Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/749

Rh had an equal chance. Here is the opportunity for those who have charge of children during the first ten or twelve years of their lives. All Nature is before them: the woods, the fields, the sea, the heavens, animals of all kinds, men and women, the habitations of man, factories and the various objects made in them, and a thousand other things, afford the means for educating the child without a single book being brought into use. Even very young children can be taught to employ their eyes to some purpose by having attractive pictures submitted to them for observation. Such exercises would interest the mind, and at the same time develop it. The picture-books made nowadays are generally very admirable; but there might be pictures specially designed for the purpose of teaching and not merely for amusement.

One of the greatest mistakes made in our present system of educating children is, that they are given too many subjects to study at once. The power of dissociation—that is, of keeping one subject entirely clear of another subject—is not great in the minds of children. They therefore have a mass of confused ideas when they have got through with their daily tasks, which it is always difficult, and sometimes impossible, for them to separate one from the other. It is true that some children are, from the beginning, able to concentrate the attention first on one subject and then on another; but these are quite exceptional instances, and the brain is very likely to be strained in the effort. It is as though a person should spend six hours in looking alternately through a telescope and a microscope, giving a few minutes to each. It would certainly be found at the end of that time that the sight had been injured for the time being, at least, and if the practice should be continued there can be no doubt that permanent impairment of vision would be the result.

The effort to form and maintain clear and forcible ideas of several subjects at once is a difficult matter, even for adults. It has been found by experience that it is advantageous to reduce the number of branches of medical science which students are required to study simultaneously. Several of the better class of medical colleges in this country a few years ago cut down the list of from eight or ten to less than half the number, and extended the period of study from two sessions of four months each to three of from six to eight months. I speak from personal experience when I say that I am aware of the most lamentable results of the "cramming" process in medical students. I have been a teacher in medical schools for nearly twenty-five years. In the course of my examinations it has often happened that I have put a question in one branch of medicine to a candidate for graduation and have received an answer in an entirely different branch. How much better it would be for the future man or woman if the boy or girl, instead of being required to learn a dozen different subjects at once, as was the poor little victim of St. Vitus's dance to whom I referred in the beginning of my remarks, should have the number reduced