Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/734

714 Affairs of Education," from which a few slips may be culled. The author holds that it is very unwise to be "lenient, indulgent, unconcerned, or superficial, in school-keeping," and considers it extremely wrong to resort to "a false show of unmasticated, unprepared, unfit, and undigested accumulation of stuff and. material, producing neither educational bone, or muscle, or nerve, and. crammed in, drummed in, or infused, as with a funnel, in a hurry, or in the worry and flurry of an unquiet, unconcerted school."

Who, understanding this, can doubt it? Or who can doubt that the confidence of the pupils in the teacher "renders them more apt to conceive how much they are bound in gratitude to parents and teacher, and to get aware of the depth of the contrast and abyss of their real course and nature of action and that what it should be, and thus makes them more studious to be grateful and to advance their own interests as scholars?"

The teacher of this school, like most other Germans, believes in systematic thoroughness. "But," says he, "this does not mean that in the system that promotes perception, thorough thinking and reasoning, understanding, memory, self-reliance, deceitless ennobling enlightenment, and well-digesting progress, a scholar gets along slowly over the ground or through the books; on the contrary, while it excludes headway on the skip and jump, as each point is completely learned and mastered, it makes the next depending on this so much easier and more quickly grasped, and in a short time, what puzzles and discourages others, becomes to him the greatest delight; and thus he progresses from point to point, from page to page, from combining to combining the known with the unknown, the former unlocking and explaining the latter, and so he moves faster and faster, leaving the half-tutored, unsteady fustians far back in the distance."

The last citation which I shall make from this document might be construed into a rap at myself:

On second thoughts, however, this passage can refer only to those who have criticised the school and made light of its methods. "Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung." We can only express our admiration for such an extraordinary "well of English undefiled," and for the profundity of the ideas contained in it.

Another school of peculiar interest is the Mars Hill Academy, near Florence, Alabama. The "permanent circular" of this institution, now before me, bears date 1872, and contains many points worthy of quotation. The merits of the school are well emphasized by the following paragraph: