ceiving the enormous value of that spontaneous education which goes on in early years, not perceiving that a child's restless observation, instead of being ignored or checked, should be diligently ministered to and made as accurate and complete as possible, they insist on occupying its eyes and thoughts with things that are, for the time being, incomprehensible and repugnant. Possessed by a superstition which worships the symbols of knowledge instead of the knowledge itself, they do not see that only when his acquaintance with the objects and processes of the household, the street, and the fields, is becoming tolerably exhaustive, only then should a child be introduced to the new sources of information which books supply, and this not only because immediate cognition is of far greater value than mediate cognition, but also because the words contained in books can be rightly interpreted into ideas only in proportion to the antecedent experience of things.'* While agreeing heartily in the spirit of this protest, I doubt whether we should wait till the child's acquaintance with the objects and processes of the household, the street, and the fields, is becoming tolerably exhaustive before we give him instruction from books. The point of time which Mr. Spencer indicates is, at

* After remarking on the wrong order in which subjects are taught, he continues, 'What with perceptions unnaturally dulled by early thwartings, and a coerced attention to books, what with the mental confusion produced by teaching subjects before they can be understood, and in each of them giving generalizations before the facts of which they are the generalizations, what with making the pupil a mere passive recipient of others' ideas and not in the least leading him to be an active inquirer or self-instructor, and what with taxing the faculties to excess, there are very few minds that become as efficient as they might be.'

UNSCIENTIFIC TEACHING.

251

all events, rather hard to fix, and I should wish to connect book-learning as soon as possible with the learning that is being acquired in other ways. Thus might both the books, and the acts and objects of daily life, win an additional interest. If, e. g., the first reading books were about the animals, and later on about the trees and flowers which the children constantly meet with, and their attention were kept up by large coloured pictures, to which the text might refer, the children would soon find both pleasure and advantage in reading, and they would look at the animals and trees with a keener interest from the additional knowledge of them they had derived from books. This is, of course, only one small application of a very influential principle.

One marvellous instance of the neglect of this principle is found in the practice of teaching Latin grammar before English grammar. Respect for the high authority of Professor Kennedy, who would not have English grammar taught at all, prevents my expressing myself as strongly as I should like in this matter. As Professor Seeley has so well pointed out, children bring with them to school the knowledge of language in its concrete form. They may soon be taught to observe the language they already know, and to find, almost for themselves, some of the main divisions of words in it. But, instead of availing himself of the child's previous knowledge, the schoolmaster takes a new and difficult language, differing as much as possible from English, a new and difficult science, that of grammar, conveyed, too, in a new and difficult terminology, and all this he tries to teach at the same

time. The consequence is that the science is destroyed, the terminology is either misunderstood, or, more probably, associated with no ideas, and even the language for which every sacrifice is made, is found, in nine cases out of ten, never to be acquired at all.* 2. All development is an advance from the indefinite to the definite.'

I do not feel very certain of the truth of this principle, or of its application, if true. Of course, a child's intellectual conceptions are at first vague, and we should not forget this; but it is rather a fact than a principle.

3. Our lessons ought to start from the concrete, and end in the abstract.' What Mr. Spencer says under this head well deserves the attention of all teachers. General formulas which men have devised to express groups of details, and which have severally

* A class of boys whom I once took in Latin Delectus denied, with the utmost confidence, when I questioned them on the subject, that there were any such things in English as verbs and substantives. On another occasion, I saw a poor boy of nine or ten caned, because, when he had said that proficiscor was a deponent verb, he could not say what a deponent verb was. Even if he had remembered the inaccurate grammar definition expected of him, 'A deponent verb is a verb with a passive form and an active meaning,' his comprehension of proficiscor would have been no greater. It is worth observing that, even when offending grievously in great matters against the principle of connecting fresh knowledge with the old, teachers are sometimes driven to it in small. They find that it is better for boys to see that lignum is like regnum, and laudare like amare, than simply to learn that lignum is of the Second Declension, and laudare of the First Conjugation. If boys had to learn, by a mere effort of memory, the particular declension or conjugation of Latin words before they were taught anything about declensions and conjugations, this would be as sensible as the method adopted in some other instances, and the teachers might urge, as usual, that the information would come in useful afterwards.

FROM THE CONCRETE TO THE ABSTRACT. 253

simplified their conceptions by uniting many facts into one fact, they have supposed must simplify the conceptions of a child also. They have forgotten that a generalization is simple only in comparison with the whole mass of particular truths it comprehends; that it is more complex than any one of these truths taken simply; that only, after many of these single truths have been acquired, does the generalization ease the memory and help the reason; and that, to a mind not possessing these single truths, it is necessarily a mystery.* Thus, confounding two kinds of simplification, teachers have constantly erred by setting out with "first principles," a proceeding essentially, though not apparently, at variance with the primary rule [of proceeding from the simple to the complex], which implies that the mind should be introduced to principles through the medium of examples, and so should be led from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract.' In conformity with this principle, Pestalozzi made the actual counting of things precede the teaching of abstract rules in arithmetic. Basedow introduced weights and measures into the school, and Mr. Spencer describes some exercise in cutting out geometrical figures in cardboard, as a preparation for geometry. The difficulty about such instruction is that it requires apparatus, and apparatus is apt to get lost or out of order. But, if apparatus is good for anything at all, it is

* 'General terms are, as it were, but the endorsements upon the bundles of our ideas; they are useful to those who have collected a number of ideas, but utterly useless to those who have no collections ready for classification.'-Edgeworth's Practical Education, vol. i. 91.

worth a little trouble. There is a tendency in the minds of many teachers to depreciate 'mechanical appliances.' Even a decent black board is not always to be found in our higher schools. But, though such appliances will not enable a bad master to teach well, nevertheless, other things being equal, the master will teach better with them than without them. There is little credit due to him for managing to dispense with apparatus. An author might as well pride himself on being saving in pens and paper.

4. The genesis of knowledge in the individual inust follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race.' This is a thesis on which I have no opinion to offer. It was, I believe, first maintained by Pestalozzi.

5. From the above principle Mr. Spencer infers that every study should have a purely experimental introduction, thus proceeding through an empirical stage to a rational.

6. A second conclusion which Mr. Spencer draws is that, in education, the process of self-development should be encouraged to the utmost. Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible. I quite agree with Mr. Spencer that this principle cannot be too strenuously insisted on, though it obviously demands a high amount of intelligence in the teacher. But if education is to be a training of the faculties, if it is to prepare the pupil to teach himself, something more is needed than simply to pour in knowledge and make the pupil reproduce