INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume V, Issue 44, 22 February 1870, Page 2

INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION.

o CFrom an article on " Eton Reform," in the Pall

Mall Gazette.)

There is one great fault which pervades every part of the system both of our public schools and our universities. It consists in the monstrous notion that it does not matter what you teach so long as the boys are kept hard at work, and made, as the phrase is, to exercise their minds. Another way of expressing the same is that boys go to school not to be instructed but to be educated.. These doctrines appear as absurd as it would be to say that it does not matter what you eat so long as you chew vigorously, and that the object of food is neither pleasure nor refreshment .? but health and strength. Such opinions overlook the facts that health and strength are promoted by pleasant and refreshing food, and that if vigorous chewing were the one thing needful, it would be far more effectively promoted by putting good food into a man's mouth than by setting him to chew sawdust without butter. So with regard to the phrases about education and instruction, it is surely obvious to anyone that if the subject of instruction given is not only intrinsically useful and important, but is seen and felt to be so by the boy himself, he will work at it far more heartily than if he is put to do what he feels to be a mere drill. The treadmill is as hard work as Alpine climbing, but- which of the two is the more likely to teach a man the use of his feet and to give him the habit of sustained physical exertion ?

This seems an obvious consideration enough, but no one who has not seen the persistent determination of schoolmasters

to regard all studies as mental gymnastics, to make them artificially difficult and uninteresting, and to prevent the boys from taking any real human interest in them, would believe to what an extent they do so. Take, for instance, the way in which the classics are studied. It is thought that it is highly desirable that boys should learn Greek aud Latin, and should be acquainted with classical literature. For this purpose they are first drilled in G-reek and Latin grammar, and then made to read in class Greek and Latin works, each boy construing by turns a few lines or two or three sentences of the author chosen. How ia it possible that in this manner any boy should get any sort of notion of the general meaning and object of what he reads ? Let any old Etonian ask himself honestly how much he learned about Homer by the two lessons a week which he had to construe and afterwards to learn by heart on a Friday morning. A book of the " Iliad" would perhaps average 700 Hues. At thirty-five lines a lesson this would give twenty lessons, and inasmuch as there used to be two lessons a week, and perhaps twelve or thirteen weeks in a term, tha result would be that in a year of forty Weeks (which is longer than the Eton working year) a boy would get through four books, and in three years through twelve books of the " Iliad," or just half of the whole poem. What sort of notion could he have of it at the end ? If Greek or Latin were taught practically — that is to say, not with a view to the performance of impossible feats in composition, but with an exclusive view to teachiug the boys to read with ease — they might be taught much more quickly than at present, xoung officers in the army are not the most* studious men in the world, yet it is no uncommon thing for a lad when he gets to India to pass in Hindoostanee in three months. The reason is that he really wants to learn, and that he takes every possible short cut for that purpose. He reads with a crib, identifying English with Hindoostanee words as he goes along, and practices the humble art of learning conversation books by heart, and so forth. A mother or a governess will in the holidays teach boys to read French for their amusement years before their schoolmasters have taught them to read Latin ; and the despised crammers and grinders who get lads up for examinations, and do not despise the devices which schoolmasters regard with the horror with which a flyflsher looks upon a drag-net, will teach more Lalin in three months than many a boy learns at Eton in six years. If these humble operations were but performed at the beginning of a boy's course, if he could read Latin with ease at twelve, as he might easily be taught to do, he might go through the whole cycle of G-reek and Latin literature, or know what i* waa a^ aboul, before he was 18. This would be a great positive gain and an education in itself. As it is, the utmost that boys learn at school is to do feats, aud very few learn that. It is just as if a man wanted tp go from London to Edinburgh, and were to spend years in a gymnasium learning to climb poles, to run, and to leap, by way of preparation for his journey, and were not to take it after all ; whereas the labor which he expended would not only bave taken him to Edinburgh in a fraction of the time, but would also have enabled him to explore the whole of Europe.