ART. III.-PRACTICAL REMARKS ON POPULAR EDUCATION. By A SCHOOLMASTER. No. 3.

Things wanted.

TOWARDS the termination of my last paper I ventured to make the suggestion, that in teaching the young in our popular schools to know themselves, it was of consequence that we should communicate to them some first notions at least, of the qualities of the human mind, of its healthful and unhealthful states, and the conditions on which its sound action is known to depend. I consider such instruction to be of so much importance, that I wish distinctly to mark the opinion, by placing it in the prefront of my present communication. It is not, however, impossible that this opinion, and others which I have advanced, may have led some to consider me as somewhat of an educational visionary. I have certainly no wish to be so deemed. At the same time I do not profess to feel any great anxiety about the results which may ensue to myself from the temperate enunciation of my deliberate convictions. How dear soever I may regard the favourable estimate of my fellow men, truth, and frankness of speech must be held by me dearer still. Nor would I knowingly give utterance to any opinion, especially on so important a subject as that which occupies our thoughts from any other consideration than an assured conviction of its truth, and a high estimate of its value. There is already but too much affectation of educational novelty in society. I know not whether there is any thing in the subject itself which invites and favours such affectation, but every great educational reform has been attended by a larger share of pretension than falls to the lot of other social transitions. In Athens these empty and showy declaimers, the sophists, who would prove for you almost any thing from any premises, make the worse appear the better reason, and upturn the grounds and pervert the practice of morality itself, appear from the keen exposures which we have of them from the lips of Socrates and the pens of his disciples, to have availed themselves of the educational excitement of their day, to trade in large promises and extravagant pretensions, which they had scarcely the will, even if they had the ability to perform. The revival of letters throughout Europe, was another great educational crisis, which presented similar empirical displays. Public disputation became a prevailing passion. Men undertook to teach every thing by short cuts, as if by patent inventions-to adopt the words of the great satirist as well as moral painter of his day

words which he puts into the mouth of Bianca's music-master in his "Taming of the Shrew,"

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And how splendid soever may have been the talents-how extensive soever the attainments of the Admirable Crichton, we at this time of day cannot but think there was no small degree of empiricism in a man, who, though he died at the early age of twenty-two, professed himself before the most learned bodies of Europe ready to dispute in all the sciences, to answer any questions, and to repel any objections either by logic or a hundred kinds of verse, or by analytical investigations and mathematical figures;" and who, in addition to skill in corporeal exercises, held himself out as a proficient in music, and in no fewer than ten languages, which, says a biographer, "were as familiar to him as his mother-tongue."

Not dissimilar grandeur of profession have we at the present day. Read the cards of terms and the advertisements which are put forth. Persons who are unable to write grammatically, undertake to teach grammar,-who cannot follow out on paper a correct sequence of ideas, offer themselves as instructors in logic; persons who know scarcely more of the sciences than their names, the very pronunciation of which some are not masters of, profess to expound for the edification of the young, the mysteries of "the Globes," as it is phrased, Astronomy, Algebra, Mensuration, Book-keeping, Stenography, and as many other branches as you choose, each and all by methods no less expeditious than infallible. Surely there must be men with whom knowledge comes by intuition, and skill in teaching is an instinct; with whom the old Platonic doctrine, that we bring into the world with us ideas gained in our previous state of existence, is established by happy experience, and the obvious facts of the case; for as to the orthodox and rugged way of learning before you teach, their genius is of too transcendent a nature for such antiquated drudgery. No matter what their former calling, nor what their former failures, they are now expert at every science, and deeply read in every tongue, or, as Sly describes himself in the same drama

"I, Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton-heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker

they have passed through as many transmutations as Pythagoras himself could have imagined, and improving at every turn, have at last "jumped Jim Crow," the schoolmaster, and keep each a "mathematical, classical, and commercial academy, where proficient scholars in every branch are produced with the productiveness of steam, and the velocity of railroads.

It is not least among the services which that inimitable satirist, the author of "Nicholas Nickleby," has rendered to the cause of true knowledge and unsophisticated feeling, that in his unsparing anatomy of schools of the Greta Bridge class, he lays open Mr. Squeers' "new practical method" of teaching the sciences:

We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular educational system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour : w-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It's just the same principle as the use of the globes.—Where's the second boy ?'—' Please, sir, he's weeding the garden,' replied a small voice. To be sure,' said Squeers, by no means disconcerted; so he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottiney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottiney is a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows 'em. That's our system, Nickleby; what do you think of it ?" "

It is an indication of a return to a sounder state of things, that people begin to entertain educational novelties with suspicion; and though all such terms as visionary, quixotic, and innovation, are two-edged tools, and may be made to discountenance the good as well as the bad, yet society is in a hopeful state when it becomes sensible of the impositions which are attempted to be practised upon it, and the pioneers of its way, its satirists, cover existing fudge with merited contempt.

To persons whose minds have been chiefly engaged in noting the contrast, the humiliating contrast, which exists between what is often professed, and what is effected by even the more costly of our present educational establishments, the outline I have given of a course of popular training, may well appear impracticable; and certainly I too think it impracticable with our actual instrumentality. I therefore proceed to point out what appear to me some indispensable pre-requisites. A thorough educational reform must of necessity be slow in coming, and it can never come till certain existing influences undergo an entire change.

And first, the mind of the public at large must be more enlightened than it is at present. Education is for the most part

an internal work and an internal result. Its greatest achievements are not in the dexterity of the fingers, but in the sound, vigorous and well-balanced action of the mind itself-not so much in any actual acquirement of knowledge-as the possession of internal power, of a well disciplined and a well-regulated mind-in habits of steady and sustained application, in activity and precision of thought, in the ability to investigate, acquire, to turn knowledge to account: in the language of Milton on another subject," to know and hence to do." Now these are educational results for which an uninformed, or a superficially-informed public can have little or no estimate, and little or no appreciation. They are too much internal for them to see or value. They are therefore results for which there is no effectual demand. It is that which is palpable to sense which they admire, and what they admire they naturally seek for. Display in consequence imposes upon the public mind. Large pretensions are taken at even more than their full value. I am just old enough to remember, that at the termination of the last war, eight and twenty shillings were secretly given for a guinea. The public have often done worse in regard to education; they have paid in gold more than its current price for paper-money. Hence educational speculators swarm over the land. Imposing manners are preferred to solid acquirements, and loud professions to aptness to teach. The wider the range of knowledge offered to their acceptance, and the shorter the time required for its communication, the greater the popularity, especially if to a scorn of established methods there is added a bold claim of novelty, and around the whole is thrown a veil of German mysticism. The remedy for these current evils can be found only in an improvement of the public intelligence. Education is in its nature one of those things of which the ordinary purchasers are, in actual circumstances, least able to judge. The great patrons of education are to be found in the middle classes, among our shopkeepers, merchants-persons who for the most part possess money and good feeling-the means of usefulness which industry affords, and a wish to turn their means to a good account-but who are too generally unable to appreciate the quality of the article they desire to possess themselves and to communicate to others. Can we wonder then that the supply corresponds with the demand? and how can we improve the article brought to market, except we improve the taste and enlarge the intelligence of the customers? I do not of course mean that superior minds may not influence for the better the course of school education-but I do mean that this process of improvement is tardy and not altogether seen-while

there can be no doubt that if parents and patrons become duly sensible of the kind of education that the young ought to receive, our educators will not fail to fit themselves for the duties of their office, or give way to less incompetent men. In medicine we have a case in point. What has become of the solemn air of pretension under which ignorance not very long since veiled its insufficiency? The bag-wig, the gold-headed cane, the important and mysterious air of the old-fashioned physician, has descended into that limbo of social follies into which educational quackery is, I trust, destined to hasten. What intelligence has done in one case it will not in time fail to effect in the other. But this leads me to

A second requisite; Medical practice owes no small part of the reformation it has undergone to the prevalence of improved modes of education, and the establishment of suitable tests of ability, in the profession itself. It has done much by its own efforts to redeem its character, to raise the practice into the dignity of a profession. And so-one of our first duties will be to educate our educators, and to adopt the necessary means for ascertaining that those who aspire to the office are competent to discharge its duties. It appears from the evidence of Dr. Kay before the Educational Committee of the House of Commons, that out of 1375 teachers engaged in the towns of Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Bury, and York, in the education of the young of the poorer classes, only 130-130 out of 1375-one-tenth, had received any education for their employment. And of the comparatively few teachers that the normal school connected with the British School Society trains for the work of education, the average of time which they remain under instruction, we learn from Mr. Dunn's evidence before the same Committee, does not extend beyond three, or at the utmost four months. With great propriety might Mr. Dunn assert that such a period was quite insufficient. "The question," he goes on to say, "the question often is, shall we send out a man with four months' training, or shall we let them have a man with no training at all." Up to this time or nearly so, the education of our educators has been left almost exclusively to chance. It is true that a large share of the work of education -especially of the higher education, is in the hands of ministers of religion who are generally men of more or less knowledge and cultivation. But the cases are rare indeed in which any person is able to discharge adequately the duties of two professions; and the ministers of religion, how much soever they may labour to turn their knowledge to account in the work of education, have not received a training specifically for the pur