THE TEACHER TAUGHT.
IT must be far more amusing to be a child nowadays than it need to be. Unfortunately, this is a reflection which can only be made by those for whom the days of child- hood are in the far retrospect the others have not the data for comparison. Of course, it is the habit of all who are adults to inform the modern child that his is the only age in which pure happiness is known. But if we have the rare gift of looking back with a sufficiently clear vision to reconstruct our own past, it is a little doubtful whether we shall find it to possess all the delights which we claim for it; and when we see it reconstructed by those who have the gift of interpreting for us that state which we have left so far behind—let us say, for example, Dickens—we do not see an image which is all joy. The chief of the troubles were associated with lessons. The system of education, or its lack of system, was the cause of most of them. It would not be far wide of the truth to say that Dickens himself never drew a picture of more true pathos than is contained in a single illuminating sentence where the great Dr. Blimber, having taken a glass of port-wine and "hemmed" twice or thrice, said:
It is remarkable, Mr. Feeder, that the Romans— ' At the mention of this terrible people, their implacable enemies, every young gentleman fastened his gaze upon the
Doctor With an assumption of the deepest interest." Dickens was a caricaturist ; but he never strayed far from truth in his caricature, however he may have wandered in his sentiment. The egregious Dr. Blimber was no fancy portrait of an individual : he was an incarnate, and not very uncommon, type. The sensations of the young gentlemen of his estab- lishment on hearing the very name of the Romans can be recognised and appreciated as closely akin to the personal sensations or emotions which this classic name aroused in the schooldays of very many of us who have left those days far enough behind to perceive them in just perspective. In spite of the distance of time, we can still seem to feel the chill effect. The point of this frightful indictment of the typical educational system of the past is that the character and the exploits of these " implacable enemies " of boyhood were just such as should have stirred a boy's heart to the most eager glow of interest and admiration. The materials of which classical history is composed—the stories of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid—are the very stuff of which the most beautiful dreams of the young male human creature are com- posed. It is only the portentous manner in which they were presented to him by pedagogues of the Blimber type that could ever turn them into nightmares. We are able to see now, having left our Dr. Blimbers, with other better things, in the dim and kindly distance, that these Greeks and Romans were not only real people, talking a language which actually meant something and was not invented solely for our torment, but that they were in truth the moat delightful savages; that they went about killing, raiding, robbing, doing everything that is most congenial to the mind of boyhood; that they were living, as the savages live, in the primitive, unspoilt, boyish age of humanity. The fact that the story of all this is told in the most magnificent language that the world has read or heard is not any reason why the tale should be less appreciated by a modern boy than a "penny dreadful " or a "shilling shocker." The reason why these old-time stories affected him as they did, instead of as they should, was simply Dr. Blimber.
The further reason why Dr. Blimber, probably as well meaning a person as most men, thus converted those who should have been boyhood's closest friends into "implacable enemies " was that be lacked, as conspicuously as his great creator possessed it, the faculty of putting himself into another's place. He never realised for a moment, or in the slightest degree, the necessity for doing so,—that was his misfortune, and the cause of his being a misfortune to many others. If it had occurred to him to consider the performances of the Romans from the point of view of those whom he was trying to instruct, instead of viewing them purely from his own, it is likely that he would have addressed himself to the task somewhat differently. This is, in fact, the great change for the better which has come over modern ideas of education : that the effort of the teacher—that is to say, of the teacher who is at all acquainted with the latest theories—is to see eye to eye with the child in every detail, to regard the problem through his spectacles. It is not easy of accomplishment. It is quite difficult enough to be interesting ; the effort must make the education of the child very much more agreeable to the modern teacher than it can have been to the portentous Dr. Blimber, and it must contain the elements of the most fascinating science in the world,—the knowledge, namely, of the mind of a child, which is, of course, the mind of man in the making. One of the very first points which "jumps to the eye" when the effort is made to regard the acquirement of knowledge from the standpoint of a child is that it is very difficult, perhaps it may be said to be impossible, for the facts of a subject or the details of a problem to be grasped unless the interest has been first aroused. Attention should be involuntarily attracted in the first instance. If we require a reason why this should be, the biologists, as well as the psychologists, will be quite ready to furnish us with one;' but this is a subject too recondite to enter upon here. All the modern theory (and certainly in this at least it is right) is to amuse the child into learning its leasons,—we had almost said to " cheat " it into learning. The idea of combining amusement with instruction, or, rather, instructing by means of amusement, is as opposed as possible to all the educational theories, if they can be said to have possessed any, of the pedagogues of the old school. If they bad a theory at all, it was that the nastier the dose, the better for the patient. It
is clearly a great step gained that we have °hanged all that.
This new idea of education is most readily suggested to the populer mind by the word "Kindergarten"; but of this, as of many things, the idea of the popular mind, although in the main accurate, is vague. That vague idea is that the children at the "Kindergarten" are encouraged to make pictures and models of animals, and thereby to learn that a bird has wings or an elephant a trunk. As an excellent Philistine of our acquaintance, who had not given much serious thought, perhaps, to education, either personally or for others, remarked: "Kindergarten ?—oh, I know—jolly good idea— teach the children all about a frog by making 'em play at leap- frog. Wonderful fellow, the Kaiser—his own idea entirely." Such, or nearly such, is the general condition of knowledge on the subject. Very few, even of those who are more fully enlightened, realise on what a thoroughly scientific basis the system rests. We have before us as we write two little books, the first and second of a series (Nelson and Sons, 3s. 6d. each), on which the worst criticism that we have to, pass is that they bear the singularly misleading title of "Nature Studies." At the first, this seems to breathe the spirit which inspired Richard Jefferies and inspires an
• ever-increasing body of disciples. Their contents, however, • are entirely different. They consist of an explanation of the methods and principles of such schools of education as are associated with the names of Froebel and Herbert, primarily, and also serve as handbooks for the instruction of children in accordance with the system. The subjects for the lessons selected are such as are most likely to attract the child's mind,—flowers, birds, fairy-tales. It is suggested that certain flowers and certain birds are associated with certain seasons of the year, and at these seasons, accordingly, it is, appropriate that such birds and flowers should be discussed,— the swallow, for instance, in summer, the robin in winter. Thus the child will readily place each in its proper environ- ment. The faculty of observation and a disposition to draw inferences are to be fostered by such questions as why the swallow flies with its mouth open. A large portion of the books is occupied with analyses of one or other of the familiar fairy-tales, such as the terrific story of " Little Red Riding Hood," apparently deemed not too alarming in its influence on the childish mind, and many more. The various steps or stages in the lessons, whether the subject be a natural object, such as a bird or flower, or a fairy-tale, are five:—(1) Preparation, in which the aim of the lesson is explained; (2) presentation, or laying the subject before the child ; (3) association, giving the child some idea of the relationships between the subjects of the lesson and new subjects ; (4) formulation or generalisa- tion ; (5) application, in the way of making the pupil write something or draw something which the lesson has suggested in order to deepen its impression on him. The analysis of the Red Riding Hood story is headed with the "Central Idea Obedience to Parents." The five steps afore- said are thus developed :—" Step I. Analysis of Children's Ideas. Step IL (a) Red Riding Hood and her Mother ; (b) The Walk through the Wood ; (c) The Grandmother's Cottage; (4) Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; (e) The Wood- man. Step III. Compare the Mother's Directions with the way Red Riding Hood carried them out. Step IV. ' Children obey your Parents.' Step. V. Word-building; Language ; Memory Drawing." This sounds in cold blood astonishingly stilted and pedantic, but we do not doubt that in spite of this it will appeal to children. No one who knows anything of children can have failed to notice their intense interest in, nay, love of, what is didactic. They love not only a moral, but . like to see it analysed down to the bare bone.
This brief statement may serve to give an idea of the way in which one of the most difficult of all human problems, the education of children, is faced by the methods of this system, and it is evident how very different it is from the manner in which it was regarded by Dr. Blimber. The problem can hardly have presented itself to him at all. Doubtless, poor man, he had his troubles, but the cause of the troubles gave him no thought whatever ; it was obvious,—the, innate and sinful stupidity of his scholars. 16 would need a brain very different from that of a Blimber to entertain a proposition so appallin,g as that any lack of intelligence on his own part could be in any way a reason of, the trouble. The two books named " Nature Studies " to which special reference
has been made are prepared by Miss Catherine I. Dodd, of Cherwell Hall, Oxford. The second of the series is prefaced with a highly appreciative introduction by Mr. W. Scott Coward, late H.M. Senior Inspector of Training Colleges.
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