Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/347

Rh connected with Elementary Education in Germany, Switzerland, and France," points out that in German elementary schools there is a "fuller programme" and a "higher state of instruction" than in ours. He takes Hamburg, as a good typical case, and he tells us that "the weekly number of hours for a Hamburg child, between the ages of ten and fourteen, is, as I have said, thirty-two; with us, under the Code, for a child of that age, it is twenty." And then, or I should rather say "but then," "the Hamburg children have, as the obligatory matters of their instruction, religion, German, English, history, geography, natural history, natural philosophy, arithmetic and algebra, geometry, writing, drawing, singing, and gymnastics, thirteen matters in all." In one of our schools under the Code, the obligatory subjects are "three—English, writing, and arithmetic. Of the optional matters, they generally take, in fact, four, singing and geography;. . . and as specific subjects, say, algebra and physiology, or French and physiology. This makes in all, for their school-week of twenty hours, seven matters of instruction." As a matter of fact, I have shown that comparatively few children are presented in any specific subject. But even if two are taken, this would only bring up the subjects to half those included in the ordinary German course. Mr.Arnold "often asked himself" why, with such long hours, and so many subjects, the children had "so little look of exhaustion or fatigue, and the answer I could not help making to myself was, that the cause lay in the children being taught less mechanically and more naturally than with us, and being more interested.''

I feel sure there is a great deal in this; variety in mental food is as important as in bodily food, and our children are often tired simply because they are bored.

As to expense, it is really ignorance and not education which is expensive.

But then we hear a great deal about over-education. We need not fear over-education; but I do think we suffer much from misdirected education. Our schoolmasters too often seem to act as if all children were going to be schoolmasters themselves.

It is true that more attention is now given to drawing in some schools; and this is certainly a matter of very great importance, but some changes must be made in the Code before that development can be made which we should all wish to see. Manual work in boys' schools seems to be exactly parallel with, and in every way analogous to, that of needlework in girls' schools, and I am inclined to agree with Sir P.Magnus that the value of the one kind of teaching should be as fully recognized and assisted by the state as that of the other. Why could they not introduce carpentering or something of that sort, which would exercise the hands of the boys as well as their heads? I have myself tried an experiment in a small way in the matter of cobblery, and although the boys did not make such progress as to be