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NATURE 



\7uly II, 1878 



The rejection of Sir John Lubbock's motion for the 

 addition of elementary science, or, rather, as the matter 

 was more happily put by Dr. Lyon Playfair in the course 

 of the debate, of elementary knowledge of common 

 things, to the subjects for which grants are given under 

 the education code, although an inevitable and foregone 

 conclusion, is not on that account the less to be deplored. 

 As happens in many similar cases, the argument was all 

 on the side of the minority, and Lord G. Hamilton, in 

 opposing the suggestion on the part of the Privy Council, 

 ■was only able to say that its adoption would, perhaps, 

 entail some temporary uncertainty about the subjects in 

 which inspectors would be required to examine and 

 children to pass. If schools existed for the convenience 

 of inspectors, or even in order that children might not be 

 troubled by uncertainties, the objection would have been 

 a valid one ; but upon any other supposition it seems to 

 tell against, rather than in favour of, the contention which 

 it was intended to support. The nation is spending large 

 and rapidly increasing sums of money upon schools, and 

 it will every year become a matter of greater urgency 

 that these sums should not be misapplied, either by the 

 omission from the code of subjects which would be useful 

 or by the inclusion of others which have no apparent 

 tendency to promote the attainment of the ends to which 

 education is supposed to be directed. These ends, in the 

 case of a peasant child, are presumably to render him a 

 more useful and a better conducted member of society 

 than he would become by the unaided light of nature ; 

 and it is obvious that the means to their attainment are 

 twofold — first, to cultivate the intelligence in such a way 

 as to facilitate the acquirement and the application of 

 knowledge ; and, secondly, to impart the knowledge 

 which has to be applied. Until a comparatively recent 

 time, however, the imparting of knowledge was considered 

 to be the sole purpose of education and to be in itself the 

 best means of mental training; so that educationists 

 occupied themselves more about the seed than about 

 the soil, and were chiefly concerned to teach those 

 things which they thought it most important that 

 a child should know. The instruction given to the 

 poor for many years was almost limited to reading, 

 writing, arithmetic, and elementary religious instruc- 

 tion, while that imparted to the rich was laid upon the 

 same foundation, and was only carried further because 

 the pupils had more time at their disposal. In the em- 

 ployment of this time the instructors could only teach 

 what they knew ; the most famous public schools and the 

 two g^eat Universities restricted themselves to giving 

 their pupils some knowledge of classics and mathe- 

 matics. 



As soon as physiologists had discovered that all the 

 faculties of the intellect, however originating or upon 

 whatever exercised, were functions of a material organism 

 or brain, absolutely dependent upon its integrity for their 

 manifestation, and upon its growth and development for 

 their improvement, it became apparent that the true 

 office of the teacher of the future would be to seek to 

 learn the conditions by which the growth and the opera- 

 tions of the brain were controlled, in order that he might 

 be able to modify these conditions in a favourable 

 manner. The abstraction of the " mind " was so far set 

 aside as to make it certain that this mind could only act 

 through a nervous structure, and that the structure was 

 subject to various influences for good or evil. It became 

 known that a brain cannot arrive at healthy maturity ex- 

 cepting by the assistance of a sufficient supply of healthy 

 blood— that is to say, of good food and pure air. It also 

 became known that the power of a brain will ultimately 

 depend very much upon the way in which it is habitually 

 exercised, and that the practice of schools in this respect 

 left a great deal to be desired. A large amount of costly 

 ^\i Pretentious teaching fails dismally for no other reason 

 than because it is not directed by any knowledge of the 



mode of action of the organ to which the teacher endea- 

 vours to appeal ; and mental growth in many instances 

 occurs in spite of teaching rather than on account of it. 

 Education, which might once have been defined as an 

 endeavour to expand the intellect by the introduction of 

 mechanically compressed facts, should now be defined as 

 an endeavour favourably to influence a vital process ; 

 and, when so regarded, its direction should manifestly 

 fall somewhat into the hands of those by whom the 

 nature of vital processes has been most completely 

 studied. In other words, it becomes neither more nor 

 less than a branch of applied physiology ; and physio- 

 logists tell us with regard to it that the common pro- 

 cesses of teaching" are open to the grave objection that 

 they constantly appeal to the lower centres of nervous 

 function, which govern the memory of and the reaction 

 upon sensations, rather than to those higher ones which 

 are the organs of ratiocination and of volition. Hence a 

 great deal which passes for education is really a degra- 

 dation of the human brain to efforts below its natural 

 capacities. This applies especially to book work, in 

 which the memory of sounds in given sequences is often 

 the sole demand of the teacher, and in which the pupil, 

 instead of knowing the meaning of the sounds, often 

 does not know what "meaning" means. As soon as the 

 sequence of the sounds is forgotten nothing remains, and 

 we are then confronted by a question which was once 

 proposed in an inspectorial report : — " To what purpose 

 in after-life is a boy taught if the intervention of a school 

 vacation is to be a sufficient excuse for entirely forgetting 

 his instruction?" 



In ^order to avoid such faulty teaching, few agencies 

 are more valuable than what are technically called 

 "object " lessons, in which the faculties of the pupils are 

 exercised about things instead of about words ; and the 

 suggestion of Sir John Lubbock would lead to object 

 lessons of a very useful character. To be taught some- 

 thing about gravitation, about atmospheric pressure, 

 about the effects of temperature, and other simple mat- 

 ters of like kind, which would admit of experimental 

 illustration, and which would call upon the learner to 

 make statements in his own words instead of in those of 

 somebody else, would be so many steps towards real mental 

 development. At the end of a vacation, even if the facts 

 of any particular occurrence had become somewhat mixed, 

 the pupils would nevertheless preserve an increased capa- 

 city for acquiring new facts, and would probably retain 

 these for a longer period ; and such are precisely the 

 changes which it should be the province of education to 

 bring about. We would even go further than Sir John 

 Lubbock, and in elementary schools would give an im- 

 portant place to the art of drawing, which teaches accu- 

 rate observation of the forms of things. The efforts of 

 a wise teacher should always be guided with reference to 

 the position and surroundings of a child at home, and 

 should seek to supplement the deficiencies of home train- 

 ing and example. Among the wealthier classes the 

 floating information of the family circle often, though by 

 no means always, both excites and gratifies a curiosity 

 about natural phenomena; but among the poor this 

 stimulus to mental growth is almost, if not entirely, 

 wanting. An explanation of the physical causes of com- 

 mon events, such, for instance, as the rising of water 

 in a pump, would usually be a revelation to the pupils 

 of a Board School, and would start them upon a 

 track which could hardly fail to render them more 

 skilful workers in any department of industry, and 

 which might even lead some of them to fortune. A 

 wise and benevolent squire set on foot many years ago a 

 school for the children of his labourers, in which drawing 

 and the elements of natural science were carefully taught ; 

 and the result was that the children educated there, in- 

 stead of remaining at the plough's tail, passed, in an 

 astonishingly large number of cases, into positions of 



