Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects | Page 3

scale or small scale. The extraordinary popularity of evening
schools and correspondence schools in the United States rests on the
need which young people employed in the various 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.