THREE INSTRUMENTS OF EDUCATION
I.--EDUCATION IS AN ATMOSPHERE
_Seeing that we are limited by the respect due to the personality
of children we can allow ourselves but three educational
instruments--the atmosphere of environment, the discipline
of habit and the presentation of living ideas. Our motto
is,--‘Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.’ 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’
specially 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._
Having cut out the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or
influence, undue play upon any one natural desire, emulation, for
example, we are no longer free to use all means in the education
of children. There are but three left for our use and to each of
these we must give careful study or we shall not realise how great
a scope is left to us. To consider the first of these educational
instruments; for a decade or two we have pinned our faith on
environment as a great part of education; as, say, nine-tenths
rather than a third part of the whole. The theory has been,--put
a child in the right environment and so subtle is its influence,
so permanent its effects that he is to all intents and purposes
educated thereby. Schools may add Latin and sums and whatever
else their curriculum contains, but the actual education is, as
it were, performed upon a child by means of colour schemes,
harmonious sounds, beautiful forms, gracious persons. He grows up
æsthetically educated into sweet reasonableness and harmony with
his surroundings.
“Peter’s nursery was a perfect dream in which to hatch the soul
of a little boy. Its walls were done in warm, cream-coloured
paint and upon them Peter’s father had put the most lovely
patterns of trotting and jumping horses and dancing cats and dogs
and leaping lambs, a carnival of beasts ... there was a big brass
fire-guard in Peter’s nursery ... and all the tables had smoothly
rounded corners against the days when Peter would run about. The
floor was of cork carpet on which Peter would put his toys and
there was a crimson hearthrug on which Peter was destined to
crawl ... there were scales in Peter’s nursery to weigh Peter
every week and tables to show how much he ought to weigh and when
one should begin to feel anxious. There was nothing casual about
the early years of Peter.”
So, Mr. Wells, in that inconclusive educational treatise of his,
_Joan and Peter_. It is an accurate picture of the preparation
for ‘high-souled’ little persons all over the world. Parents make
tremendous sacrifices to that goddess who presides over Education.
We hear of a pair investing more than their capital in a statue
to adorn the staircase in order that ‘Tommy’ should make his
soul by the contemplation of beauty. This sort of thing has been
going on since the ‘eighties at any rate and, as usual, Germany
erected a high altar for the cult which she passed on to the rest
of us. Perhaps it is safe to say that the young Intelligenzia
of Europe have been reared after this manner. And is the result
that Neo-Georgian youth _Punch_ presents to us with his air
of weariness, condescension and self-complacency? Let us hear
Professor Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, the Indian scientist, on one of
his conclusions concerning the nervous impulse in plants,--
“A plant carefully protected under glass from outside shocks
looks sleek and flourishing but its higher nervous function is
then found to be atrophied. But when a succession of blows”
(electric shocks) “is rained on this effete and bloated specimen,
the shocks themselves create nervous channels and arouse anew the
deteriorated nature. Is it not the shocks of adversity and not
cotton wool protection that evolve true manhood?”
We had thought that the terrible succession of blows inflicted
by the War had changed all that; but, no; the errors of
education still hold sway and we still have amongst us the
better-than-my-neighbour folk, whose function, let us hope, is to
administer the benefits of adversity to most of us. What if parents
and teachers in their zeal misread the schedule of their duties,
magnified their office unduly and encroached upon the personality
of children? It is not an environment that these want, a set of
artificial relations carefully constructed, but an _atmosphere_
which nobody has been at pains to constitute. It is there, about
the child, his natural element, precisely as the atmosphere of
the earth is about us. It is thrown off, as it were, from persons
and things, stirred by events, sweetened by love, ventilated,
kept in motion, by the regulated action of common sense. We all
know the natural conditions under which a child should live; how
he shares household ways with his mother, romps with his father,
is teased by his brothers and petted by his sisters; is taught
by his tumbles; learns self-denial by the baby’s needs, the
delightfulness of furniture by playing at battle and siege with
sofa and table; learns veneration for the old by the visits of his
great-grandmother; how to live with his equals by the chums he
gathers round him; learns intimacy with animals from his dog and
cat; delight in the fields where the buttercups grow and greater
delight in the blackberry hedges. And, what tempered ‘fusion of
classes’ is so effective as a child’s intimacy with his betters,
and also with cook and housemaid, blacksmith and joiner, with
everybody who comes in his way? Children have a genius for this
sort of general intimacy, a valuable part of their education; care
and guidance are needed, of course, lest admiring friends should
make fools of them, but no compounded ‘environment’ could make up
for this fresh air, this wholesome wind blowing now from one point,
now from another.
We certainly may use atmosphere as an instrument of education, but
there are prohibitions, for ourselves rather than for children.
Perhaps the chief of these is, that no artificial element be
introduced, no sprinkling with rose-water, softening with cushions.
Children must face life as it is; if their parents are anxious and
perturbed children feel it in the air. “Mummie, Mummie, you aren’t
going to cry this time, are you?” and a child’s hug tries to take
away the trouble. By these things children live and we may not
keep them in glass cases; if we do, they develop in succulence and
softness and will not become plants of renown. But due relations
must be maintained; the parents are in authority, the children in
obedience; and again, the strong may not lay their burdens on the
weak; nor must we expect from children that effort of decision, the
most fatiguing in our lives, of which the young should generally be
relieved.
School, perhaps, offers fewer opportunities for vitiating the
atmosphere than does home life. But teaching may be so watered
down and sweetened, teachers may be so suave and condescending,
as to bring about a condition of intellectual feebleness and
moral softness which it is not easy for a child to overcome. The
bracing atmosphere of truth and sincerity should be perceived in
every school; and here again the common pursuit of knowledge by
teacher and class comes to our aid and creates a current of fresh
air perceptible even to the chance visitor, who sees the glow of
intellectual life and moral health on the faces of teachers and
children alike.
But a school may be working hard, not for love of knowledge, but
for love of marks, our old enemy; and then young faces are not
serene and joyous but eager, restless, apt to look anxious and
worried. The children do not sleep well and are cross; are sullen
or in tears if anything goes wrong, and are, generally, difficult
to manage. When this is the case there is too much oxygen in the
air; they are breathing a too stimulating atmosphere, and the
nervous strain to which they are subjected must needs be followed
by reaction. Then teachers think that lessons have been too hard,
that children should be relieved of this and that study; the
doctors probably advise that so-and-so should ‘run wild’ for a
year. Poor little soul, at the very moment when he is most in need
of knowledge for his sustenance he is left to prey upon himself!
No wonder the nervous symptoms become worse, and the boy or girl
suffers under the stigma of ‘nervous strain.’ The fault has been in
the atmosphere and not in the work; the teacher, perhaps, is over
anxious that her children should do well and her nervous excitation
is catching. “I am afraid X---- cannot do his examination; he loves
his work but he bursts into tears when he is asked an examination
question. Perhaps it is that I have insisted too much that he
must never be satisfied with anything but his best.” Poor little
chap (of seven) pricked into over exertion by the spur of moral
stimulus! We foresee happy days for children when all teachers know
that no other exciting motive whatever is necessary to produce
good work in each individual of however big a class than that love
of knowledge which is natural to every child. The serenity and
sweetness of schools conducted on this principle is surprising to
the outsider who has not reflected upon the contentment of a baby
with his bottle!
There are two courses open to us in this matter. One, to create by
all manner of modified conditions a hot-house atmosphere, fragrant
but emasculating, in which children grow apace but are feeble
and dependent; the other to leave them open to all the “airts
that blow,” but with care lest they be unduly battered; lest,
for example, a miasma come their way in the shape of a vicious
companion.
2.--EDUCATION IS A DISCIPLINE
_By this formula we mean the discipline of habits formed
definitely and thoughtfully whether habits of mind or of body.
Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to
habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits._
Education is not after all to either teacher or child the fine
careless rapture we appear to have figured it. We who teach and
they who learn are alike constrained; there is always effort to
be made in certain directions; yet we face our tasks from a new
point of view. We need not labour to get children to learn their
lessons; that, if we would believe it, is a matter which nature
takes care of. Let the lessons be of the right sort and children
will learn them with delight. The call for strenuousness comes with
the necessity of forming habits; but here again we are relieved.
The intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the
following out of the due curriculum in the right way. As we have
already urged, there is but one right way, that is, children
must do the work for themselves. They must read the given pages
and tell what they have read, they must perform, that is, what
we may call the _act of knowing_. We are all aware, alas, what a
monstrous quantity of printed matter has gone into the dustbin of
our memories, because we have failed to perform that quite natural
and spontaneous ‘act of knowing,’ as easy to a child as breathing
and, if we would believe it, comparatively easy to ourselves. The
reward is two-fold: no intellectual habit is so valuable as that
of attention; it is a mere habit but it is also the hall-mark
of an educated person. Use is second nature, we are told; it is
not too much to say that ‘habit is ten natures,’ and we can all
imagine how our work would be eased if our subordinates listened to
instructions with the full attention which implies recollection.
Attention is not the only habit that follows due self-education.
The habits of fitting and ready expression, of obedience,
of good-will, and of an impersonal outlook are spontaneous
bye-products of education in this sort. So, too, are the habits of
right thinking and right judging; while physical habits of neatness
and order attend upon the self-respect which follows an education
which respects the personality of children.
Physiologists tell us that thoughts which have become habitual
make somehow a mark upon the brain substance, but we are bold in
calling it a mark for there is no discernible effect to be quoted.
Whether or no the mind be served by the brain in this matter, we
are empirically certain that a chief function of education is the
establishment of such ways of thinking in children as shall issue
in good and useful living, clear thinking, æsthetic enjoyment, and,
above all, in the religious life. How it is possible that spirit
should act upon matter is a mystery to us, but that such act takes
place we perceive every time we note a scowling brow, or, on the
other hand,--
“A sweet attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks;
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of gospel books.”
We all know how the physical effort of smiling affects ourselves in
our sour moods,--
“Nor soul helps flesh more now, than flesh helps soul.”
Both are at our service in laying down the rails, so to speak, upon
which the good life must needs run.
In the past we have, no doubt, gone through an age of infant
slavery, an age of good habits enforced by vigorous penalties,
conscientiously by the over scrupulous eighteenth century parent,
and infamously by the schoolmasters, the ‘Creakles’ and the
‘Squeers’ who laboured only for their own ease and profit. Now,
the pendulum swings the other way. We have lost sight of the fact
that habit is to life what rails are to transport cars. It follows
that lines of habit must be laid down towards given ends and
after careful survey, or the joltings and delays of life become
insupportable. More, habit is inevitable. If we fail to ease life
by laying down habits of right thinking and right acting, habits of
wrong thinking and wrong acting fix themselves of their own accord.
We avoid decision and indecision brings its own delays, “and days
are lost lamenting o’er lost days.” Almost every child is brought
up by his parents in certain habits of decency and order without
which he would be a social outcast. Think from another point of
view how the labour of life would be increased if every act of the
bath, toilet, table, every lifting of the fork and use of spoon
were a matter of consideration and required an effort of decision!
No; habit is like fire, a bad master but an indispensable servant;
and probably one reason for the nervous scrupulosity, hesitation,
indecision of our day, is that life was not duly eased for us in
the first place by those whose business it was to lay down lines of
habit upon which our behaviour might run easily.
It is unnecessary to enumerate those habits which we should aim at
forming, for everyone knows more about these than anyone practises.
We admire the easy carriage of the soldier but shrink from the
discipline which is able to produce it. We admire the lady who can
sit upright through a long dinner, who in her old age prefers a
straight chair because she has arrived at due muscular balance and
has done so by a course of discipline. There is no other way of
forming any good habit, though the discipline is usually that of
the internal government which the person exercises upon himself;
but a certain strenuousness in the formation of good habits is
necessary because every such habit is the result of conflict. The
bad habit of the easy life is always pleasant and persuasive and
to be resisted with pain and effort, but with hope and certainty
of success, because in our very structure is the preparation for
forming such habits of muscle and mind as we deliberately propose
to ourselves. We entertain the idea which gives birth to the act
and the act repeated again and again becomes the habit; ‘Sow an
act,’ we are told, ‘reap a habit.’ ‘Sow a habit, reap a character.’
But we must go a step further back, we must sow the idea or notion
which makes the act worth while. The lazy boy who hears of the
Great Duke’s narrow camp bed, preferred by him because when he
wanted to turn over it was time to get up, receives the idea of
prompt rising. But his nurse or his mother knows how often and
how ingeniously the tale must be brought to his mind before the
habit of prompt rising is formed; she knows too how the idea of
self-conquest must be made at home in the boy’s mind until it
become a chivalric impulse which he cannot resist. It is possible
to sow a great idea lightly and casually and perhaps this sort
of sowing should be rare and casual because if a child detect a
definite purpose in his mentor he is apt to stiffen himself against
it. When parent or teacher supposes that a good habit is a matter
of obedience to his authority, he relaxes a little. A boy is late
who has been making evident efforts to be punctual; the teacher
good-naturedly foregoes rebuke or penalty, and the boy says to
himself,--“It doesn’t matter,” and begins to form the unpunctual
habit. The mistake the teacher makes is to suppose that to be
punctual is troublesome to the boy, so he will let him off; whereas
the office of the habits of an ordered life is to make such life
easy and spontaneous; the effort is confined to the first half
dozen or score of occasions for doing the thing.
Consider how laborious life would be were its wheels not greased by
habits of cleanliness, neatness, order, courtesy; had we to make
the effort of decision about every detail of dressing and eating,
coming and going, life would not be worth living. Every cottage
mother knows that she must train her child in habits of decency,
and a whole code of habits of propriety get themselves formed
just because a breach in any such habit causes a shock to others
which few children have courage to face. Physical fitness, morals
and manners, are very largely the outcome of habit; and not only
so, but the habits of the religious life also become fixed and
delightful and give us due support in the effort to live a godly,
righteous and sober life. We need not be deterred by the fear that
religious habits in a child are mechanical, uninformed by the ideas
which should give them value. Let us hear what the young De Quincey
felt about going to church:--
“On Sunday mornings I went with the rest of my family to church:
it was a church on the ancient model of England having aisles,
galleries, organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the
proportions were majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt
through the long litany, as often as we came to that passage so
beautiful amongst many that are so where God is supplicated on
behalf of ‘all sick persons and young children’ and ‘that He
would show His pity upon all prisoners and captives,’ I wept in
secret, and raising my streaming eyes to the upper windows saw,
on days when the sun was shining, a spectacle as affecting as
ever prophet can have beheld ... _there_ were the Apostles that
had trampled upon earth and the glories upon earth, _there_ were
the martyrs who had borne witness to the truth through flames
... and all the time I saw through the wide central field of the
window where the glass was uncoloured white fleecy clouds sailing
over the azure depths of the sky.”
And then the little boy had visions of sick children upon whom God
would have pity.--
“These visions were self-sustained, the hint from the Litany,
the fragment from the clouds, those and the storied windows
were sufficient.... God speaks to children also in dreams and by
the oracles that lurk in darkness; but in solitude, above all
things when made vocal to the meditative heart by the truths and
services of a national church, God holds with children ‘communion
undisturbed.’”
With such a testimony before us, supported by gleams of
recollection on our own part, we may take courage to believe that
what we rightly call Divine Service is particularly appropriate
to children; and will become more so as the habit of reading
beautifully written books quickens their sense of style and their
unconscious appreciation of the surpassingly beautiful diction of
our liturgy.
We have seen the value of habit in mind and morals, religion
and physical development. It is as we have seen disastrous when
child or man learns to think in a groove, and shivers like an
unaccustomed bather on the steps of a new notion. This danger is
perhaps averted by giving children as their daily diet the wise
thoughts of great minds, and of many great minds; so that they may
gradually and unconsciously get the courage of their opinions.
If we fail in this duty, so soon as the young people get their
‘liberty’ they will run after the first fad that presents itself;
try it for a while and then take up another to be discarded in its
turn, and remain uncertain and ill-guided for the rest of their
days.
3.--EDUCATION IS A LIFE
We have left until the last that instrument of education implied in
the phrase ‘Education is a life’; ‘implied’ because life is no more
self-existing than it is self-supporting; it requires sustenance,
regular, ordered and fitting. This is fully recognised as regards
bodily life and, possibly, the great discovery of the twentieth
century will be that mind too requires its ordered rations and
perishes when these fail. We know that food is to the body what
fuel is to the steam-engine, the sole source of energy; once we
realise that the mind too works only as it is fed education will
appear to us in a new light. The body pines and develops humours
upon tabloids and other food substitutes; and a glance at a ‘gate’
crowd watching a football match makes us wonder what sort of
mind-food those men and boys are sustained on, whether they are
not suffering from depletion, inanition, notwithstanding big and
burly bodies. For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind
of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere
information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no
organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.
What is an idea? we ask, and find ourselves plunged beyond our
depth. A live thing of the mind, seems to be the conclusion of our
greatest thinkers from Plato to Bacon, from Bacon to Coleridge. We
all know how an idea ‘_strikes_,’ ‘_seizes_,’ ‘_catches hold of_,’
‘_impresses_’ us and at last, if it be big enough, ‘_possesses_’
us; in a word, behaves like an entity.
If we enquire into any person’s habits of life, mental
preoccupation, devotion to a cause or pursuit, he will usually
tell us that such and such _an idea struck him_. This potency of
an idea is matter of common recognition. No phrase is more common
and more promising than, ‘I have an idea’; we rise to such an
opening as trout to a well-chosen fly. There is but one sphere
in which the word idea never occurs, in which the conception of
an idea is curiously absent, and that sphere is education! Look
at any publisher’s list of school books and you shall find that
the books recommended are carefully dessicated, drained of the
least suspicion of an idea, reduced to the driest statements of
fact. Here perhaps the Public Schools have a little pull over the
rest of us; the diet they afford may be meagre, meagre almost to
starvation point for the average boy, but it is not destitute
of ideas; for, however sparsely, boys are nourished on the best
thoughts of the best minds.
Coleridge has done more than other thinkers to bring the conception
of an idea within the sphere of the scientific thought of to-day;
not as that thought is expressed in _psychology_, a term which he
himself launched upon the world with an apology for it as _insolens
verbum_ (“we beg pardon for the use of this _insolens verbum_ but
it is one of which our language stands in great need.” _Method_, S.
T. Coleridge) but as shewing the reaction of mind to an idea. This
is how in his _Method_ Coleridge illustrates the rise and progress
of such an idea:--
“We can recall no incident of human history that impresses the
imagination more deeply than the moment when Columbus on an
unknown ocean first perceived that baffling fact, the change of
the magnetic needle. How many instances occur in history when
the ideas of nature (presented to chosen minds by a Higher Power
than Nature herself) suddenly unfold as it were in prophetic
succession systematic views destined to produce the most
important revolutions in the state of man! The clear spirit of
Columbus was doubtless eminently methodical. He saw distinctly
that great leading idea which authorised the poor pilot to become
a ‘promiser of kingdoms.’”
Here we get such a genesis of an idea as fits in curiously with
what we know of the history of great inventions and discoveries
“presented to chosen minds by a higher Power than Nature herself.”
It corresponds too, not only with the ideas that rule our own
lives, but with the origin of practical ideas which is unfolded to
us by the prophet Isaiah:--
“Doth the ploughman plough continually to ... open and break the
clods of his ground? When he hath made plain the face thereof,
doth he not cast abroad the fitches and scatter the cummin and
put the wheat in rows ... for his God doth instruct him aright
and doth teach him.... Bread corn is ground for he will not ever
be threshing it.... This also cometh from the Lord of Hosts
which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working.”[18]
Let us hear Coleridge further on the subject of those ideas which
may invest us as an atmosphere rather than strike as a weapon:--
“The idea may exist in a clear and definite form as that of a
circle in that of the mind of a geometrician or it may be a
mere instinct, a vague appetency towards something ... like the
impulse which fills a young poet’s eyes with tears.”
These indefinite ideas which express themselves in an ‘appetency’
towards something and which should draw a child towards things
honest, lovely and of good report, are not to be offered of set
purpose or at set times: they are held in that thought-atmosphere
which surrounds him, breathed as his breath of life.
It is distressing to think that our poor words and ways should be
thus _inspired_ by children; but to recognise the fact will make us
careful not to admit sordid or unworthy thoughts and motives into
our dealings with them.
Coleridge treats in more detail those definite ideas which are not
inhaled as air but are conveyed as meat to the mind:--
“From the first or initiative idea, as from a seed, successive
ideas germinate.” “Events and images, the lively and
spirit-stirring machinery of the external world, are like light
and air and moisture to the seed of the mind which would else
rot and perish.” “The paths in which we may pursue a methodical
course are manifold and at the head of each stands its peculiar
and guiding idea. Those ideas are as regularly subordinate
in dignity as the paths to which they point are various and
eccentric in direction. The world has suffered much in modern
times from a subversive and necessary natural order of science
... from summoning reason and faith to the bar of that limited
physical experience to which by the true laws of method they owe
no obedience. Progress follows the path of the idea from which
it sets out requiring however a constant wakefulness of mind to
keep it within the due limits of its course. Hence the orbits of
thought, so to speak, must differ from among themselves as the
initiative ideas differ.” (_Method_, S. T. C.).
Is it not a fact that the new light which biology is throwing upon
the laws of mind is bringing us back to the Platonic doctrine that
“An idea is a distinguishable power, self-affirmed and seen in
unity with the Eternal Essence”?
I have ventured to repeat from an earlier volume[19] this
slight exposition of Coleridge’s teaching, because his doctrine
corresponds with common experience and should reverse our ordinary
educational practice. The whole subject is profound, but as
practical as it is profound. We must disabuse our minds of the
theory that the functions of education are in the main gymnastic,
a continual drawing out without a corresponding act of putting in.
The modern emphasis upon ‘self-expression’ has given new currency
to this idea; we who know how little there is in us that we have
not received, that the most we can do is to give an original twist,
a new application, to an idea that has been passed on to us; who
recognise, humbly enough, that we are but torch-bearers, passing on
our light to the next as we have received it from the last, even
we invite children to ‘express themselves’ about a tank, a Norman
castle, the Man in the Moon, not recognising that the quaint things
children say on unfamiliar subjects are no more than a patchwork of
notions picked up here and there. One is not sure that so-called
original composition is wholesome for children, because their
consciences are alert and they are quite aware of their borrowings;
it may be better that they should read on a theme before they write
upon it, using then as much latitude as they like.
In the early days of a child’s life it makes little apparent
difference whether we educate with a notion of filling a
receptacle, inscribing a tablet, moulding plastic matter, or
nourishing a life, but as a child grows we shall perceive that only
those _ideas_ which have fed his life are taken into his being;
all the rest is cast away or is, like sawdust in the system, an
impediment and an injury.
Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of
spiritual origin, and God has made us so that we get them chiefly
as we convey them to one another, whether by word of mouth, written
page, Scripture word, musical symphony; but we must sustain a
child’s inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food.
Probably he will reject nine-tenths of the ideas we offer, as he
makes use of only a small proportion of his bodily food, rejecting
the rest. He is an eclectic; he may choose this or that; our
business is to supply him with due abundance and variety and his
to take what he needs. Urgency on our part annoys him. He resists
forcible feeding and loathes predigested food. What suits him best
is pabulum presented in the indirect literary form which Our Lord
adopts in those wonderful parables whose quality is that they
cannot be forgotten though, while every detail of the story is
remembered, its application may pass and leave no trace. We, too,
must take this risk. We may offer children as their sustenance the
Lysander of Plutarch, an object lesson, we think, shewing what a
statesman or a citizen should avoid: but, who knows, the child
may take to Lysander and think his ‘cute’ ways estimable! Again,
we take the risk, as did our Lord in that puzzling parable of the
Unjust Steward. One other caution; it seems to be necessary to
present ideas with a great deal of padding, as they reach us in a
novel or poem or history book written with literary power. A child
cannot in mind or body live upon tabloids however scientifically
prepared; out of a whole big book he may not get more than half
a dozen of those ideas upon which his spirit thrives; and they
come in unexpected places and unrecognised forms, so that no grown
person is capable of making such extracts from Scott or Dickens
or Milton, as will certainly give him nourishment. It is a case
of,--“In the morning sow thy seed and in the evening withhold not
thine hand for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this
or that.”
One of our presumptuous sins in this connection is that we
venture to offer opinions to children (and to older persons)
instead of ideas. We believe that an opinion expresses thought
and therefore embodies an idea. Even if it did so once the very
act of crystallization into opinion destroys any vitality it may
have had; _pace_ Ruskin, a crystal is not a living body and does
not feed men. We think to feed children on the dogmas of a church,
the theorems of Euclid, mere abstracts of history, and we wonder
that their education does not seem to take hold of them. Let us
hear M. Fouillée[20] on this subject, for to him the _idea_ is all
in all both in philosophy and education. But there is a function
of education upon which M. Fouillée hardly touches, that of the
formation of habits, physical, intellectual, moral.
“‘Scientific truths,’ said Descartes, ‘are battles won.’ Describe
to the young the principal and most heroic of these battles; you
will thus interest them in the results of science and you will
develop in them a scientific spirit by means of the enthusiasm
for the conquest of truth.... How interesting Arithmetic and
Geometry might be if we gave a short history of their principal
theorems, if the child were meant to be present at the labours
of a Pythagoras, a Plato, a Euclid, or in modern times, of a
Descartes, a Pascal, or a Leibnitz. Great theories instead of
being lifeless and anonymous abstractions would become living
human truths each with its own history like a statue by Michael
Angelo or like a painting by Raphael.”
Here we have an application of Coleridge’s ‘captain-idea’ of every
train of thought; that is, not a naked generalisation, (neither
children nor grown persons find aliment in these), but an idea
clothed upon with fact, history and story, so that the mind
may perform the acts of selection and inception from a mass of
illustrative details. Thus Dickens makes ‘David Copperfield’ tell
us that,--“I was a very observant child,” and that “all children
are very observant,” not as a dry abstraction, but as an inference
from a number of charming natural incidents.
All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the
fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought
expressed in the forms of art, is, not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be
given to children now and then, but their very bread of life, which
they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods. This
and more is implied in the phrase, “The mind feeds on ideas and
therefore children should have a generous curriculum.”