Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/148

138 domestic training toward the right employment of their higher faculties. The work laid down can often only be accomplished by means of the promptitude that is a chief characteristic of instinctive action. The child who uses his sensorium to master the sounds of his task, uses an instrument perfected for him by the Great Artificer. The child who uses his intelligence must perfect the instrument for himself, must grope in the dark, must puzzle, must catch at stray gleams of light, before his mind can embrace the whole of any but the simplest question. The former brings out his result, such as it is, immediately; the latter, by slow degrees; often first giving utterance to the steps by which he is reaching it. The former is commonly thought quick and clever; the latter, slow and stupid: and the educational treatment of each is based upon this assumption, widely as it is often at variance with the facts. The child whose tendency is to sensational activity should be held back, and be made to master the meaning of every thing he is allowed to learn. He is usually encouraged to remember sounds, is pushed forward, is crammed with words to the exclusion of knowledge, and is taught to consider himself a prodigy of youthful talent. The child who tries to understand his lessons should be encouraged, praised, supplied with food for thought of a kind suited to his capacity, and aided by a helping hand over the chief difficulties in his path. He is usually snubbed as a dunce, punished for his slowness, forced into sensational learning as his only escape from disgrace. The master, in many cases, has little option in the matter. Children are expected to know more than they have time to learn; parents and examiners must have show and surface, things only to be purchased at the expense of solidity and strength. A discreet teacher may often feel sympathy with the difficulties of a pupil; but the half-hour allotted to the class is passing away, the next subject is treading upon the heels of the present one, the child must complete his task like the rest, and so a budding intellect may be sacrificed to the demands of custom.

Among the children of the educated classes, the circumstances of domestic life usually afford to the intelligence an amount of stimulus which, if not of the best possible kind, is at least sufficient to compensate, in some degree, for the sensational work of school. The easy nursery-lessons of the prescholastic age, the story-books of childhood, the talk of parents and friends, all furnish food for leisurely reflection, all serve to suggest those strange questions that are one chief evidence of thoughtfulness in the young. Minds thus prepared may often flourish in spite of subsequent excessive teaching; and, by forgetting nine-tenths of what has been learned, may find it possible to understand the rest.

In what are called "elementary schools," however, those aided by the nation for the instruction of the children of the poor, we do not find this accidental provision against the paralyzing effects of the prescribed routine. For the most part, the children have grown up like