Amongst the first things to be aimed at in the intellectual part of education is variety of pursuit. A human being, like a tree, if it is to attain to perfect symmetry, must have light and air given to it from all quarters. This may be done without making men superficial. Scientific method may be acquired without many sciences being learnt. But one or two great branches of science must be accurately known. So, too, the choice works of antiquity may be thoroughly appreciated without extensive reacting. And passing on from mere learning of any kind, a variety of pursuits, even in what may be called accomplishments, is eminently serviceable. Much may be said of the advantage of keeping a man to a few pursuits, and of the great things done thereby in the making of pins and needles. But in this matter we are not thinking of the things that are to be done, but of the persons who are to do them. Not wealth but men. A number of one-sided men may make a great nation, though I much incline to doubt that; but such a nation will not contain a number of great men.
The very advantage that flows from division of labour, and the probable consequences that men’s future bread-getting pursuits will be more and more sub-divided, and therefore limited, make it the more necessary that a man should begin life with a broad basis of interest in many things which may cultivate his faculties and develop his nature. This multifariousness of pursuit is needed also in the education of the poor. Civilisation has made it easy for a man to brutalise himself: how is this to be counteracted but by endowing him with many pursuits which may distract him from vice? It is not that kind of education which leads to no employment in after-life that will do battle with vice. But when education enlarges the field of life-long good pursuits, it becomes formidable to the soul’s worst enemies.
MORAL EDUCATION.
In considering moral education we must recollect that there are three agents in this matter—the child himself, the influence of his grown-up friends, and that of his contemporaries. All that his grown-up friends tell him in the way of experience goes for very little, except in palpable matters. They talk of abstractions which he cannot comprehend: and the “Arabian Nights” is a truer world to him than that they talk of. Still, though they cannot furnish experience, they can give motives. Indeed, in their daily intercourse with the child, they are always doing so. For instance, truth, courage, and kindness are the great moral qualities to be instilled. Take courage, in its highest form—moral courage. If a child perpetually hears such phrases (and especially if they are applied to his own conduct), as, “What people will say,” “How they will look at you,” “What they will think,” and the like, it tends to destroy all just self-reliance in that child’s mind, and to set up instead an exaggerated notion of public opinion, the greatest tyrant of these times. People can see this in such an obvious thing as animal courage. They will avoid over-cautioning children against physical dangers, knowing that the danger they talk much about will become a bug-bear to the child which it may never get rid of. But a similar peril lurks in the application of moral motives. Truth, courage, and kindness are likely to be learnt, or not, by children, according as they hear and receive encouragement in the direction of these pre-eminent qualities. When attempt is made to frighten a child with these worldly maxims, “What will be said of you?” “Are you like such a one?” and such things, it is meant to draw him under the rule of grown-up respectability. The last thing thought of by the parent or teacher is, that such maxims will bring the child under the especial guidance of the most unscrupulous of his contemporaries. They will use ridicule and appeal to their little world, which will be his world, and ask, “What will be said” of him. There should be some stuff in him of his own to meet these awful generalities.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION.
The physical education of children is a very simple matter, too simple to be much attended to without great perseverance and resolution on the part of those who care for the children. It consists, as we all know, in good air, simple diet, sufficient exercise, and judicious clothing. The first requisite is the most important, and by far the most frequently neglected. This neglect is not so unreasonable as it seems. It arises from pure ignorance. If the mass of mankind knew what scientific men know about the functions of the air, they would be as careful in getting a good supply of it as of their other food. All the people that ever were supposed to die of poison in the middle ages, and that means nearly everybody whose death was worth speculating about, are not so many as those who die poisoned by bad air in the course of any given year. Even a slightly noxious thing, which is constant, affecting us every moment of the day, must have considerable influence; but the air we breathe is not a thing that slightly affects us, but one of the most important elements of life. Moreover, children are the most affected by impurity of air. We need not weary ourselves with much statistics to ascertain this. One or two broad facts will assure us of it. In Nottingham there is a district called Byron Ward, “the densest and worst-conditioned quarter of the town.” A table has been made by Mr. William Hawksley of the mortality of equal populations in different parts of the town:
“On comparing the diagram No. 1, relating to Park Ward, with the diagram No. 7, relating to Byron Ward, it will be seen that the heavier pressure of the causes of mortality occasions in the latter district such an undue destruction of early life, that towards 100 deaths, however occurring, Byron Ward contributes fifty per cent. more of children under five years of age than the Park Ward, for the former sends sixty children to an early grave, while the latter sends only forty.” [116a]
Mr. Hawksley, the former witness alluded to, goes on to say—
“It has been long known that, with increase of years, up to that period of life which has been denominated the second childhood, the human constitution becomes gradually more resistful, and as it were slowly hardened against the repeated attacks of those more acute disorders, incident to an inferior degree of sanitary civilisation, by which large portions of an infant population are continually overcome and rapidly swept away. From the operation of these and more extraneous influences of a disturbing character, an infant population is almost entirely exempted; and on this account it is considered that an infant population constitutes, as it were, a delicate barometer, from which we may derive more early and more certain indications of the presence and comparative force of local causes of mortality and disease than can be obtained from the more general methods of investigation usually pursued.”
The above evidence is confirmed by Mr. Toynbee:—