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CHAPTER VII.

SELF-HELP-INTELLECTUAL.

It is impossible for schoolmasters to keep too persistently before them the idea that a boy's education is valuable to himself and the community, precisely in proportion as it trains him to habits of reasonable selfreliance, and enables him to stand alone; and further, tends to impel him to put into practice in the world the good and useful habits which he may have formed at school. In other words, the benefit to the individual and to the country is infinitesimally small, if the boy is unable or unwilling to be and to do in the larger sphere what he was and did in the smaller.

As I have said before, what schoolmasters ought always to be considering is not merely the boy as he is at school, but the man as he will be in the world. For the work of the schoolmaster who looks only at the boy and forgets the man, may be almost entirely thrown away. Let us first consider the training of the brain,-what we call, with a fatal narrowness of conception, a boy's

"work." In the old days of the Public Schools, a boy's "work" was, in most cases, left mainly to take care of itself. Then came the reaction, which was due partly to natural causes, but chiefly to the spur of brain-examination. And deep into the bleeding sides of teacher and scholar have the rowels been driven. The result is the usual one of a free recourse to the spur.

But let us look the facts in the face.

Does the intellectual training of a boy at school at the present time tend to enable him to stand alone intellectually when he gets out into the world? I believe that, on the whole, it does not, but that its tendency is the exact opposite. Almost everything is being done for a boy, almost nothing by him. The question that is consciously or unconsciously being asked by us schoolmasters is,-How can the best brain-examination results be most quickly produced? We have also got into a dangerous habit of thinking that a boy can hardly have too much assistance, that our object should be to clear his intellectual path of all difficulties, to make his way quite smooth for him, to do everything for him, and hardly (in the extreme case) to allow him to do anything for himself. A few facts will illustrate these various statements. Here is one.

A young and very intelligent schoolboy of a communicative nature was contrasting the hardness of the work during examination-time at the end of the term, with the ease of it during the ordinary course of lessons in

the term. His explanation of the difference was as follows: "In the ordinary lessons the master does everything for you, but in the examination you have to do it all for yourself." How sad it is to contemplate the wasted and even mischievous labour of many a good and ardent schoolmaster, and how apt are we schoolmasters to forget that it does not follow that because a master's brain is at work, the pupil's is working also. The little communicative boy was right—“The master does it all for you." The fact he knew,—he was but dimly conscious of the result. And yet he was conscious of it to some extent. For what was the result to him? He was exhausted by the unusualness of the exercise, the exercise of his brain. The master had positively, in so far as in him lay, prevented his brain from working during the term. In his desire to make all things easy and plain, in his ardour to see that he got this and that subject into the boy, the boy himself he had forgotten. He had forgotten that intellectual exercise is the necessary condition of intellectual growth and intellectual success. This exercise should, indeed, be carefully graduated to the age and capacity of the boy; but the aim should be so to develop the brain by suitable exercise as to make this very exercise natural and delightful. In doing so much for the boy, he had rendered it impossible for the boy to do a sufficient amount for himself. The boy's brain had been unused, and therefore when the time

came to use it, the effort was painful, instead of being, as it should be, delightful.

Here is another example. In this case the boy was older, and the mischief was keenly felt and deplored by him.

Some years ago I went into the rooms of a young undergraduate, whom I had known as a boy. He had lately left school, after a most distinguished career there, which included the gaining of a scholarship at his future university. He had attained to an exceptionally eminent intellectual position. But on coming to the university, he had disappointed both himself and his friends. earlier promise was apparently not being fulfilled.

His

When I entered his rooms, I found him at work. He was reading Thucydides, and sat surrounded by piles of books. In the course of conversation, he told me that he was not progressing intellectually; that his great difficulty was, that he could not do his work without having recourse to much extraneous assistance; that all his difficulties while at school had been explained to him and removed with such admirable skill and ability by the teaching he had received there, that he had felt most distressingly the want of similar assistance at the university; that he could not, for example, make out his Thucydides without all kinds of aids, such as elaborate annotations and translations, and he pointed to the pile of books in the midst of which he had been sitting. In a word, he found himself in the water

without the accustomed corks, and discovered that he could not swim alone. He was depressed and downhearted about his future intellectual success, and rightly. But he was made of good stuff, and I thought might well be strong enough to throw away all support at once, and yet not to sink. So I advised him to begin then and there by trying to make out his Thucydides without any extraneous aid whatever, and on no account to deviate from this rule, until he felt secure against that constant sense of dependency of which he complained. Certainly this was his only chance, if ever he was to do justice to his naturally fine capacities.

Such a case would, I believe, be found to be a common one, if we could analyse the mental condition of most boys who had left school after a successful intellectual career there, towards which they had been much assisted by elaborate and constant "coaching," while they had done but little independent work for themselves.

The truth is, the consequences of using frequent and much extraneous aid towards making out a classical author are most disastrous. The boy, instead of meeting with a constant series of problems presented to him for solution, never meets with any. They are solved for him, without his ever being aware of their existence. He consults dictionary and notes, and in the extreme case a translation, before he attempts to solve the difficulty for himself. That is, his brain is scarcely exercised at