organs ask all the elements and all the functions of Nature for their
satisfaction, educate the wondrous creature which they satisfy with
light, with heat, with water, with wood, with bread, with wool. The
necessities imposed by this most irritable and all-related texture have
taught Man hunting, pasturage, agriculture, commerce, weaving, joining,
masonry, geometry, astronomy. Here is a world pierced and belted
with natural laws, and fenced and planted with civil partitions and
properties, which all put new restraints on the young inhabitant. He
too must come into this magic circle of relations, and know health and
sickness, the fear of injury, the desire of external good, the charm
of riches, the charm of power. The household is a school of power.
There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life. Here is
the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go
round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions that bind
and sever. Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated necessities
can teach, here labor drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets
of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of woman, the
compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every debt: the opium
of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is Economy, and
Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and
Death and Hope.
Every one has a trust of power,--every man, every boy a jurisdiction,
whether it be over a cow or a rood of a potato-field, or a fleet of
ships, or the laws of a state. And what activity the desire of power
inspires! What toils it sustains! How it sharpens the perceptions and
stores the memory with facts. Thus a man may well spend many years of
life in trade. It is a constant teaching of the laws of matter and
of mind. No dollar of property can be created without some direct
communication with nature, and of course some acquisition of knowledge
and practical force. It is a constant contest with the active faculties
of men, a study of the issues of one and another course of action, an
accumulation of power, and, if the higher faculties of the individual
be from time to time quickened, he will gain wisdom and virtue from his
business.
As every wind draws music out of the Æolian harp, so doth every object
in Nature draw music out of his mind. Is it not true that every
landscape I behold, every friend I meet, every act I perform, every
pain I suffer, leaves me a different being from that they found me?
That poverty, love, authority, anger, sickness, sorrow, success, all
work actively upon our being and unlock for us the concealed faculties
of the mind? Whatever private or petty ends are frustrated, this end is
always answered. Whatever the man does, or whatever befalls him, opens
another chamber in his soul,--that is, he has got a new feeling, a new
thought, a new organ. Do we not see how amazingly for this end man is
fitted to the world?
What leads him to science? Why does he track in the midnight heaven a
pure spark, a luminous patch wandering from age to age, but because
he acquires thereby a majestic sense of power; learning that in his
own constitution he can set the shining maze in order, and finding
and carrying their law in his mind, can, as it were, see his simple
idea realized up yonder in giddy distances and frightful periods of
duration. If Newton come and first of men perceive that not alone
certain bodies fall to the ground at a certain rate, but that all
bodies in the Universe, the universe of bodies, fall always, and at one
rate; that every atom in nature draws to every other atom,--he extends
the power of his mind not only over every cubic atom of his native
planet, but he reports the condition of millions of worlds which his
eye never saw. And what is the charm which every ore, every new plant,
every new fact touching winds, clouds, ocean currents, the secrets of
chemical composition and decomposition possess for Humboldt? What but
that much revolving of similar facts in his mind has shown him that
always the mind contains in its transparent chambers the means of
classifying the most refractory phenomena, of depriving them of all
casual and chaotic aspect, and subordinating them to a bright reason
of its own, and so giving to man a sort of property,--yea, the very
highest property in every district and particle of the globe.
By the permanence of Nature, minds are trained alike, and made
intelligible to each other. In our condition are the roots of language
and communication, and these instructions we never exhaust.
In some sort the end of life is that the man should take up
the universe into himself, or out of that quarry leave nothing
unrepresented. Yonder mountain must migrate into his mind. Yonder
magnificent astronomy he is at last to import, fetching away moon, and
planet, solstice, period, comet and binal star, by comprehending their
relation and law. Instead of the timid stripling he was, he is to be
the stalwart Archimedes, Pythagoras, Columbus, Newton, of the physic,
metaphysic and ethics of the design of the world.
For truly the population of the globe has its origin in the aims which
their existence is to serve; and so with every portion of them. The
truth takes flesh in forms that can express it; and thus in history an
idea always overhangs, like the moon, and rules the tide which rises
simultaneously in all the souls of a generation.
Whilst thus the world exists for the mind; whilst thus the man is
ever invited inward into shining realms of knowledge and power by the
shows of the world, which interpret to him the infinitude of his own
consciousness,--it becomes the office of a just education to awaken him
to the knowledge of this fact.
We learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of
life. Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised
things, that we cannot enough despise,--call heavy, prosaic, and
desert. The time we seek to kill: the attention it is elegant to divert
from things around us. And presently the aroused intellect finds gold
and gems in one of these scorned facts,--then finds that the day of
facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God.
We have our theory of life, our religion, our philosophy; and the
event of each moment, the shower, the steamboat disaster, the passing
of a beautiful face, the apoplexy of our neighbor, are all tests to
try our theory, the approximate result we call truth, and reveal its
defects. If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into
the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church or old church,
some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events
that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour.
I am as a bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He
has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and
given the key to another to keep.
When I see the doors by which God enters into the mind; that there
is no sot or fop, ruffian or pedant into whom thoughts do not enter
by passages which the individual never left open, I can expect any
revolution in character. “I have hope,” said the great Leibnitz,
“that society may be reformed, when I see how much education may be
reformed.”
It is ominous, a presumption of crime, that this word Education has
so cold, so hopeless a sound. A treatise on education, a convention
for education, a lecture, a system, affects us with slight paralysis
and a certain yawning of the jaws. We are not encouraged when the law
touches it with its fingers. Education should be as broad as man.
Whatever elements are in him that should foster and demonstrate. If
he be dexterous, his tuition should make it appear; if he be capable
of dividing men by the trenchant sword of his thought, education
should unsheathe and sharpen it; if he is one to cement society by his
all-reconciling affinities, oh! hasten their action! If he is jovial,
if he is mercurial, if he is great-hearted, a cunning artificer, a
strong commander, a potent ally, ingenious, useful, elegant, witty,
prophet, diviner,--society has need of all these. The imagination
must be addressed. Why always coast on the surface and never open the
interior of nature, not by science, which is surface still, but by
poetry? Is not the Vast an element of the mind? Yet what teaching, what
book of this day appeals to the Vast?
Our culture has truckled to the times,--to the senses. It is not
manworthy. If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the
practical and the moral. It does not make us brave or free. We teach
boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all
they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their
noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye
and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and
comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to
make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest,
great-hearted men. The great object of Education should be commensurate
with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust:
to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a
curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources
of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to
inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Thus
would education conspire with the Divine Providence. A man is a little
thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to
the rules of love and justice, is god-like, his word is current in all
countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and
obey it as their own.
In affirming that the moral nature of man is the predominant element
and should therefore be mainly consulted in the arrangements of a
school, I am very far from wishing that it should swallow up all the
other instincts and faculties of man. It should be enthroned in his
mind, but if it monopolize the man he is not yet sound, he does not
yet know his wealth. He is in danger of becoming merely devout, and
wearisome through the monotony of his thought. It is not less necessary
that the intellectual and the active faculties should be nourished and
matured. Let us apply to this subject the light of the same torch by
which we have looked at all the phenomena of the time; the infinitude,
namely, of every man. Everything teaches that.
One fact constitutes all my satisfaction, inspires all my trust,
viz., this perpetual youth, which, as long as there is any good in
us, we cannot get rid of. It is very certain that the coming age
and the departing age seldom understand each other. The old man
thinks the young man has no distinct purpose, for he could never get
anything intelligible and earnest out of him. Perhaps the young man
does not think it worth his while to explain himself to so hard and
inapprehensive a confessor. Let him be led up with a long-sighted
forbearance, and let not the sallies of his petulance or folly be
checked with disgust or indignation or despair.
I call our system a system of despair, and I find all the correction,
all the revolution that is needed and that the best spirits of this age
promise, in one word, in Hope. Nature, when she sends a new mind into
the world, fills it beforehand with a desire for that which she wishes
it to know and do. Let us wait and see what is this new creation, of
what new organ the great Spirit had need when it incarnated this new
Will. A new Adam in the garden, he is to name all the beasts in the
field, all the gods in the sky. And jealous provision seems to have
been made in his constitution that you shall not invade and contaminate
him with the worn weeds of your language and opinions. The charm of
life is this variety of genius, these contrasts and flavors by which
Heaven has modulated the identity of truth, and there is a perpetual
hankering to violate this individuality, to warp his ways of thinking
and behavior to resemble or reflect their thinking and behavior. A
low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his
character and fortune; an expectation which the child, if justice is
done him, will nobly disappoint. By working on the theory that this
resemblance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat his proper
promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre. I suffer whenever I see
that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way
of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit.
Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way?
You are trying to make that man another _you_. One’s enough.
Or we sacrifice the genius of the pupil, the unknown possibilities of
his nature, to a neat and safe uniformity, as the Turks whitewash the
costly mosaics of ancient art which the Greeks left on their temple
walls. Rather let us have men whose manhood is only the continuation
of their boyhood, natural characters still; such are able and fertile
for heroic action; and not that sad spectacle with which we are too
familiar, educated eyes in uneducated bodies.
I like boys, the masters of the playground and of the street,--boys,
who have the same liberal ticket of admission to all shops, factories,
armories, town-meetings, caucuses, mobs, target-shootings, as flies
have; quite unsuspected, coming in as naturally as the janitor,--known
to have no money in their pockets, and themselves not suspecting the
value of this poverty; putting nobody on his guard, but seeing the
inside of the show,--hearing all the asides. There are no secrets from
them, they know everything that befalls in the fire-company, the merits
of every engine and of every man at the brakes, how to work it, and
are swift to try their hand at every part; so too the merits of every
locomotive on the rails, and will coax the engineer to let them ride
with him and pull the handles when it goes to the engine-house. They
are there only for fun, and not knowing that they are at school, in
the court-house, or the cattle-show, quite as much and more than they
were, an hour ago, in the arithmetic class.
They know truth from counterfeit as quick as the chemist does. They
detect weakness in your eye and behavior a week before you open your
mouth, and have given you the benefit of their opinion quick as a
wink. They make no mistakes, have no pedantry, but entire belief on
experience. Their elections at base-ball or cricket are founded on
merit, and are right. They don’t pass for swimmers until they can swim,
nor for stroke-oar until they can row: and I desire to be saved from
their contempt. If I can pass with them, I can manage well enough with
their fathers.
Everybody delights in the energy with which boys deal and talk with
each other; the mixture of fun and earnest, reproach and coaxing, love
and wrath, with which the game is played;--the good-natured yet defiant
independence of a leading boy’s behavior in the school-yard. How we
envy in later life the happy youths to whom their boisterous games and
rough exercise furnish the precise element which frames and sets off
their school and college tasks, and teaches them, when least they think
it, the use and meaning of these. In their fun and extreme freak they
hit on the topmost sense of Horace. The young giant, brown from his
hunting-tramp, tells his story well, interlarded with lucky allusions
to Homer, to Virgil, to college-songs, to Walter Scott; and Jove and
Achilles, partridge and trout, opera and binomial theorem, Cæsar in
Gaul, Sherman in Savannah, and hazing in Holworthy, dance through the
narrative in merry confusion, yet the logic is good. If he can turn
his books to such picturesque account in his fishing and hunting, it
is easy to see how his reading and experience, as he has more of both,
will interpenetrate each other. And every one desires that this pure
vigor of action and wealth of narrative, cheered with so much humor and
street rhetoric, should be carried into the habit of the young man,
purged of its uproar and rudeness, but with all its vivacity entire.
His hunting and campings-out have given him an indispensable base: I
wish to add a taste for good company through his impatience of bad.
That stormy genius of his needs a little direction to games, charades,
verses of society, song, and a correspondence year by year with his
wisest and best friends. Friendship is an order of nobility; from its
revelations we come more worthily into nature. Society he must have or
he is poor indeed; he gladly enters a school which forbids conceit,
affectation, emphasis and dulness, and requires of each only the
flower of his nature and experience; requires good-will, beauty, wit,
and select information; teaches by practice the law of conversation,
namely, to hear as well as to speak.
Meantime, if circumstances do not permit the high social advantages,
solitude has also its lessons. The obscure youth learns there the
practice instead of the literature of his virtues; and, because of the
disturbing effect of passion and sense, which by a multitude of trifles
impede the mind’s eye from the quiet search of that fine horizon-line
which truth keeps,--the way to knowledge and power has ever been an
escape from too much engagement with affairs and possessions; a way,
not through plenty and superfluity, but by denial and renunciation,
into solitude and privation; and, the more is taken away, the more
real and inevitable wealth of being is made known to us. The solitary
knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair
face. There is no want of example of great men, great benefactors, who
have been monks and hermits in habit. The bias of mind is sometimes
irresistible in that direction. The man is as it were born deaf and
dumb, and dedicated to a narrow and lonely life. Let him study the art
of solitude, yield as gracefully as he can to his destiny. Why cannot
he get the good of his doom, and if it is from eternity a settled fact
that he and society shall be nothing to each other, why need he blush
so, and make wry faces to keep up a freshman’s seat in the fine world?
Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great
ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts. And the most
genial and amiable of men must alternate society with solitude, and
learn its severe lessons.
There comes the period of the imagination to each, a later youth; the
power of beauty, the power of books, of poetry. Culture makes his books
realities to him, their characters more brilliant, more effective on
his mind, than his actual mates. Do not spare to put novels into the
hands of young people as an occasional holiday and experiment; but,
above all, good poetry in all kinds, epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can
touch the imagination, we serve them, they will never forget it. Let
him read “Tom Brown at Rugby,” read “Tom Brown at Oxford,”--better
yet, read “Hodson’s Life”--Hodson who took prisoner the king of Delhi.
They teach the same truth,--a trust, against all appearances, against
all privations, in your own worth, and not in tricks, plotting, or
patronage.
I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of
Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose
what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained,
and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and
thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and
kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of
Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child.
Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
But I hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion:--Would you
verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would
you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and
whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child’s nature?
I answer,--Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also
respect yourself. Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his
friendship, the lover of his virtue,--but no kinsman of his sin. Let
him find you so true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater
of his vice and the imperturbable slighter of his trifling.
The two points in a boy’s training are, to keep his _naturel_
and train off all but that:--to keep his _naturel_, but stop off
his uproar, fooling and horse-play;--keep his nature and arm it with
knowledge in the very direction in which it points. Here are the two
capital facts, genius and drill. The first is the inspiration in the
well-born healthy child, the new perception he has of nature. Somewhat
he sees in forms or hears in music or apprehends in mathematics, or
believes practicable in mechanics or possible in political society,
which no one else sees or hears or believes. This is the perpetual
romance of new life, the invasion of God into the old dead world, when
he sends into quiet houses a young soul with a thought which is not
met, looking for something which is not there, but which ought to be
there: the thought is dim but it is sure, and he casts about restless
for means and masters to verify it; he makes wild attempts to explain
himself and invoke the aid and consent of the bystanders. Baffled for
want of language and methods to convey his meaning, not yet clear
to himself, he conceives that though not in this house or town, yet
in some other house or town is the wise master who can put him in
possession of the rules and instruments to execute his will. Happy this
child with a bias, with a thought which entrances him, leads him, now
into deserts now into cities, the fool of an idea. Let him follow it
in good and in evil report, in good or bad company; it will justify
itself; it will lead him at last into the illustrious society of the
lovers of truth.
In London, in a private company, I became acquainted with a gentleman,
Sir Charles Fellowes, who, being at Xanthus, in the Ægean Sea, had
seen a Turk point with his staff to some carved work on the corner of
a stone almost buried in the soil. Fellowes scraped away the dirt,
was struck with the beauty of the sculptured ornaments, and, looking
about him, observed more blocks and fragments like this. He returned
to the spot, procured laborers and uncovered many blocks. He went back
to England, bought a Greek grammar and learned the language; he read
history and studied ancient art to explain his stones; he interested
Gibson the sculptor; he invoked the assistance of the English
Government; he called in the succor of Sir Humphry Davy to analyze the
pigments; of experts in coins, of scholars and connoisseurs; and at
last in his third visit brought home to England such statues and marble
reliefs and such careful plans that he was able to reconstruct, in the
British Museum where it now stands, the perfect model of the Ionic
trophy-monument, fifty years older than the Parthenon of Athens, and
which had been destroyed by earthquakes, then by iconoclast Christians,
then by savage Turks. But mark that in the task he had achieved an
excellent education, and become associated with distinguished scholars
whom he had interested in his pursuit; in short, had formed a college
for himself; the enthusiast had found the master, the masters, whom he
sought. Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so much as to be a
pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself.
Nor are the two elements, enthusiasm and drill, incompatible. Accuracy
is essential to beauty. The very definition of the intellect is
Aristotle’s: “that by which we know terms or boundaries.” Give a boy
accurate perceptions. Teach him the difference between the similar and
the same. Make him call things by their right names. Pardon in him
no blunder. Then he will give you solid satisfaction as long as he
lives. It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar
than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they require exactitude of
performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and that
power of performance is worth more than the knowledge. He can learn
anything which is important to him now that the power to learn is
secured: as mechanics say, when one has learned the use of tools, it is
easy to work at a new craft.
Letter by letter, syllable by syllable, the child learns to read,
and in good time can convey to all the domestic circle the sense of
Shakspeare. By many steps each just as short, the stammering boy and
the hesitating collegian, in the school debate, in college clubs, in
mock court, comes at last to full, secure, triumphant unfolding of his
thought in the popular assembly, with a fullness of power that makes
all the steps forgotten.
But this function of opening and feeding the human mind is not to be
fulfilled by any mechanical or military method; is not to be trusted
to any skill less large than Nature itself. You must not neglect the
form, but you must secure the essentials. It is curious how perverse
and intermeddling we are, and what vast pains and cost we incur to
do wrong. Whilst we all know in our own experience and apply natural
methods in our own business,--in education our common sense fails us,
and we are continually trying costly machinery against nature, in
patent schools and academies and in great colleges and universities.