was not confined to Scotland. The Wesleyan education committee from 1840 to 1851 availed themselves of Stow's institution, and encouraged their students to go to Glasgow for their professional preparation. When the Wesleyan Training College was established in Westminster, Stow's methods were largely adopted, two of the principal officers of that college having been trained at Glasgow under his superintendence.
Stow placed religious and moral training before him as the principal objects to be attained in education. The playground or ‘uncovered schoolroom’ he especially valued as a place where, under right supervision, good physical and moral training might be secured. As to direct teaching, he made biblical lessons and instruction both in common things and in elementary science prominent in his system; and he attached special importance to what he called ‘picturing out,’ by means of oral description and illustrations, those geographical and historical scenes which appeal to the imagination rather than to the verbal memory. He sought to incorporate into his practice much of the best experience of Bell, Lancaster, and Pestalozzi; but the monitorial system appeared to him very defective from the point of view of moral influence, and the parrot-like enumeration of the qualities of objects which was so often to be found in schools professing to be Pestalozzian he regarded as often unfruitful. He was one of the first of our educational reformers to recognise fully the value of infant schools, and the importance of what he called the ‘sympathy of numbers’ and of collective teaching as a means of quickening the intelligence of young children. In the training of teachers he was one of the earliest and most effective workers, and the method of requiring all candidates for the teacher's office to give public lessons which were afterwards made the subject of private criticism by the fellow-students and by himself—a method now universally adopted in all good training colleges—may be said to have originated with him. His experience led him also to advocate the teaching of boys and girls together in the primary school, and to attach great value to this association on moral grounds. From the first he determined to employ no corporal punishment, no prizes, no place-taking, and he always regarded these as wholly unnecessary expedients for any teacher who was properly qualified for his work. He was not a great educational philosopher, and he never, like Rousseau, Comenius, Locke, or Pestalozzi, formulated a scientific theory of education. His system was the result of experience guided by a loving insight into child-nature.
In the light of later experience some of his methods have been superseded. The enormous gallery on which he delighted to see 150 or more children gathered to receive a stirring moral or pictorial lesson was found to be an ineffective instrument for serious intellectual work. Later teachers have also found that it is not safe to rely too much on oral instruction or to relegate, as he did, the study of language to a rank so far inferior to the study of material things.
His chief publications were: 1. ‘Physical and Moral Training,’ 1832. 2. ‘The Training System,’ first published in 1836, which reached a ninth edition, revised and expanded, in 1853. 3. ‘National Education: the Duty of England in regard to the Moral and Intellectual Elevation of the Poor and Working Classes—Teaching or Training,’ 1847. 4. ‘Bible Emblems,’ 1855. 5. ‘Bible Training for Sabbath Schools,’ 1857.
[The best account of his life will be found in the Memoir by the Rev. W. Fraser, a member of the Glasgow College staff, London, 1868; Leitch's Practical Educationists; J. G. Thomson's Centenary Address before the Educational Institute of Scotland, 1893.]
STOW, JAMES (fl. 1790–1820), engraver, born near Maidstone about 1770, was son of a labourer. At the age of thirteen he engraved a plate from Murillo's ‘St. John and the Lamb,’ which showed such precocious talent that, with funds provided by gentlemen in the neighbourhood, he was articled to William Woollett [q. v.] After Woollett's death in 1785 he completed his apprenticeship with William Sharp [q. v.] Stow worked entirely in the line manner, and engraved many of the plates for Boydell's ‘Shakespeare’ (small series), Bowyer's edition of Hume's ‘History of England,’ Macklin's ‘Bible,’ Du Roveray's edition of ‘Pope's Homer,’ George Perfect Harding's series of portraits of the ‘Deans of Westminster,’ and other fine publications. His most important single plates were ‘The Three Women at the Sepulchre,’ after Benjamin West, which he issued himself; and a portrait of Lord Frederick Campbell, after Edridge. His latest employment was upon the illustrations to Wilkinson's ‘Londina Illustrata,’ 1811–23. Falling into intemperate habits, Stow died in obscurity and poverty.
[Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Dodd's manuscript History of Engravers in Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 33405; Notes and Queries, 6th ser. iv. 427, 521.]
