“Virtue,” continues Locke, “as the first and most necessary of those endowments that belong to a man or gentleman, was based on religion. As the foundation of this, there ought very early to be imprinted on his mind a true notion of God.” Here one finds a clear conception of Christian education, which parents of to-day would do well to study.
Cramming a papal method
The study of the classics, together with the memory work which was the chief characteristic of these studies, was not the only defect in papal education; hence it is not the only error from which educators, led, as one must believe, by the spirit of truth, have from time to time broken away. The cramming system, so justly denounced by thinking minds as one of the most far-reaching defects of the present school system, is a mark of papal education wherever it may be found. And probably no generation has passed which has not heard some voice lifted against this pernicious practice of the schoolroom. The God of heaven recognizes that the human mind contains the highest possibilities of earth; the child is a part of himself; and when wrong methods of education are used in dealing with developing minds, He, the head of the body, of which we are members, feels the hurt; so it is that Christian education is an emanation from the mind of God.
Montaigne, speaking of education in the sixteenth century, said: “It is the custom of schoolmasters to be eternally thundering in their pupils’ ears, as if they were pouring into a funnel, while the pupils’ business is only to repeat what their masters have said.” He is taught that “a tutor ... should, according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it [the child’s mind] to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste and relish things, and of himself to choose and discern them.... Too much learning stifles the soul, just as plants are stifled by too much moisture, and lamps by too much oil. Our pedants plunder knowledge from books, and carry it on the tips of their lips, just as birds carry seeds to feed their young.... We toil and labor only to stuff the memory, but leave the conscience and understanding unfurnished and void.”
Twentieth century schools cram
As late as January, 1900, Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, wrote concerning the cramming process of the popular schools: “Do American men and women realize that in five cities of our country alone there were, during the last school term, over sixteen thousand children between the ages of eight and fourteen taken out of the public schools because their nervous systems were wrecked, and their minds were incapable of going on any further in the infernal cramming system which exists to-day in our schools?... Conservative medical men who have given their lives to the study of children place the number whose health is shattered by overstudy at more than 50,000 each year.... It is cramming, cramming, cramming. A certain amount of ‘ground must be gone over,’ as it is usually called. Whether the child is physically able to work the ‘ground’ does not enter into the question.”
The writer dwells upon the evils of night study, and continues: “True reform always begins at the root of all evils, and the root of the evil of home study lies in the cramming system.”
Mrs. Lew Wallace on cramming
Mrs. Lew Wallace says: “Go into any public school, and you will see girls pallid as day lilies and boys with flat chests and the waxen skin that has been named the school complexion. Every incentive and stimulus is held out; dread of blame, love of praise, prizes, medals, badges, the coveted flourish in the newspapers—the strain never slackens.... The burden is books. The tasks imposed on the young are fearful. The effort seems to be to make text-books as difficult and complicated as possible instead of smoothing the hill so high and hard to climb.”