It was in the year 1837 that there issued from the press a work on education written by Isaac Taylor, who there lays down this proposition: “If large schools were granted to be generally better adapted to the practical ends of education than private instruction, the welfare of society on the whole demands also the other method. The school-bred man is of one sort, the home-bred man of another—the community has need of both. Hence no tyranny of fashion is more to be resisted than such as would render a public education compulsory and universal.”[[7]] Notwithstanding this warning, the tyranny of fashion is carrying us yearly more and more into the production of school-bred women, as well as school-bred men. Our girls’ high schools are replicas of our boys’ public schools, and society suffers still more from the loss of the home-bred woman than the home-bred man.
[7]. Home Education, p. 22.
Again, the late Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson, in his charmingly-written Day-dreams of a Schoolmaster, gives us the fruits of a ripe experience gained during twelve years of boyhood in a large public school, and many years of manhood as teacher of classics in schools and university. His boyhood, he tells us, was dreary because of the monotonous routine. He was “fed on dull books, and the manuals were in many cases mere tramways to pedantry. His mental training was a continuous sensation of obstruction and pain. His spiritual parts were furrowed.” (Observe, there were no nature-studies at that period.) The incitement to effort was the cane or the tawse, and flogging, he believes, never instils courage, it has transformed many a boy into a sneak. “Let us discard punishment,” says the Professor, “and endeavour to make our pupils love work.” The whole educational system in his day was mechanical and artificial, yet when he strove to initiate new methods the boys were withdrawn from his charge. Parents understood little of true education. They were slaves to custom. “How is it,” he asks, “that fathers with a personal experience like my own send their boys to school?” He answers: “They say to themselves, ‘Depend upon it if there were no virtue in birching and caning, in Latin verses and Greek what-you-may-call-’ems, they would not have held their ground so long amongst a practical people like ourselves!’ So Johnnie is sent to the town grammar school and the great time-honoured gerund-stone turns as before, and will turn to the last syllable of recorded time.” For the gerund-stone he would substitute an easy vivâ voce conversational method of instruction in all elementary classes, and throughout the school; for coercion, the more than hydraulic pressure of a persistent, continuous gentleness.
Thirty years before the Day-dreams was published, one writer at least was open-eyed to the defects of school education. He charged parents with adopting the new boarding-school system because it spared them some responsibility, and children were apt to be teasing and importunate. “Boys advance at school quickly,” he said, “in knowledge of the auxiliary verbs, the mysteries of syntax and the stories of gods and goddesses; but I am confident that the reason why women generally are so much better disposed than men is this: they live domestically and familiarly. They are penetrated with the home-spirit, they are imbued with all its influences, their memory is not fed to plethora while the heart is left to waste and perish. No daughter of mine shall ever be sent to school; at home the heart, wherein are the issues of all good, develops itself from day to day. There children ripen in their affections. There they learn their humanities, not in the academic sense, but in the natural and true one.”[[8]]
[8]. Self-Formation, by Capel Lofft, vol. 1, p. 42.
Where, alas! do we find to-day the daughters of the classes who are not sent to school? Our girls’ high schools overflow; and that, not by the action of State control, but by the voluntarily assumed yoke and tyranny of fashion. Girls emerging from these schools are not “so much better disposed than men.” They are certainly not domesticated and imbued with a home-spirit. They may have gained in refinement—even to fastidiousness! and in the knowledge of Latin and Greek, or what is called the higher culture, but they are characterized generally by a spirit of pleasure-seeking. They become, in many cases, what has aptly been called “nonsense women, prepared only to lead butterfly lives.”
Now, parents who shirk the responsibility and effort entailed in shaping their children’s characters to the best of their ability can only expect their own self-indulgence to become intensified in the lives of their children. Let me not, however, be here misunderstood. The movement for the higher education of women is a step forward in civilization. Many women are born with great mental capacity, and without the specific intellectual culture now obtainable the world would lose much, while the nonexercise of such native powers creates inward misery. But culture, according to Matthew Arnold, implies the study of perfection, and the late Professor Huxley’s ideal is expressed as follows:—“That man has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is clear, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who—no stunted ascetic—is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learnt to love all beauty, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. Such an one and no other has had a liberal education, for he is as completely as man can be in harmony with nature.” (An Address at South London Working Men’s College, January, 1869.)
Childhood is characterized by sensational activity. The reflective and reasoning powers lie comparatively dormant. Mobile sensibility is the distinguishing feature of childhood, and parents and teachers taking advantage of the law of nature whereby pleasurable sensation stimulates growth should train children step by step to the enjoyment of useful activities, to physical and manual dexterity; to simple efforts in pursuit of knowledge; to infantile firmness in discharge of duty; to unconstrained dignity in defence of the right, and sympathetic jealousy over the rights of others; to gentleness towards all mankind; to admiration of all that is noble in character, to veneration of age, experience and virtue; and to the love of truth and justice and personal devotion to both. These are the qualities of human nature that make for real civilization; and further progress requires their steady development in the race.
Now, these qualities cannot be evoked by school methods nor even by the easy vivâ voce conversational instruction proposed by Professor Thompson. An indispensable factor in the process is a rich, full, domestic environment, an atmosphere suffused with affection and vibrating with varied activities—a home-life, in short, where the delicate qualities of noble character will not be commanded to come forth, but will come of themselves through the play of circumstance, i.e. by the action of example and gentle sympathetic co-operation.
In upper-class houses, even where wealth and luxury abound, there are none of the diverse and liberal domestic surroundings conducive to early training. The first essential is that the nurseries be freed from all physical, mental and moral forces that belong to a comparatively primitive stage of evolution. Nurses drawn from the masses—however carefully selected—are incompetent by nurture for training infants in the best way. The authority they have known has been archaic, and elements of barbarism have been near them from babyhood, while education as yet has done little to raise their intelligence to the plane of civilized thought. Hence an ordinary nurse, of kindly and affectionate disposition, may seriously misdirect the budding conscience of a babe, as I have shown in my chapters on Emotional Life.