Essays on Educational Reformers

by Robert Hebert Quick

13. First impressions and early habits are the most important, because they are the most enduring.

14. What the learner discovers by mental exertion is better known than what is told him.

15. Learners should not do with their instructor what they can do by themselves, that they may have time to do with him what they cannot do by themselves.

16. The monitorial principle multiplies the benefits of public instruction. By teaching we learn.

17. The more concentrated is the professor’s teaching, the more comprehensive and efficient his instruction.

18. In a class the time must be so employed that no learner shall be idle, and the business so contrived, that learners of different degrees of advancement shall derive equal advantage from the instructor.

19. Repetition must mature into a habit what the learner wishes to remember.

20. Young persons should be taught only what they are capable of clearly understanding, and what may be useful to them in after-life.”

A. What do you think of these? E. I confess they bring into my mind the advice given to a learner in billiards: “When in doubt cannon and pocket the red.” First catch your “Method of Nature,” as Mrs. Glass might have said. As to No. 10 again, who shall say what “all the faculties” are? And is smelling a faculty that must be equally exercised with seeing? When the young Marcels went to Paris I fancy they found there far more that was worth seeing than worth smelling. A. After what you have said about pupil-teachers I infer you do not advocate the “monitorial principle”? E. Not exactly. “By teaching we learn.” This is very true. But if we can’t teach we can’t learn by teaching. A. But may we not gain by trying to teach? And short of teaching a good deal may be done by monitors. E. If by the monitorial principle we mean “Encourage the young to make themselves useful” it is a capital principle.

Words and Things.—A. In your Sturm Essay you say: “The schoolmaster’s art always has taken, and I suppose, in the main, always will take for its material the means of expression.” Surely the signs of the times do not indicate this. Have not the tongue and the pen had their day, and is not the schoolmaster turning his attention from them, not perhaps to the brain, but certainly to the eye and the hand? It has at length occurred to him to ask like Shylock “Hath not a boy eyes? Hath not a boy hands?” And as it seems certain that the boy has these organs, the schoolmaster wants to find employment for them. Till now no scholastic use has been found for the eye except reading, or for the hand except making strokes with the pen and receiving them from the cane. But it will be different in the future. Words have had their day. Things will have theirs. E. You may be right; but be careful in your use of terms. As is usually the case with “cries,” if we want a meaning we may take our choice. The contrast between “words” and “things” is sometimes between studies like grammar, logic, and rhetoric on the one hand, and, on the other, Realien, studies which in some way have Things for their subject. Then again we have words as the vocal or visible symbols of ideas contrasted with the ideas themselves. Those who complain of the time spent on words are thinking, some of them, of the time spent on the art of expression, others of the time given to symbols which do not, to the learner, symbolize anything. But in our day Words and Things are supposed to represent the study of literature and the study of natural science. At present there is a rage for Things, but it is a little early to adjudicate on the comparative claims of, say Homer and James Watt, on the gratitude of mankind. The great book of our day on Education, Herbert Spencer’s, would make short work with “words”; and yet two School Commissions, the Public Schools Commission of 1862, and the Middle Schools Commission of 1867 have defended “words.” The first of these says: “Grammar is the logic of common speech, and there are few educated men who are not sensible of the advantages they gained, as boys, from the steady practice of composition and translation, and from their introduction to etymology. The study of literature is the study, not indeed of the physical, but of the intellectual and moral world we live in, and of the thoughts, lives, and characters of those men whose writings or whose memories succeeding generations have thought it worth while to preserve.” The Commissioners on Middle Schools express a similar opinion:—“The ‘human’ subjects of instruction, of which the study of language is the beginning, appear to have a distinctly greater educational power than the ‘material.’ As all civilisation really takes its rise in human intercourse, so the most efficient instrument of education appears to be the study which most bears on that intercourse, the study of human speech. Nothing appears to develop and discipline the whole man so much as the study which assists the learner to understand the thoughts, to enter into the feelings, to appreciate the moral judgments of others. There is nothing so opposed to true cultivation, nothing so unreasonable, as excessive narrowness of mind; and nothing contributes to remove this narrowness so much as that clear understanding of language which lays open the thoughts of others to ready appreciation. Nor is equal clearness of thought to be obtained in any other way. Clearness of thought is bound up with clearness of language, and the one is impossible without the other. When the study of language can be followed by that of literature, not only breadth and clearness, but refinement becomes attainable. The study of history in the full sense belongs to a still later age: for till the learner is old enough to have some appreciation of politics, he is not capable of grasping the meaning of what he studies. But both literature and history do but carry on that which the study of language has begun, the cultivation of all those faculties by which man has contact with man.” (Middle Schools Report, vol. i, c. iv, p. 22.) As Matthew Arnold says, in comparing two things it is “a kind of disadvantage” to be totally ignorant about one of them; and I labour under this disadvantage in comparing literature and science. But I own I do not expect the ultimate victory will be with those who may kill, or even cure or carry, the body, and after that have no more that they can do. Milton says of fine music, that it “brings all heaven before our eyes.” Similarly fine literature can at least bring all earth and its inhabitants, and the best thoughts and actions the world has known. I remember Matthew Arnold in conversation dwelling on the difference it makes to us what we read. Surely one of the great things education should do is to enable and to accustom the thoughts of the young to follow the guidance which is offered us in “the words of the wise.”