Among the doctrines of Comenius to which his expositors have attached special importance may be numbered the following: that the earliest teaching should be given in the vernacular; that the first subjects taught should be such as give scope to the child’s activity; that knowledge should be communicated through the senses and put to immediate use; that examples should be taught before rules; that the arts should be taught practically; that in language-study grammar should accompany reading and speaking; that learning should be spontaneous and pleasant without undue pressure; that children should not be beaten for failure in study, but only for moral offences; and that education should follow in general the guidance of nature. These principles now rank among the commonplaces of educational method, and in so far as their acceptance has been furthered by the persuasive advocacy of Comenius the gratitude of the world is due to him; but why should Englishmen forget that they had all been proclaimed with unmistakable clearness in this country half a century earlier? Readers of the foregoing pages must be already convinced that the doctrines in question form an essential part of Mulcaster’s theory of education; but it may be worth while to recall in a connected form a few of the more striking passages in which they are expressed. On the use of the vernacular in the early years: “As for the question whether English or Latin should be first learned, hitherto there may seem to have been some reasonable doubt, although the nature of the two tongues ought to decide the matter clearly enough, ... but now ... we can follow the direction of reason and nature in learning to read first that which we speak first, to take most care over that which we use most, and in beginning our studies where we have the best chance of good progress, owing to our natural familiarity with our ordinary language, as spoken by those around us in the affairs of everyday life.” No particular quotation is needed to illustrate Mulcaster’s dependence for his elementary training on studies that called forth individual effort from the child, for the course he planned includes no other kind of occupation, but the following sentences may stand for a proof that he recognised the natural channels through which knowledge is acquired and utilised in the guidance of action: “Nature has ... given us for self-preservation the power of perceiving all sensible things by means of feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting. These qualities of the outward world, being apprehended by the understanding and examined by the judgment, are handed over to the memory, and afterwards prove our chief—nay, our only—means of obtaining further knowledge.... To serve the end both of sense-perception and of motion, nature has planted in the body a brain, the prince of all our organs, which by spreading its channels through every part of our frame, produces all the effects through which sense passes into motion.” On the point of subordinating rules to the imitation of examples, and learning the arts by practically engaging in them, Mulcaster writes: “Children know not what they do, much less why they do it, till reason grow into some ripeness in them, and therefore in their training they profit more by practice than by knowing why, till they feel the use of reason, which teaches them to consider causes.... When the end of any art is wholly in doing, the initiation should be short, so as not to hinder that end by keeping the learners too long musing upon rules.... We must keep carefully that rule of Aristotle which teaches that the best way to learn anything well which has to be done after it is learned, is always to be a-doing while we are a-learning.” To the question of the best method in linguistic study, Mulcaster was ready to apply this principle of learning directly through practice, and his sense of the proper place of grammatical knowledge is shown in the following passage: “Grammar in itself is but the bare rule, and a very naked thing.... In grammar, which is the introduction to speech, there should be no such length as is customary, because its end is to write and to speak, and in doing this as much as possible we learn our grammar best, when it is applied to matter and not clogged with rules. As for understanding writers, that comes with years and ripeness of intelligence, not by means of the rules of grammar.” It has already been seen that Mulcaster shared fully in the humaner views upon the treatment of children that were beginning to assert themselves in his day; but it is interesting to notice that he based his conviction not only on the general claims of sympathy, but also on grounds of purely educational expediency. “These three things—perception, memory, and judgment—ye will find peering out of the little young souls. Now these natural capacities being once discovered must as they arise be followed with diligence, increased by good method and encouraged by sympathy, till they come to their fruition. 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 that all may proceed voluntarily, and not with violence, so that the will may be ready to do well and loth to do ill, and all fear of correction may be entirely absent. Surely to beat for not learning a child that is willing enough to learn, but whose intelligence is defective, is worse than madness.... Beating must only be for ill-behaviour, not for failure in learning.” Finally we must admit that the principle urged by Comenius, and afterwards pushed to an extreme by Rousseau and Froebel, of following the guidance of nature in planning the procedure of instruction was explicitly stated by Mulcaster. “The third proof of a good elementary course was that it should follow nature in the multitude of its gifts, and that it should proceed in teaching as she does in developing. For as she is unfriendly wherever she is forced, so she is the best guide that anyone can have, wherever she shows herself favourable.”
It not infrequently happens that the doctrines of a notable reformer, while they are full of light and leading for his contemporaries, have no more than a historical interest for succeeding generations. The rapidity of their absorption in the general current of established theory must be largely determined by the strength of the influence with which they were first asserted, so that in one aspect it may be said that the more potent the impress of the original mind, the sooner will its individual effects become imperceptible. But it would be as rash to make this rule the measure of an estimate of relative greatness, without taking account of other contributing conditions, as it would be unreasonable to be misled into the opposite error of undervaluing proposals which had only a temporary fitness and are of no present significance. In truth it is a good deal a matter of accident whether the words of wisdom which fall from men of genius and insight bear fruit early or late, and while distance in time offers a vantage-ground for the just assignment of the tributes of admiration and gratitude, the question of immediate applicability must not bulk too largely among the elements on which our judgment of a reputation is based. As has been already suggested, Mulcaster lost his opportunity of speedy acceptance for his ideals through his inability to commend them with persuasive eloquence, though such an impediment to appreciation is happily not irremovable. The more searching investigation of our time into the history of educational thought might or might not have discovered a high present value in the aspirations to which he gave somewhat inadequate expression, without his title to fame being materially affected. But it will undoubtedly give to his writings a great additional interest if it should appear that they set forth lessons which the three intervening centuries have failed to learn, and which are still clamouring for acceptance in our own day.
It would not be difficult to show that many of the reforms which he urged and anticipated, while they have been formally admitted as necessary or expedient, have as yet made little way in leavening the whole mass of educational practice. There is good reason to maintain, for example, that the impartial diffusion of the opportunities of learning throughout all classes of the community, which was a fundamental part of Mulcaster’s gospel, has been much less completely realised among us than is generally supposed. We are apt to rest satisfied with the idea of universal education without over-careful a scrutiny into the nature of what is offered in its name. In so far as elementary instruction was concerned Mulcaster drew no distinction between rich and poor, between those of gentle and of lowly birth; all were to have the same treatment, irrespective of the uses to which their knowledge might afterwards be turned. Our State system of education may profess to carry out this aim, but the justice of the claim must be denied so long as the nature and quality of what is forcibly imposed upon the mass of the people is seriously at fault. Our system of public elementary education in this country, however efficiently it may be organised, fails entirely to provide a sound general training owing to its adoption of a curriculum that is unduly utilitarian in aim. It is undeniable that this is largely due to an implicit caste feeling which prescribes that the education of the masses shall fit them directly for the performance of certain industrial tasks in a state of economic subjection. The well-to-do citizen wishes his own child, even from the first, to be taught differently from the child of poorer parents, whose schooling he helps to pay for and has some share in regulating. The course of study he chooses may be no better,—in some respects it is undoubtedly worse; but at least it is different, and conforms to the conventional standard of a liberal training for life as a whole. The codes drawn up for our national system are not framed for any such purpose. Partly from ingrained class prejudice, partly to get tangible results to show for the public money expended, and partly from a benevolent but short-sighted regard for supposed utilities, we have overburdened the curriculum with the more mechanical parts of learning. We put too much of the drudgery into the years when we can make sure of the children, so that a minimum of interest is taken in the work for its own sake, with the result that when the compulsory term is reached, the great majority of them use their liberty to throw aside their books for ever. While this reproach remains just, can we say that the ideal of a true universal elementary education has yet been reached?
It is perhaps idle to expect any equalisation of opportunities by postponing every kind of specialism to a period beyond the elementary stage, until there is a more general agreement as to what constitutes a liberal education. If we apply the touchstone of Mulcaster’s conception, how much of the traditional lumber which is now obstructing our progress would have to be cleared away! We are the bond-slaves of two tyrants—the spirit of an outworn classicism and the spirit of a utilitarianism falsely so-called. Under the domination of the former we distort the curriculum of our higher-class schools, preparatory as well as secondary, by projecting into the elementary period and practically imposing on every scholar linguistic studies that should form a specialism only for a very few during the later years of school life. Misguided by the latter we debase our public primary education by filling up the time with subjects of mere information that neither arouse the interests of the learner nor afford a genuine mental discipline. It would indeed astound the Elizabethan schoolmaster who tolerated pre-occupation with the learned tongues only until his native English should reach a high enough point of cultivation to become a worthy receptacle of learning, and who lamented the temporary need for a medium which kept the student “one degree further off from knowledge” to find that after more than 300 years the shackles had not yet been cast aside. Nor would he be less dismayed to discover that the sole alternative offered to those who were excluded from what professed to be a liberal culture, consisted only to a very small extent of that direct knowledge of the facts and laws of Nature which he conceived to be the proper food during “our best learning time,” but mainly of the dry bones of second-hand experience. Mulcaster’s ideal will not be attained until we have devised a course of study up to the age of at least 14 or 15 years, which shall form a preparation for life that is applicable to all pupils alike—to boys and girls, to rich and poor, to those who can pursue their systematic education further, and to those who must discontinue it then to enter into the world of affairs.
Enough perhaps has been already said, though it would be an easy task to continue the catalogue of reforms suggested by Mulcaster, which have been approved by the consensus of judgment among thinkers on education, but have not yet been fully carried out in this country. When we remember the over-pressure and cramming that have resulted from the abuse of examinations in the treatment of learning as a marketable commodity subject to the severest struggles of competition; or the widespread neglect of the arts and sciences as instruments of general training; or the unholy separation of parents and children during the most critical years of mutual influence, through the acceptance of the boarding-school system as a normal institution; or the anomalous position of teachers, left as they are without recognition as members of an acknowledged profession, and having to depend for their training on the voluntary provision made by religious sects,—when we reflect that on these and on many kindred matters of high urgency the wisest guidance was offered to us more than three centuries ago, we shall have little hesitation in admitting the claim of Richard Mulcaster to be considered the Father of English Pedagogy.
