Is it not an expensive process, that thus amasses a certain quantity of knowledge at cost of the disposition, sometimes of the ability, to add to it through the whole of life? Really, schooling is short, and, contrasted with it, life is long; but what mischiefs may not the latter experience from the former! Let us clearly conceive, once, the aversion many of our boys and girls persistently feel toward the school, and of their leaving it, at the last, with rejoicing! Are we astonished that when they have fairly escaped, frivolity is, with the young woman, too apt to replace mental culture, and with the young man, vulgarity or exclusive living for 'the main chance?' That the men and women so educated are too receptive, credulous, pliant and unstable; that in too large a degree they lack discrimination, judgment, and the good sense and executive talent which plan understandingly, and work without sacrifice of honor, manhood, or spiritual culture, to a true success? But, if our instructors could find out, or if some other could find out for them, just how and by what steps it is that the young mind engages with nature and harvests knowledge, and if they should see, therefore, how to strike in better with the current of the young, knowing and thinking, to move with it, enlarge, direct and form it aright, properly insuring that the mind under their charge shall do its own work, and hence advance by consecutive and comprehended steps, we ask with confidence whether much of the notorious short-comings now manifest in the results of our patient efforts might not be replaced by an approach toward an intellectual activity, furnishing, completeness, and bent, more worthy of the name and the idea of education? We are not alone in questioning the tendencies of existing methods. Other pens have raised the note of alarm. Speaking on the character of the product of the English schools, Faraday says, 'The whole evidence appears to show that the reasoning faculties [mark, it is here the failure occurs, and here that it shows itself], in all classes of the community, are very imperfectly and insufficiently developed—imperfectly, as compared with the natural abilities, insufficiently, when considered with reference to the extent and variety of information with which they are called upon to deal.' Does not this strong language find equally strong warrant in current facts of individual conduct and of our social life?
That there is yet no recognized complete method in, and no ascertained science of education, the latest writings on the subject abundantly reiterate and confirm. The best of our annual School Reports, and the most recent treatises,—among which, notwithstanding the abatement we must make for their having been, through adventitious circumstances, pushed in our country to a sudden and not wholly merited prominence, Sir. Spencer's republished essays may be named,—while they acknowledge some progress in details, disclose an undertone of growing conviction of the incompetency and unsatisfactoriness of our present modes of teaching and training. The Oswego School Report, speaking of primary education, tells us 'There has been too much teaching by formulas;' and that 'We are quite too apt, in the education of children, to "sail over their heads," to present subjects that are beyond their comprehension,' etc. Its way of escape 'out of the rut' is by importation into our country of the object-lesson system, as improved from the Pestalozzian original through the labors of Mr. Kay, now Sir J.K. Shuttleworth, and his co-laborers, of the Home and Colonial Infant and Juvenile School Society, London. In the report of Mr. Henry Kiddle, one of the four making up the collective School Report of the City of New York for 1861, the radical error of our present teachers is very forcibly characterized, where the danger of the teachers is pointed out as that of becoming 'absorbed in the mechanical routine of their office, losing sight of the end in their exclusive devotion to what is only the means—teaching the THING, but failing to instruct the PERSON—eager to pour in knowledge, but neglecting to bring out mind.' Is there not indicated in these words a real and a very grave defect of the manner in which subjects are now presented, studied, recited, and finished up in our schools? We think there is. And then, what is the effect of this study and teaching, with so much less thought toward the end than about the material?—what the result of this overlooking of the mind, the individuality, the person?—what the fruitage, at last, of having given so much time to the 'finishing up' of arithmetic, geography, and the rest, as to have failed to bring out the mind that was dealing with these topics, and is hereafter to have so many others to deal with? The physiologists have to tell us of a certain ugly result, occurring only in rare instances in the bodily organization, such that in a given young animal or human form the developing effort ceases before completion of the full structure; the individual remaining without certain fingers or limbs, sometimes without cranium or proper brain. They name this result one of 'arrest of development.' Is it not barely possible that our studies and recitations are yet in general so mal-adapted to the habitudes of the tender brain and opening faculties of childhood, as not merely often to allow, but even to inflict on the intellectual and moral being of the child a positive arrest of development? And if it be possible, what question can take precedence of one concerning the means of averting such a mischief? Pestalozzi intuitively saw and deeply felt the existence of this evil in his day, when, we may admit, it was somewhat more glaring than now. But Mr. Spencer truly characterizes Pestalozzi as, nevertheless, 'a man of partial intuitions, a man who had occasional flashes of insight, rather than a man of systematic thought;' as one who 'lacked the ability logically to co-ordinate and develop the truths he from time to time laid hold of;' and, at the same time, he accredits the great modern leader with a true idea of education, 'the due realization of [which] remains to be achieved.' How doubly important every rational attempt to achieve such realization—every well-considered effort to improve the method of the studies and the lessons—becomes but too apparent when we note the early age at which, as a rule, pupils must leave the schools, and the consequent brief space within which to evoke the faculties and to establish right intellectual habitudes. As an illustration drawn from the cities, where of course the school period is soonest ended, take the incidental fact disclosed by Mr. Randall in the New York School Report, that in that city the course of studies must be so framed as to allow of its completion, with many, at the preposterously early age of fourteen years—really the age at which study and mental discipline in the best sense just begin to be practicable!
In all directions, in the educational world, we are struck with the feeling and expression of a great need, though the questions as to just what it is, and just how to be met, have not been so distinctly answered. Let us agree with Mr. Currie, that 'Practical teaching can not be learned from books, even from the most exact "photographing" of lessons: it must be learned, like any other art or profession, by imitation of good models, and by practice under the eye of a master.' Yet it is true, however paradoxical the statement may appear, that practical teaching will gain quite as much when the school-books shall have been cast into the right form and method, as when all the teachers shall have been obliged to imitate good models, in a system of sound normal and model schools. What has given to the teaching of geometry its comparatively high educating value through centuries, and in the hands of teachers of every bent, caliber, and culture? What but the well-nigh inevitable, because highly perfected and crystalline method of one book—Euclid's Elements? Doubtless we want 'live' men and women, and those trained to their work, to teach: quite as imperatively we then want the right kind of text-books, in the pupils' hands, with which to carry forward their common work. If mind is the animating spirit, and knowledge the shapeless matter, still method—and to the pupil largely the method of the books—is the organizing force or form under which the knowledge is to be organized, made available and valuable. We shall suffer quite as much from any lack of the best form, as through lack of the best matter, or of the most earnest spirit. In education, the teacher is the fluent element, full of present resources; the book should be the fixed element, always bringing back the discursive faculties to the rigid line of thought and purpose of the subject. We have now the fluent element in better forwardness and command than the fixed. We have much of the spirit; an almost overwhelming supply of the matter; but the ultimate and best form is yet largely wanting, and being so, it is now our most forcible and serious want.
But, rightly understood, all that we have said in reference to the short-comings of our modes of educating the young, constitutes by no necessity any sort of disparagement of teachers, or of the conductors of our school system. If a re-survey of the ground seems to show very much yet to be done, it is in part but the necessary result of an enlarging comprehension as to what, all the while, should have been done. It is by looking from an eminence that we gain a broader prospect, and coincidently receive the conviction of a larger duty. Much that we deplore in present methods is the best to which investigation has yet conducted us, or that the slow growth of a right view among the patrons of schools will allow. Then, how hard it is to foresee, in any direction of effort, the effects our present appliances and plans shall be producing a score of years hence, or in the next generation—hardest of all to those whose work is directly upon that extremely variable quantity, mind! And in what other human business, besides that of education, are there not in like manner remissnesses and errors to point out? Justice, in truth, requires the acknowledgment that probably no other body of men and women can take precedence of the teaching class, in devotion to their work, in self-sacrifice, or, indeed, in willingness to adopt the new when it shall also commend itself to them as serviceable; while, in a world of rough, material interests and successes, like ours, the teacher's avocation still remains by far underpaid, and by parents, and even by the very pupils on whom its benefits are conferred, too rarely appreciated at anything like its just deserts.
If further extenuation of present short-comings should be deemed needful, the history of science—and let us not forget that this history is almost wholly a very recent one—presents it in abundant force. Though practical arts have led to sciences, yet they have never advanced far until after they have felt the reactive benefits of the sciences springing from them. Finally, in its highest phases, the art becomes subordinated to the science; thenceforth, the former can approach perfection only as the latter prepares its way. Education has advanced beyond this turning point: the art is henceforward dependent on the sciences. But a science of education is an outgrowth from the science of mind; and among sciences, the latter is one of the latest and most difficult. Thus, our investigations result, not in casting blame upon educators, but in revealing, we may say, what is still the intellectual 'situation' of the most cultivated and advanced nations. We have our place still, not at any sort of consummation, but at a given stage in a progress. And still, as ever in the past, the things that in reality most closely touch our interests are farthest removed from our starting-points of sense and reason, and by a necessity of the manner and progress of our knowing, are longest in being found. And in this we have at least the assurance that the perfection of our race is to occur by no sudden bound or transformation, but by a toilsome and patient insight and growth.
Granting, however, all that has now been said in palliation of existing defects in education, that the whole business is a thing remote from immediate interests, and not less so from immediate perceptions and reasonings—a thing that, to all eyes capable of seeing in it something more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic, begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy distance, obscure and incomprehensible—granting all this, and yet any one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process, that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the actually existing indifference about questions as to the method or methods by which the work can most fully and satisfactorily be accomplished. We have enacted laws, built school-houses, provided libraries, employed teachers, and in a tolerable degree insisted on the attendance of pupils, duly equipped with treatises of knowledge. We have lavished money on a set of instrumentalities, more or less vaguely considered requisite to insure qualification of the young for active life, and the perpetuity of the national virtue and liberty. What we, in America, however, have least essayed and most needed, has been to get beneath the surface of the great educational question; to look less after plans of school buildings, and the schemes of school-districts and funds, and more into the structure of the lessons and studies, and the relationships, applications, and value of the ideas secured or attempted during the daily sessions of the school classes. It will be a great day for us, when our principals and schoolmasters cease to put forward so prominently, at the end of the quarter or term, its smartest compositions and declamations, and when the over-generous public shall begin to attend on 'examinations' with a less allowance of eyes and ears, and a more vigorous and active use of the discriminating and judging powers of their own minds. In the externals of education, England, France, and Germany must take rank after some of the States of our country; but in the matter of seeking the right interior qualities and tendencies of instruction, they have been in advance of us; though just now the anti-progressive spirit of their governments is interposing itself to hinder the largest practicable results by the schools, and to what extent it will emasculate them of their best qualities, time only can show. Among our teaching class, the apathy is not confined to the ill-rewarded incumbents of the lower positions; with rare exceptions, it is even more decided at the other extreme of the scale. Of all the gentlemen holding place in our over-numerous college faculties, and commanding, one would expect, the very passes to the terra incognita of the human soul, how few seem disposed to prove their individual faculties by any thoroughgoing and successful incursions into unknown regions of the psychologic and pedagogic realm! The spirit of this should-be influential and leading class among us is one of serene assent in the iteration of the old steps, with of course some minor improvements, but with no attempts at a grand investigation and synthesis, such as gave to philosophy her new method, and to the world her growing fruitage of physical sciences.
If proof were needed of the comparative apathy under which we labor in respect to activities and progress in the more abstract and higher planes of intellectual effort, we find it in the contrast between the rewards meted out to the successful in this and in more material fields, in the general estimation awarded to the two classes of workers, and in the present expressions of the public bereavement when leading representatives of the two classes are removed from the scenes of their labors. Compare the quiet with which the ordinary wave of business interests and topic closed almost immediately over the announcement of the death of Horace Mann, with the protracted eulogy and untiring reminiscence of person, habits, work, and success, that, after the decease of William H. Prescott, kept the great wave of current topics parted for weeks—as if another Red Sea were divided, and the spirit of the historian, lingering to the chanting of solemn requiems, should pass over it dry-shod! For the great historian this was indeed no excess of honor, because grand human natures are worthy of all our praises; but was there not a painful want of respect and requital to the equally great educator? Prescott wrote admirable volumes, and in our libraries they will be 'a joy forever.' Horace Mann secured admirable means of instruction, made admirable schools, awakened to their best achievements the souls of our children; and his work is one to be measured by enlarging streams of beauty and joy that flow down through the generations. Would that, in the midst of so much justice as we willingly render to self-sacrifice and worth, we could less easily forget those whose labor it is directly to fit mankind for a higher nobleness, and for higher appreciation of it when enacted in their behalf!