If the saying of Plato may be applied to another sphere, not very far removed from civil government, we may believe that education will never be rightly practised until either teachers become philosophers, or philosophers become teachers. It is certainly remarkable how seldom in the history of educational progress there has arisen any writer whose authority was based alike on the power of the abstract thinker to rise above the conditions of the immediate present into the atmosphere of pure reason, and on the instinct of the professional worker, whose conceptions of what is possible have been chastened by direct experience of the actual. Of the five classical English writers who have made any noteworthy contribution to educational thought, all but one have failed to gain a lasting influence, through the limitation in their outlook caused by deficient practical knowledge. Ascham’s experience was too exclusively academic and courtly to suggest much to him beyond questions of method in the advanced teaching of Latin and Greek. Milton’s vision, restricted by his short and partial attempt at instructing a few selected boys, narrowed itself to one school period of one rank of society of one sex, and his genius could not save him from wild extravagance in his ideas of the acquirements possible for the average scholar. The suggestions of Locke, while in one aspect they were more comprehensive, are yet essentially those of a theorist, who had never faced the difficulty that the upbringing of a child by a private tutor is possible only to the merest fraction of any population. Herbert Spencer, as the heir of previous centuries, has naturally been able to command a wider view, but even those who have gained most from his book, must have felt that owing to his highly generalised mode of treatment he has at many points failed to grapple with the problems that chiefly beset the professional teacher. A little experience, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing, and it may be that those writers, all of whom claim to have made trial of the actual work of education, would have been more convincing if they had written from an avowedly detached standpoint. Richard Mulcaster alone holds the vantage-ground of being at once a thinker and a practical expert in matters of education. Nor does this mean only that his right to speak with authority will for that reason be more readily admitted; the evidence of his fuller equipment for the task may be seen through the whole texture of his writings. He had not Ascham’s ease in expression and charm of manner, nor Milton’s commanding intellect and power of utterance, nor the fearlessness and philosophic grasp of Locke, nor the encyclopÆdic knowledge and acumen of Herbert Spencer, but he had beyond them all two essential gifts that will in the end give him a unique place in the history of our educational development—a clear insight into the realities of human nature, and an enlightened perception of the conditions that determine the culture of mind and soul.

To those who know little or nothing of Mulcaster such a claim will seem extravagant, and it will naturally be doubted whether any writer who deserves to be put upon so high a pedestal, could possibly have remained so long in neglect. It may be rejoined that in a subject like education many factors have a part in the making of reputations. It is no mere coincidence that the authors named above, whose views on education are so much more widely-known than those of Mulcaster, all gained their chief fame in some other sphere of thought; we read what they have to say on this subject because it comes from writers who have caught the world’s ear in some field of more general interest. This advantage is naturally to be associated with gifts of expression such as Mulcaster unfortunately possessed only in a very limited degree, though his deficiency is due much more to the rudimentary condition of English prose in general in the sixteenth century, than to any lack of clear thinking on his own part. It is true, indeed, that no fine sense of harmony in sound can be credited to a writer who perpetrates such a sentence as—“I say no more, where it is too much to say even so much in a sore of too much.” But even if Mulcaster had spoken with the tongue of an angel, he would probably have remained a voice crying in the wilderness, for the time was not yet come. The ultimate value of Rousseau’s message to the world in the realm of education was far less, but his unique powers of persuasive eloquence, the fame he had achieved in other ways, and the ripeness of the time, combined to give the later writer an extraordinary influence. When Mulcaster’s judgments and suggestions are studied from the vantage-ground of the present, and in a form that divests them of adventitious difficulties of understanding, they will be recognised as giving him a place of high importance, not only in the chain of historical succession, but in the final hierarchy of educational reformers.

It is necessary to take into account the state of opinion on matters of learning and on the general conduct of life, in the England of Queen Elizabeth’s day, before we can appreciate the significance of our author’s thought. We must place ourselves in the atmosphere of the Renascence and the Reformation, for although these great movements, which represented the intellectual and moral aspects in the awakening of modern Europe, had been some time in progress, and had even given place to reaction in the countries of their birth, their full influence did not reach our shores till towards the close of the sixteenth century. The phase of English national life represented by Mulcaster is that immediately preceding the great expansion of conscious mental activity to which voice was so memorably given by Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and their contemporaries. The prestige of Elizabeth, depending as it did so largely on the secure establishment of the Protestant faith, had not yet reached the height it attained through the final repulse of Spanish aggression, but yet the power of the crown retained much of the absolute sway over individual freedom that had been built up and impressed on the popular imagination by the earlier Tudors. It was not a time either of revolt or of reaction. The more galling forms of political and intellectual despotism had already disappeared in the general overthrow of the medieval rÉgime, and it was a more pressing question how to maintain existing charters of liberty than how to extend them. This conservative temper is to be discerned in all the purely English writers of the period, though in the northern part of Britain Knox and his companions were troubling the waters of controversy in a more strenuous fashion.

Apart from the influence of an atmosphere of general conformity to established authority and prevailing sentiment, Mulcaster was constitutionally cautious. He was no zealot, defiant of opposition, and careless of the esteem in which he might be held. His respect for tradition, and, it must be added, his sympathetic instincts, disposed him always to seek grounds of agreement rather than of difference, to support his suggestions by the weight of authority and precedent, to carry his readers with him by winning their consent unawares rather than by startling them into reluctant acquiescence through the use of paradox and exaggeration. Yet there was no timidity or half-heartedness in his temperament. He was profoundly convinced of the justice of his criticisms and the value of his proposals, and he was not backward in urging his views, in season at least if not out of season, on all who shared the responsibility of rejecting them or giving them effect. He has been accused, indeed, of overweening self-conceit, and it is to be feared that this is the only persistent impression of the man that remains with a number of those who know little of him beyond his name. He has been cited as a classical example of the folly into which a misplaced vanity can lead one who enters with a light heart into the region of prophecy, that “most gratuitous form of error,” on the ground that he believed the highest possible perfection of English prose to be represented by the style of his own writings. This conception, however, is due to a misunderstanding which it will be worth while to remove. The remark that is quoted against him occurs in the Peroration of the Elementary, “I need no example in any of these, whereof mine own penning is a general pattern.” Taken apart from the context, as it usually is, such a sentence sounds fatuous enough, being naturally understood to mean that Mulcaster thought he had nothing to learn from any other writers, and had himself devised a perfect model of English composition. But anyone who will take the trouble to read the whole passage (p. 201) will see at once that the statement really means, “I need give no example of any of these [idiosyncrasies of our language, especially compactness of expression], as they are sufficiently illustrated in my own writing.” This is a very different matter, and though Mulcaster had little sense of style, and was curiously mistaken in his idea that English prose had no greater heights to reach than the standard of his own time, the error was due to defects of literary taste and judgment, not of character or temper. When his writings are taken as a whole, they offer ample evidence that he was singularly modest in his pretensions, losing all self-consciousness in his enthusiasm for the causes he had at heart.

This attitude may account for the disposition in some quarters to deny Mulcaster any special originality in regard to his leading principles. But in a subject like education, which concerns so many departments of life and character, what is the precise meaning of originality? As the essential traits of human nature have remained unaltered in the last two or three thousand years, except for a slow development along lines in continuity with the past, it is vain to expect that the broader truths which underlie the arts of social improvement will be subject to any radical change. In such matters we must build on the wisdom of the ancients, and the only possible originality consists in discerning the new applications that are suited to the present time and place. It is safe to say that there is hardly a single educational doctrine that has ever won acceptance, the germs of which are not to be found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Yet every age and every country must work out its own salvation by choosing, combining, and applying to its needs the general principles that have been laid down by those that came before. Such eclecticism, if it cannot strictly be called originality, is at least the highest wisdom, and he who first proclaims the doctrine as true for his own time and place deserves the credit of the pioneer. The discoveries of the Greek philosophers in social politics, if discoveries they could be called, had to be made over again for the modern world, and it may even be said that they had to be made independently for each separate country. In the sixteenth century there was less uniformity in political and social conditions, and less mutual influence among the different States of Europe than there is now. Although the English nation under Elizabeth could not remain wholly unaffected by the more drastic changes of opinion and sentiment that marked the course of the reforming spirit in Germany and in Scotland, it certainly demanded a rare sagacity and independence of mind, if not absolute originality, to discern how far the new outlook could be shared by those whose experience had been less revolutionary. To understand the value of Mulcaster’s work it is of less moment to ask what may have been his indebtedness to Plato or Quintilian, or even to Luther and Knox, than to consider whether he had been directly anticipated by any of his own countrymen, and whether he himself anticipated, if he did not influence, later English writers on education.

A right estimate of Mulcaster’s temperament, and of his relation to the surrounding conditions of thought and feeling, is due not only as a matter of personal justice, but as affording a key to a proper estimate of his writings. For these have a significance beyond that of most works of the kind, in forming a somewhat unique record of historical facts for a bygone period. The attempt to trace the lines of progress by comparing one phase of culture with another, has hitherto had imperfect success in the sphere of education, for, like the arts of music and acting, it works in a perishable medium, and makes a direct impression only on a single generation. Even indirect testimony has until recently been almost entirely wanting. To hardly any writer of earlier times has it occurred to make any report of the actual conduct of teaching as it existed around him, for the benefit of future ages. Those who were interested in the subject have been more concerned to offer speculative suggestions of reform that have apparently little organic relation to the conditions of their own community. It is not so much to the formal treatises of Plato and Aristotle that we must look for such knowledge as we can obtain of Athenian education in the fourth century before Christ, as to the incidental references of writers who had no thought of conveying any definite or detailed information on the matter. We find the same dearth of evidence when we try to ascertain the actual working of educational methods and organisation in the most advanced countries of Europe during the two or three centuries that succeeded the Renascence. The contemporary writers on the subject are for the most part idealists; and while we gladly acknowledge their services in that capacity, we must regret that to the visionary outlook of the reformer they did not add the careful observation of the historian. If Mulcaster is a noteworthy exception to this rule, it is not because of set purpose he undertook the task of record and criticism. It was no part of his plan to offer any narrative or statistical report; indeed he expressly refrains from commenting on the current practice of teaching, and alludes to it only incidentally. His intention, as with the great majority of educational writers, was to suggest improvements, to propose an ideal; but his responsible position as a headmaster gave him an ever-present sense of what was practicable, and enabled him to base his efforts on the firm ground of accomplished fact. His proposals are so evidently related to the existing state of affairs that they may almost be taken as affording an historical record of contemporary practice. The common-sense criticisms of a shrewd observer like Montaigne, and the dreams of an idealist such as Rabelais, have their own value; but we shall listen even more readily to the words of one who speaks out of the fulness of immediate knowledge, yet with equal power to rouse our aspiration and energy.

Before considering Mulcaster’s contributions to the theory and art of education strictly so-called, it will be well to glance at his influence in the more general aspects of learning and literature. He must be credited with an important share in the movement towards the dethronement of Latin in favour of the vernacular tongues, as the medium of communication in subjects hitherto held to belong exclusively to the domain of the learned class. The initiative in this matter goes back, of course, to the time of Dante, but even with the examples of Italy, France, and Spain to suggest the change, it was a distinct and difficult task to work it out for our own language. Mulcaster was not the first Englishman to write a book in his native tongue which everyone would have expected to be written in Latin. Sir Thomas More, in some of his historical and controversial works, Roger Ascham, and a few other writers of lesser note, had anticipated him in practice, and had been more successful in attaining a lucid and graceful style, but it may fairly be claimed that Mulcaster was the first to give a reasoned justification of the course he followed and recommended, and to further the end in view by taking definite steps to elaborate the means. Nor is it only for his service in helping to establish a canon of literary English, and show the way to others by using it himself to the best of his ability, that acknowledgment is due. It was a still more conspicuous merit to see clearly, and to enforce by these means, the truth that the increase of learning, and the methods by which it may be furthered, are subjects of interest not to any limited class alone, but to every member of the community. There may be comparatively little present value in his judgments as to the proper content of the English vocabulary, and the forms of spelling which he thought should be made authoritative, but at least it is noteworthy that, at a time when linguistic science was at a rudimentary stage, he had reached a singularly just conception of the essential nature of a language, and the conditions of its growth and decay. The interesting allegory where he traces the process by which speech came to be represented by written symbols, proves him to have grasped the idea, only in later times fully understood, that language, as a product of human activity, shares in all the features characteristic of organic development.

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.”

On the question of the position and standing of the teacher Mulcaster’s contentions were scarcely more timely and just for his own generation than they are for the present time. Though certain ranks of the teaching profession have never been without social consideration, it remains true that teachers as a whole were long regarded as an inferior order of the clergy, who did not reach the goal of their ambition until they had succeeded in leaving their first calling, to take the more tranquil and dignified position of a cure of souls. As he puts it—“The school being used but for a shift, from which they will afterwards pass to some other profession, though it may send out competent men to other careers, remains itself far too bare of talent, considering the importance of the work.” It was only natural that the profession should suffer from this want of independence, in the general esteem, and therefore in its substantial rewards, but the claim which our author puts forward for greater public consideration, is obviously based, not on any petty resentment on behalf of himself or his fellows, but on broad general grounds of social advantage. He had a high sense of the importance of the teacher’s task for the national welfare, and he was anxious on all grounds that those most fitted to fulfil it with success, should in the first place be induced to enter the profession by the prospect of adequate recognition, and in the second place have sufficient opportunity of training to enable them to do justice to it. “I consider that in our universities there should be a special college for the training of teachers, inasmuch as they are the instruments to make or mar the growing generation of the country ... and because the material of their studies is comparable to that of the greatest profession, in respect of language, judgment, skill in teaching, variety in learning, wherein the forming of the mind and exercising of the body require the most careful consideration, to say nothing of the dignity of character which should be expected from them.” Mulcaster, it will here be seen, has good grounds to offer for magnifying his office, and striving to win a place of honour for it in the social economy. Subsequent experience has tended to suggest that his effort to gain greater consideration for his profession was more utopian than could perhaps have appeared to his contemporaries. There are certain general reasons why in a country like ours the teaching profession cannot be expected to reach the solidarity that belongs, for example, to the profession of medicine or of law. The wide economic differences in our civilisation inevitably perpetuate distinctions of rank, which are nowhere more clearly shown than in the choice of schools. It is natural and right that parents should be no less concerned about the companionship they provide for their children than about the quality of the teaching, and since a free and compulsory education has brought into the national schools not only the poorest but the lowest class, those who can afford it must be excused, and even commended, if they take advantage of other opportunities, where some principle of selection is applied. And as there are different classes of children, representing on the whole different kinds of home-upbringing, so there will be different ranks of teachers, varying widely in their status and emoluments. The question of numbers will always among day-schools give the town teacher an advantage over his country brother; the question of fees, in so far as these are not counter-balanced by endowments or State support, will draw the most highly-qualified teachers to the schools that serve the rich; and the secondary teacher will, on the whole, rank above the elementary teacher, partly because greater attainments are required from him, and partly because the higher teaching, requiring a prolonged school course, is demanded chiefly by the well-to-do classes. That this economic differentiation would become so marked could scarcely have been foreseen three centuries ago, and even though it already existed, Mulcaster was doing good service in protesting against its extremer forms. His claim that the elementary teacher is the most important of all, that he should have the smallest classes to deal with, and that he should be the most highly paid, must of course be taken as a counsel of perfection, but if there is no present prospect of its being fully admitted in practice, there is certainly a growing acceptance of the principle underlying it, that the most critical period of education is in the early years, when the first impressions are being received, and that no influence deserves to be so well considered as that which is to call forth an individual response from the awakening intelligence.

Difficult as the attainment of Mulcaster’s ideal of the position of teachers may have been, he was undoubtedly on the right path to seek it, when he advocated that their training should be entrusted to the universities. The demand for adequate preparation is the only reasonable means of securing at once a fitting status, and a reward sufficient to attract the best talent, and the recognition of the work of education as deserving to rank with the other learned professions for which a special academic training is required, is the natural expression of a healthy public sentiment on the matter. The higher the requirements are pitched, the safer will be the guarantee that aspirants will be drawn to the work by a genuine belief in it as their true vocation, for the sake of which it is worth while to make some sacrifice. The atmosphere of a university, moreover, offers the fullest opportunity to the teacher of acquiring the breadth of general culture, and the savoir vivre, in which he is so apt to be deficient.

Mulcaster’s proposals for university reform in general will be found in several important respects to have anticipated the course of subsequent legislation. He wished the State to have a free hand in controlling the uses of private endowments according to the special needs of each generation, as long as the confidence of the original founders was not betrayed, and he was not slow to point out directions where he considered that changes were urgently needed. We know that in his time the condition of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge was far from satisfactory, partly because definite abuses had crept in, and partly because their constitution naturally offered a passive resistance to regulative organisation. Mulcaster’s suggestions all tend to greater concentration of aim and facility of classification. He may have carried his desire for uniformity too far when he advocated the specialisation of every college to a particular study, and even to a particular stage in that study. So far as residence is concerned there is surely no need to forgo the benefits of a varied social intercourse among students of different standing and pursuits, but it cannot be doubted that every effort should be made to counteract the loss this may entail by providing full opportunities throughout the whole university for the emulation of those who are in the same academic position. In Elizabethan days there was not the same freedom of interchange in lectures among the various colleges that now obtains, and Mulcaster was doing good service in deprecating the isolation and dispersion of interest that interfered with progress. We must also commend the discernment he showed in presenting the claims of a definite and comprehensive curriculum in general learning to the attention of those who wished to engage in professional studies, as well as his zeal for the more careful selection of candidates for scholarships, fellowships, and degrees. Nor is it to be forgotten that he was probably the first to suggest the appointment of “readers” in the universities,—an arrangement that was not adopted till almost our own time.

The significance of Mulcaster’s theories may best be appreciated by comparing them with those of the great educational reformer who came next in order of time. The services rendered to the world by Comenius are too well accredited, and too widely acknowledged, to suffer any serious loss of prestige by such a comparison. It has been already urged that true originality in social affairs means an enlightened judgment as to what is possible and desirable for one’s own time and country, and the reform of education had to be worked out and proclaimed for continental Europe on independent lines. It is not likely that Mulcaster’s writings had any direct influence on Comenius, though they could hardly fail to make some contribution to the general stock of ideas that is successively inherited by each generation, and spreads almost imperceptibly over an ever widening area. Even apart from any claim to priority in doctrine, the forcible personality of the Moravian writer, expressing itself in a singularly exhaustive treatment of educational problems and their practical application, will always assure to him an unquestioned authority, while his assertion of the weighty principle that words and things must be taught together, spoken and written signs being constantly associated with the objects, qualities, or actions they represent, is in itself enough to secure him a lasting reputation. But from the national point of view, which in tracing such historical successions it is not unreasonable to assume, we may justly note that there are a considerable number of educational doctrines, now generally accepted among us in theory if not in practice, the earliest formulation of which, though generally ascribed to Comenius, is really to be found in the writings of Richard Mulcaster. More than this, it may be maintained that on several important points a more penetrating insight was shown by our own countryman, in spite of his disadvantage in time. In regard both to the end and the scope of education, for example, a more humanistic conception seems to have been held by Mulcaster. Unlike Comenius, who lays chief stress on the preparation for eternity, he sets forth as the main purpose of youthful training the more proximate aims of self-realisation and useful service to one’s fellowmen. “The end of education and training is to help nature to her perfection in the complete development of all the various powers ... whereby each shall be best able to perform all those functions in life which his position shall require, whether public or private, in the interest of his country in which he was born, and to which he owes his whole service.” And while both writers insist that the rudiments of learning should be taught to children of every social class and of both sexes, the Englishman alone expresses sympathy with the ideal of a higher education for girls where circumstances permit. It would seem also that Mulcaster took the more reasonable view of the relation of a teacher to his class, for his claim that the elementary master should have the smallest number to deal with, at least shows a fuller sense of the importance of individual treatment than is conveyed in the later writer’s dictum that it does not matter how large a class is if the teacher has monitors to help him.

Among the doctrines of Comenius to which his expositors have attached special importance may be numbered the following: that the earliest teaching should be given in the vernacular; that the first subjects taught should be such as give scope to the child’s activity; that knowledge should be communicated through the senses and put to immediate use; that examples should be taught before rules; that the arts should be taught practically; that in language-study grammar should accompany reading and speaking; that learning should be spontaneous and pleasant without undue pressure; that children should not be beaten for failure in study, but only for moral offences; and that education should follow in general the guidance of nature. These principles now rank among the commonplaces of educational method, and in so far as their acceptance has been furthered by the persuasive advocacy of Comenius the gratitude of the world is due to him; but why should Englishmen forget that they had all been proclaimed with unmistakable clearness in this country half a century earlier? Readers of the foregoing pages must be already convinced that the doctrines in question form an essential part of Mulcaster’s theory of education; but it may be worth while to recall in a connected form a few of the more striking passages in which they are expressed. On the use of the vernacular in the early years: “As for the question whether English or Latin should be first learned, hitherto there may seem to have been some reasonable doubt, although the nature of the two tongues ought to decide the matter clearly enough, ... but now ... we can follow the direction of reason and nature in learning to read first that which we speak first, to take most care over that which we use most, and in beginning our studies where we have the best chance of good progress, owing to our natural familiarity with our ordinary language, as spoken by those around us in the affairs of everyday life.” No particular quotation is needed to illustrate Mulcaster’s dependence for his elementary training on studies that called forth individual effort from the child, for the course he planned includes no other kind of occupation, but the following sentences may stand for a proof that he recognised the natural channels through which knowledge is acquired and utilised in the guidance of action: “Nature has ... given us for self-preservation the power of perceiving all sensible things by means of feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting. These qualities of the outward world, being apprehended by the understanding and examined by the judgment, are handed over to the memory, and afterwards prove our chief—nay, our only—means of obtaining further knowledge.... To serve the end both of sense-perception and of motion, nature has planted in the body a brain, the prince of all our organs, which by spreading its channels through every part of our frame, produces all the effects through which sense passes into motion.” On the point of subordinating rules to the imitation of examples, and learning the arts by practically engaging in them, Mulcaster writes: “Children know not what they do, much less why they do it, till reason grow into some ripeness in them, and therefore in their training they profit more by practice than by knowing why, till they feel the use of reason, which teaches them to consider causes.... When the end of any art is wholly in doing, the initiation should be short, so as not to hinder that end by keeping the learners too long musing upon rules.... We must keep carefully that rule of Aristotle which teaches that the best way to learn anything well which has to be done after it is learned, is always to be a-doing while we are a-learning.” To the question of the best method in linguistic study, Mulcaster was ready to apply this principle of learning directly through practice, and his sense of the proper place of grammatical knowledge is shown in the following passage: “Grammar in itself is but the bare rule, and a very naked thing.... In grammar, which is the introduction to speech, there should be no such length as is customary, because its end is to write and to speak, and in doing this as much as possible we learn our grammar best, when it is applied to matter and not clogged with rules. As for understanding writers, that comes with years and ripeness of intelligence, not by means of the rules of grammar.” It has already been seen that Mulcaster shared fully in the humaner views upon the treatment of children that were beginning to assert themselves in his day; but it is interesting to notice that he based his conviction not only on the general claims of sympathy, but also on grounds of purely educational expediency. “These three things—perception, memory, and judgment—ye will find peering out of the little young souls. Now these natural capacities being once discovered must as they arise be followed with diligence, increased by good method and encouraged by sympathy, till they come to their fruition. 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 that all may proceed voluntarily, and not with violence, so that the will may be ready to do well and loth to do ill, and all fear of correction may be entirely absent. Surely to beat for not learning a child that is willing enough to learn, but whose intelligence is defective, is worse than madness.... Beating must only be for ill-behaviour, not for failure in learning.” Finally we must admit that the principle urged by Comenius, and afterwards pushed to an extreme by Rousseau and Froebel, of following the guidance of nature in planning the procedure of instruction was explicitly stated by Mulcaster. “The third proof of a good elementary course was that it should follow nature in the multitude of its gifts, and that it should proceed in teaching as she does in developing. For as she is unfriendly wherever she is forced, so she is the best guide that anyone can have, wherever she shows herself favourable.”

It not infrequently happens that the doctrines of a notable reformer, while they are full of light and leading for his contemporaries, have no more than a historical interest for succeeding generations. The rapidity of their absorption in the general current of established theory must be largely determined by the strength of the influence with which they were first asserted, so that in one aspect it may be said that the more potent the impress of the original mind, the sooner will its individual effects become imperceptible. But it would be as rash to make this rule the measure of an estimate of relative greatness, without taking account of other contributing conditions, as it would be unreasonable to be misled into the opposite error of undervaluing proposals which had only a temporary fitness and are of no present significance. In truth it is a good deal a matter of accident whether the words of wisdom which fall from men of genius and insight bear fruit early or late, and while distance in time offers a vantage-ground for the just assignment of the tributes of admiration and gratitude, the question of immediate applicability must not bulk too largely among the elements on which our judgment of a reputation is based. As has been already suggested, Mulcaster lost his opportunity of speedy acceptance for his ideals through his inability to commend them with persuasive eloquence, though such an impediment to appreciation is happily not irremovable. The more searching investigation of our time into the history of educational thought might or might not have discovered a high present value in the aspirations to which he gave somewhat inadequate expression, without his title to fame being materially affected. But it will undoubtedly give to his writings a great additional interest if it should appear that they set forth lessons which the three intervening centuries have failed to learn, and which are still clamouring for acceptance in our own day.

It would not be difficult to show that many of the reforms which he urged and anticipated, while they have been formally admitted as necessary or expedient, have as yet made little way in leavening the whole mass of educational practice. There is good reason to maintain, for example, that the impartial diffusion of the opportunities of learning throughout all classes of the community, which was a fundamental part of Mulcaster’s gospel, has been much less completely realised among us than is generally supposed. We are apt to rest satisfied with the idea of universal education without over-careful a scrutiny into the nature of what is offered in its name. In so far as elementary instruction was concerned Mulcaster drew no distinction between rich and poor, between those of gentle and of lowly birth; all were to have the same treatment, irrespective of the uses to which their knowledge might afterwards be turned. Our State system of education may profess to carry out this aim, but the justice of the claim must be denied so long as the nature and quality of what is forcibly imposed upon the mass of the people is seriously at fault. Our system of public elementary education in this country, however efficiently it may be organised, fails entirely to provide a sound general training owing to its adoption of a curriculum that is unduly utilitarian in aim. It is undeniable that this is largely due to an implicit caste feeling which prescribes that the education of the masses shall fit them directly for the performance of certain industrial tasks in a state of economic subjection. The well-to-do citizen wishes his own child, even from the first, to be taught differently from the child of poorer parents, whose schooling he helps to pay for and has some share in regulating. The course of study he chooses may be no better,—in some respects it is undoubtedly worse; but at least it is different, and conforms to the conventional standard of a liberal training for life as a whole. The codes drawn up for our national system are not framed for any such purpose. Partly from ingrained class prejudice, partly to get tangible results to show for the public money expended, and partly from a benevolent but short-sighted regard for supposed utilities, we have overburdened the curriculum with the more mechanical parts of learning. We put too much of the drudgery into the years when we can make sure of the children, so that a minimum of interest is taken in the work for its own sake, with the result that when the compulsory term is reached, the great majority of them use their liberty to throw aside their books for ever. While this reproach remains just, can we say that the ideal of a true universal elementary education has yet been reached?

It is perhaps idle to expect any equalisation of opportunities by postponing every kind of specialism to a period beyond the elementary stage, until there is a more general agreement as to what constitutes a liberal education. If we apply the touchstone of Mulcaster’s conception, how much of the traditional lumber which is now obstructing our progress would have to be cleared away! We are the bond-slaves of two tyrants—the spirit of an outworn classicism and the spirit of a utilitarianism falsely so-called. Under the domination of the former we distort the curriculum of our higher-class schools, preparatory as well as secondary, by projecting into the elementary period and practically imposing on every scholar linguistic studies that should form a specialism only for a very few during the later years of school life. Misguided by the latter we debase our public primary education by filling up the time with subjects of mere information that neither arouse the interests of the learner nor afford a genuine mental discipline. It would indeed astound the Elizabethan schoolmaster who tolerated pre-occupation with the learned tongues only until his native English should reach a high enough point of cultivation to become a worthy receptacle of learning, and who lamented the temporary need for a medium which kept the student “one degree further off from knowledge” to find that after more than 300 years the shackles had not yet been cast aside. Nor would he be less dismayed to discover that the sole alternative offered to those who were excluded from what professed to be a liberal culture, consisted only to a very small extent of that direct knowledge of the facts and laws of Nature which he conceived to be the proper food during “our best learning time,” but mainly of the dry bones of second-hand experience. Mulcaster’s ideal will not be attained until we have devised a course of study up to the age of at least 14 or 15 years, which shall form a preparation for life that is applicable to all pupils alike—to boys and girls, to rich and poor, to those who can pursue their systematic education further, and to those who must discontinue it then to enter into the world of affairs.

Enough perhaps has been already said, though it would be an easy task to continue the catalogue of reforms suggested by Mulcaster, which have been approved by the consensus of judgment among thinkers on education, but have not yet been fully carried out in this country. When we remember the over-pressure and cramming that have resulted from the abuse of examinations in the treatment of learning as a marketable commodity subject to the severest struggles of competition; or the widespread neglect of the arts and sciences as instruments of general training; or the unholy separation of parents and children during the most critical years of mutual influence, through the acceptance of the boarding-school system as a normal institution; or the anomalous position of teachers, left as they are without recognition as members of an acknowledged profession, and having to depend for their training on the voluntary provision made by religious sects,—when we reflect that on these and on many kindred matters of high urgency the wisest guidance was offered to us more than three centuries ago, we shall have little hesitation in admitting the claim of Richard Mulcaster to be considered the Father of English Pedagogy.