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Untitled Article
reality . What can come of the method ( mistakenly called Pestalozzian ) of interrogating children from morning till night , but that the timid will be dismayed and stupified , and the bold made superficial and conceited ? Pestalozzi was perfectly right in avoiding the old system where all was communication on the part of the teacher and submissive reception on that of the pupil ; but he little dreamed of what should be done in his name while he
was doing every thing in the name of nature . If we may judge by much that we have seen , there will be , in a few years , an influx on society of conceited half-thinkers , of presumptuous all-knowers , who know nothing thoroughly , and have been too much habituated to answer questions when the solution was placed within their reach , to think of asking any when a reply is not quite so close at hand . We are far from wishing that the stir about education , through which all this has arisen , had not taken place . We
are not so sanguine as to suppose that any reformation of importance can take place without the introduction and occasional prevalence of many errors ; and we look for a certain , if not speedy , enlargement of views , and for a better direction of a very laudable zeal than that which has signalized the adoption of the many new systems of which we hear . What we desire is , not the relinquishment of what has been taught us from abroad , but its further prosecution ; not a return to the Eton grammar on the one hand , or chance on the other , but that details should not be pursued to the exclusion
of principles ; that the great principle of education should be a regard to the greatest ultimate happiness of the pupil , and that the operation of this principle should be determined by the facts of the pupil ' s own constitution as well as by those of his location . This is professed to be the design of every system of education that is offered to notice ; but we must acknowledge that we have found it pure and complete only in the quiet administration of parents who make their own good sense their chief guide , and who , while learning from every system , profess none .
Before science had driven chance from the conceptions and almost from the vocabulary of wise people , it was perfectly natural that an education of fortuitous influences should be supposed sometimes a very happy and sometimes a very harmless thing . But now that it is known to a certainty that there is no such thing as chance , and that a continually progressive power is given to the human will ( in proportion to the enlargement of human knowledge ) over all the agents whose nature can be discerned , it seems as
barbarous a proceeding to leave a child to be educated by nature , as to leave it in the woods to be bred up by savages . Man has long been learning to modify the influences to which his offspring are exposed . Man is convinced that in course of time he will be able to do this so completely , that , having acquainted himself with the primary conditions of his children ' s being , he will be able to make them what he chooses ; and , by means of the co-operation of a sufficient number of parents , to place the offspring of all in an atmosphere of virtue and wisdom by which their being shall be nourished up to a
perfection we may conceive of , but must wait long to witness . We are now somewhere between the extremes of a fortuitous education and a perfectly conducted one . We are bustling and striving after some special- methods in which we are apt to imagine resides general efficacy . We are so eagerly exerting our influence in some particular modes of operation , that we forget our equal responsibility in others . What good principles we have laid hold of , we do not carry out far enough ; what specific processes we have found to be good , we are apt to apply too pertinaciously and too generally . Health is not yet , as it may be centuries hence , a matter of course ; morals cannot be
Untitled Article
Exposition of Professor JacotoCa Spslcm of Education . 257
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1831, page 257, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2596/page/41/
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