Two points, however, deserve our attention. The first is that the school is run as a miniature republic. The second is the calibre of the instructors. “The instructors,” says our zealous humanist, “are not men from the dregs of human society nor such as are useless for other occupations, but the choice of all the citizens, persons whose standing in the Republic is known and who very often have access to the highest positions of the state.”
The last phrase again transports me back to the modern world. I see this fine humanist ideal budding in another place. This time it is a summer school in the hills of New Hampshire, where the children govern themselves in the classroom, where there is no punishment except temporary exclusion from the group, and where, above all, each instructor is chosen because of his creative practice in the subject which he teaches: a highly gifted composer teaches music, an athlete teaches gymnastics, a poet teaches literature. Then I think of all the casual and wasted talents of people who for little more than the asking would share their love of the arts and sciences with little children, if only those who are in charge of little children were not too blind or too fearful to make use of them. Faraday’s classic lectures on the physics of the candle, and Ruskin’s addresses to a young ladies’ boarding school on the function of literature—such things might be multiplied. It is not the creation of this utopian method that is difficult; for the thing has already been done: what we need is its extension. Then children might come to school as gaily as they do in Peterborough, N. H., on the lush summer mornings; and people would not turn their backs on learning any more than they would turn their backs on life. If anyone thinks that Johann Andreae’s prescription for a teaching staff is an impossible one, let him visit the Peterborough School, and examine its records and achievements.
It remains to record the further stages of learning. The halls of the central citadel are divided into twelve departments, and except for the armory, the archives, the printing establishment, and the treasury, these halls are devoted entirely to the arts and sciences.
There is, to begin with, a laboratory of physical science. “Here the properties of metals, minerals, and vegetables, and even the life of animals, are examined, purified, increased, and united for the use of the human race and in the interests of health. … Here men learn to regulate fire, make use of air, value the water, and test the earth.”
Next to this laboratory is a Drug Supply House, where a pharmacy is scientifically developed, for the curing of physical disease, and adjoining this is a school of medicine, or as Andreae reports, “a place given over to anatomy. … The value of ascertaining the location of the organs and of assisting the struggles of nature no one would deny, unless he be as ignorant of himself as are the barbarians. … The inhabitants of Christianopolis teach their youth the operations of life and the various organs, from the parts of the physical body.”
We come now then to a Natural Science laboratory which is in effect a Museum of Natural History, an institution founded in Utopia a century and a half before a partial and inadequate substitute—a mere extension of the curio chamber of a Country House—was presented to an admiring world as the British Museum. “This,” as Andreae says, “cannot be too elegantly described,” and I heartily agree with him; for he paints the picture of a museum which the American Museum at New York or South Kensington in London has only begun to realize within the last decade or two of their existence.
“Natural history is here seen painted on the walls in detail, and with greatest skill. The phenomena of the sky, views of the earth in different regions, the different races of men, representations of animals, the forms of growing things, classes of stones and gems, are not only on hand and named, but they even teach and make known their nature and qualities. … Truly is not recognition of things of the earth much easier of competent demonstration if illustrative materials are at hand and if there is some guide to the memory? For instruction enters altogether more easily through the eyes than through the ears, and much more pleasantly in the presence of refinement than among the base. They are deceived who think it is impossible to teach except in dark caves and with a gloomy brow. A liberal minded man is never so keen as when he has his instructors on confidential terms.”
Going farther, we find a mathematics laboratory and a department of mathematical instruments. The first is “remarkable for its diagrams of the heavens, as the hall of physics for its diagrams of the earth. … A chart of the star-studded heavens and a reproduction of the whole shining host above were shown,” … and also “different illustrations representing tools and machines, small models, figures of geometry; instruments of the mechanical arts, drawn, named, and explained.” I cannot help expressing my admiration here for the concrete imagination of this remarkable scholar: he deliberately anticipated, not in the vague, allegorical form that Bacon does, but as lucidly as an architect or a museum curator, the sort of institute which South Kensington, with its Departments of Physical and Natural Science, or perhaps the Smithsonian in America, has just begun to resemble. If our museums had begun with the ideal Andreae had in mind, instead of with the miscellaneous rubbish which was the nucleus of their collections—and still remains the nucleus in many of the less advanced institutions—the presentation of the sciences would be a more adequate thing than it is.
Does Andreae leave the fine arts out of his picture? By no means. “Opposite the
