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needs of the pupil, they call Artificial Education} "NVe may be allowed to revive 

 these terms lor the sake of brevity. To me they seem appropriate as well as con- 

 venient in practice. 



Tlie 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 exempli- 

 fies Quick's remark that writers on the school-course who are not schoolmasters 

 are almost all revolutionary. Others have attended too exclusively to the oppor- 

 tunity 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 frequently taught to little boys. 

 "When the Berlin Kealschule was founded (1747) it offered, among other things, 

 instruction 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 can 

 accomplish under favourable circumstances than foreign travel, which is a form 

 of self-education prescribed b^^ grown-up people to themselves. Even the milder 

 forms of compulsion are wanting here ; aptitude, inclination, and opportunity are 

 everything. The preparation, the actual journey, and the recollections yield 

 abundance of instruction to those who use them well. For weeks before setting- 

 out the traveller will turn over maps and conversation-books, inquire about handy- 

 cameras or collecting-boxes, and study the country which he is about to visit 

 wilh 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 execution, is not exhausted when -we return 

 home. Our experiences in unfamiliar countries vivify many a page of history 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 oldBelon, 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 Archi- 

 pelago, 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 un- 

 interesting before I visited the eastern end of the Mediterranean. 



Let us suppose that all is done, not by the traveller, but /or him, that routes 

 are chosen, hotel-bills paid, carriages and boats hired, languages interpreted, 

 information supplied, all without effort on his part. In a few mouths he will 

 barely remember what places he has seen and what he has passed by. This may 

 remind us that natural education is only kept alive by doing. 



Of course the grown-up person is not like a child, and there is need of steady 

 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 teaching cannot be 

 recreative. Does not this show, some of you will say, that your natural educa- 

 tion 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 

 inclination only one of three requisites. The child at school may usefully remind 

 us that the opportunity of future exercise in some cases becomes necessity, and 

 will take no denial. Nevertheless all three gbould be considered, and that teacher 



' See, for example, Henry Sidgwick in Essays on a Liheral Edxteation (1887). 



