(5) Make lessons pleasant. This does not imply that the act of learning should be always easy or amusing. Children like to feel they are making progress, and a teacher wearies them who is always trying to be amusing, but does not really get them on. Porridge has a very plain taste, but for everyday fare even children prefer it to tarts for breakfast. A London confectioner was asked, if he did not find the many boys he employed make depredations. “No,” he said, “when first they come I tell them they may eat what they like; in a few days they make themselves sick and eat no more.” There was a book called the Decoy, a story mixed with conversations on grammar; children always managed to get the story without the grammar. They like sums and history for regular meals, fairy tales for dessert.
(6) Teaching must be adapted to the mental state of the pupil, and be just a little above his unassisted intelligence. It is a worse fault to teach below than above the powers of the child. I shall never forget my indignation at having a book given me, which was below my powers, nor the stimulus of trying to do what was hard. One who was afterwards a distinguished teacher, told me how the Maurice lectures helped him, by making him feel there were regions of thought on which he had not yet entered. Knowledge quite within reach does not promote progress. A friend who had a night school was told by its members, “We want to be taught something as we can’t understand”. They meant something they could not learn without help; they wanted to overcome difficulties.
(7) Form right habits. We should as far as possible prevent the making of mistakes even once. A child when reading the Bible miscalled the word patriarch, reading it partridge; when an old man, he never saw the word without recalling his error. Hence we should not give children misspelt words, or bad grammar to correct, or let them write exercises before the ear has been cultivated to know what is right. I knew a music master who would anticipate mistakes, and stop the pupil, saying: “You shall not play that wrong note”.
On the other hand each repetition of a right action makes it easier, and the prime work of the educator is to form right habits; these should become instinctive, and so set free thought for ever higher and more perfect performance.
(8) Awaken and sustain the spirit of inquiry. We need, however, to be very careful not to ask questions, which the child cannot possibly answer. This encourages mere guessing, and the habit of deciding upon insufficient data. We should question the pupils, and build on their knowledge, but as they get older the viva voce questioning may be overdone—and for the highest classes it would be simply a distraction. For these it is well to give questions to be thought out, and answered in writing. Pascal’s father shut him up alone to find out the translation of a classical author; there are so many helps now, that people rely upon them when they might gain vigour by grappling with difficulties. No intellectual habit is more essential than the habit of patient, sustained inquiry, that described by Newton when he said: “I keep the subject of my inquiry continually before me, till the first dawning opens gradually by little and little to the perfect day”.
(9) Foster intellectual ambition. Help the child to feel the joy of surmounting difficulties, of climbing the heights. This invigorates the intellectual life. Some can remember how, e.g., they grappled with the dull work of early mathematical study, that they might one day learn to solve the problems of astronomy, or went through the labour of learning irregular verbs, that they might read the poetry and philosophy of Greece.
(10) Put before pupils the highest ideals which they can appropriate. These are not the same at each stage of development. The little child desires first to have something, and this is not wrong. Later it feels more the need of love, of approbation, and this is a legitimate and right motive; it is generally his best guide, until he can exercise himself, irrespective of the outward voice, to have a “conscience void of offence”. We have to teach him to discriminate voices which are in harmony with, from those in discord from, that inward voice, and to make this ultimately his supreme law.
(11) The ultimate ideal or final cause should be implied in all that we teach, viz., the attainment of the perfect development of the individual, through bringing each into harmony with the environment, the universal, and thereby on the other hand helping to perfect the whole. For this, wisdom and self-denial and sympathy with the noblest and the best are to be sought, and above all with the One, the Infinite Wisdom revealed in Nature, in the world of thinking beings and in the self-conscious mind. All should feel in their inmost soul what Milton has expressed:—
How charming is Divine philosophy,
Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,