Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History

by Sir Francis Darwin

Any record of education which extends fifty years back has a certain value, and my experience may serve as a stepping-stone to that of my father, of which we fortunately have an account in his own words, and these take us back to a period more than one hundred years ago.

Those of us who are inclined to despair over education as an inherent misfortune of youth, may

be encouraged by this putting down of milestones, and may almost believe that we have moved in the right direction. Whereas, to those optimists who are cheerfully and unhesitatingly educating their allotted prey of children, it may be as salutary, as a cautionary story, to realise that the same optimism ruled one hundred years ago, when the Eton latin grammar was a symbol to innumerable complacent schoolmasters of what was best in the best of all possible worlds. But the chief part of what I have to say is autobiographical, and I have only an occasional remark to make on the progress and improvement that have occurred in education.

My ignorance of educational methods may probably lead me to repeat what is well known; because what seems to me bad in my training has doubtless been recognised as such by modern teachers, nor can I hope to have anything very new to say about what seems to me to have been good.

As children, we, my brothers and sisters, were treated by our parents in a way the very reverse of the pitiless 18th and early 19th century manner—the spirit of those surprising stories such as the Purple Jar, where the child is deceived by her abominable parent. In fact, a chief characteristic of our parents’ treatment of us was their respect for our liberty and our personality. We were made to feel that we were “creatures whose opinions and thoughts were valuable to them.”

The happy relations with our elders which we enjoyed in the holidays to some extent counteracted the evil effects of going to school. The worst of a boarding-school is that it is a republic

of children, where the citizens are saturated in the traditions and conventions peculiar to themselves, and are, for more than half their lives, deprived of the saner ideals of grown-up people. Before we went to school we were taught by governesses. I cannot help wishing that we had had foreign teachers who would have taught us to speak their language—a thing that can be done so easily in childhood. I have never got over the want of fluent French and German, and I resent the fact that I should be condemned to feel like a child or a boor in the presence of foreigners. We are taught Latin and Greek because, as we are assured, they introduce us to the finest literature in the world. To most boys they do nothing of the kind, and are an intolerable burden. French and German taught by the oral methods really do introduce us to whole nations of minds that are otherwise cut off from us; and not merely minds mirrored in books, but more especially those of human beings as given in speech.

This is all very familiar, I only mention it because it is a special case of a wider question, namely: How much can be safely poured into a receptive child which he will be thankful for as he gets older? I mean, rather: What is the proportion that ought to be maintained between learning to reason, e.g., Euclid; exercising the attentive faculties, e.g., in plodding through a Latin book with a dictionary; and the more or less mechanical acquirement, as in learning by heart? Why was I not taught addition by memorising tables as in the case of multiplication? It could

have been built into the structure of my mind equally well, and would have saved much misery. It is, of course, essential that what is learned should be true. I have heard a credibly attested story of a dame-school at the beginning of last century, where class and teacher were heard chanting together: Twice 1 is 2, twice 2 is 3, twice 3 is 4, etc.

I certainly believe in learning by heart, and I am grateful for having learned many dates at school; most of them are forgotten, but enough to be of some use are retained. The worst of it is that I am as likely to know the date of the Flood as that of the Fire of London, and of the battle of Arbela as that of Worcester.