Part 14

It is admitted that the highest eminence can only be attained by the concentration of the mind, with a piercing intensity and singleness of view, upon one field of action. In order to excel, each mind must have its specific end. A man may know many things well, but there is only one thing upon which he will be preëminently learned, and become an authority. The professional man may be compared to one whose eye is fixed upon a microscope. The rest of the world is abstracted from his field of vision, and the eye, though narrowed to a scarcely perceptible hole, is able to see what is indiscernible by others. When he observes accurately, he becomes, in his department, a learned man; and when he reveals his observations, he is a benefactor of his kind. All that the university system does is to delay the professional education as long as possible; it would apply to the training of the mind a discipline analogous to that which common sense suggests in what relates to bodily exercise. A father, ambitious for his son that he might win the prize at the Olympian games or in the Pythian fields, devoted his first attention not to the technicalities of the game, but to the general condition and morals of the youth. The success of the athlete depended upon his first becoming a healthy man. So the university system trains the man, and defers the professional education as long as circumstances will permit. It makes provision, before the eye is narrowed to the microscope, that the eye itself shall be in a healthy condition; it expands the mind before contracting it; it would educate mind as such before bending it down to the professional point; it does not regard the mind as an animal to be fattened for the market, by cramming it with food before it has acquired the power of digestion, but treats it rather as an instrument to be tuned, as a metal to be refined, as a weapon to be sharpened.

This is the system which the old universities of Europe have inherited.

Philology, logic, and mathematics are still the instruments employed for the discipline of the mind, which is the end and object of a Liberal Education.[73]

The best education has been thus bodied forth: “Let a man’s pride be to be a gentleman: furnish him with elegant and refined pleasures, imbue him with the love of intellectual pursuits, and you have a better security for his turning out a good citizen and a good Christian, than if you have confined him by the strictest moral and religious discipline, kept him in innocent and unsuspecting ignorance of all the vices of youth, and in the mechanical and orderly routine of the severest system of education.”[74]

Footnote 73:

_Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury._

Footnote 74:

_Quarterly Review_, No. 103.

DR. ARNOLD’S SCHOOL REFORM.

Dr. Arnold, from his entering upon the head-mastership of Rugby, threw himself into the great work of school reform, based upon the associations of his boyhood, and the convictions of his more mature experience. “To do his duty was the height of his ambition,—those truly English sentiments by which Nelson and Wellington were inspired; and, like them, he was crowned with victory; for soon were verified the predictions of the Provost of Oriel, that _he would change the face of education through the public schools of England_. He was minded, _virtute officii_, to combine the care of souls with that of the intellects of the rising generation, and to realise the Scripture in principle and practice, without making an English school a college of Jesuits. His principles were few: the fear of God was the beginning of his wisdom; and his object was not so much to teach knowledge, as the means of acquiring it; to furnish, in a word, the key to the temple. He desired to awaken the intellect of each individual boy, and contended that the main movement must come from within and not from without the pupil; and that all that could be, should be _done by_ him and not _for_ him. In a word, his scheme was to call forth in the little world of school those capabilities which best befitted the boy for his career in the great one.”[75]

Footnote 75:

_Quarterly Review_, No. 204. In the latter sentence is conveyed the advantage which education in a large school has over education at home.

SCHOOL INDULGENCE.

Nothing is more prejudicial to after-success in life than indulgence to youth when at school. Sir James Mackintosh felt and acknowledged this error. He tells us that when he left school he could only imperfectly construe a small part of Virgil, Horace, and Sallust: he adds, “Whatever I have done beyond, has been since added by my own irregular reading. But no subsequent circumstance could make up for that invaluable habit of vigorous and methodical industry which the indulgence and irregularity of my school-life prevented me from acquiring, and of which I have painfully felt the want in every part of my life.”

Another mistake is a profuse allowance of Pocket-money at School: we once heard an old Westminster declare that to his unlimited supply of money when at the college he attributed over-indulgence in luxuries which had injured his health, and often rendered him the dupe of mean and designing persons—full-grown parasites—mischievous as the plants of that name, which bear down the trees they attack, and rob them of the food intended for their own leaves and fruit.

UNSOUND TEACHING.

The general unsoundness of what is termed an English education is, to a great extent, accounted for by the little attention paid in the Universities, Colleges, and Schools to teaching our native language, and especially to the proper teaching of English in schools for the people. The results of this neglect of the mother-tongue are multitudinous. “The mass of our population, in spite of all that has been done, must be considered densely ignorant. Millions never open a book. Nearly fifteen millions never enter church or chapel. Other causes may operate, but the want of a knowledge of language is a potent one. People whose vocabulary is limited to about three hundred words cannot follow a sermon, and clergymen who have never been taught the value of plain Saxon English cannot preach one. Then, amongst the middle and upper classes, how superficial is the knowledge of English. How few can write a common letter without faults in grammar, choice of words, or spelling. Punctuation is absolutely ignored by many. What are the speeches at public meetings, or rather, how would they appear in print but for the talent of the reporters, who bring order out of chaos? The results of the Civil-Service Examinations abundantly prove the justice of these strictures; and the fruits of University training, or rather non-training, are too patent to require illustration. Our clergy often carry into the prayer-desk and pulpit all the defects of early life,—the provincial accent, the sing-song tone, the nasal twang, the lisp, or burr, or stammer; indistinct utterance, inaudible reading and vociferation, wrong emphasis, undue stress on enclitics, and many other faults. Good sermons are the exception rather than the rule; for if sound in doctrine and full of zeal, the style is often obscure or pedantic or inflated, and the delivery monotonous and soporific. In the Senate, though most of the Members are University men, there are but few really effective speakers. Were our senators trained to speak well—that is, to the point—much time would be saved, and public business despatched more rapidly.”

The remedies suggested by the Rev. Dr. D’Orsey are:

1. Training-schools for nursery governesses, who, without knowing or pretending to know French and Italian, should speak English without vulgarisms. 2. Greater attention in our present training colleges for schoolmasters to due instruction in English, especially in correct and fluent speaking. 3. More encouragement to men of talent and education to become and to remain schoolmasters, by holding out the prospect of honourable offices to distinguished teachers. Why should Inspectorships of Schools be always given to clergymen and barristers, to the exclusion of the schoolmaster? 4. The appointment of a thoroughly accomplished scholar as English Master in every great public school, of equal rank with the other masters. 5. The endowment of at least one Professorship in every University. 6. The recognition of English as a subject in every examination not strictly scientific, and rewarding distinction in composition or oratory in the same substantial manner as eminence in classics or mathematics.

Sir John Coleridge relates the following inefficient examples of school-teaching which have come under his observation: “An Examiner was about, and he had a class before him—the first class in arithmetic. They were able to answer questions; they had gone through all the higher branches of arithmetic, and were prepared to answer any thing. But he said, ‘I will give you a sum in simple addition.’ He accordingly dictated a sum, and cautiously interspersed a good many ciphers. Suppose, for instance, he said, ‘a thousand and forty-nine.’ He found there was not one in the class who was able to put down that sum in simple addition; they could not make count of the ciphers. That showed him the boys had been suffered to pass over far too quickly the elementary parts of arithmetic. The examiner took them in grammar, and quoted a few lines from Cowper—

I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.

‘What governs right?’ There was not a boy could say, till it was put to them, ‘none to dispute my right.’

“Let me impress upon you that the best motto you can take for yourselves in this respect is that which was taken by a most eminent man who made his way from a hair-dresser’s shop to be Chief Justice Tenterden. What was his motto? When a man is made a judge, he is made a serjeant; and as serjeant he gives rings to some of the great officers of State, with a motto upon each. His motto was ‘Labore.’ He did not refer to his own talents. It was not ‘Invita Minerva.’ To his immortal honour be it said—from the hair-dresser’s shop in Canterbury to the Free School in Canterbury; from the Free School in Canterbury to Corpus Christi College; from Corpus Christi College to the bar; from the bar to the bench; from the bench to the peerage—he achieved all with unimpeachable honour, and always practising that which was his motto at last. One of the most gratifying scenes I have ever witnessed was when that man went up to the House of Peers in his robes for the first time, attended by the whole bar of England.”

SELF-FORMATION.

The one great object—the finality—of rational Education is Self-instruction. In mind as well as body we are children at first, only that we may afterwards become men; dependent upon others, in order that we may learn from them such lessons as may tend eventually to our edification on an independent basis of our own. The knowledge of facts, or what is generally called learning, however much we may possess of it, is useful so far only as we erect its materials into a mental framework; but useless, utterly, as long as we suffer it to lie in a heap, inert and without form. The instruction of others, compared with self-instruction, is like the law compared with faith; a discipline of preparation, beggarly elements, a schoolmaster to lead us on to a state of greater worthiness, and there give up the charge of us.

“Every man,” says Gibbon, “who rises above the common level, receives two educations—the first from his instructors; the second, the most personal and important, from himself.” Almost all Lord Eldon’s legal education was from himself, without even the ordinary helps, which he disdainfully flung from him; and of no one could it be more truly predicated, that he was not “rocked and dandled” into a lawyer.

The Rev. Sydney Smith has thus sketched a scheme, in which he deems it of the highest importance that the education of a British youth were directed to the true principles of legislation: what effect laws can produce upon opinions, and opinions upon laws; what subjects are fit for legislative interference, and when men may be left to the management of their own interests. The mischief occasioned by bad laws, and the perplexity which arises from a multiplicity of laws; the causes of national wealth; the relations of foreign trade; the encouragement of agricultures and manufactures; the fictitious wealth occasioned by paper-credit; the use and abuse of monopoly; the theory of taxation; the consequences of the public debt: these are some of the subjects and some of the branches of civil education, to which we would turn the minds of future judges, future senators, and future noblemen. After the first period of life had been given up to the cultivation of the classics, and the remaining powers were beginning to evolve themselves, these are some of the propensities in study which we would endeavour to inspire.

PRACTICAL DISCIPLINE.

The want of Practical Discipline has been thus put by a writer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_: “What is the use of battering a man’s brains full of Greek and Latin pothooks, that he forgets before he doffs his last round-jacket or puts on his first long-tailed blue, if ye don’t teach him the old Spartan virtue of obedience, hard living, early rising, and them sort of classics? Where’s the use of instructing him in hexameters or pentameters, if you would leave him in ignorance of the value of a pennypiece? What height of stupidity it is to be fillin’ a boy’s brains with the wisdom of the ancients, and then turn him out like an _omadhaum_, to pick up his victuals among the moderns!”

With equal truth, but finer humour, has Sydney Smith, at his own expense, exposed this neglect of the practical as a fair indication of the mode of English education. He is writing to his publisher, whom he tells: “I have twice endeavoured to write the word _skipping_—‘_skipping spirit_.’ Your printer first printed it ’stripling,’ and then altered it into _stripping_. The fault is entirely mine. I was fifteen years at school and college—I know something about the Romans and the Athenians, and have read a good deal about the præter-perfect tense—but I cannot do a sum in simple addition, or _write a handwriting which any body can read_.”

“CRAMMING.”

Cramming, which in our time was a cant term in the Universities for the art of preparing a student to pass an examination by furnishing him beforehand with the requisite answers, has travelled far beyond the tether of Oxford or Cambridge. Its abuse is well described by Watts: “As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.” It reminds one also of the Baconian saw—of those who can pack the cards, yet know not how to play them.

A president Examiner of articled clerks at the Law Institution has observed upon this forcing system:

I for one, and I am glad of the opportunity of expressing it, abhor all Cramming; and I hold very cheaply the system of Competitive Examination, which is nowadays begun almost in the nursery, and thought so highly of in some quarters as a test. It is not to be expected, without inverting the natural order of things, that a youth of twenty or twenty-one should have exhausted those stores of learning which Coke speaks of as requiring not less than the _lucubrationes viginti annorum_; and remember that those twenty years would begin at that period of life on which most of you are now but entering. In this view the papers before you have been prepared, and our aim as examiners has been to set such questions as will prove you to possess the elements of a liberal education; and that you have so far acquired the principles of common law, equity, conveyancing, criminal law, and bankruptcy, that you are entitled to enter upon the practice of your profession, leaving its complete mastery to that experience which time alone can supply. I need not remind you of the men who, beginning as attorneys, have attained to high positions in the State. The portrait of Lord Chancellor Truro hangs before you on these walls. I had the privilege of knowing him personally; his example may well stimulate your ambition, and animate your exertions, for never man won high place with more unremitting labour than he did; not, however, at the expense of his childhood or of his youth, not by the sacrifice of all else for mere mental culture, but by the full-grown energies, by the well-directed vigour and power of the man, for he was between thirty and forty years of age before he was called to the bar.

MATHEMATICS.

Mathematics drew from Edmund Gurney the odd definition, that “a mathematician is like one that goes to market to buy an axe to break an egg.”

Bacon complains that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the Pure Mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye, and a body ready to put itself into any postures; so in the mathematics, that use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended. And as for the Mixed Mathematics, I only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows further disclosed;” thus foretelling the advance of Natural Philosophy.

However, the understanding of Applied Mathematics is not unattainable under ordinary circumstances. Lord Rosse has observed that, without any special mathematical knowledge, a well-informed man may often, in the results announced, and from the observations elicited, obtain very interesting glimpses of the nature of mathematical processes, and some general idea as to the progress making in that direction. In applied mathematics there is much more of general interest, and the results are often perfectly intelligible without special education. In proof of this Lord Rosse adduces, that “at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, the general results of a very abstruse investigation in applied mathematics in physical astronomy were made very interesting. The subject was so brought forward as to rivet the attention of the whole section, and there were many ladies present. The paper was given in by M. Leverrier, and the subject was the identification of a comet. How wonderful from its origin has been the progress of mathematical science! Beginning perhaps three thousand years ago almost from nothing—one simple relation of magnitude suggesting another, and those relations gradually becoming more complicated, more interesting, I may add more important, till at length in our day it has expanded into a science which enables us to _weigh the planets_, and, more wonderful still, to calculate the course they will take when acted continually upon by forces varying in magnitude and direction.”

We trace in Porson’s habits of thought the influence which the study of mathematics had upon him.[76] He was to his dying day fond of these studies. There are still preserved many papers of his scribbled over with mathematical calculations; and when the fit seized him in the street which caused his death, an equation was found in his pocket.

Footnote 76:

In enabling him to give to English scholarship its accuracy and certainty,—as a substratum on which to rest other branches of knowledge often more useful in themselves. See Mr. Luard’s able _Cambridge Essay_.

ARISTOTLE.

Aristotle’s Philosophy, from its being upheld by the Roman Catholic theology, was lowered in a corresponding degree by the Reformation. Hence it fell into undeserved neglect during the latter part of the seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century. Of late years, however, the true worth of his writings has been more fully appreciated, and the study of his best treatises has been much revived. Dr. Holland remarks: “The whole of Aristotle’s writings on Sleep, and other collateral topics, deserve much more frequent perusal than is given to them in the present day.” The geological theory of Lyell, viz. that the causes which produce geological phenomena are in constant and gradual operation, is the theory of Aristotle and John Ray brought down to our present state of knowledge.

It has been well said that Solomon, Aristotle, and Bacon are the only three men, since our race appeared on earth, who would have been justified in saying that “they took all knowledge for their province.”

GEOLOGY IN EDUCATION.

The genius of Werner, of De Saussure, and of Cuvier, laid the foundations on which Geology now rests. They gave us the first glimpse of the fauna and flora of the earlier ages of our planet. Professor Jameson soon saw that these investigations would also lead to much curious information in regard to the former physical and geographical distribution of plants and animals; and to the changes which the animated world in general, and particular genera and species, have undergone, and probably are still undergoing; and he would naturally be led to speculate on the changes that must have taken place in the climate of the globe during these various changes and revolutions. The writings of Blumenbach, Von Hoff, Cuvier, Brongniart, Steffens, and other naturalists, are proofs of what has been done by following up the views of Werner. Ami Boué, speaking of the services Professor Jameson has rendered to science, says: “He has spread valuable working pupils all over the world, and he was the electric spark which originated the beginning of true geology in Great Britain.”