Cotitentus eruditione parabili,
Nec quorct illam, siqua quorentem fugit.
Nescire qucedam magna pars sapientio est."
Grotius.
[Greek]
One of the chief sins of our time is hurry: it is helter-skelter, and devil take the hindmost. Off we go all too swift at starting, and we neither run so fast nor so far as we would have done, had we taken it cannily at first. This is true of a boy as well as of a blood colt. Not only are boys and colts made to do the work and the running of fullgrown men and horses, but they are hurried out of themselves and their now, and pushed into the middle of next week where nobody is wanting them, and beyond which they frequently never get.
The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth, for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade—then the ear—then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear; and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, "not to forget wisdom in teaching knowledge." If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits; if it be robbed by you its guardian of its birthright, or squandered like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this always before one's mind, that the young "idea" is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than wrhat is vainly called accomplishment. We are preparing him to run his race, and accomplish that which is one of his chief ends; but we are too apt to start him off at his full speed, and be either bolts or breaks down—the worst thing for him generally being to win. In this wray a child or boy should be regarded much more as a mean than as an end, and his cultivation should have reference to this; his mind, as old Montaigne said, should be forged, as well as—indeed, I would say, rather than—furnished, fed rather than filled,—two not always coincident conditions. Now exercise—the joy of interest, of origination, of activity, of excitement—the play of the faculties,—this is the true life of a boy, not the accumulation of mere words. Words—the coin of thought—unless as the means of buying something else, are just as useless as other coin when it is hoarded; and it is as silly, and in the true sense as much the part and lot of a miser to amass words for their own sakes, as to keep all your guineas in a stocking and never spend them, but be satisfied with every now and then looking greedily at them and making them chink. Therefore it is that I dislike—as indeed who doesn't?—the cramming system. The great thing with knowledge and the young is to secure that it shall be their own—that it be not merely external to their inner and real self, but shall go in succum et sanguinem; and therefore it is, that the self-teaching that a baby and a child give themselves remains with them for ever—it is of their essence, whereas what is given them ab extra, especially if it be received mechanically, without relish, and without any energizing of the entire nature, remains pitifully useless and wersh. Try, therefore, always to get the resident teacher inside the skin, and who is for ever giving his lessons, to help you and be on your side.
Now in children, as we all know, he works chiefly through the senses. The quantity of accurate observation—of induction, and of deduction too (both of a much better quality than most of Mr. Buckle's); of reasoning from the known to the unknown; of inferring; the nicety of appreciation of the like and the unlike, the common and the rare, the odd and the even; the skill of the rough and the smooth—of form, of appearance, of texture, of weight, of all the minute and deep philosophies of the touch and of the other senses,—the amount of this sort of objective knowledge which every child of eight years has acquired—especially if he can play in the lap of nature and out of doors—and acquired for life, is, if we could only think of it, marvellous beyond any of our mightiest marches of intellect. Now, could we only get the knowledge of the school to go as sweetly and deeply and clearly into the vitals of the mind as this self-teaching has done, and this is the paradisiac way of it, we should make the young mind grow as well as learn, and be in understanding a man as well as in simplicity a child; we should get rid of much of that dreary, sheer endurance of their school-hours—that stolid lending of ears that do not hear—that objectless looking without ever once seeing, and straining their minds without an aim; alternating, it may be, with some feats of dexterity and effort, like a man trying to lift himself in his own arms, or take his head in his teeth, exploits as dangerous, as ungraceful, and as useless, except to glorify the showman and bring wages in, as the feats of an acrobat.
But you will ask, how is all this to be avoided if everybody must know how far the sun is from Georgium Sidus, and how much of phosphorus is in our bones, and of ptyalin and flint in human spittle—besides some 10,000 times 10,000 other things which we must be told and try to remember, and which we cannot prove not to be true, but which I decline to say we know.
But is it necessary that everybody should know everything? Is it not much more to the purpose for every man, when his turn comes, to be able to do something; and I say, that other things being equal, a boy who goes bird-nesting, and makes a collection of eggs, and knows all their colours and spots, going through the excitements and glories of getting them, and observing everything with a keenness, an intensity, an exactness, and a permanency, which only youth and a quick pulse, and fresh blood and spirits combined, can achieve,—a boy who teaches himself natural history in this way, is not only a healthier and happier boy, but is abler in mind and body for entering upon the great game of life, than the pale, nervous, bright-eyed, feverish, "interesting" boy, with a big head and a small bottom and thin legs, who is the "captain," the miracle of the school; dux for his brief year or two of glory, and, if he live, booby for life. I am, of course, not going in for a complete curriculum of general ignorance; but I am for calling the attention of teachers to drawing out the minds, the energies, the hearts of their pupils through their senses, as well as pouring in through these same apertures the general knowledge of mankind, the capital of the race, into this one small being, who it is to be hoped will contrive to forget much of the mere words he has unhappily learned.