THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LI, Issue 5602, 7 February 1879, Page 7

THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND.

i‘ (from tfc* ScomiiMr.) [The proper studyof mankind is—what? We know the answer of the line so quoted and re-quOted that it came to have that Inscrutable quasi, scriptural authority of proverbs and pet phrases, enhallowed by repetition, which i makes contradicting one of them nearly as impiously impossible to most good folk as contradicting a text. The proper jstudy of mankind, although Pope’s line has hot yet been expurgated from the list of quotational dogmas, is na longer man, but the globe man inhabits and its chemistry or zoology, forit has been widely made known among us as a discovery of recent days that 'wisdom is not ensured by the long learning and prompt forgetting of accidences, and that education should be a preparation for life,. In the light of this discovery we are naturally all busy in telling each other that school ume should be spent in learning {useful things, and that study should tend to the accumulating and increasing knowledge of a practically serviceable kind; and the Slar inference from this piece of unde* e sagacity is that what, in these days, a youth has to occupy himself in acquiring ready for worktime by and-by, is such science {as directly bears on the conditions of our natural existence, and on the progress of jcivilised oomfort, and that studies which are mot obviously adapted to further, in their practical application, the material well-being {of (he individual student or of the human race are but whims of the intellect, or the {unintelligent superstitions of an effete liter* 'ary faith. | If we say that what the man most needs jto know is what the child most needs to •learn, we may seem to have accomplished rather a neat truism ; nay, almost to have lighted upon one of those epitomised embodiments of the vox populi which become gs texts. But’ the truism is untrue; the text most capable of disproof. Bor, the education of the child’s mind ■being, like that of its body, the training for |tm> serious effort Of its busier future, and not Ithat serious effort itstlf, it no more follows Ithat the ohildV mental .gymnastic coarse {should be the imitative •anticipations of its future mental dobupatioh, thantnat the games M which he practises and strengthens his limbs should be the imitative anticipations of the bodily toils in which the grown workman {may have to exert his strength. The education which fortifies, which renders apt, is the true |edubatioh; and if it were that the painful acquirements' of an unpractical acquaintance W,ith the butterfly’s literary language, or the {power of counting the clouds in the sky, {could best call out) the needed faculties, then no youth-time would have been betrayed by its teachers if it had been spent on gossiping with butterflies and gazing at clouds, provided onlythatthe gossiping and the gazing •had been of the learner’s sort. Suppose the llearping. 'by heart of a Chinese verb to call {forth pr to exercise the valuable faculty of •taking pains, and suppose that this faculty is (not called forth, not exercised in the acquire- | ment of some practically useful fact, then, wo (far as the first good! of education—the train - ing to put the mind; well to work—is considered, the learning of the Chinese verb by a ohild who will never need to speak, or road, tor hear Chinese, is of ■ more important service 'than the learning the practically useful fact, Ino matter what It may bo. [ Bqfcthis point—of what is really utility in ah'ediioation', to utility—concerning which so much might be said; is hot a main one for the purpose of the moment here. It could not Tbe Ighotod,' bU,t» wing been so far, though slightly recognised, let Jt be put out of sight Let if be accepted, "without prejndice/’ thnt useful' education means an | education tofamiliaritywith matters of Isoienoe or skill which wiu be matters of help(fid inforinatibh in the work of getting on in (the world, or ofhelpingtho world to get on, laa the case may be. Then the question arises whether those studies which are at present customarily allowed to be pre-eminently the {useful studies, if direct bearing on the.future (work of life be the standard of utility, are in faot entitled to such a pre-eminenbe. We are (told that to know the geology, the flora, the •fauna, of oiir own neighbourhood is far more to our profit than intimacy with dead tongues (and the traditions of people whose day has {gone by. We are told that the causes of ifihe last railway' sicoidont are matters of moment for bur present' knowledge, hut that, what iealcusies or whafcpolioiosled to the ■ the other lost his little kingdom, can offer no theme for the researches of sensible men with a busy nineteenth century present before them. We are told to leave ofl caring in his-

torv for personal biographic* of punished men and women, as but the fruitless gossip which £ leasesi curiosity, and to seek out instruction elonging in its aim to to-day by fixing all our attention on such national events and legislation os hare made steps in the progress of our own nation, or of existing notions with which wo hare to do, towards the present state. And all this has so strong an element of truth and good sense in it that not everybody remembers how largo a part of what makes' practical wisdom it overlook*. But if to leorn usefully is to learn such things as will in themselves help us when we come to the work of life, then the selection of useful studies thus ad vacated is, for thousands, widely at fault. Take that knowledge of natural science now so much insisted on as almost, if not quite, the chief desideratum in education. Such knowledge is undoubtedly of high value to the individual, and the wider diffusion of it must obviously become of immense benefit to the nation. Yet it can by no means act, to anyone whose work in life is one of ruling, or conciliating, or serving human beings, as a substitute for that habit of understanding Others, which is called tact. And that habit is acquired and fostered by just the studies which the new educational dogmas declare raustv and irrelevant to modern life. It needs the observance of human thoughts and acts ; an observance not effectively to be had by any watching of individuals round about us—for in everyday life all personal existence is veiled by a self-protecting conventionality which baffles investigation—but effectively to be had by the comparison, oftener unconscious than deliberate, of thought with thought, deed with deed, custom with custom, which can only be made in the bourse of just such student’s reading as the new dogmas condemn. The oldworld histories, often condemned as biographers, the thoughts and passions of all times, in their various shapes, from poet to poet, lawgiver to lawgiver, chronicler to chronicler, through age to age, from the earliest days of accessible literature to now, tell some of ns some things which seem as needful to be known by man as the geologist’s carefully' ascertained story of man’s dwelling-place through ages before man was. We object to the beginning being left out; as the geologist would object to the beginning of his cycles being set aside'.as a trifle, and to finding him, self condemned to explore only the latest lifted stratum. We think yesterday too large a part of to-day to let it go unquestioned. And we think the yesterday of the human, mind, of Outer life as it came to human beings long since, bo less essential for some of us to learn about now than are the stories of the elements which make, and keep, and mar, and kill our physical life, and the technical details of man’s increasing rule over them.