To secure, therefore, so great an end: First, find—the perfect educational method! The recipe is brief; the labor it imposes is more than Herculean. To measure it, we should have to find the ratio in which mind transcends matter, or that in which the broad generalizations of genius in the materials of science surpass the poor conceptions that the wild Australian must almost utter audibly in his own ear to realize that he at all possesses them.
In the 5,865 years which the most unquestioned belief accords to the history of man on our planet, could we suppose the average duration of life throughout equal to that of a generation now, there would have been time for 177 generations of working, planning, inventive men—of men desiring at each period the best they could conceive of, and framing the best schemes they were capable of to attain it. Here has been space for the slow rise and fall of nation after nation,—vast solitary tides heaving at long intervals the face of a wide, living, sullen sea: and history reports that the nations have actually risen, flourished, and fallen. Here has been space for exquisite triumphs of art; for the late birth, and nevertheless large progress, of the sciences concerned about phenomena of physical nature; the art triumphs have been achieved, and the germs of sciences are in our possession. Here has been space for the multiplication, upon all imaginable themes, of books, to a number and volume utterly beyond the powers of the most prolonged and assiduous life even to peruse; and the books crowd our alcoves, and meet us wherever men are wont to make their abode or transit. Here has been space for the organization, though so long impracticable and late conceived, of a system of daily diffusion of intelligence, and to such a pitch as almost to bring the world freshly photographed to our eyes with each returning sun; and, lo! the photographs are here; they await us at the breakfast or the counting table. Here has been space for the springing up among the people, at distances of years or centuries, of profound educating intellects, marked by clear insight, large human love, and patient self-sacrifice, and contributing to the growth of humanity by worthy examples, and by propounding successively more and more rational modes for the informing and developing of youthful minds; and, see! Confucius, Socrates and Plato, Petrarch, Bacon, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Père Girard, Arnold of Rugby, and Horace Mann—to make no mention of many co-laborers among the dead, and earnest successors among the living—stepping from their niches in the vanishing corridors of history, lay at our feet the treasures accumulated through their patient and clear thought and their faithful experience.
Will it then readily be believed—and yet it is unquestionably true—that, to this hour, neither the schools nor the teachers can be found that are in possession and practice of a well-defined, positively guiding, and always trustworthy method of intellectual, and other means and steps by which to conduct and consummate the education of our children? Note, we do not here declare the want of the true and universal method of educating, if there can be such a thing; but we distinctly assert that no school and no living teacher employs or conforms to any well-defined, positive, and, in and for its purposes, completed method of educating the young; nor, since this latter is a supposition better pleasing certain critically-minded gentlemen, have we in anything like clear delineation and positive practice the several methods that may be imagined requisite for minds of varying bent and capacity. If we sum up in one word the most pervading, constant, and obvious characteristic of our schools, and of the teaching and the learning in them to this day, that word must be, immethodical. Although admitting that the education of the young should distinctly embrace the four departments of a training, physical, intellectual, moral, and social, yet, for the sake of clearness in our discussion and its results, not less than through the necessities of a restricted space, we shall here confine our remarks wholly to education in its intellectual aspect.
To move, for each subject, and for each part of it essayed, always along the right way, and by the true character and order of steps,—that is the thing to be desired, and which is, as yet, unattained. As a consequence, the prosecution of studies is by attempts and in ways that are generally imperfect, at best make-shift or provisional, often radically erroneous or worthless. Doubtless, the defects in method are now less glaring and influential at the two extremes of the sensibly-conducted infant school, and the well-appointed and leisurely collegiate course. There is no true study that is not what the origin of the word implies—STUDIUM, a work of zeal, fondness, eager desire, voluntary endeavor, interest. Such study has two essential characteristics; where these are wanting, study does not exist; the appearance of it is a sham; and though results disconnected and partial are attained, real acquisition is meager, and apparent progress deceptive.
Of these characteristics, the first is what the word directly expresses—zealous exertion on the part of the student's own intellectual powers, a zeal literally pre-venting all other incentives, or, at the least, subordinating them, through pure love of finding out that which is new and curious, or true. In two words, this first essential of study, and fraught with all the desirable results of study, is genuine INTELLECTUAL WORK. It is the nisus of the intelligent principle to bring itself into ascertained and well-ordered relations with the facts, agencies, and uses of nature, alike in her physical and spiritual domains. The bright-minded boy or girl who may not comprehend the feeling or thought when so uttered, nevertheless knows it, and, for his or her range of effort, as keenly as does the adult explorer.
But, when a mind thus works, the truth that it can never advance beyond missing or unfound links in the chain of thought does not need to be taught to it. The impossibility of so doing has become a matter of experience and of certain conviction. The mathematician knows, that, beyond that form of his equation containing an actual mis-step, or a positively irresoluble expression, all subsequent forms or values involving that step or expression are vitiated, and the results they seem to show substantially worthless. Now, every actually working mind, and at every stage, from schoolboy perplexities over algebraic signs, up to philosophic ventures in quest of one remove further of solid ground, in respect to the interrelations of physical forces, or the law of development of organized forms, finds itself in precisely the predicament of the mathematician: it feels no footing and accomplishes no advance beyond that link in the chain of fact and thought, which, to its comprehension, stands as uncertain, erroneous, wanting, or inexplicable. This is so from the very nature of our knowing faculties and of knowledge. The true intellectual worker, encountering interruption through any of these conditions, goes back to view his difficulty from a better vantage ground, or attempts to approach it from either side, or, failing these resources, bows to the necessity, and suffers no harm, other than stoppage and loss of time. Thus, the second characteristic of true study is in the rigidly natural and unfailing CONSECUTION of the steps and processes by which the intellectual advance is made. A mind so advancing never flatters itself of being able to grasp that which, in the nature of knowledge, must be a consequent truth, until the antecedent or antecedents german to the question in hand have first been possessed by it. But in our schools, how vastly much is supposed to be taught, in which consequents come before antecedents, or are promiscuously jumbled up with them, or assert themselves, without so much as the grace to say to antecedents of any sort, 'By your leave.' Obviously, however, such could not be the character of so much of our teaching, did not the character of most of our books for schools exactly correspond with it. And the books do correspond: they not only give to a faulty teaching its cue, but, now that the theory of education is being so much discussed, and in good degree improved, they constitute one of the most influential causes of the almost hopeless lagging of its practice.
Now, how is it that pupils get on at all with such lessons and such books? The explanation is a simple one; but the consequences it is fraught with are not trifling. The simple fact is, pupils are not yet allowed to study (in the best sense and manner of that process) the subjects they are prosecuting. When, now, they undertake in earnest to study, they are but too constantly confused and delayed by the no-method of the treatises they are being carried through. In a course of earnest intellectual work, the pupil must too often, with his present aids, become aware of absence of comprehension; he is ever and anon brought to stand still and cast about for the unsupplied preliminary facts and truths, for the unhinted hypotheses and inferences, which his situation and previous study do not enable him to supply, but which are necessary to a comprehension of the results set down for him to deal with. Barren results, per se, our learners are now too much required to ingest; and such they are expected to assimilate into intellectual life and power! As well feed a boy on bare elements of tissue—carbon, sulphur, oxygen, and the rest; or, yet more charitably, dissect out from his allowance of tenderloin, lamb, or fowl, a due supply of ready-made nerve and muscular fiber, introduce and engraft these upon the nerve and muscle he has already acquired, and then assure our protegé, that, as the upshot of our masterly provision for his needs, we expect him to become highly athletic and intellectual—that so he is to evolve larger streams of muscular energy and more vivid flashes of spiritual force!
As it is, we too nearly put the pupil's intellect asleep by our false method; and he endures it because of his unnatural condition. He thinks he 'gets on' with it; and in an imperfect way and degree does so. Rarely, we find, does such a one get so far as into the 'conics;' and he is not certain to be in the habit of reading reviews: if we were sure, however, that he could comprehend and would meet with our simile, we would say to him, that the tardy inclination up which he now plods painfully, must, if graphically represented, be shown by an oblique line descending, in fact, below the curve of his possibilities, more rapidly even than it ascends above the horizontal cutting through the point of his setting out. True, with pupils who are spontaneously active-minded from the first, or who at some point in their course become positively awakened to brain-work, very much of the repressive influence of imperfect methods is prevented or overcome. The number of those so fortunate is doubtless small in the comparison. The few who would know, by a necessity as imperative as that by which they must feed, and sleep, and probably toil with hands or head for subsistence, are able to supplement many of the deficiencies, and supersede some erroneous processes of our methods, by the play of their own powers of investigation upon and about their subject. To these, a false method can bring perplexity and delay, but not repression nor veritable intellectual torpor.
We assert, then, that from a course or manner of instruction from which those characteristics of true study—real work of the learner's faculties, and a just consecution of steps—are largely omitted or excluded, the best sort of intellectual education can not, in the majority of instances, accrue. On the other hand, the method embodying these characteristics must present that unity, certainty, and guiding force hinted at in the outset. Concisely summed up, it is a method proceeding throughout by discovery, or, as we may say, by re-discovery of the truths and results to be acquired in each department of knowledge undertaken by the learner. In the absence of the one true method of intellectual advance, what should we expect but a confusion of clashing, imperfect, or tentative processes of instruction? He who could, to-day, ciceroned by some pedagogic Asmodeus, visit one hundred of our schools, or listen successively to a recitation on a given topic, conducted by one hundred qualified and faithful instructors, would find the methods and no-methods of introducing to the century of classes the truths of this self-same subject to be—and we do not mean in the personal element, which ought to vary, but in the radical substance and order of the theme—quite as numerous as the workmen observed; in fact, a conflicting and confusing display. Now, do causes, in any realm of being, forbear to produce fruit in effects? Are the laws of psychologic sequence less rigid and certain than those laws of physical sequence which determine in material nature every phenomenon, from planet-paths in space to the gathering of dew-drops on a leaf? If it were so, falsity or confusion in intellectual method might be pronounced a thing of trifling import, or wholly indifferent. But such suppositions are the seemings only of postulates floating through the brains of Ignorance or Un-heed, who really postulate nothing at all. If, on the contrary, we admit this inflexible relation of cause and result in the mental, as well as in the material world, and if we admit also that our school-methods are yet fragmentary, varying and tentative, then we are compelled to the conclusion, that at least the greater number of our schools are falling short, in the time and with the outlay invested, of doing their best and largest work, while in very many of our schools there must be steadily going forward a positive and potent mis-education!
If it be urged that these are in a degree deductive conclusions, let them be submitted to the test of fact. At least two important circumstances, it is admitted, will come in to complicate the inquiry: first, one purpose of school training is to divert the forming mind in a degree from sense toward thought, the latter being a less observable sort of product than that curiosity and store of facts attendant on activity of the merely perceptive powers; secondly, there is the growing absorption of the mental powers with increase of age in the practical, in meeting the necessities of life, which more and more displaces intellectual activity as a set pursuit, and leaves it to be manifested rather in the means than the ends, rather in the quality than in the products of one's thinking, and, at the best, rather as an embellishment than as the business of a career. And yet, in the mind which has passed through a proper school-training, there should be apparent certain decided qualities and results, which are manifested as, and as often as, opportunity for their exercise presents itself. The schooled mind should surely not possess a less active curiosity to observe and to know than did the same mind before entering school, but even a stronger, more self-directed, purposive and efficient zeal in such direction. Intellectual vivacity and point, clearness of conception, and truthfulness of generalization and of inference,—all these should appear in more marked degree, along with the increased sobriety and judgment, and the improved facility of practical adaptation, which properly characterize maturity of mind and habit. Now, we suggest the careful observation of any number of children, not yet sent to school, and that are favored with ordinarily sensible parents, and ordinarily happy homes; and then, the equally careful study of a like number who have just emerged from their school course, or have fairly entered on the business of life; and we warn the really acute and discriminating observer to look forward (in the majority of instances) to a disheartening result from his investigation! We are convinced that the net product of our immensely expansive, patient, and ardently sought schooling will, in a large proportion of all the cases, be found to consist in the imperfect acquirement and uncertain tenure of knowledge, upon a few rudimentary branches, often without definite understanding or habit of applying even so much to its uses, and usually without the conception or desire to make it the point of departure for life-long acquisition; and all this accompanied, too often, with actual loss of that spontaneous intellectual activity which began to manifest itself in the child, and which should have been fruiting now in, at the least, some degree of sound and true intellectuality. So, we are still left to expect mainly of Nature not only the germs of capacity, but the maturing of them; the latter, a work which Education surely ought to be competent to. Meanwhile, like a wearied and fretted pedagogue, Education complains of the bad materials Nature gives her, when she ought to be questioning whether she has yet learned to bring out the excellence of the material she has.