Learning from the past: In the School Room (1868)
No one, in fact … is taught at all, except so far as he is self-taught.
In an effort to kick-start this blog again, I will be picking through some material I’ve been working on recently, as well as finishing up some draft posts which have been lying dormant for far too long! First up, an interesting text on education from 150 years ago.
A while back I posted some interesting quotes gleaned from two public domain texts on education found on archive.org — The Teacher, from 1908, and Essays on Mathematical Education from 1913. Today we step back another 50 years, to In The School Room, published in 1868, and written by John S. Hart, an American educator.
As with the other books, there is a lot of material which is still relevant today, as well as quite a lot which would no longer be applicable (such as the section about the positive results of an episode of corporal punishment). Active learning, the teacher as a guide, learning styles, and other examples of trendy ‘modern’ educational thinking all appear in the very first chapter (‘What is Teaching?‘):
In the first place, teaching is not simply telling. A class may be told a thing twenty times over, and yet not know it. Talking to a class is not necessarily teaching…
… No one, in fact, in an important sense, is taught at all, except so far as he is self-taught. The teacher may be useful, as an auxiliary, in causing this action on the part of the scholar. But the one, indispensable, vital thing in all learning, is in the scholar himself…. The teacher is to draw out the resources of the pupil. Yet even this comes short of the exact truth. The teacher must put in, as well as draw out. No process of mere pumping will draw out from a child’s mind knowledge which is not there.
… The function of the teacher is to bring about this [learning]. The means to do this are infinite in variety. They should be varied according to the wants and the character of the individual to be taught. One needs to be told a thing; he learns most readily by the ear. Another needs to use his eyes; he must see a thing, either in the book, or in nature….
Teaching, then, most truly, and in every stage of it, is a strictly co-operative process. You cannot cause any one to know, by merely pouring out stores of knowledge in his hearing, any more than you can make his body grow by spreading the contents of your market-basket at his feet…. In other words, learning, so far as the mind of the learner is concerned, is a growth; and teaching, so far as the teacher is concerned, is doing whatever is necessary to cause that growth.
The teacher who is accustomed to harangue his scholars with a continuous stream of words… is yet deceiving himself… If, after a suitable period, he will honestly examine his scholars on the subjects, on which he has himself been so productive, he will find that he has been only pouring water into a sieve.
This is certainly not the typical image you receive of the typical Victorian schoolmaster.
The paragraph which is speaking to me most at the moment comes from Chapter 17 (‘Growing‘):
The point which I wish to make, and which I deem important, is, that teachers should not rest content with their present qualifications, whatever they may be, whether large or small. Let it be the aim of every one to be a growing teacher. We come short, if we are not better teachers this year than we were last. We should aim and resolve to be better teachers next year than we are now. Our education as teachers should never be considered as finished.
If you’d like to read more of the text, then you can look at the page images on archive.org, or download a digitised HTML edition, which I have put together with the help of Distributed Proofreaders. I’ll update this post with a link to its location in Project Gutenberg, when and if it works its way through the DP system.
Downloadable content: schoolroom.html.