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WorkHerbert Spencer

Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical

Four essays for the quarterly reviews that asked what knowledge is of most worth, and answered, at every level of a life, science.

by Herbert Spencer243 passages held

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First published
(aged 40)
Original language
English

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Overview

The North British Review printed Herbert Spencer on intellectual education in May 1854; the British Quarterly Review took moral education in April 1858 and physical education a year later; and in July 1859 the Westminster Review published the piece that frames the whole case, asking what knowledge is of most worth. They were first bound together in New York in 1860, in an order that is not the order they were written, so the book opens on the question and the earliest essay sits second. One question stands behind all four: what a curriculum is for. Spencer's charge is that nobody asks it. English schools taught Latin and Greek because gentlemen had always been taught Latin and Greek: an ornament, chosen for the standing it conferred rather than for anything it did. Rank the kinds of knowledge by what a life requires, he argues, and science comes first at every level — for keeping yourself alive, for earning, for bringing up children, for citizenship, and for the arts as well, since the painter and the poet work with proportion, light and sound, which are science's own subjects. The other three essays carry that principle down into the nursery. A child should meet the consequences of its own conduct rather than a parent's temper, because consequences teach and anger only frightens. He adds that the children of the educated classes are underfed, and that under-feeding does far more harm than over-feeding. Schools work children too long and keep them from the free play that does them more good than any drill, the girls' schools worst of all. Spencer himself had never been to a university: his father and his uncle taught him, and he worked as a railway engineer before he wrote for a living. The evolutionary system he spent the rest of his life constructing is now little read; his question was still being asked over the school timetable in the next century, under his own title.

Key concepts

How does Spencer actually decide which subjects rank above which?

He sorts the activities of a life into five kinds, in descending order of importance: direct self-preservation, earning a living, rearing children, citizenship, and the leisure devoted to taste and feeling. A subject's place on the timetable is then fixed by which activity it serves and how highly that ranks. The ranking is the machinery of the argument; science coming first is its output.

What does Spencer mean by science when he says science comes first?

Far more than laboratory subjects. Physiology, which tells a body what it needs; the science of society and of mind, which bears on citizenship and on raising children; and the principles of proportion, light and sound that a painter or musician works in. Science for Spencer means any systematic knowledge of causes, which is why he can claim it serves every rank of activity.

What is his charge that education is merely ornamental?

That schools choose subjects for the standing they confer rather than the use they have, exactly as dress is chosen. Latin and Greek were taught because a gentleman was known by them. Spencer's complaint is not that the classics are worthless but that nobody was asked to justify them, and that decoration had quietly taken the place education was supposed to occupy.

Why does Spencer say teaching should follow the order civilisation followed?

Because he takes a child's mental growth to repeat, in small, the course knowledge itself took: from the concrete to the abstract, the particular to the general, the empirical before the rational. Humanity reached its principles by handling things first, so a curriculum that opens with rules and definitions reverses the only order in which understanding has ever been produced.

Does Spencer really treat a child's enjoyment as evidence of good teaching?

Yes, and it is one of his boldest claims. Pleasurable excitement in a lesson signals that the faculties being exercised are the ones ready for exercise; dullness and coercion signal a method out of step with the child's development. Enjoyment is not the reward for learning but the test of whether the method fits, which is why he trusts play as far as he does.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What Knowledge Is of Most Worth

If a timetable holds only so much, which subjects earn their place? Spencer's complaint is that nobody asks, and his answer ranks knowledge by what a life actually demands.

English schools taught Latin and Greek because gentlemen had always been taught Latin and Greek, an ornament chosen for the standing it conferred. Rank the kinds of knowledge instead by what living requires, Spencer argues, and science comes first at every level: keeping yourself alive, earning, bringing up children, citizenship, and the arts too, since the painter and the poet work with proportion, light and sound. The case is against custom rather than against culture, and the title outlived the evolutionary system he built afterwards.

  • education
  • curriculum
  • science
  • practical knowledge
  • education reform
  • pedagogy
  • aesthetics
  • art and science
  • human nature

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Discipline by Consequence, Not Temper

Who should correct a child, the parent's anger or the world's own reply? Spencer stakes moral training on that difference and treats invented punishment as a confession of failure.

Let a child meet the results of its own conduct and the lesson arrives without a quarrel, because nothing in it is one person's will imposed on another; anger teaches fear and the arbitrariness of power, and little else. Discipline so understood is arranged rather than administered, which shifts the demand onto the adult: the parent's self-control becomes the hard part, not the child's obedience. Learning follows the same rule elsewhere in the book, where observation and a child's own experiment are trusted ahead of recitation.

  • moral education
  • natural consequences
  • parenting
  • discipline
  • punishment
  • child development
  • educational psychology
  • experiential learning
  • self-directed learning
  • observation

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Underfed and Overworked Children

Can a mind be trained while the body carrying it is neglected? The least philosophical of the four essays makes food, growth and free play conditions of an education rather than distractions from it.

Educated families underfeed their children, Spencer charges, and under-feeding does far more harm than over-feeding; schools then add hours of drill and take away the free play that would do more good than any of it, the girls' schools worst of all. Physiology is the authority he appeals to, against a respectable habit of treating bodily wants as beneath a schoolmaster's notice. Coming from a man taught at home and employed as a railway engineer before he wrote, the charge has the tone of an outsider describing an institution.

  • physical education
  • health
  • physiology
  • nutrition
  • child nutrition
  • child health
  • physical health
  • growth
  • overeducation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
243
distinct concepts
445
by passages held, corpus-wide
#307

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “moral education” and “natural consequences”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
moral educationnatural consequences24
moral educationparenting20
child developmentphysical education10
natural consequencesparenting7
child developmenteducation6
healthphysical education6
child developmenteducational psychology4
child developmenthealth3
child developmentmoral education3
child developmentnatural consequences2
child developmentparenting2
educationhealth2
educationparenting1
educationphysical education1
educational psychologymoral education1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1851 Social Statics

    His first book fixed the political position he defended for the next half-century, and the evolutionary reasoning he tried out here on the poor law grew into a philosophy of the universe.

     EN
  2. 1855 The Principles of Psychology

    Fifteen years on it returned, much enlarged, as a volume of the Synthetic Philosophy — so the edition that carried his psychology to readers is not the one that broke him.

     EN
  3. 1858 Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative

    Read against the Synthetic Philosophy, this is where several of its positions were first stated at magazine length — and where he wrote about music, manners and laughter, which the system had no room for.

     EN
  4. 1860 Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical you are here EN
  5. 1862 First Principles

    Everything else in the Synthetic Philosophy was written to demonstrate the formula set out here, and every later volume argues back to it. Spencer issued it first, when none of what it was meant to govern had yet been written.

     EN
  6. 1873 The Study of Sociology

    It stands in front of the three volumes of the sociology as their introduction, arguing that the science is difficult before any of it was attempted. Much the shortest of his sociological writing.

     EN
  7. 1876 The Principles of Sociology

    Three volumes over twenty years, resting on an apparatus Spencer had to build and pay for before he could write them: the Descriptive Sociology tables, which he abandoned before the last volume appeared.

     EN
  8. 1879 The Data of Ethics

    Ethics was where the whole system was meant to arrive, and this is its opening division — issued alone, ahead of the volumes it was supposed to rest on, and later bound in as Part I of The Principles of Ethics.

     EN
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