Chapter VIII: Part 8

§ 7. Here Locke makes no distinction between different classes of truths. But surely very important differences exist.

About some physical facts our knowledge is at once most certain and most definite when we derive it through the evidence of our own senses. “Seeing is believing,” says the proverb. It may be believing, but it is not knowing. That certainty which we call knowledge we often arrive at better by the testimony of others than by that of our own senses.

Miss Martineau in her Autobiography tells us that as a child of ten she entirely and unaccountably failed to see a comet which was visible to all other people; but, although her own senses were at fault, the evidence for the comet was so conclusive that she may be said to have _known_ there was a comet in the sky.

On sufficient evidence we can know anything, just as we know there is a great water-fall at Niagara though we may never have crossed the Atlantic. But we cannot be so certain simply on the evidence of our senses. If we trusted entirely to them we might take the earth for a plane and “know” that the sun moved round it.

§ 8. But Locke probably considers as the subject of knowledge not so much physical facts as the great body of truths which are ascertained by the intellect. It is the eye of the mind by which alone knowledge is to be gained. Of these truths the purest specimens are the truths of geometry. It may be said that only those who have followed the proofs _know_ that the area of the square on the side opposite the right angle in a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other sides. But even in pure reasoning like this, the tiro often seems to see what he does not really see; and where his own reason brings him to a conclusion different from the one established he _knows_ only that he is mistaken.

§ 9. It must be admitted then that first-hand knowledge, knowledge derived from the vision of the eye or of the mind, is not the only knowledge the young require. Every learner must take things on trust, as even Lord Bacon admits. _Discentem credere oportet._ To use Locke’s own words:—“I do not say, to be a good geographer that a man should visit every mountain, river, promontory, and creek upon the face of the earth, view the buildings and survey the land everywhere as if he were going to make a purchase” (C. of U., iij, _ad f._). So that even according to Locke’s own shewing we must use the eyes of others as well as our own, and this is true not in geography only, but in all other branches of knowledge.

§ 10. But are we driven to the alternative of agreeing either with Locke or with the schoolmaster? I do not see that we are. The thought which underlies Locke’s system of education is this: true knowledge can be acquired only by the exercise of the reason: in childhood the reasoning power is not strong enough for the pursuit of knowledge: knowledge, therefore, is out of the question at that age, and the only thing to be thought of is the formation of habits. Opposed to this we have the schoolmaster’s ideal which is governed by examinations. According to this ideal the object of the school course is to give certain “knowledge,” linguistic and other, and to fix it in the memory in such a manner that it can be displayed on the day of examination. “Knowledge” of this kind often makes no demand whatever on the reasoning faculty, or indeed on any faculty but that of remembering and reproducing what the learner has been told; in extreme cases the memory of mere sounds or symbols suffices.

But after all we are not compelled to choose between these two theories. Take, _e.g._, the subject which Locke has mentioned, geography. The schoolmasters of the olden time began with the use of the globes, a plan which, by the way, Locke himself seems to have winked at. His disciple Molyneux tells him of the performances of the small Molyneux. When he was but just turned five he could read perfectly well, and on the globe could have traced out and pointed at all the noted ports, countries, and cities of the world, both land and sea; by five and a half could perform many of the plainest problems on the globe, as the longitude and latitude, the Antipodes, the time with them and other countries, &c. (Molyneux to L., 24th August, 1695.) Here we find a child brought up, without any protest from Locke, on mere examination knowledge, which according to Locke himself is not knowledge at all. It is strange that Locke did not at once point out to Molyneux that the child was not really learning what the father supposed him to be learning. When the child turned over the plaster ball and found the word “Paris,” the father no doubt attributed to the child much that was in his own mind only. To the child “the Globe” (as Rousseau afterwards said), was nothing but a plaster ball; “Paris” was nothing but some letters marked on that ball. Comenius had already got a notion how children may be given some knowledge of geography. “Children begin geography,” said he, “when they get to understand what a hill, a valley, a field, a river, a village, a town is.” (_Supra_, p. 145.) When this beginning has been made, geographical knowledge is at once possible to the child, and not before.

Perfect knowledge in geography, as in most other things, is out of every one’s reach. Nobody knows, _e.g._, all that could be known about Paris. The knowledge its inhabitants have of it is very various, but in all cases this knowledge is far greater than that of a visitor. The visitor’s knowledge again is far greater than that of strangers who have never seen Paris. Nobody, then, can know everything even about Paris; but a child who knows what a large town is, and can fancy to himself a big town called Paris, which is the biggest and most important town in France has some knowledge about it. This must be maintained against Locke. Against the schoolmaster it may be pointed out that making an Eskimo say the words:—“Paris is the capital of France,” would not be giving him any knowledge at all; and the same may be said of many “lessons” in the school-room. If a common sailor were to teach an Eskimo English, he would very likely suppose that when he had taught the sounds “Paris is the capital of France,” he had conveyed to his pupil all the ideas which those sounds suggested to his own mind. A common schoolmaster may fall into a similar error.

§ 11. In the most celebrated work which has been affected by the _Thoughts_ of Locke, Rousseau’s _Emile_, we find childhood treated in a manner altogether different from youth: the child’s education is mainly physical, and instruction is not given till the age of twelve. Locke’s system on first sight seems very different to this, but there is a deeper connection between the two than is usually observed. We have seen that Locke allowed nothing to be knowledge that was not acquired by the perception of the intellect. But in children the intellectual power is not yet developed; so according to Locke knowledge properly so-called is not within their reach. What then can the educator do for them? He can prepare them for the age of reason in two ways, by caring first for their physical health, second for the formation of good habits.

§ 12. 1st. On the Continent Locke has always been considered one of the first advocates of physical education, and he does, it is true, give physical education the first place, a feature in his system, which we naturally connect with his study of medicine, and also with the trouble he had all his life with his own health. But care of the body, and especially bodily exercises, were always much thought of in this country, and the main writers on education before Locke, _e.g._, Sir Thos. Elyot, Mulcaster, Milton, were very emphatic about physical training.

In the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we may see what attention was paid in Locke’s own century to this part of education.[114]

§ 13. 2nd. “That, and that only, is educative which moulds forms or modifies the soul or mind.” (Mark Pattison in _New Quarterly Magazine_, January, 1880.)

Here we have a proposition which is perhaps seldom denied, but very commonly ignored by those who bring up the young. But Locke seems to have been entirely possessed with this notion, and the greater part of the _Thoughts_ is nothing but a long application of it. The principle which lies at the root of most of his advice, he has himself expressed as follows: “That which I cannot too often inculcate is, that whatever the matter be about which it is conversant whether great or small, the main, I had almost said only thing, to be considered in every action of a child is what influence it will have upon his mind; what habit it tends to, and is likely to settle in him: how it will become him when he is bigger, and if it be encouraged, whither it will lead him when he is grown up.” (_Thoughts_, § 107, p. 86.)

Here we see that Locke differed widely from the schoolmasters of his time, perhaps of all time. A man must be a philosopher indeed if he can spend his life in teaching boys, and yet always think more about what they will _be_ and what they will _do_ when their schooling is over than what they will _know_. And in these days if we stopped to think at all we should be trodden on by the examiner.[115]

In this respect Locke has not been surpassed. Like his predecessor Montaigne he took for his centre not the object, knowledge, but the subject, man.[116]

§ 14. In some other respects he does not seem so happy. He makes little attempt to reach a scientific standpoint and to establish general truths about our common human nature. He thinks not so much of the man as the gentleman, not so much of the common laws of the mind as of the peculiarities of the individual child. He even hints that differences of disposition in children render treatises on education defective if not useless. “There are a thousand other things that may need consideration” he writes “especially if one should take in the various tempers, different inclinations, and particular defaults that are to be found in children and prescribe proper remedies. The variety is so great that it would require a volume, nor would that reach it. Each man’s mind has some peculiarity as well as his face, that distinguishes him from all others; and there are possibly scarce two children who can be conducted by exactly the same method: besides that I think a prince, a nobleman, or an ordinary gentleman’s son should have different ways of breeding. But having had here only some general views in reference to the main end and aims in education, and those designed for a gentleman’s son, whom being then very little I considered only as white paper or wax to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases, I have touched little more than those heads which I judged necessary for the breeding of a young gentleman of his condition in general.” (_Thoughts_, § 217, p. 187.)

No language could bring out more clearly the inferiority of Locke’s standpoint to that of later thinkers. He makes little account of our common nature and wishes education to be based upon an estimate of the peculiarities of the individual pupil and of his social needs. And no one with an adequate notion of education could ever compare the young child to “white paper or wax.” Perhaps the development of an organism was a conception that could not have been formed without a great advance in physical science. Froebel who makes most of it learnt it from the scientific study of trees and from mineralogy. We need not then be surprised that Locke does not say, as Pestalozzi said a hundred years later, “Education instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children ought to consider first what they already possess.” But if he had read Comenius he would have been saved from comparing the child to wax or white paper in the hands of the educator. Comenius had said: “Nature has implanted within us the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety. The object of education is to bring these seeds to perfection.” (_Supra_, p. 135.) This seems to me a higher conception than any that I meet with in Locke.

§ 15. But if our philosopher did not learn from Comenius he certainly learnt from Montaigne.[117] Indeed Dr. Arnstädt (_v. supra_, p. 69) has put him into a series of thinkers who have much in common. This succession is as follows: Rabelais, Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau; and, according to Mr. Browning’s division, they form a school by themselves. “Thinkers on education,” says Mr. Browning,[118] “are 1st those who wish to educate through the study of the classics, or 2nd those who wish to educate through the study of the works of Nature, or 3rd those who aim at an education independent of study and knowledge, and think rather of the training of character and the attaining to the Greek ideal, the man beautiful and good.” To the three schools Mr. Browning gives the names Humanist, Realist, and Naturalist, (“nos autres naturalistes,” Montaigne says). Locke he considers one of the principal writers of the “naturalistic” school, and says, Locke “has given a powerful bias to naturalistic education both in England and on the Continent for the last 200 years.” (_Ed. Theories_, p. 85.)

This use of the word “naturalistic” seems to me somewhat misleading, or at best vague, and it is a word overworked already: so I should prefer to speak of the “developing” or “training” school. The classification itself certainly has its uses but it must be employed with caution. If caught up by those who have only an elementary acquaintance with the subject a class of persons apt to delight in such arrangements as an aid to memory, these divisions may easily prove a hindrance to light.

§ 16. This subject of classification is so important to students that it may be worth while to make a few remarks upon it. The only thoroughly consistent people are the people of fiction. We can know all about _them_. Directly we understand their central thought or peculiarity we may be sure that everything they say and do will be strictly in accordance with it, will indeed be explainable by it. To take a bald and simple instance, directly we know that Mrs. Jellaby in _Bleak House_ is absorbed by her interest in an African Mission, we know all that is to be known about her; and everything she does or omits to do has some reference to Borrioboola Ghar. But in real life not only are people much less easily understood, but when we actually have seized their main idea or peculiarity or interest we must not expect to find them always consistent: and they will say and do much which if not inconsistent with the main idea or peculiarity or interest has at least no connection with it. Suppose, _e.g._, you can make out with some certainty that Locke belonged to the developing school, you must not expect him to pay little heed to instruction as such. Again, suppose you find that his philosophy was utilitarian; you must not suppose that in everything he says he will be thinking of utility.

Now the historian is tempted to treat real men and women as the writer of fiction treats his puppets. Having fastened, quite correctly let us suppose, on their main peculiarity he considers it necessary to square everything with his theory of them, and whatever will not fall in with it he, if he is unscrupulous, misrepresents, or if he is scrupulous, suppresses.

Again, we are too apt to read into words meanings derived from controversies unknown at the time when the words were uttered. This is a well-known fact in the history of religious thought. We must always consider not merely the words used but the time when they were used. What a man might say quite naturally and orthodoxly at one period would be sufficient to convict him of sympathizing with some terrible heresy if uttered half a century later. We find something like this in the history of education. If anyone nowadays speaks of the pleasure with which as a young man he read Tacitus, he is understood to mean that he is opposed to the introduction of “modern studies” into the school-room. If on the other hand he extols botany, or regrets that he never learned chemistry, this is taken for an assault on classical instruction. But, of course, no such inference could be drawn if we went back to a time when the antithesis between classics and natural science had not been accentuated. In many other instances we have to be on our guard against forcing into language meaning which belongs rather to a later date.

§ 17. With these cautions in mind let us see how far Locke may be said (1) to be a trainer, and (2) how far a utilitarian.

§ 18. I. Mr. Browning attributes to Rabelais, Montaigne, and Locke the desire to bring up a well-developed man rather than a good scholar. But Rabelais certainly craved for the knowledge of _things_; and if he is to be classed at all I should put him rather with the Realists, albeit he lived before the realistic spirit became powerful. Montaigne went more on the lines of developing rather than teaching, and, shrewd man of the world as he was, he thought a great deal about the art of living. But his ideal was not so much the man as the gentleman. This was true also of Locke; and here we see some explanation why both Montaigne and Locke do not value classical learning.[119] On the Continent classical learning has never been associated with the character of an accomplished gentleman; and, as far as I know, the conception that the highest type of excellence is found in the union of “the scholar and the gentleman” is peculiar to this country. In the society of Locke’s day this union does not seem to have been recognized, and Locke observes: “A great part of the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe, and that goes ordinarily into the round of education, a gentleman may in a good measure be unfurnished with, without any great disparagement to himself or prejudice to his affairs.” (_Thoughts_, § 94, p. 74.) So Locke sought as the true essential for the young gentleman “prudence and good breeding.” He puts his requisites in the following order of importance:—1, virtue; 2, wisdom; 3, manners; 4, learning; and so “places learning last and least.” Here he shews himself far ahead of those who still held to the learned ideal; but his notions of development were cramped by his thinking only of the gentleman and what was requisite for him.

§ 19. II. Was Locke a utilitarian in education? It is the fashion (and in history as in other things fashion is a powerful force), it is the fashion to treat of Locke as a great champion of utilitarianism. We might expect this in the ordinary historians, for “when they do agree their unanimity is” not perhaps very wonderful. But there is one great English authority quite uninfluenced by them who has said the same thing, viz.—Cardinal Newman. The Cardinal, as the champion of authority, is perhaps prejudiced against Locke, who holds that “the faculty of reasoning seldom or never deceived those who trusted to it.” Be this as it may, Newman asserts that “the tone of Locke’s remarks is condemnatory of any teaching which tends to the general cultivation of the mind.” (_Idea of a University._ Discourse vij., § 4; see also § 6.) A very interesting point for us to consider is then, Is this reputation of Locke’s for utilitarianism well deserved?

§ 20. First let us be quite certain of our definition.

In learning anything there are two points to be considered; 1st, the advantage we shall find from knowing that subject or having that skill, and 2nd, the effect which the study of that subject or practising for that skill will have on the mind or the body.

These two points are in themselves distinct, though it is open to anyone to maintain that they need not be considered separately. Nature has provided that the bodies of most animals should get the exercise best for them in procuring food. So Mr. Herbert Spencer has come to the conclusion that it would be contrary to “the economy of nature” if one set of occupations were needed as gymnastics and another for utility. In other words he considers that it is in learning the most useful things we get the best training.

The utilitarian view of instruction is that we should teach things useful in themselves and either neglect the result on the mind and body of the learner or assume Mr. Spencer’s law of “the economy of nature.”

Again, when the subjects are settled the utilitarian thinks how the knowledge or skill may be most speedily acquired, and not how this method or that method of acquisition will affect the faculties.

§ 21. This being utilitarianism in education the question is how far was Locke the utilitarian he is generally considered?

If we take by itself what he says under the head of “Learning” in the _Thoughts concerning Education_ no doubt we should pronounce him a utilitarian. He considers each subject of instruction and pronounces for or against it according as it seems likely or unlikely to be useful to a gentleman. And in the methods he suggests he simply points out the quickest route, as if the knowledge were the only thing to be thought of. Hence his utilitarian reputation.

But two very important considerations have been lost sight of.

1st. Learning is with him “the last and least part” in education.

2nd. Intellectual education was not for childhood but for the age when we can teach ourselves. “When a man has got an entrance into any of the sciences,” says he, “it will be time then to depend on himself and rely upon his own understanding and exercise his own faculties, which is the only way to improvement and mastery.” (L. to Peterborough, quoted in Camb. edition of _Thoughts_, p. 229.) “So,” he says, “the business of education is not, as I think, to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any when they shall apply themselves to it.” The studies he proposes in the _Conduct of the Understanding_ (which is his treatise on intellectual education) have for their object “an increase of the powers and activity of the mind, not an enlargement of its possessions” (_C. of U._ § 19, _ad f._).

Thus strange to say the supposed leader of the Utilitarians has actually propounded in so many words the doctrine of their opponents.

§ 22. When Locke is more studied it will be found that the _Thoughts_ are misleading if we neglect his other works, more particularly the _Conduct of the Understanding_.

§ 23. Towards the end of his days, Locke was conscious of gleams of the “untravelled world” which lay before the generations to come. With great pathos he writes to a friend: “When I consider how much of my life has been trifled away in beaten tracks where I vamped on with others only to follow those who went before me, I cannot but think I have just as much reason to be proud as if I had travelled all England and, if you will, all France too, only to acquaint myself with the roads, and be able to tell how the highways lie wherein those of equipage, and even the common herd too, travel. Now, methinks—and these are often old men’s dreams—I see openings to truth and direct paths leading to it, wherein a little application and industry would settle one’s mind with satisfaction and leave no darkness or doubt. But this is the end of my day when my sun is setting: and though the prospect it has given me be what I would not for anything be without—there is so much truth, beauty, and consistency in it—yet it is for one of your age, I think I ought to say for yourself, to set about” (L. to Bolde, quoted by Fowler, _Locke_, p. 120). But another 200 years have not sufficed to put us in possession of the Promised Land of which Locke had these Pisgah visions. We still “vamp on,” following those who went before us and getting small help from expounders of “Education as a Science.” But as it would seem the days of vamping on blindly in the beaten track are drawing to a close. We cannot doubt that if Locke had known the wonderful advance which various sciences have made since his day he would have seen in them “openings to truth and direct paths leading to it” for many purposes, certainly for education. It is for our age and ages to come to set about applying our scientific knowledge to the bringing up of children; and thinkers such as Froebel will shew us how.

Locke’s _Thoughts concerning Education_ and his _Conduct of
the Understanding_ should be in the hands of all students of
education who know the English language. I have therefore not
attempted to epitomise what he has said, but have endeavoured
to get at the main thoughts which are, so to speak, the
taproot of his system. Of the _Thoughts_ there is an edition
published by the National Society and another by the Pitt
Press, Cambridge. The Cambridge edition gives from Fox-Bourne’s
Life Locke’s scheme of “Working Schools” and from Lord King’s
the essay “Of Study.” Of the _Conduct_ there is an edition
published by the Clarendon Press. “F.B.” in the references
above stands for Fox-Bourne’s _Life of Locke_.

In the above essay I have not treated of Locke as a methodizer;
but he advocated teaching foreign languages _without grammar_,
and he published “Æsop’s Fables in English and Latin,
interlineary. For the benefit of those, who not having a
master would learn either of these Tongues.” When I edited the
_Thoughts_ for Pitt Press I did not know of this book or I
should have mentioned it.

XIV.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU.

(1712-1778).

§ 1. The great men whom we meet with in the history of education may be divided into two classes, thinkers and doers. There would seem no good reason why the thinker should not be great as a doer or the doer as a thinker; and yet we hardly find any records of men who have been successful both in investigating theory and directing practice. History tells us of first-rate practical schoolmasters like Sturm and the Jesuits; but they did not think out their own theory of their task: they accepted the current theory of their time. On the other hand, men who like Montaigne and Locke rejected the current theory and sought to establish a better by an appeal to reason were not practical schoolmasters. Whenever the thinker tries to turn his thought into action he has cause to be disappointed with the result. We saw this in the disastrous failure of Ratke; and even the books in which Comenius tried to work out his principles, the _Vestibulum, Janua_ and the rest, with the exception of the _Orbis Pictus_, were speedily forgotten. In the world of education as elsewhere it takes time to find for great thoughts the practice which gives effect to them. The course of great thoughts is in some ways like the course of great rivers. Most romantic and beautiful near their source, they are not most useful. They must leave the mountains in which they first appeared, and must flow not in cataracts but smoothly along the plain among the dwellings of common men before they can be turned to account in the every-day business of life.

§ 2. The eighteenth century was soon distinguished by boundless activity of thought; and this thought was directed mainly to a great work of destruction. Europe had outgrown the ideas of the Middle Age, and the framework of Society, which the Middle Age had bequeathed, had waxed old and was ready to vanish as soon as any strong force could be found to push it out of the way. As Matthew Arnold has described it—

“It’s frame yet stood without a breach
“When blood and warmth were fled;
“And still it spake it’s wonted speech—
“But every word was dead.”

Here then there was need of some destructive power that should remove and burn up much that had become mere obstacle and incumbrance. This power was found in the writings which appeared in France about the middle of the century; and among the authors of them none spoke with more effect than one who differed from all the rest, a vagabond without family ties or social position of any kind, with no literary training, with little knowledge and in conduct at least, with no morals. The writings of Rousseau and the results produced by them are among the strangest things in history; and especially in matters of education it is more than doubtful if the wise man of the world Montaigne, the Christian philanthropist Comenius, or that “slave of truth and reason” the philosopher Locke, had half as much influence as this depraved serving man.

§ 3. The work by which Rousseau became famous was a prize essay in which he maintained that civilization, the arts and all human institutions were from first to last pernicious in their effects, and that no happiness was possible for the human race without giving them all up and returning to what he called the state of Nature. He glorified the “noble savage.” If man had brought himself to a state of misery bordering on despair by following his own many inventions, take away all these inventions and you will have man in his proper condition. The argument seems something of this kind: Man was once happy: Man is now miserable: undo everything that has been done and Man will be happy again.

§ 4. This principle of a so-called “natural” state existing before man’s many inventions, Rousseau applied boldly to education, and he deduced this general rule: “Do precisely the opposite to what is usually done, and you will have hit on the right plan.” Not reform but revolution was his advice. He took the ordinary school teaching and held it up to ridicule, and certainly he did prove its absurdity. And a most valuable service he thus rendered to teachers. Every employment while it makes us see some things clearly, also provides us with blinkers, so to speak, which prevent our seeing other things at all. The school teacher’s blinkers often prevent his seeing much that is plain enough to other people; and when a writer like Rousseau takes off our blinkers for us and makes us look about us, he does us a great deal of good. But we need more than this: if we have children entrusted to us we must do something with them, and Rousseau’s rule of doing the opposite to what is usual will not be found universally applicable. So we consult Rousseau again, and what is his advice?

§ 5. Rousseau would bring everything back to the “natural” state, and unfortunately he never pauses to settle whether he means by this a state of ideal perfection, or of simply savagery. The savage, he says, gets his education without any one’s troubling about it, and so he infers that all the trouble taken by the civilized is worse than thrown away. (Girardin’s _Rousseau_, ij., 85.) But he does not fall back on _laisser faire_. He urges on parents the duty of _themselves_ attending to the bringing up of their children. “Point de mère, point d’enfant—no mother, no child,” says he; and he would have the father see to the training of the child whom the mother has suckled.

§ 6. Rousseau’s picture of family life is given us where few Englishmen are likely to find it, enveloped in the _Nouvelle Héloïse_. Here we read how Julie always has her children with her, and while seeming to let them do as they like, conceals with the air of apparent carelessness the most vigilant observation. Possessed by the notion that there can be no intellectual education before the age of reason, she proclaims: “La fonction dont je suis chargée n’est pas d’élever mes fils, mais de les préparer pour être élevés: My business is not to educate my sons, but to prepare them for being educated.” (_N. Héloïse_, 5th P., Lett. 3.)[120]

§ 7. There is much that is very pleasing in this picture of ideal family life; but when Rousseau comes formally to propound his ideas on education, he gives up family life to attain greater simplicity. “Je m’en tiens à ce qui est plus simple,” says he: “What I stick to is the more _simple_.” He tries to state everything in its lowest terms, so to speak; and this method is excellent so long as he puts on one side only what is accidental, and retains all the essentials of the problem. But his rage for simplicity sometimes carried him beyond this. There is an old Cambridge story of a problem introducing an elephant “whose weight may be neglected.” This is after the manner of Rousseau. In the bringing up of the model child, he “neglects” parents, brothers and sisters, young companions; and though he says that the needful qualities of a master may be expected only in “un homme de génie,” he hands over Émile to a governor to live an isolated life in the country.

§ 8. This governor is to devote himself, for some years, entirely to imparting to his pupil these difficult arts—the art of being ignorant and of losing time. Till he is twelve years old, Émile is to have no direct instruction whatever. “At that age he shall not know what a book is,” says Rousseau; though elsewhere we are told that he will learn to read of his own accord by the time he is ten, if no attempt is made to teach him. He is to be under no restraint, and is to do nothing but what he sees to be useful.

§ 9. Freedom from restraint is, however, to be apparent, not real. As in ordinary education the child employs all its faculties in duping the master, so in education “according to Nature” the master is to devote himself to duping the child. “Let him always be his own master in appearance, and do you take care to be so in reality. There is no subjection so complete as that which preserves the appearance of liberty; it is by this means even the will is led captive.”

§ 10. “The most critical interval of human nature is that between the hour of our birth and twelve years of age. This is the time wherein vice and error take root without our being possessed of any instrument to destroy them.” (_Ém._ ij., 79.) Throughout this season, the governor is to be at work training the pupil in the art of being ignorant and losing time. “The first education should be purely negative. It consists by no means in teaching virtue or truth, but in securing the heart from vice and the intellect from error. If you could do nothing and let nothing be done, if you could bring on your pupil healthy and strong to the age of 12 without his being able to tell his right hand from his left, from your very first lessons the eyes of his understanding would open to reason. Being without prejudices and without habits he would have nothing in him to thwart the effect of your care; and by beginning with doing nothing you would have made an educational prodigy.”[121]

“Exercise his body, his organs, his senses, his powers; but keep his mind passive as long as possible. Mistrust all his sentiments formed before the judgment which determines their value. Restrain, avoid all foreign impressions, and to prevent the birth of evil be in no hurry to cause good; for good is good only in the light of reason. Look on all delays as so many advantages: it is a great gain to advance towards the goal without loss: let childhood ripen in children. In short, whatever lesson they may need, be sure not to give it them to-day if you can safely put it off till to-morrow.”[122]

“Do not, then, alarm yourself much about this apparent idleness. What would you say of the man, who, in order to make the most of life, should determine never to go to sleep? You would say, The man is mad: he is not enjoying the time; he is depriving himself of it: to avoid sleep he is hurrying towards death. Consider, then, that it is the same here, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.”[123]

§ 11. We have now reached the climax (or shall we say the nadir?) in negation. Rousseau has given the _coup de grâce_ to the ideal of the Renascence. Comenius was the first to take a comprehensive view of the educator’s task and to connect it with man’s nature and destiny; but he could not get clear from an over-estimate of the importance of knowledge. According to his ideal, man should know all things; so in practice he thought too much of imparting knowledge. Then came Locke and treated the imparting of knowledge as of trifling importance when compared with the formation of character; but he too in practice hardly went so far as this principle might have led him. He was much under the influence of social distinctions, and could not help thinking of what it was necessary for a gentleman to know. So that Rousseau was the very first to shake himself entirely free from the notion which the Renascence had handed down that man was mainly a _learning_ animal. Rousseau has the courage to deny this in the most emphatic manner possible, and to say: “For the first 12 years the educator must teach the child _nothing_.”

§ 12. In this reaction against the Renascence Rousseau puts the truth in the form of such a violent paradox that we start back in terror. But it was perhaps necessary thus to sweep away the ordinary schoolroom rubbish before the true nature of the educator’s task could be fairly considered. The rubbish having been cleared away what was to take its place? No longer having his mind engrossed by the knowledge he wished to communicate, the educator had now an eye for something else not less worthy of his attention, viz., the child itself. Rousseau was the first to base education entirely on a study of the child to be educated; and by doing this he became, as I believe, one of the greatest of educational Reformers.

§ 13. It was, however, purely as a thinker, or rather as a _voice_ giving expression to the general discontent that Rousseau became such a tremendous force in Europe. He has indeed often been called the father of the first French Revolution which he did not live to see. But, as Macaulay has well said, a good deal besides eloquent writing is needed to cause such a convulsion; and we can no more attribute the French Revolution to the writings of Rousseau than we can attribute the shock of an explosion of gunpowder to the lucifer match without which it might never have happened (_v._ Macaulay’s _Barrère_). Rousseau did in the world of ideas what the French Revolutionists afterwards did in the world of politics; he made a clean sweep and endeavoured to start afresh.

§ 14. I have already said that as regards education I think his labours in destruction were of very great value. But what shall we say of his efforts at construction? There would not be the least difficulty in showing that most of his proposals are impracticable. It is no more “natural” to treat as a typical case a child brought up in solitude than it would be to write a treatise on the rearing of a bee cut off from the hive.[124] Rousseau requires impossibilities, _e.g._, he postulates that the child is never to be brought into contact with anyone who might set a bad example. Modern science has shown us that the young are liable to take diseases from impurities in the air they breathe: but as yet no one has proposed that all children should be kept at an elevation of 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. Yet the advice would be about as practicable as the advice of Rousseau. A method which always starts with paradox and not infrequently ends with platitude might seem to have little in its favour; and Rousseau has had far less influence since (in the words of Herman Merivale) “he was dethroned with the fall of his extravagant child, the [First] Republic.” No doubt the great exponent of English opinion was right in calling Rousseau “the most un-English stranger who ever landed on our shores” (_Times_, 29 Aug., 1873); and the torch of his eloquence will never cause a conflagration, still less an explosion, here. His disregard for “appearances”—or rather his evident purpose of making an impression by defying “appearances” and saying just the opposite of what is expected, is simply distressing to us. But there is no denying Rousseau’s genius. His was one of the original voices that go on sounding and awakening echoes in all lands. Willingly or unwillingly, at first hand or from imperfect echoes, everyone who studies education must study Rousseau.

§ 15. As specimens of Rousseau’s teaching I will give a few characteristic passages from the Émile.

“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Creator: everything degenerates in the hands of man.”[125] These are the first words of the “Émile,” and the key-note of Rousseau’s philosophy.

§ 16. “We are born weak, we have need of strength; we are born destitute of everything, we have need of assistance; we are born stupid, we have need of understanding. All that we have not at our birth, and which we require when grown up, is bestowed on us by education. This education we receive from nature, from men, or from things. The internal development of our organs and faculties is the education of nature: the use we are taught to make of that development is the education given us by men; and in the acquisitions made by our own experience on the objects that surround us, consists our education from things.”[126] “Since the concurrence of these three kinds of education is necessary to their perfection, it is by that one which is entirely independent of us, we must regulate the two others.”[127]

§ 17. Now “to live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, and of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of our existence. The man who has lived most, is not he who has counted the greatest number of years, but he who has most thoroughly felt life.”[128]

§ 18. The aim of education, then, must be complete living.

But ordinary education, instead of seeking to develop the life of the child, sacrifices childhood to the acquirement of knowledge, or rather the semblance of knowledge, which it is thought will prove useful to the youth or the man. Rousseau’s great merit lies in his having exposed this fundamental error. He says, very truly, “We do not understand childhood, and pursuing false ideas of it our every step takes us further astray. The wisest among us fix upon what it concerns men to know without ever considering what children are capable of learning. They always expect to find the man in the child without thinking of what the child is before it is a man. And this is the study to which I have especially devoted myself, in order that should my entire method be false and visionary, my observations might always turn to account. I may not have seen aright what ought to be done: but I believe I have seen aright the subject on which we have to act. Begin then by studying your pupils better, for most certainly you do not understand them.”[129] “Nature wills that children should be _children_ before they are _men_. If we seek to pervert this order we shall produce forward fruits without ripeness or flavour, and tho’ not ripe, soon rotten: we shall have young _savans_ and old children. Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, feeling peculiar to itself; nothing is more absurd than to wish to substitute ours in their place.”[130] “We never know how to put ourselves in the place of children; we do not enter into their ideas, we attribute to them our own; and following always our own train of thought, even with syllogisms we manage to fill their heads with nothing but extravagance and error.”[131] “I wish some discreet person would give us a treatise on the art of observing children—an art which would be of immense value to us, but of which fathers and schoolmasters have not as yet learnt the very first rudiments.”[132]

§ 19. In these passages, Rousseau strikes the key-note of true education. The first thing necessary for us is to see aright the subject on which we have to act. Unfortunately, however, this subject has often been the subject most neglected in the schoolroom. Children have been treated as if they were made for their school books, not their school books for them. As education has been thought of as learning, childhood has been treated as unimportant, a necessary stage in existence no doubt, but far more troublesome and hardly more interesting than the state of the chrysalis. If some forms of words, tables, declensions, county towns, and the like can be drummed into children, this is, say educators of the old school, a clear gain. For the rest nothing can be done with them except teaching them to read, write, and say the multiplication table.

But since the publication of the Émile, there has been in the world a very different view of education. According to this view, the importance of childhood is not to be measured by the amount of _our_ knowledge, or even the number of _our_ words, we can force it to remember. According to this view, in dealing with children we must not think of our knowledge or of our notions at all. We must think not of our own minds, but of the minds of the little ones.[133]

§ 20. The absurd results in which the opposite course has ended, Rousseau exposes with great severity. “All the studies demanded from the poor unfortunates lead to such things as are entirely beyond the range of their ideas, so you may judge what amount of attention they can give to them. Schoolmasters who make a great display of the instruction they give their pupils are paid to differ from me; but we see from what they do that they are entirely of my opinion. For what do they really teach? Words, words, for ever words. Among the various knowledges which they boast of giving, they are careful not to include such as would be of use; because these would involve a knowledge of things, and there they would be sure to fail; but they choose subjects that seem to be known when the terms are known such as heraldry, geography, chronology, languages and the like; all of them studies so foreign to a man, and still more to a child, that it is a great chance if anything of the whole lot ever proves useful to him on a single occasion in his whole life.”[134] “Whatever the study may be, without the idea of the things represented the signs representing them go for nothing. And yet the child is always kept to these signs without our being able to make him comprehend any of the things they represent.”[135] What does a child understand by “the globe”? An old geography book says candidly, that it is a round thing made of plaster; and this is the only notion children have of it. What a fearful waste, and worse than waste, it is to make them learn the signs without the things, when if they ever learn the things, they must at the same time acquire the signs! (Conf. Ruskin _supra_ p. 159, _note_.) “No! if Nature gives to the child’s brain this pliability which makes it capable of receiving impressions of every kind, this is not that we may engrave on it the names of kings, dates, the technical words of heraldry, of astronomy, of geography, and all those words meaningless at his age and useless at any age, with which we oppress his sad and sterile childhood; but that all the ideas which he can conceive and which are useful to him, all those which relate to his happiness and will one day make his duty plain to him, may trace themselves there in characters never to be effaced, and may assist him in conducting himself through life in a manner appropriate to his nature and his faculties.”[136]

§ 21. With Rousseau, as afterwards with Froebel, education was a kind of “child-gardening.” “Plants are developed by cultivation,” says he, “men by education: On façonne les plantes par la culture, et les hommes par l’éducation” (_Ém._ j., 6). The governor, who is the child-gardener, is to aim at three things: first, he is to shield the child from all corrupting influences; second, he is to devote himself to developing in the child a healthy and strong body in which the senses are to be rendered acute by exercise; third, he is, by practice not precept, to cultivate the child’s sense of duty.

§ 22. In his study of children Rousseau fixed on their never-resting activity. “The failing energy concentrates itself in the heart of the old man; in the heart of the child energy is overflowing and spreads outwards; he feels in him life enough to animate all his surroundings. Whether he makes or mars it is all one to him: it is enough that he has changed the state of things, and every change is an action. If he seems by preference to destroy, this is not from mischief; but the act of construction is always slow, and the act of destruction being quicker is more suited to his vivacity.”[137]

One of the first requisites in the care of the young is then to provide for the expansion of their activity. All restraints such as swaddling clothes for infants and “school” and “lessons” for children are to be entirely done away with.[138] Literary instruction must not be thought of. “There must be no other book than the world,” says Rousseau, “no other instruction than facts. The child who reads does not think, he does nothing but read, he gets no instruction; he learns words: Point d’autre livre que le monde, point d’autre instruction que les faits. L’enfant qui lit ne pense pas, il ne fait que lire; il ne s’instruit pas, il apprend les mots.” (_Ém._ iij., 181.)[139]

§ 23. If it be objected that, according to Rousseau’s plan, there would be a neglect of memory, he replies: “Without the study of books the kind of memory that a child should have will not remain inactive; all he sees, all he hears, strikes him, and he remembers it; he keeps a record in himself of people’s actions and people’s talk; and all around him makes the book by which without thinking of it he is constantly enriching his memory against the time that his judgment may benefit by it: Sans étudier dans les livres, l’espèce de mémoire que peut avoir un enfant ne reste pas pour cela oisive; tout ce qu’il voit, tout ce qu’il entend le frappe, et il s’en souvient; il tient registre en lui-même des actions, des discours des hommes; et tout ce qui l’environne est le livre, dans lequel, sans y songer, il enrichit continuellement sa mémoire, en attendant que son jugement puisse en profiter.” (_Ém._ ij., 106.) We should be most careful not to commit to our memory anything we do not understand, for if we do, we can never tell what part of our stores really belong to us. (_Ém._ iij., 236.)