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EDUCATION: ESPECIALLY OF TEACHERS AND OF WOMEN
The third of his excursions into the field of education, in his burning desire to give the people that right knowledge for want of which they perish, was the training of the teachers who prepared pupils for the examinations of the Science and Art Department. The future of scientific teaching depended upon the proper supply of trained teachers. Now, the School of Mines in Jermyn Street was without a laboratory in which to make even his own students work out with their own hands the structure of the biological "types" expounded in the lectures. An opportunity to train these new "scientific missionaries" came in 1871, when he was deep in the great schemes of elementary education. More than a hundred of them flocked to South Kensington, where some large rooms on the ground floor of the museum had been secured and rigged up for the purpose by the Professor and his three demonstrators. For six weeks in the summer there was a daily lecture, followed by four hours' laboratory work under the demonstrators, in which the students verified for themselves facts which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of the more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One clergyman, who had for years conducted classes in physiology under the Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture in Huxley's Physiology."
From 1872 onwards, when the School of Mines removed bodily to new buildings at South Kensington, Huxley had a fine laboratory of his own, in which not only were these teachers taught, but he was able to adopt the same method with the students in his regular courses—a method for long universally adopted in detail as well as in principle. The first and unchangeable principle was to make the student verify every fact for himself; to be satisfied with nothing at second hand. The system was to work over a chosen set of biological types, each representing a well-marked group and providing comparisons one with another as well as stepping stones to further investigations. Originally he started the series with the simplest organisms, and proceeded to the more complex; but, though a good philosophical order, it had the disadvantages of requiring the beginner to have much skill in handling the microscope, and of proceeding from the less known organism to the better known. Starting with the latter, the beginner would know better what to look for. His demonstrator, Jeffery Parker, argued the point vigorously with Huxley, and finally persuaded him to invert the series, with great success, albeit other lecturers preferred to keep to his original arrangement.
Education, furthermore, owes him a great debt for his long and active work upon the Royal Commissions on the Royal College of Science for Ireland, on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science; on Vivisection, to inquire into the Universities of Scotland, and on the Medical Acts—all in the sixteen years between 1866 and 1882. At the London University, also, he was an examiner for many years, and in the early nineties he strove hard to give it a new constitution, first as a member of the Senate, and then as president of a reforming Association. It is noteworthy, too, that ten years earlier he was elected a Governor of Eton College, and in the short time before his health broke down a second time he did something to aid science-teaching there and to make drawing a general subject.
In the general need for education he ranked high the need for the education of women. As early as 1860 he wrote: "I don't see how we are to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese superstitions." If only people would not bring up their daughters as man-traps for the matrimonial market, the next generation would see women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits; "though," he added, "I don't think that men have anything to fear from their competition." On this point he remarked five years later: "Nature's old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected, though whatever argument justifies a given education for boys justifies its application to girls as well."
A letter of 1874, touching the first efforts of women to qualify as doctors, prefigures what has been done since for the higher education of women:—
Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigour and capacity. We have heard a great deal lately about the physical disabilities of women. Some of these alleged impediments, no doubt, are really inherent in their organization, but nine-tenths of them are artificial—the products of their modes of life. I believe that nothing would tend so effectually to get rid of these creations of idleness, weariness, and that "over-stimulation of the emotions" which, in plainer-spoken days, used to be called wantonness, than a fair share of healthy work, directed towards a definite object, combined with an equally fair share of healthy play during the years of adolescence; and those who are best acquainted with the requirements of an average medical practitioner will find it hardest to believe that the attempt to reach that standard is likely to prove exhausting to an ordinarily intelligent and well-educated young woman.
Twenty years later he supported the entry of women into public life in a plainly reasoned letter, which he himself thought highly complimentary, although a number of estimable ladies flew at him for writing it:—
The best of women are apt to be a little weak in the great practical arts of give-and-take and putting up with a beating, and a little too strong in their belief in the efficacy of government. Men learn about these things in the ordinary course of their business; women have no chance in home life, and the boards and councils will be capital schools for them. Again, in the public interest it will be well; women are more naturally economical than men, and have none of our false shame about looking after pence. Moreover, they don't job for any but their lovers, husbands, and children, so that we know the worst.
Directly, then, as teacher, lecturer, and essayist indirectly as organizer, he ranks among the great educators of his age. But he did not establish a "school" of his own; such a thing was abhorrent to him. A resolute seeker after truth, he bade others seek also; but he refused to impose his own conclusions on any man.
Of all possible positions [he wrote in 1892], that of master of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British matron cannot look upon followers with a more evil eye than I do. Such acquaintance with the history of thought as I possess has taught me to regard school, parties, and sects as arrangements, the usual effect of which is to perpetuate all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's, or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned, thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.
In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn from them. As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out. And the correlative to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until adequate proof is forthcoming.