1. Training-schools for nursery governesses, who, without knowing or pretending to know French and Italian, should speak English without vulgarisms. 2. Greater attention in our present training colleges for schoolmasters to due instruction in English, especially in correct and fluent speaking. 3. More encouragement to men of talent and education to become and to remain schoolmasters, by holding out the prospect of honourable offices to distinguished teachers. Why should Inspectorships of Schools be always given to clergymen and barristers, to the exclusion of the schoolmaster? 4. The appointment of a thoroughly accomplished scholar as English Master in every great public school, of equal rank with the other masters. 5. The endowment of at least one Professorship in every University. 6. The recognition of English as a subject in every examination not strictly scientific, and rewarding distinction in composition or oratory in the same substantial manner as eminence in classics or mathematics.
Sir John Coleridge relates the following inefficient examples of school-teaching which have come under his observation: “An Examiner was about, and he had a class before him—the first class in arithmetic. They were able to answer questions; they had gone through all the higher branches of arithmetic, and were prepared to answer any thing. But he said, ‘I will give you a sum in simple addition.’ He accordingly dictated a sum, and cautiously interspersed a good many ciphers. Suppose, for instance, he said, ‘a thousand and forty-nine.’ He found there was not one in the class who was able to put down that sum in simple addition; they could not make count of the ciphers. That showed him the boys had been suffered to pass over far too quickly the elementary parts of arithmetic. The examiner took them in grammar, and quoted a few lines from Cowper—
I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.
‘What governs right?’ There was not a boy could say, till it was put to them, ‘none to dispute my right.’
“Let me impress upon you that the best motto you can take for yourselves in this respect is that which was taken by a most eminent man who made his way from a hair-dresser’s shop to be Chief Justice Tenterden. What was his motto? When a man is made a judge, he is made a serjeant; and as serjeant he gives rings to some of the great officers of State, with a motto upon each. His motto was ‘Labore.’ He did not refer to his own talents. It was not ‘Invita Minerva.’ To his immortal honour be it said—from the hair-dresser’s shop in Canterbury to the Free School in Canterbury; from the Free School in Canterbury to Corpus Christi College; from Corpus Christi College to the bar; from the bar to the bench; from the bench to the peerage—he achieved all with unimpeachable honour, and always practising that which was his motto at last. One of the most gratifying scenes I have ever witnessed was when that man went up to the House of Peers in his robes for the first time, attended by the whole bar of England.”
SELF-FORMATION.
The one great object—the finality—of rational Education is Self-instruction. In mind as well as body we are children at first, only that we may afterwards become men; dependent upon others, in order that we may learn from them such lessons as may tend eventually to our edification on an independent basis of our own. The knowledge of facts, or what is generally called learning, however much we may possess of it, is useful so far only as we erect its materials into a mental framework; but useless, utterly, as long as we suffer it to lie in a heap, inert and without form. The instruction of others, compared with self-instruction, is like the law compared with faith; a discipline of preparation, beggarly elements, a schoolmaster to lead us on to a state of greater worthiness, and there give up the charge of us.
“Every man,” says Gibbon, “who rises above the common level, receives two educations—the first from his instructors; the second, the most personal and important, from himself.” Almost all Lord Eldon’s legal education was from himself, without even the ordinary helps, which he disdainfully flung from him; and of no one could it be more truly predicated, that he was not “rocked and dandled” into a lawyer.
The Rev. Sydney Smith has thus sketched a scheme, in which he deems it of the highest importance that the education of a British youth were directed to the true principles of legislation: what effect laws can produce upon opinions, and opinions upon laws; what subjects are fit for legislative interference, and when men may be left to the management of their own interests. The mischief occasioned by bad laws, and the perplexity which arises from a multiplicity of laws; the causes of national wealth; the relations of foreign trade; the encouragement of agricultures and manufactures; the fictitious wealth occasioned by paper-credit; the use and abuse of monopoly; the theory of taxation; the consequences of the public debt: these are some of the subjects and some of the branches of civil education, to which we would turn the minds of future judges, future senators, and future noblemen. After the first period of life had been given up to the cultivation of the classics, and the remaining powers were beginning to evolve themselves, these are some of the propensities in study which we would endeavour to inspire.