Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/150

140 already referred incidentally to a learned pig, and to the parallelism between its training and some kinds of human education. Persons familiar with the tricks taught to animals are aware that these may all be described as muscular actions performed each consecutively to its proper signal. On hearing the finger-nails of the master click together, the animal does something in obedience to the sensation; nods its head, or shakes its head, or stands erect, as the case may be. It has no idea that the nod is an affirmation, or the shake a negation, and probably has no thirst for knowledge about the matter, being content to play its part correctly, and to escape the whip. In the case of children, the medium of communication is different, and the kind of response is different; but the faculty in action is commonly the same. The words of the pig's master are mere by-play, intended to amuse the audience, and the signal is conveyed by other sounds. The words of the human teacher or examiner, his questions, for instance, are the signals to the child, each requiring its appropriate answer; but, like the signals to the pig, they are aural sensations, capable, as such, of producing muscular action through the medium of the sensorium alone. The responses of the child are in words—that is to say, in sounds that he has been taught, and that he remembers, but of which he need not understand one iota in order to repeat them, any more than the pig need understand the affirmative or negative character of its nod or shake. In the human species, articulate speech is an act precisely analogous to locomotion, requiring the combined and harmonious working of several muscles, and the guidance of sense, but in no way essentially connected with the intelligence; and the child may make the right noises in the right order, just as the pig does not nod its head when the signal requires it to be shaken.

A general idea of the facts, which we have endeavored to state, was conveyed to the public many years ago by a phrase now almost forgotten. Educationists found, by experience, that children managed to retain sounds without meaning, and they called the process "learning by rote." Books, pamphlets, and speeches, bore witness to the practical inutility of such learning, and were full of suggestions for improving upon it. But these suggestions, to the best of our recollection of them, did not go to the root of the matter, and were mainly based on the assumption that learning by rote was characterized by some sort of deficiency only, and not by a radical error in the kind of impression made upon the pupil. It was not distinctly stated, or commonly conceded (although often implied in phraseology), that the action of the child's mind was of a nature essentially distinct from that which it would be the object of a wise instructor to excite; and the cause of the error was mainly sought in teaching not carried far enough to be beneficial, or not continued sufficiently long to produce permanent results. We conceive that the recent development of nervous physiology entitles us to maintain that learning by rote is at once