“Nor, to say something particularly on this subject, can any sufficient reason be given why the weaker sex [sequior sexus, literally the later or following sex, is his phrase, borrowed from Apuleius, and, though the phrase is usually translated the inferior sex, it seems to have been chosen by Comenius to avoid that implication] should be wholly shut out from liberal studies whether in the native tongue or in Latin. For equally are they God’s image; equally are they partakers of grace, and of the Kingdom to come; equally are they furnished with minds agile and capable of wisdom, yea, often beyond our sex; equally to them is there a possibility of attaining high distinction, inasmuch as they have often been employed by God Himself for the government of peoples, the bestowing of wholesome counsels on Kings and Princes, the science of medicine and other things useful to the human race, nay even the prophetical office, and the rattling reprimand of Priests and Bishops [etiam ad propheticum munus, et increpandos Sacerdotes Episcoposque, are the words; and as the treatise was prepared for the press in 1638 one detects a reference, by the Moravian Brother in Poland to the recent fame of Jenny Geddes, of Scotland]. Why then should we admit them to the alphabet, but afterwards debar them from books? Do we fear their rashness? The more we occupy their thoughts, the less room will there be in them for rashness, which springs generally from vacuity of mind.”
[74] Translated by Daniel Benham as The School of Infancy. London, 1858.
[75] Here Comenius seems to be thinking of the intercourse of children when no older companion is present; Froebel made more of the very different intercourse when their thoughts and actions are led by some one who has studied how to lead them. Children constantly want help from their elders even in amusing themselves. On the other hand, it is only the very wisest of mortals who can give help enough and no more. Self-dependence may sometimes be cultivated by “a little wholesome neglect.”
[76] Comical and at the same time melancholy results follow. In an elementary school, where the children “took up” geography for the Inspector, I once put some questions about St. Paul at Rome. I asked in what country Rome was, but nobody seemed to have heard of such a place. “It’s geography!” said I, and some twenty hands went up directly: their owners now answered quite readily, “In Italy.”
[77] “A talent for History may be said to be born with us, as our chief inheritance. In a certain sense all men are historians. Is not every memory written quite full of annals...? Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate.” (Carlyle on History. Miscellanies.)
[78] South Kensington, which controls the drawing of millions of children, says precisely the opposite, and prescribes a kind of drawing, which, though it may give manual skill to adults, does not “afford delight” to the mind of children.
[79] “Generalem nos intendimus institutionem omnium qui homines nati sunt, ad omnia humana.... Vernaculæ (scholæ) scopus metaque erit, ut omnis juventus utriusque sexus, intra annum sextum et duodecimum seu decimum tertium, ea addoceatur quorum usus per totam vitam se extendat.” I quote this Latin from the excellent article Coménius (by several writers) in Buisson’s Dictionnaire. It is a great thing to get an author’s exact words. Unfortunately the writer in the Dictionnaire follows custom and does not give the means of verifying the quotation. Comenius in Latin I have never seen except in the British Museum.
[80] In Sermon on Charity Schools, A.D. 1745. The Bishop points out that “training up children is a very different thing from merely teaching them some truths necessary to be known or believed.” He goes into the historical aspect of the subject. As since the days of Elizabeth there has been legal provision for the maintenance of the poor, there has been “need also of some particular legal provision in behalf of poor children for their education; this not being included in what we call maintenance.” “But,” says the Bishop, “it might be necessary that a burden so entirely new as that of a poor-tax was at the time I am speaking of, should be as light as possible. Thus the legal provision for the poor was first settled without any particular consideration of that additional want in the case of children; as it still remains with scarce any alteration in this respect.” And remained for nearly a century longer. Great changes naturally followed and will follow from the extension of the franchise; and another century will probably see us with a Folkschool worthy of its importance. By that time we shall no longer be open to the sarcasm of “the foreign friend:” “It is highly instructive to visit English elementary schools, for there you find everything that should be avoided.” (M. Braun quoted by Mr. A. Sonnenschein. The Old Code was in force.)
[81] “Adhuc sub judice lis est.” I find the editor of an American educational paper brandishing in the face of an opponent as a quotation from Professor N. A. Calkins’ “Ear and Voice Training”: “The senses are the only powers by which children can gain the elements of knowledge; and until these have been trained to act, no definite knowledge can be acquired.” But Calkins says, “act, under direction of the mind.”
[82] “What do you learn from ‘Paradise Lost’? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upward—a step ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge from first to last carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten.” I have met with this as a quotation from De Quincey.