§ 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[240] 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[241] 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[242] “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 Hélo?se. 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. Hélo?se, 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[243] 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.”[244] (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[245] 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 grace 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[246] 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[247] 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[248] 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[249] 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.[250] 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[251] 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[252] 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[253] 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[254] 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]
[255]
§ 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 fa?onne 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 i............