Languages? Sciences? ing; but the boys' time might have been better employed. Jacotot's plan of teaching a language which the master did not know, was to put a book with, say, "Arma virumque cano," &c., on one side, and "I sing arms and the man, &c." on the other, and to require the pupil to puzzle over it till he found out which word answered to which. In this case the teacher was the translator; and though from the roundabout way in which the knowledge was communicated the pupil derived some benefit, the benefit was hardly sufficient to make up for the expenditure of time involved. Jacotot, then, did not teach facts of which he was ignorant, except in the sense in which the parent who sends his boy to school may be said to teach him. All Jacotot did was to direct the pupil to learn, sometimes in a very awkward fashion, from somebody else.* § 8. 2. When we come to science, we find all the best authorities agree that the pupil should be led to principles if possible, and not have the principles brought to him. Men like Tyndall, Huxley, H. Spencer, J. M. Wilson have spoken eloquently on this subject, and shown how valuable scientific teaching is, when thus conducted, in drawing out the faculties of the mind. But although a schoolboy may be led to great scientific discoveries by anyone who knows the road, he will have no more chance of making them with an ignorant teacher than he would have had in the days of the Ptolemies. Here again, then, I cannot understand how the teacher can teach what he does not know. He may, indeed, join his pupil in investigating principles, but he * Here Jacotot's notion of teaching reminds one of the sophism quoted by Montaigne-"A Westphalia ham makes a man drink. Drink quenches thirst. Therefore a Westphalia ham quenches thirst." Arts such as drawing and music? must either keep with the pupil or go in advance of him, In the first case he is only a fellow-pupil; in the second, be teaches only that which he knows. § 9. Finally, we come to arts, and we are told that Jacotot taught drawing and music, without being either a draughtsman or a musician. In art everything depends on rightly directed practice. The most consummate artist cannot communicate his skill, and, except for inspiration may be inferior as a teacher to one whose attention is more concentrated on the mechanism of the art. Perhaps it is not even necessary that the teacher should be able to do the exercises himself, if only he knows how they should be done; but he seldom gets credit for this knowledge, unless he can show that he knows how the thing should be done, by doing it. Lessing tells us that Raphael would have been a great painter even if he had been born without hands. He would not, however, have succeeded in getting mankind to believe it. I grant, then, that the teacher of art need not be a first-rate artist, and, in some very exceptional cases, need not be an artist at all; but, if he cannot perform the exercises he gives his pupil, he must at least know how they should be done. But Jacotot claims perfect ignorance. We are told that he "taught " drawing by setting objects before his pupils, and making them imitate them on paper as best they could. Of course the art originated in this way, and a person with great perseverance, and (I must say, in spite of Jacotot) with more than average ability, would make considerable progress with no proper instruction; but he would lose much by the ignorance of the person calling himself his teacher. An awkward habit of holding the pencil will make skill doubly difficult to acquire, and thus half his time might be wasted. Then, again, he would hardly have a better eye True teacher within the learner. than the early painters, so the drawing of his landscape would not be less faulty than theirs. To consider music I am told that a person who is ignorant of music can teach, say, the piano or the violin. This seems to go beyond the region of paradox into that of utter nonsense. Talent often surmounts all kinds of difficulties; but in the case of self taught, and ill-taught musicians, it is often painful to see what time and talent have been wasted for want of proper instruction. I have thus carefully examined Jacotot's pretensions to teach what he did not know, because I am anxious that what seems to me the rubbish should be cleared away from his principles, and should no longer conceal those parts of his system which are worthy of general attention. § 10. At the root of Jacotot's paradox lay a truth of very great importance. The highest and best teaching is not that which makes the pupils passive recipients of other peoples' ideas (not to speak of the teaching which conveys mere words without any ideas at all), but that which guides and encourages the pupils in working for themselves and thinking for themselves. The master, as Joseph Payne well says, can no more think, or practise, or see for his pupil, than he can digest for him, or walk for him. The pupil must owe everything to his own exertions, which it is the function of the master to encourage and direct. Perhaps this may seem very obvious truth, but obvious or not it has been very generally neglected. The old system of lecturing which found favour with the Jesuits, has indeed now passed away, and boys are left to acquire facts from school-books instead of from the master. But this change is merely accidental. The essence of the teaching still remains. Even where the master does not confine himself to hearing what the scholars ვი Training rather than teaching. have learnt by heart, he seldom does more than offer explanations. He measures the teaching rather by the amount which has been put before the scholars-by what he has done for them and shown them-than by what they have learned. But this is not teaching of the highest type. When the votary of Dulness in the "Dunciad" is rendering an account of his services, he arrives at this climax, "For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And in the same spirit Mr. J. M. Wilson stigmatises as synonymous "the most stupid and most didactic teaching." § 11. All the eminent authorities on education have a very different theory of the teacher's function. According to them the master's attention is not to be fixed on his own mind and his own store of knowledge, but on his pupil's mind and on its gradual expansion. He must, in fact, be not so much a teacher as a trainer. Here we have the view which Jacotot intended to enforce by his paradox; for we may possibly train faculties which we do not ourselves possess, just as the sportsman trains his pointer and his hunter to perform feats which are altogether out of the range of his own capacities. Now, "training is the cultivation bestowed on any set of faculties with the object of developing them" (J. M. Wilson), and to train any faculty, you must set it to work. Hence it follows, that as boys' minds are not simply their memories, the master must aim at something more than causing his pupils to remember facts. Jacotot has done good service to education by giving pro minence to this truth, and by showing in his method how other faculties may be cultivated besides the memory. 3. Tout est dans tout. Quidlibet ex quolibet. § 12. "Tout est dans tout” (“All is in all"), is another of Jacotot's paradoxes. I do not propose discussing it as the philosophical thesis which takes other forms, as "Every man is a microcosm," &c., but merely to inquire into its meaning as applied to didactics. If you asked an ordinary French schoolmaster who Jacotot was, he would probably answer, Jacotot was a man who thought you could learn everything by getting up Fénelon's "Télémaque " by heart. By carrying your investigation further, you would find that this account of him required modification, that the learning by heart was only part, and a very small part, of what Jacotot demanded from his pupils, but you would also find that entire mastery of "Télémaque" was the first requisite, and that he managed to connect everything he taught with that "model-book." Of course, if" tout est dans tout," everything is in "Télémaque;" and, said an objector, also in the first book of "Télémaque" and in the first word. Jacotot went through a variety of subtilties to show that all "Télémaque" is contained in the word Calypso, and perhaps he would have been equally successful, if he had been required to take only the first letter instead of the first word. His maxim indeed becomes by his treatment of it a mere paraphrase of “ Quidlibet ex quolibet." The reader is amused rather than convinced by these discussions, but he finds them not without fruit. They bring to his mind very forcibly a truth to which he has hitherto probably not paid sufficient attention. He sees that all knowledge is connected together, or (what will do equally well for our present purpose) that there are a thousand links by which we may bring into connexion the different subjects of knowledge. If by means of these links we can attach in our minds the knowledge we acquire to |