadent--Are ready for a life of passionate
devotion--Our demands met by Words--And by the manifestation of
a Person--“The shout of a King” among us--But _understanding_,
prior to good works--A consummate philosophy which meets every
occasion--The teaching of Christ--Other knowledge “dumb” without
the fundamental knowledge--Our latest educational authority on
imagination--Rousseau--Our chief business the education of
the succeeding generation--The slough of materialism--Children
must have freedom of city of mind even in order to handle
things--Imagination does not work upon a visual presentation--Dr.
Arnold and mental pictures--“Selections” to be avoided--Dangers
of the flood-gates of knowledge--Erasmus--Rossetti--Friedrich
Perthes--Publishers and their educational mission--Dr. Arnold
on reading--A crucial moment--John Bull on the results of forty
years’ education--England can be saved--Knowledge exalteth a
nation--Matthew Arnold’s monition.
SUPPLEMENTARY
TOO WIDE A MESH 343
A luminous figure of Education--But only ‘universal
opportunity’--No new thing--No universal boon like air--Only
for the few who choose--No reflection on Public Schools but
on the system of the Big Mesh--The letters of two Public
School boys pathetic but reassuring--Desire of knowledge,
inextinguishable--But limitations of the absence of education--No
cultivated sense of humour--No sense of the supreme
delightfulness of knowledge--_Coningsby_--Teaching how to learn,
a farce--No avenue to knowledge but knowledge itself.
INDEX 349
_The Trustees have, at the request of the Publishers, been obliged
to reduce the original volume. Two important sections on the
practical work have been omitted,--(A)--Children’s examination
answers and, (B)--Some discussions of the method by Educational
Authorities and teachers. A pamphlet will be issued from the
P.N.E.U. Office, 26, Victoria Street, S.W., covering section B.
Sets of children’s answers (A) can be seen at the P.N.E.U. Office,
26, Victoria Street, S.W._
Foreword
Our forefathers trusted of yore to the rod and to coercion for
the evoking in children of a love of learning. For the last fifty
years we have rested our hopes on the enthusiasm of the teachers.
But that enthusiasm, when not fictitious, often acts prejudicially
by diverting the child’s love of knowledge and new ideas into
admiration for his teacher: and when that fails, as it frequently
does, nothing is left, except extraneous and baneful appeals to
self-interest.
Miss Mason saw and in this volume has explained that the natural
and only quite wholesome way of teaching is to let the child’s
desire for knowledge operate in the schoolboy and guide the
teacher. This means that without foregoing discipline, nor cutting
ourselves off from tradition, we must continue experiments already
being started in our elementary schools. These are based on the
chastening fact that children learn best before we adults begin
to teach them at all: and hence that however uncongenial the task
may be, we must conform our teaching methods to those of Nature.
The attempt has often been made before. But in this volume there
is a rare combination of intuitive insight and practical sagacity.
The author refused to believe that the collapse of the desire for
knowledge between seven and seventeen years of age is inevitable.
So must we.
EDWARD LYTTELTON, D.D.
Preface
It would seem a far cry from _Undine_ to a ‘liberal education’
but there is a point of contact between the two; a soul awoke
within a water-sprite at the touch of love; so, I have to tell
of the awakening of a ‘general soul’ at the touch of knowledge.
Eight[1] years ago the ‘soul’ of a class of children in a mining
village school awoke simultaneously at this magic touch and has
remained awake. We know that religion can awaken souls, that love
makes a new man, that the call of a vocation may do it, and in
the age of the Renaissance, men’s souls, the general soul, awoke
to knowledge: but this appeal rarely reaches the modern soul;
and, notwithstanding the pleasantness attending lessons and marks
in all our schools, I believe the ardour for knowledge in the
children of this mining village is a phenomenon that indicates new
possibilities. Already many thousands of the children of the Empire
had experienced this intellectual conversion, but they were the
children of educated persons. To find that the children of a mining
population were equally responsive seemed to open a new hope for
the world. It may be that the souls of all children are waiting for
the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living.
This is how the late Mrs. Francis Steinthal, who was the happy
instigator of the movement in Council Schools, wrote,--“Think of
the meaning of this in the lives of the children,--disciplined
lives, and no lawless strikes, justice, an end to class warfare,
developed intellects, and no market for trashy and corrupt
literature! We shall, or rather they will, live in a redeemed
world.” This was written in a moment of enthusiasm on hearing
that a certain County Council had accepted a scheme of work for
this pioneer school; enthusiasm sees in advance the fields white
to the harvest, but indeed the event is likely to justify high
expectations. Though less than nine years have passed since that
pioneer school made the bold attempt, already many thousands of
children working under numerous County Councils are finding that
“Studies serve for delight.”
No doubt children are well taught and happy in their lessons as
things are, and this was specially true of the school in question;
yet both teachers and children find an immeasurable difference
between the casual interest roused by marks, pleasing oral lessons
and other school devices, and the sort of steady avidity for
knowledge that comes with the awakened soul. The children have
converted the school inspectors: “And the English!” said one of
these in astonishment as he listened to their long, graphic,
dramatic narrations of what they had heard. During the last thirty
years we (including many fellow workers) have had thousands of
children, in our schoolrooms, home and other, working on the lines
of Dean Colet’s prayer for St. Paul’s School,--“Pray for the
children to prosper in good life and good literature;” probably all
children so taught grow up with such principles and pursuits as
make for happy and useful citizenship.
I should like to add that we have no axe to grind. The public good
is our aim; and the methods proposed are applicable in any school.
My object in offering this volume to the public is to urge upon all
who are concerned with education a few salient principles which are
generally either unknown or disregarded; and a few methods which,
like that bathing in Jordan, are too simple to commend themselves
to the ‘general.’ Yet these principles and methods make education
entirely effectual.
I should like to add that no statement that I have advanced in the
following volume rests upon opinion only. Every point has been
proved in thousands of instances, and the method may be seen at
work in many schools, large and small, Elementary and Secondary.
I have to beg the patience of the reader who is asked to approach
the one terminus by various avenues, and I cannot do so better than
in the words of old Fuller:--“Good Reader. I suspect I may have
written some things twice; if not in the same words yet in sense,
which I desire you to pass by favourably, forasmuch as you may
well think, it was difficult and a dull thing for me in so great
a number of independent sentences to find out the repetitions....
Besides the pains, such a search would cost me more time than I
can afford it; for my glass of life running now low, I must not
suffer one sand to fall in waste nor suffer one minute in picking
of straws.... But to conclude this, since in matters of advice,
Precept must be upon Precept, Line upon Line, I apologise in the
words of St. Paul, ‘To write the same things to you to me indeed is
not grievous, but for you it is safe.’”
I am unwilling to close what is probably the last preface I shall
be called upon to write without a very grateful recognition of the
co-operation of those friends who are working with me in what seems
to us a great cause. The Parents’ National Educational Union has
fulfilled its mission, as declared in its first prospectus, nobly
and generously. “The Union exists for the benefit of parents and
teachers of _all classes_;” and, for the last eight[2] years it
has undertaken the labour and expense of an energetic propaganda
on behalf of Elementary Schools, of which about 150[3] are now
working on the programmes of the Parents’ Union School. During the
last year a pleasing and hopeful development has taken place under
the auspices of the Hon. Mrs. Franklin. It was suggested to the
Head of a London County Council School to form an association of
the parents of the children in that school, offering them certain
advantages and requiring a small payment to cover expenses. At the
first meeting one of the fathers present got up and said that he
was greatly disappointed. He had expected to see some three hundred
parents and there were only about sixty present! The promoters of
the meeting were, however, well pleased to see the sixty, most of
whom became members of the Parents’ Association, and the work goes
on with spirit.
We are deeply indebted to many fellow-workers, but not even that
very courteous gentleman who once wrote a letter to the Romans
could make suitable acknowledgments to all of those to whom we owe
the success of a movement the _rationale_ of which I attempt to
make clear in the following pages.
CHARLOTTE M. MASON.
HOUSE OF EDUCATION,
AMBLESIDE.
1922.
A Short Synopsis
OF THE EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY ADVANCED IN THIS VOLUME
“_No sooner doth the truth ... come into the soul’s sight, but
the soul knows her to be her first and old acquaintance._”
“_The consequence of truth is great; therefore the judgment of it
must not be negligent._” (WHICHCOTE).
1. Children are born _persons_.
2. They are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for
good and for evil.
3. The principles of authority on the one hand, and of 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 the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or by
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. The P.N.E.U. Motto is: “Education is
an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.”
6. When we say that “_education is an atmosphere_,” we do not
mean 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_,” we mean the discipline of
habits, formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of
mind or body. Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain
structures to habitual lines of thought, _i.e._, to our habits.
8. In 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. We hold that the 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.
10. Such a doctrine as _e.g._ the Herbartian, that the mind is
a receptacle, lays the stress of Education (the preparation of
knowledge in enticing morsels duly ordered) upon the teacher.
Children taught on 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.”
11. But we, believing that the normal child has powers of mind
which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a
full and generous curriculum; taking care only that all knowledge
offered him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without
their informing ideas. Out of this conception comes our principle
that,--
12. “_Education is the Science of Relations_”; that is, that a
child has natural relations with a vast number of things and
thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore,
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.”
13. In devising a SYLLABUS for a normal child, of whatever social
class, three points must be considered:--
(_a_) He requires _much_ knowledge, for the mind needs sufficient
food as much as does the body.
(_b_) The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental
diet does not create appetite (_i.e._, curiosity).
(_c_) Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language,
because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in
literary form.
14. As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced,
children should ‘tell back’ after a single reading or hearing: or
should write on some part of what they have read.
15. A _single reading_ is insisted on, because children have
naturally great power of attention; but this force is dissipated by
the re-reading of passages, and also, by questioning, summarising,
and the like.
Acting upon these and some other points in the behaviour of mind,
we find that _the educability of children is enormously greater
than has hitherto been supposed_, and is but little dependent on
such circumstances as heredity and environment.
Nor is the accuracy of this statement limited to clever children
or to children of the educated classes: thousands of children in
Elementary Schools respond freely to this method, which is based on
the _behaviour of mind_.
16. There are two guides to moral and intellectual self-management
to offer to children, which we may call ‘the way of the will’ and
‘the way of the reason.’
17. _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_ 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.)
18. _The way of reason_: We teach children, too, not to ‘lean (too
confidently) to their own understanding’; because the function
of reason is to give logical demonstration (_a_) of mathematical
truth, (_b_) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the
former case, reason is, practically, an infallible guide, but in
the latter, it is not always a safe one; for, whether that idea be
right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs.
19. 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 ideas. To help them in this choice we give them principles of
conduct, and a wide range of the knowledge fitted to them. These
principles 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.
20. We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and
‘spiritual’ life of children, but 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.
Introduction
These are anxious days for all who are engaged in education.
We rejoiced in the fortitude, valour and devotion shown by our
men in the War and recognize that these things are due to the
Schools as well as to the fact that England still breeds “very
valiant creatures.” It is good to know that “the whole army was
illustrious.” The heroism of our officers derives an added impulse
from that tincture of ‘letters’ that every Public schoolboy gets,
and those “playing fields” where boys acquire habits of obedience
and command. But what about the abysmal ignorance shown in the
wrong thinking of many of the men who stayed at home? Are we to
blame? I suppose most of us feel that we are: for these men are
educated as we choose to understand education, that is, they can
read and write, think perversely, and follow an argument, though
they are unable to detect a fallacy. If we ask in perplexity,
why do so many men and women seem incapable of generous impulse,
of reasoned patriotism, of seeing beyond the circle of their own
interests, is not the answer, that men are enabled for such things
by education? These are the marks of educated persons; and when
millions of men who should be the backbone of the country seem to
be dead to public claims, we have to ask,--Why then are not these
persons educated, and what have we given them in lieu of education?
Our errors in education, so far as we have erred, turn upon the
conception we form of ‘mind,’ and the theory which has filtered
through to most teachers implies the out-of-date notion of the
development of ‘faculties,’ a notion which itself rests on the
axiom that thought is no more than a function of the brain. Here
we find the sole justification of the scanty curricula provided in
most of our schools, for the tortuous processes of our teaching,
for the mischievous assertion that “it does not matter what a
child learns but only how he learns it.” If we teach much and
children learn little we comfort ourselves with the idea that we
are ‘developing’ this or the other ‘faculty.’ A great future lies
before the nation which shall perceive that knowledge is the sole
concern of education proper, as distinguished from training, and
that knowledge is the necessary daily food of the mind.
Teachers are looking out for the support of a sound theory, and
such a theory must recognize with conviction the part mind plays
in education and the conditions under which this prime agent acts.
We want a philosophy of education which, admitting that thought
alone appeals to mind, that thought begets thought, shall relegate
to their proper subsidiary places all those sensory and muscular
activities which are supposed to afford intellectual as well as
physical training. The latter is so important in and for itself
that it needs not to be bolstered up by the notion that it includes
the whole, or the practically important part, of education. The
same remark holds good of vocational training. Our journals ask
with scorn,--“Is there no education but what is got out of books at
school? Is not the lad who works in the fields getting education?”
and the public lacks the courage to say definitely, “No, he is
not,” because there is no clear notion current as to what education
means, and how it is to be distinguished from vocational training.
But the people themselves begin to understand and to clamour for
an education which shall qualify their children for life rather
than for earning a living. As a matter of fact, it is the man who
has read and thought on many subjects who is, with the necessary
training, the most capable whether in handling tools, drawing
plans, or keeping books. The more of a person we succeed in making
a child, the better will he both fulfil his own life and serve
society.
Much thoughtful care has been spent in ascertaining the causes of
the German breakdown in character and conduct; the war scourge
was symptomatic and the symptoms have been duly traced to their
cause in the thoughts the people have been taught to think during
three or four generations. We have heard much about Nietzsche,
Treitschke, Bernhardi and the rest; but Professor Muirhead did us
good service in carrying the investigation further back. Darwin’s
theories of natural selection, the survival of the fittest, the
struggle for existence, struck root in Germany in fitting soil; and
the ideas of the superman, the super state, the right of might--to
repudiate treaties, to eliminate feebler powers, to recognize no
law but expediency--all this appears to come as naturally out of
Darwinism as a chicken comes out of an egg. No doubt the same
_dicta_ have struck us in the _Commentaries_ of Frederick the
Great; “they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep
who can,” is ages older than Darwin, but possibly this is what our
English philosopher did for Germany:--There is a tendency in human
nature to elect the obligations of natural law in preference to
those of spiritual law; to take its code of ethics from science,
and, following this tendency, the Germans found in their reading of
Darwin sanction for manifestations of brutality.
Here are a few examples of how German philosophers amplify the
Darwinian text:--“In matter dwell all natural and spiritual
potencies. Matter is the foundation of all being.” “What we call
spirit, thought, the faculty of knowledge, consists of natural
though peculiarly combined forces.” Darwin himself protests against
the struggle for existence being the most potent agency where the
higher part of man’s nature is concerned, and he no more thought
of giving a materialistic tendency to modern education than Locke
thought of teaching principles which should bring about the
French Revolution; but men’s thoughts are more potent than they
know, and these two Englishmen may be credited with influencing
powerfully two world-wide movements. In Germany, “prepared by a
quarter of a century of materialistic thought,” the teaching of
Darwin was accepted as offering emancipation from various moral
restraints. Ernst Haeckel, his distinguished follower, finds
in the law of natural selection sanction for Germany’s lawless
action, and also, that pregnant doctrine of the superman. “This
principle of selection is nothing less than democratic; on the
contrary it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word.”
We know how Büchner, again, simplified and popularised these new
theories,--“All the faculties which we include under the name of
psychical activities are only functions of the brain substance.
Thought stands in the same relation to the brain as the gall to the
liver.”
What use, or misuse, Germany has made of the teaching of Darwin
would not (save for the War) be of immediate concern to us, were
it not that she has given us back our own in the form of that
“mythology of faculty psychology” which is all we possess in the
way of educational thought. English psychology proper has advanced
if not to firm ground, at any rate to the point of repudiating the
‘faculty’ basis. “However much assailed, the concept of a ‘mind’
is,” we are told, “to be found in all psychological writers.”[4]
But there are but mind and matter, and when we are told again that
“psychology rests on feeling,” where are we? Is there a middle
region?
II
We fail to recognize that as the body requires wholesome food and
cannot nourish itself upon _any_ substance so the mind too requires
meat after its kind. If the War taught nothing else it taught us
that men are spirits, that the spirit, mind, of a man is more than
his flesh, that his spirit _is_ the man, that for the thoughts
of his heart he gives the breath of his body. As a consequence
of this recognition of our spiritual nature, the lesson for us
at the moment is that the great thoughts, great events, great
considerations, which form the background of our national thought,
shall be the content of the education we pass on.
The educational thought we hear most about is, as I have said,
based on sundry Darwinian axioms out of which we get the notion
that nothing matters but physical fitness and vocational training.
However important these are, they are not the chief thing. A
century ago when Prussia was shipwrecked in the Napoleonic
wars it was discovered that not Napoleon but Ignorance was the
formidable national enemy; a few philosophers took the matter in
hand, and history, poetry, philosophy, proved the salvation of a
ruined nation, because such studies make for the development of
personality, public spirit, initiative, the qualities of which the
State was in need, and which most advance individual happiness
and success. On the other hand, the period when Germany made her
school curriculum utilitarian marks the beginning of her moral
downfall. History repeats itself. There are interesting rumours
afloat of how the students at Bonn, for example, went in solemn
procession to make a bonfire of French novels, certain prints,
articles of luxury and the like; things like these had brought
about the ruin of Germany and it was the part of the youth to save
her now as before. Are they to have another Tugendbund?
We want an education which shall nourish the mind while not
neglecting either physical or vocational training; in short,
we want a working philosophy of education. I think that we of
the P.N.E.U. have arrived at such a body of theory, tested and
corrected by some thirty years of successful practice with
thousands of children. This theory has already been set forth in
volumes[5] published at intervals during the last thirty-five
years; so I shall indicate here only a few salient points which
seem to me to differ from general theory and practice,--
(_a_) The children, not the teachers, are the responsible
persons; they do the work by self-effort.
(_b_) The teachers give sympathy and occasionally elucidate, sum
up or enlarge, but the actual work is done by the scholars.
(_c_) These read in a term one, or two, or three thousand pages,
according to their age, school and Form, in a large number of set
books. The quantity set for each lesson allows of only a single
reading; but the reading is tested by narration, or by writing on
a test passage. When the terminal examination is at hand so much
ground has been covered that revision is out of the question;
what the children have read they know, and write on any part of
it with ease and fluency, in vigorous English; they usually spell
well.
Much is said from time to time to show that ‘mere book-learning’
is rather contemptible, and that “Things are in the saddle and
ride mankind.” May I point out that whatever discredit is due to
the use of books does not apply to this method, which so far as I
can discover has not hitherto been employed. Has an attempt been
made before on a wide scale to secure that scholars should know
their books, many pages in many books, at a single reading, in
such a way that months later they can write freely and accurately
on any part of the term’s reading?
(_d_) There is no selection of studies, or of passages or of
episodes, on the ground of interest. The best available book is
chosen and is read through perhaps in the course of two or three
years.
(_e_) The children study many books on many subjects, but exhibit
no confusion of thought, and ‘howlers’ are almost unknown.
(_f_) They find that, in Bacon’s phrase, “Studies serve
for delight”; this delight being not in the lessons or the
personality of the teacher, but purely in their ‘lovely books,’
‘glorious books.’
(_g_) The books used are, whenever possible, literary in style.
(_h_) Marks, prizes, places, rewards, punishments, praise, blame,
or other inducements are not necessary to secure attention, which
is voluntary, immediate and surprisingly perfect.
(_i_) The success of the scholars in what may be called
disciplinary subjects, such as Mathematics and Grammar, depends
largely on the power of the teacher, though the pupils’ habit of
attention is of use in these too.
(_j_) No stray lessons are given on interesting subjects; the
knowledge the children get is consecutive.
The unusual interest children show in their work, their power
of concentration, their wide, and as far as it goes, accurate
knowledge of historical, literary and some scientific subjects, has
challenged attention and the general conclusion is that these are
the children of educated and cultivated parents. It was vain to
urge that the home schoolroom does not usually produce remarkable
educational results; but the way is opening to prove that the power
these children show is common to _all_ children; at last there is
hope that the offspring of working-class parents may be led into
the wide pastures of a liberal education.
Are we not justified in concluding that singular effects must have
commensurate causes, and that we have chanced to light on unknown
tracts in the region of educational thought. At any rate that
GOLDEN RULE of which Comenius was in search has discovered itself,
the Rule,--“WHEREBY TEACHERS SHALL TEACH LESS AND SCHOLARS SHALL
LEARN MORE.”
Let me now outline a few of the educational principles which
account for unusual results.
III
PRINCIPLES HITHERTO UNRECOGNIZED OR DISREGARDED
I have enumerated some of the points in which our work is
exceptional in the hope of convincing the reader that unusual
work carried on successfully in hundreds of schoolrooms--home
and other--is based on principles hitherto unrecognized. The
recognition of these principles should put our national education
on an intelligent basis and should make for general stability, joy
in living, and personal initiative.
May I add one or two more arguments in support of my plea,--
The appeal is not to the clever child only, but to the average and
even to the ‘backward’ child.
This scheme is carried out in less time than ordinary school work
on the same subjects.
There are no revisions, no evening lessons, no cramming or
‘getting up’ of subjects; therefore there is much time whether for
vocational work or interests or hobbies.
All intellectual work is done in the hours of morning school,
and the afternoons are given to field nature studies, drawing,
handicrafts, etc. Notwithstanding these limitations the children
produce a surprising amount of good intellectual work.
No home-work is required.
It is not that ‘we’ (of the P.N.E.U.) are persons of peculiar
genius; it is that, like Paley’s man who found the watch, “we have
chanced on a good thing.”
“No gain
That I experience must remain unshared.”
We feel that the country and indeed the world should have the
benefit of educational discoveries which act powerfully as a moral
lever, for we are experiencing anew the joy of the Renaissance, but
without its pagan lawlessness.
Let me trace as far as I can recall them the steps by which I
arrived at some of the conclusions upon which we are acting. While
still a young woman I saw a great deal of a family of Anglo-Indian
children who had come ‘home’ to their grandfather’s house and
were being brought up by an aunt who was my intimate friend. The
children were astonishing to me; they were persons of generous
impulses and sound judgment, of great intellectual aptitude, of
imagination and moral insight. These last two points were, I
recollect, illustrated one day by a little maiden of five who came
home from her walk silent and sad; some letting alone, and some
wise openings brought out at last between sobs,--“a poor man--no
home--nothing to eat--no bed to lie upon,”--and then the child was
relieved by tears. Such incidents are common enough in families,
but they were new to me. I was reading a good deal of philosophy
and ‘Education’ at the time for I thought with the enthusiasm of
a young teacher that Education should regenerate the world. I had
an Elementary School and a pioneer Church High School at this same
time so that I was enabled to study children in large groups; but
at school children are not so self-revealing as at home. I began
under the guidance of these Anglo-Indian children to take the
measure of a _person_ and soon to suspect that children are _more_
than we, their elders, except that their ignorance is illimitable.
One limitation I did discover in the minds of these little people;
my friend insisted that they could not understand English Grammar;
I maintained that they could and wrote a little Grammar (still
waiting to be prepared for publication!) for the two of seven and
eight; but she was right; I was allowed to give the lessons myself
with what lucidity and freshness I could command; in vain; the
Nominative ‘Case’ baffled them; their minds rejected the abstract
conception just as children reject the notion of writing an “Essay
on Happiness.” But I was beginning to make discoveries; the second
being, that the mind of a child takes or rejects according to its
needs.
From this point it was not difficult to go on to the perception
that, whether in taking or rejecting, the mind was functioning for
its own nourishment; that the mind, in fact, requires sustenance
as does the body, in order that it increase and be strong; but
because the mind is not to be measured or weighed but is spiritual,
so its sustenance must be spiritual too, must, in fact, be ideas
(in the Platonic sense of images). I soon perceived that children
were well equipped to deal with ideas, and that explanations,
questionings, amplifications, are unnecessary and wearisome.
Children have a natural appetite for knowledge which is informed
with thought. They bring imagination, judgment, and the various
so-called ‘faculties,’ to bear upon a new idea pretty much as the
gastric juices act upon a food ration. This was illuminating but
rather startling; the whole intellectual apparatus of the teacher,
his power of vivid presentation, apt illustration, able summing
up, subtle questioning, all these were hindrances and intervened
between children and the right nutriment duly served; this, on the
other hand, they received with the sort of avidity and simplicity
with which a healthy child eats his dinner.
The Scottish school of philosophers came to my aid here with
what may be called their doctrine of the desires, which, I
perceived, stimulate the action of mind and so cater for spiritual
(not necessarily religious) sustenance as the appetites do for
that of the body and for the continuance of the race. This was
helpful; I inferred that one of these, the Desire of Knowledge
(Curiosity) was the chief instrument of education; that this
desire might be paralysed or made powerless like an unused limb
by encouraging other desires to intervene between a child and the
knowledge proper for him; the desire for place,--emulation; for
prizes,--avarice; for power,--ambition; for praise,--vanity, might
each be a stumbling block to him. It seemed to me that we teachers
had unconsciously elaborated a system which should secure the
discipline of the schools and the eagerness of the scholars,--by
means of marks, prizes, and the like,--and yet eliminate that
knowledge-hunger, itself the quite sufficient incentive to
education.
Then arose the question,--Cannot people get on with little
knowledge? Is it really necessary after all? My child-friends
supplied the answer: their insatiable curiosity shewed me that the
wide world and its history was barely enough to satisfy a child who
had not been made apathetic by spiritual malnutrition. What, then,
is knowledge?--was the next question that occurred; a question
which the intellectual labour of ages has not settled; but perhaps
this is enough to go on with;--that only becomes knowledge to a
person which he has assimilated, which his mind has acted upon.
Children’s aptitude for knowledge and their eagerness for it made
for the conclusion that the field of a child’s knowledge may not be
artificially restricted, that he has a right to and necessity for
as much and as varied knowledge as he is able to receive; and that
the limitations in his curriculum should depend only upon the age
at which he must leave school; in a word, a _common_ curriculum (up
to the age of say, fourteen or fifteen) appears to be due to all
children.
We have left behind the feudal notion that intellect is a class
prerogative, that intelligence is a matter of inheritance and
environment; inheritance, no doubt, means much but everyone has
a very mixed inheritance; environment makes for satisfaction or
uneasiness, but education is of the spirit and is not to be taken
in by the eye or effected by the hand; mind appeals to mind and
thought begets thought and that is how we become educated. For this
reason we owe it to every child to put him in communication with
great minds that he may get at great thoughts; with the minds,
that is, of those who have left us great works; and the only vital
method of education appears to be that children should read worthy
books, many worthy books.
It will be said on the one hand that many schools have their own
libraries or the scholars have the free use of a public library and
that children do read; and on the other that the literary language
of first-rate books offers an impassable barrier to working-men’s
children. In the first place we all know that desultory reading is
delightful and incidentally profitable but is not _education_ whose
concern is _knowledge_. That is, the mind of the desultory reader
only rarely makes the act of appropriation which is necessary
before the matter we read becomes personal knowledge. We must read
in order to know or we do not know by reading.
As for the question of literary form, many circumstances and
considerations which it would take too long to describe brought me
to perceive that delight in literary form is native to us all until
we are ‘educated’ out of it.
It is difficult to explain how I came to a solution of a puzzling
problem,--how to secure attention. Much observation of children,
various incidents from one’s general reading, the recollection of
my own childhood and the consideration of my present habits of
mind brought me to the recognition of certain laws of the mind, by
working in accordance with which the steady attention of children
of any age and any class in society is insured, week in, week
out,--attention, not affected by distracting circumstances. It is
not a matter of ‘personal magnetism,’ for hundreds of teachers of
very varying quality, working in home schoolrooms and in Elementary
and Secondary Schools on this method,[6] secure it without effort;
neither does it rest upon the ‘doctrine of interest’; no doubt
the scholars are interested, sometimes delighted; but they are
interested in a great variety of matters and their attention does
not flag in the ‘dull parts.’
It is not easy to sum up in a few short sentences those principles
upon which the mind naturally acts and which I have tried to
bring to bear upon a school curriculum. The fundamental idea is,
that children are _persons_ and are therefore moved by the same
springs of conduct as their elders. Among these is the Desire of
Knowledge, knowledge-hunger being natural to everybody. History,
Geography, the thoughts of other people, roughly, the humanities,
are proper for us all, and are the objects of the natural desire
of knowledge. So too, are Science, for we all live in the world;
and Art, for we all require beauty, and are eager to know how to
discriminate; social science, Ethics, for we are aware of the need
to learn about the conduct of life; and Religion, for, like those
men we heard of at the Front, we all ‘want God.’
In the nature of things then the unspoken demand of children is
for a wide and very varied curriculum; it is necessary that they
should have some knowledge of the wide range of interests proper
to them as human beings, and for no reasons of convenience or time
limitations may we curtail their proper curriculum.
Perceiving the range of knowledge to which children as persons are
entitled the questions are, how shall they be induced to take that
knowledge, and what can the children of the people learn in the
short time they are at school? We have discovered a working answer
to these two conundrums. I say discovered, and not invented, for
there is only one way of learning, and the intelligent persons
who can talk well on many subjects and the expert in one learn in
the one way, that is, _they read to know_. What I have found out
is, that this method is available for every child, whether in the
dilatory and desultory home schoolroom or in the large classes of
Elementary Schools.
Children no more come into the world without provision for dealing
with knowledge than without provision for dealing with food. They
bring with them not only that intellectual appetite, the desire of
knowledge, but also an enormous, an unlimited power of attention to
which the power of retention (memory) seems to be attached, as one
digestive process succeeds another, until the final assimilation.
“Yes,” it will be said, “they are capable of much curiosity and
consequent attention but they can only occasionally be beguiled
into attending to their lessons.” Is not that the fault of the
lessons, and must not these be regulated as carefully with regard
to the behaviour of mind as the children’s meals are with regard to
physical considerations?
Let us consider this behaviour in a few aspects. The mind concerns
itself only with thoughts, imaginations, reasoned arguments;
it declines to assimilate the facts unless in combination with
its proper pabulum; it, being active, is wearied in the passive
attitude of a listener, it is as much bored in the case of a child
by the discursive twaddle of the talking teacher as in that of a
grown-up by conversational twaddle; it has a natural preference
for literary form; given a more or less literary presentation, the
curiosity of the mind is enormous and embraces a vast variety of
subjects.
I predicate these things of ‘the mind’ because they seem true of
all persons’ minds. Having observed these, and some other points
in the behaviour of mind, it remained to apply the conclusions to
which I had come to a test curriculum for schools and families.
Oral teaching was to a great extent ruled out; a large number
of books on many subjects were set for reading in morning
school-hours; so much work was set that there was only time for
a single reading; all reading was tested by a narration of the
whole or a given passage, whether orally or in writing. Children
working on these lines know months after that which they have read
and are remarkable for their power of concentration (attention);
they have little trouble with spelling or composition and become
well-informed, intelligent persons.[7]
But, it will be said, reading or hearing various books read,
chapter by chapter, and then narrating or writing what has been
read or some part of it,--all this is mere memory work. The value
of this criticism may be readily tested; will the critic read
before turning off his light a leading article from a newspaper,
say, or a chapter from Boswell or Jane Austen, or one of Lamb’s
Essays; then, will he put himself to sleep by narrating silently
what he has read. He will not be satisfied with the result but he
will find that in the act of narrating every power of his mind
comes into play, that points and bearings which he had not observed
are brought out; that the whole is visualized and brought into
relief in an extraordinary way; in fact, that scene or argument
has become a part of his personal experience; he _knows_, he has
assimilated what he has read. _This is not memory work._ In order
to memorise, we repeat over and over a passage or a series of
points or names with the aid of such clues as we can invent; we
do memorise a string of facts or words, and the new possession
serves its purpose for a time, but it is not assimilated; its
purpose being served, we know it no more. This is memory work by
means of which examinations are passed with credit. I will not try
to explain (or understand!) this power to memorise; it has its
subsidiary use in education, no doubt, but it must not be put in
the place of the prime agent which is _attention_.
Long ago, I was in the habit of hearing this axiom quoted by a
philosophical old friend:--“The mind can know nothing save what
it can produce in the form of an answer to a question put to
the mind by itself.” I have failed to trace the saying to its
source, but a conviction of its importance has been growing upon
me during the last forty years. It tacitly prohibits questioning
from without; (this does not, of course, affect the Socratic use
of questioning for purposes of _moral_ conviction); and it is
necessary to intellectual certainty, to the act of knowing. For
example, to secure a conversation or an incident, we ‘go over it
in our minds’; that is, the mind puts itself through the process
of self-questioning which I have indicated. This is what happens
in the narrating of a passage read: each new consecutive incident
or statement arrives because the mind asks itself,--“What next?”
For this reason it is important that only one reading should be
allowed; efforts to memorise weaken the power of attention, the
proper activity of the mind; if it is desirable to ask questions in
order to emphasize certain points, these should be asked after and
not before, or during, the act of narration.
Our more advanced psychologists come to our support here; they,
too, predicate “instead of a coterie of faculties, a single
subjective activity, attention;” and again, there is “one common
factor in all psychical activity, that is attention.”[8] My
personal addition is that attention is unfailing, prompt and
steady when matter is presented suitable to a child’s intellectual
requirements, _if_ the presentation be made with the conciseness,
directness, and simplicity proper to literature.
Another point should be borne in mind; the intellect requires a
moral impulse, and we all stir our minds into action the better if
there is an implied ‘must’ in the background; for children in class
the ‘must’ acts through the _certainty_ that they will be required
to narrate or write from what they have read with no opportunity of
‘looking up,’ or other devices of the idle. Children find the act
of narrating so pleasurable in itself that urgency on the part of
the teacher is seldom necessary.
Here is a complete chain of the educational philosophy I have
endeavoured to work out, which has, at least, the merit that it
is successful in practice. Some few hints I have, as I have said,
adopted and applied, but I hope I have succeeded in methodising the
whole and making education what it should be, a system of applied
philosophy; I have, however, carefully abstained from the use of
philosophical terms.
This is, briefly, how it works:--
A child is a _person_ with the spiritual requirements and
capabilities of a person.
Knowledge ‘nourishes’ the mind as food nourishes the body.
A child requires knowledge as much as he requires food.
He is furnished with the desire for Knowledge, i.e., Curiosity;
with the power to apprehend Knowledge, that is, attention;
with powers of mind to deal with Knowledge without aid from
without--such as imagination, reflection, judgment;
with innate interest in all Knowledge that he needs as a
human being;
with power to retain and communicate such Knowledge; and to
assimilate all that is necessary to him.
He requires that in most cases Knowledge be communicated to him
in literary form;
and reproduces such Knowledge touched by his own personality;
thus his reproduction becomes original.
The natural provision for the appropriation and assimilation of
Knowledge is adequate and no stimulus is required; but some moral
control is necessary to secure the act of attention;
a child receives this in the certainty that he will be
required to recount what he has read.
Children have a right to the best we possess; therefore their
lesson books should be, as far as possible, our best books.
They weary of talk, and questions bore them, so that they should
be allowed to use their books for themselves; they will ask for
such help as they wish for.
They require a great variety of knowledge,--about religion, the
humanities, science, art;
therefore, they should have a wide curriculum, with a definite
amount of reading set for each short period of study.
The teacher affords direction, sympathy in studies, a vivifying
word here and there, help in the making of experiments, etc., as
well as the usual teaching in languages, experimental science and
mathematics.
Pursued under these conditions, “Studies serve for delight,”
and the consciousness of daily progress is exhilarating to both
teacher and children.
The reader will say with truth,--“I knew all this before and have
always acted more or less on these principles”; and I can only
point to the unusual results we obtain through adhering not ‘more
or less,’ but strictly to the principles and practices I have
indicated. I suppose the difficulties are of the sort that Lister
had to contend with; every surgeon knew that his instruments and
appurtenances should be kept clean, but the saving of millions
of lives has resulted from the adoption of the great surgeon’s
antiseptic treatment; that is from the substitution of exact
principles scrupulously applied for the rather casual ‘more or
less’ methods of earlier days.
Whether the way I have sketched out is the right and the only way
remains to be tested still more widely than in the thousands of
cases in which it has been successful; but assuredly education is
slack and uncertain for the lack of sound principles _exactly_
applied. The moment has come for a decision; we have placed our
faith in ‘civilisation,’ have been proud of our progress; and,
of the pangs that the War has brought us, perhaps none is keener
than that caused by the utter breakdown of the civilisation which
we have held to be synonymous with education. We know better now,
and are thrown back on our healthy human instincts and the Divine
sanctions. The educable part of a person is his mind. The training
of the senses and muscles is, strictly speaking, training and not
education. The mind, like the body, requires quantity, variety and
regularity in the sustenance offered to it. Like the body, the
mind has its appetite, the desire for knowledge. Again, like the
body, the mind is able to receive and assimilate by its powers of
attention and reflection. Like the body, again, the mind rejects
insipid, dry, and unsavoury food, that is to say, its pabulum
should be presented in a literary form. The mind is restricted to
pabulum of one kind: it is nourished upon ideas and absorbs facts
only as these are connected with the living ideas upon which they
hang. Children educated upon some such lines as these respond in
a surprising way, developing capacity, character, countenance,
initiative and a sense of responsibility. They are, in fact, even
as children, good and thoughtful citizens.
I have in this volume attempted to show the principles and methods
upon which education of this sort is being successfully carried
out, and have added chapters which illustrate the history of a
movement the aim of which is, in the phrase of Comenius,--“All
knowledge for all men.” As well as these I have been permitted
to use the criticisms[9] of various teachers and Directors of
education and others upon the practical working of the scheme.
It is a matter of rejoicing that the way is open to give to all
classes a basis of common thought and common knowledge, including a
common store of literary and historic allusions, a possession which
has a curious power of cementing bodies of men, and, in the next
place, it is an enormous gain that we are within sight of giving to
the working-classes, notwithstanding their limited opportunities,
that stability of mind and magnanimity of character which are the
proper outcome and the unfailing test of A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
I shall confine myself in this volume to the amplification and
illustration of some of the points I have endeavoured to make in
this introductory statement.
Book I
CHAPTER I
SELF-EDUCATION
The title of this chapter may awaken some undeserved sympathy;
gratifying visions of rhythmic movements, independent action,
self-expression in various interesting ways, occur to the mind--for
surely these things constitute ‘self-education’? Most of these
modern panacea are desirable and by no means to be neglected;
limbs trained to grace and agility, a hand, to dexterity and
precision, an eye made to see and an ear to hear, a voice taught to
interpret,--we know to-day that all these possibilities of joy in
living should be open to every child, and we look forward even too
hopefully to the manner of citizen who shall be the outcome of our
educational zeal.
Now, although we, of the Parents’ Union, have initiated some of
these educational outworks and have gladly and gratefully adopted
others, yet is our point of view different; we are profoundly
sceptical as to the effect of all or any of these activities upon
character and conduct. A person is not built up from without but
from within, that is, he is _living_, and all external educational
appliances and activities which are intended to mould his character
are decorative and not vital.
This sounds like a stale truism; but, let us consider a few
corollaries of the notion that ‘a child is a person,’ and that
a person is, primarily, living. Now no external application is
capable of nourishing life or promoting growth; baths of wine,
wrappings of velvet have no effect upon physical life except as
they may hinder it; life is sustained on that which is taken in by
the organism, not by that which is applied from without.
Perhaps the only allowable analogy with the human mind is the
animal body, especially the human body, for it is that which
we know most about; the well-worn plant and garden analogy is
misleading, especially as regards that tiresome busybody, the
gardener, who _will_ direct the inclination of every twig, the
position of every leaf; but, even then apart from the gardener, the
child-garden is an intolerable idea as failing to recognize the
essential property of a child, his personality, a property all but
absent in a plant. Now, let us consider for a moment the parallel
behaviour of body and mind. The body lives by air, grows on food,
demands rest, flourishes on a diet wisely various. So, of the
mind,--(by which I mean the entire spiritual nature, all that which
is not body),--it breathes in air, calls for both activity and rest
and flourishes on a wisely varied dietary.
We go round the house and round the house, but rarely go into the
House of Mind; we offer mental gymnastics, but these do not take
the place of food, and of that we serve the most meagre rations,
no more than that bean a day! Diet for the body is abundantly
considered, but no one pauses to say, “I wonder does the mind need
food, too, and regular meals, and what is its proper diet?”
I have asked myself this question and have laboured for fifty years
to find the answer, and am anxious to impart what I think I know,
but the answer cannot be given in the form of ‘Do’ this and that,
but rather as an invitation to ‘Consider’ this and that; action
follows when we have thought duly.
The life of the mind is sustained upon ideas; there is no
intellectual vitality in the mind to which ideas are not presented
several times, say, every day. But ‘surely, surely,’ as ‘Mrs.
Proudie’ would say, scientific experiments, natural beauty, nature
study, rhythmic movements, sensory exercises, are all fertile in
ideas? Quite commonly, they are so, as regards ideas of invention
and discovery; and even in ideas of art; but for the moment it
may be well to consider the ideas that influence life, that is,
character and conduct; these, it would seem, pass directly from
mind to mind, and are neither helped nor hindered by educational
outworks. Every child gets many of these ideas by word of mouth,
by way of family traditions, proverbial philosophy,--in fact, by
what we might call a kind of oral literature. But, when we compare
the mind with the body, we perceive that three ‘square’ meals a
day are generally necessary to health, and that a casual diet of
ideas is poor and meagre. Our schools turn out a good many clever
young persons, wanting in nothing but initiative, the power of
reflection and the sort of moral imagination which enables you to
‘put yourself in his place.’ These qualities flourish upon a proper
diet; and this is not afforded by the ordinary school book, or,
in sufficient quantity by the ordinary lesson. I should like to
emphasize _quantity_, which is as important for the mind as for the
body; both require their ‘square meals.’
It is no easy matter to give its proper sustenance to the mind;
hard things are said of children, that they have ‘no brains,’ ‘a
low order of intellect,’ and so on; but many of us are able to
vouch for the fine intelligence shewn by children who are fed
with the proper mind-stuff; but teachers do not usually take the
trouble to find out what this is. We come dangerously near to what
Plato condemns as “that lie of the soul,” that corruption of the
highest truth, of which Protagoras is guilty in the saying that,
“Knowledge is sensation.” What else are we saying when we run
after educational methods which are purely sensory? Knowledge is
not sensation, nor is it to be derived through sensation; we feed
upon the thoughts of other minds; and thought applied to thought
generates thought and we become more thoughtful. No one need invite
us to reason, compare, imagine; the mind, like the body, digests
its proper food, and it must have the labour of digestion or it
ceases to function.
But the children ask for bread and we give them a stone; we give
information about objects and events which mind does not attempt
to digest but casts out bodily (upon an examination paper?). But
let information hang upon a principle, be inspired by an idea,
and it is taken with avidity and used in making whatsoever in the
spiritual nature stands for tissue in the physical.
“Education,” said Lord Haldane, some time ago, “is a matter of the
spirit,”--no wiser word has been said on the subject, and yet we
persist in applying education from without as a bodily activity
or emollient. We begin to see light. No one knoweth the things of
a man but the spirit of a man which is in him; therefore, there
is no education but self-education, and as soon as a young child
begins his education he does so as a student. Our business is to
give him mind-stuff, and both quality and quantity are essential.
Naturally, each of us possesses this mind-stuff only in limited
measure, but we know where to procure it; for the best thought the
world possesses is stored in books; we must open books to children,
the best books; our own concern is abundant provision and orderly
serving.
I am jealous for the children; every modern educational movement
tends to belittle them intellectually; and none more so than a
late ingenious attempt to feed normal children with the pap-meat
which may (?) be good for the mentally sick: but, “To all wildly
popular things comes suddenly and inexorably death, without
hope of resurrection.” If Mr. Bernard Shaw is right, I need not
discuss a certain popular form of ‘New Education.’ It has been
ably said that education should profit by the divorce which is now
in progress from psychology on the one hand and sociology on the
other; but what if education should use her recovered liberty to
make a monstrous alliance with pathology?
Various considerations urge upon me a rather distasteful task.
It is time I showed my hand and gave some account of work, the
principles and practices of which should, I think, be of general
use. Like those lepers who feasted at the gates of a famished city,
I begin to take shame to myself! I have attempted to unfold (in
various volumes[10]) a system of educational theory which seems to
me able to meet any rational demand, even that severest criterion
set up by Plato; it is able to “run the gauntlet of objections,
and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but
to absolute truth.” Some of it is new, much of it is old. Like
the quality of mercy, it is not strained; certainly it is twice
blessed, it blesses him that gives and him that takes, and a sort
of radiancy of look distinguishes both scholar and teacher engaged
in this manner of education; but there are no startling results to
challenge attention.
Professor Bompas Smith remarked in an inaugural address at the
University of Manchester that,--“If we can guide our practice by
the light of a comprehensive theory we shall widen our experience
by attempting tasks which would not otherwise have occurred to us.”
It is possible to offer the light of such a comprehensive theory,
and the result is precisely what the Professor indicates,--a large
number of teachers attempt tasks which would not otherwise have
occurred to them. One discovers a thing because it is there, and
no sane person takes credit to himself for such discovery. On the
contrary, he recognizes with King Arthur,--“These jewels, whereupon
I chanced Divinely, are for public use.” For many years we have had
access to a sort of Aladdin’s cave which I long to throw open ‘for
public use.’
Let me try to indicate some of the advantages of the theory I am
urging:--It fits all ages, even the seven ages of man! It satisfies
brilliant children and discovers intelligence in the dull. It
secures attention, interest, concentration, without effort on the
part of teacher or taught.
Children, I think, all children, so taught express themselves
in forcible and fluent English and use a copious vocabulary. An
unusual degree of nervous stability is attained; also, intellectual
occupation seems to make for chastity in thought and life. Parents
become interested in the schoolroom work, and find their children
‘delightful companions.’ Children shew delight in books (other than
story books) and manifest a genuine love of knowledge. Teachers are
relieved from much of the labour of corrections. Children taught
according to this method do exceptionally well at any school. It is
unnecessary to stimulate these young scholars by marks, prizes, etc.
After all, it is not a quack medicine I am writing about, though
the reader might think so, and there is no 1_s._ 1½_d._ a bottle in
question!
Over thirty years ago I published a volume about the home
education of children and people wrote asking how those counsels
of perfection could be carried out with the aid of the private
governess as she then existed; it occurred to me that a series of
curricula might be devised embodying sound principles and securing
that children should be in a position of less dependence on their
teacher than they then were; in other words, that their education
should be largely self-education. A sort of correspondence school
was set up, the motto of which,--“I am, I can, I ought, I will,”
has had much effect in throwing children upon the possibilities,
capabilities, duties and determining power belonging to them as
persons.
“Children are born persons,” is the first article of the
educational _credo_ in question. The response made by children
(ranging in age from six to eighteen) astonished me; though they
only shewed the power of attention, the avidity for knowledge, the
clearness of thought, the nice discrimination in books, and the
ability to deal with many subjects, for which I had given them
credit in advance. I need not repeat what I have urged elsewhere
on the subject of ‘Knowledge’ and will only add that anyone may
apply a test; let him read to a child of any age from six to ten an
account of an incident, graphically and tersely told, and the child
will relate what he has heard point by point, though not word for
word, and will add delightful original touches; what is more, he
will relate the passage months later because he has visualised the
scene and appropriated that bit of knowledge. A rhetorical passage,
written in ‘journalese,’ makes no impression on him; if a passage
be read more than once, he may become letter-perfect, but the
spirit, the individuality has gone out of the exercise. An older
boy or girl will read one of Bacon’s Essays, say, or a passage from
De Quincey, and will write or tell it forcibly and with some style,
either at the moment or months later. We know how Fox recited
a whole pamphlet of Burke’s at a College supper though he had
probably read it no more than once. Here on the very surface is the
key to that attention, interest, literary style, wide vocabulary,
love of books and readiness in speaking, which we all feel should
belong to an education that is only begun at school and continued
throughout life; these are the things that we all desire, and how
to obtain them is some part of the open secret I am labouring to
disclose ‘for public use.’
I am anxious to bring a quite successful educational experiment
before the public at a moment when we are told on authority that
“Education must be ... an appeal to the spirit if it is to be
made interesting.” Here is Education which is as interesting and
fascinating as a fine art to parents, children and teachers.
During the last thirty years thousands of children educated on
these lines have grown up in love with Knowledge and manifesting a
‘right judgment in all things’ so far as a pretty wide curriculum
gives them data.
I would have children taught _to read_ before they learn
the mechanical arts of reading and writing; and they learn
delightfully; they give perfect attention to paragraph or page read
to them and are able to relate the matter point by point, _in their
own words_; but they demand classical English and cannot learn to
read in this sense upon anything less. They begin their ‘schooling’
in ‘letters’ at six, and begin at the same time to learn mechanical
reading and writing. A child does not lose by spending a couple
of years in acquiring these because he is meanwhile ‘reading’
the Bible, history, geography, tales, with close attention and a
remarkable power of reproduction, or rather, of translation into
his own language; he is acquiring a copious vocabulary and the
habit of consecutive speech. In a word, he is an educated child
from the first, and his power of dealing with books, with several
books in the course of a morning’s ‘school,’ increases with his age.
But children are not all alike; there is as much difference between
them as between men or women; two or three months ago, a small
boy, not quite six, came to school (by post); and his record
was that he could read anything in five languages, and was now
teaching himself the Greek characters, could find his way about
the Continental Bradshaw, and was a chubby, vigorous little person.
All this the boy brings with him when he comes to school; he is
exceptional, of course, just as a man with such accomplishments
is exceptional; but I believe that all children bring with them
much capacity which is not recognized by their teachers, chiefly
intellectual capacity, (always in advance of motor power), which we
are apt to drown in deluges of explanation, or dissipate in futile
labours in which there is no advance.
People are naturally divided into those who read and think and
those who do not read or think; and the business of schools is to
see that all their scholars shall belong to the former class; it is
worth while to remember that thinking is inseparable from reading
which is concerned with the content of a passage and not merely
with the printed matter.
The children I am speaking of are much occupied with things as well
as with books, because ‘Education is the Science of Relations,’ is
the principle which regulates their curriculum; that is, a child
goes to school with many aptitudes which he should put into effect.
So, he learns a good deal of science, because children have no
difficulty in understanding principles, though technical details
baffle them. He practises various handicrafts that he may know
the feel of wood, clay, leather, and the joy of handling tools,
that is, that he may establish a due relation with materials.
But, always, it is the book, the knowledge, the clay, the bird or
blossom, he thinks of, not his own place or his own progress.
I am afraid that some knowledge of the theory we advance is
necessary to the open-minded teacher who would give our practices
a trial, because every detail of schoolroom work is the outcome
of certain principles. For instance it would be quite easy
without much thought to experiment with our use of books; but in
education, as in religion, it is the motive that counts, and the
boy who reads his lesson for a ‘good mark’ becomes word-perfect,
but does not _know_. But these principles are obvious and simple
enough, and, when we consider that at present education is chaotic
for want of a unifying theory, and that there happens to be no
other comprehensive theory in the field which is in line with
modern thought and fits every occasion, might it not be well to try
one which is immediately practicable and always pleasant and has
proved itself by producing many capable, serviceable, dutiful men
and women of sound judgment and willing mind?
In urging a method of self-education for children in lieu of the
vicarious education which prevails, I should like to dwell on
the enormous relief to teachers, a self-sacrificing and greatly
overburdened class; the difference is just that between driving a
horse that is light and a horse that is heavy in hand; the former
covers the ground of his own gay will and the driver goes merrily.
The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of
books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and
is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.