Chapter X: Herbert Spencer

(1820-1903)

Spencer introduces no new ideas into the history of pedagogy. His treatise is little more than a new version of the Rousseauean and Pestalozzian ideas. But foreign ideas, as such, seldom penetrate the English soil, and the Anglo-Saxon mind naturally rebels against a man of Rousseau’s type. Thus the realistic, psychological tendencies in education which had been conquering the Continent needed their English translator. He was found in the person of the greatest English philosopher of the nineteenth century. What Rousseau grasped by the bold flight of his poetic genius, Spencer brought down to the earthly level by scientific evidence and arguments; what Pestalozzi uttered in the inspiration of his prophetic vision, Spencer reiterated in the words of common sense. Thus the Anglo-Saxon world listened to the messages of the two great continental prophets through the voice of the apostle of her own production. So it came about that the pedagogical stream which had taken its rise in the island empire through Bacon and Locke, and flowed out into the Continent, becoming ever deeper and deeper, now streamed back to its original source.

Nevertheless, Spencer was by no means an expounder of foreign thoughts in the ordinary sense of the term; he was the last man for that. “He was at no time a great reader. The influence of other thinkers did not come to him through books, but their ideas were picked up by the wayside, so to speak, or rather imbibed from the air in which they floated, without his being aware of it” (5: p. 210). He was one of the most independent and original thinkers; he was so aloof and isolated from the preceding and current history of thought that his critics account this the weakness of his philosophy in general. Yet if he was independent of the history of thought embodied in books, he was not and could not be so of its living current. We see a new widening of scientific outlook and a great upheaval of the realistic spirit in the first half of the nineteenth century, of which England was again, as three centuries before, the harbinger. This new _Zeitgeist_ of the nineteenth century England was provided with a mouthpiece in this independent, “fully self-governed and habitually self-sufficing,” self-educated philosopher. He it was that in the nineteenth century England wielded the first axe to break down her most obstinate conservatism in the field of education. True, he was not the only one to be called for this work, but his blows were the boldest and the most systematic.

Spencer’s first attack was directed against the fortress of the exalted “classics” or “cultural studies.” The positive aspect of this was the claim for a higher, nay, the highest place for science in the school curriculum. This battle had, indeed, been waged since the time of Bacon, but the development of the new sciences had only made the English schools close their gates tighter. “Science was tabooed in most schools and frowned upon in innumerable pulpits.” “The attitude of the universities toward natural science has been that of contemptuous nonrecognition. College authorities have long resisted, either actively or passively, the making of physiology, chemistry, geology, etc., subjects of examination” (9: p. 375). Here came Spencer, the nonconformist of nonconformists, and poured cold water over the long-established dignity of “the education of the gentleman,” saying:

“Men dress their children’s minds as they do their bodies, in the prevailing fashion. As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before leaving his hut, not with a view to any direct benefit, but because he would be ashamed to be seen without; so a boy’s drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted upon, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them--that he may have ‘the education of a gentleman’--the badge marking a certain social position, and bringing a consequent respect.... Not what knowledge is of most real worth, is the consideration; but what will bring most applause, honor, respect--what will most conduce to social position and influence--what will be most imposing. As, through life, not what we are, but what we shall be thought, is the question, so in education the question is not the intrinsic value of knowledge so much as its extrinsic effects on others” (7: pp. 23-26).

Thus Spencer proposes the determination of the comparative, intrinsic value of different kinds of studies as the matter of first importance in putting education on a surer foundation. “This is,” he says, “the question of questions, which it is high time we discussed in some methodical way.” “What is the use of it?” was the question repeatedly raised by every educational reformer from Bacon down. But Spencer would settle the question once for all in the light of a standard which should be rationally established as universal and necessary. What, then, is this standard?

Any value of an object which is intrinsic is determined by its bearing upon our life. Life--this is the ultimate test to which all must appeal either directly or indirectly. Anything which does not serve our individual and social life has no value whatever. “How to live” is the fundamental problem for us all. Every special problem of mankind is comprised in this one problem.

“In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in what way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family; in what way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilize all the sources of happiness which Nature supplies--how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and others--how to live completely? And this being the greatest thing needful for us to learn, is by consequence the great thing which education has to teach. To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge; and the only rational mode of judging of any educational course is to judge in what degree it discharges such function” (7: pp. 30-31).

Human life is constituted of various activities which can be classified into:

“1. Those activities which directly minister to self-preservation; 2. Those which by securing necessaries of life indirectly minister to self-preservation; 3. Those which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring; 4. Those which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations; 5. Those miscellaneous activities which make-up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings” (7: p. 32).

The above stand, considered from the biological and anthropological point of view, “in something like their true order of subordination.”

Spencer takes each of these departments of human activities one by one and tries to convince us of how necessary is the knowledge of hygiene and physiology for our self-preservation; nothing less than that of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences for our economic activities; that of physiology, hygiene, psychology, anthropology, and pedagogy for the performance of the parental function; that of sociology, which, according to him, must comprise a study of the laws of social organism, as well as its description in its political, economical, religious, social, and cultural growth, for the fulfilment of the duties of citizenship. Even in the domain of our æsthetic life, he thinks, a systematized knowledge of facts and laws concerning natural and psychic worlds will increase the power of both æsthetic production and enjoyment.

Then Spencer turns to the value of the sciences for the training of the mental powers. First of all he refers us to “the beautiful economy of Nature,” according to which “everywhere throughout creation we find faculties developed through the performance of those functions which it is their office to perform; not through the performance of artificial exercises devised to fit them for these functions” (7: pp. 84-85). So we may be certain _a priori_, he thinks, that also in education the acquirement of the valuable facts must involve the best mental exercise. Then he shows us, taking up different sciences one by one, how, through the systematic pursuance of the facts and laws of Nature and life which they present, we are better trained in our power of memory, of judgment, of reasoning, in our moral character, and even in our religious sentiments, than through linguistic studies, which largely consist, in fact, of “lexicons and grammars.”

Spencer’s next plea is for a freer education, as opposed to the prevailing one of coercion. The nineteenth century was the age for the triumph of individual freedom. The infallible authority of the Church, of monarchs, of the head of the family, were thrown down, one after another, through revolution and through development. Society became free and democratic in its every phase and department. Thus it was quite natural that the systematic revaluation of educational spirit and method, on the basis of changed conditions of society, should be reiterated by him in whom the individualism of the nineteenth-century culminates in respect to personality as well as philosophy. Liberty for the nature of the educated, for his spontaneous activities and enjoyments, encouragement of his self-instruction and independent thinking; none of the unnecessary and harmful restraints, authoritative commands and rote learning--this must be the principle of reform toward “modern modes of culture corresponding to our more liberal religious and political institutions.” Indeed, the above is nothing but the principle advocated so forcibly by Rousseau and Pestalozzi. The ice was already broken by them, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, their followers marched on far along the opened course. But England needed an apostle of her own before she would accept this gospel of psychological naturalism. And what had appeared in Rousseau as educational Romanticism, and in Pestalozzi as educational Humanitarianism, took in Spencer the form of what we might call educational Liberalism and Evolutionism. In his emotional motive, Spencer’s theory is based on his political Liberalism; in his intellectual ground, on his conception of psychic and social evolution. He writes:

“Thus, then, we are on the highway toward the doctrine, long ago enunciated by Pestalozzi, that alike in its order and in its methods, education must conform to the natural process of mental evolution--that there is a certain sequence in which the faculties spontaneously develop, and a certain kind of knowledge which each requires during its development; and that it is for us to ascertain this sequence and supply this knowledge” (7: p. 110).

Success in every educational effort depends upon “rendering our measures subservient to that spontaneous unfolding which all minds go through in their progress to maturity” (7: p. 111). This natural sequence in the spontaneous unfolding of faculties Pestalozzi endeavored to find empirically in observing the individual minds of children. Spencer, on the contrary, would search for it in the course of the race development. This idea of general parallelism between the development of the individual and the race had already been held by Rousseau and the Herbartians. But Spencer seems to be ignorant of this: he only cites Comte as having reached the same view, in believing “that, rightly conducted, the education of the individual must have a certain correspondence with the evolution of the race.” The fundamental principle of Spencerian education is to “carry each child’s mind through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through.” The principle rests on two grounds: one is the law of hereditary transmission of acquired tendencies or qualities, and the other the necessary relationships, common to all ages, between the mind and its objects. From the former “it follows that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that, even if the order were intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind.” The latter teaches us that the order of racial development has not been intrinsically indifferent, but “was in its main outlines a necessary one”; that “as the mind of humanity, placed in the midst of the phenomena and striving to comprehend them, has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route, it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between the mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached in any other route; and that, as each child’s mind stands in the same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route” (7: p. 123). Thus, according to Spencer, anthropology or developmental sociology as well as psychology are necessary bases for education, for lack of which our school curricula are burdened with useless learning.

“Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction,” so we must develop ourselves also by self-education. This is the central plea of our self-made philosopher. He writes:

“Those who have been brought up under the ordinary school drill, and have carried away with them the idea that education is practicable only in that style, will think it hopeless to make children their own teachers. If, however, they will call to mind that the all-important knowledge of surrounding objects which a child gets in its early years is got without help--if they will remember that the child is self-taught in the use of its mother tongue; if they will estimate the amount of that experience of life, that out-of-school wisdom, which every boy gathers for himself; if they will mark the unusual intelligence of the uncared-for London gamin, as shown in all the directions in which his faculties have been tasked; if further, they will think how many minds have struggled up unaided not only through the mysteries of our irrationally planned curriculum, but through hosts of other obstacles besides--they will find it a not unreasonable conclusion, that if the subject be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance” (7: p. 125).

Thus, his much-quoted phrase:

“Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be _told_ as little as possible, and induced to _discover_ as much as possible” (7: p. 124).

From this point of view the rejection of hasty and indiscriminate book instruction is simply a necessary consequence.

Interest is to be the guide and criterion of all instruction or culture.

“A child’s intellectual instincts are more trustworthy than our reasonings. In respect to the knowing faculties, we may confidentially trust in the general law, that under normal conditions, healthful action is pleasurable, while action that gives pain is not healthful” (7: p. 127).

The result of thus making education a process of self-instruction will, moreover, be to form a never-dying habit of progressive self-culture, to cultivate courage in attacking difficulties, patient concentration of attention, perseverance through failure, to give a good temper, cheerfulness, and confidence, instead of a permanent moroseness, timidity, and even depression; to establish a friendly, trustful, and consequently influential relationship between the teacher and the pupil.

Here we need not stop to point out how thoroughgoing a Rousseauean is Spencer in his view of intellectual training. He is equally, if not more so, in his conception of the fundamental principles of moral culture. Only the English Empiricist does not agree with the French Romanticist in believing in the original goodness or innocence of the child; nor can he idealize, with the Swiss enthusiast, the educational capability of parental love; nor does he expect, with the German idealist-patriot, to be able to produce a new species of humanity out of the present imperfect society by the single instrument of a perfect system of education. According to him, “no system of moral culture can forthwith make children altogether what they should be; ... even were there a system that would do this, existing parents are too imperfect to carry it out; and even could such a system be successfully carried out, its results would be disastrously incongruous with the present state of society” (7: p. 171). Progress of the social organism necessarily must be organic and evolutionary; the improvement of family discipline must go together with that of every other institution of society. Yet this does not prevent us from “elaborating and recommending methods that are in advance of time.”

The human race has learned rightness or wrongness of conduct by its total consequences, immediate and remote. “The happiness or misery caused by it are the ultimate standards by which all men judge of behavior” (7: p. 174). So in the case of individuals, their moral insight can only be truly developed by their experiencing the full bearing of each particular line of conduct. “Proper conduct in life is much better guaranteed when the good and evil consequences of actions are rationally understood, than when they are merely believed on authority” (7: p. 185). The function of parents as “ministers and interpreters of Nature” is to see that nothing more nor less than the full weight of the true, natural consequences of their children’s conduct should be always experienced by them.

“It is a vice of the common system of artificial rewards and punishments, long since noticed by the clear-sighted, that by substituting for the natural results of misbehavior certain threatened tasks or castigations it produced a radically wrong standard of moral guidance. Having throughout infancy and boyhood always regarded parental or tutorial displeasure as the result of a forbidden action, the youth has gained an established association of ideas between such action and such displeasure, as cause and effect; and consequently, when parents and tutors have abdicated, and their displeasure is not to be feared, the restraint on a forbidden action is in great measure removed; the true restraints, the natural reactions, having yet to be learned by sad experience” (7: pp. 185-186).

In minor rules of moral training, too, Spencer follows Rousseau. In his warning against the unwisdom of setting up a high standard for children, which invites the detrimental results of moral precosity; against the overregulation and constant admonition, which produces nothing but “hothouse virtue” and “a chronic domestic irritation”; in his advocacy of a due authority maintained with decision of character and consistency of judgment, and the like, we have the reverberation from “Émile.”

The aim of moral discipline, according to Spencer, is not so much to turn out an obedient, well-behaved individual, as to produce “a self-governing being,” which democratic society most needs. As to its agent, he, without raising a question, intrusts the task solely to the parents. At the same time, however, he wants to impress upon them the extreme complexity and difficulty of the task, and the consequent need of knowledge and self-culture, as well as vigilance, patience, and ingenuity.

Spencer was one among the prophets who proclaimed the morality of hygiene, which now has become a commonplace matter. He writes:

“Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as a physical morality.... Disorders entailed by disobedience to Nature’s dictates they regard simply as grievances, not as the effects of a conduct more or less flagitious. Though the evil consequences inflicted on their dependents and on future generations are often as great as those caused by crime; yet they do not think themselves in any degree criminal.... The fact is that all breaches of the laws of health are physical sins. When this is generally seen, then, and perhaps not till then, will the physical training of the young receive all the attention it deserves” (7: pp. 282-283).

We should never forget that man is an animal. “The first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal, and to be a nation of good animals is the first condition to national prosperity” (7: p. 222).

In regard to the physical care of the child, Spencer is, unlike his older compatriot Locke, an Epicurean, the scientific Epicurean, if you please. He preaches the gospel of high feeding, of ample clothing, and opposes strongly overeducation. The fundamental principle is that “in proportion as growth and organization are incomplete, much must be given and little required.” Spencer calls our present system of overeducation vicious--“vicious, as giving knowledge that will soon be forgotten; vicious, as producing a disgust for knowledge; vicious, as neglecting that organization of knowledge which is more important than its acquisition; vicious, as weakening or destroying that energy without which a trained intellect is useless; vicious, as entailing that ill-health for which even success would not compensate, and which makes failure doubly bitter” (7: p. 278).

As to physical exercises, Spencer hated gymnastics. It is merely “better than nothing”; it is the practice originated by warfare, which has “remained congruous only with the militant type of society”; it is simply the introduction of one artificiality to remedy the evils of another; namely, the suppression of free, spontaneous play. It being formal, and necessarily much less varied than plays and sports, taxes heavily special parts of the body, and thus causes a quicker fatigue and disproportionate development; being forced, it lacks the spontaneous interest and accompanying pleasures, which serve as the most healthful tonic for recreation and invigoration of our physical organism; and when carried to excess it may develop an abnormal power of muscles only at the cost of constitutional deterioration.

Spencer was probably among the first who advocated the essential need of free outdoor games for girls as much as for boys, saying: “Whoever forbids them forbids the divinely appointed means of physical development” (7: p. 258). He asks:

“Why this astonishing difference? Is it that the constitution of a girl differs so entirely from that of a boy as not to need these active exercises? Is it that a girl has none of the promptings to vociferous play by which boys are impelled? Or is it that, while in boys these promptings are to be regarded as securing that bodily activity without which there cannot be adequate development, their sisters’ nature has been given to them for no purpose whatever--unless it be for the vexations of schoolmistresses” (7: p. 254).

He thinks that the fear that unrestrained plays form unladylike habits and manners is groundless.

“For if the sportive activity allowed to boys does not prevent them from growing up into gentlemen, why should a like sportive activity allowed to girls prevent them from growing up into ladies?... How absurd is the supposition that the womanly instincts would not assert themselves but for the rigorous discipline of schoolmistresses!” (7: pp. 255-256).

Spencer, with his “constitutional disregard of authority,” and with his personal experience of self-culture, is systematically opposed to the policy of state education. In his mind, systematic school education was synonymous with artificial culture and coercive discipline. The most serious defect of it, however, is its necessary tendency toward overintellectualization. And the current, undue exaltation of academic training is based on the overestimation of the rôle of intellect at the cost of our emotional nature.

“Sensations and emotions are parts of consciousness, and so far from being its minor components, they are its major components.... Like respirations and winkings of the eyes, their unceasingness makes us oblivious of them. Yet every instant emotions are present. No movement is made but what is preceded by a prompting feeling as well as a prompting thought.... The emotions are master, the intellect is the servant. The guidance of our acts through perception and reason has for its end the satisfaction of feelings, which at once prompt the acts and yield the energy for performance of the acts” (10: pp. 36-38).

But overemphasis on academic training, which is necessarily artificial and intellectual, also tends to the neglect of emotional elements even in art, whose proper domain is emotion. “Not the arousing of certain sentiments, but the communication of certain ideas is thus represented as the poet’s office.” “It is not enough for a picture to gratify the æsthetic perceptions or raise pleasurable emotions” (10: pp. 44-45). The drama or music is valued on the basis of its serviceability to moral instruction or intellectual enlightenment, while the primary and all-sufficient purpose of art is pleasure.

From this dislike of academic education, his opposition to compulsory universalizing of this form of training by the power of authority is only natural. His plea is for an educational individualism, that each member of society should be “left to do his best for himself and children.” It rests upon his two fundamental conceptions in regard to the social organism. First, that the “social organism grows”; it is not artificially formed. Secondly, that the law of its growth is a progressive individualization. If his argument is now behind the times, it is not without much historical interest for us. For he is the best representative of that educational conservatism which has long withstood, in Great Britain and America, the modern tide of state education which started from Germany. Moreover, it is still a strong voice deserving attention as a warning against the dangers and defects of state education. The contention of the state educationists, as Spencer understands, is that parents, and especially those whose children most need instructing, lack knowledge and judgment in the matter of education. But Spencer thinks that the implication that “the interest and judgment of a government are insufficient security” is “a very questionable assumption.” The government’s interest, according to him, would necessarily tend to conservatism, and likewise the school-teacher’s interest, while a true education must always be a revolutionary force of society--“always fitting men for higher things, and _un_fitting them for things as they are” (9: p. 373).

The state educationists ignore the educational significance of the natural relationships between parent and children. “In these strong affections and mutual dependencies observers believed they saw an admirably arranged chain of influences, calculated to secure the mental and physical development of successive generations; and in the simplicity of their faith had concluded that these divinely appointed means were fully sufficient for this purpose.” But, according to them, “this combination of affections and interests was not provided for such a purpose, or what is the same thing, that it has no purpose at all. And so, in default of any natural provision for supplying the exigency, legislators exhibit to us the design and specification for a state machine, made up of masters, ushers, inspectors, and councils, to be worked by a due proportion of taxes, and to be plentifully supplied with raw material, in the shape of little boys and girls, out of which it is to grind a population of well-trained men and women, who shall be ‘useful members of the community’” (9: pp. 366-367). They forget that “educational systems, like political and other institutions, are generally as good as the state of human nature permits,” and that no hasty reform in education, which is not coördinated with that of other departments of life and the general elevation of the whole social organism, can succeed. Any attempt at uniformatization, at the present stage of progress, of educational system by an authoritative hand would bring more harm than benefit. For “were we in possession of the true method, divergence from it would, of course, be prejudicial; but the true method having to be found, the efforts of numerous independent seekers carrying out their researches in different directions constitute a better agency for finding it than any that could be devised” (7: p. 101).

Moreover, the use and function of government is, according to Spencer, only negative. “To the bad, it is essential; to the good, not. It is the check which national wickedness makes to itself, and exists only to the same degree.” So the extension of government authority or interference is rather a retrogression of society. “As civilization advances does the government decay,” and ought to decay (9: p. 25).

Therefore, he concludes, let the spread of enlightenment be free and spontaneous. “If supply and demand are allowed free play in the intellectual sphere as in the economic sphere, ... education must conduce to social stability as well as to the other benefits. For if those of the lower ranks are left to get culture for their children as best they may, just as they are left to get food and clothing for them, it must follow that the children of the superior will be advantaged: the thrifty parents, the energetic, and those with a high sense of responsibility will buy education for their children to a greater extent than will the improvident and the idle. And if character is inherited, then the average result must be that the children of the superior will prosper and increase more than the children of the inferior. There will be a multiplication of the fittest instead of a multiplication of the unfittest” (10: pp. 92-93).

Spencer’s treatise on “Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical,” in which most of his pedagogical views are given, though a mere collection of occasional magazine articles, is nevertheless a work into which he put his heart and soul. When it appeared in 1860, in book form, it carried his fame for the first time into the wide region of the world; it has been translated into thirteen languages; in England and America it has been used as a text-book, forming until recently an important basis of popular pedagogic ideas. Probably no educational treatise written in English has exerted a wider influence than Spencer’s, and in spite of its obvious one-sidedness, it is certainly one of the greatest works which has appeared in the pedagogic world on Anglo-Saxon soil.

REFERENCES

1. +Compayré, Jules Gabriel.+ History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1903. 598 pages.

2. ---- Herbert Spencer et l’Education Scientifique. Delaplane, Paris, 1901. 116 pages.

3. +Duncan, David.+ Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. Appleton, New York, 1908. 2 vols.

4. +Gaupp, Otto.+ Herbert Spencer. Frommann, Stuttgart, 1897. 160 pages. (Frommann’s Klassiker der Philosophie.)

5. +Royce, Josiah.+ Herbert Spencer, an Estimate and a Review by Josiah Royce; together with a chapter of personal reminiscences by James Collier. Fox, Duffield & Co., New York, 1904. 234 pages.

6. +Quick, Robert Hebert.+ Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

7. +Spencer, Herbert.+ Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. Appleton, New York, 1900. 301 pages.

8. ---- Philosophy of Style. Appleton, New York, 1901. 55 pages.

9. ---- Social Statistics. Appleton, New York, 1882. 523 pages.

10. ---- Facts and Comments. Appleton, New York, 1902. 292 pages.

11. ---- An Autobiography. Appleton, New York, 1904. 2 vols.

12. Herbert Spencer. A Symposium by Harris, Cook, Sutton, Winship, Rose. Proceedings of National Education Association, 1904. pp. 214-231.