A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education. Gall James

CHAP. III.

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On the Means by which Nature enables her Pupils to acquire Knowledge.

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      The second stage of the pupil's advance under the teaching of Nature is that in which she prompts and assists him in the acquisition of knowledge.—The importance of this department of a child's education has uniformly been acknowledged;—so much so, indeed, that it has too frequently absorbed the whole attention of the Teacher, as if the possession of knowledge were the whole of education.—That this is a mistake we shall afterwards see; because the value of knowledge must always be in proportion to the use we can make of it; but it is equally true, that as we cannot use knowledge till we have acquired it, its acquisition as a preliminary step is of the greatest importance. Our intention is at present, to enquire into the means employed by Nature, for enabling her pupils to acquire, to retain, and to classify their knowledge; so that, by ascertaining and imitating her methods, we may in some degree share in her success.

      For some time during the early years of childhood Nature is the chief, or the only Teacher; and the contrast between her success at that time, and the success of the parent or teacher who succeeds her, is very remarkable, and deserves consideration.

      When we examine this process in the case of infants, we see Nature acting without interference, and therefore with undeviating success. Within a few months after the child has attained some degree of consciousness, we find that Nature, under every disadvantage of body and mind, has succeeded in communicating to the infant an amount of knowledge, which, when examined in detail appears very wonderful.—The child has been taught to know his relations and friends; he has acquired the ability to use his limbs, and muscles, and organs, and the knowledge how to do so in a hundred different ways. He has become familiar with the form, the colour, the texture, and the names of hundreds of articles of dress, of furniture, of food, and of amusement, not only without fatigue, but in the exercise of the purest delight, and with increasing energy. He has begun to contrast objects, and to compare them; and this capacity he evinces by an undeviating accuracy in choosing those things which please him, and in rejecting those things which he dislikes. But above all, the infant, along with all this substantial knowledge, has been taught to understand a language, and even to speak it. The fact of all this having been accomplished by a child of only two or three years of age, is so common, that the mysterious principles which it involves, are too generally overlooked. We thoughtlessly allow them to escape observation, as if they were mere matters of instinct, and were to be ranked with the spider's catching its prey, or the sparrow's building its nest. But the principles which regulate these different operations are perfectly dissimilar. In the case of the spider and the sparrow there is no teaching, and, of course, no learning. Their first web, and their first nest, are as perfect as the last; but in the case of the infant, with only two or three exceptions, there is nothing that he does, and nothing that he knows, which he has not really learned—acquired by experience under the tuition of Nature, by the actual use of his own mental and physical powers.

      The benefits accruing to education, from successfully imitating Nature in this department of her process, will be incalculable; not only in adding to the amount of knowledge communicated, but in the ease and delight which the young will experience in acquiring it. All must admit that the pleasure, as well as the rapidity, of the educational process in the young, continues only during the time that Nature is their teacher;—and that her operations are generally checked, or neutralized by the mismanagement of those who supersede her work, and begin to theorize for themselves. The proof of this is to be found in the fact, that although a child is much less capable of acquiring knowledge between one and three years of age, than he is between eight and ten; yet, generally, the amount of his intellectual attainments by his school exercises, during the two latter years, bears no proportion to those of the former, when Nature alone was his teacher. In the one case, too, his knowledge was acquired without effort or fatigue, and in the exercise of the most delightful feelings;—in the other, quite the reverse.

      That we shall ever be able to equal Nature in this part of her educational process, is not to be expected; but that, by following up the principles which she has developed, and imitating the methods by which she accomplishes her ends, we shall become more and more successful, there can be no doubt. The method, therefore, to be adopted by us is, to examine carefully the principles which she employs with the young, through the several stages of her process, and then, by adopting exercises which embody these principles, to proceed in a course similar to that which she has pointed out.

      In prosecuting this plan, then, our object must be, first, to examine generally the various means employed by Nature, in the acquisition of knowledge by the young—and then to attend more in detail to the mode by which she applies the principles involved in each.

These general means appear to consist of four distinct principles, which, for want of better definitions, we shall denominate "Reiteration," "Individuation, or Abstraction," "Grouping, or Association," and "Classification, or Analysing."[2]

      The first is the act of "Reiteration," of which we have already spoken, as the chief instrument in cultivating the powers of the mind, and without which, we shall also find, there can be no acquisition of knowledge. The second is the principle of "Individuation," by which Nature communicates the knowledge of single ideas, or single objects, by constraining the child to concentrate the powers of its mind upon one object, or idea, till that object or idea is familiar, or, at least, known. The third is the common principle of "Grouping, or Association," and appears to depend, in some degree, on the imaginative powers, by which a child begins to associate objects or truths together, after they have become individually familiar; so that any one of them, when afterwards presented to the mind, enables the pupil at a glance, to command all the others which were originally associated with it. The fourth is the principle of "Classification, or Analysing," by which the mind distributes objects or truths according to their nature—puts every truth or idea, as it is received, into its proper place, and among objects or ideas of a similar kind. This classification of objects is not, as in the principle of grouping, regulated according to their accidental relation to each other, by which the canary and the cage in which it is confined would be classed together; but according to their nature and character, by which the canary would be classified with birds, and the cage among other articles of household furniture. All knowledge, so far as we are aware, appears to be communicated and retained for use, by means of these four principles; and we shall now proceed to examine the mode in which each of them is employed by Nature for that purpose.