The evils of bad teaching
And other "Thoughts" on education by Horace Mann
Evils of Bad Teaching
Physiologists tell us that pairs of nerves go out from the brain to every part of the body. Experiments have been tried upon animals, demonstrating that if the nerves which go from the brain to the stomach be cut and separated, digestion instantaneously ceases. Bring the severed ends of the nerves together again, the processes of life are renewed. Think how many of these nerves a harsh, cruel, ignorant teacher may cut in a day!
Compensation
Jails and state prisons are the complement of schools: so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.
Why is Education in Disrepute?
It is the cultivation of the intellect to the neglect of the moral powers that has brought education into disrepute.
Duty of a Teacher
When the teacher fails to meet the intellectual wants of a child, it is the case of asking for bread and receiving a stone; but when he fails to meet its moral wants, it is giving a serpent.
Errors of Education
The unpardonable error of education has been that, it has not begun with simple truths, with elementary ideas, and risen by gradations to combined results. It has begun with teaching systems, rules, schemes, complex doctrines, which years of analysis would scarcely serve to unfold. All is administered in a mass. The learner, not being able to comprehend, has endeavored to remember, and thus has been put off with a fact, in lieu of a principle explanatory of an entire class of facts. In this way we pass our errors and our truths over to our successors done up in the same bundle, they toothers, and so onward, to be perpetual sources of error, alienation, and discord.
''Live the the Truth"
The minds of the incoming generations are as free from the possession of positive error as of positive truth, and they have capacities that maybe qualified to discriminate between them. Instil into them the love of truth, as the supreme good; teach them, as a matter of conscience and duty, never to rehearse what is believed not to be understood; lead them from antecedent to sequence, from cause to effect, from element to combinations, and minds will be reared which will discover truth, not because they were originally stronger or better minds, but because from their position it will be more easy to discern it.
Material Importance of Education
No race of bondmen, smothered in the ignorance essential to slavery, can ever earn so much by their muscles as they could earn by their wits, had they been educated and free. The hand is almost valueless at one end of the arm unless there is a brain at the other end.
Education an Organic Necessity of Man
Education is an organic necessity of a human being. It is so in a three-fold sense. It is necessary to save him from mistake, which is intellectual error; from sin, which is moral error; and from suffering, which is the inevitable consequence of both. Instinct, without training or acquired knowledge, may prompt man to a few automatic movements of the muscles, or to a few spontaneous intuitions of the mind. But its directive forces have no amplitude of scope, no variety of application. Instinct can effect no combination of multitudes or opposites into harmonizing systems. At most, instinct can only move outward from its central point in radii or a single diameter; but reason and conscientiousness, enlightened by education, survey the whole area of circles, and not of circles only, but the whole solidity of globes. In its acuteness and in its certainty, instinct has an advantage over reason, as far as it goes; as a bee, without tools, will build as geometric a cell as a skilled mathematician with them; but reason has an immense advantage over instinct in the magnitude and boundless variety of its field of operations. A bee with its instinct can build a perfect home for bees; a man with his reason can build a home for all zoology. Without his reason, man would have been inferior to most of the brute creation; with reason, he is the lord of earthly powers; with conscience, he is God's vicegerent upon earth.
Education, Serialized, a section of EduThirdSpace: The Newsletter, features retellings of how education has been viewed over the course of history from books, reports, letters, and so forth. The posts in this section are the words of the authors and not editorialized by me, Samantha, or anyone else. However, interpretation or commentary on the texts may be published in other sections of EduThirdSpace.