588 



NATURE 



[October S. 1908 



to the curriculum should come round {''pciuently, at least 

 lor two or three years ; as nearly as ma^' be once a day, 

 but we cannot be rigid in these matters. 



The sciences taught in school may spoil one another's 

 chances in the same way. Not a few schools are con- 

 vinced that they must have chemistry and physics because 

 of their industrial importance, hygiene because of its rela- 

 tion to the health of the community, physiology to make 

 the hygiene intelligible. The schoolboy is made to buy 

 more sciences than he can pay for, and his time is gone 

 before he reaps any of the advantages which are so much 

 desired. 



Too Mitch and too Loti^. 



One inevitable result is that the school hours, including 

 the preparation of lessons, are nearly always too long. 

 Another result is that the schoolboy who is willing, but 

 not very clever, is often overworked. I have known many 

 such cases myself, and have also known cases in which 

 excellent results have been attained in a good deal less 

 than the customary time. If we could consent that our 

 pupils should remain ignorant of many useful things, if we 

 could materially shorten the lessons of very young pupils, 

 and if we could bring the home-lessons into much smaller 

 compass, I believe that the education which we offer 

 would really be more valuable. 



Natural and Artificial Education. 



If we had a pupil put into our hands for solitary instruc- 

 tion, like the .mile of Rousseau, we should find it wise 

 to begin by studying him closely, and three things would 

 particularly require attention — his aptitudes, his inclina- 

 tions, his opportunities. The first two are self-e.xplanatory, 

 but the word opportunities may present some difficulties. 

 It includes, of course, opportunity of learning, but the 

 chief stress is to be laid upon opportunity of exercise in 

 after-life. This is the opportunity which stimulates 

 interest and rewards exertion. Moral character, intellectual 

 character, curiosity, love of knowledge, equipment for 

 practical life, and, so far as I can see, all considerations 

 which ought to govern the choice of a study, come under 

 one or other of the three requisites — aptitude, inclination, 

 opportunity. 



In school we have not so much solitary pupils as groups 

 of pupils to consider, and this compels us to accept com- 

 promises, which are familiar to every teacher. W'e have 

 often to study the wants of a school-form as well as the 

 wants of an individual. 



Some writers have given to the education which con- 

 siders first of all aptitude, inclination, opportunity, the 

 name of Natural Education, while that w-hich makes its 

 choice of studies on abstract or arbitrary grounds, with 

 little reference to the needs of the pupil, they call Artificial 

 Education/ We may be allowed to revive these terms for 

 the sake of brevity. To me they seem appropriate as 

 well as convenient in practice. 



The advocates of natural education have sometimes 

 reached absurdity by pressing the claims of one of the 

 three requisites to the neglect of the rest. Tolstoy would 

 make inclination supreme, even in early education. He 

 exemplifies Quick's remark that writers on the school- 

 course w-ho are not schoolmasters are almost all re- 

 volutionary. Others have attended too exclusively to the 

 opportunity of future exercise. The old grammar schools, 

 thinking much of the future wants of the pupils who 

 might wish to enter the Church, often added Hebrew to 

 the compulsory Latin and Greek. Fortification was fre- 

 quently taught to little boys. When the Berlin Realschule 

 vvas founded (1747) it offered, among other things, instruc- 

 tion in the rearing of silkworms and the discrimination of 

 ninety kinds of leather. 



Nothing. I think, gives us a clearer notion of what 

 natural education ran accomplish in favourable circum- 

 stances than foreign travel, which is a form of self-educa- 

 tion prescribed by grown-up people to themselves. Even 

 the milder forms of compulsion are wanting here ; apti- 

 tude, inclination, and opportunity are evervthing. The 

 preparation, the actual journey, aiid the recollections yield 



/ on^,*^^' '"'■ «'^a™pl=. Henry Sidjvvick in " Essays on a Liberal Education " 

 (18B7). 



NO. 20,32, VOL. 78] 



abundance of instruction to those who use them well. For 

 w-eeks before setting out the traveller will turn over maps 

 and conversation-books, inquire about handy cameras or 

 coUecting-bo.xes, and study the country which he is about 

 to visit with an eagerness which he never felt before. 

 The journey itself, if only it be such a journey as an 

 active mind will frame, cannot but call forth many powers, 

 physical, intellectual, and moral, that are rarely exercised 

 at home. The love of science, the love of languages, the 

 love of scenery, the love of adventure, the love of society, 

 the love of poetry, all get a new stimulus. And the 

 journey, already profitable in anticipation and in execu- 

 tion, is not exhausted when we return home. Our experi- 

 ences in unfamiliar countries vivify many a page of historv 

 and many a scrap of useful knowledge which would have 

 been otherwise languidly remarked or passed by altogether. 

 Some years ago I had occasion to read the travels in the 

 Levant of old Belon, a French naturalist of the sixteenth 

 century. Though I had a purpose in reading them, they 

 made no impression, and after a few months nothing 

 survived but some pages of dry and unprofitable notes. 

 Then I visited the Greek Archipelago myself, and one of 

 the things that I made a point of doing when I came 

 back was to read Belon again. I found it an entirely 

 new book, full of curious and valuable observations. Now 

 I dwelt with keen interest on his account of the various 

 nations which had made settlements in the .Archipelago, 

 on the Greek language, on the Cretan customs of wine- 

 drinking, on the fishes and birds, and on a hundred other 

 details which had seemed totally uninteresting before I 

 visited the eastern end of the Mediterranean. 



Let us suppose that all is done, not by the traveller, 

 but for him, that routes are chosen, hotel-bills paid, 

 carriages and boats hired, languages interpreted, informa- 

 tion supplied, all without effort on his part. In a few 

 months he will barely remember what places he has seen 

 and what he has passed by. This may remind us that 

 natural education is onlv kept alive by doing. 



Of course the grown-up person is not like a child, and 

 there is need of steadv and impartial government, of 

 drill, in short, if the child is to take all the pains that 

 are indispensably necessary in school-work. All our teach- 

 ing cannot be recreative. Does not this show, some of you 

 will say, that your natural education is inadequate, and 

 that a sterner thing, which takes little or no account of 

 inclination, is demanded in school? 



I think not. I think that inclination is a power that 

 we ought to employ as often and as far as we can. No 

 doubt it is inadequate : our very definition makes inclina- 

 tion only one of three requisites. The child at school may 

 usefully remind us that the opportunity of future exercise 

 in some cases becomes necessitv, and will take no denial. 

 Nevertheless, all three should be considered, and that 

 teacher will prosper best w-ho lets none of them drop out 

 of sight. Do not forget, too, that inclination is the 

 modifiable requisite ; we can stimulate, and even create it : 

 we can also fatally discourage it. It is only natural educa- 

 tion, I still maintain, which can count upon the energetic 

 cooperation of the child. 



On the other hand, if we ignore aptitude, inclination, 

 and opportunity — if w-e pour out information upon which 

 the pupil does no work, merely because we think it ought 

 to be good for him, then we have a dull, perhaps a sullen, 

 mind to deal with, which neither will nor can learn to 

 good purpose. The example for all time of artificial 

 education is, or lately was, the setting of every boy in 

 every grammar school to learn Latin, if not Latin and 

 Greek. 



Those who believe that natural education is at once the 

 most formative and the most productive, that it helps to 

 build up body and mind, that it encourages the acquisi- 

 tion of truly useful knowledge, should attend to one point 

 which often escapes notice. Natural education demand? 

 leisure for the pupil. .\t the present moment the leisure 

 of the pupil has been reduced to a very small amount 

 indeed. We strive for efficiency, for good examination 

 results, for knowledge of useful things. The negligence 

 of the old race of schoolmasters, which winked at mon- 

 strous abuses but allowed a certain independent school-life, 

 has been replaced by zeal and conscientiousness, which 

 occupy every hour, and sometimes treat independent 



