Читать книгу Essays on Educational Reformers онлайн

79 страница из 91

Michelet has with justice claimed for Montaigne that he drew the teacher’s attention from the thing to be learnt to the learner: “Non l’objet, le savoir, mais le sujet, c’est l’homme.” (Nos Fils, p. 170.) Mulcaster has a claim to share this honour with his great contemporary. He really laid the foundation of a science of education. Discussing our natural abilities, he says: “We have a perceiving by outward sense to feel, to hear, to see, to smell, to taste all sensible things; which qualities of the outward, being received in by the common sense and examined by fantsie, are delivered to remembrance, and afterward prove our great and only grounds unto further knowledge.”[50] (El., p. 32.) Here we see Mulcaster endeavouring to base education, or as he so well calls it, “train,” on what we receive from Nature. Elsewhere he speaks of the three things which we “find peering out of the little young souls,” viz: “wit to take, memory to keep, and discretion to discern.” (PP., p. 27.)

§ 7. (3) I have pointed out that the false ideal of the Renascence led schoolmasters to neglect children. Mulcaster remarks that the ancients considered the training of children should date from the birth; but he himself begins with the school age. Here he has the boldness to propose that those who teach the beginners should have the smallest number of pupils, and should receive the highest pay. “The first groundwork would be laid by the best workman,” says Mulcaster (PP., 130), here expressing a truth which, like many truths that are not quite convenient, is seldom denied but almost systematically ignored.[51]