VII

THE PRESUMPTION OF BRAINS 2

[The following article by the late Dr. Albert P. Marble, appeared in the Journal of Education, published at Boston, January 6, 1887. The paper was probably read at a meeting of the Massachusetts State Teachers Association held in November, 1886. Dr. Marble was then at the height of his influence as Superintendent of Schools at Worcester, Mass. EDITOR.] Now when fair morn orient in heaven appeared,

Up rose the victor angels, and to arms

The matin trumpet sung; in arms they stood

Of golden panoply, refulgent host,

Soon banded; others from the dawning hills

Looked round, and scouts each coast light armed scour

Each quarter, to descry the distant foe,

Where lodged, or whither fled, or if for fight

In motion or in halt; him soon they met

Under spread ensigns moving nigh in slow
But firm battalion.

You will recognize this from Milton's Paradise lost. It is the beginning of an extract which appeared in Weld's parsing book, a textbook no larger than a primer, in use more than thirty years ago; and destitute of all the recent improvements in the methods of teaching English. It did not abominate parsing; it even advocated analysis; and it gave a model to show how that complex and "useless" process was conducted. On its first pages was a table to show the modifications of words; and following this was a lot of Rules of Syntax preceded by the classification of sentences, and the various connectives. Besides the extract from Milton, it contained selections from Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth; from Young; from Thompson and others.

1 Presumption, taking for granted.

Brains, the gray matter; a whitish soft mass, considered to be the organ of perception, etc.; hence by metonymy, the intellect.

I propose now to quote from several of the extracts contained in that parsing-book, to show what kind of language and sentiments children thirty to forty years ago had to deal with; later on I may contrast this with the style of textbooks common in recent years. While listening to these extracts, please have in mind the numerous periodicals and books for boys, written in slang phrases, or at best in boyish and not classic language, which is supposed to be fascinating from its familiarity of style.

From Young, on Life, death and immortality:

This is the bud of being, the dim dawn,

The twilight of our day, the vestibule;
Life's theater as yet is shut, and death,
Strong death alone can heave the massy bar,
This gross impediment of clay remove,
And make us, embryos of existence, free.
From real life, but little more remote

Is he, not yet the candidate for light,
The future embryo slumbering in his sire.

From Thompson:

Should fate command me to the farthest verge
Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,
Rivers unknown to song; where first the sun
Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beam
Flames on th' Atlantic isles, 'tis nought to me
Since God is ever present, ever felt,

In the void waste as in the city full;

And where he vital breathes there must be joy.

And another from the same:

'Tis listening fear and dumb amazement all,
When to the startled eye the sudden glance
Appears far south, eruptive thru the cloud;
And following slower in explosion vast
The Thunder raises his tremendous voice.
At first heard solemn o'er the verge of heaven,
The tempest growls; but as it nearer comes,
And rolls its awful burden on the wind,
The lightenings flash a larger curve, and more

The noise astounds; till overhead a sheet
Of livid flame discloses wide; then shuts
And opens wider; shuts and opens still
Expansive, wrapping ether in a blaze.
Follows the loosened aggravated roar,

Enlarging, deepening, mingling; peal on peal,
Crushed horrible, convulsing heaven and earth.

The book had a brief dissertation in Figurative Language. It contained also prose extracts from Burke, Irving, Wirt, Prescott; and from Macaulay's essay on The Puritans, this with the rest:

The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great end of existence. . . The difference between the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixt. They recognised no title to superiority but His favor; and confident of that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems, crowns of glory which should never fade away! On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked down with contempt; for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language; nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

These are only samples of the kind of literature which was placed before young pupils more than thirty years ago. In my collection I have one of those parsing-books; the leaves are worn; the edges are frayed and the corners are rounded by use; but they are not dog-eared. The book is not disfigured, but it is annotated. On one margin is the date, April, 1856; and on another, these words: Sarah, Annie, Louisa, Nellie, Delia, Lydia. Who those girls were I have

not the slightest conception; but the boy who used the book probably knew; and not unlikely there was an added inspiration in the sublime language he was studying, from their sitting upon the same rude benches with him.

Years ago, twenty-five or more, I visited a school where this book was in use; in a country town in the state of Maine. A class of boys and girls, from twelve to fifteen years of age probably, were wrestling with the extract from Milton. They had learned a few rudimentary principles of grammar; studied the relations of subject and predicate, and become somewhat familiar with syntax, the rules of agreement, etc.; and then they had been plumped right into this war of Milton's angels on the celestial plains, to study the English language: an imaginary war by imaginary beings, in the regions of pure imagination; all described in language unfamiliar, beyond them, and in style the grandest of poetry. The master had not been to college; nor to a normal school; probably not even to a high school. He may not have been far in advance of his pupils in knowledge or experience. He was not very familiar with Milton; but what knowledge he had, he used; he studied the language; he sought the meaning of every line and word; he examined the rules of his grammar and applied them; for did not brighteyed Sarah, and smiling Annie, and quick-witted Lydia sit there ready to pick him up if he made a slip or was inconsistent in his grammatical construction or his explanation of the text? and John and William were there equally alert. The latter wants to know the meaning of “matin”—the matin trumpet. "What is 'golden panoply'?" asks another, and "refulgent host;" and, a third, "What is a 'Dawning hill'? "How shall we dispose of 'scouts each coast light armed scour, each quarter'?" asks Annie. "Coast is the subject of scouts-the coast goes wandering around," says John. "That is absurd," answers Annie; "coasts do not float around." "But this was on the heavenly landscape," replies John; "don't you know that, further on, it says they tossed about mountains and promontories thru the air?" "Yes," says Annie, “but the hills did not fly around themselves; and if they did,

coasts wouldn't go scouting after the enemy; that implies intelligence, as if the coasts were soldiers like the angels." "And if coast is the subject of scouts, what is the subject of scour?" says bright-eyed Sarah. "Quarter," says John. "But quarter is singular, and scour requires a plural subject," says Sarah. "It is each quarter," says John, "more than one." Here the master is appealed to; and he decides that each is a distributive adjective and implies things single. This upsets John's theory. "I have it," says Lydia; "scouts is not a verb in this case; it is a noun of the plural number, and the subject of scour, which means to examine closely: Light-armed scouts scour each coast." "What will you do with quarter, each quarter, then?" says William. "That means about the same thing as coast; and it is also the object of scour; they explore every place," says Lydia; "the scouts in light armor scour each coast, each quarter." And so they agreed to leave it.

Now, was not every principle of good teaching violated in that school? The master was ignorant of methods; he had not studied psychology, he did not "proceed from the known to the unknown" in sufficiently easy gradations; nor "from the concrete to the abstract." He plunged his pupils plump into the unknown, and he enshrouded them all over in the most etherially abstract.

And he had no handicraft in his school. "There is no education except by doing something," you know. He did not know whether Delia could cook, or James plane a board. We quote from the New York School Journal, October 23, 1886: "The child that does nothing learns nothing. There is a theory that the training of the mind can be accomplished without the activity of the senses. The theory is a false one! We gain knowledge only by means of the senses, and we can impart it only thru the same means. The teacher who imagines he can educate his pupils by thinking, without the use of eyes, hands, or ears is wonderfully mistaken. There is no thinking, pure and simple, abstracted from the world in which we live. Any thought worthy of the name, takes hold of the live questions of the day. It can not be otherwise."