OLD AND YOUNG IN SCHOOL.

Household education is a subject so important in its bearings on every
one's happiness, and so inexhaustible in itself, that I do not see how
any person whatever can undertake to lecture upon it authoritatively, as
if it was a matter completely known and entirely settled. It seems to me
that all that we can do is to reflect, and say what we think, and learn
of one another. This is, at least, all that I venture to offer. I
propose to say, in a series of chapters, what I have observed and
thought on the subject of LIFE AT HOME, during upwards of twenty years'
study of domestic life in great variety. It will be for my readers to
discover whether they agree in my views, and whether their minds are set
to work by what I say on a matter which concerns them as seriously as
any in the world. Once for all, let me declare here what I hope will be
remembered throughout, that I have no ambition to teach; but a strong
desire to set members of households consulting together about their
course of action towards each other.

It will be seen by these last words that I consider all the members of a
household to be going through a process of education together. I am not
thinking only of parents drawing their chairs together when the children
have gone to bed, to talk over the young people's qualities and ways.

That is all very well; but it is only a small part of the business. I am
not thinking of the old, experienced grandfather or grandmother talking
at the fireside, telling the parents of the sleeping children how they
ought to manage them, and what rules and methods were in force in their
day. This is all very well; and every sensible person will be thankful
to hear what the aged have to tell, out of their long knowledge of life:
but this again is a very small part of the matter. Every member of the
household--children, servants, apprentices--every inmate of the
dwelling, must have a share in the family plan; or those who make it are
despots, and those who are excluded are slaves.

Of course, this does not mean that children who have scarcely any
knowledge, little judgment, and no experience, are to have a choice
about the rules of their own training. The object of training is one
thing; and the rules and methods are another. With rules and methods
they have nothing to do but to obey them till they become able to
command themselves. But there is no rational being who is not capable of
understanding, from the time he can speak, what it is to wish to be
good. The stupidest servant-girl, and the most thoughtless
apprentice-boy, are always impressed by seeing those about them anxious
to improve; and especially the oldest of all endeavouring the more to
become wiser and wiser, better and better, as their few remaining days
dwindle away. If the family plan therefore be the grand comprehensive
plan which is alone worthy of people who care about education at all--a
plan to do the best that is possible by each other for the improvement
of all--every member of the family above the yearling infant must be a
member of the domestic school of mutual instruction, and must know that
he is so.

It is a common saying that every child thinks his father the wisest man
in the world. This is very natural; as parents are their children's
fountains of knowledge. To them their children come for anything they
want to know: and by them they are generally satisfied. But every wise
parent has occasion to say, now and then--"I do not know, my dear." The
surprise of the child on first hearing that there is anything that his
parents do not know fixes the fact in his mind. When he has once
discovered that his parents have something more to learn, he becomes
aware--and this also ought to be fixed in his mind--that their
education is not finished; and that it is their business, as it is his,
to learn something more every day, as long as they live. So much for
knowledge. The case ought to be as clear to him with regard to goodness.

It is not enough that in church he hears that all men and women are
sinners; and that in prayers at home he hears his parents pray that they
may become more worthy of the goodness of God, and more like the Christ
who is set before them. These things may set him thinking; but there
will be, or ought to be, more light every day to clear up his ideas. The
same parents who honestly own to their child that they are ignorant of
things about which he questions them will own to him that they are not
nearly so good as they wish to be. Thus is the truth opened to the
feeblest and smallest mind that education has still to go on, even when
people are so inconceivably old as children are apt to think their
parents.

To us, grown up to this mighty age, there can be no doubt on such a
point. We know very well that we are all, through the whole range of
society, like a set of ignorant and wayward children, compared with what
we are made capable of being. Our best knowledge is but a glimmering--a
dawn of light which we may hope will "increase more and more unto the
perfect day." Our best goodness is so weak, so mixed, so inferior to
what we can conceive of, that we should blush to say that during any
day of our lives we had been as good as we ought to be. It is as clear
to us as to children, that there is room for improvement in both ways as
long as we live. To us there is another question which children cannot
enter into, and have no present business with;--whether human beings
remain capable of improvement as long as they live.

About this, there are different opinions. I rather think the prevailing
belief is that they are not; and that this prevailing belief arises from
the commonness of the spectacle, not only of the faults of old age, but
of the inability of even amiable and lively old people to receive new
ideas, or correct bad habits. This is certainly the commonest aspect of
old age; and serious is the warning it affords to correct our faulty
tempers and ways before we grow stiff in mind, as well as in body. But I
do not think that this spectacle settles the question. We might as well
say that the human intellect can achieve no great work after
five-and-twenty, because the ill-educated mind never does. As long as we
see one single instance of a mind still expanding in a man of
eighty-five, of a temper improving in one of ninety, of a troublesome
daily habit conscientiously cured, after the indulgence of a life-time,
by an old lady of seventy-five, we perceive that education may go on to
the extreme limit of life, and should suppose that it might be
generally so, but for the imperfect training of preceding years.

I have known of one old man whose mind was certainly still growing when
he died, at the age of eighty-six. I have known of another, whose study
through life had been the laws of the mind, and who, when his faculties
were failing him, applied himself to _that_ study, marking the gradual
decline of certain of his powers, adding the new facts to his stores of
knowledge, and thus, nourishing to the last a part of his mind with the
decay of the rest. This instance of persevering self-improvement under
conditions which any one would admit to be those of release from labour,
appears to me even more affecting than that of the great physician who
watched his own approaching death with his finger on his pulse,
notifying its last beat as his heart came to a stop, hoping to
contribute one more fact to useful science. With cases like these before
us, how shall we dare to suppose our education completed while we have
one faculty remaining, or our hearts have yet one more beat to give?

As for the continuance of moral education to the last, I have seen two
contrasted cases, in close neighbourhood, which make the matter pretty
plain, in a practical sense, to me. I knew two old ladies, living only
the length of a street apart, who were fair specimens of educated and
uneducated old age. The one belonged to a family who were remarkable
for attaining a great age; and she always confidently reckoned on her
lot being the same as that of her predecessors. It is true, her mother,
being above a hundred, called her and her sister "the girls" when they
were above seventy; but still one would have thought that grey hairs and
wrinkles would have gone some way as a warning to her. Instead, however,
of reckoning on her future years (if she must reckon on them) as so much
time to grow wiser in, she was merely surprised at her friends when they
advised her (she being then eighty) to make some other terms for her
house than taking another lease of fourteen years. She could not
conceive, as the last lease had answered so well, why the next should
not. I remember seeing her face, all puckered with wrinkles, surmounted
by rows of bright brown false curls, and her arms, bare above the
elbows, adorned with armlets, such as young ladies wore half a century
before. I remember a clever pert youth setting himself to quiz and amuse
her by humouring her in her notions about the state of the world,
drawing her out to praise the last century and express her ignorant
contempt of this, till she nodded emphatically over her hand of cards,
and declared that the depravity of the age was owing to gas-lamps and
macadamisation. She died very old, but no wiser than this. Her case
proves only that her education did stop; and not that it need have
stopped. The other was a woman of no great cultivation, but of a
humble, earnest, benevolent nature, full of a sense of duty towards God
and man; and, in them, towards herself. Having survived her nearest
connections, she had no strong desire to live; and her affairs were
always arranged for departure, down to the labelling of every paper, and
the neatness of every drawer. Yet no one was more alive to the
improvements of the modern world. I shall never forget the earnest look
with which she would listen to any tidings of new knowledge, or new
social conveniences. A more dignified woman I never knew; yet she
listened to the young who brought information--listened as a
learner--with a deference which was most touching to witness. But there
was more than this. She was conscious of having been, in her earlier
days, somewhat hard, somewhat given to lecture and lay down the law, and
criticise people all round by family notions; a tendency which, if it
really existed, arose from family and not personal pride; for, though
she might overrate the wisdom of parents and brothers, there never was
any sign of her overvaluing her own. However this might be, she believed
that she had been hard and critical in former times; and she went on
softening and growing liberal to the day of her death. I never observed
any weakness--much less any laxity--in her gentleness towards the feeble
and the frail. It was the holy tenderness which the pure and upright can
afford to indulge and impart. The crowning proof that her improvement
was the result of self-discipline and not of circumstances was that
when, at above seventy years of age, she became the inmate of a family
whose habits were somewhat rigid, and in many respects unlike her own,
she changed her own to suit theirs, even forcing herself to an
observance of punctuality, in which she had been deficient all her life,
and about which she had scarcely ever needed to think while for many
years living alone. Of course, this moral discipline implies some
considerable use of the intellect. She read a good deal; and carried an
earnest mind into all her pursuits. And when her memory began to fail,
and she could not retain beyond the day what she had read, her mind did
not become weak. It was always at work, and always on good subjects,
though she could no longer add much to her store of mere knowledge. Her
case proves surely that education need never stop.

Now, if we picture to ourselves a household, with an honoured being like
this as the occupant of the fireside chair, we can at once see how it
may be completely understood and agreed upon among them all that the
education of every one of them is always going on, and to go on for ever
while they live. No child could ever stand at the knee of my old friend
without feeling that she was incessantly bent on self-improvement--as
earnest to learn from the humblest and youngest as ready to yield the
benefits of her experience and reflections to any whom she could inform
and guide. When taken severely ill, she said with a smile, to one by her
bedside, "Why do you look so anxious? If I do die to-day, there is
nothing to be unhappy about. I have long passed the time when I expected
to go. What does it matter whether I die now or a twelve-month hence?"
And when that illness was over, she regarded it as a process in her
training, and persevered, as before, in trying to grow wiser and more
worthy. Here was a case in which Household Education visibly included
the oldest as naturally as the youngest. And in all dwellings, all the
members _are_ included in the influences which work upon the whole,
whether they have the wisdom to see it or not. Henceforward, therefore,
I shall write on the supposition that we are all children together--from
the greatest to the least--the wisest and the best needing all the good
they can get from the peculiar influences of Home..