Part 16

§ 9. Rarely indeed have those who either theoretically or practically have made a study of education ever acquired sufficient literary skill to catch the ear of the public or (what is at least as difficult) the ear of the teaching body. And among the eminent writers who have spoken on education, as Rabelais, Montaigne, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, we cannot find one who has given to it more than passing, if not accidental, attention. Schoolmasters are, as I said, conservative, at least in the school-room; and moreover, they seldom find the necessary time, money, or inclination for publishing on the work of their calling. The current thought at any period must then be gathered from books only to be found in our great libraries, books in which writers now long forgotten give hints of what was wanted out of the school-room and grumble at what went on in it.

§ 10. One of the most original of these writers that have come in my way is John Dury, a Puritan, who was at one time Chaplain to the English Company of Merchants at Elbing, and laboured with Comenius and Hartlib to promote unity among the various Christian bodies of the reformed faith (see Masson’s _Life of Milton_, vol. iii). About 1649 Dury published _The Reformed Schoole_ which gives the scheme of an association for the purpose of educating a number of boys and girls “in a Christian way.”

§ 11. That Dury was not himself a schoolmaster is plain from the first of his “rules of education.” “The chief rule of the whole work is that nothing be made tedious and grievous to the children, but all the toilsomeness of their business the Governor and Ushers are to take upon themselves; that by diligence and industry all things may be so prepared, methodized and ordered for their apprehension, that this work may unto them be as a delightful recreation by the variety and easiness thereof.”

§ 12. “The things to be looked unto in the care of their education,” he enumerates in the order of importance: “1. Their advancement in piety; 2. The preservation of their health; 3. The forming of their manners; 4. Their proficiency in learning” (p. 24). “Godliness and bodily health are absolutely necessary,” says Dury; “the one for spiritual and the other for their temporal felicitie” (p. 31): so great care is to be taken in “exercising their bodies in husbandry or manufactures or military employments.”[102]

§ 13. About instruction we find the usual complaints which like “mother’s truth keep constant youth.” “Children,” says Dury, “are taught to read authors and learn words and sentences before they can have any notion of the things signified by those words and sentences or of the author’s strain and wit in setting them together; and they are made to learn by heart the generall rules, sentences and precepts of Arts before they are furnished with any matter whereunto to apply those rules and precepts” (p. 38). Dury would entirely sweep away the old routine, and in all instruction he would keep in view the following end: “the true end of all human learning is to supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our ignorance of the nature and use of the creatures, and the disorderliness of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them” (p. 41).

§ 14. “Our natural faculties”—here Dury struck a new note, which has now become the keynote in the science of education. He enforces his point with the following ingenious illustration:—“As in a watch one wheel rightly set doth with its teeth take hold of another and sets that a-work towards a third; and so all move one by another when they are in their right places for the end for which the watch is made; so is it with the faculties of the human nature being rightly ordered to the ends for which God hath created them. But contrariwise, if the wheels be not rightly set, or the watch not duly wound up, it is useless to him that hath it. And so it is with the faculties of Man; if his wheels be not rightly ordered and wound up by the ends of sciences in their subordination leading him to employ the same according to his capacity to make use of the creatures for that whereunto God hath made them, he becomes not only useless, but even a burthen and hurtful unto himself and others by the misusing of them” (p. 43).

§ 15. “As in Nature sense is the servant of imagination; imagination of memory; memory of reason; so in teaching arts and sciences we must set these faculties a-work in this order towards their proper objects in everything which is to be taught. Whence this will follow, that as the faculties of Man’s soul naturally perfect each other by their mutual subordination; so the Arts which perfect those faculties should be gradually suggested: and the objects wherewith the faculties are to be conversant according to the rules of Art should be offered in that order which is answerable to their proper ends and uses and not otherwise.”

§ 16. In this and much else that Dury says we see a firm grasp of the principle that the instruction given should be regulated by the gradual development of the learner’s faculties. The three sources of our knowledge, says he, are—1. Sense; 2. Tradition; 3. Reason; and Sense comes first. “Art or sciences which may be learnt by mere sense should not be learnt any other way.” “As children’s faculties break forth in them by degrees to be vigorous with their years and the growth of their bodies, so they are to be filled with objects whereof they are capable, and plied with arts; whence followeth that while children are not capable of the acts of reasoning, the method of filling their senses and imaginations with outward objects should be plied. Nor is their memory at this time to be charged further with any objects than their imagination rightly ordered and fixed doth of itself impress the same upon them.” After speaking of the common abuse of general rules, he says: “So far as those faculties (viz., sense, imagination, and memory) are started with matters of observation, so far rules may be given to direct the mind in the use of the same, and no further.” “The arts and sciences which lead us to reflect upon the use of our own faculties are not to be taught till we are fully acquainted with their proper objects, and the direct acts of the faculties about them.” So “it is a very absurd and preposterous course to teach Logick and Metaphysicks before or with other Humane Sciences which depend more upon Sense and Imagination than reasoning” (p. 46).

§ 17. In all this it seems to me that the worthy Puritan, of whom nobody but Dr. Barnard and Professor Masson has ever heard, has truly done more to lay a foundation for the art of teaching than his famous contemporaries Milton and Locke.

§ 18. Another writer of that day better known than Dury and with far more power of expression was Sir William Petty. He is the “W.P.,” who in an Epistle “to his honoured friend Master Samuel Hartlib,” set down his “thoughts concerning the advancement of real learning” (1647). This letter is to be shown only “to those few that are Reall Friends to the Designe of Realities.”[103]

§ 19. Petty sees the need of intercommunication of those who wish to advance any art or science. He complains that “the wits and endeavours of the world are as so many scattered coals or fire-brands, which for want of union are soon quenched, whereas being but laid together they would yield a comfortable light and heat.” This is a thought which may well be applied to the bringing up of the young; and the following passage might have been written to secure a training for teachers: “Methinks the present condition of men is like a field where a battle hath been lately fought, where we may see many legs and arms and eyes lying here and there, which for want of a union and a soul to quicken and enliven them are good for nothing but to feed ravens and infect the air. So we see many wits and ingenuities lying scattered up and down the world, whereof some are now labouring to do what is already done, and puzzling themselves to re-invent what is already invented. Others we see quite stuck fast in difficulties for want of a few directions which some other man (might he be met withal) both could and would most easily give him.” I wonder how many young teachers are now wasting their own and their pupils’ time in this awkward predicament.

§ 20. “As for ... education,” says Petty, “we cannot but hope that those who make it their trade will supply it and render the idea thereof much more perfect.” His own contributions to the more perfect idea consist mainly in making the study of “realities” precede literature, and thus announcing the principle which in later times has led to the introduction of “object lessons.” The Baconians thought that the good time was at hand, and that they had found the right road at last. By experiments they would learn to interpret Nature. After scheming a “Gymnasium, Mechanicum, or College of Tradesmen,” Petty says, “What experiments and stuff would all those shops and operations afford to active and philosophical heads, out of which to extract that interpretation of nature whereof there is so little, and that so bad, as yet extant in the world!”[104] And this study of things was to affect the work of the school-room, and redeem it from the dismal state into which it was fallen. “As for the studies to which children are now-a-days put,” says Petty, “they are altogether unfit for want of judgment which is but weak in them, and also for want of will, which is sufficiently seen ... by the difficulty of keeping them at schools and the punishment they will endure rather than be altogether debarred from the pleasure which they take in things.”

§ 21. The grand reform required is thus set forth; “Since few children have need of reading before they know or can be acquainted with the things they read of; or of writing before their thoughts are worth the recording or they are able to put them into any form (which we call inditing); much less of learning languages when there be books enough for their present use in their own mother-tongue; our opinion is that those things being withal somewhat above their capacity (as being to be attained by judgment which is weakest in children) be deferred awhile, and others more needful for them, such as are in the order of Nature before those afore-mentioned, and are attainable by the help of memory which is either most strong or unpreoccupied in children, be studied before them. We wish, therefore, that the educands be taught to observe and remember all sensible objects and actions, whether they be natural or artificial, which the educators must upon all occasions expound unto them.”

§ 22. In proposing this great change Petty was influenced not merely by his own delight in the study of things but by something far more important for education, by observation of the children themselves. This study of things instead of “a rabble of words” would be “more easy and pleasant to the young as the more suitable to the natural propensions we observe in them. For we see children do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles, guns made of elder sticks, and bellows’ noses, piped keys, &c., painting flags and ensigns with elderberries and cornpoppy, making ships with paper, and setting even nut-shells a-swimming, handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn their backs and trying to work themselves; fishing, fowling, hunting, setting springes and traps for birds and other animals, making pictures in their writing-books, making tops, gigs and whirligigs, gilting balls, practising divers juggling tricks upon the cards, &c., with a million more besides. And for the females they will be making pies with clay, making their babies’ clothes and dressing them therewith; they will spit leaves on sticks as if they were roasting meat; they will imitate all the talk and actions which they observe in their mother and her gossips, and punctually act the comedy or the tragedy (I know not whether to call it) of a woman’s lying-in. By all which it is most evident that children do most naturally delight in things and are most capable of learning them, having quick senses to receive them and unpreoccupied memories to retain them” (_ad f._).

§ 23. In these writers, Dury and Petty, we find a wonderful advance in the theory of instruction. Children are to be taught about _things_ and this because their inward constitution determines them towards things. Moreover the subjects of instruction are to be graduated to accord with the development of the learner’s faculties. The giving of rules and incomprehensible statements that will come in useful at a future stage is entirely forbidden. All this is excellent, and greatly have children suffered, greatly do they suffer still, from their teachers’ neglect of it. There seems to me to have been no important advance on the thought of these men till Pestalozzi and Froebel fixed their attention on the mind of the child, and valued things not in themselves but simply as the means best fitted for drawing out the child’s self-activity.

§ 24. In several other matters we find Sir William Petty’s recommendations in advance of the practice of his own time and ours. He advises “that the business of education be not (as now) committed to the worst and unworthiest of men [here at least we have improved] but that it be seriously studied and practised by the best and abler persons.” To this standard we have not yet attained.

§ 25. Handwork is to be practised, but its educational value is not clearly perceived. “All children, though of the highest rank, are to be taught some gentle manufacture in their minority.” _Ergastula Literaria_, literary workhouses, are to be instituted where children may be taught as well to do something towards their living as to read and write.[105]

§ 26. Education was to be universal, but chiefly with the object of bringing to the front the clever sons of poor parents. The rule he would lay down is “that all children of above seven years old may be presented to this kind of education, none being to be excluded by reason of the poverty and unability of their parents, for hereby it hath come to pass that many are now holding the plough which might have been made fit to steer the state.”[106]

§ 27. From these enthusiasts for realities we find a change when we turn to their contemporary, a schoolmaster and author of a Latin Accidence, who was perhaps the most notable Englishman who ever kept a school or published a school-book.

§ 28. Milton was not only a great poet: he was also a great scholar. Everything he said or wrote bore traces of his learning. The world of books then rather than the world of the senses is his world. He has benefited as he says “among old renowned authors” and “his inclination leads him not” to read modern _Januas_ and _Didactics_, or apparently the writings of any of his contemporaries including those of his great countryman, Bacon. But, as Professor Laurie reminds us, no man, not even a Milton, however he may ignore the originators of ideas can keep himself outside the influence of the ideas themselves when they are in the air; and so we find Milton using his incomparable power of expression in the service of the Realists.

§ 29. But brief he endeavours to be, and paying the Horatian penalty he becomes obscure. In the “few observations which flowered off and were the burnishing of many studious and contemplative years,” Milton touches only on the bringing up of gentlemen’s sons between the ages of 12 and 21, and his suggestions do not, like those of Comenius, deal with the education of the people, or of both sexes.[107] This limit of age, sex, and station deprives Milton’s plan of much of its interest, as the absence of detail deprives it of much of its value.

§ 30. Still, we find in the _Tractate_ a very great advance on the ideas current at the Renascence. Learning is no longer the aim of education but is regarded simply as a means. No finer expression has been given in our literature to the main thesis of the Christian and of the Realist and to the Realist’s contempt of verbalism, than this: “The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every Nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother-dialect only.”

§ 31. The several propositions here implied have thus been “disentangled” by Professor Laurie (_John Milton_ in _Addresses_, &c., p. 167).

1. The aim of education is the _knowledge_ of God and _likeness_ to God.

2. _Likeness_ to God we attain by possessing our souls of true virtue and by the Heavenly Grace of Faith.

3. _Knowledge_ of God we attain by the study of the visible things of God.

4. Teaching then has for its aim _this_ knowledge.

5. Language is merely an instrument or vehicle for the knowledge of things.

6. The linguist may be less _learned_ (_i.e._, educated) in the true sense than a man who can make good use of his mother-tongue though he knows no other.

§ 32. Elsewhere, Milton gives his idea of “a complete and generous education;” it “fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of Peace and War.” (Browning’s edition, p. 8.) Here and indeed in all that Milton says we feel that “the noble moral glow that pervades the _Tractate on Education_, the mood of magnanimity in which it is conceived and written, and the faith it inculcates in the powers of the young human spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are merits everlasting.” (Masson iij, p. 252.)

§ 33. But in this moral glow and in an intense hatred of verbalism lie as it seems to me the chief merits of the Tractate. The practical suggestions are either incomprehensible or of doubtful wisdom. The reforming of education was, as Milton says, one of the greatest and noblest designs that could be thought on, but he does not take the right road when he proposes for every city in England a joint school and university for about 120 boarders. The advice to keep boys between 12 and 21 in this barrack life I consider, with Professor Laurie, to be “fundamentally unsound;” and the project of uniting the military training of Sparta with the humanistic training of Athens seems to me a pure chimæra.

§ 34. When we come to instruction we find that Milton after announcing the distinctive principle of the Realists proves to be himself the last survivor of the Verbal Realists. (See _supra_, p. 25.) No doubt

“His daily teachers had been woods and rills,”

but his thoughts had been even more in his books; and for the young he sketches out a purely bookish curriculum. The young are to learn about things, but they are to learn through books; and the only books to which Milton attaches importance are written in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. He held, probably with good reason, that far too much time “is now bestowed in pure trifling at grammar and sophistry.” “We do amiss,” he says, “to spend 7 or 8 years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.” Without an explanation of the “otherwise” this statement is a truism, and what Milton says further hardly amounts to an explanation. His plan, if plan it can be called, is as follows: “If after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, the boys were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then proceed to learn the substance of good things and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This,” adds Milton, “I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning languages.” It is, however, not the most intelligible.

§ 35. “I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubbs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.” We cannot but wonder whether this belief survived the experience of “the pretty garden-house in Aldersgate.” From the little we are told by his nephew and old pupil Edward Phillips we should infer that Milton was not unsuccessful as a schoolmaster. In this we have a striking proof how much more important is the teacher than the teaching. A character such as Milton’s in which we find the noblest aims united with untiring energy in pursuit of them could not but dominate the impressionable minds of young people brought under its influence. But whatever success he met with could not have been due to the things he taught nor to his method in teaching them. In spite of the “moral glow” about his recommendations they are “not a bow for every [or any] man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher.”

§ 36. Nor did he do much for the science of education. His scheme is vitiated, as Mark Pattison says, by “the information fallacy.” In the literary instruction there is no thought of training the faculties of all or the special faculties of the individual. “It requires much observation of young minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of unassimilable information stupefies the faculties instead of training them,” says Pattison; and Milton absorbed by his own thoughts and the thoughts of the ancients did not observe the minds of the young, and knew little of the powers of any mind but his own.

For information the youths are not required to observe for themselves but are to be taught “a general compact of physicks.” “Also in course might be read to them out of some not tedious writer the Institution of Physick; that they may know the tempers, the humours, the seasons, and how to manage a crudity.”

§ 37. Even the study of the classics is advocated by Milton on false grounds. If, like the Port-Royalists, he had recommended the study of the classical authors for the sake of pure Latin and Greek or as models of literary style, the means would have been suited to the end; but it was very different when he directed boys to study Virgil and Columella in order to learn about bees and farming. In after-life they would find these authorities a little out of date; and if they ever attempted to improve tillage, “to recover the bad soil and to remedy the waste that is made of good, which was one of Hercules’s praises,” they would have found a knowledge of the methods of Hercules about as useful as of the methods of the Romans.