If we examine the value of science as discipline, its priority is still assured, whether for discipline of memory, or of judgment, or for moral discipline. Also, the discipline of science is superior to that of our ordinary education because of the religious culture that it gives. Doubtless, to the superstitions that pass under the name of religion, science is antagonistic; but not to the essential religion which these superstitions merely hide; doubtless, too, in much of the science that is current there is a pervading spirit of irreligion, but not in that true science which has passed beyond the superficial into the profound.
Not science, but the neglect of science, is irreligious; devotion to science is a tacit worship—a tacit recognition of worth in the things studied; and by implication in their Cause. Only the genuine man of science can truly know how utterly beyond not only human knowledge, but human conception, is the Universal Power of which Nature and Life and Thought are manifestations.
II.—Intellectual Education
While "believe and ask no questions" was the maxim of the church, it was fitly the maxim of the schools. In that age men also believed that a child's mind could be made to order, that its powers were to be imparted by the schoolmaster; that it was a receptacle into which knowledge was to be put and there built up after the teacher's idea. But now we are learning that there is a natural process of mental evolution which is not to be disturbed without injury; that we may not force on the unfolding mind our artificial forms, but that psychology, like economics, discloses to us a law of supply and demand, to which, if we would not do harm, we must conform.
The forcing system has been by many given up, and precocity is discouraged. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal. The once universal practice of learning by rote is daily falling into discredit. We are substituting principles for rules, as is exemplified in the abandonment of that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children. But of all the changes taking place, the most significant is the growing desire to make the acquirement of knowledge pleasurable rather than painful—a desire based on the more or less distinct perception that at each age the intellectual action which a child likes is a healthy one for it; and conversely. We are on the highway towards the doctrine long ago enunciated by Pestalozzi that alike in its order and its methods, education must conform to the natural process of mental evolution. Education should be a repetition of civilisation in little. Children should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as possible. The need for perpetual telling results from our stupidity, not from the child's. We drag it away from the facts in which it is interested, and which it is actively assimilating of itself. We put before it facts far too complex for it to understand, and therefore distasteful to it. By denying the knowledge it craves, and cramming it with knowledge it cannot digest, we produce a morbid state of its faculties; and a consequent disgust for knowledge in general. And having by our method induced helplessness, we make the helplessness a reason for our method.
Education of some kind should begin from the cradle. Whoever has watched with any discernment the wide-eyed gaze of the infant at surrounding objects, knows very well that education does begin thus early, whether we intend it or not; and that these fingerings and suckings of everything it can lay hold of, these open-mouthed listenings to every sound, are first steps in the series which ends in the discovery of unseen planets, the invention of calculating engines, the production of great paintings, or the composition of symphonies and operas. This activity of the faculties from the very first, being spontaneous and inevitable, the question is whether we shall supply in due variety the materials on which they may exercise themselves; and to the question so put, none but an affirmative answer can be given. Here we must take the course which psychology dictates.
What can be more manifest than the desire of children for intellectual sympathy? Mark how the infant sitting on your knee thrusts into your face the toy it holds, that you may look at it. See when it makes a creak with its wet finger on the table, how it turns and looks at you; does it again, and again looks at you; thus saying as clearly as it can—"Hear this new sound." Watch the elder children coming into the room exclaiming—"Mamma, see what a curious thing;" "Mamma, look at this;" "Mamma, look at that;" a habit which they would continue did not the silly mamma tell them not to tease her. Does not the induction lie on the surface? Is it not clear that we must conform our course to these intellectual instincts—that we must just systematise the natural process—that we must listen to all the child has to tell us about each object, and thence proceed? To tell a child this, and to show it the other, is not to teach it how to observe, but to make it a mere recipient of another's observations; a proceeding which weakens rather than strengthens its power of self-instruction.
Object lessons should be arranged to extend to things far wider and continue to a period far later than now; they should not be limited to the contents of the house, but should include those of the fields and hedges, the quarry and the seashore; they should not cease with early childhood, but should be so kept up during youth as insensibly to merge into the investigation of the naturalist and the man of science.
We are quite prepared to hear from many that all this is throwing away time and energy; and that children would be much better occupied in writing their copies and learning their pence tables, and so fitting themselves for the business of life. We regret that such crude ideas of what constitutes education, and such a narrow conception of utility, should still be prevalent. But this gross utilitarianism which is content to come into the world and quit it again without knowing what kind of a world it is, or what it contains, may be met on its own ground. It will by and by be found that a knowledge of the laws of life is more important than any other knowledge whatever—that the laws of life underlie not only all bodily and mental processes, but by implication all the transactions of the house and the street, all commerce, all politics, all morals—and that therefore without a comprehension of them, neither personal nor social conduct can be rightly regulated. It will eventually be seen, too, that the laws of life are essentially the same throughout the whole organic creation.
No one can compare the faces and manners of two boys—the one made happy by mastering interesting subjects, and the other made miserable by disgust with his studies, by consequent inability, by cold looks, by threats, by punishment—without seeing that the disposition of one is being benefited and that of the other injured. Whoever has marked the effects of success and failure upon the mind and the power of the mind over the body, will see that in the one case both temper and health are favourably affected, while in the other there is danger of permanent moroseness, of permanent timidity, and even of permanent constitutional depression.