Children and their teachers. can understand. He has already some notion of reasoning, and abstraction, and generalisation. But with the child it is very different. His active faculties may be said almost to differ in kind from a man's. He has a feeling for the sensuous world which he will lose as he grows up. His strong imagination, under no control of the reason, is constantly at work building castles in the air, and investing the doll cr the puppet-show with all the properties of the things they represent. His feelings and affections, easily excited, find an object to love or dislike in every person and thing he meets with. On the other hand, he has only vague notions of the abstract, and has no interest except in actual known persons, animals, and things. And § 108. There is, then, between the child of eight or nine and the youth of fourteen or fifteen a greater difference than between the youth and the man of twenty; and this demands a corresponding difference in their studies. yet, as matters are carried on now, the child is too often kept to the drudgery of learning by rote mere collections of hard words, perhaps, too, in a foreign language: and absorbed in the present, he is not much comforted by the teacher's assurance that "some day" these things will come in useful. § 109. How to educate the child is doubtless the most difficult problem of all, and it is generally allotted to those who are the least likely to find a satisfactory solution. The earliest educator of the children of many rich parents is the nursemaid-a person not usually distinguished by either intellectual or moral excellence.* At an early age * Most parents do not seem to think with Jean Paul, "If we regard all life as an educational institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all the nations he has seen than by his nurse." (Levana, quoted in Morley's Rousseau.) "Preparatory" Schools. 66 this educator is superseded by the Preparatory School. Taken as a body, the ladies who open establishments for young gentlemen " cannot be said to hold enlarged views, or, indeed, any views whatever, on the subject of education. Their intention is not so much to cultivate the children's faculties as to make a livelihood, and to hear no complaints that pupils who have left them have been found deficient in the expected knowledge by the master of the next school. If anyone would investigate the sort of teaching which is considered adapted to the capacity of children at this stage, let him look into a standard work still in vogue (" Mangnall's Questions "), from which the young of both sexes acquire a great quantity and variety of learning; the whole of ancient and modern history and biography, together with the heathen mythology, the planetary system, and the names of all the constellations, lying very compactly in about 300 pages.* Unfortunately, moreover, from the gentility of these ladies, their scholars' bodies are often treated in preparatory schools no less injuriously than their minds. It may be natural in a child to use his lungs and delight in noise, but * I will quote the first paragraph of this work which is still considered mental pabulum suited to the digestions of young ladies and children : "Name some of the most Ancient Kingdoms.-Chaldea, Babylonia, Assyria, China in Asia, and Egypt in Africa. Nimrod, the grandson of Ham, is supposed to have founded the first of these B.C. 2221, as well as the famous cities of Babylon and Nineveh; his kingdom being within the fertile plains of Chaldea, Chalonītis, and Assyria, was of small extent compared with the vast empires that afterwards arose from it, but included several large cities. In the district called Babylonia were the cities of Babylon, Barsīta, Idicarra, and Vologsia,” &c., &c. Young boys ill taught at school. this can hardly be considered genteel, so the tendency is, as far as possible, suppressed. It is found, too, that if children are allowed to run about they get dirty and spoil their clothes, and do not look like "young gentlemen," so they are made to take exercise in a much more genteel fashion, walking slowly two-and-two, with gloves on.* § 110. At nine or ten years old, boys are commonly put to a school taught by masters. Here they lose sight of their gloves, and learn the use of their limbs; but their minds are not so fortunate as their bodies. The studies of the school have been arranged without any thought of their peculiar needs. The youngest class is generally the largest, often much the largest, and it is handed over to the least competent and worst paid master on the staff of teachers. The reason is, that little boys are found to learn the tasks imposed upon them very slowly. A youth or a man who came fresh to the Latin grammar would learn in a morning as much as the master, with great labour, can get into children in a week. It is thought, therefore, that the best teaching should be applied where it will have the most obvious results. If anyone were to say to the manager * I shall always feel gratitude and affection for the two old ladies (sisters) to whom I was entrusted over half a century ago. More truly Christian women I never met with. But of the science and art of education they were totally ignorant; and moreover the premises they occupied were unfit for a school. As all the boys were under ten years old, it will seem strange, but is alas! too true, that there were vices among them which are supposed to be unknown to children and which if discovered would have made the old ladies close their school. The want of subjects in which the children can take a healthy interest will in a great measure account for the spread of evil in such schools. On this point some mistresses and most parents are dangerously ignorant. English folk-schools not Pestalozzian. of a school, "The master who takes the lowest form teaches badly, and the children learn nothing"; he would perhaps say, "Very likely; but if I paid a much higher salary, and got a better man, they would learn but little." The only thing the school-manager thinks of is, How much do the little boys learn of what is taught in the higher forms? How their faculties are being developed, or whether they have any faculties except for reading, writing, and arithmetic, and for getting grammar-rules, &c. by heart, he is not so "unpractical" as to enquire. § III. With reference to the education of the first of our "two nations," it seems then pretty clear that Pestalozzi would require that the school-coach should be turned and started in a totally different direction. § 112. What about the education of the other "nation,” a nation of which the verb "to rule" has for many centuries been used in the passive voice, but can be used in that voice no longer? A century ago, with the partial exception of Scotland and Massachusetts, there was no such thing as school education for the people to be found anywhere in Europe or America. But from 1789 onwards power has been passing more and more from the few to the many; and as a natural consequence folk-schools (for which we have not yet found a name) have become of vast importance everywhere. The Germans, as we have seen, have been the disciples of Pestalozzi, and their elementary education in everything bears traces of his ideas. The English have organised a great system of elementary education in total ignorance of Pestalozzi. As usual, we seem to have sup posed that the right system would come to us "in sleep." But has it come? The children of the poor are now compelled by the law to attend an elementary school. What Schools judged by results. lad's future. What No doubt we should sort of an education has the law there provided for them? § 113. An advocate of our system would not deny this, but would probably say, "The question for us to consider is, not what is the best that in the most favourable circumstances might be attempted, but what is the best that in very restricted and by no means favourable circumstances, we are likely to get. The teachers in our schools are not self-devoting Pestalozzis, but only ordinary men and women, and still worse, ordinary boys and girls. It would be of * Having watched the "teaching" of pupil-teachers, I find hat some of them (I may say many) never address more than one child at a time, and never attempt to gain the attention of more than a single |