Schools judged by results.

sort of an education has the law there provided for them? The Education Department professes to measure everything by results. Let us do the same. Suppose that on his leaving school we wished to forecast a lad's future. What shoud we try to find out about him? No doubt we should ask what he knew; but this would not be by any means the main thing. His skill would interest us, and still more would his state of health. But what we should ask first and foremost is this, Whom does he love? Whom does he admire and imitate? What does he care about? What interests him? It is only when the answers to these questions are satisfactory, that we can think hopefully of his future; and it is only in so far as the school-course has tended to make the answers satisfactory, that it deserves our approval. Schools such as Pestalozzi designed would have thus deserved our approval; but we cannot say this of the schools into which the children of the English poor are now driven. In these schools the heart and the affections are not thought of, the powers of neither mind nor body are developed by exercise, and the children do not acquire any interests that will raise or benefit 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

Pupil-teachers. Teaching not educating.

no use talking to our teachers (still less our pupil-teachers) about developing the affections and the mental or bodily powers of the children. All such talk could end in nothing. As for character, we expect the school to cultivate in the children habits of order, neatness, industry. Beyond this we cannot go."

but silly cant.

And yet, though this seems reasonable, we feel that it is not quite satisfactory. If so much depends in all of us on "admiration, hope, and love," we can hardly consider a system of education that entirely ignores them to be well

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child. So, by a very simple calculation, we can get at the maximum time each child is "under instruction." If the pupil-teacher has but three-quarters of the pupils for whom the Department supposes him "sufficient," each child cannot be under instruction more than two minutes in the hour. The rest of the time the children must sit quiet, or be cuffed if they do not. What is called "simultaneous teaching in, say, reading, consists in the pupil-teacher reading from the book, and as he pronounces each word, the children shout it after him; but no one except the pupil-teacher knows the place in the book.

But perhaps the dangers from employing boys and girls to teach and govern children are greater morally than intellectually. Whether he report on it or not, the Inspector has less influence on the moral training than the youngest pupil-teacher. Channing has well said: "A child compelled for six hours each day to see the countenance and hear the voice of an unfeeling, petulant, passionate, unjust teacher is placed in a school of vice." Those who have never taught day after day, week after week, month after month, little know what demands school-work makes on the temper and the sense of justice. The harshest tyrants are usually those who are raised but a little way above those whom they have to control; and when I think of the pupil-teacher with his forty pupils to keep in order, I heartily pity both him and them. Is there not too much reason to fear lest in many cases the school should prove for both what Channing has well described as "a school of vice"? (R. H. Q. in Spectator, Ist March,

Lowe or Pestalozzi?

adapted to the needs of human nature. If Pestalozzi was right, we must be wrong. We have never supposed the object of the school to be the development of the faculties ɔf heart, of head, and of hand, but we have thought of nothing but learning-learning first of all to read, write, and cipher, and then in "good" schools, one or more extra subjects" may be taken up, and a grant obtained for them. The sole object, both of managers and teachers, is to prepare for the Inspector, who comes once a year, and from an examination of five hours or so, pronounces on what the children have learnt.

§ 114. The engineer most concerned in the construction of this machine, the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, announced that there could be "no such thing as a science of education ;" and as when we have no opinion of our own we always adopt the opinion of some positive person, we took his word for it. But what if the confident Mr. Lowe was mistaken? What if there is such a science, and the aim of it is that children should grow up not so much to know something as to be something? In this case we shall be obliged sooner or later to give up Mr. Lowe and to come round to Pestalozzi.* Science is correct inferences drawn from the facts of the universe; and where such science exists, confident assertions that it does not and cannot exist are dangerous for the confident persons and for those who follow them. Even

* Since the above was written, another "New Code" has appeared (March, 1890), in which the system of measuring by "passes," a system maintained (in spite of the remonstrances of all interested in education) for nearly 30 years, is at length abandoned. We are certainly travelling, however slowly, away from Mr. Lowe. are still from Pestalozzi there seems reason to hope that the distance is diminishing.

Far as we

Chief force, personality of the teacher.

if "there is no such thing as a science of education,” such a thing as education there is; and this is just what Mr. Lowe, and we may say the English, practically deny. They make arrangements for instruction and mete out "the grant" according to the results obtained, but they totally fail to conceive of the existence of education, education which has instruction among its various agents.

§ 115. In one respect the analogy between the educator and child and the gardener and plant, an analogy in which Pestalozzi no less than Froebel delighted, entirely breaks down. The gardener has to study the conditions necessary for the health and development of the plant, but these conditions lie outside his own life and are independent of it. With the educator it is different. Like the gardener he can create nothing in the child, but unlike the gardener he can further the development only of that which exists in himself. He draw's out in the young the intelligence and the sense of what is just, the love of what is beautiful, the admiration of what is noble, but this he can do only by his own intelligence and his own enthusiasm for what is just and beautiful and noble. Even industry is in many cases caught from the teacher. In a volume of essays (originally published in the Forum), in which some men, distinguished as scholars or in literature in the United States, have given an account of their early years, we find that almost in every case they date their intellectual industry and growth from the time when they came under the influence of some inspiring teacher. Thus even for instruction and still more for education, the great force is the teacher. This is a truth which all our "parties" overlook. They wage their controversies and have their triumphs and defeats about unessentials, and leave the essentials to "crotchety educationists." In such questions as whether the Church

English care for unessentials.

Catechism shall or shall not be taught, whether natural science shall or shall not figure in the time-table (without scientific teachers it can figure nowhere else), whether the parents or the Government shall pay for each child twopence or threepence a week, whether the ratepayers shall or shall not be "represented" among the Managers in "voluntary" schools, in all questions of this kind education is not concerned; and yet these are the only questions that we think about. In the end it will perhaps dawn upon us that in every school what is important for education is not the timetable but the teacher, and that so far as pupil-teachers are employed education is impossible. Elsewhere (infra p. 476) I have told of a man in the prime of life (he seemed between 40 and 50 years old) whose time was entirely taken up in teaching a large class of children, boys and girls, of six or seven years. He most certainly could and did educate them both in heart and mind. He made their lessons a delightful occupation to them, and he exercised over them the influence of a good and wise father. Here was the right system seen

at its best. I do not say that all or even most adult teachers would have exercised so good an influence as this gentleman; but so far as they come up to what they ought to be and might be they do exercise such an influence. And this of course can be said of no pupil-teacher.

§ 116. As regards schools then, schools for the rich and schools for the poor, the great educating force is the personality of the teacher. Before we can have Pestalozzian schools we must have Pestalozzian teachers. Teachers must catch something of Pestalozzi's spirit and enter into his conception of their task. Perhaps some of them will feel inclined to say: "Fine words, no doubt, and in a sense very true, that education should be the unfolding of the