Essays on Educational ReformersQuick, Robert Hebert
History
Essays on Educational Reformers
Quick, Robert Hebert
Education -- History; Educators
And yet, though this seems reasonable, we feel that it is not quite
satisfactory. If so much depends in all of us on “admiration, hope, and
love,” we can hardly consider a system of education that entirely ignores
them to be well adapted to the needs of human nature. If Pestalozzi
was right, we must be wrong. We have never supposed the object of the
school to be the development of the faculties of heart, of head, and
of hand, but we have thought of nothing but learning—learning first of
all to read, write, and cipher, and then in “good” schools, one or more
“extra subjects” may be taken up, and a grant obtained for them. The sole
object, both of managers and teachers, is to prepare for the Inspector,
who comes once a year, and from an examination of five hours or so,
pronounces on what the children have learnt.
§ 114. The engineer most concerned in the construction of this machine,
the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, announced that there could be “no such thing
as a science of education;” and as when we have no opinion of our own
we always adopt the opinion of some positive person, we took his word
for it. But what if the confident Mr. Lowe was mistaken? What if there
_is_ such a science, and the aim of it is that children should grow up
not so much to _know_ something as to _be_ something? In this case we
shall be obliged sooner or later to give up Mr. Lowe and to come round to
Pestalozzi.[172] Science is correct inferences drawn from the facts of
the universe; and where such science exists, confident assertions that
it does not and cannot exist are dangerous for the confident persons and
for those who follow them. Even if “there is no such thing as a science
of education,” such a thing as _education_ there is; and this is just
what Mr. Lowe, and we may say the English, practically deny. They make
arrangements for instruction and mete out “the grant” according to the
results obtained, but they totally fail to conceive of the existence of
_education_, education which has instruction among its various agents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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