Part 18

It is not only the more formal aspects of language, moreover, that he treats with discrimination. On the still subtler question of its relation to thought and knowledge he speaks with a discernment far beyond his time. The usurping tyranny of _words_ over the minds of men, in place of the lawful domination of the realities they symbolised, had in the movement of the Renascence changed its form without relaxing its severity. If they were no longer so frequently used as mere counters in vain disputations, they were yet apt to be regarded with unreasoning idolatry, as the sacred embodiment of the thoughts and feelings of settled forms of civilisation in the past, exempt from any enquiry as to the conceptions they expressed. Mulcaster does not share this illusion. In his view language is primarily a means of communication, and though the acquirement of foreign tongues may be a necessity for the time, yet they “push us one degree further off from knowledge.” He may not have fully realised the degree in which language is to be reckoned with as a form of artistic expression and as an instrument of thought, though his appreciation of the possibilities of the English tongue shows that he did not forget these invaluable uses; but in any case he saw clearly, and he was one of the first to see, that the crying need of his time was to be set free from the despotism of words, which made them rather a hindrance than a help to real knowledge. “We attribute too much to tongues, in paying more heed to them than we do to matter.” The bearing of this opinion on educational theory will be considered presently, but it deserves to be noted at the outset in evidence of the advanced philosophical standpoint of a writer who belonged to the generation preceding Francis Bacon.

Mulcaster’s independence of conventional practice is further set beyond doubt by his conception of the place of authority in argument. Anticipating Locke in deprecating the constant use of great names in support of a writer’s thesis, he is of course laying down a principle now so universally accepted that it seems unnecessary to refer to it, but those who are acquainted with the Renascence writers of any country know how widely a slavish regard for the opinions of the classical authors took the place of a direct appeal to the rational judgment of the reader. It was no needless service to assign limits to this controversial habit, to discriminate between superstitious servility and justifiable deference to previous thinkers, to call for a fearless statement of the truth as it appeared to each new enquiring spirit, and claim that it should be tested wholly by its conformity to reason and nature and experience. Especially valuable for his time was his insistence on the difference of circumstance between the ancient and the modern worlds, and between the characters of the various nations. He may seem to us to carry these distinctions to an excess when in considering ideal types of human nature he takes account of the form of government under which each individual has to live, holding certain qualities appropriate to a monarchy and others to a republic, but at least he laid a useful emphasis on the relativity of progress, and on the need for harmony in the component institutions of a particular form of society.

Another proof of Mulcaster’s general enlightenment may be found in the fact that he was the first of his countrymen to affirm seriously that education was the birthright of every child born into the community. It is not intended to suggest by this that he anticipated the full assumption by the State of the duty of providing and enforcing universal education, but rather that he desired to foster a public sentiment and social conditions which would be favourable to the idea that the rudiments of learning should by one means or another be distributed throughout the whole body of the nation. Efforts in this direction had been made in other countries under the levelling influence of the reforming spirit in religion, but in England, where the change of faith had been less associated with a democratic impulse, nothing had as yet been done to popularise education in the proper sense of the term, and public opinion had still to be prepared for the movement. It is true that the sharp distinctions of rank which the sixteenth century inherited from the Middle Ages were never so absolutely marked in the sphere of learning as in other departments of life. Though the child of lowly birth could never become a gentleman, he could become a scholar. The helping hand extended by the Church to the promising boy of low degree did not, however, imply any relaxation of caste feeling so far as the general supply of educational facilities was concerned. The humble scholar was raised out of his own class, and was always regarded as an exception. Taken in the mass, the gentry and the commonalty were clearly separated, and no kind of training was thought in any way due to the latter except such as might make them directly serviceable to their betters. For the first notable attack on this fundamental article of medieval faith, apart from the indirect and interested claims of the Reformation leaders to the means of influencing the young, credit is generally given to Comenius. But it must be remembered that half a century before his time, and in a country where the _régime_ of social status has always held a firm position, a strong protest against educational exclusiveness was raised by Richard Mulcaster, who maintained that the elements of knowledge and training should be recognised as the privilege of all, irrespective of rank or sex, and without regard to their future economic functions. “As for the education of gentlemen,” he writes, “at what age shall I suggest that they should begin to learn? Their minds are the same as those of the common people, and their bodies are often worse. The same considerations in regard to time must apply to all ranks. What should they learn? I know of nothing else, nor can I suggest anything better, than what I have already suggested for all.” And his unwillingness to recognise any kind of disability in matters of education, except what was proved by the test of experience to be natural, is further shown in his insistence that, as far as may be possible, girls should have the same advantages as boys. Though, as he says, in deference to the general feeling of his time and country he will not go so far as to propose that girls should be admitted to the grammar schools and universities, he not only wishes them to share in all the opportunities of elementary education, but he wholly approves of the ideal of higher culture for women, which was represented in the attainments of Queen Elizabeth herself.

We may now turn to matters that are less the concern of the philosophic thinker and social observer than of the expert in educational practice. Let us first examine Mulcaster’s conception of the content of a liberal education, from the two points of view, as to how far it should embrace a culture of the whole nature, and as to the proper range of distinctively mental studies. It is a matter of history that in both these respects the Renascence ideal had fallen away from the example of the Greeks. Intellectual culture had to a large extent been dissociated from physical and moral training. The life of the scholar was a thing apart from the conception of chivalry, which encouraged the physical prowess and regard to a code of honour that were developed by the military class. The formal profession of a religious end in learning took the place of a genuine cultivation of character, and while this restricted path was open to the more gifted of the poorer classes, the alternative ideal was reserved for the upper social ranks. It is true that in our own country in the Elizabethan era there was some reconciliation of these diverse aims in the persons of such men as Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, but the type they represented was quite exceptional, and had no apparent influence on general educational methods. There was great need for Mulcaster’s plea that in the upbringing of children we should return to the ideal expressed in Juvenal’s familiar phrase, “mens sana in corpore sano.” No stress need be laid on the particular forms of physical exercise which he recommended. His suggestions here were not original, and the present time has little to learn from the physiological conceptions of the sixteenth century. But what was really instructive in his own day, and is scarcely less so in ours, is the intimate relation he conceived to exist between the body and the mind--a relation that demanded a harmonious training of the whole nature. “The soul and the body being co-partners in good will, in sweet and sour, in mirth and mourning, and having generally a common sympathy and mutual feeling, how can they be, or rather why should they be, severed in education?... As the disposition of the soul will resemble that of the body, if the soul be influenced for good, it will affect the body also.” His use of the term _soul_, moreover, is significant of the conviction which underlies all his writing, that the end of all physical intellectual training is the development of the feelings that prompt to right conduct. He was not carried away by the current craze for book-learning into accepting as a legitimate end of education the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; in his view the teacher must always have regard to the unfolding of the whole character that would bear fruit in the discharge of the duties of citizenship and other activities of a complete life. Not that he wished the school to assume any preponderating control over the child, either in the direction of opinion or in moral ascendency. He had too clear an insight into the springs of conduct to ignore the potency of the earliest influences of the home, and so far from seeking to usurp the authority of parents in determining their children’s lives, he urges the closest co-operation and good feeling among all who have the pupil’s welfare at heart. Some further insight will be gained into his comprehensive ideal of upbringing when we come to consider his appreciation of home influence more closely, but it may first be asked what his conception was of the mental cultivation that should be aimed at in a liberal curriculum. In regard to the secondary or grammar school period of education, with which he was most intimately acquainted, though he has many acute criticisms and luminous suggestions to offer, his expressed intention of supplying a systematic treatment was unfortunately left unfulfilled; and of his ideas as to university teaching we have little more than a sketch of proposed reforms. On these points something may presently be said, but we may turn first to his contributions towards the establishment of a sound elementary system, which he held to be the most important stage of all, because it was the only form of education that could be brought within the reach of every child, and was the foundation of all further progress in learning. Even this part of the task that he imposed on himself remains incomplete, but there is material enough for a judgment of his point of view. It would seem that in England, up to the Elizabethan era at least, no provision had ever been made for rudimentary instruction for any except those who were destined to proceed to the higher stages of learning, and that the elementary training given to these select few was limited to the barest preparation for the traditional study of the classics. The reading and writing of the vernacular must have been acquired up to a certain point before the Latin grammar could be attacked, but it is clear that no adequate justice was done even to these preliminary subjects, and that no attempt was made to include a deliberate training of the senses and activities of the child. Mulcaster’s proposals as to an elementary course certainly do not sound revolutionary. His subjects coincide pretty nearly with our familiar “three R’s,” and he is himself careful to show that he is merely “reviving” what is commended by the precepts of the wise men of old, and by the practice of the greatest States. But it was no small merit to be the first to perceive that such a revival was possible and desirable in his own time and country, and when his proposals are examined it will be found that in the spirit in which he conceived them they were far in advance alike of contemporary, and of much later, thought and practice. It is a well-known criticism of his contemporary, Montaigne, that teachers were apt to think too much of the matter that was to be taught, and too little of the nature of the learner. That this remark was just in relation to these times we can well believe when we consider how recently the traditional bearing of the schoolmaster has been associated rather with the harsh enforcement of uncongenial tasks under the threat of penalties than with the sympathetic encouragement of willing and interested labours. Ascham had protested against the short-sighted severity of teachers, but failed to see that its root lay in the fact that the studies presented were generally ill-adapted to the capacities and inclinations of the scholars. Mulcaster, on the other hand, recognised that the remedy must be sought in the discovery of a more reasonable method, towards which he had definite constructive proposals to offer. He may even be said to have anticipated by a couple of centuries the doctrine of Rousseau, afterwards utilised by Pestalozzi and Froebel, that the paramount aim of the teacher is not to communicate knowledge, but to stimulate and guide the natural activity of the child. It is to be noted that every one of the five subjects he proposed to teach in the elementary school is of the nature of an art, calling for independent action on the part of the learner, and giving pleasurable exercise to the senses and bodily organs as well as to the intelligence. It was more than a happy intuition that led him to give so honourable a place to drawing and music; it was a consistent application of his doctrine that the minds of young children must be fed through the channels of sense perception, and that faculty is to be developed by placing the outlets of energy in immediate contact with the powers of acquisition. Drawing was intended to give a direct and practical knowledge of space relations and of the forms of natural objects, by combining the activities of eye and hand, while at the same time it favoured the cultivation of artistic expression. Music, being based on varied arrangements of number in pitch and time, was counted on to supply the ground-work of arithmetic, while in accordance with the persuasion of the Greeks it was held to exercise a definite æsthetic and moral influence on character. That Mulcaster had not only thought out his theories on the matter, but had verified them by individual child-study, is clear from the terms of his recommendations. “We must seek for natural inclinations in the soul, which seem to crave the help of education and nurture, and by means of these may be cultivated to advantage.... The best way to secure good progress, so that the intelligence may conceive clearly, memory may hold fast, and judgment may choose and discern the best, is so to ply them all that they may proceed voluntarily and not with violence.”

The same insight into the heart of the educational process appears in his treatment of the grammar-school curriculum. When we remember the absorbing pre-occupation with classical learning that was the distinctive mark of the Renascence scholars, and the prominence given in consequence to linguistic study in education, we should not wonder if Mulcaster were found acquiescing in some degree in the narrow ideal that exalted knowledge at the expense of faculty, and laid more stress on the interpretation of words than of things. What will rather excite our surprise and admiration is the extent to which he was able to rise above the contemporary estimate of the value of Latin and Greek as instruments of culture. It is from the pen of one whose reputation in his own day was based on his mastery of ancient languages and his success as a teacher of the classics, that we have the clearest statement of the contrast between the indirect, incidental value of linguistic training, and the direct, formative influences of scientific study. “In time all learning may be brought into one tongue, and that naturally understood by all, so that schooling for tongues may prove needless, just as once they were not needed; but it can never fall out that arts and sciences in their essential nature shall be anything but most necessary for every commonwealth that is not utterly barbarous.... The sciences that we term ‘mathematical’ from their very nature always achieve something good, intelligible even to the unlearned, by number, figure, sound, or motion. In the manner of their teaching also they plant in the mind of the learners a habit of resisting the influence of bare probabilities, of refusing to believe in light conjectures, of being moved only by infallible demonstrations.”

It has been stated above that Mulcaster had reached a conception distinctly in advance of his time in regard to the true significance of words, as the signs of realities in the outer world and of the impressions these realities make upon the mind. We may here notice the influence of this conception on his treatment of linguistic study as a means of education. While fully admitting the necessity for acquiring the classical languages as long as these continued to be the only vehicles of learning, he never fails to regret the loss of time absorbed in studying them, and he anticipates with satisfaction the time when modern tongues, and especially his own, will be sufficiently developed and refined to replace Latin and Greek, believing as he does that “all that bravery may be had at home that makes us gaze so much at the fine stranger.” Not that he ever forgets that words are something more than mere symbols, that indeed they come to have a certain objective reality of their own, which must be apprehended as directly as that of any other natural phenomenon. “Do we not learn from words?” he asks. “No marvel if it is so, for a word is a metaphor, a learned translation, something carried over from its original sense to serve in some place where it is even more properly used, and where it may be most significant, if it is properly understood. Take pains to learn from it; you have there a means of gaining knowledge.” But this appreciation of the inner significance of language does not blind him to the fact, apparently unperceived by all his contemporaries, that the unfortunate need for devoting so much time and energy to linguistic study was a very serious hindrance to the natural unfolding of the mental faculties through a reasonable education. In his own words, “we were forced ... to deal with the tongues, ere we pass to the substance of learning; and this help from the tongues, though it is most necessary, as our study is now arranged, yet hinders us in time, which is a thing of great price--nay, it hinders us in knowledge, a thing of greater price. For in lingering over language, we are removed and kept back one degree further from sound knowledge, and this hindrance comes in our best learning time.” And in another passage he bewails the “loss of time over tongues, while you are pilgrims to learning,” and the “lack of sound skill, while language distracts the mind from the sense.” Where could we find a stronger indictment of the Public School tradition that banishes every form of nature study during the “best learning time,” the years when the powers of observation are in their first freshness, for the sake of a premature initiation into the subtleties of Latin Grammar?

We may pass to another important question with which Mulcaster deals in a spirit in harmony with his enlightened conception of general instruction. His assumption that the day-school is the normal arrangement, and that either an entirely private or a boarding-school education requires to be justified by special circumstances, gives him a far wider outlook and a safer standpoint than can be claimed for theorists, whose ideal, like that of Locke, regards only the upbringing of a gentleman’s son at home under a tutor, or, like that of Milton, involves the collection of large numbers in boarding establishments of a conventual nature. This is a matter that is naturally related to the extension of educational opportunities throughout all classes of the community. As long as only a select few were thought fit for learning, residence in the monastery was almost an affair of necessary convenience, but when teaching came to be more widely offered, the day-school became a recognised institution, and such other arrangements as implied greater expenditure were retained only by the rich, as instruments of social exclusiveness. It is in countries where distinctions of rank are comparatively little marked that the day-school system has flourished most, and the partiality shown in Mulcaster’s day for the services of a private tutor, and in subsequent times for the boarding-school, is certainly to be taken in great measure as an assertion of class superiority. Mulcaster was no democrat, but he saw that the rich had more to lose than to gain by arrangements that unduly restricted their experience. Moreover he clearly discerned the importance of the family as the true social unit, the nursery of the virtues that should be developed in the school, and find exercise in the public, as well as the private, conduct of life. It is not his fault that his countrymen have become bound hand and foot to a system under which the vast majority of well-to-do parents hand over their children, body and soul, from the tenderest years to the care of professional upbringers, divesting themselves with a light heart of the most precious responsibilities that nature has conferred on them. “How can education be private?” he asks, “It is an abuse of the name as well as of the thing.” But on the other hand he urges--“All the considerations which persuade people rather to have their children taught at home than along with others outside, especially with regard to their manners and behaviour, form arguments for their boarding at least at home, if the parents will take their position seriously.... They are distinct offices, to be a parent, and a teacher, and the difficulties of upbringing are too serious for all the responsibilities to be thrown into the hands of one alone.”