Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/660

640 forgotten their own sufferings in the spelling-class, can not see that children are so very much perplexed in learning to spell, or perhaps maintain that the struggle involved is "good for them."

"I know," says Max Müller, "there are persons who can defend anything, and who hold that it is due to this very discipline that the English character is what it is; that it retains respect for authority; that it does not require a reason for everything; and that it does not admit that what is inconceivable is therefore impossible. Even English orthodoxy has been traced back to that hidden source, because a child accustomed to believe that t-h-o-u-g-h is though, and that t-h-r-o-u-g-h is through, would afterward believe anything. It may be so; still I doubt whether even such objects would justify such means. Lord Lytton says: 'A more lying, roundabout, puzzle-headed delusion than that by which we confuse the clear instincts of truth in our accursed system of spelling was never concocted by the father of falsehood. . . . How can a system of education flourish that begins by so monstrous a falsehood, which the sense of hearing suffices to contradict?'"

Here is a chief source o the incapacity for thinking which academy and college students bring into the science laboratories. This irrational process, taken up when the child enters school, occupying a large share of his time, and continued for six or eight years, has a powerful influence in shaping his plastic mind. When at last he is allowed to take up the study of nature, at the wrong end of his school course, what wonder that he sits with folded hands, waiting to be told facts to commit to memory, that he can not realize what a law is, and does not know how to use his reason in obtaining knowledge? Rational education will never flourish as it should till a reformation in the teaching of reading and spelling has been accomplished. Further, Mr. J. H. Gladstone, member of the English School Board for London, has computed the number of hours spent by children in learning to read and spell English to be 2,320, while, in gaining an equal knowledge of their native language, Italian children spend only 945 hours. The difference amounts to nearly two school years, and shows under what a disadvantage English-speaking children labor. Can any one believe that 4,923,451, or 13·4 per cent, of our population over ten years of age would be illiterate if learning to read were not so formidable an undertaking? In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and some German states, there are hardly any illiterates.

The most striking testimony to the irregularity of our spelling is the adoption by some teachers of a sort of Chinese mode of teaching reading. The children are not taught that letters represent constituent sounds of words, but they learn to recognize each group of letters as an arbitrary compound symbol standing for a word. This is more of a dead drag on the memory than even the A-B-C method, and, if it could be completely carried out, would be a vastly longer process.