Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/753

Rh go for nothing but to furnish our heads with knowledge, but give us nothing of judgment or virtue. We labor only to stuff the memory, but leave the conscience and the understanding empty and unfurnished."

"Mere bookish learning," he says again, "is both troublesome and ungraceful; and, though it may serve for some kind of ornament, there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it."

Students of mature life study the things themselves, and not the descriptions of them. How much better it would be if "object-lessons" were more common in our schools! What idea of "network," for instance, could a child possibly obtain from Dr. Johnson's definition of it, "a reticulated structure, with interstices between the intersections"? Would he not know more about a net after having seen one than he would after having learned by rote such a definition? And would not, in fact, the words used by Dr. Johnson tend to unsettle all the knowledge of a net that observation had given him?

As one mode by which a reform in our systems of educating the young can be brought about, let there be more schools for children of a larger growth. I am satisfied, from observation, that the public night-schools of this city do more good, according to their opportunities, than do those that, through the day, from nine to three o'clock are crowded with young children, tiring their poor little brains over subjects that do not interest them, for they do not appreciate their value. A child ought to see some tangible result of his efforts to acquire knowledge, and this he can only do when he is taught facts that he understands and recognizes to be facts. In this kind of instruction the mental strain is reduced to a minimum, while the mental development is carried on in accordance with Nature's laws. At the first sign of fatigue the instruction should cease. As our schools are at present conducted, all the pupils are made to conform to one uniform standard of cast-iron rigidity. Weariness counts for nothing with the feeble, so long as the robust are not tired. The exhausted child can not, like the exhausted adult, stop of his own volition. He must go on. The jaded nervous system cries out in vain, his face may look as haggard as it can, yawn follows yawn, his head may droop, his eyes may close in the drowsiness of his languor; but the goad is applied, and he must rouse himself, for another lesson is to be recited. Is it strange that headache, and nervous prostration, and insomnia, and St. Vitus's dance, and epilepsy, and utter extinction of mind should frequently result from this forcing process? Is it not much better for the child that he should occasionally play truant, and go off to some vacant lot and engage in a game of ball?

I confess to a strong sympathy with the intelligent truant, who loves the fields and the shore better than he does the overcrowded, ill-ventilated, and brain-prodding school-room.

The differential education of the sexes is a subject that can not