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Formative Influences

Formative Influences image
Parent Issue
Day
14
Month
January
Year
1891
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

In speakinir of Buckle, Mr. Lecky, ia the Forum, refers to one defect which that writer shared with thinkers ' from Bacon and Locke to Condillac and Bentham." The defect Mr. Lecky describes ts the tendency to aggrandize as much s possible the power of circumstances nd experience over the individual, and to reduce to the narrowest limits every influence that is innate, transmitted or hereditary. Man as a creature of cireumstances and his mind a blank sheet pon what education misjht write what it pleased, were the beginnings of all the philosophy of education, as well as the philosophy of history and of pure íiietftrth vsif s. The error whicta Mr. Lecky ascrihos to Buckle and his predecessors tnay no longer vit ate the reasonings of speculative philosophers, but it is so thoroughly alivo in the great mass of people that soraetimes the reformer doubts ■whether all literature written before 1.S60 should not be withhold from the ■schools and disapproved in the family ircle until every man, woraan andchild ïearns that what a living1 creature is orn that he will be until he dies. Ed"ïcation can teach a creature to exert its Kjwer, but it can créate nono. It can ♦train a creaturn to concéntrate its enOrgies, but it can not build energiesout of notünír. It can lead a human creature to do wbat it does not í ï.y do well, just as it can forcé a piff to 'stand on its hind legs or a horse to roll ai barrel. It can not. make a biped of a 'pig nor a gymnast of a horse. With a fr:iction of the labor it could ■make fat pork of the p g, and of the horse a useful servant of mon. Man has "been orffing the good of knowing h'tnself ever s:nce Sócrates told tbe AtUenians about it, but he has jivpn more at■tantion to almost every thinsf eiso. He las al ways had a monomanía for laws, ifor custom8, for wise maxima and for proverbs. He haspas3ionately weptbeoause all that was natural and strong in Tira has seemed wrong, sinful even. Everybody has been tryinsr to cut his jarmontsby a measure which was good -íor somebody else at sorao other place vnd time. The strenuous pressure of the life strusfgle for preservation has 'iifferentiated men into soldiers, mer:hants, advocates, poets, priests, labor■rs and farmer3 but it is not yet ad'niitted srenerally that it would be well to study the child's qualities and train tilín for his best future. ■Owners of cattie and horses can not ■and do not aflord to do any thing else; man alone is wasted in efforts to make jvery boy an attorney-at-law and vory girl a piano player. One boy in a thousand can become a good lawyer, and not much more than one in a, thousand is needed. One girl in flve hundred may learn to play a piano Eairly well, and one in a thousand may have the genius which will give her piano playing the toi'ioh of life. Health and iov in labor are the best education. Work is bost done when it is the natural axercise of faculty. The boy learns If he does nothing but p'ay until he is mature. It is not a good education, but sometimos it is better than a wron aducation. There is a pretty poetry and a so the blindness of ignorance in the assumption that all younpfmindsare oapable of oratory and leadership. From birth every individual is itself and perhips by no means susceptible to the influences which were good for its father. Mr. Lecky found formative influence in Hutier and Locke. If he had been bom somebody e!se he might with the same pnvironments have been affected by the Badminton library or the poetry of Keats. His mind was the loam in which ISutier and L,ocke oould "take root and Lrow. He would have been the same man, iess developed, perhaps, but not different, if he had never heard of Kutlor. Whatoloy and Locke. The world at lar;ri bas yet to consider 'the individual and s ve him his due. - ■

Article

Subjects
Old News
Ann Arbor Courier