Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/130

120 or later, of using imitative signs for the purpose of bringing absent things to the thoughts of another mind?"

A schoolbook which declares itself to be little else than a fingerboard, pointing to something else to be studied, and which is designed to avoid lesson learning and to break up school routine, is certainly something unusual in the educational world, and we might suppose from all analogy that it would meet with little favor. Yet such are the character and object of the "First Book of Botany." It was prepared, not to enable the pupil to memorize a certain amount of information about the vegetable kingdom, but to put him in the way of training his observing powers by the actual, systematic study of plants themselves. It is a handbook of guidance in the work of observation. It is an encouraging sign of improvement in methods of instruction that a book so thoroughly constructed on this plan should still not be a day ahead of the time. Its prompt and extensive adoption by the Boards of Education in many cities is an encouraging evidence of progress in the art of elementary teaching. The work has been reprinted in England, and is reviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette by Prof. Payne, of the College of Preceptors, under the title of "Botany as a Fourth Fundamental Branch of Study." He says:

"This book is so remarkably distinguished from the ordinary run of school books that no apology is necessary for calling the attention, not only of teachers, but of all who are interested in education, to its pretensions and merits. Too many school books, professedly compiled for the use of children, are really fit only to be handbooks for the teacher or the adult scientific student. Abounding with definitions and abstractions which presuppose a knowledge of the facts on which they are founded, they tend to quench rather than quicken the dawning intelligence of the child. These abstractions, though called principia or beginnings, are, in fact, such only to the mind already trained in deduction. Induction, on the other hand, appears to be the only possible method that a child can employ in gaining a real knowledge of principles. We may, of course—and we usually do—cram him with those intellectual boluses called definitions and rules, in the hope and belief that some time or other he will digest them; but we also very commonly and here is the absurdity of our plan—leave his process of mental digestion to chance, instead of regarding it as the end to be secured by the training of the teacher. Thousands of children carry about with them this crude, undigested matter, throughout the whole of their school life; and, if it is ever assimilated and appropriated by the mental system, it is after school life is over, and the youth takes his education into his own hands and begins it anew. Holding, then, as we do, that the primary aim of all teaching should be the quickening of intellectual life in the pupil, and trying school books generally by this test, we cannot but pronounce the great mass of them to be hinderances rather than helps to the object in view. They are hinderances and not helps, whenever they supersede the action of the pupil's own mind on the facts which they describe. In matters of science especially, the facts, the concrete things, are the true teachers, and should be allowed to impress their lessons by direct contact—without any foreign intervention—on the mind of the learner. These lessons gained by the authoritative teaching of facts will necessarily be productive of clear, definite, and permanent impressions, and must, therefore, be far more valuable than those given by the conventional bookmaker on his own authority. We go further, and maintain that the principle we have suggested furnishes a true test of the suitability of any given subject for elementary instruction, which, as we believe, should be confined in its earliest stages to those subjects in which the pupil can gain his knowledge at first hand from facts within his own cognizance. If, therefore, as has been declared by good authorities on the subject, that kind of teaching alone is effective which makes the pupil teach himself, it is obvious that elementary education should consist in eliciting the native powers of the child, and make him take an active share in the process by which knowledge is acquired; in setting him forth, in short, however young, on