IX.

JACOTOT.

Or the inventors of peculiar methods at present known to me, by far the most important, in my judgment, is Jacotot; and if I were not well aware how small an interest English teachers take in Didactics, I should be much surprised that in this country his writings and achievements have received so little attention. It is satisfactory to find, however, that last year some papers on the subject were read at the College of Preceptors by Mr. Joseph Payne, one of the Vice-presidents, and were afterward published in the "Educational Times."* These papers, which will not, I hope, be suffered to lie buried in the pages of a periodical, contain the only good account of Jacotot I have met with, though having long been impressed with the importance of his ideas, I have at different times consulted various foreign books about him.

In the following summary of Jacotot's system, I am largely indebted to Mr. Payne, and to him I refer the reader for a much more luminous account than my shorter space and inferior knowledge of the subject enable me to offer.

Jacotot was born at Dijon, of humble parentage, in 1770. Even as a boy he showed his preference for

* For June, July, and September, 1867. [Now found in his "Lectures on the Science and Art of Education," Complete edition, pp. 339-385.]

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"self-teaching." We are told that he rejoiced greatly in the acquisition of all kinds of knowledge that could be gained by his own efforts, while he steadily resisted what was imposed on him by authority. He, however, was early distinguished by his acquirements, and at the age of twenty-five was appointed sub-director of the Polytechnic school. Some years afterward he became Professor of "the Method of Sciences at Dijon," and it was here that his method of instruction first attracted attention. "Instead of pouring forth a flood of information on the subject under attention from his own ample stores-explaining everything, and thus too frequently superseding in a great degree the pupil's own investigation of it-Jacotot, after a simple statement of the subject, with its leading divisions, boldly started it as a quarry for the class to hunt down, and invited every member to take part in the chase."* All were free to ask questions, to raise objections, to suggest answers. The Professor himself did little more than by leading questions put them on the right scent. He was after. ward Professor of Ancient and Oriental languages, of Mathematics, and of Roman Law; and he pursued the same method, we are told, with uniform success. Being compelled to leave France as an enemy of the Bourbons, he was appointed, in 1818, when he was forty-eight years old, to the Professorship of the French Language and Literature at the University of Louvain. The celebrated teacher was received with enthusiasm, but he soon met with an unexpected difficulty. Many mem

*There is a singular coincidence even in metaphor between Mr. Payne's account of Jacotot's mode of instructing this class and Mr. Wilson's directions for teaching science. (Essays on a Liberal Education.) [Mr. Payne thought highly of this paper by Mr. Wilson, and quotes from it on pages 140, 220 of the Reading-Club edition.]

bers of his large class knew no language but the Flemish and Dutch, and of these he himself was totally ignorHe was, therefore, forced to consider how to teach without talking to his pupils. The plan he adopted was as follows:-He gave the young Flemings copies of Fénelon's " Télémaque," with the French on one side, and a Dutch translation on the other. This they had to study for themselves, comparing the two languages, and learning the French by heart. They were to go over the same ground again and again, and as soon as possible they were to give in French, however bad, the substance of those parts which they had not yet committed to memory. This method was found to succeed marvelously. Jacotot attributed its success to the fact that the students had learnt entirely by the efforts of their own minds, and that, though working under his superintendence, they had been, in fact, their own teachers. Hence he proceeded to generalize, and by degrees arrived at a series of astounding paradoxes. These paradoxes at first did their work well, and made noise enough in the world, but Jacotot seems to me like a captain, who, in his eagerness to astonish his opponents, takes on board such heavy guns as eventually must sink his own ship.

"All human beings are equally capable of learning," said Jacotot. Others had said this before; but no teacher, I suppose, of more than a fortnight's experience, had ever believed it. The truth which Jacotot chose to throw into this more than doubtful form, may perhaps be expressed by saying that the student's power of learning depends, in a great measure, on his will, and that where there is no will there is no capacity.

"Every one can teach; and, moreover, can teach that which he does not know himself." I believe this paradox is the property of Jacotot alone. It seems, on the face of it, so utterly absurd, that it seldom answers the purpose of a paradox-seldom draws attention to the truth of which it is a partial, or a perverted, or an exaggerated statement. The answer which Jacotot and his friends made to the scoffs of the unbelieving, was an appeal to facts. Jacotot, they said, not only taught French without any means of communicating with his pupils, but he also taught drawing and music, although quite ignorant on those subjects. Without the least wishing to discredit the honesty of the witnesses who make this assertion, I can only admit the fact with great qualifications. Let us ask ourselves, what is the meaning of the assertion that we can teach what we do not know. First of all, we have to get rid of some ambiguity in the meaning of the word teach. To teach, according to Jacotot's idea, is to cause to learn. Teaching and learning are therefore correlatives: where there is no learning there can be no teaching. But this meaning of the word only coincides partially with the ordinary meaning. We speak of the lecturer or preacher as teaching when he gives his hearers an opportunity of learning, and do not say that his teaching ceases the instant they cease to attend. On the other hand, we do not call a parent a teacher because he sends his boy to school, and so causes him to learn. The notion of teaching, then, in the minds of most of us, includes giving information, or showing how an art is to be performed; and we look upon Jacotot's assertion as absurd, because we feel that no one can give information which he does not possess,

or show how anything is to be done if he does not himself know. But let us take the Jacototian definition of teaching-causing to learn-and then see how far a person can cause another to learn that of which he himself is ignorant.

Subjects which are taught may be divided into three great classes:-1, Facts; 2, reasonings, or generalization from facts, i. e., science; 3, actions which have to be performed by the learner, i. e., arts.

1. We learn some facts by what the Pestalozzians call intuition, i. e., by direct experience. It may be as well to make the number of them as large as possible. No doubt there are no facts which are known so perfectly as these. For instance, a boy who has tried to smoke, knows the fact that tobacco is apt to produce nausea, much better than another who has picked up the information at second-hand. An intelligent master may sug gest experiments, even in matters about which he himself is ignorant, and thus, in Jacotot's sense, he teaches things which he does not know. But some facts can not be learnt in this way, and then a Newton is helpless either to find them out for himself, or to teach them to others without knowing them. If the teacher does not know in what county Tavistock is, he can only learn from those who do, and the pupils will be no cleverer than their master. Here, then, I consider that Jacotot's pretensions utterly break down. "No," the answer is; "the teacher may give the pupil an atlas, and direct the boy to find out for himself; thus the master will teach what he does not know." But, in this case, he is a teacher only so far as he knows. For what he does not know, he hands over the pupil to the maker of the map,