The science of education

Preface

The teacher certainly should be master of his art. He should know what he is called and undertakes to do, and how he is to do it wisely and well. He should have a full outline in ideal of his work ever present in his mind — an ideal which, however rudimental at the first, is yet a full-membered germ that can be fostered up into a rich and symmetrical maturity. To the thousands of earnest and conscientious educators of the day a concise and simple presentation of the true character of educational work may be serviceable in forming for themselves such an ideal. The presentation will need of course to be summary in its character — brief while yet comprehensive, dealing more with principles and suggestions than with detailed applications, but fully covering the field. It should itself exemplify in its form, so far as may be, the work which it expounds, at least in being in the fullest sense

iii iv PREFACE.

exactly scientific in its method. A governing aim should be to exhibit the entire field of educational work, accurately circumscribed as a whole and distributed into its complementary parts in their due relationship and order.

Having devoted a full threescore years of active .service to educational pursuits in divers relations, the author presents these results of his observation and reflection in teaching to those that are following on in this high and arduous calling with the hope that they may be both helpful to the educator himself and also tributary to the advancement of the work in which he is engaged.

Henry N. Day.

New Haven, May, 1889.

CONTENTS,

Introduction

§ I. Science of Education, defined. § 2. Three requisites in a scientific exposition ; — apprehension, discrimination, arrangement. § 3. The twofold methods of Scientific Apprehension : — Observation ; Logical Inference. § 4. The threefold methods of scientific thought : — Induction, Generalization, Deduction. § 5. Education defined. § 6. The process of education. § 7. The interaction of three distinct factors : — the active force, the subject, the means. § 8. The method of the Science : — (i) the three factors engaged ; (2) the work effected ; (3) the end or result.

BOOK L

THE FACTORS IN EDUCATION.

Chapter I. The Teaching Factor.— § 9. Self- Teaching. § 10. Nature Teaching. § 11. Parental Teaching. § 12. Its leading characteristics: (i) Early beginning ; (2) Following nature ; (3) Kindly ; (4) Continuous ; (5) Authoritative; (6) Purposive. § 13. Its method — direct in example and by precept, and indirect in controlling outward condition or environment, companionships, the reading, and outer life. § 14. Technical Teaching.— Personal qualifications of the teacher, (i) sympathetic and communicative ; (2) earnest ; (3) skillful ; (4) authoritative. § 15. Requisites for effective work.

V

VI CONTENTS.

Chapter II. The Pupil.— § i6. The subject factor in the educational interaction, presenting a complement of capabilities. § 17. Generic capabilities, (i) Intrinsic. § 18. Extrinsic in diverse relationships. § 19. Specially modified capabilities, as in respect of age, of sex, personal idiosyncrasies, condition.

Chapter III. Means and Appliances.— § 20. Educational Means. — Objects in object teaching. § 21. Appliances : (i) Provisions in respect of places and of times ; § 22. (2) Class associations. § 23. (3) Rewards and Punishments. § 24. (4) Support— Household Instruction and Select Schools. § 25. Private Endowed Institutions. § 26. State Institutions.

Book II. Educational Work.— The Interaction Of The Educational Factors

Chapter I. The Twofold Work of Education. — § 27. Receptive and Reactive — Nurture and Training. § 28. Nurture — preparatory. § 29. Training, (i) In the responsive act, (2) Retention — memory proper. (3) Reproduction — Imagination. § 30. Exercise. § 31. Exemplified in the development of the Imaginative or Reproductive power.

Chapter II. The Conditions of Effective Work in Education.— § 32. (i) Educational work must be sympathetic. § 33. (2) Earnest. § 34. (3) Aiming. § 35. (4) Developing. § 36. (5) Provident. § 37. (6) Watchful and Precautionary. § 38. (7) With recreation that is fitting, educatory, contrastive, attractive, from work to play.

Chapter III. The Special Modifications of Education. — Physical Education. § 39. Union of Body with Spirit. § 40. Physical Education seeks best ministration to the whole man in subordination to the mental life. § 41.

CONTENTS. Vll

Recognizes law of habit. § 42. Is guided by nature and condition. § 43. Moital Education. — I. Esthetic — Its province. § 44. The Function of Form. § 45. Its two sides, passive or Sensibility, and active or Imagination. The assimilating stage. § 46. The Retentive stage. § 47. The Reproductive stage. § 48. The Recollecting stage. § 49. The proper Imaginative or Creative stage. § 50. Occasions for training the aesthetic function. § 51. II. Intellectual Education. — Its place. § 52. Analysis and genesis of an intellectual act. § 53. The three great movements of thought. § 54. The Stages of intellectual training. — i the inchoative or perceptive ; 2 the completed or attributive and proper thinking activity. § 55. Culture of the Perceptive faculty. § 56. Of the proper thinking faculty.

Educational Aphorisms in Special Rudimentary Studies, i. Spelling; 2. Reading; 3. Penmanship ; 4. Arithmetic. 5. Grammar as '' art of true ana well speaking."

§ 57. III. Moral Education. § 58. Essential characteristic of the will — directive. § 59. Fundamental principle of morals. § 60. Threefold objects of moral activity— Self, Fellow-beings, God. § 61. Moral Training effected, (i) by exemplification ; (2) formal precepts ; (3) Enforcement of duty.

Chapter I. § 62. Educational Limits

Chapter II. § 63. Growth Periods.— Twofold law of educational work from consideration of growth in its subject, (i) It should be previsional : (2) should assure every step. § 64. Regulative principles of a curricidiiin.

Chapter III. Education Periods.— § 65. Four periods may be noted : (i) The Kindergarten period ; § 66. (2) The Primary ; § 67. (3) The Liberal ; § 68. (4) The Avocation or Professional Period.

INTRODUCTION.

§ I. A SCIENCE of Education is an orderly exposition of the essential nature of education in its several departments and processes.

A science differs from an art in respect to its end or aim : — science has for its end simple knowledge ; art seeks practical skill. The facts and the principles are the same ; only the method and the form vary.

A science of education thus looks more closely at the result — knowledge or ability to know — as it is to be effected in the learner : an art of education looks more at the result — skill in teaching — as it is to be effected in the teacher.

Practically science and art for the most part freely intermingle — the principles of science readily, for purposes of convenience, taking on the form of rules of art. Deficiencies in knowledge and deficiencies also in language or means of communication impose this necessity of occasional deviations from the predominant method and form specially proper to the science or to the art.

§ 2. Any science worthy of the name involves three requisites : —

I

2 INTRODUCTION.

First, a clear and distinct apprehension of the object or subject matter to be expounded in respect both to its intrinsic character and also to its relation to other kindred subjects: —

Secondly, a clear discrimination of all the constituent attributes of this object : — and,

Thirdly, an orderly arrangement of these attributes in the exposition.

We get no proper idea of the clock until not only all the constituent materials are brought together, each part formed and finished in itself; not until also each is fitted into its place in relation to the whole product and to its related parts. Only when the parts are all thus adjusted to one another does the perfect clock appear. So no science appears worthy of the name until all the parts are discriminated and adjusted in due relation, one to another.

§ 3. The methods of scientific apprehension are twofold : —

First, Observation, personal or through others : —

Secondly, Logical Inference, or a movement of thought on such observation.

§ 4. The logical methods are threefold : —

First, by Induction, in which the observation of one part leads to another like part so that one feature or element, one fact or experience, or in general terms, one instance, shall answer for many.

Secondly, by Generalization, in which process^

INTRODUCTION. 3

a plurality of things, possessing some one characteristic in common, are gathered into a class on the basis of that common characteristic ; and,

Thirdly, by Dedi(ctio7i, in which movement of thought anything found to be true of a class is accepted to be true of any species or individual of that class.

§ 5. By Education is signified the development of a Jinnian being into the character determined for him by his nature and capabilities and by the condition in zvhich he is placed. The end in all right education is the perfecting of this character. This end is attained in the two comprehensive ways of right NURTURE and right TRAINING. As essentially active, man must be met by some fit objects on which his activity is to be expended and in these supplied objects is found the food or nutriment on which he is to grow. He needs also to be guided towards the right objects and in the way and the degree of exerting his activity on them.

Educational science, accordingly, must apprehend the character which man was designed by his creator to bear, both generically as common to the race, and specifically as belonging to the membership of a nation, a family, a community of whatever kind to which he belongs, and moreover individually as pertaining to the idiosyncrasies of the person. It prescribes that an ideal of this character be ever present to shape the nurture

4 INTRODUCTION.

and the training. It will embrace in this consideration of the end to be reached in education the particular calling or pursuit in life for which individuals are respectively to.be educated.

§6. The process of education, accordingly, ever respects a growth — an advance in right direction and in fullest degree from an infantile and so characterless potency towards the ideal of a perfect maturity. It seeks a continuous growth, inasmuch as its subject is a life that as a whole suffers no interruption in its onward course, although specific functions are engaged more prominently at one time and less at another in order that all may receive their due development. This growth, moreover, proceeds by stages, in each of which it is carried on with more or less of exclusiveness and of interruption. To each stage a wisely directed education adapts its training; while at the same time it secures that the growth at each particular stage shall be helpful to the growth at each subsequent stage. The growth of man towards the ideal of a perfect character is well typified in that of the vine that by uprooting or injudicious pruning may be bereft of all capability of reaching a fruitful maturity whether in itself as a whole or in any particular branch. Its normal condition, the law of its life is that of a growth that is continuous but by stages. Its wintry rest even is real progress. Nevertheless the most promising bud or shoot may be stunted or utterly fail through

an untimely check, or by diversion of nurture or by abrupt change of treatment.

§ 7. The process of education necessarily involves the interaction of three distinct elements or factors. These elements or factors may be more conveniently and, indeed, more correctly regarded as active elements or forces. Even although at times appearing as receptive and so far passive ; since they do not lose their essentially active nature even when receptive, as factors, as interacting, or producing effects, in a word, as real, they must be held to be essentially active, and therefore forces. Their rest or passiveness is that of an active nature. These three factors are —

First, the Teacher ; — the proper active force in education ;

Second, the Learner ; — the proper subject of education ;

Third, the Means and Instruments and Conditions generally of effective education.

§ 8. Method. — From this summary view of the essential character of education in respect to its end, means, and process as involving three distinct factors or interacting forces, the proper method of unfolding the science of education may be readily discerned. The general theme being definitely outlined so that it can be intelligently apprehended and moreover being exhib-

6 INTRODUCTION.

ited as constituted of complementary parts which equally admit of definite apprehension, it shows itself to be a fit subject of exact scientific treatment. The science will be methodically and exhaustively expounded in a full and right consideration, First, of the three interacting elements engaged in education ; —

Secondly, of the work effected by these factors, as shown in its method and in its several departments ; and.

Thirdly, of the end in education in its respective modifications by reason of person and of condition.

Book I. The Factors In Education

CHAPTER I.

THE TEACHING FACTOR.

§ 9. Self-Teaching. — A great part of the educational work in human life is done by the soul itself. The process begins by the very ordinances of its nature at the earliest period. It enlarges with growth till it becomes well-nigh exclusive : the mature man, becoming his own teacher, both selecting the food that is to nourish up his character and also disciplining his faculties under his own guidance and control. The first stage is one of almost absolute dependence. The infant life is receptive, passively subject to whatever influence may come to it from without ; it is purely instinctive and spontaneous. Natural wants are the impelling, the guiding, and the controlling forces. The life seems almost all sense, and at first is mainly physical ; only later does it manifest itself as emotional or spiritual. At a second stage the reflex or responsive characteristic in body and spirit manifests itself with the appearance of the control of habit. Still later and only by very slow development is it that the infant becomes much of a learner from its own conscious teaching. More and more, however, experience inculcates its lessons, and at last expert skill and self-confidence draw into its own hands the reins and the spur of training. Infancy, childhood, youth, mature manhood, thus designate stages of self-educational growth, possessing each its own characteristics but passing each into its successor with transitional lines not easily traceable.

Only a slight inspection of human life and history thus suffices to show that man is called and destined to be his own teacher. This is his right, his duty • and his too is the responsibility of exercising the high function aright and to its full extent. He is largely charged with forming his own character, both comprehensively as a man in the entireness of his being and also particularly in the specific pursuits and acts of his life. All right education must be conducted under the recognition of this principle of self-training and must ever seek to inculcate it on every learningsoul.

But it is equally obvious that the capability of exercising this high prerogative is itself a matter of growth and training. Up to a certain stage, which however it is difficult, if not rather impos-

THE TEACHING FACTOR g

sible, to define in the life of any one, he is dependent for guidance, encouragement, discipline, on forces external to himself ; and he becomes virtually independent only by degrees and in the divers departments of his nature only by successively maturing experiences. Perplexity must often attend the question whether he is capable at any stage of assuming this self-guidance for general culture or for any special training. If weakness and inefficiency wait on the error on one side of too prolonged dependence, a possibly more harmful presumption and audacity may characterize the error on the other side of assuming prematurely self-control and independence.

Two principles of fundamental significance are applicable here. First, to every rational nature there necessarily appertains an ideal of the best and highest attainable in character and condition. The simple notion of responsibility as attaching to every such nature involves this truth. But this ideal is itself a matter of growth — of guidance and of culture. To unfold and perfect it is indeed a governing object in all true science of education. Nature of itself germinates this ideal and provides guards and helps for its development. Experience helps to school and foster it. Example and counsel with self-study and reflection add their perfecting work. The essential thing in this ideal of self-training is character — the best and highest attainable — not happiness or pleasure which ever lO THE FACTORS IN EDUCA T/OAT.

waits on character and condition, not honor or applause that is equally but a consequent of character. The principle of the best and highest applies both to the formation of the whole nature — of character in its most comprehensive import — and also to the acquisition of excellence of proper success in any specific pursuit or condition.

Secondly, the main reliance in self-teaching is to be placed on one's self. The best and the highest is to be achieved by personal endeavor. It is not to be expected to come as a windfall by some chance or turn of fortune, nor as a gift to be bestowed by some friendly agency. So even the aspirant for the best and highest will, while freely accepting or even in emergencies soliciting help and counsel, avail himself of only so much as may be needful and use that as ministering, not mastering.

Said a sagacious teacher to a lad asking help in solving an arithmetical problem that might easily be deemed to be beyond his years : " Listen : I tell you a story. Two men contracted to dig a well for which they were to receive a certain amount when they should find water. The labor was greater than they had calculated for, and they began to despond, and one proposed to give up. The other urged holding on, till at last the pick which one struck into the rock went through down into a pool of water which then rose upon them so fast that they had need to do their

THE TEACHING FACTOR. II

utmost to escape. So," she continued, "the light comes in when you try long and patiently." The lesson was accepted and was never forgotten. The whole life was shaped and blessed by that sage counsel confidingly obeyed.

§ lo. Nature-Teaching.— Self-teaching combines all the three factors concerned in teaching — teacher, learner, and medium or instrument. The self-teacher has himself for teacher, learner, and matter of study. All other teaching forces are divisible into two kinds, impersonal and pcrsonaly of which the former combines in the work of teaching two of the factors ; the latter, for the most part at least engages but one. All the impersonal teaching forces may be comprehensively included under the one denomination of nature-teach ing.

A great part and a most indispensable part of the work wrought by education in the human soul is wrought by nature. Nature indeed leads in all this work of education ; guides in all ; cooperates in all ; crowns all. She dictates the end and so the ideal of the work to be effected, for this end and ideal are but the development and perfection of capabilities which she has created for the very purpose that they should be so developed and perfected. She incites in the instinct which she has implanted and enforces in the stern retributive laws with which she rules all things subject to her sway. She guides also as well as assists in all the prosecution of the training-work which she prescribes. The work of education cannot be safely, wisely, or successfully prosecuted except as this relation of nature is recognized from beginning to end. The growing and learning spirit needs to be carefully trained from the earliest hour to observe and to obey what nature teaches and inculcates. Her teachings in themselves, rightly understood and rightly applied, never mislead. Her promptings, her instincts, her appetences, her ambitions, may be disproportionately followed, some unduly cultivated or heeded, others depressed or neglected ; she is nevertheless a wise, safe, altogether trustworthy teacher, — a teacher, too, that never tires and never forsakes ; one, moreover, that will surely crown the attentive and docile with her laurels and equally punish with failure and shame the truant and the negligent.

Nature teaches both as a model and also by direct inculcation of truth and wisdom ; revealing everywhere principles and rules which are more or less exemplified and illustrated in her arrangements and her processes. The more closely she is studied, the more does she commend herself for imitation and the more wisely is she found to counsel. " Study nature as model and counsellor" is a prime maxim for the formation of character.

Nature teaches sympathetically as with maternal solicitude for her own offspring ; wisely, as knowing her offspring's needs ; safely, as never erring ; quickly and unobtrusively, her best teachings to a large extent to the unconscious ear ; and authoritatively, promising everything to the considerate learner and threatening all evil to the reckless and the defiant.

Nature's lessons are many and diverse. She teaches what man is in himself, and in his relations to the universe of being and of truth ; that he is himself an integral and responsible part of this universe, correlated with it in innumerable ways, bound to it in indissoluble bonds of sympathy and reciprocity of influence, subject to its laws and linked in with its destinies. She teaches him not only what he is in his original constitution, but also what he m'ay become and is created and commanded to be, and assures him that the happiness for which he longs but over which he has no direct control, yet waits on his compliance with the promptings and biddings of his true nature. She teaches him the ways and conditions of all healthy growth whether of body or of mind , that it must be continuous both as a whole and in all specific advances and attainments that under the iron rule of habit repetition of act ever strengthens tendency to good or to evil, the seed sown ever yielding its own harvest — a harvest of peace and content in age ever following the virtuous endeavors of growing life in thought, desire, and purpose, and a harvest of bitter regrets in like certainty following indulgence of evil feeling and evil conduct in youth ; — with emphatic voice declaring '' the child is father of the man." She teaches him the fundamental lessons of order and regularity to be observed in all the ongoings of life. She enforces the moral lessons of temperance and self-control and persevering industry ; of rectitude and sympathetic kindness ; of reverence and piety. Truly enviable is the childhood and youth upon which rest in the fullest degree the sweet, broad and genial influences of nature where freest from the corruptions and narrownesses of artificial life.

Education is thus an ordinance of nature. The ignorance and helplessness of infancy, she enjoins in ten thousand ways, must be educated into the vigor and efficiency of full manhood. What this education is she clearly unfolds in experience and to outward observation, affording herself as a model in her manifestations of herself and in the revelations of truth and wisdom in her habitual ongoings. She is the prompter, the guide, the helper, the rewarder in all sound education. To every youthful aspirant for virtue and excellence, she says, '' Be a diligent student of my ways and of my instructions ; ever on time ; ever in place; ever aiming; ever growing; patiently waiting : confidently hoping ; the bud will at length quietly open into flower, and flower in its time bring in the perfected fruit."

f II. Parental Teaching. — The home is preeminently the nursery of character. In-

THE TEACHING FACTOR. I 5

fancy is plastic and yields freely to the earliest impressions. Between the manifold paths open to its starting career it has no choice of its own and follows any leading. Its passive nature forms itself into the mold that is first presented as its activities go out towards the particular object that first invites them. Whether endowment or culture is the mightier factor of character is for all practical interest an idle question. There can be no culture where there is no endowment to be cultivated; and genius without culture is a germ that never yields blossom or fruit. Every child has a nature of its own ; it is human, constituted of body and soul, each having its own peculiar constitution and capability. Culture can only develop or stunt this characteristic capability ; cannot make it other than human, although it may be of the lowest grade — cannot dispossess it of brain, and nerve, and muscle, and bone, nor yet of feeling, intellect, and will, however dwarfed ; while on the other hand as every such human capability is the subject of growth, each may by judicious and faithful culture be nourished up to health and vigor, to any indeterminable degree within the limits of proper human nature. The defective and the morbid may indeed in the abundant provisions of nature for her creature, man, be in a measure healed or reinforced, and supplemented. The human spirit, destined to immortality with an undying capacity of growth, however feeble or even deficient at its birth, has yet before it the assurance that a character of enviable strength and beauty is possible to it as the distinctive gift and endowment of its creator. If the richest endowment solicits the richest culture, the meanest capacity has a hopeful career before it and only demands a sympathy, patience, judgment, and faithfulness adjusted to its special needs.

Home culture is, in the general, parental. The parents, of divine right and prescription, rule the household. It is a double sovereignty, of equal rank and honor, of diverse power with their respective opportunity and fitness, but by the appointment of nature herself ever to be harmonious and reciprocally helpful. Discord in parental rule is ever perilous to filial peace and destiny.

In the earliest stage, maternal rule and influence undoubtedly must predominate, and so far it must be allowed to exert the most determining influence on character, as the first turn of the springing brook has most to do with the final course of the river. Truly has an old poet said :

The mother, in her office, holds the key

Of the soul ; and she it is who stamps the coin

Of character, and makes the being, who would be a savage

But for her gentle cares, a Christian man.

Benjamin West is reported to have said : " My mother's kiss made me a painter." He referred to the fact that when at the age of seven, having been left in charge of the cradle of his sister, he sketched the sleeping form, his mother on her return observing the sketch was so pleased with the work that '' she took him in her arms and kissed him fondly." Such little influence, particularly such kindly commxcndation, determines character in this plastic period of life.

Parental training embraces both nurture and discipline. It supplies all needful food and nourishment to the growing capabilities of right and rich character so as to supply the defects and correct the deformities of nature, so far as may be, whether in body or mind, and so as also to nourish up to an ever advancing condition of health and vigor. It is its function also to awaken and engage aright all native activities in their season, directing them upon their proper objects, repressing all excesses as well as turning back from all wanderings, keeping them ever in the right way and in the right degree of exertion.

§ 12. The leading particulars of parental duty in training are : —

First, that it begin early. It can hardly begin too early ; for earliest impressions are deepest and the most dominant of tendency and of habit. If the opening life is greeted with the glad welcome which its nature solicits, in temperature, in nourishment, in bodily contact, in taste, and sound, an sight, from all that meet it of person or thing, it gets a setting out in its career that is most promising, for nature and nature's rule are beneficent and wise. On the other hand it maybe assumed with sad assurance that fretting touch, fretting food, fretting dress, fretting noise and fretting glare, and it may be added, fretting mother and fretting nurse, will breed a fretful temper. The sunny character is the child of morally sunny skies, as no plant of worth starts from out of cold and dark and ungenial soils. Education begins when first the young life is deposited in parental care and it is then that it does its best and its most efificient work on character.

Secondly, parental training must be natural. It must be suited in kind and degree to native capabilities, and to native needs. It must not supplant nature. There is often excess of training care, which is hurtful, misleading, stifling here and stuffing there, and so deforming and marring. Human life both in soul and body has a power of its own, a trend and set of its own, and a guiding instinct of its own. This is a fact that it is dangerous to overlook. How and how far natural propensities should be interfered with in training is a question that demands consideration and sound judgment. Each case must be determined on its own claims and merits. Training skill may mend nature, or even change it ; but it must itself be natural, of nature's devising and nature's applying.