§ 1. The history of English thought on education has yet to be written. In the literature of education the Germans have been the pioneers, and have consequently settled the routes; and when a track has once been established few travellers will face the risk and trouble of leaving it. So up to the present time, writers on the history of European education after the Renascence have occupied themselves chiefly with men who lived in Germany, or wrote in German. But the French are at length exploring the country for themselves; and in time, no doubt, the English-speaking races will show an interest in the thoughts and doings of their common ancestors.

We know what toils and dangers men will encounter in getting to the source of great rivers; and although, as Mr. Widgery truly says, “the study of origins is not everybody’s business,”[47] we yet may hope that students will be found ready to give time and trouble to an investigation of great interest and perhaps some utility—the origin of the school course which now affects the millions who have English for their mother-tongue.

§ 2. In the fifteen hundreds there were published several works on education, three of which, Elyot’s Governour, Ascham’s Scholemaster, and Mulcaster’s Positions, have been recently reprinted.[48] Others, such as Edward Coote’s English Schoolmaster, and Mulcaster’s Elementarie, are pretty sure to follow, without serious loss, let us hope, to their editors, though neither Coote nor Mulcaster are likely to become as well-known writers as Roger Ascham.

§ 3. Henry Barnard, whose knowledge of our educational literature no less than his labours in it, makes him the greatest living authority, says that Mulcaster’s Positions is “one of the earliest, and still one of the best treatises in the English language.” (English Pedagogy, 2nd series, p. 177.) Mulcaster was one of the most famous of English schoolmasters, and by his writings he proved that he was far in advance of the schoolmasters of his own time, and of the times which succeeded. But he paid the penalty of thinking of himself more highly than he should have thought; and whether or no the conjecture is right that Shakespeare had him in his mind when writing Love’s Labour’s Lost, there is an affectation in Mulcaster’s style which is very irritating, for it has caused even the master of Edmund Spenser to be forgotten. In a curious and interesting allegory on the progress of language (in the Elementarie, pp. 66, ff.), Mulcaster says that Art selects the best age of a language to draw rules from, such as the age of Demosthenes in Greece and of Tully in Rome; and he goes on: “Such a period in the English tongue I take to be in our days for both the pen and the speech.” And he suggests that the English language, having reached its zenith, is seen to advantage, not in the writings of Shakespeare or Spenser, but in those of Richard Mulcaster. After enumerating the excellencies of the language, he adds: “I need no example in any of these, whereof my own penning is a general pattern.” Here we feel tempted to exclaim with Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act 5, sc. 2): “I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical: too too vain, too too vain.” He speaks elsewhere of his “so careful, I will not say so curious writing” (Elementarie, p. 253), and says very truly: “Even some of reasonable study can hardly understand the couching of my sentence, and the depth of my conceit” (ib., 235). And this was the death-warrant of his literary renown.

§ 4. But there is good reason why Mulcaster should not be forgotten. When we read his books we find that wisdom which we are importing in the nineteenth century was in a great measure offered us by an English schoolmaster in the sixteenth. The latest advances in pedagogy have established (1) that the end and aim of education is to develop the faculties of the mind and body; (2) that all teaching processes should be carefully adapted to the mental constitution of the learner; (3) that the first stage in learning is of immense importance and requires a very high degree of skill in the teacher; (4) that the brain of children, especially of clever children, should not be subjected to “pressure”; (5) that childhood should not be spent in learning foreign languages, but that its language should be the mother-tongue, and its exercises should include handwork, especially drawing; (6) that girls’ education should be cared for no less than boys’; (7) that the only hope of improving our schools lies in providing training for our teachers. These are all regarded as planks in the platform of “the new education,” and these were all advocated by Mulcaster.

§ 5. Before I point this out in detail I may remark how greatly education has suffered from being confounded with learning. There are interesting passages both in Ascham and Mulcaster which prove that the class-ideal of the “scholar and gentleman” was of later growth. In the fifteen hundreds learning was thought suitable, not for the rich, but for the clever. Still, learning, and therefore education, was not for the many, but the few. Mulcaster considers at some length how the number of the educated is to be kept down (Positions, chapp. 36, 37, 39), though even here he is in the van, and would have everyone taught to read and write (Positions, chapp. 5, 36). But the true problem of education was not faced till it was discovered that every human being was to be considered in it. This was, I think, first seen by Comenius.

With this abatement we find Mulcaster’s sixteenth-century notions not much behind our nineteenth.

§ 6. (1 & 2) “Why is it not good,” he asks, “to have every part of the body and every power of the soul to be fined to his best?” (PP., p. 34[49]). Elsewhere he says: “The end of education and train is to help Nature to her perfection, which is, when all her abilities be perfected in their habit, whereunto right elements be right great helps. Consideration and judgment must wisely mark whereunto Nature is either evidently given or secretly affectionate and must frame an education consonant thereto.” (El., p. 28).

Michelet has with justice claimed for Montaigne that he drew the teacher’s attention from the thing to be learnt to the learner: “Non l’objet, le savoir, mais le sujet, c’est l’homme.” (Nos Fils, p. 170.) Mulcaster has a claim to share this honour with his great contemporary. He really laid the foundation of a science of education. Discussing our natural abilities, he says: “We have a perceiving by outward sense to feel, to hear, to see, to smell, to taste all sensible things; which qualities of the outward, being received in by the common sense and examined by fantsie, are delivered to remembrance, and afterward prove our great and only grounds unto further knowledge.”[50] (El., p. 32.) Here we see Mulcaster endeavouring to base education, or as he so well calls it, “train,” on what we receive from Nature. Elsewhere he speaks of the three things which we “find peering out of the little young souls,” viz: “wit to take, memory to keep, and discretion to discern.” (PP., p. 27.)

§ 7. (3) I have pointed out that the false ideal of the Renascence led schoolmasters to neglect children. Mulcaster remarks that the ancients considered the training of children should date from the birth; but he himself begins with the school age. Here he has the boldness to propose that those who teach the beginners should have the smallest number of pupils, and should receive the highest pay. “The first groundwork would be laid by the best workman,” says Mulcaster (PP., 130), here expressing a truth which, like many truths that are not quite convenient, is seldom denied but almost systematically ignored.[51]

§ 8. (4) In the Nineteenth Century Magazine for November, 1888, appeared a vigorous protest with nearly 400 signatures, many of which carried great weight with them, against our sacrifice of education to examination. Our present system, whether good or bad, is the result of accident. Winchester and Eton had large endowments, and naturally endeavoured by means of these endowments to get hold of clever boys. At first no doubt they succeeded fairly well; but other schools felt bound to compete for juvenile brains, and as the number of prizes increased, many of our preparatory schools became mere racing stables for children destined at 12 or 14 to run for “scholarship stakes.” Thus, in the scramble for the money all thought of education has been lost sight of; injury has been done in many cases to those who have succeeded, still greater injury to those who have failed or who have from the first been considered “out of the running.” These very serious evils would have been avoided had we taken counsel with Mulcaster: “Pity it were for so petty a gain to forego a greater; to win an hour in the morning and lose the whole day after; as those people most commonly do which start out of their beds too early before they be well awaked or know what it is o’clock; and be drowsy when they are up for want of their sleep.” (PP., p. 19; see also El., xi., pp. 52 ff.)

§ 9. (5) It would have been a vast gain to all Europe if Mulcaster had been followed instead of Sturm. He was one of the earliest advocates of the use of English instead of Latin (see Appendix, p. 534), and good reading and writing in English were to be secured before Latin was begun. His elementary course included these five things: English reading, English writing, drawing, singing, playing a musical instrument. If the first course were made to occupy the school-time up to the age of 12, Mulcaster held that more would be done between 12 and 16 than between 7 and 17 in the ordinary way. There would be the further gain that the children would not be set against learning. “Because of the too timely onset too little is done in too long a time, and the school is made a torture, which as it brings forth delight in the end when learning is held fast, so should it pass on very pleasantly by the way, while it is in learning.”[52] (PP., 33.)

§ 10. (6) Among the many changes brought about in the nineteenth century we find little that can compare in importance with the advance in the education of women. In the last century, whenever a woman exercised her mental powers she had to do it by stealth,[53] and her position was degraded indeed when compared not only with her descendants of the nineteenth century, but also with her ancestors of the sixteenth. This I know has been disputed by some authorities, e.g., by the late Professor Brewer: but to others, e.g., to a man who, as regards honesty and wisdom, has had few equals and no superiors in investigating the course of education, I mean the late Joseph Payne, this educational superiority of the women of Elizabeth’s time has seemed to be entirely beyond question. On this point Mulcaster’s evidence is very valuable, and, to me at least, conclusive. He not only “admits young maidens to learn,” but says that “custom stands for him,” and that “the custom of my country ... hath made the maidens’ train her own approved travail.” (PP., p. 167.)

§ 11. (7) Of all the educational reforms of the nineteenth century by far the most fruitful and most expansive is, in my opinion, the training of teachers. In this, as in most educational matters, the English, though advancing, are in the rear. Far more is made of “training” on the Continent and in the United States than in England. And yet we made a good start. Our early writers on education saw that the teacher has immense influence, and that to turn this influence to good account he must have made a study of his profession and have learnt “the best that has been thought and done” in it. Every occupation in life has a traditional capital of knowledge and experience, and those who intend to follow the business, whatever it may be, are required to go through some kind of training or apprenticeship before they earn wages. To this rule there is but one exception. In English elementary schools children are paid to “teach” children, and in the higher schools the beginner is allowed to blunder at the expense of his first pupils into whatever skill he may in the end manage to pick up. But our English practice received no encouragement from the early English writers, Mulcaster, Brinsley,[54] and Hoole.

As far as I am aware the first suggestion of a training college for teachers came from Mulcaster. He schemed seven special colleges at the University; and of these one is for teachers. Some of his suggestions, e.g., about “University Readers” have lately been adopted, though without acknowledgment; and as the University of Cambridge has since 1879 acknowledged the existence of teachers, and appointed a “Teachers’ Training Syndicate,” we may perhaps in a few centuries more carry out his scheme, and have training colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.[55] Some of the reasons he gives us have not gone out of date with his English. They are as follows:—

“And why should not these men (the teachers) have both this sufficiency in learning, and such room to rest in, thence to be chosen and set forth for the common service? Be either children or schools so small a portion of our multitude? or is the framing of young minds, and the training of their bodies so mean a point of cunning? Be schoolmasters in this Realm such a paucity, as they are not even in good sadness to be soundly thought on? If the chancel have a minister, the belfry hath a master: and where youth is, as it is eachwhere, there must be trainers, or there will be worse. He that will not allow of this careful provision for such a seminary of masters, is most unworthy either to have had a good master himself, or hereafter to have a good one for his. Why should not teachers be well provided for, to continue their whole life in the school, as Divines, Lawyers, Physicians do in their several professions? Thereby judgment, cunning, and discretion will grow in them: and masters would prove old men, and such as Xenophon setteth over children in the schooling of Cyrus. Whereas now, the school being used but for a shift, afterward to pass thence to the other professions, though it send out very sufficient men to them, itself remaineth too too naked, considering the necessity of the thing. I conclude, therefore, that this trade requireth a particular college, for these four causes. 1. First, for the subject being the mean to make or mar the whole fry of our State. 2. Secondly, for the number, whether of them that are to learn, or of them that are to teach. 3. Thirdly, for the necessity of the profession, which may not be spared. 4. Fourthly, for the matter of their study, which is comparable to the greatest professions, for language, for judgment, for skill how to train, for variety in all points of learning, wherein the framing of the mind, and the exercising of the body craveth exquisite consideration, beside the staidness of the person.” (PP., 9 pp. 248, 9.)

§ 12. Though once a celebrated man, and moreover the master of Edmund Spenser, Mulcaster has been long forgotten; but when the history of education in England comes to be written, the historian will show that few schoolmasters in the fifteen hundreds or since were so enlightened as the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors’.[56]