CHAPTER IX.

_AN IMPERFECT SYSTEM OF EDUCATION._

We mould the clay while it is soft, that it may not be chipped or pulverised when it is hard by contact with obstacles which it has not been fitted to overcome. Is the process usually effectual? With how little destruction to life, with how little injury to character, do we graduate the sieves of our younger members? Do we succeed in moulding them into sane, capable citizens, or are we so careful to impart special kinds of instruction, to develop the part at the expense of the whole, that our interference is positively detrimental to the individual, and consequently to the community at large also?

I fear we can hardly be acquitted of this grave charge. The physiological demands made by growth and development on the vitality of the child are so great, that not only are abundant fresh air and nutrition required for the work, but also a considerable supply of surplus nervous energy. To use up this surplus energy for purposes other than that for which it is intended, is to stunt growth, or to limit the development of the mental faculties, or to diminish nerve-power; one of the three inevitably. And the diminution of nerve-power must bring with it physical, mental, or moral atrophy, according to the part on which the greatest strain has been put and the conditions in which the victim has been placed.

Moreover, children of large natural capabilities, whose complex nervous systems require an exceptional amount of nutriment, and whose sensitiveness and plasticity cause them to respond readily to instruction, are just those who will first break down under prolonged strain; and thus we may easily weed out the finer organisations, and continue the race from the less highly developed types.

Observation of nervous patients shows us that their small stock of available nerve-force may be attracted to one part to the detriment of another. For this reason nervous disease is specially difficult to understand. One patient told me he could get on fairly well if he used his body and not his brain, or if he used his brain and not his body; but if he tried to use both in the same day, he became ill. Of course, he did in reality use both at the same time; what he meant was that, if he exerted a fair amount of activity in the brain, he had only strength to exert a very small amount of activity in the rest of the body, and _vice versâ_. He was right in saying that his available store of energy was so small that he could not expend even a moderate amount of it in both physical and mental labour during the same day.

Others have told me that if they devoted themselves for a few days to book-work and abstained from bodily labour, their studies became easy and were performed without fatigue; but that if they began to take exercise, they were compelled by exhaustion to abandon the book-work. Moreover, the physical exertion caused great fatigue for a day or two, until they grew accustomed to the altered mode of expending energy; and when it had become easy to them, the same weariness was experienced for a short time on their return to the book-work, even though the bodily exercise was then totally discontinued. By no effort of will could the two modes of activity be carried on together, unless only a very small amount of power was expended in each, the rest of the day being given up to repose. Total collapse followed the attempt, for the necessary nerve-force was wanting.

We thus learn when we are weak a truth which is less apparent in health, viz., that our available energy is a strictly limited quantity, dependent on nutritive supply. How great, then, is the folly of those who would urge to exertion persons in whom the nutritive supply is defective! But how much greater is the folly of those who, during the early years of the individual’s life, when the constitution is being formed and future health in great measure determined, will persistently compel him to expend his nerve-force in a particular direction, to the detriment of other parts of the organism, or who put such a strain upon the whole that the constitution is permanently injured! The partial injury is perhaps the more dangerous because it is the less easily observed. If a child begins to break down altogether under the stress of his school course, we become aware of the fact, and by timely interference sometimes--not always--put a stop to the work of destruction. But many delicate boys and girls contrive to struggle through their school course with little apparent harm, because the greater amount of their spare nerve-force being attracted to the part on which the strain is put, the allotted tasks can be performed. Whether growth is thereby stunted; whether nerve-force in general be decreased; whether perceptive power be dulled; whether the child have been withdrawn from the active experience of life necessary to healthy development; whether his various physiological needs have been fully supplied--all these questions frequently remain unasked, provided that the child have learnt a specified number of the more or less erroneous notions of his ignorant fellow-creatures, and have put them down on paper. And if he become neurasthenic, or succumb to some complaint to which his lowered vitality makes him fall an easy prey, or if he grow up with feeble powers of observation, or without the self-control dependent on the firm will that can only be developed by means of the right expenditure of a considerable amount of nerve-force, little connection is traced between his defective education and his defective nerve-structure. The children whose education has consisted chiefly of instruction from books cannot properly be said to be educated at all. In most cases their minds are warped by fixed ideas.

This is not saying that children should not be taught in the best sense of the word; that they should not be disciplined and trained to self-control, to habits of attention, and to ready observation; that they should not have an intelligent interest awakened in them concerning the universe in which they live. But mere book-learning will never do this. It is, unhappily, possible to be a walking encyclopedia of so-called knowledge, and yet to be an imperfect reflector of the life of our time.

And of the wonders and glories of Nature that surround us every moment from the cradle to the grave, how much are we taught? Yet these can be studied at our leisure out in God’s blessed air and under God’s blessed heaven. In the garden, at the river-bank, on the hill-side, by the sea-shore, in the lonely desert, there we may find health and wisdom and knowledge and happiness; and how many of us go to seek them there?

“A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books,” says Walt Whitman. Few of us ever see this morning glory; indeed, very few of us even take the trouble to look at an evening glory. I have stood day after day on the parade at a small seaside place, and have watched the sun sink below the watery horizon; sea, sand, rocks and sky all being illumined with magnificent colouring. Well-dressed people would pass and repass, some averting their eyes from the splendid spectacle lavished on them by prodigal Nature, others glancing at it vacantly with irresponsive countenances, others gazing on the ground or at one another, and talking of the cut of their new dresses or of the prices of stocks. Hardly any ever paused to look and admire. Poor creatures! All this joy--joy showered abundantly on me--was simply rejected by them. The essential God-like part of their natures had been starved; they had been taught in stuffy schoolrooms by wearied teachers and out of musty books; appreciation of the works of the good God had not been included in the curriculum. Carlyle mourns the extinction of the lamp of the soul. He is premature. In most of us it is never so much as lighted.

Yet we have within us somewhere the capability for seeing--though as in a glass darkly--a dim reflection of the Lord of Glory. We have but to look--to be taught how to look aright--and to us the Lord shall be in the earthquake and in the storm. We have but to listen--to be taught to listen aright, and throughout the universe we shall hear the still, small voice.

To Carlyle it was a tragedy that one man should die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge. And are not the majority of us ignorant even of the very things which lie most easily within our reach--of the air we breathe, of the ground on which we tread, of the skies on which we gaze? There is something known approximately about all of these which no man hath taught to us. After all our years of nerve-deterioration in stifling schoolrooms, few of us know anything of the very simplest facts of life, of the composition of our own bodies, of the most ordinary conditions of our own existence.

If any one doubts this assertion, let him ask two or three very elementary questions in very elementary affairs of his neighbours and acquaintance, and note the answers he obtains. The thing is easily tested. Persons regarded as educated--persons who know all about the doings of a certain aggressive warrior of past times, who from mere greed of conquest cruelly attacked harmless savages, and then had the hardihood to describe his own misdoings in writing--are hopelessly lost and bewildered if you say to them, “What is your brain composed of?” “What is a choanite?” “What makes the leaves grow on the trees?” “Where does the soil in the garden come from?” “How does the dew find its way on to the grass?” “Why does a ball bounce?”--or some such questions which sound elementary and unscientific enough.

But perhaps the knowledge required to answer these questions correctly belongs to departments of science which in most schools are regarded as extra subjects, and only taught occasionally and perfunctorily. It is certainly strange that information which ought surely to be imparted early, and which may be imparted in a most interesting and enjoyable way, should be put on one side for dry dates and grammar, a superfluity of arbitrary arithmetical rules, and the record of immoral conduct on the part of antique conquerors,--things which few wish to remember, and which sensible persons mostly take pains to forget.

After all, we have only a limited space in which to store our knowledge. As we grow up, we have to learn the things that are suited to our several professions. We have no room for useless lumber, and must cast it out. It never ought to have cumbered the ground. Let the dates be for the historian, the grammar for the grammarian, the immoral records for the classical scholar, and the endless arbitrary rules for the dull. By the time we have specialised, we shall know what uninteresting details we are forced to master, and what we may safely leave to the encyclopædias. We shall not then have disquieted ourselves for nought. Our early education should before all things mean for us “the harmonious development of all the faculties.” For each of us and all of us should be laid the foundation of the love of God and the knowledge of such of His works as daily surround us. No other foundation can be secure.

As matters at present stand, we learn quite as much out of school as we do in it. The training of the eye, and the hand, and the judgment in games is not usually considered a necessary part of education, but it is a very important part of it nevertheless. I am not sure that, up to a certain age, it is not the most important part. We are apt to forget that we go through life rapidly calculating weight, distance, and balance, and that our success in many branches depends on our power of ready attention, on our promptness of action, on our quick observation of natural phenomena and the ways of our fellow-creatures, on our delicacy of manipulation and on our perseverance and self-control, quite as much as it does on the knowledge we have learnt from books.

Considering the imperfection of our present system of education; considering how we dwarf, stunt, and starve the noblest and best part of each individual, and the noblest and best individuals of the community, the wonder is, not that there is so much nervous disease amongst us, but that there is not more. Fortunately the tide has begun to turn, and we are at last becoming alive to the fact that our method of instruction is not all that could be wished. But we wake up slowly, and “cramming” is still the order of the day. Indeed, competitive examinations seem to be multiplying while we are cogitating. This is much to be regretted. If ever the time arrives when all public posts and places of trust are filled by persons who have gone through this extraordinary process of mental stuffing, and who are about as fitted to understand the needs of our race and the conditions of our right development as Strasburg geese are fitted to set an example as athletes, then may God have mercy on us all! In our complex social state, the nimble wit, the ready invention, the adaptive disposition, are specially needed to find out for us the best means by which the resources of Nature may more and more be used for our service and to the support of our ever-increasing populations. Persons who survive a process which destroys the most sensitive and adaptive minds are but the intellectual lees and dregs of our community. To perpetuate these at the expense of the more highly organised is literally suicide. We are scarcely alive to our danger, because those who have been trained on a different pattern still take the lead amongst us, and the full results of the system of “cram” are not yet seen.

I was talking the other day to a lady who had recently been passing her time in preparing lady candidates for examinations. She herself had survived several of these ordeals; and, without falling into the error of those who have eternally saddled on the innocent Tenderden steeple the sole responsibility for the appearance of the Goodwin Sands, it may be casually observed that she was in a frightfully nervous condition, rendering her society a real trial to all but those skilled in the care of nervous invalids. She answered candidly some questions which I had the hardihood to put to her. I give both questions and answers almost word for word:--

_Q._ Which do you consider the cleverest of your pupils; those who pass, or those who fail?

_A._ The clever ones fail quite as often as the stupid. Indeed, there are one or two clever ones at this moment whom I am very anxious about.

_Q._ How do you explain that?

_A._ In this way. When I find a pupil stupid, I just stuff the facts into her. She goes on grinding and grinding until she knows off what is necessary. This cramming is an art. If you know how to do it, you can shove the most stupid people through.

_Q._ Then why do the clever ones sometimes fail?

_A._ Well, they know most about the subject really, but, as far as I can make out, the examination does not test what you know, still less your general capabilities, but your power of keeping a certain amount of detail in your head for a time and putting it down on paper. People who don’t take it out of themselves with thinking, reasoning, and permanently assimilating, are best able to take in a number of facts after a fashion, and keep them near the surface ready for use. They are better at cramming the particular points that the crammer knows to be of use than the clever people are, and they are generally less sensitive. They are less affected by the weather, and the stuffiness of the place, and all those little things that make so much difference to some people at an examination.

Comment is needless.

I have had some opportunity of observing the cramming system in Germany, and have been struck by the unsatisfactory nature of the results of what goes by the name of education amongst girls of the well-to-do classes. A German lady, who had had experience as a teacher in a large public school, told me that she considered the present system of teaching an entire mistake. “Look at the results,” she said. “How many German women ever open any book but a novel? What do they care for culture? The teacher has no time to _interest_ the girls in what they learn. All there is time for is to cram them with the facts without which they cannot pass the examination. As if true education could be tested by an occasional examination! And the sacrifice of health amongst these young girls is terrible!”

For my own part, I heartily sympathise with German ladies who read nothing but novels. In my childhood I was taught French in England on the most approved methods and at the cost of much hard toil. I afterwards picked up German in Germany itself and in a pleasurable manner. Ever since, the sight or sound of a French word has brought to my mind the recollection of weariness, of being bored, of dry grammar that has been of no earthly use to me, of a deplorable waste of sunshiny hours. But the sight or sound of a German word recalls the soft thud of my horse’s hoofs as I galloped along the natural Rotten Row of the German pine forest; the ring of my skates as I glided swiftly over the frozen meadows; the picturesque old houses standing out against a frosty sky; the band in the Casino gardens; the voice of the soprano at the opera; the magnificent chorus, “Heilig, heilig ist Gott der Herr,” sung at the sacred concert in the old Marktkirche. And so it has come about that while I am fairly well read in German literature, I am lamentably ignorant of French literature. The study of the one is pleasure; the study of the other is pain.

The mental impressions which delight are those that weave themselves healthily into our structure and form a groundwork for future impressions of a like order. Our happiness is composed, not only of the joys of the present, but of the joys of the past. Learning, if it is to be of the highest benefit to us, must before all things be made pleasurable. In a few schools this principle is being recognised, but owing to the low value still put by the community upon the best kind of teaching, the reform is often carried out at the expense of throwing a great strain upon an inadequate teaching staff. In the best of our high schools for girls, the number of teachers is insufficient because the funds are insufficient. We have not yet learnt to appreciate our advantages and to pay a reasonable price for them.

We willingly spend our money on luxuries. Money represents so much energy. And if the energy of the country be spent on that which enervates, while that which improves and develops be left to languish, how are we to avoid deterioration?

But before we spend our money on so called education, let us be sure that it is worthy of the name. Cramming with detail is not beneficial instruction; book-lore is not always wisdom; pedantry has nothing to do with culture. It is a trite saying, but none the less true, that the only positive knowledge we are capable of acquiring is a knowledge of our own boundless ignorance. The first stepping-stone to a right understanding is humility.