The Press. — London, England, 1856-10-25 00:00:00

OCTOBER 25, 1856 MODERN EDUCATION AND GENERAL READING. THE Rev. Dr. BOOTH, F.R.S., delivered the opening address at the Hitchin Mechanics' Institution. The subject was the present aspect of education in this country, and the probable future phases of its development. In his lecture at Lewes, alluded to in THE PRESS, Sept. 27, Dr. Booth dwelt on the diffi culties which beset the path of the learner, and impede his progress. Having endeavoured to show on that occasion how a young man should lesrn, his object on this occasion was to discuss what it is he ought to learn. Dr. Booth commenced by remarking that the range of knowledge is now becoming so vast, so entirely beyond the compass of any one man's comprehension, however ample his leisure or un tiring his industry, however tenacious his memory or intuitive his intellect, that no one can hope to master more than a small portion. The practical question with which they had to deal was this, "On what principle were they to make their selection?" He was opposed to a diffuse unreflective system of light reading. Let them believe him, it was much better, under every point of view, to know two or three subjects well than to have a loose, rambling sort of notion as to what several were about. That was no needless caution at the present day, when a diligent sitter out of lectures might during a session assist at discourses on astronomy and astrology, optics and clairvoyance, medicine and mesmerism, mining and music, electricity and animal magnetism, geology, conchology, physiology, and a heap of other ologies in addition : man was not at all the more clearheaded, or even the better informed, for having all this farrago and jumble of odds and ends, of bits and scraps of knowledge shot into his memory, as a carter shoots rubbish into waste ground. A man's mind which receives impressions in this way is no better than the sheet on which one may see dissolving views thrown in a chromatic exhibition. The figures mix, and blend, and fade into each other; while, on the other hand, if you look through a telescope, although the objects you examine are but few, you recollect how bright and distinct they are, how precise their outlines, how sharp their edges. Much better is it for the traveller to have ex ict information about a few prominent distant objects by the help of a glass, than to gaze at a whole country's side through a haze or fog. Bishop Butler had observed on this point:—" The great number of books and papers of amusement which, of one kind or other, daily come in one's way, have in part occasioned, and most perfectly fall in with and humour, this idle way of reading and con sidering thigs. By this means time, even solitude, is got rid of without the pain of attention ; neither is any part. of it more to be put to the account of idleness, or spent with less thought, than a great part of that which is spent in reading." And to the same effect by another great authority :—" Nothing," says Dugald Stewart, " has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers of invention, but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of extensive and various reading without reflection. The activity and force of the mind ore gradually impaired in consequence of disuse, and not unfrequently all our principles and opinions come to be lost in the in finite multiplicity and discordancy of our acquired ideas." These were important points to be settled by those who proposed to consider their own im provement ; and to the question so ably put by Lord Ashburton, at the Society of Arts dinner last sum mer, " Man's wants are boundless ; his means of carriage are small; life is short—school-time is still shorter—knowledge is infinite ;—what shall his pack of knowledge be ?" two general principles might be offered in reply. First, that the knowledge in question may be used as an instrument of intellec tual development, as an exercise of the understand ing ; and secondly, that this knowledge may be capable of practical application. The acquisition of knowledge which would not stand these tests need not be regarded. As an illustration, Dr. Booth ad vanced the neglect in the present day of the study of the old logic of the schoolmen Why is this? Because the study of logic has failed in this characteristic ; because it has been hustled cut of its place by studies of more palpable utility. Logic may have strengthened the grasp, may have nerved the intellectual muscle ; but it provided no well-defined mental engine, like mathematical analysis, or the doctrine of atomic weights, which enabled their possessors to master the stubborn resistance of nature. Your labourers in the Seld do not practise gymnastics, because they sensibly feel that their daily toil gives them quite enough of muscular exer tion. So, in our own day, men cannot afford the titre to whet their wits on barren studies, no more than our mer chants can afford to take exercise of a morning by walking, when they are forced to rush into town by the rail. Again, a knowledge of Roman law would be a most useful ac• quirement; but how can any one give his whole time to it, while new discoveries in knowledge are matters of daily expectation? Dr. Booth then alluded to the principle of a classical education. He was opposed to that excessive devo tion to the classics, so prominent a feature in the THE PRESS. education of all boys alike, no matter what their future profession : I speak of the study of Greek and Latin in commercial schools. We all of us know that it is no uncommon thing for a boy to spend five or six years of the most valuable, because the most impressible, period of his life in getting by heart the rules of a language he is never to have the good fortune to learn; to waste his energies in putting up a scaffolding for a building of which he is never to lay a single stone. What can be more ridiculous than that a boy who is intended to work at a trade, or to serve out goods behind a counter, should stupify himself in getting by heart dead rules and exploded forms ? exploded by a more recent and deeper insight into the mechanism of language Sydney Smith puts this point very forcibly and wittily. " Cicero, in his ' Offices,' " says the reverend reviewer, " tells a whimsical anecdote of Cato the Censor. Somebody asked him what was the best mode of employing capital? He sail, To farm good pasture land. What next ? To farm middling pasture land. Well, but after that, what the next? To farm bad pasture land." Now, the notions which prevail in England respecting classical learning seem to me to resemble very much those which the old Roman entertained with regard to his favourite method of cultivation. Is a young man able to spare the time nece•s iry to enable him to pass through the Univer- sity ? Make him a good classical scholar. But a second, instead of residing at the University, must go into business when he leaves school. Make him a tolerable classical scholar. A third has still less time to snatch up knowledge, and is destined for active employment while still a boy. Make him a bad clas- sical scholar. If he does not become a Porson or a Heyne, he may learn to write nonsense verses. If he does not get on to Horaze he may read the first book of Caesar. If there is not time for such a degree of improvement, he may at least be flogged through that immemorial vestibule of learning—Otis (keel : who teacheth ? Magisler docet the master teacheth. Would to heaven that he taught something better worth knowing. To those intended for the universities of course a thorough classical education was necessary, but even under those circumstawes he objected to a boy being kept fi'e or six years plodding over unintelligible rules of grammar and syntax : Would not a boy exer,:ise his memory quite as well, and somewhat more profitably, in getting by heart the beauties of Shakespeare, Milton, and our other classical English authors, as in grubbing his way through qua genus or as in present, or the Eton Latin Grammar, or such like, to him unintelligible stuff? Oh, but some will say, a knowledge of classics, however slight, improves one's English style. Now this, too, I question. If a tithe of the pains which are bestowed on the minutia:, on the refinements, on the elegancies of Greek and Latin prose, and verse too, which is even still more absurd—were the same labour and study, I say, expended on the acquisition of a pure, manly, vigorous, graceful, and idiomatic English style, we should not have so much incorrect, slipshod slang, as is daily written amongst us. The man who would blush at being detected using a phrase of doubtful Latinity writes with out compunction or hesitation any sort of shambling English that comes uppermost. Those old Greeks. whom we in vain attempt to rival, who were masters of the art of composition to a degree of perfection which has never since been equalled, knew no language but their own, and despised every other. To perfect and polish the Greek language they bestowed all their care, and thst care was not bestowed in vain. Instead of copying their results we should strive rather to follow their mode of procedure. Dr. Booth then referred to the change taking place in the learned professions clerical, legal, or medical—each of which showed symptoms of decay. The main support of England's industrial and commercial prosperity lay in that vast variety of industrial employment, those unnamed and unrecognised productive professions which ate unknown to the Earl Marshal, and which have neither station nor precedence in the herald's pro. gramme. Of these are the men who go forth and build the aqueduct, and level the railroad, and lay down the electric telegraph along the trackless wild, or submerge it beneath the ocean. Of these are the men who are the true pioneers of civilisation." Dr. Booth concluded his lecture with a few pt actical remarks upon "quick readers " upon the right method of reading a book, and with a summary of his views upon national education : Many persons, especially those who are called quick readers, have a notion that when they get through a hook, as they do through an article in the newspaper, they have mastered the contents of the book. They have fallen far short of anything of the kind. To read a book so as to expect to acquire any knowledge of it, you must deal with it as a lawyer does with a brief. You must pencil-mark the important passages, underscore the points which the author makes, interline his arguments, and bracket his propositions. Then read the book over again, and make an abstract of it ; a little practice will give you facility ; you will be surprised, in the first place, at the clearness, firmness, and precision of your knowledge of the book ; and, in the next place, you will be astonished at the small ness of the compass within which the essence of a volume of considerable size may be condensed. The process re minds one of those preserved meats in air-tight canisters, which concentrate all the nutritious properties of the flesh and bones into a small compass. When you try this expe riment you will be surprised to find how much, even of the best books, are made up of what the masons call rubble stuff—with matter which is either superfluous, irrelevant, or twaddle ; ao true is the remark of the critic, " Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus." 1027 Now, before I conclude, I would earnestly desire once more to impress this great truth on your minds—and it cannot be too deeply impressed—that your power of learning does not depend so much upon what is called talent and cleverness, but on the ability to bring the whole light of the mind to a point and to keep it there. But this great truth has been overlooked; talent and ability have been praised as if they were the great instruments of success, while power of concentration, a great and rare gift, has been un dervalued as plodding. How often do we hear, " Oh, he is a very clever lad, he sees things at a glance ; I should not be surprised if, one day or other, he became Lord Chan cellor ; ' and of another we hear, '' Oh, he is a man of gi eat genius, of wonderful talent, but he has never applied him self to anything ;" as if his great talents were an excuse for his idleness, and not the very contrary, if there be any truth in the parable of the talents. When some persons one day were extravagantly admiring—if it could be extrava gantly admired—the transcendant genius of Sir Isaac Newton and his wonderful powers of discovery, he replied that the power of patient thinking was the only faculty he was conscious of being superior to other men in. With respect to national education, he was inclined to such a system of industrial training as should permit each child, by a certain amount of labour, to contribute towards the expense of his instruction. The plan was adopted in our reformatories and gaol; why not in our schools ? My argument is briefly this : if education and industrial training can so thoroughly cleanse those who have been dragged through the mire of guilt and crime, how much more ought they to do for those who have never offended, wl ose habits have not been warped. It is easier to keep a tree straight than to make a crooked tree grow straight But you will say, such an education as you refer to fur the whole of our poorer population would be an enormous ex pense. Look at the coat of our reformatories for a few hundred criminals. Extend this system of industrial training to the whole of our working classes and who shall compute the cost? Now, in reply to this objection, I assert that the great principle which ought to underlie every system of national education is this, that every healthy child should contribute a portion of his labour to defray, at least in part, the charge for his school instruction. Let him give value for what he receives. But some ready ohjector will reply, would you have a farm and workshop attached to every national school? would you propose that the child who is now six hours a day at school, and learns but little, should have his time still fdrther curtailed ? Now, I venture to assert this, that a boy who alternates three hours' labour with three hours' learning will make more progress than another who is shut up for the whole six hours in a school-room. This is one of the cases where three added to three do not make six, but sometimes the result is even less than three. This you will easily under stand if you will recollect what I have striven to impress on you, that the amount of knowledge of a given subject which you can acquire does not so much depend on the time you give to it, or on the clearness of your understand. ing, as on the amount of concentrated energy and vigorous attention you bring to bear upon it. MR. RECORDER HILL, Q.C., UPON TICKETS OF LE.iVF.. MR. Q.C., at the opening of the Quarter Sessions at Birmingham on Monday, delivered a powerful defence of the system of tickets of leave. The public feeling was now in favour of a return to transportation. He was opposed to such a " reversal of policy." However imperfectly the law was framFd, and however open to animadversion the manner in which it had been carried into effect, it nevertheless embodied two principles, each founded upon just and enlightened principles of jurisprudence : The first is to enable the criminsl to work nut his free. deco for himself by exhibiting proof that he is an altered man, and that he has become imbued with qualities the absence of which led to his fall. The second, to make the discharge only a conditional restoration to liberty. The causes of the late panic against ticket of leave men lay in a confusion between convicts discharged on tickets of leave, the period of whose sentences had not terminated, and convicts who had been free ab solutely, or, if liberated with tickets of leave, had been out of prison so long that their sentences had expired : It was the confounding, I say, of these descriptions of convicts, and considering them as ticket•ofleave to en, which produced what I may freely call the panic of last winter, throwing the good people of this country in•o a state of mind which placed in extreme danger the perma• nence of a measure having most assuredly the soundest foundation, whatever defects might weaken its superstruc- ture. Happily, the misapprehensions and the fears to which the committee advert have been dispelled. Our advance towards the rational treatment of criminals I as been secured, and a peril has been averted, the magnitude of which we can scarcely over-estimate. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the public had very reasonable grounds for complaint and misgivings. The responsibility of the convict discharged on ticket of leave has been in practice little better than nominal. The rule was to send him to the town or district in which his offence had been commi:ted. but no intimation of his return was conveyed to the police, and consequently they had no means of ascertaining whether he had come out of prison on a ticket of leave or whether he had received an unconditional discharge. In the latter - he - until he committed ticket was liable to recal of State, and by an ;ter event he was subject to no oontr a fresh offence. In the •ormer his ecal at the direction of the Secretary mdoraement on the ticket itself he