The Educational Writings of Richard Mulcaster

by Richard Mulcaster

Another proof of Mulcaster’s general enlightenment may be found in the fact that he was the first of his countrymen to affirm seriously that education was the birthright of every child born into the community. It is not intended to suggest by this that he anticipated the full assumption by the State of the duty of providing and enforcing universal education, but rather that he desired to foster a public sentiment and social conditions which would be favourable to the idea that the rudiments of learning should by one means or another be distributed throughout the whole body of the nation. Efforts in this direction had been made in other countries under the levelling influence of the reforming spirit in religion, but in England, where the change of faith had been less associated with a democratic impulse, nothing had as yet been done to popularise education in the proper sense of the term, and public opinion had still to be prepared for the movement. It is true that the sharp distinctions of rank which the sixteenth century inherited from the Middle Ages were never so absolutely marked in the sphere of learning as in other departments of life. Though the child of lowly birth could never become a gentleman, he could become a scholar. The helping hand extended by the Church to the promising boy of low degree did not, however, imply any relaxation of caste feeling so far as the general supply of educational facilities was concerned. The humble scholar was raised out of his own class, and was always regarded as an exception. Taken in the mass, the gentry and the commonalty were clearly separated, and no kind of training was thought in any way due to the latter except such as might make them directly serviceable to their betters. For the first notable attack on this fundamental article of medieval faith, apart from the indirect and interested claims of the Reformation leaders to the means of influencing the young, credit is generally given to Comenius. But it must be remembered that half a century before his time, and in a country where the régime of social status has always held a firm position, a strong protest against educational exclusiveness was raised by Richard Mulcaster, who maintained that the elements of knowledge and training should be recognised as the privilege of all, irrespective of rank or sex, and without regard to their future economic functions. “As for the education of gentlemen,” he writes, “at what age shall I suggest that they should begin to learn? Their minds are the same as those of the common people, and their bodies are often worse. The same considerations in regard to time must apply to all ranks. What should they learn? I know of nothing else, nor can I suggest anything better, than what I have already suggested for all.” And his unwillingness to recognise any kind of disability in matters of education, except what was proved by the test of experience to be natural, is further shown in his insistence that, as far as may be possible, girls should have the same advantages as boys. Though, as he says, in deference to the general feeling of his time and country he will not go so far as to propose that girls should be admitted to the grammar schools and universities, he not only wishes them to share in all the opportunities of elementary education, but he wholly approves of the ideal of higher culture for women, which was represented in the attainments of Queen Elizabeth herself.

We may now turn to matters that are less the concern of the philosophic thinker and social observer than of the expert in educational practice. Let us first examine Mulcaster’s conception of the content of a liberal education, from the two points of view, as to how far it should embrace a culture of the whole nature, and as to the proper range of distinctively mental studies. It is a matter of history that in both these respects the Renascence ideal had fallen away from the example of the Greeks. Intellectual culture had to a large extent been dissociated from physical and moral training. The life of the scholar was a thing apart from the conception of chivalry, which encouraged the physical prowess and regard to a code of honour that were developed by the military class. The formal profession of a religious end in learning took the place of a genuine cultivation of character, and while this restricted path was open to the more gifted of the poorer classes, the alternative ideal was reserved for the upper social ranks. It is true that in our own country in the Elizabethan era there was some reconciliation of these diverse aims in the persons of such men as Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, but the type they represented was quite exceptional, and had no apparent influence on general educational methods. There was great need for Mulcaster’s plea that in the upbringing of children we should return to the ideal expressed in Juvenal’s familiar phrase, “mens sana in corpore sano.” No stress need be laid on the particular forms of physical exercise which he recommended. His suggestions here were not original, and the present time has little to learn from the physiological conceptions of the sixteenth century. But what was really instructive in his own day, and is scarcely less so in ours, is the intimate relation he conceived to exist between the body and the mind—a relation that demanded a harmonious training of the whole nature. “The soul and the body being co-partners in good will, in sweet and sour, in mirth and mourning, and having generally a common sympathy and mutual feeling, how can they be, or rather why should they be, severed in education?... As the disposition of the soul will resemble that of the body, if the soul be influenced for good, it will affect the body also.” His use of the term soul, moreover, is significant of the conviction which underlies all his writing, that the end of all physical intellectual training is the development of the feelings that prompt to right conduct. He was not carried away by the current craze for book-learning into accepting as a legitimate end of education the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; in his view the teacher must always have regard to the unfolding of the whole character that would bear fruit in the discharge of the duties of citizenship and other activities of a complete life. Not that he wished the school to assume any preponderating control over the child, either in the direction of opinion or in moral ascendency. He had too clear an insight into the springs of conduct to ignore the potency of the earliest influences of the home, and so far from seeking to usurp the authority of parents in determining their children’s lives, he urges the closest co-operation and good feeling among all who have the pupil’s welfare at heart. Some further insight will be gained into his comprehensive ideal of upbringing when we come to consider his appreciation of home influence more closely, but it may first be asked what his conception was of the mental cultivation that should be aimed at in a liberal curriculum. In regard to the secondary or grammar school period of education, with which he was most intimately acquainted, though he has many acute criticisms and luminous suggestions to offer, his expressed intention of supplying a systematic treatment was unfortunately left unfulfilled; and of his ideas as to university teaching we have little more than a sketch of proposed reforms. On these points something may presently be said, but we may turn first to his contributions towards the establishment of a sound elementary system, which he held to be the most important stage of all, because it was the only form of education that could be brought within the reach of every child, and was the foundation of all further progress in learning. Even this part of the task that he imposed on himself remains incomplete, but there is material enough for a judgment of his point of view. It would seem that in England, up to the Elizabethan era at least, no provision had ever been made for rudimentary instruction for any except those who were destined to proceed to the higher stages of learning, and that the elementary training given to these select few was limited to the barest preparation for the traditional study of the classics. The reading and writing of the vernacular must have been acquired up to a certain point before the Latin grammar could be attacked, but it is clear that no adequate justice was done even to these preliminary subjects, and that no attempt was made to include a deliberate training of the senses and activities of the child. Mulcaster’s proposals as to an elementary course certainly do not sound revolutionary. His subjects coincide pretty nearly with our familiar “three R’s,” and he is himself careful to show that he is merely “reviving” what is commended by the precepts of the wise men of old, and by the practice of the greatest States. But it was no small merit to be the first to perceive that such a revival was possible and desirable in his own time and country, and when his proposals are examined it will be found that in the spirit in which he conceived them they were far in advance alike of contemporary, and of much later, thought and practice. It is a well-known criticism of his contemporary, Montaigne, that teachers were apt to think too much of the matter that was to be taught, and too little of the nature of the learner. That this remark was just in relation to these times we can well believe when we consider how recently the traditional bearing of the schoolmaster has been associated rather with the harsh enforcement of uncongenial tasks under the threat of penalties than with the sympathetic encouragement of willing and interested labours. Ascham had protested against the short-sighted severity of teachers, but failed to see that its root lay in the fact that the studies presented were generally ill-adapted to the capacities and inclinations of the scholars. Mulcaster, on the other hand, recognised that the remedy must be sought in the discovery of a more reasonable method, towards which he had definite constructive proposals to offer. He may even be said to have anticipated by a couple of centuries the doctrine of Rousseau, afterwards utilised by Pestalozzi and Froebel, that the paramount aim of the teacher is not to communicate knowledge, but to stimulate and guide the natural activity of the child. It is to be noted that every one of the five subjects he proposed to teach in the elementary school is of the nature of an art, calling for independent action on the part of the learner, and giving pleasurable exercise to the senses and bodily organs as well as to the intelligence. It was more than a happy intuition that led him to give so honourable a place to drawing and music; it was a consistent application of his doctrine that the minds of young children must be fed through the channels of sense perception, and that faculty is to be developed by placing the outlets of energy in immediate contact with the powers of acquisition. Drawing was intended to give a direct and practical knowledge of space relations and of the forms of natural objects, by combining the activities of eye and hand, while at the same time it favoured the cultivation of artistic expression. Music, being based on varied arrangements of number in pitch and time, was counted on to supply the ground-work of arithmetic, while in accordance with the persuasion of the Greeks it was held to exercise a definite æsthetic and moral influence on character. That Mulcaster had not only thought out his theories on the matter, but had verified them by individual child-study, is clear from the terms of his recommendations. “We must seek for natural inclinations in the soul, which seem to crave the help of education and nurture, and by means of these may be cultivated to advantage.... The best way to secure good progress, so that the intelligence may conceive clearly, memory may hold fast, and judgment may choose and discern the best, is so to ply them all that they may proceed voluntarily and not with violence.”

The same insight into the heart of the educational process appears in his treatment of the grammar-school curriculum. When we remember the absorbing pre-occupation with classical learning that was the distinctive mark of the Renascence scholars, and the prominence given in consequence to linguistic study in education, we should not wonder if Mulcaster were found acquiescing in some degree in the narrow ideal that exalted knowledge at the expense of faculty, and laid more stress on the interpretation of words than of things. What will rather excite our surprise and admiration is the extent to which he was able to rise above the contemporary estimate of the value of Latin and Greek as instruments of culture. It is from the pen of one whose reputation in his own day was based on his mastery of ancient languages and his success as a teacher of the classics, that we have the clearest statement of the contrast between the indirect, incidental value of linguistic training, and the direct, formative influences of scientific study. “In time all learning may be brought into one tongue, and that naturally understood by all, so that schooling for tongues may prove needless, just as once they were not needed; but it can never fall out that arts and sciences in their essential nature shall be anything but most necessary for every commonwealth that is not utterly barbarous.... The sciences that we term ‘mathematical’ from their very nature always achieve something good, intelligible even to the unlearned, by number, figure, sound, or motion. In the manner of their teaching also they plant in the mind of the learners a habit of resisting the influence of bare probabilities, of refusing to believe in light conjectures, of being moved only by infallible demonstrations.”

It has been stated above that Mulcaster had reached a conception distinctly in advance of his time in regard to the true significance of words, as the signs of realities in the outer world and of the impressions these realities make upon the mind. We may here notice the influence of this conception on his treatment of linguistic study as a means of education. While fully admitting the necessity for acquiring the classical languages as long as these continued to be the only vehicles of learning, he never fails to regret the loss of time absorbed in studying them, and he anticipates with satisfaction the time when modern tongues, and especially his own, will be sufficiently developed and refined to replace Latin and Greek, believing as he does that “all that bravery may be had at home that makes us gaze so much at the fine stranger.” Not that he ever forgets that words are something more than mere symbols, that indeed they come to have a certain objective reality of their own, which must be apprehended as directly as that of any other natural phenomenon. “Do we not learn from words?” he asks. “No marvel if it is so, for a word is a metaphor, a learned translation, something carried over from its original sense to serve in some place where it is even more properly used, and where it may be most significant, if it is properly understood. Take pains to learn from it; you have there a means of gaining knowledge.” But this appreciation of the inner significance of language does not blind him to the fact, apparently unperceived by all his contemporaries, that the unfortunate need for devoting so much time and energy to linguistic study was a very serious hindrance to the natural unfolding of the mental faculties through a reasonable education. In his own words, “we were forced ... to deal with the tongues, ere we pass to the substance of learning; and this help from the tongues, though it is most necessary, as our study is now arranged, yet hinders us in time, which is a thing of great price—nay, it hinders us in knowledge, a thing of greater price. For in lingering over language, we are removed and kept back one degree further from sound knowledge, and this hindrance comes in our best learning time.” And in another passage he bewails the “loss of time over tongues, while you are pilgrims to learning,” and the “lack of sound skill, while language distracts the mind from the sense.” Where could we find a stronger indictment of the Public School tradition that banishes every form of nature study during the “best learning time,” the years when the powers of observation are in their first freshness, for the sake of a premature initiation into the subtleties of Latin Grammar?

We may pass to another important question with which Mulcaster deals in a spirit in harmony with his enlightened conception of general instruction. His assumption that the day-school is the normal arrangement, and that either an entirely private or a boarding-school education requires to be justified by special circumstances, gives him a far wider outlook and a safer standpoint than can be claimed for theorists, whose ideal, like that of Locke, regards only the upbringing of a gentleman’s son at home under a tutor, or, like that of Milton, involves the collection of large numbers in boarding establishments of a conventual nature. This is a matter that is naturally related to the extension of educational opportunities throughout all classes of the community. As long as only a select few were thought fit for learning, residence in the monastery was almost an affair of necessary convenience, but when teaching came to be more widely offered, the day-school became a recognised institution, and such other arrangements as implied greater expenditure were retained only by the rich, as instruments of social exclusiveness. It is in countries where distinctions of rank are comparatively little marked that the day-school system has flourished most, and the partiality shown in Mulcaster’s day for the services of a private tutor, and in subsequent times for the boarding-school, is certainly to be taken in great measure as an assertion of class superiority. Mulcaster was no democrat, but he saw that the rich had more to lose than to gain by arrangements that unduly restricted their experience. Moreover he clearly discerned the importance of the family as the true social unit, the nursery of the virtues that should be developed in the school, and find exercise in the public, as well as the private, conduct of life. It is not his fault that his countrymen have become bound hand and foot to a system under which the vast majority of well-to-do parents hand over their children, body and soul, from the tenderest years to the care of professional upbringers, divesting themselves with a light heart of the most precious responsibilities that nature has conferred on them. “How can education be private?” he asks, “It is an abuse of the name as well as of the thing.” But on the other hand he urges—“All the considerations which persuade people rather to have their children taught at home than along with others outside, especially with regard to their manners and behaviour, form arguments for their boarding at least at home, if the parents will take their position seriously.... They are distinct offices, to be a parent, and a teacher, and the difficulties of upbringing are too serious for all the responsibilities to be thrown into the hands of one alone.”

On the question of the position and standing of the teacher Mulcaster’s contentions were scarcely more timely and just for his own generation than they are for the present time. Though certain ranks of the teaching profession have never been without social consideration, it remains true that teachers as a whole were long regarded as an inferior order of the clergy, who did not reach the goal of their ambition until they had succeeded in leaving their first calling, to take the more tranquil and dignified position of a cure of souls. As he puts it—“The school being used but for a shift, from which they will afterwards pass to some other profession, though it may send out competent men to other careers, remains itself far too bare of talent, considering the importance of the work.” It was only natural that the profession should suffer from this want of independence, in the general esteem, and therefore in its substantial rewards, but the claim which our author puts forward for greater public consideration, is obviously based, not on any petty resentment on behalf of himself or his fellows, but on broad general grounds of social advantage. He had a high sense of the importance of the teacher’s task for the national welfare, and he was anxious on all grounds that those most fitted to fulfil it with success, should in the first place be induced to enter the profession by the prospect of adequate recognition, and in the second place have sufficient opportunity of training to enable them to do justice to it. “I consider that in our universities there should be a special college for the training of teachers, inasmuch as they are the instruments to make or mar the growing generation of the country ... and because the material of their studies is comparable to that of the greatest profession, in respect of language, judgment, skill in teaching, variety in learning, wherein the forming of the mind and exercising of the body require the most careful consideration, to say nothing of the dignity of character which should be expected from them.” Mulcaster, it will here be seen, has good grounds to offer for magnifying his office, and striving to win a place of honour for it in the social economy. Subsequent experience has tended to suggest that his effort to gain greater consideration for his profession was more utopian than could perhaps have appeared to his contemporaries. There are certain general reasons why in a country like ours the teaching profession cannot be expected to reach the solidarity that belongs, for example, to the profession of medicine or of law. The wide economic differences in our civilisation inevitably perpetuate distinctions of rank, which are nowhere more clearly shown than in the choice of schools. It is natural and right that parents should be no less concerned about the companionship they provide for their children than about the quality of the teaching, and since a free and compulsory education has brought into the national schools not only the poorest but the lowest class, those who can afford it must be excused, and even commended, if they take advantage of other opportunities, where some principle of selection is applied. And as there are different classes of children, representing on the whole different kinds of home-upbringing, so there will be different ranks of teachers, varying widely in their status and emoluments. The question of numbers will always among day-schools give the town teacher an advantage over his country brother; the question of fees, in so far as these are not counter-balanced by endowments or State support, will draw the most highly-qualified teachers to the schools that serve the rich; and the secondary teacher will, on the whole, rank above the elementary teacher, partly because greater attainments are required from him, and partly because the higher teaching, requiring a prolonged school course, is demanded chiefly by the well-to-do classes. That this economic differentiation would become so marked could scarcely have been foreseen three centuries ago, and even though it already existed, Mulcaster was doing good service in protesting against its extremer forms. His claim that the elementary teacher is the most important of all, that he should have the smallest classes to deal with, and that he should be the most highly paid, must of course be taken as a counsel of perfection, but if there is no present prospect of its being fully admitted in practice, there is certainly a growing acceptance of the principle underlying it, that the most critical period of education is in the early years, when the first impressions are being received, and that no influence deserves to be so well considered as that which is to call forth an individual response from the awakening intelligence.

Difficult as the attainment of Mulcaster’s ideal of the position of teachers may have been, he was undoubtedly on the right path to seek it, when he advocated that their training should be entrusted to the universities. The demand for adequate preparation is the only reasonable means of securing at once a fitting status, and a reward sufficient to attract the best talent, and the recognition of the work of education as deserving to rank with the other learned professions for which a special academic training is required, is the natural expression of a healthy public sentiment on the matter. The higher the requirements are pitched, the safer will be the guarantee that aspirants will be drawn to the work by a genuine belief in it as their true vocation, for the sake of which it is worth while to make some sacrifice. The atmosphere of a university, moreover, offers the fullest opportunity to the teacher of acquiring the breadth of general culture, and the savoir vivre, in which he is so apt to be deficient.

Mulcaster’s proposals for university reform in general will be found in several important respects to have anticipated the course of subsequent legislation. He wished the State to have a free hand in controlling the uses of private endowments according to the special needs of each generation, as long as the confidence of the original founders was not betrayed, and he was not slow to point out directions where he considered that changes were urgently needed. We know that in his time the condition of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge was far from satisfactory, partly because definite abuses had crept in, and partly because their constitution naturally offered a passive resistance to regulative organisation. Mulcaster’s suggestions all tend to greater concentration of aim and facility of classification. He may have carried his desire for uniformity too far when he advocated the specialisation of every college to a particular study, and even to a particular stage in that study. So far as residence is concerned there is surely no need to forgo the benefits of a varied social intercourse among students of different standing and pursuits, but it cannot be doubted that every effort should be made to counteract the loss this may entail by providing full opportunities throughout the whole university for the emulation of those who are in the same academic position. In Elizabethan days there was not the same freedom of interchange in lectures among the various colleges that now obtains, and Mulcaster was doing good service in deprecating the isolation and dispersion of interest that interfered with progress. We must also commend the discernment he showed in presenting the claims of a definite and comprehensive curriculum in general learning to the attention of those who wished to engage in professional studies, as well as his zeal for the more careful selection of candidates for scholarships, fellowships, and degrees. Nor is it to be forgotten that he was probably the first to suggest the appointment of “readers” in the universities,—an arrangement that was not adopted till almost our own time.

The significance of Mulcaster’s theories may best be appreciated by comparing them with those of the great educational reformer who came next in order of time. The services rendered to the world by Comenius are too well accredited, and too widely acknowledged, to suffer any serious loss of prestige by such a comparison. It has been already urged that true originality in social affairs means an enlightened judgment as to what is possible and desirable for one’s own time and country, and the reform of education had to be worked out and proclaimed for continental Europe on independent lines. It is not likely that Mulcaster’s writings had any direct influence on Comenius, though they could hardly fail to make some contribution to the general stock of ideas that is successively inherited by each generation, and spreads almost imperceptibly over an ever widening area. Even apart from any claim to priority in doctrine, the forcible personality of the Moravian writer, expressing itself in a singularly exhaustive treatment of educational problems and their practical application, will always assure to him an unquestioned authority, while his assertion of the weighty principle that words and things must be taught together, spoken and written signs being constantly associated with the objects, qualities, or actions they represent, is in itself enough to secure him a lasting reputation. But from the national point of view, which in tracing such historical successions it is not unreasonable to assume, we may justly note that there are a considerable number of educational doctrines, now generally accepted among us in theory if not in practice, the earliest formulation of which, though generally ascribed to Comenius, is really to be found in the writings of Richard Mulcaster. More than this, it may be maintained that on several important points a more penetrating insight was shown by our own countryman, in spite of his disadvantage in time. In regard both to the end and the scope of education, for example, a more humanistic conception seems to have been held by Mulcaster. Unlike Comenius, who lays chief stress on the preparation for eternity, he sets forth as the main purpose of youthful training the more proximate aims of self-realisation and useful service to one’s fellowmen. “The end of education and training is to help nature to her perfection in the complete development of all the various powers ... whereby each shall be best able to perform all those functions in life which his position shall require, whether public or private, in the interest of his country in which he was born, and to which he owes his whole service.” And while both writers insist that the rudiments of learning should be taught to children of every social class and of both sexes, the Englishman alone expresses sympathy with the ideal of a higher education for girls where circumstances permit. It would seem also that Mulcaster took the more reasonable view of the relation of a teacher to his class, for his claim that the elementary master should have the smallest number to deal with, at least shows a fuller sense of the importance of individual treatment than is conveyed in the later writer’s dictum that it does not matter how large a class is if the teacher has monitors to help him.