Essays on Educational Reformers

by Robert Hebert Quick

Unfortunately, moreover, from the gentility of these ladies, their scholars’ bodies are often treated in preparatory schools no less injuriously than their minds. It may be natural in a child to use his lungs and delight in noise, but this can hardly be considered genteel, so the tendency is, as far as possible, suppressed. It is found, too, that if children are allowed to run about they get dirty and spoil their clothes, and do not look like “young gentlemen,” so they are made to take exercise in a much more genteel fashion, walking slowly two-and-two, with gloves on.[170]

§ 110. At nine or ten years old, boys are commonly put to a school taught by masters. Here they lose sight of their gloves, and learn the use of their limbs; but their minds are not so fortunate as their bodies. The studies of the school have been arranged without any thought of their peculiar needs. The youngest class is generally the largest, often much the largest, and it is handed over to the least competent and worst paid master on the staff of teachers. The reason is, that little boys are found to learn the tasks imposed upon them very slowly. A youth or a man who came fresh to the Latin grammar would learn in a morning as much as the master, with great labour, can get into children in a week. It is thought, therefore, that the best teaching should be applied where it will have the most obvious results. If anyone were to say to the manager of a school, “The master who takes the lowest form teaches badly, and the children learn nothing”; he would perhaps say, “Very likely; but if I paid a much higher salary, and got a better man, they would learn but little.” The only thing the school-manager thinks of is, How much do the little boys learn of what is taught in the higher forms? How their faculties are being developed, or whether they have any faculties except for reading, writing, and arithmetic, and for getting grammar-rules, &c. by heart, he is not so “unpractical” as to enquire.

§ 111. With reference to the education of the first of our “two nations,” it seems then pretty clear that Pestalozzi would require that the school-coach should be turned and started in a totally different direction.

§ 112. What about the education of the other “nation,” a nation of which the verb “to rule” has for many centuries been used in the passive voice, but can be used in that voice no longer? A century ago, with the partial exception of Scotland and Massachusetts, there was no such thing as school education for the people to be found anywhere in Europe or America. But from 1789 onwards power has been passing more and more from the few to the many; and as a natural consequence folk-schools (for which we have not yet found a name) have become of vast importance everywhere. The Germans, as we have seen, have been the disciples of Pestalozzi, and their elementary education in everything bears traces of his ideas. The English have organised a great system of elementary education in total ignorance of Pestalozzi. As usual, we seem to have supposed that the right system would come to us “in sleep.” But has it come? The children of the poor are now compelled by the law to attend an elementary school. What sort of an education has the law there provided for them? The Education Department professes to measure everything by results. Let us do the same. Suppose that on his leaving school we wished to forecast a lad’s future. What should we try to find out about him? No doubt we should ask what he knew; but this would not be by any means the main thing. His skill would interest us, and still more would his state of health. But what we should ask first and foremost is this, Whom does he love? Whom does he admire and imitate? What does he care about? What interests him? It is only when the answers to these questions are satisfactory, that we can think hopefully of his future; and it is only in so far as the school-course has tended to make the answers satisfactory, that it deserves our approval. Schools such as Pestalozzi designed would have thus deserved our approval; but we cannot say this of the schools into which the children of the English poor are now driven. In these schools the heart and the affections are not thought of, the powers of neither mind nor body are developed by exercise, and the children do not acquire any interests that will raise or benefit them.

§ 113. An advocate of our system would not deny this, but would probably say, “The question for us to consider is, not what is the best that in the most favourable circumstances might be attempted, but what is the best that in very restricted and by no means favourable circumstances, we are likely to get. The teachers in our schools are not self-devoting Pestalozzis, but only ordinary men and women, and still worse, ordinary boys and girls.[171] It would be of no use talking to our teachers (still less our pupil-teachers) about developing the affections and the mental or bodily powers of the children. All such talk could end in nothing but silly cant. As for character, we expect the school to cultivate in the children habits of order, neatness, industry. Beyond this we cannot go.”

And yet, though this seems reasonable, we feel that it is not quite satisfactory. If so much depends in all of us on “admiration, hope, and love,” we can hardly consider a system of education that entirely ignores them to be well adapted to the needs of human nature. If Pestalozzi was right, we must be wrong. We have never supposed the object of the school to be the development of the faculties of heart, of head, and of hand, but we have thought of nothing but learning—learning first of all to read, write, and cipher, and then in “good” schools, one or more “extra subjects” may be taken up, and a grant obtained for them. The sole object, both of managers and teachers, is to prepare for the Inspector, who comes once a year, and from an examination of five hours or so, pronounces on what the children have learnt.

§ 114. The engineer most concerned in the construction of this machine, the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, announced that there could be “no such thing as a science of education;” and as when we have no opinion of our own we always adopt the opinion of some positive person, we took his word for it. But what if the confident Mr. Lowe was mistaken? What if there is such a science, and the aim of it is that children should grow up not so much to know something as to be something? In this case we shall be obliged sooner or later to give up Mr. Lowe and to come round to Pestalozzi.[172] Science is correct inferences drawn from the facts of the universe; and where such science exists, confident assertions that it does not and cannot exist are dangerous for the confident persons and for those who follow them. Even if “there is no such thing as a science of education,” such a thing as education there is; and this is just what Mr. Lowe, and we may say the English, practically deny. They make arrangements for instruction and mete out “the grant” according to the results obtained, but they totally fail to conceive of the existence of education, education which has instruction among its various agents.

§ 115. In one respect the analogy between the educator and child and the gardener and plant, an analogy in which Pestalozzi no less than Froebel delighted, entirely breaks down. The gardener has to study the conditions necessary for the health and development of the plant, but these conditions lie outside his own life and are independent of it. With the educator it is different. Like the gardener he can create nothing in the child, but unlike the gardener he can further the development only of that which exists in himself. He draws out in the young the intelligence and the sense of what is just, the love of what is beautiful, the admiration of what is noble, but this he can do only by his own intelligence and his own enthusiasm for what is just and beautiful and noble. Even industry is in many cases caught from the teacher. In a volume of essays (originally published in the Forum), in which some men, distinguished as scholars or in literature in the United States, have given an account of their early years, we find that almost in every case they date their intellectual industry and growth from the time when they came under the influence of some inspiring teacher. Thus even for instruction and still more for education, the great force is the teacher. This is a truth which all our “parties” overlook. They wage their controversies and have their triumphs and defeats about unessentials, and leave the essentials to “crotchety educationists.” In such questions as whether the Church Catechism shall or shall not be taught, whether natural science shall or shall not figure in the time-table (without scientific teachers it can figure nowhere else), whether the parents or the Government shall pay for each child twopence or threepence a week, whether the ratepayers shall or shall not be “represented” among the Managers in “voluntary” schools, in all questions of this kind education is not concerned; and yet these are the only questions that we think about. In the end it will perhaps dawn upon us that in every school what is important for education is not the time-table but the teacher, and that so far as pupil-teachers are employed education is impossible. Elsewhere ([infra p. 476]) I have told of a man in the prime of life (he seemed between 40 and 50 years old) whose time was entirely taken up in teaching a large class of children, boys and girls, of six or seven years. He most certainly could and did educate them both in heart and mind. He made their lessons a delightful occupation to them, and he exercised over them the influence of a good and wise father. Here was the right system seen at its best. I do not say that all or even most adult teachers would have exercised so good an influence as this gentleman; but so far as they come up to what they ought to be and might be they do exercise such an influence. And this of course can be said of no pupil-teacher.

§ 116. As regards schools then, schools for the rich and schools for the poor, the great educating force is the personality of the teacher. Before we can have Pestalozzian schools we must have Pestalozzian teachers. Teachers must catch something of Pestalozzi’s spirit and enter into his conception of their task. Perhaps some of them will feel inclined to say: “Fine words, no doubt, and in a sense very true, that education should be the unfolding of the faculties according to the Divine idea; but between this high poetical theory and the dull prose of actual school-teaching, there is a great gulf fixed, and we cannot attend to both at the same time.” I know full well the difference there is between theories and plans of education as they seem to us when we are at leisure and can think of them without reference to particular pupils, and when all our energy is taxed to get through our day’s teaching, and our animal spirits jaded by having to keep order and exact attention among veritable schoolboys who do not answer in all respects to “the young” of the theorists. But whilst admitting most heartily the difference here, as elsewhere, between the actual and the ideal, I think that the dull prose of school-teaching would be less dull and less prosaic if our aim was higher, and if we did not contentedly assume that our present performances are as good as the nature of the case will admit of. Many teachers (perhaps I may say most) are discontented with the greater number of their pupils, but it is not so usual for teachers to be discontented with themselves. And yet even those who are most averse from theoretical views, which they call unpractical, would admit, as practical men, that their methods are probably susceptible of improvement, and that even if their methods are right, they themselves are by no means perfect teachers. Only let the desire of improvement once exist, and the teacher will find a new interest in his work. In part, the treadmill-like monotony so wearing to the spirits will be done away, and he will at times have the encouragement of conscious progress. To a man thus minded, theorists may be of great assistance. His practical knowledge may, indeed, often show him the absurdity of some pompously enunciated principle, and even where the principles seem sound, he may smile at the applications. But the theorists will show him many aspects of his profession, and will lead him to make many observations in it, which would otherwise have escaped him. They will save him from a danger caused by the difficulty of getting anything done in the school-room, the danger of thinking more of means than ends. They will teach him to examine what his aim really is, and then whether he is using the most suitable methods to accomplish it.

Such a theorist is Pestalozzi. He points to a high ideal, and bids us measure our modes of education by it. Let us not forget that if we are practical men we are Christians, and as such the ideal set before us is the highest of all. “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”