Of all the material resources one possesses; well learned, literate, skilled and proficient humans are the richest established valuable resource that directs every dimension of man’s endeavor. An educationally rich ground, equipped with intelligible trainers imparting proficiency, skills and dignified values to successive progeny of human race, can best serve the vital interests of human in the contemporary world.
To prepare the young for the duties of life is tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and schoolmasters should have in view; and happily, the value of the things taught, and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching them, is now ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end. The propriety of substituting for an exclusively classical training, a training in which the modern education shall have a greater share in our practical lives, is elucidated on many grounds. The necessity of increasing the amount of science is urged for like reasons. But though some care is taken to fit youth of both sexes for society and citizenship, no care whatever is taken to fit them for the position of parents.
While it is seen that for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of children, no preparation whatsoever is needed. While many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge of which the chief value is that it constitutes “the education of a gentleman;” and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities – the management of a family. On the contrary, it is sure to devolve on nine out of ten. Is it that the discharge of it is easy? Certainly not: of all functions which the adult has to fulfill, this is the most difficult. Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent? Not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognized, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed.
No rational plea can be put forward for leaving the art of education out of our curriculum. Whether as bearing on the happiness of parents themselves, or whether as affecting the characters and lives of their children and remote descendants, we must admit that knowledge of the right methods of juvenile culture, physical, intellectual, and moral, is knowledge of extreme importance. As, physical maturity is marked by the ability to produce offspring, so mental maturity is marked by the ability to train those offspring. The subject which involves all other subjects, and therefore the subject in whom education should culminate, is the Theory and Practice of Education.
In the absence of this preparation, the management of children, and more especially the moral management, is lamentably bad. Parents either never think about the matter at all, or else their conclusions are crude and inconsistent. In most cases, and especially on the part of mothers, the treatment adopted on every occasion is that which the impulse of the moment prompt: it springs not from any reasoned-out conviction as to what will most benefit the child, but merely expresses the dominant parental feelings, whether good or ill; and varies from hour to hour as these feelings vary. Or if the dictates of passion are supplemented by any definite doctrines and methods, they are those handed down from the past, or those suggested by the remembrances of childhood, or those adopted from nurses and servants –methods devised not by the enlightenment, but by the ignorance, of the time.
On the whole, the opposite dogma, untenable as it is, seems to us less wide of the truth. Nor do we agree with those who think that, by skilful discipline, children may be made altogether what they should be. Contrariwise, we are satisfied that though imperfections of nature may be diminished by wise management, they cannot be removed by it.
While some will regard this conception of education as it should be with doubt and discouragement, others will, we think, perceive in the exalted ideal which it involves, evidence of its truth. That it cannot be realized by the impulsive, the unsympathetic, and the short-sighted, but demands the higher attributes of human nature; they will see to be evidence of its fitness for the more advanced states of humanity. Though it calls for much labor and self-sacrifice, they will see that it promises an abundant return of happiness, immediate and remote. They will see that while in its injurious effects on both parent and child a bad system is twice cursed, a good system is twice blessed –it blesses him that trains and him that’s trained.
Of this nature is the plea put in by some for the rough treatment experienced by boys at our public schools; where, as it is said, they are introduced to a miniature world whose hardships prepare them for those of the real world. It must be admitted that the plea has some force; but it is a very insufficient plea. For, domestic and school discipline, though they should not be much better than the discipline of adult life, should be somewhat better. Instead of being an aid to human progress, which all culture should be, the culture of our Madhrasas and public schools, by accustoming students to prejudices and discriminations based on ethnicity, race, sect and religion that tends to fit them for a lower state of society than that which exists. And chiefly recruited as our legislature is from among those who are brought up at such institutes, this barbarizing influence becomes a hindrance to national progress.
But let us say if we had a virtual world that we could free our children over there to try whatever, and be sure that it is made in a way that would cause no harm, and then we'd come to discover a potential educational world. In addition to this, all intellectual education is in proportion to its success a powerful deterrent from vice, as it enables us to see more clearly the evil effects that follow from disobedience to moral rules.