THE SCHOOL.

Upon the organization and arrangement of the school largely depends the success of the educator. Two things must be borne constantly in mind. First, to create truthful and intellectual atmosphere, where wisdom, honor, and knowledge can be inhaled as with the breath, and second, to make the school cheerful and attractive in every way possible. We must get rid of the idea now generally prevailing among children, that the school is to be resorted to with regret and escaped from with pleasure.

So soon as the child will look at and become interested in pictures and toys, and will listen to tales and little stories, it can profitably be introduced in the school, the first department of which should be the Infant-school, or, as the Germans so aptly term it, the children’s garden, or Kinder Garten.

Here plaiting, modelling, and building, with simple object lessons for the older infants, develop their powers of observation, and give employment and impart skill to little fingers which might else be engaged in destroying furniture or clothes, or in pilfering from the sugar-bowl. Practical familiarity with the properties of lines, angles, circles, spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and the conic sections will be acquired, which will give a life and reality to the geometrical studies which will occupy them in their school career. Dancing and singing will relieve the tedium of sitting, shake off the surplus energy, give rest to the body, and power, time, and tune to the voice. Models of houses, stores, workshops, kitchens, farms, and factories, which later on they will assist in making, will be a source alike of amusement and instruction.

In the children’s garden no teacher should have charge of more than about twelve children, who should regard her as their mother-teacher, while she should seek to win the love and confidence of the little ones as the beginning of her work.

Each class of twelve should have their own special room, while for general purposes, such as music, drilling, gymnastic exercises, games, tableaux, and exhibitions of the magic lantern, the oxyhydrogen microscope, the stereopticon, and the like, they should assemble in a large hall. The details of arrangements will readily suggest themselves. The main feature is to have all things natural, free, pleasant, cheerful, bright, refined, and unrestrained by external forms or rigid rules, at the same time that order is secured by an easy discipline.

So deeply are we impressed with the importance and utility of the kinder garten, and with the high qualities required by the teacher of the very young, that we are more and more disposed to believe that the true order in rank and promotion among teachers should be, to speak in paradox, downwards; that is to say, the younger the children to be taught, the higher the rank and remuneration of the teacher; for not only is an extensive range of knowledge necessary to enable the teacher truthfully to answer the innumerable questions of inquisitive infancy, and to avoid giving false notions, to be afterwards with greater or less difficulty removed—always with a shock to the moral sentiment when the child discovers it has been deceived—but also a knowledge of the infant mind, a perception of the thoughts and fancies which chase one another through the infant brain, a knowledge and perceptive power which only a watchful and loving experience can acquire. An industry and a patience far beyond any needed by the teacher of more advanced pupils are also required by the highly-cultivated men and women, to whom alone the training of infant minds should be intrusted. Advanced pupils go more than half-way to meet their teacher—the infant can render no assistance to his, all has to be borne, suffered and done for him—his future habits depend mainly on those given to him in his earliest years. Yet the care of him in these important days is generally confided to ignorant nurses and to the less-skilled class of teachers.

In building the school, a pleasing style of architecture should be adopted, and the walls of the main hall should be hung with diagrams of all kinds, illustrative of natural history in its largest sense, of the sciences and of the mechanical arts, and with portraits or busts of distinguished men. The walls of the class-rooms should be decorated with diagrams and maps and figures referring to the special branches taught therein.

A large and commodious laboratory should be fitted up in the building, to enable every pupil to acquire experimentally that knowledge of chemical forces and action which books alone can never impart. A convenient observatory should afford facility for astronomical study and observation.

On the top floors or around the building should be arranged workshops, where the use of tools and machinery could be taught. The classes should assemble in the large hall, in the morning, where they might join in singing or light gymnastic exercises, or listen to some short appropriate address before betaking themselves to their class-rooms.

The teaching in these latter should be conducted, wherever practicable, upon the Socratic method, and every branch of science and of art could be thus explained. The mother unconsciously uses this method in educating or drawing out the first perceptions of infancy and early youth; and the impressions derived from this method of acquiring knowledge are the most lasting, being such as become most absolutely assimilated with the pupil’s mind. The teacher would also, at frequent intervals, conduct his class into the fields and woods for the study of botany, entomology, and geology, where Nature would supply in abundance the materials, and the teacher would be the only book. Instruction in the various trades which could be conveniently practised should receive attention, the taste of the pupils being made a guide to selection.

Some portion of the teaching which goes on in school should be performed by the pupils, under the supervision of the teacher. No adult can so thoroughly enter into a child’s mind as can another child; nor is this the only reason.

That is not fully known which can not be thoroughly used and applied, and knowledge can not be applied which its possessor can not himself impart. A perfect illustration of this truth is furnished us in the training of the soldier.

Upon nothing, perhaps, have the knowledge and skill of the most powerful intellects been more concentrated than upon the science and art of mutual slaughter; and in establishing the soldiers’ drill, an exhaustive analysis of the means by which the desired object was to be attained has been pursued. The men whose intellects have developed that drill, have not been content to treat the soldier as a pupil only. Each recruit has in turn to teach, as well as to learn to practise what he has learned, by drilling others whom he is made temporarily to command, as well as to practise his drill under the command of his officer; for only by such means could the highest degree of efficiency be secured. The reasons which led to the adoption of this principle in the barrack apply equally to the school.

This principle of giving and receiving we also see exemplified in Nature. Animals inhale oxygen from the air and return carbonic acid, which serves to build up the structure of the plant, and the latter in its turn gives out oxygen to supply the consumption of animals.

Every day—in the middle of the day, in winter, in the summer, early in the morning, or in the evening—gymnastic training on the system of the Swedish anatomist Ling or of the German Turners would form a portion of the curriculum, for which convenient apparatus would be provided.

Biography should form an important feature in the course of reading, its subjects being arranged in groups; and the true glory of a Washington, a Bentham, a Stevenson, a Morse, and a Cobden distinguished from the false glare and tinsel of a Louis XIV. and a Marlborough.

Music, both vocal and instrumental, would be taught to all, but only those more gifted by nature would be educated to perform solo. Nearly all persons can be trained to sing part-music pleasantly and intelligently, and to perform moderately on some instrument. The cultivation of the musical faculties harmonizes the mind, and affords a never-failing source of solace and recreation. The attempt to convert all persons into solo performers, and the hypocritical applause with which their discordant notes are indiscriminately greeted, deprives society of the pleasures which part-music well performed would afford, by encouraging all to attempt what they are pretty sure to do badly, to the exclusion of what they would be equally likely to do well.

We have reserved for the last, to enumerate what is, perhaps, the most important of all the subjects of instruction.

To all children, so soon as they can be promoted from the kinder garten—perhaps even to the higher grades therein—instruction in the conditions of human well-being, and in the phenomena and arrangements of social life should be given, and should be continued throughout their school career.

What! teach political economy to children? Even so. It will be conceded, that to teach the future laborers the laws by which the wages of their labor will be regulated, how high wages may be secured and low wages prevented—to teach the future capitalists the laws by which their profits will be determined, how large profits may be secured, and loss, failure, crises, and panics avoided—must be a desirable, if it be a practicable thing. Is it practicable? The experience of twenty years has proved that it is. The experiment has been tried by Mr. Wm. Ellis, the wise and noble founder of the Birkbeck schools of London, England, who not only devoted his surplus means to the endowment of true schools, but gave also his time to instruct in the principles of the science of human well-being—alike the poor children by whom his schools were attended and the children of the Queen of England. He also instructed and trained a corps of teachers, professional and volunteer, and by one of the latter a class was conducted in the winter of 1867, ’68 at the Normal School of this city of some 35 to 40 teachers engaged in the practical work of teaching in our common schools, who, under his guidance, became, after a short course of some twenty or more lessons, enthusiastic advocates for the introduction of this study into the schools; for not only does it teach the conditions of industrial success, but it is also a science of morals and of ethics far more worthy of the attention it has never yet received in this or, indeed, in any country, than that which is given to what goes under the name of moral teaching and training. It is by gradual steps—by the employment of the Socratic method of instruction—with a rare use of text-books, that the most intricate problems of this science can be unfolded to pupils with such effect that a child of fourteen or fifteen years of age, who shall have passed through a course of four or five years’ instruction, would put to the blush, with few exceptions, alike the members of both houses of the United States Congress and of the British Parliament.

A museum and a library would be necessary adjuncts to such a school as we have described. It would need but a few seasons to get together in the various excursions taken by pupils and teachers, quite a collection of botanical, entomological, and geological specimens. These would serve as objects for illustrating the teacher’s lessons, and for examination by the pupils. The drying, preservation, and arrangement of plants, animals, and minerals, in which the pupils would assist, would serve to impart to them a skill and dexterity, which they would know how to value, and would be eager to acquire, and, together with their frequent visits to the museum, would serve to cultivate a love of nature and devotion to the study of her works.

The library, besides containing treatises on science and for reference, would be filled with books of travels, and the nobler English and foreign classics; the books would be loaned to the pupils as in ordinary circulating libraries, and a pleasant reading-room would be furnished with the better class of periodicals and newspapers.

To be deprived for a time of the right to visit the museum or reading-room, or to borrow books from the library, would be one of the severest punishments known in the school.

It is hardly necessary to say that the selection of the principal of such a school as we have indicated is among the most difficult problems of its establishment. His qualifications should be as near the perfection of manhood as can possibly be found. Invited by a large and generous salary (to be dependent, beyond a stated sum, on the number of the pupils), it is to be hoped such a teacher could be found.

Such a principal, after a fixed period of probation, should not be removable except on a very large vote of the proprietors of the school to that effect, but his office should be vacated on his attaining the age of 60 or 65 years. The selection of teachers to assist him in his duties should be left to himself. The remuneration of the assistant teachers should also be large, and should be such as not only to enable them to live in comfort, but to make ample provision for their future when the age of labor shall have passed.

The chief position in society should be assured to the principal and his assistants by the proprietors of the school.

The visits of the former to the houses of the latter should be regarded as an honor, the greatest respect and deference should be paid to them, and the pupils should be taught to look upon them with love and respect next only to that they pay their parents.

The best investment a parent can make of his wealth is in the proper education of his children. Life is not merely to be born, to grow, to eat, to drink, and breathe. Noise is not music. Life is such as we take it and make it, or rather as it is taken hold of and made for us by those to whom the care of our youthful days is intrusted.

Let us endeavor to picture to ourselves the being likely to be produced by a system of teaching and training, continued for successive generations, such as we have indicated above. Let us imagine the full development of the most complex of nature’s organisms—a part of the one living organism of the Universe, the latest product of her laboratory; considered, as a part of the great Cosmos, the most perfect, yet but an integer in the whole; the ultimate development of nature’s chemistry, yet forming an atom of her living unity; combining and possessing the widest relationships, even embracing therein the entire volume of that nature whose true relationships comprise all knowledge, truly “the noblest study of mankind.” Let us try and draw the picture of the developed man!

Robust and supple of limb, symmetrical of shape, his muscles swelling beneath their healthy development; with head erect, conscious of his strength and skill, which he puts forth for the protection of the weak, and for the purpose of drawing from nature her bounteous stores; free from sickness or disease, in harmony with nature, at peace with his fellow-men, possessing a competent knowledge of nature’s laws, and guiding his conduct to be in accord therewith, “sitting beneath his own vine and fig-tree,” “blessed in all the works of his hands,” and diffusing blessings and happiness around. Such is the picture of the healthy mind in a healthy frame, which it is in man’s power to procreate and rear!