Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/104

 cheap rate, and to large numbersin adherence to this leading principle, I should lightly esteem, or entirely reject various ingenuous devicesthe philosophical pas-times, and games of science, which have indeed a show of utility; and perhaps a little more, when resorted to under the circumstances that attach to frugal education. But children who enjoy ample spaces and means for sheer amusement, and who are out of doors, and at liberty six hours of the day, as they ought, do not need to be amused also during the few hours in which they are receiving in-struction. Besides that such devices will seem very poor pleasure to those whose pleasures, properly so called, are of the most exhilarating sort. Or if considered as means of learning, these devices are circuitous, cumbrous, and fantastic; and tend rather to distract the understanding, than to aid it. A vivacious and intelligent teacher finds no difficulty in conveying the elements of geography, astronomy, and even arithmetic, in a form such as children will attend to with eagerness; and this without the gilding that is contrived with the view of cheating the young mind into knowledge, as babies are beguiled to swallow medicine.

Much also has been said of late, of certain "exercises of the senses," concerning the utility of which I will give no opinion, when brought to bear upon children in infant and parochial schools. In such places it may be well to provoke the sluggish perceptions, as well as to stimulate the dormant reason, by all possible means. But I really do not know what it is that remains to be desired, in regard to the ordinary purposes of life, if the body be sound, and in high health, and the mind be alert. It is to the savage, or it is to men exercising special callings of an inferior sort, that there can be much benefit in having the senses sharpened to an extreme acuteness. A sight like the vulture’s, or the power of descrying a sparrow in a hedge, half a mile distant, or of hearing the creeping of a dormouse in the