The Sun.
London, England, 1836-12-31 00:00:00

the College of Maynooth.

The slander c 4 111,1

O'Briens, tlle I:l‘Ghees, and the O'Sulhvans, are besi,

refuted by making the people of England acquainted

with the internal managemr,nit of one of the best con-

ducted public seminaries in Europe.

• far the ablest article in this Number is a
But ~
C't at° Educationin England."
Review of the Present
That it will give mortal offence to few 01(1-fashioned
pedant, at the head of what arc technically called
our " public schools,?? is tertam ; but it is equally mue
that it will make a salutary impression upon the minds
of all persons belonging to the middle classes of society.
The following is an eXtta.i.:t from it :
" The great vices of our existing system arc manifest—
we trust also they are not invincible. We do not begin
sufficiently early—what we teach is generally iiselt,ss—if we
teach, we do not teach long enough. We have abundanee
of mis-education, and our education is too short as well as
too slight. The child is not taken up in time ;it is not the
child of nature or of God that we have to deal with, but
the child of man. On the plea that the infant mind is not
susceptible of education, we allow the infant to mis-educate
itself. We take it soiled and profaned, rather than in the
original brightness of its angelic nature. We prefer to
work a miracle, rather than to follow out the work of God.
We consider children, as if they were always to continue
children ; but those same children whom we so triflingly
treat, form the materials of the future state. Out of those
groups of prattlers are yet to come forth constitutions, per-
haps revolutions ; in all cases, the destinies of yet unborn
millions of men. We complain of the tendency of the
present age to innovation—we iook upon the entire species
as in a state of constant hunger and thirst after anarchy.
If this be the public will, we doubt not it easily find
the opportunity and power to gratify it. The o;21v sure
course is to alter that which may guide the will. The will
of man is not sufficiently educated at present. It is the re-
sult of ideas, thoughts, passions, fixed into habits—these
habits we neglect to fix. We send the child into action
with no will, or a bad will ; we do not create in him a
strong will, and a just will. It is an absurd complaint that
with such a lever we can raise nothing. It is an unjust
complaint against the creature we have mis-fashioned, and
against the education which we did not use. If there be
disturbance in the social machine, it is because we knew
not how before it was put together to shape our machinery.
We carry no forethought—we see no future—we dwell
within ' the body of this death' of present things. No
wonder that vice should be born from such teaching—that
ignorance, and not knowledge, should follow.
" Another cause of the inefficiency of our education, is,
with few exceptions, its inapplicability. We have seen
how amply this defect has been remedied at Hackney-
Wick ; nothing is there done but with a reference to the
future position of the pupil. Not so with us. The majo-
jority of our systems are absolutely aimless : take them at
what grade we may, our schools spend their energies on ob-
jects of quite secondary importance to the pupil, while they
omit principals. We look to the Universities for our future
statesmen. How much of state knowledge, in the shape
of the moral or political sciences, is communicated there ?
Is history, are the laws of our own or other countries, is
social economy, is constitutional instruction, the great com-
ponents of their course ? The classics and the mathema-
tics divide the empire of the young student's mind; they
send him into the world informed but not educated, fitted
only for one state, and a state, too, which is rapidly passing
away. There was a time when a sermon would not be
listened to unless slashed and furbelowed with Latin quota-
tions, which no one understood, A flock would not move
for any one less than a " Latiner." The Houses of our
Legislature exacted a similar tribute. A tag of classicality
was the Shibboleth of the " set." In no other form could
a rising young man make his first debutant bow to the
public, than in a verse from Horace or Virgil. The country
gentlemen reverenced affar off, and listened to avoid scandal.
But these fooleries are dying. Men have the pressure of
stirring times, and an earnest and intelligent population
about them ; they must look to something more real than
these puerile elegancies. A mere measurer of trochaics and
anapaests is not precisely the man to reset the disjointed
state. Not that we at all undervalue classical studies,—
far from it ; we venerate them, we cherish them. We
agree with Schwart, that, next to the Scriptures, the study
of the great models of Greek antiquity is of all others the
most calculated to raise and ennoble the mind. We believe
that its lessons pass from the memory into the understanding,
and from thence into the character and conduct of man ;
vvi, believe that, rightly worshipped, in no narrow and
pitiful scholastic sense, it will raise us into something of
that ideal' which was the aspiration of the great at all
times, and which cannot be too much encouraged as a de-
fence against the Mammonite philosophy of the present.
But this is a study not to be taught from a' Gradus ad
Parnassum,'—it is a spirit not vouchsafed with a Bachelor-
ship of Arts. It is not with Latin or Greek it will stop.
It will fly for congenial food to the great spirits of our own
tongue. It will read the ancients in the moderns. Bacon,
and Milton, and Locke, and Taylor, and Hooker, these
will also be its classics, out of such study of Greek and La-
tin will also grop an English mind. But is this the cha-
racter, the tendency of our actual classical instruction ? Is
it not content with the husks of learning ? does it not glory
in the masks and manacles of words ? How few who do
not admire the frame rather than the picture, and adore the
veil instead of the sanctuary. Even as linguists they are
poor ; for ever on a treadmill, they never advance. Our
best commentators are German, our best Latin writers
have studied abroad. Is it worth spending the best hours
of life to do such trifles so extremely ill ? Such men are
not educated to raise the mind or character of any nation.
In the world, as in the college, they live a life of shadows
and phrases. We want legislation, and not pedantry :
rulers, and not academicians.
" The existence of our middle classes is essentially prac-
tical—' real'—as the Germans would term it ;so also ought
to be their education. It is anything but that. If low, it
ends with reading, writing, and cyphering, and keeping ac-
counts ; that is, with the key, but nothing else. if high, it
is a grammar school—latin, and latin, and nothing more.
But a head manufacturer may not read twenty words of
that language all his life, it lies in his mind as lumber ; it
not only fills but oppresses ; he spends time and labour,
and he gets half knowledge, or no knowledge, or the know,
ledge which he does not want ; what he does want he can-
not get. He has to deal with all sorts of results, chemical-
mechanical, mineralogical—what does he know of any one
of them ? His trade to him is art-magic, or mere mechani-
cal routine ; he blunders often, to be sure, on the right, and
calls it good luck. But there is no good luck for the in-
structed ; he sees, as it were, in the distance his discovery,
and goes on to it by slow but certain steps. He does not
bring out of his situation or means half what they might
produce ; the least degree of appropriate education would
have doubled his power ; but where are we to look for it ?
In this commercial nation, where are we to seek for a truly
commercial school ?
" Our lower classes arc if possible worse off. Schools of
Industry, Hackney-Wicks, there doubtless are—but how
easily can they be counted ! It is the education of this or
that society, not of the nation. The lower classes, for the
most part, are born labourers, and are likely to die labour-
ers : a noble destiny—a most bountiful dispensation, if they
were only taught to think that it was such. It is the using
of one's being—the ennobling consciousness that we have
power—that we have faculties and limbs, and can make
them produce—that we can strive, and can succeed. No
man is exempted from labuur, of one kind or other, or if lie
be, he is to be pitied—he is doomed to a curse. But are
these the maxims upon which our popular education is
founded ? Are these the lessons not preached, but infused ?
Does the child enjoy, or turn to true value, either labour or
relaxation ? Is he taught equally to venerate the alphabet
and the plough ? Is the soil and his own mind placed side
by side, as the source of all manly pleasures and fortunes ?
Does he know, on leaving the school, how to cultivate
either? Is lie taught to raise his physical existence beyond
the scale of his forefathers, to fill up its intervals by mental
enjoyments ? Is he taught the duties of his state ? with
general ideas of vice and virtue, has he any idea of the
peculiar complexion of the vices and virtues of his situation ?
He regards the tillage of the land as a penalty, and reading
and writing, as an instrument only which may enable him
some day to escape from it. In the interval he is an indo-
lent labourer, and a discontented man. Do not say that in
this case, his intellect has been over-cultivated at the expense
of the body—no such thing. Both have been allowed to
lie fallow. Intellect is better exercised on things than
words ; a boy who has got the habit of observation, precise
ideas upon what he sees and hears, who knows how to bring
his stock into use whenever required, is a far better culti-
vator of his intellect than the glibbest reader and writer
in the world ; leave him his reading and writing, and
nothing else, and you will only make him a secretary for
Captain Rock. We confess our ideas of an educated pea-
santry are very different ; they are those of Hackney-Wick :
we should like to see their " learning" in their manner of
turning up the soil and boiling a pot, their " virtues" in the
Christian peace and honesty of a comfortable cottage.home.
No wonder that the opposite course should have jostled the
classes against each other, no wonder there should be vanity,
and discontent, and disorder. Instead of simply but sub-
stantially clothing him, we send him our. cast-off frippery,
and set him up to be stared at by his fellows. The labourer
wants education but in the sense of the labourer ; he wants
a coin that will pass ; teach him to love his situation by
making it a situation to be loved, and you will not require
bayonets to force or keep hint down. It is not the Co-
ercive Statute nor the Poor Law which is order, but every
man in his right place, and every man endeavouring to make
it so. This is not half so difficult as what we are so obsti-
nately pursuing at present ; we are acting in complete con-
tradiction to circumstances and the human mind."