MR. FITCH ON TEACHING.*
WE have no manner of doubt that for all teachers, this book containing the lectures on teaching delivered last year by Mr. Fitch in the University of Cambridge, will prove a most in- structive one; but what strikes us most is, that for those who are not teachers, but who merely feel a general interest, half- political, half-domestic, in the art of teaching, it is an extremely interesting and even amusing book. Mr. Fitch has had so much experience in the various methods of teaching, bad and good; he has had so quick an eye for the proper inferences to be de- duced from that experience; his own knowledge is so wide ; and his mind. is so vigilant, that he has made a subject about which all civilised mankind is more or less bored,—indeed, about which we all feel it our duty to be bored without complaint, be- cause it is .so important,—one on which it is a reel pleasure to read what Mr. Fitch has got to say. For Mr. Fitch either always was or has made himself an extremely shrewd observer, as well as a very accomplished teacher, and he does not pester us with the pedantic discussions with which essays on teaching are apt to be encumbered. For instance, ho passes lightly over the rather useless abstract discussion whether teaching is an art or a science, deciding that it is the former so far as it tries to draw up a number of practical rules for the successful accomplishment of a complex problem ; but the latter, so far as it tries to find a scientific basis for those rules. For our own parts, we should not have thought that you can properly call an investigation a science only because by it you seek to establish and can establish a scientific basis for the corresponding art. Telegraphy, surely, is only an art, not a science, though it rests on several sciences, of which elec- tricity is the chief ; just as brewing is an art, not a science, though it rests on several sciences, of which, perhaps, organic chemistry is the chief. When we speak of a science, we surely mean not an amalgam of fragments of different sciences made in the interests of a particular practical end, but the grouping of a number of similar facts illustrating, or believed to illustrate closely allied principles, and therefore tending to establish what are called laws of nature or laws of thought. Engineering is founded in a number of different sciences, mathematical, physical, and classificatory ; but engineering is not a science, but an art, with its basis in several sciences,—in mathematics, statics, dynamics, heat, geology, and others. Aond so, though teaching is equally closely related with the various sciences of physiology, psychology, and what is now barbarously called sociology, we should have thought
it more correct to speak of it not as a science at all, but as an art, deriving its principles from a variety of sciences, as well as from a mass of experience which it is quite impossible to refer to any distinct scientific origin. However, we are now making the very mistake which we have praised Mr. Fitch for not making ; we are prosing away on an abstract point of no real importance, since everybody knows that whatever he may call teaching, it is an art, and a very difficult art, which cannot be well mastered without a considerable amount of. scientific knowledge. What is so good in this book is, that while its method is clear and, indeed, admirable, it yet contains so much sagacious advice which no method, however clear and admirable, could have suggested without experience like that of Mr. Fitch to point and vivify it. For example, take his com- ment on schools which "pay equal attention to all subjects" :—
* Lecturea on Teaching, Delivered in the University of Cambridge during the Lent Terni,1880. By J. G. Fitch, fd,A,. Ono of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, Cambridge Univernity Press. "In relation to the tastes and roadiug of your own leisure, I would say : When your more strictly professional work is done' follow resolutely your own bent ; cultivate that side of your iutellectual life on which you feel that the most fruitful results are to be attained, and do not suppose that your profession demands of you a cold and impartial interest in all truth alike, or that what to others is a solace• and delight, to you is to be nothing but so much stock-in-trade. If,. when I see a school, and ask the teacher what is its special feature, or in what subject the scholars take most interest, he replies, 0, there is nothing distinctive about our coarse, we pay equal attention to all subjects,' I know well that his heart is not in his work. For over and above the necessary and. usual subjects, every good school ought to reflect in some way the special tastes of the teacher. The obvious. demands of your profession and of the public must first be satisfied.. And when they are satisfied, one mind will be drawn to the exact sciences, another to poetry and the cultivation of the imaginative faculty, another to the observation of tho phenomena of nature, a fourth to the sciences of history and of man. Be sure that no study thus honestly and affectionately pursued can be without important. bearings on your special work."
Or, again, take Mr. Fitch's excellent remarks on the impos- sibility of teaching children by the discipline of the natural consequences of their acts, as Rousseau and Mr. Herbert Spencer would have them taught :—
"And while the State. cannot rely wholly on natural punishments,. because for her purpose they are too light, the parent or the teacher• has exactly the opposite reason for not depending upon them. They aro for his purpose far too severe. You want by timely interposition. with a small arbitrary punishment to save him from the more cruel Nemesis which Nature has provided for wrong-doing. He is, it may he, inclined to gluttony, and you know that if you leave him alone Nature will avenge the violation of her laws by enfeebling his consti- tution and depriving him prematurely of health and vigour. But because you are chiefly concerned with the formation of his character,. this is precisely the penalty you wish to avoid ; and you subject him. to some painful restraint, because you wish to substitute a light penalty for a heavy one. You see a man rushing towards a precipice, and you knock him down. What justifies this act of violence ?' Nothing, except that by the infliction of a small and wholly arbitrary injury, you have helped him to escape from the greater injury which, would have boon the natural penalty of his own imprudence."
Or, again, let us go to a very different subject, and see what Mr.. Fitch has to say upon the popular objections to frequent exami nations, many of which objections quite miss their mark, by
pointed at something which is supposed to suspend and interfere with quiet and steady teachiug, instead of being, as all good examinations should be, essential liuks iu that quiet and steady teaching :—
" In making up our minds on this subject, we must beware of being misled by false metaphors. We are told sometimes that the habit of probing children often, either by written or oral examinations, is like digging up the root of a flower to see how it grows, and those who talk thus say much as to the value of stillness and meditation,. and the importance of leaving scope for silent growth and for the natural notion of the child's own mental powers. Bat there is no. true analogy here. The act of reproducing what we know, and giving it new forms of expression, is not an act of loosening, but of fixing. We must, of course, abstain from needless and irritating questions, but we may not forget that with a child, to leave him unquestioned and untested is not to give better room for the spontaneous exercise of his own faculties, but simply to encourage stagnation and forgetful- ness. There is another still mom unpleasant metaphor often used in con-. ;motion with the subject of examinations. They are said to encourage cram ; and this word has come to be currently used as a convenient term to designate any form of educational work which the speaker may happen to dislike or wish to discredit. But we should try to. clear our minds of illusions on this point. If by this term we mean dishonest preparation, hasty and crude study, a contrivance by which: persons may be made to seem to know more than they actually' understand, we are all alike interested in denouncing it. But it is not necessarily encouraged by examinations. On the contrary, this is precisely what every good examination is meant to detect. And every examiner who knows his business can easily discern the dif- ference between the knowledge which is genuine and has been well digested, and that which is superficial and is specially got up to. deceive him. Dishonestly prepared men undoubtedly come up for- examinations, but they do not pass, and the blame of the transaction. rests with those who send them up, not with the examinations them-- selves."
What we find so admirable in Mr. Fitch's lectures is this, that there is not one of the many difficult questions on which different schools of teachers dispute, on which he has not formed for himself a shrewd and impartial judgment,—a judgment testa by large experience, and one which ho is able to illustrate with living examples. Once more let us hear Mr. Fitch on the sore of blunders in the mil's answers to examination questions, which should simply count as blunders, and the sort of blunders which should count as more than blunders, as indicating the radical hollowness of the other parts of the knowledge dis- played :—
" It is sometimes asked whether negative marks should ever be given, or marks deducted for ignorance. That depends on the kind of ignorance. Mere absence of knowledge ought not to be counted as a fault, otherwise than as depriving the pupil of the marks which would have been due to knowledge. It ought not, I think, to be punished by the substraction of marks to which other knowledge would entitle him. lint the sort of pretentious ignorance which makes blunders and mistakes them for knowledge, which indulges in grand, sonorous, and vague statements, carefully constructed to con- ceal the lack of true information, ought to be punished as a fault. A bad and inflated style, false spelling, the use of words which are not understood, may not unreasonably be visited with the forfeiture of marks to which the mere memory work would be entitled. But you must make allowance for a few very innocent blunders, such as will be inevitable among young people who are being put to this sort of test without much previous practice. When a scholar tells you that ' we derive a good deal of our early knowledge of English History from an ancient chronicler named Adam Bede,' that 'Buck- Ingham was at first a friend of Dryden, but that ho afterwards became one of his contemporaries,' or that Sir Wm. Temple was a statesman in the time of Charles II. who had a hand in the Triple Alliance, and who in later life acquired some odium by writing essays and reviews,' you may set it down as mere bewilderment, which does not mean ignorance, which would be corrected by a moment's thought, and should, therefore, not be counted as a fault. On the etlmr hand, a blunder such as that of the man who, in commenting on the pas- sage in Milton referring to 'our sage and serious poet Spenser' as ' better moralist than Scotus or Aquinas,' said that these worthies were "two licentious poets of the period ;' or that of the student who said that John Locke was a poet who was knighted by Qneen Eliza- beth ;' or that of him who wrote that ' the Americans were so grateful for the services of George Washington, that they made him a peer,' ought to be reckoned as a fault to be punished, because in each ease it is a mere guess, put out rather dishonestly with the chance of its being right, or with the deliberate intention of practising on the possible ignorance or carelessness of the examiner."
Perhaps the clearest rule on th is head would be to say that blunders which imply that the whole subject has been misapprehended from the very first,—like the blunder about Washington, for instance, as proving that the character of a Republican State had never been apprehended at all,—or, again, any arithmetical blunder showing that the principle of reducing to common denominators for the purposes of addition or subtraction, had been radically mistaken,—should entail a large deduction of marks from those gained for more correct replies ; but that blunders which go no further than themselves, ought not to in- volve deductions from the marks obtained for other answers.
But take Mr. Fitch's lectures where you will,—whether lie speaks of the best physical construction for a good school- house, or the moral discipline of the school, or the advantages and disadvantages of boarding-schools for girls and boys respectively, or the methods of teaching,—the method of teaching language, English and mathematics, and the true value of the discipline of natural science,—they are always wise, always modest, and always pithy. A better general in- troduction to the art of teaching can hardly be imagined, we should think, than this volume supplies. There are points, of course, on which Mr. Pitch's readers will be disposed to differ with would be impossible to write a book on a subject sug- gesting so many different kinds of experience to different minds, without raising very wide differences of opinion;—but no one, even while differing from Mr. Fitch, will fail to respect him, or to appreciate the weight of his judgment, the candour of his admissions, and the authority of his large experience.
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