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150 per cent. What a tremenduous army of illiterates compulsory education banished from England and Scotland! Those now coming here from England, Scotland and Wales are educated. In former years illiteracy abounded among the arrivals here from those countries; now we begin to see the difference. Ireland will soon make education compulsory; seeing the tremendous advantages gained by her sister countries, a strong sentiment is spreading there to enjoy similar benefits. When compulsory education was being agitated in England, its opponents said it was an un-English method. Just so there are those in this State who say it is un-American to have such a law here. According to that statement ignorance is American, but these opponents would not admit that. I need not follow that line of thought further in this presence.

But time presses, and I shall detain you only a few minutes longer. The effective compulsory measure is a growth, not a creation. While we may be very anxious to eradicate the evil of illiteracy as quickly as possible, we must not forget the experience of other States and countries. Favorable public sentiment is as important to carry out properly the provisions of a law, particularly one like compulsory education, as it is to get the law enacted. We need the good will of the people to make effective any law upon this important question. Its requirements must be reasonable, and anything like oppression avoided, bearing always in mind that Pennsylvania has never enforced education. The bill vetoed at the last session is a reasonable, moderate measure. It will oppress no one. It will interfere with no parent as to how he shall educate his child, except that he be instructed in the common English branches. We believe this law has begun a righteous movement toward justice to our children. How useful and valuable it shall be depends upon the people themselves, and more particularly upon the school officers and teachers. The Legislature has done its part. I doubt not you will do yours. I ask only that you will seriously consider and study its possibilities, sure that your experience will help to bring out its good points and correct its defects.

Pottsville. He said he had come here to hear this speech more than anything else, and had regretted a hundred times that he had agreed to be tacked on to the tail of it-and no doubt when he was through his hearers would sympathize in that feeling. In Pottsville we mean to carry out the law as thoroughly as possible. The Secretary of the Board is ready for his part of the work-the Superintendent will help him, and teachers will be expected to report results and suggest any improvements that may be necessary. The City and Borough Superintendents in their winter meeting at Harrisburg during the session of the Legislature had all the educational bills before them, among them this one that has since become a law; and it was the general opinion that not much would come of it, but it was the best that could be done. Some of us think better of it now, and we at home propose to get out all that is in it. But it must not be forgotten that there are difficulties about it. For instance, the exemption clause is loose. All weak-minded children are exempt, and there will be parents who do not care to have their children instructed, who will have very weak-minded children. Physical weakness also exempts; there will be an increase of a kind of sickness some of us have heard of, which comes on quickly about opening hour, and disappears as quickly afterwards. The certificate of any teacher will exempt; or a physician may pronounce a schoolhouse unhealthy, and so on. Then there is the

question, which sixteen weeks of the term of forty weeks or less. Parents may be in no hurry to send their children, and boards of directors who mean to enforce the law will want to know about that point. We must not expect a new thing to work perfectly, and these are some of the points where modifications of the law may be necessary.

MR. FARR: I think the gentleman magnifies the difficulties. The experience in Massachusetts is that prosecutions are few, and fines still fewer, and yet they get the desired result. I do not believe many people will lie awake nights concocting excuses or evasions of this law; I believe the sentiment of the people generally is in favor of it, and will bring in nearly all without friction. The provisions of the bill are purposely made very moderate, in order to get the solid backing of the people. As to the exempof❘tions, it seems to me the provision for

The discussion of the subject was then taken up by Supt. B. F. PATTERSON,

by abandoned forts, exploded shells, and half-filled trenches. So the triumphant march of thought is marked by abandoned hypotheses, exploded theories and empty conjectures.

physical and mental disability was abso- | lutely necessary. I wish before I sit down to emphasize the distinction between non-attendants and truants, which seems sometimes to be lost sight of. There are those who have never seen the inside of a school house, and never will, except by the operation of some such legislation as this; yet many of these will come as soon as officially notified, knowing that there is power behind the officer. There is no answer to the fact that ninety-route. five per cent. of the people are educated in the public schools, and from these come only twenty per cent. of the criminals. What right have we to deprive any child, especially those that need it most, of this great moral influence? And we can only reach them by this kind of legislation. I hope all you school people will take hold of it as our friend from Pottsville promises to do, and get all the good there is in it, and you will have results.

EDUCATION ACCORDING TO

HE

NATURE.

BY W. H. PAYNE, LL. D.

an

E would do the world no mean service who should write an impartial history of fads, showing the rise, progress, termination and results of each. Such a history would doubtless discover to us the fact that even the thinking world is addicted to hobby-riding, and that successive fads are the rungs of a ladder on which thought ascends from lower conceptions to higher, and thus gains wider and wider horizons for truth. What were Nominalism and Realism but philosophical fads, engrossing men's thoughts for a season, kindling the controversial spirit up to the fighting point, then waning in interest, and finally giving place to other fads? Phlogiston, Phlogiston, Malthusianism, Darwinianism, the Nebular Hypothesis, Phrenology, and probably Free Coinage, Christian Science and Hypnotism, are phenomena of the same sort. These are all " guesses at truth." Their devotees, indeed, regard them as truth itself, but successive thinkers finally separate the grains of pure metal from the larger volume of alloy, garner the precious residue into the general storehouse of science, and then make a venture at new guesses. The line of Sherman's march to the sea is now marked

The same phenomenon is observable in the special science to which we teachers are addicted. Men of my years have lived through a succession of educational fads, and our predecessors, near and remote, were doomed to traverse a similar Within our own time objectteaching rose in the East, if not as a sun, at least as a star of the first magnitude; but its distinctive light has been lost in its passage across the horizon. Then appeared other lights, from time to time, great and small, to which we did homage, such as Manual Training and the Inductive Method; and now the suns or meteors that are beginning to blaze on our pedagogic firmament are Concentration and "A Pot of Green Feathers."'

44

It will be readily guessed that I include "Education according to Nature," or "Follow Nature" among educational fads. In the sense just stated I do; only 'Nature" must be considered as the most respectable of these fads by reason of its antiquity and longevity; though sometimes, as in the case of Joseph Payne and other imitators of Mr. Spencer, the whole treatment is little better than cant, shallow and offensive.

The precept" Follow Nature" is prevalent in ethics, in education and in medicine, where Nature is set up as a criterion of right and wrong, of true and false. A practice that is supposed to be in conformity with Nature is thereby proved to be right, or true; while a practice that can be shown to be contrary to Nature is assumed to be wrong, or false. Thus, Aristotle defends slavery because it is natural, some men being born to rule, others to serve; some being strong, others weak; while he condemns usury, or the taking of interest, because it is unnatural. Flocks and crops springing from the soil, are wealth proper, and for convenience they may be converted into money; but to produce money from money, a dead thing from a dead thing, is unnatural. and therefore wrong.

The phrase "Education according to Nature" at once suggests the name of Rousseau; for it was he who, in his "Emile," fairly set the fashion for subsequent writers on education, great and small. Mr. Spencer adopts the new fash

ion, and his pages are overshadowed with capital N's. He accepts the new mythology, writes out a new creed, and virtually founds a new school of theorists. No theologian was ever more dogmatic. He postulates Nature as an infallible guide, and then deduces educational processes with almost mathematical precision. Whatever will not fit into his system, as history, he conveniently rejects.

Though Rousseau does not define nature, he makes it quite easy to infer what he means by the term, and a proximate definition would stand about as follows: The material world affected by physical forces (gravity, heat, light, electricity, etc.), and inhabited by uncivilized men. For purposes of right education Emile is to be pushed as far back as possible into this primitive and uncorrupted world; and society itself, in order to be rescued from growing corruption, must make a return toward this primitive simplicity and perfection. This was Rousseau's ideal education and his ideal state of society; but he had the sense to know that these ideals were impracticable, and so he accepts a compromise. He uses consummate art to reproduce a quasi state of nature; but this more than Herculean effort involves him in countless contradictions, absurdities and follies.

Mr. Spencer personifies nature (Nature), and thus carries the myth to its most perfect development. With him Nature is physical force personified, and education is experience, or contact with environment. His general theory may be summarized as follows: The individual of to-day must be educated just as the race was educated historically; the race was self-instructed through experience; the individual must, therefore, rely on his personal experience for his knowledge and training. As Nature was the tutor of the race, so Nature must be the tutor of each individual of the race. Of course, in accordance with this theory, the knowledge that is of most worth is Science; for Science has grown out of the experiences of the race-is, in the Aristotelian sense, a natural product, and is knowledge that can be reproduced and verified by each succeeding generation of learners. Past experiences, constituting what is commonly known as history, cannot be thus reproduced and verified, and therefore history is not knowledge proper. And as literature-a play of Shakespeare, for example-cannot be re

discovered or reproduced, according to the Spencerian dogma, there is no natural place in this system for literature and kindred subjects. Literature is too much tainted with art to fit into a scheme of education according to Nature.

Like Rousseau, Mr. Spencer is clearest when he applies his hypothesis to moral education. Prior to experience, an infant, if permitted, will put its little fingers in the flame of a candle. Let it do this, advises Mr. Spencer, even though a painful blister is the consequence. According to the same method the child may lay hold of hot fire-bars and spill boiling water on its tender skin. In this fashion the infant is being educated through experience by its godmother Nature. This is a reappearance of Rousseau's doctrine of consequences. From this point of view education may be defined as experience coming from contact with matter and with physical force, or, in shorter phrase, with one's environment.

It may be urged against Rousseau and his disciples that the golden age of society is not in the remote past, but in the future; that humanity is making a forward movement, slow, perhaps, but sure; that what we call civilization will not be abandoned for savagery; that cities, Rousseau's special abomination, are both a product and an agent of civilization; and that his assumption of the nobility of primitive man is an unsupported fiction. The untutored savage, as seen and described by travelers, is Nature's handiwork, a fair specimen of what she can do in the way of educating when unassisted by human art. It has not been observed, however, that men are made either happier or better by being allowed to revert to a state of nature.

Again, a proper conception of nature will include man, his endowments and his works. Is not man as natural a product as a beaver or a horse? If instinct is a natural endowment of the beaver, why are not reason, imagination and language also natural endowments of man? Why make a radical distinction between the defenses built by beavers and the defenses built by men? Why is it less natural and right for men to live in communities than for bees and ants? Why is not a poem as natural a product as a bird's nest?

When Mr. Spencer asserts that "humanity has progressed solely by self-in

struction," he either falls into an obvious error or he uses terms in an extraordinary sense. It would be as true to assert that humanity has progressed solely by capitalization. Men capitalize their experiences in labor-saving machines and in proverbs. One generation invents a snare, a trap or a hook; the next generation is spared the effort of making these inventions, but simply accepts and uses them, and devotes the time and effort thus saved to the making of other inventions. Experience begets wisdom; this wisdom is embodied or capitalized in proverbs, and then these proverbs serve other men for warning and guidance in place of wasteful experience. Humanity has never squandered its time in reinventing and rediscovering. The "geneThe "genesis of knowledge in the race" takes place through capitalization and discovery, and, thus understood, it is quite true that the individual must follow the same course. Mr. Bain is evidently right in declaring that the assumption that the child's education is to be in the main a process of discovery or of rediscovery, is a "bold fiction." In some subjects, as mathematics and physical science, rediscovery is conceivable, but in the main impracticable; while in others, as history and literature, it is impossible, if not inconceivable.

Mr. Spencer's hypothesis of Nature as the true guide in human education easily runs into the reductio ad absurdum. Let us see where this specious hypothesis will land us:

This Nature is simply brute matter, or brute force, absolutely divested of feeling, without sympathy and without pity; the teacher should, therefore, be the personification of brute, unfeeling force.

In her distribution of pains and penalties, Nature never distinguishes between innocence and deliberate transgressionthe same punishment falls on the infant as on the hardened criminal; the teacher is, therefore, to take no account of motive, but must regard the fact of transgression only.

Nature makes no distinction between a block of wood that falls from the roof of a house and a child that tumbles from a chamber window; for her use they are merely two pieces of matter which she treats in the same manner; or, if she makes any distinction at all, she favors the block of wood, life and feeling here being at a discount. Children should,

therefore, be manipulated, shaped and governed as though they were inert, senseless matter.

There are no gradations in Nature's lessons; she deigns no explanation, she is as silent as a sphinx; the graded school is, therefore, unnatural, and the teacher should be merely a stern and silent monitor.

I call attention to these absurdities, not because they are sanctioned by Rousseau and Spencer, but because they show the near limitations of this specious doctrine of Nature.

Instead of accepting the poetical fiction. that Nature (still using the term in the Spencerian sense) is our goddess and our guide, some of us who have not the fear of the new mythology before our eyes would respectfully maintain that this same Nature, in some of her work, should be disinfected, deodorized, and otherwise prevented from doing her worst. Only give her a fair chance, and Nature, in the form of scarlatina, diphtheria or cholera, will decimate whole villages and cities. In such and all similar cases Nature is a remorseless, relentless Fury, who is to be pursued, captured, and thrown headlong into the sea and miserably drowned. In other terms, and dropping figure, the joint work of Christianity, science and civilization is to subdue Nature, to make her man's servant rather than man's master, to make her minister to his joys rather than to his sorrows. There is to be a new earth, rescued from Nature and transformed by human art, and it is to be peopled by a race recreated by education and the Gospel; and throughout this secular process the dominant force is to be the human intelligence and the human will. The nature we are to follow is "nature humanized," or "nature informed with humanity," to adopt the happy phrase of Richard Grant White.

So far, the treatment of my theme has been negative, in the main, the purpose being to show that the hypothesis of Nature as a faultless paragon is subject to grave limitations; that this general doctrine is very far from being safe and wholesome; and like all other fads, it seizes upon a fraction of a truth, fancies that it is the whole truth, and then proclaims the new marvel to the world with a cackling of delight.

I will now venture on a more positive treatment of this theme, and, putting

entirely aside whatever is mystical or mythical, will try to state in plain prose some of the things that seem to be implied in education according to nature.

In dealing with the precept "Follow Nature," the task of the interpreter is twofold: (1) to determine what Nature is and what she does; and (2) then to determine whether it is wise to follow her in the cases stated. At this stage of educational science it is high time to disregard fiction, myth and personification, and to give to this vague term an articulate meaning. My interpretation of the term Nature may not be the correct one, but it is an honest effort to reach the truth. Those who reject any given interpretation owe it to the cause they are attempting to serve to state in plain terms their own interpretation.

The one word that most nearly interprets nature, as it seems to me, is experience, and to follow nature is to make experience the sole or the main source of our knowledge and discipline. It is usually said that there are two sources of knowledge, experience and language; but the precept "Follow Nature" forbids the intervention of language as a source of knowledge and makes the process of learning a course in personal experience. Experimental knowledge is the only real knowledge; all we truly know is included within the circle of our personal experiences, of our sensations, and of the inferences we draw from them. Rousseau sequesters Émile, so far as possible, from the society of men, in order that he may be tutored by Nature, that is, by experience. Instead of the mother, Mr. Spencer makes the candle flame, the fire-bars and boiling water, the teachers of the child. Primitive man, we are told, had no teacher but experience; the successive generations of men have gained their knowledge in the same way; experience is, therefore, the typical process of human education, the only royal road to learning.

A few tests applied to this theory would seem to show its general unsoundness. Is history knowledge? On the hypothesis that the real test of knowledge is experience, there can be no such thing as historical knowledge; for we cannot be brought into personal relations with the events which have given rise to history.

Is our knowledge of geography limited to what we have learned by travel? May we be said to know anything of the

countries we have never visited? I once had a pupil who was a thorough convert to the Spencerian doctrine that there could be no knowledge where there was no personal experience. "Have you ever been abroad?" I asked. "No." "Then do you know that there is such a city as London?" "No." How would you gain this knowledge?" "I would go there." "How would you know when you reached there?" So authority confronts us on every hand! The new theory broke down at this point.

Again, on this hypothesis, what is the function of books? Possibly Mr. Spencer may have learned all his philosophy from his own observations and reflections; but on his own hypothesis why does he write so many books for others to read? Scholarship and culture have always meant, and will ever mean, a loving devotion to good books.

I venture to say that the following statements are substantially true:

The process we call civilization is the triumph of art over nature, and is a mark of human progress. Men will not renounce the essential concomitants of civilization and revert to a state of nature in pursuit of happiness or moral good.

The men of each new generation will start forward from the vantage ground secured for them by their predecessors on the earth. They will accept and use the labor-saving machines which they inherit from the past, and without wasting time and strength in the effort to reinvent, they will capitalize their own experience. and wisdom in some other or better labor-saving devices.

The knowledge gained by experience and experiment is capitalized and transmitted in books, and the great mass of men in each new generation will gain their knowledge by the interpretation of the books left by the wise and the good. The pretense lately set up that students in science are to gain their knowledge inductively by personal research in theway of rediscovery, is a shallow fad. It would be just as reputable to counsel. men to construct their own almanacs.. Try to imagine a class of even univer-sity students attempting to rediscover the atomic weight of chlorin, or even the specific gravity of iron!

Can virtue, in an intelligent sense, be capitalized, transmitted and taught, so that in the moral life each generation. may start from a higher vantage-ground;

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