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17th century reaction against books.

should be "intuitive," and Montaigne requiring that the instruction should involve an exercise of the intellectual powers of the learner. But the escape even in thought from the Renascence ideal was but partial. Some of Rabelais' directions seem to come from a "Verbal Realist," and Montaigne was far from saying as Joseph Payne has said, "every act of teaching is a mode of dealing with mind and will be successful only in proportion as this is recognised," "teaching is only another name for mental training." But if Rabelais and Montaigne did not reach the best thought of our time they were much in advance of a great deal of our practice.

§ 10. The opening of the sixteen hundreds saw a great revolt from the literary spirit of the Renascence. The exclusive devotion to books was followed by a reaction. There might after all be something worth knowing that books would not teach. Why give so much time to the study of words and so little to the observation of things? "Youth," says a writer of the time, "is deluged with grammar precepts infinitely tedious, perplexed, obscure, and for the most part unprofitable, and that for many years." Why not escape from this barren region? "Come forth, my son," says Comenius. "Let us go into the open air. There you shall view whatsoever God produced from the beginning and doth yet effect by nature." And Milton thus expresses the conviction of his day: "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 method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching."

i This great revolution which was involved in the Baconian

Reaction not felt in schools and UU.

philosophy may be described as a turning from fancy to fact. All the creations of the human mind seemed to have lost their value. The only things that seemed worth studying were the material universe and the laws or sequences which were gradually ascertained by patient induction and experiment.

§ 11. Till the present century this revolution did not extend to our schools and universities. It is only within the last fifty years that natural science has been studied even in the University of Bacon and Newton. The Public School Commission of 1862 found that the curriculum was just as it had been settled at the Renascence. But if the walls of these educational Jerichos were still standing this was not from any remissness on the part of "the children of light" in shouting and blowing with the trumpet. They raised the war-cry "Not words, but things!" and the cry has been continued by a succession of eminent men against the schools of the 17th and 18th centuries and has at length begun to tell on the schools of the 19th. Perhaps the change demanded is best shown in the words of John Dury about 1649: "The true end of all human learning is to supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our ignorance of the nature and use of the creatures and the disorderliness of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them." So the Innovators required teachers to devote themselves to natural science and to the science of the human mind.

§ 12. The first Innovators, like the people of the fifteen hundreds, thought mainly of the acquisition of knowledge, only the knowledge was to be not of the classics but of the material world. In this they seem inferior to Montaigne who had given the first place to virtue and judgment.

Comenius begins science of education.

§ 13. But towards the middle of the sixteen hundreds a very eminent Innovator took a comprehensive view of education, and reduced instruction to its proper place, that is, he treated it as a part of education merely. This man,

Comenius, was at once a philosopher, a philanthropist, and a schoolmaster; and in his writings we find the first attempt at a science of education. The outline of his science is as follows:

"We live a threefold life-a vegetative, an animal, and an intellectual or spiritual. Of these, the first is perfect in the womb, the last in heaven. He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world, much more he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. According to the heavenly idea a man should-1st, Know all things; 2nd, He should be master of things and of himself; 3rd, He should refer everything to God. So that within us Nature has implanted the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety. To bring these seeds to maturity is the object of education. All men require education, and God has made children unfit for other employment that they may have time to learn."

Here we have quite a new theory of the educator's task. He is to bring to maturity the seeds of learning, virtue, and piety, which are already sown by Nature in his pupils. This is quite different from the pouring-in theory, and seems to anticipate the notion of Froebel, that the educater should be called not teacher but gardener. But Comenius evi dently made too much of knowledge. Had he lived two centuries later he would have seen the area of possible knowledge extending to infinity in all directions, and he would no longer have made it his ideal that "man should know all things."

14 The next great thinker about education-I mean

Locke's teacher a disposer of influence.

Locke-seems to me chiefly important from his having taken up the principles of Montaigne and treated the giving of knowledge as of very small importance. Montaigne, as we have seen, was the first to bring out clearly that education was much more than instruction, as the whole was greater than its part, and that instruction was of far less importance than some other parts of education. And this lies at the root of Locke's theory also. The great function of the educator, according to him, is not to teach, but to dispose the pupil to virtue first, industry next, and then knowledge; but he thinks where the first two have been properly cared for knowledge will come of itself. The following are Locke's own words :-"The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and to form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits and the principles of virtue and wisdom, to give him little by little a view of mankind and work him into a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy; and in the prosecution of it to give him vigour, activity, and industry. The studies which he sets him upon are but, as it were, the exercise of his faculties and employment of his time; to keep him from sauntering and idleness; to teach him application and accustom him to take pains, and to give him some little taste of what his own industry must perfect.”* So we see that Locke

* This theory of the educator's task which makes him a disposer or director of influence rather then a teacher, led Locke to decry our public schools, for in them the traditions and tone of the school seem the source of influence, and the masters are to all appearance mainly teachers. Locke's own words are these :-"The difference is great between two or three pupils in the same house and three or four score boys lodged up and down; for let the master's industry and skill be never so great, it is impossible he should have fifty or a hundred

Locke and public schools. Escape from "idols."

agrees with Comenius in his enlarged view of the educator's task, and that he thought much less than Comenius of the importance of the knowledge to be given.

15. We already see a gradual escape from the "idols " of the Renascence. Locke, instead of accepting the learned ideal, declares that learning is the last and least thing to be thought of. He cares little about the ordinary literary instruction given to children, though he thinks they must be taught something and does not know what to put in its place. He provides for the education of those who are

scholars under his eye any longer than they are in the school together, nor can it be expected that he should instruct them successfully in anything but their books; the forming of their minds and manners requiring a constant attention and particular application to every single boy which is impossible in a numerous flock, and would be wholly in vain (could he have time to study and correct everyone's particular defects and wrong inclinations) when the lad was to be left to himself or the prevailing infection of his fellows the greatest part of the four-and-twenty hours." But the educator who considers himself a director of influences must remember that he is not the only force. The boy's companions are a force at least as great; and if he were brought up in private on Locke's system, he would be entirely without a kind of influence much more valuable than Locke seems to think-the influence of boy companions, and of the traditions of a great school. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that our public schools used to be, and perhaps are still to some extent, under-mastered, and that the masters should not be the mere teachers which, from overwork and other causes, they often ter 1 to become. The consequence has been that the real education of the boys has in a great measure passed out of their hands. What has been the result? A long succession of able teachers have aimed at giving literary instruction and making their pupils classical scholars. Both manners and bodily training have been left to take care of then.selves. Yet such is the irony of Fate that the majority of youths who leave our great schools are not literary and are not much of classical scholars, but they are decidedly gentlemanly and still more decidedly athletic.

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