§ 1. When I originally published these essays (more than 22 years ago) the critic of the Nonconformist in one of the best, though by no means most complimentary, of the many notices with which the book was favoured, took me to task for being in such a hurry to publish. I had confessed incompleteness. What need was there for me to publish before I had completed my work? Since that time I have spent years on my subject and at least two years on these essays themselves; but they now seem to me even further from completeness than they seemed then. However, I have reason to believe that the old book, incomplete as it was, proved useful to teachers; and in its altered form it will, I hope, be found useful still.

§ 2. It may be useful I think in two ways.

First: it may lead some teachers to the study of the great thinkers on education. There are some vital truths which remain in the books which time cannot destroy. In the world as Goethe says are few voices, many echoes; and the echoes often prevent our hearing the voices distinctly. Perhaps most people had a better chance of hearing the voices when there were fewer books and no periodicals. Speakers properly so called cannot now be heard for the hubbub of the talkers; and as literature is becoming more and more periodical our writers seem mostly employed like children on card pagodas or like the recumbent artists of the London streets who produce on the stones of the pavement gaudy chalk drawings which the next shower washes out.

But if I would have fewer books what business have I to add to the number? I may be told that—

My answer is that I do not write to expound my own thought, but to draw attention to the thoughts of the men who are best worth hearing. It is not given to us small people to think strongly and clearly like the great people; we, however, gain in strength and clearness by contact with them; and this contact I seek to promote. So long as this book is used, it will I hope be used only as an introduction to the great thinkers whose names are found in it.

§ 3. There is another way in which the book may be of use. By considering the great thinkers in chronological order we see that each adds to the treasure which he finds already accumulated, and thus by degrees we are arriving in education, as in most departments of human endeavour, at a science. In this science lies our hope for the future. Teachers must endeavour to obtain more and more knowledge of the laws to which their art has to conform itself.

§ 4. It may be of advantage to some readers if I point out briefly what seems to me the course of the main stream of thought as it has flowed down to us from the Renascence.

§ 5. As I endeavoured to show at the beginning of this book, the Scholars of the Renascence fell into a great mistake, a mistake which perhaps could not have been avoided at a time when literature was rediscovered and the printing press had just been invented. This mistake was the idolatry of books, and, still worse, of books in Latin and Greek. So the schoolmaster fell into a bad theory or conception of his task, for he supposed that his function was to teach Latin and Greek; and his practice or way of going to work was not much better, for his chief implements were grammar and the cane.

§ 6. The first who made a great advance were the Jesuits. They were indeed far too much bent on being popular to be “Innovators.” They endeavoured to do well what most schoolmasters did badly. They taught Latin and Greek, and they made great use of grammar, but they gave up the cane. Boys were to be made happy. School-hours were to be reduced from 10 hours a day to 5 hours, and in those 5 hours learning was to be made “not only endurable but even pleasurable.”

But the pupils were to find this pleasure not in the exercise of their mental powers but in other ways. As Mr. Eve has said, young teachers are inclined to think mainly of stimulating their pupils’ minds and so neglect the repetition needed for accuracy. Old teachers on the other hand care so much for accuracy that they require the same thing over and over till the pupils lose zest and mental activity. The Jesuits frankly adopted the maxim “Repetition is the mother of studies,” and worked over the same ground again and again. The two forces on which they relied for making the work pleasant were one good—the personal influence of the master (“boys will soon love learning when they love the teacher,”) and one bad or at least doubtful—the spur of emulation.

However, the attempt to lead, not drive, was a great step in the right direction. Moreover as they did not hold with the Sturms and Trotzendorfs that the classics in and for themselves were the object of education the Jesuits were able to think of other things as well. They were very careful of the health of the body. And they also enlarged the task of the schoolmaster in another and still more important way. To the best of their lights they attended to the moral and religious training of their pupils. It is much to the credit of the Fathers that though Plautus and Terence were considered very valuable for giving a knowledge of colloquial Latin and were studied and learnt by heart in the Protestant schools, the Jesuits rejected them on account of their impurity. The Jesuits wished the whole boy, not his memory only, to be affected by the master; so the master was to make a study of each of his pupils and to go on with the same pupils through the greater part of their school course.

The Jesuit system stands out in the history of education as a remarkable instance of a school system elaborately thought out and worked as a whole. In it the individual schoolmaster withered, but the system grew, and was, I may say is, a mighty organism. The single Jesuit teacher might not be the superior of the average teacher in good Protestant schools, but by their unity of action the Jesuits triumphed over their rivals as easily as a regiment of soldiers scatters a mob.

§ 7. The schoolmaster’s theory of the human mind made of it, to use Bartle Massey’s simile, a kind of bladder fit only to hold what was poured into it. This pouring-in theory of education was first called in question by that strange genius who seems to have stood outside all the traditions and opinions of his age,

I mean Rabelais.

Like most reformers, Rabelais begins with denunciations of the system established by use and wont. After an account of the school-teaching and school-books of the day, he says—“It would be better for a boy to learn nothing at all than to be taught such-like books by such-like masters.” He then proposes a training in which, though the boy is to study books, he is not to do this mainly, but is to be led to look about him, and to use both his senses and his limbs. For instance, he is to examine the stars when he goes to bed, and then to be called up at four in the morning to find the change that has taken place. Here we see a training of the powers of observation. These powers are also to be exercised on the trees and plants which are met with out-of-doors, and on objects within the house, as well as on the food placed on the table. The study of books is to be joined with this study of things, for the old authors are to be consulted for their accounts of whatever has been met with. The study of trades, too, and the practice of some of them, such as wood-cutting, and carving in stone, makes a very interesting feature in this system. On the whole, I think we may say that Rabelais was the first to advocate training as distinguished from teaching; and he was the father of Anschauungs-unterricht, teaching by intuition, i.e., by the pupil’s own senses and the spring of his own intelligence. Rabelais would bestow much care on the body too. Not only was the pupil to ride and fence; we find him even shouting for the benefit of his lungs.

§ 8. Rabelais had now started an entirely new theory of the educator’s task, and fifty years afterwards his thought was taken up and put forward with incomparable vigour by the great essayist, Montaigne. Montaigne starts with a quotation from Rabelais—“The greatest clerks are not the wisest men,” and then he makes one of the most effective onslaughts on the pouring-in theory that is to be found in all literature. His accusation against the schoolmasters of his time is twofold. First, he says, they aim only at giving knowledge, whereas they should first think of judgment and virtue. Secondly, in their method of teaching they do not exercise the pupils’ own minds. The sum and substance of the charge is contained in these words—“We labour to stuff the memory and in the meantime leave the conscience and understanding impoverished and void.” His notion of education embraced the whole man. “Our very exercises and recreations,” says he, “running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, fencing, will prove to be a good part of our study. I would have the pupil’s outward fashion and mien and the disposition of his limbs formed at the same time with his mind. ’Tis not a soul, ’tis not a body, that we are training up, but a man, and we ought not to divide him.”

§ 9. Before the end of the fifteen hundreds then we see in the best thought of the time a great improvement in the conception of the task of the schoolmaster. Learning is not the only thing to be thought of. Moral and religious training are recognised as of no less importance. And as “both soul and body have been created by the hand of God” (the words are Ignatius Loyola’s), both must be thought of in education. When we come to instruction we find Rabelais recommending that at least part of it should be “intuitive,” and Montaigne requiring that the instruction should involve an exercise of the intellectual powers of the learner. But the escape even in thought from the Renascence ideal was but partial. Some of Rabelais’ directions seem to come from a “Verbal Realist,” and Montaigne was far from saying as Joseph Payne has said, “every act of teaching is a mode of dealing with mind and will be successful only in proportion as this is recognised,” “teaching is only another name for mental training.” But if Rabelais and Montaigne did not reach the best thought of our time they were much in advance of a great deal of our practice.

§ 10. The opening of the sixteen hundreds saw a great revolt from the literary spirit of the Renascence. The exclusive devotion to books was followed by a reaction. There might after all be something worth knowing that books would not teach. Why give so much time to the study of words and so little to the observation of things? “Youth,” says a writer of the time, “is deluged with grammar precepts infinitely tedious, perplexed, obscure, and for the most part unprofitable, and that for many years.” Why not escape from this barren region? “Come forth, my son,” says Comenius. “Let us go into the open air. There you shall view whatsoever God produced from the beginning and doth yet effect by nature.” And Milton thus expresses the conviction of his day: “Because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching.”

This great revolution which was involved in the Baconian philosophy may be described as a turning from fancy to fact. All the creations of the human mind seemed to have lost their value. The only things that seemed worth studying were the material universe and the laws or sequences which were gradually ascertained by patient induction and experiment.

§ 11. Till the present century this revolution did not extend to our schools and universities. It is only within the last fifty years that natural science has been studied even in the University of Bacon and Newton. The Public School Commission of 1862 found that the curriculum was just as it had been settled at the Renascence. But if the walls of these educational Jerichos were still standing this was not from any remissness on the part of “the children of light” in shouting and blowing with the trumpet. They raised the war-cry “Not words, but things!” and the cry has been continued by a succession of eminent men against the schools of the 17th and 18th centuries and has at length begun to tell on the schools of the 19th. Perhaps the change demanded is best shown in the words of John Dury about 1649: “The true end of all human learning is to supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our ignorance of the nature and use of the creatures and the disorderliness of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them.” So the Innovators required teachers to devote themselves to natural science and to the science of the human mind.

§ 12. The first Innovators, like the people of the fifteen hundreds, thought mainly of the acquisition of knowledge, only the knowledge was to be not of the classics but of the material world. In this they seem inferior to Montaigne who had given the first place to virtue and judgment.

§ 13. But towards the middle of the sixteen hundreds a very eminent Innovator took a comprehensive view of education, and reduced instruction to its proper place, that is, he treated it as a part of education merely. This man, Comenius, was at once a philosopher, a philanthropist, and a schoolmaster; and in his writings we find the first attempt at a science of education. The outline of his science is as follows:—

“We live a threefold life—a vegetative, an animal, and an intellectual or spiritual. Of these, the first is perfect in the womb, the last in heaven. He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world, much more he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. According to the heavenly idea a man should—1st, Know all things; 2nd, He should be master of things and of himself; 3rd, He should refer everything to God. So that within us Nature has implanted the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety. To bring these seeds to maturity is the object of education. All men require education, and God has made children unfit for other employment that they may have time to learn.”

Here we have quite a new theory of the educator’s task. He is to bring to maturity the seeds of learning, virtue, and piety, which are already sown by Nature in his pupils. This is quite different from the pouring-in theory, and seems to anticipate the notion of Froebel, that the educator should be called not teacher but gardener. But Comenius evidently made too much of knowledge. Had he lived two centuries later he would have seen the area of possible knowledge extending to infinity in all directions, and he would no longer have made it his ideal that “man should know all things.”

§ 14. The next great thinker about education—I mean Locke—seems to me chiefly important from his having taken up the principles of Montaigne and treated the giving of knowledge as of very small importance. Montaigne, as we have seen, was the first to bring out clearly that education was much more than instruction, as the whole was greater than its part, and that instruction was of far less importance than some other parts of education. And this lies at the root of Locke’s theory also. The great function of the educator, according to him, is not to teach, but to dispose the pupil to virtue first, industry next, and then knowledge; but he thinks where the first two have been properly cared for knowledge will come of itself. The following are Locke’s own words:—“The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and to form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits and the principles of virtue and wisdom, to give him little by little a view of mankind and work him into a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy; and in the prosecution of it to give him vigour, activity, and industry. The studies which he sets him upon are but, as it were, the exercise of his faculties and employment of his time; to keep him from sauntering and idleness; to teach him application and accustom him to take pains, and to give him some little taste of what his own industry must perfect.”[211] So we see that Locke agrees with Comenius in his enlarged view of the educator’s task, and that he thought much less than Comenius of the importance of the knowledge to be given.

§ 15. We already see a gradual escape from the “idols” of the Renascence. Locke, instead of accepting the learned ideal, declares that learning is the last and least thing to be thought of. He cares little about the ordinary literary instruction given to children, though he thinks they must be taught something and does not know what to put in its place. He provides for the education of those who are to remain ignorant of Greek, but only when they are “gentlemen.” In this respect the van is led by Comenius, who thought of education for all, boys and girls, rich and poor, alike. Comenius also gave the first hint of the true nature of our task—to bring to perfection the seeds implanted by Nature. He also cared for the little ones whom the schoolmaster had despised. Locke does not escape from a certain intellectual disdain of “my young masters,” as he calls them; but in one respect he advanced as far as the best thinkers among his successors have advanced. Knowledge, he says, must come by the action of the learner’s own mind. The true teacher is within.

§ 16. We now come to the least practical and at the same time the most influential of all the writers on education—I mean Rousseau. He, like Rabelais, Montaigne, and Locke, was (to use Matthew Arnold’s expression) a “child of the idea.” He attacked scholastic use and wont not in the name of expedience, but in the name of reason; and such an attack—so eloquent, so vehement, so uncompromising—had never been made before.

Still there remained even in theory, and far more in practice, effects produced by the false ideal of the Renascence. This ideal Rousseau entirely rejected. He proposed making a clean sweep and returning to what he called the state of Nature.

§ 17. Rousseau was by no means the first of the Reformers who advocated a return to Nature. There has been a constant conviction in men’s minds from the time of the Stoics onwards that most of the evils which afflict humanity have come from our not following “Nature.” The cry of “Everything according to Nature” was soon raised by educationists. Ratke announced it as one of his principles. Comenius would base all action on the analogy of Nature. Indeed, there has hardly ever been a system of education which did not lay claim to be the “natural” system. And by “natural” has been always understood something different from what is usual. What is the notion that produces this antithesis?

§ 18. When we come to trace back things to their cause we are wont to attribute them to God, to Nature, or to Man. According to the general belief, God works in and through Nature, and therefore the tendency of things apart from human agency must be to good. This faith which underlies all our thoughts and modes of speech, has been beautifully expressed by Wordsworth—

But if the tendency of things is to good, why should the usual be in such strong contrast with “the natural”? Here again we may turn to Wordsworth. After pointing to the harmony of the visible world, and declaring his faith that “every flower enjoys the air it breathes,” he goes on—

This passage might be taken as the motto of Rousseauism. According to that philosophy man is the great disturber and perverter of the natural order. Other animals simply follow nature, but man has no instinct, and is thus left to find his own way. What is the consequence? A very different authority from Rousseau, the poet Cowper, tells us in language which Rousseau might have adopted—

Man has to investigate the sequences of Nature, and to arrange them for himself. In this way he brings about a great number of foreseen results, but in doing this he also brings about perhaps even a greater number of unforeseen results; and alas! it turns out that many, if not most, of these unforeseen results are the reverse of beneficial.

§ 19. Another thing is observable. Other animals are guided by instinct; we, for the most part, are guided by tradition. Man, it has been said, is the only animal that capitalises his discoveries. If we capitalised nothing but our discoveries, this accumulation would be an immense advantage to us; but we capitalise also our conjectures, our ideals, our habits, and unhappily, in many cases, our blunders.[212] So a great deal of action which is purely mischievous in its effects, comes not from our own mistakes, but from those of our ancestors. The consequence is, that what with our own mistakes and the mistakes we inherit, we sometimes go far indeed out of the course which “Nature” has prescribed for us.

§ 20. The generation which found a mouthpiece in Rousseau had become firmly convinced, not indeed of its own stupidity, but of the stupidity of all its predecessors; and the vast patrimony bequeathed to it seemed nothing but lumber or worse. So Rousseau found an eager and enthusiastic audience when he proposed a return to Nature, in other words, to give up all existing customs, and for the most part to do nothing and “give Nature a chance.” His boy of twelve years old was to have been taught nothing. Up to that age the great art of education, says Rousseau, is to do everything by doing nothing. The first part of education should be purely negative.

§ 21. Rousseau then was the first who escaped completely from the notion of the Renascence, that man was mainly a learning and remembering animal. But if he is not this, what is he? We must ascertain, said Rousseau, not a priori, but by observation. We need a new art, the art of observing children.

§ 22. Now at length there was hope for the Science of Education. This science must be based on a study of the subject on whom we have to act. According to Locke there is such variation not only in the circumstances, but also in the personal peculiarities of individuals, that general laws either do not exist or can never be ascertained. But this variation is no less observable in the human body, and the art of the physician has to conform itself to a science which is still very far from perfect. The physician, however, does not despair. He carefully avails himself of such science as we now have, and he makes a study of the human body in order to increase that science. When a few more generations have passed away, the medical profession will very likely smile at mistakes made by the old Victorian doctors. But, meantime, we profit by the science of medicine in its present state, and we find that this science has considerably increased the average duration of human life. We therefore require every practitioner to have made a scientific study of his calling, and to have had a training in both the theory and practice of it. The science of education cannot be said to have done much for us at present, but it will do more in the future, and might do more now if no one were allowed to teach before he or she had been trained in the best theory and practice we have. Since the appearance of the Emile the best educators have studied the subject on whom they had to act, and they have been learning more and more of the laws or sequences which affect the human mind and the human body. The marvellous strides of science in every other department encourages us to hope that it will make great advances in the field of education where it is still so greatly needed. Perhaps the day may come when a Pestalozzi may be considered even by his contemporaries on an equality with a Napoleon, and the human race may be willing to give to the art of instruction the same amount of time, money, thought, and energy, which in our day have been devoted with such tremendous success to the art of destruction. It is already dawning on the general consciousness that in education as in physical science “we conquer Nature by obeying her,” and we are learning more and more how to obey her.

§ 23. Rousseau’s great work was first, to expose the absurdities of the school-room, and second, to set the educator on studying the laws of nature in the human mind and body. He also drew attention to the child’s restless activity. He would also (like Locke before him), make the young learner his own teacher.

§ 24. There is another way in which the appearance of the Emile was, as the Germans say, “epoch-making.” From the time of the earliest Innovators, we have seen that “Things not Words,” had been the war-cry of a strong party of Reformers. But things had been considered merely as a superior means of instruction. Rousseau first pointed out the intimate relation that exists between children and the material world around them. Children had till then been thought of only as immature and inferior men. Since his day an English poet has taught us that in some ways the man is far inferior to the child, “the things which we have seen we now can see no more,” and that

Rousseau had not Wordsworth’s gifts, but he, too, observed that childhood is the age of strong impressions from without and that its material surroundings affect it much more acutely than they will in after life. Which of us knows as much about our own house and furniture as our children know? Still more remarkable is the sympathy children have with animals. If a cat comes into a room where there are grown people and also a child, which sees the cat first? which observes it most accurately? Now, this intimate relation of the child with its surroundings plays a most important part in its education. The educator may, if so minded, ignore this altogether, and stick to grammar, dates, and county towns, but if he does so the child’s real education will not be much affected by him. Rousseau saw this clearly, and wished to use “things” not for instruction but for education. Their special function was to train the senses.

§ 25. Perhaps it is not too much to say of Rousseau that he was the first who gave up thinking of the child as a being whose chief faculty was the faculty of remembering, and thought of him rather as a being who feels and reflects, acts and invents.

§ 26. But if the thought may be traced back to Rousseau, it was, as left by him, quite crude or rather embryonic. Since his time this conception of the young has been taken up and moulded into a fair commencement of a science of education. This commencement is now occupying the attention of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, and much may be expected from it even in the immediate future. For the science so far as it exists we are indebted mainly to the two Reformers with whom I will conclude—Pestalozzi and Froebel.

§ 27. Pestalozzi, like Comenius more than 100 years before him, conceived of education for all. “Every human being,” said he, “has a claim to a judicious development of his faculties.” Every child must go to school.

But the word school includes a great variety of institutions. The object these have in view differs immensely. With us the main object in some schools seems to be to prepare boys to compete at an early age for entrance scholarships awarded to the greatest proficients in Latin and Greek. In other schools the object is to turn the children out “good scholars” in another sense; that is, the school is held to be successful when the boys and girls acquire skill in the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and can remember a number of facts—facts of history, of geography, and even of natural science. So the common notion is that what is wanted in the way of education depends entirely on the child’s social position. There still linger among us notions derived from the literary men of the Renascence. We still measure all children by their literary and mnemonic attainments. We still consider knowledge of Latin and Greek the highest kind of knowledge. Children are sent to school that they may not be ignorant.[213] Pestalozzi, who had studied Rousseau, entirely denied all this. He required that the school-coach should be turned and started in a new direction. The main object of the school was not to teach, but to develop, not to put in but to draw out.

§ 28. The study of nature shows us that every animal comes into the world with certain faculties or capabilities. There are a set of circumstances which will develop these capabilities and make the most of them. There are other circumstances which would impede this development, decrease it, or even prevent it altogether. All other animals have this development secured for them by their ordinary environment: but Man, with far higher capacities, and with immeasurably greater faculties both for good and evil, is left far more to his own resources than the other animals. Placed in an almost endless variety of circumstances we have to ascertain how the development of our offspring may best be brought about. We have to consider what are the inborn faculties of our children, and also what aids and what hinders their development. When we have arrived at this knowledge we must educate them by placing them in the best circumstances in our power, and then superintending, judiciously and lovingly, the development of their faculties and of their higher nature.

§ 29. There is, said Pestalozzi, only one way in which faculty can be developed, and that is by exercise; so his system sought to encourage the activities of children, and in this respect he was surpassed, as we shall see, by Froebel. “Dead” knowledge, as it has been called—the knowledge commonly acquired for examinations, our school-knowledge, in fact—was despised by Pestalozzi as it had been by Locke and Rousseau before him. In its place he would put knowledge acquired by “intuition,” by the spring of the learner’s own intelligence.

§ 30. The conception of every child as an organism and of education as the process by which the development of that organism is promoted is found first in Pestalozzi, but it was more consistently thought out by Froebel. There is, said Froebel, a divine idea for every human being, for we are all God’s offspring. The object of the education of a human being is to further the development of his divine idea. This development is attainable only through action; for the development of every organism depends on its self-activity. Self-activity then, activity “with a will,” is the main thing to be cared for in education. The educator has to direct the children’s activity in such a way that it may satisfy their instincts, especially the formative and creative instincts. The child from his earliest years is to be treated as a doer and even a creator.

§ 31. Now, at last, we have arrived at the complete antithesis between the old education and the New. The old education had one object, and that was learning. Man was a being who learnt and remembered. Education was a process by which he learnt, at first the languages and literatures of Rome and Greece only; but as time went on the curriculum was greatly extended. The New Education treats the human being not so much a learner as a doer and creator. The educator no longer fixes his eyes on the object—the knowledge, but on the subject—the being to be educated. The success of the education is not determined by what the educated know, but by what they do and what they are. They are well educated when they love what is good, and have had all their faculties of mind and body properly developed to do it.

§ 32. The New Education then is “passive, following,” and must be based on the study of human nature. When we have ascertained what are the faculties to be developed we must consider further how to foster the self-activity that will develop them.

§ 33. We have travelled far from Dr. Johnson, who asserted that education was as well known as it ever could be. Some of us are more inclined to assert that in his day education was not invented. On the other hand, there are those who belittle the New Education and endeavour to show that in it there is nothing new at all. As it seems to me a revolution of the most salutary kind was made by the thinkers who proposed basing education on a study of the subject to be educated, and, more than this, making the process a “following” process with the object of drawing out self-activity.

§ 34. This change of object must in the end be fruitful in changes of every kind. But as yet we are only groping our way; and, if I may give a caution which, in this country at least, is quite superfluous, we should be cautious, and till we see our way clearly we should try no great experiment that would destroy our connexion with the past. Most of our predecessors thought only of knowledge. By a reaction some of our New Educationists seem to despise knowledge. But knowledge is necessary, and without some knowledge development would be impossible. We probably cannot do too much to assist development and encourage “intuition,” but there is, perhaps, some danger of our losing sight of truths which schoolroom experience would bring home to us. Even the clearest “concepts” get hazy again and totally unfit for use, unless they are permanently fixed in the mind by repetition, which to be effective must to some extent take the form of drill. The practical man, even the crammer, has here mastered a truth of the teaching art which the educationist is prone to overlook. And there are, no doubt, other things which the practical man can teach. But the great thinkers would raise us to a higher standing-point from which we may see much that will make the right road clearer to us, and lead us to press forward in it with good heart and hope.

FINIS.