Home Education (Taylor)/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
THE THIRD PERIOD OF EARLY LIFE, AND CONCLUDING TERM OF HOME EDUCATION.
The practical difference between a public and a private education becomes broadly apparent about the time when boyhood succeeds to childhood. In their twelfth year children who have been reared beneath the paternal roof, and who have lived in the society of well-informed adults, are found to be very unlike, in tastes and habits, those of the same standing who have already passed several years at school.—They will be less childish, and more childlike: they will in a sense be too adult, and too infantile: there is an advantage they will possess, and a disadvantage also; and we must be prepared at once to avail ourselves to the utmost of the former, and to find means for obviating, as far as possible, the latter.
I do not profess to strike the balance between the two methods; but simply keeping my eye fixed upon that which I have adopted, and whic I undertake to treat of, shall labour to point out the means of doing the best with it.
Home education, when it reaches its later stages, is not unlikely to present an apparent, and perhaps to some extent, a real inconsistency, with the leading principle professed in this volume—I mean that of a retarded development of the mind; for it may often be found that intelligent children, who are constantly the companions of well-informed parents and who may have been their father's assistants in literary or scientific pursuits, have become, notwithstanding his intentions to the contrary, far more mature in tastes and habits than they would have been had they passed the same years at school. If however the home system be in all respects judiciously conducted—if animal health and hilarity are maintained by the proper means, and if severe exactions in the course of study are scrupulously avoided, few, if any, of the ill consequences of this early ripening of the mind will have been incurred. And yet I will not say that a father may not sometimes wish to see his sons a little more boyish than they probably will be, if they have conversed much more with him, than with their peers.
The school-boy of fourteen is what his comrades have made him; but the home-bred boy is what his parents have made him; and there is a balance of advantages between the two kinds of character. The former is the creature of instantaneous and vehement impulses and he acts under the guidance, not of individual reason, but of conventional habits. Whatever may be his acquirements, and whatever the assumed manliness of his bearing, he is child still; and is more sensual, more frivolous, and more wilful than a home-bred boy five years younger than himself. In relation however to the engagements of common life he is not ill prepared to brunt the world, as it is. He is not too thoughtful, or too wise, or too nice in his tastes or too considerate of the feelings of others, to take up the rough work of professional or commercial life; and he is saved the torture which those must endure who enter upon the broad paths of business with their own individual sense of right and wrong, and their own feelings, all about them.
To secure, for the home-bred, a portion of the same advantages, it is certain that, in approaching the later period of early life, some companionship, out of the family, must be admitted, even at a little risk to that simplicity which hitherto has been so anxiously preserved. And it will also be indispensable, in a home-trained family, I mean for boys, as a compensation for what is gained of spirit and audacity at school, to court hardihood and courage, and to cherish as well animal insensibility (we want the word insensitiveness) and self-possession, by arduous field amusements, and—if they can be had, by enterprises in the forest, or among the mountains. Who could wish to rear, at home, slender, pallid, aspen leaf youths, content to be never far from their mamma's protection, always duly regardful of every species of possible peril, and well pleased, day after day, to take a quiet ramble, carrying the umbrella for their sisters! We must secure something more than this, or renounce home education altogether for boys.
That higher degree of discretion and considerateness, which is likely to attach to children trained at home, may very well find an object, and so be prevented—as it otherwise will, from lowering the youthful spirits, if there be the opportunity of employing them in some really serviceable manner. This is easily done with girls; and whatever certainty parents may have of securing future competence, or even affluence for their children, there can be no doubt at least I have none, of the desirableness, in regard as well to the physical health as to the moral sentiments, and even the finest intellectual tastes, of a practical concernment with domestic duties. A substantial feminine industry, and a manual acquaintance with the routine of family comfort, gives solidity to the muscular system, and solidity also to the judgment: it dispels romantic and morbid sensitiveness; inspires personal independence; dismisses a thousand artificial solicitudes; breaks through sickly selfishness; and in a word, gives a tranquil consistency to the mind, on the basis of which all the virtues and graces of the female character may securely rest.
As to boys, if agricultural affairs, larger or smaller, are an appendage of the establishment—if there be commercial interests to be looked to—if out-of-door works are carrying on, and accounts are to be kept, great benefits will be secured by entrusting certain well defined duties—certain regularly returning and real engagements, to a youth, from the earliest time at which he appears, as to body and mind, capable of sustaining any such responsibility. Occupations of this sort are intended to give employment to that higher degree of thoughtfulness and discretion which is likely to belong to a boy who is his father's companion. At the same time the alternation of these employments with intellectual pursuits has the most favourable influence upon the mind in preserving its elasticity, and in increasing its free force.
I think too, and speak not without a regard to facts, that great advantages, advantages of more kinds than one, accrue from that knowledge of his father's affairs which a son, so employed in managing the details of them, is likely to obtain. An ingenuous and well-principled youth—confided in by his father, acquires steadiness of purpose and discretion, together with moderated views, which will be highly conducive to his future welfare.
It has been remarked by Rousseau that the period between the twelfth and the seventeenth years is the only time when man is absolutely happy; inasmuch as it is then only that his forces of body and mind much exceed his desires. At least it is certain that during this period there is a surplus force available, greater in proportion to the calls made upon it, than at any other season of life. In large schools, where severe mental exercises are exacted, and where the most vivid excitements are afforded out of class, the superfluous energy of body and mind is pretty well occupied; but at home, provision must be made for giving scope to the same superabundant power, which else, either dwindles, or finds some mischievous outlet. I have already referred to the desirableness of field exercises, and such as are of an arduous sort, in the management of a home-trained family; and as to the overflowing energy of the mind, during this same period, we must, in the place of the severely exacted exercises of school, devise labours, some samples of which will hereafter be given, such as shall not merely engage the mental force, but such as shall form into a habit the serious feeling of having to achieve a task, peremptorily demanded at a certain time.
The difficulty at home, under intelligent management, is not that of imparting any desired amount of information, or of awakening the faculties, or of giving them a high degree of activity; all which may easily be done; but the point of trial for our domestic system, let it be confessed is the forming file habit of strenuous continued labour, impelled by motives that are seen and felt to be irresistible. The very same task which costs the mind the most grievous struggles between its inclination to desist, and its wish to proceed—if the motive be a little loose or questionable, this task, not a whir abated, is performed with alacrity and ease, when once it is looked at as in no way possibly to be evaded. The sense of absolute necessity is that which makes all things easy—converting the impossible into the practicable.
Merely looking therefore at the learner's own present comfort, we should wish him, at times at least, to come under the stern law of necessity in his mental exercises. But this is not all, for it is certain that the business of life, and especially in some of the professions, demands a power of vigorous, long-continued application to the most irksome labours; nor are the highest offices exempt from more or less of what must be called drudgery. A man whose faculty of attention is speedily exhausted, who resents steady application to dry details, and who finds frivolous pretexts for shifting upon others every strenuous mental effort, such a man is good for nothing, but to receive his rents from the trusty hands of an agent; or to sign his name, and get his dividends twice a year.
A very different issue of our educational course is here kept in view; and therefore, over and beyond the conveyance of what is to be acquired, and which may be conveyed without any very painful assiduity, besides this, the power of keeping his footing with others, on the tread-mill of mental labour, must be acquired by the learner. After what has already been said on the subject, it can hardly be needful to add a caution, not to go beyond the point at which the animal system begins to sustain real injury by continued application.
If a well trained and intelligent youth of fifteen could but be put at once into possession of the detailed practical knowledge—the experience, which in fact is only to be slowly acquired, he would often have the advantage of his teacher, in readiness and rectitude of judgment, upon subjects any way connected with those vivid interests that attach men to this side, or to that, of party controversies. And this advantage would arise not merely from the clear, unimpaired freshness of the faculties, but from the freedom of the mind from the strong, though unconscious influence of personal, and gradually formed, ill habits of reasoning. An ingenuous mind is indeed conscious of the presence and operation of certain well defined motives for thinking, or for professing to think, so and so; and probably guards itself against its known partialities; but how few are at all aware of the number and the force of those unimpassioned and noiseless habitual misjudgments that actually overrule their every mental operation! The process of thinking, or reasoning, as often conducted, might be compared to the process of calculating astronomical events, when the data are taken, unquestioned, from printed tables:—the operation is, let us grant, correctly performed, and the result would be true, if it were not, alas! that this authorized vade-mecum—this book of Tables, abounds with errors of the press: all therefore is set wrong.
Now a teacher of philosophical temper, who is aware, not merely of his own party bias (with which he is careful not to inflict his pupil) but of the general fact that the mind, as it advances, becomes unconsciously subject to certain fallacious modes of reasoning, will not disdain, while assuming to guide the minds committed to his care, to watch and wait for their uncontrolled workings, when the requisite materials of thought are placed before them. A teacher may, in this way, get a clue to his own constitutional errors of calculation, and may discover, in the spontaneous reasonings of a fresh mind, the genuine logic, from which he has himself unknowingly swerved.
But at any rate the pellucid ingenuousness of young person swho, (unless miserably infected by sectarian sentiments) have no predilections, should be attentively listened to, and delicately treated. A mind may be injured beyond remedy, which is roughly dealt with, or acrimoniously rebuked, in any instance of its not immediately falling in with a teacher's opinions. To the young mind, the broad fields of thought are as yet all unfenced; nor has it learned to notice enclosures, or to respect rights of way, or manorial prerogatives:—earth is as open as air and sky.
We are not here excusing a lawlessness of thought in the young, disdainful of authority; nor are wishing to encourage unfixed mental habits; but are only adverting to a fact, not unlikely to be overlooked—that when discrepancies arise between the teacher and the pupil, a question may fairly be put to himself by the former, whether the difference does not result, in part, from a collision between the unwarped reason of the youth, and the unconsciously unsound logic of the teacher: a moment's pause, on his part, might enable him, as well to correct a personal error, as to save his pupil an unmerited reproof.
If there be room to hope that mankind will, in a coming age, reach a more advanced position on the road of genuine wisdom, than has as yet been attained, so desirable an event is likely to be favoured by a greater care, on the part of teachers, in managingth e first spontaneous expansion of the reasoning faculty. Too often the worst prejudices are authoritatively forced upon the young, which the feeble-minded retain through life as shackles; but which the strong resentfully throw off, to the peril of all faith and principle.
An intelligent agent is capable of liberty only so far as he possesses some excess of force, available at his discretion. But we have just said that this excess is proportionately greater during the years of adolescence, than at any other time of life: the capability of liberty therefore must be so much the greater; and the question is—How far it may be safely indulged. At school, absolute restraint, and absolute liberty, or something like it, take their turns in the course of every day. But at home, the two elements are mingled more, and are together spread over all hours; a greater range of discretion being allowed during seasons of restraint, and rather more restraint being imposed during intervals of liberty. Yet this intermixture would in itself tend to break down a little the force of the mind, or to render the habits indefinite, if it were not compensated by eliciting some higher motives of conduct; such as may render it safe to grant to the home-bred youth a much wider scope than is allowed to the school-boy, of the same standing. There must be more license, counterpoised by more principle; and thus a degree of steadiness of character may be secured, which is to come in the place of the school-boy's rude energy. At home we cannot have precisely the same results as are obtained at school, but must seek equivalents; and we may often command what is of higher value.
Difficulties such as these scarcely attach to female education; for a mother, possessed of the qualities fitting her superintend that of her daughters, is rarely at a loss in communicating to them such principles as will make it safe to leave them in the enjoyment of as much personal liberty as a daughter at home can wish for.
But a father finds it otherwise with his sons, after they reach their teens; for, the vastly high erenergy, animal and mental, of the male temperament, and for which adequate employment is not always available, must be disciplined, not broken down, by bringing the moral sense into fuller operation. A home-bred youth, not cowed or pinned to the sleeve, needs to be inspired with far more sentiment than would be necessary for him at school. And if these ends can actually be secured, that is to say, if youthful vigour and animation can be preserved unimpaired, along with enough feeling and principle to guarantee mild and discreet conduct, we then gain a real advantage.
Our purpose, in this respect, will be much facilitated, if the tastes of a youth are such as impel him to enter, with eagerness, into literary or scientific pursuits, as his father's companion and assistant. The genuine zest of intellectual labour being generated and kept in activity, this bond of fellowship between a father and a son, on the ground of philosophy or learning, may easily be made to extend its influence on all sides, and thus enable the former the more readily to govern the spirit of the latter. The bare force of paternal authority does not suffice for this end; for if it ensure specious obedience only, little good is done;― if actual obedience then there is a probability that the vivacity of the mind has been too much broken down by the means used for giving effect to so strict a sort of government. The same result is attained in a far happier manner when there can be realized between a father and his sons, the spirit and warmth of' intellectual companionship.
I have already said, that, as early as the eleventh year, or at some time during the middle period of the educational course, enough may ordinarily be known of children's natural endowments to enable a parent to assign them, severally, to one or the other of the two classes―the intellectual, who are to receive an elaborate and extended mental culture, or the unintellectual, who are to be fitted for business, or business-like engagements, and whose education, of whatever sort, must, or may well be brought to a close at an early age.
But about the fourteenth year, it may generally be practicable (in relation to those who are destined to a professional course) to determine the particular line that a youth is to pursue. Now if this can be done, two methods of mental treatment appear to be proper, the one of which is very obvious, and would hardly need to be specified: the other might perhaps not occur to the teacher, or might be discarded as not consistent with the former. What I mean is, that if the professional destination of a youth is ascertained, then, in the first place, and as every one will admit, something may be done before professional studies are entered upon, to familiarize them to him a little. Indeed it is probable that, if the choice of a profession has been made on the ground of a youth's personal taste and peculiar talent, he will himself court the studies that bear upon the object of his preference. On this point there can be no need to enlarge.
But while indulgence, to some extent, may be allowed to a boy's predilections for particular pursuits, there is another point, of some importance, to be kept in view during the year or two that may elapse after a profession has been chosen, and until the college course is commenced, and it is to engage the mind with studies that may serve as the correctives of professional pursuits, and which are likely to be discarded, or held in low esteem, when once the professional enthusiasm is kindled. It is not intended that a youth should be compelled to addict himself to studies altogether distasteful to him, or which he has no ability to cope with. To preclude a misunderstanding on this point, I will offer an exemplification of my meaning.
Let it then be premised that a home education supposes always the diffusion of so much liberal and expansive intelligence in a family as must have the effect of excluding exclusiveness of tastes, and so, of bringing all minds, whatever may be their particular preferences, into agreeable sociality with all the muses, and all the sciences. This being supposed, then, if for example, the legal profession were in prospect, a teacher need not be told that his pupil should become conversant with history; or that he should be exercised in the ready use of the faculties of abstraction, analysis, analogy, and ratiocination; or that he should be practised in a fluent, pointed, extemporaneous utterance of his thoughts:―all this is obvious enough; but beyond this, we ought to look out for pursuits, the tendency of which will be to counteract the ill influence of the legal profession upon the mind and the moral sentiments. With this view peculiar attention should be given (let no offence be taken at the suggestion) to that sound moral training which brings the universally applicable logic of inflexible rectitude to bear upon the technical logic of mere pleading to carry a point. History, read under a proper guidance, and especially those more elaborate specimens of modern history, wherein the real motives and private character of public men are exposed in their confidential letters―this sort of historical memoirs, affords opportunities for exercising the moral sense in discriminating between the base and the noble, the cunning and the wise, the specious and the great, in public conduct. What we are aiming at is to train the moral taste, not merely as applicable generally to ordinary conduct in a common lot, but as adapted to the trying and complicated circumstances wherein good and evil are commingled, so often, in the course of public life. Besides those sacred principles of morality which a man's character, as a man, should rest upon, there is a specific feeling of the just and fair, applicable to the difficult occasions of a professional career, and destitute of which, homely honesty and virtue get, unawares, into many a wrong position, and are tripped up. That study of history then which the lawyer needs, as a lawyer, is one thing, but that study of it which the man needs, who is to endure the ordeal of the legal profession, is quite another.
Again: it is desirable to provide against the mental short-sightedness not seldom induced by legal studies and practice; or in other words, to impart a more philosophic expansiveness of understanding, as counteractive of the habit of holding to what is merely technical, and of refusing to look at what is broad or abstract. It is usual to recommend mathematical studies as preparatory to a legal education, under the idea that these pursuits afford a good training to the reasoning faculty. But I am inclined to question whether the one species of logic—the mathematical, be indeed a fit preparation for the other—the legal, differing as do the two in their very principles: but waiving this question, it would appear that Natural Philosophy, and especially as it is now prosecuted, affords precisely the sort of intellectual preparation we need for preventing what might be called the anchylosis of the faculties, or that fixedness of the reason which makes the mind the slave of instances, of precedents, and of technical verbosities. Modern physical science is as regardful of single instances as law itself can be; but it tends always upward to the universal and the abstract; and hence it affords so good a discipline to the higher reason.
With a different immediate object, and yet coming under the same general principle of providing against professional distortions of the mind, it is very desirable to cherish the imaginative tastes in those who are to addict themselves to studies utterly devoid, for the most part, of intrinsic charms, and likely therefore to parch the intellect. For it must be remembered that it is through the medium of these tastes that access is had to some of the noblest emotions; and by these often that such emotions are kept in vitality.
It would lead us too far to pursue the illustration of the point in hand, as related to the other professions: indeed the subject is in itself so important, and has been so little adverted to, that it may claim hereafter a separate consideration. How incalculable, for instance, and beneficial, might be the consequences of an early training of youth, destined to the exercise of the Christian ministry, were it conducted on the principle of furnishing the mind with habits counteractive of certain tendencies of the clerical temper which diminish in fact the beneficent influence of the most momentous of all offices, when brought to bear upon human nature as it is.
Whatever relates, in a specific manner, to the acquirements which should be made, and to the training which should be passed through, during the latter period of Home Education, will find its place in the following chapters, or in another volume. One preliminary topic only now remains to engage our attention, and that it is a consideration of some of those original diversities of mental conformation which demand to be regarded in adapting courses of study to individual tastes and talents.