§ 3. There is another way in which the book may be of use. By considering the great thinkers in chronological order we see that each adds to the treasure which he finds already accumulated, and thus by degrees we are arriving in education, as in most departments of human endeavour, at a science. In this science lies our hope for the future. Teachers must endeavour to obtain more and more knowledge of the laws to which their art has to conform itself.
§ 4. It may be of advantage to some readers if I point out briefly what seems to me the course of the main stream of thought as it has flowed down to us from the Renascence.
§ 5. As I endeavoured to show at the beginning of this book, the Scholars of the Renascence fell into a great mistake, a mistake which perhaps could not have been avoided at a time when literature was rediscovered and the printing press had just been invented. This mistake was the idolatry of books, and, still worse, of books in Latin and Greek. So the schoolmaster fell into a bad theory or conception of his task, for he supposed that his function was to teach Latin and Greek; and his practice or way of going to work was not much better, for his chief implements were grammar and the cane.
§ 6. The first who made a great advance were the Jesuits. They were indeed far too much bent on being popular to be “Innovators.” They endeavoured to do well what most schoolmasters did badly. They taught Latin and Greek, and they made great use of grammar, but they gave up the cane. Boys were to be made happy. School-hours were to be reduced from 10 hours a day to 5 hours, and in those 5 hours learning was to be made “not only endurable but even pleasurable.”
But the pupils were to find this pleasure not in the exercise of their mental powers but in other ways. As Mr. Eve has said, young teachers are inclined to think mainly of stimulating their pupils’ minds and so neglect the repetition needed for accuracy. Old teachers on the other hand care so much for accuracy that they require the same thing over and over till the pupils lose zest and mental activity. The Jesuits frankly adopted the maxim “Repetition is the mother of studies,” and worked over the same ground again and again. The two forces on which they relied for making the work pleasant were one good—the personal influence of the master (“boys will soon love learning when they love the teacher,”) and one bad or at least doubtful—the spur of emulation.
However, the attempt to lead, not drive, was a great step in the right direction. Moreover as they did not hold with the Sturms and Trotzendorfs that the classics in and for themselves were the object of education the Jesuits were able to think of other things as well. They were very careful of the health of the body. And they also enlarged the task of the schoolmaster in another and still more important way. To the best of their lights they attended to the moral and religious training of their pupils. It is much to the credit of the Fathers that though Plautus and Terence were considered very valuable for giving a knowledge of colloquial Latin and were studied and learnt by heart in the Protestant schools, the Jesuits rejected them on account of their impurity. The Jesuits wished the whole boy, not his memory only, to be affected by the master; so the master was to make a study of each of his pupils and to go on with the same pupils through the greater part of their school course.
The Jesuit system stands out in the history of education as a remarkable instance of a school system elaborately thought out and worked as a whole. In it the individual schoolmaster withered, but the system grew, and was, I may say is, a mighty organism. The single Jesuit teacher might not be the superior of the average teacher in good Protestant schools, but by their unity of action the Jesuits triumphed over their rivals as easily as a regiment of soldiers scatters a mob.
§ 7. The schoolmaster’s theory of the human mind made of it, to use Bartle Massey’s simile, a kind of bladder fit only to hold what was poured into it. This pouring-in theory of education was first called in question by that strange genius who seems to have stood outside all the traditions and opinions of his age,
“holding no form of creed,