Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/280

270 of persons in any community can acquire wealth of knowledge, and the only thought on which I wish to insist is this: these few must also pet it for themselves, and, moreover, must work hard for it.

It is a hackneyed aphorism that there is no royal road to knowledge, although an incredible amount of pains has been taken to make one. Nature in this affair, as usual, has been a good, wise mother to us all; for it is not desirable to make the acquisition of knowledge easy, for the main point in scientific education is to secure the highest activity of the human mind in the pursuit of truth—an activity tried and disciplined by hardship and nourished on hardy fare. The quantity of food is of less importance; everything depends on establishing a good constitutional digestion. The harder the dinner is to chew, the stronger grows the eater. Canned science as a steady diet is as unwholesome for the growing mind as canned fruits and vegetables for the growing body. The wise teacher imitates the method of Nature, who has but one answer for all questions: "Find it out for yourself, and you will then know it better than if I were to tell you beforehand."

The great vice of current education is here squarely hit. As Huxley says, it is "spoon-victuals"; acquisition made easy by elaborate simplification and explanation which leaves wholly out of view the fundamental truth that mental power can only be acquired through the effort of active exercise. This is the supreme requirement, but it is this which is everywhere, and by all pretexts and devices, evaded. We are still in the lesson-learning, print-worshiping stage of education, almost as much as they were when children were taught from the catechism—

 "My book and heart Shall never part."

But the true purpose of education, as can never be enough enforced, is not to learn lessons and get explanations from teachers, and to accumulate information, but to develop power in the minds of the young to observe carefully, to reason correctly, and to think independently about the things that are important and vital in the experience of life. The minds of the young require to be cultivated and trained in this kind of activity; but all the mighty apparatus of books, teachers, superintendents, and boards of education, backed by millions of money, instead of loading to this result, stand in the way of it. The two methods are incompatible. Listening to explanations and cramming the contents of books are radically antagonistic to thinking things out, and to that self instruction the sole condition of which is mental effort, and that should be kept in view as the essential thing to be secured in all education of children and youth.

terrible pestilence, which, for several months, has been raging in the beautiful city of Montreal, carrying away thousands of its inhabitants, teaches a painful lesson of the malign consequences to a community of ignorance and superstition when strong enough to set at defiance the resources that intelligent experience has furnished to arrest its progress. It is not as if the people had been struck by some new and mysterious disease before which they were powerless. It is not as with the plagues of former ages, when nothing was known that could be done to arrest them. The saddest aspect of the Montreal calamity is not that multitudes have been swept into unripe graves, but that this vast mortality could have been avoided. That small-pox is practically a preventable disease is established; but to what purpose, when all the apparatus of self-defense in a civilized community is completely paralyzed? A comparatively small element of the population, ignorant, prejudiced, and pious, makes a blind and desperate resistance to the only measures that can bring relief; and they resort to penance, invocation of saints, prayers to Heaven, and solemn processions, to arrest the course of contagion, over which these have no more influence than they would have to arrest the course of the St. Lawrence I The chief ravages of the disease have