WHAT THE SCHOOLING IS FOR.

Every home being a school for old and young together, it is necessary,
if the training is to be a good one, to be clear as to what the
schooling is for.

For the improvement of the pupils, is the most obvious answer.

Yes; but what do you mean by improvement? We must settle what we want to
make of the pupils, or everything will go on at random. In every country
of the world there is some sort of general notion of what the men and
women in it ought to be: and the men and women turn out accordingly: and
the more certainly, the more clear the notion is.

The patriarchs, some thousands of years ago, had very clear notions of
their own of what people ought to be. One of these sitting in the
evening of a hot day under a terebinth tree ten times his own age, would
be able to give a distinct account of what he would have the training of
his great-grandchildren tend to. He would lay it down as the first point
of all that the highest honour and the greatest privilege in the world
was to be extremely old. The next most desirable thing was to have the
largest possible number of descendants; because the earth was very wide,
with not half enough people in it; and the more people a patriarch had
about him, the richer and more beautiful would the valleys and pastures
be, and the more power and authority he would have--every patriarch
being an absolute ruler over his own family, and the more like a king
the larger his tribe. Of course, the old man would say decidedly that to
make the best possible man you must train a child to obey his parents,
and yet more the head of the tribe, with the most absolute submission;
to do in the cleverest way what was necessary for defence against an
enemy, and to obtain food, and the skins of beasts for clothing. The
more wives and the more children the better. These were the principal
points. After these, he would speak of its being right for such as would
probably become the head of a tribe to cultivate such wisdom and temper
as would make them good rulers, and enable them to maintain peace among
their followers. Such was the patriarchal notion of improving a man to
the utmost--omitting certain considerations which we think
important,--truthfulness, temperance, amiability, respect for other men,
and reverence for something a good deal more solemn than mere old age.

Some wise men in Greece would have given a different account of the aim
of Education. A Spartan, for instance, living in a little country which
was always in danger from enemies without and slaves within, looked upon
every boy as a future soldier, and as born to help to preserve the
state. Every sickly or deformed child might be killed off at the desire
of his father's kin. The healthy and promising were looked after by the
state from their earliest years; and at the age of seven were put under
public training entirely. They were taught to bear hunger, and be
content with coarse food; to endure flogging without a groan, sometimes
to the point of death; and all for practice in bearing pain. They were
trained to all warlike exercises; their amusements were wrestling and
sham battles; their accomplishments singing martial songs. They were
taught to reverence rank and age; to hate their enemies; to use fraud in
war; to be unable to bear shame, whether deserved or not; and to treat
women with respect, not at all for their own sakes, but because despised
women could not be the mothers of heroes. Thus, to make a perfect
soldier was what a good Spartan considered the great object of
education.

The Jew in his own Palestine would have given a different answer, in
some respects, though he also reared his children to hate their enemies,
and to covet both martial and patriarchal glory. His leading belief was
that a greater God than any other nation had ever worshipped was the
special ruler and protector of his own. Jehovah was the king as well as
the God of the Jews; and the first virtue of a Jew was to obey every
tittle of the Law, which ordered all things whatsoever in the lives of
those who lived under it. Obedience to the Law, in affairs of food,
dress, seasons of work, sleep, worship, journeying, &c., as well as in
some higher matters, was the main thing taught by a good parent, while
he knew and thought nothing of the higher and holier aims opened by the
Gospel; of which, indeed, many a well-meaning Jewish parent could not
bear to hear from the lips of Christ, when he came to declare what every
man should be. When he declared that men should rise above the Law, and
be perfect as their Father in Heaven is perfect, some strict Jewish
educators crucified him. In a Jew's mind, the best man was he who most
servilely obeyed the letter of the Law.

When I was in America, I saw three kinds of people who had their own
notions of what it was to be a perfect man--each their own idea of the
chief aim in Education; notions as wide of each other as those of the
Patriarch, the Spartan, and the Jew. There were the dwellers in the
cities; men speaking our language, and looking very like ourselves.

These men were, as was natural, proud of their young and prosperous
republic; and they thought more about politics than appears to us
necessary or wise in a life which contains so many other great
interests. Their children were brought up to talk politics before they
could be qualified to have an opinion; and taught at school to despise
other nations, and glorify their own, as a preparation for exercising
the suffrage at twenty-one, and thereby becoming, in a republic so
constituted, a member of the government. The privilege--the trust--is a
most important one; and we cannot wonder that the subject is an
engrossing one to parents and children. The object of education among a
very large proportion of American parents is to make politicians: and it
certainly is attained.

On the same continent, I saw something of a very different race--the red
men. Their idea of perfection is a man's being a perfect warrior; and
yet in a way quite unlike the Spartans. The red Indian is not trained as
a servant of the State, but as an individual: and the Indian women are
degraded and oppressed, while the Spartan women were considered and
respected--whatever the ground of consideration might be. The Indian boy
is trained to use his five senses till they reach an unequalled degree
of nicety. And, when old enough to bear the pain without dying, he is
subjected first to hunger and want of sleep, and then to such horrible
tortures as it turns one sick to think of. He who comes out of this
trial the most bravely, and who afterwards shows himself the most alert
sentinel, the strongest and most enduring soldier, the most revengeful
enemy, the most cruel conqueror, and the sternest husband and father,
is, in the eyes of his people, the most perfect man. The red Indians,
therefore, generally make an approach to this kind of character.

In the island of Mackinaw lives the other sort of people I have referred
to. This island rises out of the wide waters of the great northern
lakes, a perfect paradise in the midst of the boundless blue expanse.

The people who inhabit it are, for the most part, half-breeds--the
offspring of the red race and the French colonists who first settled on
the island. The great object here seems to be to become amphibious; and
truly, it appeared to me pretty well attained. The dark-skinned boys who
surrounded our ship, and all others that I saw, were poppling about in
the water, as easily as so many fowl: and they scud about in their tiny
birch-bark canoes as readily as we walk on our feet, thinking no more of
being capsized than we do of falling.

The aim here has about the same level as that of the Arabs, to whom
water is the greatest rarity, and to whom the sandy desert serves much
the same purpose as the inland seas to the dwellers in Mackinaw. The
horse of the Arab is to him as the bark-canoe to the half-breed of
Mackinaw: and children are launched into the desert, to live in it as
they best may, as the half-breed boys are into the watery waste. And
they succeed as well, conquering the desert, turning its dangers into
sport, and making a living out of it. And so it is with the native
dwellers in the icy deserts of Siberia. A perfectly educated person
there is one who can surprise the greatest number of water-fowl in
summer, foretell soonest the snow storm in winter, best learn the hour
from the stars, bank up the most sheltered sleeping-place in the snow,
and light a fire within it the most quickly; dive among the beavers for
the longest time; see in the dark like an owl, track game like a
pointer, fetch it like a spaniel, hearken like a deer, and run like an
ostrich. Such being the Mongolian notion of perfection, it is more
nearly approached by them than by others.

None of these aims are ours, or such as we approve. What then is ours?

It is easy to answer, "to grow wiser and better every day:" but then
comes the question, what is the wisdom, what is the goodness, that we
aspire to? All the people I have mentioned aim at improvement in wisdom
and goodness every day. Our difference with them is precisely about what
wisdom and goodness are.

We are not likely to agree by setting up each our own notion of wisdom
and goodness. Hear children at school talking of the heroes they admire
most, and see how seldom they agree. One admires the brave man; another
the patient man; another the philanthropist; another the man of power;
another the man of holiness; another the patriot. Hear men talking by
the fireside of the sages of the race; how they vary in their
preferences, and select for themselves from among the group of mighty
minds--the fathers of philosophy, of science, of art, of law and
government, of morals. We shall never arrive at a practical point by
setting up our separate preferences as aims for all.

Nor will it answer to fix our aim by any single example: no, not
even--with reverence be it spoken--by the great Exemplar, Christ
himself. The fault and weakness of this inability are in ourselves. It
is not any cloud in him, but partial blindness in us, which renders this
method insufficient by itself. All-perfect as is the example, we cannot
all, and constantly, use its full perfection, from our tendency to
contemplate it from the favourite point of view which every one of us
has. One of us dwells most on the tenderness of his character; another
on its righteous sternness; one on his power; another on his meek
patience; and so on. And thus, while it is, and ever will be, of the
utmost importance that we should preserve the aim of becoming like
Christ, it yet remains to be settled among us, in fact though not
perhaps in words, what Christ was, the images of him in different minds
varying so endlessly as they certainly do.

The only method that appears to me absolutely safe and wise, is one
which perfectly well agrees with our taking this great Exemplar as our
model. Each of us has a frame, "fearfully and wonderfully made;" with
such a variety of powers, that no one yet knows them all, or can be sure
that he understands the extent of any one of them. It is impossible that
we can be wrong in desiring and endeavouring to bring out and strengthen
and exercise all the powers given to every human being. In my opinion,
this should be the aim of education.

I have said "to bring out, and strengthen, and exercise all the powers."
Some would add, "and balance them." But if all were faithfully
exercised, I am of opinion that a better balance would ensue than we
could secure, so partial as are our views, and so imperfect as has been
the training of the best of us.

I shall gladly proceed, in my next chapter, to declare what I think we
have learned as to what the powers of the human being are. At present, I
can only just point out that the aim proposed is superior to every other
mentioned, and I believe to any other that can be mentioned for this
reason; that it applies universally--meets every case that can be
conceived of. In the patriarch's scheme of education, the women--half
the race--were slighted. In the Spartan system, the slaves and all
work-people were left out. Among the modern republicans, citizens have
the preference over women and slaves: and under the savage training--the
Indian, Arab, and Mongolian--no individual whatever is done justice to.

And there is not a country in Christendom where equal justice is done
to all those whom we see entering the world so endowed as that we ought
to look on every one of them with religious awe as a being too noble for
our estimate. The aim proposed--of doing justice to all the powers of
every human being under training--includes all alike, and must therefore
be just. It includes women, the poor, the infirm--all who were rejected
or slighted under former systems--while it does more for the privileged
than any lower principle ever proposed to do. It appears that under it
none will be the worse, but all the better, in comparison of this with
any lower aim.

To obtain a clearer and firmer notion of what this object really
comprehends, we must next make out, as well as our present knowledge
allows, what the powers of the human being are. I mean as to their kind;
for I do not think any one will venture to say what is the extent of
endowments so vast; and in their vastness so obscure