PRACTICAL DISCIPLINE.
The want of Practical Discipline has been thus put by a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine: “What is the use of battering a man’s brains full of Greek and Latin pothooks, that he forgets before he doffs his last round-jacket or puts on his first long-tailed blue, if ye don’t teach him the old Spartan virtue of obedience, hard living, early rising, and them sort of classics? Where’s the use of instructing him in hexameters or pentameters, if you would leave him in ignorance of the value of a pennypiece? What height of stupidity it is to be fillin’ a boy’s brains with the wisdom of the ancients, and then turn him out like an omadhaum, to pick up his victuals among the moderns!”
With equal truth, but finer humour, has Sydney Smith, at his own expense, exposed this neglect of the practical as a fair indication of the mode of English education. He is writing to his publisher, whom he tells: “I have twice endeavoured to write the word skipping—‘skipping spirit.’ Your printer first printed it ’stripling,’ and then altered it into stripping. The fault is entirely mine. I was fifteen years at school and college—I know something about the Romans and the Athenians, and have read a good deal about the præter-perfect tense—but I cannot do a sum in simple addition, or write a handwriting which any body can read.”
“CRAMMING.”
Cramming, which in our time was a cant term in the Universities for the art of preparing a student to pass an examination by furnishing him beforehand with the requisite answers, has travelled far beyond the tether of Oxford or Cambridge. Its abuse is well described by Watts: “As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.” It reminds one also of the Baconian saw—of those who can pack the cards, yet know not how to play them.
A president Examiner of articled clerks at the Law Institution has observed upon this forcing system:
I for one, and I am glad of the opportunity of expressing it, abhor all Cramming; and I hold very cheaply the system of Competitive Examination, which is nowadays begun almost in the nursery, and thought so highly of in some quarters as a test. It is not to be expected, without inverting the natural order of things, that a youth of twenty or twenty-one should have exhausted those stores of learning which Coke speaks of as requiring not less than the lucubrationes viginti annorum; and remember that those twenty years would begin at that period of life on which most of you are now but entering. In this view the papers before you have been prepared, and our aim as examiners has been to set such questions as will prove you to possess the elements of a liberal education; and that you have so far acquired the principles of common law, equity, conveyancing, criminal law, and bankruptcy, that you are entitled to enter upon the practice of your profession, leaving its complete mastery to that experience which time alone can supply. I need not remind you of the men who, beginning as attorneys, have attained to high positions in the State. The portrait of Lord Chancellor Truro hangs before you on these walls. I had the privilege of knowing him personally; his example may well stimulate your ambition, and animate your exertions, for never man won high place with more unremitting labour than he did; not, however, at the expense of his childhood or of his youth, not by the sacrifice of all else for mere mental culture, but by the full-grown energies, by the well-directed vigour and power of the man, for he was between thirty and forty years of age before he was called to the bar.
MATHEMATICS.
Mathematics drew from Edmund Gurney the odd definition, that “a mathematician is like one that goes to market to buy an axe to break an egg.”
Bacon complains that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the Pure Mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye, and a body ready to put itself into any postures; so in the mathematics, that use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended. And as for the Mixed Mathematics, I only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows further disclosed;” thus foretelling the advance of Natural Philosophy.