Petty on children's activities.

handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn their backs and trying to work themselves; fishing, fowling, hunting, setting springes and traps for birds and other animals, making pictures in their writing-books, making tops, gigs and whirligigs, gilting balls, practising divers juggling tricks upon the cards, &c., with a million more besides. And for the females they will be making pies with clay, making their babies' clothes and dressing them therewith; they will spit leaves on sticks as if they were roasting meat; they will imitate all the talk and actions which they observe in their mother and her gossips, and punctually act the comedy or the tragedy (I know not whether to call it) of a woman's lying-in. By all which it is most evident that children do most naturally delight in things and are most capable of learning them, having quick senses to receive them and unpreoccupied memories to retain them" (ad f.).

§ 23. In these writers, Dury and Petty, we find a wonderful advance in the theory of instruction. Children are to be taught about things and this because their inward constitution determines them towards things. Moreover the subjects of instruction are to be graduated to accord with the development of the learner's faculties. The giving of rules and incomprehensible statements that will come in useful at a future stage is entirely forbidden. All this is excellent, and greatly have children suffered, greatly do they suffer still, from their teachers' neglect of it. There seems to me to have been no important advance on the thought of these men till Pestalozzi and Froebel fixed their attention on the mind of the child, and valued things not in themselves but simply as the means best fitted for drawing out the child's self-activity.

§ 24. In several other matters we find Sir William

Hand-work. Education for all. Bellers.

Petty's recommendations in advance of the practice of his own time and ours. He advises "that the business of elucation be not (as now) committed to the worst and unworthiest of men [here at least we have improved] but that it be seriously studied and practised by the best and abler persons." To this standard we have not yet attained.

§ 25. Handwork is to be practised, but its educational value is not clearly perceived. "All children, though of the highest rank, are to be taught some gentle manufacture in their minority." Ergastula Literaria, literary workhouses, are to be instituted where children may be taught as well to do something towards their living as to read and write.*

§ 26. Education was to be universal, but chiefly with the object of bringing to the front the clever sons of poor parents. The rule he would lay down is "that all children of above seven years old may be presented to this kind of education, none being to be excluded by reason of the poverty and unability of their parents, for hereby it hath come to pass that many are now holding the plough which might have been made fit to steer the state."†

Later in the century Locke recommended that "working schools should be set up in every parish," (see Fox-Bourne's Locke, or Cambridge edition of the Thoughts c. Ed., App. A, p. 189). The Quakers seem to have early taken up "industrious education." John Bellers, whose Proposals for Raising a College of Industry (1696) was reprinted by Robt. Owen, has some very good notions. After advising that boys and girls be taught to knit, spin, &c., and the bigger boys turning, &c., he says, "Thus the Hand employed brings Profit, the Reason used in it makes wise, and the Will subdued makes them good” (Proposals, p. 18). Years afterwards in a Letter to the Yearly Meeting (dated 1723), he says, "It may be observed that some of the Boys in Friends' Workhouse in Clerkenwell by their present employment of spinning are capable to earn their own living."

+ Petty does not lose sight of the body. The "educands are to

Milton and School-Reform.

§ 27. From these enthusiasts for realities we find a change when we turn to their contemporary, a schoolmaster and author of a Latin Accidence, who was perhaps the most notable Englishman who ever kept a school or published a school-book.

§ 28. Milton was not only a great poet: he was also a great scholar. Everything he said or wrote bore traces of his learning. The world of books then rather than the world of the senses is his world. He has benefited as he says 'among old renowned authors" and "his inclination leads him not" to read modern Januas and Didactics, or apparently the writings of any of his contemporaries including those of his great countryman, Bacon. But, as Professor Laurie reminds us, no man, not even a Milton, however he may ignore the originators of ideas can keep himself outside the influence of the ideas themselves when they are in the air; and so we find Milton using his

66 use such exercises whether in work or for recreation as tend to the health, agility, and strength of their bodies."

I have quoted Petty from the very valuable collection of English writings on Education reprinted in Henry Barnard's English Pedagogy, 2 vols. Petty is in Vol. I. In this vol. we have plenty of evidence of the working of the Baconian spirit; e.g., we find Sir Matthew Hale in a Letter of Advice to his Grandchildren, written in 1678, saying that there is little use or improvement in "notional speculations in logic or philosophy delivered by others; the rather because bare speculations and notions have little experience and external observation to confirm them, and they rarely fix the minds especially of young men. But that part of philosophy that is real may be improved and confirmed by daily observation, and is more stable and yet more certain and delightful, and goes along with a man all his life, whatever employment or profession he undertakes."

M. as spokesman of Christian Realists.

incomparable power of expression in the service of the Realists.

§ 29. But brief he endeavours to be, and paying the Horatian penalty he becomes obscure. In the "few observations which flowered off and were the burnishing of many studious and contemplative years," Milton touches only on the bringing up of gentlemen's sons between the ages of 12 and 21, and his suggestions do not, like those of Comenius, deal with the education of the people, or of both sexes.* This limit of age, sex, and station deprives Milton's plan of much of its interest, as the absence of detail deprives it of much of its value.

§ 30. Still, we find in the Tractate a very great advance on the ideas current at the Renascence. Learning is no longer the aim of education but is regarded simply as a means. No finer expression has been given in our literature to the main thesis of the Christian and of the Realist and to the Realist's contempt of verbalism, than this: "The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same inethod is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every Nation affords not experience and tradition

"In this respect," says Professor Masson, "the passion and the projects of Comenius were a world wider than Milton's." (L. of M. új, p. 237.)

Language an instrument. Object of education.

enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother-dialect only."

§ 31. The several propositions here implied have thus been "disentangled" by Professor Laurie (John Milton in Addresses, &c., p. 167).

1. The aim of education is the knowledge of God and likeness to God.

2. Likeness to God we attain by possessing our souls of true virtue and by the Heavenly Grace of Faith.

3. Knowledge of God we attain by the study of the visible things of God.

4. Teaching then has for its aim this knowledge.

5. Language is merely an instrument or vehicle for the knowledge of things.

6. The linguist may be less learned (i.e., educated) in the true sense than a man who can make good use of his mother-tongue though he knows no other.

§ 32. Elsewhere, Milton gives his idea of "a complete and generous education;" it "fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of Peace and War." (Browning's edition, p. 8.) Here and indeed in all that Milton says we feel that "the noble moral glow that pervades the Tractate on Education, the mood of magnanimity in which it is conceived and written,