Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

to me a difficult conundrum. It is much like Horace Greeley's "way to resume." If we do not have good teachers in our schools, it is simply because-no, not because we do not want them, but because we do not employ them; consciously or unconsciously we allow other motives to influence us.

How it may be in the smaller towns I do not know, but, in the larger ones, I believe we can have just as good teachers as we choose. The bright men, the intelligent men, the able, the earnest men do not, by any means, all go into the professions and trade of choice. Even with the present inadequate pay, there are good teachers enough-lovers of the work—to fill our positions.

But to throw off some of the old traditions, or rather the old associations, which still cling to our names and to our work, is a task in which the best lover of them all will find a field for his most earnest endeavor.

There have been, as it seems to me, two grand impulses given to education in this country.

The first came from the life and labors of Horace Mann, whose intense enthusiasm and burning words. stirred the heart of New England, as had never been done before, to the importance of universal education, the need of more systematic methods, and the necessity for educated and carefully trained teachers.

I have tried to recall an extract from a Fourth-of-July oration of his before the authorities of Boston, which I learned when a pupil in school, though I have not seen it since:

"For, in the name of the living God," he says, "it must be proclaimed that superstition shall be the religion, that licentiousness shall be the liberty, and that anarchy shall be the law of that people which neglects the education of its children."

The second grand impulse, wholly unlike the first, but no less valuable in its place, came, I think, from the reading of "Tom Brown at Rugby."

It was said by one of Dr. Arnold's friends that, if he should be elected head-master at Rugby, he would change the face of education in England.

However that may have been, his influence, through "Tom Brown," if it has not changed the face, has gone far to work out a change of heart in the better schools of these Northern States.

We may have learned elsewhere of the life and work of Arnold-his character, his methods, his reforms. But "Tom Brown," passing into the hands of young and old, gave an insight into the real spirit and power of the man, as seen and interpreted by the author, with a delicacy of sentiment and a nobleness of feeling which most of us, I fear, would not, unaided, have seen so clearly in the doctor himself.

This is one of the few cases, we suspect, in which the translation does full justice to the original.

This spirit of manliness, so largely pervading our better schools, had its origin, we think, in a good degree in "Tom Brown at Rugby," with which many of our own citizens are, doubtless, more familiar than with our schools in Chicago. And if some of those who, from time to time, call loudly for reform, were as well acquainted with the inner life of some of our schools as with that of the great schools of England, they would find that we have not only "outgrown our own bragging," but have left some of their ideal reforms a whole decade behind us.

It is, then, no new principles that we are urging. The deep conviction, the change of heart, have already begun. We should now strive for that inner growth which shall find expression in a fuller, completer life.

The coming generation, that is to make or unmake our city, our State, and our country, is already filling the air with its prattle, its laughter, its cries.

Some of them even now, through neglect, are stumbling and falling in the ways of ignorance and crime; some straying, uncared for, into the haunts of vice and misery; the larger and better portion, let us hope, with fresh hearts and bright faces, timidly, gleefully, hopefully advancing, singly and in groups, to the school-house.

Society is waiting, calling-earnestly, anxiously-for men and women of broader culture and nobler naturemen and women of quick intelligence, of enlightened understanding, of large heart and generous impulse, to take these little ones by the hand and lead them into the pleasant ways of wisdom, virtue, usefulness, and happi

ness.

It remains to be seen how many of us will step forward in sympathy with this call of the age, with a ready, a hearty "Ay, ay, sirs!"

III.

THE PLACE OF MEMORY IN SCHOOL INSTRUCTION.

WHILE the rebel angels were waiting, in the outer abyss, the return of their great leader from his "still hunt" for the whereabout of this new world, Milton represents them as "reasoning high of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute❞—a discussion not yet ended, nor has it been restricted to this rebel crew. None so attractive.

No supposed possession or attribute has seemed so

desirable, or raised man so near the divine, in the estimation of his fellows, as this foreknowledge, this power to discern the future. It has invested the seer, the prophet, and the soothsayer with a reverence which still casts its mysterious shadow over the otherwise transparent frauds of the modern fortune-teller, and even the prognostics of a Venner.

Face to face with the unknown, with all the forces of nature and life surging around us, in our seeming helplessness and ignorance, we are at all times tempted to cry, "Oh, that I only knew!" Whether the acquisition would be beneficial or not, or even possible, by the endowment of some new sense, so attractive is the thought that, in comparison, we are apt to underestimate or forget the importance of that hardly less valuable power of looking back at what has been-that power through which the whole past of nature and of man is spread before us like a map, with his deeds of glory and of shame; the revolution of worlds and of thought; the rise and fall of nations, as of tides; through which we can deduce the laws by which continents are built up, and suns and planets hung forth as lamps; the laws of growth and decay, of failure and success, of happiness and woe; enabling us not only to recreate the lost past, but with one hand to put aside the veil, and with apocalyptic vision descry the future, too, so that we seem no longer walking as into the night, but make even the darkness light before our steps, and direct our course among the mysteries of life as confidently and unerringly as ever in boyhood through our own father's house.

How all these fading phases of life are copied, and written down, and preserved; where they are stored for our use, and by what secret process of will or association they are made to come forth at our bidding, we may well

leave to what by a sweet euphemism is called philosophy, to which distance and obscurity the great enchantment lend.

Enough for our present purpose to know that the past by some hidden power is made ours; that the events of our lives are thus photographed; our thoughts and feelings recorded, as in sympathetic ink, and the requirements of to-day laid away and guarded, as by some faithful servitor, to be handed forth at our call and desire; that thus alone are reason and intelligence made possible, and life worth the living. And to us, as teachers, it becomes a matter of the first importance to understand the true relation of the memory to the other powers, that we may not undervalue it, as the great storehouse of the mind, and by neglect allow our pupils to become little better than mental tramps, calculating without capital, and restless with no resources; or, by our overestimate or misapprehension, make of them miserly paupers, hugging their intellectual hoards to their hungry hearts, wonders in dreary details and dates and dry statistics, but worthless for any productive work, or for any service to society.

It is this memory by which the child in the first waking of its intelligence learns to discern the mother's face, and by associating with it the little joys and pleasures which love and sympathy have been able to bestow, ere long to distinguish the sound, the spoken name by which the ever-present heeder of its wants is known, till the word mother, the synonym of all kindness and unselfish faithfulness and unexacting love, becomes the dearest, the tenderest, the truest, and most sacred word in all literature.

It is this by which he is at length enabled correctly to frame his own mysterious babblings, so sweet and so plain to the mother's ever-attentive ear; this by which

« ElőzőTovább »