In the School-Room: Chapters in the Philosophy of Education

by John S. Hart

Education may be defined to be the process of developing in due order and proportion all the good and desirable parts of human nature. On this point all educators are substantially agreed. Another truth, to which there is a general theoretical assent, is, that, in the order in which we develop the faculties, we should follow the leadings of nature, cultivating in childhood those faculties which seem most naturally to flourish in childish years, and reserving for maturer years the cultivation of those faculties which in the order of nature do not show much vigor until near the age of manhood, and which require for their full development a general ripening of all the other powers. The development of a human being is in some respects like that of a plant. There is one stage of growth suitable for the appearance and maturity of the leaf, another for the flower, a third for the fruit, and still a fourth for the perfected and ripened seed.

The analogy has of course many limitations. In the human plant, for instance, one class of faculties, after maturing, does not disappear in order to make place for another class, as the flower disappears before there can be fruit. Nor, again, is any class of faculties wanting altogether until the season for their development and maturity. The faculties all exist together—leaf, flower, fruit, and seed—at the same time, but each has its own best time for ripening.

While these principles have received the general assent of educators, there has been a wide divergence among them as to some of the practical applications. Which faculties do most naturally ripen early in life, and which late in life?

According to my own observation, the latest of the human powers in maturing, as it is the most consummate, is the Judgment. Next in the order of maturity, and next also in majesty and excellence, is the Reasoning power. Reason is minister to the judgment, furnishing to the latter materials for its action, as all the other powers, memory, fancy, imagination, and so forth, are ministers to reason, and supply it with its materials. The reasoning power lacks true vigor and muscle, the judgment is little to be relied on, until we approach manhood. Nature withholds from these faculties an earlier development, for the very reason, apparently, that they can ordinarily have but scanty materials for action until after the efflorescence of the other faculties. The mind must first be well filled with knowledge, which the other faculties have gathered and stored, before reason and judgment can have full scope for action.

Going to the other end of the scale, I have as little doubt that the earliest of all the faculties to bud and blossom, is the Memory. Children not only commit to memory with ease, but they take actual pleasure in it. Tasks, under which the grown-up man recoils and reels, the child will assume with light heart, and execute without fatigue. Committing to memory, which is repulsive drudgery to the man, is the easiest of all tasks to the child. More than this. The things fixed in the memory of childhood are seldom forgotten. Things learned later in life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly disappear. I recall instantly and without effort, texts of Scripture, hymns, catechisms, rules of grammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry and of classic authors, with which I became familiar when a boy. But it is a labor of Hercules for me to repeat by memory anything acquired since attaining the age of manhood. The Creator seems to have arranged an order in the natural development of the faculties for this very purpose, that in childhood and youth we may be chiefly occupied with the accumulation of materials in our intellectual storehouse. Now to reverse this process, to occupy the immature mind of childhood chiefly with the cultivation of faculties which are of later growth, and actually to put shackles and restraints upon the memory, nicknaming and ridiculing all memoriter exercises as parrot performances, is to ignore one of the primary facts of human nature. It is to be wiser than God.

Another faculty that shoots up into full growth in the very morning and spring-time of life, is Faith. I speak here, of course, not of religious belief, but of that faculty of the human mind which leads a child to believe instinctively whatever is told him. That we all do thus believe until by slow and painful experience we learn to do otherwise, needs no demonstration. Everybody's experience attests the fact. It is equally plain that the existence and maturity of this faculty in early childhood is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature. How slow and tedious would be the first steps in knowledge, were the child born, as some teachers seem trying to make him, a sceptic, that is, with a mind which refuses to receive anything as true, except what it has first proved by experience and reason! On the contrary, how much is the acquisition of knowledge expedited, during these years of helplessness and dependency, by this spontaneous, instinctive faith of childhood. The same infinite wisdom and love, which in the order of nature provide for the helpless infant a father and mother to care for it, provide also in the constitution of the infant's mind that instinctive principle or power of faith, which alone makes the father's and mother's love efficacious towards its intellectual growth and development. Of what use were parents or teachers, in instructing a child which required proof for every statement that father, mother, or teacher gives? How cruel to force the confiding young heart into premature scepticism, by compelling him to hunt up reasons for everything, when he has reasons, to him all-sufficient, in the fact that father, mother, or teacher told him so?

It may seem trifling to dwell so long upon these elementary points. Yet there are wide-spread plans of education which violate every principle here laid down. Educators and systems of education, enjoying the highest popularity, seem to have adopted the theory, at least they tacitly act upon the theory, that the first faculty of the mind to be developed is the Reasoning power. Indeed, they are not far from asserting that the whole business of education consists in the cultivation of this power, and they bend accordingly their main energies upon training young children to go through certain processes of reasoning, so called. They require a child to prove everything before receiving it as true; to reason out a rule for himself for every process in arithmetic or grammar; to demonstrate the multiplication-table before daring to use it, or to commit it to memory, if indeed they do not forbid entirely its being committed to memory as too parrot-like and mechanical. To commit blindly to memory precious forms of truth, which the wise and good have hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish. To receive as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not discovered or demonstrated for himself, is denounced as slavish. All authority in teaching, growing out of the age and the reputed wisdom of the teacher, all faith and reverence in the learner, growing out of a sense of his ignorance and dependence, are discarded, and the frightened stripling is continually rapped on the knuckles, if he does not at every step show the truth of his allegations by what is called a course of reasoning. Children reason, of course. They should be encouraged and taught to reason. No teacher, who is wise, will neglect this part of a child's intellectual powers. But he will not consider this the season for its main, normal development. He will hold this subject for the present subordinate to many others. Moreover, the methods of reasoning, which he does adopt, will be of a peculiar kind, suited to the nature of childhood, the results being mainly intuitional, rather than the fruits of formal logic. To oblige a young child to go through a formal syllogistic statement in every step in elementary arithmetic, for instance, is simply absurd. It makes nothing plain to a child's mind which was not plain before. On the contrary, it often makes a muddle of what had been perfectly clear. What was in the clear sunlight of intuition, is now in a haze, through the intervening medium of logical terms and forms, through which he is obliged to look at it.

A primary teacher asks her class this question: "If I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, how many marbles can I buy with 5 pennies?" A bright boy who should promptly answer "30" would be sharply rebuked. Little eight-year old Solon on the next bench has been better trained than that. With stately and solemn enunciation he delivers himself of a performance somewhat of this sort. "If I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, how many marbles can I buy with 5 pennies? Answer—I can buy 5 times as many marbles with 5 pennies as I can buy with 1 penny. If, therefore, I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, I can buy 5 times as many marbles with 5 pennies; and 5 times 6 marbles are 30 marbles. Therefore, if I can buy 6 marbles with one penny, I can buy 30 marbles with 5 pennies."

And this is termed reasoning! And to train children, by forced and artificial processes, to go through such a rigmarole of words, is recommended as a means of cultivating their reasoning power and of improving their power of expression! It is not pretended that children by such a process become more expert in reckoning. On the contrary, their movements as ready reckoners are retarded by it. Instead of learning to jump at once to the conclusion, lightning-like, by a sort of intuitional process, which is of the very essence of an expert accountant, they learn laboriously to stay their march by a cumbersome and confusing circumlocution of words. And the expenditure of time and toil needed to acquire these formulas of expression, which nine times out of ten are to those young minds the mere dicta magistri, is justified on the ground that the children, if not learning arithmetic, are learning to reason.

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not advocate the disuse of explanations. Let teachers explain, let children give explanations. Let the rationale of the various processes through which the child goes, receive a certain amount of attention. But the extreme into which some are now going, in primary education, is that of giving too much time to explanation and to theory, and too little to practice. We reverse, too, the order of nature in this matter. What it now takes weeks and months to make clear to the immature understanding, is apprehended at a later day with ease and delight at the very first statement. There is a clear and consistent philosophy underlying this whole matter. It is simply this. In the healthy and natural order of development in educating a young mind, theory should follow practice, not precede it. Children learn the practice of arithmetic very young. They take to it naturally, and learn it easily, and become very rapidly expert practical accountants. But the science of arithmetic is quite another matter, and should not be forced upon them until a much later stage in their advancement.