The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

213. Honor, the Principle of Moral Discipline.—But after having placed moral education in its proper rank, which is the first, it remains to inquire what shall be the principles and the methods of this education. Shall it be the maxim of utility, as Rousseau requires? Must the child, before acting, inquire what is the good of this? Cui bono? No; utilitarian in instruction and in intellectual education, as we have just seen, Locke is not so in moral education. Shall it be fear, shall it be the authority of the teacher or of parents, founded on punishments, upon the slavish feeling of terror? Still less. Locke reproves repressive discipline, and is not inclined to chastisements. Shall it be affection, the love of parents, the aggregate of tender sentiments? Locke scarcely speaks of them. Of too little sensibility himself, he does not seem to think of all that can be done through the sensibility of the child.

Locke, who perhaps is wrong in treating the child too early, as though he were a man, who does not take sufficient account of all the feebleness that is in infant nature, appeals from the first to the sentiment of honor, and to the fear of shame, that is, to emotions which, I fear, by their very nobleness, are above the powers of the child. Honor, which is, in fact, but another name for duty, and the ordinary synonym of virtue,—honor may assuredly be the guide of an adult and already trained conscience; but is it not chimerical to hope that the child, from his earliest years, will be sensible to the esteem or the contempt of those who surround him? If it were possible to inspire a child with a regard for his reputation, I grant with Locke that we might henceforth “make of him whatever we will, and teach him to love all the forms of virtue”; but the question is to know whether we can succeed in this, and I doubt it, notwithstanding the assurances of Locke.

Kant has very justly said:—

“It is labor lost to speak of duty to children. They comprehend it only as a thing whose transgression is followed by the ferule.... So one ought not to try to call into play with children the feeling of shame, but to wait for this till the period of youth comes. In fact, it cannot be developed in them till the idea of honor has already taken root there.”

Locke is the dupe of the same illusion, both when he expects of the child enough moral power so that the sense of honor suffices to govern him, and when he counts enough on his intellectual forces to desire to reason with him from the moment he knows how to speak. For forming good habits in the child, and preparing him for a life of virtue, there is full need of all the resources that nature and art put at the disposal of the educator,—sensibility under all its forms, the calculations of self-interest, the lights of the intelligence. It is only little by little, and with the progress of age, that an exalted principle, like the sentiment of honor or the sentiment of duty, will be able to emerge from out the mobile humors of the child, and dominate his actions like a sovereign law. The moral pedagogy of Locke is certainly faulty in that it is not sufficiently addressed to the heart, and to the potency of loving, which is already so great in the child. I add, that in his haste to emancipate the child, to treat him as a reasonable creature, and to develop in him the principles of self-government, Locke was wrong in proscribing almost absolutely the fear of punishment. It is good to respect the liberty and the dignity of the man that is in the child, but it is not necessary that this respect degenerate into superstition; and it is not sure that to train firm and robust wills, it is necessary to have them early affranchised from all fear and all constraint.

214. Condemnation of Corporal Punishment.—It is undeniable that Locke has not sufficiently enlarged the bases of his theory of moral discipline; but if he has rested incomplete in the positive part of his task, if he has not advised all that should be done, he has been more successful in the negative part, that which consists in eliminating all that ought not to be done. The chapters devoted to punishments in general, and in particular to corporal punishments, count among the best in the Thoughts. Rollin and Rousseau have often copied from them. It is true that Locke himself has borrowed the suggestion of them from Montaigne. The “severe mildness” which is the pedagogical rule of the author of the Essays, is also the rule of Locke. It is in accordance with this that Locke has brought to bear on the rod the final judgment of good sense: “The rod is a slavish discipline, which makes a slavish temper.” He has yielded to the ideas of his time on only one point, when he admits one exception to the absolute interdiction of the rod, and tolerates its use in extreme cases to overcome the obstinate and rebellious resistance of the child. This is going too far without any doubt; but to do justice to the boldness of Locke’s views, we must consider how powerful the custom then was, and still is, in England, in a country where the heads of institutions think themselves obliged to notify the public, in the advertisements published in the journals, that the interdiction of corporal punishment counts among the advantages of their schools. “It is difficult to conceive the perseverance with which English teachers cling to the old and degrading customs of corrections by the rod.... A more astonishing thing is that the scholars seem to hold to it as much as the teachers.” “In 1818,” relates one of the former pupils of Charterhouse, “our head master, Doctor Russell, who had ideas of his own, resolved to abolish corporal punishment and substitute for it a fine. Everybody resisted the innovation. The rod seemed to us perfectly consistent with the dignity of a gentleman; but a fine, for shame! The school rose to the cry: ‘Down with the fine! Long live the rod!’ The revolt triumphed, and the rod was solemnly restored. Then we were glad-hearted over the affair. On the next day after the fine was abolished, we found, on entering the class-room, a superb forest of birches, and the two hours of the session were conscientiously employed in making use of them.”[133][134]

215. Intellectual Education.—In what concerns intellectual education, Locke manifestly belongs to the school, small in his time, but more and more numerous to-day, of utilitarian teachers. He would train, not men of letters, or of science, but practical men, armed for the battle of life, provided with all the knowledge they will need in order to keep their accounts, administer their fortune, satisfy the requirements of their profession, and, finally, to fulfill their duties as men and citizens. In a word, he wrote for a nation of tradesmen and citizens.

216. Utilitarian Studies.—An undeniable merit of Locke is that of having reacted against a purely formal instruction, which substitutes for the acquisition of positive and real knowledge a superfluous culture, so to speak, a training in a superficial rhetoric and an elegant verbiage. Locke disdains and condemns studies that do not contribute directly to a preparation for life. Doubtless he goes a little too far in his reaction against the current formalism and in his predilection for realism. He is too forgetful of the fact that the old classical studies, if not useful in the positive sense of the term, and not satisfying the ordinary needs of existence, have yet a higher utility, in the sense that they may become, in skillful and discreet hands, an excellent instrument for intellectual discipline and the education of the judgment. But Locke spoke to fanatics and pedants, for whom Latin and Greek were the whole of instruction, and who, turning letters from their true purpose, wrongly made a knowledge of the dead languages the sole end, and not, as should be the case, one of the means of instruction. Locke is by no means a blind utilitarian, a coarse positivist, who dreams of absolutely abolishing disinterested studies. He wishes merely to put them in their place, and to guard against investing them with a sort of exclusive privilege, and against sacrificing to them other branches of instruction that are more essential and more immediately useful.

217. Programme of Studies.—As soon as the child knows how to read and write, he should be taught to draw. Very disdainful of painting and of the fine arts in general, whose benign and profound influence on the souls of children his colder nature has not sufficiently recognized, Locke, by way of compensation, recommends drawing, because drawing may be practically useful, and he puts it on almost the same footing as reading and writing.

These elements once acquired, the child should be drilled in the mother tongue, first in reading, and afterwards in exercises in composition, in brief narratives, in familiar letters, etc. The study of a living language (Locke recommends French to his countrymen) should immediately follow; and it is only after this has been acquired that the child shall be put to the study of Latin. Save the omission of the sciences, Locke’s plan is singularly like that which for ten years has been in use in the French lycées.