Chapter IV: Part 4

History thus ministered to the individual, and in the dim twilight of the race sang the wrath of Peleus’s son and the fortunes of the exiled men of Troy. As the importance of the individual became merged in that of the nation, it was the jealousies of rival States and foreign conquests that employed her pen. Nations, like individuals, were of special interest to themselves, and their achievements in war and politics were recorded by admiring and servile chroniclers. Men saw in history only an attempt to rescue from oblivion national and individual deeds worthy of emulation or demanding universal condemnation. Until our own period, therefore, the muse of history has, with few exceptions, been an annalist looking from a lower window. Men and events have passed before her, but she has not cared whence they came or whither they went. But as modern chemistry is the outgrowth of mediæval alchemy, and astronomy of the astrology of a still more ancient day, so modern history has been developed from these chronicles of a remote past. Clio no longer seeks alone to win enduring fame for her favored heroes, but she depicts the past, that men may live more wisely in the present. As the muse of comparative history, she goes to the mountain-top and makes the whole world hers by right of eminent domain.

Several influences have contributed to bring about this change, but the most important have come through the French Revolution. Those great intellectual movements that culminated in the overthrow of absolutism in France and the creation of new political ideals throughout Western Europe gave to history a different conception of the relative position of potentates and peoples. The subject gained new dignity as it abandoned the homage previously paid to civil, military, and ecclesiastical rulers, and concerned itself more with the characteristics of nations. Voltaire anticipated Macaulay and Green by one hundred years when he wrote, “I wish to write a history, not of wars, but of society.... I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.” History has thus during the present century gained a new theme in the portrayal of those democratic tendencies of which its new purpose has been the result.

But not only did the French Revolution create a truer historical perspective within the different nations—it also widened the horizon of each. The armies of Napoleon and the allies, that swept over Europe from the Spanish peninsula to the heart of Russia, broke down the artificial barriers that had separated nation from nation. Provincialism was diminished, national interest was less self-centred, States for the first time became aware of the existence of institutions after which their own might profitably be modelled. The political, social, industrial, and educational condition of nations became of more vital interest than the hours of dining and retiring of capricious sovereigns. The study of comparative history was born of the same destructive forces that overthrew the oldest and apparently most stable institutions of Europe.

While history has thus been indebted to political revolutions for new themes, it has also been indebted to changing intellectual standards for new methods of work. The early age had been one of credulity and adulation. But men came in time to see that “fables begin to be current in one generation, are established in the second, become respectable in the third, while in the fourth temples are raised in their honor.” Scepticism and speculative thought followed in turn, and these have been superseded by a demand for the study of facts, not for their own sake, but to determine the laws that govern them. Science and scientific methods have become controlling intellectual forces, and history, like every other subject, has come under this influence. As a result of this awakening, Voltaire in France, Niebuhr in Germany, and Arnold in England, gave the impulse to that form of historical writing which has made history pre-eminent in the world of letters in our own century. It has not been forgotten that there were immortal names in Greece and Rome, and that the eighteenth century produced a Gibbon; but these are exceptions that show that the true historical spirit characterized the individual, not the age.

If history has thus been affected by the credulity of one period and the indiscriminating love of facts of another, now by speculative tendencies and again by scientific movements, is it not a chameleon unworthy of consideration among more stable subjects? The important place it has won for itself in the curricula of all our colleges and secondary schools must at this time be a sufficient answer to the question; but it is fitting to ask what are the dangers that at present beset the path of students and teachers of history.

The first danger is the failure to recognize the individuality of history. This is often due to a desire to acknowledge the indebtedness of history to science. Schools announce the employment in history of “laboratory methods,” publishers advertise text-books in history constructed on the laboratory plan, and a recent catalogue of a large and important university proclaims that no text-book in history is used, but that one is being prepared by the professor and advanced students in the historical laboratory of the university. Historical laboratory, indeed! Is the old word _library_ to become obsolete and referred in the next edition of Webster to the heading _laboratory_? Must our study-table give place to a more scientific article of furniture yet to be produced in some other historico-scientific workshop? The true student and teacher of history is ever foremost to confess his obligation to scientific methods, but he will never recognize in history a subdivision of physics or biology, or look forward to an historical Newton who will reduce the events of the past to mathematical formulæ or physical laws.

A second phase of the same danger assumes the form of a desire to make history the vehicle for our philosophical conceptions of the past, present, and future. This desire to know and to teach the philosophy of history is a reaction against that spirit which saw in the events of the past only an enumeration of facts, a skeleton without flesh and blood. This reaction has been inevitable, and in a sense is not to be regretted; but it has brought its own attending dangers. A class of teachers, by no means small in numbers or restricted in influence, whose knowledge of history and of philosophy is based on Hegel’s _Philosophy of History_, supplemented by a course of lectures at the Concord School, is to-day instructing history classes in our high-schools that the ultimate aim of the world is the mind’s consciousness of its rational freedom. For the type of mind that has first grasped the idea that it is not all of history to teach Barnes’s text-books memoriter from cover to cover, the transition is easy to the Hegelian conception that in Greece the mind was introspective; among the Romans the mind was resolved into generality, which makes mind itself universal; while in Christianity the mind first withdraws into pure introspection in communion with the universal; then follows the reconciliation, which is the introspective mind transforming the world. (Diesterweg’s summary.) A disciple of this school, whose sublime indifference to the fact that the Norman Conquest came in the eleventh rather than in the first or the nineteenth century, had been the despair of his instructor, when asked what material he would select for a class in history in the grammar grades, replied promptly, “I would teach them the philosophy of history.” It is this spirit that teaches in our academies and high-schools the philosophical, psychological and physiological aspects of the French Revolution, that discusses history, as has been said of Mr. Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_, “in the past potential subjunctive,” and all this without any sound, accurate knowledge of the facts on which the conclusions of others have been based.

A third danger comes in the adaptation of the fatalistic “whatever is, is right,” into the fashionable “whatever is European, is right.” This, again, is but the expression of a reaction against a too fervid patriotism which would have nothing of the effete monarchies of the Old World; but special evils follow in its train. The college that employs laboratory methods and teaches the philosophy of history to freshmen glories in “original investigation” and the German seminary. He is of all men most deceived who dreams that the German _Seminarium_ can be built upon anything but a German university basis. Doubtless the word seminary is often used with us to characterize a form of instruction affording special freedom of intercourse between professor and student, and in this sense its use is not objectionable, but the typical German seminary in an American college is an anomaly.

A fourth danger comes from another adaptation of the old saying into “whatever is new, is right.” This, again, is a reaction against certain misconceptions of the subject-matter of history. Since Mr. Green wrote his _Short History of the English People_, in protest against the previous exclusive consideration of military and political affairs, it has become the fashion to decry every history that does not treat of “the people.” The protest has been well made; but there is danger that the teacher who welcomes emancipation from the drudgery that compelled the memorization of all the campaigns of the Revolutionary War will forget that

“civlyzation doos git forrid
Sometimes upon a powder cart.”

There is a temptation to overlook the fact that we are conscious of our political constitution, as of our physical body, only when it is out of order, and that the study of preventive politics, like preventive medicine, has a proper place. The fault of all early writers and teachers of history was not in the consideration, but in the exclusive consideration of military and political affairs. He errs in like degree who teaches that these phases of a nation’s life can be ignored. He is wise who sees them in their proper relation to other phenomena of society.

These four dangers, the loss of the individuality of history in, first, the scientific tendencies, and, second, the philosophical aspirations of the times, the attempted transplanting of foreign methods to American soil, and the recent ignoring of certain vital portions of history, all grow out of the proneness in the human mind to seize half of a truth and remain content with it. We have learned in medicine, but, alas! not yet in pedagogy, the fallacy of the argument that if a little of a thing is good, more must be better. Each of these methods of teaching history is half right, but wholly wrong. A scientific method in its study we must have; but to treat history as an exact science is to degrade it from its own exalted position, since all imitation is demeaning. The relation of cause and effect every beginner in history must be able to see; but to introduce Hegel, Schlegel, or Lotze into the class-room of the average academy or college is to caricature both history and philosophy. The German seminary is good—in Germany; and the adaptation of many of its methods may be good for us, in so far as it teaches us to subordinate rhetoric to fact and to consult original documents. The history of peoples we must have, but of peoples concerned in war and politics as well as in literature and industries.

If we are to avoid these and similar dangers, we must clearly understand, first, the general principles that should control all teaching of history, and, second, the line of demarcation between history as taught in the secondary school, in the normal school, and in the college and university.

History, wherever taught, should ever keep in mind, as regards the choice of subject-matter, the practical end. Perhaps we come late in life to realize that history, like virtue, is its own reward, as we learn to appreciate Mr. Lowell’s definition of a university as a place where nothing useful can be learned. But the practical end must come first and lead up to it. This end must be the creation of an intelligent understanding of American history, American institutions, American ideals. This does not imply that we are to teach American history exclusively—far from it; but our national history is to be at once the beginning and the climax of all historical study. The necessity for this is the greater since we have but recently come to recognize the importance of historical study. Not until the Civil War had made possible a true national life did we dare to bid defiance to sectional and local jealousies and study our own past. On the other hand, the study of European institutions was neglected, for the Monroe Doctrine took root educationally as well as politically. When the centennial anniversary of our independence lessened our prejudices and removed somewhat our insular character, a new interest came in the study of European history and politics. We have thus come to realize that both American and European history must be taught, in view of the large number of foreigners annually coming to our shores, the early age at which many American boys and girls leave school, and the grave political problems yet unsettled and demanding the serious attention of every mature mind. Bishop Potter, in his recent Phi Beta Kappa address on “The Scholar and the State,” has shown the necessity of keeping ever present, even in the higher paths of learning, the plain truths that history teaches, if we are not to be wrecked on the shoals where other nations have gone down. From strange localities the encouragement comes to begin and to continue this work. On Rivington Street, in the slums of New York, in a district from which comes one-tenth of the criminals of New York City, a college settlement has been established, and in connection with it a free library. The librarian reports that the first demand of every boy is for a life of George Washington, and that when the biographies have been exhausted, the second choice is for a history that has “something about George Washington.” If a recent magazine article on “Why an Irish boy should make a good American citizen” could teach, not only our friends from the Emerald Isle, but immigrants from other nations as well, their duties as citizens of the Republic, and if Bishop Potter’s address could be placed in the hands of every native American, the teaching of history would receive greater encouragement than has yet been vouchsafed to it.

If the practical end should be our objective point, three general principles should lead us to it.

The first step in beginning any historical work is to give a bird’s-eye view of the whole subject. What Bunker Hill Monument is to Boston, the Brooklyn Bridge to New York, and the Eiffel Tower to Paris, that the general outline is in all historical study. One school of writers has often of late urged the theory that historical study should begin with local history, that the town and county should come first, the nation last. But this is much like attempting to draw a map of the United States by locating New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Key West, and then drawing the coast-lines. It is the historical Cuvier, not the novice, who can take an isolated portion of local history and reconstruct from it an historical whole.

A second general principle is that in history, as well as in pure and applied science, the student must become familiar with the terminology employed. The words _state_, _constitution_, _law_, _pure democracy_, _representative government_ must be as clearly understood as straight line and angle, base and salt. In this way much local history and many political principles can be, indeed must be, taught by way of illustration. “Taxation without representation” is a glittering generality; but it has meaning when the principles of taxation are understood, and when it is evident why we never pay a direct tax without complaining, and why some persons can look with equanimity upon the payment—by others—of an indirect tax of 20 per cent. on foreign books.

A third general aim should be to train the student to do independent work. This can be done by putting into the hands of the students, even of high-school boys and girls, a certain amount of original material. The amount as well as the kind must vary with the nature of the school and the time given to the subject; but to pupils of even the lowest grade the Constitution of the United States must be something more than “what is in the back part of the book;” the Declaration of Independence must teach him why the colonies revolted, and his Iliad must show him the condition of society in the Homeric age. The best working outfit for every grade is a text-book containing a brief outline of facts, supplemented by original documents, selected with reference to the needs of special classes. Publishers are ever ready to meet such demands, and have already given us the _Old South Leaflets_, _The National Library_, _English History from Contemporaneous Writers_, and _Documents Illustrating American History_, while the instructor can find compensation for one of his trials in the large number of old English chronicles made available in the Bohn edition. Some persons indeed have cried out in alarm against the free use of original documents, even in our colleges, as an introduction of “university methods.” Such criticism, however, is due to a failure to understand what is meant by university methods, and to a lack of discrimination between _independent_ work, which should be done everywhere, and _original_ work, which properly belongs to the university.

These general principles we believe should govern all historical teaching; but there are certain specific principles that must be applied to the teaching of history in special grades. We may lay down the general proposition that in the secondary schools the distinctive aim should be the accumulation of historical knowledge, in the normal school the classification of such knowledge, in the college independent investigation, and in the university original investigation. This expresses, however, only the leading characteristic in each form of instruction, since in every grade must be found to a certain extent the distinguishing features of every other grade.

It has been said that in the secondary schools the distinctive aim should be the accumulation of historical knowledge. A German university professor was once asked the first step in historical study. His brief reply was “_Lesen_.” “And the second?” “_Viel lesen_.” “And the third?” “_Sehr viel lesen_.” The principle applies to work in the secondary schools. But here the instructor must be like the skilful engineer who constructs a tunnel by beginning at opposite sides of the mountain, knowing that the two ends of the tunnel will ultimately meet without the variation of a hair’s breadth. At one end of the historical tunnel must be the reading, the much reading, the very much reading; at the other end, careful, systematic, dry—if you please—tedious drill. There must be the much reading, or the student early forms the pernicious habit of generalizing from one particular. There must be careful guidance to furnish a receptacle for this knowledge, or it is like water poured upon the ground. There must be general information, or the student becomes narrow; but general information alone is a jelly-fish, brilliant in coloring, but formless and without use. In the secondary schools everything is grist that comes to the historical mill, but it is here also that the student must learn that “there is no northwest passage to the intellectual world.”

The special province of the normal school is to emphasize the classification of historical knowledge. To the average normal-school student a fact is a fact. His knowledge is a Chinese painting, an historical crazy-quilt. He never sees that in history, as well as in mathematics, 2+2=4. He has often much general information, especially concerning his own country, but it is an information and a zeal for information that leads him to ask “How many Presidents have died in office?” “Who was President for a single day?” “Who fired the first gun in the Civil War?” “Who was the youngest soldier in the Revolution?” and to affirm, in the same breath, “the reconciliation of the contradiction between its inner aim and life with its _actual_ being is the _process_ of the history of a nation. The collision between the _ideal_ of a nation and the _actual_ produces the process of history.” The normal-school student must first of all be taught historical perspective, and, second, that there is no historical multiplication-table or system of mechanical memorizing either of details or of general principles that can be applied to the solution of historical problems.

If the secondary school is to encourage the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the normal school the classification of historical facts, it is the college and the university that is to be the investigator of historical subjects. It is said that every lawyer owes a debt of gratitude to his profession. So the obligation rests upon every special teacher and student of history to contribute something to the sum of historical knowledge. This contribution cannot be made during a college course, but the college student must be an investigator for himself, the tools must be put into his hands, and he must learn their use. Like the high-school boy, he must be an omnivorous reader, but he must also be a critical reader. Hume and Freeman are to be to him not merely names of historians, but of historians representing different schools of thought. Macaulay’s every school-boy knows that taxation without representation was the cause of the Revolution, but the college student must know, if the school-boy does not, why but one of the twenty-seven complaints in the Declaration of Independence refers to the subject of taxation. The college student must know that Magna Charta is the corner-stone of English liberty, not because Bishop Stubbs and all the historians say so, but because he has himself studied that great instrument and the subsequent development of constitutional liberty. The college student must learn the condition of the Church before the Reformation, not from Fisher, Hausser, and Alzog, but from Chaucer, Dante, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus. He must know that history is not a simple substance, but a compound. He must be able to see that into it enter, as component parts, politics, economics, statistics, finance, sociology, jurisprudence, archæology, philanthropy, comparative philology—every subject that concerns itself with the life of the individual or the nation. He must be familiar not only with the process of analysis, but also with that of composition.

What results are we justified in thinking should follow our best efforts in secondary school and college?

In the first place, history can do more than any other subject except science to break down the barrier that too often rises between the instructor’s desk and the class-room seats. No subject except science lends itself so readily to co-operative methods of work. Professor and student, teacher and pupil are alike seekers after truth, and the library door swings outward for all. If, as has been said, aristocratic politics broke down with the French Revolution, and aristocratic economics are fast disappearing in the light of the economic discussions of the day, so aristocratic pedagogics must yield to that spirit which makes students of both instructor and instructed.

Again, history is pre-eminently adapted to teach the fact that knowledge is singular in fact as well as in form. To the ordinary mind Greek is Greek, geology is geology, and history is history. Cæsar’s “first impressions” of Britain, and Cicero’s arraignment of Verres, which must have exhausted all the editions of the Roman _Herald_ and _Evening Post_, are to the average school-boy not history, politics, and literature, but Latin. The average college student turns for his history, not to his Cæsar, but to Mommsen’s chapter on the “Subjugation of the West,” which in its narrative portion is but a paraphrase of the Commentaries. Nothing is more difficult to overcome than this belief that each branch of knowledge is isolated. History, more than any other subject except literature, must show how every study in the school or college curriculum dovetails into every other study, making from seemingly isolated parts a compact whole. History must show that, while it itself works by scientific methods, science works by the historical method; that mathematics and music are first cousins; that art and philosophy are related; and that the study of Sanscrit roots has made “the whole world akin.”

These are but suggestions of what history can and should do. History does not wish to supersede any or all other subjects in the academic or the college curriculum. It asks only a fair place and reasonable treatment.

1890.

THE PRIVATE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS.

BY ANNA C. BRACKETT.

There is no science of education. There are many theories, and there is an art of education. Every true teacher is and must be an artist, working on the most plastic of materials, and changing her methods as the state of the material gives notice to her practised mental eye that change is needed. It is this fact which makes experience of so much value in the profession, and this which makes the problem of normal schools so difficult. It is only the quickened insight of a mind originally fit for the work which can determine the mental state to be dealt with at the moment, and can then select, out of all the means at command, the very question or the very explanation that will enable the child’s mind to take hold of the truth to be conveyed. The maker of Damascus blades cannot tell you how he knows that the steel has had exactly the required amount of heat. He sees the color and he knows; that is all there is of it. If you do not see it, he cannot help you, any more than the laundress can tell you how hot the iron must be for the material she is going to put it on. She holds it to her face, or touches it with wet finger, and decides. The cook puts her hand into the oven and says that we must wait a little longer before setting the bread in, and she is right. The problem of real teaching is of this order, only more complicated because of the material; for steel and cloth and dough can be depended on to answer a certain quantity of heat with a certain reaction, while the human mind has left to it freedom in its way of working, and no two human minds are alike. There are no unfailing rules which can be given to the incipient teacher, and no patent methods will avail. All depends upon the circumstances at the very time when she has to act, and those her instructors cannot by any possibility know. The only rule without exception that occurs to me is that she should never punish when she is angry; but this would be a very slender stock to go into business with, and the imparting of it would hardly justify a legislature in building normal schools.

The truth is that education, having no principles of its own, must use those furnished by the sciences, especially by psychology. But the conclusions and the generalizations of psychology, so far as it is an empirical science, are drawn from observations on the adult mind, and therefore are not always to be depended on in our dealings with the child mind, which is, as Professor Royce says, “possessed by an incapacity of a relatively diseased sort;” and he adds, “the wise teacher is a sort of physician who is to help the child towards getting that kind of health which we call maturity.” He says wisely that the mind of the child is a “chaos of unreason.” It is the part of the teacher to create from this chaos a world which shall no longer be without form and void, and to brood over the face of the deep. She is not without assistance from within, for the spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters and waits to answer to her call. But does she know how to call? That is the question, the answer to which determines whether she be a teacher or not. The problem in the education of every child’s mind is like the problem with the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman, only that we have with common children more means of reading it than Dr. Howe had of reaching hers, and so of putting it into communication with the rest of the race. He says that the first efforts at her instruction were like letting down lines one after another into the bottom of the deep sea in which her silent soul lay, and waiting the moment when she should seize hold of them and be drawn up into the light. In teaching we are continually doing this. We let down our lines and wait. We have more lines than Dr. Howe had with her; that is all the difference; and when we see the light flash along the face, we know, as he did, that we have reached the intelligence we were feeling for. Perhaps the best training any ambitious girl could have for teaching would be found, not in a normal school, but for one year in an asylum for idiots, one year at Hampton, and one in a school for the blind. She would learn in such work as this how to reach the intelligence which lies waiting. The greatest teachers, as a rule, have not been those who have had most special training for their profession. They have been the broadest men and women who have learned of the doctrine by doing the work, and who have found their greatest pleasure and reward in the doing of it.

When it is distinctly seen that education is not a science, but an art, it is perceived why so many so-called normal schools fail of their purpose, and why the educational journals which appear from time to time, only to return to the silence from which they arose, are for the most part such very useless reading. Of course the education of the child is obtained only in a limited sense in school. She is educated in general by every circumstance of her life from the time when her eyes first open to the light. But in this article the word “education” will be understood as meaning only that portion of the “conscious direction by mature persons of the growth and development of the young” which takes place in school. The girl gains information at home or in travelling, very varied information, but all this comes to her not in definite order, not in definite relation, and with the important and the unimportant thrown together haphazard. She cannot be said to be educated unless her mind has been worked upon in a systematic way, the proper food for its natural growth given to it at the suitable time, its activity rendered orderly, and itself supplied with categories under which it can arrange any information afterwards acquired. As it is now, the so-called education of many American girls has produced a mere hodge-podge of bits of information, of no use to themselves, and, what is of more consequence, of no use to any one else. She would be thought a strange woman who should administer medicine to her children merely because it happened to turn up in some house where she was passing the summer, or because it had been left over in her own hands, the remnant of what had been years ago administered to herself. Yet this is exactly what the mother does who arranges lessons in German for her children only because a German lady happens to be spending her summer in the same hotel, or who insists upon a teacher’s giving her child the same subjects, in the same way, as those used by her own teachers when she was a girl. The old medicine may have been good in the old time, and the old physician may have been quite right in prescribing it for a headache, but it does not follow therefore that we are to keep the bottle on the table and give it whenever there is a headache in the family. It is only the skilled physician who can say whether it is the medicine proper at another time or for another patient. Many people seem to imagine that it is only the number of beats in a minute that the physician considers when he feels the pulse. If it were so, the science and art of medicine would be reduced to the level of a trade. What the physician learns from the pulse is the very thing which his experience has rendered him, and not you, capable of learning, and the thing which you can acquire only as he did. To him the pulse speaks, and he knows what its quality and its quantity mean. Then the temperature and the respiration also speak, and combining all the information that these and many other signs give him, he prescribes intelligently for the trouble which is the cause of all. This is medical insight, and, as Professor Royce says, “The teacher who can make out what the child’s actual state of mind is, has developed the true sort of psychological insight.”

To develop this is to grow into a teacher. “The habit of merely judging minds as good or evil, without observing what state it is, what mental coloring, what inner live process, that makes them good or evil,” is the habit of the unprofessional mind; and, as Professor Royce goes on to say, “this habit is so ingrained in most of us that it is always hard to learn to substitute diagnosis for mere estimation, and a loving study of the process for mere external liking or disliking of the person.” A teacher might be defined as one to whom everything that children do or say has become a sign. She thereby loses much careless amusement which other people find in their sayings and doings, and she shrinks, with a protest which she has often no right to express, from many an account of the subjects which are being taught to them, or the ways in which they have responded to some way of managing. She stands in the realm of realities, not in that of phenomena, and gains thereby much more pain than pleasure; for, like a surgeon continually surrounded by children with badly set or deformed limbs, she at present must live in the company of minds that have, as a rule, been under the treatment of ignorant and unthinking practitioners. Human vivisection is by no means rare in many an American home, where most of the time is spent in exploiting growing children for the amusement or interest of the parents or visitors. The child is interesting to its parents, and many a question is asked of it “just to see what it will say.” Thus many a subject is suggested before the mind is in the proper state for its reception, growth according to the divine plan is thwarted, reflection confused, and what should have been a pleasure to the child becomes a pain.

Too much stress cannot be laid upon the necessity of harmony between the state of growth of the girl’s mind and the nature of the study in which she is engaged. Professor James calls attention to the fact that every instinct has its own time of ripening. When the speech instinct has ripened, and not before, the child begins to talk. Earlier, when the walking instinct has come to maturity and needed expression, he begins to try to walk. When the flying instinct is ripe, the little birds quit the nest. It makes all the difference in the world whether the girl takes up a subject at the time when her mind is in the proper state for it, and those mothers who will not allow her to learn to read till she is seven years old are wrong. The mind has by that time passed the stage at which it can do without disgust the work necessary to learn the perfectly arbitrary signs that express language, and passively protests against the unsuitable labor. Equally wrong are those teachers who fancy that because two girls of widely different ages know about the same amount of French, they may be put into the same French class. The method of teaching must differ entirely with them, even though they should have the same lesson to learn from the same text-book. This fact is one reason why it is desirable to have the school so arranged that one teacher shall not be confined to one class, but shall have opportunity to act on minds of different ages. This tends to make better teachers through the varied interest which it promotes, and the wider outlook which it presents over the mind at different stages of growth, and we cannot have a good school without good teachers, no matter how many pupils we have. We must in some way keep our teachers fresh, or we lose the whole game. A London astronomer[4] remarks, in the preface to his recent book, “Virtually, the observer himself constitutes the most important part of the telescope; it is useless having a glass of great capacity at one end of a tube and a man of small capacity at the other.” In teaching, the teacher is the observer; the school, if properly organized, is the tube; the subjects taught, the glass; and the girl, the heavenly body to be learned about. The analogy is as perfect as any analogy can be between matter and spirit.

The true teacher does not need to be told of the vivid pleasure which shows itself on the girl’s face when a perception of relations between hitherto disconnected facts strikes across the mind, and when what has been so far troublesome and annoying chaos, at the right question suddenly slides into order and conformity to law. She does not need to be told, because that is the reward she is looking for, and if she have the power of the teacher, she can never fail of it. Professor James, in his _Psychology_, recognizes the great pleasure generated by a real conviction by characterizing conviction as a lofty emotion. To be able to create this lofty pleasure, and to repeat the process till the child herself seeks for it, is to be a teacher. But the teacher’s function is a higher one than that of simply creating pleasure, however high and however vivid; for to accomplish anything she must hold the attention of the pupil, and teach her how to bring back wandering attention; and “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

It is just here that the school, as a factor in the little girl’s education, differentiates itself from the home, which should have prepared her for its training. Those schools which advertise themselves as like homes simply proclaim that they do not know what the function of either is. In the home the child is a part of a whole, held together by natural relation and affection; in the school the wholeness is constituted by human law acting on individuals who are in a great degree independent. In the home, tenderness and pity come in and often save the offender from the result of her action; in the school they can never do so. It is in the school first that she feels herself a responsible member of a community, where each one has the same rights as herself, and where the other members do not belong to her. She may defend the members of her own family, even though they do wrong, because they are hers, but in the school she first learns to judge action in and for itself as right or wrong, expedient or inexpedient, and this not alone for her, but for the community of which she finds herself a component part. Then, too, the affairs of the home cannot be carried on with that regard for absolute punctuality which marks the business of any well-conducted school; to try to do so would destroy the comfort of the home, for its members would feel all the time as if about to start on a railroad journey, and that would certainly not be feeling at home. The school is an institution, in its every minutest detail arranged for the conscious direction of children, while the home must largely include in its purposes the comfort and rest of the adult members. The true home brings up the child as a member of a family, a natural relation, instructing her in the ways of civilized society, teaching her obedience and respect for her elders, reverence for authority, human and divine; the school receives her after this has been done, corrects her opinion of herself and her own people by putting her into relation with the members of other families, makes of her a responsible member of a community, holds her strictly to regularity and punctuality, gradually leads her to the thought of real individual responsibility by making her bear with strict impartiality the legitimate results of all her actions, makes a steady demand upon her voluntary attention for periods of time suited to her age, gives her rest at proper times, but demands of her always that work shall he work, and play, play. Here she learns the difference between personal and impersonal authority, for the teacher during school hours, she cannot help dimly feeling, is not quite the same person that she is when she meets her elsewhere, while her mother is always her mother. Then, intellectually, she is stimulated by the company of others of her own age who are doing the same things that she is doing, and measuring herself by them, she gets her estimate of herself healthily corrected. Every day she comes into contact with older girls, the members of higher classes though under the same discipline, who seem to her very wise, and, if the school be a successful one, very good. This opens to her glimpses of fields lying far beyond her own outlook, to the full sight of which she hopes by patient continuance in well-doing to attain. As she goes on, she finds other children in classes below her, who seem to her very small, and who are puzzling over difficulties which she has surmounted, and who, if, as I have said before, the school be a successful one, find more difficulty in self-control than she. Thus, in the daily and intertwined life of the whole school, she is living over again her past, and taking glimpses of the promised land of her own future, and all this, of incalculable value to her, could not be attained in her own home.

The managing a school so that it may be in this way a unit, an organic unit—the interweaving of all its parts by the teacher who holds it all in her consciousness—is one of the most important things which she has to do. In comparison with this, the selection of text-books is a very minor matter. One thing, however, is essential, and that is, that in this her assistants shall work intelligently with her. They must be of original character and have their own ways, for otherwise they would not be teachers at all, but they must be plastic enough to be moulded into some degree of conformity with the thought of the head teacher, and they must have the capacity for growth which will bring them finally to seize the principles underlying the whole fabric, after which they may safely be left entirely to their own devices, for then they will work in harmony with the school. Nothing is sadder than a school where no two roads meet, where the girls go from one teacher, with a certain set of requirements, to another who makes entirely different demands, till all rules take on the appearance of arbitrariness and caprice, and nothing has any fixed value. No lesson could be worse than this for a girl, who is by nature—or shall I say by all her education—inclined to look upon law without any comprehension of its tremendous significance, and to regard her own whims and fancies as of equal value with law, because she is accustomed to see them so often yielded to through the fondness of her own people. Especially therefore in girls’ schools should this unity be insisted on, for girls stand in need of it much more than boys. The latter are sure to get levelling enough when they come into contact with the outside world, but the girl remains a sort of queen in her father’s house till she becomes queen in that of her husband, and she is, as a rule, sheltered from the rude contact with the demands of business and of civil law, which is the only thing to make any one realize their reality. We never can know that a thing is hard and pitiless in its unyielding till we strike against it. Almost as bad is the school that puts the little girl in a class-room and keeps her for a whole year under the exclusive influence of one teacher. The child needs to come under differing influences, the more the better, if the underlying controlling principle be the same. The school must be composed of classes in sufficient number to cover the whole school life of the girl, and none of these classes should be too small; for the class must be used as a means of influence on each individual in it, both intellectually and morally. The differences of opinion among its different members, the different experiences of the little girls, the various points of view assumed as a result of these latter, and, above all, the errors that are made, afford to the skilful teacher the very best material with which to influence the young mind. Then these add to the zest with which she carries on the work, and therefore to her power. To teach a class is as much more inspiring than to teach a single pupil as to play first violin in an orchestra is more inspiring than to perform on the jew’s-harp. To manage a great school of the kind that I have hinted at is to conduct the orchestra.

Herbart says, “Instruction must be carried out, first, with energy, in order that interest may be awakened; second, with breadth, in order that interest may be many-sided; and, lastly, with unity of purpose, in order that intelligence may not be distracted.” For all of these purposes the influence of the class on the individual mind may be said to be imperatively necessary. It is required of the teacher, and not unreasonably, since she must be an artist, that she shall continually do the impossible—that is, that while she gives her whole attention to the one child who is reciting, she shall at the same moment be fully conscious not only of the presence, but also of the state of mind, of every other child in the class. She must always work _on the class_, not on the individual member, and must hold with a strong hand the whole of it, not only as to order, but also as to intellectual activity, under the power of her dominating authority. Authority is a stumbling-block to the American, and perhaps to all those who live in our time, but all the more is it needed. It is quite impossible to teach, in any sense of the term, a mind which refuses to be dominated to a certain degree by the teacher; and here comes again the impossible into the teacher’s experience, for while she dominates, she must also leave free. That the impossible is done, however, can never be doubted by any one who has watched the work of a recitation in skilful hands, and has had enough insight to feel the delicate reciprocal play which goes on all through it between teacher and class. Indeed there must always be “a function of authority which exceeds any given stage of the disciple’s experience.” So the teacher must always be in two places at once—her own mental place and that of her little pupil; this demands the greatest sensitiveness of nature on her part, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that a woman, other things being equal—and often where they are not perfectly equal—may be a far better teacher than a man.

While emphasizing the absolute need of unity in the school, we must not forget the equal need of a great degree of fluidity or plasticity. For we are dealing with human minds, and not with material whose laws are definitely known, and, as has been said before, with material of which no two samples are alike, and all sorts of adjustments are continually to be made. Especially is this the case in a private school for girls, where the pupils come to us from all sorts of teaching and worse than no teaching, and do not all enter classes at the same time. Here again the impossible demands to be done, for neither unity nor plasticity must be sacrificed; the two must be harmonized; and as the conditions are continually changing, so a constant adjustment becomes necessary. All parts must continually work together for one common end. It is of no more significance to the teacher of a school like this that a thing is impossible than it was to Beethoven that the human voice was not capable of singing the chorus in his Ninth Symphony. He had nothing to do with the capacity of the human voice; the music demanded that the chorus should be written so, and so accordingly he wrote it. A changeless school programme cannot be arranged for an entire year, nor indeed for any considerable part of a year. Continual changes become necessary, but these must be made with the least possible effect upon the pupils, and the least possible disturbance of the regular routine of the school. Such things can be done, and successfully done, but only when all the teachers in the school are always in touch, all working with a strong pull in the same line, and this because they are all under control of a competent head.