Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/153

 when the data are taken, unquestioned, from printed tables:—the operation is, let us grant, correctly performed, and the result would be true, if it were not, alas! that this authorized vade-mecum—this book of Tables, abounds with errors of the press: all therefore is set wrong.

Now a teacher of philosophical temper, who is aware, not merely of his own party bias (with which he is careful not to inflict his pupil) but of the general fact that the mind, as it advances, becomes unconsciously subject to certain fallacious modes of reasoning, will not disdain, while assuming to guide the minds committed to his care, to watch and wait for their uncontrolled workings, when the requisite materials of thought are placed before them. A teacher may, in this way, get a clue to his own constitutional errors of calculation, and may discover, in the spontaneous reasonings of a fresh mind, the genuine logic, from which he has himself unknowingly swerved.

But at any rate the pellucid ingenuousness of young person swhopersons who [sic], (unless miserably infected by sectarian sentiments) have no predilections, should be attentively listened to, and delicately treated. A mind may be injured beyond remedy, which is roughly dealt with, or acrimoniously rebuked, in any instance of its not immediately falling in with a teacher's opinions. To the young mind, the broad fields of thought are as yet all unfenced; nor has it learned to notice enclosures, or to respect rights of way, or manorial prerogatives:—earth is as open as air and sky.

We are not here excusing a lawlessness of thought in the young, disdainful of authority; nor are wishing to encourage unfixed mental habits; but are only adverting to a fact, not unlikely to be overlooked—that when discrepancies arise between the teacher and the pupil, a question may fairly be put to himself by the former, whether the difference does not result, in part, from a collision between the unwarped reason of the youth, and the unconsciously