Chapter 18

The example of this man was brought vividly to my mind at a later day, in Philadelphia, when an important educational question was under discussion. Rembrandt Peale had two dreams, each worthy of his genius. One was to paint a Washington which should go down to posterity; the other was so to simplify the elements of the art of drawing that young boys and girls might learn it as universally as they learn to read and write. He spent long years in maturing a little work for this purpose, no bigger than a primer or a spelling-book, and a determined effort was made on the part of some of the friends of popular education to introduce the study into the primary public schools of Philadelphia. It was introduced into the High Schools. But its benefits were limited to a comparatively small number. The hope and the aim of the friends of Mr. Peale's project were to make the study an elementary one--to make a certain amount of proficiency in drawing a test of promotion from the lower schools to the schools above it. This would have placed "Graphics" alongside of the copy-book and the spelling-book. After struggling for several years with popular prejudice, the friends of the scheme were obliged to abandon it as hopeless. The idea was too much in advance of the times. Could the plan have succeeded, and could the entire youthful population of that great city, which is preëminently a mechanical and manufacturing centre, have grown up with a familiar practised skill in the use of the pencil, in ordinary, off-hand drawing, such as our friend Michael had, there can be no question that it would have added untold millions to the general wealth. If every boy and girl in that great metropolitan city were now obliged to spend as much time in learning to draw as is spent in learning to spell, and at the same age that they learn to spell, I do soberly believe that the addition to the wealth of the city, by the increased mechanical skill that would be developed, would be worth more than the entire cost of her public schools, although they do cost well-nigh a million of dollars annually.

What is true of drawing, is true of every branch and accomplishment necessary to a complete education. A man is educated when all his capacities bodily and mental are developed, and a community is educated when all its members are. Now if we could imagine two communities, of exactly equal numbers, and in physical circumstances exactly equal as to climate, soil, access to markets, and so forth, and if one of these communities should tax itself to the extent of even one-fourth of its income in promoting popular education, while the other spent not a dollar in this way, there can be little doubt as to which community would make the most rapid advances in wealth and in every other desirable social good.

We happen to have on this subject one most striking and significant record. In 1670, the English Commissioners for Foreign Plantations addressed to the Governors of the several colonies a series of questions concerning the condition of the settlements under their charge. One of these questions related to the means of popular education. The answers of two of the Governors are preserved. One of them, the Governor of Connecticut, ruled a territory to which nature had not been specially propitious. Its climate was bleak, its coast rockbound, its soil blest with only ordinary fertility. The other territory, Virginia, had an extraordinary amount of natural advantages. It had fine harbors, numerous navigable streams, a climate more temperate by several degrees than its rival, the soil in its lowlands and valleys unsurpassed in any of the Plantations for its capacity to produce wheat, corn, and tobacco, its mountains filled with untold treasures of lime, iron, and coal, (and, it now seems, with petroleum also,) and withal that wonderful variety of natural resources, which seems best suited to stimulate and reward the productive industry of its inhabitants.

The Governor of the less favored colony replied to the Royal Commissioners, as follows: "_One-fourth_ of the annual revenue of the Colony is laid out in maintaining free schools for the education of our children." The policy thus early impressed upon the colony has been maintained with steadfast and almost proverbial consistency to this day, that region being known the world over as the land of schoolmasters. The Governor of the other colony replied, "I thank God, there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years." To this policy she also has until lately only too faithfully adhered. Now what is the result?

By referring to the tables accompanying the Census of 1860, we find the following significant facts.

1. The average cash value of land was not quite $12 an acre in one commonwealth (Virginia), and a little over $30 an acre in the other.

2. One commonwealth sustained only five inhabitants to every hundred acres of her soil, the other sustained eighteen inhabitants to every hundred acres.

3. The value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the population, was in one commonwealth $496 to every inhabitant, in the other $965 to every inhabitant.

4. The value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the acre, was in one commonwealth less than $26 to the acre, in the other more than $177 to the acre.

To which facts I may add, what is true, though not in the Census, it was the invention of Eli Whitney, a travelling schoolmaster from Connecticut, that has trebled the value of land in nearly every Southern State.

I have been endeavoring to show that popular education, though it is expensive, tends to national wealth. The argument is that an educated population is capable of producing greater material results than a population uneducated can produce. The example of Eli Whitney, just referred to, suggests the other line of argument, which I shall now notice briefly in conclusion. This second argument is, that the general diffusion of intelligence in a community tends to quicken invention, and leads to the discovery of those scientific principles and of those ingenious labor-saving machines, by which the productive power of the community is so greatly multiplied. The cotton-gin, the steam-engine, the sewing-machine, and the reaping-machine would never have been invented in a nation of boors. It is not asserted that every boy who goes to school will become an inventor. But it is as certain as the laws of mind and matter can make it, that inventions abound in a nation in proportion to its progress in science and the general spread of intelligence among the masses. Multiply common schools and you multiply inventions. How much these latter increase man's producing power, and so add to the aggregate of human wealth, it is needless to say. The invention of Watt alone has quadrupled the productive power of the whole human race. The aggregate steam-power of one single country, Great Britain, equals the muscular capacity for labor of four hundred millions of men--more than twice the number of adult males capable of labor on our planet. Its aggregate power throughout the earth is equal to the male capacity for manual work of four or five worlds like ours. The commerce, the navigation, the maritime warfare, the agriculture, the mechanic arts of the human race, have been revolutionized by this single invention not yet a century old.

The application of scientific truths to the common industries of life is becoming every day more and more a necessity. The village carpenter, no less than the builder of the Niagara Suspension Bridge, makes hourly reference to scientific laws. The carpenter who misapplies his formulæ for the strength of materials, builds a house which falls down. The properties of the various mechanical powers are involved in every machine. Every machine, indeed, it has been well said, is a solidified mechanical theorem. The surveyor in determining the limits of one's farm, the architect in planning a house, the builder in planning his estimates, and the several master workmen who do the carpentry, masonry, and finishing, are all dependent upon geometric truths. Bleaching, dyeing, calico-printing, gas-making, soap-making, sugar-refining, the reduction of metals from their ores, with innumerable other productive industries, are dependent upon chemistry. Agriculture, the basis of all the other arts, is in the same condition. Chemical knowledge, indeed, is doing for the productive powers of the soil what the application of steam has done for the increase of mechanical power. The farmer who wishes to double his crops, finds the means of doing so, not in multiplying his acres, but in applying a knowledge of the laws of chemistry to the cultivation of the soil already possessed. Even physiology is adding to the wealth of the farming interest. The truth that the production of animal heat implies waste of substance, and that therefore preventing the loss of heat prevents the need for extra food--which is a purely theoretical conclusion--now guides the fattening of cattle. By keeping cattle warm, fodder is saved. Experiments of physiologists have proved, not only that change of diet is beneficial, but that digestion is facilitated by a mixture of ingredients in each meal. Both these truths are now influencing cattle-feeding. In the keen race of competition, the farmer who has a competent knowledge of the laws of animal and vegetable physiology and of agricultural chemistry, will surely distance the one who gropes along by guess and by tradition. A general diffusion of scientific knowledge saves the community from innumerable wasteful and foolish mistakes. In England, not many years ago, the partners in a large mining company were ruined from not knowing that a certain fossil belonged to the old red sandstone, below which coal is never found. In another enterprise, £20,000 were lost in the prosecution of a scheme for collecting the alcohol that distils from bread in baking, all of which might have been saved, had the parties known that less than one hundredth part by weight of the flour is changed in fermentation.

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations. Suffice it to say, in conclusion, I hold it to be a most manifest truth, that the general education of a community increases largely its material wealth, both by the direct effect which knowledge has upon individuals in making them individually more productive, and by the increased control which the diffusion of knowledge gives to mankind over the powers of nature. A nation or a state is wisely economical which spends largely and even lavishly upon popular education.

XXX.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

My last chapter, like the first, begins with a question. Strange to say, no satisfactory definition of education has yet been given, nor has a definition of it often been even attempted. The literature of the subject is copious enough. But writers have busied themselves mainly with details, with methods of teaching, and so forth. A few, of a more philosophical turn of mind, have discussed the principles of the subject, and among these some have undertaken to develop their theories from the true starting-point of a definition. But among all these, from Plato, who was the earliest systematic writer on the subject, to Herbert Spencer, the latest and the most pretentious, not one has given a definition of it which is not open to objection.

It may seem presumptuous, perhaps, to undertake again that in which so many have failed. But there can be no harm in making at least an endeavor. What then are some of the elements which enter into our idea of education?

To educate is, in the first place, to develop. It is to draw out and strengthen the powers and give them right direction. It is, therefore, something more than merely imparting knowledge. Knowledge is to the child's mind what food is to the body. Each is a means to an end. It is to cause growth. As by the proper use of food and exercise the limbs and muscles expand, and acquire their full and appointed size, symmetry, and strength, so by acquiring and using knowledge of various kinds, the various faculties of the mind attain their full power and proportion. For this reason mainly the pure mathematics and the ancient languages, Latin and Greek, have held their place in almost every course of liberal study, not because the knowledge of these branches is likely to be called for in ordinary professional business, but because the study of these branches is supposed to be particularly adapted to develop and invigorate certain important qualities of the mind. This development of the powers, then, is the first element involved in a just idea of education.

But, secondly, nature plainly indicates a certain order to be observed in the development of the faculties. "First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." So in the human plant. The time for the efflorescence of some of the faculties is in early youth. Other faculties make little growth till near the age of manhood. A wise educator will carefully observe these facts, and not waste his energies and mar his work, either by attempting a premature development of those faculties which God seems to have meant to ripen later, or by neglecting to draw out and train in childhood those faculties which then most naturally and aptly spring into vigorous growth. Youth, for instance, is the season, of all others, when the memory is to be cultivated; the season of all others, when the instinctive principle of faith is to have free play. So, too, the moral and emotional faculties may receive the first germs of their development at a very early stage in the history of the human being. The education of this part of our nature begins, indeed, with the first smile of recognition that passes between the infant and its mother. Other faculties and powers, as the reason and the judgment, for instance, come to maturity nearer the age of manhood, and the normal period for their cultivation is accordingly near the end, rather than near the beginning, of an educational course. It is not, however, my object here to mark out an order for the development of the faculties, but only to note that there is such an order, and that the observance of this order is a most important element in our idea of what education is.

The next element in this idea is that a certain proportion and symmetry be observed in the development of the powers. Perhaps it might not be strictly accurate to say that any faculty may be cultivated too highly. Yet there certainly is an excess whenever one faculty or power is cultivated quite out of proportion to the other faculties and powers. A man in Boston a few years ago, by directing his attention exclusively for a long time to the single act of lifting, educated his body to the power of lifting enormous weights. But this power was gained at the expense of agility, grace, and many other bodily qualities quite as important as that of lifting weights. So the mental faculties may become one-sided by injudicious training. The memory may be inordinately developed at the expense of the reasoning power, the reason at the expense of the imagination, the feelings at the expense of the judgment, the mind at the expense of the body, the body at the expense of the mind. In all right education, therefore, the faculties are to be developed, not only in due order, but in due proportion.

The next element that enters into our idea is that of a proper comprehensiveness. The educator must bear in mind that the being committed to his care is one of a complex nature, and that every part of this complex nature is to receive its due attention. Physical education is included in his duties as well as mental, mental as well as moral and religious. No part is to be neglected. He should aim to secure for his subject full bodily health, agility, strength, symmetry, and power of endurance. The bodily senses are capable of a degree of cultivation that few seem to be aware of. Perhaps, in our ordinary schemes of education, no part of our complex nature is so inadequately provided for, so almost ignored, as the physical. But, as in regard to the other points that have been raised, so here, it is not my object so much to particularize the several parts of human nature that require attention, as to recognize distinctly the fact that we are thus complex, and that the business of the educator is necessarily a many-sided one, requiring most varied knowledge and experience.

But there is one important limitation to be observed here, otherwise our definition would be seriously amiss. In many works on education, it is stated, without qualification, that we ought to give to all our powers the fullest development of which they are capable. If we were unfallen angels, the rule might perhaps be a safe one. But for fallen human beings, it certainly needs some limitation. We have faculties and powers, not a few, which we need to repress rather than to cultivate. Are we to give the fullest development of which they are capable, to anger, envy, jealousy, cunning, avarice, and lust? To state the question is to answer it. It is not every faculty of the child, therefore, that is to be developed, but only those parts of his nature which are good and desirable, those by which he can best discharge his duties to God and attain his highest excellence as a man.

Let us now gather up the several ideas which have been suggested, and see if we cannot compress them into some brief formula, as a definition of education, which, if not perfect and exhaustive of the subject, shall be both more comprehensive and more precise than those now afloat.

Definition.--Education is developing, in due order and proportion, whatever is good and desirable in human nature.

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