Household Education. Harriet Martineau
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must have a share in the family plan; or those who make it are despots, and those who are excluded are slaves.
Of course, this does not mean that children who have scarcely any knowledge, little judgment, and no experience, are to have a choice about the rules of their own training. The object of training is one thing; and the rules and methods are another. With rules and methods they have nothing to do but to obey them till they become able to command themselves. But there is no rational being who is not capable of understanding, from the time he can speak, what it is to wish to be good. The stupidest servant-girl, and the most thoughtless apprentice-boy, are always impressed by seeing those about them anxious to improve; and especially the oldest of all endeavouring the more to become wiser and wiser, better and better, as their few remaining days dwindle away. If the family plan therefore be the grand comprehensive plan which is alone worthy of people who care about education at all—a plan to do the best that is possible by each other for the improvement of all—every member of the family above the yearling infant must be a member of the domestic school of mutual instruction, and must know that he is so.
It is a common saying that every child thinks his father the wisest man in the world. This is very natural; as parents are their children's fountains of knowledge. To them their children come for anything they want to know: and by them they are generally satisfied. But every wise parent has occasion to say, now and then—"I do not know, my dear." The surprise of the child on first hearing that there is anything that his parents do not know fixes the fact in his mind. When he has once discovered that his parents have something more to learn, he becomes aware—and this also ought to be fixed in his mind—that their education is not finished; and that it is their business, as it is his, to learn something more every day, as long as they live. So much for knowledge. The case ought to be as clear to him with regard to goodness. It is not enough that in church he hears that all men and women are sinners; and that in prayers at home he hears his parents pray that they may become more worthy of the goodness of God, and more like the Christ who is set before them. These things may set him thinking; but there will be, or ought to be, more light every day to clear up his ideas. The same parents who honestly own to their child that they are ignorant of things about which he questions them will own to him that they are not nearly so good as they wish to be. Thus is the truth opened to the feeblest and smallest mind that education has still to go on, even when people are so inconceivably old as children are apt to think their parents.
To us, grown up to this mighty age, there can be no doubt on such a point. We know very well that we are all, through the whole range of society, like a set of ignorant and wayward children, compared with what we are made capable of being. Our best knowledge is but a glimmering—a dawn of light which we may hope will "increase more and more unto the perfect day." Our best goodness is so weak, so mixed, so inferior to what we can conceive of, that we should blush to say that during any day of our lives we had been as good as we ought to be. It is as clear to us as to children, that there is room for improvement in both ways as long as we live. To us there is another question which children cannot enter into, and have no present business with;—whether human beings remain capable of improvement as long as they live.
About this, there are different opinions. I rather think the prevailing belief is that they are not; and that this prevailing belief arises from the commonness of the spectacle, not only of the faults of old age, but of the inability of even amiable and lively old people to receive new ideas, or correct bad habits. This is certainly the commonest aspect of old age; and serious is the warning it affords to correct our faulty tempers and ways before we grow stiff in mind, as well as in body. But I do not think that this spectacle settles the question. We might as well say that the human intellect can achieve no great work after five-and-twenty, because the ill-educated mind never does. As long as we see one single instance of a mind still expanding in a man of eighty-five, of a temper improving in one of ninety, of a troublesome daily habit conscientiously cured, after the indulgence of a life-time, by an old lady of seventy-five, we perceive that education may go on to the extreme limit of life, and should suppose that it might be generally so, but for the imperfect training of preceding years.
I have known of one old man whose mind was certainly still growing when he died, at the age of eighty-six. I have known of another, whose study through life had been the laws of the mind, and who, when his faculties were failing him, applied himself to that study, marking the gradual decline of certain of his powers, adding the new facts to his stores of knowledge, and thus, nourishing to the last a part of his mind with the decay of the rest. This instance of persevering self-improvement under conditions which any one would admit to be those of release from labour, appears to me even more affecting than that of the great physician who watched his own approaching death with his finger on his pulse, notifying its last beat as his heart came to a stop, hoping to contribute one more fact to useful science. With cases like these before us, how shall we dare to suppose our education completed while we have one faculty remaining, or our hearts have yet one more beat to give?
As for the continuance of moral education to the last, I have seen two contrasted cases, in close neighbourhood, which make the matter pretty plain, in a practical sense, to me. I knew two old ladies, living only the length of a street apart, who were fair specimens of educated and uneducated old age. The one belonged to a family who were remarkable for attaining a great age; and she always confidently reckoned on her lot being the same as that of her predecessors. It is true, her mother, being above a hundred, called her and her sister "the girls" when they were above seventy; but still one would have thought that grey hairs and wrinkles would have gone some way as a warning to her. Instead, however, of reckoning on her future years (if she must reckon on them) as so much time to grow wiser in, she was merely surprised at her friends when they advised her (she being then eighty) to make some other terms for her house than taking another lease of fourteen years. She could not conceive, as the last lease had answered so well, why the next should not. I remember seeing her face, all puckered with wrinkles, surmounted by rows of bright brown false curls, and her arms, bare above the elbows, adorned with armlets, such as young ladies wore half a century before. I remember a clever pert youth setting himself to quiz and amuse her by humouring her in her notions about the state of the world, drawing her out to praise the last century and express her ignorant contempt of this, till she nodded emphatically over her hand of cards, and declared that the depravity of the age was owing to gas-lamps and macadamisation. She died very old, but no wiser than this. Her case proves only that her education did stop; and not that it need have stopped. The other was a woman of no great cultivation, but of a humble, earnest, benevolent nature, full of a sense of duty towards God and man; and, in them, towards herself. Having survived her nearest connections, she had no strong desire to live; and her affairs were always arranged for departure, down to the labelling of every paper, and the neatness of every drawer. Yet no one was more alive to the improvements of the modern world. I shall never forget the earnest look with which she would listen to any tidings of new knowledge, or new social conveniences. A more dignified woman I never knew; yet she listened to the young who brought information—listened as a learner—with a deference which was most touching to witness. But there was more than this. She was conscious of having been, in her earlier days, somewhat hard, somewhat given to lecture and lay down the law, and criticise people all round by family notions; a tendency which, if it really existed, arose from family and not personal pride; for, though she might overrate the wisdom of parents and brothers, there never was any sign of her overvaluing her own. However this might be, she believed that she had been hard and critical in former times; and she went on softening and growing liberal to the day of her death. I never observed any weakness—much less any laxity—in her gentleness towards the feeble and the frail. It was the holy tenderness which the pure and upright can afford to indulge and impart. The crowning proof that her improvement was the result of self-discipline and not of circumstances was that when, at above seventy years of age, she became the inmate of a family whose habits were somewhat rigid, and in many respects unlike her own, she changed her own to suit theirs, even forcing herself to an observance of punctuality, in which she had been deficient all her life, and about which she had scarcely ever needed to think while for many years living alone. Of course, this moral discipline implies some considerable use of the intellect. She read a good deal; and carried an earnest mind into all her pursuits. And when her memory began to fail, and she could not retain beyond the day what she had read,