Essays on Educational Reformers

by Robert Hebert Quick

§ 22. Now at length there was hope for the Science of Education. This science must be based on a study of the subject on whom we have to act. According to Locke there is such variation not only in the circumstances, but also in the personal peculiarities of individuals, that general laws either do not exist or can never be ascertained. But this variation is no less observable in the human body, and the art of the physician has to conform itself to a science which is still very far from perfect. The physician, however, does not despair. He carefully avails himself of such science as we now have, and he makes a study of the human body in order to increase that science. When a few more generations have passed away, the medical profession will very likely smile at mistakes made by the old Victorian doctors. But, meantime, we profit by the science of medicine in its present state, and we find that this science has considerably increased the average duration of human life. We therefore require every practitioner to have made a scientific study of his calling, and to have had a training in both the theory and practice of it. The science of education cannot be said to have done much for us at present, but it will do more in the future, and might do more now if no one were allowed to teach before he or she had been trained in the best theory and practice we have. Since the appearance of the Emile the best educators have studied the subject on whom they had to act, and they have been learning more and more of the laws or sequences which affect the human mind and the human body. The marvellous strides of science in every other department encourages us to hope that it will make great advances in the field of education where it is still so greatly needed. Perhaps the day may come when a Pestalozzi may be considered even by his contemporaries on an equality with a Napoleon, and the human race may be willing to give to the art of instruction the same amount of time, money, thought, and energy, which in our day have been devoted with such tremendous success to the art of destruction. It is already dawning on the general consciousness that in education as in physical science “we conquer Nature by obeying her,” and we are learning more and more how to obey her.

§ 23. Rousseau’s great work was first, to expose the absurdities of the school-room, and second, to set the educator on studying the laws of nature in the human mind and body. He also drew attention to the child’s restless activity. He would also (like Locke before him), make the young learner his own teacher.

§ 24. There is another way in which the appearance of the Emile was, as the Germans say, “epoch-making.” From the time of the earliest Innovators, we have seen that “Things not Words,” had been the war-cry of a strong party of Reformers. But things had been considered merely as a superior means of instruction. Rousseau first pointed out the intimate relation that exists between children and the material world around them. Children had till then been thought of only as immature and inferior men. Since his day an English poet has taught us that in some ways the man is far inferior to the child, “the things which we have seen we now can see no more,” and that

“nothing can bring back the hour

“Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

Rousseau had not Wordsworth’s gifts, but he, too, observed that childhood is the age of strong impressions from without and that its material surroundings affect it much more acutely than they will in after life. Which of us knows as much about our own house and furniture as our children know? Still more remarkable is the sympathy children have with animals. If a cat comes into a room where there are grown people and also a child, which sees the cat first? which observes it most accurately? Now, this intimate relation of the child with its surroundings plays a most important part in its education. The educator may, if so minded, ignore this altogether, and stick to grammar, dates, and county towns, but if he does so the child’s real education will not be much affected by him. Rousseau saw this clearly, and wished to use “things” not for instruction but for education. Their special function was to train the senses.

§ 25. Perhaps it is not too much to say of Rousseau that he was the first who gave up thinking of the child as a being whose chief faculty was the faculty of remembering, and thought of him rather as a being who feels and reflects, acts and invents.

§ 26. But if the thought may be traced back to Rousseau, it was, as left by him, quite crude or rather embryonic. Since his time this conception of the young has been taken up and moulded into a fair commencement of a science of education. This commencement is now occupying the attention of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, and much may be expected from it even in the immediate future. For the science so far as it exists we are indebted mainly to the two Reformers with whom I will conclude—Pestalozzi and Froebel.

§ 27. Pestalozzi, like Comenius more than 100 years before him, conceived of education for all. “Every human being,” said he, “has a claim to a judicious development of his faculties.” Every child must go to school.

But the word school includes a great variety of institutions. The object these have in view differs immensely. With us the main object in some schools seems to be to prepare boys to compete at an early age for entrance scholarships awarded to the greatest proficients in Latin and Greek. In other schools the object is to turn the children out “good scholars” in another sense; that is, the school is held to be successful when the boys and girls acquire skill in the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and can remember a number of facts—facts of history, of geography, and even of natural science. So the common notion is that what is wanted in the way of education depends entirely on the child’s social position. There still linger among us notions derived from the literary men of the Renascence. We still measure all children by their literary and mnemonic attainments. We still consider knowledge of Latin and Greek the highest kind of knowledge. Children are sent to school that they may not be ignorant.[213] Pestalozzi, who had studied Rousseau, entirely denied all this. He required that the school-coach should be turned and started in a new direction. The main object of the school was not to teach, but to develop, not to put in but to draw out.