Next in importance to the inborn nature is the acquired nature which a person owes to his education and training; not alone to the education which is called learning, but to that development of character which has been evoked by the conditions of life.—Dr. H. Maudsley.

We are beginning to realize the responsibilities that rest on each generation of adults in respect of the life evolving around us. It is not merely the structure and texture of civilization that is affected by every passing generation, it is the intrinsic quality of the human life to follow.

We have seen how the laws of heredity largely decide the physical embodiment of the coming lives as a resultant of the reproductive action of parents whether motived by ethical principle or by unrestrained animal passion. We have now to consider the second great human factor in man’s evolution, viz. nurture or education, which depends in its highest terms upon sound knowledge and the application of that knowledge by men and women of the period. In an advanced scientific age, the reproductive forces of man will be socially controlled and guided to the creation of normal, i.e. healthy, physical life; while the whole apparatus of nurture, or the entire range of influence, playing upon childhood, will manifest a rational adaptation of means to a special end, namely, the elevation of humanity.

Adaptation necessarily becomes more difficult with the growing complexities of evolving humanity, but never has man’s intellect been stronger than to-day to grapple with difficult problems, or so furnished with the facts required in dealing with this problem of education.

The marvellous scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century and the practical uses to which these discoveries are put, have created in man a new attitude towards external nature. All Western nations partake of the scientific bent. They are interpenetrated by reverence for science, and are conscious that its method of close observation and study of nature is the direct road to material progress. This bent is influencing school education. There are few thoughtful teachers to-day who do not recognize that some hours spent at intervals in country lanes and fields, on the sea-shore, or in a farm-yard, with children free to observe according to native impulse, when followed by careful instruction concerning the objects observed, are of far more value than weeks of book-learning indoors.

In many parts of America “nature-studies” on this plan are worked into the public school curriculum.^[6] But adaptation implies also a fuller knowledge of the rudimentary faculties which are to be scientifically nurtured, and here again America has taken the lead. In its “child-study” movement, now spreading in this country, an effort is made to apprehend nature’s processes in unfolding mental powers; and the inference is that teachers may thwart progress by traversing the true order of mental development. This clearly indicates the entrance of a scientific spirit into the field of education. It shows regard for the order of nature, willingness to be guided by knowledge of that order, and a conviction that the laws of a child’s inner being must be respected and no arbitrary compulsion exercised in bringing him into harmony with the laws of the environment.

A child’s capacities, however, are not centred in his intellect. On the passional side of his being, his spontaneous impulses of desire, fear, joy, grief, love, hatred, jealousy, etc., have to be studied, and educative forces found for their guidance and control. Moreover, the ultimate aim is not his subjection to fixed rules of life, but the establishment within the heart of the child of a supreme rule over all his passions. And again, every child has characteristics indicative of the course of development undergone by the special race to which he belongs. The geographical position and primitive industry of that race, its conquests and failures in struggling upwards from savagery to a measure of civilization—all have left an impress in specific effects.

In respect of our formal methods of giving instruction there is much that is open to discussion; but the points usually raised are the best means of teaching grammar, history, geography, arithmetic, and so forth, not the far more important question of how best to achieve an all-round development in face of the organic unity and marvellous multiplicity of qualities in the child of a civilized race. Great improvement has taken place in every branch of school teaching both as regards the knowledge of teachers and the methods they adopt in imparting the knowledge; nevertheless, these improvements are minor matters as compared with the general question before us.

During the rise and progress of our industrial system based on individualism, the constant fluctuations of trade, the competing of machinery against human labour, the perpetual danger of getting thrown out of work, the utter failure of thrift as any protection from intermittent poverty—have been factors eminently calculated to produce a highly nervous type of humanity. Children of that type may happily prove bright and eager amid wretched surroundings, but it were folly to expect them to show any impulse towards a high standard of living, any outlook beyond the immediate present, or any inherent check upon action socially immoral.

On the other hand, our city workers have sprung mainly from an agricultural class whose scattered families presented the defects of a low order of life reared in isolation. Many of these defects have been counteracted by segregation within towns, however unfavourable in other directions that may have proved. The close proximity of beings affected by the same fateful conditions, the actual sorrowing and rejoicing together have expanded the emotional nature and engendered true sympathy. Professor Huxley once said, “It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.” Yet we have an immense population of workers, often hungry, and at all times environed more or less by squalor, whose average character is not violent and gross, but distinctly humane.

Turning from the masses to the classes we find some points of difference between the rich and the poor, viz. differences following from the diverse industrial conditions. Leisure, as commanded by the rich, has made mental development possible wherever desire prompted intellectual effort, and the magnificent record of last century’s achievements in discovery of truth, acquisition of knowledge, and promotion of artistic skill, is a gain to the world at large—a gain made possible by accumulation of wealth unequally distributed. But intellectual faculty has frequently been depraved through its devotion to wealth production. The true aims of life are lost sight of by chiefs of industry whose emotional nature has hardened under the daily spectacle of struggling fellow-beings, on whose labour their fortunes are built up. The dignity of useful labour has had no vogue in general education. An opposite principle—that the highest dignity consists in being served by others and in possessing the means of constraining and exploiting the labour of others, is impressed on the children of our classes by the whole play of circumstance around them. The property-sense has become unduly developed, and a selfish mammon-worship holds the place which an altruistic public spirit ought to hold in the inner life of a civilized people. It is true that a showy charity—a patronage by the rich of the poor—is everywhere present throughout society, but that which creates and supports it is a sentiment wholly different from the simple kindness of the poor to the poor. It is without the essential features of that charity that “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not her own ... thinketh no evil.”

Now the scientific spirit of to-day, in observing the uncontrolled play of middle-class children, has discovered how great is their interest and joy in the spontaneous exercise of the faculty of make-believe. Costly toys will readily be thrown aside to take part in a game of “pretended” housekeeping or shopkeeping, or acting the part of father, mother, nursemaid, or cook. And herein there lies, says one of our advanced teachers, “a powerful hint how to keep children’s attention alive while cultivating to the utmost their imaginative, observing, constructive and correlating faculties. We must dramatize our school education and connect school ideally with real life.” (Mr. Howard Swan; his introductory lecture at the opening of Bedford Park School.)

But the “powerful hint” goes deeper. It points to an instinct or a deeply implanted desire and capacity for actual work on the part of children of a practical race. To play at work is pleasurable, to do work more pleasurable still. Yet in blindness to the fact that in drawing out into action every rudimentary faculty favourable to happy life lies the true path of education or an all-round development, society has shut off middle and upper-class children from the sight and hearing of household labour. In nurseries, amid artificial toys, their daily routine is to seek amusement self-centred; and as in these days of small rather than large families, nursery children are often solitary, there is a systematic repression both of natural activities and infolded natural emotions. The same repressions are carried forward into school life. Dramatized teaching may connect school ideally with real life, but it cannot satisfy a child’s cravings for the real, and the companionship of children of similar age will never call out the complex forces of a many-sided emotional nature. It is not playing at life that is required for education, it is the sharing of life’s duties of service, and constant opportunity given for the practice of varied humanities.

The children of our superior workers may perchance fare better if the mother is a capable woman, and the home not overcrowded. The lighter parts of her work are shared by the little ones, and to help mother in sweeping and dusting, washing cups and saucers, and placing them neatly in the cupboard, etc., are not only interesting and useful occupations, they are educative, for they imply a simultaneous training of the eye, the fingers, the mental faculties and the heart. But overcrowding, the miserable housing of the poor, and the early age at which infant school-life begins, makes such home-training difficult even to the best of mothers, while to the upper classes—frost-bound in artificial domestic customs, all home-training seems impossible.

Nothing, however, should deter a student of evolution from proclaiming that the home-life of our people will largely decide the nation’s future. Unless the great problem of the housing of the poor is rightly solved, and unless educated women become roused to the necessity of a changed home-life in the interests of their children, and set themselves voluntarily to the task of domestic reform within their own circle, the social state can never be greatly improved.

All children born in a civilized nation have a right to education. That this principle has been fully acknowledged is evidenced by our Educational Acts and the innumerable Board Schools that stud the country. But as long as population among the masses rises without check, the highest aim of education, viz. the development and elevation of individual character must, as regards their children, remain in abeyance. The only practicable line of action is to gather them together into large schools, and while bestowing general instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., to subject them to some hours of systematic guidance and control. This signifies obedience to rule and order—a useful discipline to juveniles of Bohemian nature, and it is the only method of restraining tendencies to licence, without rousing a spirit of revolt. Fresh air, wholesome food, ample bathing, and the play of sunlight and colour upon nerves of sensation—these stimulate bodily health, while music, and the personal influence of high-minded teachers, throw into vibration finer nerves of sensibility, and elevate the mental and moral tone. But beyond this point, large schools are incapable of scientific adaptation to the needs of a modern education in a rapidly socializing community.

It was in the year 1837 that there issued from the press a work on education written by Isaac Taylor, who there lays down this proposition: “If large schools were granted to be generally better adapted to the practical ends of education than private instruction, the welfare of society on the whole demands also the other method. The school-bred man is of one sort, the home-bred man of another—the community has need of both. Hence no tyranny of fashion is more to be resisted than such as would render a public education compulsory and universal.”^[7] Notwithstanding this warning, the tyranny of fashion is carrying us yearly more and more into the production of school-bred women, as well as school-bred men. Our girls’ high schools are replicas of our boys’ public schools, and society suffers still more from the loss of the home-bred woman than the home-bred man.

Again, the late Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson, in his charmingly-written Day-dreams of a Schoolmaster, gives us the fruits of a ripe experience gained during twelve years of boyhood in a large public school, and many years of manhood as teacher of classics in schools and university. His boyhood, he tells us, was dreary because of the monotonous routine. He was “fed on dull books, and the manuals were in many cases mere tramways to pedantry. His mental training was a continuous sensation of obstruction and pain. His spiritual parts were furrowed.” (Observe, there were no nature-studies at that period.) The incitement to effort was the cane or the tawse, and flogging, he believes, never instils courage, it has transformed many a boy into a sneak. “Let us discard punishment,” says the Professor, “and endeavour to make our pupils love work.” The whole educational system in his day was mechanical and artificial, yet when he strove to initiate new methods the boys were withdrawn from his charge. Parents understood little of true education. They were slaves to custom. “How is it,” he asks, “that fathers with a personal experience like my own send their boys to school?” He answers: “They say to themselves, ‘Depend upon it if there were no virtue in birching and caning, in Latin verses and Greek what-you-may-call-’ems, they would not have held their ground so long amongst a practical people like ourselves!’ So Johnnie is sent to the town grammar school and the great time-honoured gerund-stone turns as before, and will turn to the last syllable of recorded time.” For the gerund-stone he would substitute an easy vivâ voce conversational method of instruction in all elementary classes, and throughout the school; for coercion, the more than hydraulic pressure of a persistent, continuous gentleness.

Thirty years before the Day-dreams was published, one writer at least was open-eyed to the defects of school education. He charged parents with adopting the new boarding-school system because it spared them some responsibility, and children were apt to be teasing and importunate. “Boys advance at school quickly,” he said, “in knowledge of the auxiliary verbs, the mysteries of syntax and the stories of gods and goddesses; but I am confident that the reason why women generally are so much better disposed than men is this: they live domestically and familiarly. They are penetrated with the home-spirit, they are imbued with all its influences, their memory is not fed to plethora while the heart is left to waste and perish. No daughter of mine shall ever be sent to school; at home the heart, wherein are the issues of all good, develops itself from day to day. There children ripen in their affections. There they learn their humanities, not in the academic sense, but in the natural and true one.”^[8]

Where, alas! do we find to-day the daughters of the classes who are not sent to school? Our girls’ high schools overflow; and that, not by the action of State control, but by the voluntarily assumed yoke and tyranny of fashion. Girls emerging from these schools are not “so much better disposed than men.” They are certainly not domesticated and imbued with a home-spirit. They may have gained in refinement—even to fastidiousness! and in the knowledge of Latin and Greek, or what is called the higher culture, but they are characterized generally by a spirit of pleasure-seeking. They become, in many cases, what has aptly been called “nonsense women, prepared only to lead butterfly lives.”

Now, parents who shirk the responsibility and effort entailed in shaping their children’s characters to the best of their ability can only expect their own self-indulgence to become intensified in the lives of their children. Let me not, however, be here misunderstood. The movement for the higher education of women is a step forward in civilization. Many women are born with great mental capacity, and without the specific intellectual culture now obtainable the world would lose much, while the nonexercise of such native powers creates inward misery. But culture, according to Matthew Arnold, implies the study of perfection, and the late Professor Huxley’s ideal is expressed as follows:—“That man has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is clear, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who—no stunted ascetic—is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learnt to love all beauty, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. Such an one and no other has had a liberal education, for he is as completely as man can be in harmony with nature.” (An Address at South London Working Men’s College, January, 1869.)

Childhood is characterized by sensational activity. The reflective and reasoning powers lie comparatively dormant. Mobile sensibility is the distinguishing feature of childhood, and parents and teachers taking advantage of the law of nature whereby pleasurable sensation stimulates growth should train children step by step to the enjoyment of useful activities, to physical and manual dexterity; to simple efforts in pursuit of knowledge; to infantile firmness in discharge of duty; to unconstrained dignity in defence of the right, and sympathetic jealousy over the rights of others; to gentleness towards all mankind; to admiration of all that is noble in character, to veneration of age, experience and virtue; and to the love of truth and justice and personal devotion to both. These are the qualities of human nature that make for real civilization; and further progress requires their steady development in the race.

Now, these qualities cannot be evoked by school methods nor even by the easy vivâ voce conversational instruction proposed by Professor Thompson. An indispensable factor in the process is a rich, full, domestic environment, an atmosphere suffused with affection and vibrating with varied activities—a home-life, in short, where the delicate qualities of noble character will not be commanded to come forth, but will come of themselves through the play of circumstance, i.e. by the action of example and gentle sympathetic co-operation.

In upper-class houses, even where wealth and luxury abound, there are none of the diverse and liberal domestic surroundings conducive to early training. The first essential is that the nurseries be freed from all physical, mental and moral forces that belong to a comparatively primitive stage of evolution. Nurses drawn from the masses—however carefully selected—are incompetent by nurture for training infants in the best way. The authority they have known has been archaic, and elements of barbarism have been near them from babyhood, while education as yet has done little to raise their intelligence to the plane of civilized thought. Hence an ordinary nurse, of kindly and affectionate disposition, may seriously misdirect the budding conscience of a babe, as I have shown in my chapters on Emotional Life.

To women of great attainments and culture the training of infancy properly belongs, and that training in the homes of the classes will be of the highest value to the State. The problem of how to create in childhood a ready obedience to authority without jarring the nerves, or checking freedom unnecessarily, is a very difficult one. It requires a cultured intelligence to grasp the problem and carry out the true method of its solution. The aim in the training of infancy is to develop superior types of men and women by evoking the higher qualities of human nature in a sphere of comparative liberty. A babe in the nursery, let us say, has had his attention caught by the flames leaping up in the well-guarded grate. He creeps towards them and pushes his fingers through the wires of the guard. The educated nurse gently lifts him to a safe distance, but he starts creeping again to the fire. Now there are in the nursery some baskets of different size and depth, all softly lined and weighted. Baby is put into one of these to amuse himself with a toy until the fascinating flames are forgotten.

An older child flings her ball in another child’s face. Nurse tells her the ball might hurt, but on persistence in the selfish amusement she, too, is firmly placed in a larger basket or nursery prison, and must stay there till the impulse to be disobedient has passed off; for the principle which guides nurse in the training of these infants is this: liberty abused must be abridged.

After a few such experiences the little ones feel that a network is around them—a network of authority never physically painful and that has no connection with anger.

As the reasoning powers develop they feel that liberty is theirs in the straight course of obedience to authority, and later they find that this authority represents a knowledge of the laws of nature, for when in garden and field they join in the nature-study lessons, they discover that if plants creep into unfavourable conditions, they languish; if animals run counter to laws of health, they suffer and die.

From nursery to home-training the infants pass forward. Their nerves have never been irritated by harshness, nor their affections repressed, and their impulses to unhurtful activities are of normal strength. In the more advanced training now given, the aim is no longer to impress automatically, but rationally to guide the growing intelligence. Blind obedience is not required, but every command is explained and related to the facts of happy and healthful life. At this point a discriminating judgment is profoundly necessary, and the child should be studied individually, for to each there comes the right moment when self-rule is possible, and unless outward restraints are wisely withdrawn that power of self-rule may be injured.

The human types to be desired are not slavish, but independent beings, capable of noble service to God and man; and choosing to do right because they know true happiness lies that way.

At sixteen or upwards the young thus trained may safely leave home for high school or university, in pursuit of the special instruction required for their future career. An education that has laid the foundation of noble character, comes to no abrupt conclusion. The love of truth when firmly implanted prompts to the acquisition of new knowledge, and knowledge is boundless as the universe. Fields of science become the happy hunting-ground of minds that are markedly intellectual, and although self-culture supersedes formal instruction, and original research supersedes the following of authority, education moves continuously and steadily forward.

“The environment,” says Clifford Harrison, “that lies open to men rationally developed is as vast as the ideal that lies before them. This environment is not a spiritual matter merely; not of the soul alone, but of body, mind, soul and spirit; not of heaven only, but of earth as well; not of eternity and a beyond, but of time and here.”