Herbert Spencer's Theory of Education

MR. SPENCER’S treatise on education consists of four essays, originally contributed to English reviews, and first collected and published in this country in 1860. The first essay discusses the question, “ What knowledge is of most worth ? ” The other three treat successively of intellectual, moral, and physical education. It is with the subject of the first essay that we have to do at present, the question of the relative worths of different knowledges. The succeeding three essays only carry out in more detail the theory advanced in the first, though they include by the way many most valuable common-sense suggestions on the general subject of education, and especially on that of young children.

“ What knowledge is of most worth ?” Mr. Spencer’s attitude in answering this question is different from that in his other works in that it is the attitude of a reformer ; and this must be taken to account for a certain lack of that calm breadth of view which characterizes his other writings. He is here for once the ardent advocate, rather than the cool and dispassionate judge. He seems to have written with a sort of righteous indignation at the evil which he finds in society, and which he conceives to be largely due to our systems of education. It is to be feared that the evil is deeper seated ; and certainly there is little reason to expect that the particular change proposed, apparently in a hasty and impulsive search for remedies, by our author, would do anything but aggravate the evil.

The great fault of modern education, Mr. Spencer asserts, is its wrong choice of subjects for study. His main proposition is, in a nutshell, that “ science ” ought to supersede the classics, the modern languages, history, art, and literature. His main argument in defense of this proposition is, in brief, that the activities in life which are subserved by science are more important than those which are subserved by the ordinary school and college studies.

Of course Mr. Spencer had in mind, when this treatise was written (more than twenty years ago), the curriculum of the English universities and the schools preparatory thereto. So far as these went to an extreme, in past times, by entirely excluding the natural sciences, in their adherence to the traditional course in Latin, Greek, and mathematics, the claims of this treatise had a certain justice, and very likely were productive of good. The misfortune is that in the effort to create a reaction, and to swing the pendulum back from one extreme, our author has made exaggerated claims for natural science, and has indulged in exaggerated denunciations of literary studies. So that now, when the reaction has long ago set in, and the pendulum has swung far to the opposite extreme, this one-sided and partisan statement of the case is not only productive of no further good, but is doing, in this country especially, positive mischief. There has hardly been a rash and ill-considered educational notion uttered by the thousand and one uneducated “educators” throughout the United States, for the last fifteen years, that has not based itself on Mr. Spencer’s theory of education. It has been and still is the Law and the Prophets for all the devotees of educational isms in this country, from those who would turn our schools and colleges into bakeries and blacksmith shops to those who would abolish them altogether. This has come about especially because isolated statements from Mr. Spencer’s treatise are constantly being quoted by the weaker brethren among educational men in such a way as to convey a very different impression from that which must have been intended by the author himself. For certainly his constant claim, everywhere else in his writings, is for broad thinking and complete living ; whereas his words are constantly quoted from this treatise so as to advocate the narrowest thought and the most meagre intellectual life. From the tone of many of those who quote with delight his utterances on education, one would suppose that of all things in the world Mr. Spencer despised and hated books of any sort whatsoever; when in fact he is devoting a most laborious and useful life exclusively to the production of them for the service of the world. And very little service would they do, certainly, unless the study of them as a valuable part of our literature — as a part of that which is the most important outgrowth of our planet thus far in its evolution, namely, the accumulation of man’s thought and feeling concerning human life and affairs — were considered to be worthy of time and effort, even to the exclusion or the postponement of some attention to vegetable growths, the rocky strata, and other curious points of the planet itself.

It is not, however, wholly on account of misquotation and misunderstanding by his readers that Mr. Spencer’s treatise on education is productive of harm. The views themselves are not sound. The main argument is based on a fundamental error, which ought long ago to have been thoroughly exposed. That it has had so long a vogue simply shows how strong a hold the author has gained, and deservedly gained for the most part, upon the confidence of thinking people, as an accurate observer and sound reasoner. Before considering this main proposition, let us glance briefly at his introduction to it.

Mr. Spencer sets out with the assertion that there has been hitherto no rational selection of subjects for study, nor, indeed, any discussion whatever of the relative worth of knowledges. The classical and mathematical curriculum has been adhered to, he thinks, merely through the force of a superstitious public opinion. How this public opinion grew up he does not attempt to explain, unless we are to take as an attempt at an explanation his statement that a desire for ornament precedes a desire for dress, and are to consider his brilliant attack on the pursuit of ornamental accomplishments as directed against all courses of liberal study. But this would surely be a very superficial view of the origin of our colleges and universities. They did not spring up by accident, — that is certain ; nor were they built by the instinct of the peacock and the bower-bird. The strong public opinion among the educated classes in favor of liberal studies is by no means based upon any such flimsy foundation as the mere fancy for ornament. The truth is, there is a permanent aspiration in man for spiritual enlargement, for higher and richer planes of intellectual being. This aspiration has in every age reached out, no doubt more or less blindly, after whatever was greatest and best in preceding human attainment. Latin and Greek have been studied, not alone, as our author almost seems to suppose, as words and for words’ sake, but for the vital contact they give with the living men who thought in Latin and Greek. From many desires and motives, no doubt, but most of all from this permanent hunger for intellectual illumination and spiritual enlargement, have grown up our universities and our systems of liberal culture.

But we should be greatly mistaken if we supposed that this had been a wholly blind aspiration. In our exclusive attention to the wonderful material advancement of this age we are too apt to forget that there have been thinking men in the world even before our remarkable century. There have even been two or three who supposed, at least, that they understood the need of rational discussion of educational theories. There was, for example, an honest Greek gentleman, one Plato by name ; and there were certain well meaning persons in England, such as John Milton and John Locke, not to mention others, whose ideas on these subjects may be found in libraries. Almost as well, indeed, might a Grahamite assert that there had been no rational views on the subject of food till his own favorite theory was advanced ; and that the strong public opinion in favor of beef and bread over husks and water had grown up by mere accident, and been perpetuated through unreasoning prejudice.

Mr. Spencer alleges that boys are given a classical course of study merely in order that when grown up they may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of those things which are considered essential to the “ education of a gentleman.” It certainly has some significance, one might reply, that this liberal culture has become so associated in the minds of the intelligent class with being an educated gentleman. This association, surely, has not come about by mere chance. May there not have been some relation of cause and effect in it ? One thing is certain : if all men could, by training, be carried to the point of fulfilling our idea of the educated English gentleman, there would be something to be said in favor of the system of education that had brought about such a consummation.

Not but that Mr. Spencer is perfectly right in maintaining that there is need of more attention to the question of the relative worth of knowledges. He is no doubt right, also, in saying that it is important to fix upon a test or measure of value. And no one can hesitate to agree with the test which he goes on to propose: namely, the bearing of different studies on the preparation for “ complete living.” “ To prepare us for complete living,” he says, “ is the function which education has to discharge ; and the only rational mode of judging of any educational course is to judge in what degree it discharges this function.” We should be mistaken, however, if we supposed this to be a new test. It is merely the new statement of what has been all along the underlying thought of all the great thinkers in the world on this subject. It is, in fact, hardly more than a paraphrase of what Milton affirmed more than two hundred years ago : “ I call, therefore, a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” Nor has this been merely the thought of a few great thinkers. It has been the essence, whether formulated or not, of that fundamental instinct of which we have spoken, the aspiration for a higher and wider life, out of which has grown up, slowly and steadily, our present system of liberal education. There is this to be said for Mr. Spencer: that no writer has ever stated so clearly and fully and convincingly the claims of this paramount motive, the aspiration for complete living. It is only the more unfortunate that, in an impulse of vexation with certain evils of our present arrangements, he should hastily have flung this treatise straight in the teeth of all his own liberal doctrines.

For this is the theory of Mr. Spencer’s treatise. He first lays down a classification of the activities of life, in the order of what he calls their relative “ importance.” It is in his use of this word, and his inferences from it, that we shall find the unsound spot in his whole theory. He arranges the activities of life in the order of their importance as follows : —

“ 1. Those activities which directly minister to self-preservation.

“ 2. Those which secure the necessaries of life, and so indirectly minister to self-preservation.

“ 3. Those which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring.

“ 4. Those involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations.

“ 5. Those miscellaneous activities which make up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings.”

Having thus rated the activities of life by their “ importance,” he now proceeds to rank the different subjects of study by their bearing on these divisions. The first division of activities has to do with the direct maintenance of life : for this, he affirms, the sciences of physiology and hygiene are the best educational studies; so that here, to begin with, science is the only proper thing. The second division relates to what we call “getting a living : ” for this the sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology are the needed studies ; so that here, too, science is what is needed. The third division deals with the care of offspring: for this the essential education consists, he says, of physiology and psychology; so that here, too, science is the thing. The fourth division is concerned with the maintenance of social and political relations : here we require biology, psychology, and sociology; so that here, also, science gives the requisite training. The fifth and last division includes the gratification of the tastes and feelings. For this class of activities the author had apparently expected to find that literature, the classics, and so forth were desirable, and begins to make some such concessions ; but in the very midst of them he seems to discover with satisfaction that here, also, we can find all that we want in science. So that for all these various activities a purely scientific training is the proper and only necessary preparation. Perceiving now that he has still left exposed to the enemy one whole flank of the subject, namely, that of education considered as discipline, our author goes on to affirm, that for this purpose also, whether in the region of intellectual, moral, or religious discipline, the sciences are all that we need. Both for guidance and for discipline, therefore, a narrowly scientific training is concluded to be all that could be desired.

Let us now examine a few of these points in detail, and first of all that on which the whole argument rests: the classification of life-activities according to their relative importance.

In what sense can it be considered true, as Mr. Spencer asserts, that the activities which protect the physical life are more important than intellectual and social activities ? His argument, to be sure, is at first sight a plausible one. He affirms that the thing which is made possible is less important, and must be postponed to that which makes it possible. That is to say, since the intellectual operations and social activities could not go on without a body, while the bodily life could go on without intellectual or social activities, the body is more important than the mind, or than society. Is it not obvious that, using the term “important” in any ordinary sense, this is exactly the reverse of the truth ? For what value has the body except as a means to that higher end ? And is it not the importance of that higher end that gives the means whatever importance it possesses ? To arrange the activities of life in the order of their dependence on one another, therefore, is to arrange them in precisely the reverse order of their intrinsic importance. It is upon the meaning of the word “ important ” that the whole fallacy turns ; so that our author, after allowing himself to indulge in sarcasms upon the useless study of language, seems for once to be caught by a mere juggle of words, and founds a whole theory upon a confusion of meanings.

But the only meaning of the word “ important” which can have any fitness in a discussion of the relative importance of different subjects of study is — “demanding attention in school and college education.” And in this meaning of the word, the relative importance of life-activities is again just the reverse of Mr. Spencer’s estimate; since nature looks out for the “ necessary condition,” the body, and leaves it for art, for education, to attend to “ that which is made possible,” the mind.

It seems to be one peculiar danger attending our absorption in these fascinating sciences of our day, and in their for the most part admirable methods, that we are tempted to imagine, when we have made an elaborate classification, and thrown a theory into an exact tabular form, that we have thereby systematized a great truth. May it not sometimes happen that we have only systematized a great error ? And another danger, that can perhaps hardly be laid to the charge of our scientific studies, so all but universal does it appear to be, is the liability to be led astray by an apparent analogy between something in nature and something in human affairs, so that a captivating illustration will seem an argument. So clear-sighted a man as our author, for example, compares the relation of the florist to the plant with the relation of the teacher to the child. The florist, he says, knows that the root and leaves are more important than the flower, since it is the root and leaves that make the flower possible: so the teacher knows that the body is more important than the mind. But plainly that depends on the sense which we attach to the word “ important.” In the ordinary sense of the word, the flower is to the florist the only thing which has any importance at all. Except for the flower which is to follow, he would care nothing for the root and leaves of a plant. And if we use the word, as before, to mean “ demanding attention,” then it becomes evident that there is only the most superficial resemblance between the two cases, and no real analogy. For in the case of the plant, man’s art has only to nourish the root and leaves, and wild nature will invariably see to the production of the perfect flower. But in the case of the human being precisely the opposite is true: wild nature looks to the body, and utterly refuses, in the savage state (that is to say, without education) to produce a cultivated mind; so that man’s art has to see to it, by a careful course of education, that the higher intellectual life comes forth from this natural body. The savage has a very sufficient body; nay, the wild animal is well equipped in that respect. But this admirable body might go on existing and propagating its kind for ages, without any flower and fruit of spiritual development, unless our systems of education fortunately realized the supreme importance of that, and saw to its production.

There is the same error in Mr. Spencer’s estimate of his second division of life-activities, — the activities indirectly ministering to self-preservation, or the getting of a livelihood. These activities he rates as higher in importance than intellectual and social life, because they are a necessary condition to it. But here, again, it is evident that their importance in the sense of their requiring attention in our school and college education should be rated in just the reverse order. The ordinary man, unenlightened by education, manages pretty well this matter of getting a living for his body ; which is, no doubt, a necessary condition to any intellectual life, but is intrinsically of considerably less importance than that higher end, which alone, indeed, gives it any value whatever. It is the precise function of education to see to it that men’s lives shall be so “ lifted up and strengthened ” that they shall be worth sustaining by a livelihood. Not what sort of a living they get, but what sort of a life they get, is the question of real importance.

If by “ education ” we were to understand the whole sum total of forces and influences that go to produce a man, it would, no doubt, be true that we must begin at the body to build him up. Indeed, under that supposition, our education would have to begin farther back still : we should have to make a planet for him to live on, or beyond that a solar system, or beyond that the nebula out of which such a system should be made ; for each of these would in turn be more “ important,” as being the necessary condition to what should follow. But in education, fortunately, we have no such tremendous task. Solar system and planet have been with reasonable success evolved, and finally the human body and the rudiments of a mind, and we have now to make that mind by education a more complete and perfect one. We are not to harm the body or hinder it, any more than we are to go back and destroy the planet; these necessary conditions are not to be interfered with ; but we are to leave to wild nature whatever she does decently well, and do by our art of education that which she will not do at all, or will do very badly, and which we shall not get too well done, though we concentrate all our force, during the brief period of school and college training, on that alone. The plain fact is that the one thing which wild nature never yet did, and never can be depended on to do, is to make intellectual, or even decently rational, men and women out of the common stuff of humanity. While, as to the body, and as to the getting of a living for it, and even as to the care of offspring, something may be left to nature and natural instinct ; just as the instinct of the love of life and the instinct of the desire for offspring hardly need to be cultivated in our college curriculums. Yet they, too, are a part of the sum total of essential conditions of life, and our author might well have gone back, therefore, and put them first of all in his scheme of so-called “ importance.”

It must be kept clearly in mind that in any discussion regarding education the relative importance of certain activities can only mean their relative need of attention in our curriculums of study. The whole question is confused by confounding this with their relative dependence in nature. The practical problem for the teacher, we must remember, is this : given, the average boy, of good enough physical basis, of ordinary tendencies to lead a healthy animal life, of average inclination to defend himself and push his way in the world so far as material advantages go, — given such a boy, to bring him through a course of intellectual and moral education that shall make the highest order of man out of this crude material furnished by nature. What this course is we must try our best to discover. It will certainly not be wise to assume that the previous experience of mankind is utterly worthless to us in this attempt; nor shall we be furthered much by any new and fanciful theory, based on an entire confusion as to what are the most important things to be attended to in education.

It is taken for granted that Mr. Spencer means to include in his fifth division all those activities of the mind which we sometimes speak of as constituting “ the intellectual life.” He is commonly understood to mean that. If he does, however, he uses strangely inaccurate phraseology; for these intellectual activities can with no propriety be called the mere gratification of the tastes and feelings. They belong, he says, to the leisure part of life, and so should occupy only the leisure part of education. If he has in mind mere superficial accomplishments, wax-work and the guitar, no doubt he is right. But if he means the higher intellectual processes, they are precisely the most important of all activities, and the preparation for them should accordingly occupy the chief part of education. They are the activities of life, too, as we have said, that cannot by any possibility come except by education, while the others — the necessary conditions to these — are likely to come very well without it.

If he does not mean to include the intellectual life in this fifth division of activities, then he has made the strange mistake of classifying life-activities in a discussion of education, and leaving entirely out of his classification those very activities for the sake of which our systems of education were established and have been maintained. How was it possible to do this, after setting out with such attractive aphorisms as to “complete living”? He has, in fact, oddly enough, left no place in his scheme for our activity in studying his works, nor for his own activity in writing them.

Everywhere in this treatise Mr. Spencer appears to assume that the chief purpose of education is to furnish the mind with a certain set of convenient facts. He seems never to rise to the conception of education as a process of mind development, with power to determine not merely what the man shall know, but what he shall be. Apparently, he thinks of every man as being by nature of a fixed and predetermined type, and then as receiving from education only a certain outfit of handy information. The truth is, on the contrary, that the very question of what type of man the boy shall become is the chief question that is constantly being determined by education. With regard to the preparation for the rearing of offspring, for example, Mr. Spencer affirms that the essential training will be found in the sciences of physiology and psychology. This is all very well, but it overlooks the point that the main question concerning offspring is the question what manner of men and women the parents themselves are; and what they shall be it is precisely the effort of a liberal course of education to determine. There are no scientific facts whatever that can compare in importance to parents, as parents, with their being themselves richly endowed and highly developed persons, in mind as well as in body. What they are, more than what they know, is of determining force on their offspring, from the earliest moment on through the whole period of their relations with them.

The same hastiness of statement is apparent with regard to the preparation for earning a livelihood. Mr. Spencer seems to ignore the fact that the thing, after all, that is of most service to a man in making his way in the world is to be, first of all, an intelligent man ; and this intelligence it is precisely the purpose of education to give him. He will be able to get his handy information for himself afterward, in one direction or another, as happens to be most useful to him. The ability to read, in the largest and highest sense, that is to say, the ability to get the full benefit of other men’s minds and experience from their written words, and the ability to think, — these are gifts bestowed by a liberal education, that are worth any amount of a particular set of facts. If Aristotle and Bacon were to enter the company, we should hardly fail to recognize them as rather well-educated men, although their minds would be empty of all these facts of modern science that are asserted by Mr. Spencer to be the essential conditions of any sound education.

Mr. Spencer does, it is true, briefly indicate in his treatise, almost as if by an after-thought, that studies are partly for the sake of discipline. But “ we may be quite sure,” he says, “ that the acquirement of those facts which are most useful for regulating conduct involves a mental exercise best fitted for strengthening the faculties. It would be utterly contrary to the beautiful economy of Nature if one kind of culture were needed for the gaining of information, and another kind were needed as a mental gymnastic.” “ The education of most value for guidance must at the same time be the education of most value for discipline.”

It was best to lay down this statement as an axiom ; for if it were taken as a proposition to be proved, the proof would be found very difficult indeed. It is fine to talk of the “ beautiful economy of Nature,” but the economy of man is not without its beauty, also : the economy, namely, of time and of force that results from exercises devised by man for gaining strength and skill far faster and more agreeably than by the haphazard opportunities of ordinary life. “ Everywhere throughout creation,” says Mr. Spencer, “ we find faculties developed through the performance of those functions which it is their office to perform ; not through the performance of artificial exercises devised to fit them for those functions.” Everywhere, to be sure, is the obvious reply, except in the arrangements of that rather important part of “ creation,” man ; since he is the only animal that does not rest contented with the savage state of wild nature, but is so happy as to be endowed with aspirations that lead him to educate himself and his offspring. This he ventures to do by means of plans and systems of training not found, it must be confessed, anywhere in the lower grades of creation. There would be no athletes, for example, were it not for skillfully devised and persistently followed exercises. There would be no mastery of music without laborious training by means of “ artificial” exercises. But the proposition is too absurd to need refutation by instances. Would Mr. Spencer have the boy put off all exercise in penmanship till he entered on the “ performance of those functions ” in the counting-room or the editorial chair ? One might as well object to the interference with Nature in arranging her phenomena, in experiments, for better observation as to object to our interference in arranging exercises for better discipline.

For what is this “ Nature ” (with a capital N) which figures so largely as a final arbiter in the enthusiastic eulogies of Science (with a capital S) ? Does this Nature include man and his operations, or does it not ? If it does, then these very interferences are also a part of Nature. And certainly the human part of Nature has as good a claim to be the arbiter as any other part. But if it does not include man, and is merely a name for the forces and processes of the world outside of the human world, then we may safely assert our right to come down upon this Nature, and mould and control it according to our needs. Or if, to take a third supposition, this capital-lettered Nature is meant to include man only in his so-called “ natural ” condition, — the wild man, the savage, the animal,— then surely the very effort of all civilization, and of education as its chief instrument, is to oppose, and whip in, and convert, and take command of these untamed forces of Nature, that we may develop the crude savage into the higher human being.

Probably nine tenths of the popular sophistries on the subject of education would be cleared away by clarifying the conception of this word Nature. We hear the “natural method” eulogized, and the “ natural man ” is appealed to from morbid and unnatural conditions of living. But what is the natural method ? It is of little value as an arbiter, unless it means that method which the sanest sense and the ripest experience of man has approved. And who is the natural man ? Plainly, not the savage, not the undeveloped brute, but the man as he was meant by Nature to be: completely equipped in mind as well as in body ; equipped, moreover, with the highest social and political arrangements, including a wise system of education. That is in the truest sense, the only rational sense for the purposes of such a discussion, the natural method, the natural order of studies, the natural course of exercises, which the foremost Englishman — not which the lowest Fijian — would approve and adopt.

There is space to notice but one or two instances in which the false conception of Nature leads to error in this treatise: and first in the objection to abstract studies. Mr. Spencer asserts that since the natural activities of the mind in early youth are concrete, therefore the whole education of this period should be concrete. Certainly, that is the method of wild nature, and wild nature never gets beyond that point. The uneducated man remains always, in this respect, a child, incapable of abstract thought. What we wish to do is to develop out of this crude, unnatural Nature the truly natural man, — the man as Nature meant him to be, with the power and the habit of abstract conception and reasoning. Though we follow the order, we need not follow the pace, of wild nature. The sooner the boy can be brought to read intellectual books, and to grasp complex subjects, easily and quietly, without strain or precocity or hindrance to the physical development, the more of a man will he make.

So, again, Mr. Spencer’s words are often quoted in support of the attractive doctrine that education shall give boys to do only that which they choose to do. Their diet, according to this theory, would be plum-cake and jam, and their reading would likewise be whatever was spiciest to the mental palate and easiest of mastication. Every parent and teacher knows something of what evils would follow this system, from his observation of the effects of the dime novel and of our juvenile literature in general. A young person had much better read Shakespeare and Mr. Spencer. Every teacher, at least, knows also how this theory has run into an absurd extreme in “oral teaching” and the “ object-lesson.” A boy does not need to be fed forever with a spoon. The time comes when he must learn to get his knowledge in the way that every educated man must always get it, — from the written page, and from self-controlled, persistent, laborious thought.

Of course one easily overstates any single aspect of such a vast subject as this of education. It is not surprising that even so profound and careful a thinker as Mr. Spencer has done so in this early treatise of his. Nor need it shake our faith in his candor nor in his general breadth of view ; for it was probably meant only as an extreme statement of one side of the subject, intended to correct what seemed to him an extreme practice in the opposite direction. It is to be hoped that he will yet revise the treatise, or withdraw it altogether and substitute a more mature treatment of the subject, whenever he comes to realize that his reaction has already gone much too far, and when he comes to see that his work is not taken by his disciples for the reactionary and one-sided statement that it is, but for a deliberate and complete view, — a character which the author himself would probably be the last person to claim for it.

E. R. Sill.