The same insight into the heart of the educational process appears in his treatment of the grammar-school curriculum. When we remember the absorbing pre-occupation with classical learning that was the distinctive mark of the Renascence scholars, and the prominence given in consequence to linguistic study in education, we should not wonder if Mulcaster were found acquiescing in some degree in the narrow ideal that exalted knowledge at the expense of faculty, and laid more stress on the interpretation of words than of things. What will rather excite our surprise and admiration is the extent to which he was able to rise above the contemporary estimate of the value of Latin and Greek as instruments of culture. It is from the pen of one whose reputation in his own day was based on his mastery of ancient languages and his success as a teacher of the classics, that we have the clearest statement of the contrast between the indirect, incidental value of linguistic training, and the direct, formative influences of scientific study. “In time all learning may be brought into one tongue, and that naturally understood by all, so that schooling for tongues may prove needless, just as once they were not needed; but it can never fall out that arts and sciences in their essential nature shall be anything but most necessary for every commonwealth that is not utterly barbarous.... The sciences that we term ‘mathematical’ from their very nature always achieve something good, intelligible even to the unlearned, by number, figure, sound, or motion. In the manner of their teaching also they plant in the mind of the learners a habit of resisting the influence of bare probabilities, of refusing to believe in light conjectures, of being moved only by infallible demonstrations.”
It has been stated above that Mulcaster had reached a conception distinctly in advance of his time in regard to the true significance of words, as the signs of realities in the outer world and of the impressions these realities make upon the mind. We may here notice the influence of this conception on his treatment of linguistic study as a means of education. While fully admitting the necessity for acquiring the classical languages as long as these continued to be the only vehicles of learning, he never fails to regret the loss of time absorbed in studying them, and he anticipates with satisfaction the time when modern tongues, and especially his own, will be sufficiently developed and refined to replace Latin and Greek, believing as he does that “all that bravery may be had at home that makes us gaze so much at the fine stranger.” Not that he ever forgets that words are something more than mere symbols, that indeed they come to have a certain objective reality of their own, which must be apprehended as directly as that of any other natural phenomenon. “Do we not learn from words?” he asks. “No marvel if it is so, for a word is a metaphor, a learned translation, something carried over from its original sense to serve in some place where it is even more properly used, and where it may be most significant, if it is properly understood. Take pains to learn from it; you have there a means of gaining knowledge.” But this appreciation of the inner significance of language does not blind him to the fact, apparently unperceived by all his contemporaries, that the unfortunate need for devoting so much time and energy to linguistic study was a very serious hindrance to the natural unfolding of the mental faculties through a reasonable education. In his own words, “we were forced ... to deal with the tongues, ere we pass to the substance of learning; and this help from the tongues, though it is most necessary, as our study is now arranged, yet hinders us in time, which is a thing of great price--nay, it hinders us in knowledge, a thing of greater price. For in lingering over language, we are removed and kept back one degree further from sound knowledge, and this hindrance comes in our best learning time.” And in another passage he bewails the “loss of time over tongues, while you are pilgrims to learning,” and the “lack of sound skill, while language distracts the mind from the sense.” Where could we find a stronger indictment of the Public School tradition that banishes every form of nature study during the “best learning time,” the years when the powers of observation are in their first freshness, for the sake of a premature initiation into the subtleties of Latin Grammar?