Education

IN the preface to his Essays on Educational Reformers,¹ the Rev. Robert Quick says, “ If the following pages attract but few readers, it will be some consolation, though rather a melancholy one. that I share the fate of my betters.” We have read his book through twice, and since there is no other résumé that is at once so brief and so comprehensive, we do not see how intelligent parents, teachers, and school directors can afford to be without it. The volume is not large, but the type is, and the chapters are so short that the book is easily finished. Why then should it not be extensively read, when the influence it could exercise is just now so much needed in our national educational system ? Why, indeed, except that the training of their children is the last thing about which parents and communities will exert themselves to vigorous thought and independent action ? No more striking proof of the inertia of the human mind can be found than the fact so clearly revealed by this book, that for many generations the true philosophy of teaching has had its prophets and apostles, and yet that substantially we are training our children in the same old blundering way.

Each division of the work is devoted to one or more of “those innovators whose innovations, after a struggle of two hundred years, have not been adopted, and yet seem now more likely than ever to make their way.” The author begins by a sketch of the famous Jesuit school-system, which, elaborated as a countercheck to the inroads of Protestantism, soon drove all competition from the field, and for a hundred years trained nearly all the foremost men of Europe, whether clergy or laity. “To lead, not drive ” their pupils was their principle. They taught them Greek, but they aimed chiefly at making them perfect in the Latin tongue, at teaching them their own principles of philosophy and theology, and at making them skillful in disputation. “ Originality and independence of mind, love of truth for its own sake, the power of reflecting, or of forming correct judgments, were not merely neglected, they were suppressed, in the Jesuit’s system.”

Thus the reformation of education, like that of religion, was essentially left to Protestants and skeptics. And what was that state of education, at least in England, which so demanded a reform ? Simply boys kept year after year in two daily sessions of five hours each, and punished unmercifully throughout their school-lives, to learn chiefly the Latin language. It was natural, therefore, that the attention of the first modern educational reformer, Roger Ascham, should be turned only to the shortest and easiest way of acquiring a dead language, and his method of “ double translation ” (the one in which he trained Queen Elizabeth) is still, in the opinion of weighty judges, the best ever devised.

But in the next generation, Montague took a wider view of the educational problem. He himself had learned Latin like a mother - tongue, by hearing nothing else spoken at home. Afterward, grammars and dictionaries were so heaped upon him at college that he says he half forgot what he had acquired so easily and naturally, and thereupon he burst out, “ I am scandalized that our whole lives should be taken up with nothing else than fine speaking. No doubt Greek and Latin are very great ornaments, but we may buy them too dear.” He advocated that children should be made to inquire into things, and that the pupil should be incited to think and observe for himself, instead of taking everything without reflection from his master. He also insisted on the importance of physical education. “ We have not to train up a soul, nor yet a body, but a man; and we cannot divide him.” A German, Ratich, first attempted to apply these new ideas to practical pedagogy. His method of teaching languages was similar, though inferior, to Ascham’s, and his principal maxims were these : “ Everything in the order and course of nature.” “ One thing at a time;” “One thing again and again repeated;” “Nothing shall be learned by rote ; ” “ Knowledge of the thing itself must be given before that which refers to the thing;” “Everything by experiment and analysis; ” “ Everything without coercion.” (The rod was to be used to correct offenses against good morals only.) Milton, too, accomplished classicist though he was, appreciated the “ bondage of these verbal toils,” and wished to turn the young from them “ to the study of things:” “Language is not to be pursued for itself, but merely as an instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. Latin and Greek must therefore be acquired by a method that will take little time.” The still more extraordinary educational genius, Comenius, a sketch of whose life is given, said that “education must proceed in the following order : First, educate the senses; next the memory; then the intellect ; last of all the critical faculty.” “ We should learn as much as possible, not from books, but from the great book of Nature— from heaven and earth, from oaks and beeches.” These protests of the “ innovators,” as the Germans call them, have been kept up by a succession of reformers from that time to this. “ In his demand to educate first the senses,” says the author, “ Comenius was the forerunner of Pestalozzi, and of the champions of science, as Tyndall and H. Spencer, among ourselves ; . . . and the classicists, after withstanding a siege of nearly three centuries, seem at last inclined to come to terms.” If the great educational reformers of Europe waged their war against grammatical studies which at least involved the command of another language and literature, what would they have said to our pedagogical system of spending the precious years of childhood on the twenty-four barren rules of English grammar merely ! Can it be that the misfortune came upon us through the perversion of the term “ grammar school,” which in colonial times, as still in England, meant “ Latin-grammer school ” ?

The essay of the philosopher Locke was intended only as advice upon the “ education of a gentleman.” “ Its aim was to develop a robust mind in a robust body. Good principles, good manners, and discretion were to be cared for first; intelligence and intellectual activity next, and actual knowledge last of all.” A good programme, it seems to us, on which to bring up any family of children, as could be devised. Locke laid stress on cold bathing and athletic training, and on dancing; “ and by all means,” said he, “ let a gentleman learn at least one manual trade, especially such as can be practiced in the open air.” He warned parents against the inevitable corruptions (bishops and clergymen who are founding them, hear! ) of boarding-schools. Latin he considered absolutely necessary for a gentleman, but “ the learning of Latin being nothing but the learning of words, join as much real knowledge with it as you can, beginning still with that which lies most obvious to the senses ; such as is the knowledge of minerals, plants, and animals,” etc. Though classed among the “ educational reformers ” Locke is really in remarkable contrast to them, simply because he was not a reformer or an enthusiast, but a powerful thinker who drew on his common-sense and his experience in deciding how to train up a manly and gracious man. The result is that we have the essentials which education should confer upon any and every youth who can get one.

The fifth chapter contains a summary of that extraordinary mixture of falsehood and truth presented in Rousseau’s Émile; “ probably,” says our author, “ the most influential book ever printed on education.” According to Mr. Quick, the great merit of Rousseau is in the distinction which he drew between childhood and youth, the former being the period when “ reason sleeps, and the senses are in their fullest activity and vigor.” Hence studies and methods which are suited to the one are not so to the other. He laid great stress on teaching children from objects, and on leading them to self-teaching. He believed human nature to be so utterly bad that he would have the child taught nothing about it, hut would acquaint him only with the material universe — a rather worse one-sidedness than what had gone before, since of all knowledges a knowledge of humanity is the most indispensable for human beings. Basedow and his famous school, the “ Philanthroperin ” are next described. “It was the only school in Germany,” said Kant, “in which the teachers had liberty to work according to their own methods and schemes, and where they were in free communication among themselves and with all the learned men in Germany. . . . Gymnastics were now first introduced into modern schools, and the boys were taken long expeditions on foot, — the commencement, it is believed, of a practice now common throughout Germany.” After Basedow follows the pathetic story of the life and struggles of Pestalozzi, than whom never any man was a more complete illustration of “ the experiment fails, but the principle remains the same; ” for his abortive attempts at school-keeping will influence school-teaching for all time to come. He first brought the external world into the school-room, and practically, children owe all their “ object lessons ” to him. Nor was intellectual awakening his only aim. Locke’s system showed how to bring up a youth to be a virtuous gentleman. But the conventions of the world did not satisfy Pestalozzi. “ Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect,” was his standard, and he wanted to train children primarily to imitate Christ and to fill their destinies as “ created and responsible beings.” Last in the series comes a review of Herbert Spencer’s work on Education, which is at once ably supported and ably criticised by Mr. Quick. The book ends with two chapters of the author’s own; the first giving suggestions from his own experience as to the kind and amount of schooling suitable to children between five and ten years of age, the second containing wise, and, as it seems to us, most true thoughts on that perplexing problem, the moral and religious training of boys. We regret that Luther, Dr. Arnold, and Froebel were not sufficiently “ innovating ” to have found a place in Mr. Quick’s sketches, but whoever wishes to comprehend and to respect the vocation of the educator can do no better than to study this most interesting and valuable book. If public-school teachers generally could be made to pass an examination in it, before receiving their certificates to teach, the national education would not he long in taking on a very different phase from the present.

— Professor Sauveur’s pamphlet² is one of the echoes that are beginning to be heard in response to the utterances of the “ innovators ” we have been considering. It contains an interesting account of how lie was led to attempt the “ teaching of living languages without grammar or dictionary,” together with advice to other teachers how they may go and do likewise. The accomplished pupils of the school of modern languages established in Boston by himself and his German colleague, Professor Heuess, can attest the success of their method, and the pleasure of pursuing it under their keen and animating instruction.

Professor Heness caught the idea from Montaigne, who, as we have just seen in our notice of Mr. Quick’s book, learned Latin perfectly in no other way. Professor Sauveur received it from Professor Heness, and together, in this happy land of “ new ideas,” they have put it into practice, as the latter hints it would not yet be possible to do in France. “ Who would dare to speak there,” he asks, “of a revolution in education ? ” Yet he is sure that by his method a pupil could learn as much Latin in two years as he does now in the French schools and colleges, by the old one, in ten. The difficulty, however, would be to get these schools “ wherein should be spoken only the language of old Rome, and where neither French nor any other language should penetrate, but arithmetic, history, geography, etc., all be taught in Latin.” In the account of his class of “Yale tutors,” Professor Sauveur gives a striking instance of what may be done in a few months by adult trained minds under a thorough master, in this method. In short, so interesting and so constant to nature is it, that the extent to which it will be adopted, at least for French and German, will probably depend only on the number of teachers who are competent to follow where Professors Heness and Sauveur have led.

— Mr. Lauderbach’s kindly and judicious little pamphlet³ is briefly descriptive of the system of study and discipline pursued in the Lauderbach Academy in Philadelphia. His training as a teacher was gained in the public schools, and for the last five years he has conducted an eminently successful school of his own. His hints as to his methods and management are therefore of practical value to the teacher, and they of his profession would do well to imitate him in this attempt to put himself at rapport with the parents of his pupils, since if a parent is not a coadjutor, he is pretty sure to be a hinderer, in the educator’s work.

Mr. Lauderbach seems to lean to the theory of Locke, now so much in favor, that study must bo made always agreeable to the pupil. While in general we fully believe that if the acquisition of knowledge is irksome to the scholar it is because the teacher is inadequate, yet there can be little doubt that for the scholar to feel that everything must be made easy and pleasant to him is demanding as much too little of him as it is too much of his instructor. Pestalozzi said that “ a child must very early in life be taught the lesson that exertion is indispensable for the attainment of knowledge.” We have heard one of the best high-school masters in New England complain that this demand for learning made easy is now the vice of popular teaching. Said he, “ I have so to smooth away every difficulty for my boys that the path of knowledge opens out before them at every step, apparently of its own accord, and they are left with nothing to do.” As Pestalozzi justly reflects, there can be no “solidity” in such acquisitions as these; and happy is he, rather, who “hath borne the yoke in his youth.” In Mr. Lauderbach’s primary department the natural sciences, with music and drawing, do not seem to hold the prominent place that is now demanded for them by the best educational authorities.

— The selections from the poems of Ovid prepared for the use of schools by Messrs. Allen and Greenough ⁴ form a neat volume of moderate size, which has all the principal good qualities required in a work of its kind. The choice of the passages to be included in the book could hardly have been better. The reputation of the Metamorphoses for being comprehensible and entertaining to young readers makes it a matter of course that extracts from that poem should occupy five sixths of the collection, although Ovid’s peculiar merits are better shown in his clever elegiacs than in his smooth but rather weak hexameters. But the eleven short extracts in elegiac verse are happily chosen, and are enough for a schoolbook.

The type and punctuation of the work are good, and misprints are very few. We notice a vacillation in the spelling of Virgilius and of Cygnus which is probably unintentional, but in our opinion unimportant. It is just as well that school-boys should know that orthography, whether English or Latin, cannot always be settled off-hand by a dictionary.

The introductions to the Metamorphoses, Fasti, etc., are clear and sensible, and the synopses, or arguments, prefixed to the extracts from the Metamorphoses, will be found useful in showing what connection there is between different parts of the poem.

The notes are, on the whole, very serviceable and judicious. We particularly like the instructions given at the outset in the art of scanning the ordinary Latin hexameter. We almost wish that some of the peculiarities of Ovid’s verses had here been pointed out, because mechanical criticism of this kind can be comprehended and applied by even a dull mind ; but considering that in general short notes are best, we suppose that the authors have been well advised in stopping where they do. Some points in the notes are open to criticism. For instance, the English word “ reeking ” is not elegant enough to make up for its loss of force when used out of its proper meaning, and therefore is not a neat translation of the Latin “ madens.” The formidable creature described in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea is as fabulous a monster as Ægaeon himself, and therefore should not be made to serve as his prototype. The Architeuthis monachus of Professors Steenstrup and Verrill is indeed an actual inhabitant of the ocean, but it has little to do with Victor Hugo’s absurd compound of sea anemone and cuttle-fish. Besides, when we, have Argus, Cerberus, Janus, and Hindoo divinities generally, to refer to, there is no need of a cuttle-fish to account for Ægæon. In the apostrophe of Pyramus and Thisbe to the wall between them, the line,

“ Quantum erat, ut sineres toto nos corpore jungi ” is confused by the suggested translation of “ toto corpore.” These words should of course be translated along with “ jungi ” by the English verb “ to embrace.” It is not perfectly accurate to say that “ unius ” is simply “ a ” in the phrase “ missi de gente Molossa obsidis unius,” which manifestly implies that there were not merely other hostages, but other Molossian hostages, in Lycaon’s hands. At least as good an illustration of the use of unus as an indefinite article might have been found in the line “ Deque viris quondam pars tribus una fui,” contained in the last selection in the book ; although even here “ una ” is opposed to “ tribus,” and “ pars una ” may be rendered either “ a third part ” or simply “ one.” The astronomical information relating to the adventure of Phaethon might be a little improved ; Ophiuchus, for instance, is not the Serpent. As to the course of the sun, no explanation would suffice to adapt Ovid’s careless description to the facts ; but poets have some right to say, “ Tant pis pour les faits.” Defects like those just noticed cannot be regarded as serious, and the book before us seems to contain few even of these.