My Schooling: Passages From an Autobiographic Fragment

UNTIL I was ten years old, I received most of my tuition from my grandfather Freeman.¹ After breakfast, each morning, he taught my elder brother and sister and me Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I did not know at the time what a wonderful teacher he was. He anticipated, sixty years ago, the best methods of modern instruction. In the first place, he made our studies interesting to us. Next, he removed all unnecessary difficulties, and required us to learn only what was essential. The Latin grammar which we studied was but twenty or thirty pages in length. It was called Latin Accidence, and contained the parts of speech, the declensions and conjugations, and a few of the principal rules of syntax. The larger grammar was not to be committed to memory, but to be used like a dictionary, for consultation. The more important Latin words we learned by heart from a vocabulary, and the more important Greek words from a small book called Greek Primitives. Thus provided, we began immediately to translate some interesting story in Nepos or Ovid. He kept up our interest by talking to us about it, explaining the difficult passages, and, when it was in verse, repeating it so as to bring out the rhythm and melody. When we came to a word we did not understand, he would tell us the meaning, but required us to repeat it again and again till he was sure we remembered it. To those who thought that this method made study too easy, and that it did not discipline the mind, he answered: “ The study of a foreign language can never be made too easy. There are always difficulties enough in it. But what mental discipline is there in turning over the pages of a dictionary ? I tell these children the meaning of the word, just as the dictionary does, but I save them the time lost in the merely manual operation of turning over the leaves. Real discipline comes to the mind when it acts, not languidly, but with its full energy, and it acts with energy only when it is interested in what it does. Therefore, as soon as I am unable to keep up their interest in what they do, I turn their attention to something else, or send them out to play.” The excellence of this method may be seen from the fact that before I was ten years old I had read a good deal of Ovid, some Odes of Horace, a little of Virgil, the Gospel of Matthew in Greek, and had gone as far as cubic equations in algebra. I also had read through a history of the United States, Hume’s England, Robertson’s Scotland, Ferguson’s and Gibbon’s Rome. I can repeat to-day, after sixty years, many passages of Ovid, and at least three Odes of Horace, which I committed to memory before I was ten. Nor was I aware that I was doing a great deal, for the study was made almost as entertaining as play. Problems in arithmetic and algebra were treated as a kind of game. I once met with the word “trigonometry,” and asked my grandfather what trigonometry was. “ Trigonometry,” said he, “ is a wonderful science. It is all about triangles.” “ What is a triangle?” said I. “I will show you,” he replied, and proceeded to draw on a slate a number of triangles, showing me that each had three sides and three angles, and explaining that if we knew three of these (one being a side) we could find the other three. He told me that by that law we could tell the distances of the planets and the moon. Then he took me out upon the lawn and showed me a tall tree, and explained how, by trigonometry, I could tell the height of the tree. Thereupon I made myself a little quadrant out of a shingle, and proceeded to measure the height of the trees and houses around me. Though the actual results were probably far from accurate, yet, by this little experiment, I obtained a very clear notion of the great foundation laws of mathematical astronomy. And I learned this in play. Such studies left plenty of time for outdoor exercise. With my brothers and cousins I learned to ride on horseback, with and without a saddle, to swim, to skate, to make bows and arrows and slings, and shoot with them, and to practice all the other athletic sports which boys love. We went to find distant ponds and rivers in which to catch perch and pickerel, and we even rediscovered the speckled trout in some brooks whence they had been thought to have disappeared long before. What happy hours we passed roaming through the woods, clambering over ledges of gray rock, or floating in boats on the omnipresent Charles River, which nearly encircled Newton ! Amid these studies and amusements there was still time enough for reading. First, when young, we had Miss Edgeworth; her stories not being bound together under the forbidding title of Parent’s Assistant, but in separate tales, each to be read by itself, and read again. — Simple Susan, The Little Merchants, Old Poz, Eton Montem, etc. Then, too, Walter Scott was writing his novels, and whenever a new one appeared it was brought from Boston, and read aloud in the family circle. I recollect that, when Ivanhoe came, I eagerly seized it, and became so absorbed in the story of the tournament that I hid under a bed, and refused to hear the call to study till I had seen the Black Knight and Ivanhoe triumphant in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche. I still think that there are no novels like those, — so full of character, adventure, picturesque incident, and with such an atmosphere of sunshine and good health throughout. Under that magic pen history became living, and the past was present. We were the Crusaders, we the outlaws, we the hesitating heroes, of the Waverley novels, who always seemed in an interesting dilemma, not quite able to decide between the two ways. Each Waverley novel was a new joy. And so Scott’s poems were full of delight and cheer. Their lyric flow, their manly tone, their generous sentiment, lifted us into a blessed region of ideal beauty. I remember, when I was at the Latin School, I spent my half holiday one Saturday reading Marmion for the first time. As the sun was setting I reached the end of the poem, and in the farewell verses read with astonishment these lines : —

and it seemed as if Scott were close beside me, talking to me in person.

There was an old chestnut-tree in the pasture, in which I had arranged a seat, and there I often sat, surrounded by the thick, shady branches, and read the most interesting books I could discover in my grandfather’s library. As this consisted largely of books of theology, Latin and Greek classics, or learned works in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, I found it difficult to suit myself. There was Rasselas, which pretended to be a story, but was only a long string of moralizing. But among some numbers of The Monthly Anthology I found the translation, by Sir William Jones, of the Hindoo play Sakoontala, and there was an old edition of Shakespeare in a number of duodecimo volumes. The tradition in the family was that these volumes came ashore when the English man-of-war Somerset was wrecked on Cape Cod. Some of the volumes were missing ; but this, on the whole, was an advantage, for it gave a certain aspect of infinity to this author. For aught I knew, there might be a hundred more plays of Shakespeare ; and as we think more of the lost books of Tacitus than of those we possess, because the contents of these unread pages fill the imagination with conjectures, so the plays of Shakespeare which I did not have made an ideal penumbra of beauty round those I was reading. There was also a volume of Elegant Extracts in verse, by Vicesimus Knox, which contained very good reading. From that volume I learned something of Spenser and Dryden, Swift and Pope. I even found some entertainment in Bailey’s English Dictionary, which often gave little historic and biographic anecdotes about the words, expatiating in a delightful way while illustrating their meaning. I learned from it a little of everything, and can still repeat the names and descriptions of the “ Ten honorable Ordinaries ” in heraldry as I there learned them for my amusement. It also contained tables for making Latin hexameters by a mechanical process; and other like matters, which are far below the dignity of a modern dictionary.

I confess to a weakness for such old-fashioned textbooks, which condescend a little to the infirmities of beginners. Schoolbooks now are composed by scholars who wish to show off their learning to other scholars, and who scorn what is elementary. A school treatise on algebra is composed as if intended for profound mathematicians. A Latin grammar prepared for boys ten years old goes into the mysteries of philology. A new edition of Virgil shows that the editor has ransacked all the studies on etymology and syntax in order to make a show of recondite learning in his footnotes. How much better for boys the old Delphin editions of the classics, which, fortunately for me, were still in use in my days ! There the words were arranged in the margin in the order of construction, and the footnotes gave us explanations which made the matter clear; and at the end what a copious index, which gave us words and phrases ! Besides this we had other helps, such as the Gradus ad Parnassum, and for some books an interlined translation. Instead of the modern astronomies, which bristle with mathematical formulas, we had The Young Gentleman’s Astronomy, in which the author announces that it is written, “ not to advance learning, but to assist learners,” and boldly declares his intention to begin at the beginning.

The English classics in Dr. Freeman’s library were of the Queen Anne era. Thus I became quite familiar with the Spectator and Guardian, and writers of that period. If we had not many books to read, we possessed some of the best. It did us no harm to read over again and again Paradise Lost, Pope’s Essay on Man, The Vicar of Wakefield, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels. In my good aunt Sally Curtis’s rooms I found some of the novels popular in her time: Cecilia and Evelina, by Miss Burney ; The Scottish Chiefs ; Thaddeus of Warsaw; Thomson’s Seasons, also; Falconer’s Shipwreck and Shenstone’s poems. The poems of Prior, Gay, and Peter Pindar were in the Freeman library, in old editions.

I am glad that I early came to know and love Pope. I obtained his complete works as a prize when at the Latin School, and in the same way came into possession of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and the poems of Scott, Burns, and Cowper. I am indebted to my aunt Swan for one source of pleasure and culture. When I was a child, recovering from a long illness, she brought to the house, for my amusement, the large engravings from Hogarth, and a folio volume of engravings from the Orleans Gallery.

The Boston Latin School was the first and only school I ever attended. All my early teaching, as I have said, I received at home ; and when I entered the Latin School, at the age of ten, I had already acquired a considerable amount of knowledge under that genial home instruction. Every difficult step had been made so easy for me that I enjoyed reading the pleasant stories of Ovid, and even the melodies of Horace ; and algebra had been a game full of interesting problems, the solution of which gave a thrill of satisfaction. So that I might seem to be thoroughly prepared for the studies of the Latin School. But one thing I had not learned to do : I had not been taught to commit to memory the uninteresting and unintelligible rules, exceptions, notes, and remarks of which the school grammar was full. It was the Latin School system, in those days, to have the first year wholly occupied in committing to memory the most abstract formulas of Adams’s Latin Grammar. There might be a dull kind of discipline in this, but it was, I think, an injurious one. It was a discipline of the power of cramming the memory with indigestible facts and sounds. It taught us to make a strenuous effort to accomplish a disagreeable task. But is not life full enough of such tasks? Is there ever a day in which we do not have to do them ? Why then take the time which might be occupied in learning something interesting and useful in learning as a mere tour de force that which we may never use ? It had a benumbing effect on the mind. It stupefied our faculties. It gave a distaste for study. Latin, Greek, and mathematics taught in this way inspired only dislike.

What is mental discipline ? Every faculty of body and mind is best disciplined by exercise. Now, only that which we enjoy doing fully exercises our powers. We do disagreeable tasks by a strenuous effort, feebly; we do agreeable ones without an effort, with energy. What greater exercise than playing chess ? This tasks observation, memory, foresight, the power of combining means to an end, patient, continued effort. If chess were drudgery, no one could ever do all it requires; but the pleasure which attends it tides us over its difficult mental operations.

The joy which children take in play is an ingenious device by which Mother Nature communicates to them the first and most indispensable knowledge. The playroom and playground are her primary school. There children, intent on ball, top, kite, games of tag, puss in the corner, and so on, are really learning how to exercise their limbs, balance their bodies, quicken their perceptive organs, and learn obedience to the immutable laws of the physical world. While playing they become acquainted with the nature of things, — gravitation, motion in direct lines and curves, the laws of elasticity, action and reaction, equilibrium, friction, and the like. They also learn, by playing in company, how to command and obey, to give up their own wishes for the common good, and to unite with others for a common end. From this varied, delightful, and thorough system of education we take them to a school, and teach them what? The dull memory of words ! And we think this is education!

Of course I do not mean that children should spend all their time in play ; hut I mean that we should study the method of nature, and make what we call work as interesting as play. It can be made even more interesting.

It was a well-established tradition in our family that the boys should all go to the Boston Latin School. My father went to it; my grandfather Clarke went to it; my grandfather Freeman went to it; and all my brothers, as well as I, went to it: and no doubt, notwithstanding its grievous defects of method, it did us all great good to go there.

First, it taught us social equality. There is no aristocracy in a public school, but the natural leadership of superior ability. The public schools of England have saved the nation from that separation of class from class which has brought revolution to the kingdoms of the Continent. Public schools teach boys the true equality of human beings; not an equality of powers, of function, of position, of possession, but of human and social rights. The young aristocrat, born in the purple, finds he must get the son of a ploughman to help him in his studies ; finds himself surpassed in his classes by the son of a poor widow; finds himself on the playground obeying, as his chief, the bright-eyed, quickfooted plebeian who is the natural captain of the little regiment. Thus he learns to subordinate position to faculty, outward rank to native power.

In my division in the Latin School there were the sons of the most eminent citizens, and also of mechanics. They studied, recited, played together, and were thus educated to a true democracy. One of these boys, whose father was a man of limited means, became afterward an eminent engineer. Some forty years after we left the Latin School I happened to meet a relative of his, and asked after my old classmate. “He is chief engineer,” she answered, “to the Emperor of Brazil. In his last letter he described a reception he had given at his villa to the Emperor and his court.”

On entering the Latin School I was put into a division of ten or twelve boys in the lowest, or fifth, class, and began to commit to memory the first pages of the Latin grammar. How well I remember the first sentence ! “Grammar is the art of speaking and writing correctly.”

Having thus defined it as an art, the book went on to teach it as though it were a science. Instead of practical rules and examples of correct and incorrect speech, it gave a minute philological analysis of the linguistic forms. How do children learn to speak their own language ? By being taught the difference between a noun and pronoun, an adverb and conjunction? By analyzing language into moods and tenses, number and person ? Not at all. They learn by imitation and repetition. They learn thus the use of the most essential words and forms, and come gradually to the less essential. That is, they learn by practice and observation. They first acquire the phrases which are most necessary for common use, and these they retain because they have to use them so often. Their vocabulary extends itself by degrees to an outer circle of less used terms, and so, by regular expansion, they become familiar with all that they need to know.

If grammar be the art of speaking and writing a language correctly, it should follow this method of nature instead of that of the schools. Fortunately, the superstition of grammar is rapidly disappearing. Another superstition remains, however, — that of the dictionary. Sensible and practical teachers are now generally aware that, in learning a language, all the knowledge of grammar needed at first is that of the declensions and conjugations, and a few rules of syntax. Having acquired these, the pupil is to keep his grammar by his side as a book of reference, turning to it when a difficulty appears which he is unable otherwise to remove. He learns his grammar by practical application, and thus will remember it better. But how about the dictionary ?

Great objection is made by teachers to the use of translations. But what mental discipline comes from turning over the pages of a dictionary ? Does knowledge enter our minds through the ends of our fingers ? Does the mere bodily exercise of thumbing the leaves tend to fix the word in the memory ? The dictionary tells the boy the meaning of the term. The translation does exactly the same thing, only saving the time lost in searching for it. A tutor, sitting by his side, if wise, would do the same. The point, in each case, is to have him remember the meaning after he has been told it. That can be accomplished by making him go over his exercise repeatedly till he can remember it, without referring to dictionary, translation, or tutor.

When I entered the Latin School, as I said, I was put into a small class who were set to committing to memory Adams’s Latin Grammar. In this exercise I was very imperfect, and I went at once to the foot of the class, and there remained. For it was the custom, and I think it a very good one, to excite the emulation of the boys by having each boy who made a mistake change places with any boy who was below him and could correct him. Thus it happened that the position and rank of the pupil might change several times during a single recitation. At the beginning of each recitation the boys occupied the places they held at the close of the previous one. No record was kept of this rank, and no reward or honor was obtained by it. Thus there was no undue stimulus exercised, and yet enough to arouse the ambition of the scholars. The excitement subsided at the end of each recitation.

From this experimental class the pupils were transferred, according to their apparent merits, into different divisions of the fourth and fifth classes. Finally there remained only one boy beside myself who had not been thus transferred. He was John Osborne Sargent, who has since become a distinguished man. He had been always at the head of the class, and I at the foot. To my intense surprise, he and I were both transplanted to a higher position than any of the rest, namely, into the second division of the fourth class. That Sargent should thus be promoted seemed only just, but on what ground was I sent up with him ? It looked like pure favoritism. Or did Mr. Gould have prescience by which to discern the result? For no sooner was I thus promoted, and, instead of committing the grammar to memory, set to translating Cornelius Nepos, than I became one of the two best scholars in the class, my companion Sargent being the other. My previous instruction at home began to tell. It had taught me to use my faculties freely; it caused me to take pleasure in my studies. I took great delight in the music of Ovid, which followed Nepos ; and when we came to Virgil, the lovely pastoral pictures in the Eclogues had a charm which still remains. The Æneid I never liked so well. It was very easy reading, but seemed less original and more superficial. The “ pius Æneas ” I thought a cold-blooded humbug, and I think so still. Virgil’s heroes are hardly more than lay figures, or shells of men, with no substantial humanity within. What a poor creature is Æneas compared with the high-spirited, generous Hector! The episode of Æneas and Dido is far inferior to that of Ulysses and Calypso, from which it was copied, and even to the subsequent replica of Rinaldo and Armida in Tasso.

There was one book used in the Latin School, when I was there, in which the true method of instruction was fully realized. This was Warren Colburn’s First Lessons in Arithmetic. It exercised the mind, not the memory ; it began with what was easy, and went on to what was difficult; it interested us by perpetual problems, which tasked, but did not tax, the mind. We had not to commit to memory unintelligible rules, but made rules for ourselves as we went on. We never played a game with more pleasure or more excitement than we had in seeing which would be the first to get the answer to a proposed question. Of course, this admirable book was soon banished from the schools by the pedants, who thought that whatever was interesting must be bad. It combined the best training with the best instruction, enabling a boy or girl to solve any mathematical question likely to arise in the business of life. But though it thus fully attained the end of arithmetic, it did not teach the students to call the processes by the old names, and so it was first mutilated, and then very generally discarded.²

I recollect an incident which illustrates its value. One of the best teachers I ever knew, Francis E. Goddard, of Louisville, Kentucky, had a little boy committed to his care by his father, Mr. Garnet Duncan, of that city. The boy, who has since become somewhat famous as a politician, was walking with his teacher through the main street of Louisville, when they came to a store, in front of which two or three of the principal merchants of the city were engaged in animated discussion. “ Here comes Mr. Goddard,” said one of them ; “ let us ask him. We have a mathematical question, which has arisen in the course of our business, which we cannot answer.” So he stated the difficulty, and asked Mr. Goddard to write down the problem, take it home, and when he had leisure see if he could solve it. Goddard turned to the little boy by his side, and said, “ Here. —. do it in your head.” And the boy gave the right answer on the spot. He had been thoroughly trained in Colburn’s First Lessons.

One of the most curious literary deceptions I remember occurred when I was at the Latin School. One of my class, whose father was a highly respectable citizen, but not very wealthy, suddenly appeared to have plenty of money. He would hire horses and take us to drive, and indulge in other expenditures. Years after, he gave me the explanation. John Pierpont had just prepared his reader for schools, called The First-Class Book. It was published by William B. Fowle, and had great success. Its selections were far superior to those of any reading-book then extant. The author and publisher had found it very profitable. The boy to whom I refer wrote to Mr. Fowle, in the character of a retired literary gentleman, who did not wish his name to transpire, offering to prepare a companion volume to that of Mr. Pierpont, containing extracts suitable for declamation. Mr. Fowle answered the letter, saying he would like a specimen of the work, sufficiently copious to enable him to judge of its value. Thereupon my young friend associated a companion with himself, and together they wrote out extracts from speeches, plays, and poems, suitable for elocutionary purposes, and enough in quantity to make the first quarter of the volume. Mr. Fowle accepted the manuscript, and sent his check for I think at least a hundred dollars. They prepared and sent another quarter, and received another hundred dollars. By this time they had become a little careless, and the third quarter was so inferior that Mr. Fowle refused to pay for more, and finished the book himself. But the boys received between them two or three hundred dollars ; and I presume that Mr. Fowle never knew who were the compilers of the volume.

James Freeman Clarke.