Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/98

 yet learned to quash it! While passing through the terrors of repetition, the agitated and flushed faces of children of this sort, indicate the distressing to-and-fro movement of the faculties:while learning there rôle, they have instinctively endeavoured to connect ideas with the words of the lesson; and not having the benefit of intelligent guidance in doing so, have probably perplexed themselves beyond all hope of extrication, among the crabbed barbarisms of their task:besides, they are now compelled to have recourse to their recollection of mere sounds, and thus are doubly embarrassed between memory and reason, between sounds and ideas; and meantime are scared by the harsh rebukes of their undiscriminating teacher. Through the fine transparent countenance, glowing with fear and shame, and which might so easily have been made to sparkle with the free interchange of a congenial intelligencethrough the countenance, you may look into the very organ of thought, and discern the curdling of the brain under this species of torture. Now, the harassed mind snatches at the mere sounds of the lesson; and now again endeavours to catch the rational clue of its ideas; until at length it becomes totally bewildered.

Intelligent children, so unfortunate as to come under a treatment of this sort, if not at length broken down and stultified, learn, after a while, to rid themselves fairly of their understandings whenever they have to do with their teacher, and get the habit of regarding school hours as so much time spent in the dark. They have found that, in school, THOUGHT was punishable, or was a contraband commodity, and therefore they keep it in their sleeve. Common minded children could lose nothing if their tasks were given them in Chaldee; while by this means intelligent children would be exempted from a serious disadvantage, inasmuch as reason and memory would no longer be set together on the rack.