The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

660. Insufficiency of the Sciences.—But the question is to know whether the sciences, so useful and so necessary for enriching and disciplining the mind, are also the best agents for training it. The educator is not in the situation of the farmer who has only two things to do,—to plow and sow the field which he cultivates. The work of education is vast in another direction. It has to do with developing the aptitudes or latent energies, that which the philosophy of the day hardly allows us longer to call faculties, but that which they re-establish under another name, that of the unconscious forces of the soul; it has to do, not with laboring on a soil almost entirely prepared by nature, but in great part with creating the soil itself. Now, the sciences are indeed the seed which it will be proper by and by to sow on the field, but they are not the substance which nourishes and fertilizes it.

661. Sensualistic Tendencies.—If we go to the bottom of Mr. Bain’s thought and doctrine on the mind, we shall find the secret of his ardent preference for the teaching of the sciences. His errors in practical pedagogy proceed from theoretical errors on human nature.

For him, as for Locke, there are not, properly speaking, intellectual forces independent of the facts which succeed one another in the consciousness. Consequently, there is not an education of the faculties. Memory or imagination, considered as a distinct power, as an aptitude more or less happy, is but a word. It is nothing apart from the recollections or the images which are successively graven in the mind. For Mr. Bain, as for Locke, the best education is that which places items of knowledge side by side in the mind, which accumulates facts there, but not that which seeks to enkindle in the soul a flame of intelligence.

That which also warps the theoretical views of Mr. Bain is that he accords no independence, no individual life, to the mind; and that for him, back of the facts of consciousness, there come to view, without any intermedium, the cerebral organs. Now the brain is developed of itself; it acquires fatally, with the progress of years, more weight and more volume; it passes from the age of concrete things to the age of abstractions. Hence a reduction, an inevitable contraction, of the sphere of education. There is nothing more to do than to let nature have her way, and to fill the vase which she charges herself with constructing.

662. Utilitarian Tendencies.—Finally, to conclude this indication of the general ideas which dominate and which mar the pedagogy of Mr. Bain, let us observe that a positive and practical utility, a vulgar utility, mingles too many of its inspirations with it. The criterion of utility is sometimes applied to it with an artless extravagance. Thus, in the languages, only those words should be learned which occur the most often, and in the sciences, only the parts which are of the most frequent use. Even in moral education, as it is conceived by the English philosopher, are to be found, as we might expect, these utilitarian and narrow views.

Would one believe, for example, that Mr. Bain makes the fear of the penal code the mainspring of the teaching of virtue?[286] Here, at least, we must acknowledge that science is insufficient. “To pretend, for example, that physiology can teach us moderation in the sexual appetite is to attribute to it a result which no science has yet been able to give.” But must we count any more, as Mr. Bain would have us, for example, on social influences and on personal experience? In this truly experimental education in virtue, ethics would be learned just as the mother tongue is learned, by use, by the imitation of others; and moral instruction, properly so called, would be a sort of grammar which is to rectify vicious practices.

663. Final Judgment.—But our criticisms on the general tendencies of Mr. Bain’s pedagogy subtract nothing from our admiration of the sterling qualities of his Education as a Science. Doubtless there would also be errors of detail to notice, or some particular methods to discuss; for example, that of never doing more than one thing at a time, or the propriety of first teaching to children the history of their country. Mr. Bain forgets that mythological history and sacred history, by their legendary and fabulous character, offer a particular attraction to the childish imagination, and are better adapted than history proper to infant minds. But, aside from the portions which are debatable, how many wise observations to gather on the different processes of instruction, on the transition from the concrete to the abstract, on the discretion which must be employed in object-lessons, the use of which so easily degenerates into abuse! Even through its absolute theories, Education as a Science will render great services; for, to illustrate the march of thought, nothing is so valuable as opinions which are exclusive and sincere. It were even desirable, if one did not fear to experiment on human souls, in anima sublimi, that according to Mr. Bain’s plan, the experiment should be tried of an education exclusively scientific.

664. American Educators. Channing (1780-1842).—The general fault of English pedagogy is its aristocratic character. For Mr. Spencer and Mr. Bain, as for Locke, it is simply a question of the education of a gentleman. It is in America, in the writings of Channing and Horace Mann, that we must seek the elements of a theory of democratic education, and of popular instruction.[287]

Channing, a Unitarian minister, associated religious sentiment and philosophic reason, and desired that in theology itself everything should issue in the supremacy of the human judgment. The most interesting of his writings are the public lectures which he gave in Boston in 1838, and the object of which is the education one gives himself, and the elevation of the working classes. We lack the space to give an analysis of these lectures, but a few quotations will make known the general spirit of the American reformer:—

“I am not discouraged by the objection that the laborer, if encouraged to give time and strength to the elevation of his mind, will starve himself and impoverish the country, when I consider the energy, and the efficiency of Mind.”