Part 36

§ 4. I am, therefore, though with some limitation, in favour of the _open_ school. I am well aware, however, what an immense demand this system makes on the master who desires to exercise a good influence on the moral and religious character of his pupils. If he would have his pupils know him as he is, if he would have them think as he thinks, feel as he feels, and believe as he believes, he must be, at least in heart and aim, worthy of their imitation. He must (with reverence be it spoken) enter, in his humble way, into the spirit of the perfect Teacher, who said, “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.” Are we prepared to look upon our calling in this light? I believe that the school-teachers of this country need not fear comparison with any other body of men, in point of morality, and religious earnestness; but I dare say many have found, as I have, that the occupation is a very _narrowing_ one, that the teacher soon gets to work in a groove, and from having his thoughts so much occupied with routine work, especially with small fault-findings and small corrections, he is apt to settle down insensibly into a kind of moral and intellectual stagnation—Philistinism, as Matthew Arnold has taught us to call it—in which he cares as little for high aims and general principles as his most commonplace pupil. Thus it happens sometimes that a man who set out with the notion of developing all the powers of his pupils’ minds, thinks in the end of nothing but getting them to work out equations and do Latin exercises without false concords; and the clergyman even, who began with a strong sense of his responsibility and a confident hope of influencing the boys’ belief and character, at length is quite content if they conform to discipline and give him no trouble out of school-hours. We may say of a really good teacher what Wordsworth says of the poet; in his work he must neither

lack that first great gift, the vital soul, Nor general truths, which are themselves a sort Of elements and agents, under-powers, Subordinate helpers of the living mind.—_Prelude_, i. 9.

But the “vital soul” is too often crushed by excessive routine labour, and then when general truths, both moral and intellectual, have ceased to interest us, our own education stops, and we become incapable of fulfilling the highest and most important part of our duty in educating others.

§ 5. It is, then, the duty of the teacher to resist gravitating into this state, no less for his pupils’ sake than for his own. The ways and means of doing this I am by no means competent to point out; so I will merely insist on the importance of teachers not being overworked—a matter which has not, I think, hitherto received due attention.

We cannot expect intellectual activity of men whose minds are compelled “with pack-horse constancy to keep the road” hour after hour, till they are too jaded for exertion of any kind. The man himself suffers, and his work, even his easiest work, suffers also. It may be laid down as a general rule, that no one can teach long and teach well. All satisfactory teaching and management of boys absolutely requires that the master should be _in good spirits_. When the “genial spirits fail,” as they must from an overdose of monotonous work, everything goes wrong directly. The master has no longer the power of keeping the boys’ attention, and has to resort to punishments even to preserve order. His gloom quenches their interest and mental activity, just as fire goes out before carbonic acid; and in the end teacher and taught acquire, not without cause, a feeling of mutual aversion.

§ 6. And another reason why the master should not spend the greater part of his time in formal teaching is this—his doing so compels him to neglect the informal but very important teaching he may both give and receive by making his pupils his companions.

§ 7. I fear I shall be met here by an objection which has only too much force in it. Most Englishmen are at a loss how to make any use of leisure. If a man has no turn for thinking, no fondness for reading, and is without a hobby, what good shall his leisure do him? he will only pass it in insipid gossip, from which any easy work would be a relief. That this is so in many cases, is a proof to my mind of the utter failure of our ordinary education: and perhaps an improved education may some day alter what now seems a national peculiarity. Meantime the mind, even of Englishmen, is more than a “succedaneum for salt;”[205] and its tendency to bury its sight, ostrich-fashion, under a heap of routine work must be strenuously resisted, if it is to escape its deadly enemies, stupidity and ignorance.

§ 8. I have elsewhere expressed what I believe is the common conviction of those who have seen something both of large schools and of small, viz., that the moral atmosphere of the former is, as a rule, by far the more wholesome;[206] and also that each boy is more influenced by his companions than by his master. More than this, I believe that in many, perhaps in most, schools, one or two boys affect the tone of the whole body more than any master.[207] What are called Preparatory Schools labour under this immense disadvantage, that their ruling spirits are mere children without reflection or sense of responsibility.[208] But where the leading boys are virtually young men, these may be made a medium through which the mind of the master may act upon the whole school. They can enter into the thoughts, feelings, and aims of the master on the one hand, and they know what is said and done among the boys on the other. The master must, therefore, know the elder boys intimately, and they must know him. This consummation, however, will not be arrived at without great tact and self-denial on the part of the master. The youth who is “neither man nor boy” is apt to be shy and awkward, and is not by any means so easy to entertain as the lad who chatters freely of the school’s cricket or football, past, present, and to come. But the master who feels how all-important is the _tone_ of the school, will not grudge any pains to influence those on whom it chiefly depends.

§ 9. But, allowing the value of all these indirect influences, can we afford to neglect direct formal religious instruction? We have most of us the greatest horror of what we call a secular education, meaning thereby an education without formal religious teaching. But this horror seems to affect our theory more than our practice. Few parents ever enquire what religious instruction their sons get at Eton, Harrow, or Westminster. At Harrow when I was in the Fourth Form there (nearly fifty years ago by the way) we had no religious instruction except a weekly lesson in Watts’s Scripture History; and when I was a master some twenty years ago my form had only a Sunday lesson in a portion of the Old Testament, and a lesson in French Testament at “First School” on Monday. Even in some “Voluntary Schools” we do not find “religious instruction” made so much of as the arithmetic.

§ 10. In this matter we differ very widely from the Germans. All their classes have a “religion-lesson” (_Religionstunde_) nearly every day, the younger children in the German Bible, the elder in the Greek Testament or Church History; and in all cases the teacher is careful to instruct his pupils in the tenets of Luther or Calvin. The Germans may urge that if we believe a set of doctrines to be a fitting expression of Divine revelation, it is our first duty to make the young familiar with those doctrines. I cannot say, however, that I have been favourably impressed by the religion-lessons I have heard given in German schools. I do not deny that dogmatic teaching is necessary, but the first thing to cultivate in the young is reverence; and reverence is surely in danger if you take a class in “religion” just as you take a class in grammar. Emerson says somewhere, that to the poet, the saint, and the philosopher, all distinction of sacred and profane ceases to exist, all things become alike sacred. As the schoolboy, however, does not as yet come under any one of these denominations, if the distinction ceases to exist for him, all things will become alike profane.

§ 11. I believe that religious instruction is conveyed in the most impressive way when it is connected with worship. Where the prayers are joined with the reading of Scripture and with occasional simple addresses, and where the congregation have responses to repeat, and psalms and hymns to sing, there is reason to hope that boys will increase, not only in knowledge, but in wisdom and reverence too. Without asserting that the Church of England service is the best possible for the young, I hold that any form for them should at least resemble it in its main features, should be as varied as possible, should require frequent change of posture, and should give the congregation much to say and sing. Much use might be made as in the Church of Rome, of litanies. The service, whatever its form, should be conducted with great solemnity, and the boys should not sit or kneel so close together that the badly disposed may disturb their neighbours who try to join in the act of worship. If good hymns are sung, these may be taken occasionally as the subject of an address, so that attention may be drawn to their meaning. Music should be carefully attended to, and the danger of irreverence at practices guarded against by never using sacred words more than is necessary, and by impressing on the singers the sacredness of everything connected with Divine worship. Questions combined with instruction may sometimes keep up boys’ attention better than a formal sermon. Though common prayer should be frequent, this should not be supposed to take the place of private prayer. In many schools boys have hardly an opportunity for private prayer. They kneel down, perhaps, with all the talk and play of their schoolfellows going on around them, and sometimes fear of public opinion prevents their kneeling down at all. A schoolmaster cannot teach private prayer, but he can at least see that there is opportunity for it.

Education to goodness and piety, as far as it lies in human hands, must consist almost entirely in the influence of the good and pious superior over his inferiors, and as this influence is independent of rules, these remarks of mine cannot do more than touch the surface of this most important subject.[209]

§ 12. In conclusion, I wish to say a word on the education of opinion. Sir Arthur Helps lays great stress on preparing the way to moderation and open-mindedness by teaching boys that all good men are not of the same way of thinking. It is indeed a miserable error to lead a young person to suppose that his small ideas are a measure of the universe, and that all who do not accept his formularies are less enlightened than himself. If a young man is so brought up, he either carries intellectual blinkers all his life, or, what is far more probable, he finds that something he has been taught is false, and forthwith begins to doubt everything. On the other hand, it is a necessity with the young to believe, and we could not, even if we would, bring a youth into such a state of mind as to regard everything about which there is any variety of opinion as an open question. But he may be taught reverence and humility; he may be taught to reflect how infinitely greater the facts of the universe must be than our poor thoughts about them, and how inadequate are words to express even our imperfect thoughts. Then he will not suppose that all truth has been taught him in his formularies, nor that he understands even all the truth of which those formularies are the imperfect expression.[210]

XXII.

CONCLUSION.

§ 1. When I originally published these essays (more than 22 years ago) the critic of the _Nonconformist_ in one of the best, though by no means most complimentary, of the many notices with which the book was favoured, took me to task for being in such a hurry to publish. I had confessed incompleteness. What need was there for me to publish before I had completed my work? Since that time I have spent years on my subject and at least two years on these essays themselves; but they now seem to me even further from completeness than they seemed then. However, I have reason to believe that the old book, incomplete as it was, proved useful to teachers; and in its altered form it will, I hope, be found useful still.

§ 2. It may be useful I think in two ways.

First: it may lead some teachers to the study of the great thinkers on education. There are some vital truths which remain in the books which time cannot destroy. In the world as Goethe says are few voices, many echoes; and the echoes often prevent our hearing the voices distinctly. Perhaps most people had a better chance of hearing the voices when there were fewer books and no periodicals. Speakers properly so called cannot now be heard for the hubbub of the talkers; and as literature is becoming more and more periodical our writers seem mostly employed like children on card pagodas or like the recumbent artists of the London streets who produce on the stones of the pavement gaudy chalk drawings which the next shower washes out.

But if I would have fewer books what business have I to add to the number? I may be told that—

“He who in quest of quiet, ‘Silence!’ hoots, Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.”

My answer is that I do not write to expound my own thought, but to draw attention to the thoughts of the men who are best worth hearing. It is not given to us small people to think strongly and clearly like the great people; we, however, gain in strength and clearness by contact with them; and this contact I seek to promote. So long as this book is used, it will I hope be used only as an _introduction_ to the great thinkers whose names are found in it.

§ 3. There is another way in which the book may be of use. By considering the great thinkers in chronological order we see that each adds to the treasure which he finds already accumulated, and thus by degrees we are arriving in education, as in most departments of human endeavour, at a _science_. In this science lies our hope for the future. Teachers must endeavour to obtain more and more knowledge of the laws to which their art has to conform itself.

§ 4. It may be of advantage to some readers if I point out briefly what seems to me the course of the main stream of thought as it has flowed down to us from the Renascence.

§ 5. As I endeavoured to show at the beginning of this book, the Scholars of the Renascence fell into a great mistake, a mistake which perhaps could not have been avoided at a time when literature was rediscovered and the printing press had just been invented. This mistake was the idolatry of books, and, still worse, of books in Latin and Greek. So the schoolmaster fell into a bad theory or conception of his task, for he supposed that his function was to teach Latin and Greek; and his practice or way of going to work was not much better, for his chief implements were grammar and the cane.

§ 6. The first who made a great advance were the Jesuits. They were indeed far too much bent on being popular to be “Innovators.” They endeavoured to do well what most schoolmasters did badly. They taught Latin and Greek, and they made great use of grammar, but they gave up the cane. Boys were to be made happy. School-hours were to be reduced from 10 hours a day to 5 hours, and in those 5 hours learning was to be made “not only endurable but even pleasurable.”

But the pupils were to find this pleasure not in the exercise of their mental powers but in other ways. As Mr. Eve has said, young teachers are inclined to think mainly of stimulating their pupils’ minds and so neglect the repetition needed for accuracy. Old teachers on the other hand care so much for accuracy that they require the same thing over and over till the pupils lose zest and mental activity. The Jesuits frankly adopted the maxim “Repetition is the mother of studies,” and worked over the same ground again and again. The two forces on which they relied for making the work pleasant were one good—the personal influence of the master (“boys will soon love learning when they love the teacher,”) and one bad or at least doubtful—the spur of emulation.

However, the attempt to lead, not drive, was a great step in the right direction. Moreover as they did not hold with the Sturms and Trotzendorfs that the classics in and for themselves were the object of education the Jesuits were able to think of other things as well. They were very careful of the health of the body. And they also enlarged the task of the schoolmaster in another and still more important way. To the best of their lights they attended to the moral and religious training of their pupils. It is much to the credit of the Fathers that though Plautus and Terence were considered very valuable for giving a knowledge of colloquial Latin and were studied and learnt by heart in the Protestant schools, the Jesuits rejected them on account of their impurity. The Jesuits wished the whole boy, not his memory only, to be affected by the master; so the master was to make a study of each of his pupils and to go on with the same pupils through the greater part of their school course.

The Jesuit system stands out in the history of education as a remarkable instance of a school system elaborately thought out and worked as a whole. In it the individual schoolmaster withered, but the system grew, and was, I may say _is_, a mighty organism. The single Jesuit teacher might not be the superior of the average teacher in good Protestant schools, but by their unity of action the Jesuits triumphed over their rivals as easily as a regiment of soldiers scatters a mob.

§ 7. The schoolmaster’s theory of the human mind made of it, to use Bartle Massey’s simile, a kind of bladder fit only to hold what was poured into it. This pouring-in theory of education was first called in question by that strange genius who seems to have stood outside all the traditions and opinions of his age,

“holding no form of creed, But contemplating all.”

I mean Rabelais.

Like most reformers, Rabelais begins with denunciations of the system established by use and wont. After an account of the school-teaching and school-books of the day, he says—“It would be better for a boy to learn nothing at all than to be taught such-like books by such-like masters.” He then proposes a training in which, though the boy is to study books, he is not to do this mainly, but is to be led to look about him, and to use both his senses and his limbs. For instance, he is to examine the stars when he goes to bed, and then to be called up at four in the morning to find the change that has taken place. Here we see a training of the powers of observation. These powers are also to be exercised on the trees and plants which are met with out-of-doors, and on objects within the house, as well as on the food placed on the table. The study of books is to be joined with this study of things, for the old authors are to be consulted for their accounts of whatever has been met with. The study of trades, too, and the practice of some of them, such as wood-cutting, and carving in stone, makes a very interesting feature in this system. On the whole, I think we may say that Rabelais was the first to advocate training as distinguished from teaching; and he was the father of _Anschauungs-unterricht_, teaching by _intuition_, _i.e._, by the pupil’s own senses and the spring of his own intelligence. Rabelais would bestow much care on the body too. Not only was the pupil to ride and fence; we find him even shouting for the benefit of his lungs.

§ 8. Rabelais had now started an entirely new theory of the educator’s task, and fifty years afterwards his thought was taken up and put forward with incomparable vigour by the great essayist, Montaigne. Montaigne starts with a quotation from Rabelais—“The greatest clerks are not the wisest men,” and then he makes one of the most effective onslaughts on the pouring-in theory that is to be found in all literature. His accusation against the schoolmasters of his time is twofold. First, he says, they aim only at giving knowledge, whereas they should first think of judgment and virtue. Secondly, in their method of teaching they do not exercise the pupils’ own minds. The sum and substance of the charge is contained in these words—“We labour to stuff the memory and in the meantime leave the conscience and understanding impoverished and void.” His notion of education embraced the whole man. “Our very exercises and recreations,” says he, “running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, fencing, will prove to be a good part of our study. I would have the pupil’s outward fashion and mien and the disposition of his limbs formed at the same time with his mind. ’Tis not a soul, ’tis not a body, that we are training up, but a _man_, and we ought not to divide him.”

§ 9. Before the end of the fifteen hundreds then we see in the best thought of the time a great improvement in the conception of the task of the schoolmaster. Learning is not the only thing to be thought of. Moral and religious training are recognised as of no less importance. And as “both soul and body have been created by the hand of God” (the words are Ignatius Loyola’s), both must be thought of in education. When we come to instruction we find Rabelais recommending that at least part of it should be “intuitive,” and Montaigne requiring that the instruction should involve an exercise of the intellectual powers of the learner. But the escape even in thought from the Renascence ideal was but partial. Some of Rabelais’ directions seem to come from a “Verbal Realist,” and Montaigne was far from saying as Joseph Payne has said, “every act of teaching is a mode of dealing with mind and will be successful only in proportion as this is recognised,” “teaching is only another name for mental training.” But if Rabelais and Montaigne did not reach the best thought of our time they were much in advance of a great deal of our _practice_.

§ 10. The opening of the sixteen hundreds saw a great revolt from the literary spirit of the Renascence. The exclusive devotion to books was followed by a reaction. There might after all be something worth knowing that books would not teach. Why give so much time to the study of words and so little to the observation of things? “Youth,” says a writer of the time, “is deluged with grammar precepts infinitely tedious, perplexed, obscure, and for the most part unprofitable, and that for many years.” Why not escape from this barren region? “Come forth, my son,” says Comenius. “Let us go into the open air. There you shall view whatsoever God produced from the beginning and doth yet effect by nature.” And Milton thus expresses the conviction of his day: “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.”

This great revolution which was involved in the Baconian philosophy may be described as a turning from fancy to fact. All the creations of the human mind seemed to have lost their value. The only things that seemed worth studying were the material universe and the laws or sequences which were gradually ascertained by patient induction and experiment.