In its essence it is quite easy to see what method the tendency of thought is likely to develop. Here, as in so many other places, etymology can help us. If we could think, whenever we talk or make plans concerning the subject, of what education really means—a drawing-out of the natural faculties of the instructed—we should always conceive more rationally of the work. There is no animal whose greatest pleasures are derived from anything else than the exercise of its faculties. Our dog, whether he jumps and tears about in glee as we take him for a walk, or sits happily by our side, his head on our knees, his wistful eyes scrutinising our face, sympathetic with every emotion, illustrates this fact. In the one case he is exercising the natural faculties of speed and vigorous agility; in the latter, the acquired and inherited faculties of mental comprehension. Shut him up in a room alone, or with an unfriendly person, and he is miserable or goes to sleep, providently accumulating energy for the next opportunity of exercise. What I am not afraid to call his mental pleasures are not less keen, if I know anything at all of dogs (who have loved many of them) than his physical pleasures; and I never had a dog in my life who would not cheerfully neglect his food to come indoors and sit with me in my library. Are children’s brains less energetic, less capable of yielding pleasure to their small proprietors than the brains of a dog? One of the mistakes that we are already beginning to find out (and consequently one of those which we may expect to have amended long before this time next century) is the tacit assumption that games are richer in pleasure than study. It isn’t the boys and girls themselves that give this tincture to school-government. Plenty of them really prefer books before balls, until they go to school; where we at once proceed to show them that we regard cricket as a sort of alleviation of their hard lot, and with football console them for their French lessons, and redress arithmetic by “rounders.” There is no reason why this should lead to any neglect of athletics. Only, athletics will be properly treated as only one of the joys of a school life that will be fulfilled of other pleasures equally absorbing.
The method which will make education agreeable instead of repulsive is part and parcel of the system on which education will be conducted, and it is only incidentally that it will subserve the concurrent sentimental tenderness which finds expression to-day in unwise use of games in themselves highly beneficial, just as elsewhere it finds expression by cultivating gluttony.[4]
The true object of instruction being to show children how to think, the intellectual exercise of thinking will be always found, as it has already long ago been found where this highly unusual method has been experimented with, to give keen pleasure to the instructed.[5]
A great deal that has been said both in regard to the excessive and in part exclusive training of memory, and in regard to the propriety of reversing the general order of tuition by proceeding from concrete facts to generalised theories instead of beginning with generalisations and illustrating these by specific instances, is, for practical reasons, hardly likely to be acted upon by our descendants. To begin with, the culture of memory is not in itself an abuse; on the contrary, it is a highly necessary feature of education. What is an abuse is the substitution of remembrance for ratiocination. Teachers in the future will be more anxious to develop the mind from within than to graft information upon it from without. But they certainly will foster the faculty called memory—or to speak more exactly, they will refrain from destroying that faculty in the way that present-day education destroys it. For as a matter of fact, the memory of a young child who has never been taught anything is invariably good, being both copious and retentive. One often hears it said that children quickly forget; but it is also the case that they very quickly remember again. An Anglo-Indian friend told me a somewhat pleasing anecdote which (though of course it does not prove) illustrates a general fact of which anyone can find proofs for himself by a little observation. Having taken home for a year’s leave his children, reared, like all other English children in India, amid native servants, and speaking quite correct Urdu instead of the barbarous dog-Hindustani which suffices for their elders, he was under the impression, when the “wicked day of destiny” arrived, and the family had to return from refreshment in England to labour in India, that they had completely forgotten the soft vernacular speech which formerly came much more easily from them than English. And his belief was confirmed when, the children having been promptly carried off by the adoring servants, an aged bearer came to him almost in tears, complaining that “Baba Sahib” could not understand him. But the next day all the little people were chattering Urdu as easily as ever. The fact is that a child’s mind concentrates itself intensely upon whatever subject interests at a given moment, and neglects everything else. By our present method of education we do all that the most malignant ingenuity could devise to destroy both this invaluable gift of mental concentration and the accompanying faculty of memory. The new teaching will industriously cultivate both. There is no doubt that the premature and unskilful use of books as implements of instruction is extremely bad for the memory; and the employment of distasteful and inconsiderate methods of teaching is equally destructive of concentration. A hundred years hence, when it has been recognised that the easiest way to teach anything is to find out how a child can be made to want to learn about it, there will be no difficulty in securing attention. Children’s minds do not, as most people suppose, tire very easily. On the contrary, they are with great difficulty fatigued. Anyone who has been so imprudent as to embark on a course of tale-telling near bedtime or near a meal hour, knows that the little people are almost incapable of being satiated. And the descendants of these little people will be just as insatiable of being taught, because we shall have found out how to make them want to be taught.
Herein is the whole keynote of the education of the future, moral as well as intellectual. We shall no longer treat good behaviour as if it were an artificial and unnatural abstinence from the true desires of the child or of man. We shall arrange that people, young and old, may wish to act rightly. The point of reform will be shifted. At present, all kinds of morality are approached on the assumption that it is requisite to persuade to an unwilling abstinence from vice, and that when the desires of the wicked have been curbed into a sort of ascetic abstemiousness prompted by fear of punishment, whether overt or implicit, a moral feat has been performed. The new morality will only be content when the subject of it would not sin if you asked him to. His moral sense will have been stoically cultivated. Obedience and the law of Thou-shalt-not will be dethroned. This law represents in the education of to-day the highest form of youthful virtue. Yet mere obedience, even where it has always been considered most valuable, namely, where it takes the shape of military discipline, has proved an utter failure; the last two great wars proved the fact. If the lamentable doggerel which enshrines the applauded self-immolation of Casabianca have not fortunately been forgotten altogether a hundred years hence, it will assuredly be quoted only as a monumental example of old-fashioned fat-headedness, even more offensive to the sense of reason than the verses themselves are to the sense of poetical taste. The Casabiancas of the next century will have been allowed—I do not say taught, because children don’t need to be taught this—to think for themselves. And no great exertion will have been required. On the contrary, it is impossible to listen for many hours to what goes on in a modern school without being impressed with the ingenious arrangements that are required in order to prevent boys and girls from thinking for themselves. The notion of their doing so seems as offensive to the present race of schoolmasters as, to Mr W. S. Gilbert’s sentinel,—
... “the prospect of a lot
Of dull M.P.s in close proximity
All thinking for themselves.”
However, the purpose of this dissertation is not so much to point out the errors of the present as to indicate the improvements of the future: and we may be sure that the prime virtues of the scholar a hundred years hence will be reasonableness and ingenuity, not dull obedience. Thus right conduct will be inculcated, not as an expression of obedience but as the only reasonable way of behaving, and the incentive to right action will be that it is also sensible action. The test of all conduct will be its results. Whatever does harm to self and others will be obviously wrong; what does good or is indifferent will be right. The standard of these things that has to be accepted all through life will be set up from the first, an enormous improvement upon the vicious system of exacting irrational obedience for the first eighteen or twenty-one years of life, and expecting this to produce reasonable self-government thereafter, which is so fruitful in the wild-oats of early adulthood. The latter could hardly be more ingeniously cultivated.
It would be extremely rash to conclude that books will not be employed as implements of instruction: but it is quite certain that they will not be employed as they now are, chiefly for the purpose of saving a schoolmaster the trouble of making his pupils think for themselves: and incidentally the abolition of this mistake will react most usefully upon memory, itself, with the exception of reasoning power, the most valuable of mental faculties. Oral teaching, accompanied in every possible place by practical illustration, will store and build up memory (as it always does when we employ it now) far more rapidly than anything else. The delight which this method of teaching confers upon the taught is enhanced by the avidity with which such subjects as chemistry, practical mechanics, and even geometry when taught with apparatus instead of with figures, are received by children of every growth.