a remark on swiss education

the proper study of mankind is man.—pope.

it has long been my practice, wherever i find myself, to inquire into the provisions made for education, and into the modes of teaching adopted; and, also, by observation, and talking to the people themselves, to do what i can, as far as opportunities go, to collect materials for enabling me to form an opinion on the results and fruits of what has been done. i did this wherever i was on this excursion; and as it was my object in going to zurich to see its polytechnic university, i will here give one of the conclusions i came to on the subject of swiss education.

it was constructed by the swiss to suit their own wants. that it does admirably well. such a system, however, would be very far from suiting equally well that large class amongst ourselves, who are destined for either a public life, or for what may be called the semi-public life of our men of property, and of a large proportion of those whose special work is that of one of 219the learned professions: at all events, both law and divinity, as practised in this country, have direct connections with political life. the swiss, however, are a small, and a poor people, whose affairs are, in the main, managed locally. they have no need of trained statesmen; they have no haute politique. speaking generally, they are a nation of peasant-proprietors, artisans, manufacturers, and tradesmen. at present, in many parts of the country, the only tritons among the minnows are the innkeepers. manufactures, which mean also commerce, are, here and there, introducing a moneyed class; and the hundreds of thousands of pounds, spent every year in the country, by tens of thousands of travellers, are enriching bankers, and, through many channels, many others. now the education such a people requires is one that will make intelligent artisans, intelligent manufacturers, and intelligent tradesmen; and which will give to that portion of the population for whom work cannot be found at home, sufficient intelligence to dispose them to go into foreign countries; and will enable them, when there, to take their bread out of the mouths of the inhabitants of those countries. this is what the swiss system aims at doing. and wherever it is well carried out,—of course this is done much better in the protestant than in the catholic cantons,—it attains its aim. in many of the catholic cantons the people are content to be as their fathers were: they do not 220see very distinctly the advantage of cultivating the intelligence of their children; and it cannot be supposed that the village priest will be very forward in enlightening them on this point.

what the swiss system, true to its object, sets itself to teach is the languages that will be useful in business, arithmetic, mathematics, the principles of the useful arts, and the elements of the sciences. all this is just what will enable the swiss to get on in the careers that will be open to them. they are an intensely practical people; and these thoroughly practical subjects they take care shall be taught sufficiently for the purpose they have in view. they have no idea of not getting their pennyworth for their penny. their philanthropy, and their love of home, the unfailing and fruitful source of so many virtues, make them desirous of giving every chance to their children; and they are interested in, and proud of, and spend their money on, their schools for their children’s sake. all this is just as it should be. it is a very good thing for them; and, as far as it goes, it would be a very good thing for us, if we had the same system at work here. it is exactly what is wanted for nine-tenths of our population; and what they must have if we are to keep our place in the world. but when this shall have been done, if there is ever to be a time when it will have been done, there will still remain one-tenth of our population, a number equal 221to, or greater than, that of the whole swiss nation, which will be capable of receiving, and will need for the life that will be before them, something different from, and higher than, a swiss education.

the swiss system is large and liberal for a tradesman; it almost makes of him a gentleman. but for an english gentleman it would be narrow and illiberal. it would not properly qualify him for the careers that are open to him, and for the life that is before him. it is not the kind of culture that will produce statesmen, jurists, divines, orators, poets, historians, literary lay teachers, or philosophers. if, by the grace of nature, an english boy had been intended for any one of these vocations, to bring him up in the swiss fashion would be to rob him of his birthright: and the more thoroughly the system had been applied to him, the more complete would be the robbery, and the greater the injustice and the injury.

an english gentleman has not been properly qualified for what is his work in life, unless his education has been such as to make him acquainted with the history of man, and with what may be called the sciences of humanity. by the sciences of humanity i mean ethics, economics, polity, jurisprudence, the history of opinion, the history of literature, dialectics, oratory. an acquaintance with these is what, from the first, should be kept in view. they should be worked up to from the beginning of the process, for 222they are the crown and completion of the mental training he will require. they are that training. and this is just what our system, not from intelligent and deliberate design, but from a happy accident, does in some degree attempt. it provides for it in the study of the history of greece and rome, two of the most important and instructive developments of the history of man; and, furthermore, in the direct study of some of the above-mentioned sciences. i say it does this not so much by intelligent design, as by a happy accident, because that it is doing it at this day is merely the result of our having retained the classical system our forefathers established at a time when there was nothing else to teach; and which they established just because there was nothing else to teach then. we may now, knowing what we want, and what materials we have to work with, very much enlarge and improve their system. we may advance from the classics to general history and humanity; of course still retaining the classics, which contain the most important chapters in the history of the fortunes, of the culture, and of the mind of man. and this, which is just what we ought to do, is what, perhaps, we shall do, when we come to understand what it is that gives it its value, and makes it indispensable for us.

another capital defect in a system, such as that of the swiss, is that it does not cultivate, but rather represses and deadens, the imagination. this is the 223instrument of the creative faculty in man, that in which we make the nearest approach to, and which gives to man in the form and degree possible for him, the plastic power that is exhibited to us in the richness, and diversity, of nature. it is this which makes a man myriad-minded; which enables him to look at things from all sides, and to see them in all lights; to regard them as minds most unlike his own regard them; to be in his single self all men to all things; it is what gives insight; and the power of forming accurate and distinct conceptions of things in the three forms of what they actually are, of what they have been, and of what, with reference to other conceptions that have a bearing upon them, they ought to be. a man cannot be a poet, an orator, an artist, hardly an inventor, or discoverer, an historian, or a statesman, without the exercise of this faculty. his rank in any one of these fields of intellectual work will depend on the degree to which it has been developed within him; and the kind of discipline it is under. our system, in a rough, and haphazard, kind of a way, and again more by accident than by intelligent, deliberate design, does something for its cultivation, by the study of the poets and orators of greece and rome; and by attempts at poetical composition. this is good as far as it goes; but insufficient for the great purpose. and this insufficiency of the means we are employing is aggravated, when they have to be applied under the 224direction of masters and tutors, who possibly, and probably, too, have never given a thought to the nature and purposes of the imaginative faculty; and, therefore, are, of course, equally heedless of the right methods of using the means, that happen to be in their hands, for awakening, cultivating, and strengthening it.

its proper cultivation in these times should not be confined to the poetry of the old world. that is valuable, not merely on account of its perfectness of form, but because it is one-sided, unchristian, and narrow. it is the poetry of a small, highly privileged class, when that small class was everything, and the bulk of mankind nothing. it is not the poetry of humanity broadly. the recognition of the humanity of all men equally constitutes one essential difference between the modern and the old world. and this limited, and somewhat abnormal, humanity of the ancient poetry is, furthermore, somewhat unconnected with a knowledge of, and love for, nature—the milieu of man. all this makes it very valuable as a study of a distinct development, under peculiar circumstances, of the poetic faculty. but it is insufficient. it is no substitute for an acquaintance with the poetry of the modern world; which, too, it should follow, and not precede. that is the truer and more normal development. it has additional roots, a wider range, a larger inspiration; it takes cognizance of what is in man, irrespective of conditions, or rather under every condition: and it also 225consciously regards man and nature connectedly; man’s internal nature, and nature external to man, are to its apprehension correlated. here, too, it has received a new revelation.

and the attempt to turn a child’s mind in the direction of nature, and to give him some general acquaintance with nature, and with modern poetry, would be invaluable for another reason: for not only is this now necessary, as an indispensable part of mental culture for all, being a part of the rightful mental inheritance of those whose lot is cast in these times, but because experience has taught us that there are many minds, which have no aptitude for the acquisition of languages, either from some congenital defects, or, as is most probable, from some faults and omissions of early teaching and associations—but whatever may have been in their cases the cause is a matter of no consequence now: the mischief exists, and cannot be removed. still, though deficient to this extent, they may have no disinclination for the study of nature: that, in the young, can hardly be possible. here, then, is something that will enable them to live a not unworthy intellectual life. it is necessary for all: as a part of complete culture for those who are capable of complete culture; and, for those who are not, as a sufficient culture.

the advocates of the continuance—to the extent 226and for the purposes i have indicated—of classical study will labour under a great and unfair disadvantage, as long as the classics shall be taught with but slight perception, on the part of those who teach them, of their bearing on the higher work of the day. as long as the main object of our public schools shall continue to be professedly linguistic, and that, too, in a somewhat narrow, and shallow fashion; and their tone, sometimes a little ostentatiously, at variance with that of the world, and of the day, for the work of which they ought to be a preparation (it was so with them originally) so long will the advocacy of classical studies be unfairly weighted with a sense of the justice of the charge of unreality brought against them, as now conducted. whereas in the advocates of modern knowledge as the object and instrument of education, and in its teachers, there is none of this unreality, or want of connexion with the thought, and with the work, of the world that is stirring around us. we, however, hold that it is a different department of work and thought, to which the latter training mainly and primarily applies. a public man need not, as a public man, know anything of astronomy and geology; though, of course, he is behind the age, and his culture is incomplete, if he does not. of all such subjects he ought, as an educated man, to have a general knowledge; and he will also be the better, as a public man, for having it; but what is primarily and 227indispensably required of him is a knowledge of man, and of all kinds of social phenomena in their whole range; what they are, how they came to be what they are, and how they affect man. here his knowledge should be full and precise: and a very valuable part of this knowledge is contained in the literature of the old world. he ought to have lived through those ages. to have done so is a vast extension of experience of the most useful kind. but he cannot have lived through those times, unless he is familiar with the feelings and thoughts, and actions of the men of those times, together with the circumstances, and conditions, under which they so thought, and felt, and acted. and he cannot have this familiarity unless he has a knowledge of the very words, in which they, themselves, expressed, and described, those feelings, thoughts, and actions.

one word more. there is no knowledge so valuable as that of what is knowledge; nor any intellectual habit so valuable as that which disposes us in every thing to require knowledge, and to separate that which is knowledge from that which is not. theoretically, there is no reason why either the study of language, or theology, should not be made a training for this knowledge, and for this habit. but as this is a matter of practice, as well as of theory, we must look at things as they are, and see where what we want is actually found, and what has in those cases produced it; and where there has been a failure in producing it, 228and what has been in those cases the cause of this failure. who, then, are most conspicuous for knowing in what knowledge consists, and for the habit of requiring knowledge as a ground for thought and action, and for being ever on the alert to separate knowledge from its counterfeits? no one, i think, would hesitate in replying, those who have had some scientific training. and it is easy to see how scientific training gives this knowledge, and this habit. it makes no difference what the matter of the study be, whether the stars, or the fungi; whether the physiology of man, or of an earth-worm. the object is soon seen to be truth; and the motive is soon felt to be the satisfaction which truth gives to the mind, and the desire to escape, in the practical order, from the wastefulness, and the mischief of error. whatever, therefore, is necessary for the attainment of truth is submitted to, or acquired, or eliminated, or avoided, in accordance with the exigency of each case. in these pursuits men learn to guard against appearances that they may not be misled by them; to sift evidence; to distinguish facts from supposed, or alleged, facts; to observe patiently and closely; to suspend judgment; to distinguish probability from certainty; to distinguish different degrees of probability; to distinguish what they know from what they wish; not to wish for anything but ascertained and demonstrable truth; to examine everything, and to hold fast only that which 229is demonstrably true; to guard against ambiguities in words; to use words for photographing facts, and not to make them a mist which obscures both the object of inquiry, and the paths which lead to it. as a matter of observation, and of fact, these are the habits of mind, which the scientific study of any subject inculcates, and makes natural to a man. they become his second nature. of course they ought to be the nature of all educated people. and when a man’s mind has been thus trained in the study, scientifically pursued, of any one subject, he applies these habits to the consideration of all other subjects, with which he may have to do: to those, with which he is not familiar, he addresses himself with the same ideas, and the same ways of thinking, as he does to that, with which he is familiar. he knows what knowledge is; and, while he can suspend his judgment, he cannot be satisfied with anything but knowledge. what he does not know upon these subjects he knows that he does not know. the study of language, and theology, if scientifically taught, are doubtless capable of supplying this training, but looking at our educated classes generally, and at those who have had administered to them the greatest amount of these two studies, it does not appear that the desired effect has been produced. if, then, these things are so, here is both something that should be an object, and something that is a defect, as things now are, in our higher education.