Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/750

726 to two, or at most three! Geography, for instance, might easily be sufficiently learned in three months if it were taught exclusively, and so of many other subjects. As for grammar, it should be banished from all schools, except perhaps from the senior year of a university course. No child ever learned to speak good English from studying grammar. It has driven many a poor little wretch into headaches and other nervous troubles. It is the most ingenious device for forcing an immature brain into early decrepitude that the cunning of man has yet devised. The only reason why it does not do more harm is, that not one in ten of the pupils that come out of our schools know anything about it.

So far as my experience goes (and my profession has brought me many opportunities for observation), there is too much cramming in all our schools, and too much learning by rote, without there being an understanding of the subjects studied. It appears to be the main object of some teachers to develop the memory at the expense of the other mental faculties. Now the memory is one of the lowest faculties of the mind. In fact, it is not a faculty, but simply the result of the registration of impressions. It is a property of certain parts of the brain-substance, and it often exists in its highest form in persons of low intelligence, in whom it is exerted automatically, as it were, and without reason. If the perceptions and the power of mental concentration be cultivated, the memory will take care of itself.

It is generally the case that those persons who possess good memories are deficient in the capacity for giving attention. Facts and circumstances make little impression upon us all as we grow older. Hence we find that the events which occurred in childhood, and which were registered then, are easily remembered, while those that happened only a few weeks ago, not having been sufficiently noticed at the time, made little impression on the registering apparatus of the brain, and are partly or wholly forgotten.

Persons with good memories are, as a rule, indifferent students; they trust to memory rather than to understanding, and hence rarely have clear and full ideas of the subjects studied. Of course there are persons with strong memories and great intelligence and powers of application, but they do not require schools. They are competent to take care of themselves, and they do. The text-books used in schools generally take too much for granted on the part of the student. Bald statements are made without sufficient explanation; the pupil learns them by heart, and is supposed to know all about them because he can recite them without missing a word. I recollect how it was with myself in the matter of geometry. I took the first premium at school for recitations in that branch of science. I used to go up to the blackboard, draw all my lines correctly, and then, without hesitating at a word, glibly make the required demonstration; and yet of the real nature of geometry I had no idea. I did not know the use of it, nor