SCIENCE.-SUPPLEMENT. 



FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 1887. 



ASPECTS OF EDUCATION. 

 Realism. 



Shelley, once writing to Godwin, expressed 

 liis surprise that so much time and thought had 

 been given to the teaching of words, and so little 

 to the teaching of things. Under the influence 

 of Sturm and the Jesuits, humanism, or classical 

 education, degenerated into a mere study of 

 words. Little attention was paid to what was 

 said : the chief ppint was how it was said. Cam- 

 bridge undergraduates thirty years ago. taught 

 by the most distinguished scholar in the univer- 

 sity, when they read a Greek play or a Latin 

 poem, heard little about the plot, or the allusions 

 or their relations to modern writings of the same 

 kind. Attention was exclusively paid to read- 

 ings, to the delicate variations in the meanings 

 of words, to grammatical forms, to letters and 

 accents ; yet the teacher was a man full of love 

 of English and other literatures, and steeped in 

 the knowledge of them. The best scholars turned 

 out of the university were surprised to find, as a 

 result of their training, how little they knew 

 of the literary masterpieces, which they had spent 

 a great portion of their lives in learning to con- 

 strue. The main aspects of ancient life were 

 entirely unknown to them, unless accident had 

 led them to learn them. Yet the teaching of 

 things rather than words had been advocated by 

 great educationalists, both abroad and in Eng- 

 land. 



The typical realist in education is Comenius. 

 His whole life was devoted to the improvement 

 of educational methods. He was one of the first 

 to appeal to the eye as an instrument of instruc- 

 tion ; but his most important work was the 

 ' Great didactics,' a complete treatise on the art 

 of education. The central idea of this book was 

 that the education of every man should follow 

 his natural growth. Take the whole circle of 

 sciences with which the mature man can be ac- 

 quainted, — ■ arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, 

 ethics, politics, and many others, — what are 

 these but names for departments of knowledge, 

 which the human mind creates for itself ? If 

 we take away from them their repulsive appella- 

 tions, and consider them in their simplest ele- 

 ments, we find that they are nothing but what 



the child learns from its earliest infancy. ' Meta- 

 physics ' is a hard word, yet what is it except the 

 science of ideas as apprehended by the mind? A 

 child four years old was once lying in bed, re- 

 covering from an illness, when its father and 

 mother came to the bedside. The child described 

 the feeling it had in its leg. The father said, 

 "That is pins and needles." The child thought 

 to itself, " How can my father make so rash a 

 statement ? What he means, expressed in accu- 

 rate language, is, that what I am describing 

 sounds to him aS the sensation which, if he felt, 

 he would call pins and needles ; yet how can he 

 tell that the sensation which I am now feeling is 

 the same as that which he denotes by that name ? " 

 There was present to the child's mind the whole 

 problem of the relativity of knowledge, yet that 

 has sometimes been found hard even for men to 

 grasi?. In the same way, what is the knowledge 

 of natural phenomena, such as fire, rain, and 

 snow, but the knowledge of physics? What is 

 the ability to find his way about his own village 

 but the rudiments of geography ? What are his 

 family annals but the beginnings of history ? Tlie 

 government of the household would teach him 

 domestic economy, the administration of his na- 

 tive town would teach him politics, the rules of 

 simple behavior would teach him ethics : take 

 away the bugbear of repulsive nomenclature, and 

 you will find every science can be studied in its 

 simplest elements from the beginning of life. 

 Comenius regarded the sciences which were ac- 

 cessible to human knowledge as an ever-widening 

 circle, to be learned by child, boy, and man in 

 the measure for which their strength is adapted. 

 When it is possible in this way, by following the 

 course of nature itself, to arrive at the knowledge 

 of every thing that is worth knowing, why should 

 we confine the growing mind in the trammel of 

 mere language ? From the mother's school the 

 child would pass to the national school ; one ex- 

 isting in every house, the other in every parish. 

 From this he will go, as years advance, to the 

 gymnasium, which is to be found in every large 

 town ; and thence, if strength admits, to the 

 university, which exists in every ijrovince. 



The didactic theories of Comenius met with a 

 strange fate. His manhood was nearly coinci- 

 dent with the thirty-years war, which made edu- 

 cational experiments impossible in Germany. He 

 came to England just as the civil war was break- 

 ing out. That did not prevent his proposals from 



