Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/413

Rh trained pupil would be more helped toward that end by bis schooling than a scientist has been helped hitherto by the old routine. But if this be admitted, a considerable change of the present curriculum must follow. Thus, foreign languages in our public schools are, in the best of cases, a mythical adornment, nothing else. In exchange for the money spent for it, the amount of actual philological information is very small. The only available part of such instruction would be conversational ability, which of course can not be wisely expected as the result of the few half-hours in the week, because the detached grammatical particles of a lacerated foreign idiom most assuredly can not produce the least earthly good, and do often interfere as a bad mixture with the purity of our English. Equally so with geography and history. Taught as they are, they could with equal benefit be left out of the curriculum.

Geography is either the most valuable branch to the teacher or the most valueless for teacher and pupil both. If used as the great co-ordination means for a thorough instruction in elements of natural history, botany, geology, etc; if taken conjointly with the instruction in elementary knowledge about terrestrial atmospheric forces and their activities; if united to general information on the elements of history, beginning with some conception about man, his occupations, nature, etc.—then geography in the hands of a skillful teacher is the branch, is, so to say, the mnemonic key of general information, as without localization any information is of questionable value. But if representing simply detached memory exercises of so and so many hundreds of foreign names, etc., sure to be forgotten before the pupil is through with the book, then, of course, it is waste of time.

History also falls within the same criticism. "We are a lawmaking people here in America," says one of our educational lecturers; "we have to learn how to make laws"! Very poor article indeed. Fewer laws, so much the better, as every law exemplifies a shortcoming; but would it not be preferable, if one wants absolutely to make laws, to begin to study, not how to make them, but what a law is? Thus with history. If once the pupil could command something like a fair, honest information and understanding of what society is, of what his own circle is, his borough, his county, his State, their institutions, etc., with some elements of civil government, then of course he could trace the various historical reasons for the present institutions, have a rational idea of his own country as a standard, and compare it with others, but then only would he be ready for history; otherwise the couple of dates and stereotyped versions about the courage of the good Putnam and the cowardice of the English, the ideality of the North and the blackness of the South, etc., will be