The difficulty which is felt by the advocate of modern methods is that accuracy, as hitherto taught, involves boredom, and that it is an immense gain if education can be made interesting. Here, however, we must make a distinction. Boredom merely imposed by the teacher is wholly bad; boredom voluntarily endured by the pupil in order to satisfy some ambition is valuable if not overdone. It should be part of education to fire pupils with desires not easily gratified—to know the calculus, to read Homer, to perform well on the violin, or what not. Each of these involves its own kind of accuracy. Able boys and girls will go through endless tedium and submit willingly to severe discipline in order to acquire some coveted knowledge or skill. Those who have less native ability can often be fired by similar ambitions if they are inspiringly taught. The driving force in education should be the pupil’s wish to learn, not the master’s authority; but it does not follow that education should be soft and easy and pleasant at every stage. This applies, in particular, to the question of accuracy. The acquisition of exact knowledge is apt to be wearisome, but it is essential to every kind of excellence, and this fact can be made obvious to a child by suitable methods. In so far as modern methods fail in this respect, they are at fault. In this matter, as in many others, reaction against the old bad forms of discipline has tended to an undue laxity, which will have to give place to a new discipline, more internal and psychological than the old external authority. Of this new discipline, accuracy will be the intellectual expression.
There are various kinds of accuracy, each of which has its own importance. To take the main kinds: There is muscular accuracy, æsthetic accuracy, accuracy as to matter-of-fact, and logical accuracy. Every boy or girl can appreciate the importance of muscular accuracy in many directions; it is required for the control of the body which a healthy child spends all its spare time in acquiring, and afterwards for the games upon which prestige depends. But it has other forms which have more to do with school-teaching, such as well-articulated speech, good writing, and correct performance on a musical instrument. A child will think these things important or unimportant according to his environment. Æsthetic accuracy is difficult to define; it has to do with the appropriateness of a sensible stimulus for the production of emotion. One way of teaching an important form of it is to cause children to learn poetry by heart—e.g., Shakespeare, for purposes of acting—and to make them feel, when they make mistakes, why the original is better. I believe it would be found that, where æsthetic sensibility is wide-spread, children are taught conventional stereotyped performances, such as dances and songs, which they enjoy, but which must be done exactly right on account of tradition. This makes them sensitive to small differences, which is essential to accuracy. Acting, singing, and dancing seem to me the best methods of teaching æsthetic precision. Drawing is less good, because it is likely to be judged by its fidelity to the model, not by æsthetic standards. It is true that stereotyped performances also are expected to reproduce a model, but it is a model created by æsthetic motives; it is copied because it is good, not because copying is good.
Accuracy as to matter-of-fact is intolerably boring when pursued on its own account. Learning the dates of the kings of England, or the names of the counties and their capitals, used to be one of the terrors of childhood. It is better to secure accuracy by interest and repetition. I could never remember the list of capes, but at eight years old I knew almost all the stations on the Underground. If children were shown a cinema representing a ship sailing round the coast, they would soon know the capes. I don’t think they are worth knowing, but if they were, that would be the way to teach them. All geography ought to be taught on the cinema; so ought history at first. The initial expense would be great, but not too great for governments. And there would be a subsequent economy in ease of teaching.
Logical accuracy is a late acquisition, and should not be forced upon young children. Getting the multiplication table right is, of course, accuracy as to matter-of-fact; it only becomes logical accuracy at a much later stage. Mathematics is the natural vehicle for this teaching, but it fails if allowed to appear as a set of arbitrary rules. Rules must be learnt, but at some stage the reasons for them must be made clear; if this is not done, mathematics has little educative value.
I come now to a question which has already arisen in connection with exactness, the question, namely, how far it is possible or desirable to make all instruction interesting. The old view was that a great deal of it must be dull, and that only stern authority will induce the average boy to persist. (The average girl was to remain ignorant.) The modern view is that it can be made delightful through and through. I have much more sympathy with the modern view than with the old one; nevertheless, I think it is subject to some limitations, especially in higher education. I shall begin with what I think true in it.
Modern writers on infant psychology all emphasize the importance of not urging a young child to eat or sleep: these things ought to be done spontaneously by the child, not as a result of coaxing or forcing. My own experience entirely bears out this teaching. At first, we did not know the newer teaching, and tried the older methods. They were very unsuccessful, whereas the modern methods succeeded perfectly. It must not be supposed, however, that the modern parent does nothing about eating and sleeping; on the contrary, everything possible is done to promote the formation of good habits. Meals come at regular times, and the child must sit through them without games whether he eats or not. Bed comes at regular times, and the child must lie down in bed. He may have a toy animal to hug, but not one that squeaks or runs or does anything exciting. If the animal is a favourite, one may play the game that the animal is tired and the child must put it to sleep. Then leave the child alone, and sleep will usually come very quickly. But never let the child think you are anxious he should sleep or eat. That at once makes him think you are asking a favour; this gives him a sense of power, which leads him to demand more and more coaxing or punishment. He should eat and sleep because he wants to, not to please you.
This psychology is obviously applicable in great measure to instruction. If you insist upon teaching a child, he will conclude that he is being asked to do something disagreeable to please you, and he will have a psychological resistance. If this exists at the start, it will perpetuate itself; at a later age, the desirability of getting through examinations may become evident, and there will be work for that purpose, but none from sheer interest in knowledge. If, on the contrary, you can first stimulate the child’s desire to know, and then, as a favour, give him the knowledge he wants, the whole situation is different. Very much less external discipline is required, and attention is secured without difficulty. To succeed in this method, certain conditions are necessary, which Madame Montessori successfully produces among the very young. The tasks must be attractive and not too difficult. There must, at first, be the example of other children at a slightly more advanced stage. There must be no other obviously pleasant occupation open to the child at the moment. There are a number of things the child may do, and he works by himself at whichever he prefers. Almost all children are perfectly happy in this régime, and learn to read and write without pressure before they are five years old.
How far similar methods can advantageously be applied to older children is a debatable question. As children grow older, they become responsive to more remote motives, and it is no longer necessary that every detail should be interesting in itself. But I think the broad principle that the impulse to education should come from the pupil can be continued up to any age. The environment should be such as to stimulate the impulse, and to make boredom and isolation the alternative to learning. But any child that preferred this alternative on any occasion should be allowed to choose it. The principle of individual work can be extended, though a certain amount of class-work seems indispensable after the early years. But if external authority is necessary to induce a boy or girl to learn, unless there is a medical cause, the probability is that the teacher is at fault or that previous moral training has been bad. If a child has been properly trained up to the age of five or six, any good teacher ought to be able to win his interest at later stages.
If this is possible, the advantages are immense. The teacher appears as the friend of the pupil, not as his enemy. The child learns faster, because he is co-operating. He learns with less fatigue, because there is not the constant strain of bringing back a reluctant and bored attention. And his sense of personal initiative is cultivated instead of being diminished. On account of these advantages, it seems worth while to assume that the pupil can be led to learn by the force of his own desires, without the exercise of compulsion by the teacher. If, in a small percentage of cases, the method were found to be a failure, these cases could be isolated and instructed by different methods. But I believe that, given methods adapted to the child’s intelligence, there would be very few failures.
For reasons already given in connection with accuracy, I do not believe that a really thorough education can be made interesting through and through. However much one may wish to know a subject, some parts of it are sure to be found dull. But I believe that, given suitable guidance, a boy or girl can be made to feel the importance of learning the dull parts, and can be got through them also without compulsion. I should use the stimulus of praise and blame, applied as the result of good or bad performance of set tasks. Whether a pupil possesses the necessary skill should be made as obvious as in games or gymnastics. And the importance of the dull parts of a subject should be made clear by the teacher. If all these methods failed, the child would have to be classified as stupid, and taught separately from children of normal intelligence, though care must be taken not to let this appear as a punishment.