Your affectionate
W. WORDSWORTH. [34]
Of the Same to the Same,
MY DEAR SIR,
I have taken a folio sheet to make certain minutes upon the subject of EDUCATION.
As a Christian preacher your business is with man as an immortal being. Let us imagine you to be addressing those, and those only, who would gladly co-operate with you in any course of education which is most likely to ensure to men a happy immortality. Are you satisfied with that course which the most active of this class are bent upon? Clearly not, as I remember from your conversation, which is confirmed by your last letter. Great principles, you hold, are sacrificed to shifts and expedients. I agree with you. What more sacred law of nature, for instance, than that the mother should educate her child? yet we felicitate ourselves upon the establishment of infant-schools, which is in direct opposition to it. Nay, we interfere with the maternal instinct before the child is born, by furnishing, in cases where there is no necessity, the mother with baby-linen for her unborn child. Now, that in too many instances a lamentable necessity may exist for this, I allow; but why should such charity be obtruded? Why should so many excellent ladies form themselves into committees, and rush into an almost indiscriminate benevolence, which precludes the poor mother from the strongest motive human nature can be actuated by for industry, for forethought, and self-denial? When the stream has thus been poisoned at its fountain-head, we proceed, by separating, through infant-schools, the mother from the child, and from the rest of the family, disburthening them of all care of the little-one for perhaps eight hours of the day. To those who think this an evil, but a necessary one, much might be said, in order to qualify unreasonable expectations. But there are thousands of stirring people now in England, who are so far misled as to deem these schools good in themselves, and to wish that, even in the smallest villages, the children of the poor should have what they call 'a good education' in this way. Now, these people (and no error is at present more common) confound education with tuition.
Education, I need not remark to you, is everything that draws out the human being, of which tuition, the teaching of schools especially, however important, is comparatively an insignificant part. Yet the present bent of the public mind is to sacrifice the greater power to the less—all that life and nature teach, to the little that can be learned from books and a master. In the eyes of an enlightened statesman this is absurd; in the eyes of a pure lowly-minded Christian it is monstrous.
The Spartan and other ancient communities might disregard domestic ties, because they had the substitution of country, which we cannot have. With us, country is a mere name compared with what it was to the Greeks; first, as contrasted with barbarians; and next, and above all, as that passion only was strong enough to preserve the individual, his family, and the whole State, from ever-impending destruction. Our course is to supplant domestic attachments without the possibility of substituting others more capacious. What can grow out of it but selfishness?
Let it then be universally admitted that infant-schools are an evil, only tolerated to qualify a greater, viz., the inability of mothers to attend to their children, and the like inability of the elder to take care of the younger, from their labour being wanted in factories, or elsewhere, for their common support. But surely this is a sad state of society; and if these expedients of tuition or education (if that word is not to be parted with) divert our attention from the fact that the remedy for so mighty an evil must be sought elsewhere, they are most pernicious things, and the sooner they are done away with the better.