THE SCIENCE AND ART OF EDUCATION.* Feat the concise prefatory
notice contributed to this book by Mr. R. H. Quick, we learn that Mr. Joseph Payne was for many years a successful private schoolmaster, and was during that time, and to the end of the years of leisure which followed it, an "enthusiastic theorist" on the subject of his profession. When very young, he published an account of Jacotot and his system, and he afterwards became deeply interested in the work and administration of the College of Preceptors, a corporation of schoolmasters, through the agency of which he sought to give effect to his own strong conviction of the need of training and special study on the part of professional instructors. When he retired from the active pursuit of his profession, his interest in the subject induced him to make new efforts. By lectures, and essays, and contributions to periodicals, he strove to awaken public attention ; and it was mainly owing to his energetic initiative that the College of Preceptors was induced to institute a special lectureship in the science and art of education, and to establish examinations for teachers, intended to test their professional qualifications. For a short time he himself held the professorship thus instituted ; but he did not live to complete any systematic exposition of his views, or to prepare anything in the nature of a manual of the teacher's art. The present volume, which is compiled by his son, contains re- prints of his principal lectures and pamphlets, and these are largely occupied in refuting preliminary objections, in demon- strating that a philosophy of education is possible, and in vindi- cating its practical importance. They do not profess to cover the whole ground either of the theory or practice of teaching, but they conduct the reader a long way, and they state with clearness many of the elementary principles, on which all true success in teaching must depend.
Yet those who dread the intrusion of too much of the specu- lative element into the training of the modern schoolmaster will not be wholly reassured by the perusal of this book. The bent of Mr. Payne's mind was towards theory ; and it must be owned that some of his theories, when formulated, had the ap- pearance either of harmless truisms, or else of somewhat unprac- tical and debatable propositions,—e.g., that "Mind and body are mutually interdependent, and co-operate in promoting growth,"
• Lectures on the Science and Art of Education. By the late Jossph lune. Edited by bin Son, Joseph Frank Payne, M.D. London: Longrnms. 1830.
is unquestionably true, but it is not new, and it is difficult to see what light is thrown on the work of the teacher by the formal enunciation of such an aphorism. Again, " Exercise in- volves repetition, which, as regards bodily actions, ends in habits of action ; and as regards impressions received by the mind, ends in clearness of perception," is neither a complete nor a very relevant statement. If it means anything, it means that the principal agent in producing intellectual clearness is con- tinued exercise, or repetition of the same mental experience. As a matter of fact, however, other factors have even more to do with clearness of mental perception ; especially the interest and sympathy which may be awakened in connection with the sub- ject in hand, and the number of associations which can be established between the thing to be learned and other things which were either known before, or which the learner hopes to know hereafter. A third of Mr. Payne's principles is thus stated :—" The exercise of the child's own powers, stimulated but not superseded by the educator's interference, ends both in the acquisition of knowledge and in the invigoration of the powers for further acquisition." Here the theorist in on surer ground ; and it is undoubtedly true that the schoolmaster who lays hold of this maxim, and seeks to apply it in practice, is on his way to a better understanding of his art. But then the doctrine is one which nobody denies ; and the only practical object of stating it at all is as a preliminary to some very definite rules, showing how the teacher can stimulate without superseding the action of the learner's own faculties, and when he should help and when he should abstain from helping, by way of formal instruction. But these lectures do not, it must be owned, furnish many such rules. They are useful indications of the direction in which we should look for a philosophy of education ; they warn the professional teacher of many of his besetting sins ; and they are well calculated to make him ashamed of mere routine, and anxious to adapt his methods to the actual mental condition and requirements of his pupils. To this extent, and this extent chiefly, does the book possess permanent value. Mr. Payne's illustrations of good and bad modes of teaching, of the methods of induction and analysis, and of the means whereby young children may be trained to habits of observation and inquisitiveness about the things which they see around them, are often clear, and are always useful and suggestive. He is less fortunate when he seeks to embody the result of his speculations in apophthegms and definitions. Witness his definition of "edu- cation," which, to those who remember the terse and pregnant definitions given by other writers, from Ascham and Milton down to Arnold and Richter, will seem, we fear, to have more the appearance than the reality of a scientific statement. " Educa- tion," he says " is the development and training of the learner's native powers, by means of instruction carried on through the conscious and persistent agency of the formal educator, and depends upon the established connection between the world without and the world within the mind,—between the objective and the subjective." Surely this attempted definition has a double defect. It is logically inadequate, and it is, for practical purposes, less suggestive of a true theory of method than a definition on such a subject should be.
Nevertheless, Mr. Payne's main contention is entirely true and sound, The movement of which lie was so zealous a pioneer has already met with a favourable reception in the Head Masters' conferences and in the University of Cambridge, and bids fair to have important consequences. Hitherto, although in the Normal Colleges for the preparation of elementary teachers there has been systematic training in method and school management, no such training has been available for teachers of a higher class. The methods in use in Grammar and Middle-class schools have been mainly determined by tra- dition and rule of thumb. Such success as may have been gained has been the result of natural aptitude, scholarship, and individual earnestness, but has not been achieved through any conscious study of the principles of teaching. Yet there are right ways and wrong ways of imparting knowledge, and there are good reasons to be given why some are right and others are wrong. There are certain physical conditions which are favour- able, and others which are unfavourable to right and wholesome acquirement. There are times when explanation and guidance and the pressure of authority are needed by a learner, and there are other times when all these are impertinent, and when his own faculties should be left to operate spontaneously. Each subject taught in a school has its own special char- acteristics and its special difficulties, and requires to
be taught by its appropriate method. To know by what devices knowledge may be most effectively presented to the mind of a beginner ; to know how to kindle interest and enthusiasm in a new study, when to appeal to the judgment and when to the memory, how to put wise questions, how to arrange and correlate different studies, and what are their respective values as instruments of mental development, how to test the results of work, what is the right mode of disci- pline, and how rewards and punishments can be most judi- ciously used,—all this is the business of a skilled schoolmaster. Yet such knowledge does not, like Dogberry's reading and writing, " come by nature ;" and if it comes by experience, it is apt to come slowly, and after a period of manifold blunders and futile experiments, during which the unfortunate pupil has much to suffer. In school-keeping, as in all the higher employ- ments of life, right practice is based on right theory, and on careful inductions from former experience. The investigation of that theory and that experience is not only helpful to all who prac- tise the art of teaching, but it is clearly indispensable for those who wish to practise it in the most skilful, artistic, and effec- tive way. We cannot promise the student of Mr. Payne's book that he will find in it a key to all the practical problems we have enumerated, nor even that he will be satisfied with all the author's psychological expositions. But no student can fail to derive from it many fruitful hints, or to be placed by means of it in a better mental attitude for thinking out rules and methods for himself.
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