Dorothea Beale

“ But what the properly qualified teacher can do for all is to educate—that is to say to draw out—all that Nature has put into them: to show them what music means: to quicken and develop their musical feeling, be it much or little, by rendering it intelligent: to give their taste a foundation of right principle: to cultivate the ear and the brain as well as the hand: to put them in the right road for pursuing and perhaps specialising their studies after their school course is over: in short, to make them musicians, so far as musicians can be made. ”

“ The most civilised nations are devoting their best energies to the work of education, realising that upon this depends their very existence—that it is not by starving the individual life, and merging it in the general, but by developing each to perfection, that the common good will be secured. They trust less to the power of laws and institutions, more to the power of a right education—less to external restraint, more to the wisdom that comes of a wisely directed experience. ”

“ What is it possible to teach about life? Is this nineteenth century with its marvellous electrical discoveries any nearer the secret of life? Although it may fairly be claimed that the manifestations of life are better understood, yet scientists will be the first to confess that what life itself is still remains a mystery; therefore the teacher of biology must never be satisfied without arousing in the minds of his pupils a growing consciousness of the limitations of knowledge, the basis of true reverence. Any teaching of science, not only of biology, which fails to do this is defective. ”

“ Botany.What subject of systematic study can be better suited to the child then, than that which calls out its sense of wonder and beauty, and which in harmony with its own restless nature is ever changing; in which is found endless variety with underlying order? Surely the world of flowers is specially suited for teaching the little ones. How the colours and forms delight them—has not the first sight of a flower remained with many of us through life, “a joy for ever”? ”

“ As to the aim and purpose, we may happily dismiss, once and for all, the old and imbecile notion of the piano as a conventional “accomplishment”; in more accurate language an instrument of unintelligent and repulsive mechanical drudgery, calculated to eradicate from the pupil whatever modicum of music Nature might have bestowed on her. The cultivation of the piano for the sake of vain display is not yet obsolete. But though this unacknowledged object must inevitably continue to actuate many pupils and many parents, the teacher, so far from indulging it, should set his face sternly against it. ”

“ The chief thing for the teacher to do is so to teach that the pupil shall enjoy the work. I do not mean that the pupil should be spared hard work and drudgery, or be always expecting to find honey on Hymettus; but do we not all know that the labour of making our way over rotten glaciers and up stony moraines is forgotten when we stand on the crest, and that all the way we go, we think of the joy set before us, when we shall attain to some lofty peak, whence we can see the outstretched heavens and the sunlit earth? ”

“ Literature appeals to the imagination, the faculty of the mind in which emotion and intellect join, and a literature lesson should combine the two elements of feeling and thought. Poetry needs to be enjoyed if it is to be understood, for it is the expression, not of facts which can be demonstrated, but of truth which can only be recognised by those who care for it. So the first aim of the teacher must be to make her class enjoy what they read. Dulness is a bad fault in any teacher; in the teacher of literature it is high treason. ”

“ Overstrain.This is one great reason why teachers should make it a matter of principle, as well as of worldly prudence, to avoid overstrain. You sometimes hear a young teacher boasting of the tax which she lays on her constitution; she tells it, half as a grievance that she should have so much to do, half in triumph that she is so peculiarly constituted—just as poor people exult in ailments that mark them out from the common herd! ”

“ On the later stages of the teaching of natural science I do not propose to dwell. Those who take up science as a speciality will have to limit the field, and others will be guided by circumstances, but whatever special line they may follow later, such a course of study must surely have nourished the powers of the mind, developed the sympathies, disciplined the character, enlarged the horizon beyond the petty concerns which occupy the whole attention of the uneducated of all sorts and conditions. ”

“ Those who are able to spare time and strength for Greek, and love poetry in all its forms, will delight indeed in the “Wine of Hellas,” and with the enthusiasm which they will bring to a new study they will surmount in a short time obstacles which would have delayed them for months, when they had less knowledge of co-ordinate forms, less taste, less insight, less joy in wrestling with problems and searching into mysteries. If there is not time nor talent nor inclination for all, then I would say prefer Greek to Latin. ”

“ Though we teachers do not, as a rule, get children at the early stage when most can be done with them, yet in schoolroom days we find their brains still plastic enough for us to work cheerfully and hopefully, in the teeth of the many hereditary evils which would crush our efforts, were it not that we believe education to be able to cope on fairly equal terms with heredity. Every time we induce children to make an effort for the right, or to think accurately, we make a groove in their brain which serves as a railway line along which thoughts of the same kind will pass more easily next time. ”

“ Consider the difference between home and school discipline; I may say that the home government is personal—there is not strict system and unvarying law. A girl comes down late to breakfast; or she is in the drawing-room when she should be in the study. She chooses friends and books that the mother disapproves, and there is irritation: the mother expostulates, the child is provoked. In the school on the other hand there is inexorable law, the consequence of neglect must be borne, there is no scolding, no entreaty. ”

“ Can it be to educators of little moment that learning to read, instead of introducing children to an orderly system, reveals chaos, and interferes with the tendency upon which all science is founded to expect law and order. As Professor Max Müller writes «Every thing that children have to learn in reading and spelling is irrational; one rule contradicts the other, and each statement has to be accepted simply on authority, and with a complete disregard of those rational instincts, which lie dormant in the child, and ought to be awakened by every kind of healthy exercise». ”

“ Teaching must be adapted to the mental state of the pupil, and be just a little above his unassisted intelligence. It is a worse fault to teach below than above the powers of the child. I shall never forget my indignation at having a book given me, which was below my powers, nor the stimulus of trying to do what was hard. One who was afterwards a distinguished teacher, told me how the Maurice lectures helped him, by making him feel there were regions of thought on which he had not yet entered. Knowledge quite within reach does not promote progress. ”

“ We can obtain our rights only by deserving them through our own spirit of love and sacrifice. If we seek our rights in the name of duties, we shall obtain them. If we seek them in the name of egotism, or any theory of happiness and well-being propounded by the teachers of materialism, we shall never achieve other than a momentary triumph, to be followed by utter confusion. ”

“ Science is not a matter merely of memory and accurate observation, it needs considerable reasoning power and much imagination, for without the power of seeing resemblances in facts, i.e., true induction, progress is impossible. The theory of evolution, which has revolutionised not only science, but the whole thought of the present day, could never have been formulated had Darwin and Wallace been mere observers, however accurate, and in this connection a science teacher may be allowed to bear witness to the importance of the Humanities in the training of the mind. ”

“ Very few people who have read their first play at school are happy enough to have enjoyed it. And why is this? Because a mistaken ideal has been before the teacher’s mind, and a mistaken method has been used to attain it. Careful study and exact understanding of the language of Shakspere is almost a liberal education in itself; but it is not always borne in mind that the understanding of the language is but a means to an end, and that notes, whether philological or historical, are of value only when they really throw light on the meaning of the text. ”

“ The student of economics is trained to think exactly, to reason closely, and to express herself clearly. No one surely would maintain that such training is less needed by girls than by boys. On the contrary, we are often assured that women are less accurate than men, and are constitutionally illogical. In any science, vagueness of thought and looseness of expression are fatal to success, but the student of economics has a peculiar difficulty to overcome, for he finds no special vocabulary ready for his use. ”

“ The reading of prose may be treated in much the same way, bearing in mind the fact that the emotional element is less marked in prose, the appeal being rather to reason than to feeling. Such prose as has become a part of literature is, however, largely imaginative, and we have to teach the children not only to follow closely a train of reasoning and to criticise it, if need be, but also to appreciate the means by which the writer makes his thought vivid to us, what figures he uses, what light he flashes upon his subject. ”

“ In proceeding to the positive work of teaching, as distinguished from the preliminary task of un-teaching, it will be the simplest course to dismiss these only too formidable obstacles as non-existent or overcome, and to consider at what a teacher should aim who enjoys all the advantages that he can reasonably expect. Under the most disadvantageous conditions he can at any rate aim as high as circumstances allow. ”

“ Emulation is a natural quality in the child and a very useful one to the teacher; but there is great danger in its degenerating into personal rivalry. Something may be done to soften this spirit of competition by setting before the children a fence which all may leap, not a throne which only one can occupy. The fence can be as high as you will, but if the opportunity of clearing it be open to all, the class will exult in the number of successes, without any feeling in the many of personal loss involved in the gain of the few. ”