§ 1. The beginning of the 17th century brought with it a change in the main direction of thought and interest. As we have seen, the 16th century adored literature and was thrown back on the remote past. Some of the great scholars like Sturm had indeed visions of literary works to be written, that would rival the old models on which they were fashioned; but whether they hoped or not to bring back the Golden Age all the scholars of the Renascence thought of it as having been. With the change of century, however, a new conception came into men’s minds. Might not this worship of the old writers after all be somewhat of a superstition? The languages in which they wrote were beautiful languages, no doubt, but they were ill adapted to express the ideas and wants of the modern world. As for the substance of these old writings, this did not satisfy the cravings of men’s minds. It left unsolved all the main problems of existence, and offered for knowledge mere speculations or poetic fancies or polished rhetoric. Man needed to understand his position with regard to God and to Nature; but on both of these topics the classics were either silent or misleading. Revelation had supplied what[198] the classics could not give concerning man’s relation to God; but nothing had as yet thrown light on his relation to Nature. And yet with his material body and animal life he could not but see how close that relation was, and could not but wish that something about it might be known, not simply guessed or feigned. Hence the demand for real knowledge, that is, a knowledge of the facts of the universe as distinct from the knowledge of what men have thought and said. We have heard of the mathematician who put down Paradise Lost with the remark that it seemed to him a poor book, for it did not prove anything; and it was just in this spirit that the new school of thinkers, the Realists, looked upon the classics. They wanted to know Nature’s laws: and words which did not convey such knowledge seemed to them of little value. § 2. Here was a tremendous revolution from the mode of thought prevalent in the Renascence. No longer was the Golden Age in the past. In science the Golden Age must always be in the future. Scientific men start with what has been discovered and add to it. Every discovery passes into the common stock of knowledge, and becomes the property of everyone who knows it just as much as of the discoverer. Harvey had no more property in the circulation of the blood, Newton and Leibnitz no more property in the Differential Calculus than Columbus in the Continent of America; indeed not so much, for Columbus gained some exclusive rights in America, but Harvey gained none over the blood.
So we see that whereas the literary spirit made the dominant minds reverence the past, the scientific spirit led them to despise the past; and whereas the literary spirit raised the value of words and led to the study of celebrated[199] writings, the scientific spirit was totally careless about words and prized only physical truths which were entirely independent of words. Again, the literary spirit naturally favoured the principle of authority, for its oracles had already spoken: the scientific spirit set aside all authority and accepted nothing that did not of itself satisfy the reason. (Compare Comenius, supra p. 152.)
§ 3. The first great leader in this revolution was an Englishman, Francis Bacon. But the school-room felt his influence only through those who learnt from him; and among educational reformers, the chief advocates of realism have been found on the Continent, e.g., Ratke and Comenius.[99] But the desire to learn by “things, not words” affected the minds of many English writers on education, and we find this spirit showing itself even in Milton and Locke, and far more clearly in some writers less known to fame.
§ 4. There is a wide distinction in educational writers between those who were schoolmasters and those who were not. Schoolmasters have to come to terms with what exists and to make a livelihood by it. So they are conservatives by position, and rarely get beyond an attempt at showing how that which is now done badly might be done well. Suggestions of radical change usually come from those who never belonged to the class of teachers, or who, not without disgust, have left it.
Among English schoolmasters of the olden times the chief writers I have met with besides Mulcaster are John Brinsley the elder, and Charles Hoole.
[200]
§ 5. John Brinsley the elder, a Puritan schoolmaster at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, a brother-in-law of Bishop Hall’s, and father of John Brinsley the younger who became a leading Puritan minister and author, was a veritable reformer, but only with reference to methods. His most interesting books are Ludus Literarius or the Grammar Schoole, 1612 (written after 20 years’ experience in teaching, as we learn from the Consolation, p. 45), and A Consolation for our Grammar Schooles: or a faithfull and most comfortable incouragement for laying of a sure foundation of all good learning in our schooles and for prosperous building thereupon, 1622. The first of these, when reprinted, as it is sure to be, will always secure for its author the notice and the gratitude of students of the history of our education; for in this book he tells us not only what should be done in the school-room, but also what was done. In a dialogue with the ordinary schoolmaster the reformer draws to light the usual practice, criticizes it, and suggests improvements.
§ 6. In Brinsley we get no hint of realism; but by the middle of the sixteen hundreds we find the realistic spirit is felt even by a schoolmaster, Charles Hoole,[100] who was a kinsman of Bishop Sanderson, the Casuist, and was master first of the Grammar School at Rotherham, then of a private Grammar School in London, published besides a number of school books, a translation of the Orbis Pictus (date of preface, January, 1658), and also “A New Discovery of the old art of teaching schoole ... published for the general[201] profit, especially of young Schoolemasters” (date of preface, December, 1659). In these books we find that Hoole succeeded even in the school-room in keeping his mind open. He complains of the neglect of English, and evidently in theory at least went a long way with the realistic reformers. “Comenius,” he says, “hath proceeded (as Nature itself doth) in an orderly way, first to exercise the senses well by presenting their objects to them, and then to fasten upon the intellect by impressing the first notions of things upon it and linking them one to another by a rational discourse; whereas indeed we generally, missing this way, do teach children as we do parrots to speak they know not what, nay, which is worse, we taking the way of teaching little ones by grammar only, at the first do puzzle their imaginations with abstractive terms and secondary intentions, which, till they be somewhat acquainted with things, and the words belonging to them in the language which they learn, they cannot apprehend what they mean. And this I guess to be the reason why many greater persons do resolve sometimes not to put a child to school till he be at least eleven or twelve years of age.... You then, that have the care of little children, do not too much trouble their thoughts and clog their memories with bare grammar rudiments, which to them are harsh in getting, and fluid in retaining; because indeed to them they signifie nothing but a meer swimming notion of a general term, which they know not what it meaneth till they comprehend all particulars: but by this [i.e., the Orbis P.] or the like subsidiarie inform them first with some knowledge of things and words wherewith to express them; and then their rules of speaking will be better understood and more firmly kept in mind. Else how should a child conceive what a rule meaneth when he neither[202] knoweth what the Latine word importeth, nor what manner of thing it is which is signified to him in his own native language which is given him thereby to understand the rule? for rules consisting of generalities are delivered (as I may say) at a third hand, presuming first the things and then the words to be already apprehended touching which they are made.” This subject Hoole wisely commends to the consideration of teachers, “it being the very basis of our profession to search into the way of children’s taking hold by little and little of what we teach them, that so we may apply ourselves to their reach.” (Preface to trans. of Orbis Pictus.)
§ 7. “Good Lord! how many good and clear wits of children be now-a-days perished by ignorant schoolmasters!” So said Sir Thomas Elyot in his Governor in 1531, and the complaint would not have been out of date in the 17th century, possibly not in the 19th. In the sixteen hundreds we certainly find little advance in practice, though in theory many bold projects were advanced, some of which pointed to the study of things, to the training of the hand, and even to observation of the “educands.”
§ 8. The poet Cowley’s “proposition for the advancement of experimental philosophy” is a scheme of a college near London to which is to be attached a school of 200 boys. “And because it is deplorable to consider the loss which children make of their time at most schools, employing or rather casting away six or seven years in the learning of words only, and that too very imperfectly; that a method be here established for the infusing knowledge and language at the same time, [Is this an echo of Comenius?] and that this may be their apprenticeship in Natural Philosophy.”[101]
[203]
§ 9. Rarely indeed have those who either theoretically or practically have made a study of education ever acquired sufficient literary skill to catch the ear of the public or (what is at least as difficult) the ear of the teaching body. And among the eminent writers who have spoken on education, as Rabelais, Montaigne, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, we cannot find one who has given to it more than passing, if not accidental, attention. Schoolmasters are, as I said, conservative, at least in the school-room; and moreover, they seldom find the necessary time, money, or inclination for publishing on the work of their calling. The current thought at any period must then be gathered from books only to be found in our great libraries, books in which writers now long forgotten give hints of what was wanted out of the school-room and grumble at what went on in it.
§ 10. One of the most original of these writers that have come in my way is John Dury, a Puritan, who was at one time Chaplain to the English Company of Merchants at Elbing, and laboured with Comenius and Hartlib to promote unity among the various Christian bodies of the reformed faith (see Masson’s Life of Milton, vol. iii). About 1649 Dury published The Reformed Schoole which gives the scheme of an association for the purpose of educating a number of boys and girls “in a Christian way.”
§ 11. That Dury was not himself a schoolmaster is plain from the first of his “rules of education.” “The chief rule of the whole work is that nothing be made tedious and grievous to the children, but all the toilsomeness of their business[204] the Governor and Ushers are to take upon themselves; that by diligence and industry all things may be so prepared, methodized and ordered for their apprehension, that this work may unto them be as a delightful recreation by the variety and easiness thereof.”
§ 12. “The things to be looked unto in the care of their education,” he enumerates in the order of importance: “1. Their advancement in piety; 2. The preservation of their health; 3. The forming of their manners; 4. Their proficiency in learning” (p. 24). “Godliness and bodily health are absolutely necessary,” says Dury; “the one for spiritual and the other for their temporal felicitie” (p. 31): so great care is to be taken in “exercising their bodies in husbandry or manufactures or military employments.”[102]
§ 13. About instruction we find the usual complaints which like “mother’s truth keep constant youth.” “Children,” says Dury, “are taught to read authors and learn words and sentences before they can have any notion of the things signified by those words and sentences or of the author’s strain and wit in setting them together; and they are made to learn by heart the generall rules, sentences and precepts of Arts before they are furnished with any matter whereunto to apply those rules and precepts” (p. 38). Dury would entirely sweep away the old routine, and in all instruction he would keep in view the following end: “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[205] use of the creatures, and the disorderliness of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them” (p. 41).
§ 14. “Our natural faculties”—here Dury struck a new note, which has now become the keynote in the science of education. He enforces his point with the following ingenious illustration:—“As in a watch one wheel rightly set doth with its teeth take hold of another and sets that a-work towards a third; and so all move one by another when they are in their right places for the end for which the watch is made; so is it with the faculties of the human nature being rightly ordered to the ends for which God hath created them. But contrariwise, if the wheels be not rightly set, or the watch not duly wound up, it is useless to him that hath it. And so it is with the faculties of Man; if his wheels be not rightly ordered and wound up by the ends of sciences in their subordination leading him to employ the same according to his capacity to make use of the creatures for that whereunto God hath made them, he becomes not only useless, but even a burthen and hurtful unto himself and others by the misusing of them” (p. 43).
§ 15. “As in Nature sense is the servant of imagination; imagination of memory; memory of reason; so in teaching arts and sciences we must set these faculties a-work in this order towards their proper objects in everything which is to be taught. Whence this will follow, that as the faculties of Man’s soul naturally perfect each other by their mutual subordination; so the Arts which perfect those faculties should be gradually suggested: and the objects wherewith the faculties are to be conversant according to the rules of Art should be offered in that order which is answerable to their proper ends and uses and not otherwise.”
§ 16. In this and much else that Dury says we see a firm[206] grasp of the principle that the instruction given should be regulated by the gradual development of the learner’s faculties. The three sources of our knowledge, says he, are—1. Sense; 2. Tradition; 3. Reason; and Sense comes first. “Art or sciences which may be learnt by mere sense should not be learnt any other way.” “As children’s faculties break forth in them by degrees to be vigorous with their years and the growth of their bodies, so they are to be filled with objects whereof they are capable, and plied with arts; whence followeth that while children are not capable of the acts of reasoning, the method of filling their senses and imaginations with outward objects should be plied. Nor is their memory at this time to be charged further with any objects than their imagination rightly ordered and fixed doth of itself impress the same upon them.” After speaking of the common abuse of general rules, he says: “So far as those faculties (viz., sense, imagination, and memory) are started with matters of observation, so far rules may be given to direct the mind in the use of the same, and no further.” “The arts and sciences which lead us to reflect upon the use of our own faculties are not to be taught till we are fully acquainted with their proper objects, and the direct acts of the faculties about them.” So “it is a very absurd and preposterous course to teach Logick and Metaphysicks before or with other Humane Sciences which depend more upon Sense and Imagination than reasoning” (p. 46).
§ 17. In all this it seems to me that the worthy Puritan, of whom nobody but Dr. Barnard and Professor Masson has ever heard, has truly done more to lay a foundation for the art of teaching than his famous contemporaries Milton and Locke.
[207]
§ 18. Another writer of that day better known than Dury and with far more power of expression was Sir William Petty. He is the “W.P.,” who in an Epistle “to his honoured friend Master Samuel Hartlib,” set down his “thoughts concerning the advancement of real learning” (1647). This letter is to be shown only “to those few that are Reall Friends to the Designe of Realities.”[103]
§ 19. Petty sees the need of intercommunication of those who wish to advance any art or science. He complains that “the wits and endeavours of the world are as so many scattered coals or fire-brands, which for want of union are soon quenched, whereas being but laid together they would yield a comfortable light and heat.” This is a thought which may well be applied to the bringing up of the young; and the following passage might have been written to secure a training for............