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FOUR
Simultaneous
and Successive Teaching
A
VERY
remarkable feature of modern training which has been subjected in India to a reductio
ad absurdum is the practice of teaching by snippets. A subject is taught a
little at a time, in conjunction with a host of others, with the result that
what might be well learnt in a single year is badly learned in seven and the boy
goes out ill-equipped, served with imperfect parcels of knowledge, master of
none of the great departments of human knowledge. The system of education
adopted by the National Council, an amphibious and twy-natured creation,
attempts to heighten this practice of teaching by snippets at the bottom and the
middle and suddenly change it to a grandiose specialism at the top. This is to
base the triangle on its apex and hope that it will stand.
The old system was to teach one or two subjects well and thoroughly and then
proceed to others, and certainly it was a more rational system than the modern.
If it did not impart so much varied information, it built up a deeper, nobler
and more real culture. Much of the shallowness, discursive lightness and fickle
mutability of the average modern mind is due to the vicious principle of
teaching by snippets. The one defect that can be alleged against the old system
was that the subject earliest learned might fade from the mind of the student
while he was mastering his later studies. But the excellent training given to
the memory by the ancients obviated the incidence of this defect. In the future
education. we need not bind ourselves either by the ancient or the modern
system, but select only the most perfect and rapid means of mastering knowledge.
In defence of the modern system it is alleged that the attention of children
is easily tired and cannot be subjected to the strain of long application to a
single subject. The frequent change of subject gives rest to the mind. The
question naturally arises:
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are the children of modern times
then so different from the ancients, and, if
so, have we not made them so by discouraging prolonged concentration? A very
young child cannot, indeed, apply himself; but a very young child is unfit for
school teaching of any kind. A child of seven or eight, and that is the earliest
permissible age for the commencement of any regular kind of study, is capable of
a good deal of concentration if he is interested. ‘Interest is, after all, the
basis of concentration. We make his lessons supremely uninteresting and
repellent to the child, a harsh compulsion the basis of teaching and then
complain of his restless inattention! The substitution of a natural self-education
by the child for the present unnatural system will remove this objection of
inability. A child, like a man, if he is interested, much prefers to get to the
end of his subject rather than leave it unfinished. To lead him on step by step,
interesting and absorbing him in each as it comes, until he has mastered his
subject is the true art of teaching.
The first attention of the teacher must be given to the medium and the
instruments, and, until these are perfected, to multiply subjects of regular
instruction is to waste time and energy. When the mental instruments are
sufficiently developed to acquire a language easily and swiftly, that is the
time to introduce him to many languages, not when he can only partially understand what he is taught and masters it laboriously and imperfectly. Moreover,
one who has mastered his own language, has one very necessary facility for
mastering another. With the linguistic faculty unsatisfactorily developed in
one’s own tongue, to master others is impossible. To study science with the
faculties of observation, judgment, reasoning and comparison only slightly
developed is to undertake a useless and thankless labour. So it is with all
other subjects.
The mother-tongue is the proper medium of education and therefore the first
energies of the child should be directed to the thorough mastering of the
medium. Almost every child has an imagination, an instinct for words, a dramatic
faculty, a wealth of idea and fancy. These should be interested in the
literature and history of the nation. Instead of stupid and dry spelling and
reading books, looked on as a dreary and ungrateful task, he
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should be
introduced by rapidly progressive stages to the most interesting parts of his
own literature and the life around him and behind him, and they should be put
before him in such a way as to attract and appeal to the qualities of which I
have spoken. All other study at this period should be devoted to the perfection
of the mental functions and the moral character. A foundation should be laid at
this time for the study of history, science, philosophy, art, but not in an
obtrusive and formal manner. Every child is a lover of interesting narrative, a
hero-worshipper and a patriot. Appeal to these qualities in him and through them
let him master without knowing it the living and human parts of his nation’s
history. Every child is an inquirer, an investigator, analyser, a merciless
anatomist. Appeal to those qualities in him and let him acquire without knowing
it the right temper and the necessary fundamental knowledge of the scientist.
Every child has an insatiable intellectual curiosity and turn for metaphysical
enquiry. Use it to draw him on slowly to an understanding of the world and
himself. Every child has the gift of imitation and a touch of imaginative power.
Use it to give him the ground- work of the faculty of the artist.
It is by allowing Nature to work that we get the benefit of the gifts she has
bestowed on us. Humanity in its education of children has chosen to thwart and
hamper her processes and, by so doing, has done much to thwart and hamper the
rapidity of its onward march. Happily, saner ideas are now beginning to prevail.
But the way has not yet been found. The past hangs about our necks with all its
prejudices and errors and will not leave us; it enters into our most radical
attempts to return to the guidance of the all-wise Mother. We must have the
courage to take up clearer knowledge and apply it fearlessly in the interests of
posterity. Teaching by snippets must be relegated to the lumber-room of dead
sorrows. The first work is to interest the child in life, work and knowledge, to
develop his instruments of knowledge with the utmost thoroughness, to give him
mastery of the medium he must use. Afterwards, the rapidity with which he will
learn will make up for any delay in taking up regular studies, and it will be
found that, where now he learns a few things badly, then he will learn many
things thoroughly well.
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