§ 36. 3rd. About teaching and learning, there is one point on which we find a consensus of great authorities extending from the least learned of writers who was probably Rousseau to the most learned who was probably Friedrich August Wolf. In one form or other these assert that there is no true teaching but self-teaching.
Past a doubt the besetting weakness of teachers is “telling.” They can hardly resist the tendency to be didactic. They have the knowledge which they desire to find in their pupils, and they cannot help expressing it and endeavouring to pass it on to those who need it, “like wealthy men who care not how they give.” But true “teaching,” as Jacotot and his disciple Joseph Payne were never tired of testifying, is “causing to learn,” and it is seldom that “didactic” teaching has this effect. Rousseau saw this clearly, and clearly pointed out the danger of didacticism. As usual he by exaggeration laid himself open to an answer that seems to refute him, but in spite of this we feel that there is valuable truth underlying what he says. “I like not explanations given in long discourses,” says he; “young people pay little attention to them and retain little from them. The things themselves! The things themselves! I shall never repeat often enough that we attach too much importance to words: with our chattering education we make nothing but chatterers.”[146] Accordingly Rousseau lays down the rule that Émile is not to learn science but to invent it (qu’il n’apprenne pas la science; qu’il l’invente); and he even expects him to invent geometry. As Émile is not supposed to be a young Pascal but only an ordinary boy with extraordinary physical development such a requirement is obviously absurd, and Herbart has reckoned it among Rousseau’s Hauptfehler (Päd. Schriften, ij., 242). The training prescribed is in fact the training of the intellectual athlete; and the trainer may put the body through its exercises much more easily than the mind. Of this the practical teacher is only too conscious, and he will accept Rousseau’s advice, if at all, only as “counsels of perfection.” Rousseau says: “Émile, obliged to learn of himself, makes use of his own reason and not that of others; for to give no weight to opinion, none must be given to authority; and the more part of our mistakes come less from ourselves than from other people. From this constant exercise there should result a vigour of mind like that which the body gets from labour and fatigue. Another advantage is that we advance only in proportion to our strength. The mind like the body carries that only which it can carry. When the understanding makes things its own before they are committed to memory, whatever it afterwards draws forth belongs to it; but if the memory is burdened with what the understanding knows nothing about we are in danger of bringing from it things which the understanding declines to acknowledge.”[147] Again he writes: “Beyond contradiction we get much more clear and certain notions of the things we learn thus of ourselves than of those we derive from other people’s instruction, and besides not accustoming our reason to bow as a slave before authority, we become more ingenious in finding connexions, in uniting ideas, and in inventing our implements, than when we take all that is given us and let our minds sink into indifference, like the body of a man who always has his clothes put on for him, is waited on by his servants and drawn about by his horses till at length he loses the strength and use of his limbs. Boileau boasted of having taught Racine to find difficulty in rhyming. Among all the admirable methods of shortening the study of the sciences we might have need that some one should give us a way of learning them with effort.”[148]
§ 37. 4th. However highly we may value our gains from the use of books we must admit that in some ways the use of books tends to the neglect of powers that should not be neglected. As Rousseau wished to see the young brought up without books he naturally looked to other means of learning, especially to learning by the eye and by the hand. Much is now said about using the hand for education, and many will agree with Rousseau: “If instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a workshop, his hands work to the advantage of his intellect: he becomes a philosopher while he thinks he is becoming simply an artisan: Au lieu de coller un enfant sur des livres, si je l’occupe dans un atelier, ses mains travaillent au profit de son esprit: il devient philosophe, et croît n’être qu’un ouvrier.” (Ém. iij., 193).
§ 38. In these essays I have done what I could to shew the best that each reformer has left us. In Rousseau’s case I have been obliged to confine myself to his words. “We attach far too much importance to words,” said Rousseau, and yet it is by words and words only that Rousseau still lives; and for the sake of his words we forget his deeds. Of the Émile Mr. Morley says: “It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage which made education one of the dark formalistic arts; and it admitted floods of light and air into tightly-closed nurseries and schoolrooms” (Rousseau, ij., 248). In the region of thought it set us free from the Renascence; and it did more than this, it announced the true nature of the teacher’s calling, “Study the subject you have to act upon.” In these words we have the starting point of the “New Education.” From them the educator gets a fresh conception of his task. We grown people have received innumerable impressions which, forgotten as they are, have left their mark behind in our way of looking at things; and as we advance in life these experiences and associations cluster around everything to which we direct our attention, till in the end the past seems to dominate the present and to us “nothing is but what is not.” But to the child the present with its revelations and the future which will be “something more, a bringer of new things,” are all engrossing. It is our business as teachers to try to realize how the world looks from the child’s point of view. We may know a great many things and be ready to teach them, but we shall have little success unless we get another knowledge which we cannot teach and can learn only by patient observation, a knowledge of “the subject to be acted on,” of the mind of our pupils and what goes on there. When we set out on this path, which was first clearly pointed out by Rousseau, teaching becomes a new occupation with boundless possibilities and unceasing interest in it. Every teacher becomes a learner, for we have to study the minds of the young, their way of looking at things, their habits, their difficulties, their likes and dislikes, how they are stimulated to exertion, how they are discouraged, how one mood succeeds another. What we need we may well devote a lifetime to acquiring; it is a knowledge of the human mind with the object of influencing it.
XV.
BASEDOW AND THE PHILANTHROPINUM.
§ 1. One of the most famous movements ever made in educational reform was started in the last century by John Bernard Basedow. Basedow was born at Hamburg in 1723, the son of a wigmaker. His early years were not spent in the ordinary happiness of childhood. His mother he describes as melancholy, almost to madness, and his father was severe almost to brutality. It was the father’s intention to bring up his son to his own business, but the lad ran away, and engaged himself as servant to a gentleman in Holstein. The master soon perceived what had never occurred to the father, viz., that the youth had very extraordinary abilities. Sent home with a letter from his master pointing out this notable discovery, Basedow was allowed to renounce the paternal calling, and to go to the Hamburg Grammar School (Gymnasium), where he was under Reimarus, the author of the “Wolfenbüttel Fragment.” In due course his friends managed to send him to the University of Leipzig to prepare himself for the least expensive of the learned professions—the clerical. Basedow, however, was not a man to follow the beaten tracks. After an irregular life he left the university too unorthodox to think of being ordained, and in 1749 became private tutor to the children of Herr von Quaalen in Holstein. In this situation his talent for inventing new methods of teaching first showed itself. He knew how to adapt himself to the capacity of the children, and he taught them much by conversation, and in the way of play, connecting his instruction with surrounding objects in the house, garden, and fields. Through Quaalen’s influence, he next obtained a professorship at Soroe, in Denmark, where he lectured for eight years, but his unorthodox writings raised a storm of opposition, and the Government finally removed him to the Gymnasium at Altona. Here he still continued his efforts to change the prevailing opinions in religious matters; and so great a stir was made by the publication of his “Philalethia,” and his “Methodical Instruction in both Natural and Biblical Religion,” that he and his family were refused the Communion at Altona, and his books were excluded, under a heavy penalty, from Lübeck.
§ 2. About this time Basedow, incited by Rousseau’s “Emile,” turned his attention to a fresh field of activity, in which he was to make as many friends as in theology he had found enemies. A very general dissatisfaction was then felt with the condition of the schools. Physical education was not attempted in them. The mother-tongue was neglected. Instruction in Latin and Greek, which was the only instruction given, was carried on in a mechanical way, without any thought of improvement. The education of the poor and of the middle classes received but little attention. “Youth,” says Raumer, “was in those days, for most children, a sadly harassed period. Instruction was hard and heartlessly severe. Grammar was caned into the memory, so were portions of Scripture and poetry. A common school punishment was to learn by heart Psalm cxix. School-rooms were dismally dark. No one conceived it possible that the young could find pleasure in any kind of work, or that they had eyes for aught besides reading and writing. The pernicious age of Louis XIV. had inflicted on the poor children of the upper class, hair curled by the barber and messed with powder and pomade, braided coats, knee breeches, silk stockings, and a dagger by the side—for active, lively children a perfect torture” (Gesch. d. Pädagogik, ii. 297). Kant gave expression to a very wide-spread feeling when he said that what was wanted in education was no longer a reform but a revolution. Here, then, was a good scope offered for innovators, and Basedow was a prince of innovators.
§ 3. Having succeeded in interesting the Danish minister, Bernstorff, in his plans, he was permitted to devote himself entirely to a work on the subject of education whilst retaining his income from the Altona Gymnasium. The result was his “Address to Philanthropists and Men of Property on Schools and Studies and their Influence on the Public Weal” (1766), in which he announces the plan of his “Elementary.”[149] In this address he calls upon princes, governments, town-councils, dignitaries of the Church, freemasons’ lodges, &c., &c., if they loved their fellow-creatures, to come to his assistance in bringing out his book. Nor did he call in vain. When the “Elementary” at length appeared (in 1774), he had to acknowledge contributions from the Emperor Joseph II., from Catherine II. of Russia, from Christian VII. of Denmark, from the Grand Prince Paul, and many other celebrities, the total sum received being over 2,000l.