Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/149

Rh wild animals, excepting for the advantage of an occasional beating, and their nervous centres have received few impressions unconnected with the simplest wants of existence. Coincidently with an entire absence of intellectual cultivation, they usually display a degree of sensational acuteness not often found in the nurseries of the wealthy, and arising from that habitual shifting for themselves in small matters which is forced upon them by the absence of the tender and refined affection that loves to anticipate the wants of infancy. They go to school for a brief period, and the master strives to cram them with as much knowledge as possible. They learn easily, but they learn only sounds, and seldom know that it is possible to learn any thing more. In many cottages there are children who, as they phrase it, "repeat a piece" at the half-yearly examination. We say, from frequent experiments, that they will learn for this purpose a passage in any foreign language as easily as in English; or, that they will learn an English paragraph backward way, if told to do so; and that, in neither case, will any curiosity be excited about the meaning of the composition. In ordinary practice, the master explains what they repeat, saying this means so-and-so; and the pupils have sufficient sensational acuteness to remember the sounds he utters, and to reproduce them when called upon. They do not usually understand what "meaning" is. An urchin may be able to say correctly that a word pointed out to him is an adverb or a pronoun, may proceed to give a definition of either, and examples of instances of its occurrence, and may produce an impression that he understands all this, when the truth is that he has only learned to make certain noises in a particular order, and when he is unable to say any thing intelligible about the matter in language of his own. Or he may repeat the multiplication-table, and even work by it, saying that $$7 \times 8 = 56$$, without knowing what 56 is or what 7 times 8 means. He knows all about 7 or 8, not from schooling, but from the lessons of life, from having had 7 nuts or 8 marbles; but of the 56 which is beyond his experience he knows nothing. The nature of the mental operations of such children is perhaps as little known to the teacher, to the vicar of the parish, or the kind ladies who take an interest in the school, as the nature of the mental operations of the inhabitants of Saturn. The adults distinctly understand a thing which they feel to be very easy, and do not know that any children can talk about it correctly without attaching an idea to their words. They often think the teaching satisfactory which enables the pupil to explain things in set phrases. They do not realize the possibility that the explanation may be as little understood as the statement which it explains—that it may be like the tortoise in the Hindoo myth, which supports the elephant, but which, requiring support itself, only removes the difficulty by a single step—that it may be a second unknown quantity balancing the first in the equation $$x = y$$. Such, however, instead of bare possibilities, are too frequently actual results. We have