Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects | Page 3

industries of the country feel of obtaining more theoretical knowledge about the physical or chemical processes through which they are earning a livelihood. The Young Men's Christian Associations in the American cities have become great centres of evening instruction for just such young persons. The correspondence schools are teaching hundreds of thousands of young people at work in machine-shops, mills, mines, and factories, who believe that they can advance themselves in their several occupations by supplementing their elementary education with correspondence courses, taken while they are at work earning a livelihood in industries that rest ultimately on applications of science.
Spencer's objection to the constant exercise of authority and compulsion in schools, families, and the State is felt to-day much more widely than it was in 1858, when he wrote his essay on moral education. His proposal that children should be allowed to suffer the natural consequences of their foolish or wrong acts does not seem to the present generation--any more than it did to him--to be applicable to very young children, who need protection from the undue severity of many natural penalties; but the soundness of his general doctrine that it is the true function of parents and teachers to see that children habitually experience the normal consequences of their conduct, without putting artificial consequences in place of them, now commands the assent of most persons whose minds have been freed from the theological dogmas of original sin and total depravity. Spencer did not expect the immediate adoption of this principle; because society as a whole was not yet humane enough. He admitted that the uncontrollable child of ill-controlled adults might sometimes have to be scolded or beaten, and that these barbarous methods might be "perhaps the best preparation such children can have for the barbarous society in which they are presently to play a part." He hoped, however, that the civilised members of society would by and by spontaneously use milder measures; and this hope has been realised in good degree, with the result that happiness in childhood is much commoner and more constant than it used to be. Parents and teachers are beginning to realise that self-control is a prime object in moral education, and that this self-control cannot be practised under a regime of constant supervision, unexplained commands, and painful punishments, but must be gained in freedom. Some large-scale experience with American secondary schools which prepare boys for admission to college has been edifying in this respect. The American colleges, as a rule, do not undertake to exercise much supervision over their students, but leave them free to regulate their own lives in regard to both work and play. Now it is the boys who come from the secondary schools where the closest supervision is maintained that are in most danger of falling into evil ways when they first go to college.
Spencer put very forcibly a valuable doctrine for which many earlier writers on the theory of education had failed to get a hearing--the doctrine, namely, that all instruction should be pleasurable and interesting. Fifty years ago almost all teachers believed that it was impossible to make school-work interesting, or life-work either; so that the child must be forced to grind without pleasure, in preparation for life's grind; and the forcing was to be done by experience of the teacher's displeasure and the infliction of pain. Through the slow effects of Spencer's teaching and of the experience of practical teachers who have demonstrated that instruction can be made pleasurable, and that the very hardest work is done by interested pupils because they are interested, it has gradually come to pass that his heresy has become the prevailing judgment among sensible and humane teachers. The experience of many adults, hard at work in the modern industrial, commercial, and financial world, has taught them that human beings can make their intensest application only to problems in which they are personally interested for one reason or another, and that freemen work much harder than slaves, because they feel within themselves strong motives for exertion which slaves cannot possibly feel. So, many intelligent adults, including many parents and teachers, have come to believe it possible that children will learn to do hard work, both in school and in after life, through the free play of interior motives which appeal to them, and prompt them to persistent exertion.
The justice of Spencer's views about training through pleasurable sensation and achievement in freedom rather than through uninterested work and pain inflicted by despotic government, is well illustrated by the recent improvements in the discipline of reformatories for boys and girls and young men and women. It has been demonstrated that the only useful reformatories are those which diminish the criminal's liberty of action as little as possible, require him to perform productive labour, educate