Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/73

Rh uncomprehended words are learned verbatim, school-dust lies hundreds of years thick on the natural method of teaching languages; every one who breathes this dust is sick in the brain. Instruction carries everywhere the marks of the time when the schools were established. Young people are taught a multitude of things of which they make no use in all their life.

"A new foundation must be laid upon which a new species can develop, since a regeneration can not be thought of while the youth are not transplanted to a new ground."

"We note a few of the affirmative propositions: "Artists must be trained if art is to prosper. In physical education we must return to the method of the ancients.

"The will must be governed by the reason. During youth religion shall be taught only in its extreme simplicity, without attention to sects or parties. We should not repress the natural tendency to freedom, but guide it. Children are by nature good—compulsion renders them bad.

"The boy who has no sense for anything abstract and incomprehensible, least of all for the ordinary catechism, should, before anything else, be made acquainted with the sense-world. This can be shown to him in Nature and by pictures.

"The youth are troubled with nothing so much as with Latin. More than five years are given simply to the learning of Latin. Yet there is not a fourth of the pupils thus taught who can read Latin books without trouble or without mistakes. "When these hindrances are removed, the true aim of education will be reached. This aim is to form Europeans, people having such habits and manners as are common in all Europe, people whose life should be free from harmfulness, as universally useful and contented as they might become through education."

Kant, born April 22, 1724, expressed his opinion very forcibly as to the needs of the schools at this time: "In the civilized lands of Europe educational institutions are not lacking, neither is there lacking, on the part of the teachers, a well-intentioned industry. Still, it has been clearly shown that these institutions are worthless, and that, since everything in them works contrary to Nature, they fall far short of bringing out of men the good for which Kature has given the material. We should see quite different men around us if those educational methods came into force which are really drawn out of Nature, and not those which are but slavish imitations of the ancient customs of rude and inexperienced ages. The solicitude of the common people of all lands should now be directed to the establishment of such a master-school. This institution is no longer a merely beautiful idea, but now shows, by visible proofs, the practicability of what has been so long desired. The public repute, and pre-eminently the united voices of scientific and discerning judges from varied lands, have